My first Ash Wednesday

Fifteen, maybe twenty years after I left the southwest corner of Wisconsin, I went back to look over the land, something I hadn't done while I lived and worked there. I'd been to Galena, IL, at night, only to scout some opposing basketball team; I had no idea that the old river city would become one of Illinois' finest tourist attractions.

I had no idea that the kids who sat in my classes could well have been great, great grandchildren of the original "badgers," thus named for their profession--the iron miners who dug out pits that still, here and there, litter the region. I sort of knew that those miners were a tough crew, a whole world apart from the Dutch Calvinists among and from whom I grew up. A number of those kids came from family-owned cheese factories that turned out the Swiss and brick I learned quickly to love, gifts for this young Turk teacher, still wet behind the ears, barely older than their kids. But I'd never taken the time to see where they'd come from. I was writing a novel. . .

Made me angry, being back there, driving past the high school, looking in the windows where I used to hold forth, disappointed with myself,  I hadn't really gone off-road during the two years I spent in Lafayette County, WI, whose claim to fame was having no stop lights. I hadn't gone up and down gentle hills authored by countless rivers in a hurry west to the Mississippi, Dubuque little more than a half hour away.

In those two years, even though I lived a half-hour from school, I'd never taken the time to see where my students came from. I mean, I knew that some kids were milkers and some cheesemakers, but I'd never seen the dairies where they'd spent their childhoods, storybook places in those rolling hardwood hills of America's Dairyland.

Truth be known, for me, at least, it was a hard sell to think of them as Christian believers. When your origins never wander all that far in a sturdy corral, defining characteristics are as bold as they are clear. It's not a surprise, I suppose, that on Ash Wednesday, when the Catholic kids came back from lunch with dirt rubbings on their foreheads, I had no idea what was going on and trouble not bringing the matter up. So many strangely dirtied.

"What's goin' on?" I must have asked someone or another, pointing up at my untouched forehead.

And it had to have been a treat to one or two of them to field that question, put the teacher in a desk and strong-arm the podium. "Can you imagine, Mr. Schaap has no idea it's Ash Wednesday." 

If I'd have unloaded on them, quoted from my catechism, done a Calvin thing, or simply rehearsed the reasons for the glorious Reformation, I'd have convinced them that I was nuts. I could have done that, but instead asked for their forbearance and that they not consider me as dingy as I must have seemed.

Some, as I remember, didn't wipe off the dust, so it stayed there all afternoon for me to see and judge--my Calvinism made me good at judging--and I remember thinking Bobby Westgaard?--the baddest kid in town has a dirty cross up there on his noggin? You got to be kidding. What kind of hocus-pocus religion would offer him the sacrament?'

In truth, I wasn't much older--four years--than they were, just as much a kid, maybe more. I was 22 years old, in love with my students, but innocent as Young Goodman Brown. 

Last night, that whole first Ash Wednesday and its scrapbook of memories came back as I watched my fellow congregants receive the imposition of ashes, as the action is traditionally called. 

I'm not bragging about this, but the imposition my students left on their foreheads fifty-some years ago, and my own naivete, my idiocy about it, left its own indelible mark, something I couldn't help but remember as people left the front of the church, the same dirty old cross on their foreheads. 

Fifteen, maybe twenty years ago, I went back to southwest Wisconsin in part because I wanted to see up close where they lived, where they came from. 

There was so much I had to learn.