Kiss my denim-covered butt, George Will

So I miscalculated about that Mason City dateline business (see previous post). Faced with a full day of cleaning, paying bills, changing my address, etc., it became clear I’d go nuts if I didn’t do something in between to take my mind off it. This is it.

Reading other blogs after cleaning the stovetop last night (dressed in jeans), I found a mid-April column written by George Will, a syndicated Washington Post columnist, taking America to task for its favorite fabric: denim. I know the Will face, having seen it published beside quite a number of other columns I’ve never bothered to read. What the heck. I read this one.

George apparently was inspired by a guy I’d never heard of, Daniel Akst, quoted extensively. I Googled Akst, who describes jeans as “work clothes for horny-handed sons of toil and the soil" but not for our betters. He writes a column, too, apparently, for The New York Times. Will uses Akst quotes as a jumping off point as he goes on to bewail blue jeans as “this blight on Americans’ surfaces.”

“Denim,” Will goes on to say, “is the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances. But the appearances that people choose to present in public are cues from which we make inferences about their maturity and respect for those to whom they are presenting themselves.”

In all fairness, I’m sure both Akst and Will had their tongues lodged in their cheeks at least part of the time as they wrote, but still --- them’s fighting words for those of who are horny-handed sons of toil and soil or the sons of those sons, especially if we always wear jeans, too, and I do.

My dad, a son of toil and soil if ever there was one, usually wore overalls --- both pinstripe and classic blue, not jeans, although not to church. But I’ve attended many a service back in the day and sat quite comfortably next to guys whose idea of Sunday-go-to-meeting attire was a white shirt, tie, dress shoes --- and overalls. Not too much of that any more. Now, we wear blue jeans.

In fact I buried my dad in overalls --- sort of. Daddy wanted to be cremated, having found nothing comforting in the full-tilt, rent-a-preacher, corpse-present sendoffs he’d given all previously-deceased loved ones. I humored the undertaker, though, by investing in a little file-drawer-sized cement vault for the ashes with enough room around the plastic box containing them for an old blue work shirt, his favorite shoes and a pair of overalls --- with his driver’s license, valid until the day he died at 90, in the vest pocket. Heaven, after all, is overalls and blue jeans country. God is far to wise to force us to endure eternity in a suit and tie. And Daddy’s out there now I feel sure in his overalls and work shirt, drivers license ready, awaiting the arrival of “Old Green,” his pickup --- still going strong here on earth. (Now don’t get your knickers in a twist here about the theological basis for eternal life and the wrong-headed opinion that pickups do not have souls). But I digress.

And I don’t mean to badmouth business types forced by circumstance, including office dress codes, to wear something other than denim during working hours. I had a publisher once, a little guy who looked and dressed a lot like the produce stocker I like at Hy-Vee West, who imposed the harshest of dress codes, updated regularly. Denim was one of his whipping boys. I always ignored that, and you’ll note I’m no longer employed there. So you gotta do what you gotta do.

What I do mean to badmouth are folks who worry too much about what other people are wearing and to a lesser extent, about their own attire. For most of us, I'm afraid, very little careful calculation is involved. You get up in the morning, you take a shower, you put on what's handy, comfortable or required and that's about it.

I’m working on overcoming my own bias here, since I tend to react to someone in a suit and tie (other than in church or at a funeral) in roughly the same manner I react to a snake --- jump and run.

But it never hurts to remember that the folks who got us into the current economic unpleasantness were not wearing denim for the most part, but suits and ties (or the female equivalent). Interesting to think about, that.

Moving on

This, I think, will be the last blog entry that could be datelined Mason City. It's not that I'm in any great hurry to leave, but this move has been underway for three months and it's time to wrap it up. Treated to lunch after the drive up from Chariton this morning, what I really wanted to do was take a nap, but launched the final throw-away phase plus starting kitchen and bathroom cleanup. The storeroom is finally bare.

I plan to turn the keys over Thursday and drive home, but will be back through over the weekend en route to a Sunday meeting in Minneapolis. Then I'd darned well better be prepared to spend quality time with the lawn and garden. It's rained the last few times I've been in Chariton and there's a lot there that needs attention. Watching a Sunday downpour flow over the eavestroughs and pound the flowers beneath made it clear that ridding those of fall and winter debris is one of the first jobs to get at.

I'm also getting tired of these Grapes of Wrath treks from north to south, then back again. So far no chicken coops hitched to the rear bumper, but I did drive down Sunday with a pot of ivy on the dashboard --- close.

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I'm surprised at how little there is here left to haul --- My favorite long and narrow folding table, now serving as a desk; two wooden TV trays (end tables), one sidechair, this computer plus printer, perhaps four boxes of miscellaneous stuff, linen off the bed (which is staying in Mason City), a vacuum cleaner and the carpet cleaner. That's about it. Unfortunately, I left the tarp in Chariton so I'll have get another since rain is forecast for Thursday and the cleaning devices, the folding table and the trays (all of which will survive a little damp)are going to have to ride in the back. The cab of a club-cab pickup will hold only so much stuff.

There's way too much stuff in Chariton now, but quite a bit of that will disappear as the weeks pass --- I'll miss having Salvation Army only a few blocks away. Now it'll be 40 miles.

I'm still stunned by the mountains of paper that were in this place --- thought the digital revolution was supposed to cut down on that. Much of that's my own fault, a combination of my book-of-the-week habit and the fact I feel a lot more secure when I find something useful online if I print it out. Deep down, I still expect the lights to go out one day and to be pushed back into reliance on sunlight, candles and the word inscribed on paper.

A lot of that paper is now in the landfill, shredded or intact. Some of that can be tracked to a magazine habit I used to have. I come from a long line of scrapbookers --- not the fancy expensive kind --- but people who cut stuff out and pasted it inside whatever was handy. Both my mother and an aunt maintained for years annual scrapbooks of newspaper clippings --- obituaries, marriage reports, birth announcements, breaking news, anything they thought significant. My mother also assembled recipe scrapbooks, other scrapbooks full of illustrations she liked, more scrapbooks filled with articles, poetry and other stuff she thought she'd like to read again someday.

I've never been much of a clipper and paster. Instead, I pulled whole sections of magazines out of their bindings, slipped the pages into plastic sleeves and filled notebooks. Maybe 75 percent of those are gone now, thank goodness. I had a few notebooks entitled "interesting people," filled with magazine profiles. Reducing that collection to one notebook I was kind of surprised to find that I didn't find 90 percent of the men and women I once found interesting or inspiring remotely so now.

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Mason City is not a place I'll miss, which is kind of sad. Perhaps I didn't give it a chance --- and I certainly didn't spend any more time here than I had to. But it's too darned big (yes, I know, 20-some thousand is not "big"), it's too darned flat, it's too darned cold, they buldozed most of downtown at some point and the natives are always fighting about something.

I've been thinking this week about my Uncle Elmer Gibbany, the Wyoming boy my Aunt Mae corralled back in the 1940s while visting her brother, my Uncle Owen, who ranched up against the front range of the Big Horns north of Buffalo. Uncle Elmer was born looking up at those mountains and never got over it.

Aunt Mae thought she had him hogtied securely enough haul him back to the Midwest, which she preferred, and they tried Iowa for a while --- but it didn't work. He couldn't stand flat and even southern Iowa was flat to him. Even in later years, when I remember him best, he'd last a about a week in Iowa --- then it was time to get back to Wyoming. When he was dying, he purchased a lot on the highest point of Buffalo's Willow Grove Cemetery with a view of the Big Horns. Althought I can't prove it actually happened this way, his directive was that he be buried facing west rather than the traditional east so that on that great rising up morning he'd see those mountains again first thing.

I'm not quite in that league, but I understand it. And it'll sure be good to get up in the morning from now on and look off into the hills; drive through the countryside and see pasture and woods, cattle and horses, and not those endless acres of corn and soybeans.

Black and white and read all over?

The answer used to be newspapers, but the times they are a changing. It’s not clear how many are going to be left in a few years. Comes right down to it, I have more faith in the survivability of a weekly; many if not most dailies I wonder about. Weeklies learned about economics a long time ago.

Actually I don’t think much about dailies, even though I worked for the blamed things for something like 25 years. My inadvertent retirement has left me in the position of not having to care and by gum I really don’t, although I do care about people still in the business. I’m not as well informed as I was when I had access to all the news all the time, but manage to get by with TV and the Internet. The access is still there, on the Web, it’s just that you’ve got to work harder to find, sift and digest it. And some days I’m just plain too lazy to do that.

It’s instructive to remember, too, that although most daily newsrooms still have constant access to wire service updates from around the word it’s been some time since most considered it their mission to actually help their readers be broadly informed. All local all the time is the new mantra as surviving dailies with diminishing staffs stake their futures on becoming nouveau weekly plus the Internet. How they plan to do that with fewer reporters is not clear.

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I started in weekly newspapers and that’s what I still subscribe to, The Chariton Leader and The Chariton Herald Patriot. Your ancestors may have stepped off the ark onto Mt. Ararat, but mine stepped off in Lucas County. I can make a fairly good case to prove we’ve subscribed with some degree of consistency to every newspaper ever published here --- from Lucas to Zero. The Leader and the Herald Patriot are all that’s left, they are my newspapers and although I don‘t agree with the publisher‘s politics and quite often think the news reports could be better, I will subscribe to them come hell or high water until the latest edition is pried out of my cold dead hand.

Notice I said “my” newspapers. That ownership deal’s become a problem. Most weekly newspaper publishers and the publishers of privately-held dailies had a grip on it. They knew that although they had the keys to the front door in their pockets and owned the name and the equipment inside the office, the newspaper itself belonged to the people who subscribed to it and advertised in it. Any newspaper owner at any level who overlooked that was headed for trouble, and many are these days.

That doesn’t mean subscribers and advertisers dictated how the news was covered, although they certainly influenced it, occasionally adversely if the editor or publisher lacked guts. In most instances, however, subscribers and advertisers were willing to sit back and just read (and complain loudly if their own oxen were gored) so long as product quality was maintained. If it wasn’t, subscribers stopped subscribing and advertisers stopped advertising --- the real owners stepping in to say, “enough.” That seems to be happening a lot these days.

A lot of the blame for that belongs to media companies that came to look upon newspapers primarily as investment opportunities and opportunities to corner the news market rather than as, well, newspapers. And to the type of upwardly-aspiring types encouraged by those companies who came to see jobs as springboards to other places rather than, for at least a time, ends in themselves.

Back up a ways and some of the cause can be traced to a previous generation of newspaper publishers who did know their stuff and who built businesses so successful that no one could afford to buy them when it came time to liquidate --- other than the media companies that did, or were willing to borrow beyond their means to do so, then blew it.

In many cases in part because of this, the product has become increasingly unhitched from the folks who own it, you and me. Most newspapers, knowing they’re in trouble, have come to rely on “focus groups,” small groups of supposedly representative people who tell them what readers want. That’s fine, but newspaper people who don’t know us well enough to know what we want and have to call a convention to find out are in big trouble. Readers and advertisers, meanwhile, are hotfooting it elsewhere.

If you like newspapers, the potential consequences are scary. If my former corporate master, Lee Enterprises, goes down --- and there’s a fairly good chance it will considering the massive debt it incurred buying other newspapers, it will take with it the daily newspapers in Mason City, Davenport, Muscatine, Waterloo and Sioux City as well as a variety of weeklies and subsidiary publications. And that’s just Iowa.

That doesn’t necessarily mean publication will stop, but does open the door to all sorts of mischief. Media garage sales, for example.

I decided Lee was going to hell when it sold off Ottumwa, one of the original Lee newspapers. As it turns out, Ottumwa’s probably higher on the survivability scale because of the sale although it’s probably not as good a newspaper as it was when Lee sold it.

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Newspapers whine a lot about the Internet, citing its rise as a primary reason for their decline. Well that’s partly true. But look how newspapers reacted to the Internet, taking the cheap and lazy way out.

Instead of coming up with new and innovate products branded with their names designed for a new medium to send out there into cyberspace, most if not all just began to shovel the contents of their print publications online and still do. Attempts to sell the online version failed, so now nearly all just give it away.

What sensible person, faced with parallel products --- one free and the other not --- would opt to pay? So subscriptions decline. And no one yet has found a way to make online advertising revenue pay for a quality broadly-based online news product. The big bucks online remain in the niches. A newspaper wouldn’t recognize a niche if it stepped one --- although they talk about them a lot.

Newspapers seem to just keep pushing the same old stuff online or playing catch-up with others’ online innovations. Some time after blogs caught fire, newspapers decided select staffers should blog, too. Ho hum. A fine newspaper editorial type doth not necessarily a fine blogger make. And now Facebook and Twitter. Give me a break.

A whole bunch of newspapers are either trying or looking at trying to drop all (a very few cases yet) or some of their print editions and publishing at least part of the time entirely online, an idea with roughly the same potential as the Edsel. Remember the Edsel? Fewer and fewer people do.

The insurmountable difficulty is that they’re doing this to cut costs and that means they’re not going to be willing to pay the salaries of the highly-skilled people, now for the most part still employed by newspapers, needed to gather, investigate, process and write or film the online news.

Somewhere along the line the idea slipped into newspaper gospel that it’s the managers who count. As staffs are cut masses of managers gather in conference rooms to wring their hands and strategize. Sadly, at least half of newspaper managers, and perhaps more, have about as much potential for innovation and revolution as the cement in the parking lot. It’s the news gatherers, photographers, filmers and coordinators, the online empresarios, the worker bees, who are important and most likely to be innovative here. A good reporter’s value exceeds that of his or her weight in rubies. Managers are a dime a dozen.

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Newspapers whine a lot about the economy, and there’s no denying it delivered a big punch. But the overwhelming debt many newspaper companies had incurred because of bad decisions made before the punch seems to be the tipping point. Well-run newspapers hunkered down and made it through the last depression; it’s not clear that there are that many well-run newspapers around these days.

It’s also instructive that most newspapers, back in the day, had other sources of revenue to cushion falls. Job printing was one of those --- many newspapers also were the principal printers and private publishers in their communities. Technology turned most of us into our own printers and innovative non-newspaper companies absorbed the rest of that market. Newspapers just let it go in order to focus on their “core” product, then lost track of what the core product was.

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Push comes to shove, I truly believe daily newspapers are the dinosaurs that critics in more agile media say they are, lumbering off into the sunset and adversely affecting a lot of fine journalists and us subscriber/advertiser owners as they fossilize and fail.

I still have hope for weeklies and community journals that continue to offer, for a price, something that’s not readily available elsewhere, that know what their core product is and that have not broken their connection with the folks like you and me who really own them.

I hate to see newspapers go. It think we’ll all be less well informed, more prone to swallow nonsense we read somewhere on the Web and pass it on, just too lazy to look hard for the truth.

I miss having a reasonably coherent summary of city, state, nation and world conveniently processed, packaged and printed on sheets of paper that I can study at my leisure --- and ever hopeful still buy The Register now and then.

I think it’ll all work out in the end --- we’re a remarkably innovative lot and there are lots of intelligent, creative, curious, committed people out there willing to track down and turn in the bad guys, one of the best things newspapers used to do. There may even be room for innovative continuing, new or resurrected news products printed on real newsprint.

But it’s been a bumpy ride and it’s likely to get bumpier. So fasten your seat belts.

Home before dark

As the days in Mason City dwindle, I’m concluding that the dumpster is what I’ll really miss about the apartment building where I’ve lived for about 12 years (can’t remember exactly how long and don‘t especially care). One of life’s luxuries is being able to throw away what you want when you want. That’s hard to do when the garbage truck comes only once a week and its crew ignores big stuff.

Say you want to throw something big away at midnight. With a dumpster, it’s a breeze. Sick unto death of recycling no matter how good it is for the environment? Into the dumpster it goes (but please, not too often; recycling is good!). No limit on the amount that can be thrown (I’ve filled the dumpster at least three times in recent weeks). Set stuff beside the dumpster and most likely someone will drive or walk by and take it home (a dead lawn mower hauled up from Chariton last weekend lasted 30 minutes). You’re not even being wasteful. Our dumpster is patrolled by divers who slice open every bag and remove anything useful. It’s a win-win situation.

Affection for the dumpster does not mean that this has not been otherwise a good place to park myself and my stuff --- it has. As King Lemuel said, “Who can find a virtuous landlord? for his or her price is far above rubies” (Proverbs 31, sort of ). I’ve had one of those. The building is immaculately maintained. Anything goes wrong, it’s fixed immediately.

This also is an older building, dating from the 1960s or 1970s. That means it’s well built, the rooms are large and light and the closets, magnificent.

Some probably would find the view discouraging. Built when apartment buildings were constructed in town rather than in clumps in former cornfields at the edge, it was squeezed sideways onto a deep lot. That means neither front has a good view. The west front faces our parking area with the rear of First Christian Church beyond; the west front, the side of the house next door. So the focus in these apartments generally is in rather than out, blinds partially closed, and that’s not necessarily good.

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Actually, I didn’t plan to stay here long. I moved from Thompson to Mason City for a variety of reasons, including the increasing impracticality of an 80 mile daily round trip, the departure to another job and city of a congenial friend and commuting partner who had made the treks pleasant and more practical, and late-night encounters with deer --- three of them.

I was thinking a house eventually, lawn and garden spot again. Once here, however, circumstances changed and I began to spend my free time on the road or elsewhere, mostly Chariton. It became obvious quickly that a pleasant and reasonably-priced apartment a block from the office was the best place for me to be during the Mason City work week, and here I am still --- for a few more days.

Some question the good sense of apartment dwellers, but there are advantages: Someone else pays the taxes (although you contribute indirectly) and puts on the new roof, someone else foots the bill when a major appliance or other vital component of the establishment bites the dust, someone else removes the snow and maintains the lawn, someone else worries --- you write the checks and get on with life.

The nature of the tenants has changed over the years. When I moved in, an apartment was hard to find in Mason City. That’s no longer the case. Most of the people who lived here then had been here a while. A lovely sister affiliated with the chaplaincy program at Mercy Hospital was senior tenant. The late and lamented Don, badly injured when he was hijacked and beaten in another small city, lived next door. It was a little like moving into a neighborhood and we all knew each other.

As the years passed, tenants have come and gone more quickly, rarely lasting more than a year nowadays. I’ve been here longer than anyone else.

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There have been surprisingly few problems. For a couple of years, the family upstairs (with two children) included a husband challenged in the fidelity department. I learned a good deal about infidelity from those two. While so far as I know they were never physically violent to each other, at fairly regular intervals the yelling and door-slamming would begin (and this is a solid building, so the yelling was really loud) late at night, the verbal battle would move into the foyer and then onto the sidewalk as screamed accusations and denials continued. Finally, the husband would drive away, spinning tires in the gravel, but he always came home. They were nice people, but I wasn’t exactly sorry to see them leave.

For a brief period (a month at the most), an active little drop-in shop for those in the market for controlled substances apparently operated in the apartment across the hall; and some years later, we had a very short-lived methamphetamine lab --- or at least I think that was what it was (I’ve led a sheltered life in many respects). I can’t imagine what else that awful eye-watering, lung-busting stench could have been.

The aforementioned Don set his kitchen on fire once, but because Mason City has a very efficient fire department and this building has fire walls and fire doors, there was no damage beyond his apartment. That’s about as exciting as it got here during my tenure.

For some time, Mercy Medical Center leased two of the apartments as temporary homes for Des Moines University (an osteopathic medical school) students working as interns. Most were quiet and worked long hard hours. A few were brats --- enough so to cause you to wonder about the future of medicine.

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Mormon missionaries --- a succession of young men adding up to four at all times, mostly from the West and sometimes pretty homesick --- occupied one of the apartments of a few years. They were wonderful neighbors and fun to have around.

They also offered quite bit of food for thought. Two of the missionaries stopped by once formally to inquire about my interest in the LDS approach to faith and life. Although I am not Mormon I speak Mormon, so we had a good talk. And that was that.

But those nice young men were the only people other than the nun who was here when I arrived who expressed any interest at all in the spiritual welfare of the occupants of this building.

I always thought that was odd, considering the fact we’re jammed up against the ass end of First Christian, a diminishing congregation in a big building where I sure the bills accelerate as the collection-plate total declines. First Christian has never shown the slightest interest in any of us, and apparently no one else in the neighborhood either. I wonder if they’d be alarmed if someone from the hood dropped in for a service.

That church got on my nerves, too, because it was the only property in a neighborhood where many handicapped people, elderly people and poor people live where the sidewalks never were cleared in winter. Everyone else managed.

Congregations sometimes wring their hands about declining membership and continuing LDS growth. Here are two ideas: Shovel your sidewalks and knock on doors.

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This is a mixed neighborhood on the fringe of what’s left of downtown Mason City (big chunks of of it cleared many years ago to make way for a mall and parking lots) --- some nicely maintained single-family homes, some nice apartment buildings like this one, others not so nice, some smaller single-family homes. The North Iowa Transition Center is nearby and owns apartments in the neighborhood. That agency specializes in supervised independent living arrangements for folks with difficulties --- mental illness, dependency issues, etc. --- so there have been others besides me who walk around talking to themselves some days.

The late Cleo lived in the building just south of us for a while. Mentally challenged and with a huge drinking problem, Cleo usually rode a bike, swearing loudly, making obscene gestures. We were used to him and forgot most of the time to find that offensive. Also prone to setting fires accidentally, he eventually died in a house fire.

Another guy rode his bike around town a lot dressed in a clown costume and full makeup, falling off occasionally because he was prone to seizures. When the scanner call came through, “Man down in clown suit,” we knew it was Donnie.

There have been people in this neighborhood so badly handicapped they could barely wobble --- the lovely woman with what I suspect is multiple sclerosis pushing her own grocery cart for support to and from Fareway, the youngish guy confined to a wheelchair, also headed to and from Fareway, flanked by two young children ready to push if he got hung up. The youngish woman, nicely dressed and dignified so long as she remembered to take her medicine; frazzled and incoherent when she didn’t. Such courage --- just to keep moving.

Live here for a while and pay attention and you soon learn that your own problems, which you sometimes imagine are big ones, pale by comparison.

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I’ve always felt safe here, walking the block home from the office between 11 p.m. and midnight for years. Only called the cops once --- when I encountered a young drugged-up guy who had been wandering the neighborhood for a few days trying to kick in First Christian’s basement windows.

I’m not sentimental about this place, nor will I miss it or anyone who lives here now. But it’s been good shelter, refuge from a few storms and a good observation post.

I’ve been here long enough, however, and am anxious to get home before dark from now on.

What ever happened to the via media?

More washing of walls today along with a trip or two to Salvation Army and a general attempt to bring some sort of order to the loose ends of stuff scattered around the place. Not to mention the search for the blank Wells Fargo checks I've misplaced --- absent mindedly stuck in a box I suppose. But which one?

I wouldn't need to wash walls --- since I've lived here more than 10 years all the walls will be repainted once I'm gone and the carpet most likely ripped out and replaced, too. But it makes me feel efficient to do it and besides I like to sit here in the middle of the office looking around at nice cream-colored surfaces where it's possible to see only the faintest outlines of a couple of the oldest family pictures with vintage backings that left seemingly indelible stains.

The route I've adopted to maintenance of sanity during this process is to take a break every 45 minutes or so and spend some quality time in the blogosphere. One thing I'm interested in is how much anger there seems to be out there on the Internet, some of it expressed in blogs, more of it in the sniping/debate, whichever you want to call it, that goes on in online forums or in the "comments" section of blog or blog-type entries. It's seems sometimes that once online we take leave of our senses.

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Wandering around, I happened onto this little essay by Jonah Lehrer that by extension suggests that our brains are not moving as fast as our technology and that this may be part of the problem. In other words, our brains are designed to spur bursts of sometimes incredible energy in times of crisis, the take-flight-or-fight factor. Few of us are in real physical danger these days (being chased up a tree by a grizzly bear for example), so that instinct operates in less desirable ways: Frantic worry in the middle of the night about something that will seem minor at first light of day, extreme reaction while commenting on a blog entry to a perceived threat to our precious opinion, you get the idea.

There are some excellent examples to back that theory in the Anglican/Episcopal blogosphere these days, some recent ones involving my bishop, Alan Scarfe, of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa. I like and respect Bishop Scarfe --- he received me into the Episcopal Church from the Lutheran Church. He's a good guy doing his best I think to walk the via media (the middle way) between conservatives (probably a minority) and liberals (probably a majority) in the diocese because his job is to serve us all.

His statement regarding the recent Iowa Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage reflected that --- he congratulated the LGBT segment of his flock on the new privilege, talked a little about how the case arguments and ruling had affected his own long-held view that civil unions (rather than marriage) were appropriate, pointed out that canon law of the Episcopal church still does not allow its priests to perform gay marriages (although belssings of unions formal or informal are allowable in the diocese) and asked, since we are not of one mind on the issue, that everyone focus on being kind to one another while continuing the debate. A very Iowa statement, in other words.

Not received too kindly in the Angloepiscopalian blogosphere, however, and if you believed everything you read there you'd think everyone was mad at him. From the right, "he's a heretic engaging in episcobabble." From the left, "he's a traitor engaging in episcobabble." The truth, of course, is that he's neither, merely someone doing his best to be a faithful shepherd to the whole flock --- something that has to be among the most daunting tasks facing anyone among the clergy.

"I Dreamed a Dream"

I didn't expect to get stuck on this God thing, having had my say about Easter, but you know I've noticed as the years pass that that one of the ways grace can nail a guy, knock him right to the floor gasping, is through music. I'm still awed when it happens and grateful when it does.

A lot of folks out there seem to be experiencing something akin to that these days through YouTube versions of Susan Boyle's stunning performance of I Dreamed a Dream from "Les Miserables" on "Britain's Got Talent," the British equivalent of "American Idol." It's a secular song, but still...

Susan Boyle is a Scots spinster of 47 who lives alone in a council estate apartment with her cat. Most describe her as plain, but I thought her beautiful. Plagued early by a learning disability she gave up aspirations to sing professionally in order to care for her mother, then stopped singing entirely --- including in the Catholic church she attends regularly --- when her mother died two years ago. Her decision to have a go at "Britain's Got Talent" was made partly in memory of her mother, who was a fan of the show. The result is astonishing.

If you've not watched it, and millions have, here's at attempt to provide a link. If this fails, Google "Susan Boyle" and a version will turn up. Take a look, but have a kleenex handy cuz you'll need it.

Subversive thoughts and deeds

Local history and genealogy are for the most part on hiatus here --- the notes, the photos, nearly everything else is packed, some here, most there. About the only source of information I've got left for a couple of weeks is the Internet and that's kindy of scary and also leaves way too much time for the mind to wander.

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I've never had a telemarketer hang up on me because I'd hurt his feelings before, but it happened Monday.

Here's the deal: I've never changed the phone in Chariton from my dad's name to mine in large part because I've never seen the need. Our names were the same. He used one and I used the other. But I can claim both, and do.

So when a telemarketer calls (and you can always recognize a telemarketer) and asks for Daniel, I sometimes play the "He's dead; Can I help you?" game. That gets some interesting responses. And it's not cold. Dad, notoriously rude to telemarketers, would get a kick out of it.

But Monday night's telemarketer called in the middle of "Antiques Roadshow," the only TV show I watch deliberately, so without thinking when he asked if Daniel was there and instead of remembering to play the he's-dead game, I channeled the old man and growled his usual response, "Whatcha want him for?"

Now this was one of those good old boy telemarketer types, the type you just know wants a donation for the Catalpa County Sheriff's Posse, Operation Christmas Felon or the Bribe a State Patrolman Fund --- one of those quasi law enforcement organizations that law enforcement officers should know better than to associate with. Somewhere down south there's a whole phone mill filled with these types. They always call you "buddy" or "pardner."

So when I growled "Watcha want him for?" this guy climbed on his high horse and replied indignantly, "you can't talk to me like that, pardner" and hung up. Sissy.

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Anybody else ever notice that a Super WalMart is like a landfill with aisles and people? I say that in the kindest possible way. Every time I get on my high horse about WalMart it turns out to be the only place in 150 miles that has something I need quick and I end up there. Never fails. Happened to me twice last week.

Both times, the store was packed with people running their carts into each other but only about a 10th of the check-out lanes were staffed. Lots of self-checkout lanes available. No one using them.

The second time around I got in the only operating "express" lane at the east end of the building. I only had one item. There were two women in front of me, each with a number of items well under the 10-20 item limit.

Trouble was, both women were writing checks and the convoluted system WalMart has for dealing with checks (customer writes check, computer processes check very slowly, clerk return check to customer, customer expected to sign as if he or she had used a credit or debit card) wasn't working well.

First women's check processed, she grabbed it and headed out with her cart, following a kid pushing something big and heavy on flatbed cart. She forgot to sign.

Clerk didn't realize this until the second lady in line wrote her first check (she had two small separate orders each paid for with a separate check). Wouldn't process because the first woman hadn't signed off. Clerk grabbed slip and hauled ass to catch her and get a signature. Came back huffing and puffing with the signature. In the mean time, the system had churned out the first woman's receipt. Clerk grabbed receipt and took off again. This was getting interesting. Between 5 and 10 minutes had elapsed in the express lane.

Second lady's first check now proceeded through the system, but as she was writing her second check a supervisor of some sort appeared waving a two-piece swim suit. Some hapless clerk had sold a bottom of one type with a top of another type and all clerks were now being lectured severely on the need to make sure the pieces of all two-piece swim suits matched. Time stretches to between 10 and 15 minutes.

Supervisor finishes lecture, scowls at customers, marches off; clerk processes second woman's check and she is on her way.

Time now has stretched to between 15 and 20 minutes, a personal first for me in an express lane. I pay cash ($13.50) for a package of 10 packing cartons folded flat and head out. No sack. Item too large for a sack. Guardian of the west gate demands to see my receipt. I show her. She smears it and the hand (my left) that was holding it with a yellow magic marker. You've gotta love WalMart.

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I don't mean to dwell on this gay marriage business, but there was a protest of the Iowa Supreme Court's recent decision involving about 300 people on the steps of the Capitol Monday and Des Moines TV covered it.

Of the three speakers featured on TV only Chuck Hurley, president of the Iowa Family Policy Center, was making much sense. He pointed out that the fight against gay marriage and for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman was just beginning. And that's true.

Then there was a Baptist preacher whose name I missed from Burlington going on and on about tyrants (the Supreme Court) now ruling Iowa. A bit of an overstatement there. No one's ever called the justices, some appointed by Republicans and some by Democrats, liberals before --- let alone tyrants. They're just judges, for heaven's sake, who issued a ruling some agree with and others don't.

Finally, there was Bob Vander Plaats, who would like to be governor, demanding that the current governor, Chet Culver, issue an order to prevent gay marriage until a vote on a constitutional amendment is scheduled --- several years down the road if at all.

The difficulty here is that the governor has no authority to do such a thing even if he'd like to, no more than the president can override the U.S. Supreme Court with an executive order. You'd think a gubernatorial hopeful would know that --- unless he was just playing politics and figured most Iowans were too dumb to figure it out.

The only way to halt gay marriage is to amend the constitution. It's possible that will happen. But the difficulty is, it's hard to predict what Iowans will do. We're not conservative as a whole, although some would like to think we are, nor are we liberal as a whole, something others would like to believe. We're just us. We don't scare easy and we may be cantankerous sometimes but we're not stupid.

One sure way for opponents of gay marriage to lose again down the road a ways is to keep yelling "the sky is falling" rather than working hard to make their case in a calm and sensible manner. Not that I want them to win; it just seems useful to point it out since the same thing goes for proponents of gay marriage if they want to keep winning.

Darkness into Light

I had forgotten the power of a church like St. John's stripped bare for the Good Friday liturgy, candles and veiled crosses carried out at the close of Maundy Thursday's evening Eucharist, reserved elements removed from the tabernacle to the side altar where a single candle burned and the tabernacle door left gaping, lights dimmed. And then the somber Good Friday liturgy itself in that stark setting.

I'm anticipating tonight's Easter Vigil, when fire will be lighted outside the church and blessed, the Paschal candle blessed and lighted from that fire and then carried into the dark sanctuary toward the chancel with three pauses for three acclamations: "The light of Christ! Thanks be to God!" The return of Light after a time of darkness.

We all experience and express our faiths differently, as led I believe. For many of us to be born again is to be baptized. For others, it is experienced as a sudden transcendent turning around. And there are other approaches as well.

My turning around always has been and continues to be slow, hesitant and sometimes almost imperceptible --- turns toward Light, steps backward into darkness, a marginalized time when, wanting nothing to do with the institutional church, I found solace still in liturgy, the Word and the sacraments, often helping myself to them in places where I had not been invited to partake by anyone other than He who instituted them.

The circumstances that have allowed me to participate fully in the liturgical journey this year from darkness into Light may not have been the ones I would have chosen. They were chosen for me, but I'm grateful.

I travel as best I can in the direction I'm led, as we all do. No matter what your mode of transportation or your place along the road, joyous Easter! The light of Christ! Thanks be to God! and for the first time since this lenten journey began, Alleluia!

The alarming oppression of stuff

OK let's get real here. I've gone on and on about family heirlooms, wallowing in their sentimental associations --- and meant every word. However, the opposite end of that equation is pictured above as push comes to shove in this final month of the great move south.

The only "heirloom" here is my grandmother's wooden ironing board at far right with the penciled inscription on its back: "bought new in 1942." I can't throw that away, even though I have two other ironing boards, one large and one small, and rarely iron (I have two irons; I seem to have two of everything). It's older than I am!

Most of the stuff in that still-growing pile of cartons is small items removed from closets, drawers and kitchen cupboards and for the most part this stuff will end up in a pile in the garage until I have time to deal with it. The pile of darker containers at left contains paperwork that I still hope to have a free day or two to go through (and cull) before loading it up.

Nearly all the stuff is off the walls (other than that five-foot portrait of George Washington in full Masonic regalia that I'll do tomorrow), my bedroom and the office now contain only the bare essentials. The living room is a mess of scattered little stuff, some of which will go to good homes tomorrow, and the kitchen-dining area is unspeakable. I wanted to start hauling excess furniture to Salvation Army this week, but am running out of time since the Army does not accept stuff on Saturdays. The holes left by absent chairs, tables, etc., would have lifted my spirits considerably.

I've found the darndest things. Moving the wall of books that once covered the expanse of white behind that pile of cartons in the photo I found a big mexican something or another that had fallen down behind the shelves and hadn't been missed. Moving filing cabinets in the office I found I square of good-quality plate-glass mirror once in my grandfather's bathroom (the plan 30 years ago was to frame it). It's gone to the dumpster divers now. There were three dead table lamps in the store room --- also dumpsterized.

I've thrown away lots of "good" stuff that could have been hauled to the receiving dock of a thrift store. Sorry, but there wasn't time to organize, box and haul it. I decline to feel guilty. I could have held a garage sale. Not.

Just opened the drawer below the oven on the kitchen range and found an accumulation of dusty pots and pans that hadn't been used in years. Tossed 'em. No guilt, again. It's amazing how easy it gets to toss things the more you deal with things.

But the big question is why do I (we) accumulate all of this stuff. The old stuff with associations I can justify. Much of the rest of it I can't.

I'm not the only one. How many times have you seen a giant dumpster parked in the driveway of a house where someone has died (or gone to a nursing home), filled and overlowing with the accumulation of a lifetime.

Years ago a sometimes neighbor who had lived in Manhattan for years, half a continent away from her Iowa home, and worked for The New York Times up and died tragically middle-aged. Her elderly parents went to New York to deal with her apartment and found it stuffed (in an orderly fashion) with among other things every sweater she had worn since high school. She traveled in fairly exalted circles (buried in the dress she'd worn to one of the Reagan inaugurations, tennis racket in her hands), so there were works of art and autographed books to the ceiling. Some was given away, but since The Times was footing the bill much of it was loaded in a van, shipped home and moved to an Iowa attic where I'd guess much of it still is.

Some say shopping for stuff, whether we need it or not, has been our principal form of therapy during the late 20th and early 21st centuries --- a way to make us feel better about the intangibles we've lost. I'm a believer --- now more than ever.

And I'm going to do better. Promise. I'll think about our ancestors setting out across the ocean with only the contents of their luggage; other ancestors, across the prairie with only what a covered wagon could hold. We've lost our collective mind! Me, too.

On the plus side, hauling another bag out to the dumpster a while ago I had a nice conversation with one of the divers --- pointed him toward some of the good stuff; discouraged him from plunging his hand into the bag out of the kitchen garbage can. One thing I like about this neighborhood --- you get to know the regular divers.

To love and to cherish

I’m not a fan of conservative commentator Cal Thomas, but found resonating words at the end of his opinion piece on the Iowa Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling Friday that will allow same-sex marriages in Iowa:

“Most of those who are disturbed about same-sex marriage are not as exercised about preserving heterosexual marriage. That's because it doesn't raise money and won't get them on TV. Some preachers would rather demonize gays than oppose heterosexuals who violate their vows by divorcing, often causing harm to their children. That's because so many in their congregations have been divorced and preaching against divorce might cause some to leave and take their contributions with them.

“The battle over same-sex marriage is on the way to being lost. For conservatives who still have faith in the political system to reverse the momentum, you are -- to recall Harold Hill -- "closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge."

The piece was entitled “Trouble in River City,” a reference to Mason City native Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man,” where trouble was equated with billiard balls rather than ground-shifting perceptions of marriage.

There’s little in the piece to please proponents of gay marriage. Thomas certainly is not in favor of it. But it is an interesting poke in the eyes for those Thomas perceives as being unable to detect the logs in their own (Luke 6: 41-42) while focusing on specks in the eyes of others.

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I would have forgotten about the fact Friday’s ruling was due had the guy who stopped in to help lift and carry not asked what I thought the ruling would be. I guessed wrong, but that was age and a pessimistic view of the human condition speaking.

The justices ruled fairly I think, invoking the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution, which because it does not mention marriage does not define it or specify who may participate.

The framers, of course, could not have conceived of marriage for same-sex couples, of same-sex couples or for that matter of those of us who define ourselves in part as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. It’s pointless to speculate about what they might have done were they up and walking around now --- because they’re not.

Opponents of gay marriage now hope to amend the Constitution to define marriage in the traditional sense, which is their right, although successful constitutional amendments at all levels have tended to extend rather than restrict rights of people.

A majority of framers of the U.S. Constitution thought it was OK to enslave black people, for example, or impolitic to put up too much fuss if they didn‘t. Once slaves were freed (13th Amendment, 1865) it became necessary to amend the Constitution a couple of times to ensure that black people could vote since many were determined that they wouldn’t (Fifteenth and Twenty-fourth Amendments, 1870 and 1964). Finally, an amendment was needed to guarantee women the right to vote (Nineteenth Amendment, 1920) --- a concept as foreign to the framers as gay marriage.

Like the U.S. Constitution, it is not easy to amend the Iowa Constitution. The framers intentionally made it challenging in order to give the dust time to settle and everyone involved the opportunities to make their cases and clarify their views. It takes affirmative action by the Iowa Legislature on an amendment during two consecutive two-year sessions before the public may vote.

Iowa Republicans are accusing the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate of being obstructionist for declining to bring the matter up this year, and of course they are right. That‘s politics. Were the shoe on the other foot and Republicans in control, similar roadblocks would be used to stall measures favored by Democrats.

So we will see what we will see. I hope Iowans and residents of other states allow same-sex couples to marry in the civil sense, enjoying all the rights and privileges enjoyed under the law by heterosexual couples. What churches do is up to churches --- as it should be.

But it’s useful for all of us to remember that for some (including me) ground is being gained and for others with other perspectives, ground is being lost. Civility is useful in situations like this.

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If I’m not out there cheering in the streets about the Supreme Court decision, and Tuesday’s override of the Vermont governor’s veto that allowed the Green Mountain State to become the first to establish gay marriage legislatively, it’s not because I’m not pleased.

But truth be told, I’m a little sad and have an odd feeling that much good already has gone out of marriage and that more could follow unless everyone, straight and gay, starts tending to their own knitting instead of looking to someone else to blame for their own dropped stitches.

If current statistics are accurate, roughly half of all heterosexual marriages end in divorce today and roughly 40 percent of children born in the United States are born to unmarried parents. Same-sex couples can hardly be blamed for that.

The flip side of the right to marry is the obligation to work hard to bring sanctity to those unions and I hope same-sex couples are up to the challenge. The flip side of already owning the right to marry is the obligation ensure that marriage continues to mean something, an area of apparent heterosexual failure, and I hope they‘re up to the challenge of turning that around.

This does not mean, by the way, that we should return to the days when men and women felt compelled to remain in marriages stained by emotional or physical violence or that I am in any way qualified to judge people who divorce or unwed parents.

It's just that I wish that every child could have parents like mine --- of opposite sexes (although there‘s every indication same-sex couples parent effectively, too, often embracing children thrown away by the people who produce them), committed to each other despite occasional conflicts, never violent to each other or to me, always available (never absent, remote or aloof) and affirming. Golly, I’d like every kid to have the opportunity to grow up in the country, too.

With hope, hard work and more than a few prayers much of this is possible (although probably not the rural childhood for all bit). But it’s work that’s required and not yelling.

Travels with my bureau

One more furniture story and then perhaps I should move on to other topics. But Great-grandmother Chloe's cherrywood bureau made it home on Friday, thanks to Arian who helped lift and move at the north end and Darrin, at the south.

It was a good day for a drive across Iowa, so the old girl didn't have to be covered as she rested flat on her back in the pickup. I took the slow (55 mph) and scenic backroads route rather than the interstate, figuring that was more appropriate for a piece of furniture that has traveled widely in Iowa during the last 150 years or so but rarely at high speed.

My great-grandmother, Chloe (Boswell) Prentiss/Brown, and her first husband, Moses Prentiss, purchased the bureau second-hand soon after their marriage near what now is Douds-Leando in Van Buren County on 18 March 1852. Since then it's moved around with the family by covered wagon, farm wagon, hayrack, farm truck, tractor and wagon and pickup.

This is not a valuable (in dollar terms) piece of furniture --- there are a lot of similar pieces out there, many of them more elaborate and many in better condition. Our bureau has always been used and the bumps and bangs of each move have added what could politely be called personality. I like to look at it, and use it, but don't especially enjoy moving it --- it's clumsy to manipulate, its rather delicate turned feet may be fragile (I've never tested them) and it's darned heavy.

The bureau probably was made some time about 1830 and its form is called "empire." The craftsman who made it would have been working somewhere east of the Mississippi but I have no idea where. One school of thought holds that it was brought into Nauvoo, then across the river into southern Iowa --- but that's idle speculation since there's no way to prove anything one way or another.

Moses and Chloe even may have bought the bureau in Wayne County, rather than Van Buren, since they moved with her parents, Peachy Gilmer and Caroline (McDaniel) Boswell and a majority of the Boswell family, to Corydon in 1854. Their cabin there was on the south side of Wildcat Creek just north of town.

I've told the story before of how Moses died 11 years later, on 6 July 1865, when the steam boiler used to power the sawmill he was operating exploded, leaving Chloe with four young daughters --- Eva, 10; Laura, 8; Olive, 3; and Emma, 10 months.

Chloe moved in with her widowed mother and younger sister, America E., who lived north of the creek, after that, taking the bureau along. When the 1870 census was taken, Caroline, America, Chloe and the girls still were living together. Next door was Chloe's younger brother, Ellis, who had married Elizabeth Douglas on 1 January 1865, and their eldest daughter, Mary Etta.

In the fall of 1870, 17 November, Chloe married Joseph Brown, 22 years older than she, and he moved in with Caroline and family, too, for the winter. In February of 1871, Joseph and Chloe loaded the Prentiss girls and their belongings --- including the bureau --- into wagons and headed northeast through Lucas County to Columbia, just over the line in Marion County.

Their first stop was a farm south of town near the cemetery, but title to that property could not be cleared so Joseph and Chloe bought 40 acres in the northeast corner of the village's main intersection and a two-and-a-half acre lot in the southeast corner where the house and farm buildings were located. It's not clear who built the house, a trim frame building with four rooms down and two up, quite possibly the first frame house Chloe had lived in since leaving Virginia as a teenager. My grandmother and her older brother, Joe, were born there. The bureau remained in Columbia for roughly 35 years.

By the fall of 1905, only three people were living in that old house: Chloe, widowed again in 1893; her daughter, Jessie; and her granddaughter, Verna (daughter of Emma Prentiss). Jessie had for several years operated the switchboard in the family sitting room that was at the heart of Columbia's telephone system. In doing so, she had met William Ambrose Miller, treasurer of the telephone system in his neighborhood of English Township, Lucas County, who also occasionally operated its switchboard --- located in his family's sitting room. They were married in Corydon on 3 July 1905.

There was no Social Security, other than family, at the turn of the 20th century and when Grandpa married Jessie, Chloe and Verna were part of the package. They moved to English Township to join Will and Jessie --- bringing the bureau along --- in April of 1906.

Will and Jessie did not build their new house just up the road although on the same farm until about 1909, so for three years everyone lived on top of everyone else in the old Miller house --- large for its time, but not that large. In addition to Will and Jessie, Chloe and Verna, the household included his mother, Mary Elizabeth, and younger siblings, James Clair, Easter and Jeremiah. My uncles, Joe and Owen, joined the family during those years.

When the new house was complete --- the first three rooms of it; it gained a second story and more rooms later --- Will and Jessie, Chloe and Verna and the Miller infants, along with the bureau, moved in. This was the bureau's home for roughly 50 years.

By the time I came along and first noticed it, the bureau had come to rest in the northeast bedroom upstairs that had been shared by my mother and Verna, who always was part of the family.

Sometime in the late 1950s, Granddad decided to move to Chariton --- in typical Granddad fashion: He tore down two old houses practically single-handed and built two new ones to keep himself occupied. He and Verna and the bureau, along with an outlandish accumulation of other stuff, moved to town.

But he kept the farm and could never leave it alone. When he was 90, he fell out of an apple tree he should have known better than to climb and soon thereafter his health began to fail. By that time Verna, increasingly incapacitated by the polio that had cripped her as an infant, had moved in with Granddad's sister, Cynthia, and Granddad decided to do that, too. So the house was sold and an auction of most of its contents scheduled --- other than what the children and grandchildren wanted for themselves.

Well, I wanted the cherry bureau. So my dad, in Chariton with tractor and wagon to deliver grain and pick up a load of coal for the return trip to the farm, tied the bureau on top of the load of coal and brought it home.

Our house on the farm was not designed for easy movement of bulky furniture since the enclosed stairway to the second floor made a sharp turn. So anything big headed up there, including the bureau, had to be hoisted to the roof of the front porch and taken in through the front door to the second story. Once in place, the bureau stayed in place there for about 30 years.

In the mid-1990s, however, my mother announced to my father that they were moving to Chariton. Period. And that was that. She also announced that either I assumed responsibility for the bureau or it would go on the auction block. So north it came to Thompson, then from Thompson to Mason City and now back to Lucas County.

Now that's about 10 treks that I can document and goodness only knows how widely the old bureau had traveled before she started moving around with the Prentiss, Brown, Miller and Myers families. She's seen a lot. And I wish she could talk. Since she can't, I've just told you about all I know about her.


These are members of the blended Brown-Prentiss family photographed (probably by Uncle Al Love) in 1888 or 1889 to the side of the family home in Columbia. Sam and Olive (Prentiss) McCorkle were visiting from their home in Superior, Nebraska, and their wagon is visible by the side of the house. Standing (from left) are Byron Love, Eugene Love, Sam McCorkle holding daughter Alma, Emma Prentiss and Laura Love. Seated (from left) are Ada McCorkle, Olive (Prentiss) McCorkle, Alma McCorkle, Joseph Brown, Chloe (Boswell/Prentiss) Brown and Jessie Brown holding Verna Prentiss/Brown.

That's how it was and that's how it still oughta be?

Up at 5 this morning, keeping farmer hours but with no cows to milk, I got to listening to country radio. Like I've said before, there is no topic under the sun that country musicians somewhere have not had a go at and that's one reason why I listen and enjoy.

The song that caught my ear this morning, by Arkansas/Missouri native Trent Tomlinson, is entitled "That's How It Still Oughta Be," and the refrain runs like this:

Yeah, the world was much safer, you could count on your neighbor
And a stranger was someone you just hadn't met yet
And we trusted our preachers, our heroes and teachers
and believed every word that they said.

There's a heck of a bunch of magical thinking here and believing every word that our preachers, our heroes and teachers said has gotten us into a few fixes. But it's still a nice song.

Nostalgia's a useful tool and I go back in my head sometimes to the good old days, too. On the other hand, I never recall my folks waxing nostalgic about the great depression of the 1930s. Nor have I heard tell of a kid abused by a preacher or priest, hero or teacher he or she trusted who felt that was the way it oughta be.

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I have always lived with furniture the had names, a result more of thrift than nostalgia, and have made it my business to learn something about the folks whose names that furniture bears. I'm obligated to those pieces of oak and cherry, walnut and lesser woods, and tend to them as best I can.

So it's made me happy lately to have my Great-aunt Laura Love's kitchen chairs back home and grouped around a table in Lucas County again.

Those old chairs are survivors. Absorbed into my grandparents' house in 1944, they were passed on to my mother when she married. They have been stained and varnished, stripped and painted, repainted in a rainbow of colors to match bedroom decor when moved out of the kitchen, then stripped, restained and varnished again when I brought them north. They are survivors, outlasting dozens of other chairs and recalled to service, stressed but never broken.

Aunt Laura was my grandmother, Jessie's, elder half-sister, born Laura Rozella Prentiss 2 July 1857 just north of Corydon to Moses and Chloe (Boswell) Prentiss. Laura was 8 when her father was killed and 13 when Chloe married Joseph Brown, 22 years her senior, and they moved to Columbia, just north of the Lucas County line in Marion County. Grandmother Jessie was born five years later, when her father was 64 and her mother, 42.

Three years after the move to Columbia, when she was 16, Laura married Uncle Al Love --- named Alpheus Elkanah Love by his parents, but never called that. By all accounts this was as happy and mutually respectful a marriage as any but not a union blessed with affluence.

Uncle Al was a native of North Carolina, born 17 March 1854 to Nathan and Asenath Licena (Lowder) Love. Dirt-poor, Nathan enlisted in Co. B, 45th North Carolina Infantry (Confederate) in 1862. He was captured during the battle of Gettysburg July 1-3, 1863 and later exchanged. Although there are varying accounts of why Nathan did not return to duty with Confederate forces, he is listed --- justified or not --- as a deserter in surviving records.

Sometime in the late 1840s, Licena Love's parents (Joel and Didema Laxton Lowder) had come from North Carolia to Lucas County and settled in Cedar Township. In 1870, Nathan Love and his eldest son, Joel, headed for Iowa, too, to make a new home for their family. In 1872, Nathan wrote to his wife and younger children, telling them that new home was ready.

Licena, Uncle Al and his sisters, Frances and Lenora, traveled from North Carolina to Indianapolis by wagon, took a train from there to Melrose, then walked from Melrose to the hills and hollers south of Columbia in Pleasant Township, Lucas County, where Nathan and Joel had settled. That's a heck of a walk!

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Now Uncle Al was a man of many talents, but making money was not one of them. He was a farmer and coal miner, a musician who could master while hardly trying any stringed instrument violin to piano, professional photograher, organizer of town bands across southern Iowa and into Nebraska, a giver of music lessons to the children of immigrants in the mining towns of Olmitz and Tipperary and to many others far beyond. Always broke.

My great-grandmother, Chloe, lived in fear that Laura and her children didn't have enough to eat in those early years when they lived down in the hills south of Columbia and Uncle Al was roaming, loaded baskets with food and sent her youngest children, Jessie and Joe, off on horseback to deliver the provisions.


Later, Al and Laura moved into Columbia, into a tiny and surprisingly durable house that survived until two or three years ago, and acquired among other things the chairs now around my kitchen table.

Al and Laura had four children who survived infancy, Byron, Eugene, Raymond and Alma, and one who didn't, John Nelson. Because of some genetic convergence, the Love children were astonishingly beautiful.

But Alma made two bad marriages, producing a son by each before dying in childbirth in 1922, age 28. Al and Laura were able to claim and raise one of the boys, but the other was abandoned by his father and placed in an orphange. The Love boys, then living in Montana and California, retrieved him when they got wind of this and took him west to raise themselves.

Uncle Al died flat broke in 1934, having sold his only valuable possession, a violin. Laura lived 10 years more, until 1944, supported by her sons in the West and looked after by my grandparents, who brought her to their home in English Township to spend winters.

When Laura died in her rocking chair in Columbia on the 21st of November 1944, found by the little boy who came every morning to carry coal into the house for her, just before she was due to leave for a winter with my grandparents, the boys came home of course. But they had no need for most of her belongings and so when the house was sold its contents came home with Jessie and Will Miller, including the chairs.

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One of the points here, I guess, is that while I have great respect for Laura and Al Love and treasure what I know about them, and their chairs, I am not nostalgiac about their hard lives and hard times. That may have been how it was but not necessarily how it oughta be. Like those old chairs, on the other hand, they were stressed but never broken. That I'd say is the lesson to learn and the thing to remember.

The photos are (top) Laura and Al Love's chairs grouped around my kitchen table; (center) Laura and Al with daughter, Alma, in front of the little house in Columbia where the chairs originated; and (inset bottom) Eugene Love, like all the Love children an object of great beauty, with an unidentified admirer, a beauty herself.

Reading: It's all Kathleen Norris's fault

There I was cruising along with only the usual complaints --- sore shoulders after all that shredding and lifting, mild depression (or so I thought) brought on by up close and personal encounters with the results of 30-plus accumulative years in north Iowa. Then I started reading Kathleen Norris's latest and found out I was under assault by the demon acedia.

It's been a little like spending time with "The Handy Home Guide to What Ails You." Read about a disease and you start to develop it.

I'm not even going to try to define acedia. Read the book or Google the word, obscure until quite recently. No more. As of 6 a.m. today "acedia" typed into the search slot generated 253,000 hits.

Down home we used to call it "becalmed," a seafaring reference in this land of prairie schooners. The wind goes out of your sails in sight of land and you're out of drinking water. But instead of grabbing the oars and propelling youself to shore to get a drink, you discover you don't care. So you just lay there in the sun, dehydrating --- reading a paperback to divert yourself maybe, daydreaming about what you'll pick up at Wal-Mart to amuse yourself, providing someone comes along to save you or the wind kicks up again (or the economy reignites).

Norris argues in "Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks and a Writer's Life" (Riverhead Books, 2008) that this demon detected and detailed more than a thousand years ago by Christian monastics, and distinct from although related to depression, is responsible for many of our personal and societal ills of the spirit.

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I've been a fan of Norris, who defines herself principally as a poet, since publication in 1993 of the book that brought her bigtime into the public eye: "Dakota: A Spiritual Geography." It's still my favorite --- a lyrical, graceful love letter to the high and arid plains of the Dakotas, a perceptive accounting of factors that shape the people who live there (insights that can be extended to most of us who live and think rural route) and a moving tribute to the Benedictine traditions she incorporated into the life of her backslidden Protestant self to force it into spiritual flower.

"The Cloister Walk" followed, as did "The Virgin of Bennington," "Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith" and others.

This is by far her darkest and densest book and some, expecting what she's best known for --- detecting and illumininating the sacred in the everyday --- have been nonplussed by it. She is quite frank here about the devils that have plagued her everyday life and that of her late husband, poet David Dwyer, and the story of his death is woven into the narrative.

Some have not liked it at all --- The New York Times reviewer, for example, a literary nonentity who wasted many words demonstrating how clever she was while giving a fairly clear picture of her aspirations but offering very few insights into the book she was reviewing.

I liked "Acedia & Me" and continue to think Norris is one of the most useful and masterful souls out there addressing matters of the spirit --- in spite of the spiritual hypochondria her words sometimes can lead to. I'll come back to it and read it again, more carefully and more thoughtfully this time. That's the highest praise I can give a book.