Morning Thanks

Garrison Keillor once said we'd all be better off if we all started the day by giving thanks for just one thing. I'll try.

Monday, March 18, 2024

DeSantis and the Death of WOKE


I'm more than a little shame-faced. I'm downright embarrassed, mortified even, at myself and myself alone because I fell for the guy's claptrap. 

One-time Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis blew all kinds of air into the trial balloon by questioning the righteousness of literature and social studies teachers throughout the nation, who he claimed were poisoning minds and souls by spoon-feeding the nation's youth unabashedly WOKE materials, by pushing LGBTQ at them, even "grooming" them for unspeakable things.

And that's not all. He went after librarians. That's right--librarians. It's not  easy to villainize the school librarian, or the peaceable staff downtown. I mean, you've got to go out of your way to make them out to be as depraved as DeSantis wanted to make you believe they were. But he did--and scored some significant results.

And the whole CRT thing, too, clear and present danger, an issue that grew out of some Southern swampy mess that established a clean and clear premise: there is no such thing as racial prejudice in America because here in the land of the free and the home of the brave we took care of all of that with the Civil War. I mean, look at Oprah. 

The monster was fed energetically by concerned parents who looked at their kids' education and found it riddled with ideas they thought way, way, way beyond the pale. It was as if the American public had simply assumed that teachers and librarians weren't lecherous, deranged libs. Doggone it, it was time for parents to take back the classroom and retool it with the values of, say, Donald J. Trump. America needed to arm itself with MAGA to kill off WOKE. Florida, De Santos claimed, was where WOKE went to die. 

And I fell for it. I did. I'm so sorry. I thought DeSantis' WOKE silliness worth fighting.

Nope. According to its own progenitor, the whole thing was a bit of a "false narrative." Not long ago, none other than DeSantis chided the Florida public for going too far with the whole book banning thing, told them to cool their jets, to let up a little because the whole thing was devolving into sheer madness. 

After all, some included the Bible on the list of objectionable books, and the dictionary. DeSantis says some of the objections schools and librarians face are an "abuse of the process" undertaken "to score political points."

Well, he should know.

And I believed the guy, when, dang it, it was all politics.

 Long live WOKE. May MAGA rest in peace

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 42

 


“My soul is downcast within me; 

therefore I will remember you from the land of the Jordan

the heights of Hermon—from Mount Mizar.”

 

 

For a decade at least, just about every Saturday morning I could, I ventured out west into the rolling hills that have formed, centuries ago, along the Big Sioux River, a place where the land opens broadly into a landscape that, like most of the Great Plains, ends only in what seems infinite space.  Literally, there is nothing there.  There’s corn and there’s beans and there’s some grasslands, but nothing is substantially present to fill the frame of a camera lens; and that’s why it’s such a challenge to try. I do what I can to get an angle on a subject that offers very little. We live in fly-over country here, but then I’m a fan or Thoreau: “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself,” he once claimed,  “than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”

 

Some time ago, the New York Times ran a story about Californians leaving the state for the Midwest. When I sent the story to friends, the Times website told me that story was their most-emailed piece that day. Amazing. 

 

And in some ways, terrific.  It would be nice for everyone here if some companies would relocate to the rural Midwest, where wages are dismal and, often, benefits are worse. We could use a financial shot in the arm.

 

But I’m not all that interested in a flood of new residents. I am blessed—I really am—by living in a place where open land is all around, just a farm or two per gravel road. These days, from my own backdoor I can see for miles. 

 

Some people in tall-grass prairie country lament the death of hunting, pheasant hunting specifically. The number of hunters is down, even though the headcount of pheasants, by my estimation, is up--at least I see more out here. Just scared up a half-dozen hens out back yesterday.

 

I’ve always thought Thoreau wasn’t wrong when he claimed that boys (his word) really ought to hunt when they’re young but give it up on becoming men, and that’s why I don’t lament the loss of hunters. But I’ve been one, and I still sometimes long to get out there in the silence. Just the same, I wanted to write a letter to the reporter suggesting that we’d all be better off—even the pheasants—if we all packed cameras instead of 12-gauge pumps.

 

Some Saturdays—lots of them this time of year--the sky, at dawn, is thick with clouds, so thick that I don’t bother going out. When I made a habit of it, cloudy Saturday mornings hurt because I came to need my Saturday morning’s hour-long pilgrimage into open spaces.  Kathleen Norris, in Dakota, makes clear what others have said—that sometimes where there’s nothing, there’s really something.

 

And I say all of this because in the second bout of sadness which David discusses in this psalm—and it’s interesting that 42 doesn’t end with verse six—he is a bit more specific in the means by which he’ll fight the blues. He’ll return—thoughtfully if not physically—to the open land, to the “heights of Hermon.” He’ll go back to the open spaces as an antidote to his weary, downcast soul, because there he can remember God.

 

Honestly, I think I know what he’s talking about. Just a week ago I was all by my blessed self in the snowy country just a few miles east of Glacier National Park. All by myself.  Oh, maybe a horse or gang of deer, but all by my blessed self, and it was a blessing.

 

Snow had just blew in from the far north, chilling everything and leaving an icy glaze over the entire world.  I should learn how better to adjust my camera’s f-stop. 

 

Just the heights of Hermon---the mere memory of standing there all alone, David says, gives life to a weary soul. 

 

I think I know that one.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

An old story, "Anna"



Continued from yesterday. . .

Years have passed since then. Today the church pays a music director to order a Christmas show from some slick Christian catalog out of Texas, but Anna is still teaching Sunday school, and now she has my own three-year-old boy. No one else her age teaches, because kids have a way of forcing early retirements, just as they always did. But there is a smile on Anna's face whenever we drop our son off with her for Sunday school. It's a smile unlike anything we ever saw before on her face, a smile that surprised me at first. And Anna has a permanent now, her curly gray hair curled up tight around her head like any of a dozen other women in church.

Time fills in gaps the way dawn colors a lakeshore landscape. Some things I know now about Anna. I know now that Anna cared for her parents until the day each of them died. I know now that her father was no gentle man to live with-blustery, hardheaded, stubborn as the toughest Hollander. I know now that when he was gone, every Sunday she dressed her mother, set her in the wheelchair, and pushed the old woman to church, even when she knew her mother understood little of the sermon. I know now that giving her life to them was a thankless, blessed job that might have turned anyone's face into something grim, something less than radiant.

I know now that the woman who never married regularly plays grandmother to two little blond-haired boys no older than my own son, two little boys her niece was left alone with when their father ran off with another woman.

Why does she smile that way today, twenty years after a class of fourth-grade boys decided she was much too owly to be a good teacher? Why does my son love her today? Why does he curl around my leg and turn away from her when she talks to him, as if he's embarrassed to have all of her attention himself? Why does Anna smile?

Maybe it's because life is easier for her now, later on in her years. Maybe the privileged burden of her parents' care is there behind her, settled in the pages of her mind like yellowed photographs. Maybe the anxiety of being alone has settled into a firm assurance that all things have worked together for good. Maybe playing grandmother has swelled the limits of her tolerance. Maybe the smile is simply the inherent reward of many years of Christmas programs interspersed annually in a lifetime of quiet selflessness.

Four hundred years ago we reformed the church and stopped canonization, stopped making saints. Maybe it's a shame. Today we don't know how to revere those who give themselves, all of themselves, through us to God. We let them pass on too easily, and we don't elevate them like heroes. After all, what was Abraham to David but a symbol of belief and courage, of faith and promise.

So this is for you, Anna. And this is for me. And this is for our son. And this is for our Lord.

I'm happy you're out of intensive care, and so is my son.

*~*~*~*~*

There's a bit more to the story. When the piece appeared in a magazine I knew some people in the community was published, I hoped my masked name might keep it away from those who would know who this central character is. 

Nope.

A man who grew up not all that far from where I did, took a look, read a few words, and said, "Hey, he's talking about my aunt." That discovery got back to me, and more. No one seemed angry however, although if they had been angry or hurt, I may never have known.

Then, years later, when we were visiting the town where I grew up, the fictional Anna came up to me. I don't know that I had ever spoken to her before in my life. By this time, she was most certainly elderly. I will admit that I wondered what she was going to say, but when it came out, mid smiles, she told me she'd had the whole essay decoupaged and it hung in her bedroom.

I'm happy to say that it seemed to me that "Anna" was a winner.

Friday, March 15, 2024

An old story, "Anna"





If my son, here referred to as three years old, is today well into his forties, the story I'm telling is now more than forty years old, originally published in a magazine that, by my direction, gave the author a made-up name. Why? Because, back then, I was afraid of how the individuals might react, given my going public with their lives. It's a difficult line writers walk when writing stories which "use" characters and situations others might recognize, and I was aware of that with "Anna," because here those characters attended the same church I did. So I hid, or tried to.

But here's the story.

*~*~*~*~*~*  

Anna is out of intensive care now, and I guess that's why I'm saying this. Because it strikes me-now that she has wrestled through a fight with her heart-it strikes me that we are far too good at eulogies. Nice things are always easy to say after the funeral. But today Anna came out of intensive care.

Anna is an organist in our church--self-taught for the most part--and a Sunday school teacher for three or four generations probably. When I was a boy, we feared Anna because her grim face wore no emotion; her lips were locked together in a twist that was neither smile nor frown. We read it as perpetual disgust.

Sunday school programs brought out the worst in her. A hundred kids with lit fuses would shoot around the church sanctuary during practice the night before. "You fourth graders, act your age!"

She would always snap at us. We were sure she had no loving voice in her. When she'd tum to the fifth graders, someone would mimic her for sure. Years later I discovered that Anna created those annual programs.

Anna never married. In a church of families, even kids don't quite know how to take women who don't marry. They're different, and a boy starts recognizing such things about the same time he starts reading the script writing carved into the Communion table at the front of the church he's attended for ten years. Suddenly, it's just there. Fourth-grade boys just figured a woman like

Anna--sour Anna--couldn't get a man. Meanwhile, another Christmas program would come and go.

Halfway through adolescent rebellion, I thought Anna was an icon of the staid, traditional, immovable church of my youth. Fashions arrived and left, but Anna's hair looked forever the same, as if she'd surrendered to being out of time. I swore that the older she grew the slower she played organ, until even the bouncy hymns poked along like the old psalms. And always you'd see the expressionless face up there, lighted by the soft glow of organ light. She chewed gum, not vigorously but quickly, nervously, when she played.
______________________ 

More tomorrow  

Thursday, March 14, 2024

The Tabor House, Tabor, Iowa

The John Tabor House

Religious visions were everywhere in the years preceding the Civil War. Boom towns out west here may have been hell holes for a time, but they were also peopled by starry-eyed believers who claimed their marching orders came from on high.

Tabor, Iowa, sits on a bluff far above the Missouri, the highest point of Fremont County. The place is not in terrific shape today; but Tabor has an epic past, created when fiery abolitionist Congregationalists set up camp here, just across the river from Nebraska. 

The Reverend John Todd House, in town, was a stop on the Underground Railroad in the 1850s, often a port of entry to runaway slaves who weren’t free until they could be protected from slave-holders and vigilante northerners looking to make a buck from substantial bounties. There was money to be made: slaves were property, after all.

In the 1850s, slavery was under attack, and Rev. Todd was a soldier in God’s army.
Truth is, he got into trouble before there even was a Tabor. A discussion about slavery aboard the steamer he came up on became heated. Once other passengers detected an abolitionist, they wanted his scalp. "Shoot him," someone yelled. "Kill him." One idiot told him if it was his choice, he’d straight-up trade the pastor for a mongrel dog and shoot the dog. Todd says he learned later that man was "a minister of the gospel from Missouri."

Both Iowa Congregationalists and Iowa Quakers thought the institution of slavery an abomination. What separated the two faith communities was a commitment to violence. The Quakers said no. Rev. John Todd and his Congregationalists said yes and became a prototype for an abolitionist preacher in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

The manse of the Reverend John Todd sits right on the square in Tabor--don’t expect a palace. But the old house still has an tiny door leading down to a dank basement. John Todd was no more than a shim over five and a half feet tall, so what’s downstairs is more his size, a cave really, not inviting.

But if you stop by, don’t not go downstairs. At one point in time that basement was an armory full of guns for the war he thought about to begin in "Bleeding Kansas."

What's there today? Nothing. No cement floor, just dirt, a humming dehumidifier, random stones, bricks. That cellar was was never meant to be lived in. It was a place to hide when the prairie sky turned foreboding.

At the request of none other than fiery John Brown, who stayed right there in Tabor, Pastor Todd stocked his house full of guns because he simply could not abide the sin of slavery. Slaves, he and his friend John Brown claimed, had a more righteous reason for rebellion than did patriot colonists a century before.

In his own memoir of that era, Todd described himself and what happened this way:

The parson had one brass canon on his haymow, and another on wheels in his wagon shed. He had also boxes of clothing, boxes of ammunition, boxes of muskets, boxes of sabres, and twenty boxes of Sharps rifles stowed away in the cellar all winter.

The preacher took up arms. His eyes had seen the glory.

You'll have to get off the beaten track to find Tabor, and you’ll have to call ahead to to get in the house. Not many Americans stop there anymore, if they ever did.

But the basement still beckons, and the memory of that time and place and the war it begat somehow seems more real when you stand beneath ancient beams on a dirt floor, where once a preacher readied himself for a war that God meant to happen, a war to free the slaves.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

The Man with the Branded Hand


The fact of the matter is, he was a favorite on a circuit of sorts, a circuit of American abolitionist audiences looking for more and more information about and inspiration for the cause. Abolitionists were not without a mission. The crusade they'd created when they signed on had a clear and righteous purpose--they advocated an end to slavery in these United States, and, many of them at least, meant the abolition of slavery to happen not next year or next month, but now.

Oh, my, were they hated. Southerners understood that what was at stake was their wherewithal. Loss of slaves meant loss of property, loss of economy, and loss of power, loss of a culture, loss of a way of life. In the early years of the 19th century, the battles over slavery were but a foretaste of what was to come after Fort Sumter.

But the righteous anger of the abolitionists could not be underestimated. Sometimes, slave-holders saw those dirty, rotten abolitionists wherever they looked, bound and determined to destroy their might and right. So they made laws that made them criminals, thieves when they clandestinely went after the property of slave-holders. 

Which only served to turn up the heat.  

Thus, a circuit of rostrums was created up north, where advocates for freedom would gather to hear people speak of the mission they shared so passionately. And that circuit included this particular man, Jonathan Walker, who became a favorite, not because of his oratorical skills--he was sadly wanting on that score--but because just a few minutes into his SRO presentations, he'd step off the podium and walk through the crowd, his hand open, because there on his palm stood, almost proudly, the scars from his branding--"SS" for slave stealer. 

The man with the branded hand had been a sailor since he was a kid in Massachusetts. In fact, he'd crafted his own ship, which explains why people called him "Captain Jonathan Walker," and, yes he did, he picked up slaves and brought them to freedom, sometime from Pensacola, Florida, where he and his family lived in the 1840s. It was quite simple: he'd be contacted by bondsmen, arrange a time to meet under the cover of darkness, and, this time at least, take passage to the Bahamas, where the good men and women he'd helped shook off the shackles that bound them, the whole bunch more than willing to risk their lives to escape the oppression of slavery. Walker picked them up and brought them to the Bahamas.

When he returned to Florida, he was badly infirm, a victim of sun stroke--it was not a big ship, more of a sloop than a ship. Since a number of slaves had been missing, he was accused of the theft, jailed, beat up, and then, of all things, branded by authorities--with the help of slave-owners--branded on the hand, the branding iron left in place for what seemed forever.

When finally Jonathan Walker recovered, his acclaim as a speaker rose like high seas on the abolitionist circuit, not because his rhetoric soared. By all reports, he wasn't much of a lecturer. What people remembered was those horrible scars on the man's hand, his branding, the "SS."

WELCOME home again, brave seaman! with thy thoughtful brow and gray,
And the old heroic spirit of our earlier, better day;
With that front of calm endurance, on whose steady nerve in vain
Pressed the iron of the prison, smote the fiery shafts of pain!

Or so wrote the Quaker abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, in a dedicatory poem to Jonathan Walker and his righteousness.

Is the tyrant's brand upon thee? Did the brutal cravens aim
To make God's truth thy falsehood, His holiest work thy shame?
When, all blood-quenched, from the torture the iron was withdrawn,
How laughed their evil angel the baffled fools to scorn!

Make no mistake, that branded hand was God's own to the abolitionists. Jonathan Walker had taken up the Lord's mission, after all. When Walker looked in the face of a slave, Whittier says he was looking into the face of Jesus, that very face, Whittier says, many "in blindness" miss entirely, even as they kneel "to a far-off Saviour." 

While the multitude in blindness to a far-off Saviour knelt
And spurned, the while, the temple where a present Saviour dwelt;
Thou beheld'st Him in the task-field, in the prison shadows dim,
And thy mercy to the bondman, it was mercy unto Him!

Upper-case H.

John Greenleaf Whittier's salutary poem "The Branded Hand" does the kind of work I'm sure he believed was the calling of the poet/prophet, immortalizing those sacred scars, making them sing forever.

Then lift that manly right-hand, bold ploughman of the wave!
Its branded palm shall prophesy, "Salvation to the Slave!"
Hold up its fire-wrought language, that whoso reads may feel
His heart swell strong within him, his sinews change to steel.

It had to have been an amazing time, religious people, Bibles in hand, going to war--literally and figuratively. Walker's time was even more divisive than ours. Just 16 years after the branding in Pensacola, there were Yankees and there were Rebs and there was blood all over the South, a death toll of 628,000, more than the combined deaths in every other war this nation has ever fought.

Just as so many others did, Jonathan Walker took his family west to Wisconsin for the Civil War years, then crossed the lake and ran a fruit orchard. He is buried in Muskegon, Michigan. 

For the rest of his life, he claimed the branded letters, "SS," meant "saved slaves." His body rests in a Quaker cemetery in Muskegon, Michigan. It is proudly marked.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Aside




 I don't even know how long I've been at this. Years ago already, I thought to shore things up, so I went through years of Stuff in the Basement posts, picked out some I thought might have some relevance someday, dumped hundreds, then erased thousands of others, and, sort of, started over fresh. I think I undertook that trimming post-retirement, so if I would follow the last reach of what's here below the page, I'd run into blog posts put up here about a dozen years ago.

At 76 years old, sifting through the stuff in the basement is even more prudent than it was when I walked out of the classroom. Someday--maybe soon, maybe not--one of my children will come down here and turn on the computer--I hope the old thing doesn't stumble along and take all day like it often does for me. Chances are, it'll be my son. He'll use the passwords I'll leave for him, then call up siouxlander.blogspot.com and sit here pensively--at least I hope so--before he hits the delete button. One of our kids will have to do that, so why not make the event less difficult and do it for them--after all, I'm the crazy who put all that stuff up. 

I've learned some things through all those years. I've learned, for instance, that short stories don't generally do well in the day-by-day blog-post format. Almost inevitably, if I put up a story, even a story that will last only four days, like "Light and Life," inevitably the clicks fall off, largely because short stories have more import if they can be read at one sitting and not sectioned into 15-minute segments. 

I've also learned that obituaries score greater numbers than almost anything else, especially when the deceased has a following among those who frequent Stuff in the Basement. Makes me wonder if local newspapers would say as much. In a dark way, that's comforting.

Anything about Trump generally draws something of a crowd. I don't know if there are any Trump supporters among those who stop by daily, but I rarely get any angry retorts. You certainly shouldn't think I'm creating clickbait when I put his royal Orangeness up some mornings. Color me addicted. It's awful to have to admit it, but I've likely read more about the daily horrors of Donald Trump than I have any other single topic or subject since he and his wife came down the elevator. 

Blogging, I'm told, had its day. When the internet had more wide-open spaces, a ton of people like me determined to try the blog. Originally, I started Stuff when I returned to full-time teaching, having been half-time for a half-dozen years or so. I knew the change would end long projects, and I didn't want to shut down completely. Blogging was a new thing--and sort of like getting up to greet the dawn. I found it a joy, have ever since really, except when things get tight when I get busy. Otherwise, I've long ago fallen in love with a ritual that pushes you to be creative when first your feet hit the floor (actually, I do most of my plotting the day and night before).

You shouldn't think some major announcement is forthcoming. I'm not quitting quite yet. I thought to thank those of you, my most faithful readers, for wading through four days of a short story. Fiction just doesn't work in this genre, I guess. Then again, maybe "Light and Life" is a lousy story. Whatever the cause, it's not unusual to see the numbers drop off with each passing day when I'm running a piece of fiction. I wasn't surprised.

A kid told me the story of his sister's letter in his mother's drawer and his mother's inability to tell her husband even the good news--a long-ago student told me that. Almost any fiction has prototypes. This story was just too much a projection of a sad tale one of my students told me. There was a time in my life that I couldn't help but try to write something like that out, to make sense of it, to build some sort of order out of chaos, which is the aim of most art, or so it seems to me. But with this one, I'm pretty sure it never appeared anywhere because I wanted to avoid the consequence of appearing to break that student's trust. 

It's old. Like I said, the only copy I have is in dot matrix print on yellowing paper. 

Tomorrow? On my way to Bancroft, Nebraska, yesterday, I listened to a kind of biography of Harriet Tubman. The speaker at yesterday's gathering at the John Neihardt Center was going to be talking about Nebraska's role in the Underground Railroad, and I thought I'd just listen in to the story of Harriet Tubman. I remember hearing that she was raised in a Dutch Reformed household; about that, I was wrong--that was Sojourner Truth.

And it turns out that there isn't really a definitive edition of Harriet Tubman's life, which seems impossible given her reputation and the temper of the times (and all the talk about CRT, although it's subsided a bit since the demise of De Santos). Harriet Tubman worked the underground railroad with such frequency and passion that she was sometimes called the Moses of her people.

Tomorrow, something about Dred Scott, just one time the Supreme Court and, for that matter, the Bible went sadly off course. You may want to tune in.

________________________

And what of the picture atop the page? It's got nothing to do with the price of eggs. Just another taken in front of that Lake Michigan cottage we inhabited a week or so ago. It's what I was doing, early morning, when "Light and Life" was running.