Rigged?

 

The red card this man from the U.S. World Cup soccer team was given regularly carries with it a one-game suspension for whatever foul play triggered the sentence. This man, U.S. forward Folarin Balogun, was sentenced to sit out the next US game by the long established rules. Balogun had scored three goals and is acknowledged to be one of the mainstays of the American team. The U,S., without him, would clearly miss him and be playing at less than optimum strength.

Apparently, the President of these United States heard about the sentence (quite controversial, I'm told) and apparently decided to do something about it. He called the  FIFA president Gianni Infantino. 

Then something very unusual happened. Suddenly--and largely without notice or documentation--that suspension was lifted, and the U. S. team will operate at full strength when it faces Belgium today.

Highly controversial, I'm told, although there is a possibility that the President's call to the Commish had nothing to do with the Balogun suspension. The world--and me too!-- may simply have fallen to a classic logical fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc, "after the fact therefore because of the fact."

All of which might well be easy to believe if it weren't for the fact that the President of the United States is far too capable of the kind of shenanigans behind the highly unusual resolution to the problem. And, of course, the crooked story does nothing for the reputation of the U. S.  of A. As the Pres himself likes to say: "it was rigged."

The truth? Who knows? The smell, however, is altogether too familiar. 

And don't look for the stink to drift away by game time tonight. 

_______________________________

Oops. Forgot to hit "Publish" yesterday. The U. S. lost last night, ending what had become a wildly sweet story AND defusing the problem our President had struck up by butting into the business of the World Cup. Losing is far worse than it's cracked up to be, and last night's game was a case in point. Wasn't fun, watching. I'm sure it was even less fun there. No one wants to lose.

But if you look hard enough for a silver lining, there's at least one. Trump didn't triumph. Had Folarin Balogun played a great game, had he led USA team to a glorious victory, the win would not have gone down well with the rest of the world. It would be forever smudged by the President's deliberate and very public intervention. It would have stunk.

But he didn't, and the team looked like the team that should have lost, Belgium's superior strengths so vividly on display. And, thus, the President's leaning on the commissioner became, at worst, a footnote. And that's a blessing.

So while no one would choose to end the US's Cinderella story in this year's World Cup, at least we can say that Trump can't claim the trophy.

Independence Day iii

 

He found the captain sitting at his desk, a map before him, roast pork still steaming on the plate to his left. The door was open to the warmth of that July morning. Johannes knocked.

"Yes?" The captain turned in his swivel chair and looked over his shoulder. "What is it?"

"Captain, my people would like to sing. Would it--"

The captain looked up at him blankly.

"Psalms," Johannes told him. "We would like to sing the psalms."

"Psalms!" the man repeated, puzzled. He unbuttoned the top buttons of his coat. Johannes waited. "The psalms, you'd like to sing?" He wiped the corners of his mouth with a napkin. "But today is the Fourth of July. No one I know sings Psalms today--in church, yes. Maybe Christmas, you know, or Easter--but on the Fourth? You don't know other songs?" He leaned back, smiling as if the thought was absurdity.

Johannes shrugged. "We would like to sing the psalms."

The captain pushed aside his plate as if he was finished eating. "All of them?" he asked.

"Surely not. Just maybe some?" It felt to him like a good idea, like something they should do. "We would be happy like the rest. When we sing the Psalms, we can be happy. We can celebrate too."

The captain raised his fist to his lips and burped, not loud, then stood and put his hands in his pockets. He walked to the doorway, past Johannes, and surveyed his deck. Most of the crew and many of the emigrants, the passengers, were still eating. He stood a head taller than Johannes, his thick black hair falling nearly to his collar. "That would be good maybe--I don't know," he said, as if addressing them all. "If it would make you happy--all the Hollanders--then go ahead and sing the Psalms." The captain turned to look at him. "Some of them, eh?" And giggled. "Not all."

"It would make us happy," Johannes told him.

"Then go ahead and do it." He smiled as if the whole idea was an odd joke the two of them had shared. "It's not what Americans do, you know," he said. "This psalm-singing on the Fourth of July, but you say it will make you happy? Then it's a good thing--a good, good thing."

The shooting continued later until the ammunition was spent, but the emigrants, adding their own bit of celebration and their own vision of independence, raised their voices in Psalm 68, one of their favorites, Johannes as voorzanger.

Let God be praised with reverence deep;
He daily comes our lives to steep
In bounties freely given.

The captain strolled over, shaking his head, his hands clasped behind his back. The crew, nearly exhausted from all the celebration, listened and laughed, then smiled. Some Germans joined in, their own language harmonizing with the Dutch.

God cares for us, our God is He:
Who would not fear His majesty
In earth as well as heaven?
Our God upholds us in the strife;
to us He grants eternal life,
And saves from desolation.

They never felt exactly like they did--the psalms they sang, the notes moving along faster than normal. He had only to determine pitch, for his people moved independently at a pace too strong and joyous to be tempered by the voorzanger. The captain was right, of course. It's not what the Americans did, but until his people did it--sang the psalms on the deck of a ship going across the ocean--they hadn't either.

He heard the needy when they cry,
He saves their souls when death draws night,
This God is our salvation.

Beneath them, the ship moved almost silently beneath them through calmed seas once again, pressing ever closer to the Newfoundland banks.

Independence Day -- ii

 

In a moment Johannes swung himself out of the berth and stood, his knees full of stiffness. He held up the blanket and saw his wife sitting up, her elbow propped beneath her for support.

"How is it, Maria?" he asked.

She swept her tangled hair from her face with her left hand and drew it back behind her ears.

"Good," she said. "I feel better. And you?"

Johannes saw a slight smile, warm like a summer morn­ing, break from the unfamiliar creases that lined her face. But she was still beautiful. Two weeks on board had robbed her face of its youthful sheen, but her blue eyes, glazed by sickness during the storm, were now bright and clear. The baby, Geesje, turned slowly in her sleep, her mouth puckering as if she were already nursing.

He ran his fingers through his hair and smiled at his wife. "I will go up to see what is happening here."

The ocean was still, the sky broadly blue, and the deck as full of activity as it had been during the fury of the storm. But Johannes knew that it was not yesterday. A long box of firearms stood opened on the deck and multi-colored flags festooned the rigging. Crew and passengers alike were firing round after round, hooting and shrieking. One by one the passengers had left their berths and were joining the fest. Some of his friends were standing amidship, watching and laughing. He hesitated momentarily, then walked quickly over to join them.

"What is it?" he asked.

"It is a holiday! July 4. It is the Day of Independence for Americans." The men watched closely as the crew sang and drank and ate in unchecked celebration.

Johannes enjoyed the spectacle, but unlike the Germans who participated more readily, the Hollanders were reticent; they stood apart, laughing and joking with each other for the first time in days.

He ran back to the stairs and descended in a flurry, rushing to his berth, where he found the canvas open and Geesje awake and nursing, Maria lying comfortably on her side.

"It is the American Day of Independence, Maria. You should come above."

"What is that though?"

"'Independence'--the Americans celebrate every year today, July the Fourth. Something about their War of Independence."

Maria's smile changed into a hesitant laugh, as her brows hunched in confusion. "So they shoot off guns?"

Geesje was unwilling to give up her mother's breast, but she turned her blue eyes toward her father. He shrugged his shoulders. He didn't understand either, then he turned back toward the stairway.

*

By the time Johannes had returned to the deck, his Dutch friends were shooting and laughing and dancing like the rest. 

The morning passed quickly, full of the gleeful charm of a new and unexpected holiday, celebrated by adopted children only beginning to sense the ardor of a changing life. By noon everyone was on deck, even those who had suffered most during the storm, and all were served from a roasted pig the crew prepared specially for the holiday. The Hollanders watched the men hoist their tankards and sing lusty songs.

Maria approached her husband soon after their dinner. The men sat like birds in a circle, the women also together.

"Johannes," she said quietly over his shoulder, unwilling to break the spirited mood of the conversation. "Johannes, we thought we might like to sing to God a bit--the psalms. The women said."

He looked up at his wife. Her eyes were shining from a face flushed with pink. The rest of the Dutch women sat behind her. He paused only momentarily before moving from the circle and running toward the chartroom to look for the captain, a burly man with skin as weathered as the boards on his ship.

________________________ 

Tomorrow: Celebrating freedom in a new world--the end of the story.

Independence Day

 

50th anniversary of the Dutch immigrants to Sheboygan County, WI

[Because I wanted to understand my own heritage, I read all kinds of local history books when our little family moved to Iowa from Arizona. It was 1976, America's Bicentennial, and like many others I was following the Roots phenomenon, trying to locate the Kunte Kinte that was in me, a Dutch-American. The stories I found were a delight. I'd always wanted to write. I was embarking on a career of teaching in higher education. It was time to put the pen to paper, so I did. Thus begat a collection titled Sign of a Promise and Other Stories. "Independence" is one of those stories, now fifty years old.

_________________________ 

Johannes clung to the rail with his blistered hands, but relaxed his body as if he were in a saddle, absorbing the lurches of the ship in his knees as he stood, dumbfounded, staring out at the wind-driven schooner scudding across the waves. The winds had subsided as the storm passed, and the ship had responded, it creaking muffled in relief. But the ocean had continued its frantic throbbing, as if the entire drama had been staged in a theater of measurable proportions. Then, suddenly, its labor peaking, the sea had borne this ghastly three-masted schooner, torn and battered, its ragged sails flapping from what masts still stood on her decks.

He watched, silent. The others stood beside him on the deck, quiet, eyes focused on the ship that rolled, dipped, and rose with the swells of the ocean. Jagged wooden frames rose statue-like from the deck, and the base of one thick mast jutted skyward like a broken spear, its shaft snapped by the storm. The schooner danced like a specter, so close now that they could hear its shrieking timbers; then it jigged aimlessly into the purple horizon until it disappeared as suddenly as it had come, its past--its crew, cargo, even, perhaps its emigrants—as mysterious as its destiny.

He was awed. Two ships had been so close here. . .nowhere, yet he knew nothing of the other, nor would he ever. He couldn’t help remembering Zeeland and Middleburg, the town, the house and shop. It was all so close, so warm, he knew everyone; the very streets seemed lie family now.

“But the new country!” people had said. "America!" When he heard them, the streets, the village, the house and shop, had all become so close, so confining, so colorless.

And what of the people who had once stood on those decks, he thought, people just like them, watching and waiting, their eyes straining constantly toward the fickle horizons? He kept looking west, following the trail of the ghostly schooner, even though it already had passed into the mist. What he'd seen, what they'd all seen, was all he would ever know, he told himself again. No names, no faces, no trunks, no lives, no souls. Had the storm flung them all into this endless rolling sea? Had their lives been simply swallowed ? His own ship surged beneath him, floating like some trifling pendant on the breast of the sea.

His steps were cautious but weak as he left the deck. He moved slowly down the stairway, his left arm braced against the wall to steady himself. German emigrants moved carefully throughout the lower quarters, speaking very little. Children cried-they never seemed to stop; at least the passing of the storm would quell the rage of sickness among the passengers. For several days the hold had been littered with bodies and trunks, the floor coated with vomit, the halls cluttered with anything that couldn't be secured. In Johannes' mind, listless bodies sprawled there yet, for he had seen it all and would always remem­ber. No dominie could preach human depravity and dependence on God so clearly as he had seen it, had heard it, had smelled it, had even felt it. But the halls were clear tonight, and the storm had broken.

He stopped at his berth and felt the dampness in the cur­tains that he had specially hung about his quarters. He had tried hard to make it livable. The sailors had smiled when they saw him decorating, preparing the berth for Maria and his Geesje, but it was useless. His wife and daughter could appreciate nothing since their departure . First, there had been the nearly constant quarreling with the Germans, then the disregard and cynicism of the crew, and finally the storm. 

He lifted the canvas. Maria lay motionless in the berth, her mouth gaping, her face sallow and drawn. Geesje lay at her breast in a gray pallor, cramped and weak, thin and tiny for her nearly fifteen months. She would still take nothing but her mother's milk. Johannes backed into the berth, swung his aching legs into the bed, leaned back slowly, and pulled the cover over the opening behind him. The berth was dark and damp. He reached over, almost as an afterthought, and felt for his daughter's pulse, then his wife's. He found them both alive, crossed his arms over his chest and tried to relax. From within the hold the ocean felt smooth finally, as he said a silent prayer.

*

The sun rose above a calm ocean. His family had slept well, their strength returning in a tide of repose, when they were awakened by shouts from the deck and a cannonade that boomed like thunder through the sleeping quarters. It was early, very early.

Johannes turned on his side, drew back the canvas, and looked down the narrow hallway. All down the line heads popped out in similar fashion, searching for some explanation of the thunderous noise.

"What is it?" someone gasped. More curious questions, a waking babble of voices. 

_______________________ 

Tomorrow: A celebration.

July 4, 1803

 

Stephen A. Ambrose says, in Undaunted Courage, that the Fourth of July on the Missouri River began with shooting off "the canon." Comes as a shock almost. Lewis and Clark, et al, packed that kind of heat?--an actual canon on board? Sheesh.

Yes and no. Simply making headway through the wily Missouri River' sandbars was enough trouble. With three or four ways of moving upstream, against the flow, the men had their choice; but none were particularly easy. Two of them--using lodge poles to pole the beast up, or else pulling the boat and pirogues upriver with ropes—were truly back-breaking. Pulling that thing against the current while marching along the river's edge had to be enough to make some of the men consider alternate professions. And then, on top all of that, they lugged along a canon?

John Ordway, as others, calls it a "Bow piece." That's a mite better than "canon" methinks. What ornamented (and that's not far from the truth) the front of "the boat," as the men described the biggest vessel of their armada, was anywhere from 18 inches to 36 inches long--not that humongous.

Still, the canon was meant as a weapon of war, should war break out. It sounds a little vainglorious to say it this way, but it's true: war was not the intention; peace was. Lewis and Clark--unless they lied their way through their own journals--were embarked on a business venture. First and foremost, they were explorers in the best 19th century definition of that word; Jefferson wanted to know everything about this unmapped chunk of land he'd bought from the French.

But L and C were also out there on business. The fur trade was big money, and the French were in it, as were the English, both big-time. They were all making money on beaver and an occasional buffalo hide, and Jefferson wanted to secure control of the business already going on out west in his new country. That might be best accomplished, he thought and thusly directed L and C, by meeting with the Indigenous and letting them know that there was a new Great Father in town, and that Great Father wanted to work with them, not against them. And by telling them that the near-constant warfare between some of the tribes wasn't good for anybody's pocketbook.

Amazing as it may seem, no matter what you call it, that cannon on the keelboat never took aim at any human being, not up or back, not for two long years. Still, even though nobody shot at anybody, lugging that "bow piece" along turned out to be immensely useful. Hunting and scouting parties went out frequently, looking for game, looking for Native people. After a day or two absences, the men couldn't help but wonder where the others might be. Voila! the canon. Boom! --a welcome call home.

It's been American military policy almost ever since: we avoid war by arming ourselves to the teeth. Sounds like idiocy, but it's worked, often.

Besides that, that "Bow piece" went off for celebration too. On July 4, "we fired our Bow piece this morning & one in the evening for Independance of the U. S." says John Ordway, and then, same sentence, no end punctuation, "we saw a nomber of Goslins half grown today." Wasn't much of a celebration, but it got a half sentence in Ordway's journal."

You can keep this information to yourself, but the men were given a double shot of whiskey that night on the occasion of the birthday of the United States of America. Prost.

I'm not at all sure if Ordway wrote this last sentence before or after that extra gill of whiskey (about four ounces), but the what he says about what he saw is sweet, whether he was a little holiday happy or not: "One of the most beautiful places I ever Saw in my life, open and beautifully Diversified with hills & vallies all presenting themselves to the River."

That extra gill of whiskey and a couple of rounds from an 24-inch cannon constituted the very first Fourth of July celebration west of the Mississippi. By all accounts, it was a good day.

Grandma's Blue Dress

 

"When you get to the visitor's center, check out the blue dress--it belonged to Judy's great-grandma," she told me, referring to a friend, yet another maintenance worker at St. Lebre Mission. "Both our great-grandmas were there."

With that send-off from the two women who had given me a tour of the place, I drove west for an hour to the immense swath of prairie all around the battlefields at Little Big Horn. 

The Fourth of July should be big this year—it’s a birthday, our 250^th as a nation. Less heralded certainly but no less memorable is another: the 150^th anniversary of  “Custer’s Last Stand,” the most celebrated battle of the Indian wars, a huge win that, ironically, secured their eventual defeat.  

Just exactly why Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his men all died on a hill above the Little Big Horn may never be known. His flamboyant personality long ago gave rise to the theory that, in taking the 7th Calvary where he did, when he did, he was looking for headlines. Then again, maybe he simply made a disastrous military blunder.

What resulted was a last disastrous stand on a little hill where his whole 7^th Cavalry were killed by warriors from a collection of different tribes united by the anger created by losing their world.

Capts. Marcus Reno and Frederick Benteen, distinguished Civil War vets, somehow failed to come to Custer's aid. Neither were afraid of a fight. Reno and his men were battle weary. They'd already lost forty or more troops, a catastrophic number if it hadn't been for the 210 men who went to their deaths with Custer. 

Reno chose not to help Custer, even though once the guns were silenced in his own venue of the battle, he knew something was happening to the north because all that smoke and dust meant something was going on. 

But Reno didn't go. Why not? Good question. His uniform was blood-spattered from the death of a Crow scout who took a bullet to the head right beside him. Maybe he'd simply had enough killing.

Some say Reno didn't go to Custer's aid because he simply couldn't imagine his famous battlefield boss could possibly lose a fight with a bunch of wild savages; the great white general losing to hostiles was far beyond his imagination. Reno didn't go, some say, because it never dawned on him that half-naked hostiles could defeat a famous general--they were just Indians.

It was January, not June, when I stopped at Little Big Horn battlefield. I’d been there before, but this time it felt different because I’d met a woman whose great-grandma was actually there, a Cheyenne woman in a blue dress that, I was told, was still on display in the visitor’s center. They were there, across the river with thousands of others.

I couldn't get in to the Visitor’s Center see that blue dress that January morning. No one could. Covid shut the place down. I looked in the windows, but I couldn't see Judy’s great-grandma’s blue dress. I would have loved to.

But I felt a strange species of pride that great-grandma in the blue dress helped me feel. Even though I was out there on the battlefield alone, my having met the great-granddaughter of a Cheyenne woman in a blue dress who was there 150 years ago made this visit bigger, wider even than the spacious forever plains all around the battlefield.

Just a little more on Doc Saville

[Just a little more on Dr. Saville, the Civil War doctor buried in Sioux City's Floyd Cemetery--see yesterday's post.]

There'd been gunshots, more than a few, buzzing bullets all around but, or so the agent argued, nothing yet to get angry about. J. J. Saville had what some thought to be an extremely high boiling point, so high no one in the neighborhood had yet seen it. Some claimed his dealing with Red Cloud and his people nothing less than cowardice; some called it weakness; others believed the new agent to be worthless as Sandhill sand, Saville himself a walking/talking example of the idiot silliness of President Grant's new Indian policy. 

Just one of the nutty changes involved was who would be sent to the reservation as the agent. Saville had never been administrated anything; he was a doctor, for heaven sakes, a Yankee medic who'd served on the far reaches of the Civil War's western front. Dr. J. J. Saville was chosen to be "Indian Agent" by President U. S. Grant. Saville hailed from Sioux City, Iowa. 

Grant chose Dr. Saville for the testy, even dangerous job of Indian Agent at the Red Cloud Agency because the the Episcopal Church had forwarded his good name. For a time in the 1860s, theory morphed into a new policy constructed on the determination that the needs of Native populations would be more humanely met if the agents were missionaries and not robber barons. 

Dr. Saville understood only too well that the job the President had asked him to do was not Sunday School superintendent. By 1870, intercontinental railroads had burst their way through traditional Native lands bringing thousands of eastern foreigners west, seeking their fortune on land they'd assumed to be unoccupied. Red Cloud and his people were not amused.

The Lakota were not alone; dozens of Native bands were not thrilled at the invasion of white folks, especially when they realized the whites weren't at all convinced all those trespassing strangers should be nice to what they considered savage redskins. A decade of conflict would still have to pass before Custer and 300 of his men would die on a hill above the Little Big Horn. During the early 1870s, the whole region was a tinder box.

Dr. Saville, who might have built a solid medical practice in Sioux City, chose otherwise and took the job offered him as administrator of the Red Cloud Agency in a region of the Great Plains where acts of violence occurred with perilous frequency. Saville leaped into a hot spot because he and the progressives believed that bringing Native people into the American family would occur most smoothly if Sioux and Comanche, Cheyenne and Arapaho would just learn to be cowboys and farmers, would herd cattle and forget the dang buffalo, who were rapidly disappearing anyway.

Easier said than done, of course. Saville was a liberal, a progressive. He tried everything  to bring real change to the Native West, including erecting a flag pole to fly the red, white, and blue, thereby proclaiming it's sovereignty. To Red Cloud's people, making that case was a stretch. 

So, at noon the day Saville had his people ready to raise the flag over what became Camp Robinson, as many as 50 mad-as-heck warriors rode up to Red Cloud Agency in blankets and waistcloths, armed to the teeth, and wasted no time in cutting that brand new flagpole down.

The flags were meant to portray what they meant to Saville and an entire brood of white American westerners--proud and youthful nationhood--let freedom ring! 

But on that October 23, before those beloved colors had cleared the ground, Lakota warriors and their hatchet-toting friends had cut those new flag posts up like firewood because to them the stars-and-stripes were a battle flag, nothing more than a symbol of white man's aggression, and in all likelihood, for them at least, a prelude to much larger war. In the autumn of 1867, Sioux City's own Dr. J. J. Saville, lasted only two years in the office of agent of the Red Cloud Agency before he was shown the door.

Fair or not, Dr. Saville was shown the door for his failure to understand the people he'd been appointed to serve. 

What we did on our 54th anniversary

Just for the record, we spent our anniversary this year in an ancient Sioux City cemetery. Seriously.

As anniversaries go, we've done well in celebrations, at least by my estimation. I think it would challenge the boundaries of good taste to count the ways, so you'll just have to take my word for it, generalize like I did, and simply say that, far more often than not, our anniversary retreats have been memorably and passionately sweet. Last week, on June 27, we celebrated our 54th. 

I'm serious--54 (!), many of them celebrating the special charm somehow given to bridal couples, some of our "celebrations" less "festive," I might say, than others, certainly more memorable.

Saturday--our anniversary--we ran off to Sioux City, no summer night of passion on our agenda, maybe just a good dinner. I've been wanting to find a Sioux City cemetery, the Floyd Cemetery, where, I've read, a man was buried way back in 1910, a man whose story attracted me when I recently ran into it. Dr. J. J. Saville was a medical doctor in the Civil War, a bloody horrible job. Somehow (the case is not clear), although he had a medical practice in Omaha and returned there after the war, he is buried in Floyd Cemetery, Sioux City.

I wanted to find his grave--it's that simple, but not easy. Finding the Floyd Cemetery was difficult enough. It's a big place where I spent a lot of time on Saturday afternoon, alone, nobody else came through. In fact, if you google it, there may be no answers to his remains' whereabouts other than the cemetery at Sioux City's Floyd Monument. I knew he wasn't buried there.

Anyway, it took me--and eventually Barbara too--most of the afternoon to find it, but we did (on our 54th wedding anniversary). You'll think I'm nuts, and maybe I am, but it was a thrill. Barbara found it--its location from AI was off--the entire section was backwards--but she found it.

Saville had to have been a strong believer because in the early 1870s his church--the Episcopal Church--recommended him for a position on one of the newly created Indian reservations, an offer Dr. Saville took. Wasn't a cakewalk either. He was assigned to the Red Cloud Agency, where all sorts of things, dangerous things, were happening both before and during his short tenure.

There can be no doubt he was qualified for the position of Agent. Not only did his Civil War experience recommend him, but that experience included advocating for better conditions for the men wounded in battle. What little I've read about his Civil War experience makes clear that his candidacy for the headman at the Red Cloud Agency had substantial grounds. He was a good man.

His candidacy, forwarded by the Episcopal Church, came at the request of President Grant, who argued, with others, that the deplorable situations (graft and violence) on newly created Indian reservations needed to be changed--graft was everywhere. If Christians were to run the agencies, not crooks--or so the argument ran--relations with the nation's Indian peoples would certainly improve.

Whether that argument holds water or not is questionable and worth pursuing. What little I know is that this Dr. J. J. was chosen to be Agent at the Red Cloud Agency in western Nebraska because he was a member of a Christian church deeply involved in Native missions.

It wouldn't be hard to argue that he failed miserably. History does more than suggest that's true, but it's a judgment I can't make--I don't know the story well enough. But only two years later, Saville got in a wagon and went back to Omaha. What he left behind would require others to put in order.

He's buried here--this man whose personal story carries with it endless stories from American history. He's buried here--that's what I knew.

I just wanted to find him, and I did--or Barbara did. It's there.

And that's the story of our 54th wedding anniversary. We spent our anniversary getting an army of chigger bites walking through the grass of a huge old Sioux City cemetery, no one else around. 

I was thrilled.

Seriously, we could have done worse.

SUnday Morning Meds--from Psalm 32

 

“Do not fret because of evil men 

or be envious of those who do wrong. . .”

 

The only fret I have is whether or not I do enough frettin’.  

 Take my mother, for instance—she’s sure that the world is slowly sinking toward a moral morass, some iniquitous black hole that will eventually suck most all of us in, until, gloriously, the Lord, in glory, comes again.  She frets about the life’s seamy appearances, and her continual frettin’ affects her mood.

 She’s old enough to deserve my respect no matter what her views or how much she frets; besides, she’s my mother.  But I’m not taken by the way she flirts with such obsessions because I don’t think she should spend the last years of her life frettin’.

 We live in strange times.  I don’t think it’s possible to locate an era in the last decade or so when spirituality in general and Christianity in particular was ever quite so popular.  The vast majority of Americans, unlike citizens of any other nation, claim to believe in God.  A significant majority go to worship frequently.  Crime is down, as is drug use, as is teen-age pregnancy.  Even abortion rates are lower than they were.

 On the campus where I teach, just about every student wears a t-shirt with a Bible verse.  Students flock to praise-n-worship gatherings voluntarily and exude a piety that existed only among the most devout just twenty years ago.  Lots of parents tell me their kids are far more spiritually mature at 18 than they were at that age. 

 Politically, the U. S. government is in the hands of Republicans, my mother’s party.  Many politicos and pundits claim the last Presidential election was a wake-up call to many opinion-leaders who never took Christians seriously.  Most major newspapers now concede that for too long they didn’t have a clue about what was going on in the hearts and heads of an huge segment of their own readership—American evangelicals. 

 It’s difficult to argue, I think, that we’re all going to hell in a handbasket, although sometimes I think my mother would like to think so.  Specifically, what troubles her is that this Christian nation is becoming secular, forbidding prayer and tolerating abortion, tossing the Ten Commandments and, in its place establishing, “political correctness.” 

 I think she’s frettin’ way too much.  She thinks I’m worse—liberal. 

 When Black Sunday came to the Great Plains, when clouds of dust arose from recently plowed Oklahoma land and swept all the way up into South Dakota like a murky blizzard, lots of good people presumed the world was at end.  Not long ago, a woman told me that she had a childhood memory of looking up at the preacher in the little country church she attended and, on Black Sunday, seeing only the preacher’s white collar.

When things got dark, good people thought we’d finally come to end times.  It’s understandable, but it didn’t happen.  Most believers I know plot out the trajectory of our lives in the same direction—things are just getting worse and worse. 

 Maybe not.  But then, as I said, maybe I just don’t fret like she does.  Maybe I will in just a few years.

 But I know this—both Mom and I can take heart from verse one of Psalm 37, which says, in a nutshell, “don’t do that.”  The enemy—whoever they are—aren’t worth my time or anxiety, nor are they worth hers. 

 Next week I’ll quote that verse to her.  Maybe it will help. 

 Probably not.  She’ll probably still think I’m a liberal.     

On political parties

It's a used car, not new, but it's our new car, as distinguished from our old Subaru. This one is a cherry red Buick, and it's become Barb's car. She's the one who drives it.

And she'd warned me: "there's not much gas in the Buick." Her warning stuck. I knew. What's worse, new cars won't let you forget: signs with warnings appear all over. What I'm saying is, I knew the Buick was low on gas; I'd checked the gauge myself. But the needle hadn't sunk to no-man's land so I figured I could get up on top the hill, hardly a half mile away.

And let me just say this. I have no idea if it's still a good idea or not, but the warning is there, permanently, in my mind. "Ya' should, really, run a new car out of gas so you know where the needle means it when it points below the E." I didn't make that up. It's the kind of thing that seeps into your psyche when you're flashing your first driver's license--KNOW when and where you'd better believe the needle!"

I didn't. I ran out. Well, the Buick ran out. 

At least it was in a convenient spot, an empty parking lot beneath a housing development that's not there yet--thankfully, in no one's way. 

Let me begin by saying this. We live in senior housing, a place where everything outside the condo is managed, which means I got rid of every last lawn implement before we moved here. Hence, I've got no gas can. 

I'm out of gas--sure--but I'm also shit out of luck, as we used to say.

"Go to WalMart," I tell myself. (We've got two cars.) "Buy a new gas can, stop at Coop or Casey's or wherever, fill up that new gas can, get back here to the useless Buick at the top of the hill. No sweat, and you can always use a gas can."

My dad used to start the charcoal out back by splashing a little gas over the coals before dropping a match. Not until one of my friends saw him do it, did I think of what he was doing as risky. 

The one I grabbed off the shelf is a gas can, all red, cherry-red and round, but it's affixed with a spout that, for the life of me I can't operate. I'm an old man. I've been lighting charcoal fires for more than a half century, never with gasoline. I mean, I know there's danger; but this brand new gas can features safety apparatus which appears to be dysfunctional. I can't get the dumb thing to open the spout. It's obvious that it's there on the spout for safety sake. I get that. I can't lug a gallon of gas back to the Buick because I can't operate the gas can--are you kidding me? I can't do it.

 I put gas in the can by removing the whole spout and pumping a gallon in at the Coop, but when we get back to the Buick (now my suffering spouse of 54 years is here too), I can't get that gallon into the thirsty Buick because I can't operate the doohickey on the spout of the bright new gas can.

And neither can Barb, who's far more mechanically-inclined than her writer/husband, and neither can some other retired guy who's just arrived up on the hill to get his early afternoon walk in. I recruit him to try, offer him a kind of 'good Samaritan" thing. 

Some words were spoken that shouldn't have been--not as many as I uttered in London a decade ago when driving from the left side of the car was just as confounding as figuring out what on earth a roundabout was when you're in it. 

Frustration, sheer frustration creates a climate in which a few naughty words are tolerated, I think--or hope. 

We take the Subaru back to Coop, where Marv smiles befriendingly and lends us a great black funnel, which means we get the Buick going again.

But that blasted doohicky still pisses me off because it won. 

Now I'm normally proud to be a Democrat, even though as such I'm hen's teeth in the neighborhood. I can guess at the story of that doohickey on the gas can's spout. Some Democrats determined that a gas can without some safety mechanism risked bodily injury and even death, turning people like my dad, years ago, into a pillar of flame. "So let's just create a safety feature and make it mandatory on every gas can sold in this country," some lousy do-gooder told his lib buddies.

The whole story makes me think seriously about wandering over to the Republicans, where, rest assured, they're all as angry as I am about too many gal-durn safety regulations.

Anybody need a gas can? Used only once. . .

Missouri River, 07/06

The longest American river isn't all that far away. I've been playing around in its history for years now, developing stories from its treasured history. No matter where you go up and down its banks, it's stunning in its quiet beauty.

But all that beauty makes it difficult to photograph. No matter what you shoot, the Missouri River is bigger, and all that bigness doesn't easily fit in a camera, no matter what lens you're carrying. 

No matter how or where you shoot, what you go home with is small potatoes. I never learned my lesson, no matter how often I tripped the shutter: if there's any here, I click away.

On a day in July, a decade ago, beauty was all around, and I was arrogant enough to fire away, trying to get some of it on my memory card. Nothing here comes close to the level of stunning witnessable that day, all around.

Real actual beauty is legendary, always out of reach of the camera, but I'm thankful for what I can take home.

Sunday Brunch

Take it from an old man, it's just plain easier to look back when there is so much of it behind you, so much more than what's out front. Trust me on that point--I'm aging. Whether or not I'm "aged" is, even in my mind, in dispute. 

I've been writing for fifty years, and what's clear to me these days is that there is far more "back there" than there is out front. 

So for years already I've putting together a couple of books from things I wrote years--decades!--ago. One is a collection of short stories from back yonder; it's presently with a publisher. And another is a collection of short short stories (I mean it that way) about worship, little stories I wrote on request, stories that appeared long ago in a magazine titled Reformed Worship.   

It's been fun to go through them again, like meeting old but dear friends. 

"Brunch" is a good example. Like the others in the collection I'm putting together, it has duel aims: it intends to be a good story first of all, but the magazine's readership is sharply defined as church members who think about what we do when we worship: it has to flirt with the way we worship.

Here's "Brunch," the whole thing. It's Sunday dinner at the home of Pete and Sandy. The kids are long-ago out of the house. Pete is a member of his congregation's worship committee.

*

“So, on a scale of one to five, what’s my Sunday dinner rate, Mr. Eminent Critic?” Sandy said, leaning back in her chair.

“Three-and-a-half stars. An anemic four maybe,” Pete said, one eyebrow cocked, while spreading what Sandy considered too much margarine on the last piece of coffee cake.

“Sunday brunches are very in, sir,” she said. “I got docked because I didn’t make potatoes and gravy.” She picked the last piece of pineapple from the fruit dish and placed it daintily in her mouth, as if they were dining at the Waldorf. “I confess,” she said, holding up both hands, “I simply cannot make big Sunday dinners.”

Outside, the sun was beaming the way it’s supposed to do on a Sunday afternoon. “This may come as some surprise, but I’m not shocked at your confession,” Pete said.

She looked at him as if deeply aggrieved. “For all these years I’ve thought of it as my secret sin.”

“Why don’t you pass me the rest of that bacon?” he said. “That reminds me--did you notice anything strange about the worship this morning?”

Sandy shrugged her shoulders.

“About the confession of sin?” A hint.

“I’m sorry to say I don’t remember,” Sandy said.

Pete reached for the bulletin he’d left near the phone. “Mind wandering again, eh?” He opened the bulletin and pointed to the order of worship.

Sandy took the sheet from him and followed the lines with her fingers, read it twice, then looked up and shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not supposed to like it, I take it,” she said.

“I just wondered what you thought,” he said.

She sat there, the bulletin in her fingers, waiting for him to explain. Pete sipped loudly on his coffee. “Well,” she said, “what’s the beef?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“It’s not ‘nothing,’ my dear, or you wouldn’t have asked.”

“Maybe I’m overreacting. Just forget it.”

“Pete, don’t do this to me,” she said. “What’s the gripe?”

He broke a strip of bacon with the side of his fork. “I wondered if you thought that new confession we’re using is a little--how-do-you-say-it?--maybe a little heavy, a little too ‘wretched’?--kind of ‘I’m-way-too-full-of-sin’?”

Sandy looked back at the lines: “Lord,” it read, “we have sinned. We have sought our own desires while forgetting our neighbors’ needs. We have searched for fulfillment in things and despised the promptings of the Spirit. We have gloried in our law and neglected your Word--”

“Pretty bleak?” Pete said.

Sandy spooned up the last few ounces of fruit juice. “I don’t particularly like to admit it, but all this on the list may be true.”

“Come on,” Pete said.

“Really.”

“I didn’t know you were so full of sin, you old Calvinist.”

“We all are.”

“That much?”

Sandy looked again at the words. “Yes, that much.” She picked up the kids’ silverware and laid it on their plates.

“Reading it bothered me. I just don’t feel so miserable about myself, I guess.” He pulled the sheet away from her. “Is that wrong?”

“Maybe it is--”

“Sandy--”

“No, I mean it. You know what it says in the Bible: ‘If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”

“Sandy, for pity’s sake--”

“I don’t think the Bible says ‘except for Pete Baker, who’s not a half-bad Joe’--”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I’m not being silly. We’re all full of sin, aren’t we? Even the great dinner critic?”

Pete looked miffed. “Where does it say in the Bible that we have to walk around all day with our chins in the gutter?”

“That’s not the point, Mr. Perfect.” She poked a piece of banana and held it up to his mouth. “Here, sweeten up a bit.” Reluctantly, Pete opened up. “The point is that we have assurance that we’re forgiven. Here, read this.” She reached over and pointed at the assurance printed with the worship. “You got any more bacon?”

“Am I your slave? What do you say?” she said, dropping the worship sheet back near the phone.

“Confucius say, ‘Pretty lady no cook but sharp cookie.’”

“Talk about anemic,” Sandy said.

“Now tell me,” Pete said, cleaning out the last of the scrambled eggs. “How do you get so smart when you don’t even listen in church?”

“I’m the one who listens. You didn’t even hear the Assurance, did you?

Peter grimaced, as if he’d just taken a bite of bitter herbs. “Got me again,” he said, “but it’s a dietary problem with me. I’m not getting the right foods, and it’s affecting my mind--”

“Aha, the old ‘the woman-thou-hast-given-me’ thing. Now, that’s ‘original sin.’”

“I’m sorry,” Pete said.

“And you’re forgiven.” Sandy grabbed the rest of the dishes from the table. “By the way, you remember it’s your turn to cook tonight, don’t you?--what’re we having?”

We're out

If you're so perfectly sure that same-sex marriage is an abomination before the eyes of God, then what went down at the synod of the church to which I have belonged for my entire life, the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC), makes sense, I suppose.

What happened, or so it seems, was that the CRC Synod of 2026 decided to leave a worldwide association of Reformed churches, an association the CRC had a significant role in creating just ten years ago on the campus of Calvin University (MI). There is some irony there, of course; the CRC played a major role in creating the union of churches that, a decade after its birth, we have now walked out of.

The reason for our hasty departure, as you might guess, is the "liberal" positions taken by the organization we played such an important role in founding--read "same-sex" marriage and associated issues below the belt. "Delegates to synod expressed concern over some of the organization’s statements on moral, theological, and social justice issues," the denominational magazine said.

Feels a bit like understatement.

So, we're out. We'll quit the group we started because we can't be associated with sinners who don't condemn abortion or make unholy allowances for same-sex marriage.

The CRC has been on a tear in recent years, trying its Sunday best to remain clean and pure in the face of the abominations a culture all-too willing to transgress any and all attempts at remaining pure in a sinful world.

Thank you, but we'll have none of that. Even talking with such sinners is an abomination. No more. "They (the worldwide association we quit) have had a corrupting influence on us," one delegate, arguing for severing the bonds said on the floor of the recently concluded denominational synod. "We have not had a preservative influence on them.”

I suppose that's one way to judge our lives--on the basis of what we're not; but for some time now we (CRCNA) have been flirting with the worst of the ancient and negative presentments associated with the word "Calvinist." This summer we've proven ourselves to have earned anew such associations: "We're Calvinists! Just ask us, the truly righteous, if you want to know the truth about God."

That some people leave that kind of fellowship is understandable. That others take joy in such positions, to me seems much less so.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 121

 

“The LORD will keep you from all harm—

he will watch over your life;. . .”

 

My father was an elder in the church, a watcher, a keeper, although I knew very little about what happened when he walked off to meetings on Tuesday nights.  Most of what went on, I know, he was sworn not to tell, and some of it—I know this is true—he didn’t because my knowing it would have hurt me.  I was, after all, a child.

 

One part of his job was tallying after communion.  He had to meet with the other elders after the Lord’s Supper to tally who was there, who wasn’t, and who was purposefully not taking the elements, or—even worse, I’m sure—who might have been taking the body and blood even though they’d been barred. I have no idea what the elders called that little gum shoe reconnaissance meeting, but I know that they met.

 

What those elders were watching for were stories, the people who were coming to the table with a checkered past—or in process of checkering their presents. When I became an elder, nobody watched the sacrament that closely. Maybe I remember what went on back then because I knew that behind the effort lay stories I would have liked to know, what lies beneath the ceremony. I still do. Whatever the reason, I remember that he’d come back home late from communion Sunday worship.

 

That post-communion tallying—as well as my father’s own righteousness—may be responsible for the deeply-rooted sense I have that church elders should be Godly statesmen and women, dutiful, virtuous, and devout. And that conviction may be the reason why, more than any other elder-ly task, I always loved distributing elements myself when I held the office, giving away the body and blood of Jesus Christ. It’s a big job meant for the kind of person who grows into the office having raised good kids and having been the spouse of only one mate, no messes in the scrapbook. An elder was someone not subject to the sins our mutual flesh is heir to.

 

Some years ago I was served the sacrament by two men who were once thugs, criminals—two men who, for many years, valued only their own skin. I took the bread and wine from thugs who, with impunity, cheated others, stole what they could to line their pockets, used drugs, and lived promiscuously. At about the time I began to understand why my father got home late after the Lords Supper, the two of them were leaving behind a childhood they never had in a Southeast Asian war zone.

 

I knew them. I’d walked into their lives, year by year, even written their stories; and I knew that those men—the men carrying the bread and the wine last—were once so far gone in treachery that not a soul in the church where we sat could probably imagine some species of the evil they’d perpetuated.  Who’d have ever thought that some Sabbath morning they’d be in the northwest corner of a state called Iowa doling out the body and blood of Christ? Amazing.

 

But the promise of scripture, and the Word of the Lord, here in Psalm 121 is that “the LORD will keep you from harm—he will watch over your life.” And all during those bloody years in war-torn Laos, where those two men grew up, God Almighty, who loves us, had his eye on them as if they were fletching sparrows, even when they were lousy thugs, and probably especially then. 

 

He knew them.  He was watching them, keeping them from harm, when they—and we, all of us—were yet sinners. Those two guys fed me the body and blood of Jesus.

 

Amazing grace.  

Ubi Sunt

For one semester--and for reasons I've long ago forgotten--I lived in college housing in a basement apartment beneath a brick apartment building, downtown Sioux Center, Iowa. First semester, junior year it was, I believe, right downtown, just an alley between us and the offices of the mayor of the village. 

I don't know that I ever met him personally, although I'm quite sure had I run into him on the street, he would have smiled to acknowledge me. The town mayor lived an odd life for a resident of this cow town on the prairie. Most of his life--we were sure--was lived in his next-door office, not around a fireplace at his home. He was the mayor, very highly respected, acknowledged to be the major mover-and-shaker in his town. Most histories would agree that he hustled the town into becoming thriving little burg it has become.

His strange, off-hour comings-and-goings from that downtown office only increased our estimation of his character--and his mystery: that the man lived to lead Sioux Center seemed perfectly obvious. To the college guys who lived next door, downstairs in those basement rooms, the Mayor seemed town royalty.

But back then he wasn't the only potentate. There was another too, the man who had quite single-handedly chosen Sioux Center, Iowa, as the home of a new college to be created by people from the same tiny denomination, the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC) as he and his congregation. That college was and is Dordt College (now "university"). Together, the Pres and the Mayor were the town royalty--they shared the throne and, at least to our 20-year old perceptions, got along royally.

The Mayor's Office is now a laundromat, but the apartment building looks just about exactly as it looked fifty years ago. Sioux Center is probably twice as big as it was in the late Sixties, and the college the Pres carved into existence now enrolls twice as many students, a majority of whom are not members of the CRC. Things change.

Yesterday was the funeral of a daughter of the Pres, not the oldest child but the first of what was once the royal family to pass away. But today most people around town don't remember anything of  her regal birth, or of the royal family from which she came. What ordinary folks know is that she was a long-time elementary school teacher, that her husband is a fine man, a good father. They  may also know that the two of them had three children, each of whom is married, the oldest of which has reached "middle-age."

A small crowd will be gathering, I'm sure. Whatever royal status her father (and her mother) had achieved a half-century ago won't be visible at the ceremony. People are sad, friends and relatives are mourning, but the funeral itself will not be royal. 

Cancer took her. Death, not a respecter of persons, came too early, as it often does. 

It's an old, old story, retold in every town and village on Planet Earth, isn't it? Crowns tarnish, storied lives turn to dust--after all, life is fleeting, memory is all we have, all achievements are temporary. It's one of the oldest songs we sing.

Sometimes when I go past that brick apartment building, I wonder whether anyone still lives in that basement apartment. I wonder if I'd be really polite, I could bargain my way in sometime just to look around, just to remember. 

It's a bargain with truth, isn't it?--because try as we might, we can't go home again. The only rest is eternity. "I am not my  own," the creeds beg us to promise. Death is the final seal.

An old friend, daughter of a preacher, once told me her father used to say that when he did a funeral he learned to just get out of the way. "Just read a psalm," he used to remind himself, she said, "just Psalm 90, no more: "Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom."

I don't know that I'd really like to see that basement apartment where, just about sixty years ago, we used to live. It can't possibly be the same. Nothing is.

Ubi sunt--one of the oldest themes in human literature, comes up effortlessly on days like today, one of mankind's oldest lamentations--"where have all the flowers gone?" 

Morning Thanks: A Kooser poem to relive

 

[This is an oldie, with its own history, posted here originally in August of 2000, just a few months shy of the height of the Covid plague.]

At the Cancer Clinic
by Ted Kooser

She is being helped toward the open door
that leads to the examining rooms
by two young women I take to be her sisters.
Each bends to the weight of an arm
and steps with the straight, tough bearing
of courage. At what must seem to be
a great distance, a nurse holds the door,
smiling and calling encouragement.
How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

She is not elderly. The young woman on stage in this Ted Kooser poem is being helped along by her sisters, both of them young, he says, suggesting she is too. That she is not elderly sharpens the sadness. Cancer seems most villainous when it chooses the young. 

I'd like to think that she may recover, but nothing in the poem suggests it. For her, it's a "great distance" to the examining room. She's slumped; her sisters  bend "to the weight of an arm," while that nurse in her white smock calls "encouragement." Her life is in danger.

The miracle of very real situation is that "There is no restlessness or impatience/or anger anywhere in sight," so decidedly different is what we're seeing from what we witness so regularly in the rest of the world. What's here in the waiting room is grace, Kooser says, gifts flowing from all directions--nothing less hard to find than love itself.

"Blessed are the pure in spirit," Jesus said, the first of the beatitudes, "for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Her case looks dire. I don't think Kooser sees this young cancer patient recovering. The woman in "her funny knit cap" is anything but arrogant.

But that doesn't mean that what Mr. Koozer witnessed one day "at the cancer clinic" is horror. What he sees is a testimony of grace so visible that the waiting room, just for a moment, is stunned by the rare beauty of sheer selflessness.

Today, we're in the middle of an epidemic ravishing families around the world, tens of thousands of ERs crowded with pestilence, so many--too many--people dying alone. Here in the U. S. daily deaths are right now, once again, exceeding a thousand a week.

But this too. Every day, every hour, every minute--someone with "the straight, tough bearing of courage" is helping someone, even those of us who are cancer free, towards the open door of the kingdom of heaven. 

Giving is one of those rare gifts that gives on giving. Ted Koozer's poem takes note of grace, and that's a blessing for which I'm thankful this morning.