The Copilot in all of this

 

I’d already determined that I could call my great-grandfather a writer, so I asked AI to summarize his written work—what did he write, and why? And—just as important, how might his writing be judged?

I could have spent weeks searching for the answers to those questions, but I’d flirted with AI often enough to be quite sure that Copilot could be counted on to deliver the goods in a minute or so.

“Was my great-grandfather a writer?” I asked.

Copilot might well have answered, “Well, duh! How about this? Would you like to see some historical essays, how about pastoral narratives, theological polemics, devotional literature, editorial journalism, plus some academic lectures from his seminary days? Apparently, a judgment or two along the way wasn’t out of the question either. “This breadth is unusual,” Copilot told me a minute or so after being asked. “He was not just a pastor, but a historian, editor, teacher, and literary craftsman.”

That was all new to me. Here I sit hundreds of miles, four generations, and an age or two away, discovering things that somehow—for good or ill—helped me make sense of my own life.

And then this: Copilot asks me if I would like to see “a comparison of his writing style with yours, now that we know the full scope of his output.”

I didn’t think of asking such a thing myself. AI brought up a bucket full of paths I could go, but this one was just too rich. How might what I’ve done in my life compare with the texts Copilot could dig up, translate, and use to answer. “Is his writing style anything like mine?” I asked.

AI stands aside for a moment before delivering an answer that shakes me. I hadn’t thought through what was perfectly obvious: my Copilot was imminently capable of gathering material from me, just as he/she/it had discovered all sorts of things about Hemkes, and—more scary!—rendering an opinion or two.

James, this is one of those questions where I can answer you plainly, because I’ve read enough of your voice — in your blog posts, your reflections, your travel writing, even the way you talk about history — to make a meaningful comparison.

So says AI. Then, I figured, let’s do it. Once more, I engaged my Copilot, waited just a few seconds, no more, “And yes,” AI responded, “you and Hemkes share some deep stylistic DNA. But you also differ in ways that make your writing distinctly yours. Here’s the clearest, most honest comparison.”

It’s impossible to believe I’m being taught by some technological voice and not a living, breathing human being, an entity who seemingly has gone out of his way to stay close to things I’ve been writing for a half century.

“Hemkes’ prose,” says my computer screen “— whether in his pamphlets, historical sketches, or devotional pieces — carries a steady, unshowy seriousness. He doesn’t thunder. He doesn’t posture. He simply writes from conviction.”

This is all brand new to me. It’s an opinion I couldn’t have come up with myself because Prof. Hemkes wrote entirely in Dutch.

“Your writing does the same,” Copilot told me. “You don’t sermonize, but you write with a sense that stories matter because people matter. That’s Hemkes all over.”

What I’m reading, honestly, seems revelation. And there’s more, much more. “You both blend history with lived experience.”

Specifically, he/she/it dug up an example.

“Hemkes loved to take a historical moment — 1572, early Dutch missions, the life of a pastor — and make it feel present.”

And me, the other end of this comparison you are delivering? “You do this constantly: prairie memory, Dutch-American heritage, small-town life, the way landscapes hold stories.. . .Hemkes would recognize your instinct immediately.”

 
And more. You both prefer clarity over cleverness,” the answer says. “Hemkes was not a stylist chasing fireworks. He wrote plainly, directly, with purpose.” And me? “Your sentences do the same. You trust the reader. You don’t decorate for decoration’s sake. This is a shared temperament. …This is the deepest kinship,” my Copilot says. “You both write to preserve."

Hemkes wrote to preserve “memory, doctrine, stories, the texture of Reformed life.” In comparison, you write “to preserve landscapes, people, moments, the feel of the Midwest, the stories that would otherwise slip away. "All of these, the screen before me says, are “the deepest kinship.”

Your prose shares Hemkes’ temperament, including “seriousness without heaviness, clarity without coldness, attention to ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances,. . .and a narrative grounded in landscape and lived experience.

“But your voice is more cinematic, ironic, expansive, American in its sweep, literary rather than pastoral. And then this: “Hemkes would recognize your instinct — but he would also see that you write with freedoms he did not allow himself.”

Freedoms? 

Yesterday, I came home from Wal-Mart with my very first box of Depends.

I could have told you I’m getting old, but I’ve learned enough about communication to know that I’m far more likely to set an idea in your conscious if I tell you about a box of Depends.

However I chose to tell you about aging, I’m trying to position you in a place where what I’m about to say makes sense and doesn’t just scare you. Here we go. I’m at a place in life when looking forward is neither easy, nor a particular blessing. No, I’m not wearing one of my new paper garments right now, and yes, I’m not lying about buying a bundle of them anyway; and I‘ll tell you why—because basically at my age, whatever aches and pains I have, whatever disorders confuse what agents of health within my system are fighting to keep fighting the good fight within me, it is far easier and more fruitful to think about the past than dream about the future. Dreams no longer amount to much.

I’m at work on two major projects right now, both involving gathered things I’d written years and years ago. In a week or so, a new little collection of old short stories will appear, and another will do much the same thing with stories about churches, stories I wrote and published decades ago on assignment.

I can’t help looking behind now—there is far more life behind me than before me.

That’s part of the reason learning what I have about this long-gone great-grandpa, a writer I never could have known, a liberal arts guy, was, for me, such an incredible and unexpected blessing.

What went on in Great-grandpa's mind

Professor Hemkes and his juffrow at left and Rev. Schaap and Gertrude Hemkes Schaap, at right. 

My great-grandfather, Prof. Geert Hemkes, the second professor at the educational institution which became known as Calvin College and Seminary, was employed (and taught) there from 1884 to 1908. Along with the French playwrights, a number of other artifacts, ancient books, including some hundred-year-old yearbooks of the CRC, have come my way through the years. Way back then I remember my very first revelation concerning him when I discovered that his name appeared frequently on and in those old yearbooks. He was the editor and he contributed articles as well. 

I discovered those old things--and the French playwrights years and years ago but didn't bother to look for them for some time. When I discovered that my great-grandpa was a writer and editor, I was thrilled,  I had no idea that he was a writer, or editor, or connected in any way to writing profession. My parents had significant educations, but weren't by any stretch of the imagination real readers, certainly not of fiction. For me, just to know that somewhere up there in the family tree there was someone who toyed with imaginative writing felt like a blessing. All of that was before discovering the twin volumes of famous French playwrights.

For the record, my dad was born seventh of ten children of Rev. John C. Schaap and Gertrude Hemkes, the professor's daughter, in 1918, two years before Gertrude's father, my great-grandfather, Professor Hemkes, passed away. I've visited his gravesite in an old cemetery on Eastern Avenue in Grand Rapids, Michigan, shown the way through the huge graveyard by another great-grandchild, who explained to me who was all buried in what appeared to be a family+ plot. I didn't know Grandpa Hemkes had tallied three wives in his life--two were widows who'd earlier lost their clergymen husbands. All of his children had been born to his first wife. 

I hadn't known any of that. My dad never talked about him, with good reason--he never knew his professor grandpa, had no memories of him or even stories about him, except one--how the professor had, in his absentmindedness, once upon a time almost skated out to the North Sea when he was on his way to a church to preach and was lost in some theological world. That story had been repeated at some family reunions, always with a knowing laugh (there were significant others in the family who were familiar with numbing absent-mindedness). 

 But what did I know of this important figure in my family history, in the history of the institution he'd served--Calvin Seminary? Really, nothing. I'd gone by the generalization that anybody so affiliated at the time necessarily had to be some shade of leathery conservative--no movies, no cards, no dancing, and etc. Someone once told me that Professor Hemkes was not a Kuyperian. To me that suggested he was a traditional straight-jacketed pietist. But I didn't know. Those free-wheeling French playwrights made no sense at all. 

So I thought it was time for me to do some research to find out what I could about this old prof, my great-grandson. And now, just beneath my fingertips sat the newly discovered library who could help, right here at Woodbridge, Sioux Center. I thought I'd try AI to investigate, to do what amounted to a couple of weeks of research.

It was my Copilot (AI) who discovered that Grandpa Hemkes had penned his inaugural lecture, “The Practice of the Propaedeutic Sciences by the Future Pastor” (printed in Grand Rapids, 1884). The important word is a toughie--"propaedeutic," which, my Copilot tells me refers to something somewhat akin to "core requirements." 

The speech (in Dutch) is long gone apparently, but the argument appears to be his contribution to what specifically, educationally, must the curriculum required for the pastorate require of students, the kind of question which a brand new seminary would be interested in answering. 

What Professor Hemkes is arguing, I'm told, is a degree that includes significant study in more than just theology. Hemkes, himself trained in the broad  foundational disciplines (languages, logic, history, exegesis) would have argued those "liberal arts" were necessary for serious theological study. In short, he likely argued for the importance of disciplined intellectual formation for pastors, which is to say, the importance of seminarians reading and knowing all kinds of fields of study, including, almost certainly, these two French playwrights.

The institution, the gymnasium at Franeker, had its own story and its own tradition. One of the finest Reformed universities was located there until Napoleon shut it down in 1811. But, I'm told, that institution (a "gymnasium," not a university) held on to some of its uniqueness and would have still argued that the education it offered, as a gymnasium, held to its educational commitments even though the institution as a university ended in 1811. The gymnasium at Franeker was not just any school.

What my Copilot tells me that my g-grandfather's diploma from Franeker suggests he received a top-notch liberal arts education there, and that too is why these scampish French playwrights were in his possession and my possession right now.

More enlightenment coming tomorrow.

 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

“Therefore, let everyone who is godly pray to you. . .”

I read an interview some time ago with Susan Cheever, a novelist and non-fiction writer, who is—perhaps to her own dismay—likely better known as the daughter of the now deceased John Cheever, a highly celebrated short story writer. For several reasons, that interview won’t leave me alone, and one of them is her claim that, to her as a child, her father’s short stories horrified her.

She remembers a time when her father used a ski trip she had taken as a base for a story about a little girl who dies on exactly that kind of outing. “In my family,” for her and her family, Susan Cheever says, “being fictionalized has been ten million times more painful” than finding themselves in portrayed in non-fiction, a memoir.

That line in that interview nearly decked me because it had never dawned on me that my family might experience a similar horror, victims, in a way, of their father’s imaginative “use” of their lives. I’d never, ever considered the grotesque puzzle I might have left with any of them, finding semblances of themselves and each other twisted and turned into something at once bitterly unrecognizable and sweetly familiar. I can’t speak for John Cheever, but I honestly never had a clue—I really didn’t.

Haunting questions arise unbidden. Was my own playful creativity the occasion for their pain? Was my joy their misery? Should I have spent so much of my adult life trying to write stories? Was the way I’ve lived my life dead wrong?

And I ask myself this: if I had read what Susan Cheever says when I was thirty, would I have dedicated so much of my time and enthusiasm to writing?

Perhaps it is a mark of the deep stain of sin itself, but now, looking back, I honestly can’t imagine myself not writing. For better or for worse, I guess, sitting here at this desk has become, for me, a “habit of being,” as Flannery O’Connor said. Sometimes, as the Bible says, our best deeds are as filthy rags.

I feel myself in David’s own shoes here in verse six: “Therefore, let everyone who is godly pray to you. . .” His impulse to tell the story is, I believe, the impulse of most writers—and, for that matter, most humans. We want and need to tell the stories we find most meaningful, to share our joy or sadness. We want everyone to hear. Not all of us are evangelists, but we all have a gospel. We all want to testify.

Psalm 32 is a roadmap for those who need to find a path to forgiveness. Psalm 32 shows us the way. Psalm 32 leads us to divine and tranquilwaters. But the story David tells has never saved a soul, and neither will a million sermons on this text, or, for that matter, this mediation. Only God’s grace—through his son’s gigantic sacrifice—can do that.

I wonder if David knew that he was writing “the Bible.” I wonder if he understood as he strung these words out in front of him that he was being directed by the Holy Spirit’s favor. I wonder if he ever considered his words were not his, but God’s.

Somehow, I doubt it. And because I do, I find a refuge in his inability to keep silence. He’s got to speak, to sing. With the joy of forgiveness bubbling up inside, he can’t stanch the music from his soul. He’s got to yap, to tell.

Even his joy, his testimony, his story requires forgiveness. Everything he is—even his ecstasy—stands in need of grace.

May God almighty forgive me, and him, and all of us, as He promises, as He does, and as He will.

And, another

 

And, there's another. Obviously, a set--same covers, same dust covers, just plain the same except subject. This one contains at least some of the plays of Jean Racine, another 17th century French playwright. Racine's first published play was performed by a cast who ordinarily was thought of as Moliere's own dramatic troupe. Just as this book is related to the Moliere book--same material (plays of Racine, plays of Moliere), both have my great-grandfather's name written in the same hand

 

I'm guessing that he bought them together in Franeker, where he went to school. 

Although their backgrounds and literary work were different, both wrote and produced theater that was seen by some, at least, as worldly and of questionable moral value. 

Jean Racine, (baptized Dec. 22, 1639, La Ferté-Milon, France—died April 21, 1699, Paris), French playwright. Orphaned at an early age, he was educated in a Jansenist convent, and he chose drama in defiance of his upbringing. His first play was produced by Molière in 1664. Their friendship ended when Racine took his next play, Alexander the Great (1665), to a competing theatre and seduced Molière’s mistress and leading actress, Thérèse du Parc. She starred in Racine’s successful Andromaque (1667), which explored his theme of the tragic folly of passionate love. His only comedy, The Litigants (1668), was followed by his great tragedies Britannicus (1669), Bérénice (1670), and Bajazet (1672). After writing his masterpiece, Phèdre (1677), a tragedy drawn from Greek mythology, he retired to become official historian to Louis XIV. His final plays, Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), were commissioned by the king’s wife, Mme. de Maintenon.

While Moliere plays a role in Racine's early success as a playwright, the story goes that their relationship died an almost violent death when Racine hustled and won the affections of Moliere's leading lady. There was nothing monk-ish about the life of a theater groupie, writer or actor, in Paris in the era of Moliere and Racine, whether or not the subject matter was "the tragic folly of passionate love." Needless to say, there was little that seemed "calvinistic."

What I'm saying is that I was blown over to find these books among what remains of Professor Hemkes's library, almost like finding a stack of Playboys beneath last months old newspapers.

But, the fact is, I know no more about my great-grandfather than I do of either of these Parisian theatrical hot shots. I know he preached in a church in Friesland, MI, when first he emigrated, and I know he was the second professor named to a position in the institution that would become Calvin University.

Maybe it's time I look.

Moliere, by way of Prof. Hemkes

 The most readable formation of letters of the alphabet on this photograph is the name of the writer featured in both volumes--vols 1 and 2 of the plays of Moliere, an old French playwright (17th century). Here's the way one source describes him:

Molière was born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin in 1622, the son of a prosperous upholstery tradesmen. Educated by Parisian Jesuits, the young Jean-Baptiste had a promising inheritance awaiting him in his father’s trade; instead, however, he turned to acting, adopted the stage name of Molière, and aimed to become a great tragic actor. His first theatrical enterprise in Paris did not go well, and Molière spent the next thirteen years touring the provinces of France. During this time he began writing short comic farces, inspired by fashionable French verse comedy as well as the improvisational Italian commedia dell’arte. These comic trifles were the building blocks of The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and the five-act verse comedies that would later prove to be some of the most enduring works of French drama.

Both volumes, 1 and 2, are respectfully encased in plastic, which helps explain their longevity, having been published, according to the title pages, in 1858, 200 years after many of the dramas inside were performed, and just about 200 years ago. Let me be perfectly candid here--these two books, drawn from my own library (they escaped the flood!) are of no use whatsoever to me--they're in Moliere's own French, which I can't hope to read. 

They're mine because I'm the one who ended up with them. I didn't spot them on some bibliophile's old-and-precious shelf, order them from e-bay or some other dealer in antiquities. I'd have to say, I suppose, I inherited them. I came by them having been designated by someone in the family tree as the person in this family who actually cares about such things, about such books. Once along a long time ago, they belonged to my great-grandfather, a college professor 150 years ago at Christian Reformed School that became Calvin College.

These two books are mine only because the name written on the title page belongs to my grandfather's father-in-law (subsequently my great-grandfather-in-law) Geert Hemkes.

When I first discovered his name in these books, I was shocked because that he owned the works of a French playwright and actor seemed preposterous. I mean, it seemed a scandal. Did the administration of the college know that he had books like Moliere's plays in his library? what about the school's constituents? After all, not all that long before, Moliere wrote scripts that satirized the church's social positioning and its fairly obvious hypocrisy. He was no friend of the church.

My great-grandpa was. I simply assumed that Grandpa Geert fit the stereotype--if he was strict and principled, so was everyone else in the Dutch Reformed world back then. 

I loved finding Moliere's dramatic works in whatever fragment of his library ended up in our house, honestly loved it. It made me think that what I had assumed through the years could have been dead wrong. Maybe the old professor was, gasp!, something of a liberal.

But there's more to this story.

 

I know more about inflation, 

I know more about everything than anybody in this room. 

Anybody anywhere in the world. 

Well, there's a woman sitting right over there. 

She's a housewife but she's very good. 

She got a natural instinct for business. 

She perhaps knows more than I do but I actually don't think so."

President Donald Trump, yesterday

Honestly, you can't help wondering what planet this man lives on, although we know he probably owns it--the planet is Trump world. 

I've had a suspicion for a long time--no revelations, no crystal ball, no unearthly visions--that he wouldn't make it to the end of these four years, that something would end his Trump 2.0.

Start here--he'll die of natural causes. He so regularly burns the candles at both ends that he's almost certainly going to run out of candles. He may have a staff that types out middle-of-the-night Truth Social posts, but if he has such a squad no one has ever hinted at their identities. He's 79 right now and should be losing it. When he says things like he said yesterday--"he's the smartest man in the universe"--you can't help but think he's carrying burdens no other human being could lift off the floor, and he does it 24/7. No human being can pull that kind of weight.

Just as likely is that some crazed gunman, looking for headlines or whatever, takes him out. I hope that doesn't happen because then we'd have a martyr on our hands, someone who would soon have a national holiday in his honor, not to mention a half-dozen monuments up and down the streets of Washington. Among US presidents, he stands unique as a person who refuses to think about winning converts. He is a master at gunning up his base, but he does it at the expense of voting blocks that, this election season, have never liked him. The number of Trumpsters isn't growing. The opposition is a bunch of dirty, rotten commies when he's the one who's invested in all kinds of businesses. We've never had a Pres who's been so comfy with our oligarchs, who's made billions since Trump 2.0.

Lately, often, he seems bored. Maybe he'll just hang up his spikes and go play golf somewhere far from the madding crowd. Seriously, he seems powerless to stanch the flow of the opposition. The NYT ran with a cover story yesterday about how strong Dem candidates for governor were looking with just three weeks to go, while Trump's trump, huge, pumped rallies, have a wasted look, loads of empty seats. Maybe he'll just suddenly walk away and play golf. 

Don't look for him leaving office soon. I'm saying if it happens, I wouldn't be surprised. Nothing about the Donald has been predictable.

What's much more likely is that he'll be around until 2028, still crusading against the commies, the Dems, in all their hated mutations, while the Dems, now a majority in both the House and the Senate, do their best root out Trump-level corruption, if not the orange one himself. It'll be a really rough two years, crammed full of more lunacy, like yesterday's winner: "I know more about inflation--I know more about everything than anybody in this room. Anybody anywhere in the world. "

Honestly, what other human being you know would say things like that--even think things like that--what other human being than our Commander-in-Chief?

 “. . .and you forgave the guilt of my sin.”

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

                                                        Reinhold Neibuhr

 

            Perhaps the Scarlet Letter is the American classic it is because its central characters—seemingly fallen Hester and her partner in crime, the seemingly self-righteous Arthur Dimmesdale—are so, well, seemingly complex.  Invariably, it seems, first-time readers in my college classrooms, early on, come to love Hester as much as they hate her guilt-wracked lover, a spineless phony.  But I’m not sure Hawthorne intended my students’ sentiments to move so incontestably in those directions.

            I side with those who claim that the trajectories of those two characters, in the novel, appear to move in totally opposite directions.  Hester is clearly central in the early chapters; Hawthorne seems to have fallen in love with her himself, in part because she gains so much heroic strength by accepting her red badge of shame.

            The Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale, on the other hand, is a sham, a man who receives the accolades of the community in spite of his secret sin, a man who, by refusing what Hester openly accepts, loses our sympathy as quickly and surely as she gains it.

            But slowly on, Hawthorne allows Dimmesdale to take over the novel, giving him greater billing—or so it seems to me. 

            The climactic scene, when he finally and torturously bears his sin to the community and dies, forgiven, rarely engages my students, despite the fact that they are almost all believers themselves.  It’s too little, too late—even though good Christian readers probably should see the eternity of what just occurred:  his sin, like David’s, has been forgiven. 

            I’m really not sure Hawthorne could have done better. It seems to me that while stories—the ones we read or the ones we hear—can map out what it is that happens in forgiveness, those stories cannot give us the experience. No one’s testimony of forgiveness—David’s or Dimmesdale’s or your neighbor’s or mine, can do that. By way of what some call “felt life,” stories bring us as close as anything can to verifiable experience.  But there is, finally, an experiential—an existential—character to forgiveness and faith itself that is beyond my words or Hawthorne’s or even the word of the scriptures.

            We can talk and we can share and we can testify. We can read the Scarlet Letter or Crime and Punishment or the 32^nd Psalm. We can hear the story time and time again.  We can know how forgiveness operates; we can theorize and theologize. But, finally we know forgiveness in our hearts and souls only when we, like King David, know it’s been done to us, within us.  

You have to have been there to know.  In that sense, the 32^nd Psalm is our song, even if I can’t explain it or even describe it, as no one can. 

We really know what David knows only when we too have been forgiven.

Hymn from the Mud

LDS Grand Encampment--Council Bluffs, IA

Lest you wonder, no, I'm not LDS, nor have I ever been, despite the protestations of some of my high school students a half-century ago who would have liked to get me in. But I am something of a fan, at least some aspects of the Mormon story. (Mountain Meadows Massacre, not so.)

Yesterday, I was told, was the birthday of William Clayton, who essentially invented the modern odometer on the long Mormon trek from Illinois to Utah. He did so by actually numbering the revolutions the old wagon took in one mile, then created a gadget to count the miles, thereby making life easier on him.

It's a sweet story, but William Clayton deserves to be remembered for more than numbering his miles, as if they were days. He also  wrote one of the most beloved hymns in the LDS repertoire, "Come, Come Ye Saints." Some years ago, I wrote that story. You can hear it if you click on the url below. 

But in case you would rather read it, here it is. Honestly, it's one my favorites.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

Let’s get the objectionable stuff out on the table, okay? William Clayton had nine wives. Not nine lives, like the Tom catting around out back, but nine wives. William Clayton was a Mormon, baptized in his native Great Britain, a man of some rank among the saints, a man who worked alongside none other than Joseph Smith the Prophet.

Some folks like to say that it was Brigham Young who pressed William Clayton’s poetic talents into service, proposing that Clayton, a man well-versed in verse, pen a new hymn the pilgrims on their long, hard trek to the Great Salt Lake could sing in renewed dedication to their arduous task. Some folks like to say that, but fact-checking Mormon historians say it’s likely not true.

What’s more likely is that William Clayton got the news one night right here in Iowa, that back in Illinois, his wife—that would be his fourth wife, history tells us—had given birth back to a healthy, bouncing baby boy. Eventually, he would father—hold on to your chair—43.  

He didn’t take nine wives because he was any more randy than any other mid-19^th saints—Mormons called themselves saints so I’m not being sarcastic; he took nine wives because he listened to the Prophet, who, back then, okayed polygamy and practiced it heartily himself. Clayton was a “recorder,” a church administrator, who lived by every word the prophet ordered.

That’s the objectionable stuff. If, like me, you’re not Mormon, try, as I will, to put it behind you.

Imagine, for a moment, what Omaha, a pioneer village in 1846, must have thought when, as if overnight, a suburb of 800 frame homes went up, an incredible project large enough to house 2500 Mormon pilgrims. There’s nothing there to mark the spot anymore, but a temple and a museum still grace the western hills above the Missouri River, where you can hear the incredible story and pick up a Book of the Mormon at the same time—no charge.

Seriously, this Winter Camp was not to be believed.

But William Clayton sits at the heart of things here, the church Recorder. The Iowa spring in 1846 was anything but—cloudy, rainy, cold, constant wintry mix falling all around as a couple thousand pilgrims, en masse, moved across those rolling prairie hills on their way to the Missour. Mud like you wouldn’t believe. Wagons slipped and slid when they weren’t stuck fast. Handcarts turned the men and women lugging them into beasts of burden for six or seven miles a day at best. Spring blizzards swept discouragement into the entire woebegone enterprise. It’s impossible to imagine the hardship.

Brigham Young had cause to ask Clayton to put his pen to work. The saints were suffering, dying, and Utah was an unimaginable half continent away. Clayton himself was ill with discouragement: "I have been sick again all day especially towards night,” the recorder scribbled in his diary. “I was so distressed with pain it seemed as though I could not live."

But then, this:

This morning Ellen Kimball came to me and wishes me much joy. She said Diantha has a son. I told her I was afraid it was not so, but she said Brother Pond had received a letter. . .he read that she had a fine fat boy on the 30th,. . . but she was very sick with ague and mumps. Truly I feel to rejoice at this intelligence but feel sorry to hear of her sickness. . . .

And then this: “This morning I composed a new song—'All is well.' I feel to thank my heavenly father for my boy and pray that he will spare and preserve his life and that of his mother and so order it so that we may soon meet again.”

Look, I’m not nominating William Clayton to dethrone Meredith Wilson as the Hawkeye Music Man. But anyone who’s ever listened to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir go through “Come, Come Ye Saints,” in all its regal glory can’t help but believe that what William Clayton created—“recorded”—his boots thick with sticky Iowa mud, can’t help but believe that hymn a miracle and a triumph.

And it was penned in dismal weather and profound discouragement, not all that far from here. Not all that far at all.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

Here's the url, if you'd rather listen:

 https://www.kwit.org/featured-programs/2017-07-26/anthem-from-the-mud 

And should you wish to hear this hymn from the mud, here's the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's "illustrated" version. It's really something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ia3gYSvG8M  

Top Ten Stuff*

My stenosis makes a night like this an impossibility, sadly enough. This is an old one, but it makes my heart swell just to remember.

_____________________________ 

One sweet night last night. An old woman who grew up here used to tell me that Siouxland has just ten glorious days a year--"and you better enjoy 'em." If she's not wrong, then we had one yesterday. Northwest winds carried dry (and cooler) air over this quarter of the plains in a fashion that had everyone smiling. Summer's dog days departed somewhere south, where they belong.

 We took off for Spirit Mound, an old Lewis and Clark stop, where the Native people claimed little tiny humanoids, demonic things, lived atop an odd land formation--a tiny, miniature mountain. It was hot that day--as I remember the tale--so hot that their huge black Newfoundland, Seaman, got a little sick.

Not so last night--perfect weather, top-ten variety. We were mostly alone, just a few other older couples also walking out there to the top. The corn in the neighborhood looked pretty bad from the drought, but the beans are yellowing now, creating a little medley of color in the broad landscape. The Missouri River valley looms south, but otherwise, from the top of Spirit Mound, you can see for miles and miles. There's something about a sweet day in a place like that to steady the soul. No demonic humanoids either, just pilgrims.

We drove south to a place called Mulberry Point, where an overlook offers a very unusual view of the Missouri River. To say the river is wild at that point isn't totally true. The flow of the Missouri is controlled by the dams upstream; it can't flood like it once did, seasonally. But Mulberry Point still offers a view of ye olde Missouri, one that looks far more untamed than the river people see in more familiar crossings. It's braided, thin and rangy, and seemingly unspoiled. Even though it isn't uncontrolled, its wild looks are a reminder of what that river once was, years ago, untamed and gutsy, cutting a new channel wherever and whenever it wanted.

The river is an inspiration at Mulberry Point--it looks to be its own boss, even though it isn't anymore.

We were there at sunset, and my camera's battery was dead as a doornail. The last of the great photographers.

 What a night. Out here in Siouxland, you only get ten of those per year. You better mark 'em. We did. 

Broken Kettle dawn--2003

For years, I've been writing short essays for a local NPR station in Sioux City. It's been great for me and maybe for them as well. These "Small Wonders" air on Mondays during NPR news shows, early morning (7:45) and afternoon (4:45). The story that ran this week, yesterday, is a rerun about being on top of the world at Broken Kettle, a great place to visit early morning or anytime.

Rather than print it out, I'll just put it here. You can listen.

The pictures are from my first trip with a camera to Broken Kettle, memorable for me because I was blown away by the dawn. I'd guessed that I could get some beautiful shots because Broken Kettle Nature Preserve was a drop-dead gorgeous place. What I didn't realize--and what is in the "wonder" of the essay, is just exactly how gorgeous the dawn can be--and was that morning.

A few more shots. I'd never taken landscapes before, and I'm not exactly proud of these files. But they still do bear witness to what suddenly and quickly we witnessed that morning, the morning the essay describes.

Wild West Trans

Look. If what she wore was the standard wardrobe of the hundreds of fighting men in General Crook's huge expedition in the Powder River region of a place that would be known as Montana some years later. If she wore a thick and bulky wool jacket, cut her hair short and wild; boots, of course, and shapeless thick and heavy wool pants, we don't know; if she handled horses better than any of the other staff on the mission; if she swore more or better than men a decade or two or three than she appeared to be, then is it any wonder that no one--not one infantryman of the hundreds in General Crook's army ever guessed that under that disguise-that-was- no disguise lived a woman--young, yes, but a female. 

Crook's army was just a few days from a big fight with Crazy Horse and hundreds of the Lakota and Cheyenne Washington wanted wrestled back to the reservations where treaties demanded they were supposed to be, planting potatoes and raspberries and just staying out of the way of the thousands of white folk parading into the Black Hills or bound for Utah, Oregon, or California. 

What no one could have bet would happen did when her horse threw her down and two or three of her buddies helped her get her boots beneath her again. Somehow, one of those doughboys determined that the body they were lugging belonged to a female, a little one--she stood no more than 5'5"--and a super lightweight.

The rest of them--cavalry, infantry, stock handlers, camp cooks, the whole works--never one guessed that the kid was a she, that the twirp with the king-sized dirty mouth was nothing but a girl.  And here they were in the middle of nowhere, hunting hostiles with a dang girl along.

Word spread like wildfire. Soon enough the General heard-tell about this woman they'd uncovered in the ranks. He went to look--and sure enough if the gossip wasn't actual. "What you want us to do, sir?" the other staff said.

He gave them a clear answer. "If she can pull her weight, who cares?" he must have said, or something similar, because she stayed on for a while, long enough to tell the tale of her days as General Crook's scout, which she never was. But you can bet she loved the story because she told it a thousand times, part of her repertoire whenever she entertained in seedy joints just as overrun with men--bars and brothels all across the west. She could ride better than all of 'em, shoot straighter, and cuss like some half-potted muleskinner.

For some time she rode with Crook's army in the Great Sioux War, only woman any of them knew of. Right about then, nobody knew her name exactly. But it she wasn't snookered or just plain stubborn, she'd tell men just right out what her name was--maybe you've heard of it--Martha Canary.

A year before she had been with another company, the Jenner expedition, a foray with the frontier whose significant purpose was to do nothing more than find gold. 

The kid General George Crook let stay with the expedition had begun already then to identify herself by the name she appropriated and used throughout her life in the West. You may have heard of her?--Calamity Jane. 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 “I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’

—and you forgave the guilt of my sin.”

I never committed adultery—per se. I guess I may have to confess, like Jimmy Carter, that I’ve sometimes ogled a bit too sumptuously; but I’ve have not blazed my way through some tawdry affair.

I’ve not murdered anyone. When I was a boy, I stole cigarettes—we used to call it “hocking,” as in “let’s go hock cigarettes.” But I haven’t hocked a thing in close to 70 years.

I’ve eaten too much—just two nights ago, in fact. It started with the smooth guacamole. . . But that’s another story. I’m in a perpetual battle with love handles.

I love a beer now and then, but I’m light years from alcoholism. The love of money may well be the root of all evil, but greed or avarice has never been a weakness of mine. Ask my wife.

I’ve come to that point in my life where covetousness isn’t much of problem either. Here I sit in a little office space, surrounded by books I’m can’t get rid of, file drawers full of stuff I can’t toss, and a collection of flim-flam filling every shelf, every last bit of it worthless beyond anything but sweet sentimental value. Even though a flood swallowed half of what I’ve saved through the years, I could use a couple healthy trips to Goodwill.

I don’t think I’m crochety, although my wife might argue. I’m not bitter. I love a good story, and I’ve become convinced that humor is, as the Readers Digest has long insisted, the very best medicine for the soul.

The 78-year path of my life—check it for yourself—contains no spectacular sin or reprehensible acts. I was in Vegas once, but I was ten. All I remember is sudden bright lights.

My biography would never sell. A fourteen-year-old with an eating disorder makes a better chapel speaker than I do. There are no bank heists or car chases. Thank the Lord, there never was a Bathsheba, nor Uriah.

For the most part, mine are sins of omission—and they are legion.

I wonder if, through my life, I worshipped the task I’m at right now, if I placed a god before me that obscured the one who forgives. I often wonder if I neglected to love my children or spouse because of my love of writing, if my profession of faith had more to do with the letters appearing on this screen than it did with the Lord God Almighty.

I wonder, as I never have before in my life, if I’ve done the best I could with what I’ve been given. I really do. When I look back, I wonder whether I did it right at all.

I don’t wonder, not really. I have no doubt that in many important ways I’ve failed.

I doubt my confession would be easier if I could point at a Bathsheba or too much bourbon or some kind of abuse and say, “there—that’s the sin for which I need forgiveness.” I’m thankful there are no such lurid misdeeds.

But I’m old enough to know that, just like the wanton King, I can stand only if I’ve been on my knees.

For what I didn’t do, Lord—for what I didn’t do right and for my idolatry, my pride—please, forgive.

A crumby picture

 

No matter how you look at it, it's not a good picture. Like most all of its contemporaries, it's taken with something akin to a Kodak Brownie, probably with a flash, although the usual contrasts aren't here to suggest a bulb, one of those big ones. Back then, this shot wasn't attainable without a flash.

It's a prom shot, I'd guess--her dress is not a bridal gown; his boutonniere and her corsage suggest some kind of high drama occasion, almost certainly Jr./Sr prom. I remember thinking back then, that high school proms were simply "of" another era and wouldn't be a feature of a kid's high school years after the hippie revolution. When I watched them line up for portraits, I knew I was wrong. Prom was still a big, big deal.

I'm quite sure that someone with a camera sat in a corner of the heavily decorated gym (colored paper streamers all over) and waited for couples to walk up like these two and create a keepsake.  What'd he pay? a dollar? five bucks? This was prom night, for goodness sake. How often do you get the chance to throw bucks around?

These two should have asked for their money back. It's a crummy picture no matter how you look at it. If I didn't know the corner it crept out of, there's a chance I wouldn't even know who the two of them are. But I do know, and I did know them, although they are no longer a they--they long ago went their separate ways.

The picture itself--a tiny thing--was stuck in the pocket created by the transparent dust jacket of a high school annual. Not hidden or anything, just attached somehow close to the story of the couple's senior year. "And this is prom," he might have said if he was here when I found it, "our senior year."

Sweet and memorable, just as they'd thought.

But it didn't last. 

I don't know the specifics, but I knew the couple. They were both my students in my high-school-teacher days, both good kids, really good kids and recognized as such by their friends, of whom there were many. 

And somewhere there are far better pictures, I'm sure--the two of them being married, a sure thing made eternal by their vows in some little church in town, everyone fawning over the two of them, probably, back then, a shower of rice as they left the church.

But for reasons I don't know, this couple didn't last. Those very public vows didn't hold. The marriage of too really sweet people didn't make a decade. My guess is the man with the boutonniere didn't remember that he'd stuck this really bad prom portrait in the fold of the dust jacket, stuck it there with high school memories; couldn't really throw it away like he did tons of other memorabilia from a failed marriage, told himself he wanted to just hang on to that little tiny prom portrait, a reminder--however crummy and how painful, a reminder of a moment in time when what the picture rehearsed was sugar-coated, a reminder of something sweet between sweethearts, something sweet that once was that turned regrettably not so.

I remember them both, remember the thing they were, remember that both of them were great kids.

For so many reasons, to me it's a crumby picture, a really crumby picture. I could toss it--he probably wouldn't miss it anymore, that painful time now long ago behind him. I could just throw it away.

I'll put it back where I found it, tucked away in his old high school annual.  

The powerful impact of nature on your health*

How time spent in nature can improve your health

The average adult spends more than 90 precent of their day inside, away from nature, and that's affecting their well-being.

The benefits of nature on your mental health.

The outdoors especially benefit those with:

--ADHD. Research suggests that outdoor activity reduces ADHD symptoms in children.

--PTSD. Nature-based thereapies have become increasiingly common for the treatment of PTSD veterans.

--Stress, anxiety and depression. Nature exposure reduces the symptoms of these conditions by regulating the sympathetic nervous system. 

The benefits of nature on your physical health

Studies have shown that nature exposure

--Improves immune system function through increased exposure to vitamin D and organic compounds that boost the human immune system.

--Decreases blood pressure levels.

--Regulates circadian rhythm, which helps you sleep better.

--Increases the length and intensiity of physical activity.

What counts as nature

Any outdoor green space counts. This can be your backyard, a park, walking trail, or the golf course.

And if you can't get outside, even listening to nature sounds like waves, thunderstorms or bird calls can help you reap the mental and physical benefits of nature.

______________________________________

*Text is taken from a Wellmark advertisement brochure. The images are my own.

The Restless Traveler ii

Continued from yesterday, a short essay attributed to me but long ago out of my computer. A Canadian grad student studying the occupation of the Netherlands, asked me for the proper bibliographical data, which I don't have. I remember the incident he described, but I have no copy of any essay I might have written. 

He sent me the essay. I knew it was a piece I wrote, but I hadn't seen for 16 years.  

Yesterday I passed along the first half. Here's the second. What I remembered was the restless traveler's discomfort at the comportment of the man who told the story of the Dakota's attack on his hometown, New Ulm, Minnesota--just the way he told the story, just his demeanor. It was reminiscent of the way the German occupiers acted/spoke/behaved. He couldn't handle it.

___________________ 

Achingly, painfully tethered. By choice, right then, he would have deserted the whole bus if he could avoid pain that was closing in on him—ancient, deadly fears long ago thought put to rest, but suddenly awakened by tone and rhetoric and ethnic pride.

When we got out of the bus at the college chapel, I could see he was not to be reasoned with. Some spirit in him was out of control—and he knew it too.

“When we arrived at this most beautiful Lutheran chapel,” he wrote, “I made sure to stay in the back on a church bench, so I could escape the professor’s diatribe attack on my senses. I fretted about myself—within my own, why I do not have more patience.”

And then, “Finally he stopped talking,” the Dutchman wrote.

The retired prof had stopped because we'd entered the Martin Luther College chapel, where, serendipitously, which is to say, providentially, the college’s own fine organist just happened to show up. That man opened up that new huge organ in a fashion that no guitar and drum set can ever do. Together, we sang old hymns, even “A Mighty Fortress,” Luther’s own. It was a blessing I have not the words to describe.

But our war survivor tries—listen:

“Then the college organist played this beautiful very large pipe organ, with songs so wonderful. Peace came in my heart, and I thanked God for his patience with me, being a ‘Restless Traveler.’ Those familiar songs released my anxiety,” he wrote.

Those old hymns of faith were decidedly providential therapy. What he required at that point—and he understood it himself—was therapy.

That retired history prof never wore the black SS coat and had nothing to do with The Final Solution. He was an American, doing what lots of us do—taking pride in his heritage, including the town’s own history, which started a full century before a little madman with a paintbrush mustache.

But there’s a little more to the story of our restless traveler.

Henceforth we were transported to the Shell Brewery, where, following a short tour, we were led thirstily to their tasting room for some product research.

“We were invited to taste small amounts of different types of beer,” our restless traveler wrote, quelling, for a moment at least, his old fears and hatred. “It tasted good and put me in a mood to sing a song, song from my younger days—not quite proper for elderly Christian persons perhaps, but seemed funny.”

There’s nothing like a little sip to help you forget, maybe, eh?

But the charmer was the evening, when, accompanying some fine German drinking songs, a motley crew of masked intruders, the Naaren, ended our German dinner by pulling every last one of the weary travelers from their chairs and waltzing them into a series of hoopla dances and marches that would have sent all of our travelers reeling had they carted in a keg or two with them. Which they hadn’t, thank goodness.

Here's the way the Dutchman described the hijinks:

“A dozen characters, men and women, although whether man and woman was difficult to distinguish, were wearing wetween our dinner tables, encouraging us to join. It took me a while before I was reaooden masks and colorful costumes. They entered the hall dancing, and hobbled bdy to accept their invitation, until I secured a woman who was a good dancer. I managed to get a hold of her. Her mask was not as scary as the other ones. When the music stopped, she gave me a compliment about my dancing. It made my day.”

It made his day.

And thus, presumably, our restless traveler, so psychically stricken earlier in the day, was comforted finally, by the great hymns of the church, a few sips of good stout German beer, and a sporty jaunt with a masked intruder—a woman he managed to get hold of, he says, who then told him that for an old guy with a wooden leg, he was, by cracky, one heckuva good dancer.

That's the whole story. Let preachers of all types and persuasions do with it what they will. All I know is, that’s the way I saw it, and the way he tells it.

There’s got to be a sermon there, if we have ears.