I'm good--I really am

I'm not revealing some precious secret here, but neither do I believe I've ever admitted it publicly on this media. I'm not particularly up tight about it either, although I do hope that I'm finally finished growing when it comes to my feet. I'm told I may not be since most two-legged's feet, like ear lobes and fingernails, just keep on growing when nothing else seems to. Sorry, that sounds a lot like Poe. 

What I want to say is that my feet are big, terribly big, terrifyingly big--size 16, which is way, way beyond what one might think normal on a man who is about 6'2". It's been difficult, throughout my life: I want to bowl and there's no shoes big enough. I want to roller skate or ice skate, and I'm forced to the bleachers. 

Little known fact: most stairs are not made for people with size 16 shoes. Especially now, in my dotage, stairs are dangerous because one has to position one's klompen sideways before reaching for the handrail or else risk tripping and sprawling out in some unseemly fashion down the stairway. Daily, I risk death on stairs. 

What's more, potential horror is about ten times worse since back trouble came up like some monster unseen. I need to breathe deeply when descending a stairway--I am, after all, already bathed in butt-to-toe pain. Given my condition, I've found out that going barefoot is no option; I have to wear shoes.

So what's atop the page there is a pair of sneakers that have proved about as good as any pair I own, especially during these weeks of my handicap. They're New Balance, and I got them years ago from Ebay, which is my Walmart, the very best place to shop for Big Foot shoes. Hardly any ordinary shoe store carries size 16. I can shop all afternoon on Ebay.

This old pair is used, which I like because it means that some other bloke broke them in. My NB therapeutics got some miles on them. Trust me, no one my age wears out shoes in such ordinary ways. These belonged to a runner, which is why these soles got some wear on 'em (a line I'm not going to touch even though my Calvinist instincts want badly to do so and Fred Buechner absolutely couldn't have left it alone).

Because they're the feel-good shoes in my closet right now, I thought I'd make sure I to get another pair of New Balance sneakers, another pair that dispense similar grace. Back to Ebay.

In all honesty, what I got is a majorly good buy (not all Ebay buys are). This pair of New Balance sneakers have barely been worn, and I got them for $25. That's the stuff of legends. New, they'd be four or five times that. 

Okay, the downside is they turned out to be not quite so sweet on my feet as the old NBers, but I've got them in my closet anyway, in case I feel up to a half-marathon.

In other words, I'm okay with shoes right now. What's more, I've now had two really great mornings, pain-wise. I don't know if my back is creating its own miracle, or if, later on today, ye olde sciatica will simply unleash its fiery fury once more. Either way--healthy or hurtin'--not to worry. What I want to say is, I'm well-heeled, well-shod. And therefore in no need of more or better footwear. 

I say that just in case someone out there, having heard my lament, thought they'd satisfy my longing by buying me yet another pair, a deeply patriotic pair of these.

Honestly, I appreciate your thinking of me, but I'm good. I really am--I'm good. 

Righteous warfare, circa 1980

You may remember, if you're old enough, that it was Jimmy Carter, then President of these United States, who helped fashion what became known as the Camp David Accords, an attempt at creating peace in the Middle East. It was September of 1978. The Schaap family happily welcomed its second child, David Michael, that year, and I'd just begun my third year of teaching at a college I didn't leave until retirement, thirty-some years later. 

I'd been a liberal since 1970 or so, when it seemed to me that the Republican view of the Vietnam War--"we're fighting communism so keep shooting"--seemed long-since ridiculous. It was costing us far too much. 

Chances are, if you can remember that time, you likely remember even more clearly the bitterness with which the nation viewed the hostages being held by Iran and our inability to get them freed--either by force or by negotiation. The hostage horrors bedeviled Carter's Presidency, so much so that anyone who remembers those years likely has an image--as I do--of a rather feckless President, who lacked the courage or the guile or the testosterone to get those 60 hostages  home. Their captivity went on for 444 days.

What I couldn't have known was that Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate for President in 1980, long before the election that November, let the Iranians know, by way of a special, secret envoy, that if the Iranians would hold on to the hostages, the Reagan administration would give them a better deal. 

The Iran hostage crisis could well have doomed the Carter Presidency. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 489 electoral college votes to Jimmy Carter's 49. In 1980, I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where a pall fell over the English department I'd just entered. Among the libs, Reagan was not well-thought of.

I have no idea how much I knew about Jerry Falwell back then. I knew there was a Liberty University, an institution the then mega-church showman started on the basis of his popularity, and I knew that he was dipping his righteous fingers in American politics; but he wasn't really my concern. I'd voted for Carter, but I wasn't among those who believed that a Reagan Presidency would be a horror. 

What I didn't know is that this Jerry Falwell was brokering a marriage between politics and Christianity that was not only new, but scary. To do that, Falwell had to take on Jimmy Carter, one Southern Baptist shafting another. So he did. 

Here's how Tim Alberta describes that moment in time in The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory, a book that every believer should read: 

In 1980, Falwell assembled a new coalition of voters--fundamentalist, evangelicals, Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, and all manner of vagrant Christians, plus, thanks to the emphasis on abortion, Catholics--around the message that traditional values were being extinguished by Carter and his godless government.

 What Alberda doesn't say--maybe because he doesn't need to--is that it wasn't just ideas that Falwell was peddling in order to bring down Jimmy Carter, it was also heartfelt prayer. He'd beseech the throne of the Lord, asking him to make American strong again and bring on Ronny Reagan as someone who would bring decency and truth to the world we lived in.

Is it just me, or do others see all of this, today, as despicable, as sin? Jimmy Carter is in hospice--he may well leave this world today or this week. His family says he appears to respond to things, even though most of what he was is gone. Any decided look at his legacy today has to include the abundant measure of mercy and grace he left in our world. He was a man who lived love, just didn't talk about it in the Sunday School class he taught in Plains, Georgia.

Jerry Falwell is gone. His legacy includes Liberty University, but it also include graft and mayhem. To think that Falwell prayed fervently for the destruction of the Jimmy Carter's presidency, in the name of politics, seems impossible. Alberta says,

Having already spent millions of dollars pummeling the president on radio stations nationwide, he poured an additional $10 million that fall into ads portraying Carter, as he himself would later recall, as "a traitor to the South and no longer a Christian.'"

Is that amazing or just awful--or some combination of the two. 

Falwell is gone, but similar prayers still arise--and in abundance.

Sundlaly Morning Meds--from Psalm 42

    "My tears have been my food day and night, 

while men say to me all day long, 'Where is your God?'"

 When my alma mater called to ask if I’d be interested in leaving Arizona and coming back to Iowa, I never really considered not going.  I loved high school teaching because I loved high school kids; but I understood that if I were ever going to write, I’d have to teach in college, where there simply is more time.

 

Greenway High School was brand new, on the edge of a northern suburb of Phoenix.  I’d been hired precisely because I was a Christian.  I was also male, experienced, and newly outfitted with a masters degree; those were also factors.  But, illegal or not, I got the job on the basis of my faith.  The district interviewer, a man named Bill Sterrett, was a Christian too.  That’s another story.

           

Only two years later, a college teaching offer in my hand, I decided to leave.  When I told Mr. Sterrett, I got scorched.  He looked up from behind his desk and shook his head.  “Why would you want to go there?” he said.  “Everybody there is just like you.”  He slapped that desk lightly with his hand.  “Here, you’re really different.”

           

Mr. Sterrett died several years ago, but that line still reverberates through the echo chamber that is my soul because he was right.  We’re not talking about the difference between Vanity Fair and the Celestial City—there’s far too much manure in the air to make any heavenly claims about up here in Siouxland.

 

But living out my allotted years in a burgeoning new suburb of a huge metropolitan area would have made me a different person than spending those years in an ethnic conclave huddled against the winds on the edge of the Great Plains.  I chose the monastic life, and, as Frost would say, that choice has made all the difference.

 

I say all of that because in my many years here I’ve never been anywhere near someone who might say to me, sardonically, in my distress, “So, Jim, where the heck is your God?”  Hasn’t happened—and won’t.  I am surrounded by a cloud of believing witnesses. 

 

Had I stayed in urban, public education and American suburbia, I’d know people who would ask me the very question David that burns in his soul.  Some of them are still friends.  Last summer I got an email from an old teaching buddy, a “jack” Mormon, who wouldn’t let the silliness of my faith rest, in fact, because he’s quite adamant about not having any himself.

 

But I’ve been cloistered for nearly forty years here, and those few voices who might mock my faith are accessible only on-line.  That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t hear those burning questions.  They rise, instead, from inside me somewhere; and what I’m wondering this morning is this:  if I’d have stayed in a more diverse neighborhood, would the voices I would have heard supplant the ones I now do, the ones from inside?  What would be the pitch of my own personal faith?

           

Those questions are here, even in the cloister, and they are packaged in the same taunting voice David heard.  That voice I swear I hear, that burning question, even in a cloud of witnesses.

 

But I’m thankful, very thankful, that God almighty has given me, as he did David, a faith that won’t let me take those voices to heart, even though I hear ‘em.  Only by grace, do I come anywhere near to having a faith that is equal to that task.  

The Remarkable Life of James P. Beckworth

You're no more than a kid, but you're a bruiser. You don't go out of your way to start fights, but you end them effectively. You're in St. Louis, 1820 or so. Your father took his family west. The population is four, maybe five thousand. Things are hopping. The west is calling.

A few days ago, a note in the newspaper said a man named General Ashley was recruiting young men to "ascend the Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one or two or three years." The ad promised the frontier, the west. The ad said this was all about beaver. Europeans are still nuts about beaver hats. 

Your name is Jim Beckworth, and, like the others, you want like heck to explore, to discover, to test your mettle. You sign up as one of "Ashley's Hundred.” You haven't trapped a beaver in your life. 

But you're, well, special, and you know it. You're built like a fort, haven't spent a night of your life in fear. You're of mixed race. Your father is an Irishman; your mother was mixed race herself. You're African-American--at a time most everyone would use the n-word. But you're built like a tight end. You could bite through a bullet, at least that's what you tell yourself. 

There are 34 of you signed up with this batch of "Ashley's Hundred." Early on, out on the prairie and dangerously short on grub, you and your rifle go out your own and bag a couple of deer. "Oh, yeah," you tell your friends, "and I shot something big and brown, huge."

Buffalo. You'd never seen one before. That night, everyone eats good.

One day, you’re shoeing the General's horse. This horse of his is not particularly compliant. When he refuses to cooperate, you whack him the way you'd always had done in St. Louis. Nothing harmful. But the boss sees you do it and goes ballistic, or so the story goes: "he poured his curses thick and fast" with words you can't repeat.” 

Those curses make you burn. You control your own anger and tell him you'd finished three of the horse's four shoes. "There is one more nail to drive," you tell the General, "which you may drive for yourself or let go undriven," And then you unload: "I will see you dead before I will lift another finger to serve you."

Not a good idea to talk that way, but you tell your friends that the General’s "words will never be forgiven."

That’s just one story from the life of James P. Beckworth, a mountain man, a trapper out here in the early years of the 19th century, a man born a slave.

Somewhere during those years in the frontier, a remarkable thing happened. Among the Crow, Beckworth again and again proved himself in battle, so well that when the Crow watched him face off against their enemy, the Blackfoot, his valor didn't go unnoticed.

A chief who'd lost his son in battle, formally adopted this mountain man for his very own son. For a time, James P. Beckworth became a head man, the chief among the Crow. For six years, he lived among them, fought through a string of battles, even took several wives. He wore buckskin and braided his hair like his adopted brothers and sisters.  

He was a strong man, a fierce leader in battle, this man born a slave. What's beyond doubt is that Beckworth would have had a far different life back east. Instead, he'd gone west, a mountain man, was renowned by his adoptive people in a way he could never have been valued among those who would have made him pay a price for the color of his skin. 

James P. Beckworth discovered a path through the Rockies to California, fought Seminoles in Florida and Mexicans in the Mexican War. He worked as a guide for the U. S. Cavalry, played cards professionally, and loved sitting around telling his wild, life story, not without some embellishment here and there.

There's much more to the story of James P. Beckworth, a most remarkable African-American.

 

Morning Thanks--the Hawkeye Queen

It'll be a big night tonight in Iowa. Our most famous favorite daughter, born and reared right here, a corn-fed, pork-lovin' true Iowan, our hometown ringer-of a daughter who can hit threes from a township or two away, will break the all-time scoring record set by Washington's Kelsey Plum. Our own Caitlin Clark will enter the game just eight points short of Plum's mark. If the U of M's Wolverine's were thinking of holding her to seven points, they'd have to raise the basket another ten feet. Chances are, Las Vegas, would still make her a favorite.

It's hard to be hyperbolic about Caitlin Clark, not simply because she can hit three-pointers from the other side of the court, but because she's tireless and a devastating opponent. Her Hawkeye team has a couple of losses this season already, and while just about everyone would love for the Clark team to take home all the marbles this year, there's no guarantee. And she knows it.

All of that being said, the truth is that Caitlin Clark has taken more than her team with her this year. She's grabbed the attention of millions who've become fans. NCAA women's basketball wasn't dying in the years immediately preceding Caitlin's stepping on the court, but since she has she's created something unheard of in women's sports. Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese are better known hoopsters than any two men's teams stars. They--and their teams--pack stadiums. They've raised the women's game to levels of popularity unforeseen.

For the record, Caitlin Clark has scored 3520 points in 125 games. She averages 32 points a game, so, in all likelihood she'll get the 8 she needs before the crowd even settles in with their popcorn. 

What's sweet is that it's not just her ability on the hardwood that's brought on all the fame, it's her disposition. She's a sweetheart, a good, good kid, and everybody knows it because she makes it abundantly clear that all of this--the success her teams have had and her own stardom are well, nice. But that's all. She's a darlin', and all she's all-Iowan.

Tonight, if you want to get to Carter-Hawkeye, plan on big bucks. It'll cost you $209 a seat in the upper corners. You want to watch them take on Ohio State in the season finale, it'll cost you, at bottom, $396. Not kidding.

Ask any Iowan, even those who aren't life or death Hawkeye fans, even a part-timers like me, who never saw a game, not even on tv--Caitlin Clark is great and has been great. She's a blessing, not just to Hawkeye basketball, but to the whole state--and more too, even more.

Men and women who do what they do with aplomb and humility are pure, out-and-out blessings to all of us. Caitlin Clark is one of those. Even before she hits one of those half-court threes, even before she's shoveled out an assist or two, she's lit things up and made things shine. 

This morning I'm thankful for our own Caitlin Clark. She's a blessing.

Morning Thanks--the Beatles

I didn't see the Beatles the night they walked out on the stage of the Ed Sullivan Show. I missed that historic appearance--I was in church. 

I knew about it, knew it was coming, heard about it, because it was heralded all over--the amazing Beatles, four mop-haired rock stars from a city called Liverpool and on their way to royal stardom--everyone said so--were scheduled to appear across the nation that Sunday right there on stage with Ed Sullivan. Everyone knew.

But I was in church. I don't remember fighting about my having to go. I don't remember cursing my parents' medieval ways, or thinking I was somehow bereft of a cultural phenom that, as a kid, I shouldn't be missing. I didn't necessarily love being in church, but my understanding of its place in my life made not attending something akin to choosing not to breathe. I'm sure I didn't spend the entire evening worship that night wishing I was in front of the TV.

Just for the record, it was Sunday night, February 4, 1964. I was 13 days away from being 16 years old. For point of reference, I was a month away from being old enough to drive. There was a little motorbike in the garage, probably stuck there for the winter in early February, but useful for me, except on those mornings my eyes might freeze shut if I drove it three or four blocks to school.

I had a shotgun, a little beauty I bought used somewhere--I don't remember where. It was a 16-gauge, double-barreled Remington, and, yes, I wish I still had it, but I  sold it when I went off to college (I didn't realize there were pheasants galore in Iowa!). And I was using it--although I don't remember even wasting a shell that day--on a Saturday some weeks before the Sunday night worship on the stage of Ed Sullivan. 

I had the shotgun in my hands, sitting in the back seat of a car driven by I-don't-remember-who and packed full of high school guys, going out west of town somewhere to hunt fox I think, although I don't remember seeing any, nor even hunting that day. It was a carful of guys, guns in their hands--an image that makes some people shudder, I'm sure. I was in the back seat. For the record, I remember nothing about hunting.

The station, I'm sure, was WOKY, Milwaukee, because absolutely every 17-year-old listened to WOKY. I don't remember the deejay. What I do remember as we rode along to some hunting spot some miles away, is the dee-jay going absolutely bananas about a tune he was going to spin, a tune by this phenom foursome named, of all things, the Beatles.

That's where I was when I first heard "I Want to Hold Your Hand"--backseat of a some kid's car, a double-barreled shotgun in my hand. I love it. 

What did I think of the music? I wasn't converted right then and there. I didn't have a come-to-Beatles moment right there in the backseat. If you would have asked me then, I likely would have said that if they're going to make an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show--that was fine, but I'd likely go to church anyway. Have to.

By the time I left for college, I had every Beatles album and wore them out on my old "stereo," a big box of a thing I took along to college because I couldn't imagine life without it--or them. I loved "Sgt Pepper," and had no trouble understanding that what the Beatles were up to--playing around with genre, with the whole mad business of popular music--was something of an art. They were doing something wild, and who couldn't love "I get by with a little help from friends. . ."

They stepped on to the world stage 60 years ago. I'm soon to be 76 years old. We don't go to church on Sunday nights much anymore--we live a half hour away. We go in the morning for sure. 

All my Beatles albums are long gone. Sometime, if I'm cleaning up down here, I'll ask my smart speaker to play the Beatles. In my mind, they're still wonderful, and I treasure remembering the moment I just tried to describe--the very first time I heard them, jammed into a car full of armed guys, lots of testosterone there in the back seat, on our way west of town in February, 1964. I'm betting I could still spot the place on the road we were taking.

They were a blessing and, really, still are, and, let me just say it outright:  I'm thankful for the Beatles. 

On the death of the church library

The most obvious takeaway from the death of church libraries is my initial horrifying conclusion that people don't read books any more. That's end-times stuff all right, but nowhere near to being true. While it is true your and my doctor's waiting room is full of people buried in their screens, most of them aren't playing games--they're reading. What?--I don't know, but they're reading. 

What do experts say? Somewhere close to a quarter of the entire population of the U. S. of A. did not read a book last year. A quarter may appear massive and foreboding, but if you flip the number around as some do, and say 75% of the America did read a book in the last year, it doesn't sound so much like a death knell. It's even a bit surprising.

Then there's the whole matter of media. These days, books come in all sorts of flavors. Right now, I'm juggling four books: one, I'm reading and recording audibly, Country People, by Ruth Suckow; another is an audiobook on my phone, a collection of short stories by Wendell Berry I listen to daily in the gym; a third is on my Kindle Scribe, a 1850s- era biography of James T. Frederick, an African-American mountain man; the fourth (and last!) is also on my Kindle, Tim Alberta's The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, this month's choice of the book club to which I belong. I'm "reading" four books, none of which I can hold in my hands. 

What that all suggests, of course, is that not all books these days have heft. In fact, more and more books come to us by way of our phones or iPads or computer screens, where some of those books are heard and others read. "Reading a book" these days, almost as often as not in my life anyway, has nothing to do with something bound and in your hands. 

I know that local libraries own audio books that can be checked out as if they were in print, but supporting digitizing a library requires both time and money--and most importantly, technical know-how. The demise of church libraries may well beat least in part understood if we think of the difficult time we all have dealing with the technology required. 

And then there's this: an incredible rise in political books. You may despise Donald Trump (I do), but he's been terrific for book sales and even newspaper subscriptions, national newspapers anyway. Everyone who has any experience at all with the ex-President and his day-to-day carnival has written a book as of late or else is planning one right now. Ghost writers are feeling no pain right now. Trying to understand the discipleship of millions of Trump supporters has created a huge market. No one has quite done it yet, but you can figure on more are coming out all the time.

Would a church library stock political books right now?

I'd guess probably not. If your church librarian wouldn't put Tim Alberta's book on the shelf to be loaned out, he or she is missing the kind of book that right now is selling big-time and is worth an entire church's time. If your church librarian wouldn't put Kristin Kobes DuMez on the shelf, your church library doesn't deserve to use up space. 

A friend of mine was doing a signing at a Christian bookstore recently. He told me when the crowds thinned (that's my description), he walked over to the store's fiction shelf and saw absolutely nothing he'd care to read. 

Dare I suggest that the death of church libraries may be in some small part understood on the basis of how well the librarian was able to buy books of relevance and high interest. I'm guessing most church libraries barely have a budget. I'm guessing--I'm no expert--that a church library that doesn't tell its patrons something about its latest titles or make sure those purchased titles had some legs, that moribund library would collect more dust than patrons. 

So I read the article, well done with the promise, I hope, of more. My gut reaction was horror. As a writer, I couldn't help but think that what closed-up libraries forecast is the death of the book. After all, America stands a chance of returning to office a man who can't read an 10-page summary of world affairs daily presented to whoever sits in the oval office, a man who is notorious for his lack of reading, a man who, consequently, doesn't understand NATO because he knows so very, very little about World War II and its aftermath. Millions of  us are being led by a man who doesn't read. That's horrifying.

But church libraries? I feel a little sad, but when they fail I'm not ready to say we're a step back into another round of the Dark Ages. The demise of church libraries is understandable.

I feel sorry of the Ally Junes of the world, the men and (mostly) women who kept shop in church libraries and did so with determination and resolve, despite the fact that they never really did much business, less so recently.

May such heroes--as well as their beloved libraries--rest in peace.

On the death of the church library

There are plenty of other things worth going to war about. The loss of church libraries is no omen of coming of the "end times." It's happening, and even though I'm quite sure the vast majority of folks in, say, North America, won't be startlingly affected should church libraries disappear totally, it's clear, or so I read, that churches are dumping their libraries, getting rid of them because of plain old disuse.

Lest you think this sometime-writer about to sound the alarm, the truth is I don't remember checking books out from a church library. When I was a boy, I do remember reading some books about the Sugar Creek Gang, adolescent reading my mother insisted I read. I'm guessing I got them from the church library at First CRC, Oostburg. But standing in a library having someone check it out officially (it would have been Allie June Ver Velde, I remember that)? Nothing there in my memory. I looked. It's empty.

Furthermore, my God-fearing parents never used the church library much either, at least not that I remember. Truth be told, the home in which I was raised contained no really diligent readers, no one capable of getting lost in a book, no one who had to told to get his or her nose out of a book. I'm quite sure my parents would have been thrilled to see me lost in that fashion, but their behavior never established reading to be anything other than something that "it's a good thing to do."

We had a library in our house, as I remember, a goodly chunk of it composed of Bible commentaries that Dad inherited from his father, a pastor. My sister joined a book club when she was still a kid. One of the books she purchased was The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a huge study whose spine flashed a swastika that always looked compelling to me. But Rise and Fall was a brick, a tome, a year's work in my teenage imagination--something you read when you get old and don't have to play ball somewhere.

Put bluntly, my parents' library--which wasn't bad (largely inherited) never moved much, as I remember. As I said, neither of my parents was a big reader. 

This lifelong literature teacher is publicly admitting is that I've never been much of a library patron. My billfold carries library cards from two close-by towns, but I've got them only because I use their inter-library loan systems occasionally. 

Pardon my wandering. What I meant to say is the last Christian Courier features a story that examines the demise of church libraries. Please forgive all the personal stuff I've been mumbling about; I don't want anyone to think that the topic--the demise of church libraries--is yet another sign of the times. We're all not hurdling down toward destruction just yet. 

Two men of my acquaintance, both of them quite significantly older, both of them citizens of the world and its literature, told me the same story. One of them attended Calvin in the early 1920's; the other attended Dordt in the 1950s. Both carried with them their socks and underwear, a few changes of clothes, and their own personal libraries--just two books--the Bible, of course, and Shakespeare--two books of which they were immensely proud.

To them, long ago, the book was a rare treasure. Despite their differences in age, that kind of honor and import given to books has long gone. Church libraries are dying away because few people use them. Our church doesn't have a library. It has a tall book shelf, almost always full of books people in church, including me, drop off there when we're decluttering, leave on the shelf if we can find a place, doing so in pretty much the same careful manner we drop off our empty glass bottles and jars to be recycled. 

And there the books sit. They don't move much, and they look diligent. Covenant CRC hasn't had a library for a long, long time. As far as I know, there's no movement afoot to get one, despite the fact that a significant percentage of members are profs or emeriti. 

So the back page story of Christian Courier features a story about the demise of church libraries. Evidence is all around; if the barbarians are at the gate, I've never been a warrior, even if some of the books in our church collection are mine--some having been in my possession, others adorned down the spine with my name.

The more difficult question, and a question that arises with the death of the church library, is the demise of the book? That's a more difficult question. 

That's the biggie. 

Psalm 42:1

“My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. 

 When can I go and meet with God?”

The Ghost Dance, one of the saddest religions of all time, was a frenetic hobgoblin of Christianity, mysticism, Native ritual, and sheer desperation that swept Native life throughout the American west in the final years of the 19th century.

Wovoka, a Piute holy man, saw the original vision, then designed the ritual from his own revelation. Erect a sapling in an open area, a familiar symbol from rituals like the Sun Dance, which was, back then, outlawed by reservation agents. Purge yourselves—enter sweat lodges, prostrate yourself before Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious, to witness to your humility. Often warriors would cut out pieces of their own flesh and lay them at the base of that sapling to bear witness to their selflessness.

Then dance—women and men together—dance around that sapling, dance and dance and dance and don’t stop until you fall from physical exhaustion and spiritual plenitude. Dance until the mind numbs and the spirit emerges. Dance into frenzy. Dance into religious ecstasy.

If they would dance, Wovoka claimed Christ would return because he’d heard their prayers and felt their suffering. When he’d come, he’d bring the old ones with him, hence, “the Ghost Dance.” The buffalo would return, and once again the people could take up their beloved way of life. If they would dance, the dust from the new heaven and the new earth would swallow the wasicu, the white people. If they would dance, their hunger would be satiated, their thirst assuaged, their sadness comforted.

“The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine,” says James Mooney, “is that the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery.” It was that simple and that compelling a vision.

As a white Christian, I am ashamed to admit that in the summer of 1890, the desperation of Native people, fueled by poverty, malnutrition, and the near death of a culture, created a religion that played a disturbing role in the massacre at Wounded Knee.

It’s easy for many of us to read the opening two verses of Psalm 42 if we’ve never felt the thirst David is talking about. But it’s helpful for me, a white Christian, to know the story of the Ghost Dance, to understand how thirstily Native people looked to a God who had seemingly left them behind. They were dying, spiritually and physically.

That’s why the thirsty four-leggeds here would make sense to Native people—why, back then, they would have understood the opening bars of David’s song.

What’s at the bottom of this lament is nothing less than God’s apparent absence.

When contemporary Christianity turns excessively therapeutic and promises something Disney-like, something smilingly insipid, lines like these can be read as if they were nothing more than words. But humankind has all too abundant a history.

I’m not at all thankful for the story of the Ghost Dance, or even of David’s own desperation recorded here in this memorable psalm. But I am comforted in the knowledge that when my bootless cries seem to disappear into the wide-open spaces of the plains where I live, I know I’m not the first to feel abandoned.

The gift of grace in the near despair of the opening lines of Psalm 42, or so it seems to me, is, once again, that neither you nor I nor the person down the street suffering far more than we are is ever really alone.

What the record shows

 

World War II vets are almost all gone now, as is, some might say, their spirit and service. We do well to remember them, and the horrors of the war they fought. 

A friend of mine sent me a mime a few days ago--about a dozen pictures from World War II, each of them accompanied by a startling fact about that war. Several concerned what is now often called Germany's "Eastern Front." Historians often claim that the Wehrmacht never really recovered from immense losses they took from the Russian bear. Numbers were beyond imagination. Here are a few of the pics--and the shocking facts.

 Four out of every five Germans killed in World War II died on the Eastern Front.

The Siege of Stalingrad resulted in more Russian deaths (military and civilian) 
than the United States and Britain sustained, combined, in all of World War II. 

Only 20 percent of the males born in the Soviet Union in 1923 survived the war. 

The mortality rate for Russian POWs in German camps was 85 percent.

Total casualties for World War II totaled between 50 - 70 million people, 
80 percent of which came from only four countries - Russia, China, Germany and Poland.  Over 50 percent of the casualties were civilians, with the majority of those being women and children. 

One can't help but wonder about the Ukraine today. The carnage simply continues and will, one can safely assume, until the Russians or the Ukrainians simply decide there has been enough destruction and death.

These withering reminders of death in war show both sides of the war in the Ukraine know a whole lot more about death and destruction, more than we do. 

Big (and interesting) day today

Look, if you ask me, the whole mess begins with a candidate for President of these United States who, after being told he lost the Presidential election, simply refused to accept the truth, then deliberately stirred a pot of falsehood, and now has seduced millions of cultic true-believers who follow him blindly, or so it seems. "Stop the Steal" might well have been the most pernicious phrase of our time. It is and was and forever will be a lie. We all know who chartered it, who perpetuated it, and who still rides the following he created four years ago.

Start there. With a lie. And that millions believed it. That's where this chaos caught flame.

Today is just another manifestation of the festering scourge that lie created. Today, a truly historic day in American history, Donald Trump's lawyers--he has battalions of them--will argue this: while the 14th amendment makes clear that no "official of the government" can hold office if at any time he or she was once part of an insurrection. Trump's boys--and this time they are males- will argue, among other things, that Trump wasn't an officer of the government; he was the President.

What they want--and what millions of Trumpsters also want--is Trump's name on the Colorado ballot. They want him viable where some have ruled, following the 14th amendment, that he isn't.

If you back up a minute, it's hard not to identify a little irony here. Trump pledged to the pro-life crowd that he'd see to it that Roe v. Wade came tumbling down. That's what he promised, and that's what he delivered. He did so with three Supreme Court justices (amazing tally, by the way--his four years in office gave him the opportunity to name three new justices), justices from a school of constitutional interpreters called "originalists," who claim the only standard they use to interpret the constitution is to read what the words say, not adduce what the idea might have said were the signators around today: no playing fast and loose with the truth, in other words. One doesn't interpret the constitution; one reads what it says.

All three of his appointees are "originalists" or "textualists." They don't like to mess around with what's there, which means Trump's fate is in the hands of three of his appointees, all of whom believe in taking the text of the constitution at its word, not in interpreting it to mean, for instance, that the President really isn't an "officer," when 99 percent of the American people would understand he sure as heck is.

One might well expect that Trumps' three justices rule against his lawyer's determination that the line has to be interpreted--did it really mean Donald J. Trump? after all, the amendment was written up when there were tons of Confederates still ready, willing, and able to serve their states and nations. The Prince of Orange certainly isn't a reb. But that's interpretation. No go, say the originalists he gave the court.

(snicker, snicker)

But then, they're conservative (which is why they were nominated and others weren't). They're Trump appointees, and he's made it clear that he thinks they're great justices (which is Trump talk for "you better come through!"). 

Their decision-making is going to be far, far more interesting than what they rule, because the likelihood of their taking Donald Trump's name off any state's ballot is slim and none, as they say). There might well be a full-bore insurrection in the U. S. of A if they'd rule against the Orange man. It's really unlikely that they'd rule for Colorado and keep him off the ballot. How they say what they do is the lede here for sure.

Because John Roberts has an immense problem on his hands. Trump's three facsimile justices clearly create the perception that the court is just another branch of politics in America (they were appointed because of their politics!). That idea is disaster to the court. If the Supremes are to be what the constitution itself appointed (no, appoints) them to be, they may not be political. They have to render truth, unbiased. That's tough anytime, but it's really tough when the nation is at war with itself. 

Just remember, we wouldn't be here--no, siree--if our ex-President did originate falsehood, didn't determine that he was robbed by a crooked political machine that pre-determined the results of the 2020 election.

That's not true, he knew it, as did Fox News and America's mayor--I'm not so sure about the Pillow guy.

Trump is like no other President in the history of the nation. He's one for the books. And today, more of his story--and ours--will be written. Stay tuned. 

I'm guessing the court will rule against its own better judgment and let the dirty work--getting rid of Donald J. Trump--up to us, the people. 

We'll have to vote him out. We must.

Let me gloat!!!

"According to a new poll from CNN, a majority of Americans want to see a verdict in the Jan. 6 case before they vote in the election. It’s vitally important that we find out whether the former president did what we all saw him do on television or not." Jimmy Kimmel Live just last night.

Pardon my gloating, but our side so rarely notches clear and indisputable wins that when we do—and trust me on this one: yesterday we did!—it calls for a morning full of joyous expletives, or if you’re a Calvinist, at least a few well-aimed exclamation points! Let the fun begin!

The prince of Republican politics, Rep. Mike Johnson, had a bad day. Just for the record, so did the King. For those of us on the often silent, truth-and-goodness side, we couldn't have done better.

First, this sad and silly determination to impeach Joe Biden's border czar, Mr. Mayorkas. Regardless of what you feel about the Biden administration's policies on the border, Mayorkas would have been--and still may be, or so that pillar of righteousness, Marjorie Taylor Greene promises--impeached. That's never happened before in the history of the republic, a man or woman tossed from office, not for "high crimes and misdemeanors" but because the wholly Trumpian Republicans had determined it would be fun to hold hearings for week after week, scoring points with the Orange Man's throng. They finally brought the thing to a vote yesterday, and, lo and behold, two Repubs voted against it, thus defeating the motion.

Thus was this pet issue the non-wokers have used for months soundly defeated, and, what may be worse, the child prodigy of the religious right, Mike Johnson, got mud all over his sweet face because the golden rule for any Speaker of the House is that he or she should never, ever bring a vote to the floor that he doesn't know ahead of time he's going to win. The fact is, the Democrats could have pantsed him right there in the House Chamber and the embarrassment couldn't have been greater. 

For a young man who claimed Jesus himself told him to take the reigns of the House  Republicans, I can't help but wonder if the Speaker wasn't listening to Jesus when he should have been counting votes.

And there was more, much more. The long-awaited ruling on Donald Trump's bonzo claims about immunity for a president or ex-president was finally handed down. All of those from my side of the political divide claim it's brilliantly written and argued, and that in all likelihood the Supremes, a nine-person gang stacked with Trump appointees, won't even bother considering it, given the decided rulings of the three-judge appellate that heard the case a month or so ago. 

Trump lost. Sing  it from the mountain tops! Trump lost! He sure as heck did. He was arguing that he couldn't be held libel for anything because, after all, he was king, the holy ruler of his kingdom. Three judges--all women!!--said "bullshit." And that ended that, or so we hope. What fun! What a day!

And more. A perfectly reasonable right-wing, conservative Senator from Oklahoma--need I say no liberal hot bed--worked feverishly with a Democratic sidekick to come up with something to end the madness at the country's southern border. By all accounts, it promised things to the American public that clearly indicated this deal was brokered, things most Democrats would have real trouble buying. Nonetheless, these senators did it--they created something both sides could live with. In other words, they did what people send reps to Washington to do.

Alas, the word from the Orange was that he'd just as soon solve the border problem himself. Thusly, his minions caved, claimed it wasn't tough enough for the right-wing gunslingers, and threw Senator Langford, from Oklahoma, under the bus--he's already been tossed out of his state's Republican party.

Madness. But then, what else might one expect from Marjorie Taylor Green and Ted Cruz? Madness. Chaos.

Not to be seen as nay-sayers, the Republicans then brought a bill to the floor of the House, something meant to fund Israel and make them look good. The Demos, and a number of hard-right Repubs--killed that one too. The Dems claimed the bill was a ruse to cover Republican no-vote on the compromise bill hammered out painfully and signed off on by the President, a bill that would have changed our policy on the border, funded Ukraine and Israel, the bill the Repubs dumped because they want the Orange Man to do the job once he becomes the American potentate, assuming he will, of course. 

Let me count the ways. Yesterday, the Republicans lost two major attempts at legislation, embarrassingly too, and a load of kryptonite was delivered to Superman's castle in Florida.

Yesterday was a good day!!!!

The terror within

It's elusive like the wind. It takes over your life--you can hardly stand or sit or try to move; there are times when it's barely there, when you think finally it's retreated to a someplace from which I hope to God it'll never creep out again.

For three months now, I've lived with searing pain that starts at the top of my left leg and runs down to my toes like a hot wire.  This morning it's defeating; it screams no matter what position I attempt, whether I stand or sit or try to walk to the other side of the room. It's as real as my hands, my fingers. It stays in my leg, but I'm not me when it burns.

It's phantom-like, never quite the same, differs, day to day, in intensity and even position. Sometimes all I have to do is sit here awhile at the keyboard and, almost politely, it leaves--a goodly fraction of it anyway. Sometimes it lays siege to everything that will happen. It's indomitable. Pain pills quite honestly seem of little consequence. I've had epidurals twice now, but this morning, it's as if whatever evil spirit is in me sits back in the recesses of my nerve endings and, without a dime's worth of pity, turns up the heat.

Sometimes I wonder--I can't help it!--whether it's actually there, whether I've made it such a disarming force that it's created its own reality. Every morning, I wake up, sit still in peace-and-quiet and try to determine exactly what degree of burn it will bring. Slowly, I swing my legs out of bed, as if trying to let the pain sleep. I sit there for five minutes trying to talk the devil into grace, then, carefully, I pull on socks first, then a sweat pants, then, this morning, a sweatshirt. I get to my feet tenuously, expecting an attack; but If I'm blessed, I can stand without significant pain. I swing my body away from the bed and take my first step. Immediately I reach down with my right hand to soften it's return because I can't help believing it will be there.

But will it? I may be programming my body to tell me it's there. I act as if it is before it is. I'm its victim, even in its absence I am its victim. I'm so terrified that it will appear that it does. Is all of this in my head and not my back? Will I ever be able to imagine that first step entirely pain-free? How much of my morning hasn't been victimized by the dreaded terrorist pain has become? Do I tremble beneath it extremes even when it's not there? Am I that much its victim?

Pain, like memory itself is shadowy, never quite under control. Memory is conditioned by pain. I come from a rich familial tradition of hypochondriacs. To what extent is all of this even real? I can't point to a moment when it began. There was no fall, no sudden movements that set off the fireworks. There has been no origin. 

An MRI says I have a bulging disk. It may help to know that, but it does nothing to relieve the pain. My eyes don't work well right now, and if a cop would ask me to walk a straight line, I'd be headed off to station. It's something of a wonder that I haven't fallen yet. My balance isn't gone, but it's obviously wounded--is all of that the meds I'm taking? I swallow pills by the handful. 

I've been awake now for more than a half hour. Right there behind my right glude a hot wire, maybe 150 degrees, just enough to burn but not sear. The exacting current it creates runs down the back of my leg to my knee, where, right now, it stops and pools. Soon enough, it will spill down into my calf and create pain that's akin to a charlie-horse.

I've become its victim. It simply dominates. 

Now I'll go upstairs, grab some cereal in a cup and come back down. Two trips on stairs. Not fun. Thank the Lord for handrails. 

In eight days I'll see a specialist. I may go under the knife. 

I've come--well, painfully--to realize something, just a bit, of what it might be like to give up--the fight seems too unwinnable. 

Maybe that's a good thing--I mean, to know what I know.

Maybe. But it's come at a cost.  

Sciatica--sounds like a horror movie. It can't help thinking it is.

Fake News. 1964

 

Fannie Lou Hamer

Seems to me you have to cut LBJ some slack on this one. He didn't ask to be President. Didn't run for it. Came into to the Oval Office when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November of 1963, and he, Lyndon Baines Johnson, from Texas in fact, suddenly became President, leader of a grieving nation split like a ripe muskmelon over civil rights.

You've got to cut him some slack because if he's known for anything today it's for signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as expanding the reach of the New Deal by declaring a "War on Poverty." He was no punch-in-the-mouth conservative, even though by nature and upbringing he was. LBJ was a progressive in every sense, despite the fact that he was raised in rural Texas, where such progressive-ness was something of a curse. 

While all of that is true, the Fannie Lou Hamer story makes him look like a skunk, worse, a racist skunk. He wasn't. Hold on to that fact. 

To say that Fannie Lou Hamer came up through the ranks would be overstatement. Born dirt poor in Mississippi, her daddy a sharecropper, she was picking cotton when she was six years old, The baby of a family of 20 kids, she quit school when she was 12. Had to. Cotton needed picking.

She was no school girl when all of this went down. She was 45 years old in 1962, when she attended a voting rights workshop in rural Mississippi run by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee--or SNCC, whose purpose was to champion human rights for black folks like Fannie Lou Hamer. 

Most white folks--even up north, even my dad--thought SNCC was a wretched nest of communists. 

But that meeting changed Fannie's life, seriously. I know--that's the kind of line people use all the time--"it changed her life." But I'm not lying, and she told people as much forever after. What Fannie Lou Hamer discovered at that SNCC meeting was that, in Mississippi at least, people who couldn't vote weren't counted human. 

At the 1964 Democratic Convention, Fannie and her SNCC friends raised hell. They were determined to take a place at the convention with the Mississippi Democratic Committee, and they weren't subtle. They barged in and told the all-white state delegation that, damnation! they were people too. The Convention tried to broker some peace by arranging for them to speak. One of the speakers was a firebrand preacher named Martin Luther King; another was this sharecropper's daughter, Fannie Lou Hamer. 

Now Lyndon Baines Johnson was scared his Southern constituents would leave him like a dead deer in a ditch if the American people would hear Fannie's speech, specifically her story because it wasn't at all pretty. One night a year or so before, Fannie and her friends were dragged from a bus, arrested and jailed in a little Mississippi town, where they then got beat up badly by the cops who'd arrested them. They'd been assaulted because they were Black--and they wanted to vote. All of that hardened her steel: "I was sick and tired," she used to say, "of being sick and tired."

LBJ figured her telling her story before the nation would so embarass and infuriate his white Southern Democrats that he could lose 'em. He could not let Fannie speak. He had to keep her still.

This part is forever worth telling. The only way the President of the United States could keep American people from hearing Fannie Lou was to call a Presidential news conference. So the networks obligingly cut away from Fannie's appearance on the floor of the convention. He had no news--well, he had fake news--so he told America on all the networks that it was nine months since the death of President Kennedy, the nine-month anniversary of the assassination. That was the whole ball of wax. Even to day, it ranks as the most useless Presidential speech in American history, real fake news.

So Fannie Lou got no nation-wide audience, and the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson passed landmark legislation for justice and equality in the land. But LBJ pushed along a war he didn't start in Southeast Asia and declined to run for President in 1968, when the country was even more fractured.

And Fannie Lou? Once the networks discovered they'd been conned, they saw to it that Fannie Lou lit up the screens all over all week long. Later, her hard work for voting rights gained her an armful of honorary degrees, and when she died, in 1977, she was buried right there in Ruleville, Mississippi, her hometown.

What's inscribed on her gravestone is pure poetry: "I got sick and tired of being sick and tired." 

Sunday Morning Meds — Psalm 42

“As the deer pants for streams of water, 

so my soul pants for you, O God.”

I’m not sure what I’m about to say is instructive or merely sensational, but one can die from thirst in four days, even if all you’re doing is praying.

 At the end of my career, classrooms were strewn with water jugs in all shapes and sizes, some monstrous. Students toted them everywhere. Even in church, in the middle of a sermon, millennials of all ages take out bottle and grab a swig as if the numbers on their internal clocks tick dangerously close to 92 hours. I just don’t get it—but I’m not of their generation.

 I’m guessing none of us—the heavy drinkers included—know the extremity of the opening line of Psalm 42, but then neither do I. I can’t remember a time in my life when. . .

 Wait a minute. I used to bale hay. Just about every memory haying is in the barn, where, by noon, temperatures would soar in dusty, cob-webbed corners of ancient hay mows.

 Today, close to sixty years later, I start buying lemonade come June. Often, I chug it, even though I haven’t bucked a bale in half a century. I remember baling hay whenever I drink lemonade. I remember slipping wet quart jars out of insulated paper bags, screeching off lids, and chugging cold lemonade right through a dozen ice cubes.

 Still, only a few of us know the extremity of the simile here—of thirst that rages into outright panting. And I’m not among them. I’ll never forget pouring down ice cold lemonade in a hay mow, but I was nowhere near dying, even though at twelve I may have thought so and probably acted like it.

 We don’t know that David wrote Psalm 42, but some believe he did; what’s more, some like to think he wrote it when his son, Absalom, was threatening his father’s life. Whether or not that’s true, the heft of the psalm’s opening simile has little to do with our not packing a thermos. Water jugs have nothing to do with Psalm 42.

 What David is saying—if indeed he is the author—is that he passionately thirsts after God because God seems nowhere to be found. That’s the kind of thirst at issue.

 On a particularly dark day for us not all that long ago, we took a walk around town. When we passed some houses of people we knew, I couldn’t help but recount the troubles each of those families were going through too. Maybe it was my problems that made me calculate tribulations—I don’t know. But I did, sadly. Racked up other people’s problems as if to take the edge off mine perhaps.

 I’d just read a little from Calvin, specifically a line in Book I of the Institutes: “Without certainty of God’s providence life would be unbearable.”

 Certainty is one fine blessing, but not everyone gets it. That night, I was a lot less confident than Calvin.

 Psalm 42, long a favorite of many, is all about chugging certainty even in desperation, about knowing God is there, even when we’re sure as heck he’s not. That wonderful passage from Isaiah is a heavenly promise; the story from Acts does nothing but bring smiles. But Psalm 42 is the gut-wrenching plea of a man who finds himself without.

The thirst here is for nothing in a jug, for something a whole lot more than lemonade. The thirst here is for living water in the parched soul of someone who’s wandering in a desert where there’s nothing more than hot sand.

 A lot of folks know that thirst, even David the King, David the poet, David the man closest to God’s own heart. Even he knew what it meant to pant.

It’s always nice to remember we aren’t alone, isn’t it? It seems to me that’s the blessing of Psalm 42.

Miillie's darling little memoir

Seems to me that if you lived anywhere close to Mildred Armstrong Kalish--call her "Millie," why don't you?'--life was good, even when it wasn't. What shines in Little Heathens, her glorious memoir about rural Iowa during the Depression is, well, Millie. What makes this book a wonder is Mildred Armstrong Kadish herself. Millie makes life shine. Millie is the story here.

The book is astonishing, a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I'm not aware of its record of publication, but once it was out Little Heathens found its way to the desk of Elizabeth Gilbert, who reviewed books the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Ms. Gilbert, most obviously, went all giddy over Little Heathens, and, whoever makes such choices determined to spread Gilbert's review essay over the entire front page. 

Let me step in here. That's where I ran into those Little Heathens, and I was dumbstruck. Ms. Gilbert's delighted review came as a shock, not because I thought her reactions were overblown--I hadn't seen the book--but that a book that covered material Gilbert said it did somehow found its way to the front page  of Times Book Review seemed impossible. From what the review said, this Mildred Armstrong Kalish wasn't a whole lot different from your and my Aunt Mabel, a woman with a string of stories she's learned to tell delightfully--or soberly--stories about--hold on to something now--rural Iowa during the Depression.

Any landed family in Iowa had, in 2007, an aunt and uncle who could do nothing less than entertain--once you got them going--on the perilous beauty, the deadly fun of the thirties on the farm. I didn't belong to that class, but I married into it. If I knew Depression-era farm stories, I heard them from my father-in-law or two writer friends, Stanley Wiersma and Jim Heynen, who weren't quite that old but absolutely loved spinning beloved old farm yarns. 

So I bought Little Heathens, loved it, passed it along to my wife, who loved it, and found herself in it, even though her mother was Millie Kalish's age and had many similar memories, memories she shared occasionally with a wholly different spin--my mother-in-law wasn't so greatly taken with her childhood farm experience. 

Little Heathens doesn't say as much about poverty as it does about learning to make do. Little Heathens only incidentally talks about farm foreclosures because, as she honestly says, difficult discussions weren't hammered out where the kids could hear them. And this should be said too--Mildred Armstrong Kamish was born with a sweet aversion to the dark side. 

Besides, as she says, the Armstrongs were "land poor," in short, they had no money, but they never lacked for meat and potatoes. And that's one of the absolute glories of this memoir of hers: she recounts in exacting (and loving) detail how the family got by, what they wore, what they planted, how they harvested. There's more than you'll ever want to know about making head cheese, about the magic of family when teamwork was their means of survival.

Listen, Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, is a wonderful book that deserved the ink it received from the New York Times Sunday Book Review. It's a ball, and dream, a blessing. A year or so later, She didn't write it until she was in her eighties, and she was 84 when it was published.  A year or so later, she  won Iowa's Emerging Author Award. 

But there are some loose ends. Millie grew up with a father. He was "banished," it seems, for some unholy reason. She doesn't talk about that, doesn't investigate either. Some readers--me, among them--can't help thinking it strange she simply refuses to know why.

But then the Mildred Armstrong Kalish of Little Heathens would deliberately and even naturally stay a room away from the kind of talk about a father who was, in her life, quite literally never there.

And there's just one line at the end of this wonderful book that furrows an eyebrow. At the end of the book, she confesses that her sister Avis, who experienced the very same Depression-era farm life, inherited the same genes and DNA, hated that same farm childhood and made it a point in her life never to return. 

Some loved the years and the place where Mildred Armstrong was reared. Some were forever scarred. 

Mildred loved it, and, trust me, should you choose to read Little Heathens,  you'll love it too and want her for a neighbor. She shines like an Iowa sky on a bright summer morning. Blind spots and all, it's a wonder-filled book.