My Hangouts

I've just returned from a few of my hangouts where I visit often: the public libraries and Barnes and Noble. I crave a steady diet of brain food and find it in those places. I don't know much about anything, but I sure enjoy learning a little about a lot of things. It works for me.

My initial goal when I set out this morning was to return borrowed books to the Bismarck library, but I came out with books I never could have dreamt would catch my eye. On the New Book shelves Gail Godwin: The Making of a Writer / Journals 1961-1963 begged me to open its cover and read. Yes, it appeared interesting so I carried it off and descended the long stairway to the fiction section. I found a number of novels she has authored and selected her novella Evenings at Five. Gail Godwin?

I walked past the magazine section and noticed Jack Nicholson leering out at me from the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. No, I don't think so, not today, I've got to get to Barnes and Noble for a Starbuck's. In there, the New Biography shelves offer something of interest, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere by Debra Marquardt. She writes about North Dakota and how as a young girl she couldn't wait to get out of here and find some appropriate action. It is one I will pick up again. It seems like these emigrants always yearn to come back home.

The need arises to hurry and jump into my old beater S-10 pickup and head to the Mandan library. This library is a visual treat to visit because the large reading room is furnished with beautifully conditioned Arts and Crafts furniture. Their collection holds a Larry McMurtry book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen in which there is a quotation I remember from reading a few years back that I want to lift and use in the future. We're going to Texas in January, and I find a travel guide that I think will give useful information. Walking to the circulation desk I passed the music and movie DVD collection and picked up Three Dog Night Live with the Tennessee Symphony Orchestra.

I had found enough items to satisfy my eclectic reading tastes for a day or so. I asked the librarian if the Chinese restaurant located above the library serves good food. She assured me it did, but with singleness of purpose I needed to get home to begin reading today's harvest.

Saving Images

I have a large collection of images that I've boxed and stored on a shelf in my memory. Every once in awhile I like to look at them again. Some are small and light, others weigh heavy. They have accumulated over the years. I'm lucky, the box continues to fill. Let me reach in and bring up a hand full.

I'm standing in a hayfield reaching under a windrow to hook my finger in the handle of a crock jug. Hot and thirsty, I hoist the jug high in the crook of my arm and drink long, cool swallows from it.

I'm a small boy and my Grandpa Sandvig has taken me fishing. He baits my hook and throws in the line telling me, "Don't take your eyes off that bobber!" I obey, for several long hours. Small perch pull it under. It bobs. He takes me home at twilight as a full moon rises. I look at it and see that float bobbing, bobbing, bobbing in the moon, in my supper plate, in my dreams.

Goose bumps chill me when I lie in bed with a raging winter storm howling in the eaves. I'd wonder why, it seems, a woman screams inside a blizzard wind.

I'm in the barnyard. A bull eyes me from the pasture. His hooves kick up a dust cloud filled with innate hate for the man-child he spots. He charges. My fingers dig and claw into the wall of the barn, and I gain the rooftop just as he arrives.

I'm in the hayfield again. I always want to be where the men work. I'm given the job of cleaning fallen hay from underneath the stationary stacker. As it raises up to dump its load atop the growing stack the wooden main beam breaks and hundreds of pounds crash to the ground just as I've stepped away.

My empty hand shakes. The images have grown hard. It's time to return the box to its shelf. I shall return to it.

In Search of Heroes

Occasionally someone comes along who stands tall in thought or behavior and gives us reason to examine our own. The word hero fits my thesis. As a boy I found Roy Rogers under a white cowboy hat and Superman flying overhead. As an older boy, Medal of Honor winners and ace fighter pilots marched through my imagination; then Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris batted their way to high places. Early astronauts circled my dreams in orbit.

As I matured I grew closer to the realm of ideas, and therein dwelt different heroes. I lived vicariously in the lifetimes of historical figures that stretched back into the centuries. I stood shoulder to shoulder with them to defeat evil empires, establish democracies, conquer disease, write literature, create art, defend a way of life, etc.

Has an old-age cynicism crept into my psyche? I see too many of today's near-heroes searching out book deals which diminishes their glory in my eyes. The only memoirs I place much importance in come at the end of a person's distinguished career, and therefore can do nothing to advance their careers --- only to record it for the future. On the flip side I see accomplished people being vilified by "spin" machinery run by self-serving, opposing forces. Then there are the record-breaking sports figures for whom the cloud of alleged drug-enhancement obscures their achievements. How about TV preachers selling salvation?

I'm hard pressed to name contemporary figures who fit my idea of heroes. Help me! I'm searching for a new hero!

Lonely in the Countryside

I have found real meaning to words like abandoned or deserted since working in my present employment as a transportation aide. We travel through a ten county area and visit many small towns in this south central part of the state. Lonely winds blow through more than one ghost town and swirl around uncounted and abandoned farmsteads. Some have become only place names, the town of Arena being a good example. Arena lies just south of Highway 36, about halfwqy between Wing and Tuttle, and a lot of blank space surrounds it on the map.

A pair of small grain elevators crumbles on one side of the road, and train rails that once guided grain cars into place beside them have turned rusty red in the prairie air. To the west of the road the ground rises gradually to a knoll that is capped by a steepled church with boarded up windows. A small school building rests below the rise and sports similar window treatment. No houses remain, but a couple dozen tombstones stand as conclusive proof that life once existed here.

My favorite bathroom reading material recently is Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology, a collection of short poems written in the voices of the town's dead as they rest in their graves. Every time I read those poems I am reminded of those small graveyards like Arena's that I often drive past. Most of the those lying silently in their tombs will be forgotten before a couple of generations have come and gone. The only way they will be remembered will be in the imaginations of those who view their grave stones. I find it sad.

"If I Had a Hammer" Subversive?

I recently read the Pete Seeger biography How Can I Keep From Singing and learned this banjo playing folk singer has experienced a very controversial career. What I'd always thought was the innocuous song "If I Had a Hammer" was part of the package that got him hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the purge of the arts community in the McCarthy period. When those lyrics are examined in light of the period in which they were written they spoke in honor of the downtrodden who wanted to climb out of their depths. Artists like Seeger found themselves "blacklisted" and found difficulty working at their craft.

An artist closer to home was Rhodes Scholar Tom McGrath, the poet of note from Sheldon. He lost work in the Los Angeles area in the 1950's because of the HUAC persecution of leftists. In studying their so-called subversive behavior it seems to me they were only guilty of bucking the entrenched power elite who saw them as a threat. I doubt there was anything unconstitutional in their thoughts or actions. In most cases I believe they were guilty only of trying to organize workers into unions so as to establish better working conditions and wages through negotiated contracts.

McGrath will be featured at the Dickinson State University Humanities Festival this weekend. Unfortunately, because of personal scheduling I will be unable to attend.

The U. S. Poet Laureate

The present poet laureate of the United States is Donald Hall. I've read some of his work, my favorite being "Names of Horses." He celebrates the work animal with reminiscence of their labor and toil. He turns very melancholy by the end of the poem and relates the killing of a draft horse by putting a slug in its brain to put it out of its old age misery. He ends with sad recall of some names: "O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost." I've placed this poem in an eclectic collection I've put together with other favorites, my only criterion being I like them and they speak to me in some way.

I will have a lot more to say about poets and poetry in the future, but it's a book of Hall's prose, String too Short to Be Saved, that I turn to now. Its sub-title pretty much sums up the gist of the book, Recollections of Summers on a New England Farm, and the prologue of the book tells you the type of people he grew up with: "A man was cleaning the attic of an old house in New England and he found a box which was full of tiny pieces of string. On the lid of the box there was an inscription in an old hand: 'String too short to be saved.'"

I find that humorous on the surface, but I have known many people who maintained that philosophy of saving any and all. We throw things away. Goods and products we presently use generate plenty of garbage, and land fills choke with detritus. Old timers, however you wish to define them, would probably have gone into modern dumpgrounds to retrieve items they perceived to be useful. There's no reason to pursue this idea any further except to say that times sure have changed.

Old Time Independence

I have deep respect and undying admiration for the generation our parents represent. Our small farm begged constant repairs and maintenance, but only on rare occasions was an outsider called in for his expertise. In my growing years, the 1940's and 50's, I witnessed this first hand. Many people my age, I like to joke, were born with a wrench in one hand and a hammer in the other.

On more than one occasion when a tractor burned too much oil, we lifted its cylinder head and dropped the oil pan to overhaul the engine. Valves needed grinding, too, so someone took a quick three mile drive into Sheldon to deposit the engine head at the local mechanic shop where we usually got overnight service. After reassembling the engine again, we had endured only a few hours of tractor downtime.

In 1952 the REA line came through and an arc welder was purchased so that any metal breakage could be fixed right in our yard. A broken hammer handle got replaced with a homemade one hewn from a piece of oak with a drawknife. In the shop rivets, bolts, and nails stood ready for use in rusty tins and wooden bins. Scarcely a day passed when a hand didn't reach in to grab some of these fasteners to repair something.

Rolls of old telephone wire and baling wire served to make temporary fixes. A leak in a water pipe could be stopped with strips of old innertube we wound around the leak and then tightly bound with baler twine.

Large gardens, flocks of chickens, and milk cows supplied our table. Ma sewed patches on pants and darned socks. Cloth from flour sacks was put to good use when cut and sewn into garments.

Livestock needed lots of personal attention such as birthing, feeding, docking, castrating, dehorning, vaccinating, shearing, etc. Fences and pens needed building and repairing. Buildings required shingling and painting.

It was a different world. The home we built here in Mandan six years ago needed at least 14 different sub-contractors to complete it. Each group specialized. You used to hire a carpenter and he built it. I could go on and on regarding the present state of specialization. For instance who could repair a newer model car in his garage? Is a five year old wash machine worth fixing? Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I still preferred some of the old ways.

Glory Days

A favorite song of mine is Bruce Springsteen's "Glory Days." Whenever I hear those lyrics sung I'm taken back to another time. One of the strengths of being born and raised in North Dakota is that so many of us attended small schools where it was easy to participate in sports and activities. With a bit of thought and maybe a little imagination, we can conjure up the times we experienced glory days. My hometown, Sheldon, celebrated its 125th anniversary this past summer. The large crowd in attendance gave ample opportunity to share and laugh about those old times. We do not see each other often so many of those stories have not gone stale.

But Springsteen sings of those whom life has passed by like the baseball player who "could throw that speedball by you." All he wanted to talk about were those days. We can imagine him as not having had many other successes in his life. He sings of the girl who married early, had kids, and has separated from her husband. She says "when she feels like crying she starts laughing about glory days." In the final verse he fears he will suffer the same unremarkable fate as he heads to the barroom for the evening. He fears it but states he "probably will" because "time slips away and leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of glory days."

The moral, as I read it, is fortunate are the people who have developed beyond this predicament and built a life full of other glory days.

A Quandary

Stormy debates often blow across the landscape. Extreme edges of thought contend for victory, but common wisdom says the practical solutions usually lie somewhere on middle ground. The particular argument I have in mind is that of illegal immigration. We're told that 12 million illegal immigrants live within our borders. One side of the argument says they burden our social systems, resist acculturation with our general population, traffic in drugs, etc. The opposition says they are needed to provide labor that Americans are unwilling to do, enrich the culture with diversity, exhibit strong family ties, etc.

The people we send to Washington show little backbone. They have not taken much action to set policy on the matter. In fact, the politicians seem to be part of the problem instead of the solution. I confess to having had the strongest feelings on the matter when I saw a television news piece showing unharvested crops in Oregon and Washington. The farmers simply did not have enough laborers to bring their harvest in. To be sure, I also have sympathy for the other viewpoint. That's why this is a quandary.

When I was a teenager and wanted to make money, the only work available was farm labor. I earned my first paychecks working fields, harvesting grain, and hauling hay bales. I wish I still had those hard, strong muscles gotten from loading thousands of bales and stacking them in high, neat piles. I never thought manual labor was beneath me. Maybe some of the solution can be found here. The good ole boys in Washington always solve a problem by throwing money at it. They could establish incentive to employers to hire young people and let them experience hard labor. As it is, their work experience now often consists of frying hamburgers and waiting tables.

Of one thing I am certain. We'll never be able to expel 12 million illegal immigrants.

This Old Desk

In my study the desk on which this computer sets is an old oak library table. It has history that makes it valuable to me. It originally sat in the one-room schoolhouse that my wife attended, grades 1-8. There is even an initial carved into its top that she says may or may not have been hers. We came into possession of it through her parents. When that particular school closed they purchased the building and the contents. It sat just across the road from their home place and its stout construction made it useful as a storage shed for grain and other things. This piece of furniture came to town with her parents when they moved from the farm. Mary acquired it and spent a good deal of effort in refinishing it a couple of years ago. After all that, I claimed it as the perfect desk for myself.

We have paired the desk with an oak chair that came out of a bank building. It, too, has been refinished and will serve good purpose for many years to come.

One other old item of furniture sets here: a portable cavalry blacksmith's bench. Dad bought it at an auction sale many years ago, probably very cheaply, and I always said to the folks that I would like to have it someday. They gave it to me when they moved into their apartment, and I use it as a conversation piece end table.

The point of all this is that I like some old things around me to remind me of good craftsmanship. Walk into a furniture store and try to locate pieces that will be worthy of refinishing a century from now. Old time craftsmen knew how to build things that last. I, for one, appreciate their work.

My First Blog

I became interested in the concept of web logs a while ago, and recovering from my cancer surgery, I now have plenty of time to become a blogger myself and write my thoughts regarding a wide range of topics. The essay has always been my favored style. I anticipate most of the entries will take that form; however, I may sneak other things in if I take a fancy to them. What the heck, this is my doing, and I'm not going to worry about what someone else thinks of my views.

I still remember an epiphany I experienced while a student at UND. Somehow I got enrolled in an introduction to the German language course and struggled mightily to understand the workings of that language. The main problem was that I did not fully understand the grammar of the English language - I could not cross-polinate. High school English teachers did their best with me, but that light bulb continued burning dimly. So there in the lounge in Bek Hall I sat painfully studying my German lesson of the day. In that very deep concentration, probably studying something like the four cases of the German noun in the singular, a once in a lifetime experience occurred: the working of the English language revealed itself, its light shining brightly. The two teachers named above more than likely set the foundation in place, but it was only at this instant that I UNDERSTOOD! That feeling of A-Ha has never since been so strong. I went on to major in English and have always felt confident in my written usage of it.

The blogosphere presents itself as an outlet for my writing, the tablet I set my pen to. If a few readers join me I will appreciate that; if not, I'll go on venting and writing as it suits me. At 64 years of age a good deal of thought and experience has accumulated in this body and soul, and I want to organize it in written form.