For Ken Venhuizen (2)

For Ken Venhuizen, 1938-2024

(continued from yesterday)

How did they manage so many friends? I mean, if they spent ten years in Sioux Center, I’d be surprised. You might think the price of coming and going as regularly as they did would generate rootlessness, no place allowing time enough for relationships to mature.

Not so. Every person in this sanctuary knows that wasn’t true of Ken or Betty.

What’s worse, Ken was wild as a colt even when it was time time to be put out to pasture. He must have tired some time, but not in my presence. His fuse was ever lit, his outsize energy was a constant rumble. Even late at night he sat at our table with his juice cooking. One can only wonder what the Creator of Heaven and Earth does, as we speak, to keep him occupied.

Way back when, a young chiropractor came to town, a man named Hagen, a mover and a shaker who built a pretentious place on a hidden lane just off a busy Sioux Center street. Locals furrowed an eyebrow, but Ken heard the guy knew how to swat a tennis ball, and became, thereby, one of the best friends Dr. Hagen had in town.

Now me? Once upon a time he got me on a tennis court. I thought of myself as a fair-to-middlin’ athlete back then. Besides, tennis didn’t look so formidable. Get yourself a big paddle and swing away. We played, sort of. When we quit that afternoon, why he never pulled out a racquet again was embarrassingly obvious.

Our David must have been in first or second grade when Ken and I took our kids to Oak Grove, where, in a path, a rock was that spring rumbling slowly up toward the surface. Quite carefully, Ken worked the dirt from around the stone—lots of scratchy digging.

I’m happy to say that the Siouxland quartzite is still with us. It made it through the flood, so it’s not as shiny as it was once, but not as muddy either. It’s the stone that Ken dug up from the dust of a path through the prairie and just for little David.

These are just a few of our memories of your dad, Kim and Jim and Kam. I hope we didn’t take him away from you too often. That he loved you doesn’t need to be said, really. But what’s amazing to me is how many of the rest of us he loved too. It’s so good to be here today and be together, because your parents’ capacious hearts should be remembered.

“My friends are my estate,” Emily Dickenson once wrote, and we feel that. “My friends are my estate.”

We are where Ken and Betty lived, and for that we’re all very thankful.

For Ken Venhuizen

 

Old friend Ken Venhuizen died on Christmas, December 25, 2024. A commemoration of his life was held at Westkirk Presbyterian Church, Des Moines yesterday, Saturday, April 26, 2025.

I'm told that Ken wanted me to speak at his commemoration, and I did. What follows, both this morning and tomorrow morning, is what I said about him, about he and Betty, his wife, and about friendship.

 

For Ken Venhuizen

Ken made tennis friends wherever he lived. As the decades passed, he kept winning tournaments in South Dakota, just moving up in flights until he had to be the only one capable of a decent volley. Had you asked him what moved him more, theology or tennis, he would have said theology—but I’m glad I never asked.

I’m happy and proud to say the Schaaps and the Venhuizens were fast friends from the summer of the American Bicentennial, 1976, when Ken and Betty and kids came back to North America from Korea, both of them still raving about the heat of something called kimchi. Ken was about to embark on a new teaching position in a department the Dordt’s administration wanted him to develop, not just sociology but social work, where he spent all his working life. I don’t know if Ken’s picture is up on the wall in the department, but it should be.

The Schaaps caught a break with the Venhuizens because of a blood connection between Betty and Barb. To my wife, the blond nurse who married a Grand Rapids-ite was “Betty of Uncle Oscar.” I won’t try to twist out how it works exactly, but the truth is, a friendship between the Venhuizens and the Schaaps in our mutual first weeks in Sioux Center, Iowa, got off to a roaring start by familial Dutch bingo.

Never once brought it up, but Ken and I were relatives of sorts too. A little surface scratching reveals that our esteemed grandfathers (Profs Gerrit Hemkes and Samuel Volbeda ) spent one year together at Calvin Preparatory School—1915 was my great-grandpa’s last; his grandpa’s first. All of which accounts for my being up here and not any of literally hundreds of other friends of Ken and Betty. It seems that one of their most wonderful characteristics is the ability to open their homes as easily as their hearts. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people have become friends of Ken and Betty.

And the Venhuizens did not stand still—ever. Look around you. Take a minute to reach out a hand to each other and introduce yourself by place of residence—where you came to know Ken Venhuizen—this church sanctuary is an Atlas all its own.

Grand Rapids, Sioux Center, Sioux Falls, Corpus Christi, Malawi, the Gulf Coast, Des Moines—always, always friends. There are hundreds, even thousands, who might well say that, if the greatest gift of life is friendship, we’ve received it. 

Sunday Evening Meds from Psalm 42

“Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; . . .”

 I first heard the line years ago from my wife’s grandmother, who I knew only for a few years as a rather elegant woman with a radiant crown of silver hair.  I don’t remember the occasion, but I’ll never forget the comment because it seemed so out of character for a fine old Christian matriarch.  “When bad things happen,” she said, eyes almost averted, her head shaking slightly, “they always come in threes.”

 I had no clue where she got that idea, nor why she believed it.  Grandma Visser, whose people were hearty Calvinists for generations, could not have pointed anywhere in scripture for that idea, as she well could have for most of her foundational beliefs.  But this ancient bit of folklore—does it have pagan roots?—never fully left her mind and heart, even though she probably read the Word of God every day of her life.  “Bad things happen in threes.”  She wasn’t—isn’t—the only one to say it or believe it.  Google it sometime.

 Can it be true?  I don’t know that anyone could do the research.  But it must have seemed a valid perception for generations of human beings caught in the kind of downward spiral that David must have been in when writing Psalm 42.  And, as we all must sadly admit, often as not perception creates its own realities.

 Is it silly?  Sure.  If we expect it to be true, we may be silly.  But the sheer age of that odd idea argues for some ageless relevance.  Whether or not it’s true isn’t as important perhaps as the fact its sentiment has offered comfort and strength to human sorrowers. 

 True believers expect something more than they’ve already gone through, some additional misery if they have already been stung twice.  By repeating the old line, Grandma was steeling herself for the next sadness, anticipating that three would mean the end of sorrows, at least for a while.

 My guess is that ancient folk wisdom finds a place in the human psyche not because it’s true, but because it’s comforting:  it brings order to chaos. Sad to say, there are three a’comin’, but at least that’s it.

Interesting, I think, that Eugene Peterson uses the word chaos in his version of this verse:  “chaos calls to chaos,” he says.  And he’s just as right as anyone, I suppose, for it’s impossible to claim biblical inerrancy when it comes to a verse like this. The KJV says “waterspouts” where the NIV says “waterfalls,” wholly different phenomena. The fact is, nobody really knows what specifically is meant by “deep calls to deep.”

And yet everyone who’s faced a march of consecutive sadnesses knows very well.  “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions,” Shakespeare says in Hamlet, an even more depressing assessment than Grandma’s.

We really don’t know what David means here, but many readers of Psalm 42 somehow get it. Our lives on occasion feel like Thomas Hardy novels, when things simply seem to get worse and worse and worse, and don’t get better.

 There are no vivid pictures embedded in the line “deep calls to deep,” but that doesn’t mean there isn’t meaning enough for most of us to find ourselves therein.

We can’t avoid the painful reality of the soul that’s sliced opened to us in Psalm 42:  the singer who believes in the Light but sees nothing but darkness around him.

 And maybe, thankfully, what’s there is the outline of a third bad thing.

Small Wonders--the Guernsey Tracks

They're sweet these days, as long as they stay in their banks. When and if they flood, they're a pain. Most do flood come spring, unless they're damned up somewhere and disciplined into behaving. Outside of a now-and-then outpouring, they're a darling feature of our landscapes, home to ducks and geese, and life for deer and coons and a whole gallery of wildlife living nearby. But, that's it.

Their placid nature makes it easy to forget that rivers--like this one, the Laramie in southeast Wyoming--were once upon a time our interstate highways. If you were traveling a great distance, say, across the country, you never left a river valley because the livestock, not to mention the wife and kids, couldn't go without what rivers had in abundance, water.

Today, come summer, some residents of Guernsey, Wyoming, get out old tubes and ride the Laramie, I'm guessing, although right now you'd suffer. In the fall, maybe kids shoot ducks out here--or try. Snowmobiles likely find the Laramie a fun winter highway. Cattlemen may well grab what they can of the Laramie for center-point irrigation, but mostly, like this old bridge--constructed in 1875-- the Laramie's real life is, as they say, pretty much o'er.

Forty years before the bridge, hundreds of thousands of emigrants left their tracks here literally, on the Oregon Trail. The Guernsey Tracks are like none other, trust me. They predate the Civil War. They're worn into the soft sandstone because those hundreds of thousands of people knew well that you couldn't be haphazard about time or place if you were going to make it all the way west. You needed to stay near water on a trail that would keep you from the most horrendous climbs through the Rockies. If you were going to Oregon or Utah or California, you stayed with the rivers and made tracks where others already had.

These tracks are there own kind of funnel. Everyone had pass to this way, what seemed to the Lakota an almost endless train of Conestoga wagons and Mormon handcarts, more white people than they'd ever seen or even imagined, extremely concerning. Taking a path anywhere north or south would have been a heckuva gamble. My guess is that everyone remembered this place; yet today, this place remembers everyone.

There are other spots where wheel ruts still tell the story, but if you're anywhere near Guernsey, Wyoming, you really should pass by. After all, 175 years ago--no foolin'--hundreds of thousands did.

As you can tell, in stone, 175 years later. 

Small Wonders -- Old Satch

 

Just a few days after his twelfth birthday, the kid got sent up to reform school because all too often things that were there a minute-or-so ago were gone once the door closed behind him, if you know what I mean. So this kid named Satchell Paige had a criminal record when he was eighteen years old, before he'd pitched at all; but here’s the thing: in reform school the good Lord blessed him with a coach and a teacher, Rev. Moses Davis, who that same good Lord conscripted to teach this kid named Satchell Paige to be a chucker.

Seriously, all he'd ever played before the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Law-Breakers--the honest-to-God name of the place--was a silly game with sticks and bottle caps. Preacher Davis taught him and the others baseball, even made a team of 'em, if you can believe it, got a grocery store to kick in fancy shirts.

That Reform School was in Mount Meggs, Alabama, the small town where Rev. Moses Davis taught his very special student everything he knew about pitching. "I traded five years of freedom to learn how to pitch," Satchell Paige used to say. "I started my real learning on the Mount."

Trust me, this guy was not to be believed. When he was touring with an all-black cast of fielders behind him, there were times Paige smiled, told 'em all to sit down and take life easy while he turned batters into window fans. Once in a while he'd bet locals he'd strike out the first nine hitters, then proceed to do just that and walk away, cash in hand.

The stories are endless. On April 29 he struck out 17 Cuban Stars; six days later, eighteen Nashville Elite Giants. Things were loosie-goosy back then in the Negro leagues; rival ball teams would come knocking to rent out Satchel Paige and his blind-man fast ball because fans would move the turnstiles just to see this chucker pitch.

His arm had nuclear power. Hack Wilson told reporters that Satchel Paige was so fast the ball looked like a pill when it got to the plate. Bob Feller, the famous Bob Feller, the Iowan, said Satchel Paige was so fast he made Feller's heralded fastball look like a change-up.

 On July 4, 1934, Satchel fanned Buck Leonard, who demanded the ump toss out the ball because he couldn’t believe what that ball did on the way to the plate. Paige hollered at him. “You may as well thrown ‘em all ‘cause they’re all gonna jump like that.” Right he was. Satchell Paige struck out 17 that game.

A scout from the Chattanooga White Sox of the Southern Negro Baseball League spotted him in 1926, when he was somewhere between 26 or 34, depending on when he’d say he was born. Fans knew Paige was a phenom a globetrotter--he played in Cuba, in Mexico, in the Dominican, and throughout the States, New York to LA.

 When he was 42 years old--best estimate at least--Satchel Paige signed his very first major league contract, so the Cleveland Indians put him on the field for two innings as the oldest rookie ever to lace up spikes the white major leagues. In the bigs, he pitched his last inning when he was 60 years old.

 On June 8, 1982, when he was 80 years old, give or take a few, Satchel Paige, died of a heart attack. He's buried in Kansas City, the city where, in 1920, the Negro Baseball League was charted, drawn up in an YMCA just up the block from 18th and Vine and the National Negro League Baseball Museum.

Drop in sometime and say hello to old Satch, his statue anyway. He's on the mound in a little ballpark in the middle of the museum, where he’s surrounded by guys like Josh Gibson, a burly catcher who once hit a ball out of Yankee Stadium with only one arm.

 There’s a lot of old Satch there—18^th and Vine, KC. You won’t believe what you see.

Easter message from the President

Just in case you missed it, here's Easter greetings from your President. . .

"Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country. Happy Easter also to the WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue, an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten! Sleepy Joe Biden purposefully allowed Millions of CRIMINALS to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked, through an Open Borders Policy that will go down in history as the single most calamitous act ever perpetrated upon America. He was, by far, our WORST and most Incompetent President, a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing -- But to him, and to the person that ran and manipulated the Auto Pen (perhaps our REAL President!), and to all of the people who CHEATED in the 2020 Presidential Election in order to get this highly destructive Moron Elected, I wish you, with great love, sincerity, and affection, a very Happy Easter!!!"  

That's the good words from Donald J.

Darrell Hatch, 1934-2024

Darrel Hatch died last week. He was 90 years old. I never knew it, but he was a farm boy, grew up just outside of Prescott, Arizona. I don't imagine a soul who's reading this has any idea just who a man named Darrel Hatch is. Or was.

Well, for one,  he was a teacher and dang good one, if you listened to kids, as I did, when the two of us taught long ago at Greenway High School. Often enough, as that brand new high school fought to discover what teaching was all about, the lines of argument would be steady, the school's only Dutch Calvinist, the Mormons (like Darrel), and a couple of dedicated Roman Catholics, against, well, the others.

I wasn't always comfortable about being allied with the LDS folk, but it was impossible not to see their rich grounding in Christ--well, okay, Brigham Young too. My Mormon students were, back then, among the brightest and most convivial of kids. They wanted me badly to read the book and join the clan.

Fascinatingly, the most dedicated of them are no longer  LDS.

But Darrell Hatch, math teacher extraordinaire, was deep and faithful Mormon, going on four missions all around the world, his obit says.  "After high school he attended BYU for two years and then came home to prepare for his church mission." 

I knew nothing of that. "During that summer, he met a cute young woman named Rinda. He served a 2 1/2 year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He served as a Spanish-speaking missionary in the Texas and New Mexico region."

2 1/2 years? Get that?

Sometimes I couldn't help but wonder if the missions the LDS expected of its own didn't build Mormon character as well.

I don't know. What I learned quickly at Greenway was that the world I'd spoken of at Dordt College was far, far bigger than I'd ever surmised. Darrell Hatch, the math guy, made that very clear, and he never taught me a dime's worth of freshman math. 

He was a fine, fine man.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 42

 

“My soul is downcast within me; 

therefore I will remember you from the land of the Jordan,

 the heights of Hermon—from Mount Mizar.”

 

 

For a decade at least, just about every Saturday morning I could, I ventured out west into the rolling hills that have formed, centuries ago, along the Big Sioux River, a place where the land opens broadly into a landscape that, like most of the Great Plains, ends only in what seems infinite space.  Literally, there is nothing there.  There’s corn and there’s beans and there’s some grasslands, but nothing is substantially present to fill the frame of a camera lens; and that’s why it’s such a challenge to try. I do what I can to get an angle on a subject that offers very little. We live in fly-over country here, but then I’m a fan or Thoreau: “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself,” he once claimed, “than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”

 

Some time ago, the New York Times ran a story about Californians leaving the state for the Midwest. When I sent the story to friends, the Times website told me that story was their most-emailed piece that day. Amazing. 

 

And in some ways, terrific. It would be nice for everyone here if some companies would relocate to the rural Midwest, where wages are dismal and, often, benefits are worse. We could use a financial shot in the arm.

 

But I’m not all that interested in a flood of new residents. I am blessed—I really am—by living in a place where open land is all around, just a farm or two per gravel road. These days, from my own backdoor I can see for miles. 

 

Some people in tall-grass prairie country lament the death of hunting, pheasant hunting specifically. The number of hunters is down, even though the headcount of pheasants, by my estimation, is up--at least I see more out here. Just scared up a half-dozen hens out back yesterday.

 

I’ve always thought Thoreau wasn’t wrong when he claimed that boys (his word) really ought to hunt when they’re young but give it up on becoming men, and that’s why I don’t lament the loss of hunters. But I’ve been one, and I still sometimes long to get out there in the silence. Just the same, I wanted to write a letter to the reporter suggesting that we’d all be better off—even the pheasants—if we all packed cameras instead of 12-gauge pumps.

 

Some Saturdays—lots of them this time of year--the sky, at dawn, is thick with clouds, so thick that I don’t bother going out. When I made a habit of it, cloudy Saturday mornings hurt because I came to need my Saturday morning’s hour-long pilgrimage into open spaces.  Kathleen Norris, in Dakota, makes clear what others have said—that sometimes where there’s nothing, there’s really something.

And I say all of this because in the second bout of sadness which David discusses in this psalm—and it’s interesting that 42 doesn’t end with verse six—he is a bit more specific in the means by which he’ll fight the blues. He’ll return—thoughtfully if not physically—to the open land, to the “heights of Hermon.” He’ll go back to the open spaces as an antidote to his weary, downcast soul, because there he can remember God.

 

Just the heights of Hermon---the mere memory of standing there all alone, David says, gives life to a weary soul. 

 

I think I know that one.

Holy week surprise

Big Sioux River dawn

I wasn't purposely thinking about the Lord as I came to the intersection, and I can't begin to imagine what brought the whole story to mind, save that it's Easter Week or Holy Week or whatever, and it's in the air right now--the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I was right there at Mulder's used car lot when suddenly two things struck me almost simultaneously. First, how entirely broken--in every way--those disciples must have been to see Him suffer and die. Just a week before he'd come into town on a donkey and the whole world sang his praises. They'd seen boatloads of fish in their nets after he'd just suggested, as if it might be something to consider, that they toss those nets over the other side. They'd seen a sandwich or two turn into a cafeteria. They'd seen a whole herd of pigs commit mass suicide when a wild man walked away piping David's songs.

They'd seen it all, and who could fault them for falling asleep, doggone it. You ever stay up all night?--or try, especially when you were trying to follow him, old "miracle-a-minute." Pray with him, sure. If he was what he said he was, why didn't he simply put all their batteries on the same hot circuit?

They didn't see the inside stuff, whatever happened to him when those turkey buzzards and their pompous honcho boss interrogated him. But--damnit!--they saw the crown of thorns, watched as the beat-up Lord of Heaven and Earth tried to drag that cross down Main, for pity sake. That's when most of them left, went back to hide really, went back to hide their misguided complicity. Mostly, it was the women who stayed, and John, but the rest of them high-tailed it, not because they were afraid--okay, that might have been partly the motivation, but because they couldn't stand the watch the humiliation of their messiah, their King. It made them sick, really--it made them sick to their stomachs to think of where this whole exercise had been through--it made them heave. 

So I'm driving by the college now, waiting for kids to cross the street, and I'm sick myself to think of how beat-up that crew must have been by Friday late afternoon, how beat to shit they must have been, all those months on the Jesus trail, all those crowds, all that lame guys dancing--good night!  how about the dead raised to life? And it's over. It's over. It's over.

Because whatever they believed about him--how he might strangle those damned Romans and lead his people out of bondage once again, whatever it was they believed about him--all this King of the World stuff or not, by Friday night, the guy who made them give up their fishing nets to follow him, was one dead dude. 

Nails even. They didn't want to think about it.

There they were, cowering in a corner, their hearts--once so full of promise--broken, really broken. 

I don't know why, all of that just came to me. 

Honestly, if I were among 'em--those disciples--I'd have been just plain broken too. Just remember: none of them got it right. No, not one.

 Way up there at the top of the page, I said two things struck me at the highway corner--first, how absolutely broken the disciples must have been,  as if someone dropped a box of bottles. Broken glass, broken dreams. A number of them couldn't even look up on the hill where they put him on the cross. What they'd lived for was a bloody mess. Really, why didn't listen to those mockers? Why didn't he command a legion of angels to come down and slay 'em all?

It would have slayed me.

But I couldn't help thinking of yet another Easter scene.

There they are in a kind eternal self-pity for what they'd believed, for having lost something--somebody!--so rich, beyond their wildest dreams--"think of all those fish!"--only to end in this obscene, inglorious way.

It's quiet because there ain't a word left to say and everybody knows it. There they are huddled, bawling.

And then, turn the volume up, who should walk in the door but the Master, upper-case. The Master.

That's what I was thinking as I left town.

I'm not a particularly religious man, but the images were so sharp and so unprompted, so deep this Easter week.

My new All-Terrain

No,  it's not a Cadillac. It's more like a really expensive--almost top-of-the-line--Jeep, a Grand Cherokee with none of the extras. They call it, in fact, an all-terrain vehicle, honestly, because it's supposedly able to drive through gravel and grass, through all sorts of things where ordinary vehicles dare not enter.

I tried it once. I haven't been in the basement of our country place since the flood, after my son pointer-fingered-ly made it clear I wasn't to chance the stairs anymore. He'd seen enough of my indisposed carriage. I made it around back with my new buggy. Couldn't have done it with the old cheapy.

For more than a year, when I wasn't wheelchair-bound, I used a lightweight walker with little wheels out front and tiny water skis on back. Worked well for accessibility, but it lacked more than a little for convenience. This new vehicle has its own knapsack, including a pocket for my phone. It rides like its on a cloud, and has but one impediment for new drivers--like a bad dog, it'll take off on you if you're not careful. It's easy to take along, but it's not a compact car. It'll eat up a goodly chunk of what you have behind the front seat.

Seriously, whoever sells these things calls it an "All-Terrain" vehicle--look it up if you don't believe me. Why right now all our neighboring seniors are at coffee, telling each other that they saw that new guy from #37 cruising the neighborhood in an All-Terrain vehicle, and they'd be right in going upper case.

I like it. I don't love it because I'd love nothing better than to get rid of it and walk away on my own. But it's a cruiser and a long shot better than the old buzzard with miniature water skis on its back legs.

It's made in China, so I can't help wondering whether the people who put it together over there are getting a break on you-kn0w-who's brilliant tariffs. Apple does, I know, and my guess is if you take another look at the inauguration party in DC for the coronation in January, you'd find a few other billionaires whose roots are set with favored terrif status--for 90 days anyway.

But then, don't  hold your breath. Who knows where our fearless leader will go next?

I didn't see the list of supplicants he's blessed with grace. But I'm betting against the All-Terrain folks. Acts of mercy are not in our Pres's arsenal.

Get yours fast.

In Praise of where we used to live (10)

We're gone now, still moving in to a duplex, senior  housing, in Sioux Center. What's being reported on the western sky I'd have to drive a ways out into the country to see. We used to live where the skies spoke so often we couldn't even listen. But often what the sky said was silent and gorgeous.

 

To be truthful about it, this last one is a really early photograph, the one at the end, I took maybe 10-or 12 miles west of Sioux Center, on Easter morning, 2004, 21 years ago. It's not the hottest shot I ever took, but the sun's streaming that dawn was just about as gorgeous a thing as I'd ever seen then, or even today, almost 20 years later.

It's a perfect picture for Easter.

I've enjoyed putting these pictures up. Maybe I'll do it some more. . .

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 42

“Why are you downcast, O my soul? 

Why so disturbed within me? 

Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, 

my Savior and my God.”

 

One night late, years ago, a preacher friend of mine, over a few beers, began talking about what he went through when his wife left him, years before, an event that’s not supposed to happen, and certainly not supposed to happen to preachers. He didn’t blame her; he knew he’d had a hand in what happened himself, preacher or not.

 At that late hour, with a bit of lubrication, I stayed with him when it appeared he wanted to talk. I sound as if I was using him, and maybe I was in a way; but what interested me was his use of a phrase I’d heard before: “It took me a long time to process that,” he kept saying. “I didn’t have the tools at first to process what had happened.”

 I’ll admit I thought it was psychobabble, a cliché, an entirely strange word drawn from what we do to legislation or cheese or army recruits. But the emotion he carried as he told me the story made me wonder what that pat expression meant in the context of his adultery. I wanted process unpacked.

 By “process,” he said, he meant becoming able to look at the wound and not cry or rage. Process, he said, meant stepping back from the immediacy of the emotions, a step that wasn’t at all easy--and it took time, he said.  And it took work.  Like forgiveness.

 It seems to me that in verse five of Psalm 42, David (if he’s the writer) appears to have processed something. The unforgettable opening verses of the psalm emerge from the core of his grief; but verse five steps back from the sadness that threatens him and he begins talking to himself.  “For heaven’s sake,” he says, “what’s with me anyway? Why am I so incredibly depressed?”

 Then he pulls out an old bromide and tells himself what he’d obviously known for years and even sung in a whole psalter of his own ballads, something the curtains of his despair had seemingly covered: “Put your hope in God,” he tells himself, processing his sadness. 

 And then the resolution. Picture him, gritting his teeth, almost a snarl, pulling intent and dedication out of truth he knew, inside out:  “. . .for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”

 I may be wrong. Maybe there’s a gap in this psalm. Maybe, like the preacher without a wife, it took him some time to process the emptiness in his life. 

 Wouldn’t it be wonderful to consult some standard King David biography and discover that this song was finished months after it was started, that he’s simply telling the story? 

But we don’t know that, and no one ever will. All we’re left with the psalm. And in this verse—or so it seems to me—David seems to bottom out, to take hold of the promises of God he’s relied on throughout his life, at a myriad of other moments when he stood in dire need of being rescued. “Put your hope in God,” he says, in command form.

 In this verse, the story the poem tells is at its climax because the writer has stepped back to tell himself, to shout, in fact, the truth into his own ears, and now ours. “I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God” [emphasis mine, but I think his too].

 Sounds like a preacher friend of mine, talking to me over a beer years ago.

 Sounds like Job.  Sounds like a lot of us.   

In praise of the place we called home (9)

 and then there are the little things. . .

\

Hoot no more

Hear the news? Hooters went belly up. (Something about that lede seems way too physical. I didn't mean to be offensive.)

Apparently, the promise of women proud of their up-fronts wasn't enough to score customers who went down the street for their hot wings, where the scenery might not be as billowing, but the food was better.

I remember when Hooters first appeared. Made the Calvinists gasp, me included. (Read the next line with a husky anger!) "Shameless--absolutely shameless!" 

That was 41 years ago. News stories, like most things, get, well, droopy. Still, even though chicken strips couldn't compete, you might have thought, like I did, that their unique calling as an eatery would keep men especially hard and fast customers. Nope. Things tailed off.

So today, they're flat finished. Once upon a time, when I was a good deal more Puritanical, it was nigh unto impossible for me to imagine being in a place where some young thing asking me what I'd like to drink when all she's got over her hooters is a shirt proclaiming the, well, . .breasts. But they did,

Once long, long ago, my parents found themselves in some kind of place--maybe a Hooters. Maybe not. My mother's story featured a waitress with barely any shelter over her, . . well, hooters. It's hard to imagine what--good night!--they were doing there, but Mom swore (no, she never swore) she claimed it was the truth: the waitress had almost nothing on!!!

That wasn't the point. The point was to bathe her husband in derision by telling us that Dad, completely undaunted, acted as  if was nothing at all that that waitress leaned into him, the customer, and just about smooched his cheek with one of her ample blessings.

"And he just sat there and said 'Diet Coke,' or whatever," she told us. Poor Dad.  "You should have seen him look, as if all that bosom was no big deal."

Anyway, 41 years are gone, and I'm a little wistful, this Calvinist never having darkened a Hooters doorstep, never ogled one of those hooters. I'll never get a chance to order a Diet Coke. Is Pepsi okay?

Well, I can still dream. And if I get depressed, I can go to the fridge and fetch a couple of Ruthies. They're solid.

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 of us who haven't known 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.  Think of 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 believe

In praise of a place we called home

Benny died of old age here and is buried out back. Hope he doesn't think we deserted him. 

Smokey came out here after Benny's death, a blue russian (lower case). Just exactly what he will think of his new digs we're yet to discover.

 

Round-tripper

The idea is to get to the other side of the garage. Since I sold my truck, the middle stall stays open. I'd parked the car, slid myself out, and used the car itself for ballast as I moved around it towards the ramp that runs up to the door. But there I stood, between me and the other side maybe ten feet or twelve. 

I had the option of going back into the back seat of the car to fetch my walker, but I'd just about had enough of that thing. People are surprised and happy about me and my walker, but I stagger around like a drunk with it, especially when I pull my bod around the car to get to wherever it is I want to go.

Sometimes I wonder--I swear it--whether some cop on a slow day might see me creeping around and just assume that I spent too long holding on to a bar stool somewhere, but it's standard procedure if I'm to get out of the house, which, believe me, is highly desirable for anyone who, like me, has spent a goodly chunk of the last six months without, well mostly without, four walls.

So, as I said, the idea is to get to the other side of the garage. That's it. 

From the right  front fender to the ramp is maybe six feet--I can almost reach it, so I take one tentative step with my right foot and lean until I'm there with right hand. 

Big deal. the idea is to get to the other side of the garage.

There's a bunch of stuff in a bundle and some lawn tools hanging from the wall along with--wait for it!--a baseball bat. That's right, a baseball bat. Calling that beast a baseball bat is like calling me Hemingway. It's skinny, short, and may well be the only wooden bat in Sioux County, Iowa.

But it'll work, so I inch my way across a couple of boxes, and grab it from its place  on the wall, a sandlot bat that survived hundreds of ball games kiddy-corner from the house I grew up on the blacktop at First Reformed.

It's my bat. It's got my name on it because when I was ten maybe, I branded it with a magic marker. No, I haven't packed it along with me for all these years. For a long time, it was the possession of one of the kids who played ball with us out there at First Reformed. Maybe thirty years ago, he gave it back when we stopped at his place in Hastings, Nebraska, and, yes, it was a great, surprise gift.

I can only imagine his joy when he thought about his old buddy dropping by blind to a gift he couldn't give to just any human being. I was the only guy. So sometime during that visit, he gave it up, smiling with his own generosity, and it's been mine--again!--for the last thirty years.

So the old bat wasn't a perfect cane, a little short for me and lots heavier than the aluminum one I sometimes use. But I thought it wonderful. The thing got me no farther than the other side of the garage, but that's all I needed.

Once more, these days the Schaaps are packing up, trying to throw things away. We got a helping hand from a big flood last spring that took out our first floor and lots of possessions. We haven't considered a total. It's too heartbreaking.

And I'm left with a ton of things that'll have to go now, as we move to a smaller place, an abode for the elderly. 

Among the memorabilia, an ancient wooden bat, dressed up to make it look like a Louisville Slugger.

That's what I wrote on it when I was a little shaver with visions of baseball grandeur, dreaming of getting to be a high school star. I played third base in high school, catcher in college, and never used that old bat. Even if I had wanted to, my old friend packed it along with him for all those years. Besides, it was the kind of thing made for First Reformed parking lot.

I wanted to get to across the garage because ever since I became a cripple, I've spent too much time in the house. I just wanted to sit down for a while before I went in. 

So there I sat, me and this ancient sandlot baseball bat, inscribed by a kid reaching for dreams. I ended up playing ball until I was 55. Loved it.

But it'll go now. It's hung around with nothing to do for years. Still, for a while I sat there enchanted with the dreams drawn out with black magic marker. It's a beautiful, wonderful blessing to hold and swing and dream again of lacing a fastball straight out over the pitchers head into far left center. 

Today, that old bat delivered a round tripper that led only to the other side of the garage. The old guy got me where I wanted to go. 

It's going to be left behind, but somehow I feel better knowing that on the Saturday before we move, that scrubby Louisville Slugger, signed by Jim Schaap, got me where I wanted to go.