Last Sunday, I met daughter Anna in Minneapolis where we attended Les Misérables at the Orpheum Theater. This is about my tenth time seeing Les Misérables. It is somewhere between a guilty pleasure and an addiction.

I’ve always liked musicals, in person and on stage. Film is not at all the same experience. The energy and intensity of real live human beings throwing themselves into their part, I love that. For three hours, I can be in a world that’s quite different from mine on the farm.

Every musical has scenes where heightened emotions come through in song. Les Mis is a musical on steroids. The entire story is sung, and every moment is emotional. It’s exhausting to sit through; I can’t imagine performing it. The first act sets you up to want to cry through the whole second act.

I’m not sure why I want to pay for an expensive ticket just to have my emotions tossed against the rocks like that. I’ve seen it enough to know everything that’s going to happen, and I’m still a wreck by the end. I found this synopsis at broadway.com:

“The story begins as Jean Valjean crosses the landscape of early 19th century France, always pursued by the righteous police inspector Javert. From his adoption and love of the orphan Cosette to the darkly funny plots of the thieving Thenardiers, from the soaring revolutionary fire of the student rebels who fight on the barricade in the streets of Paris to the final confrontation between Jean Valjean and Javert, the story is one of love, courage and redemption.”

In the end, most of the people you care about are dead, each death more tragic than the one before. If you can hold yourself together when Eponine is dying in the arms of Marius with raindrops streaming down her face, you are tougher than me.

Our whole family has seen Les Mis multiple times. When the kids were home, we sang along to the music on a CD. The kitchen was our stage. Once, we lived out the famous barricade scene. We decided Pam’s rule had become oppressive and we needed to rise up. We built our barricade using the couch and pillows. When Pam came home, we were ready. With waving banners, we sang:

“Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of the people
Who will not be slaves again!”

Our revolution was about as successful as that of the 1832 Parisians. Pam remained in power. She remains there today.

Long ago, I tried reading Victor Hugo’s epic historical novel. Written in 1862, Les Misérables is considered one of the greatest novels of all time. This was back when I read more than farm magazines and box scores.

With its broad sweep of lives caught up in a crucial moment in history, it is an unlikely candidate to be made into a musical. The musical was originally written in French in 1980. The English version became the longest running theater production in London and New York.

I assume most of you don’t share my obsession and willingness to pay $100 for a ticket. There was a movie version in 2012 with some big stars. I thought it was not very good. But if you’re bored on a winter night, you could check it out. Just know it’s better on stage.

If you are like me and enjoy musicals, it’s a good time to live around here. In Sleepy Eye, St. Mary’s High School has a thirty-year history of wonderful musicals under the direction of Julie Neubauer and now Geri Pelzel. I still remember Geri as Tinkerbell floating above the stage.

Being in those musicals were favorite experiences of my kids. The week leading up to productions was life consuming. For that week, they were more their character than our children, but we always got them back.

Sleepy Eye Public has also built a tradition of musicals under Sandy Brinkman and George Hirschboeck. George is a family friend who has more enthusiasm than anyone else on Earth. Sandy and George have also been involved in Sleepy Eye Community Theater musicals that have been great fun.

You can go out from here and find entertaining musicals in Springfield, the schools in New Ulm, and Martin Luther College. Add to that, productions at the State Street Theater in New Ulm. So many places to escape to Camelot, West Side, or the South Pacific.

One will always fall short when you list names to appreciate. These are some I know because of where I am planted. But wherever people participate in creating art on stage and lifting kids and adults to bring out talents inside of them, those people deserve large credit. It is truly a gift.

I can’t sing or dance, although I keep trying. I’ve often wished life were more like a musical. Why can’t people break out into song more often? Outside of church, most of us hardly ever sing. Think how better our day-to-day lives would be if we lived in a musical.

I can picture going to get parts at Miller-Sellner Implement. There’s usually three or four parts people at the counter. Why can’t Jeff step forward to sing, while Dan and Kristie and Tony break into dance behind him? Think of Oklahoma.

“MI-LLER SE-LLNER, where the parts come sweeping down the aisle!

With the oil down low and the filters high, while the chisel points are in a bin by the door!

MI-LLER SE-LLNER, we have the parts to work the land, and the land we belong to is grand!”

And when I come in from the fields, why can’t Pam greet me like Maria in West Side Story to tell me what’s for supper?

“There’s a meal for us,
Somewhere a meal for us.
Peas and meatloaf and a salad
Wait for us
Somewhere.

We’ll find a new way of eating
We’ll find a way of dining
Somehow
Someday
Somewhere!”

I’m not sure what my end time will be like. The final scene from Les Misérables, would be hard to beat. When Fantine comes to lead Jean Valjean to Heavens, she sings:

“Take my hand,
I’ll lead you to salvation.
Take my love,
For love is everlasting.
And remember
The truth that once was spoken,
To love another person
Is to see the face of God.”

Excuse me while I get a Kleenex.

It’s time for the annual Krzmarzick Farms Post Harvest Update. A lot of readers look forward to that.

Anyway, 2024, what can we say about you?

A year to remember. Like how you remember banging your head on a pipe. We had a winter that wasn’t a winter. Then there was record rain from April to July. Then came the warmest, driest fall ever.

“Is it dry? No, wait, it’s wet. No, that was last week, now it’s dry.” Picture my head on a swivel.

Disappointment: Yeah, my yields sucked. In crop farming, all the labor and decisions and investment come down to one number in the end.

How many bushels did you get?

If this was baseball, I hit below the Mendoza Line this year. I joked during harvest, that if that’s the best I can do at raising corn, I should quit farming.

Too. Much. Rain. There were drowned out spots interspersed with areas where the crop was stunted and short. The high ground saw the best yield. Unfortunately, we have more low ground than high ground. The small corn ears we harvested would have been cute in table arrangements. Not so much running through the combine.

Looks like I’ll be leaning on crop insurance and the farm program. I’ve criticized those in the past as bloated programs heavily subsidized by you taxpayers and overly generous to big farmers. That doesn’t mean that this little pig isn’t going to line up at the trough when the government starts shoveling it out. Call me a hypocrite. Just don’t call me late for supper.

Jealousy: Despite everything nature threw at us, there were farmers growing 70-bushel beans and 230-bushel corn.

Better tile, missed a rain, maybe some exaggeration, who knows?

Every year, someone gets better yields than me. I’m the D1 college football program that can never crack the Top 25.

I have this image of getting to Heaven. St. Peter meets me and says, “Welcome Randy. Up here in Heaven, you’re going to grow 300-bushel corn every year.” I say, “This is great. I’m going to like it here.” Then I find out, the guy next cloud over is getting 400 bushels.

Proverbs 27:4 says, “Of all the passions, jealousy is that which exacts the hardest service and pays the bitterest wages.” I need to find some other passions.

Perplexment: I’ve been doing this for most of fifty years, and I’m still surprised by stuff.

Why did this part of the field do better?

Why are those weeds growing there?

Why did the combine make that noise?

Being regularly confused by why things are happening keeps it interesting. I could farm for a thousand years and never figure it all out. It makes things challenging, and sometimes even fun.

I suspect working with people is at least as perplexing as working with plants. I wouldn’t be good at that.

Fatigue: I know. Fatigue is not an emotion. Work with me here.

On Sept. 16, I started inspecting soybean fields. That’s a part time job I have with the Minnesota Crop Improvement Association. That lasts up to my own harvesting of soybeans, which leads to corn. Then follows tillage. Each of those takes about two weeks.

This year, it never rained. Most years, a rainy day is a chance to catch my breath and rest a bit. This year it never rained. I worked every day for six weeks straight. I’m not that hardworking a person. I like hanging out, drinking coffee, and wasting time once in a while. Not working EVERY day.

Six weeks! Every day! You’re thinking, “Do you want a medal, or a chest to pit it on?” Yes.

Anger: I spend a lot of time on Highway 14 in the fall. We haul grain and move equipment. I’ve never liked being on the highway. When my great grandfather bought this place in 1896, there was considerably less traffic.

One dayl, I was hauling a load of corn to the elevator. I had to make a left turn from the curve onto a gravel road. Flashers and turn signals were all working on the tractor and the wagon. There is a bypass lane to my right that following traffic can use to get around me. The road is clearly marked for no passing.

I slowed to make my turn. There is no way it could have been more obvious what I was doing. I began the turn with my tractor when some guy decided he needed to pass on my left. I saw him just in time to jerk my steering wheel to the right, putting every other vehicle around me at risk. If I hadn’t seen him, he would have either hit the tractor or driven off the road.

The driver slowed when he realized what had happened. Then he drove away really fast, as if that would make it better. My bad thoughts followed him as far as they could.

When I was unloading at the elevator, I described that to Jay, who was unloading at the pit.

I said, I’m not a particularly violent person, but should I have driven that idiot off the road?

Jay suggested that a front-end loader on the tractor might have gotten the message across better.

A little sadness: Maybe you can’t tell from my complaining, but I do enjoy this. Working fields, growing crops, being outside are things I love. Despite my goal of farming forever, I know I’m in the later innings here, hopefully not the ninth inning.

My friend Gigi Portner is a poetry reader. Occasionally she sends me poems, handwritten in a letter. That is truly an amazing thing. You should all have such a friend.

During harvest she sent me one called Down to Earth, by James Crews. It’s about a farmer who opens his hand to the rain “seeping through layers to kiss the roots of every plant alive on this living, breathing planet on whose back we were granted permission to live for a limited time.”

It reminded me that this is all a gift. Thanks Gigi.