Paternity -- iii

I submitted the story to a magazine that had  taken another story of mine. I thought "Paternity" had a good chance of being published.

Nope. Got it back sometime later with a staff criticism that the ending was too shocking (ending is a day away). The general sense was that it needed to be foreshadowed somehow--readers needed to be better prepared.

At just about that time, I visited an old friend in the bike shop, and somehow we got to talking about his boyhood on the family dairy--just a little one, like the narrator's father's dairy. He told me the little story you read at the end of yesterday's passage. It was perfect foreshadowing, for building to the final scene of the story because it set within the father a certain view of life and death in the barn that would make the ending less of a shock. You'll see.

What follows is the final setting for the story--the mow.

When Cassie and her mother left late that afternoon, I went out to the barn, maybe a half hour after my father picked up and left in silence. I pulled on my boots just outside the parlor and unlatched the door. I was young then, cocky. I figured I’d take my licks and have it over. But I found him beating a cow that night, whacking away, the milking machine lying awkwardly in the gutter like some overturned turtle. He had a dowel he’d picked up somewhere, thick as his finger, and he was thrashing that cow like I’d never seen him do before.

When he saw me standing there where the rest of the cows were already stanchioned, he stopped, frozen in the act, a vacant, stunned look on his face. We both knew that nothing needed to be said, so we milked beside each other all night long and never spoke a word. I felt almost excused, as if what I’d done with Cassie was lost in some big harvest of sin.

The next morning we were out baling hay at the Trillian place, an old farm with hundreds of acres of land and a sprawling, ramshackle barn with 1904 painted just below the point of the eaves.

Today, the baler my father bought is obsolete because people say a crew of five or six makes baling hay too labor-intensive. Today, with the right kind of equipment, one man can do all the haying and never leave the air-conditioned comfort of his cab. Back then, haying employed our entire family, locked us up in dusty mows, forced us to gulp ice-cold lemonade from a common-cup canning jar, to work long, hot hours in stagnant air, thick with dust, and to talk to each other, even when we may not have wanted to.

When my father came on the job that morning, we’d already started up. I was stacking bales on the wagon when I saw his pickup roll into the yard. My brother Andy was driving the baler, while old man Trillian himself shuttled the first load back to the barn where he and little Jesse unloaded. In a matter of minutes, half hour maybe, Darrell rode out on the empty wagon and told me Dad wanted me to work with him in the barn.

My brothers hadn’t said much to me that morning. They knew what had happened the night before, but on the ride out to Trillian’s I’d found a corner in the back of the wagon and they let me be. Maybe they were disappointed in me, I don’t know. Maybe they were jealous. Whatever they felt, they didn’t say much. Maybe they felt as I did--it was all water over the dam. The way I saw it, Cassie was leaving. Now it was her problem.

My father is a tall, gaunt man with very dry hair and proud features, a wide nose that, come summer, reddens almost daily. His arms are long, and his hands carry muskmelons as if they were softballs. He resembles the picture we have of his grandfather, the North Sea sailor who, eighty years ago, decided to leave the Netherlands and cut a life for himself and his family from uncut Dakota grasslands.

My father has mellowed in the years that have passed since that summer. He laughs now as he watches his own grandchildren play on the rope swing he hung, not four years ago, from the maple I remember as a sapling. Back then, with three teenage boys and six children in all, with thirty-five milk cows, with all of that life riding the back of the cold and dreary lakeshore seasons, he seemed to me to be driven. I remember unforeseen spurts of temper during harvest, nervousness in unexplained silences during early spring planting. Whole nights passed in October when he didn’t speak a word to my mother or to us.

Although he was a man to be feared then, it would be wrong to say that I was ever afraid of my father. He was to be feared the way he himself talked about fearing God. Each of us, I think, lived in a kind of awe of him. Darrell, the oldest, still wrestles him: if Dad says Darrell shouldn’t use herbicides, Darrell claims he’ll go bankrupt if he doesn’t. Andy simply follows Dad. He’s learned to live with him the way a good Marine feels comfort in a well-defined chain of command. I don’t claim to know about myself.

___________________

That last line belongs to the narrator, but I suppose it comes from the heart of the writer too, which is probably why there are so many stories about fatherhood. 

"Paternity" ii

continuing the story "Paternity" from yesterday--

_______________________________

I remembered Cassie and our child and my own father, who yesterday was out baling hay somewhere, just as he was during the Dutch Festival in town that summer I became a father myself. We’d had a New Holland baler for four years already and developed a list of farmer-customers long enough to call ourselves the Dirks’ family custom balers--my two older brothers, Andy and Darrell, and myself. The three of us usually set things up and took turns working in the mow or in the field; then there was the boss, my father, of course, who always finished the milking at home before getting out to join us; and my little brother Jesse, eleven-years-old maybe, who usually drove the wagons back and forth and loaded bales on the elevator. Three cuts we made some years; some years only two.

Nothing remarkable happened the afternoon Cassie and I told my parents about her being pregnant. Cassie’s mother was there too, the collar of her lavender blouse lying open, tastefully, over her tanned chest. When I remember now how strange that woman looked in our farm house--with all our fans churning up the air--I can see in the collar of that silk blouse what it was that determined, finally, my father’s nodding silence: he didn’t know how to talk to a woman who looked like she’d just stepped from a television screen. My mother, in her kitchen smock, smiled the way good women can when they have to; but my father sat and listened, his hands folded in his lap as if he were in church.

Cassie controlled the conversation. It was her style to talk, to reason out what must be done, and she did, with such coolness that she disarmed my mother’s usually hair-triggered emotions. She explained how she knew it was Easton tradition to marry a couple of kids at a time like this, but how that would be foolish, neither of us even seventeen and neither of us really seriously in love. She told my mother how she was going to move back to Chicago and have the baby there, and how she didn’t blame me for the baby because it wasn’t my fault alone any more than it was hers. It was, simply, what had happened, she said.

At that point my mother reached for her handkerchief.

“Of course, we expect to be able to cover the entire financial picture,” her mother threw in, as if it were the line that Cassie had allowed her to say.

At five, my father, taking his cue from the tolling of the clock in the family room, went out to the barn, sensing, I’m sure, that nothing more could be said anyway.

If I’d scour my high school annual I could come up with two or three other Easton girls who got pregnant that summer, but the story that unfolded in those cases would have been completely different. Once the news was out, Cassie packed her bags quickly for Chicago; as a result, the elders from my church never did visit with us together, as was the custom with the other shotgunned couples who’d violated the seventh commandment. Since she was already gone, they visited me alone, three of them, all men; and once they had nudged the word sin into and out of the conversation, we spent the rest of the night talking about football, my senior year upcoming.

I never saw Cassie again, nor the child--wherever he or she may be--if, in fact, that child exits. Cassie had money like I’d never seen. That was 1970, before Roe vs. Wade, but the Mikklesons had the kind of money that could pay for illegality.

Some summer nights a few years later, when I was home from college, I drove slowly down the lake road past their home late at night, maybe once a week or so. I’m not sure what drew me back so frequently to that path through the birch just a couple hundred feet off the lakefront--lust maybe, but I don’t think that’s the whole reason. Maybe I wanted to know that what had happened was all real.

But what I remember best about that summer is what happened after Cassie and her mother made their afternoon visit to our dairy--what I saw that night in the barn, and what my father said the next day, when he finally opened up.

He caught me once, maybe a year before, beating a cow with a hoe. I don’t remember the provocation anymore, but a milk cow, like a wife or a sister or a brother, can make you feel that bloody kind of hate you can feel only for those you live with, day-in, day-out. He came up from behind and grabbed me, lifted me off the cement and kept me up there until he’d stopped my thrashing.

“You ever do that again, Gary,” he said, “and so help me I’ll use that hoe on you.”

That’s all he said about it, ever.

_________________________

The story is far from over. 

John Updike's "A & P" is a short story favorite that features the cultural difference between kids from a small town and people who inhabit the cottages and houses along the lake, not far away. When I grew up in a town just off Lake Michigan, that kind of cultural divide was manifest every summer, when the lake people came back to their places on the beach but bought groceries in town. They were commonly thought of as "lake people" and were generally more exotic than locals. 

Paternity - i

 

Note: Maybe it was Dad's birthday, maybe something else, but the word "paternity" sounded in me this morning, reminding me of a story I wrote years ago and a collection of stories with the same title, Paternity." I wouldn't say I'm obsessed with father/son stories, but I have tossed out a number of them, or did, when I was writing fiction; and one of them likely became the most read jcs story of all--and that one is titled simply "Paternity."

The father in this story isn't my father, not by a long ways, although I could list at least a few ways in which they're not that different. Anyway, I thought I'd run the story here for a couple of days. The setting is the Wisconsin lakeshore, a place I suppose I'd still call "home," even though it isn't.

Here's--"Paternity."

Paternity

Somewhere today a woman named Cassandra Something-or-other is telling a little different story, I’m sure, because she was rich and likely still is.

What do I remember of her? Her hair--the way she turned her face up into the brisk, beach sun and swept the long bronzed bangs across her cheeks. The way she laughed, always hard and full, embarrassingly sometimes--for me, not her--and the way she never giggled, even though she was only sixteen. The sharp fortitude of her eyes confronting yours and never once backing down. I remember her body very well--and her tan, both where it was and where it wasn’t. Her face, really--the exact shape of her nose and the thickness of her eyebrows, even her lips--has gone from my memory, but a part of her will never go, the ever-urging boldness that knew no fear.

The fall of her sophomore year she and her mother moved, all year round, into her parents’ cottage on the lake. She was what we called “lake people.” I was a townie. Her father owned a Chicago company that turned out fifty fiberglass boats per day. My father milked thirty-five cows. Twice she’d been to Europe. I’d been to Indiana three times to Bible Camp. She was going to college in Vermont, she said, because she hated Chicago, where she’d lived for her first fifteen years.

We were both sixteen. I was an athlete, tall and muscular from years of farm work, and blond, like a beach bum, from the burning sun and long hours in the alfalfa fields that still lie like storybook meadows between Easton and the woods that belt the lakeshore. I wanted her all right, but she just wanted. That was the difference between Cassie and normal Easton girls. They never really wanted. Cassie did--sincerely and truly.

Once I told her how--when I was a boy--we’d seen a train flatten a penny we’d laid on the track. A half hour later she stood, holding a handful of unruly hair to keep it out of her face, while only ten feet away a huge freight exploded by. The miniature football I’d hung on a chain from my rearview mirror swayed in the lurches of the coal cars across those ties, and I was in the car fifty feet away; but she never raised her eyes from the spot on the steel where she’d planted a nickel herself.

I wasn’t really Gary Dirks to her. I was merely the boy she wanted. Eight times we made love. I could probably still list them, by place and degree of success, in order. And we really didn’t quit each other, at least not until the next summer, when she became pregnant and went back to Chicago to have our baby.

She had no desire to marry me, the son of an Easton Hollander, a small dairyman. So she finished high school in Chicago, I suppose, and I never heard from her again, just as she had promised. When I say she left Easton, I don’t mean that her parents forced her to return to Chicago. She simply determined herself that she would leave, then told her mother of her plans. Back then I thought of Cassie’s having free will in the theological sense my father talked about “free will”--as the opposite of being predestined for salvation, almost as sin.

Yesterday, I sat on a crowded curb in my hometown as a Dutch Festival parade marched up from the memory of my sixteenth summer in Easton, one float after another, the Lions Club’s old black and gold, papier-maché feline still mounted on the same crepe-papered hayrack, First Presbyterian’s same black Bible open to the same John 3:16. Only the faces of the queen and her court had changed; even their Dutch costumes seemed handsewn replicas of what I remembered. My children were off on the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Ferris Wheel because a silly, small-town parade doesn’t entertain ten-year-olds who have been brought up on cartoon excesses. So I sat there alone and watched another parade too: a score of Easton high school kids dressed down for the sun, performing for each other. And I remembered who I was back then, sixteen years ago.

_______________

It just so happens that I'm working on a selection of Schaap short stories that includes--even features--all kinds of relative information, like "Cassandra"--where did that name come from? you might ask. Answer: a very comely high school senior from the school I taught in not that many years earlier. "Did Oostburg have a Dutch Festival?" Nope. The miscellany connected with all of that in the story originates here with the Orange City festival. The time lapse--the narrator is remembering--is purposeful. The narrator is putting things together, and, yes he is somewhat haunted. No, I didn't father a child in my high school years, didn't even get close. That's fiction. But yes, I worked on a baling crew back then, so I know what a hot, dusty haymow feels like. And yes, if you grew up in Oostburg, less than a mile from the western shore of Lake Michigan, you knew "lake people" because they were different than the Dutch Reformed whose influence gave the neighborhood a specific kind of identity.

On July 26

Yesterday, Sunday, was his birthday. Were he still among us, he would have been 108 years old, born as he was in 1918. He was a PK, one of ten kids in the family, his preacher/father occupying the pulpit in a Christian Reformed church in Allendale, Michigan when Dad, first of all, opened his eyes to this world. He was 85 years old when he passed away in 2003, as was his wife, my mother, who lived another ten years without him. Strangely enough, he and his only son weren't that close.

Not that we argued. Not that I went out of my way to violate whatever senses of propriety he held dear. I don't think I was ever a real "problem child." But I did run afoul of his perceptions and his politics, and, even though we never fought much, I can't help but think there were moments in his life when he prayed hard for a son whose life might well have seemed moving defiantly away from whatever safe harbors he might have hoped would be my dwelling place. 

A cousin of mine, late one night at a family reunion, told me how the marriage counseling she was getting at that time helped her understand what she'd determined were real marital problems. She suffered from having "too good a father," the therapist had told her. I wasn't a kid when she told me that, but I remember thinking, right then and there, that the problem that therapist had identified was a problem my cousin and I shared, children of Schaap brothers. 

My novel Romey's Place is spun out of what I was told at that family reunion. My father--and I knew this clearly--was a wonderful man, a man who took his Christian faith very seriously and tried to be the finest servant he could be, not for others to note but to satisfy at least something of the love he'd long ago determined was his, through grace, a gift of the Savior he worshipped. Throughout his life, the life I experienced with him, he truly and sincerely tried to do the right thing, do the thing he believed the Creator of Heaven and Earth wanted him to do. At the visitation before his funeral, dozens of people tried to wrap me in a cloud of good memories--"your dad was a wonderful man," they said, warmly. I knew they meant it because I knew he was.

Even though the two of us were never all that close, I miss him, not as some kind of fount of wisdom or moral character, but as a standard in my life, just to be here. Right now, I'd love to talk with him about getting old, about facing up into the last years. I don't know that he'd tell me anything I don't know, but just to sit beside me--I just wish he'd be here, especially now in late July, when he was born. 

Yesterday was his birthday. 

Really, I suppose, my spilling all of this out on the page this morning is a witness to what I'm wishing--he's still here somehow. He's not gone for any of his kids, even the ones who he might have thought was walking away. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Original sin (Psalm 32)

 

Honestly, I cringe when I look over the title I just typed in.  Maybe I should add a smiley face or two.  There’s just no way of dodging the darkness created by the juxtaposition of those two words. 

 The phrase has a long history of reference to a belief in the inherent sinfulness of the human heart.  For centuries theologians have maintained that we are all brimming with sin because Adam and Eve turned their back on the pleasures of the garden for a bite of the only bit of fruit denied them.  By that brazen act, we all came heir to their disobedience.  It comes with the territory, as much part of us as toenails or fingerprints.  “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all,” or so begins the New England Primer.

 And it’s not just the theological tenet that wears a black robe, it’s also the belief in that belief.  What might be the most widely read story in 19^th century American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” is the tale of a man who becomes so convinced of the darkness of the human soul that he loses nothing less than joy itself.  “His dying hour was gloom”—or so reads the final doleful line of that sad tale.

 Herman Melville recognized that feature of Hawthorne’s writing for what it was.  When he took note of the darkness in a character like Young Goodman Brown, Melville was sure “this great power of blackness” in his sometimes friend was rooted in “the appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Inner Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is never wholly free.”  Scary.

 My grandfather, a Dutch Calvinist, was capable of taking a kind of morbid pleasure in his own depravity; when he’d consider the nature of his own sin, the darkness he perceived in his soul his soul would make him weep.  Those very tears were a kind of release. 

 What there is of him in me is, quite frankly, a haunting question.

 I have this much at least: a firm belief in original sin.   I’ve watched too much television not to have it, read too many books about the Holocaust, felt horror at what white people—my own good, Christian white people—have done to Native Americans. I’ve seen my daughter through junior high, for pity sake; I know that even little girls can be spiteful as Satan.  I’ve sat in poison rooms with two people who feel nothing but hate for each other, even though they’re married, maybe because they are. I’ve felt the grip of silence between people who haven’t spoken for decades. 

 What’s worse, I’ve felt my own original sin in every last manifestation—pride, envy, wrath, sloth, lechery, avarice, gluttony—each one of the old seven deadlies.  I own them all; at times, they own me.  I honestly believe it would be nice to have faith in the eternal goodness of the human character, but such a faith would be, to me, simple-minded.

Sin is a condition, like dandruff, only infinitely worse of course, because the end of the road it creates in our lives is perdition, hell, destruction—both here and in the hereafter. 

 What David suggests in the first two verses of Psalm 32 is that not only our transgressions—those things we commit, knowing better—but also our original sin, the factory-built condition of the human heart we inherited from Uncle Adam and Aunt Eve, our sin, “not in part, but the whole/is nailed to the cross/and I bear it no more;/Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O, my soul.”   

The "God of battles"*

 

It's a diary and it's personal, but it was also penned 265 years ago by a lieutenant in the 19th Cavalry Regiment of the Missouri State Guard, 8th Division, who was clearly writing only for his wife, Bettie. Whether or not the diary ever got to her isn't known, but it's likely it did and thereby lived/lives on, one of the most treasured Civil War memoires. 

This page was penned just a few days before Lt. Fisher's bunch of the 19th Cavalry rode into Humboldt, Kansas, and torched the place, burned it to the ground. Date? October 15, 1861, six months after Ft. Sumter. Understanding the gulf of misunderstanding that prompted the secession of slave states requires a stretch from those who unwilling to paint angels' wings on the backs of either side or admit that there was more to blame than the single, horrific issue of slavery.

. . ."we may have a hard time of it as it is reported that there is a force of 500 men with 4 pieces of Cannon at Humboldt and several detachments at LeRoy, Emporia and Cofachique," he explains to Bettie. As it turned out, Humboldt put up less of a fight than Fischer and his Reb troops eventually encountered. When the 8th Division of the 19th Cavalry left the town, they left it in ashes, burning everything in sight just as Fisher says, and exactly what Missouri Gov. Claiborne Fox Jackson once famously claimed rebel forces would do, burn the whole state on their way to the Missouri River.

But then, right here on what remains as the first page of the diary, comes an admission/confession/testimony that those of us who know little about the rebel cause or mind find not only unexpected but beyond imagination--the Christian faith:

". . . if they are there they will give us 'fits,'" Fisher tells his wife, "but our cause is just and the God of battles has been with us in every fight yet and with Him on our side we are sure of success may he be with us and prosper us."

I remember learning sometime in grade school that the Civil War of these dis-United States ironically posed "brother against brother"; but this kind of testimony still gives me fits. How he can claim righteous standing with the Lord God of Hosts, while at the same time, Union troops and civilians in Humboldt, Nebraska, are scared stiff of the destruction they will suffer in the next few hours, many of them praying for protection from the same God who the seceders claim is on the side of the men in gray who can't fold their hands in prayer because one hand holds a torch?

________________________

*Lt.

No one does sweet corn like Garrison Keilor

(We had our first sweet corn of the season last night, and it was wonderful!)

When I come to the spring, the time of romance,
The season of amour
And I dig in the dirt and I set out the plants
And mix in the horse manure.
We thank you, dear Lord of power and might,
Who didst from the dust create us
Grant that your children find earthly delight
With a crop of sweet corn and tomatoes.

O the homegrown tomatoes the Lord sent down
So we know what paradise means
No grief, no tears, just tomatoes, my dears,
And sweet corn and string beans.

Oh we thank you dear Lord for this good good life
And thanks for the day we were born
And the gifts you have given, especially these heavenly
String beans, tomatoes and corn.

Sweet corn: the best thing in life. I grew up in a house 

about a hundred feet from a cornfield, 

and every evening we’d put the water on to boil, 

then pick the corn and husk it as we walked rapidly toward the house 

and chuck it in and dish up the chicken 

and say a prayer and out came the corn, 

on went the butter and salt, eight minutes flat from stalk to mouth, 

and when you ate sweet corn, life had nothing better to offer. 

You’d been to the top. That’s how it’ll be in heaven, I’m sure.

Oh we thank you dear Lord for this good good life
And thanks for the day we were born
And the gifts you have given, especially these heavenly
String beans, tomatoes and corn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AToiX451bVo

The new, old Little House -- ii

Balancing the sometimes contrary demands of the true story itself is not an easy task for a writer. Laura Ingalls Wilder was fashioning a classic for kids when she began (she was 65 years old!) to write books using her own experience and her family's pioneer saga on the way west. 

What the TV series didn't really examine was the plain fact that Charles Wilder was a squatter, someone who knew the truth but homesteaded on land he, as a white man, should have acknowledged to be Osage land. In today's language, we might say the Wilder family were "undocumented"; they'd moved on to land they weren't entitled to--they were illegals because all around them at the time were patches of land that had been the province of a variety of Native nations. They should not have been there; ICE would have moved them out.

In 1870, the Drum Creek Treaty was signed, promising the Osage nation "$1.50 an acre" for all Osage land and mandating that all would-be homesteaders (like the Wilders) had to leave before the same land would be opened up for homesteading (although the land would be for sale, not free). The new Netflix series ends with the Wilder family back in their covered wagon, bound for Minnesota, which is the historically accurate move. They're on their way to Walnut Grove, where, this Saturday, a local group will stage, outdoors, their final 2026 production of the Ingalls family story, the Wilder Pageant. 

If you're interested, you might want to look at a website that tells the story of the story and determine yourself how much of the Netflix production is accurate to history and how much is pure storytelling. 

Either way, this new version of the story is worth watching (take if from a story-teller).

The new old Little House

It's difficult to overstate just exactly how popular NBC's original Little House on the Prairie show was. Beginning in 1974, Little House ran for nine seasons at a level of TV glory that few series could even dream of. It won a list of awards as long as lodge pole, and made Michael Landon (and a handful of others) the kind of Hollywood stardom most Americans would recognize almost anywhere on the street.

 Just an hour or two north of us, Minnesota's Little House monuments features a river bank where, or so the docents claim, the Ingalls once inhabited a hole in the ground on their way west. It's not something you forget quickly, in part because seeing the Ingalls family--the TV version--crouched in a river bank hut doesn't fit exactly with the family that became the most celebrated TV family in history. 

That sweet and sentimental series captured more awards than many other really popular productions, and earned a viewership that was surprisingly universal--adults from 35-64 made up more than sixty percent of its viewing audience as late as 2024, when the original series was streamed on Peacock. The show's firm place in the American imagination was enough too make Netflix consider a reboot.

That reboot is running right now and doing very, very well. There are, of course, some major differences between the original series and the newly refashioned Little House.  One of the central conflicts of the family in the new series is their trespassing. By the time the original Ingalls family reached Kansas, they'd become squatters, living on property that, by law, belonged to the Osage tribe. It's hard to lift the kind of allegiance the whole family had in the original series when you know that they and hundreds of other white, American pioneers, were deliberately living on land that belonged to this country's original inhabitants. 

Then, too, historians claim that Pa Ingalls wasn't a whole lot like the Michael Landon version. They suggest that the records suggest that he wasn't the ace Pa who kept moving around the Great Plains, that he may not have been the nice guy the book and the series make him out to be. 

It's gutsy to make a reboot. Netflix had to know that. Any new version of the tales can't avoid the historic truth. Lets be clear here--the new Pa Ingalls is just as wonderful, just as loving, just as driven by justice (and just as handsome) as Michael Landon, but the central conflict of the new series is the fact that the Ingalls family lives on a swath of Osage tribal land, and the Osage aren't happy about it.

There are, as you can imagine, a bundle of other distinct changes, and a good deal less of the sentimentalizing so characteristic of the original series. The fact is, homesteading was probably never so sweet as it was in the old Little House. Some sweetsie stuff is unavoidable, but other major themes are more universalized--the conflicts between the Ingalls sisters, for instance, is newly adopted, and racism is more plainly evident.

No matter. I like it. It's almost impossible to think that this newly fashioned series could ever touch the massive popularity of the original, but that doesn't mean the newly minted version isn't worth your time or mine. 

Try it.

 

“Blessed is he. . .whose sins are covered”

 After far too much traveling in the last couple of years, I have come to the conclusion that motel rooms are not designed for people my age; they are decorated with entirely too many mirrors.  Wherever you look, full length panels offer views of your own sad and sagging mortality you hadn’t asked to see.

 One of the reasons English TV comedies are more fun than American sitcoms is that English audiences, it seems, don’t demand physical perfection.  English comedies regularly feature unhandsome people; but American television offers a persistent diet of perfect shapes, both male and female, so many, in fact, that one begins to believe that such pulchritude is the norm.  Given all that gorgeous flesh, suddenly seeing yourself bare naked on a six-foot wall is an epiphany of horrific proportions.  A few weeks ago I came home and told my wife I would never eat again.

 I suppose I shouldn’t be equating sin with body fat. Someone told me recently of a new study which maintains that John Calvin’s despairing views of the sins of the flesh was attributable, in part, to the revulsion he felt about the debilitating hemorrhoids he fought through most of his adult life. If that’s true, it’s something I wish I didn’t know.

But there is a link here in this verse from Psalm 32, at least in my mind.  The exuberance of the line bursts from the realization that something repulsive is wholly taken care of, covered up, covered over, out of sight and, better yet, out of mind, even out of soul.  That something isn’t nakedness, but it’s close.

Sin isn’t so much an act as it is a condition, like dandruff or flat feet. Sin is something we never stop fighting. There’s no truth, says the Apostle Paul, in those who claim they have none. 

But the blissful joy of the opening lines of Psalm 32—or so it seems to me—is not the blessed realization that our sinful condition is gone, but instead our blessed assurance that God’s forgiveness has it covered—as in, “not to worry, fella, I got you covered.” Our greed, our neglect, our thievery, our hate, our drunkenness, our adultery, our pathetic pride, our green-eyed jealousy, even our pride—sin in all its pathetic naked horror, even the ones we can’t forget, the one that haunts us, makes us sick unto death, that sin is covered because He’s got our back. 

David’s sins were legendary in the unsavory mess created when he couldn’t keep his royal hands off someone else’s wife, and then “covering” that sin by the sleazy murder of her beloved. 

All of that is gone, David himself testifies here in Psalm 32. It’s history. All that’s left is grace.

That’s the story here.  Praise the Lord.

Liberation Sunday

I've been putting together a collection of little stories originally published in a magazine titled Reformed Worship. Way back when the magazine was first published, the editors asked me to contribute stories avout how we worship, stories of relevance to those who look after liturgy. I did so for a long time. 

In an old file folder, I stumbled over this one. Don't know  if it was ever published, but a couple of decades after I wrote it, I found it quite moving, a very memorable communion Sunday.

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Thursday, April 18, 1945

The end is in sight!  Saturday evening Jan and I came from Kloosters and were just at the train crossing when four British Spitfires dove from the cloud cover to attack a passing train.  It was a hot moment, but once we were hiding in the manholes on the side of the little country road, we could see the air attack beautifully.

Today I should have gone to Amersfort, but there was so much fighting outside of Nijkerk.  People came and warned me that the Canadians were already at the river.  A German told me that I better return from where I came from, but now that it seems so close I cannot believe it may be true.

When you return, Adriaan, there will be so much to say, so much to tell you.  How strong our children are, too, in all of this.

When I arrived at Driedorp, everywhere there were Germans and cars and motorbikes, and on all the farms in that area were Germans.

I decided it would be safer to go back home, but when I passed them again they were sneaking off with their guns cocked, moving in the direction of the river.  And the Tommies were busy with their Spitfires in the air!!

After one p.m., everybody has to stay inside.  In the woods last night there was a fight between German and Canadian reconnaissance patrols.  Four Germans and three Canadians killed.

Heavy fighting around Apeldoorn.  Zwolle, Leeuwarden Meppel, and practically the whole of Gronigen and Friesland are liberated.

In Voorthuizen a landing of paratroops, approx. 1000 this morning.  The Huns are nervous wrecks.

 

Friday, April 19, 1945

Did the housework very fast, and went to Kloosters’.  Father Klooster is killed by artillery shell on the farm where he was in hiding since the Germans started looking for him.  Why, Lord, with the end so near?  Such a fine man, so much good during the war. All those allied pilots hidden and moved into the woods.  Such good work.  Now killed when the Canadians are so close at hand.

Mother Klooster is strong.  The six children are heartbroken, sit in silence at home. Many people visit, even though it is dangerous to be out and the fighting never seems really to stop.  Should I stay with Mother Klooster and help with children?

Everywhere, still, there are Germans.  I have responsibility at home.  Mother Klooster seems very strong.  Oh, but seems.

Planes in the air and all the shooting is very heavy.  Went by inside roads back home but shooting from Spitfires on everything that moves.

Farms all over full of Germans.  The school playground is green with their uniforms.

On my way home passed Vander Kamp’s farm and shells rained from two directions.  Cows lie dead all around, hooves up.  Such destruction.

Germans came to our farm after I returned.  “We have to go on,” they said, “but in two weeks it will be all over anyway.”  They were sick of it.  Wanted to see our cellar, but it was too small they said.  Thank goodness.  With our house so full of people.  And the Jews, too.

When they were gone, we put mattresses down there. Whoever was tired could sleep.  All the time the screeching noises of shells overhead and then waiting for the explosion.  Where will it come down?

 

Saturday, April 20, 1945

God up early and went outside.  Quiet for some time.  People killed and wounded.  The roads are full of people from Nijkerk, heading out to the poulders, to the meadows, crawling into shacks and henhouses.

Adriaan, where are you?  It seems too much for me to go on with everything, even though now the end is so near.  Adriaan, we will be together again soon.

The rest of the day passed slowly by, quietly.  People say that ‘t Oever and Putten also were taken, meaning “stay close to home.”  Flying still going on.  Now and then a burst of shellfire.  Fires in the distance.  A haystack down the road at Bethanien.

In the evening, with approximately 20 people, stayed in the cellar, but nothing happened so I went up to our bed.  Adriaan will come again soon.  Lord, please, bring him home.

 

Sunday, April 21, 1945

Everything is again QUIET.  All the barbed wire blockades are put in place and Jan had to go all the way around Watergoor to come home because the Allies are two kilometers away.  On the Holkerweg, every 50 meters there is artillery.  Not much flying now, and only little shelling.  This afternoon quite close by some machine gunning and even some regular rifle shots.

I think they will be here tomorrow!

The Germans seem almost to be gone.  Only the shelling continues.  It is still not safe to be out.

Piet van Meerfeld comes in the morning.  I see him coming on his bike up the lane.  He has bread in his rooksack.  He has flour, now, from the air drops.

“Mevrouw Hartog,” he says, “I have for the first time good flour, and today is communion Sunday.”  And he gives me a half loaf because he knows we have neighbors here, we have onderdykkers.  But I know he means this loaf is communion bread.

“Take and eat,” he says, and he smiles.  Then leaves for the next farm from our church.  Communion Sunday.

We have in our house two men in hiding, a family from Nijkerk--the Harts, running away from the fighting--Uncle Ben and his wife, Hannah, a man named Schneider--an American pilot--and our Anne, Henk, and Jan.

We have half a loaf of communion bread.  Schneider says he is Catholic.  The onderdykkers are Reformed.  Uncle Ben and his wife are Jewish.  The Harts are with us in our church, and I have our family, our own children.

Van Meerfeld pedaled through the artillery because he knew it was communion Sunday and he had communion bread.  And he knows it is liberation.  He wears a smile like this work he is doing is holy work.

So we eat the bread, all of us, this Sunday morning.  A communion like none other I remember.  Eat and celebrate, eat and profess. I tell myself, “take, eat, remember, and believe.”   Even the children have a bite.  It is a sacrament they will not forget, ever--I tell them later, when we are alone.  This is the children’s first communion.

Van Meerfeld is right.  He has now good flour.  It is good bread he brings.

Wageningen and Ede are also liberated and how long before finally Holland is free!

Mother Klooster is alone this Sunday.  There will be no funeral until all of this is over.  Tomorrow will come all the celebrations, and yet in all of it she must have the funeral and she will be alone with her six children.

Sometimes, I think I cannot go on with this, even though the Canadians are here--if not yet today, then tomorrow for sure.  Sometimes, even the joy is hard.

Adriaan, are you too liberated?  When I heard about Buchenwald, I turned ice cold, but Psalm 91 is for us: “Because he loves me, says the Lord, I will rescue him.  I will protect him for he acknowledges my name.  A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.”

O darling, the end is coming.  How happy we will be.  I have so much to tell you.

 

--Adapted from the personal stories of Diet Eman and Michael Van Wijk.

The Outback

 

A shot like this is all I need to explain our move to the country, post retirement. I didn't have to get into the pickup to gather this kind of bounty; I had only to step out of our back door to fill up a memory card with this show of "dawn's early light."

On mornings like this one--mid July, 2012--I couldn't help but wonder how it was we'd come to live so close to these big prairie skies and really never seen them.

With our move to the country 14 years ago, we became bit players in the drama staged daily in the immensity of our abundant open spaces. 

On more than occasional Saturday mornings, I'd been wandering around Siouxland for a decade already when we moved north of Alton, so skies like this--no matter how gorgeous--weren't exactly new. But they'd never been so neighborly, so showy, so close. On this particular July morning, I had only to walk a couple hundred feet from our back door--and there it was.

From under the canopy of a monster cottonwood that morning, I was visited by an ancient neighbor, gifted with the blessing of dawn. 

Siouxland had never been so much our backyard.

Hamnet--don't miss it

 

Way back when--in the years I was a graduate student--I took a class titled simply "Shakespeare" from a middle-aged prof who I thought, as did others, to be an expert on the Bard. He was, for certain, an apologist, very much in love with Will Shakespeare with an intensity that made every class period bountifully dramatic in and of itself.

What made Prof. Doebler particularly effective was his knowledge of the era--the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras of the English Renaissance--a culturally rich time in English history when the theaters were full and not just the province of society's elite. I remember him going on and on about how ordinary people, including the lower class, were entertained by staged productions, Macbeth being seen by loads of people right off the street. 

When he'd talk about the Globe Theater, Shakespeare's own stage sounded like something akin to a World Cup soccer stadium offering a game between, say, Spain and Brazil, a madhouse. It wasn't difficult to get a reading on how the show was going over. The teeming audience made sure you knew.

I thought of Prof Doebler during the last scene of Hamnet, the very popular movie now available on Netflix. You have to see it. It's riveting, beautifully shot and wonderfully assembled with just enough mystery to keep you attuned. Honestly, I can't say enough about it. It's just must-see.

That last scene lingers for a long, long time. Shakespeare's estranged wife has come to London for seemingly the first time and becomes one of the common people who are given the floor of the Globe to stand and watch the production, which happens to be a new play by her husband, a brand-new show titled Hamlet. 

What director Chloé Zhao does in that long scene is bring her audience ring brand new meaning from the most treasured soliloquy in all of Shakespeare and tie it into a story of loss and sadness in a way that gives all new meaning to "to be or not to be." How she orchestrates that long, final scene is just plain brilliant, unforgettable. 

Hamnet is, first of all, a story about unfathomable grief--anytime, anyplace. It's about losing a child, period.  It shakes the disbelief out of you by putting Agnes (Jesse Buckley) and her overwhelming sadness on the screen so succinctly that, even if you'd rather not experience the suffering Agnes does, you're powerless to turn away. 

But Hamnet is also about art, about what art can do for us, for all of us. "The play's the thing" in a fashion I'd never seen before, or experienced. What Zhao does in this movie is bewitchery, beautiful bewitchery; she determinedly rings brand new meaning--and redemptive meaning--out of a few words the whole world knows. Something deep as real human anguish gains a step toward healing when Agnes, amidst society's rabble, hears words her husband's most famous utterance convey to all right there in the madhouse theater.   

Hamnet streams right now on Netflix. It's marvelous, plain marvelous. Prof. Doebler would love it, I'm sure, as do his old students. 

Me and guns and Joni Ernst

 

One of the most read posts in the long history of Stuff is this one--2700 readers, eight years old.

I once shot a goose from the back of a motor scooter. Seriously, I did. I wasn't trying to show off, never guessed I'd hit it. We were riding along the Lake Michigan shoreline, putt-puttin' on the wet sand, late October probably, when a lone goose came by. My double-barrel, 16-gauge was loaded, so I aimed--sort of--let loose, and down came the goose. 

I'm not making this up.

We hunted crows with a phonograph. This old friend of mine had a record with nothing on it but a gaggle of crows gaggling. All that racket from the turntable would haul in crows from hither and yon, we thought, and we'd shoot 'em. That was the plan. Didn't happen, but we had fun. 

I hunted pheasants and deer and once upon a time got woefully lost in a Kettle Moraine forest hunting ruffed grouse I never once laid eyes on.

A day or two after JFK was killed in Dallas, a friend and I walked in a woods just outside of town, lugging our shotguns, supposedly hunting rabbits. Didn't come home with a bunny, but the two of us, not yet 16, had a memorable conversation about state of the union, as did the whole country.

In my Wisconsin childhood, I spent more time with guns than I did eating cheese. I learned to love the lakeshore woods by following an neighbor who walked as carefully through those pines and hardwoods as some Kickapoo might have a hundred years before. He taught me to love trilliums and buttercups and jack-in-the-pulpits. I watched him shoot a possum that stumbled into his trap, the first time I'd ever seen an animal die.

I've got my own treasured past with guns. I understand the attachment. I do.

On Wednesday night, a commentator on Fox News told the host that when he was a boy, he had a .22; but he never, ever entertained thoughts of shooting anyone. He was as dismayed as the rest of us, as perplexed about a problem that worsens with every passing month--18 school shootings already this year, eight inside the walls. In Florida, thousands are mourning 17 students and teachers who are dead.

I know what that guy was talking about. I shot a goose from the back of a Cushman motor scooter, but it never entered my mind to turn that 16-gauge on anyone else. Never. 

But then, I never carried an AR-15 either. Couldn't have. Wouldn't have thought of it. 

If the President can blame Democrats for the deaths of people killed by undocumented immigrants, shouldn't he also tag Second Amendment Republicans for the deaths of seventeen people this week in Parkland, Florida?

And shouldn't Joni Ernst, the hog farmer from Iowa, return the three million dollars+ her campaign blissfully received from the NRA? Shouldn't John McCain give back the seven million? Shouldn't the President himself fork over the $21,000,000 he got from a group who idiotically argue that Nicolas Cruz, a broken, parent-less, misfit 19-year-old, should have the perfect right to own a combat weapon as much like my 16-gauge as that Cushman scooter was to a Sherman tank?

What is wrong with us?

_________________________

For the record, On February 14, 2018, a mass shooting occurred when 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz opened fire on students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people. This post is dated February 18, 2018.  

Sunday Morning Meds--Transgressions (Psalm 32)

“Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven. . .”

 Alice Munro’s Runaway, includes a story titled “Trespasses,” a word only slightly less archaic, perhaps, than “transgressions.”  In typical Munro-vian fashion, she weaves together several plot lines and a gallery of fully human characters who move relentlessly toward an end that is as foreordained as any ending she’s ever written.  In fact, the story begins with a tableau—four unidentified people performing some unspecified ritual late at night, on a river bank—a scene which is also the story’s own dramatic climax.  In the story’s first page and a half, Munro shows us where we’re going; then she spends the next half hour of reading time explaining how we got there.

Great stories defy summary, so I’m on dangerous ground, but I’ll try anyway.  Lauren, an eleven or twelve year-old “only child,” meets Kate, who works at the restaurant where kids her age stop after school.  When Kate shows Lauren a ton of attention, singling her out from her friends, readers can’t help becoming fearful.  Slowly, the truth emerges:  Kate has spent some significant time finding Lauren, a child she believes to be her own, a child she once gave up for adoption. 

 But Lauren—still very much a child—knows a story Kate doesn’t because once upon a time she stumbled on a vial her father quietly explained held the ashes of her sister, a baby who was killed just before Lauren was born.  He warns her, however, never to bring up the story in front of her mother, who cannot bear any reminder of the accident which took the baby’s life.  That baby’s name was Lauren.

When Kate threatens to open up the whole story, something must be done.  Soon, the story of the accident emerges, a story which began in a fight about abortion because Lauren’s father wasn’t interested in another child.  Lauren’s mother took off in the car, an accident ensued, and the baby—the adopted child Kate had given up—was killed because she wasn’t fastened into the seat.

The story is rife with pain—her father’s, for not wanting Lauren; her mother’s, for her inattention; and Kate’s, for once, long ago, giving her child away. 

 So one night, in an attempt to find what people call today “closure,” the four major characters of “Trespasses” head out to the spot of the accident, repeat some lines from the Lord’s Prayer, and leave behind the baby’s remains.

 That’s not the end of the story, however.  In some ways, the denouement is even more horrifying because Lauren, the only child, is left carrying the greatest burden of all, the child of a marriage that has been bleeding grief ever since she was born.  Her parents are distanced, from each other and from her.  The only adult who’d ever shown her any love, Kate, now leaves, having rejected Lauren once she discovered the child wasn’t hers.

Munro doesn’t trumpet closure for the adults of this story; we really don’t know whether or not they’ll ever find the peace they’ve never felt.  What we know, however, is that this second Lauren will wear forever the livery of her parents’ trespasses. 

 It’s a story that reminds me of the great Old Testament curse of sin, that it will live for generations—“punishing the children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.”

 The Blessedness with which Psalm 32 begins is created by that most marvelous of nouns—forgiveness.  But forgiveness really can’t be appreciated with anything less than a full-bodied understanding of sin, our sin.  The miracle of our forgiveness works only when our sin is wholly acknowledged.

 The miracle of forgiveness—and it is a miracle—is experienced only when we know our sin.

Which is to say, those who know real forgiveness once knew, for real, their sin.