Happy Birthday, Ms. O'Connor

Somewhere in a file down here in the basement, I have at least a half dozen old stories, some published, some not, that bear the unmistakeable influence of Flannery O'Connor, a woman who, more than anyone else, was, once upon a time, my role model. I think I came to know her best when I first started teaching in college--her bizarre ledger of freaks and misfits, her whacko humor, her Southern gothic sensibility. When I first had time to write, hers was the only path my heart knew toward writing stories.

What both impressed and challenged me was her uncanny ability to let her faith move mountains in the weird tales she told. "The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all," she once wrote. "I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development." The supernatural descends often brutally in O'Connor, most often with a vengeance. God is there. Be careful.

Born and reared a determined Roman Catholic, she sometimes appears, in her stories, as if she were some strange holy roller herself. Her characters, she most famously admitted, were Southern, and therefore "Christ-haunted"; but in a way, so was she. Her God was very real and identifiable, even if he appeared as a rogue bull or mad man. "You shall know the truth," she wrote once upon a time, "and the truth shall make you odd."

Flannery O'Connor's popularity crossed over the oldest boundaries of all--between nature and grace. When I had Ray Carver as a teacher in the summer of 1981, he assigned Mystery and Manners, her essays; that book was required reading, even though he never said a word about religion, and M and M is full the brim of her faith. Somehow, everyone--or nearly so--loved Flannery O'Connor, believers and non, and that's why, for several years, I tried to be her, tried to write like her, tried to pattern my stories after her.

Lord knows I could have had a worse heroes back then, even though I didn't stand a chance in the world of ever doing anything akin to what she did. She understood that. She had a very deterministic sense of particular calling--and she was right: "The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live," she once said. One has to find one's own voice--that step may be the first and foremost in the life of any writer.

Nonetheless, she was there at the very dawn of my own desire to write stories, an inspiration--and she still is: "Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not."

She died young, a victim of lupus. Like Dickinson, once she received her education--including a stint at Iowa in the early years of the program--she returned to her childhood home in Milledgeville, Georgia, rarely left, and finally died there, at just forty years old, having completed only a couple dozen short stories and two very strange novels.

"All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful," she once wrote and amply demonstrated through her odd, short lifetime as a writer.

Today she'd be 85 years old, had she lived. If I had the time to write fiction, I think I'd still try to write like she did, just not so much in her way. What she saw is what every Christian writer sees, or should: "The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location."

This morning's thanks is a belated happy birthday wish to someone who has played no minor role in my life. My guess is she's somewhere not far off, scribbling away.

Happy Birthday

They never crossed paths, although they each spent considerable time in each other's neighborhoods. One of them, a daughter of the pioneering days, didn't write much at all until she looked back on a girlhood she thought of as idyllic, even though most of it happened the rough American wilderness was still being settled. You can find a dozen towns in the American Midwest today that celebrate their right to the beloved heritage of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

The other, a much younger male, got sick unto death of what that same world looked like once all the pioneering dust had settled. Sinclair Lewis made his literary fortune by making fun of the descendants of the people Ms. Wilder loved, people from whom he'd himself come, ordinary folks from small-town Minnesota, the same folks Garrison Keillor has made a career of chronicling.

It's their mutual birthday today--Ms. Wilder and Mr. Lewis, highly esteemed writers from America's Upper Midwest, as honored and celebrated as any writers whose roots are here. But they couldn't be more different.

Laura Ingalls Wilder loved her world and those who peopled it. Lewis hated it. Wilder romances the reader with sweet tales sixth grade girls can love. Lewis's bitterness enchants cynics. Both bring joy, I suppose, but the tonal qualities are at exact opposite ends of the spectrum.

Wilder's books have never gone out of print. I'm sure Lewis's haven't either. But the only place you'll find Sinclair Lewis these days is English departments. Laura Ingalls Wilder's books still find their way into the hands of new readers, none of whom read them for credit.

Takes all kinds, prairie wisdom asserts, and it does. Garrison Keillor isn't all warm fuzzies, and part of the attraction of the Cohn brother's Fargo is that the film about the very same region has a sweet bit of Laura Ingalls Wilder, as well as a good stiff shot of Sinclair Lewis.

The truth is, I've read a ton of Lewis; and even though I've seen hundreds of Little House TV episodes, I've never read a single Wilder novel and probably never will.

But even though that's true, and even though I'll likely not read either of them again, of the today's two birthday people, I'd rather be Wilder than Lewis.

And I can tell you why, too--through the eyes of another Midwestern writer, Ted Koozer, in this morning's Writer's Almanac, where I discovered these birthday parties. Ted Koozer knows how to count his blessings. Ted Koozer knows how to offer morning thanks. Ted Koozer knows what he wants, and it's not much.

This Paper Boat

Carefully placed upon the future,
it tips from the breeze and skims away,
frail thing of words, this valentine,
so far to sail. And if you find it
caught in the reeds, its message blurred,
the thought that you are holding it
a moment is enough for me.

Something tells me Ms. Wilder would like that poem. Mr. Lewis would just cackle. And me, I'd rather live in love than bitterness.

But they're all wonderful blessings--Wilder, Koozer, Keillor, and Sinclair Lewis too, all of them.
______________________________

"This Paper Boat" by Ted Kooser, from Valentines. (c) University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

You can listen to this morning's Writers Almanac at

http://www.elabs7.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,k68d,dv,ch2w,1k6c,lxj6,d21w

That poor, stupid squirrel

If I'm not mistaken, it was the very first writing conference I ever attended--at UW-LaCrosse--and the featured writer was Robert Bly, Minnesota's ace, who later went on to make a mint beating his chest for men's stuff. No matter. He read his poetry while accompanying himself on his dulcimer at the conference, and I thought the whole thing enchanting.

I remember him quoting Whitman in a kind of swoon. "I heard you, solemn sweet pipes of the organ. . ." He made me appreciate Whitman in a way I never had before.

But only one thing he said that night stayed with me, and that was a kind of encyclical he pronounced almost in jest: "No one should write anything until they're 35." I'm not sure he made the pronoun error I just did, but that was the effect. I'm quite sure I wasn't--35, I mean; but I was old enough to understand what he meant.

And it's Robert Bly I thought of when I read this morning's Writer's Almanac poem, so wise it stops me in my morning tracks, because this guy knows, too.

Father to the Man

Tom C. Hunley

The OBGYN said babies almost never
arrive right on their due dates, so
the night before my firstborn was due
to make his debut, I went out with the guys

until a guilt‑twinge convinced me to convince them
to leave the sports bar and watch game six
on my 20‑inch, rabbit eared, crap TV. After we
arrived, my wife whispered, "My water broke"

as the guys cheered and spilled potato chips
for our little dog to eat up. I can't remember
who was playing whom, but someone got called
for a technical, as the crowd made a noise

that could have been a quick wind, high‑fiving
leaf after leaf after leaf. I grabbed our suitcase
and told the guys they cold stay put, but we
were heading for the hospital and the rest of

our lives. No, we're out of here, they said.
Part of me wanted to head out with them,
back to the smell of hot wings and microbrews,
then maybe to a night club full of heavy bass

and perfume, or just into a beater Ford with a full
ash tray, speeding farther and farther into
the night, into nowhere in particular. Instead I walked
my wife to our minivan, held her hand as she

stepped down from the curb, opened her door,
shut the suitcases into the trunk, and
ran right over that part of me, left it
bleeding and limping like a poor, stupid squirrel.

from Octopus. (c) Logan House, 2008.

There is, of course, no accounting for taste, and on the night before the birth of our first child I certainly wasn't out with the boys at some sports bar or watching the NBA finals with a gang of Schlitz swillers in our apartment. Nothing like that at all.

But count me among those who would say, unequivocally, that while getting married didn't alter the course of my life all that much, the ship of state got totally rerouted when that first child made her glorious debut.

Some old self, sure as anything, got flattened; and when I remember that moment now--happily, I might add, looking down the long road behind me--I sure as anything see that poor, stupid squirrel.

I Believe in Infrastructure Almighty

As it so happened, the lights went out while I was in the bathroom, reading. The light from the window was still plenty of light for me to keep reading, so I stayed where I was. Soon after, however, I heard the pad of little feet come running to the bathroom door.

“Dad, the lights went off,” my four-year-old son Aidan declared as if I was unaware of this occurrence. “And we didn’t even turn them off.”

Children are hilarious when the lights go out—to be more precise, when the electricity goes off. My children, at least, have the tendency to go around to every room and try every light switch, expecting—no, desperately hoping—that one of them will work. It’s quite a reasonable response, actually, since they have not yet conceptualized how electricity works. They simply know that there’s a causal chain between flipping switches and lights going on and off.

Indeed, the loss of electricity in our house inspired my daughter’s first crisis of faith. When my daughter was about 3, we lost power for an extended period of time—okay, it was something like 2 hours. After she went around trying all the lights and after we had lit candles and encouraged her that this was really quite an adventure, she remained unconvinced. Eventually, in order to put her a bit more at ease, we decided to pray to God to restore power. Lo and behold, in a matter of ten or so minutes, the light came on and my daughter declared that our prayers had worked.

The connections between electricity and God don’t stop there. As a high school senior, as a way to argue for the existence of God with the exchange student we were hosting at our house, I once was led to use a comparison with electricity: We don’t doubt the existence of electricity, the argument went, just because we can’t see electricity itself.

Hopefully, back then the reference was a little sharper. Still, the point is that we don’t doubt a lot of things that operate unseen: from electricity to radio waves to viruses. Not seeing is not a reason for not believing.

Sitting in a coffee shop in Luverne, Minnesota, this past Monday, cut off from my children by a blizzard that made a very well built piece of infrastructure—US 75—impassable, I was more interested in how exactly it is that we believe in electricity, how we believe in infrastructure. I’ve taught my children to pray, taught them the truths and clichés that our warm houses and bodily health come from God. Still, because electricity and warm houses are so (seemingly) darn reliable, haven’t my kids learned practically to believe in electricity?

On the news this past weekend I saw a story about the electricity being out in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. Predictable, I said to myself, that the rural poor would be the ones to be without electricity. It’s no secret that the Rez—almost no matter what Rez we’re talking about—is an out of the way place, both physically and economically, and so it’s also the first place to lose electricity and the last place to have it restored. The story focused specifically on an elderly woman who needed oxygen and whose needs got complicated by the situation. Scary. Then they interviewed the lady herself who seemed unperturbed. Her face was graven with wrinkles and she wore glasses and was missing teeth. “I’m a survivor going way back,” she said, chuckling.

I don’t doubt it for a moment. Survival as triumph has been a rallying cry for besieged Native American populations for years. I also will bet that that Native grandmother doesn’t believe in electricity, doesn’t believe in infrastructure.

In Haiti, of course, we watch nightly the story of the lack of infrastructure, and of the obliteration of what infrastructure there was. “How can people believe in a God who allows this?” I hear a reporter ask, “And yet worship services continue.” He seems surprised. What else is there? When the ground shakes and the infrastructure around you crumbles and the electricity goes out, what else is there to do but pray?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m very thankful for power lines and utility crews, for good roads and stoplights and police to make people obey the stoplights. Infrastructure is a wonderful thing. But it’s a short jump from liking infrastructure—liking that lights turn on when we flip switches—to believing in that infrastructure.

No, for my children’s sake, may we have just enough power outages to teach us faith in something besides infrastructure.

J. D. Salinger, 1919-2010

By the time I read Catcher in the Rye, H0lden Caulfield may well have become too popular for his own good. He couldn't possibly live up to his own reputation, and he didn't. I didn't dislike the novel, but I knew far too much to be enchanted. But then, few are really "enchanted" by the guy.

I was probably forty or so, pretty much past the adolescent angst and anxiousness that characterizes Caulfield, who is, next to Huck, one of AM lit's most famous kids. Even though he made his appearance early in the 50s already, Holden Caulfield seemed to carry with him a far more of a Sixties-ish sensibility, a sad, societal drop out who would have headed to San Francisco had he stumbled into puberty a decade or two later.

No matter. Somehow, the guy spoke to millions, worldwide. Thousands know him better than I do, but I've always assumed he attained iconic status in American lit by nature of his paradoxical self: he made himself impossible to love, in spite of the fact that he wanted that love more than anything. Seems to me that I know people like that, tons of 'em, in fact.

Catcher in the Rye is an indisputable American classic for a ton of reasons, one of which is that it somehow catches the temper of the time. But that's not the whole story. The bigger story is that Salinger created a distinctive voice, a character who, by the words of his own mouth became--actually became--a human being so real that, not that long into the novel, millions of readers, worldwide, heard that voice come from their own hearts and souls. Just recently, with a whole different character, Marilyn Robinson did the same thing in Gilead. Read those books and it's as if you're somewhere in the room. There's a genie between the covers; somebody is really telling you a story.

Whiny, messed up, irreverent, not particularly fun to be around, Holden Caulfield is pretty much of a loser. Strange that he should be so celebrated. And yet, what he deeply and sincerely wants out of life is seemingly so little--and so much what most of us do: he'd love, once again, to be a boy, to start the whole mess over in empty fields and sunshine with his sweet little sister.

Honestly, I can't say I loved Catcher in the Rye the first time I read it. As I said, it likely couldn't live up to it's own headlines. But despite my shrugged shoulders, Holden Caulfield will always be there in the scrapbook that holds my most memorable characters, fictional and real, because there are times--trust me--when I feel just like him, sick of the crap, and wishing once again with all my heart to grab my baseball glove off the hook in the back hall and walk a half a block east to the diamond, where my buddies are gathering for another great pick-up game, the sun shining in the damp lakeshore air. I know that feeling. I know it well.

J.D. Salinger is gone, died a few days ago at 91 years old. That's almost another story.

Holden Caulfield lives, believe me.

Caribbean dreamin'

On the coldest day of the year, with the remnants of Siouxland's second blizzard still blowing up a storm outside, and after a long and sometimes boring faculty meeting, the Dordt College English department, worn and tired, returned to the pod only to come upon a glorious and delectable surprise.

Unbeknownst to any of them, save De Smith (who kept the secret sacredly), Myndy Prosper, senior English major from Dominica, had prepared a Caribbean dinner right there in the pod. We're not making this up. It actually happened.

Here's the menu:

Sancouche--salted cod boiled with coconut milk and potatoes, a kind of chowder--wonderful; codfish balls - salted cod mashed with potatoes, then rolled into balls and deep fat fried and dipped in some kind of scrumptious concotion; deviled eggs and cheese sandwiches; and olives, cherries, cheese, and vienna sausage on tooth picks--took her forever to make them, she said.

That's not all--Caribbean Fruit Cake for desert, sweetly and blessedly spiked (yes, you read that right).

Plus, Chaudau, a delicious milk-shake like drink made with the Stout, cream, and milk (don't tell anyone), Sorrel Juice, and Cocoa tea.

Food critics from Omaha to Minneapolis are already writing for recipes.

A department meeting followed, at which department members, still swooning, moved and seconded, the following: that whatever courses Myndi Proper takes during this second semester, she shall, forthwith, be given an A. Violaters will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Duly passed. English Department. Dordt College. Sioux Center, Iowa.

Unbelievable.

Ms. Myndi Prosper,

English Department's official nominee for
09-10 Most Beloved Student

The Amish have it down. They know exactly how to deal with Jesus's injunction about worldliness--being in it, but not of it. They've chosen their culture--some variation on 18th century European peasant culture, or something--and stuck with it, proclaiming that way of life to be just exactly what Jesus was talking about when he demanded his followers to be "in, but not of."

The rest of us still have some problems. I drive a car, for instance, even two of them. Is that being too much "of the world?" We eat humus and fry bread and enchilladas--not to mention an occasional North Atlantic cod filet from Culver's. I'm typing on a computer; we have three, now that I gave my wife a mini for Christmas. I love cameras. I've got several pairs of jeans, but--this will help--I also occasionally wear bibs. No straw hat though. I wear a beard, sort of, but I don't speak low German.

Those of us who were raised in peculiar cultures have a peculiar problem with "in, but not of" because the dynamics of the peculiar cultures offer such a clearly "set apart" battery of behaviors that it's easy simply to assume that those behaviors--going to church twice, not cutting your grass on the Sabbath, staying home from R-rated movies, sending kids to the Christian school, whatever--constitute something close to the regimen Jesus actually had in mind when speaking to his Jewish disciples. Like the Amish. God bless 'em. I'm honestly not poking fun.

The Amish turned their back on their Mennonites brethren in the 17th century sometime, when they believed their Mennonite neighbors were a'whoring after worldliness and thereby leaving the straight-and-narrow; they'd become too much "of this world," I'm sure, so some of the most devout decided to follow Jesus instead and determined therefore, that there would simply be no more change. Hence, old order Amish.

My wife and I just finished Rhoda Janzen's memoir Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home and found it both delightfully entertaining and engagingly thoughtful, although, strangely enough, a bit more the former than the latter. Often we found ourselves wondering how on earth she could resume relationships with some she calls her friends--or even her family; and while I doubt Rhoda Janzen actually "tells all," she certainly tells enough to offend a ton of those closest to her. But then, that's the genre. She's writing a memoir.

Janzen, who teaches at Hope College, doesn't pull any punches when it comes to herself either, admitting that many of the choices she has made in her life weren't anywhere near to being in her own best interests. The story begins after Nick, her husband of 15 years, leaves her for a man named Bob, a man he met on gay.com. Not long before, she'd been laid up badly by a horrible car accident. In other words, things happened in her life that pushed her into enough of a tail's spin to make her go home to Mom, which is a story in itself--the story of the memoir.

The arc of the book aims at reconciliation--not with Nick, the departed and abusive husband, but with Ms. Janzen's own Mennonite past. Much of the hilarity of the memoir is in her rehearsing the silliness of the old ways, even though her particular tribe of Mennonites is far more progressive than those whose women still don doilies and long black dresses. Much of the madcap humor of the book comes from her recitation of that culture's peculiar "other-worldliness." If you know nothing about the Mennonites, Ms. Janzen's rich memoir will fill you in quickly--and wittily.

But it's the trajectory of the thing that's somewhat disappointing because it seems clear that, to her, the horrors of her life require the sweet therapies of home and her peculiar culture to cure--she says as much. There's a quiet suggestion that, in some important ways, she's come home. But when push comes to shove, I'm not totally convinced.

Ms. Janzen seems to me to be far more gentle in the treatment of the culture she adopted--art openings, dinner parties, New York Times' readers--than she is with the culture of her birthright--the funny people who tote curduroy Bibles. Nick himself, despite the horrors she's experienced, is simply a misguided misfit--brilliant, handsome, educated, philosophical, but tragically bi-polar and therefore not responsible for his vile excesses. It's understanable, but it seems clear that only ex-patriot Mennonites can adequately speak her language--and as long as there is a NY Times Book Review somewhere close. Often, she treats her own people as if they were 20th century descendents of Van Gogh's potato eaters, which, of course, most of them are.

The sticking point in this equation is faith, of course. What creates the cultural baggage of the Mennonite tradition--or any faith tradition, for that matter--is a soul of faith. The question Ms. Janzen's story begs is really whether or not she has the soul to go home, and that question--or so it seems to me--isn't answered in this fascinating, often hilarious and but sometimes tragic memoir. In her head, she can make the necessary accomodations; in her heart, she knows she's coming home to people who love her. The question is soul--does she believe in any way shape or form what they do? For the most part, that's not a question she very openly confronts in this book, despite the often jaw-dropping candor of the memoir.

All of that is no indictment of Ms. Janzen or the memoir. I am--after sixty years--far more trusting of those who don't claim to know exactly how to balance being in the world, but not of it, than I am of those who believe, piously, that all the answers since Job's suffering belong somehow to them, whatever their tradition--Irish Catholic, Dutch Calvinist, Orthodox, or Southern Baptist. Or Mennonite.

Rhoda Janzen's problem, finally, belongs to all people of faith, the Christian faith in particular: what does it mean--exactly--to be in the world, but not of it? And that answer no one really has down, or so it seems to me. Not me, not Rhoda Janzen, and not even the Amish. All of us keep trying, as she does in this entertaining memoir.