Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 84

These Sunday Morning meditations were penned years ago, one after another, until I'd done 365, just for my own edification really. This one should really have a sequel because my teaching gig at the home turned into one of the highlights of my life. The joy is almost too great to pass along, but it turned the old folks home into "a place of springs." Their honesty and joy was a rich blessing.

These days, I'm almost one of the 'em. 

"As they pass through the Valley of Baca, they make it a place of springs; the autumn rains also cover it with pools.  They go from strength to strength, till each appears before God in Zion.”

This afternoon, I’ll fly off to British Columbia, where, in the next few days, I’m scheduled to do a number of things, including visit some old folks in an independent living facility named Elim Home, a couple dozen or more seniors who want to hear me read a story. That’s the plan.

The word got out. The good folks at Elim Home got the news of their being visited by a writer, who was going to read something he’d written, the man who’d written things so often in their church magazine. “You know him, maybe, eh? He’s from a long ways away—from Iowa, in the States—and he’s coming to Elim Home. Ja, sure.”

Lots of Dutch brogues in this place.

One of them phoned the man who arranged my schedule on this visit.
“’Ve was yust now talking,” he told him, “and ‘ve ‘vere ‘vondering whethder Mr. Schaap might yust come a little early ant’ help us learn to write our own stories.”

Some requests simply aren’t to be denied.

It ought to be a kick. I’m sure I’ll live through it and have plenty of laughs along the way.

I’m not sure why, but that polite request makes me smile. Maybe it’s because I just finished another couple of semesters of teaching. Sometimes—not all the time, and I don’t want to overstate—coming into class can be like walking into a wake. Not a student in the room is really interested in Ralph Waldo Emerson. But this Vancouver class, this gaggle of seniors, they want more time, not less, and more attention, not less. They want real teaching. They want to learn. I know, I know, I sound really whiny.

But the possibility of assuaging my wounded pride is not the only reason the Elim Home request has made my week. The other is what it is those old folks are demanding: they want help writing their stories. Good night, they’re all seniors, and they’re just now getting started thinking seriously about writing their life stories. “How can ‘ve do dat best?” they’ll say, I’m sure. There’s just something so good, so strong, so hearty about a home full of old folks wanting to learn. Whether they can is a good question; that they want to is unmitigated blessing.

It seems the older I get, the more I have to learn to pay attention to those kinds of blessings or I miss them altogether. Honestly, the prospect of visiting a couple dozen retired Dutch immigrants who want to write their life stories—it’s sheer joy to consider. It’s a peppermint in a snoozy sermon. It’s enough to make you smile.

I don’t know that anyone has a clue about the Valley of Baca, although I’d guess that some biblical scholars will be happy to hazard a theory. But then, I’m not sure that the relative glories of that place are all that important to understanding the psalm. What’s at the heart of these verses of Psalm 84 is a tribute to people who pay attention to joy, who let it fill them, who let it carry them over the dark places. These are people of pilgrimage, who take their strength from God, whose very footsteps make the desert bloom. These are people who sing in the rain.

And Thursday I’ll be blest by being among ‘em.

Old McDonald

It's in me too, even though as far back as I can reach there are no farmers--well, there were no farmers who knew and loved what they were doing. Doesn't matter really. In this country at least, there's enough of Jefferson in the national psyche to recognize that, this time of year, it's only right and fitting to plant seeds in the ground. It's simply what we do, like breathing. "People who don't plant seeds don't know God," an old friend used to quip, only half-jokingly.

So I shouldn't be surprised that our granddaughter has seemingly taken it up and done so so splendidly. "Do you think we could possibly use some space in your vegetable boxes--just some?" In this life, generally grandparents don't say no to such requests. What's a few tomatoes anyway? You know how it goes: by early October it's just work to anything with them. As much as you know how much you'll miss 'em come  February, it's easier to let them go, then annoint a special Saturday to mopping up the shards left from the season.

"Sure," we said. "We're getting old. We don't need all that space."

And thus it began. 

She has sisters-in-law who rekindle memories of Old McDonald. She'll have the world's best training in the world's best soil, and--guess what?--we'll have them around our place. They'll be here, in our house, in our backyard. We know people who move hundreds of miles to be anywhere close to their grandchildren. My word--ours will spend a goodly chunk of this summer in our backyard. 

Besides, it's cute to watch them, busy as ground squirrels, measuring inches and plopping beans into furrows--and there are onion sets, some vegetably stuff I never heard of, even broccoli--they're not holding back for a couple of rookies. 

Get this: we get to watch. How many grandparents aren't at this moment going seasonably green with envy? 

And then there's this too. Sometime this fall, when mopping up will be the only thing going on out back, there'll be more, much more than there ever was because next fall sometime the two of them will be joined by one of their very own, a roly-poly miracle the two of them have nurtured into life, a brand new baby. 

It's impossible to imagine that, but go ahead and try. We'll be great-grandparents, amazing as that may sound.

You can bet I won't let them out of mopping up. It's the duty of every last gardener on the planet. When the northwest winds set up for winter, flecked with snow, somebody's got to clean up.  

"Dad's got most the work done," great-Grandma will say. "But come on by--just be sure you bring the family."

New Heavens and a New Earth

Yesterday's note from Frederick Buechner created a scene I can't help but live with. I'm not sure of his or its sheer orthodoxy, or whoever's orthodoxy we're driven by these days; but his resolution of a view of the afterlife seems warmfully offered here, and I say, quite forcefully, that I like it.

It would be advantageous to have him offer a comment himself right now, having passed away some years ago. He's a far more trustworthy officer of the truth these days, I'd suppose, at least when it comes to what he's offering here.

Heaven

 

 

“AND I SAW THE HOLY CITY, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a great voice from the throne saying . . . 'Behold, I make all things new' " (Revelation 21:2-5).   Everything is gone that ever made Jerusalem, like all cities, torn apart, dangerous, heartbreaking, seamy. You walk the streets in peace now. Small children play unattended in the parks. No stranger goes by whom you can't imagine a fast friend. The city has become what those who loved it always dreamed and what in their dreams it always was. The new Jerusalem. That seems to be the secret of heaven. The new Chicago, Leningrad, Hiroshima, Baghdad. The new bus driver, hot-dog man, seamstress, hairdresser. The new you, me, everybody.   It was always buried there like treasure in all of us—the best we had it in us to become—and there were times you could almost see it. Even the least likely face, asleep, bore traces of it. Even the bombed-out city after nightfall with the public squares in a shambles and moonlight silvering the broken pavement. To speak of heavenly music or a heavenly day isn't always to gush but sometimes to catch a glimpse of something. "Death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more," the book of Revelation says (21:4). You can catch a glimpse of that too in almost anybody's eyes if you choose the right moment to look, even in animals' eyes.   If the new is to be born, though, the old has to die. It is the law of the place. For the best to happen, the worst must stop happening—the worst we are, the worst we do. But maybe it isn't as difficult as it sounds. It was a hardened criminal within minutes of death, after all, who said only, "Jesus, remember me," and that turned out to be enough. "This day you will be with me in paradise" was the answer he just managed to hear.    -Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

 

Alice Munro (1931-2024)

I didn't know I'd be drawn into Native American history. I didn't know we'd come to live in a brand new house with an entire acre of land between us and the Floyd River. I had no idea that acre and that land would employ us, spring 'till fall. I thought I'd pay golf just up the road and drown worms in nearby ponds, and the river, of course. The truth is I didn't know what retirement was or would be.

I'd created mandates, from what little I knew. I'd get myself a definitive edition of Emily Dickinson  (accomplished!) and go through the poems (begun. . .) as closely as I could, knowing that often a meaning would be elusive. "Read Emily Dickinson." 

I took along, from school, thirty or forty books from my teaching library, just a few books that I treasured--Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, every last Ray Carver I had, Toni Morrison's Beloved, a few more. I've never been a person who reads a book twice--I'm not that good of a reader. Honestly, I've been envious for most of my days of the instinctual love of reading some people have. I don't have it--I wish I did. There are books I took along simply because I didn't know if I could honestly live without them all around, but I've never read a book twice--that takes a real reader. 

I took with us my entire collection of Alice Munro. Having read maybe three or four of them and  used many individual stories in classes, I knew her work (she was only a short story writer) were perfectly wonderful. When I retire, I told myself, "I'm going to read the entire library of Alice Munro, eight or ten books of her short stories, because I loved so much of what I'd read. 

See that picture above?--that's the first row of the upper bookcase standing in front of my desk. Haven't been touched until this morning, when I opened Friend of My Youth and was once again reminded how I learned to love reading, an act that, as I said, didn't come natural to me. I am--I'm baring my soul here--an analyzer, not simply a listener, and while there are advantages to what I do, there are disadvantages too. Just look at what happens to the bare page. Who do you know that scribbles up a page like that?

All of this is occasioned by the death of Alice Munro, an event which struck me to the bones when I read it in a news flash from NY Times. I knew she'd retired from writing (in 2013), when she announced she was suffering from dementia. I knew she won the Nobel Prize for literature that year as well, a fitting choice. I know I wrote about it on this blog years ago, but the truth is I  hadn't heard of her or even thought of her for some time.

And now she's gone. For a long time, there has been no new Alice Munro collection--I would suppose that's part of it too. But the announcement seemed almost a missive from outer space--"Alice Munro--dead?"

Let me just say this quickly: she was (and is: "literature lives") nothing less than the best short story writer of all time.

I won't say anymore, but don't be surprised if you read more about her on these pages because I really ought to make it a solemn vow now, a resolution, to read all I have of Alice Munro. 

There she is, still alive, right down front of the desk where I'm sitting now. See her? Top of the page.

Morning Thanks--the little climber

I wish I were a little more responsible when it comes to plants out back.  I mean, it's a fault I could work at if I was younger I than I am, a response ("if I were younger") which I make often these days and may well be just another way of forsaking duty still very much my own. Rather than the most important distinction--is this little beauty a one-season-er or can I plan on its return every spring?--I don't give a rip about its name or genus or species. What I care about is what's on the outside--to wit, how is it going to pretty up the backyard? That seems awfully vain of me, don't you think? There's something inherently sinful about regarding only outside appearances. I honestly don't bother about names; I just pick up the pretties. 

Including the climbers. We've got a wonderful stony retaining wall running on both sides of our backyard. I made it--just about the only thing about this place in the country that I constructed--not the rocks, of course; they took millions of years, but the wall itself--think Robert Frost maybe. 

Several years ago, I bought a darling little climber from the plant store, not because I knew a thing about its identity, but because the idea of some climbing plant inching its way up the stone walls, a vine-like creation--sounded perfectly beautiful--no, let me change that, "looked" perfectly beautiful in the magic garden my imagination creates every April. Bought it--complete with its own little ladder to remind itself of what it is and why it does what it does--planted it (following directions) then waited for it to begin to fulfill the promises it had registered in my mind.

Let's just say whatever arose from the good Iowa soil was pitiful, not worth mentioning. The plant itself did make clear in packaging that it was a perennial, but it's first year's show was so meager that whether or not it cared to show its face the second spring, to me, completely was to me a decision it along would make. (Meanwhile, I bought a cheap little trellis, more for the birds than that little climber.

What happened? Nothing. Perfectly nothing. Meanwhile the bushes my wife had chosen were prospering with such abundance that whatever it was I'd planted, that little oh-so-cute climber, for instance, simply lost their standing, which is a nice way of saying, I suppose, that they lost their  square corner of creation. 

Last year, amazingly, that little climber inched up healthily, as if out of nowhere, but, once again lost its standing when the bushes beside it just shouldered it out of the way. By September, I thought it was gone until I started cleaning up and realized that what it had eventually spun out was quite considerable--but definitely overshadowed by the healthy perennial bushes all around.

And now's the time to look back at that picture at the top of the page because that's our unnamed climbing plant, purchased as many as a half-dozen years ago, but this spring off to the kind of start any major leaguer would be happy about, already climbing the old rickety trellis I stuck when I actually had dreams for what that climber could do or be. 

Now rather than create the sermon out of all of this, I'll let you fellow Calvinists write your own, although in this case the sermon writes itself, and does so beautifully too, even if I can't name the climber, because this year the climber is going to establish a presence, a standing. Who knows how it'll flower?--or if it will at all. Who knows, I may just put my phone to work and find out who it is. 

The climber deserves a name.

End of sermon. 

I'm thinking, "Mothers' Day, hmmm. . ."

Seems downright amazing today, but in the years just following the Civil War, two activist groups determined to get women the right to vote, went toe-to-toe for reasons that, in retrospect, seem as lightweight as their skirmishing. The National Women’s Suffrage Association (NWSA) actually opposed the passing of the 15^th amendment to the U. S. Constitution (prohibiting states from denying male citizens the right to vote, thus admitting African-American men). The NWSA was not the least bit racist. The grounds for their opposition was that admitting the newly-freed slaves to vote seemed wrong if women of all races weren’t given the same right.

On the other hand, the American Women’s Suffrage Association (AWSA) supported the passage of the 15^th amendment, arguing that even if women did not gain enfranchisement at this particular time, excluding African-American men from gaining their freedom would perpetuate injustice and be, quite simply, flat-out wrong.

‘Twas a fierce rivalry, as political battles are, even though both organizations laid claim to the same mission—to gain a woman’s right to vote—in the land of the free and the home of the brave. The battle was waged about how.

We tend to think of change coming to rural areas like our own only when winds blow hard from either coast. In this case, however, it’s simply not true. When the two warring women’s groups pulled themselves back together, it was here, in Nebraska, in 1890, at the bidding of locals who had, for the most part, kept themselves above fracas.

Erasmus Correll, who edited the Hebron Journal, and his wife—together the two of them created the greatly successful Western Women’s Journal—were tireless voices for the women’s suffrage, writing extensively themselves but also bringing suffrage notables to the rural heartland, women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who gave speeches to packed houses in small towns.

Mr. Correll was rewarded by the AWSA for his pioneering work by being chosen as its President in 1881. He was indefatigable. "It affords me much pleasure to thankfully accept the position and its duties,” he said, “and divide the honor among the earnest men and women who are. . .seeking the highest political welfare of humanity." Correll noted that "Having devoted my life to the cause of Equal Rights, no labor will be avoided.” Presumably, none was.

Just a year later the warring factions signed a peace accord to combine forces in the quest for women’s suffrage. Local folks played peacemakers and, at the same time, roused the newly conformed army for battle.

Hard as it is to believe, getting women the vote was almost impossible, even here, despite the activism. One of the most prominent advocates in Nebraska told his daughter in a private letter that the fight for women’s rights was no cakewalk. “Between ourselves--there is no more hope for carrying woman suffrage in Nebraska than of the millennium coming next year,” he told her.  “. . .We don’t want to discourage the workers, . . .but don't publish my predictions.”

And it wouldn’t be a short war. Thirty-five years would have to pass before Nebraska passed women’s suffrage in 1917, Iowa and South Dakota in 1919, with the passage of the 19^th amendment.

Great power in that crusade began here, not far away in rural America. Why? One reason might well be the difficult lives homesteaders went through to establish house and home. Man or woman, husband or wife—no one sat on their laurels. If a living were to be made, if a claim were to be improved, a life to be lived—if a loving home in the middle of all that openness were to be created, responsibilities had to be shared, equally. Equally. 

Male and female created He them.

Sunday Morning Meds --from Psalm 84

 [An entire week off, not by my choice. I was kept away. Pain mostly.  I think I'm on the way to recovery, but it'll be a long haul, I'm sure. Anyway, this Psalm meditation dates itself. If you know me at all, you can likely guess how old it is--we celebrated our 50th anniversary a couple of years ago.

Be back soon, I hope!)

“Blessed are those whose strength is in you, 

who have set their hearts on pilgrimage.”

 Today my wife and I will go to a wedding rehearsal. Two kids I met just yesterday will exchange vows, and I’m conducting the ceremony. I’m not ordained. The couple’s uncle is a judge; he’ll make the bond legal. They wanted someone to “do the wedding.” I’ve never “done a wedding,” but this is family, not close family, but family.

I admire their idealism, what seems even their estimable foolhardiness, simply in tying the knot. Getting married is a good thing, the right thing to do, even if their second cousin (me) is likely to fumble through the ceremony In Protestant tradition marriage not a sacrament; but, Lord knows, it’s a big, big deal.

But I’m of the age when their sweet resolve to plunge into a legal and (somewhat) binding contract seems, well, dreamy in an adolescent way. The whole thing seems scary. They are so young and they are, really, so dumb. They’ve been dating seven years, which has the sound of something biblical. No matter: to the mind of any oldster, they don’t know squat.

In their mid-80s, my parents suddenly turned into scrappers, even though I don’t remember their ever being particularly cross with each other before, at least in my presence. They got in each others’ hair something awful. At the very end, do we really go it alone, like the medieval play Everyman so fearfully promises? Do even our closest relationships fail us? I don’t know.

What I know is this. Last night my wife and I skipped an end-of year gala and stayed home by ourselves, in part because we’re becoming less social, but also because in our 35-year marriage, right now nothing seems more blessed than being alone, just the two of us. Playing hooky on a gala was low-stakes. Couch potatoes get bad press.          

I could try to explain all of that to this young couple—I’ve got to give a homily; I could tell them how we stayed home and simply enjoyed each other. I could try, but their being 22 means they wouldn’t begin to understand. 

They’ve got their individual pilgrimage(s) ahead of them, just as we did, and my parents before us. Those two kids will be starting out on Sunday, and all the diagrams, the how-tos, all the counseling sessions we can offer will mean little to them because they’ll have to create their own map as they go, just as we did. 

Marriages are a big, big deal for all of us really. Every cow-eyed young couple carries all our hopes with them when they recite their vows; because our hope, like theirs, is for nothing more or less than the first word of Psalm 85: 5—to be blessed. 

I cannot imagine life without faith. Faith was the soul of our solitary night together, even though we didn’t recite bible verses. The two of us have spent hours and hours in prayer in our lives together, hours of pleading that sometimes seemed fruitless, but wasn’t. Guess what?--we’ll keep praying because faith isn’t something one wears like a tux; and we are blessed—as the psalmist says—by putting our faith in God. I know that’s true. Our pilgrimage, begun so long ago, continues. Our story continues to unfold.

I hope somewhere down the line we don’t start to carp at each other, but then, my mother would roll her eyes if I brought up the subject. “What do you know, really, about pilgrimage, young as you are?” she’d say. And she’d probably be right.

What she’d tell me, unequivocally, is that their sixty years of marriage was a great ride, a pilgrimage, begun and lived in faith. She’d say, I’m sure, she was blessed.

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 84

“Blessed are those who dwell in your house; 

they are ever praising you.”

My mother thought the world of the college where I spent most of my professional life, and it’s right that she did—all three of her children went here and many of her grandchildren. She remembered the college’s founder fondly, as well as its second president. Her son taught here for thirty years. She believed in Dordt College. But let’s be clear: she lived 500 miles away.

My wife worked in financial aid, my daughter still does work there, same office as her mother, in fact. My wife and daughter are as human as anyone else on this terra firma, as am I. When the three of us talked about the college where we all worked, we don’t speak as wistfully, as romantically, as my mother does. Of course, she’s 500 miles away, or did I say that already?

Absence can make the heart grow fonder in institutions, just as in love. And—not to empty the cliché bin—familiarity has been known to breed some feisty contempt.

Benedictine monasteries are trendy places these days, in part because fine writers like Kathleen Norris make them seem a bromide to the desperation of our lives. But her own work makes clear that people don’t check their sin at the door when they walk into the abbey. I know churches where preachers on staff can barely speak to each other. The average term of office for a youth pastor today is little more than a fortnight, I’m told, in part because so many of them can’t get along with their often less cool superiors. Churches are not heaven.

Distance is sometimes delightful, comfortable. Landscapes can be beautiful; close-ups can be brutal. I’m not all that sure the Psalmist is talking about a building—that’s what I’m saying.

If what this verse emphasis were true, what do we do with Eli, the priest at the door of the temple? By all accounts, he was a fine man, but he couldn’t control his boys, who dallied indecorously with the women who worked right there. Neither Hophni and Phinehas, nor their paramours, despite the immediacy of their temple tasks, were “ever praising” God, as the Psalmist so dreamily envisions here in verse three.

Psalm 84 is an exile psalm, and its exaltation of the temple is, in a way, but a mirror image of the horrific emotional deficit the psalmist feels when he’s not where he wants to be. So he wants what he can’t have. He longs to return to a place far away, a place where he can’t go, where everything is perfect, where the pious are all praising God.

Is there such a place? Only in your dreams.

I don’t know what Hebrew word Bible translators located in this verse and then converted into our dwell, but that choice feels right to me because the roots of the word dwell in Old English and Old Frisian are, oddly enough, in wandering. To dwell is a phrase that has buried within it a history of having wandered, of having been apart. That’s precisely the position of the psalmist. He wants badly what he can’t have.

And it’s us too, even though there’s no sacred temple locked up in my memory. Three- count ‘em, three—women we know well are doing very poorly right now, trying to fight the cancer that not only threatens but already cripples. They’re not just skirmishing. We’re talking all-out war.

A man who sat here not twenty feet from this chair not long ago took a nap a week or so ago and never woke up. Sixty killed yesterday when a suicide bomber did his thing in Baghdad. Hundreds of Cubans are in Panama, trying to hike to the U.S., whole families, darling little kids. Millions are fleeing Syria.

Sometimes we feel horribly exiled and we wish so badly to dwell in the House of the Lord.

“Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they are ever praising you.”

Lord Jesus, come quickly.

First Bride -- a story (denouement)

Resolution: what the story has done to the man who tells it. The denoument wraps things up. What does he do with a story he knew absolutely nothing about just a day or so ago? When he speaks to his dying father, what might he say, if he says anything at all?

*   ~   *   ~   *

I hadn't gone to that house like the prophet Nathan, to exact some penitence. When I'd come up the lane, I didn't know even the barest outline of the story. But when I left, I'd come to learn more than I'd ever guessed I would. I understood that what she'd told me she wanted my father to know was not only something painfully torn from her own stubborn and courageous heart, but also something my father would want very much to hear--not for himself, not simply to staunch a festering wound of unrequited love. Both of them were beyond that. But my father the Christian would want to know what she'd told me because it would enable him to leave this earth with hope for his first bride, accounts settled. He would want to know that she'd said what she said, not for his sake, but for hers, this woman he probably loved so much he couldn't speak of the pain she'd given him for the rest of his life, pain he’d likely tried hard to cover with love.

What I've come to believe, now, as I drive back to my father's South Dakota farm, is that this burden of history I've unearthed, this story will be a gift I can bring to his last days on earth. It will not be unsettling, a nightmare arising from ashes long grown cold and blown away in the countless seasons of prairie winds he's endured on land many would question was meant for anything other than buffalo. The story of Berendina Janssens will give him peace.

I know exactly how he will take the news because I know that what he sees before him now is an honored appointment with the King of Kings. His final journey began two years ago with the discovery of his cancer. Death has been made flesh in his ravaged body, and while he always knew he was going to die, since he's discovered how, his stoic sense of when has only deepened his assurance.

And if I can't give to him what he really wants--something of his son's clean and clear commitment to the Lord he himself has served through so much of a loveless life--I can at least bring him the broken heart of a woman who once broke his, but more than that, the penitence of another sinner, one he knew intimately and yet not, a woman he slept with and thought he knew just as fully as he is known. This historian who happens to be his son is very grateful that he can make this one last road straight for the coming of his Lord.

Today I will see my father. We will sit on the deck of the house where I grew up, a place my mother left five years ago. We'll look out on the empty barn he ritually visits three times a day to feed a multitude of cats, the only animals left. We'll sit on chairs beside the geraniums he keeps up on the railings, the sweet smell of redolent life in the air all around us, just as it was on that small farm just outside the Veluwe.

I'm on my way to tell him something he will savor. When I went to the Netherlands, I wondered whether I should even leave the continent with my father in such poor health. I went with no motive other than something professional and academic. But I have become, by grace alone, a prophet of joy, and for that I thank my father's God, for he has entrusted the great blessing of healing to me, someone who has doubted His goodness and mercy for many years.

My father has been ready to die for a long, long time. But today, maybe for the first time, his son, who has given him great pain in many years of questioning and doubt, is finally ready for him to leave.

First Bride -- a story (iii)

I don't doubt such a thing happened. War's effects never run cold. Still, it's an amazing story--a woman marries in order to emigrate, then, once arrived, goes in search of her war-time lover. Amazing. What most writers do is start a "what if," and try like mad to make it work. That's what I'm up to here.

_______________________   

At that moment it hit her for the first time that I hadn't been lying to her, that the man she'd once married under pretext, the man she'd hauled on to some straw mattress somewhere in order to cover her sin, the man she had slept with, only to reach her baby's father in Canada--at that moment she understood that this man she didn't know at all had never even suggested her existence to me. She looked at me and said, "You don't know, do you?"

"I honestly don't know," I told her. "I don't know a word of the story. You're a revelation. Before yesterday, I had absolutely no idea there ever was a Berendina Janssens-Versteeg--no idea."

In liitle more than ten minutes, I'd seen iron resolve, an arrogance that angered me, and now something close to defeat--all of it so clearly written on her face that she never had to speak at all. I've seen that before in Dutch people--eyes that mirror every splintered emotion from the soul--concrete conviction to abject helplessness. What's going on inside appears so openly on their faces that I wonder what immigrant experience altered that characteristic in so many of the Dutch who left this country, my father included. Dena Janssens never ever would have buried the secret my father did. She could not have. Why?

And then, just as quickly, those eyes softened once more. She pressed her lips together, then smiled, softly. "You could have been my son," she said. Gentle smile--even adoring. "Maybe I would have liked your mother."

"No," I said. "Not really."

"Why so?"

"The older I've become," I told her, "the more I believe his marriage was not what he wanted us to believe it was. He is a good, good man, but he is capable of falsehood, for righteousness' sake."

"I believe that," she said.

"He was happy in the barn--a different man in the house," I told her.

"What is she like?"

"She's gone. She died five years ago. He's alone." I pushed back the chair from the table, and just for a moment as I looked down at that hiding place beneath me. "My mother," I said, "is as difficult to describe, as she was hard to love." I wasn't tailoring my words. "No one would deny that. But he never complained--I never heard about you, nor about her--never."

Determined smile, sympathetic, even stoic. "It is an act of faith," she said, "to withstand pain--and acts of faith count with the Lord." She bowed her head for a moment, seemed almost sad. "Bloody Christians all swear by election but work their heads off chasing righteousness for a reward they think they're winning all the same."

But she didn't know my father. He is not arrogant, not boastful; he is not puffed up. He may have faults, but he has never chased righteousness for any reason other than personal happiness and service to God--what he would call, simply, "thanks."

"So, you--" she said, and sat down once again beside me, "where do you fit in all of this?" She pulled the chair up close, leaned both her arms over the table towards me. "If you're not your mother's child and you're not your father's boy, then where did you come from--you historian?--"

Every word was measured and cut sharply to fit a path. I will admit it now. In a way, in those few moments in that old house, I loved her for her deliberateness, the way she cut to the quick, so much unlike my father, who seemed to me then to be living--and dying--in a completely different world. She had told me that she was too much like God to love him, and in a way I believed her. Not for a moment did she fritter away the words she could have chosen. I watched her moods shift like wind in the moods in her eyes. Everything was at the surface--nothing hidden away like my father.

"Where did you come from?" she'd asked me.

And I answered her in her own way--unflinching, direct. "Where did you?" I said. "Where do any of us come from?"

"From the air we breathe," she said. "All this genetics is just so much wasted science," she said. "I am a child of the war, the third child, second daughter, of Hendrick and Berendina Janssens. I was raised in their home--this one. But the war made me what I am." She sat back once again. "You would not believe what this place was like back then." Her arms spread instinctively. "It was a railroad station in here--people coming and going. Resistance people. Three Jews in the barn," she pointed to the back, "three pilots in the mooie room." Behind me, a closed door. Onderduikers in and out and in and out." Her hands twisted and whirled and jigged. "And my parents--they were like your father, so naive. I sometimes think my father heartily believed that some great dome of grace protected this house." She looked at me directly, silent. "I hated him for that, really--for his innocence. It is a curse to be born of innocent, Christian parents--a curse. And all that time, me and my Canadian were making love--"

"Where?" I said. "With everybody in this house, where did you find a place?"

She laughed. "The great tragedy," she said, "is that we die--and before that grow old." She was back in this house, fifty years before. "For everything that happened--for what I did to your father and what that big-time hero did to me, for all of my parents' innocence, and the craziness," she laughed to herself, "--and the craziness of all of those people and outside the Nazis capable of killing us all." She shook her head. "With everything that happened to me since--my children, who knows where, and your father, and being forced to come back here to Holland--for those months at the end of the war and that man, that Canadian, I'd probably do it all again." She raised a hand toward me. "You'll never understand that, but you asked, 'Where did we make love'? And my answer, Professor Versteeg, is where didn't we?"

"It was war--people were killed, millions," I said.

"And you," she said. "Did you ever know love?--you and your wife?"

"I'm divorced," I told her.

"I don't care," she said. "What I asked you was did you ever know love?"

"As a child?"

"Have you ever known love?" she said, slowly, as if pronouncing the words to an idiot.

"I don't know," I said.

"Then you haven't." Her fingers peaked as she held her hands up in front of her face. "For six months of my life, I had all I could do to breathe it in--in the middle of all of that bombing and Nazis all over, I was in love."

"Seventy-some years," I said. "And that's all the longer it was--six months?"

She raised her finger, pointed. "I was born in 1929, more than a decade before Hitler came to the Netherlands, but I am a child of the war."

"My father?" I said.

"You know him."

"Not like you did."

She nodded at me as if to say I deserved what she was about to say. "A good man. Not handsome. A Christian--but not a damned hypocrite--never a hypocrite." She touched her finger to her lips, sat there for a moment, thinking. "Of course, I used him, and I remember those nights, too. But I had too--my body told me I had to, and my soul said it too. I remember feeling his body on mine, in mine--and all that time I kept telling myself that when we got to Canada, the moment we get to Canada--." She made a bundle in her hands. "I can't say that what I did haunts me, because it's all now so far behind, but I remember him loving me--yes, here on this farm. I lied to myself before. I had to make him think the child already there was his. And I remember wanting to cry, not for him, but for my burden of having to deceive a good man, a man I didn't love." She looked at me, shook her head. "I don't expect your sympathy."

"You never loved him?"

"I couldn't let myself love him, even if I wanted to. Heaven was in Ontario, Canada. All I wanted was heaven."

"What did he say when you left him?"

"I never told him."

"You mean you simply walked away?"

"In a letter," she said. "I left him a note three days after I left that horrible farm. Three days. I told him the whole story and that he shouldn't come after me because I'd known what I wanted from the day he'd come here to this back door. I'd known exactly what I wanted." She looked at her open hand, as if there were some scar there, something telling; then she raised it to her face, wiped at the corners of her eyes. "In Canada, I simply disappeared--as if it were still the war. I left him, two weeks after we first put down our feet over there, and I went to find my lover and hero."

She looked up at me, her eyebrows raised, not so much a smile on her face, but something endearing pulled from a corner of her heart she'd not opened before. "You should not have come," she said. "Maybe even your father would say it--we can get by in this world from day-to-day if we don't have to remember some things."

"My father would say there's forgiveness," I told her.

"Yes, he would," she said.

She sat there at her table, alone in a house with more history than a place should have, and for the first time something unburdened within her threatened the strength of what had kept her energized, alive. Maybe they were not so much different, I thought--my father and this first bride.

"I hadn't even thought about that time," she told me. "I hadn't even thought of your father for years--and years. He was gone."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"And so am I," she said, nodding. "And so am I."

Something broke, something stiff and unyielding and very, very beautiful. For the first time, grief came over her eyes like a shadow. "You tell him that, Professor Versteeg," she said. "You tell your father that before he dies--you tell him Dena Janssens is sorry for what she gave him--that pain."

_________________________ 

And thus he leaves. But it's not the end of the story. Tomorrow denouement, the end of the story, the end of the fiction.

First Bride -- a story (ii)

In yesterday's opening segment, a historian from the States, attending a conference on Dutch immigration, discovers that his father, utterly beknownst to him, had, a lifetime ago, immigrated to Canada with a first wife his son knew nothing of. After discovering her name, he finds her right there in the Netherlands and decides to speak to her about her story with his father, who is back in the States dying of cancer.

Berendina Janssens is as surprised to see and meet him as he is surprised and amazed to meet her. 

Today, they begin to piece together what happened a half-century earlier, while they grow, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes painfully, into slowly accepting a long-ago story slowly emerging.

______________________ 

She adjusted her glasses with the back of her hand, then took a deep breath, the first sign I read of any reluctance at all. "What did your father tell you?"

At that moment, for a reason I don't know myself, I wanted to protect him. I didn't want her to know that she was a personal secret he'd either hoarded or hated or both. "What must I call you?" I asked.

"Dena," she said, a familiarity I wouldn't have expected.

"And your last name?"

"Janssens," she said, "my family name."

Maybe it was myself I wanted to protect, the historian who'd, ironically, known nothing about his own family record. "Was the marriage annulled?" I asked.

"What did he tell you?" she said again.

I brought the cup up to my lips and took a sip of the strong coffee, then lied. "That it ended," I said.

"That's all?"

My imagination created a conversation in which my father told all. We're in our barn, the milking done, and we're standing alongside the stanchions. He would have told me with a moral imperative, in the same way he told me almost everything. I can see him pointing his finger. And then I told Mrs. Janssens, "He told me it didn't matter what happened. What he'd learned was that you have to pick up the pieces and go on." I hunched my shoulders quickly, as he might have. "'Bad things happen,' he said, 'but the point is not to let them ruin your life.'" And then I smiled my father's consecrated smile. "''Suffering can make you strong'--that's what he said. 'The thing is to grow from adversity.'" I was sounding like Robert Schuller.

At that point, I'm not sure she even heard what I'd said. She held up a hand, uncrossed her legs, put her cup on the table, and pointed to what may have been a trapdoor in the floor. "That's where he was, you know--that's where he stayed," she said. "For six months, the man lived with us--six months. I was seventeen and every able-bodied man around was off somewhere, hiding or gone."

"My father?" I said.

"I didn't even know your father then," she said. "Oh, maybe by family--maybe I could picture him--his walk, his thick hair, that high wave. I knew of him, you might say, but I didn't know him."

I had no idea who she was talking about, but I did understand that even though I had been in Dena Janssens’ house for no more than five minutes, she'd already cut to very heart of a story I hadn't heard in all of my years with my father.

"He lived here with us for almost six months at the very end of the war, and I loved him," she told me, her clenched lips enforcing the passion she remembered. "My mother would have killed me--she was one of you people."

I suspected what she meant by that was something religious, but I let her speak.

"It was dangerous really, for my parents to let them talk with us--with the children." She pointed again. then kicked back the rug. "Look, look at your feet."

There beneath me was enough of square line to recognize that just below the kitchen table had been the hiding place, a cellar for whoever it was the Janssen family hid from the Nazis--onderduikers, maybe Jews.

"It was frightfully stupid," she said. "I didn't know that then, but I've thought of it often since that time. It was one thing," she told me, "for my parents to hide them here, but it was another altogether for them to let us mingle with them--and the younger children." She swept both hands up in a gesture of silliness. "Who knows? One of my sisters may have picked up an English word or phrase and used it at church in front of someone who should not have known we were hiding Canadian pilots."

And that’s when I knew the story. She'd fallen in love with a Canadian. She'd been in love with a Canadian pilot--but then why didn't she emigrate herself--a war bride? She must have used my father as a means to immigrate, then left him.

"My mother would have killed me if she knew. My father would have thrown me out of the house." She looked around her, at the stove and the laundry tree across the room, the tiles on the walls. "This house," she said, chuckling, "the one I live in now. He would have thrown me out, to be sure--a sinner because there was a baby--his baby. I needed your father."

As a pretext for getting to Canada, she'd married my father, used him as a means of finding the pilot her family had harbored and she'd loved. She was very young; and in the middle of all that war mess, she'd fallen head over heels. This woman. She was pregnant.

"I'm like a rabbit, I suppose," she said. "Isn't it a rabbit that's supposed to move in circles--that's supposed to always return to it's hokken? Now, here I am."

"A rabbit," I said, "yes. And me too, I suppose. Because here we sit--you and me."

"This is not your home," she said coldly. "You're not coming back to anything. You have no blood here."

I retaliated in kind. "How can you say that? My father's blood is on the back step," I told her. "I felt it when I stood there before coming in." She must have lied to him, told him he was the father--and it had to be fast, everything had to be fast. She had to have taken my father very, very quickly, then used his righteousness. "And his love is spilled here somewhere too, isn't it?" I said. "It haunts the place--it must be here--"

"Not his," she said. "My Canadian hero's is here," she said bitterly, "but not your father's. I don’t hate him. I never did." There was no pretense in her, no politics but truth, but sometimes it seemed as if when she looked at me, she saw a lower species. "You love your father," she said. "And you should. But I didn't--never."

"I lied," I told her. "My father never mentioned your existence--not once in his life. I never knew of a first bride."

Her eyes turned to steel, and the corners of her lips fell.

"Until yesterday, Mrs. Janssen, I didn't even know you existed," I told her. "I had absolutely no idea my father married you. I knew nothing about his taking a wife to Canada." Each line hit her hard, so I kept at it, assaulting her for reasons I really didn't know fully. "You can't imagine how surprised I was when I found your name with his," I told her. "My father married! He never spoke of you--not a word. Never even mentioned you. Only by accident am I here--only by luck. You understand?"

She reached for her cup, gathered what she could of her strength before lifting her eyes to mine once again. And then, some dignity coming back, she said, "So what do you expect me to believe," she said, "this first story or now the second one?"

I pulled the chair up close to the table. "Look at me," I said. "I'm telling you that not once in my father's life did he mention a word about you. I didn't know you existed until--" I looked at my watch, "until yesterday. Not even 24 hours ago."

She looked across the room, pulled her arms back from the table, sat straight on her chair, then lifted herself quickly and stepped back. "That's why I left him," she said. "Damned Christians and their stoic nonsense--'if you don't talk about it, it doesn't exist.'" She raised her hands to her waist, stood there straight and proud. "Damn them--damn them all for their secret sins. Damn them all for their righteousness, their Godliness. Isn't that like them?--like him? You can always tell the Christians because their backyards are full of dirt just spaded--so much they have to bury back there." What she said wasn't aimed at me. The anger spilled from something tipped full inside her. For a moment she seemed to have forgotten I was in the room, and then she looked up at me once again, and something softened. "And he is alive today yet--your father?"

"He's dying of cancer, " I told her.

"That's nothing of my doing," she said.

"I didn't blame you," I told her. "I didn't come here to blame you for anything--"

"How many others like you--brothers and sisters?"

"Three--I'm the oldest."

"America?" she asked.

"He left Canada--he had relatives in the States, in South Dakota." I didn't know the story exactly, but I played what I knew against her. "Probably soon after you left him," I said. Something of the defiance had drained from her face. "And you're back here in Holland?" I asked.

She circled the empty chair and then held both points of the back. "I got what I deserved," she said. "I got what I had coming. I don't think God is who the Christians think he is, but there is a God in heaven." She smiled. "I left your father," she raised her hands, rubbed a palm, "and my war lover left me--not even two years. Never married either. Not that I cared." Then she looked at me. "There's a God, I suppose--I just don't like him."

"Maybe it's a woman," I said.

"He's not a woman," she said. "God has a man's heart, as I do."

"Why do you say that?"

"We could never get along--too much alike, me and God." Deliberately she rolled the g in the Dutch way. "Women who believe in him love God," she told me. "Men who believe respect him. I never loved Him."

"Not even then?" I asked.

"Before the war maybe," she said, reaching for her cup. "Then I was a girl." She pulled it up into both hands but remained standing. "When I was a child, I thought as a child--you know what I mean?"

"And when you knew my father?" I asked.

"I was no child. After the war, there were no children left." She stopped quickly. "Well, maybe your father--I don't know. But none of the rest of us were children--"

"Nonsense," I said. I wanted to grab her--I really did. "You went winging off to Canada after some war hero? You lied with your body to my father for some pipe dream--to chase some guy in a uniform--and you say you weren't a child?"

She stood straight and tall behind that chair, the cup in both hands, and smiled, then laughed. "You're not like him," she said. "You're not like him at all, are you?"

"How do you know?" I said. "How long were you married?--a week?"

At that moment it hit her for the first time that I hadn't been lying to her, that the man she'd once married under pretext, the man she'd hauled on to some straw mattress somewhere in order to cover her sin, the man she had slept with, only to reach her baby's father in Canada--at that moment she understood that the man she didn't know at all had never even suggested her existence to me. She looked at me and said, "You don't know, do you?"

__________________

Tomorrow: there's more to learn. 

First Bride -- a story (i)

"First Bride" is about 20 years old or so. It holds down a place in a collection of mine titled Paternity. 

It's likely I was in the Netherlands when I heard this story--I'm not sure. But I know its source, a Canadian immigrant full of energy and smiles, an old colleague named Case Boot. He told me the story of a man. . .well, he told me a story I tried to imagine into reality.

_____________________________ 

By Dutch standards, the house is not old--at best, at very best, one hundred years. Fortress-like, red brick, hip-roofed in long, thick thatch, it stands 200 meters back from a country lane meandering up and out from the Veluwe, a woody area of the Netherlands we might call a national forest. The area is very provincial; most Dutch people would call it backward. I once met a man from Ermelo who told me people consider the whole region twenty years behind the times; he jerked the visor of his cap, hurrumphed a bit, and told me he wished it were 25.

Nothing about the house distinguishes it. Surrounded by a few trees and a wooden fence covered with something like chicken wire, the place is quintessentially Dutch, from its steep roofs to the small barn that is not out back of the house, but is the house's own spacious back room. A few trees line its brick lane, and unused wooden lawn furniture sits in a square patch of yard created where the front wall of what used to be the barn suddenly juts out from the line of the house and looks over that corner with the eye of a new and broad picture window.

On that trip to the Netherlands, my third, I took a small tape recorder, and as I traveled I told it things I didn't want to forget. Not until I stopped the car behind the house did I remember that although that recorder was in my hand and running, I'd been saying nothing.

Exactly what I wanted to tell this woman I didn't know. I didn't resent her; I had no reason to, never having met her, never having even known of her until the day before I pulled up at her back door. If I hadn't stumbled on her name beside my father's on his emigration records, I would have never known she existed. The thought of simply turning around never crossed my mind. Nervous, yes--but as I remember that moment, I was not reluctant, perhaps because I wondered whether the two of us had known completely different men. I wanted her to acquaint me with the father I'd never met.

It was late spring, and the sun had appeared for what seemed to have been the first time since I'd come to the Netherlands four days before. Out back, in the grass north of the house, sheets and pillow cases lay spread over the ground. Even though I'd never seen that done before, I knew--how? by DNA?--that the bedding was being whitened in the old way, bleached by the sun. It was not a kind of de je vu--I felt no flashing echos. But the thought of my father, years before, standing there himself, out back of this house, at the same exact place, at a time in his life when he was head-over-heels in love, was overwhelming. The war was over. A young woman who lived there would be his bride. I wondered how often he stood right there kissing her passionately. How often, just a few minutes later, did he walk down the lane from this back door, dreaming of the full course of this woman's love, a woman not my mother?

He never once spoke of a first marriage, never hinted at this huge story in his life. Nothing in his demeanor or his frequent sermons to me had ever suggested he'd suffered--the war, yes; I'd heard dozens of stories about the war. But nothing about a first bride. I had no idea there'd been anyone other than my mother. I would never have dared guess, really--and I'm a historian. My father is not secretive or reclusive; with no hesitation, I'd describe him as joyful and jovial. Even on the most forsakenly frigid South Dakota mornings, with the wind tugging at our barn's every shingle and slat, the milking parlor could be as warm as the house, filled as it was with cows, gospel music from the Motorola, and my father's lilting tenor. He was not secretive, not brooding, not dark or silenced. I would have never guessed he could hold the secret of a first marriage so firmly.

But there had been a first wife. Why didn't he tell me? Was it out of some deference to my mother? Or was the whole story that painful--even half a century after it ended? What had he done? Was it my father's sin, or was it simply my father's pain? Either way, how and why could he cover it so completely?

I make my living on the past. I trade on details. I unearth secrets wherever and whenever I can, trying to make sense of time and place long past. History is my method of putting together a puzzle from pieces scattered hither and yon in a quantity never quite sufficient to complete the whole. But the truth is that I felt somewhat sordid as I stood there behind that Dutch house, digging through my father's past. Back home, he was dying of cancer, and here I was scooping a story for some trashy family tabloid my brothers and sisters would likely be the only ones to read. Who else would care? No one. What difference did it make that he'd married before my mother? But I am a historian. Berendina Janssens, a woman I'd never met, was his first wife. I had to know.

I was in the Netherlands for a conference on Dutch-American immigration, where I had been riffling through data on display--someone's research project newly computerized--when I punched in my father's name, simply to see how the program worked. From the time I was a child I knew the month and year he'd left Holland, where he'd come from, and where and when he'd arrived in Canada. As a boy, I visited the Ontario farm where he worked his first six months. Ten years ago, I met the old man who'd sponsored him, a man who, like my father, had never said a word about a first marriage, even though we'd talked for an hour or more. Had there been a conspiracy? And did my mother know? Maybe she didn't. Maybe that's why my father never spoke of Berendina Janssens.

During a break between conference sessions, on a whim I typed in my father's name on that computer; the CD-ROM light glowed, and the screen kicked out the whole bill of goods: the date he'd left, the name of the ship that had carried him to Canada, and the name--Berendina Jannsens-Versteeg. My first impulse was to hide the screen from people milling around me. I stooped over the screen as if I'd forgotten my glasses, read the name again and again.

I had only a day to find out something about this woman, so I left the conference that afternoon and drove out to the Veluwe.