Morning Thanks--Prayer concerns

"Anything else?" the preacher says, after listing two or three prayer concerns, each of them compelling. He points to the back pews, and a voice, a shaky female voice, says her mother fell and broke her hip, which is bad enough but then it's a real problem because she's the one taking care of her elderly husband, who's in a wheelchair.  

That deepens the hush because there aren't any young people in the church, so old people breaking their fragile bones is something that hits frightfully close to home.

The preacher writes down what he has to, raises his eyes again, looks around, and points.

"My granddaughter--" another voice comes out of the back, behind me.  I don't turn around. Sometimes it feels like I'm rubbernecking if I do a 360 in order the spot the supplicant. We're still really only visitors. Nobody gives names in this church; there are no more than forty souls in the pews on a sunny Sunday.

"My granddaughter--" the voice says again. It's a grandma, but that's no surprise because there's loads of them. But now there's been two pregnant pauses and enough of an audible gulp for all of us to know that a matter of significant heft has made the telling more of a problem than she might have thought when she raised her hand. 

"My granddaughter--" a bit more hesitation, then the kind of tremolo you just know is prompting tears, "--is going to graduate this week from law school," she says, obviously emotional, "--USD."

Tears wrung from joy. Not sadness at all, but pure and radiant joy. 

I have no idea how God almighty fields a couple billion prayers per minute, but I believe he does. Somehow.  But right then I couldn't help think that, like me, amid the tales of woe, he might have smiled when this one came in. 

Her granddaughter was graduating from law school.

It's impossible for the imagination not to try to fill in open spaces. Maybe once upon a time this granddaughter had been a real problem. Look, let's think the worst: maybe there'd been meth, maybe a horrible marriage, maybe something she did that made forgiveness more than just a chore. I don't know.

Then again, maybe not. Maybe she'd been a storybook granddaughter, Little Red Riding Hood carting a quart of mint chocolate chip ice cream and two spoons along every time she'd stop by. Maybe she was absolutely perfect.

Go on, create the story yourself.

Me? Here's what I thought. I wondered if maybe those tears were wrung from the plain fact that this one, this granddaughter, was the first grandchild, not just the first to go to college--maybe that too--but the first to go on to become someone of significant professional respect in the family.  "Did you know Laura is going to be a lawyer?" she might have said to her coffee friends three or four years ago; and now, the only lawyer in her family was to pick up her diploma, right down the road too, across the river in South Dakota.  My lands, what a day.

It's what she had to say. 

And I couldn't help wonder, really, whether it wasn't a voice from the American past, an American dream that has, for many reasons, fallen on hard times. It's the dream that brings illegal immigrants to our packing plants and milking parlors, a dream that makes millions from all around the world believe that if they could only get to America they could really get somewhere.

But, as Frank Bruni says in yesterday's New York Times, "More and more I think we've lost it, and by 'it' I mean the optimism that was always the lifeblood of this luminous experiment, the ambition that has been its foundation, the swagger that made us so envied and emulated and reviled." On a new "social progress" register that lists 139 countries, we are, he says, 39th in basic education, 34th in access to water and sanitation, just two slots ahead of Slovenia. 

Republicans claim it's all Obama's fault, but two wars and a bad recession were well under way the moment he stepped into office; and Rand Paul promises he's not going to do big things--only 300 million little things. He doesn't believe in government, after all.  Most Republicans rather liked Cliven Bundy's declarations.

Something is more pervasive here, something's in the water, something--I hate to say it--only tragedy can rebuild, if it can be rebuilt at all. Today, most people don't believe in what that grandma is experiencing, a world in which our kids and their kids have better lives. Most Americans no longer believe that their kids will have it better--life, that is--than they did.  

In church, yesterday, it came as a surprise when a grandma who couldn't quite the get the words out was choked up by love and joy and greatly forgivable pride.  

It was a request for prayer and, simultaneously, an answer to it, I'm sure. That shaky voice, I'm thinking, came from a lifetime of hope. 

I may be wrong, but it was a moment we likely don't see all that often anymore; and this morning, for many reasons, I'm thankful to have been there.

Spring wigglin'

Last night, headlights ablazin', our neighbor seeded the field just this side of the river, trying to get it all in before the rain, which came, as prophesied, sometime after midnight. Spring is late this year, after what folks from eastern Colorado to wherever--Ohio? Pennsylvania?--call the longest winter on record.  We didn't have the snow that so much of the Midwest had, but winter, like a bitter old man, just would not find the door.

A late spring makes farmers more earnest than ever because they've got to the get the corn in. I went in for a blood test last week, sat in the waiting room for my turn, and listened to a couple of them yearn aloud.

"How ya doin?"

"I'm in."

"Yah?"

"Yep, mostly. What I don't got done'll get done soon."

"Wind yesterday, huh?

"'Sakes alive!"

"Audley said he put in that section along the river because it's low, you know--tried to stay out of it."

"Makes sense."

"Yep, a lot of seed got in the ground yesterday."

Both nod. They weren't thinking much about blood tests.

My father-in-law used to say that old timers, out in the shed this time of year waiting patiently to plow ground, used to say that if you stood still you could hear the seed wiggling in the bag--that's how bad it wanted to get in the ground.

I don't know about that, but you can be sure those old timers were doing more than their share of wiggling themselves.  It's spring.  Finally.

Maybe this particular late spring explains the madness of that stump up above. Some claim that beavers are nature's own elite engineers. If you've ever seen a dam, the assessment fits. Others claim beavers are dumb as a box of rocks. 

Which of those is true, I don't know, but I think the second is an awful thing to say about the flat-tailed rodent that won the West, the fur-bearer Hugh Glass and Jim Bridger and whole companies of mountain men were after. I think they deserve more respect.

Still, that felled cottonwood makes no sense. It's not along the river per se, it lies in a host of flood-felled trees, and it's one of the biggest around. Why choose that one? It's plain crazy. Whoever went after it must have been a binge drinker.

Maybe that nonsense is attributable to a beaver's cabin fever, a sense of the world's longest winter finally on its way out of town and the first whisper of spring's blessed wiggling. 

Here's Mark Twain:

It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want—oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!

This spring, even the beavers are wiggling down here on the Floyd.

Black Soil-- Book Review

Breaking Sioux County prairie

You sometimes wonder—or at least I do—if there will come a time when Sioux County, Iowa, has enough hog confinements. Industry is the name of the game here; the descendants of all those Dutch Calvinists could write primers on how to work, how to farm, and how to make money.

Confinements sit on every available hill, more than any other adjacent county, but then agriculture is a huge business here, empowering everything, keeping life afloat and a culture intact.  It’s nearly impossible to picture the region when it was wild out here, almost impossible to imagine the natural world as antagonist.  There’s still hail and even a tornado or two; almost unendurable winters come and, finally, go, (like the last one); and torrid summers still blow hot winds that once upon a time laid standing corn to waste in just a few days.

But to think of the world outside my window as untamed, as a mean and angry force that must be broken, is simply not possible in day when the finest tractors are steered through the fields by satellites. In many ways, we got the job done. Doggone it, we've subdued the earth all right.

Maybe that’s why it took me half a novel to figure out the central conflict of Josephine Donovan’s 1930 novel, Black Soil, an engaging rendition of the soul-trying settlement of this corner of the region Frederick Manfred named “Siouxland.” It’s just flat-out hard, 150 years later, to think of what she calls “the prairie” as if were a bleak and pitiless enemy.

Once upon a time, it was. Once upon a time, grasshoppers darkened the sky and devoured just about every living thing, engorging whole sections of land. The earth seem crawled with 'em. Once upon a time, their devastation created brutal poverty no descendant 140 years later can begin to imagine. Once upon a time, prairie fires ritually consumed the region. Once upon a time, life-and-death drama occurred out here. Once upon a time, white folks were scared to death of the Native people their own new homesteads so unkindly dispossessed.

If you’ve read Giants in the Earth, the O. E. Rolvaag classic set not so far from here, nothing in Donovan’s Black Soil is going to be new or visionary. The gender differences are classic in what some call “Middle Border Lit”:  men like Per Hansa and Black Soil's Tim Collins loved the adventure, loved opening the earth and making it abundant with flourishing row crops.

Meanwhile, women often felt abandoned beneath a gargantuan sky on land so barren there seemed no place to hide.  Frontier life required abandoning families back home, meant endless sweat and none of the blessings established communities offered.

Nell Connors, the woman at the heart of this 1930s novel,  is just such a pioneer woman. She’s neither Dutch or Luxembourgian, traditional Sioux County ethnics, but, oddly enough, Irish Catholic and a Yankee.  Her roots are back east in Massachusetts, where she remembers tea at the most honorable Dickinson family in Amherst, the ethereal Emily acting so very, well, poetic.

Her husband, Tim, has a so huge heart it may not be suited to the frontier. He doesn’t lack ambition, but he’s not dedicated to making the farm work—or farming as a profession. His eye is elsewhere. More than once I’ve heard old Iowa men talk about brothers who were sent off to school for the ministry or education once Ma and Pa realized they didn’t have the wherewithal to farm. Tim Connors doesn’t either.

But it’s not her husband’s misguided predilections that brings Nell Connors grief; it’s that her children walk off to school in bare feet and, once there, get a third-rate education at best in a world where its far more important to milk cows than read poems.

It’s the sheer force of “the prairie” that she fights, that makes her wonder if Siouxland can ever become a home. When she sees a boy with artistic talent return from working cattle “out west,” swaggering like some chaw-spewing cowhand, she fears the power of open spaces.  “A sadness came over Nell Connor as she walked back to the house,” Donovan writes. “Does the country make the man, or the man make the country?”

Nell Connors regrets what her children won’t have, what they’ll never experience out here on the hard-hearted Siouxland prairie.

The Dutch fare well in Black Soil. The novel is set somewhere near Primghar, where the Connors watch immigrant Hollanders arrive in waves at the western reaches of the county (“the Dutch are coming in thicker than hops!” someone reports).

Nell says, they're clannish, more so that the Germans and Luxembourgians; but they keep their towns and themselves clean and tidy, just like their farms. They work hard, and, in the novel at least, the occasional Hollander who wanders away from the colony and into foreign Siouxland regions always makes a good neighbor.

In a blizzard reminiscent of the famous Children’s Blizzard of 1888, a little Dutch boy dies when the kids are sent home as the snow begins to fall. Then, when the blizzard unfurls its anger, Little Benny Hurd leaves the Connors kids because his home is in another direction.

People die on the prairie. Ms. Donovan tells the story of Johann Hoepner, an aristocratic young German, who is just what Nell wants in a neighbor—he’s upper class, well-educated, and can speak seven languages. A sweetheart back in Germany awaits his signal that a new home awaits her in a new land.

But things don’t work out for Johann Hoepner. He doesn’t appear able to escape the mud soddie people helped him build when he arrived. When the woman he loves stops writing, Johann takes out a rope and ends his prairie life beneath a cottonwood.

Nell is heartbroken, not only because the community lost one of its own, but also because his death kindles once more her grievous fear that this place can kill, spiritually, emotionally, and physically.

If there were a church fight or two, the novel could well have been written by a Dutch Calvinist.  There isn’t. The Connors are Roman Catholic, and Nell is bountifully religious, close to God, constantly in prayer.

For years, Nell insisted that when their foster child, Sheila, was of age, she’d be sent back east for the kind of education her children were sadly missing. It’s her dream. It’s the vision that allows her to live out here at the edge of the frontier.  But when that time comes, Sheila decides otherwise.

Her mother's heart is broken. Her only comfort is that her sadness is God’s will. She goes alone to her bedroom, bearing the burden of her failure, then lies there quietly, admitting no one, seeing no one.

In her calm she realized that in this as in all other things she must be reconciled to His indomitable will. Her spirit of fight was of no avail; she must accept fate. Her recent flash of anger went out like the lightning of a storm. She got up from her bed with a feeling akin to that experienced after the birth of her children here in this room—she had been down in the valley for a while, but she was up in the heights again.

Then she says, “It’s God’s will.” And with that, “Nell bathed her face, combed her hair, changed her wrapper, and rattled up some custard pies for the men’s dinner.”

It’s the railroad that saves Nell Connors, because it links her with her childhood and the blessings of a community with good schools and endless opportunities.  When the railroad comes to town, Nell Connors finds herself ready to settle down.

Black Soil is not a great novel. Donovan’s power of description occasionally shines in portraits of prairie beauty that belie Nell’s great fears; but Josephine Donovan wanders through several characters’ perceptions with an annoying and unsteady omniscience, and the perils of the prairie—grasshoppers, prairie fires--are no more or less than what one might expect.

Still, for those of us who live here, Black Soil is a great read, even if it’s not great literature.  It brings us back to a time we need to remember. It wasn’t always easy here, farming wasn’t always a business, and opportunity was abundant as a bin-busting harvest.

That we don’t know our history better allows, even generates a certain kind of arrogance. To read Black Soil today, 150 years after white folks like the Collins came to Siouxland to seek a better life, is humbling, something to think about when you pass some huge, tech-savvy John Deere this spring, something to consider when you look up and down endless rows of corn and beans stretching into a horizon that never ends.

Wasn't always this way.

The interview as a work of art

For two reasons, his interview was out of the ordinary. First, it was obvious before we even began to record that he'd actually read the book. I'm sure that if I were a radio guy, I wouldn't take the time to read every book I was reviewing on air; after all, there are certain obligatory questions you wouldn't even have to write out to remember: 

"Where did you get the idea for these stories?"

"What's your writing schedule look like?"

"Do you write on a notepad in a coffee shop or hammer away on a computer?"

"How old were you when you knew you wanted to write?"

Etc.

I don't doubt for a moment that one could do a fairly thorough job of interviewing a writer or two, or three or six or eighteen, with the very same list on the very same single sheet of paper.

The second reason this interview wasn't ordinary was that he had a chunk of the book in his hand, a chunk of a story on a couple of sheets of paper because he wanted me to read a long passage he'd chosen himself. I don't remember doing an interview with someone who actually wanted me to read. When first he brought up the idea, I thought he was kidding. 

He wasn't. I did. I read the passage he'd chosen.

And then it was over. "That ought to do it," he said, or something similar. I was surprised, not because it hadn't taken all that long--I knew he had more copy than he needed--but because he hadn't asked those standard questions, not one, not once. 

I'd read a long passage from one of the stories, and he nodded approvingly when it was over, even indicated he was moved--and honestly I think he was.  

The interview he created was broadcast this week. He took what he'd recorded and sculpted it into a work of art, really. He added the whoosh of passing cars and an endearing rendition of the kind of Genevan Psalm that rises from the story; and what the interview became, what it is--this news feature about a new book by a local writer--is just plain beautiful.

I know--I'm hardly objective. But listen yourself. It's about eight minutes long even though the music continues to play. 

Tell me I'm wrong, but I think it's just plain beautiful.

Here it is.  His name? Mark Munger, from KWIT, Sioux City, IA.

An American story

In middle school, he played on a traveling basketball team, one of those who goes from burb to burb, later on even played a little high school football. His mother often sat in the stands. You couldn't miss her--she was the only one in the hijab.

The kid was no star, but he had a great laugh and the rest of the guys thought he was a scream, a fun guy to be around. Truth be told, he and his family--his father was a Palestinian, his mother a converted Irish-American--lived in a quiet, gated Florida community. They were not poor. That's no answer here. They weren't poor at all. Some reports maintain the family owned several grocery stores.

The mosque where he worshiped was so small they had no imam, just a dozen believers getting down on their knees together, operating as if they were some old country church with an elder reading the sermon. In fact, because they had no regular leader, this kid sometimes became one because he seemed to know his way around the Koran as well as, if not better than the handful of others who came together to pray.

He liked cats, and he was a big fan of the Miami Heat, which means, almost certainly, that he, like millions of others, loved to watch LaBron James toss crushed chalk into the air in James's own never-miss pre-game ritual. Who knows?--a navy blue Heat jersey, number 23, may still be hanging in his closet.

Back in June, he made a video of himself eating chunks of his American passport, then burning the rest. “I lived in America; I know how it is,” he said. "Just sitting down five minutes drinking a cup of tea with mujahedeen is better than anything I've ever experienced in my whole life," he said. "You have all the fancy amusement parks, and the restaurants, and the food, and all this crap and cars. You think you're happy? You're not happy. I was never happy. I was always sad and depressed. Life sucked. ... All you do is work 40, 50, 60 hours a week."

So much for the American Dream.

And then, "You think you're safe where you are, in America or Britain,” he adds. “You think you are safe. You are not safe."

All of this from the cut-up, a kid with a sparkling sense of humor often seen dribbling down the street in Vera Beach, the kid who turned a rock-hard pillar of faith. "I want to rest in the afterlife," he said in an earlier video. "There is nothing here--my heart is not resting here in this life." He told others that his transition into the violence of the Middle East was relatively easy, not difficult at all because "Allah made it easy for me," words of a true believer.

"Glorious is God, and thank God--this is a grace from him," he says in a tape released later. "When I came to Syria, I had nothing. I had no money to buy a gun and ammunition, now God granted me all of that and much more." 

Just a few moments before he and four other suicide bombers ran their explosive-packed truck into a target in Syria and killed an as-yet undetermined number of Syrian soldiers, he radioed his accomplices, "I can see paradise and I can smell paradise."  

Those in the know, fear that while Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha was the first American suicide bomber in the war in Syria, other Americans have been recruited, which is to say, there may be more.

And this:  "I have one word to say ... we are coming for you. Mark my words. You think you killed Osama bin Laden? You sent him to paradise. Just know that we are coming."

He was 22 years old.

What on earth do we do?

Madam Speaker, the Koran on the table before you is a handbook for terrorists. Blood drips from its pages. It calls for perpetual war against non-believers. That Koran before you is the hunting permit for millions of Muslims. A license to kill. That book is the Constitution of the Islamic State. What ISIS does is what Allah commands.

It's not all that difficult to determine how a politician like Geert Wilders attracts fervent disciples because it's not all that difficult to appreciate his rhetoric. Rid the world of Islam, after all, and the rest of us have a shot at real world peace. It's impossible to imagine what life would be like without jihadists.
 

Wilders is a Dutch politician who quite regularly lights hot fires. His office is in a far corner of the Dutch parliament, where it's easiest to protect him from death threats. He wears a bullet-proof vest his every waking hour, and is accompanied, wherever he goes, by a posse of body-guards. Muslim extremists would see him dead, many would like to kill him themselves. 

Just a week ago or so, he laid out some steps he thought the Dutch government should take to rid itself of its growing community of Muslims.  "Recognize that Islam is the problem," he told the Parliament. "Start the de-Islamization of the Netherlands. Less Islam."

Famously, Wilders claims he doesn't hate Muslims, just Islam. "Close our borders to immigrants from Islamic countries," he told Parliament. "Do not prevent jihadists from leaving our country. Let them leave, with as many friends as possible. If it helps, I am even prepared to go to Schiphol [airport] to wave them goodbye. But let them never come back. Good riddance."

When hooded madmen take a knife to the throats of two American journalists and send the bloody video around the world, it's tempting to listen to Jeremiads by powerhouse extremists like Wilders. The body's natural reaction to poison, after all, is to all it can to get rid of it.

But barely a month ago I stood on the site of an internment camp outside of a Grenada, CO, a sprawling cemetery of perfectly aligned cement foundations that mark row after row of living quarters where once upon a time 10,000 Japanese, rounded up from throughout the American west, were forced to live--because they were Japanese.  That America could do such a thing seems preposturous--today. But back then, after the shock of Pearl Harbor, it's not difficult to understand how a nation could turn on those it determined closest to the evil that had murdered 2300 totally unsuspecting Americans on a sunny Sunday morning in December.

But mob violence isn't any less horrendous when it's practiced nation-wide.

Iowa was the only state in the nation to pass a language law in 1918, when war sentiment rose to fever pitch. For a time, it was illegal to use any language other than English in any public place throughout the state. Only in Iowa. 

In some places throughout the state, the police were sent to monitor worship services to be sure that they were being conducted in the English language and not the language of what would have been the immigrant people the church served. Use of any other language was considered seditious and specifically forbidden. 

The pastor of the Peoria Christian Reformed Church, Rev. J. J. Weersing, was arrested and left town at that time, because anti-German sentiment burned so hot in the hearts of non-Dutch locals. He feared for his life. He actually feared for his life. To some at least, the language those Hollanders used sounded just like the language of the rotten Huns.  

On June 13, 1918, the Christian school in Peoria went up in flames lit by those who'd determined its constituents were traitors. Peoria wasn't the only place in the neighborhood torched by hate. In nearby New Sharon, the Reformed church went up in flames as well, and the pastor found unexploded dynamite beneath the parsonage. 

Geert Wilders has gathered many a disciple with his rhetoric and his bold ideas, among them, in fact, a 32-year-old Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik, who, on July 22, 2011, disguised as a policeman, gained entry to a youth camp on a Norwegian island and started shooting. When it was over 69 kids were dead, another 110 injured, 55 of those seriously.

Such things also should not be forgotten.

Reviews for NCAA UNLV Runnin Rebels Zuma Insulated Backpack

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Descriptions NCAA UNLV Runnin Rebels Zuma Insulated Backpack

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