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.