7/7/21 Timothy Ladd

I’m reading a minor novel by Jules Verne published in 1892. The theme seems to be somewhat similar to the themes of Umberto Eco in novels such as Foucault’s Pendulum and The Name of the Rose, at least from my perspective, which sees Eco really nervous about the human capacity to believe what we imagine. Eco shares with postmodernists (though he claimed not to be a postmodernist) a fear of fiction, a fear of narrative wholeness that may derive from a skepticism of metanarrative. They seem to see in all narrative the seeds of self-deception and mass delusion. If that’s not your take on postmodernism, that’s fine. I don’t know of too many scholars who agree with me. Not that I’ve really looked. I got about as far as Wendy B Faris, Labyrinths of Language. She certainly sees postmodernism as revolutionary and a break from traditional narrative structure. There are many beginnings but resolutions are something postmodernists avoid. We can’t send complete stories out into the world. That will only lead to trouble. Probably in the form of dogma and religion.

Back to Jules Verne. It’s interesting in this novel that he attacks the superstitious stories and beliefs of the peasants. Foolish people believe foolish things. And without evidence! The narrator is no such fool. He’s modern and educated. There’s just one catch — the book has a good deal of anti-Semitism. Jews are taking over countries like Romania. They’re getting rich and buying up all of the valuable property. Some day soon Romania will be a land of Israelites!

Verne was intelligent enough to recognize that superstitions could cause unnecessary fears. But he wasn’t sharp enough to see that he himself was caught up in the superstitious assumptions needed to accept anti-Semitism. Many times what people take to be evidence-based facts are anything but. It’s my suspicion that no human will ever be free of foolish assumptions. It would be like trying to take all of the sand from the oceans. New sand is being brought in by erosion every day. We have no idea what we have accepted without solid evidence and what we have not. We need to constantly clean out the filtration system. Junk is always getting into the water.

            Recently, I rewatched the third Christopher Nolan Batman film. I really like Nolan’s take on the mythos. But controversy is something I don’t mind courting, so, for full disclosure, I will admit that I also think Ben Affleck makes a good Batman. I was never convinced by Michael Keaton’s turn as Bruce Wayne. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot to like in the two Tim Burton Batman movies. For instance, I love everything about William Hootkins’s character, and all of his interactions with Jack Nicholson are superb. The scene when the Joker gets his famous smile is wonderfully macabre, creepy, and completely unsanitary. I love the Batmobile.

            There are also a number of things I don’t like. I suppose first is how half of Gotham looks like it was designed by Dr. Seuss on crack. What’s with all that piping? It’s silly. Batman shouldn’t have silliness in it. There was enough of that in the old TV show (which had its own virtues). I imagine there are films Robert Wuhl should appear in. A Batman film is not one of them. I’m not crazy about Kim Basinger given not much more to do than look voluptuous. She’s a talented actress. This film makes it easy to forget that since it only focuses on her as an object of male sexual desire. I’m also not crazy about the music that Prince cranked out for the film. I’m unconvinced by its sincerity – in that it seems to have none.

            Perhaps the point in the film where I squirm the most is at Keaton’s line when he brandishes the fireplace poker: “You wanna get nuts? C’mon, let’s get nuts!” Everything about the scene is unnecessary, the acting is wrong, and what was even the point? Was it meant to suggest that Batman really was a bit off his rocker? If so, wouldn’t we expect him to act nuts instead of talking about being nuts? I don’t think Keaton liked the line. His heart doesn’t seem into it. It’s too stagey to be meant as Bruce Wayne’s genuine anger.
            Many dramas have a face-off between the protagonist and antagonist somewhat early in the work. But this confrontation between Wayne and the Joker is awkward and poorly handled. I suppose the audience is meant to heave a sigh of relief that the Joker didn’t recognize that Wayne is Batman. That, however, is not how the scene is set up. It is almost set up that way. Wayne tells the Joker, “I know who you are.” That could suggest the more dramatic opposite – that the Joker knows who Wayne really is. Yet there is no indication that Burton wanted to audience to conclude that, despite the fact that the Joker does refer to Wayne as his “prey.” Apparently, we are meant to see Batman’s resourcefulness in this scene. Vicky Vale discovers the tray that has stopped the Joker’s bullet. When Wayne supposedly got that under his coat is unclear. What I felt in the scene was that we weren’t seeing Batman in this scene. He was being played by Michael Keaton as Michael Keaton in so many other films. Films such as Night Shift, Johnny Dangerously, Gung Ho, Mr. Mom. All of the gestures and movements are recognizably Keaton’s own. He’s not inhabiting a character. He’s being himself on camera, which is out of sync with other scenes in which he’s clearly moving in a way that portrays Bruce Wayne, billionaire genius.

            This all happens at 1 hour, 24 minutes, give or take. Out of a film that runs just over two hours. It ought to be a confrontation between the principals. As such it feels like a misfire.

            A far more satisfying confrontation in the movie is when Batman rescues Vale. This scene ends with the lovely line, “Where does he get those wonderful toys?”

            I won’t even comment on the parade scene when the Joker gratuitously shoots Bob and then brings down the Batjet.

            Let’s skip to the finale, since that’s what I began this with. The Joker and Batman finally are going to fight. We’ve been waiting all night for this contest. It’s a fight to the death. And it can’t be too easily won for our hero. I think all of the actual combat is great. It doesn’t go on too long. It’s fun. Sometimes it’s even funny – which is fitting since we’re fighting a middle-aged clown who is, after all, quite insane.

            My real issue is that the Joker dies. And it’s how he dies. It happens at a distance. The combat is not face-to-face, where I think the Big Finish needs to be. When the villain gets his, the hero should be looking in his eye. The knife should go in with some crunching of bones. I’m not sure how many blockbusters end this way. If any. Excalibur more than doubled its budget, but isn’t considered a blockbuster. The final fight there is perfect. It reflects exactly what I mean. I’m not sure how many final showdowns end in an up-close and personal way. Dirty Harry had opponents who could see each other. The Outlaw Josey Wales has a good ending. The bastard finally meets his end with a saber to the midsection.

            When Vincent Regan’s character meets his fate, he’s off camera. Guy Pierce’s character Snow has left him on the satellite prison, which then explodes. That pretty much stands for all I think shouldn’t happen in the Big Finish. Can we say “damp squib”?

            Thanos has not one but two deaths in Endgame. The final death fairly satisfying, though the vicious bastard should have screamed in pain. Really, he should have gone out like Rumpelstiltskin.

            The finale should be slightly drawn out and emotional. What I don’t understand is when directors bunt when they could have gone for a homer. (And I don’t even like baseball!) But let’s face it, when Bane dies it happens in a flash, he is dead instantly, never saw it coming, never suffered. This feels very unsatisfactory on moral grounds. The bad should be made to pay for their sins. Burton seemed to want to have it both ways with his Joker’s death. It happens far from us. Then there is the laughing toy, which seems to suggest that there is still life in our flamboyant and irrepressible villain. But, no, the Joker is dead. This is his inaugural confrontation with Batman, his first real caper, and he’s been foiled forever.

            In terms of preceding Batman lore and mythology, this is very upsetting to the audience. We know the Joker isn’t dead. Batman is always dueling the Joker. It’s their destiny to be forever locked in combat. They are a kind of imperfect Yin and Yang. It’s also more than just disappointing that the Joker dies at a great distance from Batman. If he ever should meet his fate, it needs to be face to face. Beowulf had one hand burnt to a cinder and he finishes the dragon with a knife that slices down its belly. That’s personal.

            Probably my favorite final battle is between Aeneas and Turnus. Aeneas stands over the defeated Turnus, who begs for his life out of respect to his father. This is replaying the Iliad. And we expect the Roman, with all his self-control, to act with magnanimity, clemency. Not only would this be the avowed values of the Romans, it was actually how the Greeks liked to think of themselves – rational and in control. The Spartans were disciplined and silent. They weren’t berserkers. It’s almost overdetermined from everything in the Aeneid that Aeneas will spare Turnus. It goes against all that has come before. But Vergil prepares us for the shock with some hints. Aeneas stood (stetit) acer in armis. Acer has a lot of gradations. There’s positive and negative. We aren’t really sure how we must take it until we get to the next line: volvens oculos. Eyes rolling – a sure sign of someone caught in a frenzy. That means we have to take acer to mean something very violent, furious. But Vergil teases us because the line ends the way it should when you are talking about a good Roman: dextramque repressit. His sword hand may be itching and twitching, but he is repressing it.

            Cut to the chase: fervidus Aeneas – the adjective again shows that Aeneas has lost control of his rage – “sank his sword into his enemy’s breast.” Turnus dies with a groan and his spirit flies off to a cold hell. It’s a great scene. It terminates very abruptly. Scholars that want to see the end of the poem as a fulfilment of justice skate around the words: fervidus, volvens oculos, (the saevi feels like a transferred epithet for monimenta) and furiis accensus et ira

terribilis “burning with fury and terrible rage” makes Aeneas sound a lot like Achilles. The implication to me is pretty clear. We get a VERY dramatic conclusion, but we also get to feel some ambivalence about the uses of violence and how it always tends toward chaos and insanity. It is never terribly conducive to building stability and harmony. Instead, it looks like more blood vendetta. And that’s why it’s my favorite Big Finish.       

           

Cumberland, England, 1820

“What are you doing with that telescope, Ellen?”

            “Stargazing.”

            “There can’t be many stars at that angle, dear.”

            “Must you be so importunate, Sara?” Ellen grumbled, squinting one eye into the instrument.

            “I am not being importunate, though I do congratulate you on your vocabulary choice,” Ellen said to her younger sister, smiling. “Besides,” she continued, “isn’t it too cloudy tonight? How can you see any stars?”

            It was indeed an overcast May night on the moorland, with only intermittent gleams of moonlight where there was a rent in the heavy clouds that went scudding across the heavens.  

            “It’s not that cloudy. The moon has just broken through. Can’t you see it?”

            “The only thing I can see is your candle as it blazes,” Sara complained softly.  

            “Blazes is gross hyperbole, and you know it!”

            Sara sat up in her bed, “If you aren’t aiming your spyglass at the stars or the moon, pray what are you looking at?”

            “I thought you wanted the candle out,” Ellen countered, continuing to look out the window.

            Sara fell back onto her pillow, “I do want the candle out.”

            “Then blow it out. It’s causing a reflection on the glass, anyway.”

            “Ellen, this room is small but I can’t blow out your candle from here.”

            “Oh, fine!” Ellen huffed. She got down from the chair she had been standing on and blew out the candle. The room was bathed in fresh darkness. Sara sighed in relief – rather dramatically, Ellen thought. Ellen climbed back up on the chair and resumed her observations.

            “What are you finding so thoroughly interesting, Ellen?”

            “I’m waiting for him to come out.”

            “Waiting for whom?”

            “The new tenant.”

            “At Low Bridge Cottage?”

            The window stood Ellen at faced away from the village of Keswick. She was spying in the direction of Mount Helvellyn, and definitely not at anything in the night sky. The only thing that could possibly be considered of interest that way was the residence rented by their new neighbor. Neither Ellen, Sara, nor their mother had met these mysterious tenants, though they had moved in almost a fortnight ago. The only evidence of their existence was light in their windows at night. A milk cow had also arrived with them. Prior to this tenant, the cottage had only been used seasonally by shepherds.

            “He only comes out at night,” Ellen said as if to herself. “I believe he’s a ghost. Or a vampire.”

            “Vampire! Where have you ever heard of vampires?” Sara cried.

            “In Lord Byron.”

            “I hardly think Lord Byron fit reading for a thirteen-year-old girl,” Sara sniffed.

            “There’s no need to be such an attercop,” Ellen told her.

            “That’s slang. And anyway, I’m not being quarrelsome or peevish or whatever you think that means.”

            “I believe it’s closer to shrewish and it’s not slang.”

            “ ’Tis.”             

            “I saw it in print!” Ellen declared.

            “It was never in use in Sussex,” Sara said.

            “I’m fairly certain it was,” Ellen countered, defiantly.

            “But by any people of discernment and learning?” Sara asked yawning. The darkness was having its soporific effect on her.

            “I thought I saw him last night, but I didn’t have my glass,” Ellen said. “By the time I had fetched it, he was gone. Disappeared like a ghost. I could descry him nowhere.”

            “If you are done trying to descry, perhaps we could get some sleep?” Sara mumbled half into her pillow.

            “Ah. And now he’s come out!” Ellen whispered.

            Sara exhaled sharply, her eyes opening wide. “Can you actually see him?”

            “Oh, yes. Quite clearly.”

            Sara bit her lip, dubious. Ellen was capable of playing games. Reluctantly, Sara sat up on one elbow, looking at the silhouetted figure of her sister in her night-dress.

            “I don’t believe you.”

            “Would you like to see for yourself?” Ellen asked – a little archly, Sara thought.

            She dropped back onto the bedding. “No. I needn’t. Since you can see him so well, offer a description.”

            “The spyglass isn’t that powerful, Sara. It’s far too dark to see his physiognomy with any kind of assurance.”

            “Then how do you know it’s a man at all?”

            “It is a man. And not an old man.”

            “I thought it was too dark to tell.”

            “Oh, that much is discernible. His figure is clearly outlined by the moon.”

            “Enough to say that he has no wrinkles or white hair, perhaps?”

            “Don’t be daft. He stands erect and bears himself with no stoop. He walks swiftly without the assistance of a cane, Sara.”

            “That safely puts his age below, oh, sixty, at least.”

            Sara shifted position, starting to get up. She really should see for herself, she thought.

            “He’s gone now,” Ellen said.

            “Gone. Perhaps he was a ghost after all.”

            “The path up the mountain bends around. I can no longer see him.”

            Ellen came away from the window and got into her bed.

            “Put your nightcap on or you’ll get a rat’s nest.”

            Ellen did as her sister asked and then said, “I only wonder what sort of man he is. Why does he only come out at night?”  

            “Perhaps he was out during the day when you weren’t spying on him.”

            “Or perhaps he truly is a vampire and has gone off to drink someone’s blood.”

            “Shorter walk if he headed back to Keswick, I’d figure. He won’t find much potential prey up on the fells.”

            “Sara, you simply have no imagination.”

            “And your fancy runs away with you.”

            Ellen made no reply, but her sister could almost feel her fretting and she wondered if she might do something to alleviate the younger girl’s piqued curiosity. She didn’t suppose she should let Ellen fall asleep obsessing on every possible nocturnal occupation of their new neighbor.

            Sara sighed, “Anyway, Mrs. Herrington who brings the eggs said that she heard a young man is attending an older man, an invalid.”

            Ellen shot up, “Our young man?”

            “Well…”

            “When did you speak with Mrs. Herrington? I thought she came on Tuesday.”

            “She did.”     

            “That was two whole days ago, Sara!” Ellen complained.

            “Not so loud. You’ll wake Mother.”

            “Two whole days you’ve had this information and refused to share it. Such appalling behavior, Sara!”

            Sara couldn’t help but smile.

            Ellen settled deeper under her blanket and quilt. Sara felt herself slipping into a sweet sleep. She had no idea what had exhausted her so, but sleep seemed like a lovely and welcome drug, the lotus-eaters could not have been more content.            

In a loudish voice, Ellen asked, “Do you suppose the invalid could be the vampire?”  

An Ingrid Nielsen Mystery

Marsha Kay and T W Ladd

But it’s the truth even if didn’t happen.

                                         – Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest        

 

In Hollywood anything can happen, anything at all.

                                     – Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

 

            I knew right off something was very wrong. I’m used to very wrong. Very wrong follows me around like a starving stray puppy. Could I smell it in the air? Stupid question. In southern Kaliphornia something always stinks. Factories, filth, politicians. There was a terrible pain in my forehead – like I’d taken a knife to the skull. Was that new, or do I just hate mornings? And why was I looking down at the dark-haired man? He was the one training me. This was my first day on the job. I was at work. It took a second to fit all of the puzzle pieces back in place. Humpty-Dumpty, and all that. I wasn’t looking down at him. I was on the floor and he was looking down at me.

            I was up in the Hangman Hills, at the residence of the wealthy woman who had hired me, Vernon Lee. I must have blacked out for a minute.

            I had been dreaming I was somewhere else. Somewhere very far away from Hyopolis. There was snow. It was white all around me. The wind was very cold and the big flakes of snow were coming down fast in a low slant. I could feel the damp warmth of the horse under me, as I rode without a saddle. The horse snorted steam from his nostrils. My gelding Poncho. Rays of sunlight broke through the clouds now and then in a blinding glare. I sneezed at the light. With one hand I held the reins. I took off one glove and fished a Kleenex out of my coat pocket. The dream was so vivid — I could feel the itch that was going to make me sneeze. I knew everything that my younger self knew as I rode the horse. We were on a path that ran beside the woods, along a snow-covered hay field. The path was kept clear by the owner who used it to access the woodlot. He sold cordwood all winter.

            That was Michigan, and I was a kid. It was a different world. And there was no magic. I sneezed at the sun and blew my nose. When I’d put the tissue away, I started to put my glove back on – the gloves were the Gore-Tex ones made for skiers.

            That was when I looked down at my hand and wrist. It wasn’t the milky violet that my skin is today… 

            “What happened?” I asked the man who was trying to help me up – or trying to stop me from getting up. I think he had been talking to me. I realized that there had been another person there – a woman. Possibly a maid. But she had left, hurried off – to get help?

            The door to the little room in front of me was broken, the doorjamb in splinters where the bolt had been kicked out. The door was a light-yellow wood and I could see some blood one the edge of it near the handle. Was that my blood? I touched my head. I was bleeding above my eye. Had I been trying to peep through the key-hole?

            Now, I could see into the room. There was a small desk and a woman slumped down over it.

            “Ms. Lee has been murdered.”

            I saw the nickel-plated automatic lying on the floor just inside the room. I didn’t have to check the holster under my arm. I knew it was empty, and I knew that was my gun.

5/6/2021

                Apparently, it was no earlier than 1966 that Robert F. Kennedy, giving an address in Capetown, South Africa said, “There is a Chinese curse which says, ‘May he live in interesting times.’” The name Robert Kennedy today conjures a very interesting time in American history, even painfully interesting for some of us.

            But, like all history, the interest and the pain will fade. Wait long enough and none of it will be remembered. Who Robert F. Kennedy was, what America or South Africa were – all will be blurred into myth or oblivion. In the distant future, all manner of fictions will rise up from the buried rhizome of time – or what we call our present lives. “Consider Phlebas, who once was young and strong as you.”

            A case in point, though a small matter: no one can find any Chinese curse about living in interesting times. Frederic R. Coudert said there was such a Chinese curse in 1939. Remember Fred? No? He was a New York Republican. A US Representative. He served in World War One. And now he’s dead. Been dead for fifty years.

            Even he didn’t invent the “Chinese curse.” Coudert was quoting Sir Joseph Austen Chamberlain. Have you ever heard of him? He’s even deader.

            No one concerns themselves today about whether or not Sir Joseph or Coudert lived in interesting times. But at the moment, being in this world-historical event, many of our wisest heads are feeling pressed to say something of significance, to help us in this present dark time. “This too shall pass” is cold comfort to a man I know who lost two of his sisters this year to the coronavirus. How does he go on now? How does he enjoy even the smallest things after so much as been stripped from him? All I can say is that he does. He’s had his second dose of the vaccine and is looking forward to getting back to cafes and record stores, to so much that we all took for granted before we’d heard of covid.

            That’s not to say that he has “come through the other side of this thing,” or whatever similar cliché we may want to employ. The ever-present fantasy is that we can somehow “get over it,” to “put it behind us.” We all know we can’t live happily ever after. That knowledge doesn’t stop us from wanting the impossible. It’s an unspoken wish. It may even be that the desire for all of this to be someday, somehow fixed, is what gets us out of bed in the morning.    

            And now it’s been a year since the whole nightmare began. The temptation seems to be to take stock, to look for answers that sum it all up. For me, that’s all too ambitious. Or, maybe, just optimistic. This pandemic isn’t done. I’m not going to make dire predictions about yet another wave ready to break out. We don’t have to turn our attention to new deadly variants in Brazil just to scare ourselves. There’s no knowing future catastrophes. That has always been true. Right now, however, this virus is on-going. As of writing this, there were twice the number of new daily cases as we had on, say, May 15, 2020. In America, over 542,000 people have died of covid – that is already more than all of the military dead in WW2. And the number of lives lost continues to increase.

            It isn’t only the deaths. Some survive the virus itself, but the aftermath is crippling disability and suffering. A friend of mine from college nearly died in the hospital from covid. He slept through the ventilator, slept through the doctors restarting his heart with CPR – more than once. But he hasn’t merely slept through his recovery. He’s not recovered. Every day, he regains some strength. When will he get back to 100% – that seems a natural question. Of course, there’s no guarantee that he will ever get back to where he was. And next year he turns 50.

             My cousin-by-marriage came down with covid. She was very sick with it. But her parents were worse. They both had to be put on ventilators. Her mother is now pretty much back to normal. Her father has survived. He can’t, however, walk or stand. He has trouble holding a fork. Prior to covid he was in robust health with a sharp mind. Now, he seems to be slipping into dementia.

            We will never know the number of survivors whose lives will be shortened by this disease. My mom came down with covid in December. The virus left its mark in her weakened cardiovascular system. In the days and years ahead, millions of us will ask, How much longer would Mom or Dad have had if they hadn’t contracted covid? That shadow will long linger. It will only fade in the normal course of time. See, terror too tires out. Everything expires.

            Yes, we’ve found ourselves in very extraordinary times. We look for wisdom from our brightest minds. What can they tell us? So far I’ve not heard anything new; there’s no new revelation that clears away all of the confusion. Nothing can take away the pain. We will simply live with it. It will die with us. Is that wisdom, or just a fact? It certainly can be no comfort to the parents of the children who weren’t able to handle isolation. Bromides weren’t any use for parents whose children took their own lives before this pandemic. The suicide of a child will never be easy. I bet nothing will ever be harder. Before, during, after a pandemic – that’s always true.

            Nothing will keep us from wanting some special wisdom to explain it all, to make it better.

            Seen from history’s long-view, covid is really a rather ordinary sort of horror. We should approach it as such, I think. This thought struck me as I was reading Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking, a book I’ve had on my shelf to be read for nearly two decades. Is now a good time to read it? Well, I had just finished reading a history of the 1930s that mentions Nanking. So, why not?           

            What struck me was Chang’s motivation for writing the book: not only were there no other books written about the Nanking atrocities, the Japanese government had long been systematically denying that it ever took place.

            In the introduction, she writes, “I was suddenly in a panic that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying [that took place in Nanking], this reversion in social evolution, would be reduced to a footnote in history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it.”
            The horrific insult heaped on hellish injury was the denial. Bad enough that this holocaust ever took place, worse for the survivors was the deliberate cheating of collective memory.

            I don’t believe there is any special wisdom for us in extraordinary times. There is only one wisdom, and it applies to all times equally: we must do what we have always known is right. In the words of Sholem Aleichem, “No matter how bad things get you got to go on living, even if it kills you.”

            For us in the midst of this pandemic, we need to do what Iris Chang did in writing her book. We have to unearth the truth. Again and again and again. Just the other day The New York Times ran a story by veteran investigative reporter, Sharon LaFraniere, averring that “both [the Trump and Biden] administrations deserve credit” for the current vaccine roll out. LaFraniere admits there are some fundamental differences in the two administrations; she seems vaguely aware of approaching a false equivalence, as when she says, “Still, corporate, state and federal officials agree that Mr. Biden’s White House has been more active than his predecessor’s in trying to build up the nation’s vaccine stock.”

            Fair-mindedness is one thing. But fumbling can be dereliction of duty. The Trump White House was mainly focused for its last months in overturning the election, in sedition and treachery. If we are going to bring up the previous administration at all in regard to this pandemic, we really ought to focus on Trump’s removal of expert personnel inside China. His disbanding of The Global Health Security and Biodefense Unit in 2018 speaks volumes. We should never forget that Trump knew about the severity of the virus in January, 2020. He continued to lie about the severity for months. He joked about wearing masks. He said the virus would disappear “like a miracle” with the coming of spring.

            There can be no comparing these presidents for those of us interested in the truth, for us who want to stop the swirling falsehoods. There will always be those who stand to benefit from burying the truth. Some will always find it more palatable, more convenient to believe the lie. That is part of darker human capacity to do evil, or to simply give up.

            So, this is the only wisdom I’ve found: live. And, surely, the biggest task of living is remembering, telling the story of who we are, not letting the memory slip into oblivion while we’re still breathing.

T. W. Ladd 3/12/2021

            I don’t know where I got my ideas about the Russians being our enemies. I don’t recall a first moment when I knew that they were the arch nemesis of the United States. Did I walk through the living room and ask who Rock Hudson (I’m sure I would have thought it was John Wayne) was shooting at in Ice Station Zebra. My dad would have said, “The Russians,” and things like that would have built up to fill me in on who was going to kill us in World War III. I definitely recall seeing parts of Howard Hughes favorite movie, Ice Station Zebra. It shows a submarine breaking through arctic ice. That’s such a cool thing that there are countless videos nuclear subs from several navies doing just that on YouTube.

            My brother and I watched the US Olympic hockey team beat the Russians in the 1980 Winter Olympics – 4 to 3. It’s probably the only hockey game I’ve ever watched more than three minutes of. I was only interested in it because we had to defeat the godless Soviets – not that I called them godless. And since we weren’t allowed to swear, I’m not sure what we did call them. Bret may have called them “the damn Russians.” I don’t remember, and that’s not typical for me. So many memories come with bits of dialogue.

            A good example: in the winter of 1980, when I was in fifth grade, right after deer season, I started wearing an orange stocking cap my dad had bought that year. We were always buying new stocking hats every winter. They would get lost, torn up by a dog, whatever. This particular hat had the virtue of being really really thick. It was by far the thickest warmest stocking hat I’d ever worn. But one day at school, I was out on the playground – which had very little to play on because that was the first year fifth-graders were housed in the Middle School – and a jet flew high overhead. I don’t know how all of the dialogue went that led up to my comment. I think it was something like:

            “Hey, is that a bomber?” asked some kid.

            “Yeah, a Russian bomber. It’s gonna bomb your mom’s ass,” another kid.

            “Russians?” I said, and I remember this part very clearly, “I wear this bright hat so they can’t miss me.” Looking up at the sky, I shook a fist in mock anger, “Come and get me, you creeps!”

            My brother’s best friend, Big Dave Cooper, said, “You’re a crazy little bastard, ain’t ya!”

            That was a good day. I wouldn’t get beaten up that day.

            Not that I ever got beaten up. But I did worry about it. Some of the boys in this rural public school could get rough. In a small town in Eaton County, like just about anywhere in America, there was always the possibility of violence. One time I was riding my bike through town – this was when I was there for driver’s training – and two angry-looking guys with long greasy blond hair in a rusted-out truck went slowly past me, flipping me the bird. I hadn’t been in their way. I was presenting no problem for them. My very existence was provoking.       

            That, however, was well after the winter of 1980 when the whole world got the news that John Lennon had been shot to death. The TV reports were shocking. I don’t recall having any special feelings about the Beatles. At one time my favorite song was “Yellow Submarine,” but at that point I was probably a bigger fan of Kenny Rogers. Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” was also a favorite. Hell, Blondie or Styx played at the roller rink – that was an event. My brother Bret was more into Molly Hatchet and ACDC – now that he was expanding on from his collection of KISS albums. The Beatles were not in the forefront of our mind.

            On the TV they showed a picture of Lennon. He was the one with the Jesus beard and little round glasses. I remember clearly in one of the reports there was a photo of Lennon in a trench coat outside the Dakota building where he lived. I could swear I saw an image flash on the screen of a bloodstain on the sidewalk.

            It wasn’t an outrage to me that mentally unstable person murdered in cold blood one of the Beatles. To me the horror was that it was just a guy on his way home, murdered getting out of his car. As far as fame went, I was shocked that a celebrity could be gunned down in broad daylight. The world became a little more random, a little more dangerous, a little sadder, because John Lennon was killed.

            Between the Three-Mile Island nuclear accident and the demise of Skylab, science didn’t just take a hit in 1979, the idea of guaranteed progress was slipping. We were still hearing from our teachers that by the year 2000 we would have flying cars and hotels on the Moon. But there were fractures in our collective optimism. Add into the mix the hostages in Iran, talk on the news of international flights being hijacked, and now a celebrity murdered by a madman, and there were certainly flashes through our minds that all was not well. That not everything was going to be new and improved for ever and ever. The sky wasn’t the limit; it was falling in dangerous and ugly chunks of debris.

            It was a similar thing when a few months later president Ronald Reagan was shot. At the time, none of us knew how close Reagan had come to death. When it was first announced at school that the president had been shot, we all thought of what we had heard about Kennedy. Everybody’s parents could tell you exactly what they were doing when they heard that JFK was dead. On the evening news we heard that Press Secretary James Brady had been killed. There was a moment of silence on the air. Then at some point in the same broadcast we were told that Mr. Brady was not dead. That seemed to sum up the confusion and welter of emotions many of us were experiencing. For much of the day we weren’t sure if the president would survive.

            In the decades since then, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about St. Ronny. For me, as a ten-year-old, there was something larger than life about Reagan. He had freed the hostages that had been held in Iran. Obviously, I know better now. But I didn’t at ten.

            It wouldn’t be shocking if I had elevated Reagan above the rest of us in my mind at that time. What is interesting to me is just how suspicious I was of the man. In one sense, I should have revered him. I’m glad that I didn’t, but I don’t really know why. Was it because of his clownish make-up and plastic hair? I don’t think so. Was it because his name sounded like he belonged in a comic book next to Peter Parker, Bruce Banner or Clark Kent?

            My parents didn’t vote for him the first time around. They voted for Carter. I honestly can’t remember how I felt about the election the year Reagan won. I do know that the Sunday before Super Tuesday we were walking into church and we were met by Pastor Beck. He was handing out fliers, asking people to vote for Reagan. My dad awkwardly told him that he was planning on voting for Carter because the man was a Christian. Much to our surprise, Pastor Beck disagreed and said that Carter was not a real Christian. That “born again” stuff was phony. This shocked me. Pastor Beck had preached on the passage in the Gospel of John that says, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” What was wrong with being a born-again Christian?

            Carter was the president who asked us to stop wasting energy. I had put a “Conserve Energy” sticker on my bedroom light switch. My mom had said that Reagan was a Hollywood actor and a cowboy who would get America sucked into another war. I wasn’t going to switch to Reagan’s team just because Pastor Beck was plumping for him – yes, I had only just become a baptized Christian, but that only gave Beck so much authority. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that my parents hadn’t voted for Reagan. They had stuck with Carter.

            I’m sure my parents being skeptical of Mr. Reagan played a role in my own perceptions of and reactions to the new president. But they didn’t keep me from becoming emotionally pulled into his orbit when the nut tried to assassinate him. And why did he want to kill the president? Because it would impress a celebrity – Jodie Foster. When I learned about the would-be-assassin’s rational, I’m not sure what I felt. I knew something about Jodie Foster. She had been on the cover of People magazine, which I saw in the dentist’s office. I remember it distinctly. I saw that photo and thought, God, I have to marry someone as beautiful as Jodie Foster.

            And this was my world. Or some of it. A world that leaked radiation and promised protection from a new kind of MX missile that would hide inside railroad cars – my dad worked at Grand Trunk Railroad.

Was my personal fate entangled with the fate of the whole planet? Fame, trains, and radiation. What could be more American? Didn’t the teachers say we could all grow up to be president?

Bully For You

I wasn’t very happy in fifth grade. I didn’t like switching classes. I didn’t have any classes with my buddy Heath. I had trouble getting my social bearings. I did like being in band. I played cornet and generally got first chair. The kid next to me was Matt. Sometimes he was first chair. I literally have no recollection of who the other kids were in the cornet section. Dennis Crowfoot played trombone. Todd Dunby played drums. And that’s all I remember about the other kids in band. I find that strange.

One thing that sticks out in my mind is how my brother said it was embarrassing that I was even in band. “Only sissies are in band.” If there was anything I wanted to make clear to Bret, it was that I was no sissy. That was a challenge since I was always the smallest and shortest kind in my grade, let alone classroom. Girls included. Having asthma kept me from meeting those growth-chart benchmarks.

Not looking like a wuss or sissy was a pretty big deal. It wasn’t just macho crap. I mean, it certainly was macho crap, but above and beyond that, it was a matter of survival. The halls, the bathrooms, the lunchroom, the playground – all of these were under monitored. And that’s not just paranoia spawned from living in the nuclear age with Lennon murdered and an assassination attempt on a president – did I mention how scary the Atlanta Child Murders were? At least twenty-two children and six young adults were kidnapped and murdered in the Atlanta area by May of 1981. (It was never mentioned by my parents or anyone at school but I was passively following the reports on the national evening news.)

A little bit of violence was everywhere. I mentioned Dennis Crowfoot. He was the youngest boy in big family. His mother had married the Crowfoot man and had three of four kids with him. I was never clear on just how many of them there were. She had been previously married to a man by the name of Bowers and had had three or four children with him. Now, the oldest of them was Byron Bowers. He was tall – nearly six-three by the time he hit high school. Byron was in special ed. He was mentally slow and socially awkward. He also had anger issues.

Once, Bret and I were riding home on the bus. Byron was beating on some kid. Our bus driver, Mrs. Cass, pulled up beside them and stopped. She opened the door and shouted at Byron, who paused in mid-swing of a fist. The other boy jumped up into the bus to get away from Byron, who then took one and half of his giant strides and was half inside the bus. Mrs. Cass was having none of it.

“Byron, you better get control of yourself or I’ll see to it you’re in the principal’s office tomorrow morning.”

You didn’t pull crap with Mrs. Cass.  

Byron came to his senses. Besides, there wasn’t a lot he could do. We were practically at his front door. The Bowers-Crowfoot house was directly across the street from the elementary.

Bret said to me, “You make sure you stay away from Byron. He’s not just a retard. The kid is dangerous.” I could tell from his face and his tone of voice he wasn’t fooling around. If Bret said someone dangerous, I needed to heed the warning.

“You could beat him up, though,” I said, hopeful.

“Could? I have beaten him up. He thought he could push me around like he does a lot of people. He’s freaky strong for such a beanpole.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

Then, as an afterthought, he added, “They say he raped his sister.”

It was a fact that his sister was pregnant. And it was a fact that her family was making her have the baby. She was in special ed as well. Rape was not anything I liked to think about. But neither was getting beaten up by a guy taller than Abe Lincoln.

Recently, I’ve contacted some of the former students from our public school. I asked them if they remembered Byron. “Oh, yes!” How could anyone forget the Bowers family? One woman told me she had been terrified of Byron. He would come up to her and say, “Hi, Shannon! I love you. I wanna fuck you!” Thirty years later and she could still hear his voice, she told me.

Another woman said she didn’t think Byron was the father of his sister’s child. She had always assumed the step-father was.

What happened to Dennis Crowfoot in 1986 or so always colors my memories of his stepbrother Byron and the Bowers-Crowfoot family. I can’t get past it. My mom used to subscribe to one of the bigger Michigan newspapers. They carried a story that the local gazette passed by in silence.

Dennis Crowfoot had somehow encountered a pair of men in their mid to late twenties. They asked him if he wanted to tag along with them and do some drinking. He was game. They were out well after dark on some lonely country roads, having a good time. Alcohol was drunk, pot was smoked. And then suddenly the pair beat Dennis and tied him up. They then took turns raping him. This continued for hours. When they’d had as much fun as they figured they would with the boy, they beat him some more and dumped his body in a ditch, probably figuring he was dead. He had been found the next day by a passing driver.

I don’t know if the pair was ever apprehended or tried. I did however get to know Dennis’s younger sister Dawn after I was out of high school. When I was over to her house, Dennis showed up. He had several noticeable scars on his head, near the hairline, one cheekbone was bumpy, uneven. The skin beneath one eye seemed droopy. This was more than a year after the beating. I told Dawn that I had heard something about her brother being attacked. I asked if he was still recovering. I was really only trying to be polite. Saying nothing seemed unkind. I’ve often wanted to be thought of as kind. That was important to me.

Dawn said that he was still improving. He would probably never be back to how he had been before the attack. His speech did seem off to me, but I hadn’t seen him since fifth grade. She said he was lucky to be alive. At first, the doctors hadn’t been hopeful that he’d ever regain consciousness. Dawn didn’t say how long Dennis had spent in the hospital and I didn’t want to pry, it being such a delicate topic.

When my mom had originally told me about Dennis being attacked, I thought of the goofy kid that played the trombone, sure. And of how he wouldn’t hurt a fly. But there was a part of me that felt justified. I had gotten out of that rural public school because of the toughs and their macho posturing, people picking on me, picking on anyone smaller than them in the whole warped pecking order. I was sick of the charley-horses, the attempted wedgies – you couldn’t step up to a urinal without at least thinking about someone threatening you with a swirly.

In one day I was kicked in the balls by two different boys for allegedly violating some code or other of boyhood.

My brother Bret had negotiated the whole bully code the way that’s always suggested in prison movies: he got in with the toughest, meanest boys and impressed them with feats of strength and pain-tolerance that would’ve gained him entrance into the ranks of Vikings, I think. One “game” they liked to “play” was called “arms.” This is where you let a boy punch you in the meaty part of your shoulder – the upper arm’s deltoid muscle. He hits you as hard as he can. Then it’s your turn. You keep going until one of you begs to quit. The other declared himself the victor.

The eighth-grade boys Bret hung out with for this pragmatic reason (he said) were a pair of brothers: Angus and Cecil Weir. Angus should have been in ninth grade but he had flunked in late elementary. He was also the second tallest kid in school – only Byron was taller. Angus was held back mainly because he had missed too much instructional time due to being out on suspensions for fighting or being caught smoking on school property. Cecil was only a few inches shorter than his brother. They looked nothing alike but they were both muscular in a rangy sort of way.

Bret was closest to Big Mike Madry, an eighth-grader who was already bench pressing over two hundred pounds. Mike had several brothers. Rodney was in my grade. He was the fastest sprinter in the elementary. His friends called him Hot Rod. It was a moniker that fit his quick temper. I was afraid of the boy and avoided him. But when I got to the middle school, Rodney stopped bothering me since his brother and mine were friends.

At lunch recess when there was a lot of snow, some smart aleck thought it would be cool to stick my face in the snow. That was a favorite pastime among these cretins. Then suddenly that kid was ripped off me and had his head shoved into a snowbank. It was Danny Madry, Rodney and Mike’s brother. He was in seventh grade.

“You can’t lay a hand on him, punk,” Danny said.  “That’s Bret’s little brother. You like livin’?” He asked me, “You OK, kid?”

I was.

But spring would come. Summer. Then the next year Bret would be in the high school. Would anyone remember that I was Bret’s little brother? Or would I say the wrong thing to some fat girl and get pummeled? Saying the wrong thing was really easy to do. Reminding people that you were a free agent and didn’t owe them any special consideration – in so many words – was more than some could tolerate. Anthropologists must have words to describe honor societies like this, ones with hair-triggers for disrespect. They say dueling is outlawed but doesn’t mean you can’t get your face broken by someone how outweighs you by a hundred pounds.

Sometime that winter my mom came home with a student handbook for the school that our church ran. Oak Hill Bible Church’s Crusaders. There was a knight on a horse. That was pretty cool, right? Crusaders and knights were good guys, weren’t they? When I rode my pony, well, I was like a knight.

And the boys got to wear a uniform with a tie. That seemed very civilized. A kid in a tie probably wasn’t going to punch anyone in the face. Besides, the code of conduct had a strict rule about being polite at all times. Fighting and cursing were strictly forbidden. Students who broke the rules could be paddled.

I didn’t think much about the school at first. It just sat in the back of my mind. My mom didn’t tell me why she had brought the handbook home. She didn’t ask me if I wanted to change schools. I had never heard of anyone changing to a private school. I must have had some dim awareness of private schools, but I didn’t spend any time thinking about them.

Nothing happened that made me suddenly want to try a different school. No one thing happened. But for some reason I got to thinking that a uniform and a small group of kids might be something worth exploring. I built up a warm, soothing fantasy of how dignified and happy I would be in dress shoes and a tie. I got my mom to let me buy some British Sterling deodorant. I started to think that going to a private school might make me a little like James Bond: suave, cool, well-dressed, smart.

It would get me away from the brutes.

Maybe it would even keep me from becoming a brute myself. Was there not a darker potential in my own heart?

Had I not been walking through an alfalfa field with Neil when we saw a snake? And didn’t I pick it up? It was a hog-nosed snake. I’d never seen one before. The thing wasted no time in hitting my thumb with its fangs. I dropped the snake and two drops of blood rose up.

Neil chuckled.

My eye caught a baseball-sized rock near my feet. It was very uncommon to see a rock that size in an alfalfa field.

I grabbed the rock and bent over the snake that was making its escape. I smashed the rock down on the snake three or four times.

“Why’dja do that?” Neil asked. “It was only defending itself!”

It’s possible to feel more than one thing at a time. This was Neil! The kid who would tell me stories about his dad tying cats up by their tails, slinging two of them over a tree branch and making them fight to death.

Why didn’t he think it was great that I wasn’t taking any shit from a stupid snake? Why were these rules so hard?

And why had I lost control of my temper?

I’d murdered the snake.

There was something wrong with me. I was as bad as the thugs I wanted to escape. I would sometimes get a willow switch when I was taking Ricky out for a ride. A willow switch makes a nasty slashing rip as it goes through the air. You didn’t have to hit a horse with it to make one tremble in fear. The fact that I could make Ricky tremble thrilled one part of me. There was also another part of my soul telling me it was wrong to enjoy that power.

But I did enjoy it. Ricky’s eyes would get wide in fear and I felt like a tough little man.

Still, under those memories was another. It was cowering in my own darkness, like a sick animal that crawls inside a log or culvert to die.

Toward the end of fourth grade, I had two girlfriends at the same time. They both knew about the other. They were friends. Kim and Shawn. I’m not sure what made them my girlfriends. I think they wrote me a note together that said something like, “We both lick you and think your cute. Wull you go with us? Yes or no?”

Spelling wasn’t a big concern for us.

The three of us wanted to be on the swings at the same time. But a boy named Chad was in the middle swing. He had to go. He was only a lousy third-grader, anyway. In the caste system of the elementary schoolyard, making a younger kid give up a swing was a cherished display of brutality.

At first we asked Chad to leave. But then we remembered our rank.

“Got outta the swing, kid.”

It only got worse from there. The girls were egging me on. Let the pissing-match commence!

“Knock him off the swing!” the girls urged me. This was not typical of them. Thinking back, I should have been surprised at them. But I probably thought it wouldn’t lead to anything.

Chad was a kid who rode my bus. I had watched him and his sister Missy, who was in my grade, run from the bus into their tidy ranch house with its well-kept yard. It was set beside a hilly field with Hereford beef cows. That farm was the one next to the Bernard farm. That’s where we bought our heifers when I was twelve. Mrs. Bernard was an aide at the school. They had a daughter who was a tall blonde. Her name was Katie.

I didn’t know anything else about Chad. I’d never been in a class with Missy. But I can’t say these were strangers, either. They both had thick black hair. That’s about all I could say about them at the time. Chad was taller than me and heavier.

I shoved him hard. He didn’t get out of the swing.

This went on for a few minutes. Then he jumped out of the swing and turned on me and shoved me back. He didn’t say anything. Was that when it occurred to me that maybe I’d never heard him speak?

The girls told me that I couldn’t let a third-grader push me around.

I agreed with them by doubling up my fists.

“Do you wanna fight?” I taunted him.

“I don’t wanna fight,” Chad mumbled.

I punched him in the stomach.

The girls laughed and yelled that I should beat him up.

It was like that movie where the neighbor kids tell the brother and sister to make their bird fly. But they know the bird can’t fly. The whole reason they have the bird is that they’re nursing its broken wing. They join in yelling at the bird to fly anyway. And then they pick up little stones with the other two and throw stones at the bird, chanting, “Fly, bird, fly!”

When their mom comes out and tells them to stop, the bird is dead. They’ve killed it with the rocks.

I don’t know how many times I punched Chad in the stomach – three?

He started crying and hollering like a wounded dog.

“C’mon, I didn’t hit you that hard! C’mon and fight, you sissy!”

Chad started making a weird sound and proceeded to puke. I expected him to hurl his lunch. To my shock his puke was red.

He was vomiting blood.

The playground lady was rushing up, frantically asking him what was wrong.

“He hit me!” Chad said with a mouthful of bloody bile.

She made me stand next to the school building, “Until I get back.” But she never came back. The lunch recess bell rang and we went back to class.

I never heard anything more about it. I anxiously waited all the rest of that day, expecting to be hauled down to the principal’s office. That never happened. I don’t remember seeing Chad again that year. And I don’t know what they did about him throwing up what looked like a lot of blood. This was very near the end of the schoolyear. Eventually, I more or less put it out of my mind, never forgetting what I’d seen, what I’d done.

The next year I was partners with his sister Missy for a classroom assignment. I’m pretty sure it was my afternoon social studies class. Missy and I chatted about silly kid things. I don’t remember what. Finally, I asked if her brother had some kind of medical condition. I’m certain I didn’t use that term. Or maybe I did. I had a wide vocabulary. Still, it seems like I would have said, “Is there anything the matter with your brother? Does he go to the doctor for anything?”

I don’t remember her exact answer. I just recall that she said he had something. I didn’t know what it was. And I didn’t understand how whatever it was that she was talking about could make a person hurl blood. There was no way I was going to ask her. I wasn’t about to confess.

Not only did I not confess to Missy, I never confessed to anyone.

When I was kneeling at the altar, as serious as I was about the whole ritual, I never thought to ask Jesus to forgive me for making Chad throw up blood that day on the playground. I didn’t think of the snake I’d murdered or making my pony shiver in wide-eyed fear.

Being born again wasn’t about that. It wasn’t about being sorry. Sorry wouldn’t save you from hell or death. And that was what we wanted – to be saved. We didn’t want to be sorry.

By T W Ladd 12/6/20

Black Holes – Not As Dirty As They Sound

            When trying to date things, scholars used to use the terms terminus post quem and terminus ante quem. And event of a thing had to come after (post) something, but it couldn’t have happened/existed prior (ante) to something else.

            I’m thinking of a time I came home to find my dad reading a National Geographic. Not only was he reading it, sitting in the sunshine just inside the sliding-glass door that opened on our deck, but he was engrossed in it.

            He said something like, “You boys won’t believe this, but …” and proceeded to read to us from the article. I don’t think anything like that had ever happened before.

            I know this event had to occur after I started second grade. The reason being that we never had a subscription to National Geographic. We got a small pile of them after my mom got the job as a librarian in my elementary school. She started when I was in second grade. And it happened prior to Christmas, 1979, when I was in fourth grade.

            I can be certain of that because that was when we saw The Black Hole in the theater. Over the same Christmas break we also saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Incidentally, that was the last movie my dad ever took us to. It may have been the last time my dad set foot in a theater. I’m not sure. I know he wasn’t impressed with either of those movies. I really liked The Black Hole but Star Trek made little sense to me and what did make sense was boring.

            The National Geographic in question was Volume 145, Number 5. May 1974. The article: “The Incredible Universe.” The topic: Black holes, of course.

            My dad was astonished to learn that stars could collapse under their own weight when their nuclear fuel was burned up, all of the hydrogen converted to helium. The outward pressure of the radiant heat had kept the core of the star from contracting, but once the hydrogen is gone, the star can explode. If it is sufficiently massive, all that’s left behind after the explosion of a supernova, is a black hole. The remaining core has collapsed due to its own gravity. It is now so densely packed, and its mass confined to such a small area, that its gravity traps everything that comes near it, including light. And this is why scientists call it a black hole.

            Is it a metric of how fascinated my dad was that I kept the magazine for years? That his enthusiasm rubbed off on me? I think this marks the beginning of my own obsession with space. Science was my favorite subject in fourth grade. The school library had a life-size plastic model of the human body’s vital organs. Although it had a really weird smell, I loved to take that thing apart and put it back together. My friend Heath and I were really into that. He was also into ’Salem’s Lot. I went over to his house one day after school. We played with all of his Star Wars action figures and talked about sneaking out at some point and going through the city graveyard a midnight. Heath said we needed to make wooden crosses out of popsicle sticks and memorize Psalm 23.

            Heath said we should become coroners. That would combine medical science along with criminal investigation, just like on Quincy.

            Heath Albertson was my best friend in fourth grade. He was head and shoulders taller than me. And he was quite “husky.” Kids called him Fat Albertson. He laughed it off and, honestly, I don’t think it gave him a moment of grief. Upon reflection, that can’t strictly be true. It must have caused him some pain, but he certainly didn’t show. He was loud, flamboyant, happy, and always cracking jokes. He was also smart and got excellent grades in every subject. But he spoke with a heavy lisp. Having the name Heath was perfect for a lisp. Being called Steve, for instance, would have caused more difficulties. He and I got to be friends because we both were in speech. I sometimes had a lisp when I was in second grade. By fourth grade I’m pretty sure it was gone. Heath never lost his lisp. I saw him when I was twenty and we exchanged pleasantries. He still had it then. I didn’t mind going to speech. We got to play Sorry and Stop, Thief! The latter being about the best board game ever.   

            The spring of 1980 I turned ten. It was kind of a personal Annus Mirabilis. For my birthday I begged my mom to buy me a chemistry set. It included a microscope. I think this kit sold for $10. The microscope was definitely the most attractive feature. It’s not like I knew anything about sulfur, sodium bicarbonate, or any of that other stuff. But that was the only way to get a microscope in the Penny’s catalog.

            It didn’t come with any pre-made slides. I had to find things to look at. I looked at strands of my own hair, which had to be plucked out since I didn’t use a hairbrush, and if there’s hair in your comb… Gross. I also bit my lip so I could look at some blood (at 40x magnification, blood isn’t that interest.) I figured that was safer than playing around with chicken blood or something else I might be able to find in the fridge. The strand of hair was pretty neat to look at. You can see the dark central shaft inside the hair follicle.

            Don’t worry, I never tried to dig anything out of my nose to look at it under magnification. I did have some standards.

            Heath was very impressed with my microscope. I took the kit to his house and his mom helped us do some tests with acids and bases. It’s funny that we didn’t know the term “science nerd.”

             And then the next Christmas I got the telescope. The first night the moon came up! It was sheer joy. Seeing those neatly round craters with such clarity! Thinking that there was nothing between Earth and the Moon for over 225,000 miles! All of that space is just utterly empty! The moon hangs in a sea of nothing. And so does the Earth. Both objects orbit the sun, which also hangs in the middle of empty space. The little book my parents gave me that Christmas, The Golden Guide to Stars, said the star nearest to our solar system was 4.2 light years away. That would be a long ride even in the Millennium Falcon.

            And what’s between here and there? Other than a few asteroids? Absolutely nothing. Infinitely empty space!

            How do you wrap your head around the concept of nothing? I couldn’t. And where there’s no gravity, the nothing has no effect on your movement. You don’t sink in nothing like you do water or air. That too was the pull of gravity.

            I spent a lot of time being puzzled by all of that. I also spent a lot of time reading through that little Stars book. Without realizing it, I memorized all kinds of facts about our solar system. But reading the book was just something to do when I couldn’t look at the Moon or some of the planets.

            Looking through a telescope at the partially-full Moon was an amazing experience. The fact that you had to almost continually inch the telescope along was both frustrating and part of the marvel. Everybody knows that the Moon moves. But looking at a small sliver of the sky through a fixed optical instrument shows you just how fast the Earth is spinning. Suddenly, I was aware of this dynamic, living relationship our planet has with our nearest space neighbor. We’re involved in a dance. You can know that by looking at the Moon at different times in the night. But you can’t feel the reality of the action without the fixed instrument. Naturally, your eye moves along with the Moon when you simply glance up. So, you get this impression of the whole thing being rather static. It’s like watching the sunrise of sunset over houses or trees. You can gauge the movement against those close objects. But once the celestial body is high above the horizon, there’s nothing to put the movement into perspective. You can fool yourself that time stands still.

            It’s very similar to standing near a large clock. On a wristwatch you can’t see the minute hand moving. But on a large clock you’re very aware that the minute hand is always plodding forward. Timepieces of very different sizes can give very different impressions of pieces of time.

            Another extremely fascinating thing to look at with a low-power telescope is the Sun. You do have to use a filter. If you put the dark glass up to your eye, you can see nothing – unless you’re aimed directly at our nearest star. I suppose it’s the same material in a welder’s mask. When used in a telescope it allows you to study our yellow dwarf star safely. What blew me away that first time I looked at the Sun was seeing sunspots. Just like in the books. There they were! Dark smudges on the surface of the ball of fire. It was like some kind of fruit that was starting to go bad.

            The very idea of sunspots boggled my mind. I had never heard of them before reading about them in the little Stars book. And then Bam! There they were. I was looking at them with my telescope. I was out on the deck, crunching on the ice, peering into the sky, as unblinking as a god, staring into the face of the Sun and not blinded. My little piece of precision Japanese optical equipment had taken me far above the earth.

            That was fifth grade. In the spring I would get a BB gun. Church would start to be a bigger part of my life. I was baptized now, after all. I was growing up. I had to start taking my … whatever they were called … seriously. I started looking for ways to “put away childish things.” Luckily, I wasn’t in a household where I was being rushed into adulthood. Mainly, I was fading into the background like any middle child will.

            There were the vinyl albums, 33 rpm, of Star Wars and The Black Hole. I had kept the National Geographic with the article about the life cycle of stars and the stark, almost horrifying effects of gravity on objects that are unimaginably massive. There were many times that I would be alone in my bedroom staring at the pictures in that magazine. It would be too much to say I was obsessively mesmerized by the one illustration of a black hole devouring a giant blue star. The painting was done by Victor J. Kelly. I don’t even know how many times I had looked at the depiction of stellar vampirism before I realized it wasn’t a photograph. The gruesome image a black star-eater, lifeless, lightless, put terrible suggestions into my brain. Things could be snuffed out in this universe, utterly, and forever.

            Death for stars is cold and permanent.

            I kept the magazine for years. And I wasn’t one to hold onto magazines. I didn’t even own a lot of books. When I moved out of the house abruptly at twenty, I left the National Geographic behind and my mom threw it out.

            Then in the mid-90s I was living in Detroit. I walked into one of these ratty little storefront used-book stores you used to see. I think this one was on Van Dyke near Nine Mile. I just went in out of boredom. It was the kind of place with more dust than carpet. There were tables piled higgledy-piggledy with old issues of Popular Mechanics and Playboy. I’m not exaggerating. There was a copy of the issue with Marilyn Monroe. I didn’t realize at the time that it was the first edition ever of Playboy. I have no idea why I didn’t thumb through that magazine. If I want to now, I’ll have to pay about $40 on Ebay.

            Shelved in much less chaotic fashion were some old National Geographics. I got to the early 1970s section and started pulling out copies. I knew what I was looking for – the starry cover with the purple and blue smudges of the Trifid Nebula.

            And there it was.

            I think I paid a quarter for it. We were reunited. Twenty-five years later. I still have it. I’ll never part with it now.    

By T W Ladd 11/30/20

Search Me

            When I went up to the altar and knelt down, when the deacon asked me if I wanted forgiveness for my sins, did I really think about any of my sins? No.

            Just what did I think I was doing? Was it about death? The Old Man Sunday had died. My dad’s favorite Aunt Jean had died around that time. Was I hoping to avoid death, leaping into eternal life? Maybe.

            It was around this same point in my life when I was using my mom’s Oil of Olay. Hadn’t the commercials convinced me that wrinkles were really just bad planning?

            I know I also thought it would be stupid to die and go to hell. It would be like the guy with the time-bomb strapped to his chest in the public service announcement who refused to do anything about his high blood pressure.

            It’s easier to say what I wasn’t doing. I wasn’t trying to get some one-on-one time with Jesus. Harold Bloom said American Christianity was all about being alone in the Garden with Jesus, an essentially Romantic idea. A kind of church for one. Not technically a solipsism because it was you and your God.

            So much of the evidence has vanished when it comes to our own pasts. None of the witnesses are all that trustworthy. Memory makes for poor testimony, but it’s the best I have, minus a time-machine. I know I won’t solve all of the mysteries of my earlier self. I’ve already said I don’t know why I never gave my pony a better name than an adjective that could only be applied to the poor beast ironically – which is an awful kind of name.

            When I try to reflect objectively, it seems to me that the whole asking Jesus into my heart was really about joining the adults. It was the antithesis of an individual action. It was a ceding of self, a loss of freedom. A melting into, a fusion with the collective. It was completely un-Romantic.

            It could be that someone like Harold Bloom would focus on the voluntary aspect of making a profession of faith, the willing into belief. Wasn’t that the kind of thing Fichte could get behind? Claiming impossibilities to be reality, that goes even farther than Wordsworth could in “Tintern Abbey” that the real is something we “half create,” and half “perceive.” We make it half-true by believing in it. But Wordsworth thought nature was the “anchor of all [his] purest thoughts.” Nature provided Wordsworth with at least half the words that proceeded from the mouth of God. It was his partial scripture. The other half you had to create through reason.

            And for us Baptists? Was believing even important? Wordsworth had beliefs about nature. But the Baptist didn’t really need to believe anything. She just needed to say she believed. She needed to say it to the others in her church. “Help thou mine unbelief.” (Mark 9:24) There was no metric of adequate belief for us Baptists. Just keep coming to church and no one would ever question your faith. “Without faith it is impossible to please God.” (Hebrews 11:6) And the writer goes on to clarify, “for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” It’s the diligence of seeking that is the evidence of one’s belief. It takes effort, it takes work. “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead? Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar?” (James 2:19)

            What we never heard in church: someone saying, “I used to think I believed but then I realized that I was just faking it. Now I really believe.”
            Well, there was Fred Hughes. Fred was two years older than me and lived about two miles north of us. His ears were set very low on his skull. He had severely sloping shoulders. It seemed like there for a few years, every six months or so, and he would get born again. But he never claimed that he thought he was a believer before. He claimed that he had always been insincere before. This time was real. Before it couldn’t have been because he had always gone back to his sins. So he said. One time he went forward in church to the podium and told the preacher that he had been “high on pot for ten years.” Tears streamed down is agonized face. He and some of the others of us went away to an overnight church camp. It was there that I pointed out to him that his ten-year high required him to have started smoking marijuana at the tender age of six. He wasn’t happy with that. In fact, he completely lost his shit and started screaming in my face as I lay on one of the bunk beds. Several of the other boys dragged him off me.

            We all knew that Fred, an only child with elderly parents, had emotional issues. He was the kind of kid about whom your grandmother might have said, “That boy ain’t quite right.” He was the exception that proved the rule.

            “Cor meum tibi offero, Domine, prompte et sincere.” These are John Calvin’s words: “I offer my heart to you, O Lord, promptly and sincerely.”

            There isn’t an Evangelical alive who thinks the person doing the offering doesn’t know if he or she is giving his or her heart sincerely. You know. You are either telling the truth or you are lying. You can’t lie to yourself. As an Evangelical, you know your own heart. Fundamentalist Christians don’t believe an id. There’s no part of your mind removed from your conscious reflection, out of the reach of your deliberate thoughts. We knew the passages that ask the divine, “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts.” (Psalm 139:23) We read such verses, but we didn’t put much pressure on them. “Who can detect his own errors? Cleanse me from my hidden faults.” (Psalm 19:12)

Was anyone in my church ever concerned with secret sins? I never saw any evidence of that. I never saw adults saying things like, “I’m not sure about this matter. Perhaps my secret sins are blinding me. I’ll have to pray about it.” I saw a lot of people acting like they knew right from wrong, and they knew when others were in the wrong. There wasn’t even a great deal of apologizing. I don’t recall too many people saying, “I’m sorry for what I did to you. I was wrong.” If you’ve been washed in the blood of the Lamb, if you’re a new creation, if you’re filled with the Spirit and have God searching your inmost thoughts, you don’t really need a lot of critical introspection. “The Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” (Romans 8:26) The Holy Spirit prays for us in terms too deep for human words.

So, what is there for us to worry about?

For the fundamentalist, salvation can’t be lost. Once you say you’ve decided to follow Jesus, like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, all you need to do is keep going, keep moving forward. What you think about Jesus is pretty immaterial. What you understand is even less of an issue. You only need the faith of a child. It’s not like you’re being asked to solve Fermat’s last theorem or find the Higgs’ boson. You’re being asked to say something, to identify yourself. No one asks you to put salvation or propitiation of sin into your own words before a council that then passes judgment on the correctness of your words. You aren’t required to describe a process or explain the Trinity. Call upon the name of the Lord! It’s that easy!

Rather than as you to explain what you believe, the Evangelicals want to know if you will recite the club motto with them.

Because it was never about believing. It was about belonging.

The Evangelical Christian isn’t alone with her thoughts. She’s not near the ruins of Tintern Abbey, contemplating the meaning of it all. It’s not a eureka moment. Or a series of such moments– not really, because it isn’t about understanding an idea that you can articulate, a complex idea like a recipe or set of instructions. It’s a simply urge to act. It’s joining a group, it’s submitting to a creed. The loss of independence is the price you pay for the comfort of being a member of a community.

In an Arminian Christian will tell you that you can lose your salvation. You can give your life over to Jesus, only to later fall from grace. If you die in such a state, you will be condemned to an eternity in hell. All of the Baptists I knew believed in “once saved, always saved,” a Calvinist position. Falling from grace for them was an impossibility. None of them would have questioned the sincerity of a child. None of them would have asked a person professing to have faith in the risen Christ, “But do you sincerely believe? How do you know that you sincerely believe?”

For the Evangelical, there was no such thing as self-delusion when it came to one’s own beliefs about Jesus. If you believed, it was by necessity sufficient belief. You can’t question your own sincerity. To do that would be a sign of mental illness, insanity. That’s the only way they could account for a person like Fred Hughes. He must have had some kind of brain defect or spiritual retardation, surely.

“Worry is a sin,” Baptists love to say, even though you won’t find those words in the Bible. “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” (2Timothy 1:7) Sound mind in the Greek is sophronismos. Sanae mentis, in Latin. Of sound mind. Many translations of the Bible render the word as sobriety, but that has a much more limited scope than the Greek. It certainly doesn’t mean to be free of intoxication. It’s about a mind that is healthy.

In the time of St. Augustine of Hippo, a Christian put off baptism until the end of life. This was a clear attempt to deal with idea of becoming a Christian. The sense was that the redeemed person ought to be ontologically different from the unredeemed sinner. I mean, if being a Christian was something real that mattered, then obviously the life of the Christian would be distinguishable from the life of the ordinary sinner.

This was another way of dealing with the problem of how much belief is sufficient? Not only, Do you believe? But, Do you believe intensely? And how intensely was intense enough?

In the Early Christian Church, prior to the First Council of Nicaea, the practice was almost the direct opposite of these fundamentalist Baptists. Rather than seeing conversion as a discrete event, they saw it as a process over time. Often this was a period of two or three years between the time a person declared commitment to becoming a Christian and eventual Baptism. According to Robin Lane Fox, one had to be an apprentice Christian for what we would consider a rather lengthy stretch of time: two to three years – certainly not an overnight thing, though exceptions could be made in extreme situations. The catechumens could worship in the church but they did so separately and were kept from the eucharist. Full Christians kept on an eye on their behavior. If a catechumen slipped up, he or she could be demoted to the level of a “hearer.”

The process was part of the attraction of the Church, Lane Fox thinks. The difficulty and the investment of time gave the novices a greater sense of solidarity.

The process also demonstrates that not all Christians saw knowing your own heart as a simple either/or. Christians of the time of Origen and St. Augustine would have been very puzzled by people who were both impulsive and transparent. They probably would have thought such a thing was possible with a rare miracle, but it wouldn’t be commonplace.

So, I’ll ask you, when I was ten years old and kneeling at that altar, was I being sincere?       
  

By T W Ladd
Part whatever we’re up to now. 11/12/20

The Horse You Rode In On

            My brother worked for Old Man Sunday for almost a year. He went up the road a quarter of a mile and took care of the sheep. There was also a cow. Gladys. And there were four ponies. Saving up his dollar a day, my brother’s goal kept changing. He thought of buying his own TV. Or maybe a minibike. I think it was my dad’s suggestion that he consider a horse. Somehow, I must have missed that conversation. I don’t remember how it came about that he was going to save up and buy a horse. It’s likely I just didn’t think it would happen for a while. But Bret’s pile of George Washingtons kept getting thicker. Months later he had a hundred and fifty one-dollar bills. Dad said we were ready to start shopping. He had talked to a guy who knew a fellow.

            I thought that if we were going to buy a horse that I wanted in on it. So I kicked in my whole piggy bank – all twelve dollars of it. Bret thanked me. It may have been his politest moment in his life. Then he said that twelve dollars would make me the owner of at least the tail.

            My brother was ten. I was seven. Together we came up with half of the price of our Appaloosa mare. Dad paid for the other half. He also paid for the fence. We had to help with that. We boarded Pepper in Old Man Sunday’s barn that winter, for a small fee. I still remember the first time Bret was bucked off. He went flying over the horse’s head and landed face first in a snowdrift.

            And that was how I got hooked on horses.

            Over the next eighteen months or so we stretched a lot of fence, barbed wire, on our twelve acres. A lot of fence from my perspective as a kid. It’s a pretty neat thing to watch the fencing cable get pulled tight while someone is cranking the come-along – not me. I wasn’t strong enough or it was considered unsafe for me to do that first year.

            Bret and I twisted on a lot of the wire pieces that hold the fence to the post. And we tied a lot of slips of white rag to the fence – this was so Pepper would see the fence. Horses have to get used to seeing some things. This was one of the things Dad had read about in one of his horse magazines or books. He did a fair bit of reading that year about caring for a horse. He took the responsibility of training a horse very seriously. It was all a new adventure for him, too. He had grown up in the city and never had any experiences of horse riding. But he had worked with training bird dogs to hunt, and I’m sure that was what convinced him it wouldn’t be impossible for him to break a horse to saddle and bridle.

            And then Old Man Sunday succumbed to his age and emphysema. All the property and livestock would be auctioned off. I wanted one of the ponies – red-brown and white pinto. He would let me sit on him while Bret fed the sheep and other animals. I’d gotten to like the sweet boy.

            There were four of them and they were all severely neglected – at first I had no idea just how severe. What did I know? I was just a kid and these were really the first horses I’d ever seen.

Nothing had been done with their hooves in it don’t know how long. It was completely criminal and deeply cruel – it’s the kind of thing that makes you start to favor men being horsewhipped. The winter I was nine, I learned about a foundered horse, and about severely damaged hooves.

            The pony’s name was Frisky. That’s what Old Man Sunday had told me. We all thought this was a horrible name for a pony. I knew then that it was a word that got laughs on Happy Days. Even though it suggested cat food, we didn’t think it was right to change his name. I have no idea why. This probably owes something to my dad’s time training dogs. You just don’t change a dog’s name. If that wasn’t the reason, then I really can’t explain this mystery. It strikes me as useful to reflect on the problems we can’t resolve in our own autobiographies. The more we meditate on some questions, the less satisfying any possible answer becomes. Hadn’t I named about a dozen cats, came up with band names, superhero names, spaceship names, names for secret clubs and clandestine societies? But I couldn’t even come up with a nickname for my pony?

            Does that reveal something about me? Should I see that as an indictment against my character? Maybe I should. Be that as it may, I refuse to use the name Frisky any further. Although I never changed his name while he lived, I’m changing his name now. The other name just seems too insulting. From here on, I’ll refer to him as Ricky and Good Ole Rick.

            Part of me has to wonder, Was I guilty of any crime against this pinto pony? Maybe it haunts me that begging my dad to buy the pony was my own wicked cruelty. Even though Ricky’s hooves were not as bad as the other three ponies, they were more curved than elves’ shoes. They suggested sleigh runners. The pony’s front ankles were badly displaced. Instead of walking on his “toe,” he was walking on what would be for us the back of the wrist. The rear hooves were in better shape. But the ferrier examined Ricky and said the case wasn’t completely hopeless. He didn’t sound very convincing.

            Yay! I had my pony!

            But –

Did I ever stop to think that maybe the horse was in too much pain? My dad did. I didn’t trust his opinion. The other three ponies had been sold to the slaughterhouse for dogfood and glue. No one was going to put Ricky down!

            Even if that was better for him.

            The digit that a horse puts its weight on – the tip of it – is called the coffin bone. Sometimes with founder the coffin bone will pierce through the bottom of the hoof. That hadn’t happened yet with Ricky. But his coffin bone was rotated, the tip upward. This stretches the tendon at the back of the hoof. There is another problem with the coffin being rotated. It causes inflammation in the laminar tissue. Eventually, the blood flow to the laminae can be cut off. This will create other problems and, of course, more pain for the animal. The coffin bone itself can shrink – gets its blood from the laminae. I’m not sure that was what happened to Ricky. The front of his hooves was not wrinkled and cracking like I’ve seen in many cases. But his weight was always placed farther back on the heel than it should have been. My dad worked very hard with the farrier to remedy the problem but it never resolved. The back hooves returned to normal, but the front never did.

            He lived for another nine years. He should have been shod. That may have corrected the problem almost totally. I’ve talked to vets since then. I’ve obsessed over it. Agonized. . .

            That year, the same year I was in Cub Scouts, the year before band, from the end of 1979, I spent a lot of time with my pony. I became very accustomed to using the curry comb, so much I had dreams of combing out horses. My dad took care of the hoof trimming after he learned how from the farrier, but I was supposed to do the daily cleaning of the hooves with a pick. I also gave Ricky his daily dose of minerals the vet had recommended. You scooped the powder into a pail with a little oats and molasses. Ricky loved the stuff. Actually, the daily treat was how I got the pony to agree to be tied up so I could pull up a hoof at a time and work on it, runt that I was.

            Ricky and Pepper got to be good friends. You could tell they bonded. There was no riding Ricky away from Pepper. I could ride him and follow Brent on Pepper, but he absolutely refused to venture off on his own.

            And I did ride him. If Pepper (and sometimes neighbor kids on horses) wanted to gallop and Brent gave her the OK, Ricky would run his heart out to keep up with them.

            My dad made us ride as much as we could through the fields for the sake of Ricky being footsore. Our gravel roads were mainly clay but there was enough gravel on the cement-hard clay to cause problems for the pony. And there was a good route we liked to take through the woods and a gravel pit – the road there was very sandy, part of it was even like a dune.
            I rode a lot the two summers when I was ten and eleven. I didn’t have a saddle. I can’t imagine letting my boys when they were nine or ten bounce around bareback on a trotting pony! But I did it countless hours. I fell off numerous times without too much injury. I recall one time in particular when I flew off and landed on my back in a field of Queen Anne’s Lace.

            In the late summer of 1981, just before school started, just before we started going to the Christian school (student body, under sixty kids), I fell off Ricky. It was almost exactly half way through our ride. We liked to take the horses down this huge hill – we’d been down it a number of times. It would have made a great toboggan run, it was that long and steep. We were nuts. And it was all loose, fine, sand – the kind of thing guys like to go up with their motorcycles. My brother and the two boys we were riding with got ahead of me. Thinking back on it, I can’t figure out how I ever managed to stay on that pony with no saddle. The others had saddles. I squeezed with my legs and held onto the main for dear life. Down a sixty-foot drop. If Ricky had put his head down I would have fallen under him. Somehow, I made all the way to the bottom every time – including the last time I pulled it off.

            But then I fell at the bottom of the hill. Just before it flattened out, Ricky took off at a fast trot. But when he hit the hard clay, he made a hard right. He zigged, I zagged. I fell forward and the palm of my left hand hit the hard ground. I broke the wrist in one place and fractured it bade on the opposite wrist bone. I think the radius had the break and the ulna had the fracture. However, it was, it was the worst pain I’d ever experienced – so far as I could remember. And I’ve never felt anything that bad since. I thought I was going to throw up. Everything went white. I nearly passed out but never did. I definitely had to sit down. I didn’t ride Ricky home. We got over to our friend Matt’s house – one of the boys we were riding with – and called my dad. Brent led Ricky home. I went in the truck. He didn’t think it was broken though. Or he didn’t want to believe it was broken. He’d broken bones before and knew that a cast is no fun. He knew I was in pain. After all, he was the one who so many times had said sprains could be as painful as a broken bone.

            We waited the weekend for the swelling to go down – even if I needed a cast, Dad said, we’d have to wait for the swelling to go down. The next Monday we went to the hospital and got X-rays. Sure enough, a clear break.

            Ha! I was getting a cast! People could sign it! (I’m not sure why that was important.) I was vindicated. My brother couldn’t say I was being a baby, now. I don’t remember if he had said anything like that, but I’d lived adventurously. I’d broken bones, brother!  

            I bring up the hours I spent with my pony to underscore a point: in 1979 and 80, I wasn’t a fanatical believer. I was a lot more like one of those kids in an After School Special than I care to admit.

            My daily thoughts did not turn to God or the Devil. I certainly had never heard of Roe v. Wade. I’d heard of Jimmy Carter’s “windfall profits.” They made me think of windmills. I thought about the hostages in Iran more than church – my whole class at school had discussions about the hostages. Who doesn’t remember the failed rescue attempt and the helicopter that crashed into the supply plane? That was probably the first time I heard and remember the word “abort.”

I had not heard that Jesus was coming back to earth, but I knew Skylab was going to fall ahead of schedule. My mom was the elementary librarian at the public school, even though she had no college education. She was the one who told me about an art contest for kids. You had to make a picture of the Voyager 1 satellite (I didn’t win). I still remember seeing the pictures it sent back of Jupiter’s Giant Red Spot and then later Saturn’s rings. My dad called me into the room when the Jupiter images came on TV. He kept commenting on what a marvel it was that the images were beamed back to Earth from Jupiter, which is about 500 million miles away.

“The Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun!” I chirped. I learned that fact in third grade and never forgot it.

We saw these fabulous images of Jupiter early in 1979. About nine months later we got even more stunning shots of Saturn, its many moons and mesmerizing rings. Dad and I tuned in for that too. I don’t remember my brother being very interested but I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. I was imaging going there. I didn’t learn that Jupiter’s gravity was 8 times that of Earth until I was in fifth grade, so in my mind I was in my rocket and on my way to explore the Red Spot, buddy!

(Yes, I realize that’s incorrect about Jupiter’s gravity – the gravity there is only about 2.5 times Earth’s, but there’s still no surface to stand on with gas giants. But somehow, I got the idea that Jupiter’s gravity was eight times stronger than Earth’s when I was in Mrs. Brennenstuhl’s class. It was not her fault. Another kid and I were looking at an encyclopedia.)

11/19/20

By T W Ladd

It Didn’t Seem Nearly So Crazy At The Time

In 1980 I had no idea just how far down the fundamentalist rabbit-hole I was heading. How could I? I was ten-year-old living in rural Michigan. I went to public school. We went to church probably three weeks out of the month. My favorite things were riding my pony or my bike. Star Wars and Thundarr the Barbarian were good, but my brother and I were really into Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park. I had seen every episode of Gilligan’s Island so many times I lost count. I’d never read more than a verse at a time of the Bible. I do remember being very impressed with Franco Zeffirelli’s blue-eyed Jesus, but, hey, I was even more impressed with the Six Million Dollar Man. This was all very typical for a white male in Anywhere, USA. It was about to become very atypical. See, we had been only sporadically attending our local Bible church when a new pastor came along. This was one Robert Lee Beck, born in Vina, Alabama, 1926. (No, his middle name was not an accident. The South shall rise again.) During the Great Depression, his parents moved to Detroit with the hope of finding work.

Bob Beck was a bookish child and did well enough in middle school to qualify to enter Detroit Cass Tech, a public school of distinction, located near Downtown Detroit. I don’t know what the demographics of his classes were, but in 1930 Detroit was about 92% white. And that percentage barely went down by 1940. In World War Two he joined the Navy, having been in the ROTC program in high school. I don’t know if he saw any combat then, but he would be called up again during the Korean War. He said he served on a supply ship in the Pacific.

His time in the Navy gave him a Bachelor’s degree. And at some point he got a master’s in education from the very fine University of Indiana at Bloomington. My guess is that he got the master’s after attending Bob Jones, Sr’s college, which had moved to its Greenville, South Carolina home in 1947 because of growing enrollment, thanks to the GI Bill. Yes, folks, socialism helped fund this stuff! When he was in his forties, a surgeon at the Veteran’s hospital implanted a pig valve in his heart. The final years of his life were spent in a Veteran’s hospital. Does that mean at any time he regretted being a member of The John Birch Society? I doubt it. Just as he didn’t have any qualms about accepting government cheese or any other benefits, state or federal, he might qualify for with his family of eight children and stay-at-home wife.

In 1950, Bob Beck was ordained at Temple Baptist Church in Detroit. I believe he was ordained by one J. Frank Norris. This was the same man who had been called The Texas Tornado. According to David Stokes, Norris was indicted four times by a county grand jury: once for perjury, twice for arson, and once for murder.

In 1926 Norris shot and killed an unarmed man who had come to his church office. The coincidence of this being the same year that Bob Beck was born attracts my brain. I can imagine a very melodramatic made-for-TV movie in which Norris murders a man on the very night Beck is born. Lots of lightning and thunder. Rain coming down in sheets. But in mundane reality, baby Bob was born in April. And Norris fired three shots into D. Elliott Chipps one hot July afternoon. Time Magazine did a story on the crime. The trial that has been called one of the most famous of that decade in Texas. The New York Times covered the trial as well.

There was more than a little of Elmer Gantry (1927) in Norris, the barnstorming radio preacher and pastor of multiple churches. He lived in Texas the whole time he was working as a preacher in Detroit’s Temple Baptist Church. He would fly up for the weekend in his own small plane. He did this from 1935 to 1950. This was a man who got a bachelor’s from Baylor and then a master’s in theology from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary – but then he went on to get into feuds with both institutions. Norris seems like the kind of person who invited irreconcilable differences everywhere he went. Even his friends couldn’t always avoid conflict with him. Any bridge he could burn down in a big way was a cause for celebration. “Come Out From Among Them!” could have been his war cry. And he would have been the sort to have a war cry, despite the man never serving in the military. But he was God’s soldier, the war he fought was against the forces of Satan. He claimed that Baylor was teaching Darwinian evolution. Evolution in the time of the Scopes Monkey Trial had become widely regarded among fundamentalists as a satanic teaching. His beef with the Southern Baptist Seminary was with their “modernist” tendencies – which likely meant they were marginally influenced by contemporary trends in biblical scholarship.

The “literal” reading of the Bible was in full swing!

On his radio show in the 1920s, Norris openly backed the Klan – it would not be an unreasonable conclusion that the gun-toting preacher was an active member of the KKK. He was vociferously anti-Catholic. The wonder isn’t that Norris shot a man to death. It’s that he didn’t shoot more. Or wasn’t himself shot. I don’t know anything about his court case, but it strikes me as a screaming injustice that he got off on a claim of self-defense. There was after all no weapon found on or near the body of Mr. Chipps. People across the country were riveted by this story. Would a Texas preacher get sent to the electric chair?

Such was the man who presided over my pastor’s ordination. Norris, who had also been born in Alabama, must have been something of a hero to young Robert Lee Beck.       

When You Put It That Way

Robert Lee Beck was 54 years old in 1980. A tall man, six-two in his leather Oxford wingtips – the only kind of shoes I ever saw him in. He also always had on either dress slacks or sometimes dark olive chinos, which also had a crease over the knee. Six days a week at least he wore a tie – it was always a full Windsor knot. (His son Jimmy once told me the half Windsor was for liberals.) When the whole church went camping, he would sit around the campfire with either the sleeves of his Oxford shirt rolled up, or maybe he’d take the shirt off and sit around in an undershirt covering his generous paunch. No dungarees, as he called jeans, for him. James Dean, after all, was no Christian gentleman.

Pastor Beck was an odd-looking bird. His nose was very long and a little pointed on a very long face. His was a massive head. He kept his hair as short as Navy regulations required at all times. He had a nice round bald spot in the back like a medieval friar. His ears were also enormous and the tips ever so slightly pointed and tipped outward. Since I was a big fan of the Salem’s Lot miniseries with David Soul, I saw a resemblance to the show’s hairless vampire monster. It was very Nosferatu. It didn’t help his appearance any that he had dark wiry hairs growing out of his ears – a sight I don’t recall often seeing since, especially not in persons under that age of a hundred.

But Pastor Shotts, though large, socially awkward and physically unappealing was a very gentle man. He was warm and kind. I liked him. His homeliness made have been part of his charm. He wasn’t macho, talking about sports or hunting or monster trucks. He was quick to smile or laugh – he had a comically loud laugh. In fact, his whole brood had the same odd, boisterous laugh, mouth wide open, head tipped back. Where others might simply exhale a little sharply to express amusement, the Beck clan would give a blast on their hilarity horn. As a kid, I found it equal parts annoying and amusing. I know a number of the tight-lipped Michiganders thought of the Beck as arch, fake, insincere – I heard them called such things many times in the years we were together. Bit I got close to them. I don’t think they were phony. They were simply more demonstrative when it came to humor. Out of that whole tribe, I don’t think I ever saw one of them truly angry. They were not the kind to scowl and shout, pointing a finger, making threats. That was foreign to their temperaments.

In one of his sermons you were likely to hear an anecdote about Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. (He had accepted the common misconception that Michelangelo painted the ceiling while lying on his back.) Or he would site statistics on how many times the average heart would beat over a lifetime. He loved odd facts. In one sermon he went through a litany of facts about salmon spawning. He idiosyncratically pronounced the L in salmon, too. Still, he was one of the first intellectuals I met. He would talk about etymology in his sermons. He liked to do what he called word studies. He was the one who suggested to my dad that he get a Strong’s concordance because of its Hebrew and Greek apparatus. I don’t believe he ever studied Latin but he would at least refer to it when talking about the roots of words. I didn’t know anyone else who talked about foreign languages at all. This was a real novelty for me. I wasn’t a big reader but I loved words and dictionaries.
             Pastor Beck loved tales of survival in harsh conditions. I recall several stories about Shackleton’s exploration of Antarctica. Beck was a sucker for any of that overcoming adversity crap. Anything that was like the Donner Party with a happy ending. He loved Corrie ten Boom’s book The Hiding Place. There was definitely something sentimental about his mind. On the one hand he was like a Hallmark Holiday Special. On the other he was quoting “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” He frequently told the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man from the Gospel of Luke:

             The rich man died and awoke in hell. “And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.”

Pastor Beck reading those words in his resonant bass voice, so full of conviction, made me almost feel the flames and picture the pain and suffering of the damned. The rich man only wanted a drop of water to ease his suffering. But even that was impossible.

This didn’t strike me as an unfair punishment, grossly unequal to the crime. Hell had it’s own rules, I suppose I thought. I don’t know. All of the adults in the room accepted these things. This wasn’t my first time hearing about hell. It had to be real, right? Black holes were real, and they didn’t make any sense. Hell was just like that. It didn’t make a lot of sense but the main thing was just that you didn’t want to go there.

I don’t remember what sermon Pastor Beck preached the first time I heard him. Maybe it was the Lazarus sermon. Maybe that was when my brother and I went forward after the sermon during the altar call. If you haven’t experienced an altar call, you really should. You’re missing out. The piano and the organ play, the people sing something like “Just as I am without One Plea,” a hymn from the 1860s. The plunking piano and the humming Hammond organ, the anemic effort of the singing are all part of the tragicomedy. The comedy is the corny amateurism and poor musicianship. It’s a grandma and grandpa mouthing the words. The song leader at the pulpit waving his hands in a bizarre attempt to keep the tempo.  The tragedy is that the gates of hell are And in between the melody phrases is the most important part: the pastor intones an almost broken invitation to come forward and give your heart and your life to Jesus. “If you were to die tonight, do you know where you’d spend eternity? Will it be in paradise with the poor man Lazarus, or will it be in the fiery torment of hell with the rich man? This will be most important decision of your life – of your entire existence!”

            These words can’t be uttered in a perfunctory way. The preacher’s voice has to ache with the intensity of this moment’s gravity. This is more urgent than CPR for the drowning. This is eternal life we’re talking about. Will you be washed in the blood of the Lamb? Or will you enter everlasting hellfire?

            Choose! Don’t be a fool!

I was not made of such stern stuff at ten that I was able to resist that kind of emotional manipulation. What fool wants to spend eternity burning in hell? That’s a no-brainer. So we went forward, Bret and I. I believe he went first. It may have been one of the few times when needed a cue from my brother, who was three years older. We knelt on the green carpeted steps of the podium in that windowless church – a pole barn with paneled walls – and deacons read to us the “Romans’ Road.” I still remember Deacon Burkhardt kneeling beside me, his farmer’s hand gently on my back, mumbling in my ear. He went through the series of six short verses in Paul’s Epistle to the Church at Rome: We’re all sinners. The wages of sin is death. Jesus died for our sins. Confess that you’re a sinner and declare that Jesus is Lord.

            Boom, you’re a Christian!

I’ve known a lot of people who have gone forward at an altar call and said all the words only to go about their lives with no lasting effect. That was not the case with my brother and I. We were definitely changed. That decision changed us. It changed me. Not in the way that my mom and dad had hoped – especially my mom. But it opened up new possibilities for me. I wouldn’t be who I am today, even if I no longer think of myself as a Christian. How I see the world would be so very different. I never would have gone through so many labyrinths of elaborate horrors – imaginary landscapes, visions of Armageddon, fears and reassurances of the Rapture, a sense of calling and mission (to what I wasn’t ever sure, but I knew that God had something planned for my life). Where would I be without my fascination with the USSR? I suppose some of it would still be there, but it wouldn’t have felt so personal. I used to have a National Geographic map of the Soviet Union on my wall. My dad asked me why I would have a map of that Godless country up. My mom was also popping her head into my room at that moment and without missing a beat said, “Well, he’s praying for them.”

Did I pray for the Russians? I don’t specifically remember doing that. I remember imaging myself stuck in frozen Russia. I pictured being a prisoner in one of the Gulag cells, starved and beaten like Haralan Popov or Richard Wurmbrand, both of whom were obsessively discussed in the fundamentalist Baptist circles I moved in.

And this was no accident. After the service where my brother and I went forward, Pastor Shotts approached us and grilled us if we had really asked Jesus into our hearts, or were we just going through the motions to please the adults. I’d never encountered a question like that. I recall mumbling something about really believing – visions of damnation still filling my head. The Pastor Shotts said one of the strangest things I’ve ever heard anyone say to me. “Would you be willing to die for your belief in Jesus? Because some day you may be forced to choose. Would you deny Christ?”

Your savior or your life? The gun is held to your head. What would you do? The pastor would often refer to stories of Christians in China who were asked if they were Christians. When they said yes, they were shot. Bang! You’re dead.

I assured him that I would not deny Christ. I, ten-year-old snot-nosed asthmatic weighing all of fifty-something pounds, was willing to forfeit my life for my beliefs. Or words to that effect. Pastor Shotts smiled and laughed and said he believed I would. Then he put one of his giant paws on my boney little shoulder and asked if he could say a prayer, into which he immediately launched.

I was left wondering who would hold a gun to my head and make me quit Jesus.

Who Wanted The Viper?

I had been forced to choose before. One Christmas time, while riding in the car with my mom and brother, my mom said, apropos of what I have no idea, “It’s either Jesus or Santa. It can’t be both. But if you want to go to heaven, it’s gotta be Jesus.”

I remember being viscerally startled at that. As far as memories that stand out, memories of ideas that I found utterly offensive, of ideas that seemed shockingly wrong, ideas that were not just inconvenient but part of an existential threat, having to choose between Santa or Jesus was one of the most salient of my pretty comfortably dull life.

When did this happen? How old was I? I can’t be sure. It had to be after the year when we stood in line at the Santa Train to meet the big guy himself. Now that is a really early memory and very very sketchy memory.

My dad worked for Grand Trunk Railroad. I think that Santa was only there for friends and family of employees. I think you needed a ticket. I’m assuming here based on memories. It seems like when we finally did get up to the fat man in red that I was terrified of him and wanted no part of sitting on his lap.

I wonder if that was before or after my brother told me point blank, “Santa’s dead.” I went into a fit of hysterics. We were in our bunk beds. Mine was on top. I have no idea why I had to sleep on the top bunk. Wasn’t I afraid of falling down the ladder? I don’t remember being afraid of that. I remember loving the climb. I’m surprised I didn’t fall when I had to climb down in the early hours to pee. That never happened.

But I distinctly remember Bret laughingly tell me Santa was dead. He died a long time ago, you baby! That kind of thing. No, no! That’s not true. Oh, yes, it is true and so forth.

            I bawled that “He’ll come back to life for me!”

            I had powers over death, I guess. What was this? 1974, maybe? I can’t be sure of the sequence of events with these dim, early recollections. I do know we were in the first house I lived in, beside the freeway on the end of a dead-end street. I-94 was about a hundred yards away. Trucks roared by at all hours. Sometimes an 18-wheeler would have a blow out that sounded like a canon going off. That would wake everyone in the house. If I woke up, I’d watch the headlights circle around the edge of the ceiling. First one way and then darting back in the opposite direction. And then a vehicle would come from the other direction and light would ride around the reverse of the first. If light could go backward, maybe time could too. Maybe the dead could rise again. Maybe we just had to want it bad enough.

            I don’t know what I really thought about death before I was five or six. I know at sometime around that age I wanted to be an artist. I liked to draw and color. I had gotten pretty good at it early on since I’d broken my leg when I was two. The six weeks I spent in traction were filled with coloring and doodles. When other kids in kindergarten were drawing stick figures, I was drawing entire scenes. That’s what happens when you spend a lot of time at something. It was early exposure, not precociousness.

Big Deal, So We Didn’t Have Cable!

So we were an average American family in my earliest memories. I don’t remember anything about the Vietnam War or Nixon’s problems with Watergate. The first political thing I can recall was wanting Ford to win in ’76. But that was because of the cars and trucks. My parents supported Carter. Nixon was a crook, my dad said. We had tried to see Santa one year but couldn’t or I was too afraid when we did see him. And then my mother dropped a bomb and said I had to choose Jesus or Santa. In my memory of her saying that, I know what car I’m in and what street we’re on in Battle Creek. We’re heading up Emmett St., crossing the river and about to turn onto Wagner Drive. It was winter and snowy. I’m not sure if that’s true.

            Important events happen in our lives when we’re young and we don’t make notes. We don’t check the calendar. Hell, that’s true of adults as well.

            And even though church was not a huge thing in our lives, I remember one time my mom telling me and my brother that we had to be baptized to go to heaven. She repeated this in front of my dad and he indeed verified the accuracy of the statement. That’s the way it went. Like when someone from personnel tells you you have to sign your W-2. We were not a family of Bible thumpers. We didn’t pray before meals or bedtime. I recall saying the Now I lay me down to sleep rhyme, but I can’t even be sure how I learned that. I’ll also take the opportunity to point out that it was a terrifying little ditty. I didn’t want to think about dying in my sleep! What kids ever died in their sleep? I had never heard of any of my friends from kindergarten croaking before morning. Some sicko came up with those verses. (I really don’t think SIDS counts here. Babies can’t pray that the Lord take their souls.)
            Religion really wasn’t that big of a deal in our lives in 1980. Other than Bjorn Borg winning at Wimbledon and the US hockey team defeating the Soviets at Lake Placid, the really deal was our horse, Pepper.

            When we left the edge of I-94 and moved to a dirt road in Barry County, we got, free of charge, a load of deerflies – something totally new to me, the little bastards – and a nosey neighbor by the name of Mr. Sunday. Norm Sunday owned the cornfield we bought and built a house on. He was about 70 but to me he was about the oldest looking person I’d ever gotten up close to. Varicose veins zig-zagged over his cheeks like red snakes or lightning bolts. He always wore a beaten up, gray fedora. I’m convinced he slept in the thing. The day we looked at the property, my dad, brother and I piled into the cab of his rusted-out Jeep Cherokee truck. We rode out into the pasture in low gear. It was a hot hot day in June. Gnats harassed us and the old man babbled on about property lines, smoking his cigarillo.

He had retired from the real estate business some years before. He didn’t know anything about farming but had decided to buy a house with a barn and several outbuildings. Then he bought himself exactly one hundred sheep. What made him go all biblical? Why did he want suddenly to turn into a good shepherd? Some mysteries will never be solved. I can only say that he was a life-long bachelor and a confirmed hoarder. He would hit auctions and buy cheap sets of plates and dishes. Instead of washing dishes, he’d open his window and toss the plate outside. Onto the porch. Maybe on the grass.

I remember one frigid winter day stepping inside the old man’s dirty house. We were waiting for him to get my brother’s dollar. That’s what he was paid to toss out the bales of hay, the cobs of corn, and fill up the water troughs. The kitchen was nothing but a mess. Every inch. The oven door was open and the room was overheated. I don’t think his furnace worked. It was up to the oven to warm the hundred-year-old farm house. My brother pointed to the calendar. It was one of those ones with an overlay sheet of cellophane. The women were in dresses, you lifted it and they were nude.
            He usually had one ewe living in his house with him. He claimed it was because she was sick but my dad assumed it was because he basically thought of the sheep as pets. He had no interest in sheering them. Most of them were loaded down with sheep shit that had dried onto their wool. When they jogged it would clatter like beads.

            He didn’t keep the rams from the ewes so they were lambing all months of the year and even in the dead of winter. I’ll never forget going into the dark barn. A single lightbulb on the wall providing illumination. A lamb lay dead on the filthy straw. The amniotic fluid froze it to the floor. Its mother stood over it, blinking stupidly, steam puffing out of her huge nostrils. She had a lamb that had lived she was ignoring. It was under a heat lamp but the mother had to herded back into her pen so the lamb could nurse. The gate for the makeshift pen was a door – an actual house door off the hinges, lying horizontally.

            It was a terrible scene. My dad was disgusted by the waste and pointlessness of it all. Sheep aren’t pets.

            My brother worked for Old Man Sunday for almost a year. He went up the road a quarter of a mile and took care of the sheep. There was also a cow. Gladys. And there were four ponies. Saving up his dollar a day, my brother’s goal kept changing. He thought of buying his own TV. Or maybe a minibike. I think it was my dad’s suggestion that he consider a horse. Somehow, I must have missed that conversation. I don’t remember how it came about that he was going to save up and buy a horse. It’s likely I just didn’t think it would happen for a while. But Brett’s pile of George Washingtons kept getting thicker. Months later he had a hundred and fifty one-dollar bills. Dad said we were ready to start shopping. He had talked to a guy who knew a fellow.

            I thought that if we were going to buy a horse that I wanted in on it. So I kicked in my whole piggy bank – all twelve dollars. Bret thanked me. It may have been his politest moment in his life. Then he said that twelve dollars would make me the owner of at least the tail.