Don and Mel Cook were friends of mine along with Mel’s wife Marie. They’re gone now, which is true for a growing number of people I was partial to. I have baseball friends and farmer friends. The Cooks combined those passions, sort of double dip buddies.
The Cooks lived and farmed south of us in Mulligan township. They lived on the place they grew up on. When Mel married, he built a house across the yard. Mel and Marie raised their ten children there. Don, called Duke by his million friends, never married. He lived with his mother and sister Della in the original farmhouse till they passed away.
Mel and Duke raised all the usual crops and animals that one saw on the farms of the last century. In addition, they grew and sold Cook Brothers Seeds. It’s a little lighter ground that way, and my memory of Mel and Duke was that they’d always take another rain if they could get it.
As will be true for most who turn out to be last generation farmers, the Cook family had an auction. I went out there for a few hours in the morning. I wasn’t looking to buy anything, more to see the remnants of their lives gathered in the yard and on bale racks before they were disbursed to the winds.
There was a wonderful collection of old farm equipment, tools, and parts of things, some I knew what they were, some I didn’t. It was a like a popup ag museum, open one day for the curious. Mel and Duke took care of their stuff. They also kept most of it, even past it’s “use by” date. There was the grain drill, drag, rotary hoe, cultivator, and haying equipment that most farms had when I was young. In auctioneer lingo, it was shedded, with good paint and rubber.
It was the type of stuff that straddles the line between useable and being an interesting historic piece. You won’t find a four-row John Deere planter being used today to plant an eighty. Not when a 48-row planter with GPS tractor controls can plant that field in hours and run in the dark if rain is forecast.
There are still scattered farmers on the margins of agriculture who buy smaller equipment. They are mostly young people trying to fit some farming in their lives along with a fulltime job. I’m glad they’re out there, keeping the countryside interesting. I sold an old baler earlier this summer on Craigslist and was surprised how much interest there was. A 1966 International Harvester 47 baler for a small investment might fit such a low budget operation perfectly.
As I was walking around the Cook yard looking at the tools from 50 years of farming, lined up and washed for the sale, I thought about similar pieces we have on our farm in the back of various sheds and out-buildings. Like a steel-wheeled Minneapolis Moline grain drill which I used a few times when I took over from my dad. It hasn’t moved now for a couple decades. Inside the seed hopper cover are penciled in notes Sylvester made about planting dates going back to the Thirties.
The farm was only part of Mel’s and Duke’s lives. Both were heavily involved in the community around here. There were items connected to church, school, and businesses, most of which are gone. Like I said, the brothers grew up there. So, there were things from their boyhoods, games and books and sports equipment. Duke was the keeper of those, as Mel’s house of ten kids wouldn’t have had room.
The racks were full of stuff that could transport you back in time. There was a leather football helmet with a blue felt M glued to it, likely the work of Mel and Duke’s mom. Mulligan? It was in the original box! There was an Ethan Allen’s All-Star Baseball Game from 1941 without torn corners, all the player cards intact. I could picture the young Cooks playing carefully, intent on keeping the box intact.
I suspect if I wouldn’t have married, my house would have been filled with stuff from my years. As It is, I have a couple corners of the basement with my electric football and Strat-o-Matic baseball games, plus odd baseball “collectibles:” pennants, cards, bobbleheads, mini-bats. Then there’s books, too many books that I likely won’t read again.
Part of the problem is never moving, except for college and a couple early married years. I’ve never had that sorting and flushing that one needs to do when you go to a new place. Beside the basement, there are the aforementioned sheds. There are tools and farm items that even predate my father. Ours is a century farm, and I have stuff to prove it.
Last winter Pam came across the writing and videos of Marie Kondo. Marie is an “organizing consultant,” which is a career that didn’t exist when I was a kid. She is a proponent of minimizing your stuff, keeping what “sparks joy” in you. I could see Pam consuming her writings, and thought, “Oh, oh.”
I tried to make the case to Pam that it all sparked joy. She wasn’t buying it. At one point I texted to the kids, “Mom wants to get rid of all my stuff!” I was half joking. Seriously, getting older means sorting, keeping those few things that your kids might want, finding a proper home for others, and trying to minimize the mess they’ll have to clean up when you’re gone.
I’ve tried to imagine the auction here hopefully far down the road. Those old fencing and haying tools that warm my heart as I remember working with my father won’t mean much to whoever is here. But I checked with God, and He assured me I can’t take any of it with me.
A lot of routines were disrupted in March. “Disrupted” might be too mild a word. More like smashed, mangled, and buried in the back yard.
For Christians, there is nothing more routine than going to church on Sunday. I can’t remember when Mass wasn’t part of my Sunday mornings (or Saturday evenings beginning in 1970). So, when churches closed in March, it was strange indeed.
I have a confession to make. There were a few Sundays, especially during planting, when I kind of liked having a Get-Out-Of-Church-Free card. I guess that’s proof that the flesh is weak.
At St. Mary’s we began public Mass in May. At first, two of every three pews were roped off. Now every other pew is roped. I don’t envy anyone in a position of deciding how to return to what we used to know as normal. They deserve our prayers and support.
I was at 9:30 Mass last Sunday. Early on, I looked around and saw most parishioners wearing masks. I was struck with how odd that was, how I couldn’t have foreseen that in a million years. Later as I settled into the prayer that is the Mass, I started to feel a sense of connection to those masked men, women, and children. It is after all a selfless act where we accept a small discomfort to protect each other. Like everything human, it’s not perfect, but it’s beautiful in its way.
Besides Sunday Mass, I added another routine 20 years ago, I began an hour of prayer at Perpetual Adoration early Wednesday mornings. Last week I returned there for the first time since March 11. I have prayed in the interlude, in the yard, on a tractor, in bed. But returning to the Adoration Chapel felt like seeing an old friend after five months.
“Jesus! How’ve you been? Me? Oh, I’m fine. Life’s been interesting, but you know that. There’s been a lot of sadness, 700,000 dead from this virus, 700,000 stories of loss. I don’t think of this as ‘God’s plan.’ It’s nature working in its wildly complex ways. Amid this all, I know your love prevails and you desire us to love our neighbor and ourselves. I’ll keep trying.”
Months away from routines did free up time. With all manner of things being cancelled, a lot of us had extra time. I thought here was an opportunity to clean the basement and learn Spanish. Alas, I did neither. I might need a ten-year pandemic to accomplish those.
In the time away from church, our spiritual lives kept on. We are either moving closer to or further away from God every day. Our minds and bodies are not static. They’re changing every day. The same is true for our soul.
In the time I wasn’t able to go to usual church, the Church of Marriage went on meeting. Pam was off work for a while, then worked from home for a time. I was around the house, too, with events being cancelled. We got to hang around each other more than normal. I took it to be practice for getting old, when, God willing, we’ll have some retirement years together.
I can think of two major fights we had, along with several lesser skirmishes. You would think 40 years into a marriage, there wouldn’t be anything left to argue about. We don’t begin a day setting out to have disagreements, but it happens. I suspect we fight about the same old things, just dressed up in different clothes. Regardless, such spats offer a chance to practice forgiveness and atonement.
I have met couples who said they never had a fight. I’m not sure what to make of that. Some of our worst and best moments have come from fights, and I don’t think I would give those up. At the end of fight, in the reconciliation stage, that is when I recall that our vows mean that loving and supporting this person is among the most important things I will do here on Earth.
We’ve all had extra time for the Church of Self, too. The pandemic exploded into the issues around the George Floyd killing. Suddenly race, equality, and societal structures, hidden and visible, made this a uniquely challenging time. Here was an opportunity to dig deep inside and see what is in our core. Not only as an individual, but as a member of this society in this time and place.
It seems obvious now that a set of citizens of this country have been deprived of not only equal opportunity, but even their lives, as we saw in Minneapolis. Slavery, through Jim Crow laws, through thousands of subtler but effective rules and norms have given people with darker skin than me a more difficult row to hoe. That’s not fair.
One of the things I have Iearned is how generational wealth advantages some of us, mostly white people. Generational wealth that passes forward and benefits children and grandchildren can be obvious things like land and money. But it can also be education and employment paths that are passed on. When those are never allowed to accumulate in a family, each generation is starting from square one. That has repeatedly been the case for minorities.
It is easy to say “I’m not a racist. I don’t see color. Not my problem.” That is the position of certain letter writers to The Journal. Good for them. The rest of us need to be part of making this country better as soon as possible. We’re 400 years late.
Elizabeth Bruenig is a young Catholic writer I enjoy. In a recent column, she wrote about Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle’s invocation at the demonstration where Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech in 1963. The archbishop “called for the Holy Spirit to open the eyes of Christians to the injustice of racial discrimination and praised the activists who possessed the courage to go forth like Moses in search of a beautiful country.” Fifty-seven years later, we are still about that work.
Bruenig also quoted Black friend and radio host, Gloria Purvis, with this striking thought. “Racism makes a liar of God. It says not everyone is made in his image. What a horrible lie from the pit of hell.”
Amen, Gloria. A pandemic and protests are proving to be learning moments. God works in funny ways.
In 1991, I helped with an exhibit at the Brown County Historical Society. We called it, “Baseball and Brown County, A Glove Affair.” That’s a little cheesy. But I still like it.
The exhibit was a look at the sweep of baseball through the years from New Ulm to Comfrey. We identified the first known game in Brown County between the Golden Gate Groundhogs and the Iberia Shoo Flies in 1870. Those early villages were settled by Irish and English who came from the East where baseball exploded in popularity after the Civil War. They quickly passed it to their German immigrant neighbors.
For 150 years baseball has been played in pastures and town lots here. It was played in ballparks that remain today and ballfields that are memories, some forgotten. A peak in popularity came after World War II when thousands watched the semi-pro Western Minny League in New Ulm, Sleepy Eye, and Springfield.
I remember New Ulm’s Otis Loose telling me if you drove to a rise west of New Ulm on a summer night, you could see the glow from any of five ballparks with lights. It is a magical image that says better than words what baseball means here. Leavenworth and Essig have since made that seven.
“A Glove Affair” could have been Bat Affair or a Ball Affair except for the word play. I thought of that the other day when I came across my old glove. I slipped it on my left hand, careful some critter hadn’t taken up residence.
Through years of baseball and softball, I had multiple gloves. Some wore out; some were replaced by a cooler model, one got lost at the Metrodome. Every glove is unique. Quality varies. You choose that by how many dollars you spend or get your parents to spend. Age takes its toll. The number of balls smacked into the pocket, the times it gets tossed on a dugout floor or infield dirt, those give it character. Scuffs and darkened padding are to a glove like wrinkles to a face.
At times I was better or worse at caring for my leather companion. Better was oiling it after a game with a ball rubber-banded in the pocket. Worse was letting it lay out in the yard under a night rain. In the end, it’s like us; we’ve only got so many games.
It is not exaggerating to say a ball player knows their glove intimately. It’s an extension of self. Glove on, crouched slightly, ready in the field, that formed-and-stitched leather becomes your hand. The way a gifted fielder takes the ball off the ground or out of the air is beautiful to watch. You know how amazing it is by having tried hundreds of times yourself.
All sports have their tools and the tactile sensations that come from using them in practice and competition. If a game was something you played and dreamt about as a kid, those sensations are imprinted in the part of your mind where warm and comfortable memories are stored.
My son played hockey and soccer, games I didn’t know. I was around those enough to sense the attraction of working a hockey stick or kicking about a soccer ball. I could see how a boy or girl could grow up feeling deep connection with those. When we visited Spain, it was joyful to watch children maneuver and manipulate a ball with their feet, almost like a dance, everywhere there were kids and open space. There was a good chance some of those kids were Lionel Messi in their minds, the Barcelona star. Same as I was Zoilo Versailles with my glove and a ball at that age.
I learned to appreciate those games, but baseball is where my memories are pooled. It’s not just the glove. To a now or former ballplayer, it is impossible to pick up a bat and not take hold of it as if you were stepping from the on-deck circle to the batter’s box. If you’re a righthander, right hand on top, left hand feeling for the knob. I grew up with wood, so label instinctively points up. Then it’s tapping an imaginary home plate, extending the bat in front of you, before cocking it over your shoulder. Ready. C’mon pitcher.
Alone in your garage or the middle of your farmyard, you raise the bat and drive an outside pitch to the right field wall or turn sharply on a pitch in, pulling it down the line. Since it’s imagination, the ball might as well explode off your bat, making pure and perfect contact.
There are other sensations unique to positions in the field. I caught a little but can’t say putting on those pads is a comforting memory. Those were akin to putting on football pads for me, more burden than pleasant recollection. But if you spent years crouched behind home plate, you probably are fond of that chest protector.
I played some first base. To this day, if I step on a ballfield, I like to go to first base and set my heels against the bag, ready to shift right or left depending where the infielder makes the throw. Sometimes on the farm, I put my heels up against a stone or board and go right or left with an imaginary glove to take an imaginary throw from an imaginary infielder. I do these things when Pam is gone.
Then there’s the ball itself. There is nothing that fits so well in a hand. Even a non-pitcher like me fooled around enough with the pitchers to know how to hold a curveball, forkball, screwball, knuckleball. The ball rolls around in my hand and my fingers take various positions guided by the seams.
A baseball has a smell that is part of the memory flood when you pick it up, a musty, hide-like smell. I have read that our sense of smell is the strongest placeholder of memories. Baseball has plenty of those: dewy grass of a morning practice, a dugout blend of seeds and bubblegum, the dust that lingers after sliding into a base.
There is a quote by pitcher and writer Jim Bouton about holding a ball. I suspect a lot of tough old ballplayers got a clench in their throat the first time they heard it. “A ballplayer spends a good piece of his life gripping a baseball, and in the end, it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”
I tossed some pitches to my four-year old grandson last weekend. Who knows if baseball will be what he gravitates toward? Levi has a million more options than a farm kid growing up sixty years ago. We’ll put a ball in Levi’s hand. We’ll have to see if it holds on to him.
Pandemics make you do funny things. A few weeks ago, I got my old bike out of the shed where it’s been since the kids were young. After cleaning off dust and bird poop and airing up the tires, I went to circle our town’s lake trail.
I was wobbly at first. Steering and braking were challenging. As I struggled up the hill next to Allison Park, I had to make a sharp turn to get onto the trail in the park. I was lurching toward that when I heard a friendly, “Hi Randy!”
Sandy was having morning coffee with her sister Linda out on lawn chairs. I didn’t know whether to wave or turn or yell a greeting. Instead, I drove directly into the post in the center of the trail, partially biffing, causing mild bruises to my arm, leg, and ego.
I’ve gotten better since. It’s a pleasant way to spend a summer morning. I was doing that last week, pedaling on the east side where there are benches to set and look over Sleepy Eye Lake. On the ground in front of one, a young woman was sitting with her elbows back on the bench. She was staring out at the water.
I know her a little but biked on by as she looked to be purposefully alone. This is speculation, but she appeared to be unhappy. She’s about eighteen. As long as I was wildly guessing, I wondered if it had something to do with a relationship. Those tend to run hot and cold in young adults.
As I rode on, I recalled a similar setting long ago. A girl broke up with me in college, which caused me to go into a deep funk. She dumped me for a star on the basketball team which wasn’t consolation. I was depressed, unable to focus on my work or sleep well. It was darn emotions that I couldn’t control: sadness, melancholy, old-fashioned heartache.
I walked along a nearby lake early in the morning when I couldn’t sleep. I probably stopped to stare out at the water just like the young woman I biked past. There is something about water that can be meditative, calming, healing.
Years later I found out my lost girlfriend was divorced a couple times. There is a country song that goes, “Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers,” which fits here.
But, boy, did it hurt at the time. Young people feel hurt deeply. Things are intense. It’s not just pain. The lows are low, but the highs are high. Falling in love is really like nothing else you’ll ever do. Usually that is more a roller coaster than a shot straight up, emotions spilling everywhere along the way.
I think a lot of us look back at youth as a great place to visit, but we wouldn’t want to live there. As we age, wild swings of feelings settle down. Some of that is perspective. We can see more clearly that this is a moment, and moments pass. Some of it is finding such fervor exhausting.
Now from a distance I admire the intense emotions of young people. We need that that in our world. We especially need it now as our country deals with so many perplexing issues. I appreciate young people who want things to be better and don’t necessarily want to sit around and wait for it. Why can’t we eliminate racism? Why can’t we deal with global warming? Why can’t an economy run more equitably?
If any of those good things is going to happen, it’s going to take work. We absolutely need the vitality of young people. It’s easy to suggest they are unrealistic and impractical, head in the clouds, starry-eyed. We can give them a thousand reasons why change can’t happen. Or we can get out of their way.
This isn’t to say there aren’t emotions as we age. They are down there. The surface might be calmer, but the waters below churn. The joy that comes from hugging a grandkid is a full and vivid as anything can be felt.
Things change. There is one change that I don’t completely understand. I was talking to friend Greg Roiger, and we found we shared this: as we get older, we cry easier. I’ve heard that from other men, too. Tears flow that never did when we were younger.
It’s not just big events where one expects emotions to overwhelm. It can be a story we hear. It might be something we can relate to in our family or friends. Or it might be someone we don’t know at all having to deal with tragedy. It doesn’t have to be sad. Remember those videos of a mom or dad soldier surprising their child at school after being gone for months? Tears, guaranteed.
The first time I saw my dad cry he was about the age I am now. My younger brother Dean died of an illness early on a May morning. A few hours later we were outside doing farm tasks. My father was telling me something, and suddenly, he couldn’t. I wasn’t sure what to say. That was okay. It was one of those times where saying nothing was about right.
I was eighteen and didn’t cry that day. A few years ago, I wrote about Dean. Over the keyboard I felt my throat tightening and eyes moistening as I recalled his battles with blindness and a brain tumor. He won the first, but not the second.
A few years ago, I was asked to speak at a regional meeting of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in Sleepy Eye. I was honored to do that. I talked about small town life and raising kids, things that I thought the group could relate to. Near the end I planned to read part of a column I’d written about children leaving home. It was a bit of an older group, and I thought that was something most of them had experienced.
The story was about the day daughter Abby left for Seattle and her first job after college. She was driving and so literally went out the driveway and turned west. As I got part way through reading that, I felt myself choking up. I had to stop a few times to compose myself to go on.
Here’s one paragraph. “The day after Abby got to Seattle, I was in church. I watched a couple pews over as a little girl climbed up onto her dad’s lap. Then the girl leaned against his chest. Wanting just to be close to her father. That was Abby on my lap just a few years ago. It was a few years to me. It was a lifetime for Abby.”
Geez, I have a hard time typing that now. I was embarrassed by my struggle to get through. Afterwards a couple women told me it was okay. I was still embarrassed but thanked them.
At the beginning of the growing season, farmers talk about getting out in the fields and “scratching around in the dirt.” We anticipate that all winter. The dirt is our paint brush, the seed is our paint. Or something like that.
Dirt, soil, earth, ground are all words we use for that stuff we look forward to digging around in.
Residents of cities are surrounded by lots of pavement. Out here, the dirt-to-pavement ratio is high. Besides farmers getting to know their dirt, most everyone grows a garden or bed of flowers. Spring is the season of planting for farmers and townies alike. Getting our hands “dirty” feels good after months when the ground is frozen.
Farmers think in terms of acres and fields. Town folks have a yard and a garden. Regardless whether you’re planting corn or petunias, there are things we share: working with whatever the weather gives us that day, satisfaction or frustration when things do or don’t grow as planned, that cheery feeling when sprouts come up.
You probably heard that farmers had a wonderful planting season this year. I told Pam it almost felt like cheating. Temperatures, sun, and wind all conspired to aid us in getting our seeds in the ground in near perfect conditions. That we would be granted this during otherwise troubled times was a blessing.
I put the planter in the shed on May 4. Last year that was June 8. When the fields were planted, I turned my attention to our garden. It was hard to find tomato plants. Others were taking advantage of the fine weather in this Spring of the Quarantine. When I finally located some tomato plants, I put in eight. You know, just in case seven die.
Now it’s entirely possible this perfect spring leads to an oversupply of corn, soybeans, and tomatoes. I can eat my way through the excess tomatoes. Corn and soybeans are more problematic. The thing about the busyness of spring is that farmers don’t think about burdensome supplies and prices that are below the cost-of-production. Maybe we should. But that’s a topic for another day.
April 22 was the first day we planted corn. I was already feeling quite buoyant when I heard on the radio that was Earth Day. Perfect! Earth Day doesn’t get a lot of attention. It’s like Arbor Day, one of those holidays that kids in school recognize with some activity out on the playground. Maybe they plant a tree, which is always a hopeful thing.
This spring we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day. Big E, Earth the third planet from the sun, is the home we all share. Little e, earth is the surface of that planet, the ground I was planting into.
I remember the first Earth Day. In 1970 the environment was large news. It blends with Vietnam and civil rights in my memory of a volatile time. Some extreme examples of harm caused by humans were getting attention: factory sludge piped directly into rivers, smog blanketing cities, species disappearing. When the Cuyahoga River flowing through Cleveland lit on fire, that was a symbolic tipping point that cried out for change.
Some improvements have been made since. They are ones where you wonder, “What were we thinking?” The work is not done. Having seven billion human beings inhabit a planet is a great experiment we are taking part in. If we get it wrong, our posterity will suffer. Posterity is a fancy word for our grandkids. There is no Plan B. In science fiction, our species can flee to some distant planet. Alas, we shouldn’t count on that.
A microscopic virus reminds us that in the end nature will have her say. We like to think we’re in control. We all want to be in control at our job or in our house. But we’re ultimately dependent on air to breathe, water to drink, and soil to grow food. Air, water, and soil are things that we don’t “control.” They are the Earth’s. We share them.
We are always limited in our vision to what is in front of us. We see to the horizon. It takes imagination to “see” what is beyond the curve of the Earth. It takes foresight to “see” into the future. If we are only concerned about what is best for us here and today, our species is in trouble.
I grow corn and soybeans. I love growing corn and soybeans. There is nothing I like more than an even, weed-free field. At the same time, I know that growing those crops comes with environmental costs. My carbon footprint is large. Water that drains through tile causes problems downstream. Chemicals I use are far from natural.
There are things I do now that are better than when I started farming with tillage, fertility, and weed control. At the same time, there are things worse than when my dad had more diverse crops and livestock here.
Farmers hopefully are open to new ideas. There might be better ways to grow corn and soybeans for the environment, and there might be different crops that fit in the future. We shouldn’t be afraid of environmentalists looking at what we do. We should welcome discussion and even criticism. We learn that way.
We shouldn’t be afraid of regulations. In some quarters that is an unpopular thing to say. There are people who will tell you we are overburdened by regulations written by zealot environmentalists. But I can say that in forty years of doing this, I have never had a single time when some regulation kept me from doing what I wanted.
The notion that regulations are inherently bad is crazy. Just because I “own” these acres, doesn’t mean I get to do whatever I want. I don’t own the air above and the water that flows through. I share these with seven billion others.
Certainly, farmers should be involved in creating rules and standards for agriculture. I belong to several farm organizations to do just that. In my experience of talking with consumers of food (which is everybody) farmers are respected and welcome at the table where these things are discussed.
Of course, farmers are going to be on different sides of issues in some cases. But most of us want to do right by the Earth. We understand generations will follow us. We don’t want to leave a mess.
I wrote that we are limited to what we can see. But we are the first generation to see amazing pictures from space of this planet. Astronauts report how beautiful and yet vulnerable it looks from up there. It’s a great planet. Happy belated Earth Day.
by Dean Brinkman
On June 16th, my good buddy Randy texted to our Baseball Texting Group, “Brian Piccolo died 50 years ago today.” Brian died of testicular cancer in 1970 at the age of 26.
You may recall crying to a made-for-TV movie titled Brian’s Song. I can remember burying myself out of view, hidden by the couch on the TV room floor so that mom and dad couldn’t see me “crying my eyes out”. I’m pretty sure they heard the sniffles.
It has been said that Brian’s Song is “the movie that makes grown men cry.” Also, “the first time that kids saw their fathers cry”. I couldn’t see if my dad was crying because I couldn’t see through my own tears.
Brian Piccolo and Gayle Sayers were rookie running backs with the Chicago Bears in 1965. In the beginning they experienced many endeavors. One was always joking, while the other was shy and quiet. One was blessed with God given talent and the other worked for every yard he gained. One was raised in the deep south, the other in the Midwest. One is black, the other white. They were the first interracial roommates in the NFL.
Their story was told by Sayers in one of the greatest sports books of all time, I Am Third. “The Lord is first, my friends are second, and I am third.” The book became the basis for the movie Brian’s Song.
If you didn’t see that, the beautiful, haunting instrumental theme song charted for weeks on the Billboard’s Top 100 in 1972.
My neighbors across the alley back then were like a third set of grandparents, Karl and Eileen Doeltz. Their son, Chuck, lived in the “big city” of Minneapolis. He was a handsome bachelor, gifted pianist, and scratch golfer who worked at Honeywell. I thought of him as the male version of Mary Tyler Moore’s Minneapolis TV character. Chuck, in my opinion, had “made it after all”.
Chuck was in the Big Brother program. With a huge heart, he befriended a ten-year old inner-city boy named John Simpson. John didn’t have a father at home. Chuck and John did many things together through their brotherhood over the years.
One day, Mrs. Doeltz came over to ask if I would be John’s friend and play with him as Chuck was bringing him to Sleepy Eye for a few days. Growing up on a block with no kids I was excited to have a new friend. Especially one from Minneapolis!
From little on, I never saw color. I saw humans. My sports idols were seldom white. My favorite comedian was Flip Wilson. My musical tastes rooted themselves in R & B.
John Simpson was my first black friend. I felt so cool! Our friendship was so cool. We laughed and joked about many things. Even the color of our skin. He introduced me to his favorite group Sly and The Family Stone. I remember him seeing cows for the first time. I tried to soak in everything about my new friend who lived in the big city.
We played a lot of football in the yard. We were the kid versions of Piccolo and Sayers, polar opposites who became friends.
Once I told John that, “I wish I was black.” He was so cool and said that I should be proud of how God made me. Keep in mind we were about 10 years old.
Chuck brought John to Sleepy Eye several times during their Big Brotherhood. One Saturday, I was proud to take John to the matinee movie at the Pix Theater downtown. Back then the lines for many of the kid’s movies wrapped around the block and all the way to the meat market. This was one of those days. The theater was packed. I was behind John as we walked to get to the few remaining seats way down in the front rows. Of course, there were looks but I felt like a celebrity with my new cool friend.
And then it happened. I started to realize that many, what felt like all, were glaring at my buddy. A boy I knew pointed at John and yelled. “Hey, look there’s a n——!” Then the boy started laughing and so did some others. John turned, stared, and tensed up like a cougar ready to pounce. I grabbed him and told him not to worry about that jerk.
I felt horrible for John. I thought kids from Sleepy Eye, all of us, were cooler than that. I expected “us” to be better. I don’t remember anything about the movie that day as that event ruined it. Imagine how John felt!
You know what? I can’t. It’s not possible for ME to know what HE felt like. The recent events in our world have continued to repeat this nasty cycle by volume and tragedy. I think back to how bad I felt that day, but truly how bad I felt for John. All of this has only magnified in our world. And I thought we were better than that. I expected the “U.S.A.” to be better than that.
My wife Sandy and I met with John years later when I lived in Bloomington. We talked about that event. It was one experience for me. I shudder to think of how many times this happened to him.
Brian’s Song aired on November 30th 1971. After watching it, my eight-year old self took out my 1968 Topps football cards of “Pic” and the “Kansas Comet”. I wanted Piccolo and Sayers to be together again. I framed them and hung them on my bedroom wall. For years they remained there, a reminder of true friendship and brotherhood.
I met John Simpson the next year.
No matter who your Creator is, the Creator made us all.
Gayle Sayers delivered a speech on May 25th 1970 at an awards banquet honoring him as the most courageous player in the NFL. This was days before Brian Piccolo died. Sayers said this: “You flatter me with this award, but I tell you here and now I accept it for Brian Piccolo. Brian Piccolo is the man of courage who should receive the George S. Halas award. It is mine tonight, it is Brian Piccolo’s tomorrow. I love Brian Piccolo. And I’d like all of you to love him, too. And tonight, when you hit your knees, ask God to love him.” Then Gayle walked away from the podium in respectful silence, not a dry eye in the room.
Brian Piccolo and Gayle Sayers were opposites in many ways. Their brotherhood was a perfect example of how opposites can attract.
Reflecting back to 48 years ago, John Simpson did not say, “I wish I was white.” At ten-years old, he knew he was glad the Creator made him who he was. Our friendship is hauntingly beautiful to me, just like Brian’s Song.
I want you to love John Simpson. And when you hit your knees tonight, ask God to help you love him.
Abby at the United Nations Office in Geneva, Switzerland
I had a little schtick when our children were young where I “whispered” loud enough for all to hear that each was my favorite. Anna, “You’re my favorite kid cause you’re our first.” Abby, “You’re my favorite kid cause you’re our little girl.” Ezra, “You’re my favorite kid cause you’re our boy.” They knew I was being silly. I was good at that.
Black poet Clint Smith was talking about parenting. He said his mom used to say her children were pieces of her heart walking around. Davis thought she was being overly dramatic. Till he had his own.
I love my three, and no, I don’t have a favorite. These pieces of my heart are scattered, Anna in Rochester, Abby in Paris, and Ezra near Portland, OR. Like all you parents, I could brag on any of them at length over a beer. Probably a pitcher. Anna was an RN at the Mayo, now going to school to be a Nurse Anesthetist. Ezra finished a six-year term in the National Guard.
Here I want to give attention to middle kid. Abby is likely the only graduate of Sleepy Eye St. Mary’s. the University of Minnesota, the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals, and Sciences Po in Paris. She is on a unique journey for a Brown County farm kid.
To the beginning. Abigail was born to us October 1991. She came during our worst harvest: mud, poor crops, breakdowns. Then I broke my arm, so was forced to hold my new baby with a cast.
Abigail came to us with eyes wide open. I can picture her staring around intently. She was quiet, taking everything in. She didn’t talk a lot early on. That would change as Abby found her voice.
It’s interesting that children come to us with a sense of fairness. Some of that is passed socially, but it seems to be in their soul at birth. “That’s not fair!” This preternatural sense of right and wrong is an argument for the existence of a Creator.
Fairness became an intense interest for our little Abby. On the farm, that meant trying to save any bunny or bird that had been unfairly orphaned or injured. Every kitten deserved a fair shake, and that meant personal care if needed.
That shifted to humans when Abby went to school. From the early grades, she was standing up to anyone she perceived as bullying another. A couple times Pam and I cringed as she told about pushing back verbally, sometimes physically, against a playground wrongdoer. More than once we expected a phone call from another parent.
Into high school, Abby continued to stand for causes extending from the halls of St. Mary’s to the halls of Congress. Sometimes that meant Abby was on opposite sides of an issue with her teacher. No one was lukewarm toward Abby. People really liked her, or they found her annoying. She was okay with that as long as she thought she was doing the right thing.
Abby was a good student in addition to her crusades. She took Spanish in high school with Gail Bromenshenkel. That would prove to alter her path significantly. Spanish became more than schoolwork when she went to San Lucas, Guatemala with a group from the New Ulm Diocese and found herself translating.
There was also an exchange of students that Gail arranged where a handful of students got to live the life of a small-town kid in Mexico and vice versa. The Sleepy Eye natives made quick friends with locals from Silacayoapam, a village in southern Mexico. Maybe too quickly. I remember Abby telling us they were offered tequila and cigarettes their first night there.
Later she spent a college summer in Toledo, Spain, again making friends with locals. There’s been a Spanish boyfriend, too. Spanish grew from a textbook to something organic in her. Abby and I were at Meyer’s Bar once, visiting with some Hispanic men. The conversation raced in Spanish, with me plodding along in English. One of them told me I should be proud of my daughter, that Spanish sounded like her first language. As a guy barely hanging to my school German, I was.
After high school, Abby went to the University of Minnesota. She took to city life vigorously; I could see this one wasn’t coming back to the farm. She graduated early with degrees in Criminology and Spanish.
When she was young, Abby thought of going into criminal work. She was a big fan of the TV show NCIS. (Her other favorite was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If there were a career in slaying vampires, that would have been her first choice.) While at the U, she volunteered with the Center for Homicide Research working with the FBI and did ride-alongs with police. She also had an internship at the Minnesota Supreme Court.
Somewhere along the way, her interest shifted from chasing bad guys to helping good guys. In the Cities she volunteered with social agencies using her Spanish. Abby’s first job out of college was in Seattle as a legal advocate for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. She also helped Spanish speaking immigrants in the King County court system. Next was a move to San Jose where she worked as a Dependency Drug Court Manager for the Superior Court of California.
A constant through these was working with victims, the poor, people without power. Pam and I could see a connection between her work and the little girl on the playground standing up for the weaker kid.
Graduate school had been in her mind, and she considered doing that overseas. The election of a certain president in 2016 nudged her that way. She applied to prominent schools in Europe. These are difficult to get into, but Abby had a solid resume by then.
When she began receiving acceptance letters, it was a difficult decision. The Institut Barcelona was attractive as she had friends in Spain. After deciding on that, she learned that Sciences Po in Paris had accepted her. That is no small feat. It is the second ranked school in the world for international studies behind Harvard and lists a number of world leaders as alumni.
Abby’s been a good negotiator for getting her way since she was two. She asked Sciences Po if they would take her a year later, and they agreed. So, after getting a degree in International Relations at d’Estudis Internacionals, she headed to Paris in 2018.
A degree in Human Rights at Sciences Po requires an internship. Last fall Abby lived in Geneva working in the United Nations Human Rights Office. They liked her work enough that this spring semester back in Paris, she continued to work with the United Nations, virtually with a team in Venezuela. Some of her co-workers were taken with Abby’s place of origin; in informal communications she was known as the “runaway princess of Sleepy Eye.”
Graduation for Sciences Po was scheduled for June 27. Pam and I planned to go, but it was cancelled. That bothered Abby’s dad more than Abby. She had her mind focused on a job. She called excitedly a couple weeks ago to say that she had been accepted for a fulltime position, again with the United Nations. She will be moving to Guatemala City to work for the UN Office of Human Rights there.
On Abby’s career path, this is a good step. She told us that if you’re going to work for an international organization, you need to spend time in the “field” to be respected. The “field” typically means someplace that is not particularly comfortable and maybe not all that safe.
When friends ask what our daughter is up to, I joke that “Abby is trying to save the world.” I’m kidding, but only a little. A lot of us lately have been impressed with a younger generation that wants to make this planet a fairer place. I’ll put Abby in that group.
I’m writing this on Monday morning. The column I was working on will be tossed on a pile of half-done things. Like everyone else in Minnesota I’m feeling anxious and shook up. If you’re not, maybe you were on a weeklong hike in the Northwoods without a radio or your phone. If so, we’re jealous.
When you layer a police-killing and protests morphing into riots on top of the strange world of the pandemic we’ve all been living in, it is a lot to hold in your head. I feel compelled to write, knowing full well and with humility that I do not have much to offer being safely ensconced here on our farm place, far from everything.
But to not write is to pretend that the Earth is not convulsing around me. Writing about the planting season would be like a tree just fell on our house and I write about how great the view is.
If you are my age or older, you have a comparable time to go back to in memory, although there is not much comfort in that. The late Sixties when I was coming of age were all of this and more.
The United States was sending thousands of young men to a distant jungle to fight for something vague compared to what their fathers fought for in World War II. Civil rights were finally being addressed a century after slavery ended, only to be replaced by discrimination in every level of society. A notion of women’s rights began drawing attention. Environmental concerns grew from a small group crying out in the desert to alarm bells going off.
Sometime back then I read this from the British poet W. B. Yeats. It is from the poem “The Second Coming” that Yeats wrote in 1919 in response to the World War that ravaged Europe. It fit in 1969 and perhaps now:
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
As a teenager, I found myself taking sides, drawn to the side of equality and fairness as I perceived them. This was colored by Christian faith and what I thought a better and holier world should look like.
I was young on the same farm place where I observe the world from today. I watched the adults around me try to understand the craziness going on in distant places. I remember tension and conversations that turned into yelling matches where people were talking at and around each other and no one was listening.
Fifty years later, and people are talking at and around each other and no one is listening.
I wrote a while ago about the legacy of my generation and what we are leaving our children and grandchildren. I had concerns then about the world we are gifting them. Right now, those concerns have exploded into full blown despair and sadness. That is rare for me. I know there will be a day when protests have ended and the pandemic is a weird memory, and I will rejoice in a beautiful sunset. But not today.
You can pick your own favorite source of angst and gloom. There are plenty to go around. I’m going to choose this: we have all gathered into camps without any positive interaction with the other side. No matter the topic from the most serious to the most harmless, we are one side or the other, absolutely, thoroughly, and completely. You are either “with me or agin’ me.” Red, blue, right, left, friend, enemy.
I’ve always enjoyed a spirited discussion on an issue of the day with someone on the other side. I’ve thought those could be valuable, productive, and even fun. On a personal level, Pam and I have had to talk through a million different things as we’ve steered a home and a marriage. Many of those began with us on opposite sides. I’ve held in my mind the belief that two reasonable people of good will should be able to come to a conclusion, often a compromise, that is best for all.
I’m not sure anymore.
A virus attacked our species, and for a while it looked like we could unite around something that is a threat to every country on Earth. There were even places where fighting stopped between entrenched enemies. “We’re all in this together” seemed to mean we were all in this together.
Till we weren’t. The virus quickly became politicized. Like everything else. Now you are a mask wearer, or proudly not. You are for a cautious opening-up, or “Restore my rights!” The hope that we could deal with this reasonably and effectively while caring about each other’s well-being has faded.
Turns out a pandemic was easy compared to the George Floyd killing and its aftermath. Every fault line that existed in America become a seismic quake in a few days. Here are the same issues of race that had people marching in the streets fifty years ago. Perhaps you are one who thinks racism is overblown and problems in minority communities are ones “they” should deal with. I suppose that is comforting since it asks nothing of you.
I don’t have much to do with social media outside of texting friends. But now and then I see things that people say about other human beings. Sometimes when I do, I want to close my eyes and pretend I didn’t see that. Writers and thinkers for centuries have tried to understand “man’s inhumanity to man.” Now you can go on any comment thread online and find examples of well-honed hate.
While I have been writing this, our president insulted and mocked some people. That’s pretty much a daily occurrence. As you’ve probably discerned, I am not a fan of his and think he has unleashed some awful streams of malevolence from the highest branches of America. But it would be too easy for me to blame him and move on.
Going back to that world we are leaving our children, it will not do any good to mope and feel depressed and overwhelmed like I do today. I’ll wallow in this a while, but then I need to get to work doing something, anything to make this a better place. We all do.
Alan Paton was a white South African writer who from his Christianity found it right to oppose apartheid. Paton had days of despair, but he wrote this: “There is only one way in which one can endure man’s inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one’s own life, to exemplify man’s humanity to man.”
It was a turn I’ve made a million times, coming home from town, left into the driveway. A bright sun was low in the west. I could make out the light of an oncoming motorcycle. I could have rushed to turn but came to a stop with my blinker on.
Often in that situation I look in the rearview mirror, but not this time. All of a sudden, and I mean a sudden, I felt a tremendous bang. A driver had not seen my car till too late and rear-ended it. They hit more the right side of my car causing it to spin around, ending up in the opposite lane. There was not a car following the motorcycle, or that might have been the end of me.
It was a sharp reminder of my mortality. This came during a pandemic when we regularly receive such reminders. Those are easier to ignore than being struck at a high speed.
A few nights after the accident, it began to replay in my mind as I lay in bed. As I said, I was not looking back, so it was a surprise. Could there be a bigger surprise? Perhaps I benefitted from not being tensed.
Here is what’s in my memory. I recall the impact, but then nothing for a split second. It might be a thousandth of that second that is blank, probably knocked briefly unconscious. My memory returns as the car and I are spinning, my body pressed up against the seat like an astronaut in takeoff. The swirling around is vivid.
When the car came to standstill, I made a quick assessment of my condition. My parts all seemed to be in place. By then I guessed what happened. I was able to get out of the car, my door being the only one not crunched. Scott Juni, the motorcycle driver who thankfully just cleared ahead of the collision, stopped and was running toward me. He called 911, and together we turned our attention to the other driver. Soon police and ambulances arrived.
That scene keeps playing in my head, staccato-like: waiting, bang, nothing, spinning, stop, out, yelling to Scott, running, ambulance, lie down, ride to hospital. There’s lots of adrenaline.
One tiny bit of the drama grew in my thoughts in the dark. It was that piece of a second when there is nothing, right after the collision. It’s a blank. As I dwelled on it, it became a dark void, a mental black hole.
Then one night this came to me. What if there had been another vehicle that hit me as I spun, and I died there on Highway 14? And what if dying was like that dark nothing I experienced on impact? I wouldn’t say that haunted me, but it wouldn’t go away. It didn’t really scare me. If there is nothing on the other side, it wouldn’t be painful or sorrowful. It’d just be nothing.
You see where the problem lies. If death is an empty, blank ending, then what about heaven? And if there is no heaven, what about a soul? And if there is no soul, what about God? Everything I believe begins to fall like dominoes. These things come to you in the dark after an accident.
The thought forced me to face doubt square on. It is not the first time I entered the land of doubt and walked around there. I am a believer and a Christian. But doubt always hovers near, like something moving just off the corner of my vision.
Belief in a Creator has been a core belief as long as I remember. It is central to my being. It was first put there by my mom in little prayers and songs. My larger family, my church community, my teachers all built on the foundation.
I can’t see or touch God. Or hear or smell or taste. We know this world through our senses. This is not without pain. I watched my young children bang their head on a table or taste something sour. At some point we figure out that all tables hurt, and all lemons make us pucker. We learn pillows are soft and candy tastes sweet. Gradually we know the world this way.
But God and heaven? Here is faith. As a matter of fact, there is only faith. It is faith of our mothers and fathers and countless generations. We can strive for “perfect” faith. But we are imperfect human beings. Doubt is part of that. Not just in spiritual matters. Each spring I wonder if the seed I put in the ground will grow.
There is a scene in the movie “Prancer” (an odd favorite of mine) where eight-year old Jessica is angry at her best friend Carol. Carol is not sure there is a Santa Claus. Worse, she is not sure about heaven. Jessica’s mother has died, and if there is no heaven, then what about her mom? “Alright for you, Carol Wetherby! You’re not my friend anymore!”
I’m like Jessica. I take comfort that my mom and dad and others who’ve gone before me are in a “better place.” I long ago quit trying to describe that place to myself. God will show me when the time comes. I joke with friends about playing baseball in heaven, but I know that is fanciful. Will we have connection with people who were dear to us on Earth? I hope so.
I suppose my doubts are like those of Thomas, who wouldn’t believe Jesus had risen until he put his finger in Jesus’ nail holes. When Thomas does encounter the risen Lord, Jesus tells him, “Blessed are those who have not seen and who believe.” I want to be like the disciples who believed sight unseen, who believed without their senses proving it.
But that blank moment in my accident hangs around in my conscience. I want to believe. I know that grain of doubt sifting around in my head is part of being human. Until whatever day my end comes, I look for signs that might give clues. Here’s one I remember.
My brother Dean who was blind, built an impressive martin house in shop class during his last year at Braille School in Faribault. We put that up, but no martins appeared for the two years he came back to school in town here. During that time, he was dying of a brain tumor. He died around this time of year. When we came home from the funeral, some family members began shouting. And there they were, martins darting about, in and out of Dean’s house.
A sign from heaven? I can’t know that. It was a beautiful moment, regardless.
Gwen Ruff is filling in for her brother in law Randy Krzmarzick this week. Gwen lives in Gibbon.
Like many organizations, the school district I work for participates in an employee wellness program. We can qualify for money that can be put into a health savings account by reporting basic health measurements–blood pressure, cholesterol levels, body mass index, etc.– just the numbers you don’t want to think about after a month and a half staying inside your house and snacking. We also have to complete a prescribed number of activities throughout the school year. We’ve had group hikes, after school yoga, pickleball games, sessions on cooking healthy meals complete with taste testing and craft-making classes meant to decrease stress and increase creativity. December typically has been reserved for a month-long calendar of physical and mental activities–like going without electronics for one day–to combat the accumulated calories and tension of the holiday season.
Our last activity of this unusual school year seems especially appropriate. It’s May Meditation. For some of us, we’re staying busy with new tasks, chores or hobbies. We’ve gotten a lot of closets, junk drawers and cupboards cleaned out and perfected recipes for chocolate chip cookies or freezer jam. Parents have brushed up on third-grade math skills. Judging by the empty fabric shelves at Walmart, a lot of people are sewing face masks. My neighbor across the alley says she’s gotten more outdoor projects than ever done this spring. More kids are playing outside and riding their bikes around Gibbon than usual.
Some people I know have been even more busy taking care of grandkids while sons and daughters do essential jobs or deal with changing work schedules.Several women I work with said their kids are extra busy because now that they’re doing high school and college classes from home, they’re also around to help on the farm.
I’ve been making up a list of chores to get done every week, so in a lot of ways I’m doing more than when I go to school, come home and make dinner as my one accomplishment after a day subbing for the phy. ed. teacher. So, the May Meditation calendar got me thinking how you can keep yourself even busier during this stay-at-home period and not take the time to really think about what’s been happening and what we want to make important in our lives.
Take cleaning out those cupboards. One day, the calendar suggests “mindfully” organizing a cupboard or a drawer. I reorganized a kitchen cupboard because it looked messy, but now I’m going to go back and decide whether I really need all those neatly lined up mismatched coffee mugs. Just the “Best Gramma Ever” and the Star Wars movie poster set will do.
Later this week, a calendar entry is especially appropriate. “Everything changes. This is both beautiful and tragic. Set aside some time to celebrate the gifts and grieve the losses.” Most of us have witnessed or performed acts of kindness in the last month and a half or marveled at the creativity of people learning to do things in a new way. All of us have lost something–whether it’s a milestone birthday party, high school graduation ceremonies, canceled summer musicals or the first snuggle with a newborn grandchild.
Later in the month, the task is to “do a chore you normally dislike with extra love and attention.” My first thought was cleaning the litter box, but I might switch to dog bathing because they’ll be more appreciative than the cat.
“Do something different today. Notice what this brings up for you.” This might be tricky because all our lives are pretty different right now. If the point of May Meditation is to be mindful of what you do, think and feel, I’ll have to come up with something. Maybe instead of standing at the kitchen sink staring out at the empty garden beds while eating a toaster waffle for dinner, I’ll set a place at the dining room table using my good china. Feeling weird and self-conscious–Can my next-door neighbor see inside my dining room?–should give way to memories of great family holidays at the same table.
“Be kind to someone that you find challenging in your life.” I don’t know any Stillwater, Oklahoma residents who abused store workers because they didn’t want to shop wearing masks or gun-toting misogynistic anti-stay at home protesters in Michigan, but I’d have to stick daisies in their gun barrels, I guess.
May 21’s task will be easy. “Reach out to someone in your life that you are grateful for and tell them why.” Every family member on our lengthy and hilarious text chain will get a special message along with my latest Bitmoji avatar depicting a wonky grown-out haircut, sweatpants, slippers and the same cardigan I’ve been wearing for six weeks.
Then there’s this calendar prompt: “Name three things that you have gained growing older. Take time to celebrate.” What a great thing to ponder. Growing older does give you a different perspective. My IRA has tanked before. Can you say dot-com bubble? What about the Great Recession? But it’s always eeked back up, and I’m confident it will again when our pent-up demand for decent haircuts and below-the-waist clothing gets the economy flowing. My only grandson was born and lived in Ohio for a couple years, so not seeing him for so long has been hard, but I can’t wait to see his face light up when I finally visit. I might not be as optimistic if I weren’t “older.”
There have been a zillion news stories, Facebook posts and text messages about Americans having a chance to slow down, to bake bread and cook real meals, to play games with their kids. And just as many funny memes about being over it all. There also has been much speculation about what life will be like once this is over. How we get through daily life out in the world again will change, but I hope a lot of the good things will remain.
So, maybe take time to do your own May Meditation. Jot down things you’re appreciating and finding important on the calendar that hangs on your refrigerator. Before you throw it away in December, flip back to May. Write a little note about how you’re feeling May 6, 2020 on the back of your daily tear-off calendar. Stick it under everything in your junk drawer to find the next time you clean it out. If the memory isn’t so great, congratulate yourself for making it through and offer kindness to someone not so fortunate. If the message was more hopeful, remind yourself of the good things you found in yourself, your family and your neighbors and keep them going.
