The impetuous

I'm not at all surprised that "haste makes waste" has its origins in the Netherlands. It's such a Dutch idea, for pity sake, which doesn't mean those of us who share that heritage are good at observing its warning. 

I'd be happier if it belonged to Poor Richard, as I thought. I've never been much of a fan of Ben Franklin, after all; but I just now discovered that, in literature, no less a star than Erasmus, a humanist Hollander, first used it: "Haste makes waste."

That's me, up top, a selfie with first fruits from the muskmelon patch, a beauty too. Notice it's tannish color. I tried to abide by the first rule of picking them--if they just snap off the vine, they're ready.

It was Sunday morning, it snapped (kind of), and I came arrogantly in with this beast. It was warmed by the sun. Look at its size. Almost heavenly.

We went off to church with this beauty right there on the kitchen counter. No, I didn't pray for it --perhaps I should have. I simply determined that once home from church, I'd cut it up and put it in the fridge so, that night sometime, we could eat our first fresh, juicy cantaloupe.

It was green. It was hard and it was green, and hugely tasteless. I'd picked the monster too soon.

I cut it up anyway, gave it a proper burial in the fridge. But I was reminded, not of the humanist Erasmus, but Poor Richard, who wasn't the source but could have been. It was Erasmus the Dutch humanist who thought to teach us all the proper diligence required to make our way through life.

I'm impetuous. Always have been, and haste makes waste.

Oh, that hurts. 

I haven't picked another since--no siree. 

Gaps and music and playgrounds

There's always a gap, always a space, always an opening for us, for the reader. There has to be: art suggests; it doesn't preach. Even if the poet wants to change the world, flat straightforwardness is an enemy. "Tell all the truth," Dickinson so famously wrote, "but tell it at a slant." Art may require very little of us, but if a poem is to be artful it leaves openings for reader-participants because we are a part of it.

Case in point, “Clear and Sunny,” a little poem by my friend, Dave Schelhaas, who occasionally appears in these pages. “Clear and Sunny” is in a collection of poetry titled Final Exam: Poems About Teaching, collected and edited by J. Barry Koops. It’s a treasure, by the way, for an ex-teacher, or for many who find themselves, this week, once again up front in a classroom.

The first two lines go like this:

I heard it again this morning
the music of the playground.

Look, I know the writer. I know he lives a hop, step, and jump from a school playground, busy today, I’m sure. I'm two lines into the poem, and I see him walking along on a sidewalk just up the street. If "writing is seeing," then Schelhaas has me already because I see him and I hear "the music of the playground." I'm in.

Worried that I would not hear it,
I had listened as soon as I left the house,
and there it was,
softened by all the green leaves in the tall trees,
rich like thick jam on buttered bread,
more beautiful than church bells:
the shouts and laughter of schoolchildren,

"Green leaves," "thick jam," "church bells"--it's all embellishment. He's scoring "the music of the playground," playing a blessed recording meant for us. The notes rise mellifluously from the printed page. Great music. Just kids, little ones. No one’s singing, but what rises from the swings is great music.

Then, conflict: "Worried that I would not hear it,/I had listened as soon as I left the house.” Some darkness rises, but the heft of the poet's worry is relieved in a moment by "the shouts and laughter of school children."

I'm in this all right. I know the poet. I'm thinking I know the nature of the troubling sadness too, even his worry. I know the darkness he knows. I get it. I live here too.

The last three lines nail it--the outpouring of his relief at hearing all that music a half a block away--

bubbling through air waves still trembling
with the terrible news of
yesterday.

What happened "yesterday" is the horror, the darkness, an enemy. And because I know the poet, I tell myself I know the darkness. The poem was written in the last couple of years when the school down the block suffered horrific trauma when one of its teachers was abusing his students.

David walked out his back door one fair morning, filled with the darkness generated by what had happened at the school down the block, the school his grandchildren attend. Then, unmistakably, he heard, "the music of the playground," and in it the sheer beauty of innocence drawing back the veil of tears. He heard the splendid oratorio of kids having fun.

Sure, I had it down, this poem written by a friend.

But then--and only then--I spotted the subtitle: "September 12" and realized "Clear and Sunny" wasn't a poem about the horrors of sexual abuse, but the day the Twin Towers buckled into a cloud of poison dust at the hands of kamikaze assassins.

I'd been thinking that because I know the poet, the heart of the poem was obvious. I was wrong. It's not about the school, it's about 9/11, and the relief those children's playground voices sang the morning after the madness in Manhattan.

Now let's just say the poem didn't use the subtitle, deleted it in a final edit before he finished. If read without its datedness or my personal associations, the poem is both less specifically constructed (taking some solace in life after 9/11) and more universal (how hearing children is solace in the darkness all around).

I was ready in a moment to fill that open space I'm offered as a reader. The poem made immediate sense, until I saw the subtitle and realized I was wrong--way, way wrong.

But the gap, the space, the blank the reader has to fill, would have been even wider, its impact more well, global, because less immediate. The poem might be more "universal," to grab a literary weapon from the arsenal, had the poet not specifically dated it via its subtitle.

But would it be a better poem? It would be less specific and more vague. “Merit” might be an interesting topic for English majors--should the poet have dumped the subtitle? Talk among yourselves.

Everything I've just written, however, in the long post about a short poem attests to the joy, the human joy, of poetry and art itself. Even though his writing the poem didn't earn my friend a dime, he wasn't looking to be salaried. He just wanted us all to hear the music rising from the playground on a morning he couldn't help but feel that grief and anger had left the world without any harmony at all.

That's the music he heard and the song he wanted to sing for us and with us.

Hear it?

Morning Thanks--Simone Biles

And then there's Simone Biles. . . There's the rest, and then there's Simone Biles.

Watch her perform, and you just might think she's barely human, but human she is, even though it's fair to say that she can do things with her body that no other human being can--and few can even imagine.

To say she's America's most talented gymnast is understatement. She's incomparable. No one does what she does. She's the quintessential mighty mite, 4'8" tall in a package of sheer grit and muscle. What she can do on the horse is not to be believed. For the eighth time, just last week she won the National Championship.

When she went over to Tokyo for the Olympics in 2020, nobody was more highly celebrated. She was the poster child for America's hopes. If anyone questioned our gold medals, no one doubted Simone Biles. She would do things the other girls could only dream of.

Then, out of nowhere, she was best by a case of "the twisties" that took her right out of the action. At her moment of world dominance, suddenly she was forced to step back, to languish out of the spotlight, to come agonizingly clean about her own emotional woes, to admit failure. Nothing about her withdrawal from competition was easy. People can be mean, thoughtless. She suffered for her withdrawal, but she suffered just as severely from the open criticism of others. American culture has come a long way with respect to emotional weaknesses, but some people thought she'd let down the red, white, and blue, dropping out of the competition, save for one event.

That was 2020. This week, the country's most storied gymnast returned and swept up the mat, not to mention the Vault, Uneven Bars, Balance Beam, and Floor Exercise. She was shockingly good, as close to perfect as any human being could be. She's back. Amazingly, she's returned.

And she's stronger. Physically? maybe--who knows? But more importantly, emotionally she's stronger. She's stayed out of the limelight deliberately, plotted out her own return, and stayed away from pressures she never really needed. She still does things no one else on earth can, but maybe her greatest gift to all of us, to any of us, is the arc of her triumph, which is an age-old plot line, but always a blessing--always, always a blessing.

She's come through. She's cut her losses. She's returned. Who cares if she messes up, she's back in the game and you can mark that a win--for all of us.

This morning's thanks is for Simone Biles, whose model of strength in life is even more remarkable than the magic she creates on the balance beam. She's back, and that she is is her most significant gift to all of us.

Ubi sunt* at Juffer Fieldhouse

Okay, there's a story here, so let me unpack it. That's me. The earphones, like the sweaty neck of the shirt, suggest I've been working out, something Barbara and I do almost daily at the Rowenhorst Center, Northwestern College. 

Big deal. There's more. In the bottom left corner, barely visible, is a hero of mine, ye olde Pres of Dordt College, the Rev. B. J. Haan. Trust me, it's him. My daughter gave me the t-shirt some time ago; she knew I'd love it, more--far more--than some fancy one that says "Hawkeyes" or even "Green Bay Packers."   Here 'tis. You really have to see it. 

This isn't just "B. J. Haan"; it's B. J. Haan in front of a church. He looks like a barnstorming, circuit-riding evangelist, which he wasn't, even though the photographer--from Time magazine--thought he was. That's right--Time and Life circa 1947, when this young firebrand preached up a storm of such magnitude that it blew the movie theater right out of town, which brought him and Sioux Center some momentary fame--and some guffaws. Imagine! --this man in this pose on the cover of Life magazine!

For me at least, it's a famous portrait, if for no other reason than nothing from or about Sioux Center, Iowa, has been on the cover of a national magazine since. 

B. J. went on to establish a brand-new college amidst broad Sioux County cornfields of Iowa's northwest corner and become its first president. Some 20 years later, he hired me to teach English, a position I stayed at or in for almost forty years. 

For some time, quite reverently, I wore my daughter's thoughtful gift only around the house--I mean, how could I profane it with the kind of sweat I can still work up? But when it became clear it was getting little use, I added it to the gym-shirt closet and decided it--and he--was going to get a workout. It's just a t-shirt, nothing sacred, nothing Rome-ish.

However, to my haunted mind, the idea of wearing a BJ t-shirt to Northwestern College, Dordt's most foul rival, seemed well, profane. I told my giggling self I'd be lucky if some Raider PE guy didn't pull me off the ellipticals and hang me out to dry.   

No matter--I pulled it on for a workout.

The parking lot was full. Strange. There had to be something going on, so we parked near Juffer Fieldhouse and went in on the other side of the gym. Place was so full we had to squeeze our way through all the people, not just football players but a crowd of parents. I'd never seen so many people in the place. We had stumbled into the middle of the very first football practice. The players had just arrived. I'm guessing the coach had made sure parents were invited.

Honestly, I have no idea what they were doing, but whatever it was involved their smart phones. The grassy infield was covered with ball players, each of them looking at their phones and carrying out some kind of on-line workout ritual in a kind of reverence. Neither the kids nor their moms and dads were saying a thing. It was as if me and BJ had entered some villainous holy temple, all the earth in silence. 

And there he was on my chest. We made our way through the observant crowd toward the entrance to the gym, walked through the silence like reprobates storming out of church. Seemed deeply impious. 

But that's me, at the top of the page, in a selfie that's supposed to bear witness to our transgression, as if it were, in fact, the profanation I'm claiming it to be. 

It wasn't. Even as we picked our way through the crowd, it struck me that no one in that crowded practice facility, not one of them had any idea whose visage adorned my t-shirt. Furthermore, I told myself that at a college twenty minutes northwest of this one, had I walked through the football team assembled on their practice field, no one would have recognized the old preacher either, nor would anyone have known the story of how it was this prairie prophet had run the theater right out of Dodge City.

No one there at Juffer Fieldhouse--a hundred people at least--had a clue who this guy on my chest was, the preacher in a swallow-tail suit, holding forth on the abominations of Hollywood. 

No one knew. No one cared. I'm guessing few of them had ever heard of Life magazine.

Sometimes, no matter how hard an old guy works staying youthful, the job is downright impossible. Oh, woe and woe and woe. 

_____________________ 

*Ubi sunt is a literary trope that "expresses a sense of loss, as well as a mourning or lament for lost things," a frame of mind that frequently obsesses old men.

  

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

“Trust in the LORD and do good; 

dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.” Psalm 37:3

Via e-mail, I asked a student I don’t know personally if she’d like to work for me during the coming semester, the kind of work-study job students receive to help them through college, a pilgrimage which is, if you don’t already know, a very expensive journey these days.

I assumed she’d say yes. The college jobs coordinator told me she had been working in the dining hall, and most students rather appreciate an opportunity to work with profs, especially when those profs are in their majors. Slam dunk, I figured.

Her e-mail said yes. “After much prayerful consideration,” she wrote, “I’ve decided to take the English work study job.”

She must have liked the dining hall more than I assumed. Well, so did I when I worked there way back when. That’s good. It commends her, in a way.

The part of her answer I’ve not been able to forget is that dependent clause: “after much prayerful consideration.” She went to the Lord with this decision, even did it muchly? Seriously? I figured that either the decision wasn’t easy or that she goes to the Lord even with her slam dunks. Maybe it’s just rhetoric, but I doubted that—not her.

Like so many students these days, this young lady was—and presumably still is--far more “spiritual” than her parents likely ever were—at least, more than some of her profs were or are. When in the presence of such radiant spirituality, my natural tendency—for better or for worse—is to wonder if I’m somehow terminally jaundiced by my own oily skepticism and whether I wouldn’t be, well, more happy if I too took upon myself the myriad tasks presented me in life with equally soulful prayerful consideration—even when the slam dunks.

“Takes all kinds” my mother-in-law would say, which is as close to grace as some rural Midwesterners ever get, I think. And I honestly don’t doubt this student’s words, her devout sentiments, or the prayer closet regimen that single dependent clause implies. I’m hip enough to say she has a right to her righteousness. But so do I.

And I read Psalm 37:3 just a bit differently, it seems, than she does. There is something of a swap here, and I recognize the inherent danger of self-righteousness, in thinking that what I’m doing is “doing good.” Nonetheless, God almighty brokers a deal, it seems, and I honestly believe, deep in my soul, that I’m the beneficiary of his offer: “trust in me (I do), do good (I try), and I’ll be there (he’s my shepherd).” It’s that simple. With true faith in God, we shall be fed—which is the way the KJV translates this verse.

A friend of mine in South Dakota says the rains there this summer have been phenomenal, a tremendous blessing. “Those pastures you walked in, you know,” he told me, “they’re really thick—the cattle are belly-deep in grass.”

Charles Spurgeon says the real meaning of the line is in the word “shepherded”: those who trust in him and try to do his will will be shepherded.” But the NIV is nice, too: “will enjoy safe pasture.”

Here’s my spin on this bountiful verse (can you see your way through a madly mixed metaphor?): I don’t have to give prayerful consideration to my slam dunks if I’m belly-deep in grass.

Does that make sense?

Anyway, you know what I mean.

"Never Surrender!"

 

When finally, his long descent from heaven ends, Satan and his minions find themselves sprawled out in a burning lake of fire. They are worn and beaten by their fall and the realization that their circumstances will never change. They've been summarily banished from the place of all Good. What they see around them is well, hellish. They know the Lord of Heaven (there is no Earth yet) will never invite them back. They're out, period, not even sure of where they are. What they know is they've been dumped in a hot swamp.

So begins Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, which is not a poem to read before bed. Oddly enough, it begins with the arch-villain, the baddest dude in the cosmos, Satan himself, who picks his busted up body and stands to deliver one of the most moving and consequential lines in all of Western literature. 

Does he throw in the towel, recommend mass suicide? Of course not, he's the Devil. Instead, he charges God with evil, rails on what's happened to him and them, vows his revenge, delivers lines that are as famous as anything on the shelf marked "world literature" --"better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." 

And with that line, he rouses the troops for the eternal battle they'll wage against the Almighty, the battle soon to begin on earth between good and evil. 

Historically, John Milton's depiction of the Devil has been interpreted as one grand mistake. Satan's determination and will, his rousing cry for freedom from tyranny, his commanding presence, his resolute battle cry can hardly help being seen as wonderful. A whole school of interpretation stubbornly claims his mighty strength and charisma make him--the Devil himself--the protagonist, the hero of the epic. People can't help but love him.

I don't know if it was John Gardner or not who created a double-take on that incredible scene, but his book on Paradise Lost is where I first became convinced that Milton didn't make some kind of error in creating the Devil as a marvelously sympathetic character because--and this is the believer in me speaking--because he is. Let me exercise my sometimes hidden orthodoxy here and say it in another way: readers can't take their eyes off Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost because most human beings--me included--rather like the guy, or at least find his deceptions greatly attractive. 

Milton knew exactly what he was doing in PL when he made the Devil such a handsome character. He made him that way because he is. Milton's Satan dupes readers because Satan dupes us. Sin, it seems, is always more interesting than righteousness.

I could say more, but this morning I'll let a mug shot do the talking.

This man returned to Twitter last night with this picture. Beneath the mug shot, he ran the line "Never Surrender."

Morning Thanks--A visit to the DAHM

Mr. Hoekstra arranged a visit ahead of time, as many do. He came down south from Worthington, MN, accompanied by a friend. He told us he was in search of information about his own ancestry, his great-grandmother particularly, who a cousin of his had told him was written up in the Dutch American Heritage Museum (DAHM) in Orange City. 

When he didn't know his great-grandmother's name, his search seemed impossible. But given what he thought he knew about her--she'd come to America alone and homesteaded in the late 19th century--we could guess where her story might be on display in the museum.

We looked. Sure enough, Mr. Hoekstra's cousin wasn't wrong. In the section of the museum that describes the early days of the Dutch colony, we found a photograph--that one at the top of the page--and the story of a woman blessed with an impossibly Frisian name. Listen to this: Akke Sijes De Jong Hoekstra. There she was, her name and her story and even a distinguished portrait. 

Akke Hoekstra was not your ordinary immigrant. She came to America, to Iowa, to Orange City, when she was 56 years old. Left Berlikum, Friesland, the Netherlands, a widow, with a son. Her husband had passed away, in Holland, 15 years earlier. According to the story Mr. Hoekstra found, some family members claimed that, like many others, she'd left the Netherlands because of hard times, but also a decisive fear of tuberculosis, the disease that had taken the life of another son, who, when he passed away, was just 18 years old.

The Homestead Act (1862) gave Akke Hoekstra the opportunity to acquire land here in the neighborhood. Her youngest son helped her establish a farm and then left, returned to the Netherlands when Mrs. Hoekstra moved to town. She died in the year 1900. The story says that the inscription on her tombstone is taken from the book of Proverbs: "the memory of the righteous is a blessing." 

All of that is in the story that Mr. Hoekstra, Worthington, MN, found, exactly what he'd come to look for. 

In a way, I suppose, museums are in the business of bringing people together, but it doesn't happen often, so when we can get the job done, it's a sweet, sweet blessing for which we're thankful. 

Brad Hoekstra and the portrait of Akka Hoekstra, his great-grandmother.

On Common Ground--uncommonly rich

 

Interestingly enough, Mt. St. Helens, in faraway Washington state, begat the whole idea. Brian Hazlett, Professor of Biology and Environmental Science at Briar Cliff University, Sioux City, picked up a book he thought he'd like (and did), a hybrid compilation of essays, poems, and visual art, put together by a group of naturalists and artists drawn together by a landscape almost hallowed in their minds. Professor Hazlett thought the whole idea something grand, something worth doing here, in the northernmost reaches of the Loess Hills.

So he and a colleague, Ryan Allen, of Briar Cliff's English Department, gathered a gang of writers and naturalists from the Loess Hills region and invited them to retreat for a weekend at one of the region's most spectacular preserves, the Broken Kettle Grassland, just north of Sioux City, to gather and mix, to speak and listen, to observe and behold the breathtaking hills of Broken Kettle.  

And they did--actually helped out with a prairie burn, observed and studied Broken Kettle's bison herd, chatted with and listened to each other, and did some fulfilling contemplation on and in the natural wonders of the far northern edge of the Loess Hills. 

On Common Ground: Learning and Living in the Loess Hills, just now published, tells the tale and is the tale, a collection of writing, of poems and art work, spiritual work, that celebrates 200 miles of sheer beauty along the Missouri River by observing Broken Kettle, the Hills' far northern gem.

Here's the essence, a drawing that tells the story. One of the participants, hiking stick in hand, explains something of the prairie to the others, the Hills in the background. Delight with Yucca, this sketch is titled, fully to the point. What Common Ground features is delight, pure and simple. It's a hymn to creation, a collection of writing that is itself a delight. 

Country People at the station

Been reading, again, Ruth Suckow's Country People, her very first novel, published exactly a century ago, where I came on a passage that sounded familiar, even though I was nowhere near (nor even alive) to witness it. 

Let me set the scene. Country People is what the title says it is--a very real story about country people, a straight-up character study, a generational family album in the form of a novel, a novel in the form of a family album. It's not Hee-Haw, or some third-rate Sinclair Lewis. Ruth Suckow is not being condescending or in the least contemptuous, just honest, even loving in her concern with what's real.

It's 1917, and August and Emma's oldest son, Carl, is going off to the war in France. It's been a difficult last couple of years on the farm. German-Americans have found it difficult to determine their own identities--are they German or American? Furthermore, their non-German neighbors have often been more than happy to let them know that they're the hated Bosch, who've made life hard. Carl decides he's going and leaves the station in a bare bones scene that's effective, in part, because Suckow, like her characters, doesn't care to say more than what is required. This is what happened the morning Carl left, she says in this scene.

The train left in the early morning. August drove his family in, Emma and Carl and Marguerite. Johnnie and Frank and Frank's wife came in Frank's car; Mary and Elva and Roy in Roy's. There was a little group at the small wooden station: the other two boys and their families, a few people from town, one or two detached travelling men. The family stayed awkwardly in the depot, didn't know what to do or to say to one another. Johnnie and August went out to see if the train was in sight. 

Just before the train came--the morning Clipper, the Chicago train, by which clocks were set and rising timed--old Jerry McGuire the postmaster, an old Catholic who had come into office when "the Democrats came in," lined the three boys up on the station platform and read the President's Proclamation to them. It was a strange, solemn, unreal scene. Even the people who saw it didn't believe in it. The three boys standing there, their figures against the dim red of the harvest sunrise, with solemn blank faces, frowning a little to keep down any signs of emotion. One of the mothers sobbed. Emma wept only a little, effacing herself even now.

The little town was silent. Away from the station stretched pastures, the dew lying wet and heavy on red clover and tall weeds. The train came bearing down upon them, puffing out blackish smoke into the pale morning sky. It went black and big into the red prairie sunrise. The fields were left silent again. The scattered group of people on the platform got into their battered cars and drove back home to the morning chores. 

The photograph at the top of the page features Barbara's dad, my father-in-law, in uniform, Randall Van Gelder, accompanied by family and friends the morning he departed from the Alton, Iowa, train station for the war in Europe, the Second World War, thirty-plus years after Carl Kaetterhenry left from some fictional railroad station in Wapsipinicon, a town they call "Wapsie," somewhere out east in Iowa. 

There were three men leaving Wapsie, only one leaving Alton, only one family there at the station, but I can't help thinking it's something of the same picture. Dad is in uniform, his nine brothers and sisters gathered around, his stoic mother just over his left shoulder, his dad almost hidden in the back. 

Most readers today want fiction that's not about their own world, but some other. That's richly understandable and commendable. Suckow, born in Hawarden, left Iowa's small towns herself for some time, but never quite departed in her writing. 

Is it self-centered to appreciate worlds that are remarkably one's own? I hope not. The human being we spend a lifetime trying to understand is ourselves, or so it seems. "Know thyself," Socrates says. Almost uniquely, Ruth Suckow explores the worlds from which I came. 

R.I.P.--Liberal Arts

It's not a given. It's not true, like sunrise. People like me believe it, not because it can be proven, like gravity, but because we have faith. It's like religion that way: even though certainty is out of the question, believers are not at all afraid of telling you the argument has been and forever shall be absolutely true.

Then again, some of us set a life's agenda on it, maybe even spent our lives practicing it, as if it were a religion. I worked in the field for forty years, trained for it, entered it once that training was over, and never looked back. Have no doubt--I was among its saints, a true believer. Still am.

That's why I'm saddened by what happened last week at West Virginia University. As Leif Weatherby wrote yesterday in the New York Times, "If you’re a West Virginian with plans to attend West Virginia University, be prepared to find yourself cut out of much of the best education that the school has traditionally offered, and many of the most basic parts of the education offered by comparable universities."

Why the warning? Because in this country a verifiable decline in college-age students is coming. All institutions of higher education--well, not all, but most--will feel more than a pinch. Many will experience a drop in enrollment that will force them to cut programs and drop majors. Weatherby laments what happened at WVU:  "The university is deciding, in effect, that certain citizens don’t get access to a liberal arts education."

What will they drop? English departments at Briar Cliff and Northwestern were cut back painfully a few years ago already. Why? no majors, or very few. How long can an institution of higher learning keep an English department if no students fill the chairs in American Lit?

Why so few? The teacher shortage in this country is an acute pain. "We are Teachers" website reports that 35 percent of all teachers say they'll be quitting in the next two years, in part, I'm sure, because 89 percent claim they're working harder these days because of teacher shortages. In December of 2022, almost half of the schools in the country--elementary and secondary--were operating understaffed. 

But I've wandered. The scars at West Virginia University story show how colleges and universities will cut--history, literature and language, theater, even math, gone. What remains makes WVU look more job oriented. Gone is the commitment, the faith, that the humanities, the liberal arts, will somehow make individual students more human members of the society they join the moment they graduate.

That idea held sway in this country for more than a century, and I believed it--and still do. I can point to the exact place on a campus sidewalk where I was when I decided what I was looking forward to in the very next class was something I could see myself doing when I graduated. I remember that moment--second semester, second year--I told myself I could do worse for a profession than to be able to talk about history and literature. That day I confessed my faith in the liberal arts. 

Don't misconstrue. I'm no heretic, but I do believe that a civil society can be best created by people's being familiar and conversant with their nation's history and story. Can something of that content be absorbed from the little screens kids stare into constantly? Maybe. Will that kind of society emerge if the body politic's education has been little more than job training? We'll see.

Once again--it happens often lately--I'm going to sound like an old man; but I can't help thinking how thankful I am for living when I did, in an era when the liberal arts--history and literature, philosophy and theology--mattered.

Today two local colleges begin another term. It's been more than a decade now since I marched off to school, opened my office, pulled books out of my bag, and looked over once again what was coming up that day. 

Do I miss it?--no. Am I afraid?--well, maybe, for the life of the culture in which I've lived. Is that normal for someone my age? I think so.

Still, let me just say this. This morning I'm thankful for 40 years in the classroom, good years, but I'm also thankful I lived when I did, at a time I could spend my working days reading and talking about ideas. I believe--I still do--in the liberal arts. 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

 “Trust in the Lord and do good. . .”

“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me- some of its virus mingled with my blood.”

                                                            Henry David Thoreau, Walden

 I don’t know that anyone in Concord, Massachusetts, in the mid-19^th century would have thought of Thoreau as a warm and loving neighbor. His best work, I suppose, was done in a secluded single-room cabin he built with his own hands, set in the middle of a woods, beside a little lake called Walden Pond, no human being in sight. 

 Of course, Thoreau wouldn’t have called his cabin secluded either. To hear him speak of it, you might believe he was living downtown or just off a highway. The point of the Walden experiment, or so it seems to me, was to get away from people—do-gooders and non-do-gooders alike—and see if the natural world couldn’t teach him something worth learning. He called it a grand success, and school kids have been assigned various sections of Walden ever since, even though, if you ask me, the book seems, oddly enough, appallingly anti-American.

 The historical record suggests that, in Concord, no one liked him much—maybe just a few; and if the paragraph at the top of the page is any witness, it’s not difficult to guess why.  Even if he sounds curmudgeonly, most of us would have to admit that at some points in life, smarmy sweetness chokes just as surely as rat poison.

For years, a man I know visited hospitals every weekend, just dropping by on patients, whether or not he knew them. It was his habit to pray, too, asking the Lord’s favored blessing upon each and every one of the infirmed. Hospital visitation was his ministry.  To some, his visits were a joy; to others, they were a pain in the posterior.

 He was “doing good,” and at least part of the motivation that brought him to all the hospitals in the region, week after week, was his personal history of suffering—years of abuse and horror in a Nazi concentration camp. Knowing that story of his life somehow excuses his excesses, I think, don’t you?

 It’s impossible to fight with the injunction in this verse—“trust in the Lord and do good.”  It is our calling to love, to aid, to offer helping hands, to love our neighbors as ourselves.  It’s a commandment “like unto” the first—to love God above all.

 Thoreau may have been irritating to his Concord neighbors, but he is his own kind of do-gooder, really.  Whether nor not we like it, Walden makes us think twice about where we put our treasures, what kinds of barns. For the veracity of his argument, we have to thank him—even those school kids stumbling through his long sentences.

 There are myriad ways of doing good.  Our “calling,” someone once said, can be defined as the place where our passion meets God’s need. There’s a bottom line here, and it goes like this:  it’s our job to love, as we are, forever.

 Thanks be to Him.  

Sgt. Charles Floyd

You don't really need to know a man named George Rogers Clark, but let me introduce him anyway as the Revolutionary War leader who engineered victories over the Brits in Virginia, where he was born, and as far west as Illinois, which wasn't Illinois at the time. George Rogers Clark was notable, no question. But he was soon out-heralded by his little brother William, who needs no intro. I'm talking about William Clark.

But I'm bringing up the old war hero for another reason: another Revolutionary War vet, this one named Robert Clark Floyd, served under George Rogers Clark's leadership out west, and this man, a frontiersman to be sure, had a son named Charles--that's right, Charles Floyd, whose life is memorialized in a thousand ways all around us, right out my window in fact, where the Floyd River runs and occasionally floods. 

Now if your skeptical mind is at work, you might want to think that Charles Floyd was chosen for the Corps by way of family connections, that his father's legacy is what got him aboard. Understandable conclusion, but wrong.

Dozens of young men applied for the job of finding some waterway through to the Pacific Ocean—wild adventurers, who’d look in the face of murderous savages, bears and who knows what kind of monsters. Every last one of those men had to shoot straight and think on their feet out in the middle of nowhere. Many were inspired, but few were chosen. 

Among them was our own Sgt. Charles Floyd, one of the first seven men signed. More notably, Charles Floyd was selected to be one of only two sergeants. Mr. Lewis had given the job of selecting mates over to Mr. Clark, who'd been living at his famous brother's place in St. Louis. When Mr. Clark showed up and shook hands with Mr. Lewis, a moment Stephen Ambrose claims was "the moment the Lewis and Clark Expedition began."

But we've gone back in time. What Sioux City's most visible monument commemorates, high on a bluff above the river and I-29, is the life and death of the only member of the Corps to pass away on the expedition--and the deep grief the Corps felt as they laid his body to rest. For a trip across the breadth of half a nation at that moment in time, to lose only one member is remarkable. 

Several days before he passed away, everyone knew Sgt. Floyd was sick. Mr. Lewis had opined that Sgt. Floyd was suffering from bilious colic. Medical experts long ago decided that Lewis's diagnosis was understandable but wrong. Sgt. Charles Floyd died here, in a place that would become Sioux City, by way of what medical professionals guess was a ruptured or perforated appendix. 

It's comforting to know that had Sgt. Floyd been taken to the most advanced hospital out east, had his doctor been the famous Benjamin Rush, there was no diagnosis or treatment for a ruptured appendix. He simply couldn’t have had better care.

A descendant of George Shannon, Kate McMullen, wrote a fictional diary of her famous ancestor. In it, she describes her sense of what happened on the bluff where today the monument stands. This is how Kate McMullen imagines young Pup Shannon describing what happened that day.

We dressed Charlie in his uniform and laid him in a wooden coffin. .. We all put on our dress uniforms and carried Charlie up to the knob of a hill that overlooks the river. There we dug his grave and lowered it into it. Capt. Lewis read the funeral service. I spoke up, saying, "Charles Floyd died with great dignity at only 22 years of age. He was a fine sergeant and a leader of the men on this Expedition." Others murmured, "Amen." We marked Charlie's grave with a red cedar post, which Whitehouse had branded to say: 

C Floyd, Sergeant 

First United States Regiment, Infantry 

1782-1804. 

 __________________________ 

Kate McMullen, My Travels with Capts. Lewis and Clark, by George Shannon, 2004.

L and C: the death of Sgt. Floyd

from the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, Sioux City

[This morning, a story to tell the story. On Sunday, it will be exactly 219 years since Sgt. Floyd, the only man from the Corps of Discovery to die on the exploration, did so, here, on a bluff above the Missouri River.]

“Hurry,” Capt. Clark said, and that was all he needed to say because everyone knew—as they’d known for days—that Charley Floyd was in the kind of trouble from which there could be no easy escape. What Clark ordered was a long shot—everyone knew it, but no one said it. It was Sgt. Floyd, after all, and every last man liked Charlie.  

“Go down, get some water, and stir up the fire so we can that water hot,” Capt. Clark had told them.

They were up high on a wide and grassy bluff above the river, at the confluence of yet another, this one much smaller, maybe forty rods wide, Lewis had noted. It would be easier by far for the men to get what they needed from the smaller tributary coming down from the north.

“Long ago already,” Lewis told Clark, “I had in in me that we weren’t going to get out of this without some losses.” He wasn’t looking at Capt. Clark, didn’t have to, didn’t mean to. What he said was pure confession, not meant for anyone but maybe himself and the Almighty. “Had to happen, I suppose. I just hope the next one, when it happens, is somehow easier.”

“Don’t count on it,” Clark told him. “Lot of river between here and the sea.”

It was Clark’s idea to give Charlie Floyd a warm bath yet. Everyone knew a bath had nothing to do with making the sergeant well, just might make what was coming less of something no one wanted to name. Young and tough and not afraid of anything, they were; but unaccustomed death, too, when it lay right there before them.

Hard, hard work it had been getting this far upriver from St. Louis. If they weren’t poling all that tonnage through the current, they were on shore tugging it up with ropes. They soon understood that they were part of good bunch. At night, over a fire--lots of laughs, a healthy swallow or two of whiskey, and tales—no end to the tales the old river rats could spin.

The moment Sgt. Floyd complained about the pain, they believed him; the man wasn’t someone anyone had to babysit. Besides, he’d been getting weathered, not by all the work but by a body they could see was fighting an enemy they could see too clearly and hear in a rattling cough.

Once they got the water back up the hill, they filled every last vessel they could, leaned it into the fire and waited until they could see the steam rising, then poured it into a tank and went for Floyd, who was already on his way to glory.

“I’m going away,” he told Capt. Clark. “You be sure to write me.”

They never got him into that bath.

Somewhere, not close, a couple of coyotes let them know they were near. No wind. The river flowed along as if nothing at all was happening up there, nothing that hadn’t happened a thousand times before.

Capt. Lewis couldn’t help thinking about that, the cruel indifference of this mighty world they were seeing, all of them stunned with beauty from the moment they started up river. Tomorrow, there’d be a burial somewhere up here, up above the water, he thought. They’d leave Charlie Floyd’s body behind where no one would ever find him, so far from his Kentucky home. Some kind of ceremony they’d have to put together—they hadn’t planned on someone dying. He and Clark would put words into the souls of the boys bunched up right now around the campfire in a swell of silence brand new—and old, really as these hills, old as death itself.

They’d thought the world of the Sgt. Charles Floyd. Loved him. Once they hit the river again, it would be impossible not to think they’d left something of themselves in what they’d dig tomorrow with diligence and care. It’d be silent again, silent still.

It was Lewis’s idea. That little clear-water river down there feeding the Missouri—they ought to name it after Charley. They ought to name it after their good friend, Charley—the Charles Floyd River.

Wherever they were congregating, that pack of coyotes did out some long and mournful crying sounded like something of a gift. 

Lewis and Clark--Coyote

 

It's mid-August right now, maybe a little difficult to remember January. Let me try. The cold somehow finds a way to creep in here, downstairs where I’m writing. I'm in a fleece vest over a long-sleeve shirt, my warmest pair of sweat pants, and heavy wool slippers. The furnace is roaring. Soon, I'll grab a coffee and light the fireplace.

Long, long ago, it is said, the people didn't have any such comfort. In fact, on some frigid mornings, some died from cold, froze to death--often the elderly and the very young. The people loved the world they lived in--spring, summer, and fall-- but winter meant death and disaster. They counted their years in winters.

Now dream a little. Someone outside of their band saw the children and the old ones dying, and determined that the beings he knew of on top the mountain, those beings, dangerous as they were--the Fire Beings--were gifted with what the people needed, something warm and deep, whose rich voice and bright colors would even be of benefit. The people needed fire. He resolved to get some.

Who was that silent friend? It was Coyote. That's right--Coyote. He could be reckless and even dangerous, as some of them knew, but he was somehow just the one who could save the people.

So Coyote climbed the mountain until he found the Fire Beings. There they were, seated comfortably around the flames--monsters, vicious and terrible. Coyote knew that if he were to grab some of that fire, he'd have to do it when they weren't suspecting him. He waited and waited, studied their behavior until he figured he'd have the best chance at the moment they were changing guard. When next that happened, Coyote grabbed a lit stick from the roaring blaze and took off running. He ran and ran and ran though forest and valley, through endless trees and flowing creeks. He tore down the mountain, the Fire Beings in a pack behind him, so close they singed his tail. Even today, the very tip is sooty black. 

But Coyote had friends, like Chipmunk. So when it became clear to him that he could run no farther and no faster, he handed that stick of fire to Chipmunk, who took off like a meteor. But the Fire Beings didn't quit. When they got up close to Chipmunk, one of them drew his clawed hand over Chipmunk's back which explains those dark lines down its body.

When Squirrel got the firestick, the Fire Beings bent its back and tail with their strength, but Squirrel passed it along to Frog, who soon lost his tail. Still, Frog got it to Wood, where the Fire Beings stopped on a dime because they couldn't grab the fire from Wood.

And that's how Coyote stole fire from the Fire Beings and saved the people from dying in winter. 

On August 1804, the Corps of Discovery spotted a four-legged they didn't recognize on the west side of the Missouri. Clark called it a Prairie Wolf. A couple men went to shore to try to get it--but didn't. Couldn't. They couldn't find him-- blame thing got away. 

That was the first time any Euro-American had seen the real wily coyote.

Native people knew all about them, of course. The coyote were sly dogs, and you didn't want to cross them. Still, sometimes they did really wonderful things, like the time, you know, when they brought fire down the mountain to the people who were dying in winter. 

In ten years out here on the edge of town, we've seen only one coyote. But we know they're here because sometimes at night, when the windows are open. . .well, you know, they're out there.

"Innumerable Hosts of Graves"

[The calendar says we're running up close now to the anniversary of the death of Sgt. Charles Floyd, 23 years old, the only member of the Corps of Discovery to die on the trek back and forth across the northwest region of the American continent. He died here, in a place to be called, years later, Sioux City, where a mighty memorial, an obelisk, a full 100-feet high, commemorates his death, the first American military person to die west of the Mississippi. The series has been airing on KWIT, 90.3, Sioux City's NPR affiliate, every Monday.]

Exactly where the Corps of Discovery was when William Clark took men to a beaver dam that day no one really knows. Historians guess the place was once somewhere above Macy, Nebraska; but wherever it was, it isn’t. Too bad.

It’s not altogether clear what kind of gear they employed to catch fish. Clark described the technology this way: “the men picked up Some Small willow & Bark [and] we made a Drag.” A seine of some sort, I’m sure, which would have required a couple of the men to drag the ends through the water to thereby trap fish within.

Good night, did they come up with a catch, but I’ll get to that.

Fishing may well have been therapy. They’d been looking for the Omahas the day before. They had trekked up and away from the river to what they’d guessed was a big village, but the entire place was dead quiet, mud huts not only emptied but destroyed, burned. The Omahas were somewhere out west on a buffalo hunt, they figured; but the place seemed a graveyard.  

They knew the Omahas had lost hundreds during a devastating smallpox epidemic four years before, in 1800. Included among the victims was their leader, Black Bird. “The Situation of this Village, now in ruins,” Clark wrote in his journal on August 14, 2004, “surrounded by innumerable hosts of graves, the ravages of the Small Pox.” And then this: “The cause or way those people took the Small Pox is uncertain, the most Probable from Some other Nation by means of a war party.”

Others say otherwise. Omaha tribal history doesn’t blame the Brule or Pawnee or anyone Native. “Around 1800 a smallpox epidemic, resulting from contact with Europeans, swept the area,” tribal history says, “reducing the tribe’s population by killing approximately one-third of its members.”

The Omaha village was deserted because of a death-like pact the Corps of Discovery wouldn’t have believed even if the Omahas had left a note and tried to explain. According to The Omaha People, when the survivors realized the extent of the horror smallpox had wrought, they saw their demise as a people in that horrific death and disfigurement. Rather than perpetuate suffering, they determined to fight traditional enemies and even friends in what some call “a mourning war,” their tears paradoxically fueling the fire in their bellies.

Their long-time friends and cousins, the Poncas, eventually talked them out of more death, but when the Omaha went back to the village on the Missouri, they couldn’t face the misery. Instead, they used the village that had once been their home as a burial ground, which is what the Corps of Discovery found that day, even if they didn’t know it— “innumerable hosts of graves,” Mr. William Clark wrote.

When they lived right here at the mouth of the Big Sioux River, “the River of the Mahas,” the Omaha had once been among the most powerful of all North American tribes. But hundreds died in 1800, and for years those deaths nearly emptied the Omaha soul.

Lewis and Clark weren’t stunned by the silence of Big Village. They simply thought the Omahas were out hunting buffalo.

The next day they dragged a rough-hewn seine through the water just behind a beaver dam and walked away with 308 fish, “of the following kind Pike, Salmon, Bass, Perch, Red horse, Small Cat, & a kind of Perch Called on the Ohio Silverfish,” Clark recorded.

Great eating the day after they walked into a ghost town they couldn’t have understood, a place that had suffered hundreds of deaths from a virus they believed the Omahas picked up from some alien warrior band.

Maybe if you don’t know the truth, it’s easier to have a banquet.

But Patrick Gass’s diary entry for the day they caught 300 fish ends with this line:  “This day Sergeant Floyd became very sick and remained so all night. He was seized with a complaint somewhat like a violent colick.”

The Corps of Discovery, right here, were about to discover something about death themselves.

Our Fainting Couch

 

To my mind, decadence surrounds a monster piece of furniture called a "fainting couch." Two morally questionable images arise; one is of some delicate Victorian lass with the back of her hand up to her forehead, feeling, well, faint. Her problems, if indeed they are real, stem from too much leisure, not the lack thereof. She's having a moment, and the lady of the manor suggests she step discreetly to a place just off the great room, where she'll find a fainting couch. It's a Downton Abby sort of thing. Oh, and add this too--this Victorian lady is far too tightly corseted. 

The other image is centuries older. A paunchy bald guy wearing a white smock and a laurel wreath is aboard this long, long chair, one arm up over the pillow while being fed succulent grapes, one by one, by some comely consort, a young thing with an ample bosom. 

It's all fantasy, of course--the Victorian woman and the Greek hedonist. It's all fantasy and decadence, which explains, perhaps, why they are the images that come to unregenerate me when my wife speaks of a "fainting couch."

We moved one--a real one--into our house Saturday, a big, ungainly thing that was somehow lighter than I thought it would be. Today it sits in our library, where--I must admit--it fits, well, perfectly. We just had to excuse a rocking chair, bring it to the basement. Otherwise, our fainting couch is set in a place where it could well have been since the day we moved in.

My partner (I'm using a high-fashion term) has always dreamed, maybe even decadently, of a fainting couch. I don't know why exactly. The only times I ever remember her fainting were in church, when she was just then in the family way. If she is now, at least we have a fainting couch.

We're far too old to buy new furniture. What's more, we spend far more of our time trying to figure out what to get rid of than what to import. Nonetheless, on Saturday we moved it in, a huge thing with a 3/4-cut oak base that stands on softball-sized feet that match our kitchen table's. That massive pillow makes it a fainting couch and not a day bed, I'm told. 

Here 'tis, in the house from which it came, a house that belonged to an aunt (Barb's side), who today, in the Home, needs far less than she had when she lived alone in a place in town. 

I could ask, but knowing the aunt who left it behind, I find it hard to believe that at her place it ever relieved any fainting. Aunt Carol worked in Orange City's Sioux County County Courthouse, where it likely did, occupying considerable space in the nurse's office. 

Through the years, whatever commerce it had ever done slimmed away to nothing, at which time someone in authority determined the courthouse's fainting couch would be unceremoniously dumped. Aunt Carol sprang into action, called her husband on the farm outside of town, told him to get his pickup, because that ample piece of furniture was not going on a trip to nowhere.

Thus, it became the property of Aunt Carol, who, as I've already said, is presently at home in the Home. 

Seriously, it took this non-fainting and most certainly not-with-child spouse of mine about a week to follow up a notion she'll admit she's had for years, a notion she inherited from her mother, who, Barbara claims, would have loved a fainting couch but didn't have one because she just didn't have a place for one. A week ago she saw it, but Friday, as if out of nowhere, she pulled me upstairs and said, "What would you think if I took that fainting counch?"

I don't think I'm far off the mark if I say that we now have a fainting couch because my golden anniversary-plus-one partner is satisfying an unrequited longing her upholsterer mom had for just such a piece of furniture.

If it suits you, just hold on to those decadent images--I don't mind. But be relieved to know that I won't be donning a toga any time soon, and you can bet my wife, scantily clad, won't be feeding me grapes--green or otherwise. All of that is nothing but decadent fantasies. 

But the beast is newly at home in a house we built a decade ago on the north edge of Alton, where my partner found a place where, honestly, it fits perfectly. 

Or so thinks the cat, who loves it, cats being, of course, masters of unequaled decadence. 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

“. . .for like the grass they will soon wither, 

like green plants they will soon die away.”

 Lawns are shabby. We’re not in any kind of drought, but the abundant rainfall we’ve had this spring and summer probably kept the grass from having to reach for moisture so that when the rain stopped and the heat pulled in our lawn turned to toast, the grass going as dormant as it will come January.  

 King David is not wrong in his appraisal of things here:  real villains—real evil men and women—don’t last. Their hay-day is fleeting, you might say. Hitler and Stalin had designs on world conquest, but they both like a’moldering right now. Bin Laden is a footnote. Right now, it’s Putin who’s blood-letting in the name of conquest. If we believe the verse, won’t be long and he’ll be toast too—that’s the promise here.

 I know what David means. 

Why beat around the bush?  This isn’t my favorite verse in the Bible, and I probably have Walt Whitman to blame.  What’s my quarrel?  I don’t like the simile.  Grass has been withering all month long under the heavy gaze of an outrageous July sun.  The perennials aren’t standing up well either.  I know what David means.

But last night a cold front came through and this morning we’re twenty degrees colder than yesterday.  Highs today may reach into the 70s; for most of the month, we’ve been in the 90s.  Our air conditioning shut down last night, and you know what else?—if the temp stays close to what it is this morning, it won’t take long and that tawny grass will be emerald, May-like green. Those perennials we’re so proud of? —they’ll be back.  They may wither for a season, but they’ll be a bouquet again. You know that too.

 There’s something unspoken in this verse that reminds me of horror movies because just when you think the blob or whatever atomic anteater devastating New York is finally gone, there’s this wink, this raised eyebrow that suggests it may not be completely wiped out. The wicked, says David, are like grass—they die. 

 Well, I got news. Grass doesn’t die quite so fast. It may get cut and shorn; it may brown like old leather and get prickly underfoot; the earth may go bald beneath it, but the grass will be back.

 That’s what Leaves of Grass is all about, and while I’m not into yawping as barbarically as Walt Whitman, his American classic testifies, from the middle of the mayhem of the Civil War, that the grass will come back.

 Some may well consider “Song of Myself” to be holy writ.  I don’t count myself among them. But, like Whitman, I love green stuff; and I just can’t help my unease when David equates beasts like Putin with God’s beneficent growing things. It’s the Bible, the word of God, but here, I wish he’d have found some other comparison. 

Trust me. I will take the lesson to heart because it is the most comforting assurance God’s word offers anywhere, anytime—what it comes to is little more than this imponderable assurance: “don’t be afraid.” That’s the real of this versestory, something that needs to be said, time after time after time. And then again and again. And again. 

 Fear is a killer. Don’t be afraid. Trust in Him.