Month: August 2008

  • These Are My Peeps

  • This Is My Father's World

  • After the Diagnosis

    A friend of a friend was just diagnosed with recurring cancer. 

    After fumbling with words, I went to my old faithful Lutheran prayer book. 

    It is a wonder how just the act of praying can calm and comfort.  Prayer reorients us.  I remember the time a girlfriend was in crisis, leaving our house in the morning on her way to the unknown.  She was trembling, shaking, heaving, sobbing.  I hurt, but felt so helpless and ineffectual.  Curt gathered us into a three person huddle; he prayed with strong, manly tones.  My friend was bestilled, becalmed, bequieted. 

    Divine Savior, Shepherd of our souls,
    embrace me with Thy love and protect me throughout this day.

    I need Thee, for I am wounded and bruised,
    sick at heart and in trouble and distress.

    To Thee I come.

    Forgive me all my sins in Thy mercy
    and love and uphold me amid these trials and tribulations.

    Strengthen my faith.

    Take every doubt out of my heart and lead me into Thy Word,
    which promises that Thou wilt be with me always in every situation in life.

    Calm my nerves.

    Make me hopeful and patient.

    O Christ, have mercy upon me.
    O Christ, be Thou with me now and forevermore.

    Amen.

  • Letters from Mom - Dealing with David

    This letter is nine 1/4 months before I was born.  Dad is away teaching; Mom is raising six kids in a farmhouse. The incident with David, my oldest brother who was ten at the time, illustrates Mom's refusal to let things "slide" by her.  More letters here.

    1-21-57

    Dearest,

    Monday's wash is done and the noon news is on so I should have time to dash off a note before the mailman comes.

    You are probably wondering about David's note.  He begged me for a pencil when down at the Gospel Book Store and I refused him, because he has several now, and I had already bought him a new Sugar Creek story.  Mrs. Gage gave him a liquid lead pencil [??]  to try out and he just kept it.  I didn't know anything about it until somehow it came out on Saturday.  One of the other youngsters mentioned it and he finally admitted that he had one and first told me that he thought she meant for him to keep it.  But after awhile he told me he knew better and had just kept it.  So I asked him to write Mrs. Gage and tell her and send the money for it and also to write you and tell you what he had done.  He really hated to do that.  But after they were in the mail box and he sat on my lap and talked to me about it, he was so happy to have it out in the open and taken care care of.  Several times during the day he told me he was glad about that.  I do believe he gets his love from pencils from you. [not love of, but love from - interesting] It always amazed [him] how many different kinds you kept around and ready for use.  He said he was really tempted to take an eversharp that he saw down there but he didn't and now is glad that he didn't.

    We have been having a siege of diarrhea [what a colorful phrase!]  around here. Dorothy was seized with it last night just before time for church so we didn't go. [...] Danny took sick with diarrhea during the night and doesn't feel good now.  Funny how it hits all at once - the stuff just poured out of him for about two hours.  Just kept changing him.  He didn't complain or cry, but Dorothy was in pain last night. [...]

    Well, I will close and get my boys down for a nap.  Danny really needs one after last night.  Much love from all of us - pray for us and we have to decide about the Bollman house [a new living situation] right away.

                                    All my love,

                                    Nellie

  • A Soldier of the Great War

    Reading Mark Helprin keeps me off balanced.  I never know what direction he will take.  His stories are intriguing, engrossing and provocative.  I'm beginning my final lap of the 860 page marathon called Soldier of the Great War.  So many quotes are 80% good chewing, with some stray bone which I just can't swallow.  [I find this a common experience when reading Jewish authors.]  One clause of a sentence Helprin is on solid ground; before it's finished, though, he's out on the skinny branches.   I keep on reading because I want to and because Helprin makes me see beauty, God, relationships, art -- in other words, life -- from a different perspective.

            "I never took my religious instruction seriously," Alessandro told them, "because it was delivered in the language of reason.  I asked everyone you can imagine, from the nuns when I was a child, to bishops, philosophers, and theologians later on, why do you speak of God in the language of reason?  And they said it was because God has burdened those who believe in Him with the inability to prove His existence except in the language of His enemies, which is a language in which you cannot prove His existence.  Why bother? I asked.  Their answers showed me that they believe in God no more strongly than you do.  Can you see a group of people on a beach in a storm, deafened by the surf, their hair blown back from their foreheads, their eyes tearing, trying to prove the existence of the wind and the sea?

              "I want nothing more than what I have, for what I have is enough.  I'm grateful for it.  I foresee no reward, no eternal life.  I expect only to leave further pieces of my heart in one place or another, but I love God nonetheless, with every atom of my being, and will love Him until I fall into black oblivion."

              "You're grateful for what you have?" they asked, their lips curling into bitter smiles.  The leader said, "You're a piece of sh** in a dungeon.  You live on potatoes and salt, and you're a servant to the dying scum of a dying world.  For this you're grateful?"

              Alessandro thought for a moment, and then he said, "Yes."

              "Why?"

              "I know what I was, what I had, what I lack."
             

  • Mama, Don't Let Your Baby Grow Up Without Grammar

    "...he writes the worst English
    I have ever encountered.
    It reminds me of a string of wet sponges;
    it
    reminds me of tattered washing on the line;
    it reminds me of stale
    bean-soup,
    of college yells,
    of dogs barking idiotically through
    endless nights.
    It is so bad a sort of grandeur creeps into it.
    It
    drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish,
    and crawls up to the
    topmost pinnacle of posh.
    It is rumble and bumble.
    It is flap and doodle.
    It is balder and dash."
              ~  H.L. Mencken

    "The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead."
              ~  E.E. Cummings

    The subject of these scathing sentences is our twenty-ninth president, Warren G. Harding.  It is said that he was elected because of his striking good looks (?? I'm just not into eyebrows) and his ambitious wife.  He promised a return to normalcy - one of his favorite words, a word journalists thought should be normality -- but his short term was marked by scandal.

    Thus endeth the history lesson of the day.

  • A Day for Remembering

    Dear Chris,

    Days like today are good for remembering.  Remembering and giving thanks.  Because I am always very thankful for you, my firstborn son.  You were born with a sense of responsibility which is evident in this photo. 

    •  Remember the pre-dawn in Grand Rapids when Dad took off for the airport to fly home?  The weight of commitment you felt on your twelve year old shoulders to keep us together as we drove two thousand miles home was almost too much.  I drove the car, but you navigated, took charge of your little brother, and encouraged me.

    •  I remember walking with you to school the first day of first grade.  Your hair was slicked back, your face fresh, you looked preppy in the red and white striped knit shirt with a collar.   I cried all the way home, wanting one more moment of the way things used to be.  You and your brother cried  yourselves to sleep after we told you we planned to homeschool  six years later. 

    •  I will never forget the afternoon you busted into the house after school with your long stride, jumped up for your ritual flick of the ceiling fan, and landed your size 13 feet  1/4 inch away from your baby brother's face.  God was merciful to our family that day.  Your tender heart was broken at the possibility that you could have hurt/killed him.  Remember our wailing brought Dad running wet and naked down the stairs to see what was wrong!!

    •  I am embarrassed to remember my pride in you as a baseball player.  Ugh!  I was an over-the-top mom and you were much more balanced about your abilities.  You took me aside after one game and said, "Mom, you were yelling 'Strike him out Chris!  You've done it before, you can do it again!' Mom, the batter and I both knew that I had never struck him out and your yelling gave him the mental advantage."   But I have fond memories of watching you pitch and catch, of our car time driving to and from games, running situations, reviewing plays and just talking.  You taught me to love the game of baseball.

    •  Your love of being on time often clashed with my perceived need to get everything done before we left.  This was a weekly seesaw we played getting to church.  But it was especially a dispute before long trips when I stayed up through the previous night working on my desk and was just starting to pack when you were ready to get into the car.  While I haven't changed, I am theoretically on your side.  Keep it up.

    •  Your father taught me to respect you in your growing manhood.  Another blushing memory!  I had the screamin' meemies about your treatment of a warmup jacket.  Without saying a word to me, your Dad turned and looked you in the eye.  "Chris, you are 15 and we aren't going to do much reminding anymore.  You can treat your possessions the way you want to and live with the consequences.  We won't nag you; you are old enough to take care of yourself."   And you were.

    •  I remember when we two read through the Ralph Moody books simultaneously.  When I got a chance to read, I'd have to hunt out your hiding place and snatch the book.  When I finished I squirreled it in my own hiding spot and you'd have to search for it.

    •  Last one:  I remember the car-crazy boy you and your brother were.  I was desperate to drum into you the fact that cars depreciate and houses appreciate.  When you were seventeen I sat you down and penciled out how you could use sweat equity to make money tax free.  You were so receptive and wanted to start right in.  You bought your starter home at 19 and have been making it wonderful for seven years.  I admire the way you learn new skills with each new home project. 

    Happy 26th Birthday.  You are my Psalm 1 man.  I see God's blessings in your life and rejoice.

    Mom


    Chris reading a birthday card

  • A Sad Fine Art Friday


    Grieving Parents     by Käthe Kollwitz  (Katie KAWL vits)
    The models for these sculptures are Kollwitz and her husband.

    The sculptures reside in the graveyard where their son, Peter,
    a German soldier who died in 1914, is buried.

    "The task is to bear it not only during these few weeks, but for a long time -
    in dreary November as well, and also when spring comes again,
    in March, the month of young men who wanted to live and are dead."


    Mutter mit Zwillingen

    Much of her art is a response to war and death.
    There are grotesque representations of death,
    hollow-eyed mothers, grieving mothers.

    Kollwitz featured the working class as her subjects.
    In this drawing you see the weariness of mom
    contrasted with the repose of baby.


    Working Woman with Sleeping Child, 1927

    55 drawings, article, Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köhn
    (click on English at bottom)


     Seed Corn Must Not Be Ground, 1942
    Käthe Kollwitz' final lithograph,
    after her grandson Peter (named after his uncle) died in WWII