PAGANS AND LUTHERANS

PAEAN FOR AN ELDEST SON

2011-05-24T19:18:00.003-05:00

Digging through some old papers yesterday, I came across a form letter I'd sent out to friends about five and a half years after my oldest son was born, which would have been 23 and a half years ago. Strange tune, it. However, it does its fair share of describing young fatherhood and also describes reasonably well my oldest son, at age almost six. Here is some part of the tune:

....Colin wants to know what "excessive" means. He wants to know what "Contras" are. He's listening to the world around him. His parents are getting nervous. He wants to know what's the price of Heaven. He knows there is one because he was digging around for that baby bunny we buried last year and couldn't find it. We are glad he couldn't find it.

He's singing songs but changing the words. The Roche Sisters tune "Older Girls" has become "Only Girls" to C. "Wheel me down to the willow ground" becomes "will me down to the wheel ground" when he sings it. He wants to know what the wheel ground is. "Bugs" in his strange lexicon are "bungs." He's listening and learning, storing things away for just the right moment to embarass his parents...

C is also getting longer. It is getting harder to transfer him from the bed he falls asleep in to the bed he wakes up in. Although no Kareem, he is to his parents still growing like a weed. Ask Deb who tries to keep him in clothing.

Clothing. The war cry from Deb these days is..."NO MORE! This is the last time I buy you clothes that you won't wear!" Colin has his own taste in dress. He has definitely started a new trend in fashion that has eclipsed anything anyone has heretofore conceived of. Some of our more interesting friends have taken to observing C and trying to imitate his sense of style and color. It is hard to imitate genius, however. Clashing blues is his specialty, especially when he has an unusually early morning. When given a chance to wake up normally--say, ten o'clock--he is often found sporting three or four long-sleeve T-shirts. Hey! You never know what the weather is like out there! Lord knows you can't trust what your parents tell you.

I took C to one of my Dad's Chanters concerts. This is a group of rather elderly gentlemen, slightly out of tune but singing their hearts out. Not a five year old's ultimate dream. There were a lot of elderly people in the audience of seventeen hundred at this concert. I felt underaged. It was ninety degrees in the concert hall. Colin was wearing, at least to my knowledge, his Karate Kid pajamas (he refuses to acknowledge this) and some corduroys. Ten minutes pass. There is some singing. To my left is my mother. To my right is some serious squirming. C tries to sing along. He says he's hot. Off come the Karate Kids. Under it is a long sleeve shirt. He stage whispers to my Mom that he can take off three shirts and "still not be naked." There are snickers, now, among the elderly. Another two shirts come off. There is a pile in the aisle. He's now down to a short sleeve T-shirt and still roasting. By now the focus of attention around us is, shall we say, no longer on center stage. Intermission is hours away. Any minute a spotlight will be redirected onto my son. During the next song Mom, me, and the Kid bundle out of there with C's wardrobe in my arms...

...The fact is, ole dance-in-the-nude Colin is The Man around here...He has gone beyond accepted methods of doing business. He's developed a look. He has this dark sideways grump put on when things aren't going so great. The look says it all. It says that my opinion polls are way down. It says that one more morning of being awakened and dumped at the breakfast table without a blanket may be his last. It says that he and the dogs are considering a recall.

Of course he has his better days. Yesterday I picked him up early from school and we hopped on our bikes and did a few miles. It is a trick riding behind Colin. You have to have your wits about you, no doubt! Colin has to talk and ride and jump around and sing about Jesus (he doesn't really know the words) and dodge in and out like the guy in the RAD movie (He's seen it a thousand times). His is a little two-wheel bike that just fits his little shrimp legs perfectly. He is excited! He learned to ride one day about two months ago in the Stoughton High School parking lot, chosen because it was big and at the time, empty. It took two minutes for him to "learn" to ride his bike, and several more days to learn. He still doesn't get on his bike without the help of Dad, or a curb. But once mounted...!

A month after learning we did a 28 mile excursion along an abandoned railroad bed bike trail. Can you imagine riding 28 miles in first gear? That is about what Colin did on his little bike. Those legs just pumped all day! He didn't do badly on the falls, either. Every so often--and very often toward the end of the trip--he would suddenly veer off the path in the underbrush, completely disappeared but for a plaintive cry for help...

The Perils of Prayer

2011-05-09T22:36:00.002-05:00

I admire those eighteenth-century Hasids who understood the risk of prayer. Rabbi Uri of Strelisk took sorrowful leave of his household every morning because he was setting off to his prayers. He told his family how to dispose of his manuscripts if praying should kill him. A ritual slaughterer, similarly, every morning bade goodbye to wife and children and wept as if he would never see them again. His friend asked him why. Because, he answered, when I begin I call out to the Lord. Then I pray, "Have mercy on us." Who knows what the Lord's power will do to me in that moment after I have invoked it and before I beg for mercy?

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

The Perils of Work

2011-05-09T22:30:00.002-05:00

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.

Thoreau

Alas, a good description of the vigor and at-large unrealism of my early days as a woodworker. There was nothing I could not eventually do, given time and the right materials. "Time and love have branded me with its claws," wrote Bob Dylan. Craftsmanship is like this, I think. If you don't start with passion and a vision completely out of sorts with what is possible, you don't end up accomplishing anything. Yet the irony is, what you accomplish is so out of sorts with that original vision, it is difficult to consider it anything but a woodshed. So it goes.

CHARACTER

2011-04-20T19:47:00.003-05:00

Ashenden sighed, for the water was no longer quite so hot; he could not reach the tap with his hand nor could he turn it with his toes (as every properly regulated tap should turn) and if he got up enough to add more hot water he might just as well get out altogether. On the other hand he could not pull out the plug with his foot in order to empty the bath and so force himself to get out, nor could he find in himself the will-power to step out of it like a man. He had often heard people tell him that he possessed character and he reflected that people judge hastily in the affairs of life because they judge on insufficient evidence; they had never seen him in a hot, but diminishingly hot, bath...

W. Somerset Maugham, ASHENDEN

KLEINIG on SASSE

2011-04-05T14:25:00.002-05:00

"...I still remember it graphically...it was such a significant point in my life. I still remember, Sasse was there, after a lecture, he had a big pile of books--he always carried a big pile of books into lectures, he never opened them, he knew it all by heart, he'd just have them along just in case...
I said, 'Dr. Sasse, do you have a moment?'
And he said [using a low gruff voice], "Yes?" Ah, ah, very abrupt.
'Yes, what do you want Kleinig?'
And I said, 'Ah, look, Dr. Sasse, I've got a spiritual problem."

And Sasse stopped walking, and he faced me, and he lifted his finger and he said,
'Good!'"
John Kleinig, Lectures On Spirituality, 10a

John Bunyan

2011-04-04T16:36:00.004-05:00

From today's TREASURY OF DAILY PRAYER reading:

I find to this day seven abominations in my heart:
1) An inclination to unbelief.
2) Suddenly forgetting the love and mercy that Christ shows us.
3) A leaning to the works of the Law.
4) Wanderings and coldness in prayer.
5) Forgetting to watch for that which I have prayed for.
6) A tendency to murmur because I have no more, and yet a willingness to abuse what I have.
7) I can do none of those things which God commands me, but my corruptions will thrust themselves upon me so that "When I would do good, evil is present with me."
These things I continually see and feel and am afflicted and oppressed with; yet the wisdom of God orders them for my good.
1) They make me abhor myself.
2) They keep me from trusting my heart.
3) They convince me of the insufficiency of all inherent righteousness.
4) They show me the necessity of flying to Jesus.
5) They press me to pray to God.
6) They show me the need I have to watch and be sober.
7) And they provoke me to look to God, through Christ, to help me and carry me though this world.
Amen.
-John Bunyan

Such an old fashioned geezer, Bunyan. So obviously out of step with modern wisdom and psychology. The guy obviously needed therapy.

And golly, he was so much like me.

It is interesting to me that when we think of God's grace and the work of the Holy Spirit, we naturally think of God's Goodies: his peace, love, charity, salvation. We don't naturally associate the things Bunyan writes about: tentatio, a dying to ourselves, a profound awareness of our sinfulness; our shortcomings. Naturally we flee from these things, or else go into therapy (I've always flinched at the idea personally. I'd rather fix or outwait my own problems, or ignore them altogether). And honestly, this particular spiritual reality does not market well. It isn't on the outreach agenda. Unless you're reading John Kleinig or Senkbeil and their ilk, you have to go back to Bunyan to find it conveyed. And yet, it is a mark of sanctification, or being made holy. Who would have thought that Romans 7 was just about that very thing?

Some Recent Work

2011-03-26T23:15:00.012-05:00

About fifteen years ago, I built the library for the common room of Lutheran Church of the Living Christ. Here is half of it:

About five years after that, a member asked me to build a sort of library/entertainment center for his home, inspired by my work at the church. Here it is:

About four years after that, I was asked by another member of that church, who saw the library/entertainment center I built for the other member of the church, to build him an 8' x8' wall library for his home office. Here it is:

A year later, a co-worker of the wife of the guy who had me build his home office wall library called, asking for a wall library of their own. Here are pics of that:

So, here, to date, is my family tree of wall units, serial recommendations over a 15 year period. But wait. The granddaddy of them all was a suite of furniture I produced for an old friend, a NYC attorney who now resides in California. His was the most ambitious:

Finally, I also finished, a Prie Dieux I have been working at for about a year (mostly just staring at it and wondering when I'd get it done). I had a very patient client:

There. That brings us up to date. I feel a lot better now...

Sim City and Real Life

2011-03-26T22:45:00.003-05:00

I'm catching up on a few back issues of FIRST THINGS magazine. Even after the death of long-time editor Richard John Neuhaus, I almost always turn first to the While We're At It section at the back---the section Neuhaus always wrote himself and which is now handled by Joseph Bottum. Here's an interesting take:

"'I'm a feminist graduate of an all-women's college who has vowed to never change my name or end my career to raise children full time--though I would never undervalue the work that many women do in their home,' Monica Potts assures us in the American Prospect, but, to her horror, in all of her virtual reality games (and kudos to her for admitting how many virtual reality games she plays) she chooses conservatively.
'My Sims are conservative,' she admits. 'I'm in complete control of them, but for some reason their lives aren't anything like the life I consider ideal in the real world...My Sims rarely remain single long into adulthood. My wives always take their husbands' last names. They don't just have children; they bear lots of them. And they leave their careers to take on the lion's share of care-giving duties.'
It gets worse, or better, depending on your point of view: An expert on Sim City, she reports that 'things function much more smoothly if taxes are low and city government caters to corporate interests,' while 'wind energy is fine in theory, but old-fashioned petroleum and coal facilities really make them run.'
Potts blames the parameters of the game; they just make it so much easier to be a conservative: 'Having children has the added bonus of extending game time in The Sims, because I get to continue to play the same family as the generations roll by. Maternity leave is mandatory for pregnant Sim women because of a long-standing technical issue within the game..."
FT April 2011 issue; P 69

Art--or virtual reality--imitating life.

I don't know: if I'm going to dabble in virtual reality games, I suppose I'd try living out a life different from my own. So that may explain this puzzling phenomena. You can't forever blame the parameters of a game. If you know them as well as this lady knows her game, you'd eventually find a way to game the system. But there is a winsomeness to the realization that, if your wives have many children, you get to play "longer." Sweet.

O God, O Lord of Heaven and Earth

2011-02-20T19:59:00.004-06:00

O God, O Lord of heaven and earth,

Thy living finger never wrote that life should be an aimless mote,

A deathward drift from futile birth.

Thy Word meant life triumphant hurled,

In splendor through Thy broken world,

Since light awoke and life began, Thou hast desired Thy life for man.

Our fatal will to equal Thee,

Our rebel will wrought death and night. We seized and used in prideful spite

Thy wondrous gift of liberty.

We housed us in this house of doom,

Where death had royal scope and room

Until Thy servant, Prince of Peace, breached all its walls for our release.

Thou camest to our hall of death,

O Christ, to breathe our poisoned air, to drink for us the dark despair

That strangled our reluctant breath.

How beautiful the feet that trod

The road that leads us back to God! How beautiful the feet that ran

To bring the great good news to man!

O Spirit, who didst once restore

Thy church that it might be again the bringer of good news to men,

Breathe on Thy cloven Church once more,

That in these gray and latter days

There may be those whose life is praise, each life a high doxology

To Father, Son and unto Thee.

-Martin Franzmann

Try singing these powerful words to rich music in a high-halled sanctuary,

driven by a wonderful organist. Heaven on earth.

Why China Will Soon Own The United States

2011-02-15T16:50:00.002-06:00

I had lunch today with an old acquaintance. She has worked as an R.N. for 22 years in a private hospital locally. In those 22 years she has supported her family nicely , had plenty of vacation time, and built a nice home in the country.

She told me today that she was going to work as a nurse in a federal facility. The job will almost exactly mirror her present position and responsibilities--actually it appeared to her to be a much easier position. Then lowering her voice, she admitted, "They're going to be paying me over $10,000 more for the same position, and about double the benefits!"

I'm fairly certain she didn't see the irony in all of this. But I did. Something is terribly wrong with the direction of the country when an equivalent publicly funded job pays that much more than the same position in the private sector. If it isn't unsustainable, it at the very least is unbalanced greed.

Application To Become A Green Bay Packer Fan

2011-02-02T08:17:00.009-06:00

Name ______________ CB Handle_______________

Mobile Home Color: __ Two-Tone, Brown & White__Pink & White__Faded

Neck Shade: ___Light Red___Med. Red___Dark Red

Model of Pickup Truck_________Size of Tires_______

Number of Teeth Exposed (With Full Grin)--Upper:____Lower:____

Length of Right Leg____Length of Left Leg____

______________________________________________________

Note:To be accepted you must be honest and you must be able to check at least 20 items from the questions below. You may check more than one item per question.

1.I am in love with:

____My brother's wife_____Mother-in-law

2. My favorite music:

____Country____Western

3. My favorite meal:

____Head cheese and Old Style

____Venison sausage and Old Style

____Cheese curds and Old Style

____Seven course dinner (Brat and six pack)

4.Preferred Weapon:

____12 gauge shotgun ____Tire iron

____Forehead ____Chain saw

____Ice augur ____Beer bottle

5. Primary Auto:

____'67 Ford Galaxy

____'67 Ford Galaxy with transmission

____'67 Ford Galaxy with Chevy transmission

____'67 Ford Galaxy with Chevy transmission and '71 Buick engine.

6. I usually greet people by saying:

____"Ya hey dere"

____"Dem Packers is playing like a bunch a old women"

____"Day should take a whole bunch a dem Madisom liberals

and just line 'em up an shoot 'em!"

7: I can count to:

____Ten (10) ____Twenty (20) (With shoes off)

8. Pick one:

____Someone is helping me read this.

____Someone is reading this to me.

9. Favorite Reading:

____Fishing Facts ____Beer bottle labels

____Guns & Ammo ____Tractor manuals

10. Things In My Front Yard:

____Car on blocks ____Transmissions

____Various kitchen Appliances

____Deer hanging from tree (In season)

____Deer hanging from tree (Out of season)

11. My favorite female in the world is:

____My mom ____My sister

____Both, cuz I think my sister is my mom.

12. I mostly wear:

____Polyester leisure suits

____Packers belt buckle

____Packers cheese head hat

13. The most memorable event I ever attended:

____Miocqua moose calling competition

____OMSGA Outboard Motor Repair Finals

____Lake Tomahawk Crew Cut Championships

____Carp Queen Beauty Contest

____Spread Eagle Proctologists Convention

14. My favorite entertainment is:

____Deer hunting while drinking

____Watching Green Acres while drinking

____Snowmobiling while drinking

____Ice fishing while drinking

Signed by:____________________Date:________

Note: Somebody handed this to me at a Green Bay Packers game party.

I have no idea who wrote it, but you could probably credit Jeff Foxworthy.

GO PACK!!

Thank You, Anonymous...

2011-01-20T21:31:00.001-06:00

...whoever you are...!

Aunts and Nephews

2010-12-20T21:01:00.001-06:00

Robin meets Aimon for the first time.

Fathers and Sons and Grandsons

2010-12-20T20:52:00.003-06:00

A new grandson, Aimon.

Beggars

2010-12-20T19:33:00.005-06:00

It is nearly Winter, officially, but truly it has been with us here in Wisconsin for some time now. I'm tired of it already, unless it snows a lot. The cats have begun their Winter Sojourn. Instead of scampering under the deck, eating grass, hunting voles in the roadside ditches, or chasing rabbits: they sleep, eat, and beg.

Long afternoon naps in the bedroom, or in my easy chair, or for Pippin high up on a box near the ceiling in the basement. This is reached by a complex route across my desk, up onto the cherry storage unit, a leap up onto an upright storage unit, and then slinking up into the space above the concrete footings. You can see his ears peering over the top edge of the box. Nossa's deeply rooted cowardice would never allow her to make such a journey.

Then the evening campaign begins hours in advance, begging for their dinner. They sit near my shoulder on my desk, eyes wide, so sad, so needy. Such liars.

Field Trip

2010-10-17T18:30:00.004-05:00

I accompanied the Verona High School Science Club to Ski Hi Orchard and a hike at Devil's Lake on Saturday, giving them a quick tour of the orchard (including hands on apple picking which is always a big thrill no matter what the age). Here's a view of the south end of Devil's Lake from atop the bluffs, just above Balance Rock.

Anke the German Shepherd came along, awash in glorious affectionate petting from everyone she met. And to end a nice climb up and down the bluff with a nice wade in the largest drinking pond she'd ever seen! Glory. She slept all the way home.

Apple Picking

2010-10-06T19:30:00.002-05:00

Early October means a quick trip to the Baraboo Hills, to Ski Hi Orchard for our annual picking frenzy. Having worked here years before and having a friend in the owner, Betty Thiessen, I get to go out into the orchard and browse around, picking my own. Ribs and Deb along, we trounced down the old gravel road in search of apples!

Our first stop was in the Golden Delicious aisle, where we loaded up in preparation for the Annual Applesauce Day, a tradition in the fam. Um. A tradition for Dad that is, although I do manage to talk my spouse into helping out. The kids duck out and await the results. Golden Delicious applesauce needs no sweetener, and we make about 30 quarts a year, to freeze and bring out for the eating throughout the long winter.

Next, we moseyed down past the Cortlands and Jonathans and hit up the Honey Crisps, a hybrid the likes of which we didn't know back in the Day, when old Art Bassett roamed the orchard in his War Two vintage jeep, keeping an eagle-- and I mean eagle--eye on those who were privileged to pick his apples for him. That was sort of the arrangement. Honey Crisps are, whoa, sweet and crunchy! Some apple researcher hit paydirt with this apple. Two bushels' worth.

George, the orchard foreman, a grizzled old veteran of Who Knows What--but grizzled nonetheless--came rambling down in the same old Massey Ferguson on which I used to roam the orchard. "I remember you from last year! Thought you were just pickin' Goldens."

"Yeah, we mosey around a bit, pick a few other things as well."

George didn't shoot us, having been warned off by Betty. Last year was a closer call, since Betty forgot to tell him we'd be invading his orchard. You don't get anything past ole George.

George and I chatted about the crop. "Yeah, we gotta color pick those Crisps. Damn things keep fallin' on the ground. Next year I'm just gonna pick 'em clean once!"

Color picking means just that: pick over the best looking apples and leave the rest to redden and ripen a bit more. It isn't a practice pickers enjoy, because it slows the picking, and if you're being paid piecework, that slows the income.

It appears to have been a nice crop of apples. George's parting shot was to tell me that if I wanted to pick apples, to pick Cortlands. "We ain't pickin' any more of 'em. I got a cooler full. You can have as many as you want!"

I'm coming back up in a few weeks with a local high school science club. Every two years I give them a tour of the orchard and the old log cabin homestead. This year I think we'll venture into the orchard, and if those Cortlands haven't frozen, by golly I think we'll send the science club kids home with some pie-making apples.

On the way back up we topped up our bushel boxes with some Jonathans and Red Delicious, as well as the Cortlands with which to make pie filling. I picked a mixed bushel for Ted Gullixson, a local Lutheran pastor, and on the way home we dropped them on his doorstep. We hope he finds them!

The Need For Books

2010-08-11T18:12:00.005-05:00

Ethan Bartlett, Son of Neil, erstwhile member, and still member-at-large, of the No Inklings Book Club, recently wrote a screed in which he decried these newfangled electronic readers every book merchant is seeming to come out with. One of his points, if I get his point, was that a book-in-the-hand was better than 37,000 on the screen. At our most recent book club--which was actually a Mexican food pigfest followed by a little reading and great discussion followed by an attempt--deftly deflected--to roast Ethan and his baby bro Zeke as they prepare to depart for college (truly a Franzmannian sentence going on here)--a distinguished and much beloved member of the book club (he supplies us with mounds of food each time we meet, nudge nudge, wink wink) presented Ethan with a large dorm-room-suitable poster of part of the screed imposed electronically into a Kindle reader. Or was it a Nook? I forget. Ethan was duly roasted.

In today's Wall Street Journal letters section, someone named Anthony Mirabile of Philadelphia wrote an amusing rant of his own, commenting on a recent article about "the subtle joys of communing with books". To wit:

Sven Birkert's poignant prose evokes the subtle joys of communing with books in the company of fellow book lovers ("Bye-bye Bookstores," op-ed, Aug. 6). No less a public figure than Sir Winston Churchill took comfort in the midst of books when he urged, "If you cannot read them, any rate...fondle them. Peer into them...let them fall open where they will...Set them back on the shelf with your own hands...If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate by your acquaintances." A bookstore browser expects freedom and, despite the public setting, some basic privacy. No Big Broher scrutinizes choices for thought crime, wheile the browser peruses this title or turns away from that. And the browser assumes that the books, unlike their digital substitutes, cannot be edited as they wait to be browsed.
Reaching for a book is a symbolic and literal grasp at freedom, untethered to the whim of some cyber-gate-keeper. It is bearing arms oneself versus surrendering their use to an impersonal authority. It is driving one's own car where the spirit leads, regardless of where and how the elites think you should go. It is the gesture of a citizen, versus that of a slave. It is opening one's mind to the wide field of ideas and information without the risk that one's mind will be shut off at the flick of a switch.

I'm bitterly clinging to my books.

I like that last. The editors titled the letter in part, "A PANEGYRIC ". That's fancy talk for "a letter to the editor. The word, however, seems like it ought to mean something like....

...screed.

The--completely unrehearsed--Gee Library

The Amazing, Spiral-Turned, Steam-Bent, Woven Back Cherry Rocker

2010-06-16T22:03:00.001-05:00

I have the most amazing rocking chair in my shop. You've never seen anything like it.

I also have a request: I have written a very brief survey on a project I'm working on (I wasn't really abducted by aliens, but after I get going on this project you'll wish I had been). Take you two minutes to fill it out. And as a SPECIAL BONUS for taking the time, I've written an essay WITH PICTURES about this amazing (Did I say amazing?) rocking chair. Did I mention the essay comes complete with PICTURES?? Ah, guess I did.

You can take the survey, and grab a link to the essay, by just clicking on this:

SURVEY

Many thanks, and be kind. Be kind.

Oh, and comments. I love comments. In the survey.

I'm Back

2010-06-16T21:40:00.002-05:00

Whew, that was weird.

I mean, I was just standing in my shop, spaced, trying to remember what tool I was looking for or why I'd just walked from the staining room to the millshop, and suddenly...

...that's right. I was abducted by aliens. What day is it? Who mowed my lawn? Why are my golf clubs in the garage? And what is all of this strange furniture doing in my shop?

You wake up in the morning, grab your face, say: "My name! What's my name??"

This getting old is serious business.

Meanwhile, a daughter has gotten her temporary driver's permit. I'm just sayin'. A son is talking about coming home from the Mexican wars for a spell. Another son has more schemes and plans than Mr. Obama hisself. Most have to do with glory and fame, but in the meantime, he's waiting tables. You got to keep the money moving.

I'll keep you posted.

Benedict, Referred

2010-04-14T20:03:00.002-05:00

A good post from Paul McCain on the current worldwide controversy regarding child abuse in the Catholic Church. While I appreciate those who have pointed out the hypocrisy on all sides, I think the angle pastor McCain is pointing to is the best. To quote and summarize:

"Here’s the point: It is precisely the wrong response to go on the attack against the media. The only response that should be made is to express total and complete outrage and complete and very public remorse for the sexual abuse of children at the hands of priests. Period. And keep saying it. Over and over, ad naseum. Back the words up with actions and provide the proof of action. An absolute zero tolerance policy on these behaviors must be adopted everywhere and applied every time."

That doesn't mean I'll take down my earlier post on the controversy. I still think my friends will benefit from reading the post by John Stephenson. Even if what he has done is exactly that: "...go on the attack against the media...". Ah, well.

Nevertheless, read this.

Quote du jour

2010-04-14T19:08:00.002-05:00

The psychology of uncertainty really does matter. As long as those in industry and commerce hear that the government is the solution to the problems that they supposedly created, browbeaten individuals will not take risks and begin hiring. All the populist rhetoric, all the sympathetic statistical gymnastics from the liberal pundits, all the euphemisms of “jobs saved,” still won’t change the fact that American business believes Mr. Obama wants to take more of their money to redistribute rather than empowering them to hire and make a profit.

-Victor Davis Hanson

The dialogue between my wife and me, during this past quarter when my gross earnings as a self-employed individual were the lowest they've been in 30 years, has centered around the profound uncertainty injected into not just the business community but the consuming public, as a result of the extensive indecision on healthcare (and its playout, which I think is obviously disastrous), and just about all of the rest of the current admin's agenda. You may like the agenda, but it has played havoc with earning a living. The psychology of uncertainty has to be the prime theme of Obama's first year and a half.

WOMAN

2010-04-13T21:52:00.003-05:00

I can remember when I was a teenager, at the height of the cold war between my father and me, both of us suddenly one day standing back in awe, as we simultaneously became cognizant of the glue job my mother was doing of keeping flock and fold together. It was a serious revelation for me of her hard work and dedication to the family, and as unhumblable as I was, it served to humble me.

I'm reading THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA by Philip Roth. Yes, THAT Philip Roth. He's gotten to be a pretty good writer in his old age. Here is an interesting quote that took my by surprise last night. He is describing a late 1930's New Jersey small-town Jewish community, but actually also describing America everywhere at that time:

"The men worked fifty, sixty, even seventy or more hours a week; the women worked all the time, with little assistance from labor-saving devices, washing laundry, ironing shirts, mending socks, turning collars, sewing on buttons, mothproofing woolens, polishing furniture, sweeping and washing floors, washing windows, cleaning sinks, tubs, toilets, and stoves, vacuuming rugs, nursing the sick, shopping for food, cooking meals, feeding relatives, tidying closets and drawers, overseeing paint jobs and household repairs, arranging for religious observances, paying bills and keeping the family's books while simultaneously attending to their children's health, clothing, cleanliness, schooling, nutrition, conduct, birthdays, discipline, and morale..."
P.3

Yeah. I'll take the men's job.

And this, from a Stephen Vincent Benet poem, describing a mistress of a plantation, as a woman able:

To take the burden and have the power
And seem like the well-protected flower

The women in my life--wife and mother and grandmothers all--have shown this multi-talented multitasking skill that men frankly don't regularly notice. Our egos tend to blind us. They hide their talents in plain sight, and shake their heads when we take them for granted. So it has ever been.

One has to wonder which of Solomon's wives he was thinking of when he (ok, purportedly; perhaps) penned these words:

An excellent wife, who can find?
She is far more precious than jewels,
The heart of her husband trusts in her,
and he will have no lack of gain.
She does him good, and not harm,
all the days of her life.
She seeks wool and flax,
and works with willing hands.
She is like the ships of the merchant;
she brings her food from afar.
She rises while it is yet night
and provides food for her household
and portions for her maidens.
She considers a field and buys it;
with the fruit of her hands she plants
a vineyard.
She dresses herself with strength
and makes her arms strong.
She perceives that her merchandise is
profitable.
Her lamp does not go out at night.
She puts her hands to the distaff,
and her hands hold the spindle.
She opens her hands to the poor
and reaches out her hands to the needy.
She is not afraid of snow for her household,
for all her household are clothed in scarlet.
She makes bed coverings for herself;
her clothing is fine linen and purple.
Her husband is known in the gates
when he sits among the elders of the land.
She makes linen garments and sells them;
she delivers sashes to the merchant.
Strength and dignity are her clothing,
and she laughs at the time to come.
She opens her mouth with wisdom,
and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.
She looks well to the ways of her household
and does not eat the bread of idleness.
Her children rise up and call her blessed;
her husband also, and he praises her;
Many women have done excellently,
but you surpass them all.
Charm is deceitful, and beauty in vain,
but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.
Give her of the fruit of her hands,
and let her works praise her in the gates.
Proverbs 31

It Must Be Holy Week!

2010-04-01T13:53:00.005-05:00

Throughout Christendom, this is the week of weeks, the celebration of the "fullness of time" when Jesus Christ went to Jerusalem, taught (and, you could say, taunted) in the temple courts, instituted his Holy Supper, and then proceeded to be put to death "for the sins of the whole world" (1 John 2:2), to be raised again on a Sunday morning.

However, something about this week seems to bring out the wackos. This year they are specializing in wacking Pope Benedict, for his alleged crimes vis a vis the priest sex abuse scandals. While not wanting to reduce in any way the severity of these crimes, I have read in the past few days a couple of articles that defend Ratzinger/Benedict from the misinformation afloat out there. They are, in fairness worth a read. At least one may also be eyebrow raising for old, settled, staid Lutherans (I've not been one long enough to be staid, but I'm old and settled).

The first, from Logia magazine is entitled

The dictatorship of relativism strikes back—and goes nuclear

by John Stephenson of St. Catherine's seminary in Canada. He does a wonderful job of revisiting the career of Ratzinger, and gives us confessional Lutherans this rather nice quote:

“The Lutherans are to Ratzinger what the Orthodox are to John Paul: the separated brethren he knows best, and for whom he has the greatest natural affinity.” John Allen, Cardinal Ratzinger, 231

Stephenson doesn't mince words, but I find his article a balancing act against what you'll find in what he calls the "quality" press.

The second article is a more direct defense of the NYT article cited above. It is written by Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Again, a balancing read if all you've seen is the Times article and its trickle-downs. He begins:

In our melting pot of peoples, languages and backgrounds, Americans are not noted as examples of “high” culture. But we can take pride as a rule in our passion for fairness. In the Vatican where I currently work, my colleagues – whether fellow cardinals at meetings or officials in my office – come from many different countries, continents and cultures. As I write this response today (March 26, 2010) I have had to admit to them that I am not proud of America’s newspaper of record, the New York Times, as a paragon of fairness.

May your Maundy Thursday be yeastless, and your Easter full of rediscovered joy at the peculiar, surprising story of God-become-man, and his deeds of redemption for us, for us, for all of us.

Pop and Son

2010-03-27T11:47:00.003-05:00

Hanging out in Boulder with Jeremy

Is...is that a CIGARETTE in his hand????

Trippy Pics

2010-03-27T11:23:00.002-05:00

Well, southeast Utah. We'd left the utterly forgettable town of Blanding Utah, turned right where the map indicated "picturesque", and had enjoyed a very nice drive through one of the many unknown massive vast valleys in which this part of the country specializes. Then, back to rather bland, flat, high chaparral. Thinking we'd seen what there was to see and on to Monument Valley. Driving the speed limit: 65 m.p.h. on a paved two lane road. Miles and miles of this. Suddenly, a non sequitur: signs warning us the speed ahead was 35; the road itself turning to gravel. Too weird; not possible! Suddenly, we flamed out onto this precipice. It doesn't matter the speed you are going, if you are unprepared for the earth to immediately fall away a thousand feet at your feet, it is hair-raising. Gasps from everyone in the car, including hizzoner the driver.

It is called the Valley of the Gods.

There are these ghostly stone monuments, themselves a thousand feet tall, scattered throughout a 25 mile valley as far as eye can see.

The hairpins were paved; the rest was dirt.

Looking back to where we'd just come.

Monument Valley, which I had come to know about through the novels of Tony Hillerman, was spectacular, but really. How much eye candy can one mere Midwesterner ingest in one day's drive?

The photos, of course, do not do justice to the view.

Childe Abuse

2010-03-01T21:52:00.002-06:00

Or is it? You make the call.

This is Colin, 26 plus years ago, on one of those Fall weekends when Deb was off in Milwaukee finishing her nursing degree, and the kid and I would take off on various adventures. This pic was taken at the World Watermelon Festival, in Pardeeville, WI. No, I'm not force-feeding the Houli-Mouli. I'd give him a bite; he'd gobble and gag, and then I'd give him another bite.

This was, of course, the festival where I was a member of the Four Man World Championship Seed Spitting Team. We were all pathetic, but we had one guy who could really get some mileage out of a seed. The secret was picking the right seed. You knew that. I honestly have no recollection of where Colin was while I was competing. He may have been competing in the speed eating contest.

What a cute baby. Where'd I get those glasses?

Heartland Furniture (that's me) New Web Site

2010-03-01T14:29:00.004-06:00

I've finally gotten a business web "presence." Is that right? Presence? REAL presence? Ok, anyway. I've slogged together something that is halfway respectable but not too respectable, as is my wont. Please feel free to take a peek. It features lots of photos of past work, in hopes of encouraging future work. I do like to work.

You'll find me here. The site is still being developed, so go easy on it. My guy Scott who has been helping from a distance has already pointed half a dozen things--"nitpicky stuff" he calls it. They don't sound nitpicky to me, but I'm probably hypercritical as is my wont.

Did I mention you could find my new business website here?

Ah. Oh.

Old Clem

2010-02-17T20:54:00.011-06:00

No commentary on marriage, as that seems to be the topic I'm fixated on at the moment, would be complete without an extended reminisce about my old Grandma McCallum.

Ah. How to describe this woman? Bear in mind the bearer of this tale was still himself en formatif , as the tale's details unfold. Caveat emptor.

My mom's dad died when she was eight. From what I can gather, her mom then went into extended hybernation, leaving mom, the eldest of three, to sort of raise the other two. Eight years old. No doubt the tales are a bit skewed. My grandma couldn't have been THAT out of it.

Well, by the time I got to know her--the third of four children and a little befuddled myself in my early years (no comment, you)--she was truly off the deep end. I remember driving, after church and Sunday dinner, off to the Reedsburg county home where they had a set of really mentally disturbed people. I am young--perhaps eight years old. We would hear the zoo sounds of your usual home for the disturbed of mind. I would occasionally unaccountably find myself holding hands with some strange old lady who would look at me with these googly eyes; I had nightmares about it for years. There we would visit Grandma, who had at some time in the past had a terrible accident, falling down a flight of stairs and hitting her head severely and therefore putting herself at the mercy of the latest and greatest in psychotropic drug treatment. The cure I think was the disease,, because after many years of this a wise and learned doctor took a long look at her, cut all her medications, and told her to enjoy a nice glass of port wine before retiring for the evening. That seemed to work. Grandma returned to the world.

Before departing, however, it seems my Grandma McCallum spent a lot of time with her nose in harlequin romances. She had a really strange romantic streak. During her illness, but when she lived for a time with us, our family got our very first television. Late fifties. While we watched Andy of Maybury, Grandma would stand next to the television with her hands behind her back and answer imaginary questions that she thought were coming from the set. Very personal and titillating questions. Very complete and detailed answers. I got a lot of what I'd call my early sex education listening to Grandma answer these unheard-by-us, imaginary questions . She believed she was being interviewed by some fella on the TV. Truly, another world. I will say however that it made television watching just that much more fascinating for me. So, see. Sickness runs in the family, I guess.

Jumping ahead a number of years: I'm in high school. By now grandma has been put in a nice retirement home in my home town. But that old romantic streak (call it what you will) isn't gone by a long shot. For one thing, she's 82 but is claiming she's 76. And soon enough she is kicked out of the retirement home for having an affair with her new guy, Clem Blanchett. They find lipstick on his pillowcase and trace it back to her. Clem doesn't get ejected; just my grandma. My lib mom seethes that it is retaliation for a recent public act of nonviolent dissent she's committed in our small town, but who knows? Grandma's out on the street.

My mom finds her a nice little apartment near downtown. Clem, who is 92 but still retains a great sense of humor, and a few other things as well, is brought over to granny's pad weekly by my mom for--I dunno--conjugal visits or something. Soon enough, it is announced that Clem and Emma McCallum are getting married!

I am appointed Best Man.

Look. I'm--what?--nineteen? What do I know about being a Best Man to a 92 year old French American? On the day of the wedding, I arrive late, and my grandmother is livid. "You're LATE! For my WEDDING! I had to dress him MYSELF!" I truly had no idea I was expected to help the groom dress. To this day I get the geebies.

Something rather funny happened on the way to the church. I was ushering Clem down the hallway of grandma's apartment to the long, wide staircase leading to the first floor. We got to the head of the stairs, and for some reason I tripped. In what I remember as a long, slow motion fall, I tumbled, rolled, gallooped, and flipped all the way to the bottom,where I lay in an ignominous, embarassed heap. At the top of the stairs, for the first time that day, Clem is cracking up into a coughing, wheezing, bent-over cackle that lasted until I dragged myself back up to him. Ah, so. I guess I did my essential service as Best Man to the Groom after all. He was completely relaxed for the first time that day.

At the wedding, a covey of uninvited old ladies from the community sat in the back, glowering. Jim Weis, the very sweet Methodist pastor who performed the ceremony, smiled and welcomed us in. Being 92, Clem (and I) sat in the front pew while Emma was escorted down the aisle by my sister Janet, the Bridesmaid. Other than my mom, there was no one else there in that big sanctuary. A serious problem developed when I produced the ring and Clem tried to deposit it onto Emma's ring finger. There was an inordinate amount of shaking going on. My sister Jan stifled a giggle. A chain reaction of stifling took place, Jan to me to Jim Weis; back again. I could have killed her. We came THIS CLOSE to just completely falling apart in laughter. I was in enough trouble with Grandma as it was. Finally, I did my second Good Deed of the day, helping to steady Clem's hand and guide the ring onto the steadied hand of his bride. Everyone smiled and Clem looked relieved. I now pronounce you man and wife.

The two-and-a-half-month-long marriage was stormy, if the stories can be believed. Grandma fussed and furied, furied and fussed. Clem pretty much just sat there. I'm not sure what brought it all on, but soon enough Clem Blanchett departed this sad veil of tears. I would have liked to report that the marriage was blissful, but that wasn't in the nature of my scotch Grandmother's personality. Something about being married again gave vent to something, some controlling emotion that had perhaps lain dormant since Bruce, her first husband, died when my mother was eight. All at the expense of poor, sweet, simple Clem. And that is the story of Grandmother McCallum's second wedding.

ADDENDA:

MY SISTERS WEIGH IN: The "caveat emptor" comment was indeed necessary. My memory does not flourish as it should. Some amendments, which in turn should be caveat-emptored, since heck, they're as old and feeble as I am. To wit:

:Mom may have been six years old when Robert Bruce (not simply "Bruce") died. He was. obviously, named after "Robert The Bruce" of Scots fame.

: Well, the institution was NEAR Reedsburg, but not in it. It may have been a county home, it may have been a state home. Versions differ. Rebecca, being the oldest, remembers the barred doors, the old lady eating dirt from a flower pot, the strait-jacketed souls lying prone on their beds. Very " One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" ish. As with me, the weekly experience of seeing all of this had a profound , disturbing effect.

: Clem may have been 94 not 92; he may have been married to my grandmother for all of seven months, not the 2.5 I've alleged. He had four previous wives. "I buried them all!", remembers a sis.

: Two sisters don't remember the post-wedding furies but do remember the bliss, which somehow I missed. Grandma was thrilled about the freedom to love each other "legally". As Rebecca put it: "She did have some proper notions." Sweet.

: Grandma supported her three children through the years selling Avon.

: All three sisters were present at the wedding, as was my dad. Rebecca, the oldest, even made grandma's wedding dress. Was there a reception afterward? I seem to remember a reception afterward.

Barth On Marriage

2010-02-17T20:24:00.002-06:00

No, not THAT Barth. I'm reading John Barth again, after a twenty-five year hiatus. He of CHIMERA and THE FLOATING OPERA. He's gotten older, mellower, less flashy. He's more reflective, more given to thankfulness. Not really too bad for an atheist.

I'm reading ONCE UPON A TIME. No, I'm not necessarily recommending it. But I'm enjoying it a lot. Here is Barth going on about his marriage:

"...What do I know, having lived with the woman for only twenty-plus years and in the world for some forty before that?...

I know that now we're in love and trouble, is about all--the love abiding, the trouble not--and that in this couple's chemistry neither of those precludes the other. Given the closeness of their connection, the differences between them, the amount of time they spend in each other's company, and the very little time they spend apart, these domestic storms used to beset them once or twice per season, interstitched with passionate reconciliation and overarched with indubitable love. In latter years, the love and commitment have, if anything, grown; time, experience, fatigue, and reciprocal understanding have happily decreased the frequency, duration, and damage (if not the occasional intensity) of such in-house blowups. Perhaps for that reason, they have still a way of taking us by surprise: The emotional fuel-air mix builds almost imperceptibly in the house until some spark--typically a thoughtless word of mine, some small thing done or neglected, inconsequential in itself--blows the roof. Our adrenalines surge; each charges the other with initial provocation; we watch and listen appalled as the angry words scarify; we exhaust ourselves in the night (What home-brewed tempest ever didn't rage past bedtime?)...
Thanks be, then, that since this pair's early years together such full-blown storms have come to buffet them ever more rarely. Both of them are abler than once they were at containing and deflecting the inevitable frictions of conjugality. Weather the storm you cannot avoid, goes the old sailors' proverb, and avoid the storm you cannot weather. Every lasting marriage follows those advisements..."

Why Do People Stay Married?

2010-02-16T21:11:00.004-06:00

The Wall Street Journal had an article back on Feb. 9 entitled HAPPY COUPLES KISS AND TELL.

The journalist, Elizabeth Bernstein, asked the very sensible question, "Why do some couples thrive, while others fizzle or flame out, despite their best intentions?"

The article goes into most of the common, practical reasons for these life-long marriages, which seem so archaic, so unusual today. I remember years ago a couple joking with us that we were the only other couple they knew who hadn't gotten a divorce. They are, of course, now divorced.

I say "of course." Interesting.

The article gives a series of tips on how to stay married for a lifetime, including:

Find the middle ground.
Be funny.
Keep (some) secrets.
Never, ever give up.
Stay alive (More on that one in a sec).

The "keep some secrets" one is fascinating. What do you think? The example given is a Las Vegas couple. The husband is a professional gambler. He has never discussed his business with his wife, but is willing to tell the journalist that he's won and lost millions of dollars. The wife has her own bank account. Actually, I think that's the secret there.

My wife and I are closing in on (I'd better get this right...) 32 years of marriage. We were married on Easter Sunday in a Methodist church on South Hill Drive in Madison by a pastor who is now divorced. He gave us pre-marital counselling. He might have taken some of his own advice. I forget his name. Both Deb and I agreed that being married was a lot better than getting married. That was a lot of nervous work.

STAY ALIVE: The article ends with an anecdote about the writer's sister: "...a doctor,

told me about one of her patients, a 92-year-old woman who showed up for her appointment with her husband, who is 94. They said they have been married for almost 70 years.

"My sister, highly impressed, asked the couple the secret of their union's longevity. And they looked at each other for a long moment. Then the wife spoke: "Eh, neither of us died."

That's right, the secret of a long marriage, in the final analysis, is for neither partner to die. As my wife has confessed (for us both) on more than one occasion : "We're just stuck with each other. That's all."

Photos from Life Magazine

Higher Things Youth Retreat

2010-02-15T21:43:00.012-06:00

Trinity Lutheran Church, Sheboygan, WI

Ah, Sheboygan. Brats and Lutherans, and the question is: are they interchangeable?

Haha, just kidding. My daughter and I, along with the interminably zesty Zeke Bartlett of Mental Llama blog fame, spent the weekend at a theological retreat sponsored by the Higher Things Lutheran youth organization. This isn't your ordinary happy-clappy Christian youth get together. The topics are decidedly doctrinal and challenging, and the kids,--generally confirmed youth through high school-- carefully listen. The pastors who lead these sessions are engaging and entertaining, but they definitely don't hold back when it comes to going deeply into the chosen topic of the retreat.

The location of the retreat was Trinity Lutheran (one of them, anyway) in Sheboygan,with its beautiful, restored sanctuary. The people of Trinity are to be congratulated for taking such good care of this church they have inherited. Pastors Mech and Berg can be my pastors, any day.

The chosen topic of the retreat was itself a deep one: the doctrine of Confession and Absolution. Try luring 175 teenagers to something like this. Yeah, just try it!

Yet come they did, and the topic was fascinating. While there was ample time for the kids to hang out together--as well as to watch a Hitchcock movie and to see Comedy Sportz at a nearby restored movie house--the bulk of the time was taken up with worship, breakout sessions on various topics, and longer plenary sessions with two pastors. The highlight of the plenary sessions was a great video of Johnny Cash, late in his life, singing an old Nine Inch Nails tune, HURT. It is worth a look, and was a great setup for the topic of the need for confession, the greater need for absolution--and while we're at it for a nice chat about the lost but returning practice of Private Confession and Absolution.

I found myself often sitting at the back of the auditorium, just looking around at these kids. Yes, there was chatting and joking around, but by and large they listened carefully to what the presenters were saying. It helped a lot that the presenters were both interesting, funny, , and also interspersed really great videos into their talks.

Scattered around the auditorium and hallways were quotes from the good Doctor Luther himself, some of them pretty funny; some of them more funny because of where they were placed. And of course, the main speakers were called upon to judge the chocolate chip cookie bakeoff. It sounds like a good gig, but they were pretty sick of cookies by the time the judging ended.

Le Mssrs. Peperkorn and Kuhlmann, Pastors, sitting in Judgment

"Here I stand. I can do no other."

"CLOTTED CALM": Franzmann and Conflict in the Church

2010-01-18T20:59:00.003-06:00

The No Inklings Book Club has undertaken to read together Martin Franzmann's fine book FOLLOW ME, a devotion on the book of Matthew. I used this book a decade ago in leading a Bible study at a previous church, and found it poetic and inspiring. A taste:

"Conflict is never pretty and always entails agony; and there are those who hold that in the church all conflict should be avoided at all costs and tranquility should be purchased at any price, and they deem such clotted calm the very peace of God. But the evangelists' account of the contradicted Christ tells us plainly that the church cannot avoid conflict if she be the church of Christ. It tells us that men must take the agony of conflict and bear the brunt of controversy if they are the Christ's. We cluck our disapproval of the bitter controversies of the past and rejoice that such things can no longer happen here. Perhaps our reluctance to face conflict is one of the reasons why we see so puny a Christ and think our God and His kingdom so small."

By "contradicted Christ" Franzmann is referring to a theme he has developed regarding Jesus' powerful responses to men's doubt, rejection, and blasphemy in Chapter 11: his response to the prisoner John the Baptist's questions about him.

This is by no means an easy read. In fact, I find I have to read it in gulps, because it is so densely populated with insights and language that just make me stop and pause. One of my favorite quotes is Franzmann trying to quote Luther, in a way many of us have found ourselves doing:

"'When God begins a thing,' Luther says somewhere, 'it always looks as if nothing will come of it.' He chooses out the least of all nations to be His peculiar people. He makes His Messiah a Servant who goes down in defeat and death. And His kingdom comes as an unspectacular 'stone cut by no human hand,' no match for the bright and splendid and mighty magnitude of the powers of this world. And so His revelation always strikes sparks of contradiction when it comes to man...'"

"Luther says somewhere..." How many times have I heard THAT? I love that Franzmann put it in his book, as if the point he had to make was too intense to stop and actually look up and cite the Luther quote. Not everyone can get away with that. Or, I picture him having looked fruitlessly for the quote, queried his peers about it, been unsuccessful at actually locating it in Luther's works, but still unwilling to give it up. It is such a good quote, and so true.

Compost In Winter

2010-01-18T16:37:00.002-06:00

Asparagus stems, orange rinds,

Celery stalks, coffee grinds.

Sleep, my beauties!

The worms come in Springtime.

MEXICO, the pelicans

2010-01-12T21:17:00.005-06:00

As we bobbed out in the ocean, very near us pelicans by the dozens were busy attacking the fish feeding just off the beach. This gives you an idea of the dive bombing these crazy birds were into. As soon as one had a fish in its copious beak, a seagull would land on its back and try to steal the fish. I could get within a few feet of these birds as they dove--sometimes from 30 feet in the air--crash landed, speared a fish, gobbled it down while being harassed by seagulls, and then without fail they would wiggle their tail feathers in tingling delight. Or maybe the live fish in the belly just tickled, I'm not sure.

One afternoon, we could look up and down a two mile beach and see this frenetic activity happening along its full length. It reminded me of WWII air battle scenes, wild dogfights in the sky, flying objects diving and swooping. And then wiggling their tails in delight.

MEXICO, the beach

2010-01-12T19:39:00.004-06:00

The beach at Lo de Marcos is perhaps two miles long, with a user friendly shark net 200 yds out. This is brown sand, not the white glorious stuff of the playas in the Yucatan. Still, very nice, and with partly cloudy skies and 75 degree weather, it was particularly suited for our northern skins. In the Yuc, we burned.

One day we wandered south, on a rutty dirt road over a ridge, and found a smaller beach around the bend from the main beach. The boys and I played football, sort of: I was Brett Favre on one of his crazier days, and the football was a lime. It was pretty much just an excuse for Colin and Jeremy to beat each other up, but now and then I drew up a sneaky play that involved taking someone's swim suit down. Deb sipped beer and took photos. Don't look at that fat man in the picture. It is just an illusion. The game ended in a tie.

Another day we wandered out to the beach in the early afternoon, found some shade and slept half the aft away. The boys got hungry, and armed with one of my fifty peso notes went wandering away, to return shortly with a stack of fish, shrimp, and beef tacos. Hot beach, cold beer, and tacos? It is better than 72 virgins. At least, as far as I can tell.

Then it was time to body surf. The water was perfect: cool and refreshing. Salt water is just really good for the body, I gotta tell ya. Deb was utterly blissed out. Long after Colin and I--the two old men--had dragged our sorry butts up to our towels and collapsed on the beach, Jeremy and Deb kept going, catching wave after wave, glorying in this throwback to her childhood. Deb spent most Augusts of her early years camping on the beach in California, before it was spoiled by people from Indiana. Well, Wisconsin too. Minnesota for sure.

Mexico

2010-01-10T20:25:00.009-06:00

Taking a break from the cold and the snow, my wife Deb and I travelled down to the Pacific coast of Mexico for a week. Our sons Jeremy and Colin beat us there by about a week, spending a few days in Guadalajara before bussing down to Puerto Vallarta with the task of finding us a decent place to stay for a few nights during the high season of Epiphany. The Mexicans were on vacation.

The boys did a good job. One tossed the other in the ocean, wearing his cell phone. So we couldn't actually reach them. The other left his cash card back home. So they were broke when we did find them. But they did the job. We stayed at the Marlyn, a very Mexican little hotel in old, el centro PV. And they found the best Mexican food in town, ironically cooked by a gay chef named Austin, from Boston. Life can be very strange like that.

Soon enough, we'd had enough of Puerto Vallarta. It was a madhouse, and not our kind of madhouse. We were looking for something else. The boys celebrated our imminent departure by staying out all night, drinking and shooting pool. It was two very silly, sleepy boys we trundled out of town. We'd rented what was supposed to be the smallest little Dodge the Mexican Hertz handled, but got a nice SUV instead. Don't ask.

Breakfast. We drove up coast to Bucerias, which used to be, according to the Lonely Planet, one very cool place, and cheap. Breakfast at the famous Orange Building on the beach was great, but not cheap. The boys continued to celebrate, but soon after breakfast hit their bellies, it was off to the beach chairs with them.

Well, we had to find a place to stay.

I had read about a nice little beach hamlet north of

Bucerias, called San Francisco, so over the mountains and up the coast we went. We found a very crowded, claustrophobic

San Francisco all right, with expensive places to stay. The tourists had found it. Drat.

There was nothing for it but to continue to drive north. The boys were still lost to the world, unaware of the growing discomfort Deb and I were feeling at not really being sure of what wewere doing. Over another mountain, down into a valley we drove. I came to another hamlet, and just decided to turn left. Right away, the vibes were better. This was a quieter, cleaner, less touristy place. Half a mile into town I came to a nice looking bungalow, called Tortuga, The Turtles. It had the most beautfiful VACANTE sign out in front! Better, it had prices that were half what we

were paying in PV! Not a word of English was spoken by the elderly manager, but he showed me a nice two room bungalow with a nice kitchen, back patio, right on the pool. Sold. The room wouldn't be ready for an hour, could we come back? Somehow the idea was conveyed. So off to the beach we went. The boys we depostied under some palms trees, took a swim and a walk, and then headed back to claim our room. And there we stayed for three comfortable, interesting, relaxing days. Aside from the nail I took in a tire, requiring the services of the local nail-in-tire-repair guy (No, really. He knew what he was doing!), it was all good. Colin became the bungalow’s residence translator, and Deb, Colin and Jeremy took part in cooking enormous Mexican breakfasts: refritas, fresh hot corn tortillas from the local tortilla factory, fresh mango and pineapple, eggs with hot peppers, and mucho hot salsa. Camp coffee, Mexican pastries, and guacamole. Feasts, my friends! Feasts.

COME THOU FOUNT OF EVERY BLESSING

2009-12-15T22:00:00.003-06:00

Enjoy a song from Sufjan Steven's Christmas album.

The Divine Deli

2009-12-11T18:20:00.004-06:00

Back in the day, when I was deeply involved in the Transcendental Meditation program, some of those of us who were starting to look askance at where "the Movement" (as it was called by insiders) was taking us would sit around and talk about the Spiritual Rat Race. The SRR can be found in any number of New Age groups, and amounts to a sort of competition among True Believers (Robespierre comes to mind, but that's politics) for doing the right things, saying the right things, and being Spiritually Correct in all outward appearances. It had to do with keeping up with the latest thing, whether it be rudrash beads, yogic flying techniques, or just the right sort of incense you burned during the puja. When you come to realize that Cosmic Consciousness is just the first step on the path to getting off of the great mendalla; that God Consciousness is followed by Unity Consciousness and there's no way this foul sojourner will get there in this lifetime, its time to maybe rethink the path.

Well, I got out of there, thanks in part to a relationship with a woman who became a wife; the woman yearning to rediscover her Christian roots. The guy--me--sort of just tried to keep up. Little did I know that Americans would soon enough begin to practice a sort of spiritual rat race of their own, in imitation of that which I had fled.

Now comes an article in the Wall St. Journal by a Mr. Prothero, religion professor at Boston U. The article, entitled A HINT OF THIS, A PINCH OF THAT, reviews the latest Pew research into the strange habits of American Christians, among others. It seems we've rejected our first love, if we ever loved at all, in favor of picking and choosing the spiritual path that most appeals to us. Nothing new there. The good news is that Professor Prothero is bothered by it. Let's see why.

In a survey released by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, it was concluded that the U.S. is a "nation of religious drifters". Prothero compares it well to the sort of serial monogamy that has become so widespread among American adults. But it gets worse:

"A new Pew study, released last week, shows that Americans are swingers as well as switchers, flirting with religious beliefs and practices other than their own without officially changing their religious affiliation. Catholic leaders have long denounced 'Cafeteria Catholics' for going down the line and picking and choosing the Catholic beliefs and practices they choose to uphold. According to this new study, Americans as a group are now bellying up to what my Boston University colleague John Berthrong has referred to as the 'divine deli.'"

Prothero asks, "Is mixing religous traditions a matter of heresy or ignorance?" I would answer, "It is a matter of lack of discipline, plus some heresy and ignorance."

He calls it "religious promiscuity" and I would agree with that. Americans have become spiritual Tiger Woods's (to jump on a certain bandwagon). We've got a problem with that.

"Once upon a time, Baptists and Lutherans and Disciples of Christ fought bitterly over such matters as when to baptize Christians and just how Jesus was present at the Eucharist. But that stuff is so last century. Today even the distinctions between Jews and Buddhists, or between Hindus and Christians, are starting to blur, not least because most Americans have almost no idea what these traditions stand for....contemporary Americans know almost nothing about their own religious traditions and even less about the traditions of others. Most Americans cannot name any of the Four Gospels, and an overwhelming majority admit to being wholly ignorant about Islam. So we shuffle from one to the other with little sense of what is being lost (or gained) in the process."

Prothero thinks this process of mix 'n' match is more akin to the marketplace than to education. "The store managers in our spiritual marketplace seem a bit too eager to sell us whatever they imagine we want."

Ouch. 'Tis too true. Everyone is doing what is right in his/her own eyes.

I think that it goes deeper than that, or actually, more shallow: we haven't done the grammar of the thing. We don't sit still long enough to know how to parse our own tradition, like an inexperienced, anxious young woodworker who is so eager to assemble a piece of furniture that he neglects to take the little steps that make the piece of furniture functional and beautiful. Maybe it is our penchant for emphasizing the rhetoric stage of education before we've ever slogged through the grammar and logic stages of anything. Let the little children clarify their values.

In any case, it is beginning to look like a spiritual rat race to me. As Prothero concludes:

"Absent a chain of memory that ties us to these religion's ancient truths, these visions are lost, and we are left to our own devices, searching for God with as much confusion as we search, in love, for the next new thing."

I naturally have a problem with all of these ancient traditions actually having spiritual truths--to say nothing of The Truth--but his point is nevertheless apropos to the sorts of things going on in Lutheran churches all over this land.

Deb's Kindness Cleansing Diet For Husbands

2009-12-03T20:06:00.003-06:00

Or, her husband, at any rate.

Homemade almond milk, apples, cashews, beets, yellow beets, and greens,greens, greens.

That's what I'm talkin' about!

Every day a new version.

Obama, the New Rehoboam?

2009-11-28T16:13:00.007-06:00

Then King Rehoboam took counsel with the old men, who had stood before Solomon his father while he was yet alive, saying, "How do you advise me to answer this people?" And they said to him, "If you will be a servant to this people today and serve them, and speak good words to them when you answer them, then they will be your servants forever." But he abandoned the counsel that the old men gave him and took counsel with the young men who had grown up with him and stood before him. And he said to them, "What do you advise that we answer this people who have said to me, 'Lighten the yoke that your father put on us'? And the young men who had grown up with him said to him, "Thus shall you speak to this people who said to you, 'Your father made our yoke heavy, but you lighten it for us,' thus shall you say to them, 'My little finger is thicker than my father's thigh. And now, whereas my father laid on you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions.'"
I KINGS 12:6-11

Peggy Noonan, in her usual Saturday Wall Street Journal column, has some things to say about what people are saying about the new president that brought this quote to mind. I'd call Noonan a moderate, although she did work for Ronald Reagan and was a speechwriter in the first Bush presidency. Nevertheless, she has a more even hand than many conservative pundits these days.

In her column she makes two points, or rather points to two moderate-to-Democratic sources of concern for the way the administration is carrying on. The first is domestic: she quotes journalist Elizabeth Drew:

...[w]hile the president was in Asia last week, "a critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man."... They once held "an unromantically high opinion of Obama,"...but now they are concluding that the president isn't "the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought."

MY thought on this is: "On what basis did they come to their initial conclusions?" which has been my question from the time Obama arose out of the obscurity of the Illinois state senate. It seems that supporters from the beginning have ascribed to the man whatever their own hopes and aspirations are. The movie BEING THERE is a comical but close approximation of what I think went on. If they are now coming to different conclusions, then it is not Obama that is to blame, but their own delusions of who this man is. Bottom line: we are still finding out.

Noonan then turns to another source, Leslie Gelb, writing in the Daily Beast. This centers on the Asian trip, and The Bow. Noonan, quoting Gelb:

...the president's Asia trip suggested "a disturbing amateurishness in managing America's power." The president's Afghanistan review has been "inexcusably clumsy," Mideast negotiations have been "fumbling." ...He added that rather than bowing to emperors--Mr. Obama "seems to do this stuff spontaneously and inexplicably"--he should begin to bow to "the voices of experience" in Washington.

When longtime political observers start calling for wise men, a president is in trouble.

Noonan's last comment is interesting, and is what made me think of the ancient king Rehoboam, the son of Solomon who took over the troubled kingdom at the death of his father. The fork in the road for the new king had to do with what advice he would abide by. History tells us that he took the wrong fork in the road, piling more financial woes on a people who had already been scoured by the cost of building Solomon's temple, and, according to the prophecy of Ahijah, ultimately losing 83% of his kingdom to the former servant Jeroboam. And here we have, perhaps, a parallel figure in Obama, replacing the "whips" of the past administrations with the "scorpions" of vastly expanded federal spending, the likes of which we may never get out from under.

Noonan, again quoting Drew:

She sco[u]red "the Chicago crowd" which she characterized as "a distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team." The White House, Ms. Drew says, needs adult supervision--"an older, wiser head, someone with a bit more detachment."

A few weeks ago after church, I stood next to a man I didn't quite know except I knew he fervently opposed Obama. To my delight and surprise, what he said was, "I find myself praying for this president more than any president we've ever had."

As Noonan writes, "Mr Obama is in a hard place."

We might start, or having started, continue, praying for the man.

UPDATE : It seems Der Spiegel has gotten on the BashObama bandwagon as well.

Heroic Adventures In Oven Repair

2009-11-25T20:48:00.008-06:00

The Critter

It's 3:59 in the afternoon, the day before Thanksgiving. My wife is upstairs, slaving away making pies, peeling potatoes, preparing all the fixin's for a Thanksgiving dinner she isn't going to enjoy because she has to work the next day.

I'm in the basement hiding.

Suddenly, out of the blue, comes the call:

"THE OVEN WON'T WORK! Can you come take a look at it?"

Deb and I stood before the gleaming but aging GE wonderoven, the second of our thirty-plus-year marriage, and thought about how to cook a turkey on a stick, over a fire in the firepit on the deck. The oven wouldn't turn on. I mean, what's THAT all about? I started to laugh. "Maybe Cindy next door will let us use her oven..."

Finally, the shock wore off and reality set in. I had to act--FAST! We were burning daylight. The Bartlett boys were coming to dinner tomorrow and they were not to be denied. The doggone BROILER worked, so why wouldn't that lower burner ignite when we pushed all the right buttons?? I suggested we try lighting it "by hand", a technical term my wife didn't like the sound of. That got her to dig out the oven operating instructions, which indicated in fairly strong terms that lighting the oven "by hand" was not recommended.

Ok. Get out the tools and start poking around. How do you take the door off an oven. I eyed the hinges and had a really bad vision: parts coming loose and sliding down inside the oven; having to remove side panels to reinstall; the works. Time enough to worry about the door later.

I managed to get the lower panel removed from the interior of the oven, turned on the oven light,and there before me was the critter pictured above, attached to the lower burner. I tried turning on the oven again, but the critter wouldn't heat up. I tried turning on the broiler, and the critter's brother, up there attached to the upper burner, lit up like a ceegar. So, thinking fast and furious, I concluded that maybe I had a burned out lower critter.

What to do? I called my appliance repair guys, hoping that I could buy my way out of this increasingly absurd situation. Of all the times for an oven to die. Egad. They were friendly--too friendly!--JOVIAL in fact. They just chuckled when I suggested that maybe they could, as a special favor to me, send out a techie guy. No, they're all home, preparing to enjoy the holiday. "Would Monday be ok?" They suggested I fix it myself. Somehow I knew that was the rabbit's hole I was going to dive down. I asked if they had the part. Yes, right here, and we close in twenty minutes. Just $76.95.

I didn't want to walk the dog anyway, which HAD BEEN the next item on my agenda. I drove up to get the part. By the time I got home Deb triumphantly declared she'd figured out how to remove the door. "Yeah, I know. Open it halfway and then lift. The parts guy told me all about it," I said.

The new critter came complete with handy instructions.

The first instruction read:

"WB2X9154 IGNITER KIT:
"Remove all parts necessary to provide access to defective igniter."

Sounds easy enough. Instructions, you gotta love them. And so began my odyssey into the layers-of-an-onion that is the nether regions of your modern oven. Good news? I needed just one tool to do the whole job, a quarter-inch bolt driver. So equipped, I began unscrewing this and unscrewing that, whipping out this chunk of sheet metal and that. Deb dutifully took them from me and opportunistically started washing them, as washerwomen are wont to do. And then scattering them around the kitchen in random order. What a team we are.

Five, six layers down, I finally unpuzzled my way to the floor. And there was my Precious, the little burned-out critter: my dead igniter: exposed for all the world to get at to remove the two obscure little screws that attached at an upward 45 degree angle rather than, more practically, downward where you could get at them without digging to China. It didn't matter: there were those two little white wires coming out of the back that had to be snipped, stripped, and rewired using the cute little ceramic wirenuts that came in the igniter kit. I snipped, dutifully. Then I read:

Instruction #5:

"Reattach the wires the same as the old igniter, using the ceramic wire connectors enclosed in kit."

Oops. Didn't quite notice which wire went where on the old igniter. Ah, doesn't matter, I'll just attach this....here, and this....HERE. Good. Done. Daringly, without even reinstalling all of the scattered parts, I turned on the oven to see if the new critter worked. Nothing. I mean, nothing! Then, just as I was about to turn it off and do the ole switcheroo, bingo! Ceegar.

LIT ceegar! Damn. I'm good.

I started backing out of the cave feet first: attach the cigar to the mounting bracket, then the bottom most sheet, attached with two screws at the front underside, then the mounting brackets at the back, then the next two sheets, then the two funny weird ones in front, which fit sort of tightly and screwed into the sides, then reattach the front of the burner, then....a few extra screws here, hm....then finish it all up and get the hell out.

Some serious cat toy equipment was found on the floor at the bottom of the oven. No loose change. But five minutes after completion, we had lift-off!

I glanced at the Igniter Kit instruction sheet one more time, and happened to notice a

WARNING! "Electrical Shock Hazard. Disconnect power supply before servicing!"

Oops.

The Happy Results

Victor Davis Hanson on Our New Superstitious Age

2009-11-25T14:04:00.002-06:00

If Postmodernism was the taking away of rational thought without replacing it with anything, then the next, er, logical step would be the Age of Superstition.

Hanson argues that's what we've now entered. I've had an on-again, off-again conversation going with Ed Veith for ten years about how Postmodernism was a "transitional" stage, mostly reacting to modernism. We've noted how it had its good sides: rediscovery of things that were not "modern", and a balancing out of our over-reliance on "scientific thinking" and rationalism as a panacea for all mankind. But it still remained, to me, an unstable way of thinking, like a cleaned house awaiting what came next. Hanson still calls it postmodernism, but I think we've gone beyond that vacuum into the Hereafter. Here are snippets from Hanson's very political take on what's come next:

Barack Obama promised us not only transparency, but also a new respect for science. In soothing tones, he asserted that his administration was “restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making.”

In our new Enlightenment of Ivy League Guardians, we were to return to the rule of reason and logic. Obama would lead us away from the superstitious world of Bush’s evangelical Christianity, “intelligent design,” and Neanderthal moral opposition to human-embryo stem-cell research.

Instead, we are seeing an unprecedented distortion of science — indeed, an attack on the inductive method itself. Facts and reason are trumped by Chicago-style politics, politically correct dogma, and postmodern relativism.

He then goes on to count the many ways we are no longer being led to think logically about the world, including this:

Western inductive thinking used to teach us to look at facts and collate symptoms. (E.g., we have observed a number of killers evoking Islam, yelling out “Allahu Akbar!” at the moment of their murdering, or post facto, bragging unrepentantly of murdering Jews and infidels.)

Then one makes a diagnosis based on such empirical findings. (E.g., unlike the case with radical anti-abortionists or violent environmentalists, in the last eight years we have witnessed a series of unhinged Muslim males who have justified their violent actions through affinities with, or promotion of, radical Islam.)

All those data lead to a scientific conclusion and prognosis. (E.g., while only a small proportion of Muslims have committed violent attacks, over the past eight years there have been dozens of cases in which angry Muslim males have attacked Jewish centers or U.S. military personnel, and have shot or deliberately run over individual Americans. Therefore, there is a danger that a subset of young Muslims is disproportionately committing terrorist acts. Furthermore, the combination of disaffected Muslim males and ubiquitous jihadist propaganda, together with Western denial, will logically lead both to more formal plots and to more lone-wolf attacks.)

But not so fast: Remember, we are now in an age of superstition, not rationalism, in which utopian ends justify unscientific means.

The new Age of Superstition. Embrace it, live it, enjoy it. It may be with us for awhile.

FEYNMAN On Scientific Honesty

2009-11-24T19:36:00.005-06:00

This quote probably should apply to Business, Government, the Media, as well as its intended subject, Science. It comes from the Nobel Physicist's Caltech speech in 1974.

In light of the apparent rise of politics in science (It has always been there, but the damaging effects can hurt more people now), I offer you a quote from the author of What Do YOU Care What Other People Think? and other delightful books.

It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty – a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked – to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can – if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong – to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

WHY DID JESUS SPIT?

2009-11-18T15:58:00.004-06:00

Spitting, your mother told you, is gross. She may have said uncouth, but probably not. She may have told you, if you had to spit, to spit outside.

Here's a little email interchange between me and an anonymous pastor friend, I'll call him, er, say, Jesse. I had some questions for him.

ME: I've been thinking about incarnational theology again.

JESSE: An excellent pasttime.

ME: I've been wondering if you have any insight into, or can point me to

someone with insight into Jesus' acts of spitting to cure the deaf

and the blind men in Mark?

I'm thinking about it in terms of baptism and the Lord's Supper: is this somehow connected: the desire of the Lord to connect the physical world with the spiritual in forgiveness and healing? I'm thinking also about the Fall, how creation itself is broken. When Jesus spit, was part of the message that he was healing, or

promising to heal, Creation?

JESSE: I haven't seen anything about healing creation, but the connection to the means of grace is something I've used before. Asking why He healed the senses through spit is like asking why He washes sins away and bestows spiritual life with water.

ME: Well, actually, most questions from the reformed have to do with that, so I am looking to connect as broadly as possible the incarnation and the work of the Incarnation. When people say, "Oh, baptism is just symbolic", with the implication that the sign points elsewhere and therefore we shouldn't put too much emphasis on the sign, then I think, "So we shouldn't put too much emphasis on the incarnation of Christ, should we?" That often stops 'em.

As to why, not sure I care. You are right: answer one part of it, we answer it all. "why did Jesus spit?" "Why did Jesus condescend to be born a man?" There HAS to be a connection.

The fact that there are other times he doesn't use matter in healing doesn't undermine these examples, I think. But it does confuse the issue just a bit. Was it Jesus' mood at the time? :)

JESSE: Actually, I don't have a satisfying answer, unless it's satisfying to know that He has redeemed our bodies as well as our souls for eternal life. Yet that still doesn't tell us "why." Why did Naaman have to dip seven times in the Jordan? When we have the answer to one of these questions, I think we'll have the answer to all of them. Part of the problem may be the disconnect that we assume between the physical and the spiritual. There are not two creations, but one. Easily overlooked physical events may have spiritual implications, consequences, or causes: a good reason to use the liturgy and pay attention to our posture and movements in worship.

Incarnational, indeed.

Jesse

If anyone has anything to add to the discussion, jump right in. Why did Jesus spit?

DACHAU

2009-11-15T12:29:00.002-06:00

I just ran across an old journal I kept when I was a 19 year old kid traveling in Europe for the first time. About a week into the trip , while in Munich, West Germany, I visited the Dachau concentration camp museum. My notes:

January 7--Munich-Dachau:
A concentration camp, I have found, looks quite similar to an army barracks--that is--twenty-five years after being used...Dachau was the scene, from 1933 through 1945, of 31,591--or more--deaths: mainly Jews, Russians, or German resisters. I walked to the gate with a South African acquaintance, who was in the midst of a two-week whirlwind tour of Europe...
We first entered the museum, which resides in the main building at the head of an area that used to be barracks. In front of these stands the "roll-call" area, where prisoners used to be tortured--after anyone managed to escape--by being forced to stand at attention for one night and half a day.
The museum mainly consists of documents and pictures that have been blown up and posted within two or three large rooms, rooms that were used for storage. In a pinch, when there was a scarcity of room, these were torture chambers. The pictures digress from the original building of Dachau through the first prisoners in 1933, to 1938. They finally end in some photos of starving, bony men cheering as they are freed, and the aftermath when American soldiers find "the morgue" full of hundreds of dead bodies.
My friend and I walk down the rows of barracks, all gone now except for two or three; we walked where thousands of hungry, tired prisoners walked, or trudged, or crawled. At the end of the lane, to the left and through a gate, stands a statue of a hungry, dirty POW. Behind it is The Building. We walked in through an empty room to the Ovens. A sign hanging from a large wooden support read, "Prisoners were hung here." This was directly in front of the third of five ovens. There were open, showing what amounted to a great baker's oven, seven feet long and two feet wide. Walking through this room into the next, I felt something akin to depression as I tried to imagine the attitudes and consciousness of men accustomed to seeing others being tortured and hung. I couldn't imagine it.
We entered "The Showers" which were never used at Dachau (the showers at the Hartheim Castle, near Linz Austrian, were apparently "much better"). These are actually gas chambers, disguised so that prisoners wouldn't kick up a fuss while being taken there, etc. It is just an empty room with several holes in the ceiling, from which gas would have come.
And that was all. It didn't impress one, all clean and tidy, as being a dangerous unusual place. But the story behind it all makes one imagine that one sees machine guns and Nazis in the towers, and that one hears trudging footsteps, and a voice crying out in total, frustrated despair. I left quietly.

Obamacare, The House, and the Senate

2009-11-14T19:03:00.004-06:00

From The Federalists Papers, article 73:

The oftener the measure is brought under examination, the greater the diversity in the situations of those who are to examine it, the less must be the danger of those errors which flow from want of due deliberation, or of those missteps which proceed from the contagion of some common passion or interest. It is far less probable, that culpable views of any kind should infect all the parts of the government at the same moment and in relation to the same object, than that they should by turns govern and mislead every one of them.

The populist, rash House has passed a travesty of a bill: emotional, power-hungry, the dream of any decent far leftist. Well, with the exception of federal funding for abortion for any female of any species. Things should not go so well in the Senate, where a "greater diversity" of situations and opinions should help bring some sanity to what is a crazy bad piece of legislation.

This is a great teaching moment in the history of the United States. Did the founders understand how treacherous simple democracies could be, and did they take steps to anticipate effective ways to stymie mob rule? The sedate, royal, sophisticated state of affairs in the Senate--all in comparison to the mob rule tendencies at the moment in the House--may be about to tell us something about the wisdom and greatness of the founder's vision.

As Abe Lincoln is known to have said: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but..."

Attention CORMAC MCCARTHY fans

2009-11-13T12:35:00.003-06:00

There is a really good interview with the author of THE ROAD in today's Wall Street Journal. A few snippets:

WSJ: Does [the] issue of length [of a movie] apply to books, too? Is a 1,000 page book somehow too much?

McCarthy: "For modern readers, yeah. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're gong to write something like 'The Brother's Karamazov' or 'Moby Dick', go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different."

WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?

McCarthy: "I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing."

WSJ: You grew up Irish Catholic.

McCarthy: "I did, a bit. It wasn't a big issue. We went to church on Sunday. I don't even remember religion ever even being discussed."

WSJ: Is the God that you grew up with in church every Sunday the same God that the man in "The Road" questions and curses?

McCarthy: "It may be. I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it's meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person. I have friends at the [Sante Fe] Institute. They're just really bright guys who do really difficult work solving difficult problems, who say, 'It's really more important to be good than it is to be smart.' And I agree it is more important to be good that it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you."

****

Well. Those of us who already knew McCarthy's work knew not to go to him for spiritual advice. He seems above all very talented at posing all of the hard questions, unflinchingly, but leaves the answers to others. There are times in his novels when he probably should have stopped typing, gone have a cup of coffee, and looked out the window. But I think he is the best writer in America today. And posing the hard questions is an important vocation.

My son Jeremy gave me a copy of THE ROAD for Christmas last year. It's time I read it.

"I was sick of it, too."

2009-11-12T18:42:00.002-06:00

I got a nice note from my son Colin, living in deepest darkest Mexico.

But within reach of an internet connection, thankfully. One of his comments:

How are you all doing? Glad to see the blog continues. Got sick of seeing that stupid tray every time I clicked on the link.

Very cool tray btw, no joke.

Love,

Heroin and Confession

2009-11-08T21:16:00.004-06:00

The Friday night prison Bible study continues apace. There has been a complete turnover of men from a few months ago, when for perhaps six months only two showed up regularly. We now pretty regularly seat seven. Not a huge group, but perhaps a start toward interesting a few of the shyer, or harder-core inmates in maybe sitting down with us. I've finally given up on finding anyone to help out, so I've made a commitment to go every Friday night myself.

A large, black, sweet ex-con has been returned to prison, and is back in the Friday night group. "I did pretty well for about ten months, but then I just started selling those narcotics again, and here I am back again." I told my old friend I was glad to see him again, but not there. "You're hurting people by selling that stuff, you know that don't you?" Yeah, he knows. How hard it is to find a new way when you're black and poor and the old ways have worked, financially speaking, in the past.

Last Friday, we started a scriptural word study on forgiveness. I'm not sure that's the best way to go about it, but they asked to do thematic studies rather than just reading consecutively through books of the Bible, which we'd been doing for years.

I realized once we got started I needed to back up though, and talk about the doctrine of sin. We found ourselves puzzling our way through the latter parts of Romans 7, and it was helpful! Then, back into the OT to discover what it has to say about forgiveness. Interestingly, the overwhelming number of passages regarding "forgive others" are NT. In the old testament, the writers are begging God for forgiveness. As Daniel said in his prayer, "not because of our righteousness, but because of your mercy."

Anyway. One of the guys started talking: "When I was doing heroin, I tried to hide the fact from God. Heroin was all I wanted to do; it consumed my every thought. God didn't look all that attractive to me. I was hiding from God. At some point, I finally got around to telling God, in prayer, that what I really, really wanted was more junk, to get high. It seemed when I finally honestly just told him that, then He started to answer my prayers."

I thought that was marvelous. I kept coming back to this with the others at the Bible study: his honest confession removed the obstacles to the Holy Spirit: heaven opened and he found help; he was delivered from his bondage to this terrible drug.. And then, later, we ran across this about forgiveness:

"I acknowledged my sin to you,

and I did not cover my iniquity;

I said, "I will confess my transgressions to

the Lord,"

and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.

Psalm 32:5

I had the man who had struggled with heroin addiction read this passage aloud, and bam. It really seemed to hit home. We then went on to talk about the relationship between confession and forgiveness, which I harp on all the time anyway. A few things are starting to gel, perhaps.

These guys keep running into one another. It is like a brotherhood of the jailed. Most have been serial offenders, and have been in Bible studies together in various institutions around the state. I have always suspected that for some of them, it is easier to be in than out. Three squares a day, a warm and safe bed, and they have friends in there. Many of them, at this level, are working on the outside during the day: menial jobs, assembly line jobs; one guy's job is to drive them to their workplaces and pick them up again.. And they run into familiar cons and ex-cons at their workplaces as well.

For others, time hangs heavy and they can't wait to be released. These are the ones with families awaiting their return.

MERCY

2009-11-08T21:07:00.005-06:00

Now I have found the ground wherein

Sure, my soul's anchor may remain--

The wounds of Jesus, for my sin,

Before the world's foundation slain;

Whose mercy shall unshaken stay

When heaven and earth are fled away.

Father, Thine everlasting love

Our scanty thought surpasses far,

Thy heart still melts with tenderness,

Thy arms of love still open are;

Returning sinners to receive

That mercy they may taste and live.

O Love, Thou bottomless abyss,

My sins are swallowed up in thee!

Covered is my unrighteousness,

Nor spot of guilt remains on me,

While Jesus blood, through earth and skies

Mercy, free, boundless mercy cries!

With faith I plunge me in this sea,

Here is my hope, my joy, my rest.

Hither, when hell assails, I flee,

I look into my Savior's breast.

Away, sad doubt and anxious fear!

Mercy is all that's written there.

J. A. Rothe, trans. by John Wesley.

Decorative Tray

2009-09-30T15:01:00.005-05:00

This is a decorative tray, in bookmatched Curly Maple, Wenge, and Brazilian Cherry,

made for one of Deb's co-workers.

CORNER TABLE

2009-09-30T12:37:00.004-05:00

New additions to the Beaudet collection, by Heartland Furniture

In Cherry, SoftMmaple, Purple Heart, Curly Maple, and Brazilian Cherry

Luther, On His Daily Life

2009-09-30T11:28:00.003-05:00

I do not know how strong in spirit others may be, but I cannot make myself so holy, even if I were so learned and Spirit-filled as some fancy themselves to be. But my experience is always that when I am without the Word, when I do not think about it or occupy myself with it, then no Christ is present nor indeed are any spiritual desires. But as soon as I take up a psalm or a passage of Scripture, it so shines and burns in my heart that I gain a different mood and mind. And I know that everyone will daily epxerience this for himself.

Martin Luther, Luthers Works 69, P. 18

That's what I love about Luther: he so well and honestly expresses my own daily experience. Try this with Calvin, and you always end up feeling inadequate.

My chore on those mornings when I remember to read from The Treasury of Daily Prayer, is to find a passage or two that catches my eye and heart. Then I 'm good to go. Bonhoeffer suggested studying, meditating on and praying only one short passage per week. Gobbling up a whole chapter of holy scripture in a morning's devotion is all well and good, but more often than not I find more food for thought and depth of understanding and enrichment, when I hit upon even a short verse that for whatever reason for the first time strikes a deep chord. Sometimes I have to read a chapter of scripture just to find the verse. But the hidden treasure is well worth the search. The rest of my day resonates well.

It is interesting to me to think of Luther NOT with his nose in scripture. How often did that happen? Often enough, it seems, for him to comment on it in a sermon on the 17th chapter of the gospel of John. Then again, dig through his Table Talks and you get an idea there were times when he'd spent a little too much time with his onion, sausage, and beer--especially the beer-- and not enough time in the Word. He did have a coarseness about him you would not have found, I think, in the refined John Calvin.

That's another thing I like about Luther...

Quote du Jour

2009-09-17T16:16:00.002-05:00

Necessity is the mother of several other things besides invention.
Flannery O'Connor

I found this in a hilarious short story by the author entitled THE KING OF THE BIRDS, which is about peacocks. While it bodes of something deep and profound, it was just about peacocks. And peahens.

Quote du Jour for Ethan Bartlett

2009-09-17T16:08:00.002-05:00

Flannery O'Connor is perhaps best when she is just writing anything, not necessarily when she is formally writing a story. A quote on Southern Writers:

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners [She speaks of the South here], we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers. In the South there are more amateur authors than there are rivers and streams. It's not an activity that waits upon talent. In almost every hamlet you'll find at least one lady writing epics in Negro dialect and probably two or three old gentlemen who have impossible historical novels on the way. The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.

Ha! How long and deep is the list that could fit under the rubric "It's not an activity that waits upon talent"! I'm duly humbled, and you should be too. But is there really such a thing as "no manners at all"? I'm trying still to wrap my mind around that concept.

No manners at all. Would that be like "no taste"? I've been accused of that.

GLOBAL, HIGH STAKES CHESS GAMES

2009-09-15T16:49:00.003-05:00

STRATFOR, which is an intelligence gathering, evaluating, and disseminating business organization, has put together a cogent, fascinating, and a little frightening evaluation of the mounting stakes in the Israel-Iran-Russia-USA-Germany-Planetary conflaconfusion* that is percolating based upon Israel's sense that the US no longer has its back, Iran's sense that Russia has its, Obama's sense that no major international player believes he has a spine, the problem of oil and the Hormuz Strait, and the perceived slow progress toward's Iranian nuclear weaponry. Egad. Check it out.

*I. uh, I made that up.

QUOTE DU JOUR

2009-09-15T16:14:00.004-05:00

I'm reading--desultorily--Jude Wanniski's THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS. I ran across a quote that more than caught my eye, from the little frenchman himself:

Writing to his brother Lucien on Christmas Day, 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte wrote:

"Whilst an individual owner, with a personal interest in his property, is always wide awake, and brings his plans to fruition, communal interest is inherently sleepy and unproductive, because individual enterprise is a matter of instinct, and communal enterprise is a matter of public spirit, which is rare."

A big AMEN to that. The recurring problem I have with a massive takeover of anything by government is that gummint, by nature, is sleepy and unproductive. Its real success lies in the absolute need for its workers to be dedicated and devoted, in a way that is supplied naturally to owners and private operators by, hate to say it, the motive of profit and pride. That is difficult to sustain year after year when one has no PERSONAL interest in the stewardship to which he/she is called. When an entire bureaucracy is asked to sustain it, the results are going to be much much worse than the fettered capitalism we now enjoy.

With Apologies to Ambrose Bearce

2009-09-15T16:01:00.003-05:00

The WSJ has a very humorous piece in its Currents section entitled:

The Devil's Dictionary--Financial Edition

Bearce published the original Devil's Dictionary as "The Cynic's Word Book" in 1906; a guide to the code language which permeated the cultural landscape of the day.

The Journal's version is an attempt to humorously update and focus on the devolution of terms during this endless financial mess we are in. A few examples:

TARP,n. acronym. 1. A synthetic device designed to cover up an unsightly mess, or to protect perishable goods (firewood, banks) from the ravages of the elements, typically costing somewhere between $12.99 and $700 billion.
2. Prime example of how governments use otherwise anodyne acronyms, abbreviations and sports metaphors to disguise matters of controversy. See also TALF, TLGP, TURF, FHFA, BACKSTOP, WRAP, OFHEO, and SPECTRE.

CREDIT-DEFAULT SWAP, n. loose translation from the original Latin "ubi mel ibi apes," or "where there's honey there are bees".
1. A complex financial instrument vital to the functioning of a modern economy in the way it spreads risk among consenting parties (Greenspan, A., pre-Sept. 2008).
2. A complex financial instrument that nearly destroyed modern capitalism (Greenspan, A., post-Sept. 2008).

GREEN SHOOTS,n. 1. The first signs of spring, often clobbered by summer's heat and autumn's rain. 2. A sign the economy is falling apart more slowly than previously tought. Related: DAISIES, PUSHING UP. See also THINKING, WISHFUL.

DEFICIT,n. For the party in power, at worst a minor irritant and at best a precondition for economic growth. For the minority, the gravest threat to the stability of the Republic.

Methinks the Journal has grown cynical in its old age.

CIA and the Justice Dept

2009-08-31T10:40:00.003-05:00

The WSJ Saturday ran a long article by a former CIA clandestine operative, Reuel Marc Gerecht, expressing deep concern about the decision by the Obama justice department to go after CIA interrogators. He argues that this arguably unnecessary move--undertaken for political reasons alone--will completely undermine the agency's ability to do its job.

"A good case officer with Middle Eastern languages and a penchant for understanding Islamic radicalism would now have to be insane to accept an assignment that detailed him to interrogate Islamic terrorist suspects. No self-respecting case officer wants to be constantly surveilledby his boss. That's not the way the intelligence business works, which is, when it works, an idiosyncratic, intimate affair. We should be horrified by the idea that holy warriors will now be questioned by operatives who tolerate all the cover-your-trash paperwork, who don't mind being videoed when they go to work, who want to be second-guessed by their CIA bosses, let alone by FBI agents, and intelligence-committee Congressional staffers, and now White House officials."

While Obama has retained the practice of rendition, and while we are likely in a period--unlike the years 2001 to 2003--when interrogation will be less frequent, what Gerecht most deplores is the removal of the tools of the trade for interrogators.

"...With enhanced interrogation off-limits, CIA operatives could easily find themselves face-to-face with a jihadist who tells them to bugger off. What are they then to do? Will their superiors be professionally sensitive to their inability to make further progress? Could they get promoted after they pass suspected jihadists to the FBI? Would the FBI even take them, knowing that they might have to be rendered to an unsavory foreign power and thereby quite possibly compromise the bureau's more pristine image?..."

The CIA "hardly did a superlative job.." in its fight against Islamic militarism. Nevertheless, I have to believe we're back on the clock again, awaiting the next major strike. Thanks to the Obama justice department, America is once again much less safe.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS SIGN?

2009-08-31T10:27:00.004-05:00

Wafting my way through a local Cracker Barrel store, floating on waves of perfumed candles and other inedibles, my eye caught this little hand painted plaque. It wasn't till I got out to my van and was about to start the engine that it registered, and I found myself wandering back in to take a picture. "My wife may be interested in this," I sorta lied to the lady behind the counter, "But I always take a picture first." Well, it wasn't technically a lie, although if I were to present this to Deb as a gift I'd be greeted by a disbelieving goggle, followed by a chuckle, followed by its being tossed into the recyclables.

It is the theology behind it that intrigued me, motivating me to slog back in to the C Barrel, make my excuse, and snap the picture. Have we finally found the succinct, theological summary of neo-evangelicalism? C'mon, confessional Lutherans, expound!

Or is it just too obvious?

Come to mull on it, this plaque describes the starting point of Roman Catholicism as well, doesn't it?

Quote du jour

2009-08-29T21:38:00.001-05:00

"Way down deep, we're all motivated by the same urges. Cats have the courage to live by them."
- Jim Davis

Secondary quote du jour:

"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea."
- Unknown

A Man and his Bike

2009-08-29T18:31:00.003-05:00

My Dad, who died in '05, and his beloved Beamer.

Truthfully, though, you really didn't want him to take you for a ride. The guy had a tendency to show off. Plus, he'd had a few accidents. His first BMW pretty much died one Father's Day, when my wife and I went riding with him--Deb and I riding my old Yamaha 500 with its dented gas tank. We'd pretty much safely made it up into the Baraboo hills, when Dad suddenly went swooshing past us, up over a hill and soaring down into a valley, on one of the Hills' famous little windy roads. Two things happened at the bottom of the hill: the road veered right. And it turned to gravel. Sort of hard to see from the top of the hill, or while going 60 on a motorcycle.
Dad didn't quite make the veer, and disappeared in a cloud of dust into a rapidly narrowing gully. By the time we caught up to him, he was standing next to a smoking motorcycle. Bloodied but unbowed.
End of ride.

He had a new bike three days later. Some guys just never learn.

2009-08-29T18:28:00.000-05:00

Or is it....?

The Georgia Guidestones

2009-08-27T23:21:00.000-05:00

Wired Magazine has a fascinating retelling of the quarter-century existence of the Georgia Guidestones, a post-apocalyptic kiosk for enlightened survivors.

The article begins:

The strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern. The rocks are each 16 feet tall, with four of them weighing more than 20 tons apiece. Together they support a 25,000-pound capstone. Approaching the edifice, it's hard not to think immediately of England's Stonehenge or possibly the ominous monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Built in 1980, these pale gray rocks are quietly awaiting the end of the world as we know it.

Definitely worth the read.

The New Fundamentalists

2009-08-12T19:50:00.003-05:00

The Secretary of the UN, Korean Ban Ki-Moon, has this to say about the future of the world:

"We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet."

This is in reference to a UN environmental conference in Copenhagen in December.
However, it smacks of the sorts of dire predictions--based in my opinion upon about the same quality of data--that religious fundies often spout.

Check out this website for a list of recent end-of-world predictions. Do we have two disparate types of fanatics now, each predicting similar things? And gosh. Is one of them the head of the United Nations?

Church Softball Leagues and Bad Theology

2009-08-08T16:31:00.002-05:00

The Wisconsin State Journal ran an article on its opinion page, back on August 5, about church softball leagues. I thought, "Hm. Ok, good move!" Then I read further. The writer, presumably a Christian, had a nasty collision with another member of his team, both scrambling for a popped up ball. He stopped me cold with this little zinger, though:

"Some might point out, correctly, that the softball gods were merely punishing me for committing the cardinal sin of failing to call off the shortstop..."

Grrrrr. I have no sense of humor about this sort of little gaffe.

Faith and Sexual Identity

2009-08-08T16:00:00.002-05:00

The Wall Street Journal had an article this week entitled

A NEW THERAPY ON FAITH AND SEXUAL IDENTITY .

For years there has been a serious wall erected by the American Psychological Association and other groups, insisting (based upon what many consider questionable science, or soft science, or just plain anecdotal evidence) that sexual orientation is fixed and unalterable. The direction this position tended to take was to tell people who are struggling with being homosexual that there was and should be no way to change, and that gays should embrace their identity.

This provoked a lot of conflict within some people vis a vis their faith. If the shrinks were right, did this mean their faith teachings were wrong? For many, this was the conclusion they came to, and then went about reshaping their doctrinal positions to accomodate the teachings of the psychologists and psychiatrists and gay activists. For others, the conflict just kept getting deeper, with many men and women unable to reconcile their sexual feelings with their beliefs.

To the credit of the association, there are new APA guidelines that have amended the longstanding practices of counselors somewhat. It came about as a result of a task force, initially formed to respond to the increasing numbers of "change therapists" out there--presumably mostly Christian--who were claiming that arousal patterns could be changed. The article goes on:

"But the task force also gained an appreciaiton for the pain some men and women feel in trying to reconcile their sexual attractions with their faith...The task force acknowledged that for those from conservative faiths, affirming a gay identity could feel very much like renouncing their religious identity..."

The new guidelines aren't without many glass walls.

"...The therapist must make clear that homosexuality doesn't signal a mental or emotional disorder. The counselor must advise clients that gay men and women can lead happy and healthy lives, and emphasize that there is no evidence therapy can change sexual orientation.
"But if the client still believes that affirming his same-sex attractions would be sinful or destructive to his faith, psychologists can help him construct an identity that rejects the power of those attractions, the APA says. That might require living celibately, learning to deflect sexual impulses or framing a life of struggle as an opportunity to grow closer to God."

Well. Progress. Gay rights activists aren't necessarily thrilled about the new guidelines. Some call them incredibly misguided, likely to cause great suffering. They make statements like, "People have their lives destroyed." I personally think too many experts are telling too many people they are having their lives destroyed, usually because these poor sops aren't lining up behind the experts' agendas. These people also don't understand the import of faith, and how faith shapes lives.

Yet Another B'er St'er

2009-08-08T15:57:00.002-05:00

"Hello! Do you have a blog?"

2009-07-31T20:13:00.003-05:00

Deer Valley Golf Course, just past Barneveld on Highway 151 in southern Wisconsin, is a beautiful, daunting, textured course, a great pleasure to play if your game is under control; a great source of misery if not. It resides in the highlands and deep vales of that particular part of the world, a parcel of land that must have been terribly hard to farm, when once it was farmed. Colin and I played it again today.

Teeing off on the first hole, one dives down into a sharp crease of a valley, and then descends up a wide ski slope of a hill to--somewhere up there--a green. We duly teed off, with Colin's long drive getting pulled into the rough between the outward bound first fairway and the inward bound, parallel ninth fairway. I hit my second shot, from much further back from where Colin's drive landed, and drove the golfcart up to where he was comparing golfballs with the couple who were headed downward on the ninth fairway.

The woman peered at me, then said,

"Hello! Do you have a blog?"

Um.

"Yes, I guess I do."

"Is your name Bruce?" Ohoh.

"Yyyyeah..." Who would this be? Perfect strangers, these two. Yes I am Bruce, yes I have a blog. Why am I being asked this on a hillside on a golfcourse near Barneveld?

"My name is Mary; I spent last week with your wife at the Higher Things conference! I recognized you from your blog photo!"

Too weird. Later, alone, I asked Colin if I was that recognizable across a span of golfcourse rough.

"Yeah. The goatee, the robust grey hair...You're pretty recognizable."

Vocation and the Sedir Bed

2009-07-11T14:07:00.008-05:00

It has been a cool July; sky blue and the large shop windows opened inward to allow a breeze. Inside, the sedir bed has taken shape, a long low platform with drawers, nothing fancy, the work of a week. A Turkish quilt and imported pillows will flesh out the decor. My job is to simply give them a resting place.

I'm counting out the final things in my mind, the little project minutiae that do not make it onto the flat scripted plan but are there to be done: pilot holes counter sunk in pine planks; maple pulls turned and installed; drawer front edges veneered; drawer fronts fitted and installed,; exposed surfaces sanded. Finally, the marking of parts, and disassembly and then off to the finishing room.

My client I've had for many years. Our relationship started with refinishing a formal dining room of furniture, and has grown to the point where, when I drop by for a project, I get coffee, talk politics and culture, and take a tour of their rock garden. They've just returned from Cappodoccia, Turkey, where a niece lives in a cave, something in that dry country that is actually as interesting and comfortable as the image is strange . A land of caves. Deep in the cave home is a sedir bed, a low platform upon which sit sumptuous and comfortable mattress and pillows. Being smitten with it, and thinking of a little room in their home back home, they have purchased and shipped the requisite, floral, black and red Turkish pillows, and only require the platform itself, modified for American tastes. And so the email came to me, asking if I might be interested in building the platform, the Sedir bed.

The shop has recently been cleaned. Piles of wood cut-offs, neglected since last Summer's building projects (these furniture-making sprees seem to be a Summer occurence, going back years); a pile of wood chips behind the planer; table saw and post sander and jointer and bandsaw surfaces needing a good cleaning and lubrication. I had the son of a friend over to help with the project, a day's work of hauling wood chips out to the raspberry patch, cutting and stacking fireplace wood, and dragging the plywood cutoffs out to the burn-pile. So, some semblance of order, like a clean kitchen before the creation of a feast. Everything works better, tools are where they are meant to be, the mind is more orderly and at ease.

A lithe, dangerous orange and white teenaged cat wanders in, chasing his fancy and the hopes of little things to bat around, things to climb on, things to nibble. He gets promptly turned around and sent back out the door. He is not yet shop cat. I'll let some of that young feline energy dissipate before letting him loose among the fresh finishes, fine wood furniture pieces, and power tools.

A bit of lathe work. Turning drawer pulls goes like this: the first one is spontaneous and creative, following a pattern developed over many years but always with a little variation. All of the subsequent pulls are laborious, an effort of copying closely the first, spontaneous effort. Squares of maple are cross-cut on the table saw, diagonal lines drawn on one face to find center, then corners band-sawn off before a center pilot hole is drill-pressed, and finally onto the lathe, one at a time. I select four or five lathe tools from a motley collection of an unmatched dozen or so, sharpen them quickly on the vertical sanding belt, and get to work. When doing lathe work, you cut or you scrape. The cutting action takes more skill but is cleaner and very much more satisfying, a laying of the bevel of the tool against the wood and slowing rotating the cutting edge into the work. It is something like that satisfaction of learning to ski: first the [scraping] laborious snowplow, and later the slow evolution into [cutting] parallel skiing, culminating in perfect, blissful, controlled floating down a mountain. With lathe work, there are occasional very nervous events as one learns how to apply the tool to this swiftly rotating spindle or chunk of wood. The two maple pulls turn out well, and I'm off to the next little thing.

This shop and I have been together for 23 years. I built it after working out of a garage for two years,. Like all relationships, after awhile we have taken each other for granted. The shop was mine before I was the shop's. Some part of the angst of
difficult, sleep-denying problem jobs has rubbed off on this place, so that at times I haven't liked it at all. There is also this other thing: a deepening sense of attachment. So many pieces have come through here, to be mended, sanded, color matched, finished. And many furniture pieces have had their origin here, taking a shape from ideas, plans, rough boards, plywood. Perhaps it is a growing sense, finally, that I know what I am doing and can relax a little, trusting my experience and the vocational guidance of the holy spirit.

The Sedir bed, stained and finished, will go out at the end of next week, making room for the next collection of broken furniture in need of mending.

Sedir Bed, installed.

Rhetorical Theology

2009-07-08T16:48:00.005-05:00

August Friedrich Christian Vilmar. I'm reading a book by a 19th Century German theologian entitled THE THEOLOGY OF FACTS VERSUS THE THEOLOGY OF RHETORIC. A little, light, bedside reading for the lay theologian.

According to Vilmar, "theologians of rhetoric" remind him of old BC Greek poets who rather than creating original forms wrote dense, polished, wordy verse. Cicero scorned them. He makes a connection between these "Alexandrian" poets and the rationalistic Christian theology of his own, German nineteenth century. "For more than thirty years authors are no longer read, but read about," he complains. In a rather fascinating chapter called Literature and Exegesis of Holy Scripture, he makes the case that this Alexandrian rhetoric has infected theology, with the result that the gospel is completely lost.

"An exegetical course by rhetorical theologians has the habit of opening a "scientific" discussion in which arguments and counter-arguments are weighted, opinions heard and rejected, views proposed and refuted, and all, or the highest ranking "scientific authorities" are allowed to speak. There is only one authority that does not regularly speak: The Word of God itself..."

Now it gets interesting:

..."And yet this should be the first task of an exegete, to make it a duty to set as the hearers' first task the reading of portions of Holy Scripture with a gathering and stillness of soul, and again, and again, and yet again, to read it without allowing one human word, not even one's own to interrupt. The divine word gradually takes on life and speech while at the outset it appeared dead, and it begins (in a most unfigurative sense) to speak with us, to us, in us. It shows us that it is not a speech put together from individual words, but rather a divine deed, that it is the Word, at once light and life, from which bright and ever brighter streams fall on every detail..."

A gathering and stillness of soul. Vilmar actually compares the reading of scripture to the reading of really difficult, interesting ancient poetry, that of Pindar and Aristophanes.

"...Let them go to them without all the expositions, commentaries, and scholia. Let them read them seriously through three, four, and more times, despite all the difficulties of language and subject matter...Gradually, the whole product takes on a surprising life and intelligibility, and gives an enjoyment which can be weakened but never strengthened by subsequent use of commentaries...[This] was the source of great joy philologists took in classical antiquity, but Luther in Holy Scripture."

It occurs to me that this deep, innocent, protracted reading of scripture is what is missing today from our church people (me included). There was a time when huge swaths of scripture were committed to memory by children of eleven and younger. It was the basis of much of their education in their early years. Vilmar testifies to his own training, while regreting that at the time of writing this emphasis had been lost:

"The foundation for this secure knowledge of scripture, sound in all its details, was laid in families and schools, but now no longer. The essentials were gained at the university. I call to mind only what we experienced, that all the dicta probantia [Biblical proof texts] in the original Hebrew and Greek text, besides that at least twenty to thirty Psalms, eight to ten chapters from Isaiah, the first three chapters of Genesis, and numerous sections of the New Testament (the Sermon on the Mount, chapters 14-17 from the Gospel of John, Romans 5-8, and other sections) were committed to memory in the original languages."

I'm guessing, but it is likely that the sort of sermon heard by the parishioners in the above cartoon came from the "theology of rhetoric": intellectual word games that manage to entertain without offending "people like us."

Cartoon taken from The New Yorker Album of Drawings, 1925-1975.

Lewis The Cat Makes His Debut

2009-06-26T17:20:00.006-05:00

Once upon a May, 2009, on the day of the great Syttende Mai footrace, a scrawny orange and white cat got sucked up into the windy venturi of joggers, and raced a mile or two down the road. Or maybe even further. Or maybe just a few blocks, we don't know. When he finally got kicked out of the maelstrom, he was at our house.

"Don't feed him, he'll never leave," I said.

But he was a cute, scrawny cat, long legged and so very different from the slouchy, letting-themselves-go, low-slung black cats who call our house a home. He got fed. He stayed. He got a name.

"Ornge," Colin calls him. But after several days of deep reflection, a family straw poll went with...Lewis. And once you name a cat, soon enough there will be a manila folder at the vet's bearing the cat's name. And so it is with Lewis.

Lewis does yoga.

Introducing:

Lewis the Cat

Dark Water

2009-06-25T22:32:00.008-05:00

Cimabue's Crocifisso, pre-flood

Crocifisso, restored

I just finished reading Robert Clark's DARK WATER, a sort of art-history telling of the 1966 flooding of the Arno River. I had passed through Florence, Italy, in 1972, spending several days glorying in the amazing art of this ancient home of Dante. The David of Michelangelo had by then been cleaned up after the flood, but much much art not to mention hundreds of thousands of ancient books, were still mud-covered and rotting in various storage facilities spread throughout the area, awaiting the funds and restoration resources of Italy and the world. Still in 1972, the terrible flood of 1966 was fresh on the minds of the people there and the people who came to observe the city.

The book is a great read. A taste:

"...But on a morning in Florence in February I woke up and I didn't believe in God anymore; or, rather, I had the belief but not the feeling of believing, which I suppose was to say that I had lost faith. I still had the idea of the divine, but couldn't quite touch it, not to say see it. It had become an abstraction at a very great remove. The loss didn't seem to make any great difference to me except when I thought of it. It was as though I'd been entertaining a great hope for a very long while--say, a windfall, an award, the perfect job--which had been in the end disappointed, but whose reality hadn't quite sunk in.
That I should have felt this was odd, because on the principle just enumerated, I should by rights have been up to my neck in God because I was up to my neck in beauty. Maybe I needed to try a little harder. I should put art to the test and see if it actually did what I thought it was supposed to do. I went back to see the Cimabue Crocifisso. [Cimabue's Crucifixion of Christ, a 13th century milestone in the history of art, had become the symbol of the struggle to return to normalcy for Firenze after the flood.] Cimabue's purposes were strictly spiritual and in that regard even practical. That's not to say the labor did not give him pleasure or despair, or that he wasn't proud of it and pleased to think about what it would do for his reputation. But he'd made an object, a tool to effect Christian worship, prayer, fear, and consolation. As the Arno was a machine made to move water, the Crocifisso was a machine to move sinners to salvation. I had a feeling I would not be so easily converted. But maybe I would have a transcendent moment, or at least a powerful sense of "tactile values." The beauty would turn me back onto the path whose track I'd lost.
I went to Santa Croce first thing in the morning so I could have the Crocifisso to myself, and I was indeed the only person in the refectory. But on the way, I stopped for a moment to look at the cross by Lippo di Benivieni....It was more striking, more compelling, than I'd remembered. Its Christ was an obviously young, even handsome man and perhaps because of that, he projected an innocence that could only produce a concomitant sense, in me at least, of the outrage and cruelty that had been perpetrated on his body. Mary and John, on either end of the horizontal spar, look shattered, their faces wrenched by grief. In the Benevieni there's what Ruskin called the sweetness of Giotto [Cimabue's famous student] in the rendering of Jesus; in the tender-limbed body, the way the toes of the right foot are curled around the left, as though to protect them, this one little thing, from harm. It moves you to pity, and perhaps to the thought that God might pity you.
After seeing the Benevieni, the Cimabue looked different to me. I couldn't now say how many times I'd visited it in the last two years, never mind how many times I'd seen it in photographs. But now it seemed darker, stiller, more silent and cold than I recalled. Viewing it wasn't an entirely pleasant experience. It wasn't consoling or uplifting. What it manifested more than any other quality was the absolute deadness of Jesus. It seemed to enclose and hold fast the minute just after his last breath, his final heartbeat. Mary and John are not so much grieving as stunned; they're still taking things in; the tears haven't yet come. And the resurrection doesn't even register as a possibility. It's as though he's swallowed death whole."

di Benivieni's cross

Far be it from me to judge how people go about the terrible and discouraging task of rediscovering their faith after, apparently, losing it. It is interesting for me, however, that the author turned to iconography rather than the words of scripture as a means to rediscover his spiritual groove. Is religious art "enough"? By his words it is clear Clark has much more than a shallow understanding of the meaning of Jesus' death and resurrection. Whether this is due to early catechesis that stuck, or a lifetime of pondering religous art, he doesn't make clear. He does, however, remind me that religious art based upon strong catechesis can be very powerful. Alone, it isn't enough. The Word, spoken into our ears is, clearly, by the testimony of scripture, needful.

SUNDAY, overhauled

2009-05-16T14:56:00.002-05:00

In the mail today, an advertisement for the local Sunday paper. Here is what Sunday amounts to in modern day America, according to the advertisers for the Wisconsin State Journal:

IT'S SUNDAY.

It's when you take a break from the rat race and join the human one. It's when you do what you want to do, at your own pace...
No matter what your ideal Sunday entails--shopping, planning, relaxing or exploring--it all starts with the Sunday Wisconsin State Journal.

No mention of what Sunday used to mean in America: church!

ARTHUR

2009-04-23T23:58:00.004-05:00

I worked with Arthur Bassett at Ski Hi farm from the time I was a junior in high school till after I was married; twelve years. Art asked if I was Bayard Gee’s son, and gave me a job.

What I loved was the smell of apples, the old-farm feel of the place; the sense of history as expressed in tools and implements of bygone years. I was fascinated by the little hidden stashes of mysterious surplus goods Art had squirreled away in the many farm buildings which had arisen over the seventy-five year period of time the farm had developed. He had everything from dynamite to surplus Cold War tins of emergency water and food. I doubt he ever threw away a tool in his life. He had an old Model B Ford stored away in a garage, fully restored by his son-in-law Jerome Thiessen. There was a wonderful, mysterious two-story shed uphill from the sales house that held a wealth of tools. He had entire drawers devoted to screwdrivers alone, or old box-end wrenches; stacks of shovels, rakes, scythes, hoes, and poleaxes. At some point in time he’d purchased piles of old telephone poles, complete with glass insulators which were taken off and sold as collector’s items in the store. Below the packing shed was an implement shed containing the farm’s motley collection of tractors and heavy farm equipment. There was an old Ferguson tractor, a Massey, newer Fords and a Case backhoe, and the famous painted-red Army surplus jeep, Art’s major means of transportation around the farm and a favorite of mine.

Ski Hi is situated near the top of one of Baraboo’s range of bluffs, facing north. The farm buildings overlook the orchards, a long valley off to the northwest, and the ribbon of Highway 12 to the west. In the Fall, when the oaks, hickorys, maples, birches, and poplars have turned, people flock from all over the area and from Illinois to gaze at the colorful vista, and to buy apples-- cider, pie, caramel-apples-on-a-stick; bags and boxes of apples. This is the land and the life Arthur was born into. The spectacular view from the top of the bluff had long lost its newness for him, no doubt, if it had ever indeed been new. But I know he loved this place he knew so well. He would say, “a change is a vacation”--that old farmer’s adage--and instead of heading off to explore new lands he would stay home and watch his land change through the seasons.

Art wasn’t only an apple farmer, though that’s how he was known. Deep in his heart, I suspect he wanted to be known just as a farmer, with all of the skills and appurtenances of any other successful farmer. He raised beef and had hay and cornfields, with a fancy modern-day corn grinder that Raymond, the hired hand, would drive up to the upper barn where the cattle were kept. Ray would grind a load of corn and pump it into the feed silo there. Many a hot, summer day was spent making hay. As the youngster I was always given the job of moving the hay high in the barn loft, receiving the bales from the elevator and tossing them to the back of the mow to stack. In this job, I was helped by old Bob Newman, retired butcher, and sometimes ‘community Santa Claus’. He would unload the bales from Raymond’s wagon and send them up the elevator to me. While Ray would drive back out to get more loads of hay, Bob would now and then climb up and help me stack the hay. I remember the heat in the haymow. As the space got smaller the temperature rose. One particular day had to be above one hundred degrees. There would often be a short break, after stacking the hay but before the next load arrived. I can remember old Newman dripping with sweat, and finally saying with a sigh, “I may just have to take off my long underwear!”
I looked at him in amazement. "You have longjohns on, do you Bob?”
“I always have longjohns on! I’m a ‘butcher’!” Bob retorted. After forty years of working in a freezer for a living, Bob had never gotten out of the habit, even on the hottest Summer day, of wearing long underwear. I begged him to get out of them! He rumbled and grumbled about it, but on that beastly hot day he finally did.

In order to understand Art Bassett it is necessary to understand the people around him. Raymond the hired hand had been with Art since shortly after WWII; was single and lived with his mother until her death. To Raymond fell most of the responsibility of handling any heavy equipment on the farm (such as the backhoe). He drove truckloads of apples to various markets. Otherwise he fell into well-accustomed roles that had developed between him and Arthur over the years. On Saturday morning when cider was made in the old two-story cider house down below the sorting house, Art always assumed the upstairs job of sorting and feeding the apples into the grinder. Raymond along with Jerome had the downstairs job of loading up the cider press with grindings, and running the press. When log-sawing day arrived, we would gather to saw the old apple tree logs into firewood. Ray would assume his position on the takeup side of the absurdly large and ummuffled and guardless outdoor circular saw, with Art and the rest of us on the other side of the blade, feeding logs into it, cutting down to size the long piles of accumulated apple wood. When we spent days out in the orchard grinding brush (into yet another loud and un-muffled machine), it was Raymond who climbed on the tractor to move the equipment farther along the long rows of apple trees.

Bob Newman was just a happy handyman, six and a half feet tall, broad and full of jokes. At various times during his tenure on the farm there was serious doubt in Art’s mind whether he was worth the trouble. I think Bob would have worked for free, and in fact vaguely remember some claim of his to that very fact! He got up in the morning and had a place to go with jobs to do and a role to play. He was among friends, and it delighted and pleased him immensely. He was in awe of Art, and would brook no criticism of the great appleman. Everyone on the farm loved Bob too--even Art, in spite of the occasional grumble about some perceived incompetence. By the time I was on the scene, it was too late for either of them to change. Bob was coming out every morning in the fall, like it or not. It didn’t matter that he knew next to nothing about apples, even after fifteen years of working there.

Olga Marie Bassett, Arthur’s wife, was a short, pert, pretty woman who looked more like her mother-who lived to be well past one hundred years of age--every day. She was the sweet side of Arthur, and sweetened him up from his years of working for his father, who was of a very bad-tempered sort. That’s what Olga used to say: “Art’s father was just an old grump! When Art and I got married, we decided we just weren’t going to be like that!” I’m sure Art would have agreed with her, but wanting to change and changing are ever two different things. Olga gave Art the means of changing, in her smile and crackling laugh, her bubbly jokes and good humor. I think he orbited around that sun. When I first started working with Art, he terrified me and I could easily see the crotchety old farmer his father had been come out in him from time to time, as when I got the bushel count wrong or dumped too many green apples into the mix as we whiled away the hours sorting and packing in the low, long, dark old packing shed. He had a growl, and a sharp look, and an even sharper word when he was in the wrong kind of mood. His name for me the first years I worked there was simply “Boy”. “Hey boy! Wake up back there! You think I’m paying you to daydream? !” The old, grumpy, sharp ways of working with the help were alive if somewhat buried in Art. I think Olga taught him to be more content, and to try harder not to be as tetchy as his father had been.

The love of Raymond’s life--though he never would have admitted it-- was Art’s daughter Betty, who worked with her mother selling apples each day in the sales room and now manages the apple operation herself. In little reminiscences out in the orchard, as he and I worked away an afternoon pruning trees in late November, or shoveled manure up in the cow barn, Ray would let slip his feelings about things. Raymond was shorter than Bob Newman, just under six feet, but powerfully built, the prototypical hired hand. Mostly silent and hard working, nursing his private ambitions and grudges, well set in his ways and in the choices he’d made, Raymond would sometimes tell me of his regrets, the chances he’d missed, the things he might have done differently had he a chance. I used to tell friends that Raymond had five stories, and only five. As we worked together out in the orchard, I heard them all annually. I appreciated the coarse intimacy of those times, and was always pretty sure that had Raymond been given the chance, his choices in life would have been the same anyway. One of the regrets he expressed was Betty’s marriage to Jerome Thiessen, whom Raymond considered well below her. Jerome, at the time I worked on the farm, had married into the role of part-time farm mechanic, a role he was most competent in but often complained to me about. I looked around his well-stocked auto shop, and seeing his beautiful tools wondered if he under appreciated his position. He was a great mechanic. Even Raymond would come to him for advice. When they had to work together, as on Saturday mornings when the cider was made, they got along great. But when the topic of “the marriage” came up Raymond could get a bit resentful. He had been here as the little girl Betty had grown up, the apple of Arthur’s eye and probably of his as well. He naturally resented it when the boys started coming around to court the pretty, well-shaped and intelligent teenager. The tenderness and protectiveness would have been entirely the feelings of an adoptive uncle. Betty no doubt was mostly unaware of it.

Betty for her part was part Art and part Olga: pretty and lively like her mother but sharp as a tack, like the old man. As the current manager of the business, the combination has served her well. Back then, she was growing into the various roles that presented themselves. I remember her best as being always full of energy, always in a hurry even while standing still, dancing from foot to foot (like her mother, come to think of it!) and telling tales of this customer or that, observing gaily the many strange people who would walk through the doors. Born and raised on the farm, the farm was as much in her blood as in her parents’, and she’s still there.

I walked into Art’s life when he was fully in his prime. He certainly was over sixty when I started work at the farm, and what he knew was apples. A few years after starting there I overheard Olga say, in the midst of a glorious October bearing a harvest of large and perfect apples, “This is the year Art’s been living for!” I don’t think he liked leaving the farm. Word in town was he had no friends, which spoke of the mean streak of the town as much as of Art. But part of it was that his heart and mind and soul were tied to his vocation as the husband of this land which he had inherited and in which he'd grown up. Part of it was that his friends were his wife and daughter and hired men; those who came year after year to pick his apples; those who came year after year to buy them. He had no time for the artificial friendships born of leisure. The people he cared about had taken part with him in his lifetime endeavor of apple raising. In that sense he was pure Wisconsin farmer.

In June 1971, I graduated from high school. I was able to beg a day off before going to work full-time for Art Bassett. Of course, that was given grudgingly. There was work to be done! Why waste your time? Art never understood leisure very well, I think. That first year he invited me to lunch with him in his home, so every noonday we’d trudge up the hill to the blue house, where we’d eat on the back porch, slurping soup, eating sandwiches, Colby cheese and of course apples, listening to the farm report on the radio. I’d get my courage up every now and then to ask a question about the farm, but mostly we ate in silence, with Olga flitting in and out serving us lunch. Whenever I did get him to talk, she listened eagerly, easily laughing and adding little tidbits of information. We’d talk weather, or the history of the farm, or apples. Any conversation about politics or sports was going to be a short one. Art’s attitude on politics was the typical one for farmers: politicians needed to get real jobs. He’d tell one of his favorite jokes about a politician running for reelection; up on his soapbox, going on and on about all he’d accomplished for the people. A drunk staggered to his feet and asked, “Is it true you’ve done all that?” When the politician answered yes, the drunk replied, “Well then, you’ve done enough! Let somebody else run things for a change!” Art would tell his jokes with a chortle, a sort of crescendo which built almost to a giggle at the punch line. Half of his jokes I never quite understood, but his giggling, delighted way of telling them made me laugh anyway.

The next year, the year I got the name “Bruce” in place of the honorific “Boy”, Art told me to pack a lunch and eat down with Bob and Ray. I had in some sense arrived; I was no longer a guest. I think we both felt a little relieved at the new arrangement; if I was going to stick around longer, I should take my place as a regular hired hand. So I lunched at noon with Bob and Ray, and listened to their talk of the hippies in their hippy vans, and what they’d do to one if they ever caught one. Those were the polarized days of the Vietnam War, when two generations stood apart and deeply distrusted each other. They also talked of goose hunting and deer hunting, and Bob would tell stories from his days as a butcher in Baraboo; of the many people they both knew there. Lots of gossip. ‘Small town Wisconsin talk’. I mostly listened, and wondered what I was going to do with my life.

Work in the summer involved gathering and grinding the prunings from the apple trees--days upon days of this--as well as other back-breaking and steamy labor in preparation for the harvest. The Baraboo hills teem with white tail deer, and tall deer fence needed to be made and maintained. Art had recently planted a new orchard down the road on Highway 12, and it needed the same deer fencing the old orchard had. That meant digging holes for the telephone-pole-sized timber used to hold up the fencing, and the manual part of the job fell, it seemed, mostly to me. Raymond would come along on the tractor with the post-hole digger attachment, and get as far along as he could; the rest was up to me. That meant digging through limestone and quartzite, which with hand tools is very slow going. I remember an afternoon adventure with Art during which he attempted to blast the holes deeper using dynamite. It seemed he was licensed to use the stuff. I had a suspicion he’d gotten it as army surplus as he had so many other things. The dynamite wasn’t always reliable. I'd prepare a hole for the explosive, set the charge, and then walk quickly away as Art, who always walked like an old sailor on shore leave, would slowly amble a distance from the hole. We'd be fifty yards away, waiting for an explosion that didn’t come. Art would begin mumbling under his breath. Ten minutes would go by. Art would murmur some more: “The damned stuff going to work? Surplus junk!” He'd start walking back toward the hole, get halfway there when BLAM! Sure enough, the damned junk worked. Small stones would rain down around us, and Art would look as sheepish as I’d ever seen him. “Well, Boy! Let’s see what kind of a hole we got!”

The sorting shed was a long, low building with a large door at the back, which allowed a tractor and apple trailer to be driven in and parked. Standing parallel to the trailer was the sorting machine, twenty-five feet long. Bushel crates of apples could be off-loaded and dumped by hand onto a conveyor table at one end. From there they would travel up a series of rollers which would turn the apples, exposing any flaws—bird pecks or scabs--and from there into a chute at the end of which Art always stood to pack them into bushel baskets. Art always told me the most important job belonged to the dumper, as he controlled not just the flow of apples but also the variety of color. Before starting to pack, Art would wander back and study the assortment of apples on the trailer, pointing out to the dumper how he wanted them mixed as to color. Naturally, it didn’t do to day dream, yet the job was entirely conducive to just that: a mesmerizing exercise, which invited long journeys of the imagination far from the world of apple packing. Many times I was brought up short by an angry word or gesture from Art, who wondered just what sort of fool he had working back there! This was a job, particularly after the harvest of late October and November; that I did day after day, week after week. It was excellent training in perseverance.

One graduated from dumping apples to sorting apples to packing apples. The sorter stood on a large crate over the sorting rollers, surrounded by partially filled apple crates, grabbing as many as possible of those apples which were undersized, too green, or too scabby or bird-pecked for the apple chute; and depositing them in the appropriate crate. It was to Art the sorter would look for direction when an apple of borderline condition would come rolling along. The sorter would hold the apple up with a questioning glance at Art, and Art would pronounce his judgment upon it. This too was a job that invited long lapses of awareness, even sleepiness. However, one was several steps closer to the eagle eye of Arthur, who ruled over his ‘apple sorting’ machine as a stern king rules a province. And one of the unsung advantages of being sorter was that one was within earshot of Art when he launched into some memorable tale or other.

The “chute” style of apple packing ended my second year of full-time work, when a shiny new, reverse-conveyor-belt packing table arrived—you can see it still to this day at Ski Hi. This received the apples from the rollers, but then moved them back and forth in front of the packers so that they were better mixed. With the old system, the chute was the point where the apples stopped, only to be removed as the speed of the packers allowed. It was a sort of race, getting apples into the baskets before being overwhelmed by the next batch that had been dumped. The new system allowed for a sleepier, stupider dumper, as the conveyor table could hold more than three times as many apples as the old chute.

Art knew he needed to modernize, but nonetheless looked at the apparatus with suspicion. We had some trouble assembling the unit so that it dovetailed with the old sorting table. Art grumbled and cussed; proclaiming the new table had probably been designed “by some horse’s ass with a college degree!” The rest of us chuckled and nodded our heads. Yet this was going to make Art’s work life change for the better. Little did we know how the entire sorting and packing apparatus would evolve.

We soon settled into a new work life with the new table, and soon enough it became obvious that Art was delighted with it. No more sudden and frequent stopping of the whole operation because of a glut of apples at the packing end. Now Art could fuss to his heart’s content over the appearance of each filled bushel of apples. And when the phone rang he could answer it briefly without closing down the whole operation.

Apple packing for Art at that time was a fine art, if you will. Later his son would (behind his back of course) roll his eyes and caricature the time and finesse Art used in getting each bushel to look “just right”. Raymond or I would stand opposite Art and help him fill each bushel, grabbing with both hands four or six apples at a time and placing them gingerly in the bottom of the container. We still used real bushel baskets at that time, the evolution into cardboard boxes an innovation which had not yet gained a foothold in Art’s mind. As the apples reached the top of the container, Art would take over by himself, and the helper would be expected to be busy getting the next basket ready (newspaper shoved into the basket as a liner; a stack of prepared baskets standing at hand). Art would then carefully select the right combination of apples to represent the contents of the bushel: none too big or red, just the right mix. He would then go through a complex ritual of turning and adjusting the apples, sometimes removing one and selecting another of a different size, with the end in his mind of the perfect, eye-pleasing bushel of apples. When, he was satisfied the apples would be conveyed to a cart by his assistant, or a lid would be slipped into place so that the bushels could be stacked. The whole operation was as much craft as it was system. More than once, while Art was distracted with a phone call, I would try my hand at it, confident that I could get it right. But each time, when Art returned to the table, he would redo my work. Now and then he’d point out some subtle aspect of his art, showing me why one apple worked in a certain spot rather than the one I’d chosen. Even Raymond after all those years couldn’t finish to Art’s satisfaction. It took Art’s trained eye to do it properly. Anyway, that's how the boss saw it.

Work would stop for breaks, for lunch, or for certain carefully defined (in Art’s mind) interruptions. These included the arrival of certain old customers who had done business with Art usually on a wholesale basis for many years. Interruptions included phone calls; visits from certain angry women customers--who would only agree to talk to Art and to no one else-- or from suppliers who had accumulated the right amount of grace in Art’s eyes to justify stopping an entire operation of four workers.

The old customers were divided into two groups: those who Art genuinely liked, and those who Art tolerated. When those in the latter group arrived, Art would dispense with his business with them as efficiently and politely as he could, and then would invariably turn back to work with a wisecrack to me at the customer’s expense. “Horse’s Ass” was his all-time favorite pejorative term. I’d been called it dozens of times. A customer like this was one who came regularly, but under terms that usually had been cajoled out of Art years before, and which he couldn’t see his way to change. A man and his wife had been coming for years to pick up windfall apples. They would pick on their hands and knees all day, to Art’s wry amusement, and drive away with the pickup overloaded like a Mexican bus, high and teetery with crates of slightly dented apples. Art couldn’t see selling a windfall. “What if a snake pissed on it, eh?” (That was, as an aside, his definition of an environmentalist: someone who’d eat a snake-pissed apple!).

One year the wife arrived but without the husband. Art dutifully shut down the packing machine, turned to her and asked, “Where’s John?”
“He died!” the poor woman managed to get out before succumbing to a shower of tears. Art quickly scooped her up in his arms, shushing and reassuring her, making those sympathetic noises people make in such situations. After talking with her, getting her all set up and watching her walk away, he turned and ambled back to the packing table. “Jesus H. Christ!” he laughed, “I’m glad that’s over!” He went on to reminisce about what a horse’s ass the couple had been, picking windfalls all those years and selling them at their stand. The picking of windfalls was definitely below Art. He was uncomfortable with the whole arrangement. What struck me that day, however, was how Art was clearly laughing at the man’s death. I was deeply shocked, even as I laughed along with him. It took a long time to understand that it was really death itself Art was laughing at. “Just come and get me. Try it.” This was the closest I ever got to see the theologian in Art. He laughed at death because it was the only way he could see to respond.

Those customers whom he genuinely liked were treated to the incomparable charm of a properly motivated Art Bassett. Their visits usually lasted longer than usual, advancing into an actual work break. They often involved Olga or Betty or Raymond--usually Bob if he was there--and a rich combination of gossip, slander, and embellished tales of years gone by. One of Art’s favorite people was Al Klotz or just “Klotz” as he was referred to (I didn’t know his first name for years). Klotz was the star apple picker in the orchard when he could get away from his job at a local lumberyard, and was as proud and protective of Arthur as a friend could be. Work always stopped when Klotz came around.

The second group of people Art would stop the packing operation for was certain suppliers. I can remember someone from the farm implement store calling him, and because they had done a lot of business in the past, Art spent a lot of time on the phone with him. More than once I heard him say, “No, no.”, “Not this year.”, No we’ve got enough on the swindle sheet for this year.” Art was always polite and businesslike.

The third group, a much smaller group but one which any businessperson should be familiar with, was the “Old Hen”, as Art called any woman of any age who badgered him. Usually it was a rich woman from town, often one who couldn’t make up her mind what sort of apple to buy and had worn to a fray the patience of Olga and Betty and the other women who worked the apple store out front. Eventually, they would be referred back to Art in the packing--house and they always received polite consideration and deference. Once their business was done, however, Art would turn away, shake his head, swagger up to the packing table, and burst out: “Bruce, don’t you marry a woman like that!” More than once, he followed that with the advice, “Marry a woman like your mother. She’s sweet as sugar. If she got caught in the rain, she’d melt!” Somehow he’d had a chance to meet Phyllis Gee, and had come away impressed.

It is hard to describe the richness of those workdays, as Arthur gradually trained me up to anticipate what was needed and to do it. Always the boredom of a routine job must be entered into and endured, and there was plenty of that. The hours could dawdle with astonishing slowness. There were other days when we were all in a fine groove, Arthur feeling unusually optimistic and the rest of us inspired by it. Standing by his side, we’d work through the rhythm of packing dozens of bushels of Macintosh, Macoun, Cortland, or Delicious apples, or any of the dozens of other varieties grown on the farm, and Art would slide into an old tale of his younger years working on the farm. He would tell of hauling apples up out of the orchard with horse and wagon; of the time Chicago gangsters showed up and rented some of the cottages the family had for lease to tourists. He told me that the Model B Ford had been purchased from the local Ford dealer, located on the Baraboo River. This Ford dealer apparently sold not only Fords, but was also one of the local distributors of Prohibition whiskey. Seems the used Ford truck Art’s father had just purchased had unusually heavy-duty springs, and had belonged only recently to one of the booze-running gangs. The oversized springs were to mask the heavy load of legally disallowed liquid refreshment the truck often smuggled. A few days after purchasing the truck, the sheriff-- Art alleged that he belonged to one of the gangs-- thoughtfully made the trip out to the Bassett farm. He wanted to gently warn them that they might not want to drive the truck publicly for a few days till he could get word out that it had been sold. He didn’t want the innocent Bassett farmers to get shot!

Many of Art’s reminiscences were centered in the Great Depression, and he would tell of the farm selling apple seconds, for two bits a bushel. Farmers with their families in old cars would wheeze up the hill to buy a bushel, not willing to get out of their cars until they had been assured that the price was truly as quoted. Art seemed amazed at this even to that day, admitting that even though the Depression years had been hard, his family had been somewhat sheltered from it compared to many others. He’d shake his head, and fall silent.

In later years I became an apple picker, after the farm had switched from individual bushel crates to picking into large eighteen-bushel bins. Art was the one who taught me to pick. He’d say, “Your hands need to work together just like a team of horses. Fella over there near North Freedom used to teach his pickers, ‘Don’t let one hand know what the other is doing’. Horse’s ass! Worst thing you can tell a picker.” I was a bit too shy at the time to mention that “working together like a team of horses” was a phrase outside of my experience. But I soon enough caught on, and learned to love the efficient, physical act of cleaning a heavily laden tree of apples. On a beautiful blue-sky day in late September in the Baraboo Hills, there isn’t much that tops it for pure enjoyment of labor.

Art liked to know his pickers well, and did know well the ones who returned year after year. He knew when Genevieve, whom the boys called the “town whore”, was wearing gloves and pinching the apples. Genevieve was buxom and brazen, an aging woman with a high-pitched voice who had picked apples for Art for years, along with her estranged husband, whom the boys called the “town drunk”. It was said-- at least by Bob Newman--that they still lived--together but separately--in the same house, each unwilling to move out: “Afraid the other’ll sell it on ‘em”. They had to be kept apart in the orchard. Genevieve was another of those who was a questionable asset, a la Bob Newman, but Art always accepted her back for another season. There were days he'd be in the packing house, inspecting the latest load of apples from the orchard,, ready to be sorted. I'd hear him snarl, "Genevieve's wearing gloves again!!" He’d drive out into the orchard early the next morning to give Genevieve one of his careful lectures on not pinching the apples, and to stop wearing gloves. Genevieve--fat, sweet, high-voiced Genevieve-- up on a ladder, in a tree, partly hidden by branches and leaves, would listen to Art’s lecture, and go on wearing gloves.

Once Art hired a young picker, a man a few years younger than me, who clearly fell into that class of people the boys called “hippies”. He wore long hair and a beard and funny clothing. This fellow definitely fit the hippy stereotype: vegetarian; camping up in the woods and even, it was rumored, sneaking a girl into his tent at night. He didn’t own a car, but one day word came up from the orchard that he’d gone out and bought six or seven large watermelons which he had carefully laid out under a Tolman Sweet tree in the middle of the orchard for his daily meals. One of the workers pulled Art’s leg, telling him that he needed to go out and see the enormous green apples laying under the Sweet tree along the gravel road--”biggest Tolman’s you’re ever gonna see!” Sure enough, late in the day Art climbed into the red jeep and drove out to have a look at the watermelons. The packing crew the next day had a great laugh at Art’s expense—his curiosity overcoming his profound suspicion that he was having his leg pulled.

As years went by I’d take time off from my job in Madison to drive up to help with the apple harvest. By this time Art knew me well enough he’d just send me off to do my picking by myself. At the end of each day we would spend a few minutes together, chatting about the harvest and the crop of pickers he had that year, enjoying the view and eating apples. At one time he’d wanted me to learn horticulture, and take a more permanent job with the orchard. I remember one day he made the offer as we were packing apples together. I immediately turned him down. I mumbled something about wanting to be a teacher. He said what was sort of a question “You don’t know what you want to teach...?” I didn’t reply, and that was the end of it. There were many small reasons I had for turning Art down; none of them would have made much sense to an old farmer who was wise in the ways of farming but ignorant of the wanderlust in a young man. There was a long silence between us that day. I don’t think we ever spoke of it again. But as time went on we became friends. I often thought of him as a father.

The last month of his life, I paid him a visit before leaving town after spending Thanksgiving in Baraboo. We sat in the front living room of his blue house overlooking the orchard, staring out together at the long gravel road, which runs the middle of the old orchard. He’d seen a dentist recently; somehow a nerve in his mouth had been hit; he said he kept seeing stars and was dizzy. As was always the case, Art wasn’t able I think to speak of his feelings or his fears with me. We sat there, two guys maybe trying to say something to each other and failing. We knew the fondness we had for each other, just didn’t know what to do with it apart from work. A few months later I learned of his death. Many regrets and sadness came with the news, but I’ve held onto many of the memories of the rich life I had working at Ski Hi apple farm with Arthur.

Bruce Gee
November/December 2001

Aahhhh...

2009-04-20T15:25:00.002-05:00

Mid-afternoon cafe au lait and a scone;
Enough work to pay the bills;
Enough work completed to relax a bit here at the last week of another month.

Each successive, completed month of small-scale self-employment is a miracle
In the best of times.

I remember as a youth dreaming of this:
Independence; a life of work that satisfies and engages.
In the best of times.

Blood Meridian

2009-04-18T15:27:00.003-05:00

If you're looking for an entryway into the writings of Cormac McCarthy--and there are many--you could actually do a lot worse than to start with Blood Meridian. This is a writer who inevitably conjures up comparisons with William Faulkner in his convoluted, twisting, but ultimately persuasive and clarifying use of the language. Blood Meridian may be his most coherent book. His tendency at the ends of book (Cities On The Plain and No Country For Old Men come readily to mind.) to wander off into pastiches of mental witch-and-stitchery where no man has ever gone, can be off-putting and take something away from his work, in my blue collar opinion. He seems here to avoid that tendency toward long-winded philosophizing--much of which is incomprehensible--and pulls off a neat, clean story., very much worth the read.

I have failed in resisting the temptation to give you a long drink of McCarthy. Blood Meridian is about a young kid, running away from a hopeless home in Tennessee at age 14, who then drinks deeply of the dusty West, and the reader is given an alternate taste of what a wild, bitter, murderous place it was. Here is a conversation between the kid and Tobin, an ex-priest both of whom have caught on with a band of coup-counters, so to speak. They speak of The Judge, a fallen Renaissance Man who leads them. A taste, then:

You've done this afore, said Tobin.
The kid wiped hisnose with a swipe of his greasy sleeve and turned the piece in his lap. Not me, he said.
Well you've the knack. More so than me. There's little equity in the Lord's gifts.
The kid looked up at him and then bent to his work again.
That's so, said the expriest. Look around you. Study the judge.
I done studied him.
Mayhaps he aint to your liking, fair enough. But the man's a hand at anything. I've never seen him turn to a task but what he didn't prove clever at it.
The kid drove the greased thread through the leather and hauled it taut.
He speaks dutch, said the expriest.
Dutch?
Ay.
The kid looked at the expriest, he bent to his mending.
He does for I heard him do it. We cut a parcel of crazy pilgrims down off the Llano and the old man in the lead of them he spoke right up in dutch like we were all of us in dutchland and the judge give him right back. Glanton [the other leader of the gang] come near fallin off his horse. We none of us knew him to speak it. Asked where he'd learned it you know what he said?
What did he say.
Said off a dutchman.
The expriest spat. I couldnt of learned it off ten dutchmen. What about you?
The kid shook his head.
No, said Tobin. The gifts of the Almighty are weighed and parceled out in a scale peculiar to himself. It's no fair accountin and I dont doubt what he'd be the first to admit it and you put the query to him boldface.
Who?
The Almighty, the Almighty. The expriest shook his head. He glanced across the fire toward the judge. That great hairless thing. You wouldnt think to look at him that he could outdance the devil himself now would ye? God the man is a dancer, you'll not take that away from him. And fiddle. He's the greatest fiddler I ever heard and that's an end on it. The greatest. He can cut a trail, shoot a rifle, ride a horse, track a deer. He's been all over the world. Him and the governor they sat up till breakfast and it was Paris this and London that in five languages, you'd have give something to of heard them...
The expriest shook his head. Oh it may be the Lord's way of showin how little store he sets by the learned. Whatever could it mean to one who knows all? He's an uncommon love for the common man and godly wisdom resides in the least of things so that it may well be that the voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such beings as lives in silence themselves.
He watched the kid.
For let it go how it will, he said. God speaks in the least of creatures.
The kid thought him to mean birds or things that crawl but the expriest, watching, his head slightly cocked, said, No man is give leave of that voice.
The kid spat in the fire and bent to his work.
I aint heard no voice, he said.
When it stops, said Tobin, you'll know you've heard it all your life.
Is that right?
Aye.
The kid turned the leather in his lap. The expriest watched him.
At night, said Tobin, when the horses are grazing and the company is asleep, who hears them grazing?
Dont nobody hear them if they're asleep.
Aye. and if they cease their grazing who is it that wakes?
Every man.
Aye, said the expriest. Every man..

McCarthy's prose is not for the faint of heart. In the end, his are not stories of hope but related tales of experience. You have to be willing to accept what he wants to say, and enjoy his saying it. In the end, it is the purity of his prose that is what is remembered and enjoyed.

2009 Madison Tea Party

2009-04-15T16:19:00.005-05:00

A disparate band of 5000 patriots, homeschoolers, rubes, gay federalists, anti-tax activists, blue-collar hangers-on, unemployeds, anti-Feds, country club Republicans, Republicans-by-default, black Baptist Democrats, self-employeds, formerly self-employeds and soon-to-be self-employeds, mothers-with-children, fathers-with-children, and conservative politicos gathered on the state capitol grounds to...well. I'm not completely sure. There were at least fifty agendas present (There would be at a liberal gathering as well, of course. We are a varied and interesting people; a still free people). My overwhelming sense was that as a group this was an anti-big-government gathering, but we wouldn't agree on too much more.

We were a very polite and civil gathering. An announcement thanking the Capitol Police for their cooperation was greeted with applause and shouts of thanks. The biggest roar was early on, for Paul Ryan. He should have spoken last. The most appreciative applause was for a 17 year old homeschooled gal who wowed the crowd with her passion and spunk, reminding us of the first Boston Tea Party and connecting us to that. It was a beautiful day. I think most of the folks came from outside of Dane County.

I took the Libertarian Quiz (chart shown above) and scored a 170 out of 200. To the Libertarians administering the quiz, they thought that meant I was one of them. But hey, can a libertarian ever be part of a larger group? And doesn't siding/voting with them amount to a wasted vote? I'm mulling it over. Plus, the quiz was a bit rigged, so I'm not sure what it all means.

As I was walking away, I passed a brand, spanking new van. In the driver's seat was a smarmy, well-fed liberal. He was saying "Deal with it! You lost!" I replied, indicating the dispersing crowd, "This IS dealing with it, isn't it?" It occurred to me to ask him, should our current trend toward almost infinite deficit spending continue, if he thought he could expect his children and grandchildren to be able to drive a nice expensive new minivan, or dress as well as he was dressed, or eat as well as he clearly was eating. But I let it go.

UPDATE: I received this email from a woman friend "of about my generation", a Lutheran in Mississippi (You didn't think there were Lutherans in Mississippi, right?). Quoted with permission:

First demonstration since 'invading' the college president's office in 1969 (and boy was I scared then--of course, he'd invited us in, and listened to us; even posed for photos--what can I say? it was a Methodist church college--not Berkeley, and we were protesting new restrictions on male visitors into female dorms, not Vietnam or Imperial America--as if I ever had a male visitor...ahem...but that's another story--I digress...ahem...)
Maybe 1000 people in little old Tupelo today, at the City Hall square. The most exciting part, really, was turning onto Main Street and joining so many other cars going to the same place!
Satisfying, to an extent, but probably not so effective as we dream. Still, I and many of my Lutheran friends were there, so...
Probably the cleanest, neatest, politest protest ever! (and whitest...)
Susan

Chat Pack Question, Encore!

2009-04-14T22:13:00.003-05:00

It is time once again for another age-old question, just to restart the conversation.

What age when you turned it--
was the most difficult for you to accept?

And on the other hand...

Which of your birthdays do you remember anticipating
with the greatest amount of enthusiasm?

I guess it was only a matter of time

2009-04-13T18:55:00.005-05:00

"...subjecting the whole of Scripture to one agenda..."
Alan Jacobs

You can find it here.
That is, if you really want to.

Do you really want to?

"SMUG AND COUNTERFACTUAL WHIGGERY

2009-04-13T14:15:00.006-05:00

This is Joseph Bottom of Higher Things magazine, quoting Lucy Beckett of the Times Literary Supplement, citing Nicholas Lash' Theology For Pilgrims, reviewing Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion:

"Only in the English-speaking world do we speak of 'science' in the singular," Lash notes. Ludwig Wittgenstein was famous for his dictum that we are all bewitched by language, and Dawkins seems the most besotted of all. When the singular form of the word science is used, says Lash, "to support sweeping assertions to the effect that here, and here alone, is truth to be obtained, then one is in the presence neither of science, nor of history, but ideology...There are no 'scientific' facts. There are just facts, what is the case." Dawkins is also, one is not surprised to learn, besotted by his substitute god, that empty demiurge called Progress, which prompts this tart observation from Lash: In the light of the horrors of the twentieth century and the global dangers and injustices of the twenty-first, '[it is]hard to understand how a man as intelligent as Richard Dawkins can sustain such a smug and counterfactual Whiggery."

Keep this in mind while weighing how you will vote in this month's poll. Not that I'm trying to influence anyone one way or t'other. But "the horrors of the twentieth century" were in the context of the rejection of Christianity (not just by Stalin and his ilk but also by post War One Christians who struggled with a God who appeared not to be there), and the embrace of technological weapons of mass destruction and the willingness to use them.

Not that I'm trying to influence anyone.

Easter, April 12, 2009

2009-04-12T11:39:00.004-05:00

Let no one fear death, for the Savior's death has set us free. He who was held prisoner of it, has annihilated it. By descending into Hell, he has made Hell captive. He angered it when it tasted his flesh. And Isaiah, foretelling this, did cry:
Hell, said he, was angered, when it encountered You in the lower regions. It was angered for it was abolished. It was angered, for it was mocked. It was angered, for it was slain. It was angered for it was overthrown. It was angered, for it was fettered in chains.
It took a body, and met God face to face. It took earth, and encountered Heaven. It took that which was seen, and fell upon the unseen. O Death, where is your sting? O Hell, where is your victory?

St. John Chrysostom

HOLY (MAUNDY) THURSDAY

2009-04-09T16:39:00.002-05:00

Be still before the Lord and wait
patiently for him;
fret not yourself over the one who
prospers in his way, over the man
who carries out evil devices!

Ps. 37:7

How Long Can This Go On?

2009-04-08T15:25:00.002-05:00

"In a recent poll, invited to state the "ideal" number of children, 16.6 percent of Germans answered 'None'."
Mark Steyn

The medium is the message. The world is shrinking due to technology. But this, this is something different. The world is shrinking due to the technology of abortion and birth control. Steyn demographizes onward:

"Unfortunately, the Western world is running out of young people. Japan, Germany, and Russia are already in net population decline. Fifty percent of Japanese women born in the Seventies are childless. Between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of Spanish women childless at the age of 30 almost doubled, from just over 30 percent to just shy of 60 percent. In Sweden, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, 20 percent of 40-year-old women are childless. In Germany, 30 percent of all women are childless."

Here is one way to look at it, although it may not be the best way: It is a numbers game as far as the world producing enough genius and brilliance to solve its problems. For every thousand souls born, perhaps fifty will grow up to think the world forward. Yes, political and economic systems also play a part in generating educated souls who can creatively think and act the world out of its current set of impossibilities. Some are better at this than others. For example, the freedom to think and act and earn gorgeous amounts of money tends to produce more creative solutions to problems than those systems where citizens are prisoners.

I've got to think that killing off half the world's population in vitro can't be helping us to take it to the next level. This inverted triangle of world population is going to get a lot more top heavy in the next two decades. Our children and grandchildren--those fortunate to be born--will be facing an inheritance of debt that won't be able to be dealt with in the usual, civil manner. Here's hoping somebody gets born with the gumption to figure it all out.

Quotes taken from the Mark Steyn column, Happy Warrior, in the April 20 print edition of NR.

I Want Me One Of These

2009-04-07T16:45:00.002-05:00

The Littoral Combat Ship

Constitutions embody enduring values.

2009-04-07T15:51:00.000-05:00

Let's think about that for a week or so...

APRIL Poll O' The Month

2009-04-06T12:31:00.003-05:00

New Feature, a monthly poll! Could this be a pathetic attempt to get readers to flock to my inconsequential little blog?
No. That' s NOT the poll question. Not this month, anyway.

The new poll question is:

IN THE MODERN ERA, WHICH IS MORE DANGEROUS:

Science infected with politics?
or
Religion infected with politics?

Please cast your vote, at the top to the right.
Feel free to comment on your vote in the comments section.

Let's play ball!

MARTIN CHEMNITZ

2009-04-05T17:55:00.004-05:00

From THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST:

Moreover, let us not show a lust for controversy, nor an inclination for disputing, an impudence to argue, a desire to win, nor a foolish longing to show off one's wisdom, but rather a mind desirous of the truth, a humble spirit, and a heart which fears God, so that in God's sight and with His Word leading us we may depend on the word of His mouth alone and not pervert the things which He has revealed to us in Scripture according to the norm and measure of our own reason, but humbly and firmly embrace them in the simple obedience of faith.
P. 258

Consider me duly chastened.

The Death of the Paper Route

2009-04-01T15:51:00.018-05:00

Before there were Frisbees, there was the Baraboo News Republic.

When I was a young teenager, one of the coveted jobs for boys was having a paper delivery route. The job paid all of about $4.31 a week, involved long hours and miles of walking (in Winter) or biking, but was one of the main business-training and memory disciplines available to lads.

I knew about this occupation through Timmy O'Keefe--one of the famous sporting O'Keefe brothers of my hometown, Baraboo. Timmy was my baseball captain the year I broke into the Baraboo Little League; me with my burnt-potato-casserole overstuffed glove and my burning desire to play God's game. Timmy's nickname was Spazz because he had this little nervous twitch, but I found the twitch to be just part of the charm of the guy. He was a few years older, was a southpaw, and gosh, he was one of the famous O'Keefe's. For a period of time, he became my hero.

Timmy had a paper route. It took him up Second Ave to Park, and back down Third and Fourth to the library. He and I could sling that route in no time, riding both sides of the street. I think I remember being paid in chocolate cake donuts. I remember Timmy carefully instructing me as to which houses to deliver to, and my soon memorizing the whole route. I vaguely remember Timmy having a special status among the older paper boys by having a younger boy to do his work for him. Timmy would call me "Bear"; it was his way of saying my middle name--Bayard-- a name too foreign and puzzling to pronounce. I was too young to have a route, or else there weren't any open. But the day came when, having perfected the famous Baraboo News Republic delivery system handed down from boy to boy for perhaps generations, I got my own route. It wasn't a great route, of course. When you broke into the System, you got the leavings that the more senior delivery executives didn't want.

Mine took me to Baraboo's South Side, which like every south side in every city and small town in America is where the poorer of the town's occupants resided. I attended a brand spanking new grade school on Baraboo's south side, learning to cipher with some of the poorest-read youngsters in town. I remember it being a long, very cold route in Winter. I remember not being dressed warmly enough, and always having cold feet. I remember the long slog home after the route was completed, all the way up Lynn Avenue to Moore Street. I also remember the joy of being given a better route in the Spring; of finally being able to deliver the papers on my bike. The Spring I was in seventh grade I tried out for the junior high baseball team, and made second-string catcher. After school, I'd ride over to pick up my newspapers, and then scoot down to the ballpark for baseball practice, and then rush off to deliver the papers before dark. It taught me that I could be efficient with my time; that more things can get accomplished than you'd think.

After school and on Saturday mornings, we paper carriers would gather at the News Republic office, half a block from the junior high school, and, in the other direction, half a block from the town square. The sporting goods store was around the corner, and an electronics store was a few doors down, selling 45's and LPs. At the newspaper office, we'd collect our allotted portion of papers, count them, and then sit down outside or along the wall by the long counter inside to fold them.

Folding a Baraboo News Republic was also a time-honored hand-me-down from years past. The paper was just the right size--you couldn't do this with a Wisconsin State Journal--to fold three times across, and then three times again, tucking the last folds together so it was a neat, 7" square, flying saucer. In a pinch, this folding business could be done on the run, as one walked the mile or so to the start of one's route. Its purpose was to enable the delivery personnel to fling the paper from the sidewalk onto a client's porch, thus saving innumerable steps and adding immensely to both the danger and satisfaction of delivering papers. The satisfaction was seeing a square of the News Republic go sailing through the air to land neatly at the screen door of a Mrs. Carmichael's front porch. The danger was what happened when you missed. Paper boys were assigned only the absolute correct number of papers based upon paid-in-advance subscriptions. If an errant paper ended up on someone's porch roof, it called for a certain panicked creativity if the situation wasn't going to result in an indignant phone call from the client to She Who Must Be Obeyed. Yes, it can now be admitted. We'd climb up there and get it down.

The paper's main counter was commandeered by a tall, scary, taut schoolteacherly older woman whose name I probably have buried too deeply in my subconscious to recover. She knew what was necessary to efficiently run a slew of amateur schoolboy paper deliverers, and the main factor was fear. It took a certain amount of courage to just approach her to ask for a job. Once asked, one was subjected to a scouring evaluation, each question innocent enough--"How old are you?" "Where do you live?" "Are you Bayard Gee's boy?"--but delivered in such dubious and accusing tones as to make a boy think this woman saw into his very soul. Believe me. No schoolboy wants an old woman to be able to do that.

Her approach was a good one, looking back. She knew the delivery jobs were in demand; she knew if she started a boy out with the right understanding that there wouldn't be trouble down the road. She knew that every now and then an example had to be set. Any boy not working up to her expectations would be subjected to a public dressing down that would bring smirks to the faces of the other paper boys. The smirk is a boy's most potent weapon, most often used against those younger and less experienced in life's ways. Smirks, public humiliation, the possible loss of a steady income. It was what made us shimmy up porch corner-posts in search of awkwardly thrown curve-balled papers that landed on roofs.

There are cruel paper routes where the newspaper people require the boys to collect the subscriptions. In later years I had one or two of those, and learned firsthand the valuable lesson that if you spend all of the subscription money up front, sooner or later there will be a day of reckoning. The Baraboo paper wasn't like that. There was one house where every day I had to go into a screened-in porch, drop off the paper, and collect seven cents for it. Every day. It happened to be located half a block from one of those corner grocery and candy stores you no longer find scattered across small-town America. Seven cents could buy me a bottle of cold chocolate milk and a nice candy bar. But this was the exception. Most people mailed in their paper subscriptions, and we paper boys were left to simply deliver the goods. I seem to recall we were paid according to the number of papers we delivered. The coveted better routes weren't just about location; they were about delivering more papers and making--who knows?--ninety cents to even a dollar per week more. As I said: coveted. Saturday morning was glory day, when the stern counter lady would parcel out our hard-earned wages. I remember well the sense of exuberance and freedom of those Saturday mornings. The printing plant was just on the other side of the wall from the cramped business and editorial office. This in turn was corralled by the high, long counter, past which a paper boy never strayed. The smell of printer's ink, the sounds of the huge print machines were all part of the ambience of the place. It bustled with copyworkers, an editor, the Counter Lady, deliveryboys, and the strange, inked men who worked the presses in back. A sense of purpose permeated the air on Saturday mornings. We bellied up to the counter one by one, collected our measly pay, and collected our allotment of the day's paper--still warm from the printing presses. And then we'd scatter outside or along the base of the wall to sit and fold papers, and gossip. Or we'd make a donut run to the bakery, beckoning to us down the block and across the alley.

I am reminded also (by Tim O'keefe himself, roused to life by my writing this little story) that the paper had an interesting but archaic motivational tool at its disposal. It would charge each boy ten cents for every paper he lost or that wasn't delivered, and at the end of the week, those boys who had delivered every paper perfectly got to divvy up the fund. I may have forgotten about this painful detail, as only rarely did I cash in on an extra couple dollar's worth of perfection. There were weeks, however, when I was sooo close!

A paper boy was assigned a paper bag, of course; new stiff canvas with the name of the paper stencilled onto the outside. It had a long sling so that a boy could carry it over his shoulder. If you were lucky enough to have a Schwinn with risers, you could wrap the sling around the handlebars and carry papers, donuts, ball gloves, school books, even a bat in one of those. A Schwinn bike with risers and with a Baraboo News Republic bag hanging from the risers was at one time in my life the highest status symbol to which I could aspire. Having attained it, I basked in the confidence, the status and surety of what it all meant.
For a span of time in my youth, I had, finally, arrived.

UPDATE: I got an email from my old friend Tim O'Keefe. In it he writes: "You must be referring to Mrs. McIntyre behind the counter. Donuts seemed like fair compensation at the time. Those were good years. I think we were the most important people in town in those days…especially on Saturdays when you needed to read Curt’s write up on Friday night’s basketball win. Fun article to read.
Tim O’Keefe"

GHOSTNET and the death of privacy

2009-03-28T17:09:00.004-05:00

Almost 1300 computers in 103 countries have been hacked by a spy ring, perhaps in China, perhaps enabled by the Chinese government. A Canadian research team, acting on behalf of the Dalai Lama--whose computer had been attacked--found the trail and has uncovered this much so far.

The malware is remarkable both for its sweep — in computer jargon, it has not been merely “phishing” for random consumers’ information, but “whaling” for particular important targets — and for its Big Brother-style capacities. It can, for example, turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of an infected computer, enabling monitors to see and hear what goes on in a room.

This is more than just a bit creepy. We once thought of television being the main channel by which the world of evil infiltrated every home. Now evil people have found a new more perverse way to infiltrate. Strangers who are likely enemies can now turn on the camera and recording functions of your computer.

Want privacy? It may come at the cost of serious personal technological downsizing.

The Lives Of Others

2009-03-27T22:33:00.003-05:00

I have a movie recommendation, if you haven't already seen it.

The Lives Of Others concerns the goings-on of the infamous Stasi of the late German Democratic Republic; its iniquitous involvement in the lives of its citizens, with a surprising look at the complex motivations of a leading member of the bad guys.

I can't say much, lest I unnecessarily spoil it. But anyone who wants to discuss it, feel free to spoil it to your heart's content in the comments. I want to know what you think became the real basis for the actions of Gerd Weisler, for one thing.

NEW CHAT PACK QUESTION!

2009-03-27T22:02:00.003-05:00

Note: This one isn't from the actual Chat Pack. I borrowed it from a movie.

Including up to five things, give me your bucket list.

A bucket list, FYI, is a list of unusual things you plan to do before you expire.

the old neighborhood

2009-03-25T20:38:00.006-05:00

Me, my dad, and some of the boys in front of Country Antiques
Oh, and Peaches.

On the occasion of our 31st wedding anniversary, Deb and Robin and I drove up into our old neighborhood on Madison's east side for dinner.

My father and I had run Country Antiques, a refinishing and furniture making shop on Atwood Avenue, for seven years in the late seventies and early eighties. After Deb and I were married in 1978, after a few other stops we bought a very sweet little two story house around the corner from the shop, on Division. Deb was working as a young R.N., and soon enough little houly-mouly, Colin, was born into the world.

Atwood Avenue was at that time trying to figure out what it was going to be. It had grown up as a pure blue-collar neighborhood. In post-war Madison, the main east side employers were Oscar Mayer foods, Gisholt machine factory, and Rayovac. All of them--along with a cluster of smaller industrial shops--were centered on the east side. As these industries matured and eventually died (Oscar Mayer is still there, but much less robustly than back in the day), the neighborhood slowly aged and eventually began to get regentrified as university graduates unwilling to leave the city discovered the cheap real estate and settled in droves. Instead of blue collar guys, the area gradually filled with lawyers, state office workers, and medical professionals in their first homes.

We ate dinner across Corscot Court from my old shop. The Lao restaurant where we dined on hot pineapple chicken, squash, green pepper, and cashews used to house an old, very messy typewriter repair shop, run by an aging typewriter repair wizard named Ken. Everything about Ken was a mess. His shop was filled with boxes of typewriters, typewriters in for repair, typewriter parts. His car was filled with papers, typewriters, typewriter repair kits. His shop--now a restaurant--is attached to the Barrymore Theatre, which now is a venue for a lot of really good out of town bands, but in my time was a seedy adult theater. We used to laugh at well-dressed men who'd drop by for an afternoon matinee, stroll down the street, look both ways, and then dive into the theater.

Across the street is the Blue Plate Diner, a wonderful little American style restaurant that used to be the Havey Brothers service station. Dick and Dave Havey had been there since the war, buying the station from their uncle. They did all of the work on our old Ford step delivery van, including once filling it with gas after I had it towed in because it wouldn't start. The very dour Havey brothers thought that was pretty funny. I remember hanging out with them one day when Ken pulled up in front in a new used car. "Hey look," said Dave Havey. "Ken got a new car!" Dick said, "That's because his old one finally filled up with junk!'

After dinner we crossed Corscot and peeked in the windows of my old shop. The guy who bought it was also named Bruce. At the time he bought it there was a refinishing shop next to ours named Bruce's. There was a certain amount of confusion among our collective customers just what was what. The Bruce next door was a grumpy old guy who I think would have preferred to be doing something else. He had been there before Country Antiques had gotten its start, and was always a bit put out by that. After I'd worked at CA for a few years, a hand-printed sign showed up in Bruce's window, saying,

"Attention! The Bruce who works next door is in no way connected with Bruce's Fine Furniture Refinishing! Bruce's Fine Furniture Refinishing has been at this location since 1968 and has been providing a superior level of refinishing for all of these years. Please don't confuse the Bruce next door with us!"

The sign stayed up a few days. One of us strolled over there at one point and said, "Say, Bruce. Are you SURE you want to have that sign up? We're not sure it is going to do much for your business, is all." Soon enough, I think Bruce figured that out for himself.

Some time later, our two golden retrievers began their long, illustrious careers as Wood Chewers and Shop Greeters. Peaches and Jasper would hang at the door of the shop. Many a time a potential client would park in front of Country Antiques and Bruce's Fine Furniture Refinishing, get out with a broken chair in his hands, and then stand looking back and forth at our two shops, clearly undecided into which shop he should go. Out would wiggle these two golden retrievers, and inevitably the customer would be lured into our shop by the two dogs.

The wood chewing part of it was amazing. Old Peaches got it started, snagging worn sand paper and old wood bits as they fell off one of the benches, and reducing them to gristle. She would park herself under the bench and wait for wooden manna to descend. But she never chewed up anything of any value, and that was the amazing part. Peaches was also famous for the "golden retriever lean", so called because of her amazing ability to ride up front in the step van, both doors wide open, and fearlessly "lean" into curves as one of us furiously took a corner. Peaches started out belonging to my sister Rebecca, came into the possession of my Dad, briefly sojourned with Deb and me, and eventually met her end with my Dad, being overdosed on Vita Lea supplements.

We never did make any money at Country Antiques. We hung on by our fingernails, slogging through that awful Jimmy Carter economy brought on by the awful Dick Nixon economy, just taking it a few days at a time. By 1984, when I was ready to strike out on my own and my Dad retired and sold the business, I was making a whopping eleven grand a year. I remember my Dad was famous for the five cent raise. "I put a little something extra in your paycheck this week!" he'd say in all sincerity. Uh, thanks, dad. Thanks!

Bruce's eventually became Joe Shulla's rolltop desk shop, and the quality of the neighborhood went up substantially. I peeked in Joe's old shop as we passed by tonight. It is now a restaurant.

A favorite poem*

2009-03-24T12:43:00.006-05:00

On Being Given Time

Sometimes it seems to be the inmost land
All children still inhabit when alone.
They play the game of morning without end,
And only lunch can bring them, startled, home
Bearing in triumph a small speckled stone.

Yet even for them, too much dispersal scatters;
What complex form the simplest game may hold!
And all we know of time that really matters
We've learned from moving clouds and waters
Where we see form and motion lightly meld.

Not the clock's tick and its relentless bind
But the long ripple that opens out beyond
The duck as he swims down the tranquil pond,
Or when a wandering, falling leaf may find
And follow the formal downpath of the wind.

It is, perhaps, our most complex creation,
A lovely skill we spend a lifetime learning,
Something between the world of pure sensation
And the world of pure thought, a new relation,
As if we held in balance the globe turning.

Even a year's not long, yet moments are.
This moment, yours and mine, and always given,
When the leaf falls, the ripple opens far,
And we go where all animals and children are,
The world is open. Love can breathe again.

May Sarton

*"Given", for Indecisivegirl.

SECULAR JUBILEE

2009-03-09T11:33:00.005-05:00

According to an article on Bloomberg, the world lost 50 Trillion Dollars in value in 2008. This is equivalent to A YEAR of world gross domestic product.

$50,000,000,000,000.00.

I keep thinking that there is a kind of Jubilee going on, not as part of a covenant with Yahweh, but maybe amounting to something like the same thing.

Or, one could say that this is what happens to the world's inhabitants when trust in the Lord is neglected and a Jubilee Year is not observed. Let's review:

The Year of Jubilee is treated in Leviticus chapter 25, which encompasses a speech from The Lord regarding the establishment of three institutions in the lives of the Israelites, for when they settled in Canaan. The three institutions are 1)the Sabbatical Year, 2)the Jubilee and 3)the redemption of the land with its tenants. (I'm getting this from Dr. Kleinig's commentary on Leviticus, a most valuable volume of work).

The Sabbath Year was every seventh, and the Jubilee was the fiftieth year. In return for resting the land every seventh year (Talk about incarnational theology and the connection between the redemption of Humankind and Creation!), the Lord promised that the Israelites would have more than enough to live on. Frankly, what's NOT to like about taking every seventh year off?

The Jubilee was established in relationship to debt and a farmer's losing of his land in order to pay debt. It was a corrective for sin, of course. Someone buying the debt of the farmer had the use of the land for a limited time. The word "usufructuary" shows up in these discussions, but I'll let the gentle reader off easily and just say the buyer became the steward of the land, entitled to its use until the Jubilee, when it was returned to its original owner. The value of the land was established in part by the numbers of years before the Jubilee. The longer the time, the higher the value. Of course, some other market considerations had to come into play as well. The price depended upon the fecundity of the land.

Note that this whole thing worked to the extent that the people were faithful to Yahweh, and trusted Him for their provisions. There was a rhythm to this life of promise, just as there is a rhythm to our economic lives. The second rhythm is not as promising as the first. But there may be parallels.

If we do not observe the Sabbath days and years, and the Jubilee, isn't it likely that the Lord would visit a Jubilee upon us nevertheless? In the Jubilee year, "from the field you may eat its produce". In our secular jubilee, we're left to eat what we can find of what is left from the fat years.

Kleinig in his commentary offers a remarkable section at the end of each chapter entitled FULFILLMENT IN CHRIST. For him to include this is especially useful since the particular book of Leviticus is so abused as irrelevant to modern day peoples. Kleinig on Christ and the Jubilee:

"In Is 61:1-3 we have a remarkable prophecy. There, in words that recall Is 35, the Suffering Servant of the Lord declares that he was sent by God to proclaim an extraordinary Jubilee. In the regular years of Jubilee, creditors released debtors from their debts and returned their land to them and their families. But in this year of Jubilee, God himself would free his people from their debt to him and avenge their enemies. Through his Messiah he would announce a royal amnesty, a year of divine favor that inaugurated his reign as King. He would free his people from oppression, enslavement, and imprisonment. He would comfort the bereft citizens of Zion by rebuilding their ruined city and reinstating them as a liturgical community...Thus the celebration of the Jubilee was taken as a type for the messianic age...
Luke's gospel shows us that Jesus explained his ministryin the light of the prophecy in Is 61...[A]fter Jesus had been baptized, he returned to Nazareth and declared that he was ushering in the ultimate Jubilee. Jesus deliberately selected Is 61:1-2, with its allusion to Lev 25:10, as part of his Scripture reading in the synagogue for his inaugural sermon at the start of his public ministry..."

Is the disappearance of fifty trillion dollars in "worth" a parallel to the OT Jubilee? It doesn't matter who did this or "why" it happened. It is impossible for faithful Christians to ignore the hand ("hands") of God in this. In it, we can see the two hands of God: His judgment (on one hand) and His mercy, working together to edify and discipline the world. Much good will come of it, both by humbling us and by subsequently blessing us.

...when there’s so much rightly gotten gain to be got!..."

2009-03-08T15:30:00.001-05:00

This, a quote from STRANGE HERRING, following a comment on ill-gotten gain.

Colin In China

2009-03-04T20:50:00.004-06:00

My oldest son, Colin, has completed his teaching commitments in Korea and has moved to China for a year. He is currently in Tianjin, down the river from Beijing and on the coast. He moves in two months to a new location out on the peninsula, which ought to be much more picturesque. Pictured are his new classroom and the view from his apartment.

Hmmm. Still want to visit him? I've got a query on his Facebook page, wondering if the sun ever shines in this place. If not...

UPDATE: The sun shines in Tianjin. The sky is blue when the sun shines. Amazing.

YET ANOTHER CHAT PACK QUESTION

2009-03-03T18:16:00.002-06:00

IN YOUR OPINION, WHAT IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MAN-MADE OBJECT IN THE WORLD?