Thanksgiving thanksgiving

Some people may be accustomed to scarfing down such huge platefuls of turkey and stuffing in the middle of the day, but I'm not one of them. Thanksgiving dinner--for which we all give thanks--is just so thick and starchy (heavy-laden with gravy that honors our departed Grandma, whose recipe it is) that by two or so in the afternoon, it's a wonder the whole adult family hasn't passed out.

That's why I like to hike on Thanksgiving afternoon*, even though there's not all that much daylight by late in the day. We drive out to Oak Grove, a wooded park along the Big Sioux, and work off some of the excess after the Thanksgiving extravaganza. But this year it was too blame cold, a sharp northwest wind icy enough to take a bite out of your face, the windows still thick with Jack Frost.

The bowling alley's long gone, so I asked my daughter if there were any movies playing downtown, something appropriate for her kids, which is to say our grand kids. Yeah, she said, so three blocks was the best I could do for a hike--straight west to the theater, where we donned special glasses and watched Tangled, Disney's version of the Repunzel story in a 3-D version so real my grandson and I kept reaching for butterflies when they came floating past.

In David Brooks' last column in the NY Times**, he quotes that odd Christian curmudgeon Tolstoy like this: “The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations.” I sat there beside my tow-head, second-grade grandson, watched him lose himself in the story, and told myself that there's so much I just haven't learned about stories, like what they're all about, after all. He was teaching me. I was learning new stuff from him because between the two of us, we were dead lost, him loving the story, me in him loving it. And him.***

I watched him turn away disgustedly as little boys do when finally Repunzel and her sweetheart thug-turned-saint finally, delightedly, kiss. He just couldn't watch. When the two of them faced sure death by drowning, when it looked like the end was near, he flipped off those glasses and looked up at the ceiling, sure, I guess, the whole story was going to come crashing down on him like a third-rate garage door. I watched Tangled through my grandson's eyes, and when he snuggled up against me during all that high Disney tension, I felt the tremors in his heart and soul.

I came out of that theater telling myself that it's no dang wonder I haven't figured out how to finish that novel of mine**** because I hadn't been thinking of what it's all about, hadn't seen the wonder in my grandson's bespectacled eyes or thought at all of trying to making sure that novel offers people what Tolstoy says it must--the sheer joy of loving life.

Disney snatched a few tears out of me on the holiday--I'll admit it. Maybe one or two because all things worked together for good in that zany, hairy movie, but also because my grandson lent me, for two hours, his child's heart, an act that gave that movie even more wonder than anything you could see through those plastic glasses.

This morning--three days after--I'm still on a high, and for all of that I give thanks. Thanksgiving thanksgiving.

Oh yeah, the meal was terrific and the pie was to die for. That too.*****

________________________ 

*I'm still a resident of Heartland Home; I can't walk without a walker. There'll be no hiking today for me. That doesn't mean I'd wouldn't like to be out there somewhere. 

**Sometime 17 years ago now--that's how old this blog post is.

***For the record, he's 23 or so today. . .

****Looking for Dawn, available on Amazon for Christmas giving. . .

*****Just one more thing worth noting--last Sunday his sister and her husband baptized a baby, my great-granddaughter. . .just sayin'

"It ain't my first rodeo"

For the record, these days I have no idea what my rear end looks like. At home, we've got at least one full-length mirror, but I don't know that I was ever vain or crazy enough to spin around and survey the scene. 

I was a high school jock. I've taken a thousand locker room showers with countless other wild-ass nakeds. It was impossible not to see loads of other posteriors, so I think I know what they look like--what I look like--with one exception: it's seventy years later. The lot of us, if left undraped would most certainly look. . .well, how should I say it?--forlorn, droopy maybe. 

But I've never looked in that full-length bedroom mirror, so I swear I don't know what kind of impression my own bare butt might make.

I know the bundle I carried was of considerable heft years ago, when I couldn't have won wind sprints if the other guys wore 20-pound weights on their ankles. I remember being a lousy hitter because I knew that if I swung hard I could slam a good pitch 500 feet in our fence-less ball diamond and, if I was lucky, end up on third. My butt was a burden, an embarrassment. It's true. 

But that was a thousand years ago. In college, I'll never forget being at a motel swimming pool with friends. Later, alone, this girl I was seeing told me that some of her friends told her I had cute buns.

Cute buns. That was sometime during the Paleozoic Era.

Right now, there's no chance of my checking out what's behind me. Besides, I'd rather not know.

All of which is a dirty shame because right now, living in a nursing home's rehab center as I do, I couldn't begin to count the number of women who have, already, pulled down my pants. Dozens of women of all shapes and sizes have come face-to-face with my keister. I've hosted whole gatherings in front of the toilet, but mostly it's just two or so tugging down the sweat pants one more time before I aim my butt at the throne. 

Morning comes. "Wanna change your briefs?" one says. 

Nod, and down they come, full Monty.  

Listen, it takes some moral, emotional, and spiritual adjustment for a 76-year-old Dutch Calvinist Professor of Literature to adjust to full frontal nudity before a bevy of CNAs. But they're sweet about it and quick too, which is nice. 

For my first bath--I hadn't taken a bath since the early years of this century and never, well, in public--a sweetheart named Mollie smiled when I let her know I wasn't yet at home being buck naked in her cold plastic bath chair. "Oh, get over it," she said. "This ain't my first rodeo."

I'll admit it--that helped. When I can't help but feel exposed, I tell my chilly soul, it ain't none of them's first rodeo. 

For Dutch-American Heritage Day

Whatever the cause, we  needed a sump pump--new house, too dang much rain, walk-out basement--we needed a sump pump. But where to buy one--'twas a Sunday as I remember, and there sure warn't no place I knew of to buy a sump pump on the Sabbath. 

"Go to Le Mars," the neighbor said.

"Bomgaars open there, you think?" I said. Orange City's sure enough wasn't.

"South of 10," he answered easy en0ugh.

I had to think that answer through. Hwy 10 runs through Sioux County, west to east, from the Big Sioux at Hawarden to Granville. When it does, it creates a line behind which--to the north--lies "Dutch Siouxland." "South of 10," roughly, abides a different world, the world whose inhabitants my people for  years, maybe a century, called "Americans."  

For the record, the Dutch came to Sioux County, Iowa, in or around 1870. At the same time--same year--another ethnic contingent, this one from Luxembourg, found their way to the last unsettled region of Iowa and parked their colony just a bit east and north of the wooden  shoes. The Dutch came from Pella mostly, the Luxembourgers from St. Donatus, where they left a tiny village that looks in places as if nothing's moved.

For the record, the sprawling lines of the railroad picked out a place and determined it to be a stop--water and wood for billowing engines. They created similar burgs out here for their convenience until homesteaders came along to call the place a town. That's how Marcus was born, a railroad town, no nirvana for ethnic types in wooden shoes, black dresses, and long prayers. 

There were no visions, no scriptural mandates, just cord wood and water for the boiler.

In Marcus, a depot went up, as well as the section man's shanty, together creating the very first sense of something standing here in a treeless prairie so broad you could ride all week long and not get out of it. The town's name wasn't particularly difficult for John Blair, the railroad king, head of the Iowa City to Sioux City Railroad,, whose son just happened to be named--well, Marcus. 

Orange City is named for a storied Dutch hero of mythic proportions. 

Mr. Blair had a thing about names. When Aurelia was incorporated (it was platted as early as 1883), the king of northwest Iowa railroads simply slapped down the name of one of his daughters.

Cherokee, Iowa, had only a bit less pragmatic birth. A half-dozen families from Massachusetts bought up land for purposes of trying life out west. If those original families shared a religious heritage, history doesn't mention it.

I've spent a month now "south of 10," in a convalescent home in Marcus, Iowa, cared for lovingly by a bevy of nurses, CNAs, and others who don't call Orange City home. They're a terrific bunch I'd commend to anyone, but many of them don't know the Dutch, except for this Tulip thing of theirs and the sheer awe they exhibit in the presence of high school volleyball giants.

They're the children of Americans, all of them, and daily they do my dirty work--they sweep my legs into bed and out, they  undress me, change my underwear, wipe my butt, and move me, when asked, from chair to toilet and back. 

They have tougher stories than I'm used to and a bunch more tattoos. They seem to have more dogs than marriages, although that might be disputed. Many work part-time, then double up at other old folks' homes. They're not rich. They're just plain dang good at what they do. 

Don't mention this north of 10, but I believe I've fallen in love with a dozen of 'em--"Americans."

Where to listen

 

She’d told me about the school she’d attended as a little girl, almost ninety years before. She spoke of the humiliation of losing, so quickly, her free-flowing long hair, felt the absurd foreignness of having to speak a language she didn’t understand. All of that in a big reservation school, the school at the agency, the school her parents insisted she attend. She held very few memories from that place that were a joy, but she remembered how her father would come to visit almost weekly.

She was a child there. She was being shaped into adulthood.

Years later, after nurses’ training in Rapid City, she’d returned to the Agency hospital, same town, the hospital where she worked on the same reservation where she was born and reared. First school, first job—home, in a way, even though she lived a half day’s ride away. She wanted to show me all of that, wanted me to see what I could of her childhood really, and, at the same time, history of her people.

Sometime previous I’d asked her to take me to her precious places, those places where significant things had happened in her life, the really important things. I wanted to see those places with her. It was a joy for her to remember and for me to watch and feel her explain.

First stop was a cemetery, where we hunted down her grandfather’s grave. She knew where it was but hadn’t stood there before. Then we drove on, all the way to a long crooked finger of land so high above the river it didn’t go under when the Army Corps of Engineer’s finished the Big Bend Dam, far down river. It was the far eastern bit of reservation just off Hwy 212. A little park just off the road is hardly elegant, but the great blue lake the river formed is gorgeous, so elegant against rough-hewn reservation boundaries that it looks like Disney.

“There,” she pointed straight into the water. “All of that life, so much of my history, our history is lost forever beneath the water.”

Who in South Dakota could stand against the dams 75 years ago when they were built? Who didn’t rejoice with the kid waterskiing directly over the old Agency on that perfect summer day? What on earth is not to like about Lewis and Clark Lake?

That moment returned to me last week when Wright Thompson says a similar thing in  his new book, The Barn: A Study of a Mississippi Murder. Floods explode down, into, and through the Mississippi Delta area, he says, and have for more than a century. Flooding has destroyed whole river towns. swallowed them up beneath rampaging water and mud that swamp alleyways and streets and bury businesses and churches. In some locales, Thompson says, locals swear “they can hear church bells ringing when the currents move right.”

It's a beautiful image, isn’t it?—the sense that when the currents are just right you can hear church bells from churches long buried in the deep?

I’d like to believe that because that reservation memory came back to me in a torrent when I read it in Thompson’s book, at least something of what my Native friend was trying to teach me got home. 

I know lots of empty places where I swear I can still hear distant church bells.

Sunday Evening Meds--from Psalm 4

“Let the light of your face shine upon us, Lord”

 Like all of us, Moses’s brother Aaron stumbled through a life far less than perfect. Because he conceded to the Israelite mob that demanded an idol to worship, Aaron was almost single-handedly responsible for his brother’s wrathful smashing of the God-inscribed stone tablets, not to mention God’s wrath on his own chosen people.  No one ever mentions Aaron in a roll call of the saints.

 Yet, Aaron’s words ring throughout millions of church fellowships around the world every week.  The Lord told Moses (see Numbers 6) to have Aaron bless the Israelites with words that you can still hear almost any place two or three are gathered to worship God: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. . .”

 If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a million times.  King David likely did too.

 And maybe that’s why the line itself has lost its visual character; simply said, I’ve heard it so often. Just for a moment, it’s helpful, I think, to create the picture this famous benediction offers. Penitents, millions of them through the ages, are on their knees (it’s almost impossible not to see them in some kind of supine position physically) and in some kind of darkness, waiting for a brightening glance of Godliness, just a glance.

 Now delete millions of those people from that image and picture just one penitent. Put yourself there, on your knees, eyes slightly arched but staring downward in helplessness, a nervous shakiness in hands and arms and legs in anticipation of a passing glance, and repeat: “Let the light of your face shine upon me, Lord.”

 I dare say that the only people who can effortlessly create that image of themselves are those who, for whatever horrifying reason, have spent time themselves in that position.  Those who, like me, have never suffered significant bouts of abandonment or grief or despair have trouble creating an image of so great a helplessness. After all, I might say, I’ve got fairly substantial bootstraps to prove my internal strength. What I’ve done, I’ve done on my own.

 It seems so medieval almost, doesn’t it?—the image behind the blessing; so, well, Islamic:  hoards of people, face to the floor, hoping for a fleeting glance from the King of Creation.  Good capitalists create their own fates, after all; we seal our own successes with the sheer tonnage of our personal industry.  We make our fate.

 But the line we repeat so often—and hear repeated as a blessing to us—offers a wholly different portrait.  There isn’t a dime’s worth of self-sufficiency in David’s abject request here: “Just a glance, Lord.”

Embedded in the old line is something of the sun, of course—God Almighty as iridescent force whose rays bless abundantly. And what David wants, as has each and every one of us who’ve been in that abjectly needy, is but a glance of divine favor, a glimpse of light in the darkness. We’re not even asking to meet God’s eyes; the line begs for something to take away those heavy shadows, just a glance.

 It’s so medieval, so lords and serfs, country manors fortified cathedrals. It’s so impotent, so paralyzed, so defenseless. It’s so blasted un-American.

 And yet I know—I really do—that such helplessness is what He wants. “The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. . .”