Catherland

It was a long, long trip, but I don't remember once thinking it wasn't worth my time. What's more, I don't remember ever feeling boredom in my students or seeing it in their faces. Once we'd get there, it seemed the topography had changed--and it had. We live, here, on the emerald edge of the Great Plains; northwest Iowa is not the Great Plains. Willa Cather's Red Cloud, Nebraska, is. At the right time of year, the grasses around the region seemed red, just as she says in My Antonia so beautifully. 

It was My Antonia that drew us out there. Maybe ten years after I'd begun teaching at Dordt, I inherited the American Novels course that had been on the books ever since I'd been a student. I don't know how I ever noticed it, but somewhere along the line Ms. Cather's Great Plains started to feel something of a cousin to what we could see around as the eastern edge of all that open space. 

When I did, I probably looked on line for a place called Red Cloud, thinking it might be worthwhile just to check. Even then--35 years ago--what's left of Red Cloud, Nebraska, was just about a full-time chamber of commerce for Nebraska's most favorit-est writer, Willa Cather. I was sure that if anyone in town could prove that young Cather had visited there house or lot, they'd get a commemorative marker to put in the ground. Back then, Red Cloud, Nebraska could have been Cathertown, maybe should have been.

We'd meet at the old Cather Center--books, coffee cups, t-shirts, you know--where we'd meet our assigned tour guide. In the old bank museum, we'd get our first-hand bio of Willa Cather. Then, it was on to the old railroad station (now redone), the Catholic church up the block, the Episcopalian church (Cather's), a little spin around town, and finally the Cather home, just off Main. 

We'd have lunch in one of the town's greasy spoons (there were only two, only one choice), making quite a show of ourselves, the old guy--me--with at least a half-dozen coeds (all blonde), and, one year, just two guys, both of whom happened to be African-American. Strange combo we figured those Red Cloud-ians up at the counter must have whispered. 

There was more, too, lots more, especially if the tour guide--always a local woman-- was good, best if she didn't just follow the straight-and-narrow. Inevitably, and with maybe a little coaxing the $64,000 question would emerge. "So, tell us--what do people in Red Cloud say?--was Willa Cather gay?"

Generally, back then, my students were squeamish about it--I doubt they would be so guarded today. Being gay--in those first years out there--was still not something to be bantered about lightly. Sometimes, our hosts would mutter some line to get the class off the subject, but once in a while our genial host would sit up in front of the van we'd be in and wind a story that would often satisfy me, at least, the guy in charge.

One year, she drew the answer from a discussion she must have had years before, with her grandfather who was old enough to remember an adult Cather, who lived in New York City, not Red Cloud, but came back home often enough for her visits to be remembered.

That guide's Grandpa had once told her that long, long ago, his father before him had told him that when he was a boy, his Red Cloud father (three generations back), had set the kids down formally. Cather went on to Lincoln, to the University of Nebraska, after graduating as valedictorian of her high school class--just three in the class; but her graduation picture caught her in the way she wanted to be seen at that time in her life--not as a girl, but short-haired as a boy who signed her name "William."

With Willa Cather, the most famous of the Great Plains novelists, there were some gender issues throughout her life. The guide's grandfather claimed that his father had told them not ever to make fun of Willa because, she said, her great-grandfather had told his kids that Willa, unlike the other kids, was very, very special.

I'll never forget that answer, that story, because it so wonderfully handled every last comment. She's not weird; she's special--small towns, early 20th century, at their best. I left, proud.

Besides, who cares, really? What we had, in hand, was a wonderful novel, a beautiful tale of life on the open prairie, always the students' semester favorite. Somewhere here I've got a brick I dug from the ground her grandparents homesteaded. 

And I've got that story. "She's 'special.'" 

Six hours out, six hours back home. Twelve hours together in a van, me driving.

Worth every minute.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 121

 

“I lift up my eyes to the hills—

where does my help come from?” Psalm 121:1 

I wasn’t sure where my daughter’s question came from, and I was busy thinking of something else at the time.  That’s why I didn’t give her a very good answer, not a fatherly answer anyway. 

 “When you were my age,” she said, sort of laughing, “did you ever think that the world was just going to come to an end?” 

 My daughter was 30 at the time, the age I was when my wife and I had her. Truth be told, right then I couldn’t remember ever thinking the world was in imminent danger of coming to an end.  I smiled and said no, rolled my eyes, and turned back to the computer screen.

 Later, I couldn’t sleep.

 I was a kid, but I remember learning to crawl under my school desk should nuclear holocaust come to Oostburg, Wisconsin.  I grew up in the Cold War, when the Soviets were capable of pushing the wrong button or pushing the right one wrongly. 

 I remember walking on a football field during the Cuban missle crisis and having a profound talk with a kid about whether or not we’d ever play a game.  We both knew football was a metaphor; we were talking about the end of the world.

 I remember the comet Kahoteck and Y2K.  I remember a number of primitive eschatologies—Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, for instance—that numbered our days by manipulating ancient calendars vaguely suggested in the odd visions of minor prophets.  End-times theology does well often. Not long ago, everyone and their pet hamster wanted not to be Left Behind.

 If you ask me—and she once did--I believe her generation lives in more fear than mine did. I was reared with more freedom than her kids will ever see.  When I was ten, my friends and I took our bikes down to Lake Michigan and lost ourselves and our inhibitions in endless lakeshort woods. Today all that land is private property; but today, no parent would allow a ten-year-old kid that kind of freedom. 

 The change in parents’ attitudes toward their children was immense in the years I was a teacher. Loving, helicopter parents, moms and dads who ask more questions about college than their children do, visited campuses every spring for the last two decades already, lugging their children with, most of them far less interested than they were. I never visited the college where I enrolled. Come September, my parents drove me there—500 miles—then left. That was it.

As I write, the Brits have suffered several vicious attacks of terrorism. Our President uses their tragedy to urge the implementation of his orders to shut the door to immigrants from certain Muslim countries. Some object, but fear is a motivator, and a political motivator too, to be sure. Fear sells.

 So, my daughter, this is a better answer than my eye-rolling:  yes, I’ve felt as if the world was about to end. I’m guessing we all have. We’ve all been afraid.  Even the psalmist. 

 While the psalms tell us bountifully about God, they’re even better at telling us about ourselves. “I will lift up my eyes to the hills,” he says in verse one of this faith-heavy psalm, “—where does my help come from?” There are times we all feel there’s no one out there to hold back the horror.

 You’re not alone. But that’s divinely true, isn’t it? It’s a joy to know you’re not alone.

The Rendezvous (2) -- James Beckwourth

That famous ad William Ashley in Saint Louie used to fish for recruits for his Rocky Mountain Fur Trade brought in men, even young men, who weren't choir boys or  ever would be. Hard as it is to believe in 1824,  Ashley was an equal opportunity employer. How can we know that? Because we know one of his recruits, at least, was African-American. 

James Beckwourth's father, using an old English family title, went by name of Sir Jennings Beckwith. Sir Jennings coupled with one of his slaves who gave birth to James Beckwourth, a multi-racial kid who was treated by his father, the old sources say, like a son, not a slave--which is to say educated and, in general, pampered.

Okay, but then how on earth did a Black man fare with a cast of mountain men, rough-an- tough hooligans who held less-than-charming prejudices? James the Black man didn't get drummed out of the corps. 

Why not? Sir Jennings' son James carried along a deed of emancipation that declared his freedom. He couldn't be cashed in like some runaway. So here's a word that's fallen out of use--manumission. One word, manumission, a word used to describe how freed slaves were granted, by their owners, their freedom. Once manumitted, we might say, James Beckwourth was free as a bird.

And he flew--did he ever. Once freed from his apprenticeship to an ornery  St. Louis  blacksmith, Beckwourth read the ad and signed up to be one of Ashley's rugged wilderness crew, where he spent most of the next decade as one of the original mountain men, taking a wife or two or three from the Crows, where he became the chief's adopted son and lived, quite comfortably in fact, while fighting the Crow's traditional enemies, the Blackfeet. 

There's oh-so-much more. He left the Crow people and became a commodities trader at places like Bent's Fort,  Sante Fe, and Taos, and in 1842 put up his own business at a lonesome place that would someday be named Pueblo, Colorado.

During the Gold Rush era, he went to the bank with his what he knew about the untraveled west, leading wild-eyed fortune seekers to the places they thought to make a fortune. 

And everywhere he went he fought Indians--Seminoles in Florda, renegade bands in California, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho back on the plains. When finally he grew old, he met a man named Thomas Bonner at Beckwourth's own country hotel. Bonner listened to Jim Beckwouth tales and wrote them down into a book, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth: Mountaineer, Scout and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians (1856).

Beckwourth didn't have to lie about the happenings in his life, but he did--or so say some historians. Sometimes it's hard to measure tall tales.

Late in life, he went back to the Crow, where he'd come son of the chief way back in the ancient past. No one knows how he died, or at least no one's talking about it. A rumor claims one of his ex-wives found a way to get back at him. 

Not nice, but it sort of fits, don't you think?

Was he here? Had to be. He was, in short, almost everywhere else. 

  

A Rendezvous (i)

 

When William Ashley, THE William Ashley of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, came back up to St. Louis from far up the Missouri, all the way to the Bighorn River that first time, the load of furs he took back with him was enough to blow out his pretty substantial pockets. It was 1824, and what Ashley had attended—he never trapped a beaver himself—was a celebration/festival/sales meeting of a hundred or more mountain men, his men, his employees, who had, like never before, gathered together near a fork in the Green River, somewhere close to where a town named McKinnon, Wyoming lies today.

It was Ashley’s idea to substantially alter the commonly held way in which fur companies gathered in the bounty. Instead of waiting for the trappers to get to St. Louis to bring in the county, it was Ashley’s idea to go get the furs himself, venture up the Missouri River to get to a place agreed upon for a “rendezvous,” the first of the famous rendezvous, rowdy celebrations, get-togethers of men who’d hardly seen other human beings for something close to a year.

William Ashley might have been a little scared of handling all that bounty, $50,000 worth, in fact, 1.5 million in pelts in today's cash, but then what he knew was that as long as he kept his head down, he wasn’t in imminent danger of being robbed. It’s not as if swash-buckling pirates roamed the Missouri back then. Few people were likely capable of imagining the wealth of what he had in the boat.

He must have worn a smile because his “rendezvous” idea was a winner he wasn’t about to abandon. All the way down the river, right here where the Big Sioux flows into the Missouri, he had to be thinking of what manner of vice and malefaction next year’s wilderness jamboree was going to entertain. If you stand up on the South Sioux City bridge, you can almost hear him cackle.

What he’d done, almost blindly, is hired some real ringers with an ad that ran, famously in an 1822 St. Louie newspaper: “One hundred enterprising young men… to ascend the Missouri River to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years,” which means, of course, that the winners all had to pass by our place at least once on their way up the Missouri River.

Who were the ringers? Well, Jim Bridger for one, who was 18 when he answered Ashley’s ad. He’d never been any further west than St. Louis. He spent the next 20 years wandering from the Canadian border to the Spanish forts of New Mexico, from Missouri to Utah. When he stumbled on the Great Salt Lake, he thought it was the Pacific Ocean. In fact, he may have been the first white man to Old Faithful blow its top.

Then there was Jedidiah Smith, the parson of the bunch, often credited with discovering overland routes that became major highways during the Gold Rush. Smith lost a scalp to a grizzly, but got it back when his buddies sewed it back on.

And who can forget Hugh Glass, mauled by a bear and left for dead, a man whose will to revenge kept him alive but sense of humanity finally conquered all those troubled demons in his memory, a legendary character still alive in the works of John Niehardt and Frederick Manfred.

How about James Beckwourth, an African-American who shows up almost everywhere across the continent, including a significant tour of duty with the Crows, serving, some say, as their head man.

Ashley’s home base was St. Louis, but when he went afield to pick up the good, he, like the others, passed right by the confluence of three river which became Sioux City. We can’t call them residents, but they were here, if not on the river then on the great river road you can still note with its brand new sign up on our Old Missouri River Trail.

Just go stand there sometime and imagine, with Ashley and his crew gracing our hills. Just imagining all those tough-as-leather mountain men, their wives, their donkeys, their furs—just imagining our story makes our world a bigger place.

Let's say, just for kicks, that our President suddenly gets the message that unless something changes, unless something makes an 180-degree shift, it's going to be lights out for him and his precious cargo-carrying administration come November. Let's just say, for sake of argument that reality looks him right in the eye, as Nathan did David, and says "you're the man," you're the cause of the absolute mess we're in.  You done it, not fake news or those lousy commie dems.

Let's just say, again, for sake of argument, that all of a sudden he gets it, maybe even gets real, honest-to-goodness faith, begins to understand that we all stand in need of grace, even him, that his hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness. I'm bringing up religious madness only because he seems to deal in it, criticizing the pope, running an AI pic that makes him into a savior, Trump bibles for sale--you know. 

But, just for kicks, let's try to get our minds around Donald Trump becoming a saint in any of the great world's religions--a Buddhist monk, a Native medicine man, a Muslim cleric. Let's just assume that suddenly he comes to an understanding of the fact that he's not his people's "retribution" (remember that speech?), but his people's humble servant.

Let's just assume that he is the blessed recipient of some kind of Damascus Road experience that leaves him mute, in furlongs of abject humiliation that he can't Truth Social his way out of.

Let's assume it happened, okay?

How does he communicate his redeemed soul? How does he comport himself for what's left of a largely ruined second term? How does he express that the dominating word in his vocabulary will from that day forward be love and not graft? 

How on earth could he proceed?

Well, easy, really. He'd have to make clear, in word and deed, that he is reversing course on EVERYTHING his agenda had formulated and acted upon. He'd have to start by being human, by hurting for and with the hurting. He'd have to reinstate USAID programs he cut with such relish. He'd have to back off his war in the Persian Gulf, call Putin the murderer he is, tell each and every one of his billionaire buddies to use their bounty to help rebuild medical care for all. He'd have to call of the uniforms and tell the nation that what we really need is a standardized program of immigration, then, with Congress, build it.

He'd have to either shut down Truth Social or else use it to broadcast meditations on the sacred words of whatever world religion has grabbed his attention. 

In short, he'd have to be something, someone he isn't. 

Could that happen? Even if he really wanted to, even if he came to see how perilous his rule is right now? Even if the impossible became possible?

Could that happen? Seriously, could that happen?

If you're a true believer in whatever world religion you or he might choose, the answer to that question is "Of course it could happen. The Almighty is all-powerful--nothing, no one stands beyond his love and rule. 

So could he?

"Lord, I believe," both me and the man with the possessed daughter said. "Help thou my unbelief."

The West

 

The West can still take your breath away, as millions of vacationers know when they head out every summer. There are untolled places in the American West that are just as untrammeled as they were in the late 18th century, when the only human residents were indigenous. 

One can only imagine the abject astonishment when any Easterner would arrive at vistas so wide open they seemed to swallow you.

There are some records, of course, like this passage from Thomas James, Three Years Among the Indians and Mexicans.

On the third day we issued from very high and desolate mountains on both sides of us, whose tops are covered with snow throughout the year, and came upon a scene of beauty and magnificence combined, unequalled by any other view of nature that I ever beheld. It really realized all my conceptions of the Garden of Eden. 

In the west the peaks and pinnacles of the Rocky Mountains shone resplendent in the sun. The snow on their tops sent back a beautiful reflection of the rays of the morning sun. From the sides of the dividing ridge between the waters of the Missouri and Columbia there sloped gradually down to the bank of the river we were on, a plain, then covered with every variety of wild animals peculiar to this region, while on the east an­other plain arose by a very gradual ascent and extended as far as the eye could reach. 

These and the mountain sides were dark with buffa­loes, elk, deer, moose, wild goats, and wild sheep; some grazing, some lying down under the trees, and all enjoying a perfect millennium of peace and quiet. On the margin the swans, geese, and pelicans cropped the grass or floated on the surface of the water. The cottonwood trees seemed to have been planted by the hand of man on the bank of the river to shade our way, and the pines and cedars waved their tall majestic heads along the base and on the sides of the mountains.

 The whole landscape was that of the most splendid English park. The stillness, beauty, and loveliness of this scene struck us all with indescribable emotions. We rested on the oars and enjoyed the whole view in silent astonishment and admiration. Nature seemed to have rested here, after creating the wild mountains and chasms among which we had voyaged for two days. Dougherty, as if inspired by the scene with the spirit of poetry and song, broke forth in one of Burns noblest lyrics, which found a deep echo in our hearts. 

"a vast expanse of moving, plunging, rolling, rush­ing life"

Maybe gas prices will open up Yellowstone this summer. Otherwise, it's as busy as a downtown intersection. Lots of attractions, of course, but one of the majors is the buffalo. Every year some clown gets mashed by some angry bull, but it doesn't stop dozens of others from getting out of the car and risking the ire of these wonderful mammoth beasts, of whom all of us can be proud.

This is part of the herd belonging to the Yankton Sioux, on their reservation land. They're a wonder to see because, rare as they are, they remind all of us of our world once was. 

They bestow a reverence that downright spiritual.

This passage from Warren Angus Ferris' Life in the Rocky Mountains (1843), describes a scene thousands witnessed 200 years ago but is almost unimaginable today. 

But, go ahead and imagine--

On the fourteenth, hurrah, boys! we saw a buffalo; a solitary, stately old chap, who did not wait an invitation to dinner, but toddled off with his tail in the air. We saw on the sixteenth a small herd of ten or twelve, and had the luck to kill one of them. It was a patriarchal allow, poor and tough, but what of that? we had a roast presently, and hamped the gristle with a zest. Hunger is said to be a capital sauce, and if so our meal was well seasoned, for we had been living for some days on boiled corn alone, and had the grace to thank heaven for meat of any quality. Our hunters killed also several antelopes, but they were equally poor, and on the whole we rather preferred the balance of the buffalo for supper. 

People soon learn to be dainty, when they have a choice of viands. Next day, oh, there they were, thousands and thou­sands of them! Far as the eye could reach the prairie was literally cov­ered, and not only covered but crowded with them. 

In very sooth it was a gallant show; a vast expanse of moving, plunging, rolling, rush­ing life--a literal sea of dark forms, with still pools, sweeping currents, and heaving billows, and all the grades of movement from calm repose to wild agitation. 

The air was filled with dust and bellowings, the prairie was alive with animation. I never realized before the majesty and power of the mighty tides of life that heave and surge in all great gatherings of human or brute creation. 

The scene had here a wild sublimity of aspect, that charmed the eye with a spell of power, while the natural sympathy of life with life made the pulse bound and almost madden with excitement. Jove but it was glorious! and the next day too, the dense masses pressed on in such vast numbers, that we were compelled to halt, and let them pass to avoid being overrun by them in a literal sense. 

On the following day also, the number seemed if possible more countless than before, surpassing even the prairie-black­ening accounts of those who had been here before us, and whose strange tales it had been our wont to believe the natural extravagance of a mere travelers' turn for romancing, but they must have been true, for such a scene as this our language wants words to describe, much less to exaggerate. On, on, still on, the black masses come and thicken--an ebless deluge of life is moving and swelling around us!

Buffalo rank high on vacation destinations because somehow even a couple of hundred create visions of what once was the world where we live.

Sunday Morning Meds (Psalm 121)

 

“The LORD watches over you—

the LORD is your shade at your right hand. . .”

 

            What he told the world is that since 1895, American news sources have alternated warnings about our changing climate.  For almost forty years prior to the Great Depression, most opinion-makers touted the present danger of a returning ice age.

            And that’s not all.  What he said is that arch-political scientists and their friends in the news media have beating the drum about global warming for years now, when there is no such phenomena—or, if there is, it’s nothing more than a temporary shift, our climate and planet far more dynamic than some would think.

            What he claimed has been proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that the so-called “hockey stick,” the heavily reported spike in climate temperatures throughout the 20^th century after thousands of years of constancy, has been proven totally false by Canadian researchers who simply tore it apart.  That spike is phony baloney. 

            What he told all of us is that the National Academy of Science has shown conclusively that humanity has suffered through minor climate changes before, that what is called “the Medieval Warm Period” (900 A.D. to 1500 A.D.) and “the Little Ice Age” (1500 to 1850) are bona fide proof of natural and sustainable climate variations—and that therefore the propaganda about “global warming” today is just hype and hooey.

            What he said is that the Arctic isn’t warming but cooling.  He’s reminded us all that sixty prominent Canadian scientists sent a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister, saying that “'Climate change is real' is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes occur all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural 'noise.'"

            He claimed that restraining so-called greenhouse gases has real economic costs, stifling business activity and a bustling economy, and therefore hindering progress in dealing with world poor.  He quoted this headline, "Climate Changes Endanger World's Food Output," called alarmist and dangerous, and then pointed out that it ran in the New York Times in 1975, thirty years ago.

            He is a senator, and the speech he delivered, years ago already, is much longer, full of facts and documented anecdotes and references to studies.

            I have neither the time nor the competence to study the issue of global warming thoroughly, and whether the Senator is even partially right, scientists themselves appear to disagree.  So the nature of the question changes in my circumstance:  it’s not “what do you believe about global warming?”  Instead, it’s “who do you believe?”

            And I choose not to believe the Senator. I choose to believe instead a list as long as my arm of people who radically disagree with his claims. I may be wrong.

            But I also choose to believe the psalmist when he says—with nary a hint of global warming—that this God of his (who’s apparently at his right hand armed with a parasol) is watching over all of us—polar meltdown or coming ice age, and that this God, my God, is my shade from all kinds of heat. That truth is transcendent. 

            He is my only comfort—in both deathly cold January and the dog days of mid-July. He is my only comfort. That I know by faith.

A Missing Week

They call it a TAVR, and it's a blessing. Trust me, I know. I just had one. 

Tuesday had to be one of the most memorable of my life. What a couple of Polish MDs did was recondition an aortic valve in my chest, not by open-heart surgery (the old way) but via a vein in the groin (mine), a procedure called a TAVR. Both sides of the groin are attacked by first-time-ever intrusions, one of those intrusions carries a tiny new piece of technology that will strengthen the weak valve; the other is a temp pacemaker, which won't be used unless it has to be. In my case--which is to say in my procedure, it didn't. That's good. Anyway, that temp needs to be there until it's clear it's not needed, but it has to come out some hours later. 

The first step in healing is an overnight in the hospital, ON YOUR BACK, which is a form of nearly lethal torment to keep things in place. It was perfectly awful. I didn't sleep, watched the clock from 11:00 am on Tuesday to 9:30 am on Wednesday. I took as many pain-killers as they would give me. When we got home, but I could not write a sentence. (I hope I'm doing better). That having been said, I'm greatly thankful that everything went well and that the procedure worked. 

Ostensibly, my heart has been made stronger by the TAVR, and it's been done--my seriously delinquent aortic valve got a big-time boost.

But I say all this to explain the long pause in posts. I started a blog so many years ago I can't begin to remember when exactly, and I've been doing it ever since. If I miss for a few days--as I have twice now in the last few year (for medical reasons) this good old Calvinist starts to feel guilty. 

Thusly, this explanation. That's where I've been.

Long ago, my friend Dave Schelhaas asked me if I'd like to do a "reading" with him last night, and, of course, I said yes. Then, this faulty aortic valve got noticed and I was given the opportunity to have the procedure done "like, next week." So the question was, can you come in on April 7? 

Why put it off, I thought. 

So when I got to the hospital that morning, I said to one of the gallery of nurses, "I'm a writer. Will I be able to do a reading on Thursday night?"

"Of course," she said, fluffing a pillow (or doing something).

I think she thought I was talking about my sitting in my grandpa's chair and reading a book, because when I woke up yesterday, I could tell quickly that my "reading" warn't in the offing. 

Fortunately, I'd thought a ton about what I was going to read and decided on a story from what might be my last book, a selection of short stories from the last forty years. That story, it's in Paternity, concerns a marriage undertaken only to get passage to Canada after the war. It stuck me that I could, quite easily, change the story into a readers theater presentation. So the givens were in place. I had only to bow out and let my characters do what I'd asked them to do.

And, lo, it was very good. I made it over there, and the ringers I recruited did marvelously well, as I knew they would.

Anyway, I'm back.

Some thoughts on Easter morning

Hard as it is to admit, I've become something of a shut-in. Yesterday, once again, the wind blew so horribly that I cared not a fig to go out in it. This winter--and when will it be over, please?--we've had a half-dozen snowstorms (nothing near blizzard-level, however), but what's most wearing finally is the interminable wind, takes your face off, I used to say. 

We're in process of selling our house out in the country this week, and it hurts a little because we're solidly in senior housing right now, a pretty little condo that's less than half the size of the home we left behind. Honestly, out there, with a corner to the northwest, we were subject to prairie winds far more than we are here, in a covey of condos. Still, I can't help but believe we've suffered more wind here than there.

So this shut-in has more time on his hands, time to do things. . .like read. I spent my Holy Saturday reading, and I enjoyed what I read--I really did. I don't know that I'd call Ruth Suckow my all-time favorite-st writer, but I've grown a real affinity for her work, even though its oh-so provincial in subject matter--rural Iowa, early 20th century, almost exclusively farm folk of German stock doing what they did, being who they were.

Suckow, a preacher's kid who grew up here in northwest Iowa, is a sworn realist. She'll never make your favorite writer list if your a devotee of Harry Potter. In a Suckow story, you have to expect an unflinching look at setting and character. Plot isn't all that exacting. Spending an afternoon with Suckow means not wandering far at all from these windswept plains, just no cell phones.

After two long stories, I moved on, but the stories stuck with me. One of them, "Renters," featured a Steinbeck-like family who simply couldn't shake being "renters," the economic place thereby implied, as well as the stigma--"they're just renters," as if they'll never be anything but.

A friend from Parkersburg, Iowa, once did some research about my ancestral family who lived there sometime around the turn of the 20th century. He found my great-grandfather's name on a patch of scrubby river bottom land and told me, rather sweetly, that that patch of land did more than suggest he wasn't wealthy. 

In Suckow's story, the couple hits hard times harder and longer than most families do; they're not in the least lucky--in fact, good times so regularly escape them than they can't help wonder whether there are good times at all. But they're sympathetic. The husband is a hard worker who does his landlord's right. They're fine people really, but they just find it impossible to keep their heads above water. 

It's sad. "Renters" is a sad story. It's well-done, but it's just plain sad.

And then there's "Uprooted," a story made more painful by reciting the lot in life when accrues to people our age. Adult children of an old couple meet at their parents' farm to talk about what's to be done with their parents, who are little more than potted plants. For very understandable reasons, none of the children (and their spouses) really want their ever-more elderly parents to live with them. In point of fact, those elderly parents don't want to close down the old ramshackle house and move in with their childrens' families either. 

Suckow's characters inhabit a community and time in which there are no old folks' homes, which means there are no good options. Plus, Ma and Pa absolutely don't want to move either. My grandfather Schaap was the pastor of the church I grew up in before I was around. My only memories of him are as a sourpuss I wanted to stay in his room and out of my life. Grim stuff.

The story ends with the rich son heading back to his home in Omaha, anxious to shake off all the residue of a visit to Ma and Pa. He's looking forward to sitting in his own chair. Thus do we all make nests of our domiciles; thus, would we all rather not be "Uprooted."

I enjoyed reading both stories, really did, more than I enjoyed the stories--if that makes sense. But I couldn't help wonder why Ruth Suckow chose the kind of determinism she did--why are both stories so sad. She could have turned the lives of the renters around and given them blessed landlords. She could have changed the attitudes of one of Ma and Pa's kids, made them more sympathetic to their elderly parents' cares and needs.

But she didn't.  If I'd written the story, I don't know that I would have either. Life is like that, right?

Two stories, well-written, close to the bone, but both of them given gray and cloudy skies. No wind really, but no sun either. Both negative. 

So we wait--like Holy Saturday. We wait, the meditation we read last night at supper maintained. So, on Holy Saturday, we wait.

The morning has come. Just now--felt like the first time--I woke up to birds singing. No wind either.

It's Easter morning. 

The eternal is once again very real.  

Good Friday

A country churchyard in northeast Iowa.

Just a couple weeks ago I passed a country church and saw this crucifix through the trees, stopped, and tried to put it in the camera and take it with. Somehow I was moved by an ordinary crucifix in a little country churchyard. I told myself on Good Friday I'd put it up, so here it is.

I'm a child of the Reformation, so the crucifix seemed to me--and still does, I suppose--a peculiarly Roman Catholic thing, almost contraband; but I've taken a shot at more than a little of Christ's suffering through the years. Here's a number of them, for Good Friday, from a host of places of worship. They are what we try to know, to feel, to understand of this particular day, a day when we're all catholic.

California Mission

Florence, Italy

Hoven, South Dakota

Marty, South Dakota

Hospers, Iowa

Rome, Italy

St. Paul, MN

Marty, SD

St. Peters Basilica, Rome

A California Mission

Cathedral of Sioux Falls

Peter Kreeft, Jersey born and reared, went to Eastern Christian High School and, thereafter, to Calvin College, before switching fellowships and becoming Roman Catholic. I don't know his work well, but I've been reading his memoir, From Calvinist to Catholic, where he says that one of the first inkling he felt with respect to the change was a simple desire to see, bodily, Christ.

To the Catholic faith, the 

physical dimension is not an addition to the essence but as essential as the spiritual. Christ saved us not merely or even mainly by giving us His mind, as all the great saints, sages, and philosophers did, but by giving us His Body. I intuitively knew and felt this "Catholic thing" even before I ever considered becoming a Catholic.

Just a thought on Good Friday. 

Holy Week--Maunday Thursday

When it comes right down to it, I'm pretty much of a stick-in-the-mud conservative. In my book, Obama isn't the malefactor he is on Fox News; and, quite frankly, watching Governor Mike Pence tap dance this week hasn't been all that painful. I mean, politically I'm probably not. 

But psychically, give me a ritual and I'm happy. I'm more-than-okay with what's ordinary. Innovation? Give me a break. What on earth is new under the sun? Not much. As far as I'm concerned, we'd get along better if we'd all go home with the one who brought us to the dance, you know? 

I've never been big on praise teams. Some people find them a turn-on because they can see how much the singers care about Jesus and that's thrilling, I guess. Me? I'd rather have a choir, and I'd rather they sang from the back of the church, as an offering. I'm too sinful for praise teams. They stand up there, mouthing mikes, and I'm wondering if what's-her-name is putting on weight, or why the bald guy playing the bass insists on wearing cargo shorts. You know. I'm distracted.

I'm a conservative. What the heck was wrong with the old-time religion anyway?

And I get scared on Maunday Thursday because churches in small towns like the ones I've lived in are always on the look out to out-hip their neighbors. They're always looking for something new, something that hasn't been done, something the church down the block isn't doing. "Ya' hear what New Church is doing this year? Why can't we do stuff like that? Sheesh."

Let's not and say we did, okay?

See what I mean? Basically, I'm conservative.

I get scared on Maunday Thursday because the whole Maunday Thursday business is new to me. I don't even know what Maunday means. I know churches practice the Lord's Supper on Maunday Thursday, but what is a Maunday anyway? 

When I was a kid, Main Street closed up tight from 12 to 3 on Good Friday, just flat shut down during the hours of Jesus's suffering. That I remember. I don't remember Maunday Thursday. 

And what I fear is foot-washing. Really, there are only a couple of reasons for Maunday Thursday services; one of them is the commemoration of the Last Supper. That's fine.

But these days, you just know someone's going to get out five-gallon buckets and ask men and women and their kids to come up and get their feet washed. Drop shoes and socks and plop in the water, then wrap wet toes with a towel from a stack yeah-high, you know? Somebody's going to do it tonight. Just watch. What I want to know is how do you choose whose feet get washed?--lottery? Do people say, "here, wash mine?" and who does it? the preacher? the elders? just anybody? We all wash each other's? Is that it? It's going to be a mess, see? 

It's chaos, and conservatives like me hate chaos. Not only that, it's another church fad, a gimmick, even though it's a couple thousand years old.

Besides, it's just not the same in a land where people don't wear sandals 24/7. You want to replicate everything that happened Easter weekend, why not make the whole congregation wear a crown of thorns or drink hyssop?

Makes me a disciple, I guess, thinking about someone else washing my feet. Makes me a disciple because they didn't like it either, found it repulsive, found it, well, theologically and culturally chaotic, out of whack, even disturbing, and that was 2000 years ago.

"Seriously, Lord?  You. Wash. My. Feet?" 

It was unthinkable. It was gross. It was obscene. It was perfectly ridiculous.

And He told them--get this!--if you don't get this, you honestly and truly don't get me. If you don't understand, you missed the whole program of the last thirty years. I came to this mucked-up world to wash feet--that's been the mission since day 1.

It is a big deal, no question. It's huge. It's bigger than anything we or the disciples can handle. God almighty bending down to wash dirty feet.

It's the whole story. That's what he told them from down there on the floor as he pulled the bowl up closer to the stool. This is what I'm here for, he said.

I don't care what you say, it's not something I'm comfortable with--that's all there is to it. And neither were they, those disciples who not all that much later fell asleep.

Neither were they.

_____________________ 

Second round for this one, the original written 11 years ago. I'm not so up tight as this anymore--if I ever was. You'll be happy to know that tonight's Maunday Thursday service was quite inspiring. 

Icarus, South Dakota style

We're barely a state away out here in northwest Iowa, but it seems to me that the Kristi Noem story had madness written all through it for a long time already. Her treatment of the state's significant Native populations was perfectly nutty. During Covid, when several of the tribes shut down access, the then-governor threw a fit and ended up alienating herself from a significant region of the governor's domain. 

Her memoire badly required a sane editor, someone to tell her that the way she handled her pup's lack of hunting skill or initiative or whatever, did not need to be shared with the world. How any story from her younger years could be more memorably insane than that one--the way she simply shot him to apparently put him out of his misery; she said she had it figured that he'd never be what she wanted him to be. Yikes.

Nonetheless, with her stunning good looks, she kept moving up Trump's ladder, maybe because he rather liked someone--a beautiful woman!--who'd just shoot her dog if  he didn't hunt, or at least he liked a woman who seeming understood how to draw attention to herself far from the madding crowd--he liked a looker who reminded him of himself.

But Governor Noem was a small-town girl with some small-town values, an ardent anti-abortion voice, who seemed to want to take those values with her in Washington or wherever the ICE job took her. Scary. Seemed to me she was way out of her league.

Perhaps the most horrific moment was created by her determination not to tell at least something of the truth about the two anti-ICErs who were killed in the Twin Cities during the ICE messes. She insisted they were the enemy, agitators who, apparently got their just reward, death, for getting in the way of the ICE jam the whole region became. In the style of her benefactor, she simply would not show empathy or sadness. She was Trump-tough. They were agitators.

The rumors of her having an affair with one of her boss's favored attack dogs only made things worse. Some people know the truth about Noem and Lewandowski, but whether or not there were trysts--many or few--she got painted with a scarlet letter early on, a badge she must have regretted, wherever the heat of passion may have taken her. 

And now, it turns out her handsome high-school sweetheart husband is hanging around shadowy websites that specialize in cross-dressing and other whacko fetishes that make him look as over-the-top as his gorgeous, madcap spouse. Life wasn't like this in good old Castlewood, SD. 

I think they should go home. My guess is that the people who knew them both before Kristi's wild ascent to power might just be most willing to forgive--and maybe even forget. 

We don't share political persuasions, of course, but I can't help thinking they should go back to the insurance business he ran and she should go on long rides with those horses she loves and stay away from hunting with dogs. 

There's an Icarus-level tragedy here, or so it seems to me. She--and her hubby--got burned when they flew far too close to the Don.