Willa's world

Let's be clear about this. In Willa Cather's most beloved novel, My Antonia, a pure celebration of the beauty of the world of her childhood, she offers some intriguing complexities, specifically in gender or sexuality.

Her short preface gives the entire story to a childhood friend of hers, Jim Burden, an old friend but now a New York-based attorney for the railroad. She and Jim find themselves on a trip across the prairie together and get to talking, the trajectory of their conversation aimed precisely at the red prairie grasses where they grew up. Jim tells "the narrator," who we certainly can't expect to be any one other than  Cather herself, that he's been toying around with a book about Tony Shimerda, a woman they both, long ago, deeply admired.

Once back in New York, Jim Burden drops by "our narrator's" apartment and drops off a manuscript. That manuscript, "our narrator" says, is My Antonia. Old English teachers could argue all day long about exactly why Willa Cather chooses to begin the tale that way--you're reading a story from a writer named Willa Cather, but it's actually written by her old friend? Seriously?

All right, we'll give her that mystery, but there's more. It's fair to say that Jim Burden may lack some typical male attributes. There is, after all, his proud worship of the Bohemian girl--she is his mother, his lover, his wife, he says; she's his everything. But that she's not at least her heart throb seems odd. In fact, at some moments throughout the novel, it's not a stretch to think of him as maybe a bit, well, gay.

Then there's Willa Cather herself, who, as a young lady, wanted to think of herself as a young man, and did, by dressing like a man, cutting her hair like a man, and signing the name "William," rather than Willa. She never married, lived with a woman named Edith Lewis for forty years. She was mightily circumspect about this area of her life, burning her letters and determining that what remained couldn't be opened for years and years. 

Gender mysteries abound in this greatly famous novel. Please!-nothing I'm saying should lead you to think I'm nay-saying. I read it first when teaching, several times since. I've been to Red Cloud, Nebraska, four or five times, and I'd go tomorrow again tomorrow if someone would ask. I love her worship of the world where she grew up.

But there's this gender thing that's a little intrusive, and it begs some investigation, which you can be sure it's gathered throughout the one hundred years the novel has been around. 

In the years that I taught "The American Novel," My Antonia didn't change a whit; however, the students did, and did so massively. I remember my first year, hardly daring to bring the subject up (it doesn't need to be, by the way). Perhaps incorrectly, I presumed that if my good, Christian students knew that the novel they held in their hands and had come to love--most have loved the novel--was written by a lesbian, it would affect their admiration and, well, them. My Antonia would suffer some shunning surely.

By the last time I taught it--and that must be 20 years ago--things had changed. Not only were good Christian students more questioning, they were downright fascinated and wanted to know quite desperately, "Was Cather gay?" 

Answering that question only complicated matters, because no one can know for sure anyway--and besides, what would you look for anyway? Real Cather scholars frequently say she was in a "lesbian relationship."

It's been a long time since I've been through the novel, but I went back into its reveries this week for a discussion at the museum, all adults, many of them retired. Gender questions entered into the discussion, but they certainly didn't dominate.

Cather herself appears to have created some of those questions in this wonderful novel. 

While as a culture we may have wandered far afield from the repressions of old, gone wildly across the line into spaces unheard of years ago, such as middle school kids demanding to be addressed as "we/they," I much prefer the freedom to deal with the questions Willa Cather's wonderful worship of her Nebraska childhood raises than leave them somewhere under lock and key.

Playing the numbers

Let's do the numbers.

Donald J. Trump won the Iowa Republican caucus going away, a landslide victory, 98 of the 99 counties, amassing a vote total that smashed records. No one had won a Presidential caucus in Iowa by 30 points. He took home 30 delegates by winning 51% of the vote. Nothing like it, ever.

[For the record, Trump won Sioux County, where I live, with 45% of the total; DeSantis had 31%--and quit the race; others, including Nikki Haley, only notched 24%.] 

In New Hampshire, a conservative state with a populace notably without the thousands of evangelicals in Iowa, once again Trump won, this time over a field significantly diminished, taking home 36,000 votes more than Nikki Haley, the only real opposition candidate left standing. To be noted: more votes were cast in the New Hampshire Presidential Primary--318,000--than the earlier record set in the 2020 Democratic Primary-- 288,000. 

In Iowa, Trump won despite losing the backing of two significant Republicans, Governor Kim Reynolds, as well as Bob Vander Plaats, generally assumed to be the voice of the Iowa's Christian Republicans. In New Hampshire, the highly popular John Sununu campaigned hard for Nikki Haley.

No matter. Trump took home all the bacon.

In South Carolina, a state widely perceived as far to the right of either New Hampshire or Iowa, Trump crushed his former Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, taking home all the delegates and winning 60% of the total vote. All this despite the fact that Ms. Haley had been the state's own highly popular, two-termed governor.

For anyone who has watched anything surrounding American politics, Donald J. Trump, the twice-impeached ex-President, swimming in upcoming court dates, a man who now bills himself as a martyr to the MAGA cause--whatever that is--seems the inevitable Republican candidate, although he's no more "Republican" than I am. The numbers don't lie. He will be the MAGA candidate.,

But, if you believe the newscasters I listen to, the numbers don't lie about other things either. There was swirling snow and cold the night of the Iowa Caucuses after all, and maybe tons of people didn't show up because they knew the outcome of the whole affair before it even began. On the other hand, maybe scads of people didn't show up because they weren't at all interested or thrilled. One way or another, here in Iowa, only 15% of the registered Republicans caucused that night--15%.

Thusly, let me (and my leftie friends) spin the numbers. In Iowa, Donald J. Trump won the caucus hands down, but he did so with only 51% of the 15% Republican voters. Hmmmmm. Do I smell a weakness? In New Hampshire, 43% of the Republicans in the state who voted didn't vote for him. 

It's the fuel Nikki Haley is running on--with some significant financial backing too, of course. But it's the only faith we Dems have to hold on to right now amid Trump's blowouts, and MSNBC is full of that kind of talk--that even though blitzkrieging Trump is rolling over whatever opposition attempts to break his hold, there's more to the numbers than meets the eye.

It's all we've got right now. But then everything changes if the two candidates that seem destined to be America's choice in November, aren't. Could that happen? You bet. 

Somewhere in the area of 65% of the American populace would vote for Bullwinkle rather than the Orange Man, whether or not he was behind bars. The true-blue MAGAS make a ton of noise, but they're a shrinking percentage of the American people. 

Numbers don't lie, but they can be spun. 

Keep the faith!!

Home (2)

This is a new thing. I knew my phone was touted as being able to shoot pictures at night, but I'd never really tried it. By the time darkness fell, that placid orange pond did its Jekyll-Hyde stuff and turned angry. I have no reason to call this angry really, but the roar outside demanded attention and made talking tough.

Once it was obvious the camera would do as it was told, I kept snapping, outside. I can't help but think there is some kind of other-worldliness in these shots, but they're fascinating--and totally wrought by the phone, a Google Pixel 8.

Lest you think the phone decided this night shot would be better in a dusting of snow, it fell that evening, just a little, like icing. 

Not to be outdone, here's a night shot done the old-fashioned way--with the camera. To my eyes, this one looks more "natural." 

 

When morning lit up the sky on Saturday, the lake had calmed, and the dawn the sky offered wasn't generous with color, even though I thought there would be an explosion way out there somewhere above Michigan. Saturday was the exact opposite of Friday, when a clear sky suffered only a far away belt of thick clouds. This morning, there was only a faraway belt of clear sky beneath huge cloudiness.

So when the sun finally appeared, it had just a tiny stage before it slipped away for the day. 

But Sunday was glorious, as Sunday should be, even before the sun appeared. 

On Sunday, some massive freighter came by, faster than I might have thought. It seemed to me that he'd be right in the eye of the dawn when the sun rose across the waves. I thought about going back in the house for my big lens, but something told me not to feature it--a bigger lens could have. Something told me that massive ship was only an ornament to the heavenly palette laid out in glory before me.

Here's the camera's version, offering a good sense of the lake's mood.

But what the phone offered created a shot that topped the weekend. This one, IMHO, is really quite memorable. I'd like you to believe it's strength comes from having been shot by a photographer who knows what he's doing.

Nope. Just blessed with good fortune: I was there at the time. All I had to do was squeeze a bit and something of what we witnessed got itself into my camera and my phone. 

A couple more Sunday mornings here:

Just gorgeous--the sky I mean.

So with limited mobility--I still can't get around well--and about a 50' beach to work from, I still had a great time. Even better than sitting there with a camera was, well, sitting there. You can't come away from a visit home, on the lake, without feeling somehow humbled by the presence of a something we call God.

It was a great weekend--and that's not counting the blessings of family. Really good to be home again.

Home?

I went home last weekend, a bit of a misnomer because I never lived on the beach when I was a boy, and while the neighborhood is where I grew up, I haven't really lived there--save a two-year sojourn, 1980-82--since 1966. You do the math.

So whether or not I can call home "home" anymore, we'll let the sociologists determine. Meanwhile, I'm not shying away from saying it because it rises to my heart without apology: "I went home last weekend, home to Wisconsin"--and yes, we bought cheese, sausage, and beer. 

That cabin above is the place we rented, newly remodeled--and splendidly, I might add--but small and ancient, by cottage standards. I'm sure it's been there for years, but it was greatly comfortable and, well, downright gezellech (a Dutch word--I'm not sure of its spelling) which means just plain fingers-laced-across-the-belly goed. 

As you can see, our little abode stands right smack dab on the lakefront, so close that a line of gargantuan rocks, piled four feet high just a bit east, kept the cabin from floating out to sea some time ago when the lake was high. 

I started messing around with photography when I still lived "home," so it's fair to say I've been taken by what kind of beauty can be captured in a camera for a long time. A cottage on the lake let me greet the dawn--and get what I could of sheer beauty through a lens. 

We arrived back home in the middle of a beautiful April day--February to be exact-- temps in the 50s, windless for the most part, clear skies, so sweet a day that looking out over Lake Michigan the next morning didn't seem a whole lot different than watching the sun rise on a fair-to-middlin' farm pond. At dawn, it seemed only as if some almighty hand had spilled orange juice over most of the world.

I started messing around with photography when I still lived "home," so it's fair to say I've been taken by what kind of beauty can be somehow captured in a camera for a long, long time. A cottage on the lake gave me the opportunity to greet the dawn--and get what I might be lucky to find into a camera. 

All the while I waited that morning for the sun to rise, that dark belt of something or other out there was slowly advancing, east to west, a weather pattern we rarely see. It was notable only because it broke up what might have been an orange sea. And, it offered it's own kind of pleasure. The shot below is with a 150mm zoom lens out. Still, the thing seemed a little ominous, a broad, dark curtain rising, strangely, from the stage floor.

When the sun finally came up--6:30 or so--it had to climb above what now, clearly seemed a cloud bank that suggested--and so said the weatherman--that April would be fleeting for us. February was returning. 

See those rocks at the bottom edge? By later that afternoon, I was happy they were there. Conditions had changed. The big lake was flexing its muscles. 

In a day, we fell back a couple months in weather and charged forward through ten thousand syllables of noise.

***** more "home" tomorrow

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 42

 “These things I remember as I pour out my soul: 

how I used to go with the multitude, leading the procession to the house of God, with shouts of joy and thanksgiving among the festive throng.”

 

Those who don’t know David’s deep sadness in this verse are truly blessed, but I can’t believe there are many.

 

A decade ago or so I took a trip from Sioux City, Iowa, to Billings, Montana, up the Missouri River valley through the magnificent country explored 200 years ago by the Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery.  Much of that territory hasn’t changed dramatically; there are no cities to speak of, and most of the towns are dying and have been for a century or more.  Agriculture reigns throughout that region, even though making a living is just as tough as it ever was.  But the great joy of traveling the Lewis and Clark Trail a century after they did is that so much space, so much grandeur is still there waiting to awe.

           

I left the river and angled through “Indian country” on my way home, stopping at the 125^th anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Little Big Horn, and then visiting a desolate place called “Wounded Knee.”  The whole trip was, for me, an epic journey, resulting in a novel—and more.  I fell in love with territory that keeps me dreaming of a life out there somewhere in the humbling reverie of so much open space and such a big, big sky.  These very words are part of that trip’s legacy.

           

One moment, however, was purely personal and unrelated to history or landscape, a moment in the Black Hills, where the Schaap family vacationed when our kids were kids.  Camping in the Hills was always a joy, the children so young they could spend all day on a beach no larger than a backyard and not complain a mite. 

 

I intended to drive through Center Lake campground, where we always set up our tent.  But when I passed the lodge and store at Sylvan Lake, I was time-capsuled back to a moment when I stood in that very store and watched my two tow-head kids trying to determine which of the little Black Hills curios they were going to lug along home. 

 

The memory was crystal clear, almost a vision--their blonde heads, their innocent indecision, and myself, a young father who knew, honestly, little more than joy and pride and the wide horizon of expectation.  I too, it seemed to me, was an innocent back then.

 

I didn’t go in the store that day, just drove by; but when I came to the Center Lake turnoff a few minutes later, I didn’t go to the campground either but headed in the opposite direction. A visceral grief so profound I almost cried hit me like some unseen Black Hills bison.  

 

Ubi sunt, that grief is called in literature—a grief of soul at the transience of life, of my life and yours.  I know what what ubi sunt is. I taught literature for a lifetime; but that I knew it in a textbook didn’t heal the sad pain that came over me.

 

Today, remembering that moment, I can’t help but think about how much deeper Lakota grief must be for those Hills, the Paha Sapa, because Native memories are so much richer and so much more profound.  That’s another story for another day.

 

David’s lament in Psalm 42 has within it the same profound lament for how things were and how those things are no more.  His may well be the original ubi sunt.

 

Put yourself in a grand memory, a place and time now totally unreachable. Think of the Lakota at Pine Ridge, not that far away, remembering the joy of Paha Sapa.  Think of me turning away from Center Lake. Remember David and that unforgettable mad dance of his before the ark. That’s what’s haunting him, and that’s why he needs God. 

 

As I do.  As you do too.  As all of us do, I think.

Those cliffs at Running Water

 

These magnificent sandstone cliffs along the Missouri are stunning, even gorgeous. To find something like like this in the middle of endless miles of treeless prairie must have seemed a miracle. And in a way, I suppose, it was. This sculpted row of cliffs stand almost militarily above the confluence of the Niobrara and Missouri Rivers, just a bit north and east of Niobrara, NE.

Over on the east side of the river, there used to be a town here, a place called Running Water, which happens to be the English translation of the word "Niobrara," which is Native--Ponca maybe, or Sioux. There still are some homes along the river here, still something of a community. My guess is you could find a half-dozen families who would be more than happy to tell you that you're doggone right there's a community here, been so for years.

But once upon a time, there was almost a port here, more life certainly than you can roust even on a Fourth of July weekend--fishermen, you know. Once upon a time lots and lots of Poncas were around. This is Standing Bear country, after all, the place he stubbornly returned to twice, the second time battling white man's laws to stay (and he won!). 

A bunch of Mormons were here one winter, on their way to Zion, wherever that was going to be. They had real troubles. It was deathly cold. In a story that should be told over and over and over, the Ponca dropped in at the meager winter quarters of those Mormon families and likely saved their lives.

A chap named Albertus Kuypers stepped off a steamer here--in the old days, when steamships still attempted to squeeze up and down the Missouri--and when he did, he motioned to the others, several dozen immigrant Hollanders, who had made a deal on land they must have been anxious to find, just a few more miles up river. He motioned to them and they all shouldered their burdens and walked north and a bit east to a place they eventually called "Friesland." No surprise there. Friesland was where they came from.

They were, in the 1880s, only one of thousands of European immigrant families who wanted out of the old world and a place of their own in the new one. These Hollanders were Dutch Reformed, a particularly righteous bunch; but they also were men and women of some standing in Holland, so, well, dignified that when they began to gather their cows, their men milked in white shirts and ties beneath their bibs, and the women wore some unlikely dresses.

For a time. Then, like all the rest, they got acculturated. The frontier wouldn't stand much pretense. 

But farming in those early years was no picnic, and the weather didn't cooperate--too many years of too little rain. When Kuypers' Hollanders grew weary, they talked of moving to northwest Washington, where, people said, good Dutch people grew watermelons you could lift only with both hands. 

So Kuypers went exploring, took the train up to Whatcom County, Washington, right up there on the Canadian border, where people showed him produce left him slack-jawed. All that ballyhoo back in Dakota wasn't wrong. Abundance was understatement.

When he went back to Friesland, South Dakota, he thought about leaving the place they'd come to when they'd immigrated, thought about it long and hard. When the people looked to him for their futures, he told them he'd decided after much prayer and deep consideration, that they were going to stay in Dakota. They were going to raise more pigs and cattle, rely less on row crops, but they were going to stay.

Friesland, South Dakota, today, is long gone; but I'm sure if you would ask around in Platte or New Holland, you could find a name or two from the bunch that came up from Running Water, looking, like those Mormons, for their own version of Zion.  Some, by the way, parted company with Kuypers and went to Washington anyway.

There are enough old stories here to fill up those gorgeous yellow cliffs, but who'd want to? Those cliffs are here, just as they always have been, even longer than the Ponca, the Yankton, the Frisians, or the Mormons have been. Those beautiful cliffs up over the river have outlived them all,, even though they wear no buffalo coats, even though they're sandstone and change, subtly, but change, every year. 

And the picture?--it doesn't even come close to capturing the beauty. You can't get that kind of immensity in a lens, on a canvas, or a page. Stand there for awhile and it makes you want to dress up like those old Hollanders, makes you want to wear a tie.

Morning Thanks--Ed Kellogg

This is the sky yesterday just a step out of my back door. Whenever jet trails get this showy, I can't help but think something is being communicated--or else the pilots are just being goofy.

I grabbed this shot because of an artist named Ed Kellogg. Once long ago Ed Kellogg spent a semester or two at the college where I used to teach, and did utterly breath-taking work of this world--the emerald eastern edge of the Plains. He didn't just do a painting or two, he kept himself monstrously busy by doing loads of them, most of them, as I remember, landscapes. 

I grew up on Lake Michigan, so coming to the northwest corner of Iowa fifty-some years ago was all new. The terrain, the landscape (I wouldn't have known that word or thought that way when I was 18) was entirely new and interesting. Jackrabbits bounded around--I remember that (they're gone now), and the sun was no stranger--it was much cloudier on the lakefront. Outside at least, things were just plain wide open. From some spots in the country, you could see forever. It was like the lake, another place where sheer expanse makes you feel small--and that was just fine with me.

Ed Kellogg's paintings as I remember--huge canvases sometimes--made perfectly obvious that his time here was just as fascinating to him as this edge-of-the-Plains place had become to me. I'd been a resident for a while by that time, having taken a teaching job some years before. 

To say I loved his work is understatement. It wasn't love that made them so compelling to me, it was the vehemence of their testimony to his recognition that what's out there in the immediate world around me is quite amazing and, at some moments, utterly compelling. I loved how those gargantuan paintings bespoke his awe at a world so different from the world around Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where he and his family lived.

Ed Kellogg showed me how to go speechless at the world around me. That gift was a treasure. 

For years, I've taken a camera along wherever I go (a good bit easier these days with a phone). For years, I've jumped in the car or truck and just left early morning to see what I could see. Thusly, shots like this.

I've got more. Like this from outer space.

And I'm thinking, "Ed Kellogg really ought to see this."

A couple from a year ago, on a little cold trip out to the Santee Reservation in Nebraska. That's where I shot these. Stunning, isn't it?--all that azure slung in a wardrobe that seems plaid, almost Irish. 

The jet trails story goes this way. It seems impossible now, but I couldn't help think that artist Kellogg was overdoing them. "You've got jet trails in every landscape you paint," I told him. "Is there a reason?"

He looked at me with a gritty smile. "It seems they're always there."

I don't know that he's right about that, but I believe him--that they were always there when he was out in the country, measuring the beauty of a landscape he was right then beginning to envision on canvas.

I think of Ed Kellogg on mornings like yesterday, when the sky is ribboned. 

Ed Kellogg helped me to see. He did.

This morning's thanks is for occasional jet trails over a big prairie sky, and for an Artist named Ed Kellogg who helped me see.

I'm good--I really am

I'm not revealing some precious secret here, but neither do I believe I've ever admitted it publicly on this media. I'm not particularly up tight about it either, although I do hope that I'm finally finished growing when it comes to my feet. I'm told I may not be since most two-legged's feet, like ear lobes and fingernails, just keep on growing when nothing else seems to. Sorry, that sounds a lot like Poe. 

What I want to say is that my feet are big, terribly big, terrifyingly big--size 16, which is way, way beyond what one might think normal on a man who is about 6'2". It's been difficult, throughout my life: I want to bowl and there's no shoes big enough. I want to roller skate or ice skate, and I'm forced to the bleachers. 

Little known fact: most stairs are not made for people with size 16 shoes. Especially now, in my dotage, stairs are dangerous because one has to position one's klompen sideways before reaching for the handrail or else risk tripping and sprawling out in some unseemly fashion down the stairway. Daily, I risk death on stairs. 

What's more, potential horror is about ten times worse since back trouble came up like some monster unseen. I need to breathe deeply when descending a stairway--I am, after all, already bathed in butt-to-toe pain. Given my condition, I've found out that going barefoot is no option; I have to wear shoes.

So what's atop the page there is a pair of sneakers that have proved about as good as any pair I own, especially during these weeks of my handicap. They're New Balance, and I got them years ago from Ebay, which is my Walmart, the very best place to shop for Big Foot shoes. Hardly any ordinary shoe store carries size 16. I can shop all afternoon on Ebay.

This old pair is used, which I like because it means that some other bloke broke them in. My NB therapeutics got some miles on them. Trust me, no one my age wears out shoes in such ordinary ways. These belonged to a runner, which is why these soles got some wear on 'em (a line I'm not going to touch even though my Calvinist instincts want badly to do so and Fred Buechner absolutely couldn't have left it alone).

Because they're the feel-good shoes in my closet right now, I thought I'd make sure I to get another pair of New Balance sneakers, another pair that dispense similar grace. Back to Ebay.

In all honesty, what I got is a majorly good buy (not all Ebay buys are). This pair of New Balance sneakers have barely been worn, and I got them for $25. That's the stuff of legends. New, they'd be four or five times that. 

Okay, the downside is they turned out to be not quite so sweet on my feet as the old NBers, but I've got them in my closet anyway, in case I feel up to a half-marathon.

In other words, I'm okay with shoes right now. What's more, I've now had two really great mornings, pain-wise. I don't know if my back is creating its own miracle, or if, later on today, ye olde sciatica will simply unleash its fiery fury once more. Either way--healthy or hurtin'--not to worry. What I want to say is, I'm well-heeled, well-shod. And therefore in no need of more or better footwear. 

I say that just in case someone out there, having heard my lament, thought they'd satisfy my longing by buying me yet another pair, a deeply patriotic pair of these.

Honestly, I appreciate your thinking of me, but I'm good. I really am--I'm good. 

Righteous warfare, circa 1980

You may remember, if you're old enough, that it was Jimmy Carter, then President of these United States, who helped fashion what became known as the Camp David Accords, an attempt at creating peace in the Middle East. It was September of 1978. The Schaap family happily welcomed its second child, David Michael, that year, and I'd just begun my third year of teaching at a college I didn't leave until retirement, thirty-some years later. 

I'd been a liberal since 1970 or so, when it seemed to me that the Republican view of the Vietnam War--"we're fighting communism so keep shooting"--seemed long-since ridiculous. It was costing us far too much. 

Chances are, if you can remember that time, you likely remember even more clearly the bitterness with which the nation viewed the hostages being held by Iran and our inability to get them freed--either by force or by negotiation. The hostage horrors bedeviled Carter's Presidency, so much so that anyone who remembers those years likely has an image--as I do--of a rather feckless President, who lacked the courage or the guile or the testosterone to get those 60 hostages  home. Their captivity went on for 444 days.

What I couldn't have known was that Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate for President in 1980, long before the election that November, let the Iranians know, by way of a special, secret envoy, that if the Iranians would hold on to the hostages, the Reagan administration would give them a better deal. 

The Iran hostage crisis could well have doomed the Carter Presidency. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 489 electoral college votes to Jimmy Carter's 49. In 1980, I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where a pall fell over the English department I'd just entered. Among the libs, Reagan was not well-thought of.

I have no idea how much I knew about Jerry Falwell back then. I knew there was a Liberty University, an institution the then mega-church showman started on the basis of his popularity, and I knew that he was dipping his righteous fingers in American politics; but he wasn't really my concern. I'd voted for Carter, but I wasn't among those who believed that a Reagan Presidency would be a horror. 

What I didn't know is that this Jerry Falwell was brokering a marriage between politics and Christianity that was not only new, but scary. To do that, Falwell had to take on Jimmy Carter, one Southern Baptist shafting another. So he did. 

Here's how Tim Alberta describes that moment in time in The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory, a book that every believer should read: 

In 1980, Falwell assembled a new coalition of voters--fundamentalist, evangelicals, Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, and all manner of vagrant Christians, plus, thanks to the emphasis on abortion, Catholics--around the message that traditional values were being extinguished by Carter and his godless government.

 What Alberda doesn't say--maybe because he doesn't need to--is that it wasn't just ideas that Falwell was peddling in order to bring down Jimmy Carter, it was also heartfelt prayer. He'd beseech the throne of the Lord, asking him to make American strong again and bring on Ronny Reagan as someone who would bring decency and truth to the world we lived in.

Is it just me, or do others see all of this, today, as despicable, as sin? Jimmy Carter is in hospice--he may well leave this world today or this week. His family says he appears to respond to things, even though most of what he was is gone. Any decided look at his legacy today has to include the abundant measure of mercy and grace he left in our world. He was a man who lived love, just didn't talk about it in the Sunday School class he taught in Plains, Georgia.

Jerry Falwell is gone. His legacy includes Liberty University, but it also include graft and mayhem. To think that Falwell prayed fervently for the destruction of the Jimmy Carter's presidency, in the name of politics, seems impossible. Alberta says,

Having already spent millions of dollars pummeling the president on radio stations nationwide, he poured an additional $10 million that fall into ads portraying Carter, as he himself would later recall, as "a traitor to the South and no longer a Christian.'"

Is that amazing or just awful--or some combination of the two. 

Falwell is gone, but similar prayers still arise--and in abundance.

Sundlaly Morning Meds--from Psalm 42

    "My tears have been my food day and night, 

while men say to me all day long, 'Where is your God?'"

 When my alma mater called to ask if I’d be interested in leaving Arizona and coming back to Iowa, I never really considered not going.  I loved high school teaching because I loved high school kids; but I understood that if I were ever going to write, I’d have to teach in college, where there simply is more time.

 

Greenway High School was brand new, on the edge of a northern suburb of Phoenix.  I’d been hired precisely because I was a Christian.  I was also male, experienced, and newly outfitted with a masters degree; those were also factors.  But, illegal or not, I got the job on the basis of my faith.  The district interviewer, a man named Bill Sterrett, was a Christian too.  That’s another story.

           

Only two years later, a college teaching offer in my hand, I decided to leave.  When I told Mr. Sterrett, I got scorched.  He looked up from behind his desk and shook his head.  “Why would you want to go there?” he said.  “Everybody there is just like you.”  He slapped that desk lightly with his hand.  “Here, you’re really different.”

           

Mr. Sterrett died several years ago, but that line still reverberates through the echo chamber that is my soul because he was right.  We’re not talking about the difference between Vanity Fair and the Celestial City—there’s far too much manure in the air to make any heavenly claims about up here in Siouxland.

 

But living out my allotted years in a burgeoning new suburb of a huge metropolitan area would have made me a different person than spending those years in an ethnic conclave huddled against the winds on the edge of the Great Plains.  I chose the monastic life, and, as Frost would say, that choice has made all the difference.

 

I say all of that because in my many years here I’ve never been anywhere near someone who might say to me, sardonically, in my distress, “So, Jim, where the heck is your God?”  Hasn’t happened—and won’t.  I am surrounded by a cloud of believing witnesses. 

 

Had I stayed in urban, public education and American suburbia, I’d know people who would ask me the very question David that burns in his soul.  Some of them are still friends.  Last summer I got an email from an old teaching buddy, a “jack” Mormon, who wouldn’t let the silliness of my faith rest, in fact, because he’s quite adamant about not having any himself.

 

But I’ve been cloistered for nearly forty years here, and those few voices who might mock my faith are accessible only on-line.  That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t hear those burning questions.  They rise, instead, from inside me somewhere; and what I’m wondering this morning is this:  if I’d have stayed in a more diverse neighborhood, would the voices I would have heard supplant the ones I now do, the ones from inside?  What would be the pitch of my own personal faith?

           

Those questions are here, even in the cloister, and they are packaged in the same taunting voice David heard.  That voice I swear I hear, that burning question, even in a cloud of witnesses.

 

But I’m thankful, very thankful, that God almighty has given me, as he did David, a faith that won’t let me take those voices to heart, even though I hear ‘em.  Only by grace, do I come anywhere near to having a faith that is equal to that task.  

The Remarkable Life of James P. Beckworth

You're no more than a kid, but you're a bruiser. You don't go out of your way to start fights, but you end them effectively. You're in St. Louis, 1820 or so. Your father took his family west. The population is four, maybe five thousand. Things are hopping. The west is calling.

A few days ago, a note in the newspaper said a man named General Ashley was recruiting young men to "ascend the Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one or two or three years." The ad promised the frontier, the west. The ad said this was all about beaver. Europeans are still nuts about beaver hats. 

Your name is Jim Beckworth, and, like the others, you want like heck to explore, to discover, to test your mettle. You sign up as one of "Ashley's Hundred.” You haven't trapped a beaver in your life. 

But you're, well, special, and you know it. You're built like a fort, haven't spent a night of your life in fear. You're of mixed race. Your father is an Irishman; your mother was mixed race herself. You're African-American--at a time most everyone would use the n-word. But you're built like a tight end. You could bite through a bullet, at least that's what you tell yourself. 

There are 34 of you signed up with this batch of "Ashley's Hundred." Early on, out on the prairie and dangerously short on grub, you and your rifle go out your own and bag a couple of deer. "Oh, yeah," you tell your friends, "and I shot something big and brown, huge."

Buffalo. You'd never seen one before. That night, everyone eats good.

One day, you’re shoeing the General's horse. This horse of his is not particularly compliant. When he refuses to cooperate, you whack him the way you'd always had done in St. Louis. Nothing harmful. But the boss sees you do it and goes ballistic, or so the story goes: "he poured his curses thick and fast" with words you can't repeat.” 

Those curses make you burn. You control your own anger and tell him you'd finished three of the horse's four shoes. "There is one more nail to drive," you tell the General, "which you may drive for yourself or let go undriven," And then you unload: "I will see you dead before I will lift another finger to serve you."

Not a good idea to talk that way, but you tell your friends that the General’s "words will never be forgiven."

That’s just one story from the life of James P. Beckworth, a mountain man, a trapper out here in the early years of the 19th century, a man born a slave.

Somewhere during those years in the frontier, a remarkable thing happened. Among the Crow, Beckworth again and again proved himself in battle, so well that when the Crow watched him face off against their enemy, the Blackfoot, his valor didn't go unnoticed.

A chief who'd lost his son in battle, formally adopted this mountain man for his very own son. For a time, James P. Beckworth became a head man, the chief among the Crow. For six years, he lived among them, fought through a string of battles, even took several wives. He wore buckskin and braided his hair like his adopted brothers and sisters.  

He was a strong man, a fierce leader in battle, this man born a slave. What's beyond doubt is that Beckworth would have had a far different life back east. Instead, he'd gone west, a mountain man, was renowned by his adoptive people in a way he could never have been valued among those who would have made him pay a price for the color of his skin. 

James P. Beckworth discovered a path through the Rockies to California, fought Seminoles in Florida and Mexicans in the Mexican War. He worked as a guide for the U. S. Cavalry, played cards professionally, and loved sitting around telling his wild, life story, not without some embellishment here and there.

There's much more to the story of James P. Beckworth, a most remarkable African-American.

 

Morning Thanks--the Hawkeye Queen

It'll be a big night tonight in Iowa. Our most famous favorite daughter, born and reared right here, a corn-fed, pork-lovin' true Iowan, our hometown ringer-of a daughter who can hit threes from a township or two away, will break the all-time scoring record set by Washington's Kelsey Plum. Our own Caitlin Clark will enter the game just eight points short of Plum's mark. If the U of M's Wolverine's were thinking of holding her to seven points, they'd have to raise the basket another ten feet. Chances are, Las Vegas, would still make her a favorite.

It's hard to be hyperbolic about Caitlin Clark, not simply because she can hit three-pointers from the other side of the court, but because she's tireless and a devastating opponent. Her Hawkeye team has a couple of losses this season already, and while just about everyone would love for the Clark team to take home all the marbles this year, there's no guarantee. And she knows it.

All of that being said, the truth is that Caitlin Clark has taken more than her team with her this year. She's grabbed the attention of millions who've become fans. NCAA women's basketball wasn't dying in the years immediately preceding Caitlin's stepping on the court, but since she has she's created something unheard of in women's sports. Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese are better known hoopsters than any two men's teams stars. They--and their teams--pack stadiums. They've raised the women's game to levels of popularity unforeseen.

For the record, Caitlin Clark has scored 3520 points in 125 games. She averages 32 points a game, so, in all likelihood she'll get the 8 she needs before the crowd even settles in with their popcorn. 

What's sweet is that it's not just her ability on the hardwood that's brought on all the fame, it's her disposition. She's a sweetheart, a good, good kid, and everybody knows it because she makes it abundantly clear that all of this--the success her teams have had and her own stardom are well, nice. But that's all. She's a darlin', and all she's all-Iowan.

Tonight, if you want to get to Carter-Hawkeye, plan on big bucks. It'll cost you $209 a seat in the upper corners. You want to watch them take on Ohio State in the season finale, it'll cost you, at bottom, $396. Not kidding.

Ask any Iowan, even those who aren't life or death Hawkeye fans, even a part-timers like me, who never saw a game, not even on tv--Caitlin Clark is great and has been great. She's a blessing, not just to Hawkeye basketball, but to the whole state--and more too, even more.

Men and women who do what they do with aplomb and humility are pure, out-and-out blessings to all of us. Caitlin Clark is one of those. Even before she hits one of those half-court threes, even before she's shoveled out an assist or two, she's lit things up and made things shine. 

This morning I'm thankful for our own Caitlin Clark. She's a blessing.

Morning Thanks--the Beatles

I didn't see the Beatles the night they walked out on the stage of the Ed Sullivan Show. I missed that historic appearance--I was in church. 

I knew about it, knew it was coming, heard about it, because it was heralded all over--the amazing Beatles, four mop-haired rock stars from a city called Liverpool and on their way to royal stardom--everyone said so--were scheduled to appear across the nation that Sunday right there on stage with Ed Sullivan. Everyone knew.

But I was in church. I don't remember fighting about my having to go. I don't remember cursing my parents' medieval ways, or thinking I was somehow bereft of a cultural phenom that, as a kid, I shouldn't be missing. I didn't necessarily love being in church, but my understanding of its place in my life made not attending something akin to choosing not to breathe. I'm sure I didn't spend the entire evening worship that night wishing I was in front of the TV.

Just for the record, it was Sunday night, February 4, 1964. I was 13 days away from being 16 years old. For point of reference, I was a month away from being old enough to drive. There was a little motorbike in the garage, probably stuck there for the winter in early February, but useful for me, except on those mornings my eyes might freeze shut if I drove it three or four blocks to school.

I had a shotgun, a little beauty I bought used somewhere--I don't remember where. It was a 16-gauge, double-barreled Remington, and, yes, I wish I still had it, but I  sold it when I went off to college (I didn't realize there were pheasants galore in Iowa!). And I was using it--although I don't remember even wasting a shell that day--on a Saturday some weeks before the Sunday night worship on the stage of Ed Sullivan. 

I had the shotgun in my hands, sitting in the back seat of a car driven by I-don't-remember-who and packed full of high school guys, going out west of town somewhere to hunt fox I think, although I don't remember seeing any, nor even hunting that day. It was a carful of guys, guns in their hands--an image that makes some people shudder, I'm sure. I was in the back seat. For the record, I remember nothing about hunting.

The station, I'm sure, was WOKY, Milwaukee, because absolutely every 17-year-old listened to WOKY. I don't remember the deejay. What I do remember as we rode along to some hunting spot some miles away, is the dee-jay going absolutely bananas about a tune he was going to spin, a tune by this phenom foursome named, of all things, the Beatles.

That's where I was when I first heard "I Want to Hold Your Hand"--backseat of a some kid's car, a double-barreled shotgun in my hand. I love it. 

What did I think of the music? I wasn't converted right then and there. I didn't have a come-to-Beatles moment right there in the backseat. If you would have asked me then, I likely would have said that if they're going to make an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show--that was fine, but I'd likely go to church anyway. Have to.

By the time I left for college, I had every Beatles album and wore them out on my old "stereo," a big box of a thing I took along to college because I couldn't imagine life without it--or them. I loved "Sgt Pepper," and had no trouble understanding that what the Beatles were up to--playing around with genre, with the whole mad business of popular music--was something of an art. They were doing something wild, and who couldn't love "I get by with a little help from friends. . ."

They stepped on to the world stage 60 years ago. I'm soon to be 76 years old. We don't go to church on Sunday nights much anymore--we live a half hour away. We go in the morning for sure. 

All my Beatles albums are long gone. Sometime, if I'm cleaning up down here, I'll ask my smart speaker to play the Beatles. In my mind, they're still wonderful, and I treasure remembering the moment I just tried to describe--the very first time I heard them, jammed into a car full of armed guys, lots of testosterone there in the back seat, on our way west of town in February, 1964. I'm betting I could still spot the place on the road we were taking.

They were a blessing and, really, still are, and, let me just say it outright:  I'm thankful for the Beatles. 

On the death of the church library

The most obvious takeaway from the death of church libraries is my initial horrifying conclusion that people don't read books any more. That's end-times stuff all right, but nowhere near to being true. While it is true your and my doctor's waiting room is full of people buried in their screens, most of them aren't playing games--they're reading. What?--I don't know, but they're reading. 

What do experts say? Somewhere close to a quarter of the entire population of the U. S. of A. did not read a book last year. A quarter may appear massive and foreboding, but if you flip the number around as some do, and say 75% of the America did read a book in the last year, it doesn't sound so much like a death knell. It's even a bit surprising.

Then there's the whole matter of media. These days, books come in all sorts of flavors. Right now, I'm juggling four books: one, I'm reading and recording audibly, Country People, by Ruth Suckow; another is an audiobook on my phone, a collection of short stories by Wendell Berry I listen to daily in the gym; a third is on my Kindle Scribe, a 1850s- era biography of James T. Frederick, an African-American mountain man; the fourth (and last!) is also on my Kindle, Tim Alberta's The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, this month's choice of the book club to which I belong. I'm "reading" four books, none of which I can hold in my hands. 

What that all suggests, of course, is that not all books these days have heft. In fact, more and more books come to us by way of our phones or iPads or computer screens, where some of those books are heard and others read. "Reading a book" these days, almost as often as not in my life anyway, has nothing to do with something bound and in your hands. 

I know that local libraries own audio books that can be checked out as if they were in print, but supporting digitizing a library requires both time and money--and most importantly, technical know-how. The demise of church libraries may well beat least in part understood if we think of the difficult time we all have dealing with the technology required. 

And then there's this: an incredible rise in political books. You may despise Donald Trump (I do), but he's been terrific for book sales and even newspaper subscriptions, national newspapers anyway. Everyone who has any experience at all with the ex-President and his day-to-day carnival has written a book as of late or else is planning one right now. Ghost writers are feeling no pain right now. Trying to understand the discipleship of millions of Trump supporters has created a huge market. No one has quite done it yet, but you can figure on more are coming out all the time.

Would a church library stock political books right now?

I'd guess probably not. If your church librarian wouldn't put Tim Alberta's book on the shelf to be loaned out, he or she is missing the kind of book that right now is selling big-time and is worth an entire church's time. If your church librarian wouldn't put Kristin Kobes DuMez on the shelf, your church library doesn't deserve to use up space. 

A friend of mine was doing a signing at a Christian bookstore recently. He told me when the crowds thinned (that's my description), he walked over to the store's fiction shelf and saw absolutely nothing he'd care to read. 

Dare I suggest that the death of church libraries may be in some small part understood on the basis of how well the librarian was able to buy books of relevance and high interest. I'm guessing most church libraries barely have a budget. I'm guessing--I'm no expert--that a church library that doesn't tell its patrons something about its latest titles or make sure those purchased titles had some legs, that moribund library would collect more dust than patrons. 

So I read the article, well done with the promise, I hope, of more. My gut reaction was horror. As a writer, I couldn't help but think that what closed-up libraries forecast is the death of the book. After all, America stands a chance of returning to office a man who can't read an 10-page summary of world affairs daily presented to whoever sits in the oval office, a man who is notorious for his lack of reading, a man who, consequently, doesn't understand NATO because he knows so very, very little about World War II and its aftermath. Millions of  us are being led by a man who doesn't read. That's horrifying.

But church libraries? I feel a little sad, but when they fail I'm not ready to say we're a step back into another round of the Dark Ages. The demise of church libraries is understandable.

I feel sorry of the Ally Junes of the world, the men and (mostly) women who kept shop in church libraries and did so with determination and resolve, despite the fact that they never really did much business, less so recently.

May such heroes--as well as their beloved libraries--rest in peace.