Fort Emanuel, Dakota City

"You ought to see it--it's right there on your way home. Just turn right, into Dakota City. Watch for the signs."

That I didn't know him doesn't mean I didn't recognize the guy. He's a Dakota County version of me--retired, a tad overweight and underserved by his hairdo. But the guy spills enthusiasm for ye olden days. "You can't miss it," he says as he rips through the pages of an old booklet to find a picture of the church he's looking for, then shoves the entire booklet in my hand--a Nebraska Centennial History of Dakota County, Nebraska, dated 1967. "Take it along," he says. It was right there on a table of the museum. There's still a pile. Not to worry.

If you got a minute, you can't say no to all that joy. Besides, he says it's not just any old church, but the very first Lutheran church in all of Nebraska, formed there two years before the War Between the States, way back in 1858, when a missionary named Kuhns crossed half the continent and the raging Missouri just to get here and preach the gospel to the pioneers, which he did, preached the very first Lutheran sermon in a long-gone Dakota City Hotel--get this, the Bates Hotel. The first meeting of Emanuel Lutheran was at the Bates Hotel. (I'm not making this up.)

There is some horror here in the story of the church behind the fence, but no murder, at least none written up in the Centennial booklet, which is itself fifty-plus years old. The horrors follow. Tired of the Bates Hotel, those goodly, godly Lutherans bought what was left of a store in a village wiped out when that rascal river flooded, but that skeletal building never made it to town. It went up in a prairie fire as it was being hauled to Dakota City.

Two years later, this very building--the oldest church structure in all of Nebraska--was built at a cost of $2000. That centennial book includes a story that somehow makes sense when you see the old church. The Reverend Kuhns and Emanuel Lutheran got themselves snowed in one Sunday, in the kind of brutal Nebraska blizzard old folks use to impress the kids. Just three men were there that day--that's it; just the pastor and a congregation of two. Reverend Kuhns shook off whatever reluctance or doubt he might have had and went on to deliver a Lutheran hum-dinger to the only two souls in the pews. 

Even if there's no snow in the air, I'll swear that if, on some cloudy day you look through the spaces of that chain-link fence all around, you'll still hear that sermon echo through the place--in German, I'm sure--as if no time has passed, just the three of them there, sheltered in the time of storm. 

It's a shame that fence has to be all around. You can't help but half-expect some "Beware of Dog" sign hammered in the grass. When I got out of the car, I couldn't help thinking Emanuel Lutheran was a prisoner. Once a year it opens, I hear. Otherwise, there it stands in a quiet neighborhood of Dakota City, where it's stood for a long, long time, all around it that fence. Fort Emanuel. 

Why not bring it away somewhere and open up the property to new housing? Why keep it around if it's not going to serve the people it was meant to?-if it's a fenced-in prisoner of its own old age?

It's not nostalgia that keeps it there. Not the docent, not anybody in Dakota City, Nebraska, is old enough to remember attending regular worship in Emanuel Lutheran. 

There it stands, well kept, but locked behind a fence so tall I'd need a ladder to get in. I had no need to get in. I didn't even want to, but it hurt to see that old frame church so imprisoned behind that chain link fence. Still, as I stood there, that wire fence somehow disappeared. Strange effect. 

I couldn't help thinking we need our old Emanuel Lutherans. The sermons they preach, even behind fences, offer explanations of who we are and what we need to know about ourselves in whatever Dakota Cities we live and have our being. 

"This old church still stands as a monument to the steadfastness of purpose of the early settlers," the Historical Marker says, "and as a symbol of pioneer religious life."

Here's what the fenced-in church still preaches: we are not alone. There were others, in 1860 and long before that, truth be told. We are not the first. We are not alone.   

I sent my Dakota City doppelganger a note, thanked him for his help and the Centennial booklet, then let him know that, as instructed, I'd stopped at the church. "Quite the place," I said.

Seventh-Day Baptist Nature Worship

Seventh Day Baptists go to meetin'

Today there will be snow, Google just told me. It's not the time to let James Leander Scott have his way with us. It'll just make us bitter--in addition to cold. 

But I can't help it. I just stumbled on this yesterday. 

James Leander Scott was a Seventh-Day Baptist, proud, even arrogant about it, unyielding, theologically at least. In 1842, the call to preach the gospel out west came to him without much hoopla it seems. What the call amounted to was a contract with the Almighty drawn up by what his own heavyweight sense of duty told him needed to be accomplished--someone had to go west and preach the unsullied gospel to keep all those sinner-pioneers from the fires of hell--and to hear the SDB's signature doctrine, the scripture's clarion call for a Saturday Sabbath. 

Oddly enough, one of his first stops was a Mormon temple, greatly deserted because at that moment most LDS had already left for Nauvoo. Three pages of his memoir are devoted the temple's features, so much that the editor in him couldn't help but judge. "This is as concise a description as I am able to give, and although my notes are somewhat defaced I believe it is correct." He wanted, he says, "to show how far delusion may go, even in this our enlightened land."

Catholics fare far worse than Mormons in the memoir. James Leander Scott took off for the great northwest fearing the immigrant Roman Catholic communities already staking out territory for a beachhead on the ocean of grass, all of that to create an American papacy and begin yet another bloody round of inquisitions.

But then he happened on the prairie's sheer and endless beauty, a colorful flowery maze all around him. "The Botanist," he says, "might be lost in this natural and almost unbounded garden of flowers." It's too beautiful for words. "It is in vain to attempt to describe fully this grandeur-dressed garden of nature, which is unparalleled in beauty." 

No matter. He tries.

Along with his wife and son (who barely get his attention), he can't help but fall into sheer wonder at the glamour of the prairie. Each of them, he says, "alike enchanted stand like fixed monuments with the head bent forward, as though the whole soul was thrown at once into the eyes," something he vain would call a "religious experience," even though it sounds Emersonian.

All of it is Hudson School, this breathtaking frontier world so wide and encompassing it wrings what's human right out of him. "All is silent as the house of eternal slumbers, and each is indifferent to all around." The man is taken by the beauty all around.

The world he sees when he leaves the forests is beyond real. James Leander Scott doesn't lose his senses on the prairie, he gains them. Once more tries his hand at getting something of its glory down on paper before.

The green carpet -- the never-to-be-described clusters of flowers -- the prairie hen, rising and falling into this and that bed -- the snipe, with his chattering bill -- and turkey-buzzard floating carelessly in the air, surveying all below -- the sand-hill crane strutting around -- the yelping wolf as he slips along from bank to bank --and add to this the enlivening notes of the feathered songsters, who could help being entranced? 

Lest you wonder, he can restrain the nature worship he feels, and he does. "Omnipotent is the hand that formed all these objects of beauty. Who that is a christian could refrain from adoring the God of Wisdom." 

In those early years of the 19th century, were the Reverend James Leander Scott a Winnebago or Sac or Fox, the God of Wisdom would be the Great Spirit. 

Art with all its grandeur and decorated form, is lost at once in this incomprehensible field of natural curiosities. The mind almost fancies
itself in an unsullied world of joy. 

The preacher says a June prairie is--dare I say it? dare he?--almost heaven. 

English visual artists pursued "the sublime," as did the French. It wasn't only Hudson River Yankees who tried to create something as mystically glorious, as sublime, as the magnificent American frontier landscape. 

Let me confess my sin. I wanted not to like James Leander Scott, this tent-meeting, tub-thumping, circuit-riding, Seventh Day Baptist whirlygig; but the earnestness he carries into making darn sure the reader sees what he sees and loves what he loves made me smile, made me give the stumper an inch or two more grace than he might have given the roughneck sinners lined up outside his tent. 

He just couldn't help himself amid all that beauty. He just about lost it.

All those clusters of flowers he describes won't stop the snow from whipping through this morning, but then again maybe a day like today is the right time to hearken to the parson's sermon out there on the gorgeous prairie. 

Hope springs eternal. 

Morning Thanks--Thanksgiving

Somehow--I'm not sure exactly how or where he picked it up--my son, a forty-year old husband and father of two darling little girls, manages very well, so well, in fact, that all around me now here in the basement of our home, I'm hard-pressed to find any trace of the whirlwinds that blew through here during a not-long-enough weekend. The basement is that clean. Not only that, there's nothing--nothing my wife and I have discovered--that's been left behind, nothing we'll have to address to Oklahoma. 

Yesterday, Sunday, I was almost completely wiped out by the kind of head cold I haven't had for years--I can't even remember one with a similar fist. That was part of the silence, I'm sure--I spent most of the day on the couch, with a blanket o'er me. But that steep head cold notwithstanding, the real reason for the home front silence on the Sabbath was the sudden absence of two little wildcats, packed up and put away into their respective seats in the van before finally departing on an all-day trip back home to Oklahoma. Their antics sentenced my wife and to heavy silence.

At my age, life offers a Sears catalogue of daily events and occurrences that spell out my age, but if you want to know you're a grandparent, just host a four-year-old and her little sister, a two-year-old sometime for a long weekend. The energy they spend on life is so immense it mocks you silly.

And now, the morning after, the silence is not golden but painful, and I'm honestly depressed by the fact that my son cleaned up as well as he did. It seems to me that there's almost nothing in this house to suggest the glorious bedlam that reigned here for the last three or four days. It's gone--every last bit of it. They left no trace of the joyful mess they created. 

I'm a bit less beaten up this morning by that head cold. It'll be a few days until I'm capable of working out in the gym, may be a while before my appetite returns. Even the silence is momentary--I need to reassure myself of that.

It was quite a Thanksgiving, but it's behind us now, even though my thanksgiving isn't. Not at all. That thanks is an all-year-long thing.

Maybe they left something beneath the couch. I'll look. Good night, I hope so.

Hope and Delight

 

The LORD delights in those who fear him,

who put their hope in his unfailing love.” Psalm 147:11

It was strange watching the video, eerie. The fire looked rather ordinary, I suppose, an entire chunk of apartment complex going up in flames, smoke everywhere, the helicopter circled the blaze slowly, descending as it did, the camera coming in close. From east to west, the roof was mostly gone, the whole place a blazing honeycomb.

The last shots of the almost two-minute video were taken quite low. The camera zeroed in on the colonnades of a second-story apartment porch, where flames were lapping away at the roof, and something—I couldn’t see what—was lying on the cement balcony, in flames.

I could have sworn those final images were our son’s apartment.

Yesterday when he called, he started the conversation with a line whose relief is completely disarming, “I’m okay.” Then he told us he’d lost everything. He had his book bag, his truck, the clothes on his back—and his bike. Everything else—his Mac, his cell phone, his TV and furniture—is gone. All of it.

The Red Cross got him a motel room until Friday, when this season’s pigskin finale is scheduled and every spare room within 100 miles of the university is booked. They gave him $100 to buy clothes at Wal-Mart, told him the University would find him a place to live. Others called to offer him a bed. Some woman asked about clothes sizes, and a fraternity was taking up an offering. He not a fraternity-type—never was anyway.

He says his cell phone—he bought a new one while the smoke was still rising, and the dealer gave him a $50 credit—has been ringing off the hook, even though, he says, he never gets all that many calls. It’s his first semester at the university.

His parents are not frantic. He’s not a child, and I trust the largesse of good people. He won’t be alone. So far, he’s been shocked himself at the offers of help. They keep coming. I’m sure we’ll hear more stories today. Nothing could be better. Nothing.

His parents are powerless, however. I would have jumped in the car the moment I put down the phone if he would have asked us to come. But tomorrow he’s flying home, as planned. It’s Thanksgiving, and, yes, we have cause to rejoice.

You wonder why God doesn’t see to it that our stuff burns up more often. Maybe this fire has burned up more than his earthly goods. Maybe something new will rise from the flames.

In the last day I’ve felt closer to promise of this line than I would have, had you asked, last Wednesday, or Tuesday, or Monday, or even Sunday. In the last 24 hours I swear I understand it because I don’t know where else to put my trust. God is delighted with my faith, I think, because it’s grown, not because of anything I did but because I’ve nowhere else to go with my hope, my trust, my prayers.

Nowhere else to go but him who delights in our hope because we know his unfailing love—from frat boys, the Red Cross, friends and strangers. He’ll get it there. I trust in his love. And about that, he’s delighted. And so am I.

_______________________ 

Thursday, not tomorrow, was Thanksgiving. He's home again, with a spouse and family, two darling little girls. Guess what? Today, he's a fireman, a lieutenant at that. Amazing.

Black Friday at the Schaap Bookstore

Out of nowhere, it seemed, a man I didn't know raised his hand at a presentation I was giving at a library out here in northwest Iowa. He told me he loved a story of mine, then proceeded to describe it in detail. It took my surprised self sometime to realize that he was talking about a collection of short stories now ten years old--or more. It won a contest and was published on-line, then done again as an in-your-hand book (the covers are greatly different). Here's the on-line cover:

Same insides, different skin. I'm not at all sure where the ferris wheel came from, but this cover won some kind of prize, if I remember right. Both still available on Amazon.

For me, it was odd but fun, all the stories originating in a cemetery, a gathering of dead men walking (women too), souls who abide there and have been given generous opportunities to return to the small town where they lived out their lives, not to interfere--there are ground rules after all--but to observe and think seriously about the world they once occupied and have now (not entirely) left behind, think in ways that, well, blessed by their having passed into what Native folks would call "the Spirit world."

I wrote one story, then decided there were more there, if I'd think about it a bit. I am an inveterate cemetery stalker. Visiting new neighborhoods, I often choose to spend any extra time I might have by strolling through the graveyard because the stories are so abundant--and almost instantly imaginable.

“James Calvin Schaap has done the impossible," Mary Swander said, a former State of Iowa poet laureate. "In Up the Hill, he has beautifully crafted a collection of stories written from the grave, and these voices are both humorous, powerfully moving, and scary."

Nice. But "scary" surprised me. I didn't think of the stories at all Halloweenish. She must have meant something else.

"Up the Hill is a very original and heartwarming collection of tales that invite readers to listen in on the congregation of the dead as they speak from the afterlife," or so said Jim Heynen, an old friend and writer of darlingly tall tales.

Here's Diane Glancy, another old friend: “A fine mix of characteristic Schaap grit and wholesomeness, frugality and abundance, colloquialism and wisdom. If you don't read these stories, ‘Honestly, you don't know what you're missing.’”

I even concocted a little book trailer, hoping to gather some readers:

Have a look

Today is the day the world calls "Black Friday," so I thought I'd open the bookstore down here in the basement and let you know that today you can buy any of a dozen Schaap books at bargain basement prices. Just tell me what you want and what you want to pay. I'll be more than happy to oblige.

Sometime soon take a walk in a cemetery and let me know what you come up with. If nothing at all, let me know and I'll send you a book, or two or three.

Thanksgiving Queen

Three things about my grandparents' grave you may miss unless I point them out. The first is my bottom half, in white shorts, so telling on the smooth granite. Very professional.

Then, moving from pitiful to profound, note three names etched on the stone. My Dirkse grandparents had three children: a son who took over Grandpa's downtown Mobil station; a daughter, my mother; and the baby of the family, Gertrude, killed in a freakish automobile accident on a foggy night along the western shore of Lake Michigan. Gertie was a school teacher in the brand new Oostburg Christian School. Her name is at left.

Grandma Dirkse lost a daughter and heard the news from county cops who rang the doorbell late one night in 1949. The stone doesn't say all of that, and most anyone old enough to remember Gertie or her death probably can't. 

Then there's that ornament to the right announcing Grandma Dirkse to have been a lifetime member of the American Legion Auxiliary. She would not allow her only brother's death, in France, August, 1918, to be forgotten. My grandma Dirkse suffered two dreadful losses.

Mabel Hartman Dirkse was the only grandparent I knew. Both grandfathers never reached my age and passed away before I was ten. Grandma Schaap died three years before I was born. 

But during my life I came to see Grandma Dirkse growing from a different root. The Hartmans came to the new land in 1845, the Wisconsin shoreline all frontier. They were not seceders, not afscheiding. I'm not sure they were all that religious. The new land was wonderful, but it was only new land.

Years ago, with a giggle, Grandma told me that just after the turn of the century, as a school girl, she had to recite the Heidelburg Catechism in Dutch language even though she couldn't speak the Holland tongue herself. Grandma always was more "flexible" than the other grandparents, less theologically. But she'd married a man so old-country pious that he found it something he found it pleasing to relish the depth of his sin. You read that right. Grandma, relatives told me, had the arduous task of trying to simmer away the dreariness when it edged into darkness. She wouldn't let things get too spiritual.

When my sisters went off to high school and wanted to go to dances, Dad, a CRC preacher's son, wasn't taken with the amusement. Grandma told him, sweetly I'm sure, that it wouldn't hurt for him to loosen things up a notch or two.

My mother's only memory of her Grandpa Hartman is the time Grandma Dirkse, then a young mother, hauled her daughter along to a bar on Sheboygan's Indian Avenue, where she found her father and hauled him home.

Grandma Dirkse may not have been a prophet, but she was the first to wear a pantsuit to church. "Why Mabel," another woman said, "I never thought I'd see you wear a pants to church." She told the critic, "I never yet went without one."

Sometime before our daughter was born, a letter arrived. Grandma said the whole family awaited our daughter's birth because that little girl would be the first woman preacher in the CRC. That was a joke. Grandma Dirkse was a comic, not a crusader. When she was well on in years, she told my sister fearfully that one night she was sure there was a man under her bed. But then, she took a breath. "Of course, that could have been interesting too."

Grandma liked an occasional Old Fashioned, and her requests allowed my dad to have one too. She was a comic, her own kind of free spirit, and when I rehearse what I know of the other grnadparents--sincere, pious, deeply religious, it's Grandma Dirkse I can't help documenting her as, well, my particular saint. 

Still, when I remember her as I do every Thanksgiving, the effect is more serious than playful. Once, when I was a boy, she was the one who set the table's goodies. She was once the memorable Thankgiving queen.

I wasn't home for her last one. My sister's family had her over, along with my parents. But I can imagine the scene--the table drawn out into the living room, the unmistakable aroma of turkey and stuffing wafting bountifully, the tinkling of forks against my sister's holiday china, and Grandma being the last to finish.

When it was over, she slowly leaned into the car and sat be­side my parents for the trip home. She told them, clear and simple, it was a wonderful Thanksgiving. Then, her head fell sideways, and my father, sensing seriousness, sped to the Memorial Hospital, just a few blocks away, where she died.

I can't help thinking she played this last little joke on us, dying when she did, so that every Thanksgiving she shows up, smiling, in my imagination. And that's okay. Somehow, Grandma's death reminds me of what God gave her--joy in a life rife with sorrows through a quiet, even silent faith not earned but given freely.

Gratitude owns no spe­cial date on a believer's calendar, doesn't require turkey or pumpkin pie.

But I like to think Grandma is up there on the right hand where she's got her place at the table, still chuckling about that last fast one she pulled.

Next Thursday, somewhere close to her husband and her daughter and her brother, like the graves out there in the in Hartman Cemetery, she won't somehow be watching, maybe cracking a joke, smiling all the while, still, for me, Thanksgiving queen.

Grandma pix

Tomorrow's post, which you're invited to read on Thanksgiving, is all about this woman, my Grandma Dirkse, who married an upstanding young Oostburg businessman named Harry H. Dirkse, a blacksmith with a shop right downtown. One of my earliest childhood memories is of that blacksmith shop, the only light in the place coming from a fire he tended and the open doorway to Main Street. I remember the ringing rhythm of that hammer on the anvil as he fashioned a horseshoe or plowshare. The shop closed up fairly soon after that memory and Grandpa's business became a red horse, Mobilgas filling station. 

Grandma looks like a scrapbook grandma, doesn't she? My oldest sister, Judy, is perfectly darling little girl with her left arm on Grandma's shoulder. Judy is 79 today. Her sister--and my sister, Gail--is the child who looks greatly taken by the book her cousin, Jane, is reading. Gail is 77.

An earlier picture features Grandma Dirkse as a young mom. Gertrude Hartman married Harry H. Dirkse when he was 21 and Grandma was 20, a stenographer, I read somewhere. That's their firstborn, Allan, born in 1915. His sister, my mother, came along in 1918. 

The picture I used--you'll see it again tomorrow if you come around, is the one that follows. Grandma is younger here and likely unmarried. She has a kind of haughty, worldly look, but it's fair to say that she was a good deal more at home in the world than her husband, who came from a more conservative church fellowship--he was Christian Reformed. 

So what's not to love here? She's just a kid whose working joyfully at becoming a woman. She carries herself as if she has some solid sense that she is, well, attractive. Nothing particularly demure of this young lady. It's a given that what she's prepared to say will be witty and memorable.

It's a posed portrait, maybe high school graduation? What you see is a bit of an enlargement--the original measures a bit less than two inches wide and a bit more than three inches tall. 

I wasn't hunting for this one in particular, but when I found it in the pile I knew it was the right one. I'd seen it before in the collection of ancient photographs Grandma herself entrusted me with when she was old and considered me, of all her grandchildren, the one who might care. 

But I'd never really taken the time to look closely at this (what I believe to be) late-adolescent portrait. I'd never turned it over--or if I did I certainly didn't remember what I found on the back. Look.

In a stenographer's handwriting, beneath four stains from some kind of glue--the picture likely came from an album--this little picture says this:

You love Harry

Mabel Hartman

There are more than a few interpretations, of course. Is what's written here intended as a command, as if she's unsure herself and needs to have her courage dialed up? Or is what's written something some friend wrote in, giggling, as if begging young Mabel to admit what everyone else seems already to know? 

Is it in fact her handwriting? Is she simply telling herself what she knows very, very well: "you love him, girl." Just admit it.

Choose what you will. There may well be more. The mystery of who and how and why she wrote what she did, if she did, is a joy, a love story.

The real blessing of those words--last week when I found them and today when I read them again--is that they offer me a Grandma I knew only as a grandma and never as a flirty sweetheart, a young lady somehow in love with a man who would never ever leave her horse's feet unshod. 

The real story of those words is long gone, but the delightful mystery those words beg has even more to say to her grandson's imagination. What a joy really--what a find. Without a dollar more in my pocket, I'm a good deal more wealthy today, having discovered those few clouded words on the back of her picture.

More about her tomorrow.  

The Phoenix Smokestack

The bottom line of this historical highway marker claims the sign was placed there in 1956. I was nine years old. As I remember, it was south and east of town, closer to Cedar Grove than it was to Oostburg, along what was once state highway 141, but what has been blessed today with a more historical name--the Sauk Trail. 

Some Sauk, some Fox, some Pottawatomi, some Ho-Chunk or Winnebago--they were all there on the lakeshore in 1847, at least remnants thereof, most of them by that time reduced to begging, indigents, according to my great-grandfather's obituary, victims of a rapacious western movement of Euro-Americans, many of them, like my ancestors, immigrants.

The first book I owned I bought from Prange's Department Store in Sheboygan. Most likely, that was close to 1956. That coffee-table sized book cost all of three dollars, I think, but it documented and described Indians, Native Americans, not just the tribes that were on Wisconsin's Lake Michigan shoreline, where I grew up, but all kinds of Indians. I loved it. Paid for it myself--I think my parents were proud really. 

I never forgot the highway sign. Mom and Dad likely piled their kids in the car--an old Mercury--and went south down the highway, maybe on our way to Milwaukee, when Dad spotted that flashy new highway marker he'd read about and decided to pull over. 

I'm almost positive no school class ever taught me anything about the Phoenix disaster. When I was a boy in the Christian school, there were only two histories that really counted much: national history (the Tea Party, Washington on the Delaware) and Reformation history (Luther, Calvin, Knox, etc.). When I was a kid, I don't know if any teacher I ever had considered Sheboygan County history to be history at all. 

All I ever knew of the Phoenix disaster was from this sign. No one talked much about it as I remember, and while there were many in local communities who could trace their ancestry back to some long-gone Phoenix disaster survivor, I couldn't, nor did I lose a relative that cold November night in 1847. 

But the story stayed with me, found a permanent place in my heart and soul, and when first I was given the assignment to write a short story--I was a sophomore in college--the very first story I wrote was something about the Phoenix disaster.

Close to 300 Dutch emigrants had left the Netherlands months before, bound for rural Sheboygan County, Wisconsin. They'd boarded the steamship Phoenix for the last leg of the journey, stopped for a time, just north at Manitowoc, then departed, middle of the night, for the Sheboygan harbor. They were within sight of the city lights--that close!--when a boiler blew and set the wooden ship aflame. Most of those on board had one last choice--to drown or burn. The lifeboats were a joke. Who on earth cared for these people, after all? They were just a bunch of lousy immigrants. 

When, a few years later, I decided to try to gather a sense of my own roots (Alex Haley, Roots), I started on my very first book project. It was 1976. I was a college teacher. My idea?--to read local histories of Dutch Reformed areas, find stories I liked, and try to write them to learn to write fiction. 

The first story I wrote with that collection of stories in mind was the story of the Phoenix disaster. In a way, ever since I was nine, ever since I read that highway sign, I couldn't help but think that somehow, for someone like me, a kid with a Dutch name, who grew up on the lakeshore, that story in some mysterious way belonged to me.

A story in yesterday's Sheboygan Press claims that a local scavenger took a State Historical Society diver along to look over what he'd considered a log when he'd earlier taken a Dutch researcher to the place, a couple miles out, north of Sheboygan, where the Phoenix was thought to have gone down. The expert now claims that the log is not a log, but a smokestack, almost assuredly from the Phoenix. It's been lying there in cold Lake Michigan waters for 175 years. Amazing!--and wonderful.

I just hope some kid in the neighborhood will take notice of all of this, do a little homework on the story, and then allow it a permanent place in the library of his or her soul, which is where you'll find mine.

The story of the Phoenix disaster is bigger and broader, deeper and wider, than even a Lake Michigan horizon at dawn. It begs unanswerable questions, critiques our prejudices, puts us into the kind of stillness that reminds us to think eternally. 

__________________________ 

The story "The Heritage of These Many Years" appears in my first book, Sign of a Promise and Other Stories, 1979.

Wake up, America

You really can't miss that wild cover, but let me help you with the small print. On the first day, the program offered some great music--The Manhattan Quartet--and then a lecture by someone named G. A. Gearhart. Title?--"BENEFITS FORGOT," a wake-up call to small town America, begging good, sturdy, hard-working people not to fall asleep at the wheel but remember and then recommit themselves to the fabulous freedoms America afforded its blessed populace. 

Right here in Orange City, the second day, July 14, 1920, offered a wider and broader range of wholesome activities, all of it family entertainment, including stories and poems, dramatic readings by Miss Marybelle La Hatte, in a not-to-be-forgotten performance for young and old alike. Orange City must have considered itself especially favored among regional small towns in far corner of the state. The Radcliffe Chautauqua (RC) created big-time programming for American small towns. 

It was clearly, all civic pride stuff, featuring content intended to bring Orange City-ans (RC would be in Dakota City, NE the weekend before) to ordinary folk who might otherwise be starved for "classic music popularized, popular music dignified," as their advertising maintained. The whole Chautauqua movement meant to impart a dignified, thoughtful citizenry loyal to the central truths of American freedom.  You should support the RC, its own documents argued, "if you believe in making better homes, better churches and schools, better character, better civilization, in making life brighter and happier, and in making young men and women less anxious to go to the big city but more happy about staying in their home community."

RC wanted little more than to bring some class to podunk, and it did. Using the familiar tropes of old-fashioned tent revivals couple with a little Barnum and Bailey, RC created a big-top on some open field to attract a crowd, then preached the vital glories of American civic life with first-rate speakers, dramatists, and musicians. 

"Do you know that thousands of alien-born anarchists, Bolsheviks, and other "reds," thoroughly organized and backed by millions of dollars are deliberately plotting and working night and day for the destruction of the United States?"

That's the fourth paragraph of the middle pages of the brochure, if you're wondering. I would imagine, in 1920, with the fire and smoke of the Russian Revolution just recently drifting away, that paragraph wasn't political or propaganda, I'm guessing the good folks at RC would have maintained that paragraph was simple fact: there were "reds" and they were sworn to bring down American democracy.

I happened upon this 102-year-old program/brochure (it's the property of the Dutch American Heritage Museum) the day after ex-President Trump delivered a speech announcing his candidacy for the office of the President. How can you not note that wild cover?

“Biden has made a corrupt bargain in exchange for his party’s nomination,” Mr. Trump said. “He has handed control to the socialists and Marxists and left-wing extremists like his vice-presidential candidate.”

It's amazing. That argument has been a mainstay of Republic politics for more than a century, right here in River City, Orange City. 

And elsewhere. Lots and lots of American elsewheres.

Sunday Morning Meds--In His Feathers

 

“. . .in the shadow of your wings 

until the disaster has passed.” Psalm 57:2

The italics designate that the title is a book, not just a few words hung atop a meditation—and this is not a marketing ploy.

Years ago I published a collection of a woman’s letters and notes and journal entries, which is titled, on the basis of this verse, In His Feathers. It was published in very low numbers because, try as I might, I couldn’t find a big publisher—well, let’s broaden that a bit: I couldn’t find an editor or an agent even willing to read the manuscript.

Why wouldn’t anyone look? It’s the story of a woman’s battle with ovarian cancer. Sharon Wagonaar Bomgaars died in 2003, just a few years after diagnosis, which means In His Feathers is, I suppose, to big publishers just another memoir by a nobody. If Sharon was a celebrity—if she’d been featured on Good Morning America, or—the big enchilada, Oprah, we would have had no trouble finding a publisher.

Sharon was a loving wife and mother, a thoughtful, honest, committed Christian, an inveterate journal-keeper who recorded every last sorrow and joy. Listen to her thoughts as she sat at the keyboard for the very last time:

This morning [my husband] brought me a half-cup of pear juice with ice. I took a sip and a tiny piece of pear had slipped through the sieve. I caught it on my tongue. I squeezed that little gritty fragment lovingly. It smoothed into nothingness and it was so good! I squeezed each lovely sip and rolled it around on my tongue. Then I let it slide slowly down my throat. Pear juice, delicious pear juice, squeezed from pears grown on some tree in dusty California, and now bringing me all its sun-warmed sweetness. What a gift!

God is so good to give us such pleasures in this sin- sick world. I love God's gifts! I love his peaches, and pears, and grapes, and strawberries, and apples! I love his wet, sweet, juicy creations! What an awesome God!

Twenty-one days later, she left all the sweet, juicy creations behind.

Forgive my bitterness and even my jealousy, because I do wish the book would be featured on Oprah. But its failure to find a publisher may well be itself a reason to praise God. Thousands upon thousands of stories like Sharon’s exist, stories of real people who took or take abiding refuge beneath the wings of God almighty.

Somehow, I think Sharon would like me to say what’s in my heart—that the glory and power of this single line from Psalm 57 is that it is true, true until the day we die, and then on into eternity. And the proof is in the numbers: there are so many stories.

Sadly, there’s even more to Sharon’s story. Her husband, just a few years after Sharon died, was diagnosed with lung cancer, even though he never smoked in his life. Today, he’s gone too. I’m just happy there’s a book that tells her story, and theirs. It is a love song.

The truth of Sharon’s story is in this plaintive song of the poet/king. Refuge, as David knew, even as he sang this line, is under his wings and in his feathers.

Me and My Vote - finis

In late summer, 1976, we were back in Iowa, when I read a note about the Sioux County Republicans holding a meeting at the TePaske theater of the high school. I decided to attend. I don't remember the issues exactly, although I probably could guess because they haven't changed: Democrats were socialists, Marxists, communists--however many of those adjectives you could stack up in front of the name. Democrats hated America. Democrats weren't Americans; they weren't patriots, and if we didn't call them out, the whole country was down the tubes. You know, same-old same-old.

I walked out of TePaske Theater than night and never looked back. The world around me in northwest Iowa hadn't changed much at all, and while I wasn't yet convinced I was a real live Democrat, I knew this much for sure--that clown show made it perfectly clear that I was no Republican. 

I voted for the peanut farmer in 1980, not Ronald Reagan. At the time, I was, once more, a graduate student, now at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. We'd moved, again, and now there was a little toe-headed little guy on the crew, David, born a couple years earlier in 1978. 

The day after the Presidential election that year, the entire English department, it seemed, should have shut down in grief and sorrow. The phony Western actor was going to be in the oval office. I never liked Ronald Reagan, but I didn't hate him, like so many did. I remember standing at an English department water fountain--in Wisconsin people call them "bubblers"--and actually chuckling at the doomsday horrors hovering over everything.

In 1984, back in Iowa, I was among the few and the proud who voted defiantly for Minnesota's Walter Mondale, even though the election turned into another rout, up there with Goldwater and McGovern. I didn't hate Reagan, but neither did I trust him.

In 1988, I voted for George H. W. Bush, in part, I think, because that picture of George Dukakis, of Massachusetts, in that tank, wearing that helmet was just too silly a cartoon. Dukakis got creamed by racism, by ads about Willy Horton and the spectre of Black criminality, a long-time favorite issue for Democrats, an issue they haul out every four years in an attempt to scare the excrement out of white voters. 

In 92, I wasn't all that fond of the Governor of Arkansas or his wife, but I voted Clinton rather than abide another round of George H.W. I never cozied up to the Clintons, basically because I saw him as a womanizer, which he was. I couldn't help believing that if could lie so smooth and often about his excesses, he could lie about other things, the kind of man, a Canadian friend of mine used to say, who could shake hands with his right hand while pissing on your leg with his left. I just didn't believe him, but I voted his way because ever since that Sioux County Republican meeting in the TePaske I knew this much at least--I wasn't a Republican.

In '96, I honestly don't know who got my vote, although I remember--and somewhere around here, I'm sure--is a button featuring the face of that odd little man from Texas, Ross Perot, who told America in no uncertain terms that if they'd vote him into office, he'd by golly lift the hood of the nation and get down there and fix it. I didn't vote for him, because it would have been--and was--a wasted vote. But there was something about him I liked. I liked Dole more than I liked the Clintons, but I wasn't a Republican.

In 2000, I voted for W. I remember why, and I distinctly remember regretting it.

In 2008, I wouldn't have voted for him for any money. I admired him after 9/11, but the war in Iraq felt for all the world like another Vietnam. John Kerry knew what was was like, despite the lies of the Republicans who tried to swift-boat him. Kerry got my vote, the whole Iraq thing a quagmire that never should have been. Saddam had no nukes--George W. Bush was either lying or incompetent.

In 2008, I wore a t-shirt that said Obama 2008. Twice in a matter of weeks, I was upbraided angrily--really angrily--by people I'd never seen so insanely angry before. They were outraged, both of them. Obama was a baby killer, didn't I know that? How can you side with a baby killer? Even my own grandson, a kindergartner, knew as much. One morning he crawled up into my lap and, out of nowhere, told me that Obama killed babies. 

All of that made me more sure I wasn't a Republican. Besides, I'd heard Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. It had been something of a
phenomenon, and I couldn't help thinking that what we all needed, Euro- and African-American, was a man of color in the White House.

In the years since I've not come near to voting Republican again, and I don't really understand at all people who do, even though I'm in a tiny minority all around. Trump has been an abomination, a criminal abomination. 

In 2022, the election just completed, I voted for Mike Franken and not Charles Grassley, in part because Grassley is too old and has spent too much of his campaign as a chum of the orange crook. Eighty per cent of the county went for Grassley. Voting Democratic is always, here, a losing cause; people believe, I can't help thinking, that their grandfathers will roll over in their graves should their grandsons and daughters vote Democratic. 

All of this started with a simple question: how did you vote this year? 

I thought simply to answer that question, but I wanted you to understand.

________________________________ 

I think that's it!!!

Me and My Vote - ix

What did we know about having kids? I remember falling asleep in ten-minute segments the night Andrea Jane was born. We lived at 35th Avenue and Thunderbird Road, a half-hour from the downtown hospital where we were set for the birth. 

Midnight-ish, as I remember, maybe a bit later, we drove downtown because it seemed to us rookies that it was time. The nurse at the hospital said it wasn't, told us go home, keep watching things, and come back when we knew for sure that the child was on the way.

After I finished the masters program, I had taken a job in a brand new high school on the city's northern edge (no more, by the way). Why? I wasn't sure I was cut out for more graduate school, I had loved high school kids, and I realized I had a good opportunity to teach a classroom full of different colored kids, a Room 222-thing, a bunch of students who'd greet me like Welcome Back, Kotter.

I got a job in a way that I still think jaw-dropping. I'd signed up for an interview when Glendale School District, ten or eleven high schools, would be on campus. I walked into an interview room where I met a blonde-haired guy, maybe 45 or so, a man named Robert Sterrett, who started the interview by asking me if there was one thing he thought he should know about me, one answer I could give to what Jim Schaap was, what would that be?

I find it amazing--and did, even at the time--that what popped into my mind as if it were always there was the first q and a of the Heidelburg Catechism. "That I belong, body and soul, to my savior, Jesus Christ. " That's what I told Sterrett, something drawn from the catechism of my youth, I told him. 

I didn't need that job. I was still exploring possibilities--maybe even being a newspaper editor in some small town somewhere. If I didn't get it, there were other options. I say that because you shouldn't, and I didn't, think of my knee-jerk response as something brave and daring--I wasn't trying to be a witness or any such thing. That first q and a simply jumped from my memory to my lips, just like that. i

Robert Sterrett looked at me, shook his head, and said, "You got the job."

Easiest interview I ever had. 

Sterrett was a believer, but he also had his reasons. He was looking for a male because his English department at Greenway High School already had 15 women. He was looking for an MA, someone to lead the troops; the year I came, Greenway had no seniors. My record as a high school teacher at Blackhawk was fine as wine, so once he heard the confession, any questions he might have had coming into the interview had left the room. 

Two years later, we had a baby, Andrea Jane, and for both of us, looking homeward, back to the Midwest, seemed a good thing. When the Dean of the college I'd attended--and left angrily--called to ask about my teaching there, things fit together. 

We had our first child early on the morning of March 9, 1976, after going home and then returning downtown when we could no longer imagine Andrea wasn't well on the way. By then it was early, and there was a moment--not much more--when we sat in our blue VW, stuck in rush-hour traffic, Barb's labor intense. That I'll never forget. But we got there fine, and the baby came forthwith, thanks be to God.

In 1976, President Gerald Ford, who'd pardoned Nixon, was on the ticket, along with a peanut farmer from Georgia named Jimmy Carter. I don't know who I voted for, the guy from Grand Rapids or the born-again Christian. I'm betting, even though I'd hated Nixon and gleefully watched as many minutes of the Watergate Hearings as I could, I had enough Republican blood in me to at least appreciate Ford's pardon of Tricky Dick, via a for-the-good-of-the-nation argument that sounded gracious.

___________________________

One more, I promise.

Me and My Vote - viii

Whether, in this madcap courtship, any political compatibility tests were administered between Barbara and me, I don't remember. We were an odd couple. Both of us knew something of the other--this much at least, that neither of us had been, well, celibate. We'd both been around the block with significant others; we were veterans, even bloodied, by relationships--how can I say it?--that didn't work out. We already knew what didn't have to be said, and I'm darn sure she knew she wasn't getting into a relationship with the kind of Young Republican I might well have been in high school. Or a saint. 

In 1972, Senator George McGovern got shellacked by Tricky Dick, who, ridiculously, held up both arms and won in a landslide. I don't remember grieving or throwing a fit, but I was undergoing a psychological test my brand new life administered. I was in graduate school, I was married--I'd hauled this beautiful woman along to Arizona, even though I'd not been bull-headed about it. At some point, I'd told her that my time at Blackhawk High School was going to end because I was going to graduate school. She made her own connections, came up with an Arizona teaching job, then let me know she had--and suggested that she'd be willing to consider coming to the desert with me. I sprang an engagement ring on her, but I don't know that I ever asked her to marry me. The relationship took on its own lovely momentum. Thus, we spent our very first Christmas together around a scrawny little Christmas tree we sawed down in the snow on Arizona's Mogollon Rim. . .our first Christmas and we'd already been married six months. 

Neither of us were Johnny Cash fans, but sure as anything "we got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout." Was a delight. Still is. Wouldn't trade it for anything.

I'm guessing that I didn't break down and cry about the Nixon landslide because the times, they were a'changin' again. In graduate school I had profs I liked a great deal who had no time whatsoever for the mythology of historic Christianity, profs who lambasted Calvinism, while explaining how immeasurably pervasive it was in the early years of the Republic. The thing is, I knew people who were the 20th century equivalents of Cotton Mather, face down on the floor all day long to repent of sins that weren't at all evident. I knew people who, if given the opportunity, would without question toss women they considered witches out of the church. 

I understood why Emily Dickinson refused when her teachers told the students to indicate their need of salvation by standing and saying so. Somehow, in a grad program at Arizona State University, we were covering familiar territory; but when I looked around at the other students I didn't see anyone as personally engaged as I was. None of them looked as if they recognized themselves in the Calvinism of Melville's Captain Ahab.

One moment in those early months I'll never forget, even though the slight seems silly today. "So," the prof said, when I met him in his office, "what was the name of that college you attended again?" 

When I told him, I tried to explain. "It's like a cousin of Calvin College," I said.

"Calvin?" he said as he lit a cigarette. He had no idea there was a Calvin College. 

In a sense, I was relieved. I'd left Dordt College wondering whether I'd made the right choice four years before, whether I shouldn't have matriculated at Calvin, where the anti-war sentiment built up far greater force. Professor Marvin Fischer, ASU, may never have heard of Dordt, but he hadn't heard of Calvin either. I was in a whole new world, but I was also alone. 

I bought Calvin's Institutes on my own. It wasn't a required text. I'd never read any of it in college. My motivation was something I remember clearly: I'd begun to understand that this whole Calvinism business was something far bigger than what I'd experienced as a boy in Oostburg and a college kid in northwest Iowa. Calvinism was there at the birth of the nation I'd been born into, not only that but it had a starring role.

Three years out of a college education I'd sometimes grown to regret, I found myself fascinated by this whole Calvinist thing because I understood for the first time that I'd been part of something much bigger than myself, something I'd never really understood. I can't help thinking that Arizona's legendary frontier conservatism (the Goldwater state) took a toll on me too, but so did a slowly opening vision that made me think so much of what I'd regretted just a few years before was even more encompassing and formative in a broader world I was just beginning to discover.

That spring, one Sunday when I was in Chicago to see Barbara, we went to church together--First CRC, South Holland, IL. First time in a long time for me. Place was huge. Preacher stood way, way, way up front and held forth in a sermon I thought could well have been spoken in Latin or Afrikaans it seemed so lifeless. I didn't say it to this woman with whom I was hopelessly in love, but I certainly wondered what on earth drew people to have to attend such a stultifying thing. 

When we were married, we went to church, both of us--me, returning.

Politically, in Arizona, a graduate student, this peacenik slid over a bit to the right once more. I don't remember bawling when the anti-war forces were crushed in McGovern's loss. Why not? Because I was leaning more to the right than I'd been for years. 

The truth?--I don't even remember voting.

___________________ 

I know I promised this would be the last, but there's more to the story. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe. 

Me and My Vote - vii

It's hard for me to imagine that my high school students held strong political beliefs. I honestly don't remember talking about politics at all. Even though I left college with an English major; even though I remembered telling myself one day on a sidewalk outside the classroom building that I could spend my life reading and discussing literature--be an English teacher; even though I began to think more and more seriously about doing what I'm doing right now, this morning, at 5:30, tapping out letters to become words and sentences, creating all sorts of things with words; even though all of that is true, I was, that first year, falling in love with literature.

When I think about that time now, I think I can say that I was so deeply set in what happened, day to day, in my classroom, I'd become less political than I'd been. In a sense, everyone knew the war in Vietnam was rolling down--there were fewer body bags. One of the candidates for Pres was a bona fide liberal peacenik, Senator George McGovern, a boy from the prairies who'd graduated from a small, liberal arts college and had done some religious studies. McGovern was firmly anti-war, and in class, I was analyzing lyrics from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. No fights really. 

Somewhere along the line, even before I took the job at Blackhawk High School, I had determined I wanted to teach in college someday, which meant, sometime soon, graduate school. I was happy, even thrilled to sign the Blackhawk contract, but I knew I'd be there for no more than two years. I mentioned that once to the principal, and he told me he was glad I hadn't said that when I signed because he wouldn't have hired me. 

After a year and a half at Blackhawk, that career plan had not changed. I loved teaching, but it was killing me. I'd begun applying to graduate schools I chose simply on the basis of their being in exotic places--Florida, Arizona--places I'd never been. My two-year sojourn in that little drafty trailer in beautiful southwestern Wisconsin was going to end. That was sure.

My loneliness vanished gloriously when my sister, in a south Chicago suburb, insisted that I come down for a visit and take out this cute single teacher named Barb Van Gelder, the woman--if you're following all of this--who'd spent Ref Doc class (at least in my mind) writing letters to her sweetheart in Vietnam. "Don't be ridiculous," I told her. "She went with my roommate--she went with two of my roommates. You just 'don't have a thing' for your roommates' ex-sweeties. It's just not done."

"Don't be an idiot," my sister told me. 

I went, I saw, and Barbara, unknowingly, conquered, even though I spotted her all the way across a the gym floor. She was wearing a thin orange sweater, clingy. I've never forgotten. 

Less than six months later, the two of us, who'd spent too much time alone, were married--that was 50 years ago.

My students were thrilled. I think I became even more beloved. 

June 27, 1972. First CRC, Orange City, Iowa

That summer, the summer the two us went off to Arizona, newlyweds, I'd visited her home here in northwest Iowa, and attended a family picnic in an Orange City park. I don't remember why I stuck my neck out--whether it was purposely to get into a fight or to simply and honestly tell the family what I felt--but I made it clear to the men--we were segregated, the women in a circle elsewhere--that people who would vote for Tricky Dick that year were only fooling themselves. I was for McGovern. I couldn't understand how people wouldn't be. Nixon was a liar and a thief, and worse, a warmonger. 

I wasn't thinking straight. I should have known that kind of platitude was not a firm foundation for future family life together. Barbara's parents were soft-spoken, not determined Republicans. Both of them had what I would call a Democratic heart, a soul that kept them distanced from power-hungry pols and firmly planted on the side of the hurting, the disenfranchised, those altogether too easily run over. I don't think they minded the politics of their new and liberal son-in-law. 

But I got clobbered right there in the Orange City park. It was a massacre. I got killed. 

Later, two of her relatives I knew to be McGovernites, couldn't help but giggle. They kept their silence, they said, because the only smart thing to do was keep your mouth shut here when it came to politics. I didn't.

I'd been in rural Wisconsin for two years, an hour away from Madison. I hadn't been in northwest Iowa since college graduation. Maybe I'd just plain forgotten--I don't know. Maybe I told those old uncles of hers what I thought about Tricky Dick because I'd simply assumed I was doing nothing more than contributing to a good, hearty political discussion. 

It was hearty all right. I got burned at the stake. 

_________________________ 

If you're still with me in this long-winded tale, thanks. I should be able to wrap it up tomorrow. The project is a single chapter in a book some great-great grandchild someday could stumble on when she wonders about her ancestors--who they were and how they lived and why they lived the strange way they did. 

Me and My Vote - vi

Journalism class, Blackhawk HS, 1972. I'm the guy with the tie.

After a fashion, I lost myself in teaching. 

I loved it far, far more than I ever imagined I would or could. My students, literally, were my life. I was single, totally unattached, and sometimes terrifyingly alone. Without them, I'd have died, I'm sure. On weekends, I haunted local bars, cruising, but at closing time--or before--I left alone. 

Politically, I'd gone sort of inactive. Just a few days before school started, the Sterling Hall bombing happened just up the road at UW. A homemade bomb had been planted in protest against the university's affiliation with the military, some research aspect that angered the anti-war crowd, and at Madison the anti-war crowd was legion. What they were after was the Army Research Training Center, a couple floors of Sterling Hall. 

That bomb injured a few and killed a student named Fassnacht, who had absolutely nothing to do with the ARTC. Four Kent State students had died, or so Crosby, Still, Nash, and Young told us, over and over again; but even one dead at the bloody hands of the anti-war crowd was a horrible shock. I didn't change my politics, but I did tell myself that the whole Haight-Ashbury, flowery, "give peace a chance" movement had spent itself in spilled blood. In the fall of 1970, the times they were a'changin'. The good guys had inexplicably showed themselves to be killers.

But I was too busy for politics. Just getting ready for classes I'd never taught before kept me up at night and got me up early in the morning. It was hard, hard work, but it had immense rewards because I couldn't help knowing I was appreciated, even loved.

I had enough "sphere sovereignty" in me to stay the heck away from my female students. I was four years older than they were, but I was their teacher and had no desire to undermine the respect they gave me. I remember thinking that when I'd be 50, they'd be 46--roughly the same age. But somehow I never once thought about starting something up with one of the young women. When old friends came to visit one weekend and visited the school, they were dumbstruck. "How do you keep your hands off that stuff?" one of them said. I didn't say it, but I was offended at the question. 

My abode--1702 South Eighth Avenue, Monroe, WI

In fact, I think I repressed that drive deeply. I'll never forget late one night, alone in my rented trailer, having a dreamy sexual liaison with one of my students, a student whose face I can still see even though I'd have to look up her name. That dream was so vivid, so real, that it woke me. I had to tell myself what had gone on had a life only in my overactive, sleepless brain.

At school, first period was my prep time. As soon as Mrs. Lancaster, the librarian, opened up the next morning, I went over to the library and looked up Freud and the interpretation of dreams--there was no internet in 1970. When I walked in, horrifyingly, the only student sitting there was the young woman my subconscious had undressed the night before. The old Calvinist in me couldn't help thinking it wasn't Freud who could explain, but God. 

I was a three-hour drive from my parents' place, so I didn't go back to Oostburg every weekend. In fact, I didn't go home often at all, which meant going to church, Sunday worship, just didn't happen. The fact is, I'd not gone regularly for some time already, even in college. My absence could be traced, at least in part, to politics. So convinced I was of the righteousness of my anti-war beliefs that I found it difficult to go to church with people whose religious faith considered mine evil. 

Not having church affiliation made me more lonely, I suppose. One day I came home to find a rolled up note wound in a rubber band on my front door, an invitation to a revival at some church or other right there in Monroe, Wisconsin. I'm guessing now, but I can't help thinking that that handbill triggered some guilt in me, some odd sense that I needed a revival of sorts. Maybe it was just too goofy for me to pass up--a come-to-Jesus thing playing out at a church right down the road.

I went. As I remember, there might have ten people there, nine of whom were the very souls who'd canvassed with the invitations, the first ones to testify and to come up to the front for the altar call, that cheap Wurlitzer spinning out "Shall We Gather" or some other gospel fave. The fiery middle-aged preacher had but one customer really, but he was a good one--a big-shouldered young man all by his lonesome, standing in the need of prayer. I got preached at that Sabbath morning, the only fish in the pond. He made no bones about it, looked only at me, and let me know I was not walking with the Lord if I didn't, right then, turn my heart to Jesus.

In the two years I spent in that little trailer in Monroe, Wisconsin, I never went again, not to any church around. I'd had enough.

One more story about a guy, a teacher, who'd been reared Dutch Reformed. I played town league basketball with some local guys. I coached high school freshmen, so the fact that I'd played basketball got out and I got drafted. Town league basketball was fun--and it was good for me. We were good, too. Only recently did I throw out some old trophies.

When spring came around, some town guys said they'd heard I was a catcher on the college baseball team--"and what was the name of that college again?" They needed a catcher. Was I interested? 

They played on Sunday. The talons of old-line righteousness were so deeply set within me that I considered--not long, but I considered--saying no. 

The importance of that story lies in my own thinking about saying no, about the repercussions thereof, about how my beloved students might read that decision: I couldn't help believing that it would have been just about incomprehensible to them--"is Schaap Amish or what?" My parents thought Johnny Vander Meer, the ace Dutch Reformed chucker who once spun consecutive no-hitters but wouldn't pitch on Sunday, a real saint. But I couldn't help think that my ingrained sabbitarianism, there in the Blackhawk school district--no Sunday baseball!--would have seemed freakish, not a witness.

I decided to play, and did, and in one of the games hit a ball out of the park, something that hadn't been done often, if at all, or so I was told by students who thought that feat spectacular. 

My faith wasn't crumbling. Back then, I prayed with more fervency than I ever had at college. I needed help. I was alone. But the only church in the county I'd ever visited was a little honkey-tonk to which I wasn't about to return.

But what continued to crumble within me was the citadel of behaviors the Dutch Reformed, as I knew them, defined "the Christian life." When I decided to play ball on Sunday during the summer of 1971, what became even more clear to me was that some of the laws my tribe long ago institutionalized were manifestations of my people's existential sense of what was godly (lower case g), and that included an insistence on Republican politics. 

1972 was another Presidential election year. This time I'd get to vote.