A gourmet Fourth

I'm not sure how all of this goes together, but I'll see if I can work it out. 

It wasn't long ago--and I don't remember where--when the whole bunch of us were subject to one of those cruel games meant to force you undress in front of people you don't know and show them something of yourself that'll make them like you in ten minutes. You know.  "Here we go, answer me this--how would you wear your favorite garden vegetable?"

Ain't we got fun.

The question was something about fast food, not complicated.  Maybe you had to imagine yourself on some deserted island with one menu item. I don't know.

I spent zero time coming up with an answer--for me, hot dogs.  I'm not kidding.

Gasp.  Gasp. Gasp. Gasp. Strange looks. Crooked eyebrows. "Seriously?" You'd think I caused offense.

Yes, seriously. Hot dogs. 

My mother was a piano teacher.  (Stay with me now.) When I was a schoolboy and walked home at lunch, there was always some kid on the piano taking a lesson. My mother was a piano teacher. I know I said that already, but it's also my way of suggesting that she wasn't a cook. I'd make my own lunch, which I did, daily, for most of my middle school years.  

A simple menu really, just boil a hot dog, roll it in a piece of Wonder Bread, and smother it in ketchup and relish. Voila. 

That's why people say miracles can happen. I still love hot dogs.

Some guy wins hot-dog-eating contests by jamming 79 into himself in ten minutes or whatever. I'm not that gone. But I do love 'em.

Okay, all of that is simply to get here. The world's best hot dogs are from Chicago. Hands down. Even O'Hare. I can't climb out of that place without a couple. I'm sure real Chicagoans have their favorite hot dog haunts, and there may well be some losers; but I'm not fussy. Give me a Chicago hot dog with that juicy kosher dill, and I'm home.  Maybe a few peppers. And mustard.  

Hands down, however, the best hot dog west of Joliet has to be those beauties from Bob's Drive-Inn, LeMars, Iowa. Go ahead and google. I'm not lying. They're bathed in what Iowans call "tavern," basically un-constituted hamburger brewed with some punchy spices. "Loosemeat" some call it here, but there's something vaguely sinful about that word so retired people like me use it sparingly.

Anyway, Bob's has been on a stoplight corner of Hwy 75 since 1949. It's old enough to retire, but it still delivers the goods. You walk up to the window and wait. No carry-out girls on skates or anything--this is old-fashioned, blue collar drive-in culture right here in Siouxland. 

Okay, so it's the Fourth today. John Phillip Sousa plays all over America, and the night sky explodes with China's very best concoctions. If I did my math right, 238 years ago some rapscallion radicals spit in the eye of King George and went their own way. The U. S. of A. was born. It would take a while for hot dogs, I'm sure.

I read somewhere that the city of Frankfurt, Germany, celebrated the 500th anniversary of the hot dog in 1987. You might think of Bob's as the glory of what evolution created after five centuries, the flowering of the art, the best of the wurst (sorry).  

Look at that place and remind yourself it's the Fourth of July, doggone it. Hum a verse or two of "Stars and Stripes Forever." 

Then step up an order a hot dog. Maybe two or three. They're only three bucks.

You're an American. You bleed red-white-and-blue. U-S-A.  U-S-A.

Seriously, if you're in the neighborhood, stop at Bob's for a hot dog.

You'll be ready for the fireworks.

Geometry assignment; Feb. 25

We continued working with the three trig functions today as we solved right triangles and went over a few word problems.  Defining angles of elevation and angles of depression was a key point in the lesson, as was being able to solve a right triangle for all of its sides and angles.

Assignment:  solving right triangle worksheet #1-11 odd;  section 8-7;  page 318-319;  #1, 2, 5, 10

Chapter 8 Review tomorrow for chapter 8 test on Thursday

Remembering Frederick Manfred--1912-1994 (vi)

Frederick Manfred remembered me from that second seemingly invisible visit, perhaps because he thought it was good of me to bring that beret-ed old aficionado up to meet him just months before the oxygen tank was retired. From that visit, Fred remembered me. Besides, he knew I taught literature at Dordt College.

Frederick Manfred stood 6’9”. In the late 20s, the basketball coach at Calvin saw this huge presence show up on campus and almost immediately recruited him to play ball, even though Feik had not played a quarter of high school ball at Western Academy. Back then, competitive athletics were basically aerobics for town boys. Fred wasn’t.

Aldert Venhuizen, a student manager for the basketball team in those years at Calvin, once told me that his job for half a season of practices was nothing more or less than teaching Feik Feikema to rebound, which he attempted to do by shoving him in the lower back whenever a shot would go up during scrimmage, creating a sense of timing Fred had never learned.

Tall and gaunt, his shoulders broad as a double-tree, Manfred’s sheer physical stature filled a room—and that was before he started talking. Because, in the late 70s and 80s, he knew me—and because he knew Dordt—he liked driving down highway 75 from Luverne to meet with my literature classes. With time, the sharp edges of the old scandal had dulled a bit, enough so that it didn’t seem an abomination for Feik Feikema to appear in a Dordt College classroom, at least it wasn’t as unthinkable as it might have been a decade earlier. Still, discretion advised me not to carry the news into local papers.

Mr. Abma’s questions about Fred’s soul, about his salvation, weren’t questions he alone had raised, of course; and there was that matter of sexuality—not to mention violence, loads of it in some of the "Buckskin Man Tales," Scarlet Plume, for example, buckets of blood and gore from the Indian wars. “Was that Christian writing?” people asked, rhetorically. Those books were nothing at all like the Sugar-Creek Gang.

Manfred used to tell me that there was, in the Middle Ages, Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower, two significant English poets. Chaucer loved the miller and the wife of Bath, sinners and the saints, loved every one of them. Gower could sing praises only to God, not to life.

Fred said he wanted to be a Chaucer, chanting the tales of all the Siouxland pilgrims. He wanted to chronicle the joy of the very earth he loved between his fingers and toes. He wanted to celebrate life, not eschew it for dreamy visions of the hereafter. The good Christians of Siouxland didn’t know quite what to make of that. In a way, to their minds and souls, Manfred loved life a bit more than good Christians should. He used to say that his grandfather, an outspoken atheist, had the best answer of all to impertinent spiritual questions—“God is in me, and I’m smiling.”

I knew his grandfather’s answer would not have been what Mr. Abma was looking for, had he taken the time to ask the question he didn’t.

The first time Fred Manfred visited a class of mine I had no idea how it might go. I had spent some time having my students read passages from some of the novels and a few poems from Winter Count, and I’d promised him that his appearance wouldn’t require a thing—all he needed to do was field questions.

And those questions came. One kid raised his hand and brought up a scene in Green Earth, when, soon after his profession of faith, Free and his buddies hang out. In the novel, a couple of the guys, multi-talented, tune their expressive flatulence into music, if you can believe that—“The Star-Spangled Banner,” or so Manfred would have us believe.

“Mr. Manfred,” one of my students said, “in that passage, are you making fun of profession of faith by having them fart the way they did?”

I don’t remember how Fred Manfred answered the question, but what I’ll never forget is the way he grabbed me, shocked, the minute the hour ended. “That kid said the word fart right in class,” he said. I’d never guessed that Frederick Manfred’s sensibilities could be so easily violated.

It was one of those moments when something happens that blows our expectations into oblivion. I thought I knew Frederick Manfred. After all, I’d read many of his novels. But the man was even bigger than I’d determined, and there was more to him than I’d guessed—which is, I’ve come to believe, true of most of us.

___________________

Tomorrow:  A visit with the President

Algebra 10-12 assignment; April 28

We got back our factoring test today and went over it as the students had a chance to correct their mistakes.  We then got started on the next unit of study which involves working with radical expressions.  Today's lesson involved work on simplifying radical expressions and factoring out perfect squares.  After going over several sample problems together, the students then got started on their homework at the end of the period.


Assignment:  Simplifying radicals worksheet #1-20

Geometry assignment; May 13

We went over our test from last week, and then took questions about the homework.  The lesson today focused on calculating the slope of various line segments, and also being able to identify the different types of slopes  ( positive, negative, zero, and undefined ).  The students got started on their assignment at the end of the period.


assignment:  section 13-2;  page 532-533;  #1-21 all, 23, 24, 28

Morning Thanks--Anniversary

She was 22--that's enough of a start. 

There's a story here. Esther Helen Emal nee Claassen died very young, just 22 years old, and she died in 1945, which might prompt you to believe she left a husband in uniform; and that might be true if it weren't for the fact that her mortal remains are in the cemetery beside First Mennonite Church, a rural congregation in central Nebraska.

The war didn't take her, even though it took thousands of others her age in 1945. And it likely didn't take her husband either, although he was, in all likelihood, very much of age. Traditionally, Mennonites are pacifists, although calling them "traditional" pacifists makes the position they've religiously staked out sound far less difficult than it is or has been. Telling someone you're a pacifist with Hitler trying to take over the world couldn't have been a cakewalk.

I was out on a blue highway, on my way back to Beatrice, Nebraska, when there it was--First Mennonite, a tan brick fortress mid-prairie, its own well-manicured cemetery in the backyard. I have to push myself to make unplanned stops because my natural tendency--a vestige of original sin, I think--is simply to keep trucking, to get there, wherever it is I'm going. My internal capitalist reminds me I hadn't planned on a stop at First Mennonite. It wasn't on the itinerary. 

These days, that's when I remind myself I'm retired. 

I drove in. There's always life in a cemetery.

To be truthful, I didn't think much about Esther Helen Eman nee Claassen when I stood in the grass beside her grave and snapped this picture. What had stopped me cold was the icyness of what's on the cement beside her--three little somewhat scattered markers telling the world that there's a vacancy here; the space beside Esther Helen is open, you know, just in case. 

"Ask not for whom the bell tolls." That's John Donne. And Hemingway, later. "It tolls for thee."

Which is to say, me.

Memento Mori--memorials of death--abound in our world, although, quite frankly, they abounded much more richly in the age of Menno Simmons and John Donne.  Here's a couple of beauties I snapped in Holland a couple of years ago. 

One of the side doors of an old cathedral, a sticky note skeleton, to remind you not to forget that there's an end to things.  Just sayin'.

How about this bonny lass?  Naked as a baby, but that skull is, you might say, a dead giveaway.

I don't know--maybe I'm just susceptible. "Vacant," the three little slips said, as if space was on sale last Saturday. 

Look, today's our anniversary, not a time to be haunted by death, right?  

Well, maybe, maybe not. What all this marble intends is simply to say that death is real. 

So live. Get off the highway. Keep scratching items off your bucket list, and always add a couple more at the bottom.

That's not a bad rule of thumb for an anniversary--42 years today.  We'll have to see what we can do.

I don't know a thing about Esther Helen Eman nee Claassen, but I dare bet that were she sitting there at her grave site last Saturday when I stopped, she'd probably suggest the very same thing.

Keeping time

So, anyway, sometimes when we go to town (sounds so Depression-era, doesn't it?) we take gravel. It's faster, even though stones up the wheel wells get old and you can't keep the dust off the back of the car. But then, both of ours are old, not decrepit, just old.

Friday I got to thinking I was late, so I took the gravel four miles straight north to the blacktop, then west to town. It was windy (what else is new?) and I was in the Tracker which isn't much more than a motorcycle engine aboard a tin can. I'm no Iowa farm kid so keeping the Tracker from fishtailing on loose gravel isn't something that comes naturally, which means I was floating along dangerously, trying to make time because I fashioned myself late.

I'm going to walk in the graduation ceremony at the college, I'm emeriti, hence a guest, and I know I'm going to have to hike a country mile once I park the Tracker because the campus is going to be, like always, full of people. I don't want to be late, but neither do I want to end up in the ditch. At the same time, I'm feeling guilty because if I'd have started earlier, I'm telling myself, I wouldn't have to fly. What a cocktail!--fear and guilt on gravel.

Suddenly it hits me. I've been a ton of places in the world where I wouldn't be racing down gravel at breakneck speed just to get to something on time.  Seriously. I've been places where church start a half hour late because nobody gets there on time because most people don't "keep time" like a chapel full of Dutch Calvinists. Just one of the enemies in Walden is the clock, after all, because Thoreau says its infernal tick-tocking runs our lives, and it does. 

I'm risking life and limb because I can't be a minute late. I know good people who'd say that's flat out nuts.  So I'm angry too, on top of everything else. That's another blasted ingredient in this potent mix.

No matter. I'm in Sioux County, Iowa, so I keep the pedal to the metal. 

But then maybe I'm just getting old.

Not long ago I got to an appointment with the heart specialist right on time.  I walked into the office, signed in, and was directed to the waiting room, which was so full that I took the very last chair, sat down, crossed my legs, looked around, and texted my wife, telling her it would for sure be a while. 

Immediately--I mean just that fast--a nurse calls out my name: "Mr. Shaap."  

Nobody else moves. It's got to be me. 

I stand up and figure every last person in that waiting room hates this Mr. Shaap. I would.

Once we're out of ear shot, I shake my head. "You just made a couple dozen enemies," I tell her. "That room is full, and I'm the one who just got here."

She rolled her eyes. "They're all old people," she says. "They all got here an hour early."

I'll have you know I parked relatively close on Friday, closer than I thought I would, in fact. I carted my cap and gown over, even went to the wrong place for en-robing, and was directed across the street to the mezzanine floor of the chapel, where I put on the glorious trappings of academia, and stood there, at least ten minutes early, waiting.

Just like an old guy. 

The Story of Hugh Glass

Two other mountain men stayed with him, and one of them, Jim Bridger, would become even more famous than he. It was 1823, and they were part of a party of trappers, 200 miles from a settlement, when they stumbled on a she-bear who didn't take kindly to being disturbed, her cubs right there at her side.

He suffered greatly when she struck. There was no time for him to get his rifle, so he fought back with his knife; but a mad grizzly wasn't just a sparring partner, and soon enough Hugh Glass was lacerated and bloody and maimed. The bear was dead, Glass well on his way there himself.

The boss asked for volunteers to stay with the dying man because no man should be alone in his hour of real need. Bridger and John Fitzgerald kindly raised their hands.

But Glass didn't die. He wouldn't. 

Three days later, Bridger and Fitzgerald grew fearful, what with Lakota all over the place, most of them on the hunt for scalps. But Glass kept breathing, his wounds stanched but his body still a crumpled, broken mess. 

Finally, scared for their own lives, they left him behind, alone, bloody and dying, or so they thought. He had no more use for his rifle, his knife, his belongings, they figured, so they took all of that with him. There were Indians all around--what choice did they have? I mean, the man was almost scalped and his ribs poked out of his back where the grizzly had ripped away his flesh.

It's the stuff myth is made of, and this story is one of them, one of the great myths of the American west--the legend of Hugh Glass. He crawled, literally, for miles, subsisting on what he could find with his broken hands on the ground in front of him. Crawled. 

What sustained him, he said, was revenge. He was going to kill Bridger and Fitzgerald, who'd left him alone, unarmed, bloody and broken, at death's door. Each day, each hour, he took another straight shot of pure hate.

With the help of friendly Indians who fashioned a hide to cover his still-open wounds, with a diet of bugs and berries and whatever he could reach to eat, including a bison calf a pack of wolves had just brought down, Hugh Glass crawled all the way to the Cheyenne River, where he fashioned a raft and floated down to Fort Kiowa, four miles north of what is Chamberlain, South Dakota, today. He'd crawled for two long months and 200 miles.

It took him more months to recover, but he went back west, to the wilderness, still driven by hate. Some time later, he found Jim Bridger at a trading post on the Yellowstone. For reasons no one really knows, Hugh Glass, whose soul was black with hate, somehow let him live. What had sustained him during an ordeal that has become legend simply disappeared.

Just a few miles south of Lemmon, South Dakota, there's a monument to this unearthly survival tale, the story of Hugh Glass.

But if you'd like to read more, have a look at Frederick Manfred's Lord Grizzly, a runner up for the National Book Award in 1954, when it was published. Manfred told me, years ago, that once upon a time he'd sat on the back step of his family's farm house, the milking done, and asked himself what stories this land could tell. 

One of them, he discovered, was Hugh Glass, a story that became Lord Grizzly.

He also told me that he couldn't understand why the people from whom he'd come, pious Dutch and Frisian immigrants to Siouxland, a place he claimed to have named himself, didn't trust him. After all, he said, Lord Grizzly, his most famous novel, was all about forgiveness.

I read the Hugh Glass story again, first time in years, in Robert Utley's A Life Wild and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific and couldn't help but remember my old friend Fred Manfred, Feike Feikema, who died in 1994, twenty years ago, as mythic in his own way as was the old trapper.

I think he'd like me retelling it again. After all, it belongs to the land.

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Geometry assignment; Jan. 13

After going over homework, we took our chapter 7 quiz on similarity in class today.  The students also got the first of their 3 review packets today that they will be working on to prepare for the semester final.  After finishing the quiz today, they got started working on the first one.

Assignment:  Final review packet #1

Geometry assignment; May 12

We began the day by going over the schedule for the rest of the school year as we took a look at the finals week schedule and what chapters of study remain for us to cover.  We then began our next chapter on coordinate geometry.  The topics that we took a look at today involved using the distance formula to prove various geometric facts and also working with the distance formula to generate the equation for a circle on a coordinate grid.

Assignment:  section 13-1;  page 526-527;  #2-8 even;  9-25 all, 27, 28

Geometry assignment; 9/10

We went over the Chapter 1 quiz to begin with today before getting into the lesson.  Today's lesson focused on two things:  how to bisect an angle using a compass and then how to do calculation problems involving the angle addition postulate.

The angle addition postulate is one that will be used extensively throughout the year, so we will work on this several more times throughout the first few chapters.


Assignment:  worksheet packet of angle constructions and angle addition problems  (1-10 all, 12-20 evens)

Wasicu at Chankpe Opi: A White Man at Wounded Knee VII

Now look down at the sign where the reservation roads cross, three hundred yards from where we’re standing. In summer, you might see a car or two. Go ahead. Walk down. People there beneath a brush arbor—Lakota people—will be happy to sell you some keepsake from your visit.

I have one—a little cowhide drum, two inches across, decorated with beaded fringe and hand-painted on both sides—on one, the image of a red drum; on the other, the words “Wounded Knee” painted in above a single eagle feather, two dates, one on either side—“1890” and “1973.”

Cost me twenty dollars. I bought it from an angular man in a Western shirt who had three of them strung over his hand when he showed me his goods. His dark, expressionless face was pockmarked, his eyes blood-lit. I am sad to say he looked far too much like the caricature some of us hold of reservation people today.

“My wife makes them,” he told me slowly, handing me the one that now hangs on my wall. He pointed into an old Ford parked just ten feet away. I looked into the interior where she was sitting on the passenger’s side. She didn’t move, her head bowed as if she were asleep. Maybe it was my own sinful prejudice, but I couldn’t help think the worst.

I picked a crisp twenty out of my billfold and handed it to him. He took it and left. I suppose the next day he would return with the other two he’d shown me.

I don’t know that I can unpack the whole meaning of that single twenty-dollar transaction—what percentage of what I gave him may have come from pity, what percentage from blood guilt, what percentage from the very real desire to take some icon home to remember Wounded Knee. I honestly cannot interpret my own motives, in part because I don’t know that I want to look that closely into my own heart.

But I’m happy that little cowhide drum is here beside me as I write these words, not because it’s cute—it isn’t. I have no doubt that some enterprising wasicu could create a kiosk and churn out Wounded Knee kitsch far more marketable—refrigerator magnets, ball-point pens with pinto ponies that run up and down the shaft. But there’s something about the people who sold it to me that I can’t forget, just as surely as the tawny prairie landscape all around and the entire awful story that gives the valley its ghostly life. Mystery and the sadness are here in my little buckskin drum, a drum that really doesn’t sound.

Mostly, at Wounded Knee, there is silence. When you visit, you won’t read or hear many words at all. If you’re white and you want to understand, you’ll have to look deeply into your own heart, stare into your deepest values, listen to the songs you sing, examine the history your family has lived and the faith you celebrate.

Maybe it’s best to simply to simply stand in awe at Wounded Knee and pray with your silence. That’s not easy. We’re not good at lamentations. White folks would much rather see Wounded Knee as a battle than a massacre, as we have, officially, for more than a century.

Look up. Somewhere in that vast azure dome a jet will be cutting a swath across the openness. Inside, three hundred people are sipping Cokes, reading Danielle Steele, watching a movie. Some are sleeping. Some are traveling home.

Do the math. Count them yourself—the thousands each day that only incidentally glance out from corner-less airplane windows as they pass over the spot we’re standing. Then look around and see how alone you are up here on the hill with four silent Hotchkiss guns.

Maybe we’d all rather not know. We’d all rather fly over Wounded Knee.

Visit sometime. Leave the kids at home. Welcome the silence. Stand here for an hour until the keening, the death songs, rise from the ravines as they once did. Look out over nearly a thousands ghosts assembled in space so open it’s almost frightening. 

Stand here alone for awhile, and I swear that what you’ll read in the flow of prairie grasses and hear in the spirit of the wind is that, really, despite the tracks of those jets in the skies above and the immensity of silence all around, once upon a time every last one of us was here.
___________________ 
This essay was published initially in Books and Culture.

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Algebra 10-12 assignment; May 22

We continued our review for the EOC today with some more work with word problems that involve linear equations.  We worked through several in class before then getting started on the homework.

Assignment:  Scatter Plots and Linear Equations worksheet #2

Geometry assignment; Feb. 10

We went over our radical expressions quiz to start the period today.  We then continued to review similar triangles and working with the geometric mean.

We will begin our work with right triangles and the Pythagorean Theorem tomorrow.

Assignment:  Geometric mean worksheet with similar triangles;  #1-12 all, evens on back

(I think during one of the periods, I said to do the odds on the back.  2nd period can choose to do even or odds, as I believe I forgot to mention which ones to do on the back.)

Algebra 10-12 assignment; Feb. 4

We continued working on systems of equations today, dealing with word problems involving money and different age scenarios.

Assignment:  Word problems set #1  (1, 4, 5, 6)

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Algebra 10-12 assignment; 8/29

We corrected homework today and did a quick review of how to multiply fractions and then reduce the final answer.  The students then took a short practice quiz at the end of the period before getting started on their homework.


Assignment:  Reducing Fraction worksheet side:  Do columns 2 and 4
                     Multiplying Fractions worksheet side:  do the even problems

Sunday Morning Meds--Begging Bread

“I was young and now I am old, 

yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken 

or their children begging bread.”

Psalm 37

“Piety gave birth to prosperity,” Cotton Mather once wrote (or words similar to those), “and the child devoured the mother.”  But then, Cotton Mather really believed that his beloved Puritan theocracy got shipwrecked by the diminished righteousness of the children of New England’s “visible saints.”  The new-found wealth of the second and third generations of the Puritans simply destroyed orthodoxy and faith itself. 

He may have been right, of course, but then, as President Bill Clinton might say, a whole lot depends on what one means by righteousness.

We could twist this verse of Psalm 37 into something entirely different from what David likely intended if we listened to European history or, for that matter, Professor Max Weber, who, a century ago already, argued that capitalism and its myriad excesses descended, in no small part, from the Protestant work ethic. It goes like this: great piety creates a deep sense of calling, commitment to task; but once the piety fades, what’s left the industry, the work ethic; and that work ethic is the dynamo that empowers capitalism. 

Odd to think of Max Weber and Cotton Mather sitting down somewhere and agreeing, but their arguments aren’t that distanced. And those arguments are a far cry from what King David claims to have experienced in his life. The children of the righteous, Mather and Weber might argue, don’t beg, not because of God’s faithfulness, but because they come heir to generous fortunes created by their righteous parents’ commitment to work.

Throughout the psalms, it’s not so common to hear David reflect in the way he does here—as if he’s sitting in Sun City, fingers arched over a keyboard, reflecting on the life that stretches behind him. I like that picture. He’s trying his best to convince us of the basic melody of the whole song—that God almighty loves the righteous fully as much as he hates the wicked. And what’s crucial in Psalm 37 is that you can see it—that’s his point. You can see it all around, if you just look. Observe the plight of the wicked and the prosperity of the righteous, he says. In all my life I’ve never seen the righteous forsaken, or their children begging bread, he says.

End of story.

But even Charles Spurgeon has his doubts about what we might call David’s hyperbolic claim. Spurgeon says that what David sees may well be what he saw during his lifetime, but it’s not what Spurgeon observed. Nor can I say that it’s what I’ve seen. Good people suffer. Good people readily feel forsaken—and often. In hurricanes and floods and wars and persecution, good people are swept out of their homes by tidal surges that seem brewed up only by the Devil, not the loving hands of God. Bad things happen to good people.

But our doubt of the specifics here, or of David’s rhetoric, “does not cast doubt upon the observation of David,” Spurgeon says with reference to this verse. “Never are the righteous forsaken,” he writes; “that is a rule without exception.”

David isn’t so much stretching the truth as he is pounding it home. What’s behind his almost unbelievable claims is the central truth of God’s love to those who love him: “Be not afraid.”

Here and everywhere in scripture, that’s the bottom line. Sometimes, in scripture as in life, you’ve got to get behind the words to find the truth.

Geometry assignment; Feb. 7

We took the last of our perfect squares quizzes today.  I'll average the top two scores when I put them in the gradebook.  We also took a short quiz on working with radical expressions.

Assignment:  section 8-1;  page 288-289;  #27-32

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Remembering Frederick Manfred--1912-1994 (ix)

To my mind, Frederick Manfred was deeply influenced by modernism, the prevalent intellectual worldview of his time and the cultural and intellectual milieu of, at least, the American Depression. After leaving college he traveled to the East coast, where the rough shod farm kid with the Calvinist pedigree walked in on the substantial political questions of the day, questions which were, during those years, sometimes answered better by socialism and communism than capitalism.

In New Jersey and later in Minnesota, he met what his own people would have called “leftists.” They were bright and they were influential and they were many. His many years of cloistered Christian and Reformed education did not stand up well against the prevailing modernist views of faith and spirituality—that Christianity was little more than a remnant primitive mysticism that would, soon enough, disappear among the masses, just as it had already disappeared among the enlightened. That never happened, and Fred died before the advent of our post-modern milieu, when spirituality, in all its manifestations, is flowering, sometimes madly.

His father, Frank Feikema, may well have prompted the most beautiful writing Fred Manfred ever did, a loving elegiac biography in Prime Fathers.

But what remained in him of the faith in which he grew was the beloved, yet searing memory of his deeply religious mother, whom he idolized, a woman named Alice Van Engen. His mother’s vibrant and gracious spirituality must have glowed like a dawn, if you listen to him. She is in his novels. Her death ends Green Earth, and offers his readers—and his people—an explanation of how he considered himself liberated from the cultural and spiritual strictures of his tribe, a tribe he never really stopped loving, strangely enough—and respecting.

In his daughter’s memoir, Frederick Manfred: A Daughter Remembers, Freya Manfred remembers the way her father always extolled his mother’s beauty and grace. But she also remembers her father—and quotes him—admitting that his mother’s early death (he was 17 when she died) was something of a blessing: “’. . .I’d have had an awful time explaining my vision to her or going up against her,’ he said, ‘because she never yelled at me. If I did something wrong, or she thought I hadn’t been entirely honest, she’d just look at me sadly and I’d feel terrible, deep in my guts.’”

The caricature of stern Dutch Calvinism would have no currency if it weren’t, in part, true. Fred Manfred remembered and undoubtedly experienced dour religiosity, preening self-righteousness, and outright hypocricy amid the Siouxland Dutch, and Fries, from which he’d come. But it wasn’t sharp tongues that kept him wondering about God, even arguing, I believe; what never left him was, instead, the loving embrace of his Godly mother, what she was and what she represented.

His liberation comes in the final powerful pages of Green Earth, when, on her death bed, Ada (his mother) tells Free (read Feike) that she wants him to be a writer even if she’ll never see him in heaven someday. She wants him to be true to what he is.

But to know that he himself felt, in a certain way, blessed by her early death, for the reasons he gives, can’t help but make us question whether the liberation he celebrates in Green Earth is purely fiction and not memoir at all. No one will ever know. Only two characters are privy to that death bed scene—Free and Ada, son and mother.

Most critics of the work of Peter De Vries maintain that even though you could take the boy out of his boyhood Calvinism, the ambience of that world—its powerful religiosity—never really left him. The same can be said for Frederick Manfred.

Elsewhere in her memoir, Freya Manfred remembers how, close to his death, her father once asked her a question she thought strange: “What do you suppose God will have me do when he gets me into the other place?”

To which his daughter replies: “I didn’t know you thought there was another place.”

It seems, he did.
________________

Tomorrow:  A hospital memory

Red Rock Miracles

Henry Whipple was one of the first students. Don't be fooled--not the Henry Whipple, the famous Minnesota missionary who, in 1862, pleaded with President Lincoln for the lives of hundreds of Dakota braves and won.

This Henry Whipple was a cute little Navajo six-year-old, who no one on earth had called "Henry Whipple" until he came to the new school at the mission, Rehoboth Mission. In 1903, that Henry Whipple was one of Rehoboth's very first students. He's the little guy down on the left.

First crack out of the box, his teachers named him Henry Whipple because the Henry Whipple was a missionary hero.

But there was another reason too, that one not so noble. Those very first teachers, all of whom spoke with thick Dutch brogues, didn't stand a chance of pronouncing Henry Whipple's Navajo name--whatever it was--so they simply dropped it and gave him a name rich with honor and a whole lot easier to pronounce.

They likely didn't ask him. After all, changing the boy's name didn't matter because they were there in New Mexico on a mission to teach the Navajo the gospel of Jesus Christ; and they were sure--just as all Anglos were back then, even those with thick Dutch brogues--that accomplishing that mission meant stripping a six-year-old Navajo kid of just about everything he'd ever known: cut his hair, dress him in white man's clothes, teach him the Bible, the English language, and Heidelburg Catechism. That's how Indian education was done, after all, in this country.

The truth is, there was a school at Rehoboth mission only because the mission wasn't on the Navajo Reservation. It wasn't placed where there was already an Indian school, where the government gave missionaries lots of good time with kids anyway because the government believed that bringing Native people Christianity was a super good way to make them forget they were Indians and make them real Americans.

It's no wonder that many Native people across the continent, even today, think of Christianity as the white man's religion. Even the government thought so: teach 'em to look decent, to speak English, drive a tractor, build a shed, and go to church. You know, get with the program: be an American like everyone else.

Today, no one knows what happened to Henry Whipple, the cute little boy you see on that first Rehoboth school picture because no one really knows his name. On that picture, he's just Henry Whipple, not the missionary Henry Whipple.

Not long ago, Rehoboth Christian High School was named one of the premiere 50 Christian high schools in the nation. It's a great honor really, even though no educator fully understands how someone decides who's number 27 and who is 127. Rating institutions must be something of a crap shoot.

That being said, I'm sure Rehoboth Christian High is greatly thankful they are among the chosen, the elite, recognized to be what they are, one of the finest Christian high schools across the length and breadth of this country. Being one of the fifty best, no matter what kind of wizardry got them there, is far better than not showing up on the list.

That they are there is not a miracle. A school that began as a mission enterprise in the racist footsteps of every other educational institution on American reservations, has slowly and stubbornly become something compellingly unique, a reservation school that not only works but excels, and one that does it all in the name of the Lord. There are teachers and administrators at Rehoboth--and I am blessed to know some of them--who work their hearts out to create a school dedicated to the glory of the risen Christ.

Hard work, dedication and endless prayer have played significant roles in creating an institution that's become nearly as stunning as a sunset on the red rocks in the school's front yard. There are many to thank, including some of the earliest folks, who recruited Navajo and Zuni kids the hard way, by building friendships, one family at a time, through long hours sitting in front a fire on the dirt floor of a hogan.

An old Rehoboth grad, someone whose kids and grandkids have all attended Rehoboth, told me his father claimed that the only reason he sent his boy down the road to the mission school was because that missionary, that Rev. Van--when that white man talked about living a good life he was really talking about what his father called "the beauty way." 

His father wasn't a Christian, but his father sent his little boy to school at Rehoboth because he'd learned to trust the man who said the boy should be there.

There are other schools with Dutch Calvinist roots among the fifty best Christian high schools in the nation--Eastern, in New Jersey, Pella, in Iowa, Lynden, in Washington, Sioux Falls, in South Dakota, and Holland, in Michigan. Each of them has ties to each other and to Rehoboth, schools where the mission is teaching kids something akin to what one might find in John Calvin:  "There is not one blade of grass, no color in the world, that is not intended to make us rejoice." All of life belongs to Him.

But only one of those elite Christian high schools was not built for Dutch Calvinist kids. Only one was built for others, and only one was built for this country's first nation people. That one is Rehoboth. We did a lot of it wrong through the years, but God almighty quite regularly weaves gorgeous blankets out of our filthy rags. 

Really, Rehoboth Christian School is a miracle.  Soli deo gloria.

Sunday Morning Meds--Noonday Sun

. . .the justice of your cause like the noonday sun. . .”

Not an appropriate metaphor—not right now anyway.  It’s too blame hot.

Two days ago I decided to take a quick trip out west before school starts and I’m pitched back into the classroom.  Just two and a half hours west, the Missouri River, which has been turned into a series of reservoirs by the Corps of Engineers, winds its way north, cutting right through South and North Dakota, before moving west once again.

 

The Missouri Valley, gorgeous and humbling, is huge, broad, wide, and, frequently treeless.  Standing alone out there, you somehow get to know your place in time and life.  I wanted to get out to some out-of-the-way spot along the river and stand on a bluff at dawn, camera in hand.  I did.  But that has nothing to do with this line from Psalm 37.

I’m getting older—trust me, that I know—as is our car.  We’ve got a sun roof, right?—and the car is white.  I’m thinking I can save the old beast some wear-and-tear if, for two and a half hours, I deign the air-conditioning.  Besides, all around me are myriad overweight and balding Harley lovers on their way to Sturgis for the annual million motorcycle march.  What kind of man am I if I sit like a sissy in air-conditioned comfort?  It’s a guy thing.

So I turned the air-conditioner off.  I did. 

And I almost died. 

Just a few weeks ago on the plains of South Dakota, the temperature reached 115.  It wasn’t that hot while I was there, but 105 is hardly mellow.  The whole world looked bleached and starved.  There will be no corn crop this year out there, but that’s not terribly all that unusual in central South Dakota. Fields are yellowed prematurely and sickly thin because weeks and weeks of heat often rode the back of a raspish south wind that will wither almost any living thing.

I had visions of taking photographs, but during the middle of the day it takes a pretty heavy polarizing filter to get anything but endless tawny-ness on the Plains.  Out there, earth and sky meet, really—the world seems a dusty tarn in flat-out unremitting heat.  On the Great Plains, there ain’t no trees, and thus no place to hide.

Heat wears you out.  All along the way, my windows open, I marveled that road construction people could actually stand in that heat during the day—worse, work in it, pouring blacktop, of all things. 

But I know what David means, even if, this morning, in the cool of my basement, I’m thankful to be out of the noonday sun he seems to admire. 

The shoulders of the Missouri River are huge and husky, just a few rippling savannahs running memorably up their ample sides.  When the noonday sun shines openly down upon its waters and those gargantuan bluffs, there are few dark corners and almost no hiding from that ball of fire.

King David’s take on that phenomenon is joy, however, because in bright sun there are no secrets and no prejudices.  Righteousness shines, bare nakedly, in the wash of noonday.  Everybody sees what they haven’t.  They’ll all know because there it is. 

There are times in everyone’s life when it’s a great thing to be out of the shadows, to be baldly open for all the world to see.  That’s the promise, startling as it seems.  No more repression, no more fear, no more enforced silence.  God’s love creates for all of our humanness one grand out-of-the-closet noonday sun. 

_____________________ 

For the record: It wasn't 105 degrees two days ago, I'm no longer teaching, and that wonderful white Aurora became part of the pages of history long ago.  In case you're wondering, Sunday Morning Meds are a series I wrote some time ago, over several years. After the world's longest winter, I think I'd love 105.  Once.