Obvious

I speak a word, it's clear to me;
How could it be a fog to thee?
For ardored amour holds my mind;
Self-evident and satisfied.

Conclusions happy, logical;
To disagree? Impossible!
So leave behind false omnibus,
and walk with me in obvious.

Ulysses, Hickok School, and a Near Miss in the Principal's Office

There are always a thousand stories to tell, and the telling goes as deep as anything we know. I loved those happy Ulysses years, love to remember them, and love to tell about them from time to time.

We arrived in Ulysses near New Year's Day 1971. I was 5 and had three siblings: 7, 2, and 5 months. Our first house was at the far edge of a new subdivision on the Northeast corner of town. You could take Missouri Street North, pass a flower shop and the old Hungarian mechanic's back yard shop, past a public housing area and the dirt track by Hickok school. There was a park on your left followed by an old folks home.

Next you would come to that main cross road – Patterson -- that led out to the famous railroad bridge, go two more blocks or so and hit a wheat field. The airport was a mile distant to the West and our house was a brand new little brick place that we rented right on the corner where Missouri St. met farmland. It was so new there were sink holes in the back yard left over from excavation. We parked our Ford 500 in the front yard, friends unloaded the farm truck that served as a U Haul, and my folks set up house.

We only lived there a year or so but as memories go that little three bedroom home with a full, unfinished basement is etched in my mind. Someone was building another house next door in that first year, and the backhoe was fascinating. We had neighbors, especially the Akagi family whom I knew in school and always enjoyed knowing. Others from surrounding homes I remember by face or experience, but not name.

Of course there was the first year walking to Sullivan for Kindergarten. Who walks that far anymore? We did, and thought little of it. I passed the time on the way to school by kicking rocks and swinging sticks, once to the dismay of my elder sister, a second grader walking along side. I was oblivious and energetic, and the end of my stick found her eye one morning. My teacher had a stern word for me when we got to school, and my sister was at the eye doctor before the day was over. No more swinging sticks while walking!

Sullivan was good though I've forgotten my teacher's name. It was larger than the little country school I had attended far away in Miltonvale for first semester. I still remember the circle drive where my Mom would sometimes drop me off and say cheerily, “Let your light shine for Jesus.” I think of it now with gladness, though I often left the admonishment unfulfilled!

The next year I went to Hickok for first grade. This was a much shorter walk, all decked out in my Sears Toughskin pants and a new shirt. Mrs. Bowen was my teacher, nearing retirement and seeming old, like every adult does to a 1st grader I suppose. I loved her and knew where she lived in later years – seems like it was on my way to Kepley, maybe Baughman at Sykes or somewhere in there. I loved Mrs. Bowen even though she gave me a swat for tripping my friend, Troy. Life was pretty real then.

And I received other swats at Hickok, not for the telling now, except for this near miss. In first grade we were in the lunch room acting as boys will do. I was sitting next to my friend, Dale. “Get over there by your girlfriend,” I said playfully, pushing him away as we sat on the cafeteria table benches. “Get over there by yours!” he shouted back, shoving me in return. Without warning a man grabbed my left elbow and Dale's right, yanked us off of the bench, and marched us into the office adjoining the cafeteria. I was terrified. The Principal, Mr. Welch, knew we needed attention and he definitely had ours. I still remember the long narrow paddle with holes in it. He got it out of the bottom drawer and laid it on the desk where we could see it plainly.

I was a tender soul and some would say this was too much, even traumatizing. But I am not so sure. It put fear in me, and fear is what is needed sometimes, or so seems to me. I can assure you the idea of shoving a friend in the cafeteria never again entered my mind. Lesson learned! After a stern lecture he set us free, the paddle back in the drawer un-used.

There were other memories at Hickok. My teachers were, I think, a Mrs. MacArthur who taught us Spanish a little in the second grade. Another lady whose name slips my mind filled in for awhile in 1972 second grade – she also taught us kids piano lessons and lived over on Ulysses Parkway or adjacent. In fact, seems she had a bad accident and it may have been Mrs. MacArthur filling in for her. Third grade was Mrs. Day and I once got into well-deserved trouble with her in which I barely dodged the bullet.

Fourth grade was good – I learned how to multiply – and I can see the teacher's face but forget the name. Fifth grade was Mrs. Bender and she made a good positive impact with reading and other qualities of her class. I once remember, with childish innocence, telling a racially crass joke and receiving a hasty correction. Years later I had occasion to chat with her son, Gary, the noted broadcaster, and it was good reminiscence on Ulysses and her teaching life.

I think a Mrs. Oches taught music there, including occasional days when we would all play random instruments. And there were creative escapades into things like square dancing. PE was always fun with some pretty tough and challenging exercises, like holding the parachute all on the edge in a circle and pulling it up and down while balls bounced in the middle. Team work, strain, unusual muscles, and awkward all rolled into one.

And there was always something like a field day at the end of the year when, to my delight, Sullivan would send over there teams, or vis a vis, and we would have, among other things, a great softball game out on the playground.

Not long before we moved to Ulysses, I am told, someone lost there life at the electrical site on the south end of the Hickok school property. That always made me sad and thoughtful when I would go on that part of the playground. And among other things at Hickok there were the occasional after-hour activities for 4-H or music recitals that brought me into the building and I would see the halls, dark and mysterious behind the barricades.

I loved Ulysses and I loved Hickok, principal's office and fear of paddles notwithstanding. And I am deeply grateful for all those who gave their gifts and love and labor to help me and my siblings get through those happy years of school.

Christmas at Tinker Creek

 “Self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating.” 
If we spend “every waking minute saying hello to ourselves” we’ll never learn a thing.

I had a goal this year to read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and write twelve reflective pieces on

it. Written by Annie Dillard from her home near the creek in Hollins,VA, Pilgrim was published 50 years ago and won the 1975 Pulitzer for general non-fiction. It’s a remarkable book and I’ve enjoyed the journey. Except in September I ruptured my biceps tendon, was unable to type, and lacked the patience for dictation and left-handed editing.

But the goal has stayed with me like a subliminal voice: “You have 5 more pieces to write on Tinker (or is it 6?)” And so as my arm heals enough to type I decided to simply say what’s on my mind, and any gracious reader who is with me thus far may stay to the end.

The chapter at hand this month is, simply, “Stalking.” It is masterful. As always, Annie takes time and gives herself to the subject. In particular, she stalks muskrats. She learns how to be still and stealthy so she can be close to the creatures for minutes on end. She once got close enough literally to step on one. Another time the muskrat appeared next to her unexpectedly, so close “I could have touched him with the palm of my hand without extending my elbow.”

She saw the slack skin of the animal’s face, the distinctive bend of the wrists, the locking neck muscles and the underslung jaw. She learned their various habits and skills, how patient and still one must be if one would see. And she learned how quickly they will flee. Once the stalking fails, game over. Muskrat gone.

One thing I love most about Annie’s writing is how she ties the whole world together. My expression for this: “the world is of a piece.” A similar idea says we are all so connected that even with 8 billion people it takes only a few “I know her, she knows him, he went to school with him, he used to work with her uncle” until you are shocked to find a connection.

Same with life: it is all of a piece. I’ve been accused of interjecting random notions in conversation, except they were never random to me. I will see shades of connection to some story and feel compelled to blurt them out. I don’t always lay the groundwork and make the connection like Annie does.

This chapter has many of those, one being Moses on Sinai. Stalking, says Annie, is necessary if you would know reality. God was not readily known to Moses – or anyone. Indeed, we are hardly readily known to ourselves! This Annie points out with an adjoining reference to the 1927 physics discovery of Indeterminacy. The heart of life is endlessly elusive. We won’t find the secret of things easily. Stalking is involved. A life time of it.

But this brings me full circle and reveals my wont for the seeming random. During the recent holidays I knew I was overdue for a Tinker piece, and I wondered if there was a connection to Christmas in the book. Of course there is I thought, laughing at myself. All the world is of a piece!

There are several connections but I will try to work with only one, itself multi-layered. Annie insists that self-consciousness is the enemy of learning. If we would stalk, we must forget ourselves: how we look, what it will cost us in self-respect. So, if we would learn – if we would stalk – we have to get over ourselves. We may have to crawl through the grass and sit motionless. We may have to stoop down to the creature’s level. We may be uncomfortable and bear all kinds of indignities in pursuit of the goal.

Christmas? You have to wonder how on earth Mary died to self-consciousness. Imagine the rolling eyes, the scorn, the very understandable mockery of her strange story. “The baby came from God, Mom. Honest!” Yet she let go of herself and did as she felt she must. Same with Joseph, that easily neglected character in the Nativity. What a man. He willingly abandoned self-worry so he could do what he knew he must do. In forgetting themselves they became players in the deepest reality the world can know.

Behind it all is Francis Thompson’s timeless picture of God as the “Hound of heaven.” This self-consciousness of which Annie speaks? God has nothing of it! He is free of selfishness because he is completely real. The earliest Christian theology says that in the incarnation God “emptied himself.” He stepped out of Himself, He stooped, He took on human flesh.

Ever tried to don someone else’s ill-fitting and misshapen clothes and imagined what it would be to walk in public? Impossible. The self-awareness would be mortifying. In the Christmas story God took on the clothes of a human.

That’s Tinker Creek at Christmas. Stalking, coming in a way we would easily miss if we weren’t paying attention. He displayed no self-consciousness and required of us, if we would know reality, that we abandon our own selfishness and pride.

For self-consciousness really is the “ish” of selfishness gone amuck. It is indeed the bane of our age, and of any life. And at Christmas we learn again – if we have ears to hear – to be “imitators of God” and let it go.

All the world really is of a piece.

Christmas Remembered

I assume most have treasured memories of childhood, of special days and seasons, of people – relatives, teachers, friends – whose lives and words weave among happy reminiscence. And of course there are many who remember little worth treasuring, for what might have been good and beautiful is blanched by too much of the awful. I grieve for those whose story is so up-side down. And I am grateful for all the good in my own story that managed, in the great line from St. Paul, to “overcome evil with good.”

The story is long and joyful to me, with a thousand points of light (for starters). It could be a book, and should be. Contrary the carmudgeons, I think that is true of everyone's life. Mix in some imagination and dare, a wide-eyed perspective that lets wonder find its breath; throw in bracing honesty and laugh-at-yourself humility and every story sees and emits light that shines through a window on reality.

And that's what we need, I propose. Reality. What other option do we have? Living by lies is no strategy for good living, nor is the pickled, jaundiced look or, for that matter, a foolish naivete. See life as it is, I maintain, and the good seeps out everywhere. I'll just leave that there, knowing all will never agree, including my lesser self on some days.

But I was talking about memories and, in particular, Christmas. Some of the best come from those days in our bungalow on North Glenn. The tree in the old paneled living room was magic. My younger sister and I would get up early and go sit on the floor and soak it in. I was 9, she was 6 and we couldn't wait to open the gifts and, on one or two occasions, we didn't.

There was always food and family. As memories sometimes lodge in the mind and settle in the soul, I once awoke at 2 AM or so on Christmas Day, sat up in bed, hearing voices. The light was on in the kitchen and I peered through the door. My Mom and Dad were together, making cookies, and I still see them smiling at me.

We lived in Ulysses, Kansas, a farming and light-industrial town in the southwest corner of the state. The winters were cold and windy but the main street stores shut it out as best they could. We lived one block off the North end of downtown, across the alley from the Ulysses News, and I could do my

Similar to this in my memory.

Christmas shopping within a few blocks' walk, especially at the Duckwall's store.

Duckwall's was the store that had everything. Baseball gloves that smelled of real leather because they were, arts and crafts, televisions which, if we were lucky, were showing the latest football game. They had an Atari game you could play until the next person indicated your turn was over. Of course there was candy and watches and clothing and who knows what else. It was Walmart lite. It was right.

I remember those low-light winter evenings -- storefronts all lit up, carols playing on the street loudspeakers -- whenever I hear Fogelberg's Same Old Lang Syne, though I'm no fan of the somber purview of that melancholy song. Snow does “turn into rain” as the song says, and there are plenty of sadnesses and “what-might-have-beens” in this life. But we can't live there.

Instead, I live with the happy, the muted wonder of the ordinary in those good days of growing up. Piling into the old white Mercury to go to church, wading through the snow to build a snowman, going back inside too soon to find a seat beside the floor register stove, looking through all the old World Book encyclopedias to learn more than we knew and wondering what life would bring. Whatever we dreamed for the future, it paled beside the wonder of the present.

That all seems true and right to me now. Life is a grand adventure, a gift we barely know how to receive, much less handle. If we let it, Christmas takes us there, past the sadnesses, for they are real indeed. Past even the memories, as much as they mean, to the daring possibility we face every moment, the haunting idea bigger than the world we know: my life matters, breath is a joy beyond knowing, giving and loving and caring make me real again at Christmas and everyday of my life.

I hope you and I can believe again that the sadnesses, whatever they are, do not blanch love and goodness. For in the end evil will lose and good will prevail. I'm all in on that bet. It is the only way to live. Happily, it is the bottom line in all my memories, and it is the life-changing story of Christmas.

A Beginning Verse [100WW]

We do too scarce, or so I'm told.
We should reach up and be more bold.
The soul knows more than it can tell
but laziness is easy sell.

 
And there is more than simple verse
that helps us learn the rhythm serve
But this feels right and so I stay
as if this path's the only way.

One hundred words to say a thing
that helps a soul or could we sing;
the words will rhyme – that's not enough
it needs so much of other stuff.

But if it needs a hundred words
it stops right now enough.

Back to Normal (sort of): [10'TU]

Well, this is the first ten minute Tuesday since my injury and I suppose I will treat it as a bit of reminiscence on the injury and the writing.

I ruptured the distal biceps tendon in my right arm on September 13th while trying to lift a washing machine out of a trailer into a dumpster. It is the kind of chore I have done many times, but this was a little heavier and my arm was slightly twisted as I lifted. I heard 3 pops and it was done. Some others came and helped finish the job. The pain was manageable, and I drove to an MD friend for advice. He said definitely worth an ER visit as it was nearing 7 PM and clinics would be closed.

On the 23rd, thanks to expedited process by local surgeon Mark Wade and one of his colleague helping behind the scenes, Dr. Jim Matai, I underwent surgery. He made a 3 inch incision longwise in the inside of my elbow through which he reached to pull the tendon down from where it attached to the bicep. The other incision, also about 3 inches, is on the right side of the forearm where the tendon, after passing along the elbow bones, attaches to the forearm bone so I have twisting strength in the arm. Here he found about 15% of the tendon still attached so he had to disconnect that, properly re-orient the tendon, and re-attach to the bone. 

I came-to around 4 PM or so and was home by about 5. The pain was manageable, not least because I had a complete block in the arm that didn't subside for 48 hours. After that I took the 800 mg Ibuprofen and the other pain med off and on for a week and then quit. Very grateful.

A thousand lessons in all of this, not least gratitude for the aptitude, skill, training, and love of the doctors, nurses, and various other attendants. They give such a vital service to the world and to each of us. It is no small thing, though we easily take it for granted.

Glad to be back in the loop, able to type almost normally. 

Thoughts on a Sunday Morning

I remember an anecdote from the inimitable Chesterton in which a given thought was compared to a cow suddenly speaking in a drawing room. Thus, I suppose, our best thoughts may only ever be best to us, if that, and one may dare believe they may surpass untranslated Bovine utterances.

Be that as it may, I wondered about this: Ontology and meaning go together so much so they are nearly indistinguishable. This is the relation between created and Creator, yet deeper. It is as if the Creator and created are one.

This being true, whenever our ontology is skewed, we are in trouble. Thus when families divide, thus when God is imagined expunged, thus when we consider ourselves self-caused. To have a false ontology is to implode.

Yet, there is mercy. The pain of false ontologies calls us Home and we begin to believe it is God alone we need. To deny Him is to deny our very being, and meaning in the process. It has been suggested that such a construct is not a life-enhancing strategy. I concur. But then again, if life has no meaning why would it matter?

Ontology and meaning cannot be separated. Pray for the wisdom to know to whom you pray. Dare to believe the infinite, personal God exists, and He may be known by the likes of you and me. That faith -- that reality -- is the only thing that will save us. And it lives within the wedding of ontology and meaning that simply is.

*The way of understanding God in the last paragraph is borrowed from Francis Schaeffer.