tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-296489912024-03-28T22:29:28.394-05:00Stuff in the BasementUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2744125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-45558689036134514912024-03-28T07:10:00.000-05:002024-03-28T07:10:48.240-05:00De Smet in Iowa<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh5rAsvMN29kXQuplFQQNxaKzLoknyG9Be3kWZNCrUPyWUBDLQ5Q1T6jVVxusl4GueDu8PSVnwFqxKbGiqXose0w6kSGFXHuOEFW-JODKiLSZ8v1YfpyZ1a9IFWdqC0p0spvoUn361Ii9wuCCCEQ1SC3vrfX9vsFjcKt_9eo14X2rZ3TYB7aqvm" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="284" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh5rAsvMN29kXQuplFQQNxaKzLoknyG9Be3kWZNCrUPyWUBDLQ5Q1T6jVVxusl4GueDu8PSVnwFqxKbGiqXose0w6kSGFXHuOEFW-JODKiLSZ8v1YfpyZ1a9IFWdqC0p0spvoUn361Ii9wuCCCEQ1SC3vrfX9vsFjcKt_9eo14X2rZ3TYB7aqvm=w605-h640" width="605" /></a></div><br /></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">It's easy to call it a case of the blind leading the blind. Seriously, the only way to understand what little good Roman Catholic missionaries (virtually all of them fresh off the boat) could do among the Potawatomi (barely at home--just three years!--in Iowa, having been routed from their Great Lakes homelands), the only way to understand it was the cartoon nuttiness of those first missionaries, the nuttiness of blind faith.</span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Even the most beloved of the servants, even Father De Smet, who ran away from his Flemish home in Belgium, even the blessed Father, hadn't a clue about the people he was called to serve right there on the east side of the Missouri River in a country that was still to him a vast undiscovered frontier. Literally, the whole bunch--red and white--were struggling strangers in a strange land, but De Smet and his crew were different--they had a mission.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Two Black Robes, dedicated to purpose, wandered west from what is today Omaha and moved into that sea of grass that was, back then, the Great Plains. Why?--in search of what, no one remembers. They wandered off west and soon enough became dreadfully lost. The plains they'd walked into was, in fact, a "sea of grass." An occasional river valley transgressed the plainness all around, so what was out there seemed unbounded, the horizon itself an illusion, a garden without end. Turn around sometime and there's nothing but more in every direction. It's very much feeling absolutely directionless on water. It's horrible.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">But say you had a drone back then, with a video camera, and say you put it up high in the sky to record the movements of those two priests lost in the grass. What you'd see is a cartoon--two men in long black robes irretrievable, lost in that ocean of grass. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">For five or six days, or so, the story goes, two emissaries of the cross were completely lost, nowhere to go, thrashing around on an ocean that had no shores. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Now speed up the video, and watch those two Black Robes circle around and around and around, lost in space and time. Speed it up and try not to giggle. The two of them are real people, and they are irretrievably lost in a world where there is literally nothing around them.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Now populate that grassland with a thousand wayfaring immigrants who honestly don't have a clue where they are. What they know is that they were promised a place out west somewhere, out of the way of the blood they'd left in unending war back east. The Potawatomie, at least this branch of them, were walked--on a highway of death--to a place on the Missouri River the white man's government assigned them. There was a treaty, in 1833 there was a treaty in Chicago. That's what they knew. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">What did they know about a place called "Council Bluffs"? Nothing. They were Great Lakes people who, out there alone on a sea of grass, couldn't be farther from home. They were pushed away and forgotten, left to rot, with nothing to do. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">That's where Father De Smet, a young man from a small Flemish town he'd left, was assigned to bring the heathen to Christ. It's nutty. It's an absolutely crazy story of a man and a people who could not possibly be so unequally matched. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">It's a story about failure and faith. </span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-41333195311887001792024-03-27T12:46:00.001-05:002024-03-27T12:46:36.775-05:00The Ronna deal<div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhWKGGMi548FSQZU33RI3oiVXtN93wRdpPv7ujvsmj2TeFl-K-K8UW5TcqUzo_BN6yT-GhfeK8U4UZs1UTJOgJX9Cc3Nfpeqw-mS0aT5UgLlJP5RC2-AfRRzS8pMTbGXCYZBk9o_yx-wOmG0NsJX3sSX6cy9Hw1NT5qkxny9o1TjDCMML7v-Sbj" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="525" data-original-width="700" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhWKGGMi548FSQZU33RI3oiVXtN93wRdpPv7ujvsmj2TeFl-K-K8UW5TcqUzo_BN6yT-GhfeK8U4UZs1UTJOgJX9Cc3Nfpeqw-mS0aT5UgLlJP5RC2-AfRRzS8pMTbGXCYZBk9o_yx-wOmG0NsJX3sSX6cy9Hw1NT5qkxny9o1TjDCMML7v-Sbj=w640-h480" width="640" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">Some might well have agreed with NBC news management. Hiring Ronna McDaniel, the recently felled chair of the Republican Party, would be a good move for the network, lending some balance to their lib-leaning programming. Bringing a Republican ringer in would have steered the course of the whole gang in a more conservative direction, "righting" the course, you might say.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">That Ms. McDaniel, who had deliberately erased her family name, Romney, in a move to point out her intra-party loyalties, was obviously talented enough to hold her own behind a microphone. <span> MSNBC wanted to invite a broader audience to its news programming.</span></span></div><div><span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Then, the shit it the fan. Don't know if you saw it or not but on <i>Meet the Press</i>, ye oldest TV program on the air, Chuck Todd, blasted NBC management for that decision, apologizing to moderator Kristin Welker, for having to do what she just had done, interviewing Ronna McDaniel, an interview that was set up <i>before</i> McDaniel had been hired by the network.</span></div><div><span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Then, Monday morning, the <i>Morning Joe</i> principles went ballistic about it too. NBC News upper management faced a full-fledged revolt. Everybody went hostile, at least most all of NBC's on-air stars.</span></div><div><span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Yesterday, management reversed field and broke off whatever handshake existed between the network and Ms. McDaniel. So much for the uprising. The stars won the day.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">I haven't checked but I'm guessing Laura Ingram and her ilk will point at the whole mess and giggle about "lib censorship" scribbling it on every last post-it in the office. "So much for 'balance' among the lefties--they throw a conservative under the bus." You know how that goes.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">But if I were Chuck Todd, I'd have come out swinging at management too--not because Ronna McDaniel was the kind of conservative voice MSNBC's gang of libs couldn't stand, but because she was MAGA's co-chair. She sold the "stop the steal" madness as wholesale as anyone. She simply repeated Trump's lies. Hers was among the strongest voices claiming MSNBC was "fake news." She was no friend of the network, nor any of its principles.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">As Todd maintained on <i>Meet the Press</i> Sunday morning, how could viewers trust the commentary of anyone who'd climbed on the "Stop the Steal" bandwagon? When, on Sunday morning, she was asked about her appraisal of the 2020 election she said something to the effect of this sort of thing: in her position as Party Chair, she really had to play with the team. For the record, on Sunday morning, she said Biden won the 2020 election. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">That turn of mind is what's ailing this country. Trump is one thing, but when Republican stalwarts like John Thune and Randy Feenstra take one for the team and say nothing at all about Trump's silly "American Bible," that's why we're in the pickle we are as a nation.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Chuck Todd was right. Why should anyone believe Ronna McDonald on Sunday morning, when she says, in truth, there was no rigged election? She'd sung a wholly different song just a week or so ago when she was a soloist in Trump's choir. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">I can't help but believe that maybe someday people will look back on the days of Trump and point at "Stop the Steal" as the lie it was right from the beginning, and how that outright lie steamrolled through the American electorate and created the ills suffered thereafter--for how many years is yet to be determined. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">"He who sups with the Devil best use a long spoon."<br /></span><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-75169939343484852482024-03-25T07:31:00.002-05:002024-03-25T07:31:52.793-05:00Pep<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiers4zGOvgR3gPf3hfFGU-_TmFPmIGCe2dIaqnuPKuboQmCF3NFwE6pT1tSDZkd5HntpEJr5i3tjQBvJukqIoaidMhvN6pTLFd6oJufL7jH8RRhMwTT92yukhrmPlkaWkhc1uYAnGIpoR1w_f-ljORKwhTj28yBI7Er4jUfveTqNHKbDbbPwwy" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="275" data-original-width="183" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiers4zGOvgR3gPf3hfFGU-_TmFPmIGCe2dIaqnuPKuboQmCF3NFwE6pT1tSDZkd5HntpEJr5i3tjQBvJukqIoaidMhvN6pTLFd6oJufL7jH8RRhMwTT92yukhrmPlkaWkhc1uYAnGIpoR1w_f-ljORKwhTj28yBI7Er4jUfveTqNHKbDbbPwwy=w427-h640" width="427" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: georgia;">Look, you got to hand it to him. He's my age, for pity sake; in fact, he's two years older. He's about my size too, and he eats like he's 17. He travels over the country, as if Vegas and Mara Lago are twin cities. He has his own plane or two--that helps: he doesn't get stuck in lines waiting to be searched. The man has more get-up-n-go than anybody I know my age. My mother, who liked him, would say he's a man with a whole lot of pep. </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Some days he wins, some day no, but there's not a day on his calendar when he doesn't create a fresh ink spill, or achieve it anyway by way of the cat-scratching mob. A little scandal, well-handled, goes a long ways to keep him in the news. So why not give them something to talk about?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">"Remind me--what's the President's name again?--I mean the guy who's running against Trump?"</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">So it goes. Today too. He's makes the Ever-ready Bunny look housebound. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">According to the website <i>Just Security</i>, he's got two hot buttons today. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #777777; font-size: 19px; font-weight: 700;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Monday, March 25, 2024</span></span></p><ul style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #777777; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 15px 30px; padding: 0px;"><li aria-level="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 19px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/JustSecurityNY2016ElectionInterferenceCaseClearinghouse%E2%80%94Order-adjourning-trial-date-until-April-15-setting-March-25-hearing-on-MTD-discovery-violations-DA-trial-exhibit-designations-March152024.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #266d81; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">NY Election Interference: (1) Hearing in courtroom 59 at 10 AM on (a) Trump pending motion to dismiss, in the alternative preclude witness testimony, and adjourn based on discovery violations (to last at least one day), and (b) the scheduling of a trial date, if one is necessary; and (2) DANY to finalize trial exhibit designations </span></span></a></li><li aria-level="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 19px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-19/what-happens-if-trump-can-t-cover-454-million-bond-by-monday?embedded-checkout=true" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #2c7f96; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">NY Civil Fraud Trial: Last day for Trump to post a bond of approximately 120% of Justice Engoron’s final monetary judgment, to stay that judgment pending appeal</span></span></a> </li></ul><div><span style="color: #777777; font-family: georgia;">The first one alone would have sacked any other candidate for President in the history, but the last one is can of fireworks. In all likelihood, he'll come up with a buzzer-beater. He's going to tell his admiring throng that he really has no money? Nonsense. Then again, a punch-drunk Trump has used pity to grab dollars for years: "I am your retribution."</span></div><div><span style="color: #777777;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="color: #777777;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">And now, today, let's see what's on the calendar of a man two years younger:</span></span></div><ul style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #777777; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 15px 30px; padding: 0px;"><li aria-level="1" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Garbage out.</span></span></li></ul><div><span style="color: #777777;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Yessiree, that's it. </span></span></div><div><span style="color: #777777;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="color: #777777;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I'm saying, you got to hand it to him. He's a man of boundless energies and limitless strengths, a man capable of lying his way through every last 24-hour chunk of his life and, at four in the morning, going on Truth Social and ripping off some guy's nose. Yup, pep. </span></span></div><div><span style="color: #777777; font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="color: #777777; font-family: georgia;">He's the Republican party. . .end of sentence. I was going to write "he's the Presidential candidate <i>of the Republican party</i>," but there's no "of's" here. He <i>is</i> the Republican Party and he<i> is </i>running for re-election under a red sea of MAGA baseball caps.</span></div><div><span style="color: #777777; font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="color: #777777; font-family: georgia;">Seriously, he is amazing and far, far more likely to crash-and-burn someday than his aged and sometimes creaky opponent. </span></div><div><span style="color: #777777; font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="color: #777777; font-family: georgia;">Oh, yeah, one more thing. He's plain-and-simple nuts. He's unable to control himself. Just this weekend he told whoever was listening that he has 500 million in cash. His lawyers, just a day or two earlier, said, under oath, that he didn't. </span></div><div><span style="color: #777777; font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="color: #777777; font-family: georgia;">Have no fear. Gird up your loins because Donald will find a way out, and when he does, some evangelical preacher with a on-line church and a hot podcast will announce to his thousands of parishioners, once more, that the fact that the man just keeps going is proof he's not 'of this world'--he's the MAGA Christ. </span></div><div><span style="color: #777777; font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="color: #777777; font-family: georgia;">It'll happen because it already has, more than once.</span></div><div><span style="color: #777777; font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="color: #777777; font-family: georgia;">Grab the popcorn, take a seat, and get ready for today's show. Well, be sure to take the garbage out. </span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-90341291695897682102024-03-24T06:14:00.000-05:002024-03-24T06:14:07.790-05:00Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 42<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSPCHfTv592PWWEZ3YcaTkW_Gus7xeefrZumnUM7rhrfI5nAiVi-HuDXLoZ2mMULKf923wOU1w9Ap61vAtGSPvuynuawwvZA_i0oWGwMhrJ_O2eGcp2UaJuKrlJzhUDOfW_i7uup3LNOIYtq7Fwc-9zJnDmMViFhtIGMW4yd7QnatoPkAChi4y/s4608/49.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4608" data-original-width="3456" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSPCHfTv592PWWEZ3YcaTkW_Gus7xeefrZumnUM7rhrfI5nAiVi-HuDXLoZ2mMULKf923wOU1w9Ap61vAtGSPvuynuawwvZA_i0oWGwMhrJ_O2eGcp2UaJuKrlJzhUDOfW_i7uup3LNOIYtq7Fwc-9zJnDmMViFhtIGMW4yd7QnatoPkAChi4y/w480-h640/49.jpg" width="480" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><br /><br /></b></span><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>“Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; . . . </b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I first heard the line years ago from my wife’s grandmother,
who I knew only for a few years as a rather elegant woman with a radiant crown
of silver hair. I don’t remember the
occasion, but I’ll never forget the comment because it seemed so out of
character for a fine old Christian matriarch.
“When bad things happen,” she said, eyes almost averted, her head
shaking slightly, “they always come in threes.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I had no clue where she got that idea, nor why she believed
it. Grandma Visser, whose people were
hearty Calvinists for generations, could not have pointed anywhere in scripture
for that idea, as she well could have for most of her foundational
beliefs. But this ancient bit of
folklore—does it have pagan roots?—never fully left her psyche, even though she
probably read the Word of God every day of her life. “Bad things happen in threes.” She wasn’t—isn’t—the only one to say it or
believe it. Google it sometime.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><o:p> </o:p>Can it be true? I
don’t know that anyone could do the research.
But it must have seemed a valid perception for generations of human
beings caught in the kind of downward spiral that David must have been in when
writing Psalm 42. And, as we all must
sadly admit, often as not perception creates its own realities.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Is it a silly?
Sure. If we expect it to be true,
<i>we</i> may be silly. But the sheer age of that odd idea argues for
some ageless relevance. Whether or not
it’s true isn’t as important perhaps as the fact its sentiment has offered
comfort and strength to human sorrowers. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><o:p> </o:p>True believers expect something more than they’ve already
gone through, some additional misery if they have already got stung twice. By repeating the old line, Grandma was steeling
herself for the next sadness, anticipating that three would mean the end of
sorrows, at least for a while.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><o:p> </o:p>My guess is that the ancient folk wisdom finds a place in
the human psyche not because it’s true, but because it’s comforting: it brings order to chaos. Sad to say, there
are three, but at least that’s it.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Interesting, I think, that Eugene Peterson uses the word <i>chaos</i> in his version of this verse: “chaos calls to chaos,” he says. And he’s just as right as anyone, I suppose,
for it’s impossible to claim biblical inerrancy when it comes to a verse like
this. The KJV says “waterspouts” where the NIV says “waterfalls,” wholly
different phenomena. The fact is, nobody
really knows what specifically is meant by “deep calls to deep.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> And yet everyone who’s faced a march of consecutive
sadnesses knows very well. “When sorrows
come, they come not single spies but in battalions,” Shakespeare says in <i>Hamlet</i>, an even more depressing
assessment than Grandma Visser’s.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">We really don’t know what David means here, but many readers
of Psalm 42 somehow get it. Our lives on occasion feel like Thomas Hardy
novels, when things simply seem to get worse and worse and worse, and don’t get
better.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">There are no vivid pictures embedded in the line “deep calls
to deep,” but that doesn’t mean there isn’t meaning enough for most of us to
find ourselves therein.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">We can’t avoid the painful reality of the soul that’s sliced
opened to us in Psalm 42: the singer who
believes in the Light but sees nothing but darkness around him.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">And maybe, thankfully, what’s there is the outline of
a third bad th</span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">ing</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-65684395444793732732024-03-22T07:19:00.002-05:002024-03-24T06:14:58.852-05:00Morning Thanks--an old friend<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQy_mOURnBSHuLjz3YLF7KS5aOZ0ZudwINhDj7vWCBmQpv7_k-cGR5838RlnlvSyMXMaoYA1v-QuaPQ6pDck3uJ3BYBvBXyfOmPW4tnM-hNExWxpZpSv2swMvOy3mZjNV5O8hEwpK-HaSwnntCQvkok589SfBt5Obhc40IOZut5uyIICMA-3wl/s475/Jayber%20Crow.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="475" data-original-width="316" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQy_mOURnBSHuLjz3YLF7KS5aOZ0ZudwINhDj7vWCBmQpv7_k-cGR5838RlnlvSyMXMaoYA1v-QuaPQ6pDck3uJ3BYBvBXyfOmPW4tnM-hNExWxpZpSv2swMvOy3mZjNV5O8hEwpK-HaSwnntCQvkok589SfBt5Obhc40IOZut5uyIICMA-3wl/w426-h640/Jayber%20Crow.jpg" width="426" /></a></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><p>People who love Wendell Berry--and they are legion--don't read him for his masterful plots. Often as not, Berry's love is only secondarily for what <i>happens</i> in a story; his love is making characters live. When he's good, and he's always good in my book, what he adds to your library (and your world!) is real live human beings, each of whom are worth knowing. In his novels, you discover their marvelous humanity. </p></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That "marvelous humanity" is in short supply it seems, so stumbling on a Wendell Berry novel means stumbling on characters who, through thick and thin, in some perfectly fallen way, show you truly rich--that very "image of God" that Berry would say dwells in us all. Few writers create such characters--another, by the way, is Marilyn Robinson.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">For me, reading <i>Jayber Crow</i> was a long-standing obligation. I'd promised, long ago, to read it, when a friend told me he thought <i>Jayber Crow</i> was the very best book he'd ever read--and that man, Terry Vanden Berg, was a librarian. His praise overflowed with religious conviction. <i>Jayber Crow</i> was simply overwhelmingly good--"You <i>have to</i> read it--you'll love it."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Those weren't his last words by any means, but they were, if I'm not mistaken, his last words to me. He died on the street, when a heart attack took him long before it might have. He was out jogging. It may well be that his untimely death makes me think his great reverence for <i>Jayber Crow</i> were Terry's last words to me.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">No matter. It took me a quarter of a century to read the book this librarian told me was the very best novel he'd ever written. No piece of fiction could possibly live up to that kind of billing. We all suffer similarly: someone says, "you HAVE TO see" a movie; so you do, and you can't help thinking it didn't rate that kind of praise.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But then, to say I expected more glory from<i> Jayber Crow</i> is off the mark too. It's a fine book, a beautiful book, by all means worth reading. But the fact of the matter is, I enjoyed <i>Hannah Coulter</i> more. It's hard to decipher why, I suppose, and maybe I should simply say there's no accounting for taste.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But let me wander into this a bit. <i>Jayber Crow</i> tests the limits of what I might call "presentational theater," of listening to a chorus or an observor or a stage manager guide you through a story. The undeniable beauty of <i>Jayber Crow</i> is Jayber Crow, the man, in large part because he possesses what I'd call heavenly wisdom. He is an orphan, someone educated by his own passion for ideas and books, a kind of stranger in the world, a man whose lifeblood appears to flow only when in the presence of a woman who is unequally yoked. Jayber Crow spends most of his adult life quietly and passionately in love with a woman already married. The novel's surprise resolution is <i>perfectly</i> sad, which is to say, perfectly beautiful. I liked the novel greatly, but I loved <i>Hannah Coulter</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">After a fashion, the novels are brother and sister. They all grow up around a small community fictionalized as Port William, Kentucky, a very small town surrounded by the kind of blessed countryside where a fully-fledged agrarian like Wendell Berry can grow. If you've never read Wendell Berry, it may be difficult to believe that he actually builds a community, but that's what he does--and in a series of novels all titled by characters' names. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Berry loves flourishing community, and therefore loves the people who create it--people like Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow, as well as the men, women, and children around them. His concerns are with the soul really, the human soul, and his conviction is that men and women who live in community have separate lives that can, in that community, truly flourish. He doesn't write cartoons; his characters fall into deep valleys and wander into dark shadows, but finally their lives are rich. They flourish. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Terry Vanden Berg couldn't have been wrong--<i>Jayber Crow</i> was the best novel he ever read. It was right up there for me. I can sing its praises, just not as convincingly as he did.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Once upon a time, sitting in a dorm lounge at Dordt College, Terry was reading over a paper of mine. I was a freshman. I'm quite sure I'd asked him to proof. He was an English major, two years my elder. He likely drew out a red pen. "Not <i>knew</i> here--you have to say <i>knows</i>. All the way through, you've got to correct your verb tense," he told me. "Always remember, when you write about a story or a poem, 'literature lives'--it's present tense, always present tense. Literature lives."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That's what he told me, years earlier, when I needed to understand what I was myself feeling--somehow literature lives. Always present tense. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That too I've never forgotten. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">This morning's thanks are for a librarian and a reader, a man named Terry Vander Berg. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">______________________</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=3103761849647523" target="_blank">Here's a fine 10-minute talk on <i>Jayber Crow</i> by Russell Moore.</a> </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-5373343287437701592024-03-21T07:29:00.000-05:002024-03-21T07:29:06.189-05:00City Champs!<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvR935oyjpi4impxriU5zJt8G1RAARY9JsK8AEvABxUGuhhyphenhyphenuFkXFOOI6zPHF1_SVaTeUPwpmlgxQvc1zdkBXDki4ja8btB-sEMzu9BZHUzuf3Ssq02m5k71JtjbQ40Pcr_mKWgnRrcjeKWcRxTtiKQAtYvlugLxQtTlzvNfFzb77b73R-KIid/s1189/Monroe%20city%20league.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1014" data-original-width="1189" height="546" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvR935oyjpi4impxriU5zJt8G1RAARY9JsK8AEvABxUGuhhyphenhyphenuFkXFOOI6zPHF1_SVaTeUPwpmlgxQvc1zdkBXDki4ja8btB-sEMzu9BZHUzuf3Ssq02m5k71JtjbQ40Pcr_mKWgnRrcjeKWcRxTtiKQAtYvlugLxQtTlzvNfFzb77b73R-KIid/w640-h546/Monroe%20city%20league.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><p>So I just so happened to sit on a steel chair set up directly beneath the basket on the north end of the court last week at church (we're worshipping in a school gym temporarily), and I couldn't help thinking that that rim looked twenty feet off the earth--waaay up there.</p></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I hadn't really looked at a basketball rim from beneath it for a long, long time, and it just seemed impossible that one night at a gym in Orange City, Iowa, during warm up layups, on the court of our rivals who we all knew would beat us, I was somehow hyped enough to get up and over that rim and actually stuff the basketball. (I doubt such an event myself, but don't smudge a dream.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">There I sat beneath the bucket, thick black bands up around my left calf to keep a brace in place beneath my left foot, a limb which no longer appears to cooperate when my body asks it to. I don't walk well, not well at all, although the brace keeps my limp from being advertised. It doesn't help that I couldn't really imagine myself shooting a basketball or rebounding or moving downcourt on a fast break--no matter, that rim seemed impossible.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I spent years playing ball, stopped slo-pitch when I was almost sixty, even though at that age I likely slammed more big fat pitches out of the park than any of my teammates. It just was time. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Two days ago, I walked into the indoor athletic field at Northwestern, on my way to a workout designed for this new condition of mine, and watched as a softball coach hit grounders to a couple of infielders. The sound of the bat on the ball sounds nothing at all like it did years ago, but I stopped, stood and watched, wishing, just wishing that the coach would see the old bald guy with the brace and offer me the bat. I'd have given anything for fifteen minutes hitting grounders.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It would be impossible for me to tally the hours I spent on a basketball court. Add in a baseball diamond, and we're talking about most of my life. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">All of that and more, and then a sweet ex-student sends me the picture up top from my teaching days in Wisconsin. That's me in the sweaty Calvin College shirt--and no, I didn't go there. I remember the team that won the Monroe (WI) City Basketball League Championship that year, 1971, I think. We were a tough bunch, that square man in the middle knew how to muscle the ball into the basket. He wasn't quick, wasn't graceful, but get the ball into him in the pain and he bulled in to score.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">For a long time I had a little individual trophy--we must have each got one. I think it's gone now, tossed finally in one of our attempts to slim down, and I remember the picture too well. It was in the Monroe Times, a daily, and I loved it being there, not necessarily because I was so proud of our win but because--I can hardly believe I'm admitting this--because I hoped that some Calvin grad would see it, someone of the tribe I knew as my people would recognize the peculiar name of the college--and call me, just someone who knew the name Kuyper.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I love remembering those two years in Wisconsin, loved it because I loved my students, one of whom sent me that picture when she saw it in a display at a birthday party for the guy who'd get ball in the paint and somehow muscle it in. This party was, of course, at a bar--it's Wisconsin after all. A recent college graduate, someone who left the fold angrily in fact, I had a lot to learn.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">When I remember back to that time today, I remember the students--it's hard for me to have to admit that they're all, long ago retired at this time, just as balding and paunchy as their four-years older teacher. But I also remember the loneliness, stark and painful loneliness that I felt, something of an alien.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It's painful even remembering that, but honestly what I remember about that picture just now sent to me from one of those students from long ago, is wondering if maybe some Calvin grad in Green County, Iowa, would look at it and pull out a phone book. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It's not that I had no friends. Besides, kids really adored me--they still write. </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">But what I remember, what I can't quite forget, is loneliness. Sometimes things looked, even back then, as if they were somehow far out of reach. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-28495107429329329662024-03-20T07:33:00.002-05:002024-03-20T10:15:15.579-05:00Songs and Stories from the Falls<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjBhnKByWNafeq94kC8XwUNaxTGIS8rWWWKEUaiFmkckjauUMFUuedt0c24ItUjrMvegMA4IUOQhUGeJq-Nw19fpdDoPKKeuFtZpDRo5UPZrizoglRC7J8QNOos__tqpLHstoQC5ZjcKnRUtRh32O3COfKx09ol5M_W_YS0YFQXrJUwAsC-_6P6" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2346" data-original-width="2971" height="505" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjBhnKByWNafeq94kC8XwUNaxTGIS8rWWWKEUaiFmkckjauUMFUuedt0c24ItUjrMvegMA4IUOQhUGeJq-Nw19fpdDoPKKeuFtZpDRo5UPZrizoglRC7J8QNOos__tqpLHstoQC5ZjcKnRUtRh32O3COfKx09ol5M_W_YS0YFQXrJUwAsC-_6P6=w640-h505" width="640" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">Henry James once said of the English novelist Anthony Trollope that "</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: georgia;">His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual." </span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: georgia;">That's the kind of fine </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: georgia;">line that makes you sit back and spin through it again. Whether James is right or not is a judgment I'm not qualified to make, but I can't help feeling what James might be talking about shows up in a passage Trollope penned about "the falls," the only ones that matter really, the Niagara Falls. </span></div><div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Now, don't be mistaken--Niagara Falls is in no wise "usual." Its three separate falls span the border between Ontario, Canada, and New York state, and empty the Niagara River at a rate of almost six million cubic gallons of water every minute. Nothing about the Niagara Falls is "usual." Some claim that kind of immensity pounding into the Niagara Gorge can be heard as far as forty miles away. </span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Here's what Trollope, this master of the usual, said about the Falls:</span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></span></span></div><blockquote><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">…To realize Niagara you must sit there till you see nothing else than that which you have come to see. You will hear nothing else and see nothing else. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">At length you will be at one with the tumbling river before you. You will find yourself among the waters as though you belong to them.</span></span></div><div></div></blockquote><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Then there's the water's sheer divinity:</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></span></span></div><blockquote><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">The cool liquid green will run through your veins and the voice of the cataract will be the expression of your own heart. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">You will fall as the bright waters fall, rushing down into your new world with no hesitation and with no dismay: </span></span></div><div></div></blockquote><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">Oh, yes, and here's the spirit too: "and you will rise again as the spray rises, bright, beautiful and pure. Then you will flow away in your course to the uncompassed, distant and eternal ocean…"</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">Phew. But then, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">I'm sure Niagara Falls (where the three are one) prompts every mortal soul who takes the time to sit and stare at its eternity of water, then rise into some timeless transcendence, not a particularly difficult thing to do, by the way.</span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">A boat tour at the Falls uses an ancient myth to advertise, goes by the name of "The Maid of the Mist." The almost ageless story belonged originally to the </span><span style="background-color: white;">Haudenosaunees, a local Native people who long claimed one of their own, a young woman suddenly widowed, depressed and lonely, took it upon herself to push her canoe into the Niagara River and willfully plunge over the falls to her death. </span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Once she heard the roar of the falls, she prayed to her god to make her death easy, or so the story goes, and he did more than that: he saved her, even married her off to one of his handsome sons. Don't know if Trollope heard this one when he was at the Falls, although if he did, he may well have been even more ecstatic. </span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">One more chapter. The lovely maiden, now a wife, amid the pounding somehow hears the anguish of her people back up top the falls, then gets permission to visit them and warn them, which she does successfully, thereby becoming a savior of her people, "the Maiden of the Mist." </span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white;">But then, how about this one? Harriet Tubman, who almost single-handedly saved as many as seventy enslaved people, many of them by way of the Underground Railroad, used to bring the newly freed over the vast and newly built suspension bridge, right there at Niagara Falls. She delivered the suddenly freed, including her parents, to St. Catharine's or Chatham, to Canada, where finally their shackles fell blessedly away. </span></span></div><div><span style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white;">Josiah Bailey must have heard that immense roar of the falls as the train he was taking came up on the old Suspension Bridge. But, Tubman said, he wouldn't look up, kept his head in his hands, or so she wrote in a memoir.</span></span></div><div><span style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white;">Finally, when Tubman knew they'd passed the halfway point on the bridge, she shook him, grabbed his shoulders, and told him they'd made it--he was out, he was free. This man Josiah Bailey stood right then and there in the train, and started singing on that suspension bridge. </span></span></div><p style="background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 20px auto; max-width: 700px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> “Glory to God and Jesus too,<br />One more soul is safe;<br />Oh, go and carry de news,<br /> One more soul got safe.”</span></p><div><span style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white;">And didn't stop singing that song till he got off the train, even drew a crowd of admirers while he sang, Tubman said.</span></span></div><div><span style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="background-color: white;">Anthony Trollope first visited America in the early 1850s, and stayed only for a short time to visit his mother, who'd moved to America sometime earlier. So i</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">t's unlikely but not impossible that Trollope was here in 1856 when Harriet Tubman brought Josiah Bailey into freedom, which means you can't help but wonder what more Trollope might have said or how he would have said what he did, if he knew that right above him on that newly constructed suspension bridge, four slaves from Virginia were being brought into freedom. I wonder what this "master of the ordinary" might have added to what he had written had he heard Josiah Bailey's song amid the tumult and the roar, because it's amazing, isn't it?--how music stays in the soul?</span></span></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-37506726444999635332024-03-19T07:02:00.000-05:002024-03-19T07:02:36.733-05:00Just a little bit of Buechner<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtWLnul_thJaCPLSirnPtXBLWAULkpkVIjUyT29aJJqMhCcovCwLGtSyWx7LrhkosOEeYFz84iM1HTmetLqiUSzkUFXw240R7756zyVlHJR2vaFq0DoR_sJVlXhOwj1yGVPOUZKOVEGB5v6d30bHddsK_ywcx8tVwxexdshvDYMfbHeLCOHFQI/s4351/797_edited-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4351" data-original-width="2967" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtWLnul_thJaCPLSirnPtXBLWAULkpkVIjUyT29aJJqMhCcovCwLGtSyWx7LrhkosOEeYFz84iM1HTmetLqiUSzkUFXw240R7756zyVlHJR2vaFq0DoR_sJVlXhOwj1yGVPOUZKOVEGB5v6d30bHddsK_ywcx8tVwxexdshvDYMfbHeLCOHFQI/w436-h640/797_edited-1.jpg" width="436" /></a></div><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Frederick Buechner is someone whose work I wish I'd met long, long ago. For years, I've heard people I know and trust speak so very highly of him, you'd think he'd contributed to Word himself. Smart, funny, thoughtful, rich and wide in breadth, Buechner's reputation had soared in my mind even if I hadn't taken the time to read him. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I have now, although not extensively. Barbara and I have used a book of meditations of his that was just wonderful. Somewhere behind me on the shelves, I've got, unread, <i>Godrick</i>, a novel, I think, and I read a little bit of him every day.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">A friend of mine told me his laptop gets a shot of Fred Buechner every morning. Sounded like a great idea, so I signed up. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">This one came about a week ago.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">A theologian I respect once said at a conference that I attended, a conference where she was a speaker, that no true Calvinist can say he or she hasn't flirted wildly with universalism. When I read this chunk of Frederick Buechner, I was reminded of that line and, smilingly, my own flirtations. </span></p><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="MsoNormalTable" style="width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td style="padding: 0in 0in 0in 0in;"><p align="center" style="margin: 0in; text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 25.5pt;">Descent Into
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<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt;">THERE IS AN OBSCURE PASSAGE in the First Letter of Peter where
the old saint writes that after the crucifixion, Jesus went and preached to
"the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey" (3:19-20), and
it's not altogether clear just what spirits he had in mind. Later on,
however, he is not obscure at all. "The gospel was preached even to the
dead," he says, "that though judged in the flesh like men, they
might live in the spirit like God" (4:5-6).</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt;">"He descended into hell," is the way the Apostles'
Creed puts it, of course. It has an almost blasphemous thud to it, sandwiched
there between the muffled drums of "was crucified, dead, and
buried" and the trumpet blast of "the third day he rose again from
the dead." Christ of all people, in hell of all places! It strains the
imagination to picture it, the Light of the World making his way through the
terrible dark to save whatever ones he can. Yet in view of what he'd seen of
the world during his last few days in the thick of it, maybe the transition
wasn't as hard as you might think.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt;">The fancifulness of the picture gives way to what seems, the
more you turn it over in your mind, the inevitability of it. Of course that
is where he would have gone. Of course that is what he would have done.
Christ is always descending and redescending into hell.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt;">"Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden"
is spoken to <em>all</em>, whatever they've done or left undone, whichever
side of the grave their hell happens to be on.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt;">-Originally published in </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"><a href="https://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=49409649&msgid=474618&act=QKK6&c=1318316&pid=1164657&destination=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.frederickbuechner.com%2Fwhistling-in-the-dark-a-doubters-dictionary%2F&cf=8078&v=c6af579f304322231a9f4b781a280982fb2ea51a8eb25f420be30c69d839ddd0"><em><span style="color: blue; font-size: 13.0pt;">Whistling in the Dark</span></em></a></span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt;"> and
later in </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt;"><a href="https://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=49409649&msgid=474618&act=QKK6&c=1318316&pid=1164657&destination=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.frederickbuechner.com%2Fbeyond-words-daily-readings-in-the-abcs-of-faith%2F&cf=8078&v=c277651e98f4e86ff28bcdc59241a8f7207a748b566d6289fa47d5ed5f05f4b3"><em><span style="color: blue; font-size: 13.0pt;">Beyond Words</span></em></a></span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-83077314108221093162024-03-18T07:02:00.000-05:002024-03-18T07:02:17.713-05:00DeSantis and the Death of WOKE<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiQujEHMMHb29UG3hCNzKERV06C6RLXxxgKvbpDkz7ImmlPQBHFfD1YQ5auIsfBA0nylVpdOdPaM6A90bjm9lSjEOMtEkBFBI7mbROeceZr_j4ZmicSFbt4hhYv5hv2B_0ODXUc18-QGqnRuBwHvvDQo7xxUBaSB4OBzikX_c-BP9Q4VHpKdBaW" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="635" data-original-width="1130" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiQujEHMMHb29UG3hCNzKERV06C6RLXxxgKvbpDkz7ImmlPQBHFfD1YQ5auIsfBA0nylVpdOdPaM6A90bjm9lSjEOMtEkBFBI7mbROeceZr_j4ZmicSFbt4hhYv5hv2B_0ODXUc18-QGqnRuBwHvvDQo7xxUBaSB4OBzikX_c-BP9Q4VHpKdBaW=w640-h360" width="640" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">I'm more than a little shame-faced. I'm downright embarrassed, mortified even, at myself and myself alone because I fell for the guy's claptrap. </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">One-time Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis blew all kinds of air into the trial balloon by questioning the righteousness of literature and social studies teachers throughout the nation, who he claimed were poisoning minds and souls by spoon-feeding the nation's youth unabashedly WOKE materials, by pushing LGBTQ at them, even "grooming" them for unspeakable things.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">And that's not all.<i> He went after librarians</i>. That's right--librarians. It's not easy to villainize the school librarian, or the peaceable staff downtown. I mean, you've got to go out of your way to make them out to be as depraved as DeSantis wanted to make you believe they were. But he did--and scored some significant results.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">And the whole CRT thing, too, clear and present danger, an issue that grew out of some Southern swampy mess that established a clean and clear premise: there is no such thing as racial prejudice in America because here in the land of the free and the home of the brave we took care of all of that with the Civil War. I mean, look at Oprah. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The monster was fed energetically by concerned parents who looked at their kids' education and found it riddled with ideas they thought way, way, way beyond the pale. It was as if the American public had simply assumed that teachers and librarians weren't lecherous, deranged libs. Doggone it, it was time for parents to take back the classroom and retool it with the values of, say, Donald J. Trump. America needed to arm itself with MAGA to kill off WOKE. Florida, De Santos claimed, was where WOKE went to die. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">And I fell for it. I did. I'm so sorry. I thought DeSantis' WOKE silliness worth fighting.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Nope. According to its own progenitor, the whole thing was a bit of a "false narrative." Not long ago, none other than DeSantis chided the Florida public for going too far with the whole book banning thing, told them to cool their jets, to let up a little because the whole thing was devolving into sheer madness. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">After all, some included the Bible on the list of objectionable books, and the dictionary. DeSantis says some of the objections schools and librarians face are an "abuse of the process" undertaken "to score political points."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Well, he should know.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">And I believed the guy, when, dang it, it was all politics.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"> Long live WOKE. May MAGA rest in peace</span>. </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-41267492291854285262024-03-17T06:26:00.001-05:002024-03-17T06:27:41.225-05:00Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 42<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOgyNi1Xk2Ru2En8rNkGlUEIaU6xfhXNVIEvjXEO0WZXp-xpHW4WIJXZIHtsXCjI_ItQCOzhNoj14S-UJbwhH1wJP3vitrsHO0wYRw_r5hPmXdGMtyJmcmZkv-KlbTXHq_LvBrI2EoTaUGR-dZt7kHgcTM0ZsWjpNK9dW6SQrppBdRyIOzgteF/s4594/Home%20of%20Standing%20Bear.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2442" data-original-width="4594" height="340" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOgyNi1Xk2Ru2En8rNkGlUEIaU6xfhXNVIEvjXEO0WZXp-xpHW4WIJXZIHtsXCjI_ItQCOzhNoj14S-UJbwhH1wJP3vitrsHO0wYRw_r5hPmXdGMtyJmcmZkv-KlbTXHq_LvBrI2EoTaUGR-dZt7kHgcTM0ZsWjpNK9dW6SQrppBdRyIOzgteF/w640-h340/Home%20of%20Standing%20Bear.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p style="margin: 0in; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: georgia;">“My soul is downcast within me; </span></b></p><p style="margin: 0in; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: georgia;">therefore I will remember
you from the land of the <st1:country-region w:st="on">Jordan</st1:country-region>, </span></b></p><p style="margin: 0in; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>the heights of Hermon—from <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">Mount</st1:placetype>
<st1:placename w:st="on">Mizar</st1:placename></st1:place>.” </b><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">For a decade at least, just about every Saturday morning
I could, I ventured out west into the rolling hills that have formed, centuries
ago, along the Big Sioux River, a place where the land opens broadly into a
landscape that, like most of the Great Plains, ends only in what seems infinite
space.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Literally, there is nothing
there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s corn and there’s beans
and there’s some grasslands, but nothing is substantially present to fill the
frame of a camera lens; and that’s why it’s such a challenge to try. I do what
I can to get an angle on a subject that offers very little. We live in fly-over
country here, but then I’m a fan or Thoreau: “<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself,” he once
claimed, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“than be crowded on a velvet
cushion.”</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Some time ago, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New
York Times</i> ran a story about Californians leaving the state for the Midwest.
When I sent the story to friends, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i>
website told me that story was their most-emailed piece that day. Amazing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">And in some ways, terrific.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would be nice for everyone here if some
companies would relocate to the rural <st1:place w:st="on">Midwest</st1:place>,
where wages are dismal and, often, benefits are worse. We could use a financial
shot in the arm.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">But I’m not all that interested in a flood of new
residents. I am blessed—I really am—by living in a place where open land is all
around, just a farm or two per gravel road. These days, from my own backdoor I
can see for miles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Some people in tall-grass prairie country lament the
death of hunting, pheasant hunting specifically. The number of hunters is down,
even though the headcount of pheasants, by my estimation, is up--at least I see
more out here. Just scared up a half-dozen hens out back yesterday.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I’ve always thought Thoreau wasn’t wrong when he claimed
that boys (his word) really ought to hunt when they’re young but give it up on
becoming men, and that’s why I don’t lament the loss of hunters. But I’ve been
one, and I still sometimes long to get out there in the silence. Just the same,
I wanted to write a letter to the reporter suggesting that we’d all be better
off—even the pheasants—if we all packed cameras instead of 12-gauge pumps.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Some Saturdays—lots of them this time of year--the sky,
at dawn, is thick with clouds, so thick that I don’t bother going out. When I
made a habit of it, cloudy Saturday mornings hurt because I came to need my
Saturday morning’s hour-long pilgrimage into open spaces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kathleen Norris, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dakota</i>, makes clear what others have said—that sometimes where there’s
nothing, there’s really something.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">And I say all of this because in the second bout of
sadness which David discusses in this psalm—and it’s interesting that 42
doesn’t end with verse six—he is a bit more specific in the means by which
he’ll fight the blues. He’ll return—thoughtfully if not physically—to the open
land, to the “heights of Hermon.” He’ll go back to the open spaces as an
antidote to his weary, downcast soul, because there he can remember God.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Honestly, I think I know what he’s talking about. Just a
week ago I was all by my blessed self in the snowy country just a few miles
east of Glacier National Park. All by myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Oh, maybe a horse or gang of deer, but all by my blessed self, and it
was a blessing. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Snow had just blew in from the far north, chilling
everything and leaving an icy glaze over the entire world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I should learn how better to adjust my camera’s
f-stop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Just the heights of Hermon---the mere memory of standing
there all alone, David says, gives life to a weary soul.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I think I know that one.</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-56717996135813235092024-03-16T07:00:00.001-05:002024-03-16T07:00:00.128-05:00An old story, "Anna"<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicarFuYdR08Jm3yN4ZEb791ehle9_2-SjHQKjtvBSGUW4e4oAdE0UzarJTgtWdoGJXb2h_2OHeFn8hpoXR5rKOVBocLUXsPKqEONS-S-LaxkBNIlibFVlb78agwNopW6pNFD4RcnYvxSiSPaW169NPRgBkI3pKZtOfP6ZKf5msWoXi34jxBP0R/s4608/P3240079%20filtered.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4608" data-original-width="3456" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicarFuYdR08Jm3yN4ZEb791ehle9_2-SjHQKjtvBSGUW4e4oAdE0UzarJTgtWdoGJXb2h_2OHeFn8hpoXR5rKOVBocLUXsPKqEONS-S-LaxkBNIlibFVlb78agwNopW6pNFD4RcnYvxSiSPaW169NPRgBkI3pKZtOfP6ZKf5msWoXi34jxBP0R/w480-h640/P3240079%20filtered.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: small;">Continued from yesterday. . .</span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Years have passed since then. Today the church pays a music director to order a Christmas show from some slick Christian catalog out of Texas, but Anna is still teaching Sunday school, and now she has my own three-year-old boy. No one else her age teaches, because kids have a way of forcing early retirements, just as they always did. But there is a smile on Anna's face whenever we drop our son off with her for Sunday school. It's a smile unlike anything we ever saw before on her face, a smile that surprised me at first. And Anna has a permanent now, her curly gray hair curled up tight around her head like any of a dozen other women in church. <br /><br />Time fills in gaps the way dawn colors a lakeshore landscape. Some things I know now about Anna. I know now that Anna cared for her parents until the day each of them died. I know now that her father was no gentle man to live with-blustery, hardheaded, stubborn as the toughest Hollander. I know now that when he was gone, every Sunday she dressed her mother, set her in the wheelchair, and pushed the old woman to church, even when she knew her mother understood little of the sermon. I know now that giving her life to them was a thankless, blessed job that might have turned anyone's face into something grim, something less than radiant. <br /><br />I know now that the woman who never married regularly plays grandmother to two little blond-haired boys no older than my own son, two little boys her niece was left alone with when their father ran off with another woman. <br /><br />Why does she smile that way today, twenty years after a class of fourth-grade boys decided she was much too owly to be a good teacher? Why does my son love her today? Why does he curl around my leg and turn away from her when she talks to him, as if he's embarrassed to have all of her attention himself? Why does Anna smile? <br /><br />Maybe it's because life is easier for her now, later on in her years. Maybe the privileged burden of her parents' care is there behind her, settled in the pages of her mind like yellowed photographs. Maybe the anxiety of being alone has settled into a firm assurance that all things have worked together for good. Maybe playing grandmother has swelled the limits of her tolerance. Maybe the smile is simply the inherent reward of many years of Christmas programs interspersed annually in a lifetime of quiet selflessness. <br /><br />Four hundred years ago we reformed the church and stopped canonization, stopped making saints. Maybe it's a shame. Today we don't know how to revere those who give themselves, all of themselves, through us to God. We let them pass on too easily, and we don't elevate them like heroes. After all, what was Abraham to David but a symbol of belief and courage, of faith and promise. <br /><br />So this is for you, Anna. And this is for me. And this is for our son. And this is for our Lord. <br /><br />I'm happy you're out of intensive care, and so is my son.</span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">*~*~*~*~*</span></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;">There's a bit more to the story. When the piece appeared in a magazine I knew some people in the community was published, I hoped my masked name might keep it away from those who would know who this central character is. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;">Nope.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;">A man who grew up not all that far from where I did, took a look, read a few words, and said, "Hey, he's talking about my aunt." That discovery got back to me, and more. No one seemed angry however, although if they had been angry or hurt, I may never have known.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;">Then, years later, when we were visiting the town where I grew up, the fictional Anna came up to me. I don't know that I had ever spoken to her before in my life. By this time, she was most certainly elderly. I will admit that I wondered what she was going to say, but when it came out, mid smiles, she told me she'd had the whole essay decoupaged and it hung in her bedroom.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;">I'm happy to say that it seemed to me that "Anna" was a winner.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-76266744210649457472024-03-15T10:48:00.003-05:002024-03-15T10:48:48.615-05:00An old story, "Anna"<div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5HPgvBjAvvWuS4bvOZLQ6ijeEdbxqjipfIpxi6gCN9ytXZTvCVpqr4zAapZ3wLYNJgIPFOkFQu9URW7daum8A_aNeWEJogL12Cyb75dO8bzm9EPU2VC5sNgjv390ORBoSwj0dRhuSf8a1X-xEsxo6xcAvrMi0lzHhznfkcdT9UoT5zAvHh2Y-/s4608/P3240079%20filtered.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4608" data-original-width="3456" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5HPgvBjAvvWuS4bvOZLQ6ijeEdbxqjipfIpxi6gCN9ytXZTvCVpqr4zAapZ3wLYNJgIPFOkFQu9URW7daum8A_aNeWEJogL12Cyb75dO8bzm9EPU2VC5sNgjv390ORBoSwj0dRhuSf8a1X-xEsxo6xcAvrMi0lzHhznfkcdT9UoT5zAvHh2Y-/w480-h640/P3240079%20filtered.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>If my son, here referred to as three years old, is today well into his forties, the story I'm telling is now more than forty years old, originally published in a magazine that, by my direction, gave the author a made-up name. Why? Because, back then, I was afraid of how the individuals might react, given my going public with their lives. It's a difficult line writers walk when writing stories which "use" characters and situations others might recognize, and I was aware of that with "Anna," because here those characters attended the same church I did. So I hid, or tried to.</span><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;">But here's the story.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: small;">*~*~*~*~*~* </span></div><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">Anna is out of intensive care now, and I guess that's why I'm saying this. Because it strikes me-now that she has wrestled through a fight with her heart-it strikes me that we are far too good at eulogies. Nice things are always easy to say after the funeral. But today Anna came out of intensive care. <br /><br />Anna is an organist in our church--self-taught for the most part--and a Sunday school teacher for three or four generations probably. When I was a boy, we feared Anna because her grim face wore no emotion; her lips were locked together in a twist that was neither smile nor frown. We read it as perpetual disgust. <br /><br />Sunday school programs brought out the worst in her. A hundred kids with lit fuses would shoot around the church sanctuary during practice the night before. "You fourth graders, act your age!" <br /><br />She would always snap at us. We were sure she had no loving voice in her. When she'd tum to the fifth graders, someone would mimic her for sure. Years later I discovered that Anna created those annual programs. <br /><br />Anna never married. In a church of families, even kids don't quite know how to take women who don't marry. They're different, and a boy starts recognizing such things about the same time he starts reading the script writing carved into the Communion table at the front of the church he's attended for ten years. Suddenly, it's just there. Fourth-grade boys just figured a woman like <br /><br />Anna--sour Anna--couldn't get a man. Meanwhile, another Christmas program would come and go. <br /><br />Halfway through adolescent rebellion, I thought Anna was an icon of the staid, traditional, immovable church of my youth. Fashions arrived and left, but Anna's hair looked forever the same, as if she'd surrendered to being out of time. I swore that the older she grew the slower she played organ, until even the bouncy hymns poked along like the old psalms. And always you'd see the expressionless face up there, lighted by the soft glow of organ light. She chewed gum, not vigorously but quickly, nervously, when she played.</span></div><div>______________________ </div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: xx-small;">More tomorrow </span><br /></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-34770659897540744802024-03-14T07:15:00.001-05:002024-03-14T07:15:35.808-05:00The Tabor House, Tabor, Iowa<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG53L0rvzyo0qHA4gNIEAzIZTiEDv329TmC6yiaHw8M0DcJnDH-nAiqE3XNkhrDjEn11U7Urb7Bx2KVWbsf2PjSHP6tuGguYnnet27Kaec3jrC9-nZKqvW1DqsJxXPlvsYYBE7PYF-S8oXOp-nc8njlQu-IFrX1p3aj149S0_bCPR5QzoqLckr/s880/ugrr%20house.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="660" data-original-width="880" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG53L0rvzyo0qHA4gNIEAzIZTiEDv329TmC6yiaHw8M0DcJnDH-nAiqE3XNkhrDjEn11U7Urb7Bx2KVWbsf2PjSHP6tuGguYnnet27Kaec3jrC9-nZKqvW1DqsJxXPlvsYYBE7PYF-S8oXOp-nc8njlQu-IFrX1p3aj149S0_bCPR5QzoqLckr/w640-h480/ugrr%20house.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: xx-small;">The John Tabor House</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Religious visions were everywhere in the years preceding the Civil War. Boom towns out west here may have been hell holes for a time, but they were also peopled by starry-eyed believers who claimed their marching orders came from on high.<br /><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Tabor, Iowa, sits on a bluff far above the Missouri, the highest point of Fremont County. The place is not in terrific shape today; but Tabor has an epic past, created when fiery abolitionist Congregationalists set up camp here, just across the river from Nebraska. <br /><br /><a href="https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/underground/ia1.htm">The Reverend John Todd House</a>, in town, was a stop on the Underground Railroad in the 1850s, often a port of entry to runaway slaves who weren’t free until they could be protected from slave-holders and vigilante northerners looking to make a buck from substantial bounties. There was money to be made: slaves were property, after all. <br /><br />In the 1850s, slavery was under attack, and Rev. Todd was a soldier in God’s army. <br />Truth is, he got into trouble before there even was a Tabor. A discussion about slavery aboard the steamer he came up on became heated. Once other passengers detected an abolitionist, they wanted his scalp. "Shoot him," someone yelled. "Kill him." One idiot told him if it was his choice, he’d straight-up trade the pastor for a mongrel dog and shoot the dog. Todd says he learned later that man was "a minister of the gospel from Missouri."<br /><br />Both Iowa Congregationalists and Iowa Quakers thought the institution of slavery an abomination. What separated the two faith communities was a commitment to violence. The Quakers said no. Rev. John Todd and his Congregationalists said yes and became a prototype for an abolitionist preacher in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.<br /><br />The manse of the Reverend John Todd sits right on the square in Tabor--don’t expect a palace. But the old house still has an tiny door leading down to a dank basement. John Todd was no more than a shim over five and a half feet tall, so what’s downstairs is more his size, a cave really, not inviting.<br /><br />But if you stop by, don’t not go downstairs. At one point in time that basement was an armory full of guns for the war he thought about to begin in "Bleeding Kansas."<br /><br />What's there today? Nothing. No cement floor, just dirt, a humming dehumidifier, random stones, bricks. That cellar was was never meant to be lived in. It was a place to hide when the prairie sky turned foreboding. <br /><br />At the request of none other than fiery John Brown, who stayed right there in Tabor, Pastor Todd stocked his house full of guns because he simply could not abide the sin of slavery. Slaves, he and his friend John Brown claimed, had a more righteous reason for rebellion than did patriot colonists a century before. <br /><br />In his own memoir of that era, Todd described himself and what happened this way:<br /><br />The parson had one brass canon on his haymow, and another on wheels in his wagon shed. He had also boxes of clothing, boxes of ammunition, boxes of muskets, boxes of sabres, and twenty boxes of Sharps rifles stowed away in the cellar all winter. <br /><br />The preacher took up arms. His eyes had seen the glory.<br /><br />You'll have to get off the beaten track to find Tabor, and you’ll have to call ahead to to get in the house. Not many Americans stop there anymore, if they ever did. <br /><br />But the basement still beckons, and the memory of that time and place and the war it begat somehow seems more real when you stand beneath ancient beams on a dirt floor, where once a preacher readied himself for a war that God meant to happen, a war to free the slaves.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-13400719472775680852024-03-13T07:35:00.002-05:002024-03-13T12:35:31.352-05:00The Man with the Branded Hand<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgomM-ECjE0QFDjzizP88mPrTF_y1HKc-P4MBXAmTX4pgLy8WLjdZI-UDUkAKDZqQFVVsUVquKLmzVkO3J5_YAyObcV1FLdJF9Sz4SnShiFmX5D9EkdRQdfX2NxwuPSs8mJ5MIrLDwg6Tro9_jIEcqEu2ZIyh8nC7HWLsmeIpELe6qAsV9G7RB5/s551/Jonathan_Walker_branded_hand,_1845.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="442" data-original-width="551" height="514" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgomM-ECjE0QFDjzizP88mPrTF_y1HKc-P4MBXAmTX4pgLy8WLjdZI-UDUkAKDZqQFVVsUVquKLmzVkO3J5_YAyObcV1FLdJF9Sz4SnShiFmX5D9EkdRQdfX2NxwuPSs8mJ5MIrLDwg6Tro9_jIEcqEu2ZIyh8nC7HWLsmeIpELe6qAsV9G7RB5/w640-h514/Jonathan_Walker_branded_hand,_1845.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The fact of the matter is, he was a favorite on a circuit of sorts, a circuit of American abolitionist audiences looking for more and more information about and inspiration for the cause. Abolitionists were not without a mission. The crusade they'd created when they signed on had a clear and righteous purpose--they advocated an end to slavery in these United States, and, many of them at least, meant the abolition of slavery to happen not next year or next month, but now.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Oh, my, were they hated. Southerners understood that what was at stake was their wherewithal. Loss of slaves meant loss of property, loss of economy, and loss of power, loss of a culture, loss of a way of life. In the early years of the 19th century, the battles over slavery were but a foretaste of what was to come after Fort Sumter.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But the righteous anger of the abolitionists could not be underestimated. Sometimes, slave-holders saw those dirty, rotten abolitionists wherever they looked, bound and determined to destroy their might and right. So they made laws that made them criminals, thieves when they clandestinely went after the property of slave-holders. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Which only served to turn up the heat. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Thus, a circuit of rostrums was created up north, where advocates for freedom would gather to hear people speak of the mission they shared so passionately. And that circuit included this particular man, Jonathan Walker, who became a favorite, not because of his oratorical skills--he was sadly wanting on that score--but because just a few minutes into his SRO presentations, he'd step off the podium and walk through the crowd, his hand open, because there on his palm stood, almost proudly, the scars from his branding--"SS" for slave stealer. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The man with the branded hand had been a sailor since he was a kid in Massachusetts. In fact, he'd crafted his own ship, which explains why people called him "Captain Jonathan Walker," and, yes he did, he picked up slaves and brought them to freedom, sometime from Pensacola, Florida, where he and his family lived in the 1840s. It was quite simple: he'd be contacted by bondsmen, arrange a time to meet under the cover of darkness, and, this time at least, take passage to the Bahamas, where the good men and women he'd helped shook off the shackles that bound them, the whole bunch more than willing to risk their lives to escape the oppression of slavery. Walker picked them up and brought them to the Bahamas.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">When he returned to Florida, he was badly infirm, a victim of sun stroke--it was not a big ship, more of a sloop than a ship. Since a number of slaves had been missing, he was accused of the theft, jailed, beat up, and then, of all things, branded by authorities--with the help of slave-owners--branded on the hand, the branding iron left in place for what seemed forever.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">When finally Jonathan Walker recovered, his acclaim as a speaker rose like high seas on the abolitionist circuit, not because his rhetoric soared. By all reports, he wasn't much of a lecturer. What people remembered was those horrible scars on the man's hand, his branding, the "SS."<br /><br />WELCOME home again, brave seaman! with thy thoughtful brow and gray,<br />And the old heroic spirit of our earlier, better day;<br />With that front of calm endurance, on whose steady nerve in vain<br />Pressed the iron of the prison, smote the fiery shafts of pain!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Or so wrote the Quaker abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, in a dedicatory poem to Jonathan Walker and his righteousness.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Is the tyrant's brand upon thee? Did the brutal cravens aim<br />To make God's truth thy falsehood, His holiest work thy shame?<br />When, all blood-quenched, from the torture the iron was withdrawn,<br />How laughed their evil angel the baffled fools to scorn!<br /><br />Make no mistake, that branded hand was God's own to the abolitionists. Jonathan Walker had taken up the Lord's mission, after all. When Walker looked in the face of a slave, Whittier says he was looking into the face of Jesus, that very face, Whittier says, many "in blindness" miss entirely, even as they kneel "to a far-off Saviour." <br /><br />While the multitude in blindness to a far-off Saviour knelt<br />And spurned, the while, the temple where a present Saviour dwelt;<br />Thou beheld'st Him in the task-field, in the prison shadows dim,<br />And thy mercy to the bondman, it was mercy unto Him!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Upper-case H.<br /><br />John Greenleaf Whittier's salutary poem "The Branded Hand" does the kind of work I'm sure he believed was the calling of the poet/prophet, immortalizing those sacred scars, making them sing forever. <br /><br />Then lift that manly right-hand, bold ploughman of the wave!<br />Its branded palm shall prophesy, "Salvation to the Slave!"<br />Hold up its fire-wrought language, that whoso reads may feel<br />His heart swell strong within him, his sinews change to steel.<br /><br />It had to have been an amazing time, religious people, Bibles in hand, going to war--literally and figuratively. Walker's time was even more divisive than ours. Just 16 years after the branding in Pensacola, there were Yankees and there were Rebs and there was blood all over the South, a death toll of 628,000, more than the combined deaths in every other war this nation has ever fought.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Just as so many others did, Jonathan Walker took his family west to Wisconsin for the Civil War years, then crossed the lake and ran a fruit orchard. He is buried in Muskegon, Michigan. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">For the rest of his life, he claimed the branded letters, "SS," meant "saved slaves." His body rests in a Quaker cemetery in Muskegon, Michigan. It is proudly marked.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit7ZxK5V2q9AuV4GZIuzCmiR2IJbbiCaPorbUto2e25kgqncjj72QPszlHpcbd7PIqZSJpJ61durnsw8wjlAthF0jVjY2JBBB8zF8kJ51vSjnReeFu3d5fXabJqGytOt-FPTIgmwVOLOVYf62PgU3cYOKFShY4LmYEqk4K0Kcq5M9NZhk2lYKh/s1067/Branded_Hand_Monument_2013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="800" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit7ZxK5V2q9AuV4GZIuzCmiR2IJbbiCaPorbUto2e25kgqncjj72QPszlHpcbd7PIqZSJpJ61durnsw8wjlAthF0jVjY2JBBB8zF8kJ51vSjnReeFu3d5fXabJqGytOt-FPTIgmwVOLOVYf62PgU3cYOKFShY4LmYEqk4K0Kcq5M9NZhk2lYKh/w480-h640/Branded_Hand_Monument_2013.jpg" width="480" /></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-88974880398390594752024-03-12T06:16:00.001-05:002024-03-12T06:16:35.178-05:00Aside<p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuxMtjhWlcxwDhAvH5mGReWlVg29SkJLFCvtutLKRiacHfqiHAz6g1x4kpS1gfw7iLHEOaJuWkZ_CzCEcSyR2QpNsC9y42FR9keLK5wpakSzJHI9-Bcwm8IdqYBsJFNppqFQhDQnaw3rAsnrH8lf43r8Ysi0LIl5dw3IS-3UbbmPVjzcIhw4bG/s4032/PXL_20240225_120620055~2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2268" data-original-width="4032" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuxMtjhWlcxwDhAvH5mGReWlVg29SkJLFCvtutLKRiacHfqiHAz6g1x4kpS1gfw7iLHEOaJuWkZ_CzCEcSyR2QpNsC9y42FR9keLK5wpakSzJHI9-Bcwm8IdqYBsJFNppqFQhDQnaw3rAsnrH8lf43r8Ysi0LIl5dw3IS-3UbbmPVjzcIhw4bG/w640-h360/PXL_20240225_120620055~2.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /> <span style="font-family: georgia; text-align: left;">I don't even know how long I've been at this. Years ago already, I thought to shore things up, so I went through years of </span><i style="font-family: georgia; text-align: left;">Stuff in the Basement</i><span style="font-family: georgia; text-align: left;"> posts, picked out some I thought might have some relevance someday, dumped hundreds, then erased thousands of others, and, sort of, started over fresh. I think I undertook that trimming post-retirement, so if I would follow the last reach of what's here below the page, I'd run into blog posts put up here about a dozen years ago.</span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">At 76 years old, sifting through the stuff in the basement is even more prudent than it was when I walked out of the classroom. Someday--maybe soon, maybe not--one of my children will come down here and turn on the computer--I hope the old thing doesn't stumble along and take all day like it often does for me. Chances are, it'll be my son. He'll use the passwords I'll leave for him, then call up siouxlander.blogspot.com and sit here pensively--at least I hope so--before he hits the delete button. One of our kids will have to do that, so why not make the event less difficult and do it for them--after all, I'm the crazy who put all that stuff up. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I've learned some things through all those years. I've learned, for instance, that short stories don't generally do well in the day-by-day blog-post format. Almost inevitably, if I put up a story, even a story that will last only four days, like "Light and Life," inevitably the clicks fall off, largely because short stories have more import if they can be read at one sitting and not sectioned into 15-minute segments. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I've also learned that obituaries score greater numbers than almost anything else, especially when the deceased has a following among those who frequent <i>Stuff in the Basement.</i> Makes me wonder if local newspapers would say as much. In a dark way, that's comforting.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Anything about Trump generally draws something of a crowd. I don't know if there are any Trump supporters among those who stop by daily, but I rarely get any angry retorts. You certainly shouldn't think I'm creating clickbait when I put his royal Orangeness up some mornings. Color me addicted. It's awful to have to admit it, but I've likely read more about the daily horrors of Donald Trump than I have any other single topic or subject since he and his wife came down the elevator. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Blogging, I'm told, had its day. When the internet had more wide-open spaces, a ton of people like me determined to try the blog. Originally, I started <i>Stuff</i> when I returned to full-time teaching, having been half-time for a half-dozen years or so. I knew the change would end long projects, and I didn't want to shut down completely. Blogging was a new thing--and sort of like getting up to greet the dawn. I found it a joy, have ever since really, except when things get tight when I get busy. Otherwise, I've long ago fallen in love with a ritual that pushes you to be creative when first your feet hit the floor (actually, I do most of my plotting the day and night before).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">You shouldn't think some major announcement is forthcoming. I'm not quitting quite yet. I thought to thank those of you, my most faithful readers, for wading through four days of a short story. Fiction just doesn't work in this genre, I guess. Then again, maybe "Light and Life" is a lousy story. Whatever the cause, it's not unusual to see the numbers drop off with each passing day when I'm running a piece of fiction. I wasn't surprised.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">A kid told me the story of his sister's letter in his mother's drawer and his mother's inability to tell her husband even the good news--a long-ago student told me that. Almost any fiction has prototypes. This story was just too much a projection of a sad tale one of my students told me. There was a time in my life that I couldn't help but try to write something like that out, to make sense of it, to build some sort of order out of chaos, which is the aim of most art, or so it seems to me. But with this one, I'm pretty sure it never appeared anywhere because I wanted to avoid the consequence of appearing to break that student's trust. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It's old. Like I said, the only copy I have is in dot matrix print on yellowing paper. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Tomorrow? On my way to Bancroft, Nebraska, yesterday, I listened to a kind of biography of Harriet Tubman. The speaker at yesterday's gathering at the John Neihardt Center was going to be talking about Nebraska's role in the Underground Railroad, and I thought I'd just listen in to the story of Harriet Tubman. I remember hearing that she was raised in a Dutch Reformed household; about that, I was wrong--that was Sojourner Truth.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">And it turns out that there isn't really a definitive edition of Harriet Tubman's life, which seems impossible given her reputation and the temper of the times (and all the talk about CRT, although it's subsided a bit since the demise of De Santos). Harriet Tubman worked the underground railroad with such frequency and passion that she was sometimes called the Moses of her people.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Tomorrow, something about Dred Scott, just one time the Supreme Court and, for that matter, the Bible went sadly off course. You may want to tune in.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">________________________</span></p><p><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: xx-small;">And what of the picture atop the page? It's got nothing to do with the price of eggs. Just another taken in front of that Lake Michigan cottage we inhabited a week or so ago. It's what I was doing, early morning, when "Light and Life" was running.</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-89045141419826862332024-03-10T06:42:00.000-05:002024-03-10T06:42:32.182-05:00Sunday Morning Meds--Psalm 42:3<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisUfUtukhNfiM8P2IgUm0aN3ZSDlB8yO1nFq9lKpKZDpOEPoDAd3JwFImrP81EcnzF_IIsSb_GBQat0rwnDBdwVh0kYN5e7qX0KUKurE2Ili_N7uVmc4nuJZz3GIsqLRhc_6KacKmzvJ725P77Pe7ky4hNPWQ3fF5YIi6qQHk-zIQHZMCvHuRT/s2778/P1010106-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2084" data-original-width="2778" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisUfUtukhNfiM8P2IgUm0aN3ZSDlB8yO1nFq9lKpKZDpOEPoDAd3JwFImrP81EcnzF_IIsSb_GBQat0rwnDBdwVh0kYN5e7qX0KUKurE2Ili_N7uVmc4nuJZz3GIsqLRhc_6KacKmzvJ725P77Pe7ky4hNPWQ3fF5YIi6qQHk-zIQHZMCvHuRT/w640-h480/P1010106-1.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: georgia;">“Why are you downcast, O my soul?</span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: georgia;">Why so disturbed within me? </span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: georgia;">Put your hope in God, </span></b></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: georgia;">for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”</span></b></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">In verse three of Psalm 42, some shrill voices are taunting, as they do again in verse ten; but unlike so many other songs in the book, in this one, Psalm 42, the enemy is not the psalmist’s Godless neighbors, but his own miserable self.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br />What’s clear in the opening verses is that David—if he’s the author—has seemingly fallen into a chapter from Saul’s life, Israel’s very first king, the potentate who wrote the book on depression. His darkness is self-imposed: “Why are you downcast, O my soul?” is not the question David would ask himself on a battlefield. The war here—or so it seems to me—is within. “Why are you down in the dumps?” is the way Eugene Peterson puts it. <br /><br />If Psalm 42 were a short story—which it isn’t—I might be willing to hazard this analysis: in verse six, we’ve arrived at the climax, maybe not the dramatic climax of the narrative, but the technical climax, because, somehow, we get the sense he’s turned the corner, that the conflict, whatever it may be, has been bested. <br /><br />Right here in the psalm, this narrator—emotionally enfeebled—rallies, not because someone tells him he should, but because he tells himself he should. “Put your hope in God, fool,” he argues and then commits: “I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” He’s gritting his teeth, pushing himself up by his own spiritual bootstraps, rallying himself as if he were the captain of his own cheerleading squad. <br /><br />Were some student to hand me this story, I’d likely red-pencil, “I’m not convinced” somewhere in the margin, and then scribble in something even more widely scribbled in on student stories: “show us, don’t tell us.” <br /><br />But when we read on, it seems clear that the answer he commits to in this verse doesn’t shoo the darkness. Psalm 42 is not at end. The whole poem may well be a technical climax to the big story. I sort of like that idea, even<br /> if there is no satisfying denouement. <br /><br />It seems to me that what David is calling on to cure himself is what he already knows but may have forgotten or simply not mustered. What he now believes will deliver him from the darkness is not a bromide he’s buying from someone else because he already knows the way to health and joy. <br /><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">You can almost feel him trying to bully away his personal demons: “I WILL YET PRAISE HIM,” he tells himself, doing everything he can to refresh his own faith, telling himself—a mantra even—something he knows so very well but has somehow lost. <br /><br />He’s not asking God to ride in on a heavenly steed; he’s not asking to be saved. Instead, he’s telling his own darkened spirits what he already knows but has forgotten or stopped believing—that his only hope and comfort is in the Lord. <br /><br />The joy of David’s poetry, read thousands of years later in a world David himself wouldn’t begin to understand, is our blessed realization that a human heart beats in every line. These are God songs, divinely inspired; but to read them as if they weren’t the work of a human soul is to miss half the inspiration. <br /><br />In Psalm 42, David knows the truth he simply can’t muster. Every believer who’s ever been “down in the dumps” has been there, feeling exactly that pain. Every one. <br /><br />David knows, but somehow he just can’t. The psalms are ours too. The psalms are us.</span><br /><p class="MsoNormal">
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-35004658304379481782024-03-09T07:06:00.001-06:002024-03-09T07:06:00.139-06:00Light and Life -- finis iv<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtbefNCvZVZ_LMCT6ezEVnSrIMeg9cXCYjr5UQD-ZS9wUsQXA6eDGt0kJrslcxb11ptvJy8ygJ01cGwSvqQstSJWEphm2P4Htof6s9KLFzKTwFmuW8t4bQpnNLLdpIyoiIffMR8e9Fpe2iLO0VbIpOErPbqd4xlnhWwDrimGVEWX-Mv1HzPhhF/s2048/DSCF0005.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtbefNCvZVZ_LMCT6ezEVnSrIMeg9cXCYjr5UQD-ZS9wUsQXA6eDGt0kJrslcxb11ptvJy8ygJ01cGwSvqQstSJWEphm2P4Htof6s9KLFzKTwFmuW8t4bQpnNLLdpIyoiIffMR8e9Fpe2iLO0VbIpOErPbqd4xlnhWwDrimGVEWX-Mv1HzPhhF/w640-h480/DSCF0005.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: xx-small;">Today, the end of the story.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: xx-small;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: xx-small;">*</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: xx-small;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">In three weeks we'll be married, Shari and me, and I really believe I'm better off knowing what I do now about Kenny and Sally, and about my own parents. Shari's from such a model family--everything's perfect. At college she gets these recordings her dad makes of the conversation at Sunday dinner, and it's all so "nice." Besides, Shari's the oldest.<br /><br />It's December now. We decided that I'd spend some time alone with my parents when the semester ended and before we all head out to California for the wedding. So I'm back home now in my bedroom, where the pennants are still tacked to the wall because Mom won't let that bedroom belong to anyone other than her little boy.<br /><br />Yesterday, when Dad was at the store, I told Mom what Sally had told me, how she'd claimed she wrote her about Light and Life. I didn't want to hurt her, but I felt like I needed to know. We talked about what Sally had said. "How is it you can't tell Dad?" I said. "I'd think he'd be just plain thrilled."<br /><br />She'd been sitting at the table with both arms up, but they dropped right away. Then she looked up at the chandelier as if an angel might just then descend from all the light. Her hands came back up to her eyes. "If you would know the hurt that girl gave us," she said. Then she breathes in deeply, as if what was coming would take more than words. "You can't ever know how much we cried. You wouldn't believe it, Brian. You wouldn't." <br /><br />I reached for the radio and turned down the volume. "I don't understand how you can keep that from him. It ought to give him hope," I said. <br /><br />She breathed in deeply again. "Who knows what goes on in the corners of his mind? I don't doubt your father prays fifty times a day for that girl. I don't doubt right at this moment, when some guy is buying a new hammer or whatever in your father's store, paying for it at the counter--I don't doubt he's thinking about two grandsons he's never seen."</span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">"And his daughter?" I said.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">"And his daughter," she said. "Praying."</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">She pulled her hands down around her coffee cup. "We can't talk about all of that anymore. We just can't. There's only so much hurt somebody can take and that's it. Something else has got to break through the silence." <br /><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">"Do you love him, Mom, or are you scared of him?" I said. <br /> <br />She took off her glasses, laid them beside her toast. "You get to be one flesh," she said, "and you know exactly how he's going to react to anything and everything, because you know how he's part of you." She sipped her coffee. "I'm not afraid of him. But I'm afraid of all that pain." She closed her eyes tightly. "He once swore he didn't have that daughter--that that's the way it was going to be."<br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">*</span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br />My mother keeps her letters in a little, shiny cedar box that resembles, in a way, her own hope chest. It has a key somewhere, but it's been lost for years. When I was little I used to look in it because it had two pink bracelets that my sisters wore when they came home from the hospital, fresh from God--and mine, a blue one, P-0-S-T printed in the beads, the family name. Jewelry, and other stuff--birth certificates and my grandpa sent my grandma during the war. <br /><br />I don't think Sally writes often, because I didn't find many letters. Mom keeps what she gets in there. She wouldn't throw them away. I'm sure my father knows too about her secret place. <br /><br />When I checked it yesterday, I found the one about Light and Life Christian School. There it was, just like Sally said. <br /><br />I think he has to read It. Besides, he taught me himself to believe in miracles. So I'm going to the store this afternoon. Place will be full of Christmas shoppers, but he's got enough holiday help so I can sit him down in the back at his old roll-top, take out the letter, and put it in front of him. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">I want peace at our wedding, when all of us together go over those vows. If we can't have joy, we can at least have hope. Besides, I know my father needs an answer to a a thousand prayers he never spoke out loud, and I know from the way Sally turned her eyes away that the Lord of rubber cement hasn't finished with her either. One way or another, the God I worship, the one my father respects and fears, the God who brightens Shari's family's faces, the Wonderful Counselor the two us want right there at our wedding in two short weeks, that God, the super-glue God, is going to have His way with my sister, just as I can't help but believe He will with Dad.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br />Faith itself, I want to believe, is its own kind of miracle. <br /><br />I've got that letter here with me right now. It's in my billfold, along with two school pictures of Mark and Bryant, pictures he's going to see. They're perfectly darling kids, and his daughter is a good mom. He's going to know.<br /> <br />Maybe I am naive. Maybe I am. But I believe.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-63661822884733238282024-03-08T06:19:00.000-06:002024-03-08T06:19:16.377-06:00<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_NOtoc_JFYQtrCWi07lq_D7mmynooGRCWPzmYVnUtFiojKukBoPiGSnsdP-tMBi4tU3ZCRmgI27Jjxf8u8FjAM1JNXNnSQn7hWWJBrKL2iUeNZaYiXcyd9MJ7uArUx4aenzV0GyKiYOuYlR1pAsVJd4od2RbPY1o17l4QDvqWQ27d3lywNfLt/s1825/suffering.2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1691" data-original-width="1825" height="594" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_NOtoc_JFYQtrCWi07lq_D7mmynooGRCWPzmYVnUtFiojKukBoPiGSnsdP-tMBi4tU3ZCRmgI27Jjxf8u8FjAM1JNXNnSQn7hWWJBrKL2iUeNZaYiXcyd9MJ7uArUx4aenzV0GyKiYOuYlR1pAsVJd4od2RbPY1o17l4QDvqWQ27d3lywNfLt/w640-h594/suffering.2.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: xx-small;">"Light and Life" is maybe thirty years old, and, I think, unpublished. Why not? I think it was one of those stories that might have been too "Christian" for the small magazines and literary journals, and too, well, "obvious," if it were to appear in the kind of church magazine that it could have reached. Plus, too close to the real thing.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: xx-small;">There were prototypes for the characters and the action of the story, prototypes--real people--that I wouldn't really want reading this story or living with the fact that maybe some of their neighbors were.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: xx-small;">I may be wrong, but after writing it, I think I stuck it in a drawer. My only copy of "Light and Life" is boldly outfitted in dot matrix print.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: xx-small;">So this could well be its first public appearance. The people I wouldn't want to shame have long departed this world of sorrows. Whether or not they made their peace is something I don't know. I'd most certainly like to believe they did.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;">* ~ * ~ * ~ *</p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Shari takes the boys on the tramway down at Santa Cruz' Boardwalk on the oceanfront. She's up there floating over the whole amusement park, and Sally and I are sitting down beneath them, sharing a gyro. Mark and Bryant poke their hands out when they're right over top of us, and all I can see is their pink flattened palms against the pale blue skies.</span></p><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Sally is almost ten years older than I am, and Kenny's not the first man she's lived with. She works for the county social services, investigating abuse cases. She takes referrals from people she calls "mandatory reporters"--doctors and teachers and other school officials--and tries to check them out. It puts her in places you wouldn't believe. The old man should be proud of her. She works hard and she gets tired because sometimes she says the pain won't go away. To me, what she does is a kingdom calling. The stories are enough to make you weep, seriously.<br /><br />Anyway, we're sitting down there on a bench along the edge of the beach, Bryant and Mark right above us in the tram car with Shari, and Sally's got a mouth full of gyro.<br /><br />"Why don't you get married?" I say, just getting it right out there in front of both of us, the same tone had I asked her for shampoo. "I don't get it. What's the big deal?"<br /><br />"You got Dad in you," she says right off. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">"So do you," I tell her.<br /><br />She nods at me as if truer words have never been spoken. She's got that gyro in both hands so it doesn't leak all over, but she pushes it at me. I take the sandwich, but I don't want to take a bite just then.<br /><br />"Tell me," I say.<br /><br />She waits, looks around, jabs at her lips. "Listen, little brother, whyn't you mind your own business?" she says, wiping the juice from the corner of her mouth with a napkin, still trying to laugh it off.<br /><br />"It is my business," I tell her. "You're my sister." </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">"Shuttup and eat," she says.<br /><br />It's a Saturday, but Kenny's off working somewhere, making a delivery.<br /><br />"You go to church ever?" I said, this big glob of sandwich right between us.<br /><br />Now she waits for a long time, looking right at me. I'm thinking she's mad--didn't want me asking. Finally, she looks off into the sky and says, "What's left in me for faith is between me and God--not you or Dad or Mom or anybody else."<br /><br />Lines are drawn in around her eyes. I sometimes wonder if she didn't lie out in the sun too long because her skin seems almost calloused, hard and edgy, spotted, but not with freckles. Her hair falls off her face and is pulled back behind her ears, tied there in a style popular years ago. She's getting older.<br /><br />"I'm going to have to tell Mom something," I said to her. "When I get back, she'll want to know about you."<br /><br />"Easy enough," Sally says. "Tell her we're all fine, we're all doing just fine."<br /><br />"Are you?" I said.<br /><br />"I don't need your righteousness, little man," she tells me. "You lived all your life in that burg. Only thing you know is hardware."<br /><br />Like I say, she's my big sister, and I didn't grow up with her; but I saw her slay my father's spirit. "Dad's had more pain about you, Sally, more than I'd ever hope to see anyone have," I tell her.<br /><br />Shrugs her shoulders. "I'm sorry about that, but the old man screwed up my life," she says.<br /><br />There the both of us are, this messy sandwich between us, little kids running all over, spending money, a big log-ride concession splashing down into the water, not fifty feet from where we sit.<br /><br />"How'd he ever hurt you?" I said.<br /><br />"You're a tail-ender. You don't know shit about what it was like to be breaking the freaking ground."<br /><br />I took another bite of the gyro. I didn't want her to know how serious I was. "You still believe in God?" I asked her.<br /><br />She stood up, walked over to the railing, and looked out over the quarter-mile of beach toward the ocean. The wind pulled at her skirt. Her legs were whiter than I'd ever seen them.<br /><br />I threw the sandwich in a barrel and looked up at the tramway. Shari and the boys had to be on their way back. I felt like I had to get something down in my mind. "Tell me," I said. "I don't care about Mom or Dad. I got to know myself what's going on with you--tell me."<br /><br />She pulled her arms back from the railing and stood there as if she were chilled. "Mom knows," Sally said. "Mom knows well and good. She knows everything. I write her."<br /><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">I'd been gone to college for three years. Maybe Mom had never had the opportunity to tell me what Sally told her in her letters. I wasn't even aware of Sally's writing anyone. As far as I knew, it had been years since Sally's name was even spoken. That's what the old man ruled.<br /><br />"What do you tell her?" I said.<br /><br />"Ask her," she said. "She knows." </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">"I didn't know you wrote her." </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">"She does."<br /><br />"I'm sorry," I said.<br /><br />Both of us watched a gull float by and beg for popcorn.<br /><br />"I wrote her already last spring to tell her I enrolled Bryant in a Christian school," Sally says. "I wrote that. It wasn't easy. Well, she knows it. This little Christian school a couple blocks away. 'Light and Life,' it's called."</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">I didn't know what to say.<br /><br />"What do they want from me?--blood? She told me how wonderful it was. I got a letter back that wasn't like anything I'd ever received before--almost as if I were back in the fold." Then she laughed, the same as when she told Kenny they hung blacks in Denton--same mocking laugh. "But she can't even tell him," she said. "She can't even tell the old man because he won't hear about the damned black sheep. I'm just lost." She twisted her purse back behind her shoulder. "You ever think of what that man does to her? You ever think of that?"<br /><br />The beach was full of people, but we couldn't have been more alone.<br /><br />"You are so much like Dad," she said. She pulled her shoulder up to her face, as if to wipe away something that might have slipped from her eyes. "You're such a kid," she said, pulling the back of her wrist through her eyes, and looked down as if gyro sauce were running down her fingers. Then she looked at her watch, turned it around on her arm so she could read it clearly.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">"Lately I think He won't let me go--I mean the big guy," she said, pointing up. "It's like something sticky is between us--super glue. The other day I was thinking that's what it was--super glue. Isn't that nuts?--just super glue. Or rubber cement--that too, stretchy stuff that won't let go."<br /><br />"Hey, Mom," the boys yelled from above. "Look up here."</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">She raises a hand to her eyes to see the kids, smiles. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">I tell myself that's enough.<br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">*</span></div></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-49657121843606438772024-03-07T06:37:00.000-06:002024-03-07T06:37:03.612-06:00Light and Life -- a story ii<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibQeoRRHhnXFEXqIrzJPhSBs_EXyr4DrBzsJiUYGml3K1jbFeecXk11bofj9Ki5eipZL4Aty52_0wHFs7c9mw-QudKkhVzgL1IqpparXNmFC83D1m_lBNeaJotphyFYGA89YghO-JTfUfgqqGryOFYEa_fc9KnIH8La0mZ2iflvGsgay4VeOB6/s4080/PXL_20231227_212409654.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3072" data-original-width="4080" height="482" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibQeoRRHhnXFEXqIrzJPhSBs_EXyr4DrBzsJiUYGml3K1jbFeecXk11bofj9Ki5eipZL4Aty52_0wHFs7c9mw-QudKkhVzgL1IqpparXNmFC83D1m_lBNeaJotphyFYGA89YghO-JTfUfgqqGryOFYEa_fc9KnIH8La0mZ2iflvGsgay4VeOB6/w640-h482/PXL_20231227_212409654.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p>Rev. Ellerbroek isn't a ball of fire, but Shari's parents like him--just like mine would--because basically he's conservative as heck. Shari and I saw him on and off last summer, when I worked out there on her uncle's dairy. We're getting married in a couple weeks now, in January, and Ellerbroek is marrying us. <br /><br />He's dry as sticks from the pulpit, but in his study he's all there. When he talks about the Lord, his face is lit as if he's in love. <br /><br />He was telling us how when we plan the wedding we ought to think that it's not just for us but for all the people who attend. I don't think he knows about Kenny and Sally. <br /><br />He was saying how the people who attend hear the vows when they're sitting out there listening to us, and how just listening in again to the commitment people make is important, no matter how many years you've been married. He says that repeating the vows means everybody else renews them. <br /><br />I told Shari it was hard for me to think of my parents actually repeating vows again, as if through the years they may have forgotten they were married. <br /><br />She said she thought when you're a kid you don't know everything--maybe not even when you're an adult. You still I don't know all there is to know about your own parents, even though they brought you into this world. <br /><br />I suppose she's right. The older you get, the more you know that there's mystery in life, balances in the way we get along. Sometimes, I suppose, a very fragile truce. <br /><br />"I'm scared anyway," I told her. "Going to be a hot time in the old town with Sally and Kenny there in the same church as my old man." <br /><br />"Maybe Ellerbroek's right, honey," she told me. "Maybe we can be a blessing." <br /><br />A blessing's one thing, I thought. This one'll take a miracle. <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*</div>I worked in California last summer because I wanted to be with Shari and I didn't care to sit alone at home selling ten-penny nails. Sometimes I think it's hard on my dad to know that I'm not taking over for him. The store has been in the family for three generations, ever since the late 1800's. Don't ask me why I want to be a teacher, but I do. Actually, I think it has something to do with the way my parents raised me, to aspire to something noble, like teaching. It's been my father's undoing, I suppose, to make me think that being a teacher or a preacher is a kingdom calling. I took him seriously. <div><br /></div><div>But then, who knows? Maybe someday I'll run the store. Stranger things have happened. <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*</div><br />Santa Cruz is more than just a couple hours' drive from Shari's place. It's like a whole different world. The tree-lined streets downtown are full of VW buses and jeeps and old woodies, surfboards strapped up-top. Bearded guys with graying hair tie it up with farmer's handkerchiefs. They sit on downtown benches and play chess in the soft sunlight that falls between the trees. </div><div><br /></div><div>You see the strangest things. I bought a tape one day from a place where the guy who took my money wore a Fu Manchu mustache and silver-flecked orange glasses with the wildest butterfly rims. <br /><br />I met Shari at college. She lives in Denton, a California town that would look just like Apple Valley if it weren't for mountains whose sloping shadows rise from the horizon. It's a small town, where the Coast to Coast has a big quadrangular desk and the men come in on Saturdays to lean up against the edge and talk--just like they do at the old man's place. The only difference is that in Denton's Our Own you can't buy an icepick. <br /><br />Shari's along with me one weekend, when Denton comes up in the conversation at my sister's place. It's Saturday night, and we just got back from this dive where we had terrific Mexican food, not just your standard taco. Shari's playing with the boys on the floor and we're all laughing, when Kenny tells her that he's made deliveries in Denton before and he knows what kind of place it is. "I been there," he says. "You're a California girl all right, but you're from Denton, really." <br /><br />In the way he says it, I feel this blade across my neck, and I figure Shari feels it too. <br /><br />"Sometime I want to stay up there overnight and party in that white town, party big-time," he says, rubbing his palms together as he sits there on the couch, his elbows on his knees. "All night long," he says, looking at Sally. <br /><br />He's talking about all the stiff old farmers in Denton. I know what he's saying, and so does Shari. But he doesn't mean it for us, he means it for Sally. He keeps looking at her. <br /><br />"You party up there and you're dead," my sister says. She's pointing her finger at him. "They'd hang boys your color." And then she laughs. <br /><br />I didn't know how to react, but the thing is, he laughed at Sally. I thought he would have kicked her. I thought he never would have let her say that, but the two of them sit there laughing at each other's poking. <br /><br />The way they laughed together about what Sally had said about Kenny being black--as if she he just let her talk that way to him--it's just something I didn't forget right away because it said something about them together. I can't find words for it exactly, but it felt different being around them after that. <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*</div><br />Shari takes the boys on the tramway down at Santa Cruz' Boardwalk down on the oceanfront. She's up there floating over the whole amusement park, and Sally and I are sitting down beneath them, sharing a gyro sandwich. Mark and Bryant poke their hands out when they're right over top of us, and al 1 I can see is their pink flattened palms against the pale blue skies. <br /><br />Sally is almost ten years older than I am, and Kenny's not the first man she's lived with. She works for the county social services, investigating abuse cases. She takes referra1s from people she calls "mandatory reporters"--doctors and teachers and other school officials--and tries to check them out. It puts her in places you wouldn't bel leve. I think my father would be proud of her. She works hard and she gets tired because sometimes she says the pain won't go away. To me, what she does is a kingdom cal ling. The stories are enough to make you weep, seriously. <br /><br />Anyway, we're sitting down there on a bench along the edge of the beach, Bryant and Mark right above us in the tram car with Shari, and Sally's got a mouth full of gyro. <br /><br />"Why don't you get married?" I say, just getting it right out there in front of both of us. "I don't understand." <br /><br />"You got Dad in you," she says. "So do you," I tell her. <br /><br />She nods at me as if truer words have never been spoken. She's got that gyro in both hands so it doesn't leak all over, but she pushes it at me. I take the sandwich, but I don't want to take a bite Just then. <br /><br />"Te1 1 me," I say. <br /><br />"Listen, little brother, whyn't you mind your own business?" she says, wiping the juice from the corner of her mouth with a napkin, still trying to laugh it off. <br /><br />"It is my business," I tell her. 11You1re my sister." "Shuttup and eat," she says. <br /><br />It's a Saturday, but Kenny's off working somewhere, making a delivery. <br /><br />"You never go to church, do you?" I said, this big glob of sandwich right between us. <br /><br />11What1s ln me for faith is between me and God," she says, "not you or Dad or Mom or anybody else." <br /><br />Lines are drawn in around her eyes. I sometimes wonder if she didn1t lie out in the sun too long because her skin seems almost cal loused, hard and edgy, spotted, but not with freckles. Her hair falls off her face and is pulled back behind her ears, tied there in a style popular years ago. She's getting older. <br /><br />"I1m going to have to tell Mom something," I said to her. <br /><br />"When I get back, she'll want to know about you." <br /><br />"Easy enough," Sally says. "Tell her we"re all fine." <br /><br />"Are you?" I said. <br /><br />"I don't need your super righteousness, Arlan," she tells me. "You lived all your life in that little burg. Only thing you know is the store." <br /><br />Like I say, she's my big sister, and I didn't grow up with her; but I saw her slay my father's spirit. "Dad's had more pain about you, Sally, more than I'd ever hope to see anyone have," I tell her. <br /><br />"He"s screwed up my life," she says. <br /> <br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />There the both of us are, this messy sandwich between us, little kids running all over spending money, a big Jog-ride concession splashing down lnto the water. not fifty feet from where we slt. <br /><br />"How/d he ever hurt you?" I said. <br /><br />"You/re a tail-ender, Arlan. You don/t know what it was like to be first in 1 ine, breaking ground." <br /><br />I took another bite of the gyro because I didn/t want her to know how serious I was. "You sti 11 be!ieve in God?" I said. <br /><br />With that, she stood up, walked over to the calling, and looked out over the quarter-mile of beach toward the ocean. The wind pulled at her skirt. Her legs were whiter than I/d ever seen them. <br /><br />I threw the sandwich in a barrel and looked up at the tramway. Shari and the boys had to be on their way back. I had to get something down in my mind. <br /><br />"Tell me, Sally," I told her. "I don/t care about Mom or Dad. I got to know myself. Tell me." <br /><br />She pulled her arms back from the railing and stood there as if she were chi 1 led. "Mom knows," Sally said. "Mom knows wel 1 and good. She knows everything. I write her." <br /><br />1/d been gone to college for three years, of course, so maybe Mom had never had the opportunity to tell me what Sally told her in her letters. I wasn/t even aware of Sal Jy/s writing anyone. As far as I knew, it had been years since Sally/s name was even mentioned. <br /><br />"What do you write?" I said. <br /> <br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />"Ask her," she said. "She knows.11 "I didn't know you wrote her." "She does." <br /><br />"I'm sorry," I said. <br /><br />Both of us watched a gul I float by and beg for popcorn. <br /><br />"I wrote her already last spring that I enrolled Bryant in a Christian school," Sally says. "I wrote that. It wasn't easy. <br /><br />She knows it, Arlan. This little Baptist school a couple blocks away. Light and Life, it's cal led. Bryant goes to a Christian schoo I . 11 <br /><br />I didn't know what to say. <br /><br />"Shoot, what do they want from me? Blood? She told me how wonderful it was. I got a letter back that wasn't like anything I'd ever received before--almost as if I were back in the fold." Then she laughed, the same as when she told Kenny they hung blacks in Denton--same mocking laugh. 11But she can't even tel 1 him," she said. "She can't tell Dad because he won't hear of the black sheep. To him. I'm lost eternally." She twisted her pu se back behind her shoulder. "You ever think of what that man does to her? You ever think of her, Arlan?" <br /><br />The beach was ful I of people, but we couldn't have been more alone. <br /><br />"You send Bryant there for her sake?" I said. "Is that why you dld i t?11 <br /><br />She looked at me as If she hated me. 11You.are so much like <br /><br />Dad," she said. <br /><br />11Te l l me ," I sa i d. <br /> <br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />"The only difference between us--between him and me--is that he thinks he knows why he does things. I don/t.11 <br /><br />Maybe I was asking for myself only right then, I don/t know. "Sally, you still pray?" I said. <br /><br />She pulled her shoulder up to her face, as if to wipe away something that might have sl lpped from her eyes. 11You/re such a kid,11 she said, pulling the back of her wrist through her eyes, and looked down as if gyro sauce were running down her fingers. Then she looked at her watch, turned it around on her arm so she could read it clearly. <br /><br />"Lately I think He won/t let me go," she said. "It/s like something sticky is between us--rubber cement. The other day I was thinking it was rubber cement. Isn/t that nuts! But it/s like God won/t let me alone. He won/t.11 <br /><br />11 Hey, Mom," the boys ye1 1 ed from above. 11 Look ,·a here." <br /><br />11That/s all, Sally," I said. "I just had to know." <br /><br /> <br /><br />* <br /><br />In three weeks we/11 be married, Shari and I, and I really believe that I/rn better off knowing what I do now about Kenny and Sally, and about my own parents. Shari/s from such a model farnlly--everything/s perfect. At college she gets these tapes her dad records of Sunday dinner, and it/s all so nice. Besides, Shari/s the oldest. <br /><br />It;s December now. We decided that I/d spend some time alone with my parents when the semester ended and before we all headed out to Califor·nia for the wedding. So 1/rnback home now, <br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />in my childhood bedroom, where the pennants are still tacked to the wall because my mother won't let that bedroom belong to anyone other than her little boy. <br /><br />Yesterday, when Dad was at the store, I told Mom what Sally said, how she'd claimed she wrote her about Light and Life. "How is it you can't tell Dad?" I said. <br /><br />She'd been sitting at the table with both arms up, but they dropped right away. Then she looked up at the chandelier as if an angel might suddenly descend from all the light, and her hands came back up to her eyes. "If you would know the hurt that girl gave us," she said. Then she breaths in deeply, as if what was coming would take more than words. "You can't ever know how much we cried. You wouldn't believe it, Arlan. You wouldn't." <br /><br />I reached for the radio and turned down the volume. "I don't understand how you can keep that from him. It ought to give him hope," I said. <br /><br />She breathed deeply again. "Who knows what goes on in the corners of his mind, Arlan? I don't doubt your father prays fifty times a day for that girl. I don't doubt right at this moment, when some mother is buying Lincoln Logs in your father's store and paying for it at the counter--! don't doubt that he's thinking about two grandsons he's never seen." <br /><br />She pulled her hands down slowly and surrounded her coffee cup. "But it's a subject that we can't talk about anymore. We just can't. There's just so much hurt somebody can take and that's it. Something else has got to break through the silence." <br /><br />hDo you love him, Mom, or are you scared of him?" I said.<br /><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-90730470807925360072024-03-06T07:28:00.001-06:002024-03-07T05:37:31.343-06:00Light and Life - i <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEitVcTTcK5CToybEZvKqr_HcsZ3bc5_KGHeYde-4T8SIyhgHzeYHpX1iOvkkgb8fHN8DRzdqQF050qUb6utq6lDDzDmzZVS51c5L3ZeZAnwGIhTvpP647p3sa20cD7xtUHHv828x1_63Yi615lQvS2gKANlANZubaMnUBlSG5wfzmB_aieMMfzD" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="241" data-original-width="320" height="482" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEitVcTTcK5CToybEZvKqr_HcsZ3bc5_KGHeYde-4T8SIyhgHzeYHpX1iOvkkgb8fHN8DRzdqQF050qUb6utq6lDDzDmzZVS51c5L3ZeZAnwGIhTvpP647p3sa20cD7xtUHHv828x1_63Yi615lQvS2gKANlANZubaMnUBlSG5wfzmB_aieMMfzD=w640-h482" width="640" /></a></div><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: courier;">A story for lent.</span></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">In point of fact, Kenny Hays is not my brother-in-law--not by man's law or God's. He's only lived with my sister Sally, not married her, and the whole business has been almost the death of my father.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br />But Kenny Hays feels like my brother-in-law, and maybe by common law he is. What he's not, is my dad's son-in-law; not yet anyway, and not ever--if you listen to the old man. But neither is Sally his own daughter anymore; I heard him say just those words to Mom once, years ago, and once is as often as he says important things. <br /><br />Kenny's black, but that's not the reason. Long ago when I just started in my father's hardware store I was arranging fishing lures up front when the men who come around about ten in the morning to stand around and jabber--looking over the <br /><i>Journal</i> lying open on the knife case--when those men were talking about the black guy who, strangely enough, walked into Apple Valley from the lake and was standing across the street in front of the cafe. I heard every word they said about him--about blacks. I was just a kid. <br /><br />The guy was a string-bean in a cut-off sweat shirt, with a bluish tattoo against his bicep; and he had on a hat, even though it was warm for May. His boots were scuffed, as if he'd been walking through sand since dawn. That far north of the city you just don't see many black people. <br /><br />My father came up from the garden department to help Jenny Wassenaar carry out a rented lawn seeder, and he heard the men talking about the black guy, about blacks in general--in fact, about black men--in words I never heard adults say before. Bill Aanders looked right in my father's face and laughed as he spit it all out·--what they'd been saying--hoping to get a laugh out of him too. <br /><br />But my father didn't crack a smile. He glanced over at me as if to tell me he knew I'd heard what they said; then he turned away and walked to the back of the store, leaving the chorus of yucking behind him. <br /><br />I don't think my father has written off his daughter because she's shacked up with a black man, although that may be part of it. In a little town like Apple River, to some people Kenny's being black is a worse curse than the two of them's not being married--but not to my father. To him, Kenny and Sally are living in sin, and Sally's left absolutely every last value he tried to teach her, like an empty can of pop, along the road she took to get as far away as she could in record time. There's two kids over there now, little bushy-haired boys, Mark and Bryant, whose skin is the color of hot chocolate and who talk Just like Kenny. But both of them have short legs like their mother--like I do too--and when they hop off the kitchen stools and head out to watch cartoons in the morning, their feet make the same shuffle I've heard for years when the boss walks over the hardwood floor to his roll-top in the store's back room. When I heard those kids walk last summer, I thought right away that it was something my father should know, once I dare to tell him.</span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">*</span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">I visited at Sally's this summer, when I worked in California. I'm on a ride with Kenny one day down to Modesto, even though he's not supposed to take riders--company rules. He works for Gardener's, an industrial delivery service in Santa Cruz, and sometimes he makes long trips with this Audi truck. <br /><br />"You like dried fruit?" he says to me when we come up on a roadside out in the middle of sand hills. "I'd kill for dried bananas." <br /><br />"Sure," I said. I'd tried it once when we carried some ten- dollar bags of trail mix we thought hunters might buy. <br /><br />So we're walking around this fruit stand, looking at every kind of dried fruit you could think of, and Kenny grabs one right out of the bin, a little sharp slice of banana, and he sticks it into my mouth. "Lay that on your tongue one time," he says. <br /><br />It was okay, kind of tasteless really, just a little sweet. "That's good," I tell him. "I see what you mean." And he puts one in his own mouth as if he's never tasted dried bananas himself, just picks a half dozen right out of the bin. <br /><br />"You can buy everything here, can't you?" I tell him. <br /><br />We're looking at dried apples right then--flat, donut-shaped things that feel like soft rubber when you bite them. <br /><br />"In California, you can buy every last kind of thing all right," he says, chuckling at little as he rips at a piece of apple. "Whole lot more than dried fruit." <br /><br />I got a hint of what he's trying to say when he laughs, so I figure I'll bring it back. "Beautiful state," I tell him. <br /><br />He just shrugs his shoulders. "I grew up in a place where a boy could take out a fishing pole and spend all of a day down at the river pulling catfish," Kenny says. "I grew up in a place where there wa'n't any drugs to speak of, where we used to play ball every afternoon we weren't fishing, and where there was more than enough real air to go around--you know what I'm saying?" <br /><br />I'd always figured Kenny was born in California. <br /><br />"I'd move back to Mississippi in a twinklin'," he says. "People say I'm nuts, but I know what's real, see? Thing is, it wouldn't be no place for your sister."<br /><br />I didn't think any black man in his right mind would would want to move back Mississippi, but I didn't know how to say that to him. "I didn't know you were a Southern boy, Kenny," I said, and once I'd said <i>boy</i>, I wished I hadn't. <br /><br />But Kenny laughs so hard he almost loses the hunk of apple. "I'm a real Southern boy for sure," he says. "Thing is, a black man knows where he stands in the South. Go north or out here, and you don't know what's the score with some folks." <br /><br />Tons of prunes and nectarines are piled up in separate bins, but Kenny grabs a plastic bag of bananas, another one mixed fruit, and a pair of fresh apricots, then pulls out his wallet by the chain, and marches up to the woman who makes change from her denim apron. <br /><br />"Ain't no place for a kid to grow up," Kenny says. "They rot from the inside out. Can't find a place to be alone," he tells me, as earnestly as my own father could have. "I'm thinking about moving back to South Dakota."</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">I looked at him strangely, I suppose, before he busted out laughing.<br /><br />I guess I'd never thought of Kenny in the same way I'd thought of Sally--as someone who couldn't go home.</span><div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">*</span></div><br /></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-65265494897121055682024-03-05T07:42:00.003-06:002024-03-06T06:11:30.702-06:00At Fort Belmont<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyaVibe6F-XPNtVPHz50KMi3BTGT7UN8aZo1BgkpQ72UWUwp3FHq1fs1nkoC4s5JXGWbHh2RySMEV3NdPUFOsgRpuir1eq7Zx6CJAIRBuWSFB99flry4CKUi-FlzbJhU6ZjdKu4x5ngl_QBVzig3P-gt63JKUSfD1mBJtLB6xkP6B_1wBGZMmO/s800/6a7e2a8b4f04c93fc0407e5d6035ed51-800.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="502" data-original-width="800" height="402" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyaVibe6F-XPNtVPHz50KMi3BTGT7UN8aZo1BgkpQ72UWUwp3FHq1fs1nkoC4s5JXGWbHh2RySMEV3NdPUFOsgRpuir1eq7Zx6CJAIRBuWSFB99flry4CKUi-FlzbJhU6ZjdKu4x5ngl_QBVzig3P-gt63JKUSfD1mBJtLB6xkP6B_1wBGZMmO/w640-h402/6a7e2a8b4f04c93fc0407e5d6035ed51-800.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">My daughter seemed unwilling to believe her parents used to travel back and forth--western Iowa to eastern Wisconsin--on a two-lane road. I don't know why she thought that impossible, but the plain truth is I'm a good bit older than Interstate 90, old enough to remember Hwy 16 that ran through hill and dale down at the foot of the state of Minnesota.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Personally, I go back even further, my very first trip undertaken in 1956, when I'm guessing I-90 may have been little more than someone's dream. Back then old Hwy 16--I get nostalgic just typing out the numbers--jig-jagged through what seemed endless miles of boring farmland until it began to spaghetti through the hills west of the Mississippi. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Occasionally a river valley would break the endless miles of prairie. Already at Jackson, old 16 snuck down into the woods along the Des Moines River, dipped into the shadowy darkness wrought by honest-to-goodness woods, and passed a tourist trap on its way into town--Ft. Belmont, the signs said, a shady spot on the prairie that--or so I couldn't help thinking--had designs on, in the days before Visa, loosing you from whatever you had jingling in your pockets. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">We never stopped. We were on our way home after all, miles to go before we'd sleep. Ft. Belmont stood up and out from the trees right there where somebody would be glad to sell you a little war bonnet or a rubber tomahawks or a full set of bow and arrows. "Trading post"?--sure. Most everything made in Japan, I thought.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Along came I-90. Ft. Belmont was off the beaten path, so the chamber of commerce (or something similar) made haste to move it all--store and reconstructed fort a mile or so north to a nice big spread along the interstate, easy access on and off. Eventually they put an old Lutheran church there too, and a school. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">The new Ft. Belmont keeps hours only between Memorial Day and Labor Day, so the whole place was shut down last Saturday, when finally I stopped by. What's new now is I know something about Ft. Belmont. I know Inkpaduta and his outlaw gang of cold-blooded Santee killers moved north after the desolation they left on Lake Okoboji in March of 1857. I knew that they kept up the slaughter when they came up river north to here. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">I knew all of that, and that's why I left I-90, hoping I could at least walk up to this good old phony Ft. Belmont. What I didn't know was that during the 1862 Dakota War more local men and women and children were killed here, slaughtered by yet another outlaw gang of killers. I didn't know that, had to read it off a memorial.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9Mned0ijUWa7YOTxZkMJ3b1iwAdJC5QpfwzhYc2OG0NIFS3i8wvrgsSTFnrKt-4Bx_w7nmsUarlusudUILNXmzSuYDfNBCeeyPziqaRzUl2SAVc_F4XXP5PdBiC_SI7FOBixA0uY6wHBRmavdajUratHfU4Sps3f-vzEIJfDThkSFETjIlAU4/s4608/P1010745.2.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3456" data-original-width="4608" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9Mned0ijUWa7YOTxZkMJ3b1iwAdJC5QpfwzhYc2OG0NIFS3i8wvrgsSTFnrKt-4Bx_w7nmsUarlusudUILNXmzSuYDfNBCeeyPziqaRzUl2SAVc_F4XXP5PdBiC_SI7FOBixA0uY6wHBRmavdajUratHfU4Sps3f-vzEIJfDThkSFETjIlAU4/w640-h480/P1010745.2.JPG" width="640" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Believe me, I know the historical context, the required background. I know the Santee Sioux were losing their homeland to newcomers named Ole and Britta and Lars. I understand their loss of homeland, but if you call those Santees "freedom fighters," then you better do likewise with the Hamas killers who swarmed into Israel one early Sabbath morning in October. There's no pardon for slaughter. Murder is murder.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Three women tried to escape the horror here near Jackson by bringing their children with them and climbing into a hole in the ground beneath the cabin. One child could not be stilled, so one mother took it upon herself to leave the cave so the others might be saved. She did, and she and her baby were immediately slain. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">On Saturday I stopped at Ft. Belmont. No one was around. I stood a hundred yards from the tourist-y fortress facsimile, alone in a little cluster of historic buildings that still felt tourist trap-y, just as the original had when years ago it was clustered down the hill at the edge of town, surrounded by trees so otherwise foreign on the prairie we'd travelled.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">I stood there, in a way, to apologize. The sight isn't sacred. That monument you see, set there in 1909, is in a city park downtown. You have to hunt to find it. Sure the new Fort Belmont is touristy. You can't miss it from the highway. It's huge, and, sure, its more than a little silly. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">But this time, when I had the time and actually stopped, like I never did sixty-some years ago, this time I stopped and remembered the suffering I now know something about. I stood there alone, just off the interstate, and nearly bawled because I know the brutal stories and because I couldn't help but think, once again, how blasted unredeemable we can be before God, but how, despite whatever arrows befall us, whatever roads we travel, He is somehow never all that far off the highway.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjHCIUqLOM-OeWjgR4QGHRYQbTyrEgHIUgdqPD2mPMecGftNzHD_Agk1mLsipNJwX3tJl3c27xs7rhitIS3Oyk56F1zSF0DEYfy1P8SU7ObrjwdAsOecpJscrHKZH3sLfLyr5Eqw0JXB-UdElBRE9WBtOj3a76HdLgDPSIrKoI_TOnuUuLplHE/s4608/P1010741.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2200" data-original-width="4608" height="306" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjHCIUqLOM-OeWjgR4QGHRYQbTyrEgHIUgdqPD2mPMecGftNzHD_Agk1mLsipNJwX3tJl3c27xs7rhitIS3Oyk56F1zSF0DEYfy1P8SU7ObrjwdAsOecpJscrHKZH3sLfLyr5Eqw0JXB-UdElBRE9WBtOj3a76HdLgDPSIrKoI_TOnuUuLplHE/w640-h306/P1010741.JPG" width="640" /></span></a></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-52168595426920186522024-03-04T07:15:00.000-06:002024-03-04T07:15:16.170-06:00State Champs!!<p><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi17ZXtyM24_f1xugBUmB2wCeUFPD25S09laWlsUSwr8MVY2D7HSL2pb-8z9gQsZzeHod0XcYf4NHk4nrroLYdfnHkkk-cEEmTtwrPri2HA2vEq6fV3DKvOrulFm8Flkb1odo2Y5PzK5gu42rivRU5TD2eRbZru_mW0DD48puT71wBt-d4GNPnR" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi17ZXtyM24_f1xugBUmB2wCeUFPD25S09laWlsUSwr8MVY2D7HSL2pb-8z9gQsZzeHod0XcYf4NHk4nrroLYdfnHkkk-cEEmTtwrPri2HA2vEq6fV3DKvOrulFm8Flkb1odo2Y5PzK5gu42rivRU5TD2eRbZru_mW0DD48puT71wBt-d4GNPnR=w480-h640" width="480" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">They're state champs. If they were a volleyball team--or buckets--they'd ride into town aboard the city fire department trucks, all of them, horns and sirens blasting. Won't happen. Didn't. They'll be lucky to get an inch or two in the local newspaper, even though a sub-state basketball game will get a page. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">So let me just say something--a little bit about those kids in that picture--because somewhere way back I had a hand in their incredible victory. The guy who, literally, runs the show isn't even the teacher. Call him a para-professional maybe, someone who gets a few bucks for taking on their competitive forensics program. Anyway, last summer, when he was casting about for material for his readers theater troupe, he called. "Got any ideas?" he said.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I've done a few in the last few years, the first of which was a simple readers theater text created from the fine poems of one-time American Poet Laureate, Ted Koozer. I loved his <i>Blizzard Voices, </i>a book of poems with stories that aren't exactly his either. Koozer listened to the stories of hundreds of men, women, and schoolchildren, who'd lived through the Great Blizzard of 1888 (GB88), sometimes called the Schoolchildren's Blizzard.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Listened</i> isn't exactly the right word either--just plain <i>read</i> is a better fit. Years ago, some wise person thought it might be a good idea to get people who remembered GB88 to put their memories on paper and send them in, then put them all together in a book you can buy yet today, a book that goes by that name, <i>The Great Blizzard of 1888</i>. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Koozer, who's from Nebraska, picked up that book and crafted a small book of poems from stories he'd read. A decade ago, I read his book of poems, loved it, and couldn't help thinking it would be really easy to create a readers theater script from those poems, a script that would, as Koozer did, tell the immensely powerful story of GB88. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">A readers theater presentation means no one has to recite lines, action doesn't have to be blocked, and it doesn't require a cast of thousands or a stage manager or lighting or music. It's just three or four people--maybe six or seven--maybe just two people reading great material, like memories of an terrible blizzard, the GB88.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Furthermore, a readers theater doesn't even require lots of rehearsals. I've got one coming up twice this month, and I'm guessing the cast--four people--will read through it only once before it goes live at the town library and, later, the museum.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The blizzard's got me far afield--back to high school forensics. The coach called me and asked about ideas. I told him about Koozer, sent him my script, and he ran with the whole idea. The result--I saw it yesterday in a very special showing for parents and family of the state champs--was wonderful, warm-hearted, touching, very moving, creatively accomplished. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">People died in GB88, hundreds, mostly children. You know the story--the storm struck as if without warning and left scores of rural school teachers, most of them just teenagers, with the very same difficult question--should kids be sent home or kept at school? The answer to that question in hundreds of rural school throughout the region turns out to have been "kept at school." </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">So the high school's take on <i>Blizzard Voices</i> made it through regionals and went on to state, where they finished first, best in show, state champions. The list of finalists included schools twice and three times their size. Their depiction of <i>Blizzard Voices</i> was perfectly masterful.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">My role didn't amount to much. I merely pointed at an option, a story line, and the director took it from there. What I pointed at was a treasure, and he realized that, shaped it wonderfully in his own way for the high school kids he had, and created what I'd be more than happy to call a work of art. Let me repeat that--"a work of art."</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">And art is good. The beauty it brings is a blessing. Stories that speak to the heart do just that--they actually speak to the heart, as did--and does--MOCFV's "Blizzard Voices." </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">That State Champ banner at the top of the page is worth more than a State Champ basketball trophy. Their care-filled depiction of a monster blizzard brought the kind of beauty that rises when a very human story is brought to life before our eyes and somehow leaves our hearts moved.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Congratulations!!!</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-26819027806165099822024-03-03T05:55:00.002-06:002024-03-03T05:55:40.526-06:00Do Process<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-weight: bold; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTAMD2gT-nP7Xutmi9r_LqbabhsaUbBNAz9p2UCQa86wP35BIMQXP5Abro8fyFMh9kzTpALLOxDlPe-tB-Ra2yrMA9N7JnfZFZBQVyWuHlk0kmDSNiZgIAf7yhQc-fo3WFzLXgcbmZRYIgNWy9tvgswOmm5hLsMLX3OJsbc_VRQvLjRIQ6JJBp/s4032/PXL_20240302_130020177.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2268" data-original-width="4032" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTAMD2gT-nP7Xutmi9r_LqbabhsaUbBNAz9p2UCQa86wP35BIMQXP5Abro8fyFMh9kzTpALLOxDlPe-tB-Ra2yrMA9N7JnfZFZBQVyWuHlk0kmDSNiZgIAf7yhQc-fo3WFzLXgcbmZRYIgNWy9tvgswOmm5hLsMLX3OJsbc_VRQvLjRIQ6JJBp/w640-h360/PXL_20240302_130020177.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>“Why are you downcast, O my soul?</b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Why so disturbed within me?</b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Put your hope in God,</b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”</b></span></div><p></p><span style="font-family: georgia;">One night late, years ago, a preacher friend of mine, over a few beers, began talking about what he went through when his wife left him, years before, an event that’s not supposed to happen, and certainly not supposed to happen to preachers. He didn’t blame her; he knew he’d had a hand in what happened himself, preacher or not. <br /><br />At that late hour, with a bit of lubrication, I stayed with him when it appeared he wanted to talk. I sound as if I was using him, and maybe I was in a way; but what interested me was his use of a phrase I’d heard before: “It took me a long time to process that,” he kept saying. “I didn’t have the tools at first to process what had happened.”<br /><br />I’ll admit I thought it was psychobabble, a cliché, an entirely strange word drawn from what we do to legislation or cheese or army recruits. But the emotion he carried as he told me the story made me wonder what that pat expression meant in the context of his adultery. I wanted process unpacked.<br /><br />By “process,” he said, he meant becoming able to look at the wound and not cry or rage. Process, he said, meant stepping back from the immediacy of the emotions, a step that wasn’t at all easy--and it took time, he said. And it took work. Like forgiveness. <br /><br />It seems to me that in verse five of Psalm 42, David (if he’s the writer) appears to have processed something. The unforgettable opening verses of the psalm emerge from the core of his grief; but verse five steps back from the sadness that threatens him and he begins talking to himself. “For heaven’s sake,” he says, “what’s with me anyway? Why am I so incredibly depressed?” <br /><br />Then he pulls out an old bromide and tells himself what he’d obviously known for years and even sung in a whole psalter of his own ballads, something the curtains of his despair had seemingly covered: “Put your hope in God,” he tells himself, processing his sadness. <br /><br />And then the resolution. Picture him, gritting his teeth, almost a snarl, pulling intent and dedication out of truth he knew, inside out: “. . .for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” <br /><br />I may be wrong. Maybe there’s a gap in this psalm. Maybe, like the preacher without a wife, it took him some time to process the emptiness in his life. <br /><br />Wouldn’t it be wonderful to consult some standard King David biography and discover that this song was finished months after it was started, that he’s simply telling the story? <br /><br />But we don’t know that, and no one ever will. All we’re left with the psalm. And in this verse—or so it seems to me—David seems to bottom out, to take hold of the promises of God he’s relied on throughout his life, at a myriad of other moments when he stood in dire need of being rescued. “Put your hope in God,” he says, in command form. <br /><br />In this verse, the story the poem tells is at its climax because the writer has stepped back to tell himself, to shout, in fact, the truth into his own ears, and now ours. “I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God” [emphasis mine, but I think his too]. <br /><br />Sounds like a preacher friend of mine, talking to me over a beer years ago. <br /><br />Sounds like Job. Sounds like a lot of us. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-24650939448695060442024-03-01T07:18:00.000-06:002024-03-01T07:18:29.147-06:00. . .but not forgotten<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWdW-FMXioyN_LZAw7p5RBp57OHyjQMkgBfXqcbmM-fcb_HawJA-ctoHwlMjEfl_dqd4iXYV-XHAyONq78D29K1aVapu0vaF9X8VkdwgGh68VsUzsHqd5VlHfnkQNk1Sw2NOCdE6mcSbVfZJsqK68TpEgCLDfdGXmpR1QNJuvS4Mydu3KBKZqv/s3264/P1100337.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3264" data-original-width="2448" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWdW-FMXioyN_LZAw7p5RBp57OHyjQMkgBfXqcbmM-fcb_HawJA-ctoHwlMjEfl_dqd4iXYV-XHAyONq78D29K1aVapu0vaF9X8VkdwgGh68VsUzsHqd5VlHfnkQNk1Sw2NOCdE6mcSbVfZJsqK68TpEgCLDfdGXmpR1QNJuvS4Mydu3KBKZqv/w480-h640/P1100337.JPG" width="480" /></a></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><p>In a work of fiction, it's almost impossible to make a character as supremely loveable as Nebraska's Willa Cather does with the great earth-mother Antonia, in her century-old novel <i>My Antonia</i>. This Antonia isn't one bit divine, but her zest for life, notable throughout a childhood Cather recreates, is perfectly enchanting. If you've read <i>My Antonia </i>and you love the novel, as gadzillions have and do, then you probably adore Antonia, or Tony, as Jim Burden calls her in the story.</p></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Tony is not untouched by the dark side. She is the oldest daughter of an immigrant Bohemian family struggling to make a go of it on uncooperative Great Plains land, one family of thousands, many from all over Europe, who believed that this new country was their chance to escape the bondage of poverty. For some, that dream was real. For others, just staying alive required every last stich of strength and perseverance. Some didn't make it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Tony's father, Anton Shimerda, was something of an aristocrat in the old country. But he'd married a tyrannical woman, then lost himself in the vast expanse of treeless prairie he found himself in here, bereft of the art and music that had enchanted his soul.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Tony's father ends his life by suicide. She was just a girl. His death not only emptied her life of her father's presence and grace, but forced her to take over the hard, hard work of breaking ground for a sustainable life.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Still, like Jim Burden, who cannot forget her, readers can't help but love Tony Shimerda, who eventually came to town to work for well-situated town folks. What she and the other hired girls take with them is rowdy earthiness of their country ways. Off-limits to town boys of means, the country girls just want to have fun. Jim Burden's parents, in sanctified righteousness, forbid him from going to dances, where the country girls just plain shine. They're thought to be loose. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">No matter, like Jim, who tells the story, most readers love her zest. Besides, the hired girls are great and sexy dancers.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Quite suddenly, Tony finds herself with child, and on a train to Denver, where the father, Larry Donovan, a passenger conductor on the railroad, told her he'd meet her, marry her, and raise a family. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In Denver, he was not to be found. Tony Shimerda was pregnant and abandoned.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">She can do nothing but return. With her brother, she slaves through harvest season and into winter, when one night she locks herself in her bedroom and delivers her baby boy herself. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">You can't help but love the woman. And, well, hate this scum, Larry Donovan. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">If you've never been to Red Cloud, Nebraska, schedule a trip sometime soon. Because Willa Cather used so much of Red Cloud and its history, the town's heart and soul is their favorite novelist daughter. You can visit the little old Catholic church where Tony eventually married the farm boy who gave her the rest of her kids. You can visit their farmhouse, the Pavelka place, north of town.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Tell you what--take a car tour through the whole wide country where Willa Cather remembers her childhood so fondly.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">And be sure to stop the tiny cemetery plot at the beginning of the tour. You can't miss it--it's right there along the gravel. In it stands the stone of the man who abandoned Antonia Shimerda, in real life, Anna Pavelka. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Of course, his name isn't Larry Donovan; for the record, what's etched there in stone is "James William Murray." There's the stone all right, just where the tour notes claim it is. And here's the thing: the bottom of the stone bears this old cemetery cliche: "Gone but not forgotten."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">No kidding. "Gone, but not forgotten." Every year thousands of people take that gravel road tour, and nobody forgets what Larry Donovan did to your and my Antonia. Poor James William Murray: in Red Cloud, Nebraska, so much just can't be forgotten. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Visit sometime. Stop there at the grave and tell him he was a cad. Or worse. Good night, was he ever. Like a hundred others, tell him he's gone all right, but not forgotten.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYkqe_xLGcBXSXvyeSPRoOFlrIEeL_4Kl0osQKDTZVyEtpPX5AW8E5n4J21B7o2H_QH7F9iAbcYryXGCinNtSKzDvwCQla7zzSsgqtF-S_5X4CIz9H6YFQfDhBuWoyRiWp0Bj5skPpVuSs8LAsIqYYPp1bJCZ3Ek10S__Ul9zG8MsxFGx20hvb/s4608/P8060319.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3456" data-original-width="4608" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYkqe_xLGcBXSXvyeSPRoOFlrIEeL_4Kl0osQKDTZVyEtpPX5AW8E5n4J21B7o2H_QH7F9iAbcYryXGCinNtSKzDvwCQla7zzSsgqtF-S_5X4CIz9H6YFQfDhBuWoyRiWp0Bj5skPpVuSs8LAsIqYYPp1bJCZ3Ek10S__Ul9zG8MsxFGx20hvb/w640-h480/P8060319.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29648991.post-13840637487808970282024-02-29T07:31:00.000-06:002024-02-29T07:31:58.290-06:00Willa's world<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4CPkaoToEdumjbHFv4EhRVXVhcRUI6-krhPhE8yougLqVKI_4zNQg-c-o1NpQTu5X2GjqVSLgysP_6sRpI3qQBHgH6HMFinNvJuiTOPjtQg0I7BmkOlESM86FB73-3VGluYQSHTvO24wDuqeELpuxkihOSKLJBf1qA_-r2nSa6kYgJbbjCAkJ/s500/Cather.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="393" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4CPkaoToEdumjbHFv4EhRVXVhcRUI6-krhPhE8yougLqVKI_4zNQg-c-o1NpQTu5X2GjqVSLgysP_6sRpI3qQBHgH6HMFinNvJuiTOPjtQg0I7BmkOlESM86FB73-3VGluYQSHTvO24wDuqeELpuxkihOSKLJBf1qA_-r2nSa6kYgJbbjCAkJ/w504-h640/Cather.png" width="504" /></a></div><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Let's be clear about this. In Willa Cather's most beloved novel,<i> My Antonia</i>, a pure celebration of the beauty of the world of her childhood, she offers some intriguing complexities, specifically in gender or sexuality.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Her short preface gives the entire story to a childhood friend of hers, Jim Burden, an old friend but now a New York-based attorney for the railroad. She and Jim find themselves on a trip across the prairie together and get to talking, the trajectory of their conversation aimed precisely at the red prairie grasses where they grew up. Jim tells "the narrator," who we certainly can't expect to be any one other than Cather herself, that he's been toying around with a book about Tony Shimerda, a woman they both, long ago, deeply admired.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Once back in New York, Jim Burden drops by "our narrator's" apartment and drops off a manuscript. That manuscript, "our narrator" says, is <i>My Antonia</i>. Old English teachers could argue all day long about exactly why Willa Cather chooses to begin the tale that way--you're reading a story from a writer named Willa Cather, but it's actually written by her old friend? Seriously?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">All right, we'll give her that mystery, but there's more. It's fair to say that Jim Burden may lack some typical male attributes. There is, after all, his proud worship of the Bohemian girl--she is his mother, his lover, his wife, he says; she's his everything. But that she's not at least her heart throb seems odd. In fact, at some moments throughout the novel, it's not a stretch to think of him as maybe a bit, well, gay.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Then there's Willa Cather herself, who, as a young lady, wanted to think of herself as a young man, and did, by dressing like a man, cutting her hair like a man, and signing the name "William," rather than Willa. She never married, lived with a woman named Edith Lewis for forty years. She was mightily circumspect about this area of her life, burning her letters and determining that what remained couldn't be opened for years and years. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Gender mysteries abound in this greatly famous novel. Please!-nothing I'm saying should lead you to think I'm nay-saying. I read it first when teaching, several times since. I've been to Red Cloud, Nebraska, four or five times, and I'd go tomorrow again tomorrow if someone would ask. I love her worship of the world where she grew up.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But there's this gender thing that's a little intrusive, and it begs some investigation, which you can be sure it's gathered throughout the one hundred years the novel has been around. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In the years that I taught "The American Novel," <i>My Antonia</i> didn't change a whit; however, the students did, and did so massively. I remember my first year, hardly daring to bring the subject up (it doesn't need to be, by the way). Perhaps incorrectly, I presumed that if my good, Christian students knew that the novel they held in their hands and had come to love--most have loved the novel--was written by a lesbian, it would affect their admiration and, well, them. My Antonia would suffer some shunning surely.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">By the last time I taught it--and that must be 20 years ago--things had changed. Not only were good Christian students more questioning, they were downright fascinated and wanted to know quite desperately, "Was Cather gay?" </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Answering that question only complicated matters, because no one can know for sure anyway--and besides, what would you look for anyway? Real Cather scholars frequently say she was in a "lesbian relationship."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It's been a long time since I've been through the novel, but I went back into its reveries this week for a discussion at the museum, all adults, many of them retired. Gender questions entered into the discussion, but they certainly didn't dominate.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Cather herself appears to have created some of those questions in this wonderful novel. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">While as a culture we may have wandered far afield from the repressions of old, gone wildly across the line into spaces unheard of years ago, such as middle school kids demanding to be addressed as "we/they," I much prefer the freedom to deal with the questions Willa Cather's wonderful worship of her Nebraska childhood raises than leave them somewhere under lock and key.</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0