ATTENTION: Owing to some kind of error in the huge, unresponsive bureaucracy of Kindle Direct Publishing, part of Amazon, many of my outstanding small-press publisher’s books are no longer listed on Amazon.com. This includes my Amazon Best-seller immigrant saga The Price of Passage and also the heartwarming coming-of-age story, Izzy Strikes Gold!
FORTUNATELY, we do not rely on Amazon to get our books in people’s hands. You can purchase either or both of these books direct from the publisher by clicking these links: Izzy and Passage.
Thank you for your unwavering support of fine literature from small, independent presses.
I left off other pursuits at age 70 to work seriously on becoming Your New Favorite Writer. By writing and publishing two great books (The Price of Passage and Izzy Strikes Gold!), a few short stories, and about 325 blog posts—weekly ruminations on the past, the present, and topics of literary and historical interest—I have established a late-life career as a minor, yet real, literary lion.
But a few weeks ago, at age 80, this literary lion discovered a serious condition—a lumbar stenosis—that required surgery if I wanted to spend the rest of my days upright and ambulatory. It’s a tough operation, involving a long dorsal incision, six hours on the table, and the placement of rods and screws inside my spine.
I solemnly vow, Gentle Reader: This is the last time I will lumber you with tales of Your New Favorite Writer’s surgical woes. As rumors, spread by me, of post-operative grief have turned out to be exaggerated, we will return next week to interesting stuff.
Suffice it to say: An octogenarian takes several months to recover from this kind of event. I am working on it.
Br’er Fox throws Br’er Rabbit in the briar patch. Walt Disney Productions. Fair Use.
NOW, HERE IS THE COMPENSATORY BLESSING that has been revealed: In the past weeks—just before the Big Health Scare, continuing through it, and afterwards as well—a more ambitious literary agenda has come into focus. It includes a way through the thicket of the current work-in-progress, a WWII-era historical novel; the impetus for a narrative nonfiction work on a “history-of-religion” topic; a Vietnam-era military memoir; a speculative fiction comic novella partly inspired by the Big Health Scare; several new short stories; and a more sustainable approach to marketing and selling these gorgeous hunks of intellectual property.
All this may keep me busy until I’m 100. We’ll see how it goes.
Gentle Reader, from this end of the telescope I suddenly see every bit of life—every difficulty, every failure, all the boredom and frustration experienced at tasks I didn’t want to be doing—or more precisely, tasks the preparatory value of which I did not grasp—every problem encountered and surmounted or endured: I now see all of that as simply a fair price paid for the marvelous vista gleaming just ahead.
Excuse me, but I’ve got to get to work. See you next week.
I woke up this morning, fresh home from lumbar surgery at University of Wisconsin Hospital, to read that a Kaibab Plateau event, the Dragon Bravo Fire, burned down the National Park Service lodge on the venerable North Rim of the Grand Canyon, a place loved by generations of hikers, campers, explorers, and just regular old tourists like you and me.
I call the North Rim venerable because it was there long before we ever even thought about it.
I’m tempted to say the fire waited until it knew I was down and couldn’t respond.
View from the North Rim Lodge.
I’m sure glad I got my chance at the place last May 15-16. A group of us, organized by the Road Scholar people, spent two nights on the North Rim after a longer stay on the South Rim. The majestic Grand Canyon Lodge was a perfect place to gather our thoughts and reflections in solitude after a week of exposure to the stunning 277-mile gorge of the Colorado River.
Now it’s gone. Just like that.
But don’t you worry about a thing, Dear Reader. Our systems for meting out blame are already in action.
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, according to the Associated Press, “called for a federal investigation into the Park Service’s handling of the fire, which was sparked by lightning July 4.
“ ‘Arizonans deserve answers for how this fire was allowed to decimate the Grand Canyon National Park,’ the governor said in a social media post Sunday. ‘The federal government chose to manage that fire as a controlled burn during the driest, hottest part of the Arizona summer.’”
It may be that National Park Service officials made a bad decision on how to respond to the fire when it first arose. Or it could be that officials with limited resources at their disposal sometimes guess wrong. Or perhaps there are some fires that will not be contained until they’re good and ready.
Two or more of those things can even true at the same time. For the ultimate verdict of history, tune in again a hundred years from now.
One near-term question that arises is, “Will the lodge be rebuilt?” And the answer, almost surely, will be: Not right away.
An expensive barn to replace.
It’s a very big project. Unless you’ve been there, you may not appreciate the ambition required to transport the needed tons of building materials to the remote site, high in the Arizona mountains, to reshape the land, build new service roads, provide essential infrastructure for construction—power, water, etc.—analyze architectural requirements (which will have changed since the lodge was built ninety years ago), etc. My guess is that to pull all these requisites together will take a few years, and then the actual construction will take a few more.
The chief requirement, of course, is the political will to rebuild. But I can’t imagine that will be lacking. The site is simply too grand, too seminal; it simply looms too large in our national awareness to go untenanted for very long.
A more immediate question is water. That’s always the key question in the Southwest, but quite specifically: The sparsely-populated and lightly-touristed North Rim provides nearly all the water for the whole Grand Canyon National Park. The North Rim of the Canyon rests upon the Kaibab Plateau, a high-lifted (8,000-8,500’) rock shield that funnels water southward. According to a National Park Service website, “The Transcanyon Water Distribution Pipeline, known as the Transcanyon Waterline (TCWL), is a 12½-mile water pipeline constructed in the 1960s that conveys water from the Roaring Springs source on the North Rim to the Havasupai Gardens . . . pump station and ultimately to the South Rim. It provides the potable water and fire suppression for all facilities on the South Rim as well as some inner canyon facilities in the Cross Canyon Corridor including over 800 historic buildings.”
One of the famous Grand Canyon mules. They stay on the South Rim but drink water–lots of it–from the North Rim.
It goes on to say: “The National Park Service (NPS) is replacing the TCWL as it is beyond its expected useful life, experiences frequent failures, and requires expensive and continuous inner canyon maintenance work to repair leaks.
“Since 2010, there have been over 85 major breaks in the TCWL that have each disrupted water delivery. The breaks are expensive to repair, occur in locations that pose dangers for responding employees, and negatively impacts the visitor experience. The cost for a single waterline break often exceeds $25,000. Access to the inner canyon, where breaks occur, is by trail and helicopter only.”
Fortunately, the needed upgrade work is already underway, but it comes as a package of discrete projects, which are scheduled over the course of several years.
It seems that a water treatment (chlorination) facility has been affected by the Dragon Bravo Fire, and perhaps other parts of the water system as well.
If the fire has caused an outage of potable water for the five million tourists who will visit the South Rim this year, that will have to be addressed posthaste.
As for the rest, well, as I said, it’s going to take some time.
It’s a good thing we have time available in which to make it right. At moments like this I treasure the wisdom of Christ as mediated by Dame Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century English mystic: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
St. Louis Gateway Arch. Photo by Yinan Chen, Public Domain.
What a difference a week can make. Or, in this case, two weeks.
My apologies, Gentle Reader, for not posting here last week. I was busy attending a national church convention in St. Louis. We had a wonderful time, caught up with a lot of old Congregationalist friends, and learned a few new things.
We got a scare on the way home. Your New Favorite Writer experienced a sudden weakness of the thighs amounting to total collapse. I had to hunker over the sink in the hotel bathroom because my legs wouldn’t stand up. It was terrifying.
Praise the Lord, it was a transient episode. After a minute or two, I was all right.
But it happened again at home the day after we got back. This time, I called 911.
A squad of paramedics and firefighters swooped down and bore me, as on angels’ wings, to the University of Wisconsin Hospital Emergency Room. It was all very swift and efficient.
MRI image of lumbar spinal stenosis. Not mine, but similar. Image by Jmarchn, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.
It was still scary.
At the hospital, medicoes gave me an MRI scan and found spinal stenosis in the lumbar region. Displaced vertebrae squeezed the nerves that work my legs, and that’s what caused a temporary paralysis. If left untreated, this condition might kill those nerves and make me a permanent invalid.
I sure am glad we have doctors. And nurses. And MRI machines, and the technicians who run them. God bless them, every one.
I have an appointment with a neurosurgeon, and we’ll schedule an operation to fix the problem. Soon, I hope.
Regular readers of this blog will appreciate the irony. In our last installment, I had just turned 80 and was flying high with the thrill of being in such good shape, looking forward to an active old age.
“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”—Proverbs 16:18
“How are the mighty fallen!”—2 Samuel 1:19.
The Bible has a lot of sayings like that.
I never used to be very good at praying, but I’ve gotten better—because so many friends need prayers. In the last decade, no day goes by but two or three people of my acquaintance need intercessory prayer—often for cancer, but for other woes as well.
I often thank God for the astounding string of blessings that has allowed me to escape major health threats. Until now.
Going to the ER was an emotional experience. Answering questions posed by paramedics, doctors, and nurses, my voice trembled—a sign that I was shaken.
Lying on the gurney awaiting an MRI scan, I prayed sincerely to the Lord God above—up there somewhere beyond the fluorescent ceiling lights. I prayed an intercessory prayer, this time on my own behalf. But I also mentioned my friends Stu and Janet, visited by different forms of cancer—because the Lord knows we’re all in this together.
After my MRI scan, as I lay on the gurney awaiting transport back to the ER, I said Psalm 23 in my mind two or three times. I was led beside the still waters; I was made to lie down in green pastures; His rod and His staff, they comforted me.
Over a long lifetime I have been, at times, a reluctant convert, honoring God more by omission than observance. But as we age, our perspective tends to true up. Life is fleeting and precious.
Years of spiritual training and practice have prepared me, at least a bit, for this moment. I know some good ways to get in harmony with the Creator and enjoy my role in His universe.
I hope the surgery will be soon. Please pray that I make a good recovery.
Last week was a big one—my eightieth birthday and our fifty-fifth wedding anniversary.
Your New Favorite Writer is now an octogenarian and, presumably, past ordinary cares.
My backyard.
I love to occupy my zero-G chair in the backyard, staring at the black locust tree that arches high above our roofline. I’ve traveled the world and seen its sights. I love Italy and Alaska; I really like Iceland, Austria, Croatia, and Costa Rica. But my favorite place in the whole wide world? Right here, in my backyard.
Fooboo.
Fooboo and I sit here of evenings and commune with the Great All. This communion is sweeter by a glass of wine—or Benedictine, better yet. I share a bit of sharp Wisconsin cheddar with Fooboo. He gobbles it and, if a morsel drops, chases it among the grass blades. I eat mine on a Wasa rye cracker.
I read a book—a history or biography, or a good novel. I see birds and sometimes frame them in my Nikon 8×30 binoculars.
But even at eighty, life’s not all about sitting and relaxing. I picked up some firewood logs the other day from a guy who wanted to get them out of his backyard. I’ll give them a new home, split into pieces, in my woodstove next winter. As I was loading the heavy wood into my little car, he said, “You’re a tough old bird, aren’t you?” I think he meant it as a compliment, not an insult, but in any case I’ll take the rap.
LeRoy “Satchel” Paige in 1970. Photo by Bernard Gotfryd. Public domain.
Some people don’t make it to eighty; others are in poor shape when they get there. I’m blessed to be able to continue most of my usual activities—and suppose I’d better do so as long as I can. Satchel Paige said, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”
I would not be in such fine fettle, or in any fettle at all, had I not been saved from myself by a grand young woman—Joelle Caroline Nelson—when I was twenty-five. She’s like me—or rather, I’ve become like her. Hungry for life.
Me and my significant other.
“It takes life to love Life.” That was the advice of Lucinda Matlock in Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology.
What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you —
It takes life to love Life.
That’s a more stirring philosophy than I would have come up with on my own, but it approximates my lifemate’s approach to all things, and in fifty-five years I guess I have soaked some of it up.
So I keep on playing tennis, which is just plain fun. And I keep on walking the dog, even when my hips hurt. And I’ll keep mowing the lawn, walking thousands of steps behind the Toro; though I don’t enjoy it all that much, I’m terrified to stop. And I reckon I’ll get all that wood split before winter.
I’m not ready to quit life yet. Tough old bird, you know.
But the best thing about old age—and I’m only starting to grok the fullness of it, Gentle Reader—the best thing is, I get to enjoy and appreciate everything. Things that used to drive me crazy now do nothing but warm my heart.
The folly, stupidity, and perversity of the human race? Well, what do you expect? It’s only human. We all mean well. We can’t help that we’re limited creatures. But in the living of life, we do throw off occasional gleams of splendor.
I think my worst birthday was when I was thirty. I had reached three decades of age and felt I had not accomplished anything. I meant I had not written a symphony or the great American novel; I had not made a million dollars; I was not President of the United States. I was a failure.
What I did not know then, but do know now, is that most of us don’t leave a great big mark on history. Most of us leave a whole lot of little marks—and half of them, for better or worse, we don’t even know we’re leaving.
It can take a lifetime to wise up to the great joy of living.
The poet W. D. Snodgrass, when he was only thirty, wrote:
While scholars speak authority
And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,
My eyes in spectacles shall see
These trees procure and spend their leaves.
There is a value underneath
The gold and silver in my teeth.
Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.
I’ve tried sometimes, but never quite succeeded, in specializing. Guess I’m just a tough old bird.
We went to Monona again this year for the Memorial Day Parade.
Last year, our granddaughter, Elsie, marched in the parade with the Monona Grove High School band, playing her trombone. We were very proud.
This year she was chosen for the honor of twirling one of the band’s decorative flags, so she donned a special outfit and left the trombone at home. She was not carrying our nation’s colors, you understand—just one of several blue-and-white flags that decorate the band’s arrival as it marches down Monona Drive. She marches ahead of the instrumental players and twirls the flag in a decorative display. We were very proud.
Elsie twirls the flag.
This parade is not one of the solemn events of Memorial Day. It’s more like a celebration of community spirit. It starts with a color guard carrying the U.S. and Wisconsin flags. Then everyone in Monona, except spectators, marches or walks down Monona Drive. Many sprinkle items of candy upon the bystanders. Some of them drive old-fashioned cars or huge trucks with elaborate paint jobs. There is a gentleman dressed as Uncle Sam who zips up and down the street on a penny-farthing bicycle. It’s all very grand, and happy.
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Bratwurst on grill. Photo by Dan Fuh, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0
Memorial Day—the Monday observance of the official Memorial Day—is the culmination, here in the Madison area, of a long weekend of food indulgence at The World’s Largest Brat Fest. The event, held on Willow Island near the Memorial Coloseum, features bratwurst sandwiches of all possible descriptions served to enthusiastic consumers in the name of hundreds of worthy charities. It starts on Friday morning with Take Your Brat to Work Day, your annual opportunity to zoom through a quick bratwurst pickup lane and bring a few thousand calories of warm sausages with you to your office, and it ends on Sunday night or whenever the brats run out.
It, too, is a celebration of some kind.
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Veterans—in uniform and with U.S. flags—are integral to both the parade and the brat fest. They show up everywhere, usually being thanked for their service.
As a Vietnam veteran of the U.S. Air Force, I find myself charmed and gratified whenever our fellow citizens thank us for our service. But thoughtful veterans may reflect that not all of us came home to enjoy the blessings of liberty, to chomp the bratwurst, to march in the parade.
Some paid in blood. Some paid the ultimate price. Some laid their lives as a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. Memorial Day is about them, about their loss of life, about our loss of their continuing company. It is, on that account, a day of rue and woe.
Franklin
Stanley
I think of my uncles, Stanley and Franklin Sommers, both bomber pilots, both shot down in flames before I was even born. I feel like I know them, even though I never met them.
Billy Harff
I remember Bill Harff, my buddy from the Rattlesnake Patrol in Boy Scout Troop 27, Kenosha, Wisconsin. Billy died of fragmentation wounds near Polei Kleng Airfield in Vietnam in 1968, hit by fragments from a mortar round that burst in the air above him. But I recall him alive and vibrant, pounding tent pegs at a campground or playing a rough-and-tumble Scout game called “British Bulldog.”
Brian and Ryan in happier days.
I remember Ryan Jopek, the hale, cheery 20-year-old son of my friend Brian. I photographed them, father and son together, before Ryan went off to Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2006. He was killed by an improvised explosive device in Tikrit. I know his father feels the loss every day.
There are almost too many to count, yet each one is counted by somebody. Every death is personal to someone. Through blunders of policy or failures of execution, our nation can waste young lives in fruitless battle. Yet those who died in vain cannot be less honored than those who won some clear, unarguable victory.
They are all ours, they gave their all for us, and the least we can do is remember.
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Don’t get me wrong, Dear Reader. I love my granddaughter, and she looks great in a majorette outfit, twirling a flag.
For the record, I like brats as well as the next man, maybe even better.
But we who remember the honored dead ought to say something about their sacrifice, at least once a year.
Last week in this space, Dear Reader, I mentioned my trip to the Grand Canyon. A pilgrimage, I called it. But in truth, I just wanted to visit a landmark, to cross an item off my bucket list.
Like everyone else, Your New Favorite Writer knew Grand Canyon from Disney films, National Geographic specials, and the like. But that is not the same as being there. I figured it was about time I joined the park’s visitor list.
I signed up for a week-long Road Scholar tour of the canyon’s North and South Rims. Road Scholar, formerly known as Elderhostel, is an organization that provides educational travel programs for older adults. I’ve taken five of their tours and always found them interesting and enjoyable. This sixth was no exception.
Twenty-four of us, first-timers at the canyon, gathered in Flagstaff, Arizona. Our guides would be Joel Kane and Rocky Sullivan. Joel, a geologist, previously worked seven years as an interpretive park ranger in Grand Canyon National Park. Rocky is a writer and cowboy poet who has also been a hot air balloon pilot and cabinet maker. Their kindness and expertise, and the uniformly warm spirit of the group members, made the trip work.
We spent one day exploring the red rock country of Sedona. The next day, we drove north from Flagstaff past the San Francisco Peaks, through a forest of ponderosa pine, ascending from 6,800 feet elevation at Flagstaff to 7,000 at the South Rim, arriving at mid-morning in a state of high anticipation.
What would we make of it? Would our reactions echo those of many who have gone before, or is each person’s experience of the place unique?
We stepped off our van at the South Rim Visitors’ Center and walked to the nearby Mather Point overlook. Joel suggested we keep our eyes on the path in front of us and raise them only after arrival at the viewing point. I followed his suggestion.
“All right,” he said. “We’re there. Look up.”
I looked up.
It was staggering.
The visual scale was overwhelming.
This was nothing you could prepare for, nothing I can describe.
I-Max, eat your heart out.
Charlotte Stone, one of our Road Scholars, views Grand Canyon and visitors from the top of Mather Point.
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For thousands of years, proto-Americans and historic tribes have lived and worked in the depths of the canyon and on its rims. Today’s Hopi, Zuni, Hualapai and Havasupai peoples are thought to descend from earlier peoples who left abundant evidence of their sojourns. National Park Service archeologists have explored less than five percent of the region’s area, yet have found more than two thousand separate sites for study.
The winding green patch in the center of the photo is Havasupai Gardens, a cottonwood oasis once home to Havasupai people until the National Park Service evicted them in 1928. It is now a public campground for Grand Canyon hikers, and belated efforts are underway to pay respect to the Havasupai for past wrongs endured.
John Wesley Powell. Public Domain.
White, European people touched the canyon as early as 1540, when Captain García López de Cárdenas led a small group of Spanish soldiers to the South Rim. But it wasn’t until John Wesley Powell descended the Colorado River in 1869, with ten men in four wooden boats, that the words “Grand Canyon” came into the American vernacular. Until then, the region was unexplored. Powell, a Union officer who had given an arm for his country at Shiloh, put Grand Canyon on the map. Powell led another expedition two years later.
Fred Harvey. Public Domain.
Then, true to America’s genius for exploiting resources, others began to arrive: explorers, adventurers, fortune-seekers, builders. Many sought gold or other precious minerals. Ralph Cameron built a toll road to the South Rim and filed many mining claims, not so much to extract metal as to snap up choice real estate.
There came developers like the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, which built a spur line from Williams, Arizona, to the South Rim; and entrepreneurs like Fred Harvey the railroad restaurateur, who established a grand hotel, El Tovar, on the canyon rim.
El Tovar Hotel.
Vista from Hermit’s Rest, one of Mary Colter’s buildings.
There were artist/explorers like photographers Emery and Ellsworth Kolb, who opened a studio and made the earliest still and motion pictures of the canyon. There were artist/builders like architect Mary Colter, whose structures, often of native Kaibab limestone, defined a new Southwestern aesthetic style.
The lives of these pioneers overflow with remarkable incidents and exploits, enough to fill books and museums in plenty. And the feats of more recent Grand Canyoneers—such as the pipeline across the chasm, which supplies the South Rim’s five million tourists a year with fresh spring water from the less-visited North Rim—are just as remarkable.
The formation known as Wotan’s Throne.
But a question rises in one’s brain as all this canyonesque lore unfolds: What is it about this great vacuity—this vast rancho of open air bordered by extravagant tons of stratified, water-chiseled rock—that re-organizes the people, and even the space, within its realm?
Maybe it’s something about the geology. Perhaps that’s why Joel, with his bottomless treasury of igneous and sedimentary arcana, is the person best qualified to guide our little expedition. For the canyon seizes one’s attention not just by its hugeness or its sculptural complexity. Rather, it compels one to think about processes.
The Grand Canyon, 277 river miles long, ten to eighteen miles wide, and more than a mile deep, is the only place on Earth where such a large area of land came to be shaped in this particular way.
Road Scholars view the canyon from the North Rim.
As we amiable tripmates view the Grand Canyon from hundreds of angles at two dozen different viewing platforms, as we overfly it in a special sightseeing plane, looks of concentration and reckoning pass across the faces of my fellow Road Scholars. This visage is composed in equal measures of disbelief and recognition. It says:
Something momentous happened here, on a giant stage, over vast reels of time. What was it? What happened here?
Joel explains as much as he can by dramas of uplift, folding, eruption, erosion—thick layers of different kinds of rock laid over one another, then dislocated by earthquakes, floods, and other cataclysms over geologic time. The simultaneous uplift of a huge tract—the Colorado Plateau—all in one piece. And always the irresistible power of water flowing downward.
Rocky adds human dimensions—a keen knowledge and respect for the lore and practices of long generations of native Americans who have called this place home.
Questions remain, an unsettled feeling. This landscape was shaped by titanic battles among the forces of nature. Yet without us, it’s incomplete. I don’t mean to imply, Dear Reader, that it was all staged for our benefit. But without our presence, without our testimony—without our need to relate to the world where we have been placed—what could it possibly mean?
Juniper and piñon pine embrace the canyon’s incipient glow at sunset.
We are a part of that we wonder at. If not, then how could we be so moved?
The canyon’s real presence demands some kind of imagination. And then you find your own imagination too small to encompass it. And you wonder, at least I do, what imagination was big enough to create it?
A visit here is a soul event. Maybe it was a pilgrimage, after all.
I can’t write about it yet, Gracious Reader. It’s too big.
This is a repost of an item that originally appeared November 19, 2024. Although the information is six months out of date, the emotions are still true. Hope you enjoy it.
I’m creeping up on eighty.
At such an age, one ought to have something for the world. Something to leave behind when you go. Wisdom.
Not just any old wisdom, you understand.
Not just: “Treat people well on your way up, because you might meet them again on your way down.”
Or: “Don’t neglect to floss; ignore your teeth and they’ll go away.”
Comic Henny Youngman. Public Domain.
Good nostrums both, but I mean something deep. Something universal, touching one’s inner life.
Take emotion. I say that in the Henny Youngman sense: “Take my emotion . . . please!”
As in, “You can have it. I don’t want it.”
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With me, a little emotion goes a long way.
In old age, I’ve become a writer of fiction. (See Izzy Strikes Gold! and the soon-to-be-republished Price of Passage.) What we fiction writers principally strive for is to pluck emotional strings in the reader.
Sure, we want to entertain, we want to inform; but the brass ring on this carousel is moving the reader. Emotion is the gold standard of art.
Ansel Adams, who obsessed over the minute details of photography—lens aperture, depth of field, developer time, characteristic exposure curves of different films and papers, the tonal scale of the finished print—that Ansel Adams, the supreme technician, said: “A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.” (My italics.) He wanted to express emotion.
Adams also said, “I give it to you as a spectator, and you get it or you don’t get it, but there’s nothing on the back of the print that tells you what you should get.” He saw that what he strove to express might not strike a resonant chord on another person’s emotional keyboard. But the possibility of doing so was the whole point of his art.
Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, one of Ansel Adams’s most famous photos. Photographed on November 1, 1941, 4:49:20 p.m. local time, as subsequently determined through independent analysis by amateur astronomer Dennis di Cicco. Public Domain.
I show my stories to quite a few people for critique—colleagues, friends, so-called beta readers—before turning it on the public at large. The feedback I most often receive is that my characters seem to lack emotion. They need humanizing.
Why am I reluctant to inject emotion?
I happen to like my characters flat and unaffected. Only after several colleagues tell me that a character is too calm and phlegmatic—only then will I revise my work to develop an underlying core of fear, joy, or throbbing pain.
Once I give in and do that, the work gets stronger and more interesting. From long experience, I know that.
Yet I resist doing so.
The fact is, Dear Reader, I dislike emotion.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I don’t hate emotion. I don’t despise it. I don’t abhor it. That would be emotional, which is the last thing I want to be.
I distrust emotion. I look upon it with suspicion.
Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins. Fair use.
I’m like Henry Higgins of My Fair Lady, as voiced by Rex Harrison: “. . . a quiet living man . . . who likes an atmosphere as restful as an undiscovered tomb . . . a pensive man . . . of philosophic joys who likes to meditate, contemplate free from humanity’s mad inhuman noise.”
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Is it possible to live life free of emotional upset?
Tilt-a-Whirl. Fair use.
Could it be that life is a teeter-totter, after all? Or maybe a Tilt-a-Whirl?
One Thursday night recently, I dreamed a dream: I drove through pleasant countryside. In the seat beside me was my wife. Only we weren’t married yet. We were still the young people we had been many years before. I sincerely hoped she was enjoying the ride, and liking my company enough to want to do it again.
But the windshield turned opaque. It grayed out. The car hurtled along the road, but I couldn’t see where it was going. I was terrified.
I woke up , and it was Friday.
I dismissed the dream and drove off to Onalaska, about three hours from home, to attend the Wisconsin Writers Association annual conference. There I saw some old friends, made some new ones, and learned a few things about writing and marketing. It was a good conference.
On the way home Saturday afternoon, I stopped in Mauston for dinner. When I came out of Denny’s half an hour later, night had fallen. I drove south on the highway, into the black.
Strange optical effects vexed the darkness. The sky ahead—which should have been black stippled with small points of light from farms or vehicles—was instead a uniform sheet of gray. It looked like I was approaching a raised concrete overpass, one which kept receding as I drove toward it.
But the overpass was illusory. In fact, when I did drive under an actual overpass, it caught me by surprise. I didn’t think it was real until it passed overhead. And there, splayed across the windshield before me, hung another overpass—one that I was almost sure was a phantom.
The sides of my vision seemed to be lined with vertical concrete walls, as if the road were passing through a tunnel. You could say I had tunnel vision.
What I actually have, Dear Reader, is macular degeneration—an insidious condition that robs me of sight inexorably, by tiny degrees. These night-time illusions were just the latest symptom.
Before reaching Sauk City, I decided I will no longer drive at night. At least, not at speed, on rural highways. It’s the first clipping of my wings due to old age. A curtailed freedom.
A day or two later I remembered my odd dream the previous Thursday night. It seems prophetic now.
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Only minutes after my momentous decision to give up night driving, I struck a deer that leapt in front of my car. It was purely coincidental. Because of how it happened, I can say for sure that the deer strike was not caused by my night vision problems.
Still, it shook me up. But you would hardly know that, Gentle Reader, from the flat, just-the-facts-ma’am, report of it which I posted here last Tuesday.
At any rate, within a space of three days, I had received a fateful prophecy, made a dreaded decision, and incurred major vehicular damage.
Some people might call that a tough weekend.
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One week after the collision with the buck, I traveled to Washington, D.C., in the company of eighty-six fellow veterans, and escorted by my much-loved daughter, Katie, on Badger Honor Flight Mission 57. I’ve posted that in some detail here and here, so I shan’t belabor it further.
Stunned by the reception. Photo by Kari Keunzi Randall. Used by permission.
Only: It was something I had never expected to do, an opportunity offered me as if to make up for a decades-old slight from the nation, which I did not grieve at the time. Now that this honor was virtually thrust upon me, I felt such a catharsis of long-withheld gladness—such a glorious rush of love—that I now question the value of this lifelong habit of stuffing my emotions into my back pocket where I can ignore them.
That’s all.
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Being the Alert and Perspicacious Reader that you are, you will no doubt have noticed an underlying theme to these ruminations: Your New Favorite Writer is getting older. He is tripping over events that may spark strong feelings of a kind that he has little experience of, and little taste for, welcoming in an honest and open way.
You might say a prayer for him, if you’re so inclined.
In the present scrimmage of ghastliness, mere civility gets trampled underfoot.
Instead, let us speak of forbearance.
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It’s an old word, a good word, the kind of word you might see in a Jane Austen novel.
I don’t recall its ever being spoken in my growing up. Mother never sat me on her knee and said, “Now, Son, remember to forbear.”
My New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary claims that many of the word’s meanings are “Now rare” or “Now chiefly Sc[ottish].” I put it to you, Gentle Reader: If “forbear” is being shipped off, bit by bit, to Scotland, how much longer can it last?
It would be a crying shame to lose the word “forbearance”; if we lose the word, we shall nearly have lost the thing itself.
Forbearance has nothing to do with any of those bears who went before us (“My forebears came over on the Mayflower”). It has much to do with our bearing—with what we bear and how we bear ourselves.
Better to be forbearing than overbearing.
Kindness, care, tact, decency, empathy, compassion are rough synonyms—but forbearance beats them all. Why? Because it includes instructions for its use. You can unpack it to mean: Back off a little. Restrain yourself. Cease bearing down with all your might.
To bear is to carry or hold something, perhaps a weight, as in “I don’t know how I can bear this.” But it can also mean to press, to be the weight, as in “Bear down hard on it.”
The for- at the beginning of “forbear” does not mean “fore,” nor does it mean “for.” Rather, it is a prefix of its own that means “against, out of, away from” or “abstain, neglect, renounce,” as in forgo, forgive, forget, forsake, forswear.
To forbear is to abstain from pressing. It is to relent, to have patience, to wait and see. It is the opposite of maximum pressure; it is the relief valve in society.
True, some definitions of the verb have become rare—or even Scottish—but it gives us a very useful noun, “forbearance.”
1 Abstinence from enforcing what is due, esp. the payment of a debt 2 The action or habit of forbearing; an instance of this 3 Forbearing conduct or spirit; patient endurance, lenity
Forbearance automatically includes a regard for the needs and interests of others. To hold yourself back is to give them space.
Forbearance is the willingness to go a little easier, to have patience with others. Not to make a federal case out of everything.
Life is too short.
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Forbearance seems the opposite of politics. I don’t mean garden-variety, small-town politics, in which forbearance may still play a useful part.
But I’m thinking of big-name, national, every-night-on-TV politicians. And, even more, their acolytes—poor, lost souls who have allowed politics to become their religion. They talk of nothing else, they think of nothing else. It is all-consuming.
You may know a few such people. They never let up, never relent. They bear down, then bear down more. They press each point to its unimaginable limit. They honor no boundaries. If you disagree, or even if you do agree but without enough totality, you are past all hope of redemption.
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Yes, O New Favorite Writer—granted, their conduct is despicable.But we must do the same, don’t you see, or they will win! If I show forbearance, they will use that weakness, ride roughshod over my concerns, and win by the simple force of their absolutism.
Now, Dear Reader, in case you have been wondering for years whether I would ever say anything truly subversive, listen up:
Please try forbearance.
Let them have their precious triumph; it will turn to dust and ashes in their mouths.
Those who forbear, on the other hand, will gain something of far greater worth.
Gain? Gain what, precisely?
They gain self-respect as well as the respect of others.
They gain the infinite satisfaction of sponsoring calm. They become wholesome exemplars of sanity for our world.
Those who make a habit of forbearance, and all who come within their orbits, gain a larger perspective: a glimpse of the fat upland where those things dwell that are more important than politics.
They win the argument by moving beyond it. They rest on eternals, while others remain mired in temporalities.
These are the fruits that come from reclaiming the happy ground of forbearance.
I’m looking forward to an inspiring weekend, a time of meeting new friends and learning new things, at the Faith Forward Writers Retreat near Sparta, Wisconsin. I’ll be a panelist in the open-to-the-public “Meet the Authors” event Thursday night.
It’s billed as a retreat for “Christian-faith based writers.” It makes me wonder, this Easter week: What qualifies me to speak at a Christian writers’ conference? Am I a Christian writer?
I am Christian; I am a writer. Therefore, I’m a Christian writer. But the term calls up an image of one who writes “Christian books”—Bible explorations, for example. Or inspiring essays. Or Christian romance, meaning romance novels in which the heroine’s Christian faith plays a pivotal role in the development and outcome of the plot. Some of my good writer friends, like Barbara M. Britton and Deb Wenzler Farris, write with excellence in some of these genres.
My books feature fictional characters—Anders, Maria, Daniel, Izzy—who live in a Christian world and whose faith is conventional, largely unexamined. Faith plays a role in forming their personalities, and it influences their actions, but it’s seldom at the front of their minds.
The Christianity in my books is like an iceberg, or like an old tree trunk that has floated in a lake or river long enough to become waterlogged. Only a bit may appear above the surface, but mariners: ignore it at your peril.
Since I’ll be billed in a public event as a Christian writer, this is a good time to inform you about the particular Christian faith that undergirds my doings, writing included. Though Your New Favorite Writer’s books are neither Bible commentaries nor theological treatises, Dear Reader, you may wish to learn the spiritual identity of their author.
Who knows? It might be catching, and you deserve fair warning.
So here it is.
Credo
I believe there is a God, and I know it’s not me.
I think we are all creatures of a Great Intelligence far beyond our imaginations, exempt from our own limits of history and finitude.
I believe in Science; I believe God is its Author. The greatest scientists—the Keplers and Newtons and Einsteins and Hawkings—are its imperfect annotators.
Whether or not I know God is not as momentous as the fact that God knows me.
It is wondrous that, despite my imperfections, despite my dual nature as saint and sinner, God loves me wholly, forgives my transgressions, and showers blessings on me daily. God seems to ignore my just desserts. That is why God is called Love.
Photo of a painting of Jesus healing the paralytic from the wall of the baptistery in the Dura-Europa church circa 232 A.D. It is one of the earliest visual depictions of Jesus. It was excavated by the Yale-French Excavations between 1928-37 in present day Syria and now resides in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, CT. Public Domain.
Jesus Christ is the avatar of that Love.
As a Christian, I ought to be wholly on Christ’s team. But in our complex world, it’s often unclear to me whether I am batting for Jesus or the Other Guy.
I have come to rely on God’s forgiveness, because I so often need it.
A Few Corollaries
The Bible says God commanded us to “go and make disciples of all nations.” I am choosing to use the method of drawing them to Christ through the attractiveness of my example. I know this seems a forlorn hope, but it’s what I’ve got.
How can I convert you? I have a hard enough job converting myself.
Maybe that’s only my recessive personality speaking. For example, I also don’t wish to baptize you into my political views or my sports team. In fact, I’ve never hankered to run your life. You need to figure things out for yourself.
Yet, if I have the salvation power of Jesus Christ, and if that is the Greatest Gift in the World, should I not want to share it with everyone I meet?
Well, of course I should. But I’m a writer, not a miracle worker.
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”
Paul the Apostle.
I’m still working on the love part. Once I master that, we can talk about the rest.
Amen.
P.S.—You may still be able to attend the Faith Forward Writers Retreat. The sign-up is here.
Bronze bust of John Donne, photographed by Matthew Black. Licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0
No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were . . . .
John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation 17
When you reach a certain age, you notice how many friends you have lost.
“Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind.”
When someone I know dies, I take it personally. There goes a friend.
It could have been me.
A few weeks ago, Linda Grover Stehura died. Next Saturday I will attend her memorial service. Linda was a cherished friend of long standing. She was kind and intelligent, with a gentle humor.
Linda and friend
Her obituary says: “In June 1967, she graduated cum laude as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society from Knox College in Galesburg, IL, where she majored in English Education. Linda continued her education at UW-Madison earning her Master’s degree in English in 1970. While in Madison, she met her husband, Thomas J. Stehura, and they married in 1971.” (My italics.)
Joelle and I introduced Linda to Tom. Their wedding was held on our lawn, under a huge willow’s canopy, when we lived on Major Avenue on the East Side. We were friends ever since. Linda succumbed swiftly to pancreatic cancer at the tender age of 79.
Charles
Just days ago, AyukEnow Beatrice Diffang announced “the passing into glory of Rev. Charles Sagay, founder and president of Mission of Hope and Mission School of Hope, on January 21st, 2025.” Charles was a big man—quiet, warm, friendly. He, through the institution he founded in a poor corner of Cameroun, schooled hundreds of tribal children who would otherwise have had no education. More than that, he actually brought them into official existence by trooping them to the county seat to get birth certificates, so their government could no longer ignore their existence.
Charles made many trips to the United States—to raise funds for his important mission, yes, but more than that: to be in fellowship with others who shared his hope for the future of the human race. One time he stayed at our house and got the deluxe tour of Madison, Wisconsin. His humility and grace were lessons for us all. The human race can hardly bear to lose such people.
Krafty
My friend and fellow writer John Kraft passed into eternity a few years back—I don’t recall exactly when. I do know we were in a hotel somewhere on one of our travels, possibly in Ketchikan, when his wife, Dawn Curlee Carlson, announced his death via Facebook. It had been sudden, unexpected. He simply died.
Dawn, and the rest of us, lost a glowing light that day. Self-effacing, John was—except that nobody so blessed with sharp wit and a sardonic take on everyday things could ever fade into the shadows. It was a privilege to know him. Yet another good friend gone too soon.
Tim
Almost eight years ago, Tim Donovan died from a wholly unexpected cerebrovascular event. Tim was a newscaster, television personality, military officer, and public affairs professional. An intelligent, challenging, and complex personality.
I worked under his sometimes exasperating direction in the Wisconsin Department of Military Affairs. It took some years to get know Tim, but by the time of his death, he was a friend. He and I had been through a lot together. Tim was only 65.
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Perhaps you will think me cold, Dear Reader, but when I think of Linda or Charles or John or Tim—or many other friends, relatives, and acquaintances lost over the past years—when I think of their swift passing, I am driven back upon the rock of survival. My survival.
They are dead; I am not. Through no special merit, I have endured this long on the face of the earth and still hope to last a while longer.
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When one has been retired for some time, the question of relevance rears its unlovely head.
“Isn’t it true, Mister Wise Guy”—I hear some Celestial Prosecutor say—“isn’t it true that you have spent the past fifteen years living on accumulated wealth . . . unemployed . . . at leisure . . . doing whatever you please, which in your case amounts to writing down the meandering contents of your head and publishing them wherever and whenever you can, broadcasting them to all and sundry, whether anyone is interested or not?
“Is that not so, Mister Wise Guy?
“Can you mention any recent year in which you have made a tangible contribution to the good of humanity?”
You have caught me, Your Honor, just as I am, without one plea.
But here is what is left out of that telling indictment:
The trivial routines of each day—I scale them like a desperate mountaineer.
When I ponder the value of any one of the pursuits in which I spend my being, the only thing that comes to mind is: Well . . . it’s better than being dead.
When I rise in the dark of a November morning, after the dog jumps off my bed, when I have found and sorted the tangled sheets, plumped the pillows, and smoothed the covers still soaked in smells of sleep—what can I say about all this bed-making?
It is an activity preferable to being dead.
When I pull my twin-bladed razor through the slop of lather, careful to shave close but not too close, swabbing off the lingering soap-trails with a hot rag, towelling my new-shorn face, and slapping on the sting of aftershave—what can it be but another activity which, whatever else you may say of it, is preferable to being dead?
Someone named Jim Harrison was quoted in a Facebook meme, to wit: “The difference between poetry and you is you look in the mirror and say, ‘I am getting old,’ but Shakespeare looks in the mirror and says, ‘Devouring Time, blunt thou thy lion’s paws.’”
Of course that’s true.
We know now—thanks to post-Modern physics—that time itself has no existence apart from matter/energy. We only pass through time by living it—by doing things. If we did not do things—if we did not have extension and heat and motion—time would be quite beside the point.
As a Christian, I know that my Redeemer lives. And I trust I shall meet my Redeemer in some unimaginable plane of being, in form I know not what, in circumstance I know not how.
That phrase, incidentally, was not first murmured by a Christian. The locus classicus of “I know my Redeemer lives” is the Book of Job, which we may regard as a work of rhetorical fiction penned centuries before the coming of Jesus and preserved in the Jewish Scriptures. In the book’s 19th chapter, verses 25through 27, Job—an upright man bewilderingly visited by a series of harrowing misfortunes—replies to a scolding by his friend Bildad the Shuhite, saying, in part,
“But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and he will stand upon the earth at last. And after my body has decayed, yet in my body I will see God! I will see him for myself. Yes, I will see him with my own eyes. I am overwhelmed at the thought!” New Living Translation
Gentle Reader, I don’t know how to plumb the wisdom of Job. You may say rightly that I have really no excuse for even thinking about such matters, let alone sharing my thoughts with the world.
And yet . . . and yet, it is better than being dead. It is something I can do that Linda and Charles and John and Tim no longer can. So I will do it for them.
