The cross is the enduring symbol of Christianity. An open tomb might more accurately represent our faith, since the resurrection was Jesus’ triumph and our salvation. But an open tomb would be difficult to put atop a steeple or wear around your neck.
This time of year, the nativity scene becomes a cherished symbol. Tradition has it that St. Francis created a reenactment of Christmas night after a visit to the Holy Land. He hoped to inspire his followers to worship. I would say he had a good idea there, as it continues to touch us 800 years later.
There are all sorts of manger scenes. There are simple sets, three figures, Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus. They range all the way to elaborate sets with shepherds, kings, angels, and animals surrounding the Holy Family. Liberties are taken with the story, such as when the stable is surrounded by snow-laden evergreen trees that never grew in Palestine, not even 2,000 years ago.
When our kids were young, putting up the manger scene was a highlight of Advent. Children clearly enjoy the story of the birth of Jesus. A baby, comforting parents, angels, animals, all of this under a bright star: there are so many things for a child to be drawn to.
We had several different sets. My artistically inclined wife was partial to small, lovely sculpted scenes. Those fit on a shelf or an end table, subtle in their presence. You came across them almost by accident as you moved about the house, a gentle reminder of our dear Savior’s birth.
Then came the Fontanini era in our house. Fontanini is an Italian company known for realistic religious statuary. They’ve been in the business since 1908, creating and selling figures of saints and biblical characters. They are most known for their nativity sets. I suspect they make their profits on families that become mildly addicted to their products.
For about a decade, our Fontanini manger scene kept expanding. Especially Abby loved to play with what became Bethlehem World. She and Pam added people and animals and scenery to our Fontanini set every year, till the Baby Jesus was at the center of an entire corner of our living room.
When little brother Ezra and Abby hit playing-together-age, exciting dramas played out around the manger scene for weeks around Christmas. Many of these adventure stories do not appear in the Gospels, unless you read between the lines or have the imagination of a seven-year old.
Around this time, Abby was a big fan and collector of Pokémon creatures. At some point, the boundary between the Pokémon regions and the City of David blurred. Pikachu, Squirtle, and Mewtwo could regularly be found in and around the stable. The shepherds had to make room for these odd characters. The bright new visitors added color to the brown and gray hued Fontanini figures.
It was harmless fun. I made sure that Jesus was in the manger at the end of the day and that Mary and Joseph returned from whatever adventure they had been on. I’d set Charmander and the rest of the Pokémon gang back a way.
On the topic of the Nativity, I am looking forward to seeing my four-year old grandson Levi in a living Nativity at his church in Rochester this weekend. He has been cast in the role of a sheep. Or a cow. I’m not sure. Either way, I fully expect I will be impressed by his acting skills.
In my own youth, I never moved beyond being a member of the angelic host in Christmas programs. The one time I did get a major part, I was a “boy” of 35.
Abby was born in October of 1991. Back then, Trinity Lutheran Church in Sleepy Eye each year would ask one of their parish families with a baby to portray the Holy Family at Christmas Eve service. Lutherans were not especially fertile in 1991; there were no parish babies. We had (still have) friends at Trinity Lutheran, and some of them asked if we would take that role.
It was a neat honor. I was pleased to be part of some local ecumenism as our little Catholic family shared the beautiful service with our Lutheran friends.
I don’t remember a lot of details now. I remember putting on our costumes. I was chunkier back then, so “free flowing robe” was a good look for me. I think I was in brown and Pam/Mary in blue. Two-month-old Abby was in swaddling cloth, of course. Daughter Anna was ten that year, and it made sense for her to be an angel to complement our manger scene.
When we took our spots in front of the church, I did my best to look reverent and pious. I thought Pam was beautiful, comely, her face framed in cloth. Abby was very good in her role, a mostly sleeping Jesus. Anna the angel was darling as she blessed our scene from the step above.
There were hymns and some readings. It wasn’t terribly long for adults. But it became long for a ten-year-old. Anna started to slump and move from foot to foot. As unlikely as it would have been at the first Christmas night, our angel began to look bored.
Here Joseph began to whisper under his breath, “Anna, stand still!” “Anna, straighten up!” I hoped the worshippers in the front pews didn’t hear me. In typical father-fashion, it probably looked worse to me than others. Some years later, I still tease Anna about that, and she still rolls her eyes at me. We got through it, and it remains one of my favorite Christmas memories.
Whatever form the manger scene takes, living or statuary, it draws us back to that unlikely night, in the hills of Judea. What happened that night changed everything. We’ll never fully comprehend it. In front of the crib, we are children again. Christmas is the beginning of the story that will lead to Calvary and the cross. There will be rejection and suffering along the way, and ultimately redemption. But Christmas night, at the manger, it is simple joy.
Why would we have expected anything else? After a miserable spring, we had a miserable fall. Late planted crops matured late, no surprise. The bad days it rained or snowed. The good days were cold and cloudy. It wasn’t much fun.
There were few of those sun-dappled autumn days where it is a joy to be outside, with a jacket in the morning that comes off in the afternoon. We had maybe a couple hours like that. In the end, we had time to get things done, barely, finishing in mud.
There were weeks of below normal temperatures. When we finally got a few days of normal, it was mid-November when normal isn’t exactly shorts-weather. I was hopeful to have a chance to put the farm to bed properly before winter. There is always work at the end of harvest to clean, grease, oil, fix, and shed. I try to be nice to my machines after beating the hell out of them.
Things have a way of working a lot better next year if they are properly stored away. Tired and beat up myself, there is always the temptation to back things in the shed and go have a beer. In the old days, we would have been told not to put up our horse wet. Equipment is like that. Especially the combine. If it’s not cleaned, rodents from several sections around come to take up residence.
I got a reminder that my plans aren’t always nature’s plans when a Winter Storm Warning popped up on my phone. Huh? Fall’s over? That was it?
I rushed to do two weeks of work in a day. Besides machinery, there are other things around a farm to get ready for winter. Plus there are things around the house and porch. Pam gives me lists of tasks that I can ignore while we’re harvesting, but not a minute past if I want a healthy marriage.
Amid this all, day length shrinks. Light becomes precious. Work ends up being done by yard light, flashlight, and headlight. All those are less efficient than God’s own sunlight.
In these northern climes, winter is the elephant among the seasons. This is true for southern climes on the bottom of the globe opposite our calendar. You might be able to slide through spring, summer, and fall without a lot of thought. But not winter. You better have food, clothing, and shelter, with an emphasis on the latter. If you remember the fable of the grasshopper and the ant, things don’t end well for the grasshopper.
This was strikingly true for those who lived here in the past. Both the Native Peoples and the settlers spent most of the warm months preparing for the cold months. Gathering, growing, putting up food, securing shelter, stockpiling heating materials: if you fell short on any of these, it wasn’t an inconvenience. It meant you weren’t likely to see spring.
Thankfully, the world most of us live in today is more forgiving. For people of some means, it’s possible to live mostly outside the seasons. Climate-controlled home, vehicle, workplace, heated garage, shopping at the mall or at your computer. The seasons provide entertainment: hunting, boating, skiing. But they aren’t life threatening.
There’s prepping for winter that goes on outside, but I’ve noticed as I get older, I have to prep for winter inside. I mean, inside my head. “Seasonal Affective Disorder” is now recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders. You can call it “trying not to go bat-crazy” in the winter.
I thought about species besides us humans that find a way to survive and even thrive in the winter. Plants have gone to seed or hardened off. Some critters are burrowed in to hibernate. Others are out there running around friskily any time the sun is shining. It made me think I should be a little tougher, like the squirrels and rabbits in our grove. But then I find a dead squirrel out there and think maybe not.
There are all those birds that took wing south. I have friends now who are opting for migration, following the birds. They look smarter and smarter every year. I think of them with a jealous sneer as I do a spontaneous dance across our icy yard trying to stay upright.
At least we know winter is coming. We have a calendar and plenty of evidence in nature. It may come early and harshly, but it’s not a surprise. But there can be “winters” in our life that aren’t as predictable. These are times of metaphorical winter, when it’s dark and cold in our lives, when the sun doesn’t shine much.
These might be a relationship turning bad, problems at work or losing a job, an illness for you or someone close. All lives will have these, some more than others. Unlike seasonal winter that is equally distributed, metaphorical winters can be very unfairly allocated. Sometimes they can pile up in our lives.
We can’t look at a calendar and know to prepare for these times, like putting fuel treatment in the gas tank. But there are things we can do to ease the hard times that inevitably come.
We can nurture friendships and keep close to family. Friends and family are not a given; they are a blessing and a grace. We can have an inner life. There will come times when you are alone; getting along with yourself will be helpful. We can have a prayer life. It’s good to have a channel open to the Creator all the time, not just to beseech Him in the bad times.
We know the season of winter will pass. Spring will come around. It always has. In the Song of Solomon, we are told, “For behold, the winter is past; the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.”
We trust that our personal winters will pass, too. It is faith that God will not give us more than we can handle, although sometimes that might be a lot.
West of Sleepy Eye there was a hemp field this season. There are thoughts that hemp can become a crop to complement corn and soybeans, so farmers are rooting for it. It was fascinating to watch Bryan Berkner plant, tend, and harvest the plants. It was combined early in September, and the stalks were left to stand.
Every fall we have a day when the blackbirds come. Lots of them. It is usually on one of those crisp, sun-anointed fall days. The blackbirds are glorious to behold as they squawk and chirp and screech on every branch in the grove. I looked it up, and the noisy flock is called a “cloud” or “cluster” of blackbirds.
For several weeks this October, such a cluster made daily appearances in the harvested hemp field. I’m thinking they were finding hemp seeds in the stubble. (You can make your own joke here about the birds being interested in the minute level of THC. Birds with a buzz?)
It’s hard to know how many, but it was thousands. They regularly flew back and forth to a corn field across the highway, sometimes overhead as I drove to town. My guess is they liked the shelter of the corn stalks. Regardless of their reasons, it amazed as the group ascended and descended in harmony. Right, left, up, down in absolute unison. It really is a kind of natural poetry as you watch them move in such choreography. One can’t help but think, “How do they do that?”
The blackbirds are an extraordinary example, but we live with birds all the time, year-round. If you are outside, even if you have the windows open in the summer, you’re likely hearing them. They are a part of the backdrop to our lives, mostly unnoticed.
I got schooled in this phenomenon years ago by young son Ezra. He was three or four. We stepped out of the house together, and Ezra stopped and stood perfectly still. I thought something was wrong, and finally asked what he was doing. He said simply, “Listening to the birds.”
Then I heard them. Yes, there were birds all around us. It hit me, that in my adult-oblivion, with probably ten things on my mind, I was missing this great gift from God/nature. Since that day, I try to listen like a four-year old occasionally when I am out in the yard.
Our farm is home to a variety of birds. The constant ones are the sparrows. That’s what we’ve always called them, or “sputzies.” Come to find out, our sparrows are not sparrows, but rather house finches. They came from England. They are an invasive species. Only the species they displaced were mostly gone anyway. Tough little critters, the sputzies are flitting about the place when it’s 30 below.
Robins and barn swallows spend summers here. They are favorites, harbingers of the warm season when they arrive. The swallows come late and leave early. I commented to a few farmer friends back in September that I would miss the swallows. After several weeks of gathering on an overhead wire plotting their travel itinerary, they were gone one morning, and I felt a tinge of sadness.
I didn’t find much love for the sleek little birds among my fellow farmers. Some of them don’t care for their nesting and the resultant droppings. I actually leave openings in a couple sheds for the swallows. I’m willing to trade scraping a little bird poop for the bugs consumed and aerial show on summer nights.
Other birds make appearances but don’t take up permanent residence: blue jays, cardinals, owls, hummingbirds. Various woodpeckers hang out for a while. The most striking are bald eagles who have begun visiting a few times a year. They soar in circles above the farm site, likely looking for some critter-dinner down below. Occasionally an eagle will rest atop one of the highest branches in the grove. In my mind I thank them for their consecration upon our homeplace.
You may have seen the recent analysis done by scientists that reported the dispiriting news that North America has seen a decline in bird numbers of 30% since 1970. There are 2.9 billion fewer birds in our skies than 50 years ago. The greatest decline has been in prairie populations. In the bad news was that nugget that gave me pause. Those prairies are what lie beneath our farm, both in history and in soil.
When I was a kid, I remember walking out the driveway to get the mail, or whatever it is kids do. There were telephone and electric lines coming into the place back then. Almost without fail, there was a meadowlark up on those lines singing its trill, sharp melody. Meadowlarks are prairie birds. The ones I heard were likely descendants of populations that had been there thousands of years.
Back then, probably a fourth of the land around me was in some type of pasture. Another fourth of the land may have been in grains, alfalfa, or some other hay crop. There were still a couple untiled sloughs within the section. In many ways, it was a reasonable facsimile of the prairies that had been there a century before.
Now, it is corn and soybeans. I haven’t seen or heard a meadowlark in decades.
I suppose there are several ways I can react to the news about the dramatic decline in bird population in most of our lifetimes. One is to shrug and ignore it and go about my day. Many will.
Another would be to assume the scientists are wrong. I could look at all the blackbirds flying across Highway 14 and say, “Look at all the birds. How can there be fewer birds?” It is like saying it is cold outside, so there is no global warming. These imply that I am smarter than the scientists, and it is no doubt comforting to feel that way.
Or I can feel a bit of sadness and wonder if there is anything I can do to help. I grow corn and soybeans, so pointing fingers does no good. Maybe I can find a small way or two to use less of the world up. Maybe I can make my farm a little less unfriendly to nature. Maybe I can consider the Earth when I am choosing among candidates for office.
In Genesis 1:20, God says, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” God put them there. It is on us to keep them there.
Being Catholic, I look to the saints for comfort and instruction. Pam makes me keep it in the basement, so you won’t see it when you come in. But I have a small altar to St. Jude, the patron saint of desperate and lost causes. In front of a holy card and votive candle are my Twins hat and Rod Carew mini bat.
There was so much hope. There is always hope. That’s the nature of being a fan. Then, like a geranium after the first freeze, life was sapped out of the hope. I’ve resigned myself to knowing the Twins will never beat the Yankees in a playoff game in my lifetime. Grandson Levi is four. Maybe, just maybe, in his.
Back in May, I wrote about how Twins fans were dealing with incredible success. Reticent Minnesotans don’t typically express joy well. For six weeks, the Twins were the best team in baseball. Improbably, they were one of the best teams ever in that span. It is of course a 162-game marathon, and some struggles followed. Cleveland actually caught the Twins in August. Then with both teams fighting injuries, the Twins punched their way to the Division title.
With that came the chance to play the Yankees. Which I don’t want to talk about.
What a season it was. The Twins set all sorts of homerun records. That was as likely as me winning the lottery, and I don’t play. Almost every hitter spent time on the Injured List, and others stepped up. The starting pitching was great, and the bullpen was bad. Then the starting pitching was bad, and the bullpen was great. It was a team that could come back from any deficit. There was a 17-inning game and an 18-inning game. They even beat the Yankees twice! No. Really.
My baseball friends and I were in a funk for a day or two after the Yankee sweep. Baseball is a game where the worst teams win sixty and the best teams lose sixty. For very good Twins teams to lose sixteen straight playoff games over fifteen years is almost not possible.
Noted historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote a beautiful memoir about growing up a Brooklyn Dodger fan called, “Wait Till Next Year.” It is the motto for most fans each fall, as we steel ourselves to the winter ahead. Gradually the life came back into my baseball buddies’ faces. We saw that the sun rose the next day. Our focus will shift from the Yankee beatdown to a future with a bunch of fun, talented Twins.
I was lifted from my mourning when uber-fan Billy Moran sent this: “Losing all these silly, short best of five series that happen in a blink are not allowed to diminish the pastoral joy of the long winding journey from winter to fall. A season’s aesthetic pleasure. Postseason is designed to inflict brutal agony within four days. Postseason can kiss my —.” I’ll let you fill in the blank.
The Star Tribune’s Patrick Reusse was ruminating on this, too. Patrick said all he really hopes for out of a baseball season, is that the local team is “relevant.” That makes a good summer for a ball fan. A metaphor for relevant would be competitive, or “playing meaningful games in September.” The 2019 Twins offered all of that.
Ruesse wrote, “Still, in the Age of the Internet, we have too many people who watch baseball as if they are watching football, where every blip is a crisis. It’s not. There are 162 of these things and they come in every form imaginable. They should be viewed in hunks, not in single outcomes, not even in disappointing three-game eliminations.”
Long before the Age of the Internet, there were sixteen teams in two leagues. It was that way since the beginning of time. There weren’t weeks of playoffs. There was a World Series between the American and National League champions. If you go back to the first half of the Twentieth Century, winning the pennant was the big prize, the brass ring to be grasped at each summer. The World Series was a fun exhibition following the real season. Losing it did not diminish a pennant.
It’s interesting that attendance did not yoyo up and down based on a team’s success. This was a time when baseball was the only major sport. Fans had plans to fit so many ballgames in their summer, and a losing team wasn’t going to take their baseball away from them.
Then came television and ESPN and espn.com and Twitter. Suddenly every day is the Biggest Game of the Season. Stadiums went from gentle organ music and billboards on the outfield wall to constant blaring sound effects and video boards flashing messages in bombs of color. It’s as if the game went from a quiet township road to the 35W/494 interchange.
The thing about a baseball season is that there is no Biggest Game of the Season. The nail biter in May counts as much as the blowout in August. If you include Hot Stove League and Spring Training, a baseball season is about ten months long. It’s a journey with an unknown destination. It becomes part of life. Almost every day, I have the game on in my tractor, kitchen, car, or machine shed.
In that way, it is like much of life. There are weddings and graduations and birthdays. But most of life is what happens in between, day to day to day. Showing up for work, taking care of a child, being a good spouse, taking care of animals; you don’t succeed at these things in the celebrations.
You succeed at them in the moments of drudgery. You succeed at them when you’d rather be sitting on the couch, but you go do the tasks life has handed you. If one can get up day after day after day and embrace it, there is deep satisfaction there. You succeed in life’s 162 game schedule.
I get to observe my daughter and her partner parent our four-year old grandson. It is a different perspective from being the parent. When you’re in the moment, you lose track of how much work a child is. But I see Anna either taking direct care of Levi, or else fully aware of where he is each minute of the day. Much of it is tedious. Most of it goes unnoticed. We undervalue that work. Raising a child is eighteen 162 game schedules.
Sure, it’ll be nice if the Twins win the World Series someday. It will be a heightened moment. But in the meantime, I love that baseball moves in and stays for all those days. It is perfect background to late winter melting into spring, warming to summer, and fading to autumn. Postseason can kiss my, well, you know.
There are a lot of great things about being young. One is that you can mostly ignore your health. That’s true for most, not all, if we’re lucky and/or blessed. At a certain age, though, you begin to think about your health. Let’s pick a number. Oh, say, 63. You have to do more than just think about it. You have to do something. You can still hope to be lucky and/or blessed, but don’t count on that.
There is a lot of information about living healthily aimed at us new old duffers. There are typically three legs to the stool that are mentioned: nutrition, exercise, and sleep. The first two seem self-evident. But sleep?
Sleep is an odd thing to write about. Despite the things going on deep in the inner workings of our mind and body, we’re not awake for it. On the surface where we live, sleep seems a sea of nothingness. The world keeps turning, people are busy on night shifts or with crying babies, half the globe is in daytime. But we drift along in that darkened sea, unaware, not knowing what we don’t know.
There are things we share with all our brethren in the animal world. Breathing, eating, some less delicate matters, and sleeping. When life is already so short, it always seemed to me to be a design flaw that we are supposed to sleep through a third of it.
If we must be unconscious a third of our life, I’d like to suggest we reconfigure things so that we hibernate in the winter. Instead of missing out on eight hours every day, we’d skip four cold months. That seems a fair compromise. I like the idea of burrowing into some hole like a bear, and then slowly waking when I hear the drip, drip of melting snow from the March sun above.
But then, I suppose day and night roughly coinciding with wake and sleep works out. Maybe it’s best I’m not in charge of the design for human life on Earth. If we hibernated, useful things like hockey and snowmobiles wouldn’t exist.
Why is sleep such a big deal? Turns out sleep isn’t laying around and doing nothing. Scientists admit that we don’t fully understand sleep, but we know all manner of essential things are going. Our body is healing damaged cells, boosting our immune system, and recharging our heart and cardiovascular system.
Beyond those necessary physical tasks, sleep is vital for creativity and memory. One scientist explained it this way. When we are awake our senses are constantly bombarded with an explosion of sights, sounds, smells, touches, and tastes. It’s like a million tiny jigsaw pieces are created and floating in our subconscious. In sleep, our mind slides pieces together that belong, building our personal map of the world. Some pieces get connected in ways we hadn’t thought of. Probably most pieces are simply discarded to keep life manageable in our brains.
I mentioned the three parts of health being nutrition, exercise, and sleep. I eat better than I did 20 years ago. I try to be physically active every day by work or exercise. But I’m a really lousy sleeper.
I can fall asleep on a dime. But staying asleep is another matter. A lot of nights I wake and look over the side of our bed to see our illuminated clock telling me it’s 3:00. Or 2:00. Then it’s a matter of whether the rest of the night will be dozing fitfully or lying awake in the dark. Either will be a witch’s brew of weird thoughts and weird dreams, till I finally give up and go make coffee.
When I was younger, I used to say sleep was overrated. I’d stay up late and get up early, and life was good. Now, my next day is dependent on how I slept the night before. The better I sleep, the better I feel. I almost hate to admit that. My younger self wouldn’t have believed my older self.
We have a perfectly wonderful bedroom for sleeping so I can’t blame that. My mate is small and typically still. The yard light is on the other side of the house. A few years ago, I got some ringing in my ears. Pam brought home a white noise machine that I like having next to the bed. I’ve fooled around with things like melatonin and valerian root, which seem to help and then don’t.
Oh well. There are worse yokes to bear. Maybe I should try milk and cookies.
I mentioned dreams, and that is one advantage I suppose to restless sleep. When I am dozing in and out of wakeness, I can have whole series of odd and goofy dreams, which can be entertaining. Awake, I try to figure out the bizarre set of things in my life that got connected by my subconscious in the dream I just had.
It’s funny though, how our dreams seldom stay with us. Most of the time, by the middle of the day, that intense and peculiar dream is gone. They are like a coating of snow that falls in a late fall night, and then melts in the morning sun.
I am not alone in sleep troubles. I find comrades in these night battles in lots of conversations and lots of articles. People who study this point to the Industrial Revolution and the creation of artificial light as a watershed moment. Until then, our bodies adjusted and responded to day and night the way every other creature on Earth has. Manmade light made the night shift and all-nighter possible. Our brains which evolved to function in sun and dark, suddenly had possibilities that had nothing to do with nature’s light. I’d guess sleep issues leapt around then.
We can find an appreciation for sleep that long predates the sleep clinics we have today. In Proverbs 3, we are instructed to follow the Lord and take up his wisdom. If one does that, “When you lie down, you will not be afraid; when you lie down, your sleep will be sweet.”
Five hundred years ago, Shakespeare appreciated the gift of good sleep. “Innocent sleep. Sleep that soothes away all our worries. Sleep that puts each day to rest. Sleep that relieves the weary laborer and heals hurt minds. Sleep, the main course in life’s feast, and the most nourishing.” Reading that makes me want to take a nap.
I’ll end with something my mom used to say. It’s a bit unnerving, but she meant it lovingly. “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”
Dean Brinkman is subbing for Randy Krzmarzick this week
“Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport. The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. The human drama of athletic competition. You are looking live at Summit Street Stadium in beautiful Sleepy Eye, Minnesota and this is ABC’s Wide World of Sports.” That’s my kid version of Jim McKay’s iconic introduction.
In the days of “boy germs and girl germs,” I knew what I was going to be when I grew up. At seven years young, my future looked bright. I was going to play for the Twins in the summer, the Vikings in the fall, and score goals for the North Stars in the winter. If the Lakers would have me, I’d fly in whenever they needed help at The Forum. After all, Jerry West was getting up there in age.
Yes siree! I had it all mapped out. I’d live in a nice house in Bloomington, close to Metropolitan Stadium, Met Center, and the airport so I could jet to those NBA cities. I couldn’t wait to see myself on a bubble gum card.
I knew that “On the Road to Bloomington” many things had to come together. Lord knows, I worked on being like my heroes. Every. Single. Day.
Rod Carew’s batting stance with a peach pit in my cheek for a “chaw” made for better visibility to see the pitch. Stoic Alan Page, standing in the snow, hands on hips, watching my breath as I meditated and prepared like a bull kicking up turf to engage it’s matador, to sack some pitiful neighborhood quarterback. My “Goldy Shuffle” boot hockey celebration after “He shoots! HE SCORRRRRES!” And last second shots in the driveway to win Summit Stadium Basketball Championships. My dad nicknamed me Sport.
Our home at 110 Summit Street SW was my training grounds to destiny. It was also corporate headquarters where I ate and slept. I lived with the real estate owner and my own personal chiropractor (Dad). I had a chef, nurse, and housekeeper (Mom). She made sure that I had “clean underwear on,” and developed proper nutritional habits like “cleaning my plate before I left the table” and eating organic foods. It was called fresh from our garden then. She patched up blue jeans and “skun” knees. She was always ready to piece me back together with Band Aids and a trusty bottle of Merthiolate Tincture. Damn, that stuff burned like when they poured bourbon on an open wound in a John Wayne western.
Our double lot in the middle of the block was a multi-purpose stadium for backyard football and one of the nation’s finest Wiffle ball parks. The driveway doubled as a boot hockey rink and basketball court. It was surrounded by buildings that walled in the stadium. Their shingles looked like perfect rows of stadium seating. The clothesline was a goalpost for breaking Tom Dempsey’s 63-yard record kick. We made penalty boxes with freshly shoveled snowbanks.
My friends and I took little time off. Only to eat dinner and supper, celebrate holiday gatherings, and an occasional day on the couch to be sick.
I didn’t look at lawn mowing “chores” to be a punishment. Rather I wanted to mow Summit Stadium so that George Toma would give his stamp of approval. I might have even lowered the blade a notch to indicate field markings or foul lines. Somehow this never bothered George Toma. Um, I mean Dad.
The turf was passed down from my older brothers, as the dead grass areas were from their games. Countless games of hot box wore out dirt spots which also doubled as home plate and second base.
Back then, dads showed up at home just in time for supper. Neighborhood moms were always around and vital to our daily activities. Moms were quick to the rescue with our version of sports drinks: an ice cube-chilled, glass pitcher of powdered Kool-Aid laced with sugar.
We whippersnappers had to play it cool if we wanted to play indoors. There were indoor sports like Nerf Hoops and Knee Football. Or you could clear out the living room furniture for “DING DING DING! All. Star. Wrestling!” If we got rambunctious in the house any of the neighborhood’s matriarchs would vociferate, “YOUKIDSGETOUTSIDEANDPLAY!” Yes, it sounded like one word. It was followed by, “NOW!”
Our home had one television set with four channels. We had a remote-control channel-changer, but it was not hand-held. Instead it used voice command. The youngest in the family laying on the floor closest to the TV changed the channel by parental voice command.
Remember this? Dad snoring to Lawrence Welk or Walter Cronkite as you belly crawl, elbow and knees, like a toy army soldier to silently change the channel. Only to have the Voice Command snort and wake up. “Hey! Turn that back on! I was watching that!” That meant it was time to go outside and play.
You see, it wasn’t punishment. “Outside” was where hours of play dominated our youth. Before metal bats, youth travelling teams, and video games, there was a world of hand-me-down gloves and nailed-together wood bats reinforced with black sticky tape. There were weathered footballs with striped ends, cracked wooden hockey sticks taped together, and red, white, and blue rubber Artis Gilmore basketballs. Smells like the aroma of dirt mixed with basketball rubber while washing our cold hands in a sink of warm water.
It was a time that a few ingredients made for a wonderful recipe of fun: kids, some equipment, and, the best part, imagination. Not a parent to be found. Rules were made to be broken along with panes of glass and porch screens. Instant replays were “do-overs.” Hydration breaks were from the garden hose, not purchased in plastic bottles.
The Vikings won multiple Super Bowls in my 1970s. I have friends in their fifties to prove it. There were Twins’ World Series trophies hoisted by Carew, Killebrew, and yours truly.
Well, I can’t be late for supper. I’ll get on my banana bike, pop a wheelie, and lay a patch of rubber on the driveway before the 6:00 whistle blows. I don’t want to be grounded. We have another game tomorrow, and I can’t let my future teammates in Bloomington down.
When you have a moment, Google Frank Sinatra singing “There Used To Be a Ballpark.” Close your eyes and listen, visualizing your own ballpark called home.
Thanks 110 Summit Street, old friend, for all the thrills of victory and the agonies of defeat. Yes, there used to be a ballpark, right there.
Aug. 15 was a Holy Day of Obligation for us Catholics. Obligations are big in our church. In Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, the German Catholics attend Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. That’s about right. Sunday Mass is required. Then we have these Holy Days to be sure we’re paying attention.
This particular Holy Day was the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It was a Thursday, and the schedule was flipped around with a Mass at noon. Because my employment is elastic, I was filling in for both scheduled lectors who had to be at jobs. I’m not used to putting on clean clothes in the middle of the day, but I did.
In the Catholic Mass, lectors do the two readings that are part of the Liturgy of the Word preceding the Gospel. I can’t remember when I first served as a lector. It goes back to high school. I enjoy it and am honored when my name comes around on the schedule.
On a typical Sunday, I am part of a team effort. There might be the priest, a deacon, the other lector, and four servers. We gather in the sacristy ahead of Mass. It’s not unlike being in the locker room preparing for that day’s game. In addition, there are an organist and the choir up in the balcony, ushers working the aisles, plus Eucharistic ministers who get in the late innings of the game. Er, I mean the Mass.
Being a Holy Day, I was expecting a full roster. When I arrived in the sacristy, it was only Father Andy and me. I was going to get additional duties and decided this would be fun. I saw there was a song list and asked about that. Fr. Andy didn’t think anyone was there to do music, so he would lead the singing. I love Fr. Andy. He is a man with many gifts. I wasn’t sure singing was one of them. But sometimes you have to man up.
I went to set the book on the lectern. There was a nice crowd there, a few hundred. Retired folks, people taking long lunch hours, plus some young people between summer jobs and school.
Then music suddenly filled the space. We did have an organist, up in the choir loft. It’s a long way, but I could see it was Sean Connolly. Sean is the wonderfully talented Music Director for our parish. We are blessed to have him. He was playing a prelude before Mass as the final worshippers made their way in.
I stepped back in the sacristy to ask Fr. Andy if that changed anything. I went ahead and did the introduction announcing the opening song. Sean picked up the Responsorial Psalm as I thought he would. Those went fine. Later, no one introduced the Offertory Song. So, Sean played it as an instrumental. I made a mental note to announce the closing song when the time came.
The first reading was from Revelations, which is always interesting. The Book of Revelation is the last book of the Bible. It has perplexed readers for centuries. It is an example of apocalyptic literature, filled with grand and soaring and strange symbolism. This day’s reading was no exception.
“A great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun,
with the moon under her feet,
and on her head a crown of twelve stars.
She was with child and wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth.
Then another sign appeared in the sky;
it was a huge red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns,
and on its heads were seven diadems.
Its tail swept away a third of the stars in the sky
and hurled them down to the earth.”
(Revelation 11:19; 12:1-6, 10)
Okay then. It goes on to describe the dragon’s intent to devour the woman’s child. But the son born to her is taken up to God, and the woman flees to the desert where God has prepared a place for her.
It is a breathtaking image. It tells us something about Mary, Jesus, and God, although theologians might have to do some heavy lifting to explain exactly what. The majesty and beauty of the words are undeniable, though.
As I finished the reading, I looked out at the faces. No one was gasping, which is really what one might do if you envisioned the words. It struck me that those of us gathered on this August day in St. Mary’s probably had lots of things on our minds: family, jobs, finances, activities.
Our lives alternate between drudgery and tasks that need to be done, and hopefully moments of connection to others and even some joy. Into this workaday world we are part of comes this reading from Revelation about a woman clothed with the sun and a dragon hurling stars to Earth. The dragon is the devil in the fiery poetry of Revelations. We can’t see the devil, and we can’t see God. But for us believers, they are real.
There is the seen world in which we maneuver every day, doing chores, going to work, eating, sleeping. But there is this great unseen world. There our Creator is. There our soul will be some day. In this unseen world is also the devil and an eternal struggle which goes on between good and evil. It goes on in our every-day here on Earth and in our souls. I’m writing here of not just Catholics, but fellow Christians, along with believers of the other religions.
That serpent sweeping away stars and hurling them down to Earth tempts us every day to be selfish and to dislike others and not think of the higher good, but only think of ourselves. That is what we will be up against as we leave the church and go to our cars. It is difficult to comprehend, but we go to church to remind us of that unseen world.
Meanwhile in the seen world, I would introduce the closing song. After communion, I sat to the side of the altar. When Father completed the final blessing, I went to the lectern with this script: “We go forth to share the love of Christ. Let us joyfully sing together…”
I got about to “We go” when Sean’s deep and rich voice filled the church, introducing the Recessional Hymn. Coming from above and around us, I thought of Bob Sheppard. He was the public address announcer for the New York Yankees who Reggie Jackson famously called the voice of God.
I stepped back from the lectern, smiling, a little embarrassed. I was hoping none of those parishioners saw me right then, which was unlikely since they were all looking toward the front of the church. Oh well, I’ve had worse.
I first heard the way I hear a lot of things now. In a text. A group of early risers who share thoughts on baseball and local happenings are my first human contacts. “Did you hear anything about Del Monte?” I hadn’t, but within an hour the Sleepy Eye plant closing was official.
It goes without saying this is big and bad news for our town. As I write, the story is fresh, still in the rumor-stage. One rumor is that the plant will be sold and continue to operate. That would be everyone’s first choice, and I would be glad to see this column become quickly antiquated.
I’m not as connected to Del Monte as some. My dad grew for them way back, and I passed on opportunities to add sweet corn to my crop mix. I worked clean-up crew there in my early farming years. This was in the Eighties when extra cash was welcome. My last day there I got my arm caught in a conveyor and needed surgery to mend it. That’s a story for another day.
I have lived west of Sleepy Eye my whole life, so have driven by the factory more than a few times. A little figuring tells me it might be a hundred thousand. It hasn’t been there forever, but the foreverness of my life. And the lives of everyone else in town. The church, the monument, the factory: those seem things that God put here in Creation.
There is a constant, almost subliminal, awareness in a small town of such a business. Conversation naturally includes factory news. “Del Monte started putting in peas on some of the lighter ground.”“Corn pack’s going to start next week.” “Sweet corn’s running nine tons an acre.” Updates on Del Monte come as easy to conversation as the weather and the Vikings.
In its way, it is an attractive plant, built at a time when brick gave an air of permanency. I’d guess the bricks are from Ochs in Springfield. Hulking conveyors and outdoor machines sit still under snow in winter, then come to life in the summer humming round the clock under sun and spotlights. Railroad tracks head out from the warehouse, hinting at far away destinations for our corn and peas.
Of course, a venerable old building is less the story than the people working inside there. From college kids financing their education to farm folk who needed a side income to the Hispanic workers who became essential to the operation, thousands have worked there in the past and hundreds currently. A press release can’t begin to tell their stories.
Del Monte the company has been bought, sold, bent, and folded by the business world many times. Each time, there were rumors about our Sleepy Eye plant. Currently Del Monte Foods is headquartered in California but is owned by an investor group based in Manilla. It’s doubtful anybody there knows much about Sleepy Eye, less about the employees and farmers who depend on this factory for income.
It is part of the same global economy that benefitted American agriculture so much in the last decade. International trade was the main driver of our $7 corn and $15 soybeans. In farming years, those prices seem eons ago. Now tariffs are helping to grind our prices into the dirt.
If Del Monte in Sleepy Eye is to be closed, it will join thousands of empty factories across America. We are not unique. The stories are legion about towns having their manufacturing plants mothballed. In each of those, the community is altered forever. There is a distinct line between life before and after the factory closed.
Years ago, I went on a baseball trip to Cleveland and Detroit. Along the way, we drove the remains of the Rust Belt: mile after mile of shuttered steel mills and places that made things with steel. Rust was literally the dominant color. I remember wondering how many jobs weren’t in those massive shops anymore.
Of course, this is capitalism, and this is a dynamic economy. Everyone who goes to Europe comes back impressed with the age of castles and churches they visited. It is different on our side of the ocean, where seemingly nothing lasts. In the movie Field of Dreams, in the scene where James Earl Jones says that baseball is the one constant, he says, “America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again.”
He’s right. We know that. But that doesn’t mean it is not unsettling when the steamrollers come to your town. It happened before here a century ago.
When you grow up in a place, you only gradually become aware of things around you. On the opposite side of town from Del Monte is an impressive five story also-brick building with large paned windows up and down. I was probably in high school before I learned that was the old mill building.
The Sleepy Eye Milling Company built it in 1892. This was during a time when our area was literally the center of the international milling industry. Sleepy Eye, Springfield, and New Ulm had booming mills that were shipping the world’s finest flour around the globe. Lots of wealth was flowing to these towns. It is not a coincidence that St. Mary’s Church, the Dyckman Library, and the Depot were all built in 1902.
Soon after, the milling industry went in to decline. A global recession was part of that. The Wheat Belt shifted westward, and our local mills had to transport grain from the Dakotas. Sleepy Eye Milling had several stops and starts as business declined but was closed permanently in 1921. The city tried to find a replacement for what had been its largest employer. Several enterprises set up shop in parts of the mill building through the years, but nothing stuck. Now it sits hauntingly empty and dark over the northeast part of town.
Ironically, officials from California Packing Company first came to town in 1928 to explore the possibility of putting a vegetable canning facility in the mill building. That company, which became Del Monte, did decide to come here. Instead they built a factory on property which had been used for landing airplanes on the southwest edge of town.
There are lots of buildings that are empty or underused around here. Barns and sheds for cows and pigs sit empty on thousands of farm sites. Main streets have storefronts from a time when all economy was essentially local. After a day of driving past farms and through small towns in my part time field inspecting job, I told Pam once, “There are more things around here that used to be than still are.”
Here’s to hoping Del Monte doesn’t become one of the used-to-bes.
I’m not a big tech guy. There is some technology that falls into my skill level. Like my toaster. It has handles you push down after you put the bread in. There’s a dial to set length of toasting time and a button that will pop your toast up on command. There’s another button that I don’t know what it does, but I figure I don’t need that. I’ve mastered toast technology.
Technology more complex than my toaster gives me fits. Recently Pam and I were driving her Toyota and looking at the display screen that you are apparently not supposed to look at while you’re driving. On the touch screen that you are apparently not supposed to touch while you are driving are the radio and climate controls. We’ve figured those out. (When I was a kid, we had a heater in the car that we hope worked. Now we control the climate. That’s quite a leap.)
We noticed there is a button for “Apps.” Pam touched it, and a whole spectrum of possibilities opened: weather, traffic, satellite radio, messages. Only we couldn’t figure out how any of them worked.
I wish I could report that was a unique experience. Alas, I am afloat in a world of things I don’t know how to work, or even how to turn on in some cases.
Part of that is being 63. But my lack of tech-aptitude goes back a long time. In high school, a kind and patient Mr. Blackstad tried to teach us some rudimentary computer skills. We were to write a program that would simulate the roll of a dice. This was 1973, and that’s what counted as a video game back then. Matt Rausch and Patty Eckstein were part of my group and smarter than me. Still are, I suppose. I leaned heavily on their talents. Actually, they did everything and I tried not to look dumb. I did that a lot back then, with varying degrees of success.
Flash forward to today. There is a technology boom in agriculture right now. If you walked around Farmfest, every booth had an element of incredible science that would have been unimaginable to my father who began farming a century ago with horses.
I recently purchased a monitor for our eight-row planter. (Yes, there are eight-row planters. You don’t have to go to a museum to see one.) This monitor tells me that seed is going into the ground, which I appreciate. But it could also map my fields with GPS, syncing with sprayer information and my combine monitor to create layered maps showing what variety of seed I planted at what rate in what soil type with which pesticides, receiving what rainfall and heat units that yielded how many bushels and how that compared with all my fields.
It could. But I don’t know how to do any of it. Using that monitor to only tell me seed is going into the ground is like owning a Corvette ZR1 and driving it in and out the driveway.
I could go into Miller Sellner and have one of the young mechanics show me how to it works. These fellows are my kids’ age, and I’m embarrassed when I don’t get what they’re saying. Even. When. They. Talk. Really. Slow.
I’ve noticed in talking with friends lately, we are all taken aback with how many people there are in our various occupations who are “our kids’ ages.” It wasn’t that long ago they were playing with toy tractors and Pokémon cards. Now they’re programming software and administering anesthesia. How’d that happen?
A while back, I wanted to connect my phone to Bluetooth in the aforementioned Toyota. After sitting in the car flailing away at the various screens involved for half an hour, son Ezra came by. He took my phone, thumbed a couple dozen rapid taps and handed it back to me. Connected. I felt sheepish; I might as well have been back there with Matt Rausch and Patty Eckstein trying not to look dumb.
If technology would just stand still for a decade or two, I might be able to catch up. I’ll use television to illustrate.
When I was a kid, we got Channel 12 in black and white. We had Gunsmoke, Walter Cronkite for national news, and Chuck Pasek for local news. I knew how to turn on the TV and adjust the volume. Life was good.
Then we got a color TV and began to get stations out of the Twin Cities. I still knew how to turn on the TV and even change the channels. Now we got Star Trek and the Game of the Week. Life was still good, and really, what else could anyone need?
After we got married, we bought a VCR. I could put in a VHS tape and play that for the kids. But it could also record things from the television at preset times. Here technology began to race ahead of me. I never figured that out. Later came a DVD player. The TV channels had to go through the DVD player. Or the DVD player had to go through the TV channels. I’m not sure.
Next came some device so we could watch things off the internet on the TV. That ran through my son’s Xbox. By now the cords behind the television began to look like spilled spaghetti. There were a couple times I had to ask how to turn the TV on. We were getting a bunch of channels, but I missed Gunsmoke.
Around then, I started to fall asleep on the couch watching whatever was on anyway. When a storm bent over our antennae, I was ready to let the whole complicated mess go. We haven’t had a working TV since. The Twins are on the radio, Pam watches Netflix on her iPad, and I fall asleep reading just as well as I used to watching television.
The inventor Buckminster Fuller created the “Knowledge Doubling Curve.” He wrote that until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today on average human knowledge is doubling every 13 months. It is expected that the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours.
I see where this is heading. Even if my brain maintains what I know, and that is iffy, I know less of what there is to know all the time. If at some point I could claim to be at least half-witted, that would be a quarter-witted in 13 months. I’ll be lucky to be one sixty fourth-witted pretty soon.
This is all upsetting. I’m going to go make some coffee. Let’s see. Water, filter, one button on my coffee maker. I’ve got this.
Big brother Dale Krzmarzick holding Randy as a baby.
Big brother Dale passed away on June 21. Dale battled dementia his last years, although I’m not sure it’s correct to say one “battles” dementia. It creeps upon its victim who slowly succumbs. In the end, death is the known outcome.
Dale was older than me and gone from the house by the time I remember things. So we didn’t play together as kids. That was made up for by working together 40 years. Dale had his own farm, and shared machinery and labor first with our dad and then me. There were many hours fixing on stuff, moving equipment, and strategizing.
Dale liked to play to a certain gruff persona. We had conversations when things weren’t going well that were more grunts and huffs than words. When Dale was in a good mood, his friends knew he was a master of “giving each other crap.”That’s a guy thing; I don’t know that there is an equivalent in the other gender.
Under that exterior was a soft part. I saw that when we talked about our children or friends who were going through a rough patch. I never figured out why he carried the ornery personage on the outside. My mom said it was there back in his childhood. It was a defense mechanism I suppose. We all have our ways to circumvent this life.
I heard often “I can’t believe you two are brothers.” We had differences. Dale wouldn’t have been caught dead writing a newspaper column. That said, there were those things that siblings have in common by rights of sharing parents. Bits of father Sylvester and mother Alyce leaked out. Children inherit traits, albeit in different doses.
There was always baseball to talk about when we were tightening bolts or greasing. Whether it was the Twins or the Legion team Dale coached, there was plenty to fill conversation, the same being true for any two fans. He was a very good high school player, probably good enough to play college ball. But Dale and classrooms weren’t much of a fit. He hurt his hand in the Army Reserves, and that cut short his amateur career.
There is somewhere a picture of Dale in a St. Mary’s baseball uniform holding his baby brother, me. (I couldn’t find that photo but found the one you see here of the same vintage.) I was born in February 1956. That June, St. Mary’s hosted the Catholic High School State Tournament in Sleepy Eye. The Knights were a favorite under young coach Moe Moran. Fred Bruckbauer was the star pitcher; Dale played third.
St. Mary’s kids hosted visiting players. A couple Faribault Bethlehem Academy players stayed at our farm. Dale was friendly to them until they upset the Knights in the semifinals. Then he wouldn’t talk to them. My mom told me she wasn’t too happy with him, but that was Dale.
In our years of farming, we had one large argument. This was long ago, steeped in the pressure of a late fall, something to do with where the plow should go next. I remember my dad being dragged into that and thinking how hard it must be to watch your two sons argue. I think both Dale and I wanted to avoid a repeat of that. There were other times when I did something stupid, that Dale had a smirk that didn’t need words. A couple times I wanted to punch him and a couple times he probably wanted to punch me.
Forty years of working together is like a marriage in ways. You get to a point where you complete each other’s thoughts. In a farming context, that is expressed in knowing what and who should be where and when. Patterns are established that make conversation nonessential. We just knew what came next.
About five years ago, I remember coming in the house and telling Pam I didn’t know what Dale was doing. Those seamless thoughts that meant we knew what went where and when were not seamless. He was putting wagons in places that didn’t make sense as I was opening up a field with the combine. I had to get out and explain what I thought were obvious things.
Soon after, Dale’s wife Dorothy stopped me in the yard to say that the doctor had diagnosed Dale with dementia. Suddenly, things made sense. Or more accurately, things that didn’t make sense had an explanation.
Around then, Dale’s son Jay began helping, taking days off from his teaching job. Over a few years, as Dale struggled to do things that used to be second nature, Jay took more responsibilities.
Dale’s decline seemed gradual to me, but the markers were more obvious to his family. A year and a half ago, it became unsafe to have Dale at home, and he moved to Prairie Senior Cottages in New Ulm. It is a wonderful facility for folks afflicted with memory loss, with a home-like atmosphere.
I went there with Jay a month ago. When we came to Dale sitting in a recliner, there seemed a flash of recognition. I half expected, “Randy, what the hell are you doing here?” But he couldn’t name me. We talked about the crops and the Twins. The replies were mostly one word.
You’ve seen the projections about the coming epidemic of Alzheimer’s and other dementias as the population ages. I have several friends whose parents are so afflicted. There are only a few ways to be born, to enter this world. But there are many, many ways to leave this life. Dementia is one. It would not be my first choice. (Can I choose “none of the above?”)
For some reason, it doesn’t scare me as much as it used to. Perhaps it’s the gradual nature of it. There were several years of frustrating, poignant, and even comical moments with Dale. In the end, it felt like a long good-bye whose time for leave-taking had come.
I’ll end with a memory. My first year home from college, I was trying to learn a lot about machinery and harvesting crops quickly. It was stuff I’d helped with, but never was responsible for. I asked my dad and brother a million questions.
One October Sunday night Dale and I were combining corn. We were stopped and making some adjustment on the corn head. There was enough moonlight that we could do whatever we were doing by that. I decided that was a good time to give Dale some news. Pam was expecting, and my life was about to get more complicated for sure.
Dale gave me a look of some consternation. Then he said he also had news. Dorothy was pregnant with their fifth child. Seventeen years apart in age, we were facing similar unexpected situations: me at the front end of this parenting thing, Dale at the back end. At some point, we started laughing. Under the moon, next to the combine, in a corn field.
Thirty-eight growing seasons have rolled by since then. My daughter Anna and Dale’s son Kelly are talented adults, both doing good work. Anna has four-year-old Levi, and Kelly has five-year-old Kyler. None of that could be known in that field the night we were laughing.
