These Foolish Things Remind Me
Blog for March and St. Patrick’s Day
After a week in which, now for almost everybody, everything has changed, changed again, and left us in a new world, I was moved by our Presiding Bishop’s prayer during Sunday’s live-stream of a service from the National Cathedral—a prayer that the virus dividing us as bodies might unite us as a society. One feature of that will be to turn our attention away from the crisis fatigue manipulated by the White House and toward things that abide, that bear more importance in our lives.
So, sure, there’s alwaysrecent news out there, and I do think on it at times. For example:
I recently watched a DVR of Mickey Rooney in Andy Hardy’s and His Private Secretary. Yes, it is corny and trite, but along the way as Andy’s father holds forth, there are some grand representations of the values that formed the country the current occupant of the White House claims to want to make great again. Those values included much praise for the public education available in this country and its value in the dual track of American education, public and parochial schools. MAGA and sycophantic followers in Nebraska, on the contrary, are doing all they can to subvert public education, including the ubiquitous slur of the phrase “government schools.” I doubt the president can read, but someone might slip Andy Hardy into his TV watching.
Super Tuesday. First of all, a misnomer. Yes, there are lots of states; but then come Michigan and Florida and lots of other decisive battles. Oklahoma and Minnesota, California and Texas—important yes, super no. And, yes, I’d favor a national primary day or a series of primaries given their order by the percentage of their voters who turn out to vote over a four-year election cycle. And while I like Bernie a lot, it may well be that Biden has a better chance of getting some of Bernie’s goals accomplished than Bernie does. As to the coverage, our media (and from the looks of it our own conversations in person and on social media) have not yet grasped this: the best way to defeat Trump is to ignore him, refuse him an audience for his antics, focus on addressing the carnage he’s perpetrating hourly, and get out the vote!
Which, for some reason, brings to mind George Jean Nathan’s remark: “Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.” Translated, Mar a Lago over decency and order. And, no, the stock market and the number of people working at underpaying and under-rewarding jobs are not the only and not even the best measures of an economy.
But here I want to focus on the truth that there are so many things more important than politics. These days, we are often drawn away from them by our domestic ‘war’ just as my grandparents were by WWII. So, now, on to some of those better things.
Every year, I cull out the photos that came in Christmas card and emails and mount them on a bulletin board we think of as our “wall of fame.” You send it, it goes up; you don’t, it doesn’t.
It is a reminder of the affection of friends and family all year long, and it always ends up a marvelously eclectic rogues gallery. It hangs where anyone can see it—if they use our downstairs bathroom! Here’s this year’s:
If you don’t see yourself here, send us a photo the next holiday that presents itself!
In my office I also keep another bulletin board of recent photos of people I like to keep hanging around (literally!) and reminders of shoulders I stand on, things I stand by.
This bulletin board is surrounded by photos you won’t see in the picture below: a college picture of Nancy, a photo of me with Mary Park at Camp Comeca, Pope Francis, Desmond Tutu, the windows at La Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, stalwarts of the Faulkner Conference Jim Carothers (longest running presence) flanked by the late poet Daniel Brodsky and the former director Don Kartiganer, Dad and Mom and her pregnant with me (no ultrasound back in the day, so my first picture), Nana at her stove at 1865 10th Avenue, Greeley, Colorado; Albert Camus; a note to me as a lowly instructor from Dudley Bailey, English Department chair; Paul Olson teaching a class; Gertrude and Oets Bouwsma; and a collage of family photos surrounding one of my Dad—the family as I remember it from childhood. On the facing wall, a print of San Francisco where Nancy graduated high school, a copy of the Declaration of Independence (read Willes’ Lincoln at Gettysburg to get an idea of what the greatness of America consists), “At the kitchen table,” a poem by Ted Kooser; a photo of the Chinook helicopter that Nancy’s dad shepherded when he was at Boeing; and two prints from the south of folk black culture. From my years failing to quite master Spanish, a Mexican flag is draped on the doorway. Above the bulletin board, a beautiful print from an art show in Flagstaff when we lived there.
There, amid all that, hang the “current onlookers” of my life and work; here’s a photo of that bulletin board:
- From the top left: Buttress-Weber’s, Darts, Foxes, Hadley’s, Joneses—fall birthdays 2019;
- Safe Person Ally notice that used to hang on my office door at UNK;
- friend, former parishioner, and all-star rancher Merle Hayward;
- Hemingway folks en route from Italy to Switzerland across Lake Maggiore (the little inset is Hemingway scholar—also Faulkner, Lawrence Durrell, many others and folk singer as well, H.R. Stoneback);
- American and Chinese flags;
- key ring Eiffel Tower;
- ‘official’ button for Bishop Kemper School faculty;
- label on the quilt made for me by dear high school friend Anita McBride Faddis;
- name tag from time I served on Nebraska Library Commission;
- longest running friendship: Steve Schneider at their home in Henderson (Nevada, not Nebraska!);
- the late Peter Clark, fellow graduate student, Shakespeare and modern theater scholar, and great guy;
- buried behind the flag, Karen Park, long-time friend, former parishioner, and mother of several of our kids and our friends;
- the late Ken Anderson (inventor, artist, entrepreneur) with Denise Christensen at the time of the show of his sketches at the Merryman Performing Arts Center;
- our friends the Hustwits (from grad school on) with other Cather readers at the Palace in Red Cloud for a Spring Conference;
- Lee’s Chicken with grad school friends Jerry and Cathy Parsons, Don and the late Olive Cunningham, the late Clyde Burkholder, and Jeanetta Drueke, photo taken by the late Mike Cartwright;
- Cather Stalwarts Wade Leak and Jay Yost, in as I recall Afghanistan;
- a brunch in Oxford (Mississippi not England!) at a Faulkner do, with Colby Kullman, Jack Barberra, Dale and Ann Abadie, Jenny Joiner, Theresa Towner, and Jim and Bev Carothers (another similar photo on the book case to the right);
- a sketch of the late Dewey Jensen, great friend from philosophy grad school days;
- my trustee “mascot”—the print of the armchair armadillo;
- and anchoring the board, Nancy at a grape harvest at the Fox Vineyard.
Finally, as UNK and the Prairie Arts Brothers are about to put out a volume of my poems and short essays on Nebraska, I was overjoyed to get this thank you for my sending the creative writing program at a public school in Thayer, Nebraska, a copy of my chapbook Breezes on their Way to Being Winds. Their teacher, Anne Roesman Heitmann puts lots of effort into Poetry Out Loud, and I met her and some of her students when they came to Kearney Public Library for a preliminary recitation put on by Mark Foradori.
Incidentally, the girl who “enjoyed glancing through” the chapbook was last year’s statewide winner. Some of the others appear to have actually read some of the poems!
To paraphrase St. Paul, I ‘think on these’ things to quiet my mind and heart.
April will bring the usual Eastertide blog—although it doesn’t promise to be the usual Eastertide!
Kearney, Nebraska
March 2020
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