Light and Life -- a story ii

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

"Maybe Ellerbroek's right, honey," she told me. "Maybe we can be a blessing."

A blessing's one thing, I thought. This one'll take a miracle.

*

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. 

But then, who knows? Maybe someday I'll run the store. Stranger things have happened.

*

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. 

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.

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.

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."

In the way he says it, I feel this blade across my neck, and I figure Shari feels it too.

"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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

*

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.

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.

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.

"Why don't you get married?" I say, just getting it right out there in front of both of us. "I don't understand."

"You got Dad in you," she says. "So do you," I tell her.

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.

"Te1 1 me," I say.

"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.

"It is my business," I tell her. 11You1re my sister." "Shuttup and eat," she says.

It's a Saturday, but Kenny's off working somewhere, making a delivery.

"You never go to church, do you?" I said, this big glob of sandwich right between us.

11What1s ln me for faith is between me and God," she says, "not you or Dad or Mom or anybody else."

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.

"I1m going to have to tell Mom something," I said to her.

"When I get back, she'll want to know about you."

"Easy enough," Sally says. "Tell her we"re all fine."

"Are you?" I said.

"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."

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.

"He"s screwed up my life," she says.







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.

"How/d he ever hurt you?" I said.

"You/re a tail-ender, Arlan. You don/t know what it was like to be first in 1 ine, breaking ground."

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.

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.

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.

"Tell me, Sally," I told her. "I don/t care about Mom or Dad. I got to know myself. Tell me."

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."

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.

"What do you write?" I said.







"Ask her," she said. "She knows.11 "I didn't know you wrote her." "She does."

"I'm sorry," I said.

Both of us watched a gul I float by and beg for popcorn.

"I wrote her already last spring that I enrolled Bryant in a Christian school," Sally says. "I wrote that. It wasn't easy.

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

I didn't know what to say.

"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?"

The beach was ful I of people, but we couldn't have been more alone.

"You send Bryant there for her sake?" I said. "Is that why you dld i t?11

She looked at me as If she hated me. 11You.are so much like

Dad," she said.

11Te l l me ," I sa i d.







"The only difference between us--between him and me--is that he thinks he knows why he does things. I don/t.11

Maybe I was asking for myself only right then, I don/t know. "Sally, you still pray?" I said.

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.

"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

11 Hey, Mom," the boys ye1 1 ed from above. 11 Look ,·a here."

11That/s all, Sally," I said. "I just had to know."



*

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.

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,






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.

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.

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."

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.

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."

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."

hDo you love him, Mom, or are you scared of him?" I said.

Light and Life - i

A story for lent.

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.

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.

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
Journal 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

*

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.

"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."

"Sure," I said. I'd tried it once when we carried some ten- dollar bags of trail mix we thought hunters might buy.

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.

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.

"You can buy everything here, can't you?" I tell him.

We're looking at dried apples right then--flat, donut-shaped things that feel like soft rubber when you bite them.

"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."

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.

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?"

I'd always figured Kenny was born in California.

"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."

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 boy, I wished I hadn't.

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."

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.

"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."

I looked at him strangely, I suppose, before he busted out laughing.

I guess I'd never thought of Kenny in the same way I'd thought of Sally--as someone who couldn't go home.

*

At Fort Belmont

 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

State Champs!!

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. 

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.

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 Blizzard Voices, 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.

Listened isn't exactly the right word either--just plain read 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, The Great Blizzard of 1888. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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." 

So the high school's take on Blizzard Voices 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 Blizzard Voices was perfectly masterful.

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."

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." 

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.

Congratulations!!!

Do Process

“Why are you downcast, O my soul?

Why so disturbed within me?

Put your hope in God,

for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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?”

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.

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.”

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.

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?

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.

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].

Sounds like a preacher friend of mine, talking to me over a beer years ago.

Sounds like Job. Sounds like a lot of us.

. . .but not forgotten

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 My Antonia. 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 My Antonia 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

No matter, like Jim, who tells the story, most readers love her zest. Besides, the hired girls are great and sexy dancers.

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. 

In Denver, he was not to be found. Tony Shimerda was pregnant and abandoned.

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. 

You can't help but love the woman. And, well, hate this scum, Larry Donovan. 

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.

Tell you what--take a car tour through the whole wide country where Willa Cather remembers her childhood so fondly.

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. 

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."

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. 

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.

Willa's world

Let's be clear about this. In Willa Cather's most beloved novel, My Antonia, a pure celebration of the beauty of the world of her childhood, she offers some intriguing complexities, specifically in gender or sexuality.

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.

Once back in New York, Jim Burden drops by "our narrator's" apartment and drops off a manuscript. That manuscript, "our narrator" says, is My Antonia. 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?

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

In the years that I taught "The American Novel," My Antonia 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.

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?" 

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."

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.

Cather herself appears to have created some of those questions in this wonderful novel. 

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.

Playing the numbers

Let's do the numbers.

Donald J. Trump won the Iowa Republican caucus going away, a landslide victory, 98 of the 99 counties, amassing a vote total that smashed records. No one had won a Presidential caucus in Iowa by 30 points. He took home 30 delegates by winning 51% of the vote. Nothing like it, ever.

[For the record, Trump won Sioux County, where I live, with 45% of the total; DeSantis had 31%--and quit the race; others, including Nikki Haley, only notched 24%.] 

In New Hampshire, a conservative state with a populace notably without the thousands of evangelicals in Iowa, once again Trump won, this time over a field significantly diminished, taking home 36,000 votes more than Nikki Haley, the only real opposition candidate left standing. To be noted: more votes were cast in the New Hampshire Presidential Primary--318,000--than the earlier record set in the 2020 Democratic Primary-- 288,000. 

In Iowa, Trump won despite losing the backing of two significant Republicans, Governor Kim Reynolds, as well as Bob Vander Plaats, generally assumed to be the voice of the Iowa's Christian Republicans. In New Hampshire, the highly popular John Sununu campaigned hard for Nikki Haley.

No matter. Trump took home all the bacon.

In South Carolina, a state widely perceived as far to the right of either New Hampshire or Iowa, Trump crushed his former Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, taking home all the delegates and winning 60% of the total vote. All this despite the fact that Ms. Haley had been the state's own highly popular, two-termed governor.

For anyone who has watched anything surrounding American politics, Donald J. Trump, the twice-impeached ex-President, swimming in upcoming court dates, a man who now bills himself as a martyr to the MAGA cause--whatever that is--seems the inevitable Republican candidate, although he's no more "Republican" than I am. The numbers don't lie. He will be the MAGA candidate.,

But, if you believe the newscasters I listen to, the numbers don't lie about other things either. There was swirling snow and cold the night of the Iowa Caucuses after all, and maybe tons of people didn't show up because they knew the outcome of the whole affair before it even began. On the other hand, maybe scads of people didn't show up because they weren't at all interested or thrilled. One way or another, here in Iowa, only 15% of the registered Republicans caucused that night--15%.

Thusly, let me (and my leftie friends) spin the numbers. In Iowa, Donald J. Trump won the caucus hands down, but he did so with only 51% of the 15% Republican voters. Hmmmmm. Do I smell a weakness? In New Hampshire, 43% of the Republicans in the state who voted didn't vote for him. 

It's the fuel Nikki Haley is running on--with some significant financial backing too, of course. But it's the only faith we Dems have to hold on to right now amid Trump's blowouts, and MSNBC is full of that kind of talk--that even though blitzkrieging Trump is rolling over whatever opposition attempts to break his hold, there's more to the numbers than meets the eye.

It's all we've got right now. But then everything changes if the two candidates that seem destined to be America's choice in November, aren't. Could that happen? You bet. 

Somewhere in the area of 65% of the American populace would vote for Bullwinkle rather than the Orange Man, whether or not he was behind bars. The true-blue MAGAS make a ton of noise, but they're a shrinking percentage of the American people. 

Numbers don't lie, but they can be spun. 

Keep the faith!!

Home (2)

This is a new thing. I knew my phone was touted as being able to shoot pictures at night, but I'd never really tried it. By the time darkness fell, that placid orange pond did its Jekyll-Hyde stuff and turned angry. I have no reason to call this angry really, but the roar outside demanded attention and made talking tough.

Once it was obvious the camera would do as it was told, I kept snapping, outside. I can't help but think there is some kind of other-worldliness in these shots, but they're fascinating--and totally wrought by the phone, a Google Pixel 8.

Lest you think the phone decided this night shot would be better in a dusting of snow, it fell that evening, just a little, like icing. 

Not to be outdone, here's a night shot done the old-fashioned way--with the camera. To my eyes, this one looks more "natural." 

 

When morning lit up the sky on Saturday, the lake had calmed, and the dawn the sky offered wasn't generous with color, even though I thought there would be an explosion way out there somewhere above Michigan. Saturday was the exact opposite of Friday, when a clear sky suffered only a far away belt of thick clouds. This morning, there was only a faraway belt of clear sky beneath huge cloudiness.

So when the sun finally appeared, it had just a tiny stage before it slipped away for the day. 

But Sunday was glorious, as Sunday should be, even before the sun appeared. 

On Sunday, some massive freighter came by, faster than I might have thought. It seemed to me that he'd be right in the eye of the dawn when the sun rose across the waves. I thought about going back in the house for my big lens, but something told me not to feature it--a bigger lens could have. Something told me that massive ship was only an ornament to the heavenly palette laid out in glory before me.

Here's the camera's version, offering a good sense of the lake's mood.

But what the phone offered created a shot that topped the weekend. This one, IMHO, is really quite memorable. I'd like you to believe it's strength comes from having been shot by a photographer who knows what he's doing.

Nope. Just blessed with good fortune: I was there at the time. All I had to do was squeeze a bit and something of what we witnessed got itself into my camera and my phone. 

A couple more Sunday mornings here:

Just gorgeous--the sky I mean.

So with limited mobility--I still can't get around well--and about a 50' beach to work from, I still had a great time. Even better than sitting there with a camera was, well, sitting there. You can't come away from a visit home, on the lake, without feeling somehow humbled by the presence of a something we call God.

It was a great weekend--and that's not counting the blessings of family. Really good to be home again.

Home?

I went home last weekend, a bit of a misnomer because I never lived on the beach when I was a boy, and while the neighborhood is where I grew up, I haven't really lived there--save a two-year sojourn, 1980-82--since 1966. You do the math.

So whether or not I can call home "home" anymore, we'll let the sociologists determine. Meanwhile, I'm not shying away from saying it because it rises to my heart without apology: "I went home last weekend, home to Wisconsin"--and yes, we bought cheese, sausage, and beer. 

That cabin above is the place we rented, newly remodeled--and splendidly, I might add--but small and ancient, by cottage standards. I'm sure it's been there for years, but it was greatly comfortable and, well, downright gezellech (a Dutch word--I'm not sure of its spelling) which means just plain fingers-laced-across-the-belly goed. 

As you can see, our little abode stands right smack dab on the lakefront, so close that a line of gargantuan rocks, piled four feet high just a bit east, kept the cabin from floating out to sea some time ago when the lake was high. 

I started messing around with photography when I still lived "home," so it's fair to say I've been taken by what kind of beauty can be captured in a camera for a long time. A cottage on the lake let me greet the dawn--and get what I could of sheer beauty through a lens. 

We arrived back home in the middle of a beautiful April day--February to be exact-- temps in the 50s, windless for the most part, clear skies, so sweet a day that looking out over Lake Michigan the next morning didn't seem a whole lot different than watching the sun rise on a fair-to-middlin' farm pond. At dawn, it seemed only as if some almighty hand had spilled orange juice over most of the world.

I started messing around with photography when I still lived "home," so it's fair to say I've been taken by what kind of beauty can be somehow captured in a camera for a long, long time. A cottage on the lake gave me the opportunity to greet the dawn--and get what I might be lucky to find into a camera. 

All the while I waited that morning for the sun to rise, that dark belt of something or other out there was slowly advancing, east to west, a weather pattern we rarely see. It was notable only because it broke up what might have been an orange sea. And, it offered it's own kind of pleasure. The shot below is with a 150mm zoom lens out. Still, the thing seemed a little ominous, a broad, dark curtain rising, strangely, from the stage floor.

When the sun finally came up--6:30 or so--it had to climb above what now, clearly seemed a cloud bank that suggested--and so said the weatherman--that April would be fleeting for us. February was returning. 

See those rocks at the bottom edge? By later that afternoon, I was happy they were there. Conditions had changed. The big lake was flexing its muscles. 

In a day, we fell back a couple months in weather and charged forward through ten thousand syllables of noise.

***** more "home" tomorrow

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 42

 “These things I remember as I pour out my soul: 

how I used to go with the multitude, leading the procession to the house of God, with shouts of joy and thanksgiving among the festive throng.”

 

Those who don’t know David’s deep sadness in this verse are truly blessed, but I can’t believe there are many.

 

A decade ago or so I took a trip from Sioux City, Iowa, to Billings, Montana, up the Missouri River valley through the magnificent country explored 200 years ago by the Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery.  Much of that territory hasn’t changed dramatically; there are no cities to speak of, and most of the towns are dying and have been for a century or more.  Agriculture reigns throughout that region, even though making a living is just as tough as it ever was.  But the great joy of traveling the Lewis and Clark Trail a century after they did is that so much space, so much grandeur is still there waiting to awe.

           

I left the river and angled through “Indian country” on my way home, stopping at the 125^th anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Little Big Horn, and then visiting a desolate place called “Wounded Knee.”  The whole trip was, for me, an epic journey, resulting in a novel—and more.  I fell in love with territory that keeps me dreaming of a life out there somewhere in the humbling reverie of so much open space and such a big, big sky.  These very words are part of that trip’s legacy.

           

One moment, however, was purely personal and unrelated to history or landscape, a moment in the Black Hills, where the Schaap family vacationed when our kids were kids.  Camping in the Hills was always a joy, the children so young they could spend all day on a beach no larger than a backyard and not complain a mite. 

 

I intended to drive through Center Lake campground, where we always set up our tent.  But when I passed the lodge and store at Sylvan Lake, I was time-capsuled back to a moment when I stood in that very store and watched my two tow-head kids trying to determine which of the little Black Hills curios they were going to lug along home. 

 

The memory was crystal clear, almost a vision--their blonde heads, their innocent indecision, and myself, a young father who knew, honestly, little more than joy and pride and the wide horizon of expectation.  I too, it seemed to me, was an innocent back then.

 

I didn’t go in the store that day, just drove by; but when I came to the Center Lake turnoff a few minutes later, I didn’t go to the campground either but headed in the opposite direction. A visceral grief so profound I almost cried hit me like some unseen Black Hills bison.  

 

Ubi sunt, that grief is called in literature—a grief of soul at the transience of life, of my life and yours.  I know what what ubi sunt is. I taught literature for a lifetime; but that I knew it in a textbook didn’t heal the sad pain that came over me.

 

Today, remembering that moment, I can’t help but think about how much deeper Lakota grief must be for those Hills, the Paha Sapa, because Native memories are so much richer and so much more profound.  That’s another story for another day.

 

David’s lament in Psalm 42 has within it the same profound lament for how things were and how those things are no more.  His may well be the original ubi sunt.

 

Put yourself in a grand memory, a place and time now totally unreachable. Think of the Lakota at Pine Ridge, not that far away, remembering the joy of Paha Sapa.  Think of me turning away from Center Lake. Remember David and that unforgettable mad dance of his before the ark. That’s what’s haunting him, and that’s why he needs God. 

 

As I do.  As you do too.  As all of us do, I think.

Those cliffs at Running Water

 

These magnificent sandstone cliffs along the Missouri are stunning, even gorgeous. To find something like like this in the middle of endless miles of treeless prairie must have seemed a miracle. And in a way, I suppose, it was. This sculpted row of cliffs stand almost militarily above the confluence of the Niobrara and Missouri Rivers, just a bit north and east of Niobrara, NE.

Over on the east side of the river, there used to be a town here, a place called Running Water, which happens to be the English translation of the word "Niobrara," which is Native--Ponca maybe, or Sioux. There still are some homes along the river here, still something of a community. My guess is you could find a half-dozen families who would be more than happy to tell you that you're doggone right there's a community here, been so for years.

But once upon a time, there was almost a port here, more life certainly than you can roust even on a Fourth of July weekend--fishermen, you know. Once upon a time lots and lots of Poncas were around. This is Standing Bear country, after all, the place he stubbornly returned to twice, the second time battling white man's laws to stay (and he won!). 

A bunch of Mormons were here one winter, on their way to Zion, wherever that was going to be. They had real troubles. It was deathly cold. In a story that should be told over and over and over, the Ponca dropped in at the meager winter quarters of those Mormon families and likely saved their lives.

A chap named Albertus Kuypers stepped off a steamer here--in the old days, when steamships still attempted to squeeze up and down the Missouri--and when he did, he motioned to the others, several dozen immigrant Hollanders, who had made a deal on land they must have been anxious to find, just a few more miles up river. He motioned to them and they all shouldered their burdens and walked north and a bit east to a place they eventually called "Friesland." No surprise there. Friesland was where they came from.

They were, in the 1880s, only one of thousands of European immigrant families who wanted out of the old world and a place of their own in the new one. These Hollanders were Dutch Reformed, a particularly righteous bunch; but they also were men and women of some standing in Holland, so, well, dignified that when they began to gather their cows, their men milked in white shirts and ties beneath their bibs, and the women wore some unlikely dresses.

For a time. Then, like all the rest, they got acculturated. The frontier wouldn't stand much pretense. 

But farming in those early years was no picnic, and the weather didn't cooperate--too many years of too little rain. When Kuypers' Hollanders grew weary, they talked of moving to northwest Washington, where, people said, good Dutch people grew watermelons you could lift only with both hands. 

So Kuypers went exploring, took the train up to Whatcom County, Washington, right up there on the Canadian border, where people showed him produce left him slack-jawed. All that ballyhoo back in Dakota wasn't wrong. Abundance was understatement.

When he went back to Friesland, South Dakota, he thought about leaving the place they'd come to when they'd immigrated, thought about it long and hard. When the people looked to him for their futures, he told them he'd decided after much prayer and deep consideration, that they were going to stay in Dakota. They were going to raise more pigs and cattle, rely less on row crops, but they were going to stay.

Friesland, South Dakota, today, is long gone; but I'm sure if you would ask around in Platte or New Holland, you could find a name or two from the bunch that came up from Running Water, looking, like those Mormons, for their own version of Zion.  Some, by the way, parted company with Kuypers and went to Washington anyway.

There are enough old stories here to fill up those gorgeous yellow cliffs, but who'd want to? Those cliffs are here, just as they always have been, even longer than the Ponca, the Yankton, the Frisians, or the Mormons have been. Those beautiful cliffs up over the river have outlived them all,, even though they wear no buffalo coats, even though they're sandstone and change, subtly, but change, every year. 

And the picture?--it doesn't even come close to capturing the beauty. You can't get that kind of immensity in a lens, on a canvas, or a page. Stand there for awhile and it makes you want to dress up like those old Hollanders, makes you want to wear a tie.

Morning Thanks--Ed Kellogg

This is the sky yesterday just a step out of my back door. Whenever jet trails get this showy, I can't help but think something is being communicated--or else the pilots are just being goofy.

I grabbed this shot because of an artist named Ed Kellogg. Once long ago Ed Kellogg spent a semester or two at the college where I used to teach, and did utterly breath-taking work of this world--the emerald eastern edge of the Plains. He didn't just do a painting or two, he kept himself monstrously busy by doing loads of them, most of them, as I remember, landscapes. 

I grew up on Lake Michigan, so coming to the northwest corner of Iowa fifty-some years ago was all new. The terrain, the landscape (I wouldn't have known that word or thought that way when I was 18) was entirely new and interesting. Jackrabbits bounded around--I remember that (they're gone now), and the sun was no stranger--it was much cloudier on the lakefront. Outside at least, things were just plain wide open. From some spots in the country, you could see forever. It was like the lake, another place where sheer expanse makes you feel small--and that was just fine with me.

Ed Kellogg's paintings as I remember--huge canvases sometimes--made perfectly obvious that his time here was just as fascinating to him as this edge-of-the-Plains place had become to me. I'd been a resident for a while by that time, having taken a teaching job some years before. 

To say I loved his work is understatement. It wasn't love that made them so compelling to me, it was the vehemence of their testimony to his recognition that what's out there in the immediate world around me is quite amazing and, at some moments, utterly compelling. I loved how those gargantuan paintings bespoke his awe at a world so different from the world around Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where he and his family lived.

Ed Kellogg showed me how to go speechless at the world around me. That gift was a treasure. 

For years, I've taken a camera along wherever I go (a good bit easier these days with a phone). For years, I've jumped in the car or truck and just left early morning to see what I could see. Thusly, shots like this.

I've got more. Like this from outer space.

And I'm thinking, "Ed Kellogg really ought to see this."

A couple from a year ago, on a little cold trip out to the Santee Reservation in Nebraska. That's where I shot these. Stunning, isn't it?--all that azure slung in a wardrobe that seems plaid, almost Irish. 

The jet trails story goes this way. It seems impossible now, but I couldn't help think that artist Kellogg was overdoing them. "You've got jet trails in every landscape you paint," I told him. "Is there a reason?"

He looked at me with a gritty smile. "It seems they're always there."

I don't know that he's right about that, but I believe him--that they were always there when he was out in the country, measuring the beauty of a landscape he was right then beginning to envision on canvas.

I think of Ed Kellogg on mornings like yesterday, when the sky is ribboned. 

Ed Kellogg helped me to see. He did.

This morning's thanks is for occasional jet trails over a big prairie sky, and for an Artist named Ed Kellogg who helped me see.