On Those Outside Agitators

Nevertheless, while the attack on Judge Bradley was undoubtedly inspired by outside agitators, of whom "Mother Bloor" was one of the more distinguished Communists, all of those who were caught and tried in the subsequent military occupation were residents of Plymouth county or nearby territory. Many of them were bona fide farmers.

It was hard the morning after, I'm sure, hard on those dozens who'd grabbed him from his court, the dozens who threatened to hang him, the dozens who put him in the back of a truck and took off out of town. Truth be told, they'd treated him as if he were himself the cause of all their economic problems; they'd put a hub cap on his head like a helmet,pulled down his pants, then tied a rope around his neck, let him know they were about to hang the guy.

But Judge Charles C. Bradley, kneeling in the dirt at the side of a country road, wouldn't budge, wouldn't do what they wanted him to do--to swear not to carry out one more blasted farm foreclosure, like the one in Primgahr they'd just witnessed. Too many good men, too many fine farm families were being tossed off their land when it became impossible for them to keep up with payments because--as the whole world needed to know--a man couldn't make a living on corn that wasn't worth a dime, milk that a good farmer might just as well dump as bring to market. How is a man supposed to pay what he owes when there's no money anywhere?

The judge is in his court room in LeMars, they told each other, just the kind of enemy they needed. That's how it was that they were there that afternoon, April 27, 1933. They were juiced with their own righteous anger. Farmers couldn't prosper when they barely could live. So they went to Le Mars to find the damned judge.

They did everything but hang him, their anger somehow melted by time slipping by, by a brace of good sense, by the judge who, when given the chance, prayed for justice for all people. They didn't string him up, as they'd promised.

The anger didn't subside. It would take some time--years!--for handsome prices to return. But the next day there had to be some shame. Hence, as the obituary says, it was easy to blame those damned outside agitators, the commies who were infiltrating everything, bringing about no good by lighting fires that could burn down the whole county. It was "outside agitators" that turned good farmers into thugs, church men into killers. It was those outside agitators that brought grief to the county.

So it turns out that when the toll was taken and the marauders identified, they were all locals. Wasn't a commie among them. Not only that, there was regret, embarrassment, shame, along with some prison sentences.

It's just so much easier to count on others when it comes to shame and regret. Life is so much easier with "outside agitators." It's just so much easier to put the blame on nameless others. 

In 1933, right here in northwest Iowa, not all that far down the road, a gang of frenzied farmers grabbed a judge right out of his courtroom, drove him out into the country, hung a rope around his neck, slipped that rope over a telephone pole, then, blessedly couldn't do it. Amazing.

Lord knows their anger had cause. Lord knows good people lost their way of life problems far out of control, problems with no solutions they could make whole. 

It would take a decade and another world war for problems on the farm to disappear. 

But the grand idea of blaming "outside agitators" wouldn't disappear and likely never will. 

It's just too much like us.

My scarred life -- iii

Everything changed in high school. I was the first to have a sideburn, even though I hadn't touched a razor blade. My shoulders broadened, and I began to grow into a normal human being except for the orange racing stripe running down my face. Sooner or later, most of the kids in the high school I attended knew some variant of the true story, but some macho seventeen-year-olds would say, "What the heck did you do to her?"

Thus began my life as a storyteller. In college I got marked up in a full-fledged barroom brawl, but the "passionate lover" was never fully put to sleep (it would be half a century before "Me Too.") Bigots claimed the perps were Black. Outdoorsmen, had me chasing a wounded buck through naked winter foliage. Girls, well, why let the cat out of the bag; half of romance was intrigue and the other half was deception. Besides, I told myself, really--who'd want to tell the real story? 

When, dutifully, I went to the Selective Service Office for the ritual, I was well aware that the lady behind the desk would ask a uniquely personal question. Three of us, born around the same time, went in together. I made sure the dutiful lady couldn't miss seeing the bloody thing running down the side of my face.

"James," she said, “any identifiable scars?" I swear she didn’t bother looking up.

I shook my head with appropriate reverence.

"You must have some scar somewhere, don't you?" Pause.

"I can't think of any."

A little help from my friends. “Oh, Schaap, come on—you must have a scar someplace.”

Hunched my shoulders, shook my head.

“Think hard,” she said, “—everybody's got a scar somewhere--maybe on your face?”

"You got a scar above your eye where you took an elbow in basketball,” one of friends said. Teamwork.

She rolled her eyes. “Something more obvious,” she said, determinedly.

The gig was about up. “Oooooohhhh, how about this one on my cheek?”

"Perfect!!!" she said. The only time in life my scar got earned that approval. 

I was 40 maybe, maybe older, when, going through customs at the Toronto airport, I was waylaid by a box of books I'd taken along to try sell at a couple of readings I had scheduled in Ontario. Books always were a pain—taxes, sales, even prices—“what are they worth?” someone official would say. Difficult questions to answer honestly. None of those books were marked with prices. I fully intended to sell them much cheaper than usual, didn't want to haul them back and go through the whole inquisition again.

So, this time I went along with the program, tried to explain that assessing dollars-and-cents was tough when we were talking about my books. And then, of course, there was those Canadian taxes. . .

“Maybe you ought to see the guy in the desk in the next room,” the second customs agent told me, pointing, a level I normally didn’t achieve.

The two of us were in some back room, alone, a long way out of the flow of traffic. I knew I wasn’t in trouble—that wasn’t it. The question was, were they going to let me haul the books into Canada or not.

“So,” a third guy says. He’s sitting behind a wide old desk. There’s a light on above his head made me feel I was part of a crime family. “You’ve got these books. . .” He looked over the report that came with me, then at me. “So how’d you get that scar anyway?” he said.

I was gutsy. I’ll admit it. I smiled, big-time. "Scar on my face's got nothing to do with writing books,” I told him, as if I was sharing a joke.

And, nodding in silence, he took it that way, flicked his head, smiling--all he needed to do to let me be on my way.

It's a joy to imagine the incredible stories that may have shot through the minds of some people who never told me what they were thinking or got any sense of the truth: "I was two, my sister was five, and it was a couple of days after Christmas."

I wasn't much of a veteran when I took my first teaching job, so one Friday--you need to write something every Friday, I told them, as if I knew--I told them the topic was how Mr. Schaap got his scar.

That was a mistake. 

It's  just that the truth is such a bore and I've never been much of a liar. Thus, it's better for everyone concerned if I just allow people to dream up their fantasies. If they ask, I'll tell them about a morning at Grandma's house and my sister and a board game--but not until I have to, and most often, I don't. 

Little kids and old people--they like to know right off.

Long ago--I think I was in college--my mother told me I could get that old scar taken off by a process called "sanding," she said. No reason for me to carry it along anymore, not with modern medicine. But somewhere along the line I figured I'd had it for so long that I wouldn't be me without it. I don't think Mom ever understood that.

But I got a hearty lesson from a photographer-friend, who took me out to the woods at Sandy Hollow once upon a time long ago. I needed a portrait for the cover of a book I'd written, something that made me look good.

My friend, who taught art at the college, made no bones about it. She took every last proof from the left side of my face. Finally, I thought I'd ask. "You're getting the scar side," I told her, thinking maybe she hadn't noticed.

"That's the you, Jim," she said, snapping away.

I'm not so joyful admitting it, but she's right. I been carrying it for 74 years. It's hardly as crimson as it was for so long, but it's still there. I suppose when I meet people, it's still what they notice about me right away. But I don't think much about anymore. Never did really, except maybe for that junior high story about "Old Scarface."

For good or ill, that scar's me. I don't know how be without it.

Thanks, Sis. 

A Scarred Life -- ii

Scars turn white, right? Well, not this one. For reasons known only to God, mine stayed proud and red as a banner and therefore totally dominated first impressions.

Your and my scars are ours forever, so this long, red stripe of mine became second nature, so much a part of me that I most often forgot I had it--until I was shuffled into new circles and met new people, including some few who would almost immediately blurt out the question--you know, "How'd you get that thing?" Seniors, for example, and little kids. From ten to seventy, we seem to grow enough decorum not to ask. It's not polite, after all, and your mother will, sure thing, let you know it. 

But seniors and little kids often lack shame and ask the obvious question first crack out of the box. "How'd you get that mean scar, fella?" When such questions jump out at you, you can expect the shameless to unclothe their own wounds and show you parts of their bodies you weren't asking to see.

Conversation goes something like this:

"Hi--I'm Jim Schaap, originally from Wisconsin, live in Iowa now. . .”

"Bill. Bill Sanderson--where the hell you get that scar? Good night, you ought to see mine.”

You learn to live with their affrontery, as with their indecency. I've so accustomed myself to such things that I avoid exposures by making a game out of the answer before telling him or her just what I imagine he would like to hear.

“Well, I was in Chicago one night. . . "

Tried that on the first basemen of a college team in South Dakota who asked me a what the heck had happened the moment I got to first.

"In a little fight," I told him. A lie. 

"Oh, yeah?” he says, begging for the story.

When I started into a yarn, the chucker threw the ball to f1rst, and I was dead in the water. I wondered what the guy tried on the unscarred.  

As I grew up, the storied means by which I had acquired the scar changed. When I was a little boy, some moms would always bring up a cat. My mom always felt bad about their wanting the story. Never bothered me too much--after all, it was my sister's fault for tossing me around. 

Early adolescence was, well, early adolescence. People didn’t know what to think--I seemed too young for a fight and too old for a cat. And the dumb thing stayed bright red, like something lifted from a cop's car. It was tough on me back then--like talking about pimples, you know? I had this scar and I couldn't help it, so try not to stare, okay? 

My mother had a little box of pictures of her kids, a box I inherited when she died. It's hard to find any shot of her only son that doesn't feature the scarless side of my face. Mom used to "tint" black and white portraits. Mine, noticeably, are scar less. 

One day in the seventh grade, we opened our books to a story in our reading class titled, "Old Scarface", about a whale, I think. I don't think I looked up from my book for the whole hour.
_________________________

just one more day of this embarrassment. 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

 

“I have seen a wicked and ruthless man 

flourishing like a green tree in its native soil, 

but he soon passed away and was no more; 

though I looked for him, he could not be found.”

 

People frequently ask me what’s real and what’s not real in a piece of fiction, as if every character, every crack in the sidewalk, every 20-second gap in dialogue is somehow prototyped.  It isn’t, of course.  In a story, nothing is true true, even though, if I do my job well, everything is.  Let me put that another way:  nothing that emerges from the soul can be bereft of that from whence it came; everything in a story is real in me—something I’ve seen or touched and imagined. Almost everything I write can be footnoted, traced to something I’ve experienced. 

           

A few mornings ago I woke up with a pleasant dream of my first teaching job, 35 years ago. I don’t remember the exact image, but somehow the slot machine my mind becomes in sleep turned up an old classroom image from a stack I hadn’t thumbed through for a long time.  Why?  Freud thought he knew and so have countless others.  But I’m not sure anyone does, at least fully.  Our experiences—both real and imagined—never totally disappear, even though they're nowhere near our radar screens for years.

           

I take that back.  Some things definitely do.  I’ll never forget eating breakfast at a diner in the deep South the morning after Martin Luther King was murdered.  That greasy spoon because it was a haven for rednecks who’d been partying all night long, getting drunk on their joy about King’s death.

           

Years later, after I’d written a piece about that diner, an old friend who was with me that morning told me he had absolutely no memory of that place. 

           

“You’re kidding?” I said.

           

“Nothing,” he told me, “but I’ll never forget stopping in front of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.  You remember that?”

           

For the life of me, even today, I have no memory of standing at the place where John F. Kennedy had been shot only seven years before. 

           

While our experiences shape us and shape what we write, what we say, and even how we say it, isn’t it strange that we really don’t control which of those experiences do the heavy lifting?  We act—and are, most certainly, acted upon. 

           

I say all of this because I’m not sure there’s a verse in this poem that so fully resounds with David’s voice as these do. I swear, I can almost hear him. Maybe it’s the personal pronouns. Maybe it’s their placement—that big I sitting there, front and center. This is testimony, and if you read it a couple of times you can almost feel David’s finger poking at your clavicle. He won’t be doubted.

           

I know enough about memory to wince a little at his vehemence, but I also understand that it’s all we’ve got to go on—what we’ve experienced. He says he’s seen it himself: the wicked are chaff the wind blows away. Been eye-witness. Been right there to watch. Been there. Never forgot.

           

Finally, maybe, I’m less sure of David than I am of the Word of the Lord.  And these lines are the Word of the Lord:  relax, downright evil will not get a mite less than it deserves.

           

That, I believe.

My Scarred Life -- i

When Cain murdered Abel, God planted a mark on his forehead to signify that he had sinned grievously. The mark was to stay with him for the rest of his born days so everyone would identify Cain as, well, undesirable.

I don't remember doing anything quite so horrendous as murder before my second birthday. I may have wet a few diapers and kept Mom and Dad from sleeping, but nothing quite so out of the ordinary for any run-of-the-mill kid. Regardless, I, too have borne a marking that will stay with me for however long death may tarry.

In January, 1950, soon after Christmas, our family made a trip to Grandpa's house to celebrate the holiday season. As usual, Grandma made sure she had all the seasonal goodies prepared, the new toys set out in plain view for the grandkids. Among them was a colorful, new pin-ball machine, not a big one found in pool halls, but a smaller game designed to set on the floor. As far as I can remember, this particular model looked much like any other toy pin-ball machine, except by some genius of manufacturing, the toy-makers had neglected to lay glass over the playing surface, leaving the metal pegs exposed.

That pin-ball game dominated our attention for the afternoon, and only when we ran to the holiday table did the marbles rest in the tray at the bottom of the machine.

Let me make this clear: I always liked my sister. She was three years older than

me, and she was a girl, but she never bothered me in any ways other than any usual older sister might.

After supper she went back to the living room floor and resumed play on the delightful little game, placing it next to the Christmas tree so as to get a little additional light, then bent over on all fours in front, creating an inviting little horse to any year-old cowboy. I hopped on, decided to make a game of her.

She didn’t consent to that species of horseplay. She wriggled and shook at first, kind of half-heartedly, then told me to get off. Truth be told, my weight was not enough—I was not yet two--to take her attention off the marbles zigzagging down through those posts. When she decided she had enough, she lifted her feet like a rodeo bronc, and catapulted me success­fully off her back, and so began my life as a marked man.

I flew off and made a perfect one point landing in the field of posts set into the wonderful Christmas toy. Those nasty little posts did their thing, or, so I am told, because when I came up for air my face looked like Antietam.

In moments, I guess, both parents and grandparents were at the sight of the accident, bemoaning my bloody face, and saying rather nasty things about "such a dangerous toy.” I was almost-two, so I started bawling, especially when Mom told me I was going to be all right after a visit to the doctor.

I’m told I had quite a few gashes over my face, several of which required stiches, but one was nasty, running the up my face on the left side. Hence, me and Cain.

Unfortunately, the doctor failed to sew the wound shut quite as tightly as he should have, so the scar, even as it healed, remained, well, pronounced.

Scars turn white, right? Well, not this one. For reasons known only to God, mine had real fortitude, stayed so proud and red that it totally dominated first impressions.

___________________ 

Note: I have in my possession my mother's entire collection of Jimmy Schaap pics. Very few shots feature the left side of my face. Both Mom and thoughtful school photographers must have made sure that whopper was unseen. In this one--maybe first grade?--it's there at least. Trust me, it was. 

Tomorrow: more of a scarred life.

Twisted rails--a monument at the museum at Westerbork

One more time for a different platform--this terrific book I just read. The essay is till a WIP.

___________________ 

For many moons I've been told by friends I trust that I really need to read An Interrupted Life, by Etty Hillesum. If you are not one of those friends, Etty Hillesum was a grown-up Anne Frank, a Jewish woman living in the heart of Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. 

Both of them kept intense journals. Both unflinchingly recorded the richness of their hearts' desires amid the suffering. Both kept notebooks that, given their honesty amid the strife, today offer crucial testimony to the horrors of a very real extermination plan.

As life becomes harder and more threatening, it also become richer, because the fewer expectations we have, the more good things of life become unexpected gifts that we accept with gratitude.

The Dutch chapter of that insanity was more successful than elsewhere in occupied Europe. In 1939, the Netherlands Jewish community numbered 140 thousand. When the war ended, less than 40 thousand remained. Some nations lost more Jewish people, but the percentage was unequalled. Among those who perished were Anne Frank, 16, and Etty Hillesum, 29, along with both of their families. 

The journals are remarkably similar and shockingly different. After the war, Anne Frank's father did some editing, removing things he thought didn't need to be said. Etty Hillesum had no familial editor. An Interrupted Life is amazingly candid. 

But then it's fair to say that while the Hillesums and the Franks shared their Jewishness, they shared little else. Etty, clearly a resident of Dutch intelligencia, seems largely unaffected by the occupation for almost 100 pages of the diary. Not until the yellow stars were codified does she say much at all about the German presence all around.

Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.

But then, her attention is with the pressures of her own roiling interior life, a life that's so nakedly offered up in the journals. Today, Etty Hillesum was polyamorous, entertaining several different partners frequently, perhaps because to her, sexuality seems to be just another characteristic of her humanness. In a way, sex is itself therapy, as her mentor and guru appears to believe. In the Me-Too era, Julius Spier would certainly lose his license and probably his freedom. But Etty Hillesum was not an unwilling partner. "I don't think I am cut out for one man," she says baldly.

But the philosophizing gets lost in the intensity of her reflections once the Jews, the  community she is part of--if only tangentially--begins to be bullied. Those conflicts/horrors lead her to consider deeply the difficult question she faces ever more darkly--how to live sanely in an insane world. 

To live fully, outwardly and inwardly, not to ignore external reality for the sake of the inner life, or the reverse — that's quite a task.

That quest grows more pressing when her status as a member of the Joodse Raad, a Jewish council created by the Nazis to buffer relationships, grants her a unique position in the camp at Westerborg,the last stop between Holland and the death camps. Once there, Etty Hillesum lives a calling she shapes to minister to those hopeless many who hopelessly watch the trains depart.

Thirty years after people recommended the book, I finally got around to reading it when David Brooks spoke highly of it: 

One of my heroes is a woman named Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who lived in Amsterdam in the 1930s and ’40s. Her early diaries reveal her to be immature and self-centered. But as the Nazi occupation lasted and the horrors of the Holocaust mounted, she became more generous, kind, warm and ultimately heroic toward those who were being sent off to the death camps.

An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork is unlike any other book I've ever read. Her life, her spirit and her creed deconstructs our ideologies. Evangelicals would be shy to claim her; she sleeps around and undergoes a self-inflicted abortion because, she says, she chooses not to bring a child into an impossibly cruel world. 

Militant Jewry would despise her passivity, even blame it for the deaths of thousands of Jews, who chose not to fight but to get on the trains lock-step. Benjamin Netanyahu has Etty Hillesum in mind when he refuses to reign the IDF. "Never again," his people say today as they destroy Gaza. There shall be no more  passivity. Most Jews would find her adoption of Christianity unsettling--she drew great strength from New Testament readings, from Saint Augustine, from Thomas a' Kempis.

Feminists would find her unshakable emotional attachment to Julius Spier embarrassing. And me? I loved the book. I should have read it years ago. 

But I was disgusted with myself. I found it so easy to be judgmental. 

From the feeder

I couldn't help thinking that the focus was off on this shot of a sparrow outside my window--and it may well be. But the portrait also features something of the wardrobe my fine feathered friends are into right now when they descend on the feeder--and descend they do: "when sparrows come, they come not as spies, but in battalions." That's not Shakespeare, but it's close.

This fella is a full winter gear. They don't throw on hats and gloves, nor wrap themselves in woolen blankets. Somehow they make do when temps get to -20, as they did last week, by just fluffing those feathers out as far as they can so they look only half-focused. More fluff is all they've got to fight the cold. Their fuzziness is a blessing.

Those fluffed-out coats keeps them warm, as does as much food as they can gobble up, both from and beneath the feeder outside my window. I can go through--correction! they can go through--20 pounds a week, although their numbers suggest that I'm now feeding more than my share of the battalions.

Wait a minute. Let me get you a shot that's wide enough to include the bush that's there at the right side of the picture. 

That's a little better, but there's only two in the bush--often enough there are more. Sometimes the goings-on out there seems a massive tag team match: ground troops battle it out until they're winded, they ascend to the bush where they touch wingtips with some buddy at rest, who then takes his or her turn in the scrum on the ground.

They're a circle of middle-school girls, moving only when someone decides to shuffle to the other side of the cafeteria. When I walk past the window, they all take flight. As they do when the jays show up.

I don't know that I've ever seen a blue jay take a shot at a sparrow. One jay equals about a half-dozen sparrows, who don't have to be told they're outgunned. The whole bunch take off in a fog when the jays grab a snack. At least they bring some color onto all that dirty snow; the sparrows, in a bunch, would look like buffalo from a drone. If you deliberately fuzz your gaze, they could be wearing fur.

The Jays flash their blessed blue, as if a chunk of sky fell just outside the back door. But they're also battle worn these days, like snow that fell a week ago. They'd be  handsome if they'd take a bath. 

And then there's the juncos, little 'uns who stay the heck out of everyone's way. They come around only when the others have et their share. They pick away at almost anything and never dare the height of the feeder. During the reign of  dusky sparrows, their white bellies bouncing along on the snow cover make them little darlings. You got to love 'em. They run from everybody, but seem to be, oddly enough, least afraid of me.

I don't know what kinds of birds St. Francis supposedly charmed, but of the residents of our backyard right now, I'd guess it would be juncos. Maybe I ought to try.

Friend of mine, a man I respect, claims that feeding birds the way I do turns them fat and lazy. A bag of bird feed is a totally unnatural form of sustenance. He can't be wrong, of course. If it weren't for me, all these troopers would have to be somewhere else, chewing up the prairie grass or pulling what seeds remain in curled up sunflowers, not dependent on that big guy with the plastic pitcher of feed.  

I don't know. This friend knows far more about birds than I do. He may well be right. Maybe I'm breaking some naturalist's law--I'm sinning by putting out feed when the temps are as low as they go. Me and St. Francis, we both have too big of a heart. 

But, good night, it's been cold.

Maybe in a millennium

Somewhere in Europe, Lewie took a bullet or two--I never did hear the story--and he was thereafter forever affected. When he came out of the military hospital, people who determined such things told him that he needed a working life that required no heavy lifting, some profession that had him sitting and standing, sitting and standing. I have no idea if it was his idea or some war-time job counselor, but when Lewie came back to town, he went into shoe repair. A sweet, mild-mannered man, he dressed neatly beneath the knee-length leather work apron. I don't know if he suffered bad dreams. If he did, my parents never told me.

Then there was Rusty, who lived out on the edge of town in a little house that scared me, a dark place set a quarter-mile back from the road. It's possible that I was never in his shop when it was sunny, but when I remember the place I see him slowly walk out of a shadowy darkness. He fixed all things electrical, including radios and TVs, but he seemed forever invalided by the war, someone who got our appliances when they didn't work, not because his work was so dependable, but because, well, Rusty needed our business, needed the work. Everything about him in my memory exists in a foggy darkness.

The Jewel Tea Man was a carnival, a traveling showman who came around maybe once a month with a metal basket full of whatever he was trying to sell that round. I think my mother regularly ordered some cleaning supplies from him, not because those cleansers were any better or cheaper than what she could have picked up at the grocery store downtown. When he'd come around in that brown truck he drove, he'd flirt with her--nothing serious, but just enough to make me think of him as a party. Mom did too. I don't think it was unhealthy for her to think of herself as flirt-worthy. He had jokes, and one of them--the only one I remember--was about a Jewish businessman from Sheboygan. The Jewel Tea Man--his name was Gottlieb--said that Jew was so crooked that when he died they had to screw him in the ground. That I remember. My mother told me, back then, that he was a real German. 

I took a class in the German language when I was a graduate student at Arizona State University, the most fun class I took in my graduate program. As far as I knew I was the only grad studying literature, but the class was full of students just like me, grad students who needed to fulfill a language requirement--for all of us, German. The prof was a ball. One day he stopped for a moment and told us a rollicking good story about his war experience. He'd been drafted into the Wehrmacht late in the war, given a uniform and a gun, and put on a train to the front. He was 15. He no sooner arrived and the war ended, he said. The country was in horrifying disarray, so he put his rifle down somewhere and walked home. It was a hilarious, moving story. He said he felt obliged to tell his students about his war-time experience in Germany. 

All these people come back to me now because of a reference Etta Willesum gives to a young kid who worked at the camp at Westerborg, the place where the Nazis and their Dutch National Socialist brethren deposited Dutch Jewry before sending them on to Poland or Germany, places from which they would never return. The Netherlands led occupied Europe in the percentage of its Jews "exterminated" during the German occupation--100,000 of the 140,000 living in Holland in 1940 died.

There was a kid there whose job it was to make sure the Jews sent to the camp at Westerborg were not hiding anything of value on their persons. Willesum says--and the evidence is sound--that as early as 1943, Germany was recruiting ever-younger Dutch Nazis to do their dirty work. This kid, she remarked, seemed very young to be doing anything around the camp at Westerborg, much less something that required the kind of ardor patting down fearful people required, people literally scared to death. When the war was over, when the Canadians came in and freed north Holland, how did a kid like that live with himself? You can't help wonder. Did he just walk home?

Those who are keeping track in Gaza now claim that the war there has killed about 25,000 people, mostly women and children. The effects of that war will resonate for successive lifetimes. If the Israeli people believe that they are cleansing their own lives and fortunes of radical Islam, they're simply dead wrong. 

The war they're conducting will be over, maybe, in a millennium.   

Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 37

"The wicked lie in wait for the righteous, seeking their very lives."

Few people really talk about what a stroke of genius Bin Laden’s attack on New York’s Twin Towers really was. That he pulled it off—that such a horrific attack could be orchestrated at all—had to seem a miracle to Islamic militants defiantly sure of their God-ordained role. I wondered as much myself. How could they get away with an attack that required such a network of deception? The fact is, they did.

But 9/11 was also a work of art. The aim, after all, wasn’t simply to kill people. The World Trade Towers were a symbol of America’s financial dominion, our own Babel. With two deftly aimed jet-liners, al-Qaeda utterly destroyed the canvas of New York’s skyline, washed out our brash financial—and cultural—self-confidence.

One of my memories of the immediate aftermath is a Sunday morning question, in church. A friend who was ushering that morning stopped me, looked into my eyes, and asked, passionately, “Why do they hate us?” He meant it, because he himself meant no harm to anyone in the Middle East, rarely even thought of them, I’m sure.

Which is not to say Mohammed Atta ever thought about the usher either, some factory worker in a small town of a state Atta could likely not have pronounced. But Atta and his ilk had deep-seeded feelings about my friend as an American, feelings that had historical roots far, far deeper than either I or my friend could imagine. Even though my friend didn’t understand why, he knew very well the honest-to-God truth: Atta and his martyred friends hated us with a passion.

In some ways, I can imagine the emotional truth of this line only if I try to put myself into the soul and psyche of some murderously righteous Islamic madman or woman, someone who sees the West—particularly America—as not only a challenge to Islamic culture (and surely it is), but sheer demonic horror. I don’t want to make Jihad-ists more pure than they are or were, but to them Western decadence looked—and still does to some—like the villainous predator David sees in this verse.

Human beings are marvelously complex, so I’m not about to say that the attitude David holds here creates murderous acts, but I dare say none of us could carry out a plan like the ISIS haters did if we didn’t feel, like David, that the enemy was at this moment plotting our deaths, as some very well might be.

Why do they hate us?—Atta and bin Laden and or ISIS? Because they believe we’re enemies, and if they don’t get us first, we’ll get them.

For me, a 21st century American, perhaps those very Jihad-ists are the only recognizable contemporary versions of the phenomenon David sings of in this verse: they’re lying in wait for us, seeking to kill us, seeking our very lives.

But I’m not David—and I’m not some mad Islamic fundamentalist.

And for that I’m thankful, thankful especially for Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, who brought grace to amend the law, mercy to temper justice, and love, which is, quite simply “the greatest of these.”

Feels very strange to say it, but I will, once again, even though I remember well that God himself claimed David the man closest to his own divine heart: there are times when I’m just thrilled that I’m not the Poet King.

We have the Lord Jesus, who drew out a different plan, a different way.

An Interrupted Life

Several times late last year, David Brooks, whose social commentaries I read religiously whenever I can, mentioned the name of a woman I'd heard of often previously, Etty Hillesum. Hers is a name I remembered because it would come up in conversations about a book I did, Things We Couldn't Say, the life story of a woman named Berendina (Diet) Eman. "Have you read Etty Hillesum?" someone would ask, that someone being not just any someone, but a someone whose opinions about things merited some attention. 

Never read her, however. But I knew her because her letters and journals came into print at about the same time Things was published--hence, the frequent references. Essentially, An Interrupted Life is a long "testimony," which make it sound like another Hiding Place, and it is--it does share elements with Corrie Ten Boom. Both are set in occupied Holland during World War II; both honor heroic characters, who, in the face of evil, do wonderful things. 

As life becomes harder and more threatening, it also become richer, because the fewer expectations we have, the more good things of life become unexpected gifts that we accept with gratitude.

But Etta was Jewish, not Dutch Reformed. An Interrupted Life is more akin to Anne Frank's Diary. Ms. Frank, of course, was a just a girl; Etta Hillesum was a woman, mid-twenties, almost startlingly free for a significant amount of time in occupied Holland, walking and biking all over Amsterdam while Anne Frank, along with others, was in hiding in what she called "the Annex," an  apartment deliberately hidden away on an ordinary street of the city. Both were Jewish, and both kept journals that explore life itself in ways that seem extraordinarily fine for their time and place.

Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.

Etta Hillesum lived a life that would have been beyond the imagination of Anne Frank, a bohemian life, the unsteady kind of life that Hitler himself used to describe the decadence he promised to wipe out of Germany and eventually all of Europe. Etta's life defined promiscuity. Her journal doesn't indulge in graphic descriptions, but neither is it ashamed about her bed-hopping. Corrie and her sister might well have described Etta as "loose," because by just about anyone's definition, she was.

Like Anne Frank, Etta's life story ends in a crematorium. Once she leaves her native Holland, her life eventually is extinguished, along with 100,000 Dutch Jews.  

Let me summarize. Etta Hillesum's An Interrupted Life tells a far more reckless story than the stories told by Anne Frank, Corrie Ten Brink, or Diet Eman, a different kind of story altogether really, a story that is only tangentially about the SS or life during the Nazi occupation. 

To live fully, outwardly and inwardly, not to ignore external reality for the sake of the inner life, or the reverse — that's quite a task.

Thirty years after people recommended the book, I finally got around to reading it when David Brooks recommended it as highly as he did and still does: 

One of my heroes is a woman named Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who lived in Amsterdam in the 1930s and ’40s. Her early diaries reveal her to be immature and self-centered. But as the Nazi occupation lasted and the horrors of the Holocaust mounted, she became more generous, kind, warm and ultimately heroic toward those who were being sent off to the death camps.

Etty Hillesum's diaries is a classic "testimony" of a woman who moved from sheer self-centeredness to gracious charity, who learned that giving herself to help others was a blessed way to endure immense horrors all around. 

Sometimes I long for a convent cell, with the sublime wisdom of centuries set out on bookshelves all along the wall and a view across the cornfields—there must be cornfields and they must wave in the breeze—and there I would immerse myself in the wisdom of the ages and in myself. Then I might perhaps find peace and clarity. But that would be no great feat. It is right here, in this very place, in the here and the now, that I must find them.

An Interrupted Life is a remarkable book written by a remarkable woman in the eye of the storm during a remarkably horrible time. 

For the Ruth Suckow show at the Hawarden Library

Some of Suckow's books

I'm scheduled to give a little talk at the library in Hawarden soon, when the local Historical Society and the Chamber of Commerce meet to present a new exhibit in the library, an exhibit which honors the life of a novelist who grew up in Hawarden at the turn of the 20th century, Ruth Suckow. This is what I'm going to say. 

_____________________________ 

The first time I ever saw the name Ruth Suckow was in a book handed to me, an anthology of literature text for a class called "Introduction to Literature." “A Start in Life,” is the painful story of a girl who is “working out,” that is, literally housekeeping for a couple of greater means, at least sufficient means to hire poor country girl to take over household duties while Mom recovers from having a child.

I had no idea that kind of underage employment existed until my mother-in-law told me she did it herself when she should have been in eighth grade. Instead, her widowed mother, during the height of the Depression, sent her oldest daughter to “work out” on nearby farms and thereby bring in some family income. Her father had lost a battle with diabetes before his fortieth birthday, which left her mother with a houseful of kids and no financial means. Little Bertha Visser’s employment in households down the road was nearly the family's only source of income at a time when there were no government-sponsored safety nets.

Somehow, somewhere, I read that this writer, Ruth Suckow, was from Hawarden, Iowa, just down the road from the town where I lived. Regardless of whether or not I liked the story, that she was born here, in Sioux County, Iowa, made her really interesting to me, although not interesting enough to make me read more from the books she had written.

Then maybe 15  years ago, a man I didn’t know called to tell me he thought I’d be interested in a meeting that would be held right here—in the Hawarden Public Library, a meeting of the Ruth Suckow Society. He was right—it was interesting in the way an English teacher would find it interesting: it included a really in-depth discussion of The John Wood Case, a novel that most Ruth Suckow fans believe has its source in a Hawarden story she remembered from her childhood.

Strange thing happened. I’ve been a member of Ruth Suckow Society ever since, and it’s the Ruth Suckow Society who is sponsoring this library exhibit, an exhibit which is having its debut right here in the town where Ms. Suckow was born and reared, her hometown. Her father was a preacher in a church right here in town. (By the way, he left a memoir himself which is fascinating if  you’re interested at all in the history of Christianity in small towns like Hawarden. Much of it is set here.)

I don’t need to tell you much about Ruth Suckow. You live in a town which celebrates her life and work by preserving her childhood home. What’s more, if you don’t know much about her, this library exhibit is meant to bring her alive, in a way, to tell you about her and her life here and in a variety of towns in Iowa. Maddie says the library has multiple copies of Ruth's work.

Let me just be candid here. Ruth Suckow doesn’t write stories people love. She writes about people the way she believed they are and were, not the way we would like them to be. Which is not to say she took a wrecking ball to Iowans. Not at all. She finds salf-of-the-earth Iowans wonderful and fascinating—and maybe a bit peculiar. She knows how to find the weaknesses we’d rather not admit we’ve hidden away, and she knows how to show them to the world.

“A Start in Life” is not a happy story. It explores just a few weeks in the life of a little girl who sheds her childhood when she is employed by a good family who consider her an employee and not, well, a little girl. It’s a story that outlines the kind of experience we all have as each of move from the innocence of youth into the far more difficult world of adulthood.

Let me just list a few factors which make Ruth Suckow’s writing difficult. First, it’s not always happy. “A Start in Life” is kind of sad really, not a joy.

Second, Ruth Suckow is a demanding. She wants you to think, not just experience a story. It’s entirely possible you could read a story, put down the book, and ask yourself why on earth she wrote what she did. She wants you to do that. None of her characters are superheros, and the Devil in the stories is in all of us. Hers is a complex world.

Third, she probably writes more words than she should. The detail can be overwhelming sometime, even though the detail is being drawn from the lives of all of your grandparents and great-grandparents.

But Ruth Suckow is worth the investment, especially here, in Hawarden, where she grew up, and where, on some special days, you can walk through her house—and where the library has multiple copies of her books.

But as a member of the Ruth Suckow Society—most of the members are from eastern Iowa—so I might say, as a representative of the biggest fans of Ruth Suckow's stories, I want to thank you, Maddie, and library board and staff for allowing us to bring in this exhibit meant to honor your Ruth Suckow.

We exist in admiration of her work, and we hope, by way of this exhibit, to spread once again great interest in your Ruth and her thoughtful stories spun from her deep love for small-town life in Iowa, a love planted in her by a childhood right here in Hawarden. 

January 12, 1888 -- one more look

On January 12, 1888, a monster descended on the northern plains just as country school kids were about to be dismissed. The brute force of that totally unexpected storm did not go unnoticed, even by the youngest children, some of whom began to cry alarmed by all the noise, as if there a train was passing just outside the rattling windows and shaking walls. Those who dared step out, all too quickly learned the barrage iced over man and beast. The Schoolhouse Blizzard put those teachers in a horrifying predicament: should kids be sent home or kept at school? And if they stayed, when would the storm relent? Was there enough coal or corn cobs or stalks--anything?

Not one of the children who stayed died; 200 or so who left did. It's a horror story retold by hundreds who survived in a pointed collection of memories titled In All Its Fury: Great Blizzard, 1888. Eighty years ago, those many survivors wanted their stories told. They published a book. 

It's an odd old book, full of instant replays, a thousand tellings of the same story, some end in horror, some in miracle. Being odd and old myself, I loved it. All of it about another January 12, this one in 1888. 

That night there was good reason to pray-without-ceasing, but by my count, only a half-dozen survivors even mentioned prayer. Ordinary folks, sodbusters in the earliest years of homesteading, and it's almost as if they didn't pray at all. Lord knows they had cause.

A little girl named Bertha Lawless and two of her siblings stayed alive by holding hands with others through the 50-mile an hour winds and four-foot drifts on her way to a house close by her school. Her father attempted to retrieve his daughters, but his horses refused to face the bitter wind when their eyes froze shut. Imagine the fear those parents felt, alone that night, a locomotive wind finding every crack in the house. Bertha Lawless says when finally all the kids were safe at home, her parents "thanked God for the preservation of their lives." One of the few mentions of prayer. 

Will Saxton wasn't at school. He intended picking up a load of hay in town when that black cloud of madness struck. He turned around forthwith, fearful. But the mules wouldn't budge against the torrent and flipped the bobsled. When he couldn't find his way home, he burrowed into a haystack he'd bumped into, where he dug a hole and spent a frigid night. Home alone, Ma and Pa Saxton were "crying and praying God to save her boy. The older ones," one of them remembered, "saw the agony my mother went through." And then, "I never want to go through an experience like that again."

Orah Arnold Borer remembers. "Father and mother were of a deeply religious nature. . . .It was natural therefore to kneel around the stove while Father prayed." His voice, she says, "shivered with emotion while he carried to the Throne of Grace his pleas on behalf of all those who might be suffering on this terrible night." She says, "Never can I forget the earnestness of that prayer."

Grace McCoy was teaching in a school with very little coal. She determined early on to keep the children for as long as the blizzard raged, but when the little ones complained about cold fingers, she told the older boys to take desks apart--break them up--and burn 'em. Somewhere around midnight, snuggled beside her littlest scholars, she gathered all the kids in school, put each on their knees, and prayed together asking God "to keep us through this terrible storm." They were hungry, but they all were there when help arrived.

On September 12, the Schoolhouse Blizzard took the lives of as many as 230 in the sparsely populated northern Great Plains. But thousands lived through it too, thanks often to unimaginable miracles those survivors recorded.

Still, only a few remembered praying? Really? What's left of the old pietist in me couldn't help but furrow a brow. 

But I'm often a victim of ancient songs and hymns that get little play these days, and one of those oldies returned, a line or two anyway: "unuttered or expressed." I sang that often as a kid and never really thought much about it. And more too: "the motion of a hidden fire/that trembles in the breast."

I can't believe all those moms and dad, all those teachers in whatever light they could create that night-- a few candles and a glow that arose from that big, hot stove in the middle. And all those kids, children--I can't believe there were no prayers.

Long, long ago, I remember Ralph Waldo Emerson writing somewhere that our most ardent wishes are, in fact, our fervent prayers. That old pietist in me, well developed, had more say when I was 19. Emerson was a transcendentalist. 'Nuff said.

But I liked the guy, and in the late 60s, he stuck too, so today I can't help but think that what that old dreamer said about prayer isn't all that many furlongs away from the title of that old hymn: "Prayer is the soul's sincere desire." And that hymn certainly got official approval. 

I don't know much about the theology of prayer, but no matter what this odd old book says or doesn't say with its silences, I can't help but believe the entire northern plains weren't in utterance that night, deep impassioned silence full of the hidden fires trembling in their breasts. Think of it this way--the whole northern plains storming the gates of heaven.  

Trump wins big here

They're here for a reason, a reason they explain at the beginning of the night. If Donald Trump can win Sioux County, where he's not won before, then his win is going to be big. Sioux County, they explain, is a hotbed of evangelical Christians, a place where Trump's reputation as a dirty old man has, at least in the past, overcome any hope that he might somehow be a champion--dirty, yes, but a champion nonetheless--of true Bible believers. And, after all, the Bible is full of champions who had their problems. Look at King David.

So the liberal media is here in Sioux County, in Sioux Center, in fact, and they're at the caucus, mikes in hand, camera's churning, when reporter (she's African-American, may well be the only one in the house) asks a guy, just any guy, a young guy, maybe 40, and asks him who he's going to vote for. He says Trump, and she asks what has become an age-old question, why? He says because he himself is a Christian and Trump shares his family values. Furthermore, he likes Trump's policies.

What policies? she says, and he says his family values, and of course he throws in abortion--you know: he got rid of Roe v. Wade. 

And anything else? she says, and he says he also moved Israel's capital to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. The guy liked that too.

Thank you, she says, and the show goes on.

And I ask myself, "where does this guy go to church?" Trumps's 2017 recognition of Israel's capital as Jerusalem was a popular move with some of America's evangelicals, but I can't imagine where in Sioux County, Iowa, this guy goes to church because that move--restoring Jerusalem as capital of the country--is a event on the list of Things that will happen to signal the end times, the rapture and all of that, the opening bars of Judgement Day. And not too many churches say much about the rapture and all of that.

Lots of folks call all of that "pre-millennialism," and it's rare as moose in Sioux County, where generally churches haven't bought into that kind of theology. But the guy said that one of the reasons he was going to vote for Donald Trump was because Trump moved Israel's capital to Jerusalem. 

He may well go to some mega-church in Sioux City or Sioux Falls, I suppose, but I can't imagine that there are many churches in Sioux County who are pre-mill. Want a better argument? I'm betting that this guy worships at First Church of Fox News. 

MSNBC's announced they were here to check on the counties where Trump hadn't rolled up a win in the past because his score card here looked pretty bad--until last night. While walking away with 51 per cent of the vote throughout the state, Trump tallied 45 per cent of the Sioux County caucus vote last night (five points less than the statewide average), coming in first for the first time.

So now we know what we suspected: Sioux County Republicans love Trump just as much as any county's Republicans. 

MSNBC got an answer to their question--Trump plowed through the county just as he plowed through the rest of Iowa. 

Okay. Now we know. 

Henry Aaron and Martin Luther King

  

He was just 23 years old when, in 1957, he won the MVP award. I was in third grade, and hard as it might be to believe, I don't think I thought of him as black. He'd come up from the Negro league, in fact, the very last player from there to arrive in the Bigs, at a time when African-Americans were just beginning to get a place in MLB dugouts. 

Seems to me that Billy Bruton played next to him in centerfield, so he wasn't alone on the roster. But he was early. Those old pics of that 1957 team--World Champ Milwaukee Braves!--have four or five others. There were others.

No matter. All I know was that when I was a kid, on many a night I fell asleep with the Braves game still playing on that little radio up above my bed, it's soft yellow light over the dial. I loved going to bed with the Braves on, loved it so much that there were nights when I didn't even nod off.  

Coming into the ninth, the Braves may have trailed, but if the heart of the lineup was on its way to the plate, there was always a chance. Hank Aaron was there, batting in the third position, followed by Matthews, the third basement, at cleanup. Those two guys could hit. And did. That's what I remember thinking about Hammerin' Henry Aaron--the guy could hit. 

Really, he was a little guy. Eddie Matthews was beefy; he looked like he could jack the long ball out of County Park Stadium. But Henry was a wiry six-footer who weighed in at a good deal less than 200 pounds. Muscle-y? --sure. But Aaron had great wrists, my father used to say, great wrists that snapped that bat with so much torque the stadium walls came tumbling down. 

The biggest story of his professional life was how he finally outdid the Babe and ended his career with 755 round trippers. That was two decades later, in 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial, the year our daughter came into the world. By that time I was well aware of his being African-American, as was the nation, because hate mail and death threats arrived in his mail daily as he climbed ever closer to Babe Ruth's otherwise untouchable record. All that hate on its 200th birthday made the country look menacing.

"You are not going to break this record established by the great Babe Ruth if I can help it," some guy told him in a letter. "Whites are far more superior than jungle bunnies. My gun is watching your every black move."

Generations of kids today can't imagine someone capable of such wicked hate, but it was in the air in 1976. The man who wrote those lines wasn't alone. An African-American was threatening a great man's home-run record, a great hitter who was white. Things like weren't supposed to happen.

The Postal Service gave him an award that year for getting mail, nearly a million letters (long before email), thousands and thousands in that massive bag full greatly supportive and loving. But America's finest racists couldn't go down without threatening a noose from the old days. 

But they couldn't stop him. He was just too good. Hammerin' Hank still owns a shoebox full of major league records: most career runs batted in at 2,297, total bases at 6,856, and extra base hits at 1477. 

There's more--lots more, but I thought of him on Saturday, couldn't help it really when I saw his name on a stone beneath my feet. Here it is.

There's his footprints on the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame at the Martin Luther King National Monument in Atlanta. He's in good company--Thurgood Marshall, Dr. Ralph Abernathy, Senator Edward Brooke, Rosa Parks, President Jimmy Carter, and more than a dozen others. Some things tells me Hammerin' Hank is fully as proud of being here as he is in Cooperstown.

Breaking that record wasn't easy, not at his age. He played in 3300 ball games, third place all-time. But it wasn't easy either to live as long as he did in the eye of a racial storm that will likely never fully pass somehow off the cost and out to sea.  

When Barry Bonds broke Hammerin' Hank's record in 2007, Aaron didn't make a big deal out of it because, he told a reporter, baseball isn't about records. It's about playing to one's own greatest potential. 

That day in Atlanta, he hit number 715, one more than the Babe, that day when some people were actually scared of what could happen, the image I like best is that when Henry Aaron came around third, there at the plate stood his parents. Isn't that just the greatest? 

It was nice seeing him again last Saturday. This morning, I'm thankful for that sidewalk, those footprints, and the tracks he left in my own life.

Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 37

“Turn from evil and do good; 

then you will dwell in the land forever.”

Ben Franklin says in his Autobiography that he was deeply influenced by Cotton Mather’s Essay to Do Good. 

Wow. It would be hard to find two human souls more different than those two in the early years of the republic. Mather was the child of theological giants, as predestined as any Calvinist ever was to take up the heavy lifting of the learned divines from whose loins he’d sprung. No one else in American literature is quite as sober as Cotton Mather, but then who’s looking?

Ben Franklin, on the other hand, was anything but sober and something of a scamp.  Witty, urbane, sophisticated, Franklin the ambassador was the first American to charm European courts. A new Franklin biography claims that the entire Autobiography needs to be read, as Emily Dickinson might say it, “at a slant.”  Franklin is, this new bio argues, tongue-in-cheek throughout. You really can’t always believe him.

I never dared to believe that, even though I smelled it in the many times I’ve been through Franklin’s Autobiography as a teacher. I always had this odd sense of him pulling my leg. 

That’s heresy. When pols fight, they always reverence “the founders,” those sagacious bewigged men whose brilliant energy churned out the Constitution.  Jefferson, Hamilton, John Adams, John Hancock, George Washington, et al, are American saints. And Franklin?—my word, he wrote the "Declaration," igniting all the fireworks.  And we can’t take him seriously?

That is heresy.

Still, I’ve always suspected he was more cunning than we like to think he was. So was he lying when he said that the imminently pious Cotton Mather was so influential in the life of a man who couldn’t have been less of a Puritan? 

Don’t know. But I’m happy to read that I’m not the only one who’s thought Franklin was scratching out his life story with a wink and a smile.

Franklin liked Mather, he says, because Mather taught him morality, and his entire Autobiography, begun as a moral lesson to his son, proposes to teach his son to be good—if we can believe him. I’m not sure.

But Franklin’s moral urgings, unlike Cotton Mather’s, promise that the way to wealth and happiness is sobriety and industry. Franklin tells his son that if he wants to get ahead in life, he should do so as his father had: take a good strong hold of his own blessed bootstraps and pull them on himself: do it yourself and do it well.

That’s not what David says—David, remember, whose hands were too bloody for God’s own approval. And it’s not what Cotton Mather would have said either.

Doing good and living well are not a matter of bootstraps. David says God almighty promises that turning away from evil and doing good instead means a long and blessed life in the land.

There is a third party in the cause/effect sequence in this promise, and that third party, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, isn’t talking about bootstraps. He’s talking instead about obedience.