Rain was forecast for Tuesday night. That’s been a constant this spring.

Whenever we got into the fields, it was only for a short time before the next rain. So, Tuesday was a 16-hour planting day for me. That was 16 hours with an apple and a muffin and a thermos of water. It’s late May and time for lollygagging has been compressed out of this planting season.

The second half of Tuesday was that – another shooting. It felt oddly commonplace, flipping stations for updates: how many dead, what do we know about the shooter, any connection between the shooter and the shot?

It is, of course, commonplace. By now, every one of us knows the emotional path we will take. On a tractor, as long as the planter monitor doesn’t sound an alarm and I’m staring at that marker trench in the dirt in front of me, there is ample space for emotions in the cab. Overwhelming sadness and anger rush to take up most of the space in my head, with frustration, confusion, and rage filling in air pockets.

You, like me, probably take a mental walk down the empathy path.

What does it feel like to be the friend or relative of a victim?

This is difficult enough and can lead to tears if done well. Empathy is a valuable skill for the members of our race to have, essential to a well-functioning society I would say.

But what does it feel like to be a parent of a dead child?

If you are a parent, you can get a small sense of the blow to the gut that would be by thinking of your own children. But it is literally beyond comprehending. It would be a sadness and emptiness that we do not have words for. Nothing I can write here could describe that. No writer in the world could.

On Wednesday morning, I woke, and yesterday’s news came into my head.

What would it be like to wake the morning after losing your child?

Then I thought, you wouldn’t have slept anyway if you were that parent.

How do you ever fall asleep again?

The hole in you would be deep and permanent.

Back to the tractor radio, as darkness fell and my world shrunk to what the tractor lights illuminated, two reporters from the BBC asked a quite logical question: why does this keep happening in the United States of America and nowhere else?

I thought about the humor website The Onion. Every time one of these shootings occurs, they post the same headline: “‘No Way to Prevent This’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

We like to think of the United States as “exceptional.” I guess we’re right.

At least I don’t delude myself anymore. Nothing will change and, in a few weeks or months, I will be on the tractor feeling all these emotions again.

Maybe it won’t be small children in a school. Maybe it will be Blacks or Jews or Hispanics. As difficult as those are, it’s easier seeing adults than dead school kids lying in pools of blood in my mind’s eye.

A reporter said that the young bodies are torn apart by bullets from an automatic rifle, no clean shot to the heart. Then, the parents must identify their child.

Can you imagine that?

No. We can’t.

How come no one goes and shoots up a nursing home?

It might be easier to accept the senseless death of old people who’ve lived a life, rather than kids who are having theirs snatched away from them.

I admire and appreciate that people close to the dead will insist there be change. God bless them. Since your loved one is dead for no known reason, I can see how one would want some small bit of useful good to come from that mindless evil. God bless them, but it won’t matter.

According to polls, a large majority of Americans agree on a number of common-sense limits to guns. It doesn’t matter. Nothing will change. The large majority of Americans can go to hell.

I could use this space to report that the United States has more guns per capita than every nation on Earth except for Syria and Libya. Or that the number of suicides by bullet and accidental shootings have grown perfectly in step with the proliferation of handguns in the last 20 years. Or I could restate the simple fact that if you are carrying a gun, you are more likely to be killed by gunfire than if you are unarmed.

I guess I just wrote those. But it was a waste of my time and yours. Sorry.

On the tractor radio, the last weeks have been filled with ads for candidates who want to fill the empty congressional seat. Most include a line about protecting our Second Amendment rights. If I had just flown here from the last century, I would have assumed they were referring to guns used for hunting. No one has ever talked about limits on those.

Can I be clearer about that?

NO ONE has ever tried to take legitimate hunting guns away.

That was so last century. Now, by “Second Amendment rights,” we mean that there can be no limits on guns of any kind. None. And if a confused 18-year-old boy wants to buy an assault rifle, damn it, he can. Because this is America, and that right is greater than the rights of nineteen children in a small town in Texas to live.

Don’t ask whether we value guns more than children. That’s a trick question. We know the answer.

Farmers like predictability. I like putting the seed in the ground, knowing the sun will shine, the rain will fall, and I will harvest in the fall. I like to think my machines will work.

Some predictable things aren’t so good. I know sometime soon, I will be on a tractor punching buttons, racing about finding news about the next shooting in America.

That’s actually more predictable than my crops growing or my machines working. Because there is nothing we can do about it.

You’d think this great country could do better. You’re wrong. We can’t.

– Randy Krzmarzick farms on the home place west of Sleepy Eye where he lives with his wife, Pam.

In the art of small talk, it’s good to start with something you agree on. We all share the weather. Jesus recognized that when He said, “He causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”

It’s safe to open a conversation with, “Cold enough for you?” Or “When’s the last time we saw the sun?” Both those lines have been useful this spring. None more so than, “Geez, it’s windy out.”

As I begin writing this, we are in a wind advisory. It might save the National Weather Service time to let us know when fierce winds aren’t blowing unsecured objects to the next township. Issue a “Calm Advisory” and just assume the rest of the time it’s blowing like heck.

I heard a meteorologist say they have tools to measure historic precipitation and temperatures, not so for wind velocity. He agreed though this spring has been the windiest of his career.

March and April are typically windy months. There is nothing so pleasant as those first warm southern breezes. We feel spring arriving, literally melting winter away. I’ve often planted corn in high winds. That means coming in at night with a face darkened by graphite I shake on the seed to lube the planter. The black powder swirls in the wind and always flies up at me.

This spring, there haven’t been many warm breezes. A lot more howling winds from the north. It’s as if Old Man Winter won’t relinquish control. The few days the wind has been out of the south, it gusted frantically as if trying to catch up with the delayed season. The bitter winds made it hard to stay outside. I’m two weeks behind in my work, which about matches everything in nature.

One day I was working on a tractor in the yard and looked up to see our 14-foot trampoline rolling by on its side. I keep it in a spot where it is sheltered from north and south winds, but that day there was crazy east wind. It might have continued to Springfield if not for hitting the old cattle fence.

All the wind meant branch-picking-up made regular appearances on my to-do list. Trees are amazing in their ability to withstand wind. But they sacrifice branches to natural pruning. There’s nothing like hours of bending for branches to remind me how soft I’ve become after the long winter.

Winds have been a prominent theme around here lately. Last August 28, a storm did substantial wind damage to corn fields over a wide area, ours included. Stalks weakened by drought were susceptible to leaning or breaking. It made harvest a lot less fun. It’s depressing this spring to see the yellow ears sticking out of the tilled ground that the combine couldn’t gather. It’s a good year to be a field mouse.

Then before Christmas, our farm was on the north edge of this phenomenon: “On December 15, a rapidly-deepening low-pressure area contributed to a historic expanse of inclement weather across the Great Plains and Midwest, resulting in an unprecedented derecho and tornado outbreak across the Northern United States.”

A record number of December tornadoes spun out of the sky from Kansas to Wisconsin. I’m not sure exactly what sort of winds we had. But the west side of a steel building was blown apart and scattered hundreds of feet into a field. The way wood and steel were twisted and bent, it’s as if a bomb went off.

Every crop is a gamble and faces multiple risks. But this year, excessive wind has moved to the top of things I worry about, ahead of hail, drought, flooding, insects, weeds, diseases, not to mention spiraling costs. Phew. No wonder I can’t sleep.

Corn plants must stand from “knee high by the Fourth of July” until October harvest. That’s four months where howling winds from the Canadian prairie or the Gulf of Mexico can wreak havoc on the stalks. I’ve added extra wind and hail insurance on my crops because of recent weather.

Our grove had damage in both those storms. Wind out of south in August and north in December knocked down large trees that had survived sixty or seventy years of prairie winds. That tells me this isn’t normal. It causes one to wonder what’s going on. Is there something we’re seeing on my farm that’s part of something larger?

All weather is the result of troughs and waves of air pushing and sliding around our globe. There is no way to assign any single moment’s weather in a single place to climate change. But as the impact from man-caused atmospheric warming grows, it becomes likelier that the wind harassing my crops and trees is a piece of that. Things like the historic drought in the west and melting of the polar ice caps are easier to assign to global climate shifts.

Regardless, there is no more doubt that global warming and our species culpability for it are real and worsening. We need to quit arguing and let the smart people find solutions. They are. The question is whether it will be in time to avoid an apocalyptic future for our grandchildren.

We all know someone who has a video that proves that manmade climate change is a fraud, that these thousands of scientists are lying to us. Do we want to take our chances with this giant majority of the world’s climate experts with vast consensus? Or uncle Bob’s YouTube video?

Global climate change is the round Earth of our time. Flat Earthers will believe what they will, and God bless them. But the rest of us need to get to work making things better. It helps if we all push in one direction. Or at least get out of the way.

As I finish writing this, we’ve just had back-to-back evenings of severe weather with thunderstorm and tornado warnings racing across the Midwest. Weirdly duplicative one night to the next, it was a game of Russian roulette where you hope and pray the eighty mile per hour winds miss you. Then the next morning, you cringe and offer prayers for those who weren’t lucky as the destruction appears in the morning light.

Again, there is no way to know if this is just the Earth being the Earth. Or if we are seeing consequences from human impact on our planet-home. But the combination of Aug. 28, Dec. 15, and May 11-12 look suspicious to me.

Here we go. Another season!

I mean the growing season. And the baseball season. Those two mirror and complement each other so perfectly as to be like art. A number of writers have made that association. None better than Bart Giamatti, the former commissioner who died too young.

He wrote of baseball, “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

A lot of good writing is about heartache. I look up Giamatti’s quote when I want to feel melancholy. Feeling a little sad is like enjoying an occasional rainy day; they make you appreciate the sunny days.

Anyway, the growing season is what I do (farmer), and the baseball season is what I love (fan). We are on the front end of both. Winter is giving up her grasp haltingly, as cold and wind greet us when we step out the door and go back in to get a heavier coat. Neither planting nor the Twins season is off to a great start. But there’s always tomorrow, right?

I like to sneak to a game before planting to meet up with former Sleepy Eye kid Bill Moran. Bill is my go-to when it comes to all-things Twins. Spending a few hours at various spots around Target Field with Bill gets me ready for the 162-game dash. He fills me in on areas of optimism and concern.

Last Wednesday, the weather report wasn’t terrible. That’s as good as it gets this spring. I bought a $4 ticket entitling me to pay $12 for a beer. I walked out on the plaza in rightfield and took in that glorious green field, a moment I look forward to all winter. Right then it started sleeting. The rain quit eventually, but it stayed cloudy and cool. The Twins got one hit, made some bad plays, and lost 7 to 0. Regardless it was a day at the ballpark, and any day at the ballpark is a good day.

It’s April, so I’m predicting a World Series for the Twins and 200-bushel corn for my fields. I’ve predicted a World Series for the Twins for sixty straight years so don’t go placing any bets on account of me. Two hundred bushels isn’t that uncommon now, so I’ll shoot for 250 as long as we’re being wildly optimistic. Spring does that. Until the losses pile up or drought settles in, there’s hope for the best.

That’s the thing about a new season. Anything is possible. All my rows could be straight and clean. The garden will be abundant, the apple trees full of perfect red fruits in September. Byron Buxton could play 160 games. The Twins might even beat the Yankees in the playoffs.

Okay, maybe not that last one. But you get the point. If you can’t be insanely idealistic in April, when can you be?

A season is a manageable piece of time. We’ll know in a half year how any of this works out. It is more a sprint than a marathon. You can give it your full attention, whether it’s the crops or the baseball season, knowing the day will come when the equipment is put away and the last pitch is thrown.

Having done this a while, I know the routine. Winter follows. I don’t look forward to winter. But I know it’s out there, and there will be a chance to live that slower pace again. It’s not quite hibernating, but there’s time to spend under a blanket with a book that summer doesn’t afford.

The seasons have been metaphor as long as people have used words. Spring lends itself to birth and beginnings, summer to growth, fall to completion, winter to sleep and, yes, death. We understand things in comparison to the time it takes the Earth to go around the sun.

Not everything happens in 12-month chunks, but we still refer to seasons. Lives, marriages, organizations, even nations have a beginning and an end, with growth and decline in between. I saw my grandson for Easter. We have fun with the fact that he is six and I am sixty-six. He is somewhere in May, and I am in September. He is the young corn plant, vibrant green, shooting up to the sky. I am the mature stalk, hoping to stay upright till harvest.

One could spend hours making comparisons to seasons. Pam’s and my marriage is past the intense, giddy days of spring when stormy days alternate with bright sun. We’re settling into a comfortable autumn of gentle breezes and agreeable temperatures.

There is much talk about our nation and western democracies. Are they in a decline with dark days of authoritarian winter ahead? What about religions that are struggling with numbers right now? Is this autumn for them or a cloudy spell before the sun comes back out?

We don’t know for sure who wrote Ecclesiastes. Tradition held it was Solomon, although scholars doubt that. Whoever it was, 2,500 years before Bart Giamatti, someone was thinking of the seasons and humankind:

“For everything there is a season,
A time for every activity under heaven.
A time to be born and a time to die.
A time to plant and a time to harvest.”

It goes on: kill and heal, tear down and build up, cry and laugh, grieve and dance, embrace and turn away, tear and mend, be quiet and speak, love and hate. Sadly, Ecclesiastes reports there is a time for war, as we are learning again, and a time for peace, as we pray again for.

Alas, all these, good and not so good, are as predictable as the greening of the Earth in the spring and the browning in the fall.

If Ecclesiastes were written today, it might include “A time to bunt and a time to swing away. A time to bring the infield in and a time to play the line.” So, here we go, the 2022 season. Best to you in your own planting, whether that’s corn, tomatoes, or a pot of marigolds. And go Twins.

Good things come to those who wait.

At least we like to hope so. Two things I’ve wished for my entire adult life have been in the news lately. Tony Oliva was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. And Roe v. Wade is likely to be overturned.

First, the lighter fare. Jim Kaat was chosen for the Hall along with Oliva, making it a double treat for Minnesotans. Tony O. and Kitty Kaat were stars on the Twins of my youth. They were vital cogs on the 1965 American League pennant winners. Being nine, that will forever be my favorite team. Stupid Dodgers.

Oliva spent his whole career with the Twins. In the ’60s, he was one of the best hitters in the game, on a career arc to be one of the greatest ever. Unfortunately, knee injuries and surgeries meant he literally limped to the end of a shortened career. Instead of gracefully gliding across right field at old Met Stadium, he was forced to DH. It was painful to watch him run the bases at the end.

The question for Hall of Fame voters was what to do with someone who was so amazingly gifted, but not for very long. Every year when voting came round, I had discussions with friends about the relative merits of quality vs. quantity.

Kaat’s career was the polar opposite. He was a stalwart on the mound for the Twins before leaving in 1973. He went on to pitch for four more teams before retiring after a 25-year career. For Kaat, it was a different debate than for Oliva. Kaat was good, but not great. He was just good for so long.

Both became ambassadors for the game. Oliva has worked for the Twins in several capacities. Kaat had a lengthy announcing career following his lengthy baseball career. They’ve both been pleasant and insightful the many times I’ve heard them. I even met Tony at Hardees in Sleepy Eye!

When the announcement came on Dec. 5 that they’d been elected, a few of us got together for a celebratory beer. After initial expressions of relief and joy, I said, “Now what do we do?” Something we’d talked about for 40 years had come to pass. I wasn’t quite sure what would fill that space.

Now I’ll put down the sports page and pick up the front page. Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court January 1973. I was a junior in high school and had no idea the impact that would have on our country and my political involvement. For every discussion I had about Tony Oliva, I probably had a thousand about abortion.

It is an issue I, like many of you, have cared deeply about. I can’t see around the fetus as an unborn child. As science advances, the proof of that grows. I don’t think the argument in favor of abortion is a strong one.

I have friends who are pro-choice who I respectfully disagree with. I have had good talks with people on the other side, although not many lately, as those never seem to go anywhere. I also understand democracy is messy and we don’t get our way all the time.

I’ve spent time in both parties, but the great majority of my votes have been for pro-life candidates. It’s interesting that Roe v. Wade didn’t immediately sort the way it would later. In the ’70s, there were large numbers of pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans.

For years we heard we needed a Supreme Court that would reverse Roe. Now that is in place. It is also a court that could do damage to rights for all of us, born and yet-to-be-born. By predictable 6-3 votes, this court looks like it will weaken voting rights, environmental protections, immigrant rights, workers’ rights, meanwhile defending wealth and power.

There is concern the Supreme Court has become politicized. In a democracy, an independent judiciary is essential. Historians will point to the Democrats rejecting Robert Bork in 1987 as setting us down this path. The shameless blocking of Merrick Garland for nine months and ramming through Amy Barret in two cemented a view that the Court has become a wing of one party.

Senate confirmation hearings have become circus, more akin to drunks in a bar than statesmen and women in a prestigious hall of democracy. Of the most recent, conservative columnist George Will wrote of, “Ketanji Brown Jackson, who in a reasonable era would be confirmed 100-0.”

Regardless, I support the defeat of Roe v. Wade. But it will not mean the end of abortion. It will turn it back to the states. Our country will not look appreciably different than it does now: in some states it will be easy to get an abortion and in others, not.

I have thought for a while that pro-lifers should shift our focus. The unsatisfying world of politics might change legislation. But I wonder whether we should be about the business of changing hearts.

What if every child in America was welcomed and valued from conception on? What if every mother felt supported and protected? Right now, many children are born into situations that are difficult. What if those of us who are pro-life make sure we are pro all lives?

Here in Brown County, we have First Choice Pregnancy Services. That is a wonderful example of good work that can be done for mothers.

At the same time, our nation has a health care system that is great if you are well off, not so if you are poor. My daughter who lived in Spain, France, and Switzerland will tell you how health care in those places is not dependent on income. Here, it absolutely is. Maternal mortality rates are consistently higher in economically depressed areas.

We need to get to work solving large gaps in our country in education and housing. Paid parental leave is available to well off and not to the poor. Affordable day care reduces stress for those having a child and is lacking. All these things make choosing life more difficult.

We need be honest with ourselves. When Roe is overturned, wealthy women will go where abortion is legal, and poor women will seek unsafe alternatives.

But if every newly pregnant mother felt safe and protected by the community around her, if she knew her child would be born into a caring, nurturing society, there would be less abortions.

We can all contribute to making this a good place to have and to be a baby. A kinder, fairer, more decent place doesn’t sound like a bad place to be an old guy either.

You’ve heard of your life flashing before your eyes in its final moments. I had something like that happen in a tree recently. Thankfully, it wasn’t my final moment. Which you probably guessed since I’m writing this.

That phenomenon was in the news lately. Scientists were doing brain scans of an 87-year-old Canadian man as part of a research project. By a coincidence, one that was fortunate for the scientists and not so much for the man, fate chose then for him to have a heart attack and die.

In the seconds before and after the man’s heart stopped beating, scans showed rapidly increased activity in parts of the brain associated with memory and dreaming. Scientists were intrigued by the presence of gamma waves. Those suggest the man’s brain may have been replaying memories from throughout his life.

While I’m not sure about my final moment, I can attest that our brains can riff through a lot of thoughts in a short time. And there might be a correlation with how far above the ground you are. I researched that myself.

Late winter is time to prune apple trees. Last week I headed to the orchard with saw and loppers in one arm and ladder in the other. It was a warmish day with snow piles receding.

I raise trees the way I raised kids: slightly out of control and unkempt. Once a year I try to bring some order to the branches. Branches that I can reach from the ground are preferred. A ladder gets me to another set. Then there are some that are too high.

I was reaching for one of those near the top of the ladder. Right then, I realized the ladder was going to tip over on some soft ground at a slight incline where I had thoughtlessly parked it. Going down with the ladder isn’t as noble as going down with the ship. My only other option was to stay where I was. So I grabbed the branch I was leaning over.

When the ladder got to where it was going, I was left hanging. Literally. It was then that my brain kicked into a higher gear. I quickly surmised that I didn’t like my situation. My life didn’t flash before my eyes. A couple of days I’m trying to forget maybe, but that doesn’t count.

I remembered something like this happened to Wile E. Coyote once that did not end well for Wile E. I imagined Road Runner smirking up at me.

If I was young and nimble, I would have flung the rest of me on to that branch and found a way to shimmy down the trunk of the tree. I’m not young and never was nimble.

Pam was in the house a few hundred feet away. If I started yelling, there was a chance she would hear and come out and set the ladder back up for me to safely descend to the ground, no worse for the wear.

There were two problems with that plan. Screaming frantically is so unbecoming, downright embarrassing. A man wants to maintain some dignity, even if he is dangling from a tree. The other problem is that if Pam did hear and came outside, she would jump to all sorts of conclusions about my decision-making abilities. Besides, did I really want to talk to Pam right then?

Then I realized I was visible from the highway. If someone happened to be looking toward our yard, they might see me clinging to that branch. Perhaps they would drive in the driveway and calmly set the ladder up. Or they might panic and call 911. That would be followed by emergency vehicles racing here from town. As their sirens blared into our yard, Pam would have noticed, with all those concerns I previously listed.

What if my buddy and intrepid reporter Fritz Busch happened to be on his way to cover a breaking news story in Cobden? If Fritz saw me suspended in air, he would have no doubt come to my aid. But being an intrepid reporter, he would have wanted to first get a picture. As much as I like having a column on page four of The Journal, I cringed at the idea of being on the front page. Again, it would have been easy to see a photo of my predicament and jump to all sorts of conclusions. Like that I’m not very smart.

Being a believer, prayer crossed my mind. God could plainly see the mess I was in. I wondered if God sees humor in the crazy things people do. Maybe grin and shake His head in a God sort of way?

The old joke came to mind where a man falls over a cliff and is hanging on a limb. He yells out for God. God answers in a thundering voice, “Do you trust me?”

The man says, “Yes Lord, I do.”

God instructs him to let go of the branch. The man looks up to heaven and says, “Is anyone else up there?”

I thought of my friend Scott. Scott is a Safety Coordinator by trade and would have had a thing or two to say to me right then. When I told him once about almost falling off a bin, he informed me about the three points of contact rule. That says at any moment in a climb, three of your hands and feet should be affixed. I have tried to follow that. In my moment of distress, I clearly had only two points of contact.

A few years ago, I sent a picture to Scott of my extension ladder in a loader bucket which I was going to use to replace a yard light. He was not impressed. I believe he still uses that as part of his Safety Training class.

By now, it was occurring to me that I had one option left, a bad one. I let go of the branch and fell to the ground, landing with a thud and a roll. I’ve been limping around with a sore knee since, but it could have been worse. I didn’t need to break anything this close to spring planting.

A few days later, I told Scott my story. Scott pointed out that March is National Ladder Safety Month. Oh, the irony. Consider this my contribution to that: Don’t do this.

A grain marketing guy about my age said this is the most volatile period for commodity markets in his career. I always say of prices, they could go up or they could go down. I have amended that to, they could go way up, or they could go way down. It’s fun to sell at high prices. But the stress of getting it wrong is amplified when soybeans can run up a dollar and fall a dollar in 24 hours.

Grain markets are just one wildly unpredictable thing I follow. The costs of farm inputs are bouncing erratically. My agronomist is already worried about getting fertilizer next year, price be damned. The auger I want to buy might be here by fall. For sure it will cost me a thousand dollars more than a year ago.

That’s my small world. Everyone has their own kind of crazy right now. All of us who pay for gas get to play along with the uncertainty at the pump. We all wonder what higher interest rates will mean to us or our children who are earlier along the path of kids and houses.

Everybody I know who builds, makes, or fixes things has had periods of not knowing about supplies or what they’ll cost tomorrow. We all remember the Great Toilet Paper Crisis two years ago. Since, we’ve become used to hearing this or that might or might not be available.

A once-in-our-lifetime pandemic gets blame for the unstable nature of things right now. But deeper, longer lasting phenomena got us to this place. Increasingly destructive weather likely tied to man-made climate change has affected and will affect everything. As we propel toward eight billion people on the planet, a population Earth has never seen before, issues will flow from that.

Set into a world that is challenging under the best of scenarios is social media which rewards obnoxious behavior with attention and likes. More and more people talk, and less and less people listen. Newt Gingrich created modern governance thirty years ago when he said, “Where we agree we will cooperate. Where we don’t, we will not compromise.” I know that wouldn’t work in a marriage; how would it in Congress?

Into this cauldron, throw the invasion of a small democracy by its large nuclear-armed autocratic neighbor, and you’ve got a stew that is boiling over.

We have a war being live streamed by unwilling participants. What a difference from wars of the past where we had to wait for the 6:00 news to know what’s going on. Not surprisingly, this close-up of war is discomforting. War is a wretched enough experience for young men who never chose to be there. Taking it to civilians is another level of heinous. A photo of a Ukrainian soldier carrying a baby through wreckage wrought by Russian bombs is moving to most of us.

Not to a certain man in Moscow. Vladimir Putin has bombed and killed thousands of civilians in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria, so what’s going on now is sadly predictable. It has been heartening to see much of the globe rally to the side of Ukraine. It is less so that Putin has so many admirers in our own country.

Pat Buchanan wrote, “In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity.” Buchanan can be excused for writing that before Ukraine, but not those other countries.

Perhaps this will subside. Maybe our lives will settle again after pandemic, war, and wild price swings fade away. Maybe not.

All this was knocking around in my head like a misfiring engine. Then I heard these words. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

As ashes were rubbed onto my forehead, thus began Lent. Every year, Ash Wednesday comes just in time. Winter has grown long, coinciding with certain qualities in me. Ash Wednesday means brighter, warmer days are ahead. It also means that I can make another run at sculpting a better me. It is especially so that Ash Wednesday comes just in time, here in our winter of discontent and craziness.

This doesn’t coincide with any official church calendar, but Ash Wednesday always seems the beginning of the faith year to me. We begin the six weeks that will lead to Jerusalem, Calgary, and finally an empty tomb. Lent is the cleaning up of our lives and airing out of our souls, as we try to be our best selves on Easter morning. Lent is a second chance. Or a third chance. Or a 66^th chance for some of us.

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It might be easy to look at that line and find it depressing. You can see it as shrinking and reducing us, as we are nothing more than dirt. But for reasons I don’t completely understand, I am encouraged by it.

Maybe it’s knowing that the dust from whence I came was formed by the Creator. It is the hands of God using the materials of the Earth to make us. It is holy dirt created on the third day in the Book of Genesis. I am glad to be of it.

There was a poster around in the Sixties that showed a little boy who it appeared was being disciplined. In a bold statement of self-worth, he is saying, “I know I’m somebody, cause God don’t make no junk!” I’ll take that as a type of benediction.

Maybe I like the reminder that I shall return to dirt. I only have so much time here. It is limited to whatever number of days God grants. Those days will be a lifetime to me, but they are a blink in eternity. While we are here, we are directed to love; our instructions are clear. We are to do more good than harm. But it’s not an endless task. We have those days, and then our work is done.

The world is a messy place right now. It always is. Beautifully and perfectly created by a God of love, then made messy by flawed and imperfect beings. Messy, like a smudge of ashes rubbed on a forehead.

My morning routine includes checking the obituaries over coffee. As the comedian Carl Reiner instructed, “Each morning, check the obits to see if you’re listed. If not, eat breakfast.”

On a recent morning, there was “Patricia Ann Stadick.” As I do with each name, my mind flipped it around, seeing if I could make a connection. A light bulb burst on. That was Pat of “Ralph and Pat!”

I say “Ralph and Pat” in the way I might refer to a comedy duo. In a way, that’s not too wrong. Funny lines bounced between Ralph and Pat Stadick, sometimes each teeing one up for the other. Both were witty and had eyes that twinkled when bantering back and forth. They played off each other in a George Burns-Gracie Allen style. (If you didn’t grow up with black and white television, you might have to google Burns and Allen.)

The Stadicks had a long time to hone their act, married 65 years when Ralph passed away in 2016. I got to know them early in my farming life. We were in some of the same farm and community groups. Besides being funny, Ralph and Pat were genuinely kind and caring. When they asked how my young family was doing, they really wanted to know.

I wouldn’t have known Ralph and Pat in the years before they were married. Of course, they were individuals with their own unique qualities. But most of the time I was with them, they were together. I knew them as a couple; I knew them as “Ralph and Pat.”

I was thinking about people I know mostly as part of a pair. As couples came to mind, I realized I often put the husband’s name first. I think of Mark and Elia and Scott and Judy. I asked Pam, and sure enough she usually thinks of them in reverse order, woman first. Perhaps my habit of husband first a remnant of the “Mr. and Mrs.” days?

When I think of friend-couples we’ve known for a long time, it becomes hard to imagine one without the other. Francis without Rebecca in a way doesn’t make sense. It’s like having one glove or one shoe. They share kids, they share a house, and decades of history. A lot binds them. Most of my conversations with one have been with both.

Of course, there are people who mostly know me, and there are people who mostly know Pam. For those, our spouse is a name they know in a secondary way, connected to the first. But a lot of friends know us as “Pam and Randy.”

A little of me gets folded into our identity as a couple. Pam’s strengths and weaknesses are stirred into mine, creating a type of batter that is more than the sum of the ingredients. I’m okay with that. Pam softens some of my rough edges, and I hope I round some of hers.

It’s not uncommon for one of a longtime couple to finish the other’s thought. Or at least clarify it. Sometimes if I know I’m going to have trouble retrieving a name, I’ll look at Pam as I move through a story. Since she’s heard that story a hundred times, she can pick it up where needed.

Making a marriage work, being part of a team, is something I’m proud of. “Pam and Randy” has been around for 41 years. But those are in in the past: we need to make our marriage work today and the next. It’s not unlike a long baseball season; yesterday’s box score doesn’t help you today. Ralph and Pat had 65 of these. For them, the season is over, and “the totals on the scoreboard are correct.”

I don’t want to be pollyannish about this. There are times I’m sure Pam wants to yell, “That’s him, not me!” The comedy duo of “Randy and Pam” lays an egg sometimes. We’ve had rough patches. No doubt, Ralph and Pat did, too, in decades of farm, family, and health challenges.

None of this should be taken for granted. Two-person teams break up. All of us know couples who’ve split. Looking back on friends who’ve gone through a divorce, in some of those cases, it made perfect sense. You could see it coming a mile away. For others, it snuck up like a slow arriving cold front. No one can ever really know what’s going on inside of another’s relationship. Sometimes it’s a surprise to those on the outside.

A few times, we’ve known both parties to a breakup equally well. In some of those, we’ve gotten to hear both sides of a bad story. That’s a painful situation to be in. It makes you think marriage counselors are underpaid. As the saying goes, there are two sides to every story and then the truth.

We’re at an age where couples “break up” for another reason. Time will take one of the partners and the other will go on alone. Some time, hopefully a long time, one of “Pam and Randy” will leave the stage and the remaining member of the duo will be left to perform solo.

We are in a couples-prayer group that began meeting thirty-five years ago. Originally, we were part of an international Catholic organization called Teams of Our Lady. We gather for a meal, prayer, and a lesson based on a chosen reading. In that setting, I know the others almost exclusively as couples. We’ve been together for the raising up and moving out of kids and funerals of parents.

We’ve talked about what it will be like the first time one of us comes to a meeting as a single. It will happen, whatever we think of the idea. The husbands joke with Mike, who is the youngest of the husbands by a little, that he will have to help our wives when we are gone: moving furniture, carrying in softener salt, all that guy stuff.

Dewy and Karla, Mickey and Minnie, Tim and Lora, Homer and Marge, Wayne and Jackie, Fred and Wilma, Mike and Gigi, Popeye and Olive, Rick and Gwen: couples I’ve known.

Most of us don’t spend a lot of time awake in the dark. Unless you work night security. Or have sleeping problems.

I’m in the latter group. Invariably, I wake in the dark and spend time trying to get back to sleep. Sometimes it’s in and out of restless sleep till I get up and turn on the coffee at 5 a.m. Sometimes it’s two or three hours of lying awake, thinking about how tired I’m going to be the next day. Which is as unproductive as a person can possibly be.

In talking to friends my age now, they are catching up with me in sleeplessness. It’s a common Old Guy complaint. Trips to the bathroom are part of that. This is all tied up with prostates. Now we’re really in the realm of Old Guy material. If you’re young and reading this, consider this a heads-up. At a certain age, you’ll talk less about cool stuff and more about prostates.

In any list of healthy habits, getting seven to nine hours of sleep is included. All manner of ill affects follows from not getting enough shut eye. I realize my lack of sleep is not helping me in my goal of farming till I’m 100. I try to keep up with others of those healthy habits. I eat well. I exercise. I drink beer. Well, mostly healthy.

I was thinking about what one does when they are lying awake at 3 a.m. I was thinking this at 3 a.m. So it was less of a hypothetical question than a practical one.

First thing, you do NOT want to wake your spouse. Having two people awake instead of one doesn’t improve the situation. If that spouse is grumpy the next day, it becomes even more regrettable. As a wise person once said, “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”

Sleep experts recommend not staying in bed if you are awake. Occasionally, I slide out from the covers and go downstairs. I turn on a light and pick up a book. After a few minutes of reading, I begin wishing I was in bed sleeping. So I go back to bed, where I can wish I was asleep without having to wish I was in bed, too.

There is one useful thing you can do in the middle of the night. Pray. Some nights that is spontaneous prayer, offering up to God thoughts of family, friends, and situations. After I cycle through my prayer list a few times, I start adding things like, “the Twins to sign a starting pitcher.” Finally God asks, “Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

Sometimes I turn to the Rosary, using my ten fingers, or toes if it’s been a really long night. When that works, I get groggy by the third or fourth decade. “Hail Mary, full of grace…um, hail Mary…uh, blessed art thou…holy Mary, Mother of God…lead us not into temptation…no, no…hail Mary…” I trust Mary appreciates the effort.

I’ve noticed this. Two in the morning is a good time to think about things you’ve done wrong. There is nothing like dark, cavernous, solitude to call to mind things you’ve screwed up or dumb things you’ve said. A little self-persecution is good for the soul. It’s not a particularly good sleep aid, however.

Along those same lines, the middle of the night is peak time for worrying. I might have noticed a small hydraulic hose leak on the planter that I’m trying to ignore because I don’t want to take the time to fix it. After dwelling on that in the darkened bedroom, I begin worrying the planter will break down. And I won’t get the field planted before it rains. And we’ll get a terrible yield. And our loans will get called in. And we’ll lose the farm. And Pam will take up with some floozy guy she met in Cobden. And I’ll have to go to work in a poultry processing plant.

Sometimes I work on one of my columns when I am lying there staring at the ceiling. I come up with some strange stuff in that sleep-deprived, addled state of mind. That last paragraph is a good example right there.

Another use of hours spent awake in the dark is we can plan our next day. Our perspective isn’t always good, afloat in the night ocean. I tend to overestimate my ability to get things done. I might come up with fifteen things I need to do tomorrow, which I can only get done if I don’t eat or go to the bathroom. Consequently, the next night I’m lying there wondering why I didn’t get anything done the day before. So, I plan to do twenty things the next day.

A fun activity in the middle of the night is the Position Game. I sleep on my left side, my right side, and my back. At any given moment of wakefulness, I decide that if I switch positions, I’ll fall blissfully asleep. Till I get to that position. And decide that another position is the right one. All this turning must be done in a way so as not to wake the woman I mentioned earlier. Turns are made a quarter inch at a time, agonizingly slowly.

There is one advantage to being awake at all hours of the night. I’m attentive in case of imminent danger. Wide-eyed and vigilant, I can leap cat-like out of bed to defend our home against ne’er-do-wells. Speaking of cats, 99 per cent of the noises I hear that have me tensed and in attack-mode come from the cat knocking around downstairs. The other one per cent I assume is poltergeist, and I can’t fight them anyway. So I stay in bed.

I’ve read it is common to wake during the night, so maybe you can relate. If you think about it, wouldn’t the good sleepers among our prehistoric ancestors have been eaten by nocturnal saber tooth tigers? Next time we’re lying there staring at the illuminated clock, maybe we should count our blessings.

There is a bright and glimmery poster on social media for the upcoming Sleepy Eye Chamber of Commerce Annual Meeting. Down a way, under the “All Things Sleepy Eye” banner and award winners to be honored is “GUEST SPEAKER: Randy Krzmarzick.”

Christina Andres is Chamber Secretary and a friend. We’ve worked together on some things. She asked if I would talk a few minutes at the meeting. She assured me I was one of several presenters. I figured I could wing it, talking about the centennial of Babe Ruth’s visit. Then I saw I was “GUEST SPEAKER.”

As someone who is generally terrified to stand up in front of a group of people and open my mouth, I’ve found myself doing just that quite a bit over the years. I’m not sure why. I’m a farmer and spend my day talking to myself, my dog, and occasional imaginary friends. Real people expect more acuity than my dog.

I’ve always been impressed and somewhat incredulous at people who can present information, ideas, or stories by spoken word. I dabble in written words and that is difficult enough. In writing, I can and do go back over and revise. I used to have an eraser; now I have a delete key. Both are invaluable; I’ve worn out several.

Good speakers have to “think on their feet.” Their brain must find the right word to follow the last, and make it seem effortless, like a word river flowing. We know about 40,000 words. (I looked it up; I didn’t count.) Finding the right one is no small feat. Then the words have to be organized and coherent. On top of stacking words, it’s also good to have a point you’re making.

I learned long ago I don’t have the skill to talk off the top of my head. A couple of vocal car crashes when I was younger proved that. Since then, I have a set of notes in front of me when I speak at something. Even with notes, I’m capable of many “ums” and panicky moments trying to figure out what my notes meant.

It’s not a natural thing, to speak continuously out loud. Conversation isn’t like that. You say something, someone else says something in response, then someone else has a different thought. If you listen, you might even learn. Conversation is a team game. Being a speaker is like trying to make a 40-foot putt with a gallery staring at you, holding their breath, hoping you don’t choke.

There are careers that involve speaking to audiences. Teachers have roomfuls of eyeballs staring up at them every day. Most of us would be frightened to death at that prospect. Teachers are heroic. Lawyers talk a lot. Juries are bound to hang on every word, hoping to make a right decision.

Politicians come to mind, too, when I think of people holding forth with spoken word. It’s interesting that so many politicians were lawyers before seeking office. Not a lot of politicians were teachers. I guess teachers have more important things to do.

Early in my farming career, I found myself running in alternative ag circles. I got asked to speak at the Lamberton Experiment Station about things I was trying on the farm. That led to other invitations to talk at other farm-type events. One of those was at a church by Owatonna to a group of sincere Lutherans. It was my Lake Wobegon moment. They fed me afterwards, so it couldn’t have been too bad.

Scott Sparlin tagged me to talk at a Minnesota River rally, and other river and environmental events followed from that. Sometimes, I filled the role of token farmer. It’s a burden to speak for agriculture since it’s such a broad and varied field. In those cases, I made clear that I was one voice speaking from one place at one time.

Classmate and buddy Steve Hansen was for a while director of the Minnesota River Joint Powers Board, a consortium of counties in the watershed that did some good work. Steve’s job wasn’t easy as he moved back and forth from the ag world to the environmental world. Thankfully, there are environmental farmers and farming environmentalists. That helped Steve walk that tightrope.

Looking back to then, our country wasn’t as divided about everything as we are now. We’ve gotten much better at not getting along. Still, there were hot button issues around farming practices, water quality, and regulations. Around 2000, Steve and his board came up with an event at Good Counsel in Mankato where involved groups would come together to search out areas of agreement. He asked if I could talk at that.

I prepared some thoughts on respecting each other and trying to understand where each was coming from. I shared ideas on real listening, deep listening. Somewhere in my talk, it took a turn toward a spiritual notion of honoring each other. We are all children of the same Creator, after all.

Around then, we were singing a hymn at St. Mary’s that tugged at me each time we sang it. “Will You Let Me Be Your Servant” was a simple song with an up and down melody. I’m not sure where this idea came from, but I decided we would end my talk by singing that together. It was maybe one of the stupidest and best Ideas I’ve had at the same time.

I had copies of the words for each table. Then I led the singing a cappella. I am most definitely not a singer. Even now, I wonder, “What was I thinking?” But it kind of, sort of worked. People joined in and music was for a few minutes a balm for all the challenging work we needed to do.

We are pilgrims on the journey,

We are travelers on the road,

We are here to help each other,

Walk the mile and bear the load.

Will you let me be your servant?

Let me be as Christ to you,

Pray that I may have the grace,

To let you be my servant too.

Christina, don’t worry. I promise not to sing next week.