Hamlin Garland (i)

On Tuesday, July 11, at 6:30 p.m., the Dutch American Heritage Museum, in Orange City, will be treating a crowd to a readers' theater production of "Mrs. Ripley's Visit," the first short story Garland wrote for a collection he eventually titled Main-Travelled Roads. We couldn't have better readers--Jeff and Karen Barker, long-time theater profs at Northwestern, will be reading Mr. and Mrs. Ripley.

This post was published here a year ago, after I returned from a visit to Osage, Iowa, where, for a time, Hamlin Garland's parents homesteaded. 

________________________ 

She rose from the cow’s side at last, and, taking her pails of foaming milk, staggered toward the gate. The two pails hung from her lean arms, her bare feet slipped on the filthy ground, her greasy and faded calico dress showed her tired, swollen ankles, and the mosquitoes swarmed mercilessly on her neck and bedded themselves in her colorless hair.

You're thinking Cinderella maybe? Good guess, but the setting is no match--no court, no Prince, no overfed grumbletonian sisters; instead, as you can tell, we're in farm country, ours, circa 1850, Sim Burnes' wife, or so Hamlin Garland tells us in the very first line of the story "had never been handsome, even in the early days of her girlhood."

So who is this sexist pig Hamlin Garland?--and why, pray tell, should I tune in to the schluck's misogynist rants? Maybe you shouldn't. Millions don't. Hamlin Garland has largely disappeared from high school lit texts, even though at one time he won a Pulitzer Prize and was thought to be one of the finest writers of his time.

These days, however, he's no longer read, in part because the subject matter he chose--subject matter that chose him--is the hardscrabble settling of the region he called "the Middle Border," a composite of the very westward movement his own family, like so many others, traveled mid-19th century.

Garland was born in western Wisconsin, grew up in central Iowa, and moved as a young man to the Dakota Territory, as his father and thousands of other Euro-Americans bullied their way into Native lands. Richard Garland followed a well-worn script during the era of Manifest Destiny, moving ever farther west as land opened, always looking to nail down a haunting dream of liberty--or something. That he never quite found it is in the record his son, Hamlin, left behind, a whole bundle of stories that define and describe the dreary and depressing demands of the life of a homesteader, especially on its women.

But then, it's good to remember that just breaking new ground was no chore for a sissy. Pulling that plow through the uncut earth demanded the kind of hard work that wore on both man and beast. But 160 acres almost scott-free, and all you had to do was put in a tree or two and an outhouse, improve the land a bit--and you had five years to do it? That seemed just too good.

Garland's descriptions of what it took--and what it took out of his mother especially--are hardscrabble all right. The men in his stories don't ruin their wives and kids by spending hours on end slumped over a stool at the saloon, they make life miserable by demanding unending, back-breaking work round the clock. On a hundreds of townships in what we called, back then, the great Northwest, far more dreams went bust than prospered, some by heat and drought, but most because of the back-breaking work required to build something permanent on ground the Native people white folks displaced never attempted much more than a mobile home they called a tipi.

Garland fashioned the saga of his own experience in the channel already created by at least some of the intellectual forces of his time. Among those who remember his writing, he's often considered "a literary naturalist," one of a whole "school" of writers who couldn't help believing that human beings were powerless losers before the government, or Wall Street, or even endless foul weather. We're all "Under the Lion's Paw," which is how he titled one of his most-read naturalistic stories.

The kind of naturalism Garland adopted doesn't make fun reading. Dire and dark, it gets whiny finally. You get tired of stories that follow characters who get stepped over or stepped on no matter which way they turn.

Garland the naturalist is a Garland for English majors, but not a Garland to love. When, in 1922, after decades living in American cities, he won the Pulitzer, the prize wasn't for stories of a dismal life. He won for memories he drew of those days on the Middle Border, breaking new ground, stories of the work he thought he hated, tales of a boyhood out in the middle of an jaw-dropping nowhere.

A Son of the Middle Border won him the kind of wide attention as a writer that he hadn't achieved--it's an autobiography, of all things. A kind of sequel, The Daughter of the Middle Border, won him the Pulitzer.

He cut a place for himself in the annals of American literature, not by disparaging his own boyhood, but by doing exactly the opposite: by honoring it, by making it sing.

Far away from the Middle Border, he came to came to understand the uniqueness of his childhood, which prompted him to respect it, and finally appreciate it. His Middle Border things offer an encyclopedia of life in the region where we live, mid-19th century.

In the museum of Homestead National Historical Park, there hangs a photo of a bumpkin farmer trying to cut a rug. It's goofy. It's hilarious. It's even a little embarrassing (look at the women behind him). Aside from Fred Astaire, there's something unseemly about old men dancing--old farmers especially; but I can't forget the picture, and I can't forget it not because its so tacky but because it happened: there was life out here on the plains, hard work or not. Read Hamlin Garland. Read Willa Cather.

Maybe they shouldn't have, but out here in the middle of all that openness, sometimes people danced. That too is our story. You bet it is.

Bog Walk

Bit of a tribute. Took a stroll yesterday through "the Big Woods, north of Bemidji's own Lake Bemidji to a bog (rhymes with hog), a delicate place no one I know would want to live, closest thing to a rain forest one could probably find east of the Rockies. Loved it. Easy hike, but I still sweat madly due to deep woods humidity (at least to a prairie dweller!).

For those of us who are un-Minnesotan, it just so happens that what you're looking at here is the officially recognized State Flower, a little sweetie of an orchid that blooms for only ten days. Their numbers are few, but we were blessed to be able to appreciate their glory out in the bog.

A little break up north

For close to two decades, I've left a warm bed early in the morning, come downstairs, snapped on the desktop, called up the website, and said something, lots of things, right here on the page. I don't know how long that will continue. in fact, there may be a break starting tomorrow--may, I say, because I do have some plans. 

Just thought I'd mention it because we're leaving in just a couple of hours for a respite (excuse my language--we're retired, we have no need of a respite) in northern Minnesota. For many years, a week or so "up north," as they say, was a blessing, twice a year too; first, early summer, and then again to do the color thing, first week of October.

In anticipation, I'll put some pictures up. Tomorrow is our anniversary--51. Last year's Arizona extravaganza was memorable. This year's will be far more silent and significantly shorter (not to mention less expensive), but as much a joy, just the two of us. Here's some shots, "up north."

I'll try to snag some similars in the next couple of days. Don't hold your breath. This is a quick trip. 

I'm anxious to get on the road.

Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 42

“Why are you downcast, O my soul? 

Why so disturbed within me? 

Put your hope in God, 

for I will yet praise him, 

my Savior and my God.”

In verse three of this psalm, some shrill voices are taunting, as they do again in verse ten; but unlike so many other songs in the book, in this one, Psalm 42, the enemy is not the psalmist’s Godless enemies, but his own miserable self.

What’s clear in the opening verses is that David—if he’s the author—has seemingly fallen into a chapter of Saul’s life, Israel’s very first king, the potentate who wrote the book on depression. His darkness is self-imposed: “Why are you downcast, O my soul?” is not the question David would ask himself on a battlefield. The war here—or so it seems to me—is within. “Why are you down in the dumps?” is the way Eugene Peterson puts it.

If Psalm 42 were a short story—which it isn’t—I might be willing to hazard this analysis: in verse six, we’ve arrived at the climax, maybe not the dramatic climax of the narrative, but the technical climax, because, somehow, we get the sense he’s turned the corner, that the conflict has been bested.

Right here in the psalm, this narrator—emotionally enfeebled—rallies, not because someone tells him he should, but because he tells himself he should. “Put your hope in God, fool,” he argues and then commits: “I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” He’s gritting his teeth, pushing himself up by his own spiritual bootstraps, rallying himself as if he were the captain of his own cheerleading squad.

Were some student to hand me this story, I’d likely red-pencil, “I’m not convinced” somewhere in the margin, and then scribble in something even more widely scribbled in on student stories: “show us, don’t tell us.”

But when we read on, it seems clear that the answer he commits to in this verse doesn’t shoo the darkness. Psalm 42 is not at end. The whole poem may well be a technical climax to the big story. I like that idea, even though there is no satisfying denouement.

It seems to me that what David is calling on to cure himself is what he already knows but may have forgotten or simply not mustered. What he now believes will deliver him from the darkness is not an elixir he’s buying from someone else because he already knows the way to health and joy.

You can almost feel him trying to bully away his personal demons: “I WILL YET PRAISE HIM,” he tells himself, doing everything he can to refresh his own faith, telling himself—a mantra even—something he knows so very well but has somehow lost.

He’s not asking God to ride in on a heavenly steed; he’s not asking to be saved. Instead, he’s telling his own darkened spirits what he already knows but has forgotten or stopped believing—that his only hope and comfort is in the Lord.

The joy of David’s poetry, read thousands of years later in a world David himself wouldn’t begin to understand, is our blessed realization that a human heart beats in every line. These are God songs, divinely inspired; but to read them as if they weren’t the work of a human soul is to miss half the inspiration.

In Psalm 42, David knows the truth he simply can’t muster. Every believer who’s ever been “down in the dumps” has been there, feeling exactly that pain. Every one.

David knows, but somehow he just can’t. The psalms are ours too. The psalms are us.

Morning Thanks--Milkweed

"They got a lateral root," my dad-in-law told me, explaining just what we were after. He had me out to the farm to walk beans, the kind of job, back then, only traditional farmers did anymore, before spraying. His only daughter had married a teacher who knew nothing about farming. But he could walk beans. A nine-year-old could walk beans, after all. You didn't have to have a college degree to walk beans. I told him that if he'd ever have anything for me to do. . .well, you know. So he called. "Wanna' walk beans?" he said. I couldn't say no.

Those lateral roots came up when he was talking about milkweed, a bully of a plant easily distinguishable between and through much more reserved soybeans.

Dad stuck a homemade machete in my hand, a hideous thing that would have made a great weapon in some cheap murder mystery. It was hot, I remember, July hot in northwest Iowa, and the forty acres out there before us had never seen a tree. Still, for me, a teacher on summer break, being out there with him was a joy--hard work?--yup. But a joy.

Milkweed wasn't the only enemy. Waterweed, a gangly beast, shot up and out like a green skyrocket but still did a better job of mingling into bean rows. Dogbane also got whacked, even though, Dad told me, its lateral root--like its cousin milkweed--meant any bean-walking farmer could be playing whack-a-mol all summer long. But the number one criminal in the bean field was milkweed, which could grow to preposterous heights but never particularly difficult to pull or whack, largely because its life stayed down there only to return, time and time again, like something Hitchcockian.

Fifty years have gone by. Forty years ago, we used to see elaborate carriages mounted on John Deere tractors, those carriage seats filled with farm kids armed with chemical sprayers. They're gone too. Last year, the field behind our house got strafed by a yellow plane delicately laying some chemical over everything. 

Yesterday, years later, I spent a couple hours in the summer heat pulling milkweed again. When we bought a lot out here north of town, it wasn't your standard fare. We got an acre, which doesn't sound like much, but when you try to keep the weeds under some measure of control, you soon discover an acre ain't no postage stamp. 

The first year we lived out here, like an idiot, I dug up milkweed from along the road that goes past our place. I wanted milkweed for what I thought I was creating out back on that acre of Schaap land. I didn't tell my father-in-law I tried to plant some. But I'd heard, hard as it is to believe, that some naturalists in Minnesota were aying people for milkweed seeds because wholesale spraying had pulled numbers down mercilessly which threatened the fragile lives of monarch butterflies, once abundant, but no more so. I wanted milkweed--for the monarchs.

I got 'em, tons of 'em. Dad-in-law wasn't wrong. They keep coming back like idiot boxers. You can pull 'em or whack 'em. Just don't believe yo
u're rid of 'em.

And then there's this. I'm not old enough to have participated, but I've heard stories from northwest Iowa all the way to Michigan of kids, children, picking milkweed pods, putting them into whatever would hold the harvest, and then bringing them in to some designated place in town where they'd be collected.

"Two bags save one life," people said, because milkweed floss is water-repellant and naturally buoyant enough to be used for life-jackets--"two 20-pound bags of milkweed ponds for every life-preserver." 

I pulled out a wagon full yesterday, but the whole time I kept seeing little kids with big bags-full singing patriotic songs, maybe Sunday school ditties, as they filled those bags and saved the lives of men they knew from just down the street, uniformed men far, far away, on their way to Berlin. 

If you stop in the Alton dump sometime today and see a big pile of milkweed sitting there waiting to bull-dozed into the hill of grass clippings, they're mine. . .or were. They lost their lives because there simply is too many of them, far too many, which only means more in the future. I pulled dozens and dozens, but, trust me, the monarchs still have plenty out there. They'll not starve if they flutter down on our acre. I've got more, much more, I'm sure, than the corn field next door. I made sure not to pick them all. I saw one out there yesterday too--real prairie royalty.

But I want you to know that the wholesale murder I perpetuated yesterday--killing which will likely continue today--was not done un-feelingly. Milkweed is precious. There just too much of it.

I'm not lying. Thus, this morning's thanks is for the stories that played in my head yesterday afternoon, stories of milkweed. 

L and C and me--the monster Newfie

Meriweather Lewis got himself one great deal when he picked up a dog in Pennsylvania. The twenty bucks he paid for his furry buddy way back in 1803, translates to well over $500 bucks today. Seaman wasn't cheap. 

But if, today, he decided to pick up a real Newfoundland puppy--he'd pay twice that, even three times as much. I'm not kidding. An honest-to-goodness Newfie pup, not some cheap facsimile, could clean out a checking account. 

If he could've got by with a whippet or chihuahua, the relative heft would have had less of an effect on the corps, who ended up polling or pulling their whole package of goods up the considerable flow (five miles an hour--with no wind). I mean, Newfies can tip the scales at 200 pounds, although, given his circumstance, it's unlikely Seaman was that kind of load.  

In fact, he was a workout king who didn't just sit aboard the boat like Java the Hut. Oh, no--he was off and running every other day when Lewis, a scientist by nature and inclination, would go out looking for unforeseen treasures along the banks of the Missouri, treasures, like say, prairie dogs. No one had ever seen a prairie dog, so they shot one and stuffed it because Mr. President Jefferson wanted to know about every new thing dead or alive from this massive hunk of real estate he'd picked up for a song from the French. 

Newfies are huge, muscular, powerful, as good in the water as they are on land, maybe better--after all, they've got webbed feet. On land at least, a skinny greyhound would make a Newfie look like a sea turtle, but get a beast like Seaman in the water and he'll turn half-gator.

If Seaman was smart enough to write a book, his diary would look nothing at all like the those left behind by the Corps. Seaman's daybook would record foibles and adventures, strange and even fearful meetings no one else knew or experienced because--you won't believe this!--Master Lewis let his big guy run at night when the men were fast asleep from 16-hour days in and out of the water.

We know Lewis let Seaman snoop around because he says, once in a while, that he spent some time looking for his big furry friend, hoping Seaman wouldn't have taken on some grizzly or even a badger--they'd never before seen a badger either, by the way.  “His Shape & Size is like that of a Beaver," Clark reported about this strange new creature. "His head mouth &c. is like a Dogs with Short Ears,' , "his Tail and Hair like that of a Ground Hog."

That's a badger of course, not Seaman, as everyone around here knows, thanks to  the statue out front of the Lewis and Clark Center makes unforgettably clear. Seaman was a hundred pounds of huge, a monster who dwarfs the two humanoids figures behind him--"and what were their names again?" 

Lewis almost lost him once, far down the river and on the way back, in fact, when the Corps of Discovery was having real trouble keeping track of belongings. It was April, '06, and they were in the company of Nez Perce, who so admired things the Corps had, and used, and gave away, that they grabbed what they could when they could--including, one night, Seaman.

Lewis was livid. He sent out three men armed to the teeth, and told them in no uncertain terms not to return without dog. Took them awhile, but when they showed up, you couldn't miss that big, black Newfie, whose big red mouth was likely turned up into a smile. Stephen Ambrose says, "Lewis may have been ready to kill to get Seaman back, but the Indians weren't ready to die for the dog." 

I can't help thinking we ought to look for a major motion picture sometime soon, a Disney production, a rich collection of the stories only Seaman could tell--long, dark nights alone on the banks of the Missouri. Pixar maybe.

Not long after their return, Captain Lewis died, and when he did, people say, Seaman was so full of grief he refused to eat and died himself soon after.

So next time you're down at the Lewis and Clark Center, get a selfie of you and Seaman, that great monster Newfie.             

"The Whiz," a story -- vi

This story must be 25 years old or so, and when I now go through again what some call this denouement, I can't help but think that even when I wrote it, I didn't know what to do with the experience, how to understand the events nor my role in what had happened to a young lady with all those brains and talent. The import of Mr. Crotty's emotional breakdown still isn't clear. I was 22 years old, a first-year teacher. I was as blown away as the 6th hour class who wandered into my room that day, stupefied at what they'd just seen and heard.

The line between fiction and memoir almost disappears here at the end. The person you're listening to is no longer a fictional teacher in a fictional high school. The narrator is nakedly me. 

______________________

That was years ago. Today, Wilson Crotty might have gone to jail if the whole truth were ever told. Certainly, he would have lost his job. Instead, he may still be there behind his old desk.

I could have told Templeton everything Mel told me—if I would have spoken to him, he would have pressed her for every last detail. She could have told him too, but she didn't. She was powerless, really, and maybe it's taken me all this time to understand that. That may be why she never told the principal anything more than that this: "just now, in class, Mr. Crotty had a nervous breakdown."

Maybe I didn't tell Templeton because I was already starting to know Crotty's loneliness. Maybe I didn't tell because I was a teacher, or because I'm male.

Maybe I didn't tell because I wanted to protect her from the public slime of being seen as Friedli's victim, to keep a young woman already short in self-esteem, from the ignominy of a kinky association with a tall, gangly psycho, old enough to be her father, a man who was, by and large, a decent teacher, but like so many of us, starved, I suppose, for love.

Maybe I still can't see the whole thing clearly, objectively.

I got a card from her today. She sends something at Christmas every five years or so. This one came more than a month before the holiday season, along with a letter she sent out to dozens of friends.

It says she changed jobs now--and addresses--and that she loves the new job, writing software for banks, because it allows her to stay home more often and brings in even more money than the high-pressure marketing position she had with some Fortune 500 company.

The card's corners are decorated by little holly wreaths she drew in by hand, and she slipped in a snapshot of her kids, three of them, the oldest getting to high school age himself now. She knows it's early for Christmas, she says, but she knocked off two birds with one stone by announcing her address change and giving holiday wishes all in the same envelope, all with the same stamp.

"That's just like me, I know you're saying," she writes in the letter. "I don't know where in my life I've picked up all the frugality, but it seems to get worse with age."

It's hard to imagine the Mel I knew thinks about aging.

She signed the card with a fountain pen, but what is conspicuous by its absence is her husband's name. "Love," it says, "Mel, Brittany, Stephen, and Zack." No Burt this year. No husband.

There has been a divorce, it seems. It's obvious that she's suffered again, and I can't help but think I may be at least partially responsible for whatever travail she's not documented here. I'm the one who kept quiet as to what really happened between her and Wilson Crotty--protecting her, I thought, and him, and maybe even me, I suppose, when what she likely needed back then, more than anything, was her own innocence. I know that now.

She came back to me a week after Wilson Friedli lost it, came back to my room, and told me, without a tear, that it would be best if I not tell a soul what she'd told me in the cemetery. I never did.

On the picture, her auburn hair is cut short and neat, like an executive's. Zack's in a surf shirt, like every other kid in junior high. Stephen is leaning just far enough for you to see three little stripes shaved in above his ear. A long-haired cat flops uncomfortably over little Brittany's arm. The picture was taken on a redwood deck, and there's a lake somewhere beyond the pines. She's got a better job now, she says, and from the looks on the faces of her kids, they're not as starved for love as she was—or Friedli, for that matter.

I know this: to me, the joy on those children's faces says that we all have to get up and move—Melinda, Wilson Crotty, and me too, I guess. I ask myself this, as a Christian: isn't the great lesson of the gospel simply this, that there is hope?

I'm sorry, Melinda. I can't help but think I let you down.

Maybe it's not necessary for you anymore, but it is for me—it’s time I tell the story.

___________________ 

The last line isolates a theme present throughout the narrative but now rising as central to a story drawn from my memory of an incident that seems more than just sad. 

Flannery O'Connor once said that she didn't know what she thought about some idea or another until she wrote about it. Writing, some say, is itself a way of knowing, although in this case it was, at least for me, a way of knowing that I didn't know, couldn't know, would never know.

The Christmas card story is real. Some students remembered me for several years and sent cards; some are still my Facebook friends. One year, one of those holiday missives bore no record of the man who had been her husband. I assumed he was gone, out of her life.

That card prompted me to write "The Whiz." Could what happened to her those years before have anything to do with the failure of her marriage? And if it did, what role might I have played in that sadness? After all, Mel had trusted me enough to tell me at least a fragment of her horror.

The card triggered the story. I used to believe that, at least for me, every story required two foci before it could be attempted. Here, one focus is the day fifth-period math went off the rails; the other is my discovering no husband's name on the Christmas card. The tension created by those realities made me want to try to tell a story that remains, half a century later, a mystery, especially my part or role in it.

Museum people call the story of an artifact its provenance, the story of the item. Sometimes the provenance of a hammer or a dress made from a flour sack adds immense value to the artifact itself.

It's been a long haul. Thanks for listening.

"The Whiz" -- a story (v)

Chief Blackhawk

That which triggered my fictional attempt to tell this story is not something I witnessed. What I witnessed is what the narrator describes: 6th period, junior English, American Lit were stunningly quiet when they walked into the room that day because they'd just come from a class where they'd experienced something they'd never seen, something which became for all of us a very real "teaching moment." 

What you're reading is fiction, but were you to ask anyone who was there--as I did some of them almost fifty years later--they would tell you they hadn't forgotten. 

The next day in class, Mel stood in front with the chalk in her hand, trying to wrench the right answer from some stubborn puzzle on the board, and she wasn't getting it. But no kid in that room understood why not. There was more in her figuring than what she was scribbling, but when she didn't get it right, Wilson Friedli's best student, the one he'd opened up to the night before—when she didn't get the answer, he took it personally. It drove him crazy, and he blew his mind all over that classroom.

"I try and I try, and I try," he screamed. "I give my life for my students, and what do I get for it? Does anyone every appreciate me?" He screamed directly at Melinda.

The kids stared, petrified, at the assault.

"You can't believe how hard I work around here--how much I care."

He turned to the rest of them. "I want you kids to learn this. I want you to leave my classroom knowing this stuff. I give my life for this, and what do I get back? Does anyone ever say anything?" he yelled. "Does anybody ever say thanks? Do I ever get a yearbook dedicated to me? What do I have to do?"

He turned back to her, in silence. He caught himself for a moment, I guess, then looked back at the class, his eyes unfocused, as if he recognized none of them. He stepped back, felt behind him for the corner of his desk, and brought himself slowly around to his chair, still glancing back and forth between Melinda and the rest of the kids. Blindly, he sat down, stunned, they said, as if suddenly embarrassed. Then he dropped his head into his hands and started to cry very much out loud.

Melinda stood stiff at the board.

Then came up once more and looked at them again, eyes full of tears. "And you," he said to Mel, "you know what I mean. You—of all of them—know. And you don't even care."

Melinda ran out of the room.

The others stared blankly at each other as Wilson Crotty put his head down once again when he saw her leave. "I try and I try and I try," he said again, banging his fists on the desk. "I try and I try and nobody cares—no one," he said.

He pulled both arms up around his face and lay there on the desk bawling. The kids waited, looking at each other, wondering what to do. When the sobbing stopped, two of them, football players, took it upon themselves to walk to his desk--at least that's the way the story went.

They took hold of Wilson Crotty's elbows, got him to sit straight, then helped him to his feet. "You need to get out of here for awhile," one of them said, almost in a whisper. "Come on," he said. "Let's go."

Mr. Templeton met them at the door because Melinda, this time, hadn't simply run out of school.

*

Most of those math kids came downstairs to my room for sixth period English. I didn't know what had happened, but I could tell the moment they came in that something had occurred which left them speechless.

One of the guys who'd helped him told my class very respectfully how Mr. Crotty's arms were shaking when he held them. He explained how what the man had said earlier, yelled really, didn't make any sense to anybody, and how he'd aimed it all at Mel, and how horrible it must have been to be the kid who caught all that screaming. It was about the worst experience he'd ever had, he said, to see someone blow a fuse that way, just lose it right in public. "And Crotty too," he told the others. "Geez, I mean, who'd have ever thought it would be Crotty, you know?—I mean, I thought he was already crazy."

They giggled, respectfully really.

Melinda went home. Crotty did too, the principal driving him. He stayed out of school for almost five weeks, until the school board thought it would be okay to let him finish the year, psychologists indicating that it may have even been therapeutic for him to return to the classroom.

When he came back, everyone asked him how it was going—maybe it was the first time in all those years he'd been at Arrowhead that anyone had paid much attention to him, in or out of the teachers' lounge.

Mel never told anyone what he'd said or done the night before.

I was the only one who knew what was going on, and I didn't say anything either. Melinda never spilled a word to Templeton either. It was something only the two of us knew—the three of us, Crotty too.

____________________ 

Tomorrow--conclusion of the story.

"The Whiz" -- a story iv

The year--just so you know--was 1971, the spring of 1971, long before the advent of "Me Too." When Mel said she knew how the principal would react, Sandoval agrees, as if the outcome of any such abuse is fairly well cut-and-dried. What she meant was that the principal, a fine man, would have said, "I'll talk to him" and let the whole mess go right there. 

At this point in the story, we're in the middle of what today is recognizable as sexual abuse. That's a ready conclusion that was, back then, neither ready, nor a conclusion. What happened was precipitated by an emotional breakdown. Back then, no one would have thought of involving the police. Mel would not have been blamed for what happened, but Mr. Crotty would have been looked at with a certain amount of sympathy, a pathetic man. It's difficult to think him somehow a criminal; easier to see him as a victim of mental breakdown.

Back then, a first-year teacher, I don't know that I would have known what to do but suggest what this fictional me initially suggests Melanie do: "talk to the principal."  

But that suggestion changes because the story takes a darker turn. 

___________________________  

Mel blew a moist breath over her glasses and rubbed them with a balled Kleenex she'd pulled from her pocket. "It's my fault, I think. If I wasn't there, there wouldn't be a problem," she said. "He's not a bad man, Mr. Sandoval." She shrugged her shoulders as if the whole mess was easily remedied. "It's just that I can't be around him."

I wanted to touch her myself right then, I wanted to comfort her in my arms. 

"You think I should just quit the whole deal?" she said.

I don't know why I said what I did. I really don't. It was so much easier, I think, just to keep it quiet, to keep the lid on. I suppose I was thinking the same way she was, that there was more to lose all the way around if the truth were known. I was no Crotty, but maybe I even wanted to protect myself--I don't know.

"What should I do?" she said.

"Don't tell Templeton," I told her. "Just be sure that tonight he can't get you alone. Leave early," I said. "Do something."

"I can't," she said.

"Try," I said. "Just don't put yourself in any kind of position where it might happen again. Stay the heck away from him."

I suppose I assumed that the fear across her face, in the way her lips tightened and her eyes narrowed—I suppose I thought that was only natural. What did I know, really?

When we walked back to school, we walked through an uneven cadence of grunts, three or four guys in dirty practice jerseys lowering their shoulders and butting the blocking sled around the field, the coach astride the machine in front of them, yelling derisively. All the way back, I had Melinda on one side, almost silent, and the football team on the other.

*  

The next day, Wilson Crotty lost it all in math class. Melinda and two others stood at the board working out a simple problem, the rest of the class diligently computing through the sub-stratum of the same exercise in their notebooks, likely as not glancing up once in a while to see how Melinda, the whiz, was accomplishing something that seemed to the others impenetrable.

No one knows what had happened between them the night I sent Mel back to math contest practice. I don't know either. Melinda never told me exactly. But I can guess what happened because I think I understand something of Wilson Crotty. He likely tried to explain to Melinda once again how his soul was rushing headlong towards her in a way that he'd never felt before. He probably told her everything again, expecting her to return the intimacy. And he probably reached for her, expecting this very bright and mature student to be one of his students, at least, who would love him.

No one knows exactly what happened, and I fear the worst. Even then, I didn't really want to know. Maybe what I'm guessing is just the best possible face I can put on Wilson Crotty. I'm trying to excuse him. Maybe it's the maleness in me that I'm still trying to protect.

_____________________ 

Sex abuse is all about power, I'm told, but what was at the heart of Wilson Crotty's unchecked passions wasn't abuse; he didn't want to rape Mel. In the "Me,too" world, he was--morally, even criminally--abusing the power of his position when he reached for her, his math whiz, his prize student, maybe the only young woman in his tutelage who was thoughtful enough to understand the depth of his loneliness. What he wanted was to be loved. She knew all of that herself. Even Mel didn't want to break him.

When old friends of mine came to visit that year and stopped by the school to visit my classroom, they came away telling me that there were some real babes in those desks. I was shocked, honestly shocked at a sexual appraisal I'd not let myself make. They were my students. They simply not available. 

When I heard them go on about great legs and boobs, I was even a little angry. They were my students, after all, not sex objects. I didn't tell those guys as much, in part because I knew they were right; I'd made the same assessments.

I don't know when I'd determined that this story was going to be about the narrator. My guess is that I knew it going in. There's an old rule in fiction writing: the reader is going to side with (which is to say, to believe in) the story's "means of perception." In first-person narration like this, readers can't help but see the narrator as the central character, the protagonist.

In the next segment of the story, even though the action will have taken the elsewhere, I'm embarrassed to say the narrator will remain the central character. 

The events you'll witness tomorrow prompted, years later, my writing this story.    

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 42

“Why are you downcast, O my soul? 

Why so disturbed within me? 

Put your hope in God, 

for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”

 

One night late, years ago, a preacher friend of mine, over a few beers, began talking about what he went through when his wife left him, an event that’s not supposed to happen, certainly not to preachers. He didn’t blame her totally; he knew he’d had a hand in what happened, preacher or not.

At that late hour, with a bit of lubrication, I stayed with him when it appeared he wanted to talk. I sound as if I was using him, and maybe I was in a way; but what interested me was his use of a phrase I’d heard before: “It took me a long time to process that,” he kept saying. “I didn’t have the tools at first to process what had happened.”

It seemed almost psychobabble, a cliché, an entirely strange word drawn from what we do to legislation or cheese or army recruits. But the emotion he carried as he told me the story made me wonder what exactly that pat expression meant in the context of unfaithfulness. I wanted him to unpack process.

By “process,” he said, he meant becoming able to look at the wound and not cry or rage. Process, he said, meant stepping back from the immediacy of the emotions, a step that wasn’t at all easy--and it took time, he said.  And it took work.  Like forgiveness.

It seems to me that in verse five of Psalm 42, David (if he’s the writer) appears to have processed something. The unforgettable opening verses of the psalm emerge from the core of his grief; but verse five steps back from the sadness that threatens him and he begins talking to himself.  “For heaven’s sake,” he says, “what’s with me anyway? Why am I so incredibly depressed?”

Then he pulls out an old bromide and tells himself what he’d obviously known for years and even sung in a whole psalter of his own ballads, something the curtains of his despair had seemingly covered: “Put your hope in God,” he tells himself, processing his sadness. 

 And then the resolution. Picture him, gritting his teeth, almost a snarl, pulling intent and dedication out of truth he knew, inside out:  “. . .for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”

I may be wrong. Maybe there’s a gap in this psalm. Maybe, like the preacher without a wife, it took him some time to process the emptiness in his life. 

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to consult some standard King David biography and discover that this song was finished months after it was started, that he’s simply telling the story? 

But we don’t know that, and no one ever will. All we’re left with the psalm. And in this verse—or so it seems to me—David seems to bottom out, to take hold of the promises of God he’s relied on throughout his life, at a myriad of other moments when he stood in dire need of being rescued. “Put your hope in God,” he says, in command form--and to himself.

In this verse, the story the poem reaches its climax because the writer has stepped back to tell himself, to shout, in fact, the truth into his own ears, and now ours. “I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God” [emphasis mine, but I think his too].

 Sounds like a preacher friend of mine, talking to me over a beer years ago.

 Sounds like Job.  Sounds like a lot of us, I'd guess.  

"The Whiz" -- a story iii

I don't know that I've ever really thought much about a cemetery walk with a student, but the town cemetery was little more than a football field away, easy walking distance. Honestly, I think I remember taking a senior English class out there one day, on a whim almost because I had no idea what to do with them that morning. I coached basketball, ran the school newspaper, did the theater, and--let me think!--taught junior and senior English, a first-year teacher. It's a wonder they didn't bury me out there.

So the story uses the cemetery down the road. Mel wanted to get out of the school. The narrator of the story, who is embarrassingly me, suggests a walk through the cemetery.

Mel opens up. 

___________________________

I waited for awhile, and then, once we neared the cemetery, I asked her if she had family there, more to break the silence than anything.

"A brother," she told me, as if I should have known. "He got killed in an accident when I was ten." She walked into the grass and pointed toward a back section where the graves were smaller. "Over there," she said. "I don't think you can see it from here exactly." She stuck her hands back in her pockets. "He got the annual dedicated to him," she said. "You can look it up. He's got his picture in it. So tell me, why do people do that--dedicate something to somebody who's already dead?"

"Probably made your folks feel good," I said.

"My dad drinks every night," she said. "He drank before too. He works at the brewery--I mean, you can drink there all day long if you want, as long as you do your job. And at night. He drinks at night too."

"Gets drunk?" I asked.

"Falls asleep in his chair." She turned her head and pointed farther east. "Bruce Richter's father is out there--that new grave. Every time I see him in school, I kind of shrink, you know? You just don't know what to say to a kid whose father hung himself. Do you say your sorry, or what?—'I’m sorry your father hung himself'—how does that sound?"

"I didn't know that," I said.

"There's a lot you don't know," she told me.

Some kid went by and laid on the horn. "Freddy Jackson," she said. "He lives next door. He seems like such a kid to be driving already-"

"I don't know him," I said.

"He's a sophomore?—thin, lots of zits?"

I shook my head. "What are we doing here, Mel?" I said. "Is it your father you want to talk about or what? Why am I out here?"

She took a deep breath, looked up at the streaks of clouds across a flat autumn sky, and almost lost herself when finally it came out. "I can't stand him," she said, "even in class. I didn't go today, you know. I skipped until eleven. Can you imagine that?—Melinda Drost skipping class?" She walked farther into the stones, and I followed her. "I can't stand it that he can talk that way about stupid math problems when I know he doesn't even care. He just goes on and on as if doing dumb problems is a really big deal with him, but it isn't. Trust me, I know better."

She was talking about Wilson Crotty, Mr. Math, a man who so rarely came into the teachers' lounge that first semester that even though we shared a free period, I'd barely said a word to him since I came. When we talked, he asked such obvious questions that I knew he was working hard at trying to be social. "So, Marshall, I saw you with golf clubs yesterday—you play golf, do you?" Every word coming out nervously, bite-sized as numbers.

His gangly body was little more than a rack for the double-breasted suits he always wore, in the era of beards and beads. He kept his wispy mustache barely visible, and parted what was left of his hair down the center, about a decade or more before it became popular. He couldn't have weighed more than say, 120, just out of the shower.

"You don't like Crotty," I said, not so much as a question.

"I feel sorry for him," she said. "I really do. Do you realize how much he's given to kids since he's been here? You don't know, Mr. Sandoval. He's been here forever, and what's he ever got out of it? Even my dead brother got a yearbook dedicated to him."

"Mel," I said, "I don't get this at all."

"I don't want ever to see him again," she said. "I want to get out of your stupid essay assignment, and I want to quit math, and I want to leave school, and I just want to die."

"Mel," I said, but that's when it came, when it all poured out, finally, when the tide of her pain couldn't be held back any longer.

"I let him say things to me that he shouldn't say to a kid--a girl. I let him tell me things I shouldn't have to hear, and it makes me want to puke. He's so lonely. He just says this stuff to me and expects--"

"What kind of stuff?"

She picked a stick off the ground and broke it in pieces. "Must I draw you a picture?"

"Makes you uncomfortable?" I said.

"No," she sneered. "I take all my teachers out here so I can bawl my head off."

I was barely 22, a first-year teacher who drew his daily breath from five periods of teaching English in a basement room where each day I fed my spirit on the lives of my students. Lord knows, alone in the country with Melinda, my brightest student, somebody who talked to me like an adult, I felt no more than a foot away from being another Wilson Crotty, a man who, it seemed, had unbuttoned his loneliness to the only student he respected enough to want her to understand him. It pains me to say it, but I think I understood Wilson Crotty much better than I would have wanted to admit—much better, perhaps, than I understood the predicament of Melinda Drost.

"Did you tell Templeton?" I said, pointing back over my shoulder as if the principal stood just beyond the trees.

"I'm telling you," she said, almost derisively. "I know what Templeton will do."

And so did I.

"He says he loves me," she told me. "Gives me the chills. Horrible. He stands there over my desk like the teacher, and when all those contest problems are finished, and the other kids are gone—then he tells me that stuff. And there I sit, beneath him, and he goes on and on." She was looking down at a stone, her arms crossed over her chest. "He lives with his mother—did you know that? I mean, did he ever tell you that? I mean, do you ever talk to him?" she said, looking up, as if I were the guilty one. "You know, she treats him as if he was six years old--honestly, she does. He's got to do these jobs. She's got them written on the refrigerator--'take out the garbage'-that kind of shit."

"He told you that?"

"Every single year there's a math contest, you know, and this is my last one, and every night he wants to take me home." She was almost crying. ''I'm scared to death of him," she said.

I didn't know how to handle it. I really didn't. I felt almost nauseous. "Did you tell him?" I said. 

She laughed. "How do you say no to a teacher?" she said, her bottom lip in her teeth. "And he touched me," she said. "Last night he touched me. He tried to make out with me."

______________________ 

"The Whiz" a story -- ii

Chief Blackhawk

Just one of the differences between teaching in high school and teaching in college, I discovered, was that high school kids kind of "needed" you. College kids didn't; their interest in the professor was, at best, an interest in literature, or getting the credits to graduate. 

I found all that adolescent need warm and even inspiring; they were, back then, the only people in the world I really cared about because, quite frankly, they honestly seemed to care about me. 

It wasn't at all unusual for me to stay around after school to hear some frantic kid pour out troubles. Such confessionals happened often, too often sometimes, as high schools back then--and maybe yet today--were filled with uber-impressionable kids; you know, "Mr. Schaap, so-and-so won't talk to me." Real tears too.

The back-and-forth that begins "The Whiz" didn't happen; it's fiction. It's made up. But it could have, easily. Scenes like this happened weekly. Mr. Sandoval is somewhat distracted--he's finishing up something for the school newspaper. It takes some doing for Mel to tell him what she came to say, but it takes some doing for Mr. Sandoval to pay attention.

When I started the story I knew what would be it's heart--there was an event, a prototype. What I didn't know was that Mr. Sandoval would give up a secret, a kind of fear he had that female students like Mel were potential lovers. That realization begins to emerge here. As I'm writing the story, I'm conscious of it, but the potential for my having a relationship with Mel ends up looming larger than I'd ever determined when I mapped out the story in my mind. Writing--writing fiction especially--sometimes surprises even the writer. In fact, it probably should.

___________________


It was unlike her to come to talk to me. She was, that day, nervous--agitated, clearly, and I was young. I thought immediately that she was telling me she was pregnant. And it all made sense. In a moment, I had written the entire story: smart girl, lonely, no dates, not bad looking. She picks up some farm kid, maybe an older guy, some guy back from Nam, looking for someone to come live out on that acreage his old man wants to buy. She fools around because she's curious, and besides, like all the rest of us, more than anything she wants to be loved.

I had it all figured out, so I spit it out, half in jest, allowing her the convenience to respond in whatever voice she wanted. "You're pregnant," I said.

"I wish! Miss Goody Two-shoes?" she mocked.

I swung my chair around and stuck the tool away. "Mel," I said, "have you got something you want to tell me, or what?"

I think most students, male or female, would have just spit it out after standing there that long, but Melinda had brains enough to fight off her emotions.

"Can we go outside or something?" she said.

What brings back the memory is the letter I got from her today, the letter and the sound of the football team, whose shouts are now echoing through the already leafless trees across the street, the cadence of grunts from the field several blocks away from our house. I hear every exercise the coach has scribbled on the clipboard, and each rally of the kids' clapping once they've finished. It's such a male sound.

It's the sound I remember echoing across the football field when the two of us, Melinda and I, walked on the crumbling edge of a blacktop road north of the school. That's where Melinda told me about Mr. Crotty, and math.

"I can't be with him again," she said. "I can't go back there tonight. I'm sorry," she told me. "Maybe it sounds like I'm backing out, but I don't care."

Cars passed us slowly as we left the school. "I don't get it," I said. “What’s the big deal?”

“It's all because I got brains, see?" she said. "I can't help it that math comes easy. I really can't. Sometimes I try to block it off, but I just get the stuff right away."

Away from school, she spoke more with her hands than she had at my desk.

"Look," she said, "if I quit, people will say, 'Why in the world isn't Melinda in the math thing?' That's what they'll say. You know they will."

Nine weeks into my first year of teaching. What did I know? "Big deal," I said.

"I shouldn't care about what people think?" she said.

"You don't have to do anything you don't want to do," I told her.

"Easy for you to say," she said.

But I was worried about the two of us out there alone, what some young mother might think, some woman picking up her daughter after school.

"Am I taking up your precious time here or what?" she said.

No student had talked to me like that before. "What's the matter?" I said. "You say you don't want to be in the math contest?-all right, quit. Tell Crotty you're out."

Leaves in the grasp of a northwest wind drifted across the road and blew into the stubbled fields running up the hills to the south. She pushed both her hands into her jacket pockets, and I pulled up my collar.

But that was it for awhile. She didn't say another word as we kept walking east past the football field and out towards the town cemetery. Behind us, I wondered what the guys on the team thought of the two of us.

"The Whiz," a story -- i

Chief Blackhawk

Just one story emerged from the two years I spent at Blackhawk--a novel, too, that was never published, but just one story whose prototype would likely be remembered by every kid in class that day. They'd all have their own take on what happened; this I guess, is mine, whether I like it or not. 

It's almost totally fiction--that is, created in my imagination. But the scenario at the base is what no one that year will likely forget, even though it happened a half-century ago. 

It's not at all unusual for a writer to rely on personal experience to create fiction, but doing so can be risky inasmuch as you're revealing sometimes intimate stories from the lives of people you know. I'm not altogether sure that "The Whiz" was ever published anywhere--I'd have to look it up. The event that is this story's compelling narrative is memorable maybe becausse it isn't pretty.

This warning may be far worse than what you read. What I remember is that what happened deeply affected my students, made them suddenly adults. Back then, they were my world.

___________________________ 

The Whiz 

Poor Melinda. Her sun-streaked auburn hair was wonderfully wavy, but ironed flatness was still all the rage back then. She was blessed with dark, clear skin, but her thick glasses rather unpleasantly magnified her otherwise beautiful brown eyes and became a symbol of her relative isolation from the other kids. She loved to read, which made her seem an alien. A beautician might have trimmed her eyebrows, but I thought that heavy line drew maturity into her face.

To students, she was bookish and slightly overweight and altogether too smart. To most faculty, including me, she was beautiful.

Poor Melinda. She came to me after school to get out of an essay: "React to Sir Francis Bacon's 'On Marriage and Single Life.'" Odd to think that I ever assigned something like that, but that was years ago.

She couldn't do the assignment, she said, not with the math contest staring her down. Poor Melinda. Valedictorian. Stage manager for my first play. Editor of the newspaper. Did everything in high school except play basketball.

"That's okay," I told her. "Hand it in when you get time. Get yourself ready for math."

"I hate math," she said right away.

"You do not," I told her.

"I do too," she snapped.

"You're our only hope," I said. "Crotty says--"

"I don't want to be the 'only hope,''' she said. "Who wants to be somebody's 'only hope,' Mr. Sandoval?" She turned her face into a sickly smile.

"Okay then," I said, "don’t go."

"Sure," she said, "and do you realize what people would say?"

I was working on a mimeo master, scratching in the last few feathers on the portrait of the Indian warrior we used on the newspaper's masthead. I never even looked up as I remember. "Since when do you care what people think, Mel?" I said.

"Well, thanks," she said.

''I'm pulling your leg," I told her. "Get it in when you can—now go fiddle with a slide rule or something."

I was single, four years older than she was; it was my first year teaching, and a young mature woman like Melinda, even though I don't think I understood it then, made me nervous.

She picked up a piece of chalk from the blackboard gutter and drew a cartoon tree on the board. "You don't want to talk to me," she said.

That's when I looked up. That last line was purely junior high, not typically Melinda, a senior, smartest kid in school.

"What's the deal?” I said.

"I love math," she said suddenly, "I do." She shrugged her shoulders. "You think I'm crazy, don't you? You said in class that you always hated it and you didn't understand how people--"

"Melinda," I said, "I don't think you're crazy for liking math." I picked up the master I was working on and held it up to the light to check my work. "Hey, listen--how about I put a goatee on the warrior?" It wasn't time for a joke.

“’On Marriage and Single Life,’” she said, "--right? That's the assignment? Well, here's my essay, ‘I'm getting married.’ That's my essay. You always say that we should make a commitment to what we write. I'm getting married.”

"Do I know the guy?" I said.

"You never met him."

___________________________

Tomorrow: Slowly getting to the bottom of things.

Morning Thanks--Jamie Sargent, Homecoming Queen

The note down at the bottom of the page says Jamie was "Homecoming Queen 4." Honestly, I don't remember that she was high school royalty, nor do I remember the appreciation the entire note offers. That she wrote all of this in my copy of the '72 high school annual is a mark of how close I was to my students. Today, I'm 75, and they're all reaching 70, barely a difference. 

But I was their teacher, and I honestly don't remember crossing a line I maintained quite effortlessly, I'd say, because I don't remember any trying moments, any youthful surges of desire for more than teaching them about Shakespeare or Thoreau. It's hard to imagine being any closer than I was to the kids in my classes, but neither they nor I ever stepped over the line. One 1972 Blackhawk senior signed off--her words are here in the annual--"to the teacher with the best body." All these years later, 500 miles away, she's a Facebook friend. 

I'm guessing that none of them were conscious of the way their teacher was being taught in the same classroom. What I learned in the dairy land of southwest Wisconsin was truly existential. For the first time in my life, I lived apart from the tribe that had raised me. For the first time in my life, I was blessed with the opportunity to choose rituals. For the first time in my life, the people I knew and came to love couldn't care less about the rule book that heritage of mine had set up in my heart and soul.

Once, when I returned home from school, a handbill was affixed to my door knob with a rubber band plugging a rootin-tootin' revival somewhere down the street, at a church I'd never seen. My inherited Calvinism would not allow me to believe that ad was there by chance alone. I thought I'd go. Why not? Besides, maybe my soul needed to be saved. 

This Sunday, the note said, and gave the address. So I went, the only time in two years out there that I darkened a church door. I'll never forget the service. I couldn't help noticing that I was the only customer those door-knob ads harvested. The sermon's bumpy ride and ensuing altar call seemed created for me alone. Not more than a dozen people attended, and the others, it seemed, were regulars. I didn't go to the front.

That was it. I never went back to that church or any other in town.

I was a fair-to-middlin' athlete, coached freshman basketball at the high school, and thus got recruited to play in a town league with a team of other over-the-hillers who loved to relive glory by bruising play on the court. Games were on Sunday. I said I'd play. I remember, as a kid, shooting baskets at a neighbor's, then sitting down between that place and our house to make sure the sweat dried. I wouldn't have wanted my parents to know I'd shot hoops on the Sabbath. 

Come summer, it was baseball. I got recruited by an area ball team. Games on Sunday. "We could really use a good catcher," they said. My students told me I was the first person ever to hit a homer over the left-center field fence. 

That was the summer after my first year of teaching, and I knew my students well enough to realize that if I had said no to Sunday baseball, they'd not begin to understand why on earth I wouldn't play. I wouldn't be a witness; I'd just be weird. 

Teaching English at Blackhawk High School gave me an education, about myself, and the lesser-level ethics which, for better or for worse, accompanied the overall vision of things that was my legacy.

I got myself a Blackhawk High School annual that year, and some students--as kids did back then--asked to sign it. They knew I was leaving, and, the seniors at least, were leaving too. Back then, I must have read what Jamie Sargent wrote, but it took me decades before what's there on the page trumpeted something I today recognize as liberating. 

Mr. Schaap didn't proselytize. I don't think I ever mentioned church, never prayed, never once read from the Bible, didn't lean on the baggage of my familial religiosity, even played ball on Sunday. And yet, what the homecoming queen says is that I was "the only teacher that admits he loves God."

Those two years in the region that once was a mining camp taught me that the signposts I'd grown up with, the sanctifying blessing of my being "a covenant child," were not the only means to an end. Even though to my mind I was no fountain of piety, I had somehow communicated what I was to Jamie Sargent. The road of life may be straight and narrow, but it's still much wider than I'd been led to believe. 

Eventually, I returned to the tribe. I don't regret that choice or forty years here in the land of Dutch Reformed. Still, those two years in a smalltown high school was a kind of liberation for which I'm greatly thankful this morning and every morning. What Jamie Sargent wrote so long ago is one of the most significant passages, a kind of revelation, in my life as a student in a world far wider than I had once thought it was. 

Thank you, Jamie Sargeant, wherever you are.

Morning Thanks--Religious, not reactionary

Oostburg Christian School, Oostburg, WI -- circa 1960

My parents were outspoken advocates for the Christian school just down the block, a place that opened its doors for the first time somewhere close to the date I was born. My mother, a "normal school" graduate, taught in rural schools until she was married and had children, but advocated--prayerfully, I might add--for the eternal importance of a Christian education, an education that wouldn't and didn't put Christ on the bench or somewhere lost in the stands. If He was God, they might have said, then he was, in all things, the sovereign creator of heaven and earth. To study anything without that acknowledgement and His guidance isn't education at all, they might have said. They were most certainly pushers, and they were also movers and shakers.

I went through eight grades of Christian education before four years of public high school. There were minor high school skirmishes--for instance, about dancing--but I don't remember ever coming home and being quizzed on what kinds of secularism I was being fed or whether or not the biology teacher mentioned the word evolution. My parents weren't afraid of public education; they simply believed that a Christian education was the correct choice for their children.

When I graduated from college, I took a teaching job at a rural high school in southwest Wisconsin. I will admit that my two years there appear in my memory as almost Edenic. My college education had been "Christian," but when I graduated, during the height of the Vietnam War, it seemed to me that the adjective "Christian" meant "Republican," particularly supporting a President named Nixon.  

I was never a proselytizer. When I left college for southwest Wisconsin I didn't look at the students as if they were ripe for the harvest. I don't think I ever preached from behind that little podium behind my head (above). I was conscious of Blackhawk High being a public school, where such proselytizing would have been against the law. I didn't pray before class, although I did a lot of praying for help in the classroom.

My students who were church people were Roman Catholic or Lutheran or Methodist, but being raised as intensely religious as I was, I couldn't help thinking most of the kids weren't serious Christians. The only religiosity I remember witnessing were the ashes on the appropriate Friday in February, when Catholic kids came back smudged. That was new to me. I didn't giggle, but I'm sorry to say I couldn't help thinking that lick of darkness on their foreheads was a hoot. 

I don't believe my parents were disappointed in my choice of venue, at least they never really spoke about it. I'm sure they would have preferred that I teach in a Christian high school somewhere, but they never said it. They were happy their son had a job; I'd graduated without one. 

What I'm wading through here is a familial background that was profoundly "pro-choice" in education--to use language my parents would not have known or used. They had to have been among the most determined advocates for the new Christian school down the block; furthermore, back then, had anyone tried to build a Christian high school, my dad would have lovingly volunteered to paint the hallways in preparation for my enrollment there.

They were themselves public high school grads, the same high school I'd attended years later. I don't know where their sincere advocacy for Christian education came from exactly. All I know is that it was deep and strong and voiced frequently. It's not difficult for me to say that they believed in the necessity of a Christian education. 

I don't know that the word justice ever fit into the equation. What they understood and stood for was their choice--to send their kids to that new "Christian" school. 

What I am trying to establish here is that the motivation for separate, Christian education had nothing to do with criticism of public education. It wasn't based in some fear that my being enrolled there would lead to a loss of faith. If some slipping away occurred in my life, it did so during and after my "Christian" education, a change that resulted from factors that had more to do with the era than with the classrooms, including bull sessions. Vietnam loomed over all our conversations; we knew that the moment we left college, we could be drafted. 

I'm attempting to compare my parents' Christian school championing with a widespread advocacy today for separate but equal education. It's not difficult to listen to arguments today from the political right that lambast public education and thereby establish alternatives, righteously, for parental choice. DeSantis isn't the only one, but he does use a megaphone.

I don't remember my parents ever criticizing public education. Disenchantment with or anger about public education wasn't a motivation for their sincere advocacy for the Christian school. The motivation was religious, not reactionary. And there is, I'd like to say, a profound difference. 

Does that mean that a "Christian education" is always preferable because it stands foursquare for the truth? Segregationist private education popped up all over the place after Brown vs. the Board of Education and thereby clearly illustrated unhealthy devotion. What I'm saying is that DeSantis's motivation is altogether different from that which I can and do call the legacy I carry.

This morning I'm thankful for the legacy of faith Mom and Dad left for me. I'm thankful for the fundamental priorities they carried and shared and preached because it grew from a peculiar "world-and-life" view that, despite our considerable political differences, I most certainly inherited. This morning I'm thankful for that profound gift.