I have this picture in my head of us all sitting around when the pandemic is over and saying, “What the heck just happened?”

We’re trained from young on to prepare for bad things. Fire drills, tornado warnings, duck-and-cover in the event of nuclear war: all manner of dreadful events are possible in our minds. A virus that moves around the globe, morphing into deadlier variants, arriving in surges like waves on the beach? Hadn’t really planned for that one.

I remember as a teenage reader being taken with the book “The Andromeda Strain.” That was a 1969 science fiction tale about a satellite that returns to Earth bearing a deadly microorganism from space that kills almost everyone it comes in contact with. It becomes a harrowing story of a group of scientists racing against time to save humanity.

“The Andromeda Strain” was more dramatic and fast-paced than the Covid strain, although the part about heroic scientists follows. Our non-science fiction pandemic is definitely not fast-paced. Here we are, well into our second year of dealing with this wretched virus. We know now Covid is unlikely to “end.” It will eventually join the list of afflictions that make life something of a crapshoot. For now, it is too virulent to ignore and hope for the best.

Historians will have a field day dissecting what happened. This has affected every place on Earth where members of our species abide. Most events we study in history are isolated. The World Wars didn’t cover the “world.” This global pandemic is really, truly global.

As for historians analyzing our actions and reactions, good luck to them. Those of us living this in real time can’t make sense of it. I don’t, won’t, and never will understand how this became something we fight over. We’ve managed to pack an enormous amount of divisiveness, rancor, and just plain old arguing into the last twenty months.

Did it have to be this way? Is it possible to imagine we could have come together for the better of everyone? We faced a challenge that was most threatening to the weakest and most vulnerable. Shouldn’t that have united us?

When a tornado tore through Comfrey, hundreds of people showed up to help. If a farmer is injured during harvest, dozens reach out to the family. I could go on with examples of humanity and compassion. That is in us. In those cases, the reaction is “How can I help? What can I do?”

Since March 2020, we’ve known things we can do. And in fact, most people have done those. I am talking about a minority who fought against the notion of a common good. But guess who stands out in a room of twenty small children? The nineteen behaving or the one screaming in the corner?

When I found myself in a conversation with someone upset at measures being taken here, I pointed out that these same tools were being used in every country on the planet, democracy or dictatorship. Mozambique. Uzbekistan, and Peru are doing the exact same things we are. There is striking consensus among scientists and health officials everywhere.

From the beginning, we have had to waste valuable time and effort quarreling. Mistrust, pettiness, name-calling, you name it. Every negative quality has flowed like a river. Flight attendants, shop owners, waiters have all been abused. Good grief, there are stories of nurses being attacked verbally.

At the beginning, we had a president who told us things that weren’t true. I don’t think he was lying. I just think he is not intelligent enough to know what he doesn’t know and to listen to people smarter than him. Knowing what you don’t know and listening to smart people are important skills.

He wasn’t helpful, but I don’t blame him for the ongoing divisions. The seeds for that were sown before. Analyzing those seeds will be a chore for those historians I refer to. This should be a golden age of cooperation. The internet means each of us has access to all the collected knowledge of humanity, something undreamt of by previous generations.

Turns out the internet is also an ideal way to spread fakery and deception. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone who is disparaging masks or vaccinations say, “I saw a video…”

Mark Twain’s admonition takes on new meaning: “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.” A falsehood on Instagram or TikTok is around the world in a nanosecond. The truth might not even be out of bed.

Nothing has been more contentious than wearing a mask in certain settings. Early on I thought if there is a tiny chance that I’m protecting you by wearing one, why wouldn’t I?

Our daughter spent parts of the pandemic living in Europe and Central America. She reports that people there willingly adopted to masks. My six-year-old grandson wears a mask in the Rochester schools. His parents point out to him that he is protecting people. Like his grandparents.

With the instincts of a child, he understands that. Yet, among adults, arguments broke out every day over that simple effort. The ability to focus on a larger good over personal comfort is a mark of maturity. For society to function, the needs of the community have to sometimes rise above the wants of the individual.

Perhaps the most frustrating part of the contentious sides people take on every issue, is that intelligent and reasoned debate is pushed out. There are important discussions to be made about how best for schools, businesses, etc. to proceed as we work through the pandemic’s stages. I have not agreed with every decision made. But when one group won’t accept the science or medicine the rest of us are working from, the foundation for rational dialogue doesn’t exist. Instead of thoughtful deliberation, we have another argument. Just what we don’t need.

We have to worry about problem-solving amidst crises we will face in the future. It’s  probable our country will face graver challenges. Are we going to react to those by arguing among ourselves? We may not have the luxury of the time that Covid gave us. If there were a Pearl Harbor today, would 30% of us blame the other party and insist it was a government hoax?

All this is heavy and depressing stuff. What good is a global pandemic if you can’t have a little fun with it? I’ve gone back to wearing a mask during the recent spike in Covid as I go about my business in town. I’ve taken to telling whoever I’m working with, “Yeah, my wife says I look better with it on.” That’s a joke.

There are things I’ve loved my entire adult life: my wife, Miller Sellner Implement, beer. Pam’s not really a thing, but you know what I mean.

Then, there are things I’ve loved even longer, as far back as I have memory: my parents, cheese, baseball.

In the early Sixties, brother Dean brought home an interest in the Minnesota Twins from Faribault Braille School. Summer days with a transistor radio set to WCCO for Twins’ games were as routine as milking cows. I grew up listening to Mom, Dad, and Herb Carneal.

Appealing players like Killebrew, Oliva, and Kaat cemented that relationship. Later there were days meeting friends in the Baltimore lot. In my mind, I can still walk you around Metropolitan Stadium with a smile on my face. I could do that with the Metrodome, but it would be with a frown, recalling the imprisonment of baseball there. That sentence ended with the delightful return of grass and sky at Target Field.

Like any relationship, there were bumps on the way in my long affair with baseball. Strikes and lockouts jerked fans around. Trading Rod Carew stung. The designated hitter: just because we’re used to it doesn’t make it less wrong. Regardless, every Opening Day brought me back filled with anticipation for the lovely marathon that is a baseball season.

2020 was hard on lots of us for lots of reasons. Just as I was starting to engage with Spring Training, boom, it ended. No one knew whether that was for a week or a month. It turned out a truncated season began in August with cutout fans and piped-in crowd noise. Some oddball rules made it seem like a pretend season, and I never had much interest.

2021 was going to be a Return to Normal. I went to a few games at Target Field. Nothing beats a day at the ballpark; that hasn’t changed. But as the season went on, my interest waned. It wasn’t just that the Twins were bad. That’s happened before. My whole attention to baseball was fading to dark. By September, the games barely registered on my mental radar.

It struck me last week that I didn’t watch one inning of the World Series. That hasn’t happened since Kennedy was in the White House. I found myself wondering. “Wha’ happened?”

I’ve talked about this with friends. I hear similar sentiments. “I’m just not as interested as I used to be.” “It’s harder to watch a whole game.”  The fact that I and my buddies remain baseball’s main audience is not a good sign for the sport. We are an aging fan base for sure.

I’m talking about pro baseball here, the Twins in Twins Territory. You can still find school games, kids ball, and town teams at the comely ballparks we are blessed to have around here. Those are a pleasant and inexpensive way to spend time outdoors in our short season of sun.

But something is going on with the game at that upper level, where players make lots of money and fans spend a day’s wage to sit in the stands.

Most obvious, is the that the games take longer. It’s always been an attraction of the game that there is no clock. In the past, I considered myself lucky to see extra innings. More time at the ballyard. But now there is tedium, with mind-numbing spaces in the game.

Long ago when I played Bi-County baseball, we had a dear old ump named Otto Siewert. After every third out, Otto would begin chirping, “OK, off the field, let’s go, get out there, hustle it up, let’s go, let’s go.”  We found it amusing, but it did quicken the pace. Major League Baseball could use Otto.

A couple years ago, I went to Detroit to see the Twins play the Tigers on Labor Day weekend. It occurred to me that it was almost exactly twenty years before that I took daughter Anna to Detroit to see a couple games at old Tiger Stadium. I looked it up, and the games we saw in 1999 were under two and a half hours. The games in 2019 were all over three hours.

Nine inning games approaching four hours are not uncommon. In the past, a crisply played pitching duel might have us out tailgating in two hours. To blame? Television, batters tugging their batting gloves, and a shrinking strike zone all have a piece.

Then there are pitching changes. Lots of pitching changes. A playoff game this year had sixteen pitchers. Nine innings, sixteen pitchers! No one ever came to the ballpark excited to see a parade of relief pitchers.

When I was going to a game in the past, I would anxiously check out who the starting pitchers were and create scenarios in my mind for that day’s game. The starting pitchers had lead roles in the drama I was about to see. Now a starting pitcher going five innings is rare as hens’ teeth.

Someone figured out that when a batter sees a pitcher a third time, his odds of succeeding go up. So, we come to the role of statistical analysis. A few decades ago, Bill James led a group of smart people looking inside the game and plucking out truisms that weren’t true. That was exciting for young fans like I was then. It was hip to be analytic.

At first analytic believers stood outside the gate and lobbed stones at baseball. Over time, they were invited in and began to appear in management. Now, the former stone throwers are in charge.

Strategy shifted. Strikeouts and homeruns came to be valued, so much that a player can strike out 200 times and be in the lineup if he hits homeruns. Rod Carew took five years to strike out 200 times. Strikeouts and homeruns have their place. But neither is as exciting as a triple off the wall and cheering as the runner rounds second base.

In ways the game has become predictable, dull, and slow. Perhaps this will cycle around and my fandom will return. Pam knows that when I go into the nursing home, I want to watch baseball games all day. That’s still the plan. I guess I can get a nap if the game goes four hours.

We were nearing the end of a tough corn harvest, fighting through downed and snarled stalks. The weather was good, and the stress of the last month was receding. I was pulling a wagon and made the turn to the field. I was met with the warm glow of a low sun.

A thought came that shows up now and then. I looked at the corn stubble stretching to the west, and I thought of the tall grass prairie that was there for the 10,000 years since the glaciers receded. My ancestors started growing things here about a century ago, one per cent of that time.

That changed drastically when Europeans arrived. The tall grass prairie is for all intents extinct, save for remnants and restorations, neither of which can duplicate the ocean of grass that was.

I enjoy raising corn and soybeans. It is challenging work in sync with the seasons. But I can feel loss for what was here. The wealth in these soils comes from prairie grasses dying into the ground and building the deep, fertile dirt I plant into. I am thankful for that.

I wonder if our ancestors could have found a way to preserve some of what was here. I’m not sure what that would look like, but it seems possible. Since the arrival of the plow, could farmers have done a better job preserving that soil? Again, I think that’s possible.

Could I have done better in my four decades farming? I tried alternative practices early on that mostly didn’t work and found myself farming conventionally. I try to do that responsibly. It’s dependent on fossil fuels and chemicals, more than I’d like.

There are positive signs for the future. Cover crops, less tillage, alternative crops, all hold possibilities. I hope younger generations get more things right than mine did.

The upshot? There is nothing I can do about the past. I wish we’d done better, including myself. And I’m hopeful for the future.

I suppose I could ignore the past, pretend the prairie wasn’t here. I could convince myself I’ve done everything perfectly, and that there is nothing wrong in agriculture. Deluding myself wouldn’t make any of that true.

Speaking of past, our nation has spent productive time opening books to the past. Some of those books were collecting dust; some were purposely hidden away. I’m talking about our discussion of race. The murder of George Floyd was a pivotal moment no one saw coming.

If you didn’t learn anything the last year, you had to be trying hard not to. Vague notions I had about being Black in the United States were given flesh, as I listened to and read Black men and women. COVID gets credit for giving me extra time.

Slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, right up to modern tools of suppression, were all things I learned more about. Looking back on my schooling and 65 years on this planet, it is amazing how little I knew. I am grateful to know more. With humility, I know my knowledge remains incomplete.

I learned in sixth grade that slavery ended in 1865. I didn’t learn how that awful institution was replaced with essentially the same economic and societal structure in the South. Ex-slaves and their descendants had no meaningful rights for most of the next century.

Efforts to change society were met harshly. Hanging the occasional Black man was effective in messaging. I read about church congregations that ended Sunday service in time so parishioners could attend a local lynching. The Tulsa race riots, when up to three hundred were killed, was never taught in my 17 years of school.

A black writer told of his father who fought and was decorated in World War II but wasn’t allowed in restaurants when he came home. That, despite wearing the uniform of the United States Army. I wondered how frustrating that would be.

That man took his family to the North, joining a great exodus. Through redlining and other manipulations, Blacks became disadvantaged there, too. Again, these were things I had faint understanding of. The truth is that most Blacks (and other minorities) for our entire history up to today had poorer housing, lesser schools, lower health care, and reduced wages.

That is simply true. Is racism the reason? The phenomenon is so consistent through time and place, it becomes clear it is. You have to perform serious mental contortions to deny that.

You might say that there is nothing today preventing minorities from chasing the American dream. Look around, and you will see yourself and most everyone you know has ended up in roughly the same economic class as their parents. There are exceptions. But most of us used advantages we were given to lead comfortable lives, advantages not proffered to Black, Hispanic, and Natives.

I didn’t grow up in the South, so the Black experience is distant. I don’t have that excuse for the Dakota who were here. The “Indian line fence” on the south side of our property is the border of a long-abandoned treaty. If you can look at the story of the Native people on this continent and not see hot racism, you’re looking through foggy lenses.

I’m grateful to know more than I did. There are those who will say I can’t love my country with these things in my head. I would challenge that to my deepest core. What kind of love is grounded in untruth, deception, and ignorance? Yes, I love this country. I love it enough to want it to be better.

Something no one had ever heard of six months ago has become a cause celebre of people who deny these truths. Critical Race Theory has come to be blamed for an absurd number of ills. It has ignited a craziness that I can only compare to the John Birchers of my youth. Instead of seeing a communist behind every bush, CRTers see a raving Antifa.

In this misty world view, “justice, equity, and inclusion” are bad words. Justice, “the quality of being just: righteousness, moral rightness,” according to the dictionary. How does the world have to be turned on its head for “justice” to be a bad thing?

Do I want my children to know the history of racism in this country? Damn straight. I hope and pray they are part of a better future. Why would I want them to learn less, not more? I hope they don’t wait till 65 to learn. If schools can’t teach the truth, what’s the point?

Does that mean that young people begin life as “oppressors and victims?” No, it means that armed with morality that we all have a part in passing to them, with full knowledge of what came before, they make this world better. God bless them in that.

I come to a place similar to my thoughts on the prairie. There is nothing I can do about the past. I wish we’d done better, including myself. And I’m hopeful for the future.

We get to this time of year, and light becomes a precious commodity. Our planet tilts and the southern hemisphere gets all the fun of grilling out and laying on the beach. To paraphrase the Alan Jackson, Jimmy Buffet song, “It’s Summer Somewhere.”

Farmers start the fall work in reasonably long days. We watch our daylight slip away till much of the work is done in the dark. There was a time nature called all the shots, and the farming day was bound by the number of hours of sun. Now we have lights on our combines and tractors.

If you drive around on fall nights, you notice these small “cities” across the countryside. Bin setups, where the crop is delivered to dry and store can shimmer on the horizon as much as a small town. A lot of wattage goes into that display, especially as farms get bigger and the yield from thousands of acres funnel there.

Our setup is modest in comparison: a drying bin and three storage bins that were shiny new when I was young. I spend a lot of time there each fall. I have memories of working with my father, with heavy coats on November nights when we could see our breath. Those memories are treasured now. I wouldn’t have guessed that in the moment. I was miserable then.

I had an electrician friend add some lights to brighten new bin stairs that were added as safer-than-the-old-bin-ladder. Additional lights are also a safety enhancement. I work up and down and around a lot of moving things that could cause injury if the wrong part of me got in the wrong part of them. Seeing things helps avoid unpleasant surprises.

Lights have gotten better on the equipment. Our combine and newer tractors have bright white LED lights, much better than the lights that I remember my dad picking ear corn with on the old 560. Guessing those lights went out 15 or 20 feet. Now the area lit is larger besides being brighter.

With all artificial light, there is field of illumination that has a boundary. Beyond that is the dark and unseen. What is unseen is unknown. Every once in a while, a fellow can creep themselves out late at night, after long hours in a cab. There’s a reason I don’t watch horror movies. My imagination can gin up a scary possibility in those rows in the dark over there without the aid of a script writer.

We take walking into a room and flipping on a light switch for granted. None of us remember a day you couldn’t unless there was some sort of outage. A few generations back did know that, and what an incredible change. I read once how many minutes and hours someone had to labor before electricity to pay for lamp oil or candle to light one room for one hour. Now we leave lights on all over the house for pennies.

Mostly, we don’t notice the battle being waged against dark by car lights, streetlamps, and light fixtures. I can drive through town on a winter night and think nothing of every house glowing from within. People are doing dishes, kids doing homework, someone watching TV.

It’s different when I drive into town at 4:30 in the morning for my Adoration shift at church. Then, a very small number of houses have a light on, usually one room. My imagination wants to fill in the blanks: Up early for work? Someone not feeling well? Crying baby?

I am by no means a fan of the shortening days. I get that this happens every year, but I still want to say to the southern hemisphere, “I want my sun back!” I’ll grant that there are some benefits to a short day. One is that there’s not a lot of time between sunrises and sunsets. It’s easy to be outside for both.

Both have been regularly spectacular this year. A sun low on the horizon with a dimpling of clouds can create an amazing montage of colors. Sometimes it’s like a watercolorist just spilled everything. Around then, I will be flipping on combine lights or running around to flip switches on the bins. But the warmth and glow of a sunset can steel one for working out in the cold hours ahead.

I opened with light as a precious commodity. It also has been the most common metaphor for good as long as people have been writing things down. We all want to be that candle lighting the dark. Or LED light in more contemporary terms.

It takes no creative writing to see a need for light in today’s world. There seems no limit to negative thoughts, harsh language, and snarky criticism. Social media has been getting blame for that lately. It certainly has empowered people to mock and belittle those they disagree with. Much of it coming from the most comfortable, well-off people who have ever lived.

Being light might mean withholding that mean thought that strikes you as you sit at your computer. Maybe let a line go by in a conversation that rankles you. Maybe turn up your light, say something positive, compliment someone, comfort another.

There is a now 25-year-old song that is a favorite. Written by Chris Rice, “Go Light Your World” has been sung by many Christian singers. LISTEN>>>

Here is the chorus:

Carry your candle, run to the darkness,

Seek out the hopeless, confused and torn,

Hold out your candle for all to see it.

Take your candle, and go light your world,

Take your candle, and go light your world.

We spend our time between conception and death in these human bodies. There are days we leap and run and dance in them. Then there are days we are stiff and sore and just want to lie on the couch. If we are blessed or lucky or both, we will live with these bodies for some decades, eventually wearing them out.

The Bible refers to these as our earthen vessels. It is God’s plan for us. Paul writes in Corinthians, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels that the excellency of the power may be of God and not out of us.” It is a gift, the whole package: body, mind, and spirit, all to give glory to God.

I’ve been an on-and-off runner going back to school days. “Running” is generous. More like jogging. As I’ve gotten older and slower, I’ve taken to calling it “slogging.” Whatever, I try to go two or three miles.

I had to shut that down for a year with an injury and a surgery. This summer, I was able to start up again.

I had been walking and biking some, but even a slow run is more physically fatiguing. So, I started out doing one minute jogging and three minutes walking. Then two and two. Eventually a half mile run, half mile walk. My body went along with this regimen, tolerating the running, knowing a walk break was coming. Finally came the day I planned to do the full three miles. After a while, my body said, “Okay, time for walking.”

“Nope,” I replied, “Keep running.”

“What? No!” My body even tried to negotiate. “How about a deal? If we can walk a while, we’ll have a big bowl of Schwan’s butter brickle ice cream when we’re done!”

Eventually we fought our way through our dispute. My earthen vessel is still not entirely happy about this.

That got me thinking about things we do that aren’t necessarily easy. Life is filled with these. A large part of maturity is learning to complete them. Like a three-mile run. Sticking to tasks until they are completed is something we try to impart on our children. Stick-to-itiveness is a quality we want to pass on.

We hear, “If you love your job, you never have to work a day in your life.” Hogwash. What job doesn’t have tedious, laborious, and taxing parts to it? I love farming, and the harvest is the best time of year. But every fall, there get to be times when I’m exhausted and have to choose to get back on the tractor or climb up on the bin. I’m guessing your job has those moments. Where it would be easy to put away your tools or turn off the computer. But you don’t. And that’s how you get things done.

We might hear marriage is blissful if we only find the right person. I heard a speaker say once, “Finding someone is the easy part. Working through the days and years and decades of marriage is the difficult part.” As Pam and I cross the 40-year line, I think she would agree with that. There have been lots of days when we had to work hard at making this work. Perhaps it gets a little easier when the pressures of child-rearing have passed. But we still have our days.

Speaking of parenting, there is marathon, not a sprint. When you and your partner bring home that little bundle of personhood, you’ve signed on to 18 years of effort and commitment. Really more. From the 3 a.m. wakeup with a crying infant to the frustrations of a teenager fighting you every day, parenting is lots of work, to say the least.

Of course, it is in completing difficult and challenging tasks that there is satisfaction. The three-mile run, the harvest, the life-long marriage, raising a child: each have moments it would be temporarily relaxing to quit. There is a difference between relaxing and joy that comes from something well done. We will be judged in these lengthy arduous tasks, not the easy ones.

I think that is why I love a baseball season. Over 162 games and six months, the best players will have slumps, and anyone can get hot for a few days. Teams can have everything work and rattle off six wins in a week, or struggle with pitching, hitting, and defense and lose a bunch. The best teams will lose sixty and the worst teams will win sixty. Anything can happen on any day, but the full measure of the team is taken over those six months.

I love the season but am not a fan of the expanded playoffs. Ten teams now get to enter the October lottery. It used to be eight, before that four, and when I was a kid two. I get that it’s all about television and money. But why is it better to have your team eliminated in a few games in the playoffs, when any number of freaky things can happen, rather than that beautiful 162 game endurance run? It is a snapshot vs. a full-length film.

As a fan, you live and die game to game, ups, downs, and everything in between. Talk about a metaphor for life. It is not unlike marriage or parenting in that you’re never quite sure what’s going to happen that day. But at the end of it, you love your wife, your kid, or your team. You look forward the next game/day, open to whatever surprises come your way.

Speaking of marathons, of course the ultimate one is life itself. In Hebrews 10:36, we are told, “For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised.” When I get round the lake trail, near the end of three miles, I see my car and I know I will be resting soon. It’s a good feeling. Someday, we’ll get to the end of our life’s run. Hopefully we will see heaven and know we will be resting soon.