My morning thanks

This morning's Writer's Almanac quotes the poet Linda Pastan, who talks about her insane passion to write. "I often write poems in my head to distract myself during hard times," she wrote somewhere. "Years ago, after a car crash, while I lay waiting for the ambulance, I actually finished a poem I had been working on, determined not to die before I had it right."

Now that's insane, I think. But then again,it's not yet five in the morning, and while there are no flashing lights that I know of on their way to the basement here, most the world would say, I'm sure, that I'm just as crazy.

Last night I finished reading the manuscript of an ex-student, who decided, long after taking my class (where he did not necessarily distinguish himself), that he wanted to write a novel. I took up the job reluctantly--I've read enough student fiction in the last six months, as a matter of fact--but once I started, I had his novel finished in just two nights.

The truth is, it has more than its share of errors, but simply to read it was a blessing to me because I know only too well what kind of commitment it takes to sit down and write a 200-page novel, for better or for worse, and what kind of hope just doing it requires.

"People without hope don't write novels," Flannery O'Connor once famously wrote, and she's right. But then people without hope don't put on roofs or do root canals either. In a way, that line feels a bit presumptuous because people without hope don't plant tomatoes either or put out fires or even sweep the front porch.

I may be myopic about all of this, given the fact that I'm here and there isn't a bit of light yet outside my basement window, but I believe her nonetheless because I know Pastan's lunatic impulse--it's something about trying to make meaning, trying to make sense. That's what O'Connor is testifying, and it's why I'm here now.


This ex-student's first-draft novel has a brightly engaging plot line; it brings into question important issues, it's set securely in time and place, and it has memorable characters. But what thrills me as much as anything about holding it in my hands is just holding it in my hands. What he's trying to do is nothing more or less than make sense of what seems sometimes senseless.

Getting novels published is nearly an impossible task these days, and the mere fact that he wrote this whole story out is wonderful. Honestly, there are many reasons to love the work, but the real story of the novel, to me at least, is that he did it at all--and that's the great gift, the blessing of the manuscript that sits here beside me.

May he continue to work, to try to make sense, in the light of the Caribbean sun, where he lives, or in the early morning darkness, even in the fervent anticipation of flashing lights.

This morning I'm thankful for his gifts.

The Bakery Conversation

I got sandwiched in a conversation on my Saturday morning bakery run. In the back of the Edgerton Bakery, rolls and loaves of fresh bread were coming out of the oven and needed to be sliced, so that left one high school girl to work the counter up front for a whole line of customers. Outside it was windy and raining lightly, a hard drizzle, and the temperature was in the mid forties. Miserable. We were in the middle of a string of cold, rainy, early May days, still shaken from the long winter past but daring to hope for a 75-degree day that we might stretch ourselves collectively and tell ourselves again why we’ve chosen to live here. That kind of day was nowhere in sight, however, which left us feeling uncharitable and almost unjustly persecuted.

“So much for global warming,” a man to my left began.

“Like those Minnesotans who are for global warming,” another answered across my person to the first speaker. Pause without response. “There are a group of Minnesotans who say they are in favor of global warming.”

“Oh, in favor of global warming? Ha ha. Yeah, we could use it about now.”

Oh, boy. Here we go. Global warming, Barack Obama, Mexican immigration. I always feel at risk in conversations like this. Like I should pipe up with a good liberal arts perspective to balance the scales. Then I think, it’s easier not to say anything. To listen.

“Hope this doesn’t mean it’s gonna be like last summer.”

“It never did get warm.”

“I think we had six hours of 90 degree weather.”

“All summer.”

“All summer.”

We live on a ridge in the middle of the continent. The nearest ocean is days away, but we’re far enough east of the Rockies that aridity—real drought—hasn’t been a serious problem since at least the ’80s (knock on wood). Winters are often brutal; so, if our winters would turn into the typical winters of, say, Kansas City, life would be seemingly easier in southwest Minnesota. It’s not bad logic, just self-interested.

“But it’s as a whole that the earth is warming.” Sarcasm.

“Ha ha. Yeah right.”

“Well, 2001. 2001 was the hottest year. But since then it’s been down.”

I’ve heard that that there was a bit of a push of “global cooling” in the 1970s. Seems incredibly ironic that ideas could change that fast, even though today that ’70s thinking has been discredited by the scientific community. Still, in middle America it makes one even more wary of new global theories, especially when they get associated with a particular type, a particular politics.

“But that’s not what they want you to believe.”

“Nope. That’s not what Al Gore wants you to believe.”

“And he’s made a mint off this thing.”

“Oh, millions.”

I had a Prof in college who lauded Al Gore for his work on the environment long before An Inconvenient Truth. I’d never thought about the fact that he’s probably made money off of it. It’s a tough jab to parry. As soon as someone stands to gain personally from an issue—see Halliburton and the war in Iraq—pure motives are shot. The Marxist critic Frederic Jameson has said that “ecological politics tend to be bourgeois politics,” another tough jab to parry, that we sit around and talk about the environment because our money enables us to do so. In a more complete form, Jameson’s quote runs like this: “My observation of these things in the West—is that ecological politics tend to be bourgeois politics, that lower-class people are interested in other issues that are sometimes incompatible with ecology” (Jameson, Buchanan 79).

“So how d’you like hauling hogs?”

The conversation turns. Or does it? One of these men used to be a long-distance trucker, it turns out, but now he hauls hogs shorter distances—hundreds of miles instead of thousands of miles, or, perhaps more likely, thousands of miles instead of tens of thousands of miles. I would bet the farm that he also listens to talk radio—thus the information that “2001 was our hottest year”—and his general acerbic skepticism. He doesn’t know me, identifying my place in the line by saying “That guy in the yellow coat is the end of the line,” when someone asks.

The other gentleman is a shirt-tail relative of mine through marriage. Story is that he knocked up my cousin—one of those cousins about 30 years older than I am—and had to get married. His wife, who often asks about my parents, I’ve talked to many times; never to him. He may know me but doesn’t acknowledge me, nor I him, an older, never-talked-to relative. By his clothes, he, too, is “a working man.”

I won’t enter this conversation because I have no “street cred” with these men. Though I’ve lived almost my whole life in the community (I defected for four years of college in the city), though I’m the son of a farmer (I’ve defected to a career in higher education), and though “my issues” are really also their issues (the integrity of the landscape, economic viability on small farms), I’m now part of the academic establishment that is theoretical and therefore impractical, liberal, and distant. Or I’m afraid that’s how I might be perceived if I jumped in with a comment such as, “But gentlemen, your socioeconomic status also predisposes you to the conservative rhetoric that makes you pawns of the global capitalist establishment.”

No, if I’m to enter this conversation, I must do so from a practical route, one that proves that I have local knowledge and that I can apply any theoretical knowledge pragmatically. I must enter the conversation on their terms and engage their way of life.

I don’t. I hold my tongue and think of my roll order.

It’s well nigh impossible to think of doing things other than the way we do them. Even as oil spews into the Gulf of Mexico and threatens ruination upon a way of life along an entire coastline, it’s hard to think of a model of life that doesn’t revolve around oil. Anyone who asks us to do that threatens a way of life, and there may be nothing more religious than the collective idea of “a way of life.” That is, if Al Gore’s interest in global warming can be questioned as “bourgeois politics,” these men’s interest in driving over the idea of global warming as so much road kill is equally a type of socioeconomic politics.

It strikes me that, in this bakery line in the midst of a reluctant spring in the middle of the continent, this is a question, ultimately, of faith. Not quite religious faith, though there are ties, but faith in a story.

I don’t know that one can call belief in one’s own system, one’s own way of life, “faith.” If faith is being “sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see,” then “faith” in one’s own way of life is not really faith, it’s something else. That is, one quality of faith, it seems to me, is that it’s a bit nonsensical and beyond self-interest.

There are those who believe in the “gospel” of global warming, or—to fashion it as “good news”—the “gospel” of a green earth. I read about one such woman who had herself sterilized to make sure the carbon footprint she left was small.

On the other hand, however, what strikes me about the global warming story is that it does encourage us to think beyond self-interest, to think of the small group of islanders in the pacific who can’t afford to lose six inches of coast; to think of the loss of creatures due to the shrinking of already narrow temperature bands within which those creatures can survive (note: I’m resisting the politicized polar bear; think instead “human being”); to think of living in a way that doesn’t mean plugging something in, flipping a switch, turning a wheel, throwing away. And that’s hard. That takes imagination. And faith of a sort.

On the landscape of the Middle West and West, the worst kind of mistake can be misplaced faith, even though our history is full of such misplaced faiths: the myth that rain would follow the plow comes to mind, among others. No, although myths have driven us out here and although we cling to our favorite myths, we’re tremendously skeptical of new myths. We stick to what we [think we] know.

And so I leave without opening my mouth once. I leave to sort out for myself myths false and true, to think about how to engage myths in bakery conversations, how to unify disparate elements of environmental politics around a central myth. In an increasingly fragmented world, that common vision seems more and more illusory. Once again, this is where faith enters the picture. Faith gains its strength from the Biblical vision of what might be, of a land flowing with milk and honey, of a holy city where Christ himself is the light. Of course, even these visions and how one interprets them and makes them to serve political ends can lead to controversy, which gets at another quality of faith: while it can be political, it cannot only be political; while it can have a vision of an end goal, that end goal must be fluid and not set in stone; while it can and should have earthly ends in mind, it must also have the mind of heaven.

When it comes to the global environment, then, I’m sure of what I hope for and certain of what I do not see. Now to get that into a bakery conversation. . .

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.