This past Saturday night Mary and I drove a few miles south of Mandan to an outdoor concert at the Bohemian Hall, a structure built years ago by an ethnic group of immigrants of the same name who originated in Czechoslovakia. The prime mover and organizer of this musical event, which draws a few hundred people, was Chuck Suchy, himself a Bohemian who likes to encourage and continue the building’s use as a community center, something which harkens him back to his childhood days of going there with his family. Suchy, a few years back, received the honor of being named North Dakota’s Troubadour by the state legislature and is a talented writer, singer, and guitar player. He draws his inspiration from the agrarian life and still runs cattle on the family farm located just a couple miles across the hill from the hall.
At one point during the evening, with guitars set aside and singers standing off-stage, we were treated to a couple of monologues, one by Clay Jenkinson, this state’s resident intellectual and scholar, the other by Suchy. Jenkinson spoke of the simpler things in life and of his grandmother’s ways and attitudes regarding life on her small Minnesota dairy farm. It revived memories in most of us and set us to laughing and thinking of parents and grandparents and our days at home.
Suchy sets the date for the concert always in the weekend closest to coinciding with August’s full moon, and there it stood in the cloudless sky, only a few days away from being fully round. A stiff southeast breeze cooled us after the sun set and kept the mosquitoes at bay. Suchy spoke of being in love with this night, the landscape, the people who inhabit it, and life in general in this part of North Dakota. Something he said resonated: money can’t buy this, but money sure can destroy it. He related this to things such as factory farms where animals are raised in confinement, strip mining, oil field development, etc. The familiar quote “Take time to smell the roses” came to mind and he clearly relishes the simple farm life he lives and brags with special pride of the hay crops he raises.
The next day, driving to Fargo, we listened to the public radio station for the three hour trip, and there on the Bob Edwards program was a topic of the same theme we had heard the night before. A newspaper reporter from somewhere had compiled a collection of his newspaper columns into book form, one of them giving title to the book: Fiddler in the Subway. He’d written of a professional symphony musician who possessed a valuable violin and had conducted an experiment in a Washington, DC subway. During rush hour throngs of federal bureaucrats crowded the station and hustled about boarding their rides, talking on cell phones, reading papers, etc. He proceeded playing difficult but beautiful violin pieces with his instrument. At the end of his stint he counted only seven people who’d lingered a bit to listen to the rich sounds of the music while hundreds of commuters ignored him, showing no interest at all. People so wrapped up in the hum-drum habits of their lives couldn’t or wouldn’t break out of the pattern to enjoy this thing of beauty.
I have been trapped in this attitude many times in my life, but I now make more conscious effort to relish the finer things. With that I will return to the paradox I am presently contemplating of why factories installed whip sockets on horseless carriages.
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A local news station was interviewing an 80 year old woman who’d just married for the 4th time. She told the reporter that her new husband was a funeral director. Thinking that was interesting the reporter asked, “What did you first three husbands do before they died?”
She replied “The first was a banker, the second was a circus ringmaster, and the third was a preacher. I married one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready and four to go.”
