Sunday, February 8th, 2004

Wise Words for Today --
"Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today."
-- He didn't. Live forever. James Dean was dead at age twenty-found in 1955, killed in a head-on crash in in California. He was going about 115 miles per hour when a vehicle driven by Donald Turnupseed (who survived) crossed the middle of the road and hit his Porsche - other estimates of his speed include one that says he was only going 85. Rebel and loner, symbol of the young Americans who felt they were being ignored during the Eisenhower era, James Dean lived hard and died young; he then became a legend, for he had almost achieved that status before his abrupt departure from the middle world. He engendered a cult, this rather unstable fellow who didn't read East of Eden before he took on his first big role. Jimmy Dean - not to be confused with the sausage-making singer who was fired from his job as spokesman for the stuff he created and then sold - but James Dean, the Rebel Without a Cause was full of himself. Eli Kazan, the great Hollywood director, said of hard-driving James Dean, "His great love was himself and he spent a good deal of his time off the set taking pictures of himself with a camera." What was James Dean appeal? Says Warren Beath, one of his biographers (The Death of James Dean) who also wrote the novel Who Killed James Dean?, "He seduces all of us at a certain stage in our development--by appealing to that primary emotion: 'You better love me, or I'm gonna kill myself.'" Dean was so famous that we even knew about him in Oliver County when I was beginning high school in 1956 - and he became the touchstone for what precious little rebellion we had throughout my high school years. No few farm boys like I wanted to at least look like James Dean. Of course, we didn't know much about him- and what we did, we probably learned from The National Enquirer. We didn't really understand what references to his alleged bisexuality meant - we didn't talk about such things as deviations from love and marriage being between a woman and a man.

We had never heard of Kate Chopin, born on this day in 1850. Kate Chopin, born on this day in 1850, she died in 1904 of a stroke - far too young. Best known for her novel The Awakening, published in 1899, Kate Chopin outraged many with her novel about a woman in search of physical and spiritual happiness, love in all of its possibilities in her time. She has been read and taught ever since. Chopin wrote of the restlessness of people trapped inside themselves or in relationships or places, a society that stifles the essence of their humanity - "She wanted something to happen - something, anything: she did not know what," says the narrator of Chopin's heroine in The Awakening. That's what all of us - from the worldly-wise youth of New York and Los Angeles to those of us who ate the sloppy joes in portable tables set up on the gymnasium for hot lunch at Center Public School back in Februaries of '58, '59, and '60 -- wanted as well. And that's why James Dean was our hero. But we would not have considered taking it as far as Chopin's Edna Pontillier, who swims into the ocean and drowns rather than living less than what she was awakened to, a full human existence.

Chopin herself, who began writing at age thirty-nine, was, from all accounts, a loving wife and mother in a most satisfying relationship. She wasn't prepared for the national outrage about her writing and her daring to talk about female oppression and a woman's emotional and sexual needs. Back in 1899, folks didn't talk about such things -in fact, the self-appointed guardians of morality refused to even consider the possibility that such as Edna Pontellier could exist in the real world. Kate died young of a brain hemorrhage, bitter and unknown to most of the world. One hundred years after her death, our most prominent keepers of public morals, folk of the ilk of the Reverend Pat Robertson, the guy whom God told a month or so ago that George Bush was going to be re-elected president of the United States, are outraged with the possibility that gays and lesbians should be able to live as married couples with all the rights and privileges of married women and men. He just appeared on CNN this early A.M. to explain why no politician will be permitted by God to be elected if she/even even entertains the possibility that the Massachusetts Supreme Court correctly afforded these "deviants" their constitutional rights. Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and many of the clergy of the mainstream sects from Roman Catholics and Episcopalians to the Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, and Mormons express their love and concern for all of humankind in the same breath they declare gays and lesbians sinners hell bound as James Dean coming down a hill 85 miles per hour in his Porsche. Robertson is probably right -- only a candidate for president who goes along with those who would deny a rather large minority in our social compact their basic rights as citizens can be elected president this November 2004 - rights denied by many of those who would have been in the same boat from the beginning of our nation until well into the nineteenth century -- all women and all people of color were so treated as we do unto gays and lesbians today back one hundred years ago.

Remember that observation made by George Santayana some ninety-nine years past - "Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it." As citizens, we suffer from a collective form of Alzheimer's. We not only "forget the mistakes of the past" as the Optimist Club Creed puts it, we forget it entirely, and we "press on to the greater achievements of the future" by ignoring the baggage of the horrible prejudice we carry with us. As I sit here this gloriously beauuuuuuuuutiful day in Dakota where the temperatures already approach the high 20s above zero at the early hour of 6:00 A.M. and the barely waning moon hangs bright in the western sky, I sip my Welch's Mountain Berry juice and contemplate something I read in Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow last night. The Berry novel is about the barber of Port William who tells his story near the end of his life. Says Jayber Crow, remembering his youth,

         Back there at the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same return forever.
         And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time. Toward the end of my life at Squires Landing I began to understand that whenever death happened, it happened to me. That is knowledge that takes a long time to wear in. Finally it wears in. Finally I realized and fully accepted that one day I would belong entirely to memory, and it would then not be my memory that I belonged in, . . . .

What never "wears in" for far too many of us, methinks, is Jayber Crow's hard-won realization that "whenever death happened, it happened in me," which is a marvelously insightful way of saying what John Donne (1573-1631) offered more three hundred and eighty years ago in his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions:
Meditation 17
Nuc lento sonitu dicunt, morieris.
Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.

​
...No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee...

Death comes in many ways, and there's ways of dying which leaves one breathing and existing but not living. In a sense, we who deny our fellow travelers their right to live as they wish when it in no way jeopardizes our lives or happiness is condemning them to such a metaphorical death - in fact, we kill them less than softly with our professed love for those we judge sinners and hatred of the sins we so self-righteously assign to them. We would do well to remember, as did Wendell Berry back in 1968 on Groundhog Day before he went out to sow clover - he wrote this poem, "February 2, 1968":

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,
war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

I'm off to sow clover this fine day to be alive - and I hope that you are taking such good care of yourselves, kola, that you've opened your baggage on this day of traveling through the middle world and looked for the kind of stuff that might prevent you from looking out for your neighbor the way you should. 'Tis a task I must take care of myself, methinks - one more swig of Mountain Berry and I'm on my way - no better way than reading a weest bit more of Jayber Crow 'ere I go about the business of public humanities. . . .

Ev Albers

Saturday, February 7th, 2004

Wise Words for Today --
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning."
-- Aye, of course 'tis a beauuuuuuuutiful day in Dakota, where the temperature will soar to near 20 degrees above by evening and not drop below zero tonight - briskly balmy, with "plenty of sunshine, heading our way, zippidity do dah, zippidity de aye!" What a song to be earwormed with on such a morn. Of course, 'tain't a fact and 'tisn't actual that everything around this ole troubled world will be satisfactual - and we can either muddle along of agitate for reform, as today's birthday boy demanded. Frederick Douglass, the Black Lion, was born into slavery on this day in 1817 - and he lived a couple of weeks past his seventy-eighth birthday in 1895, when things had changed a bit for the better for black Americans - freed from formal slavery, but still languishing as second-class citizens. 'Tis also the birthday of many others who "prayed with their feet," as Douglass put it - women and men who wouldn't accept things as they are; they wrote and spoke about what ought to be. Last year (check out 2/7/03 from date selector above) I wrote about Sir Thomas More, born in London on this day in 1477. He completed his journey in the middle world in 1535 - and was declared a saint by Pope Pius XI four hundred years later. St. Thomas More was beheaded by the state for standing by his religious convictions and following his conscience. 'Tis said he went to his death cheerfully, optimistic that things could be different, as he described with such eloquence in his Utopia. Elsewhere, More wrote of the importance of wit and the humanities to a life of learning that is not "half lame":

Begin More quote
Reason is by study, labor, and exercise of logic, philosophy, and other liberal arts corrorborate and quickened; and the judgment both in them and also in orators, laws, and stories much ripened. And although poets are with many men taken but for painted words, yet do they much help the judgment, and make a man among other things well furnished in one special thing, without which all learning is half lame . . . a good mother wit.
End More quote

There was nothing "half lame" about Frederick Douglass, who said, "It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake." In short, we have to shake things up if we want to bring change - but it helps if we do it with humor and wit. I'm trying to remember the last time I heard a politician or national leader tell an amusing story to make her/his point - nothing comes to mind, and 'tain't just that "zippidy do da" goin' round and round. From politicians, especially those running for office, we mostly a message of the doom and gloom and utter misery that will descend upon us it their opponents are elected or stay in power. As Molly was wont to say to her hubby Fibber McGee, "'Tain't funny, McGee."

Today's birthday girl lived three days past her ninetieth birthday - Dakota's own (well, she did spend some time on a homestead in South Dakota, but that's close enough) Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was born on this day in 1867 and lived to see Dwight David Eisenhower (aka "Ike," whom we really liked out in Hannover Township in Oliver County). Ingalls wrote the Little House on the Prairie books for children. Somewhere in the world right now, a re-run of an episode from the television program that begin in 1974 - or watching them on DVD. In both Ingall's books (she started publishing in 1940) and in the television series featuring Michael Landon as Laura's famous fiddlin', storytelling Pa, there's plenty of doom and gloom - hail or a blizzard, grasshoppers and drought - Pa didn't harvest many crops. There was never enough money, there were always drunks or other ruffians - but through it all, the family in the little house on the prairie sang and laughed, and all was always well in the end.

Landon's real name was Eugene Morris Orowitz. He was born in 1936 to a Jewish father and an Irish-American Roman Catholic mother, whose name was Peggy O'Neill - I'm not kidding about this. His parents didn't like each other, and his mother didn't like him at all. Of his parents, Landon said in a 1987 interview:
I loved my father because I learned a lot from him. He never disciplined me, and he only hit me once. He didn't even want to hit me then, but my mother goaded him into it. He didn't know how to hit me-by the time it happened, I was a half-foot taller than he was-so he slapped me with the back of his hand. A ring he was wearing cut my lip, and I started to bleed. It didn't bother me, but my father started to cry and left the room. I was really glad it happened because it was the first time my father showed any emotion.

She [my mother] was a stabber, a kicker and a wacko. She was off her rocker. She was very abusive. My mother would sit on the sofa in her nightgown-she always wore her nightgown when she was upset-holding a Bible, asking God to kill me. My mother was sad -- she never got better -- and she always kept me a little off balance. I could do all the bad things -- fail a grade, skip school for weeks -- and she wouldn't say a word. But If I drank milk out of a bottle, she'd dropkick me all over the kitchen.

Landon grew up in Collingswood, New Jersey, where folks didn't like Jews or African Americans or anyone else who was different than they - so life for the young Eugene and his siblings was anything but pleasant. His sister, Victoria, says that:
The children constantly called us "Christ Killers" and when I would ride my bike to school they would say "kick her off her Jew bike." I got so bruised that I walked to school for the next year. My brother was only four years old when we moved there, but when he started school, he would come home with bruises and my mother asked him what happened. He said, "they called me a lousy Jew." She said to him, "oh, no, you're not a Jew -- your father is a Jew -- I had you and your sister secretly baptized." Even though my brother and I were being discriminated against, we were being taught bigotry at home.

The family moved to Hollywood - Eugene (Michael) was offered a scholarship at UCLA because of his expertise in throwing the javelin. But his father, who had been relatively successful working for RKO as a publicity agent in New York, expected that the studio would welcome him and give him a good job - he couldn't even get on the lot, so Eugene decided to fend for himself - he quite college and became the actor Michael Landon. We all know about his successful career - and his fame in television. Landon died at the height of his career of an insidious invader, the Big C - his little challenge, as is mine - was pancreatic cancer - he was but fifty-five. A fellow with a mission, Landon saw his life's work "to repair some broken hearts and some broken promises." He wanted to "repair the world" (Tikkun Olam in Jewish theology). He said that's why he was involved in the series, Highway to Heaven. Married three times, Landon left nine children - his first wife Dodie's son Mark and Josh, whom he and Dodie adopted; his second wife Lynn's daughter Cheryl and the four children they had together -- Leslie, Michael Jr., Shawna and Chris; and his third wife Cindy -- together they had Jennifer and Sean. His family life was never rosy, and things didn't always turn out well in the end, as they did in Little House on the Prairie.

Landon said, near the end of his life, " Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of every day. Do it! I say. Whatever you want to do, do it now! There are only so many tomorrows." That's not bad advice. I must be about the business of taking it - remembering, course, that observation from Little House on the Prairie -- "Once you begin being naughty, it is easier to go on and on, and sooner or later something dreadful happens." And keeping in mind the words of the Black Lion, Frederick Douglass: "Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get." One way or the other kola - may it only be money, not a soul-scabbing act of not looking out for our neighbor the way we should or not taking care of ourselves by thinking just the weest about whether or not we really want to do something before we do . . .

Ev Albers

Friday, February 6th, 2004

Wise Words for Today --
"I couldn't help but say to [Mr. Gorbachev], just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet. [We'd] find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together."
--He'll be ninety-three today, but he won't realize it, because former President Ronald Reagan suffers from Alzheimer's - and many say it will be his last birthday. Sixty-nine when he took office in 1980 following a landslide victory over the beleaguered President Jimmy Carter because of American being held hostage in Iran, Reagan long ago achieved the status of being the longest-lived of all who have served in the office of the presidency. A man of an uncomplicated belief in God who had a great fear of flying, he was able to board Airforce One only because he believed that God had already decided where and when he would die, that his life was totally in the hands of God. This he learned from one of the two most important people in his life, his mother, Nelle, who also suffered from Alzheimer's. A smiling optimist who cheerfully thanked God that he wasn't killed by an assassin's bullet that lodged inches from his heart in 1981, Ronald Reagan has never been far from the second important person in his life, his wife Nancy, who is with him today on his ninety-third birthday and who speaks for him. Millions of Americans consider his presidency for eight years in the eighties the best in our nation's young history of but two hundred years and a decade or so - for it was he and his optimism and simple convictions that he could express with such eloquence - he was a Hollywood actor, after all - that brought down the wall in Germany and the Soviet Union, and 'twas he who implemented an economic policy that kept money in the pockets of those who had it - his most ardent supporters.

But he was granted little time to enjoy the adulation of the millions who have successfully lobbied to have dozens of public buildings and facilities named for him, for the devastating Alzheimer's struck in earnest shortly after he left office in January 1989 - and has left him in isolation from the world for more than a decade. 'Tis a fate no human, let alone "The Great Communicator," deserves.

Reagan in his great communicating days was a master of the pithy, simple sweeping statements of what he thought was the truth - and he was sure that any right-thinking American would agree - so many did that he won his second term in office with almost every electoral vote in the country - all but the thirteen from from Minnesota and the District of Columbia which went for Senator Fritz Mondale and his running mate, Geraldine Ferraro. His speeches were laced with humor - not all of it intentional. 'Twas he who offered the conclusion, "Facts are stupid things." Of another Hollywood actor's foray into the political world - that of Clint Eastwood who made a movie with a chimpanzee - Reagan, who starred in the television series Bedtime for Bozo, said, "What makes him think a middle aged actor, who's played with a chimp, could have a future in politics?" Reagan employed unorthodox standards to judge the character of his fellow travelers here in the middle world - "You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans," for example. For those bent on freedom of conscience and keeping God out of government, President Reagan had little time - "Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged," was his simple answer to those who thought our nation was drifting toward theocracy. Still and all, his laid-back optimism had an appeal - and Americans loved the Dagwoodian nature of a man who said he was most comfortable on the back of a horse - and quipped such indications of letting God worry about the big stuff as "I never drink coffee at lunch, I find it keeps me awake in the afternoon," and "No matter what time it is, wake me, even if it's in the middle of a Cabinet meeting."

There are probably folks out there who are writing Reagan's name in on ballots in primaries this year - that's how much he's adored. He has the status of North Dakota's "Wild Bill" Langer, who's name kept on appearing as a write-in more than a decade after his death. The full moon arches over the western sky here in beauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuutiful Dakota this February 6 on a brisk and peaceful morning - 'tis a great day to be alive - and to reflect with continuing chuckles of appreciation for the gifts of thoughtful fellow travelers of the ilk of writers David Kline and Wendell Berry, whom I heard last night in an auditorium at Bismarck State College just up the hill from our home here on Arthur Drive. Both were in town for a big conference on sustainable agriculture. 'Twas an evening where hundreds of bearded fellows and unpretentiously dressed strong women gathered to hear about the joys of the simpler things in life. Kline, an Amish farmer from Ohio and passionate naturalist, talked about the joys of observing the curious ways of the soaring red-tailed hawks and horned larks, who build porches to their nests to wipe their feet. Nothing escapes the eye of the ever-curious Kline, not the tiniest fly or the weest bit of stone on the tiny porches of the horned larks. Here's a fellow who's so winsome that we would have stayed another hour to hear his stories, told in halting Swiss-German accent, about the place where he's lived his entire life, the farm where he was born and where he and his wife raised their children. His essays, published in such collections as Scratching the Woodchuck: Nature on an Amish Farm are lean summaries of his careful reflections following his observations. For example, in a chapter titled "Weather Lore," he talks about how birds active at the feeders in late afternoon is an indication of snow coming. Here's a sample of his writing from that chapter:

​     Weather forecasting has developed into a science, with weather stations around the world and satellites aloft keeping an eye on approaching storms and measuring atmospheric pressure. With this technology, weather patterns can be fairly accurately predicted three to five days in advance. Farther ahead than that there is still a lot of guesswork involved. Maybe then we'll do best to look to moon haloes, the lowly woolly worm, and the Old Farmer's Almanac to discern what the future holds.
     Humankind can send spacecraft to distant planets, split atoms, and splice genes, but we cannot stop a blizzard, tornado, or thunderstorm. We farmers live with the weather: we watch the clouds and monitor wind direction; we get caught in it; we lose crops and livestock to it - and yet, we have no notion or desire of ever mastering it.
     Whether the drowsy old groundhog sees its shadow or not, as February ends and the earth tilts more toward the sun, we feel its warmth and dream of spring. The horned larks, my winter field companions, are also conscious of the growing length and intensity of daylight, and their soft lyrics float through the warming air. I hope to find their nests when sowing clover seed on the wheat ground. As Barry Lopez so beautifully writes in his book Arctic Dreams: "In a simple bow from the waist before the nest of the horned lark, you are able to stake your life, again, in what you dream."

'Twas Wendell Barry, who shared the stage with David Kline last night, who said of him, "David Kline is an alert observer of the natural world and its creatures, and an utterly pleasant and interesting companion." Barry read from a novel in progress, a story told by an old woman living on a farm in Kentucky - a story laced with humor and insight into the human condition so true to the essence of living in tune with that nature that one cries and laughs at the same time in awe of Berry's hard-won way of communicating his alternative to simply accepting the desperate anxiety of being caught up in a materialistic society. When a real estate developer comes to ask her about selling her farm and going to live with one of her grown children in the city - a man whom she knew as a pudgy, dainty boy from a neighboring farm, one she served countless meals to - she stands on her freedom and self-sufficiency with dignity and wit unmatched by any character in American fiction. She tells him that she's thinking of donating the farm as a wildlife preserve, for example. And at the end of the visit, she suggests that the fellow is getting the weest bit fat - and tells him that she'd hate to have to interrupt her pleasant quiet life by attending his funeral. She makes her point. She also reflects on the peculiar way in which the past meets the presence in rural Kentucky where folks stay on the land, the way in which "what was" meets "what is," and how all those who have completed their passage in the middle world from the community of farmers live on in those who continue the journey by staying in the place and living in harmony with it. Berry, who has written some thirty books, has become a master at allowing his fictional creations to offer his philosophy with humor and a fidelity to the way in which those who stay on the land and love it can instruct all of us who don't in values that put us back in touch with all that is holy in ourselves. As I think about the reverential respect for every blade of grass on the places they call home, I couldn't help but contrast Kline and Berry's tales with Reagan's quip, "It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas."

Reagan also observed that "We can't help everyone, but everyone can help someone." Everything depends upon how we help our fellow travelers, does it not, kola? How do we best prepare to fulfill our essential responsibility to take care of each other? Both Kline and Berry have an unswerving faith in God - and act upon it, but in a way quite different from the way President Reagan, the Great Communicator, did it. I just opened The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry to his poem "The Wild Geese" - 'tis a moment of Jungian synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence. I give Berry the last word this day - as I think about growing up in the Garden of the Universe on that farm in Hannover Township in Oliver County where when it rained, we let it rain, just as Grandpa Henke said they did back in Germany; and where I knew for certain that a bad storm was coming when our faithful dog Curly ate grass on a hot August morning. But that's another story for another time, perhaps. Here's Berry:

Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer's end. In time's maze
over the fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed's marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for a new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

Kola, may what you need be where you are this glorious morning - aye, 'tis a great day to be alive,

Ev Albers

Thursday, February 5th, 2004

Wise Words for Today --
"Now I bid you good night, with a full heart and a fervent prayer that we will meet often again in the liberal's everlasting battle against ignorance, poverty, misery and war."
-- These were the gracious words of Adlai Stevenson in his concession speech after losing a second presidential election to Dwight David Eisenhower. Today is the 104th anniversary of the birth of my childhood hero. Back in Hannover Township in Oliver County, most everyone was for Ike - we all liked Ike. But, I must confess, as a ten-year-old in the heart of the heart of Republican Dakota, I liked Adlai Stevenson better. Hannover Township and Oliver County was so Republican that when election officials opened ballots with votes for Democrats, there was probably the same sort of reaction that actually happened in a Dakota precinct during one of the infamous "Wild Bill" Langer's campaigns. Langer came to visit the Republican election officials and asked, "Well, Henry, how did we do?"
         "Governor," replied Henry, "you received every vote.
         "Oh, that can't be Henry," said Langer. I know there are some Democrat here."
         "Yes, Governor," insisted Henry, "you received every vote. Oh, some people made a mistake on their ballots, but we threw those out."

But I still liked Stevenson. He was drafted to run by the Democrats in 1952 - and his acceptance speech reflects a degree of humility, graciousness, and ability to communicate to all with great rhetorical skill and unusual command of the language - skill in wordsmithing of the like of Winston Churchill. Here's part of what Stevenson said in that speech back in 1952:
For all things I am grateful to you. But I feel no exultation, no sense of triumph. Our troubles are all ahead of us. Some will call us appeasers; others will say that we are the war party. Some will say we are reactionary; other swill say that we stand for socialism. There will be inevitable -- the inevitable cries of  “throw the rascals out,” “it’s time for a change,” and so on and so on.

We'll hear all those things and many more besides. But we will hear nothing that we have not heard before. I’m not too much concerned with partisan denunciation, with epithets and abuse, because the workingman, the farmer, the thoughtful businessman, all know that they are better off than ever before, and they all know the Great Depression under the hammer blows of the Democratic party.

Nor am I afraid that the precious two-party system is in danger. Certainly the Republican party looked brutally alive a couple of weeks ago -- and I mean both Republican parties. Nor am I afraid the Democratic party is old and fat and indolent. After a hundred and fifty years, it has been old for a long time, and it will never be indolent, as long as it looks forward and not back, as long as it commands the allegiance of the young and the hopeful who dream the dreams and see the visions of a better America and a better world.

You will hear many sincere and thoughtful people express concern about the continuation of one party in power for twenty years. I don’t belittle this attitude. But change for the sake of change has no absolute merit in itself. If our greatest hazard is preservation of the values of Western civilization, in our self-interest alone, if you please, it is the part -- is it the part of wisdom to change for the sake of change to a party with a split personality, to a leader, whom we all respect, but who has been called upon to minister to a hopeless case of political schizophrenia?

If the fear is corruption in official position, do you believe with Charles Evans Hughes that guild is personal and knows no party? Do you doubt the power of any political leader, if he has the will too do so, to set his own house in order without his neighbors having to burn it down?

What does concern me, in common with thinking partisans of both parties, is not just winning this election but how it is won, how well we can take advantage of this great quadrennial opportunity to debate issues sensibly and soberly. I hope and pray that we Democrats, win or lose, can campaign not as a crusade to exterminate the opposing party, as our opponents seem to prefer, but as a great opportunity to educated and elevate a people whose destiny is leadership, not alone of a rich and prosperous, contented country, as in the past, but of a world in ferment.

And, my friends even more important than winning the election is governing the nation. That is the test of a political party, the acid, final test. When the tumult and the shouting die, when the bands are gone and the lights are dimmed, there is the stark reality of responsibility in an hour of history haunted with those gaunt, grim specters of strife, dissension, and materialism at home and ruthless, inscrutable, and hostile power abroad.

All of us who were older than ten or so in 1962 will remember Adlai Stevenson as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations taking on Soviet Ambassador Zorin - Stevenson showed photographs of Soviet missiles in Cuba and demanded that Zorin explain and admit that there were offensive weapons there - and told Zorin he was prepared "to wait until hell freezes over" for an answer. His life was far too short -- Stevenson died suddenly in London in 1965, age sixty-five, while seeking peace in Vietnam.

Ah, Adlai, where is a politician of your integrity and intelligence four years into the twenty-first century? Can we possibly hope for a campaign that doesn't embrace what Stevenson was "The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal -- that you can gather votes like box tops," and idea which, said Stevenson "is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process."

Adlai Stevenson, for all his intellect and commitment to social justice, was not perfect - in fact, he did indeed get caught up in trying to win, and appears to have been willing to set aside his ideals in order to win. In 1956 he carried six state in the South - largely because he was silent on the issue of civil rights. In fact, Ike took 60 percent of the black American vote in 1956 because of Stevenson's silence on the continued loathsome racism of a segregated South. Stevenson carried the four states who had voted for Strom Thurmond in 1948 and two more - they didn't like Ike because he had nominated the liberal Earl Warren as chief justice of the Supreme Court - and 'twas Warren who wrote and presided over the Court that rendered Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 decision that outlawed segregated schools. A man of principle should have said something in support of that landmark moment toward greater social justice - Stevenson did not.

American politics has a way of turning the best of humans against their best instincts. 'Twas among the hardest of lessons to learn - and it took me a long time. Since I began sorting out the history of those years of adolescent search for truth and model of principle and integrity, I've come to appreciate the enormous sacrifice made by those who agree to run for office - and what they subject themselves to in terms of attacks on their character. In 1952, the loathsomely hypocritical J. Edgar Hoover spread rumors that Adlai Stevenson was gay, for example - anything to keep a man of his intelligence out of office. Yet, while I understand why Stevenson set aside his hatred of racism in hopes of being elected, I really cannot forget - or forgive it. I really need to work on the latter --

'Tis a gloriously beauuuuuuuuuuuuuutiful day here in Dakota. There's no chance whatsoever, by the way, that a Democrat will win this state in the November election. The last time the state voted for a Democratic presidential candidate was in 1936 - for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We've voted Republican ever since. We did vote for Woodrow Wilson back in 1912 and 1916 - but that's it for Democrats in North Dakota - FDR in 1932 and 1936 and the two wins by Wilson. But we elect many very liberal, Democratic Congressman - why so? The fact is, we're a beggar state - we want the federal dollars. This bit of paradise could not survive, economically, without receiving far more from the common federal money pot than we contribute - and it's always been that way.

Elections in the twenty-first century in America - all elections, but especially those for the presidency of the United States - are all about money - run out of money during the primaries if you are the party out of the White House, and you are a goner - no one wins an election without enough money to buy media. I'm haunted by the words from Stevenson's 1952 acceptance speech - '52 was back in the days when presidential candidates could still be drafted. 'Twas a much less democratic system than the primaries of 2004, but in some ways more exciting, for it kept open possibilities. Stevenson referred to a troubled, divided country and a world in turmoil:

When the tumult and the shouting die, when the bands are gone and the lights are dimmed, there is the stark reality of responsibility in an hour of history haunted with those gaunt, grim specters of strife, dissension, and materialism at home and ruthless, inscrutable, and hostile power abroad.

​We're still a social compact where "grim specters of strife, dissension, and materialism" plague and prevent the kind of respect for others' opinions that is the first step to solving our problems. I'm among the chief sinners in becoming so outraged by the all-too-human sins of politicians that I rant rather than trying to seek common ground. What's to be done on this fine day in Dakota, where the temperature climbs to the high teens above zero and the moon waxing to fullness over the Missouri ('twill be full moon tomorrow) in the western sky? Methinks I would do well to look at the moat in my own eye before ranting about the little specks in my neighbors' as I have a bit of cereal and enjoy a cup of coffee. I hope you are taking good care of yourselves, kola - and that you're looking out for each other and not getting caught up in the polarization that politics so often brings - with a more divisive social compact the result. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't get mad as hell and say we aren't gonna take it anymore - that's as much the responsibility of citizens in a free society as looking out for each other. 'Twould be great, though, if we could find a way to do it with more civility than I can muster during presidential elections . . .

Ev Albers

Wednesday, February 4th, 2004

​Wise Words for Today --
"I stand by all the misstatements that I've made."

-- no, it wasn't my friend Clay Jenkinson who said so - 'twas Dan Quayle, Vice-President of President George Herbert Walker Bush, who celebrates his fifty-seventh birthday on this February 4, 2004. Don't know about you, but I miss Dan Quayle and his great one-liners mightily - I wrote about him at some length in my journal last year (select 2/4/03 from date option box above). Here we are in 2004, a dozen years after the last year Quayle served with the current president's father, and his words about Mars illuminate President George W. Bush's push to go to the red planet on a manned space flight. He might have quoted Quayle:
Mars is essentially in the same orbit. . . . Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.
Aye, 'twasn't it a bright and sunny day this one past - and we'll have another today here in beauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuutiful Dakota whose clime is paradisiacal, better than that touted by Camelot. It always snows just the right amount (in every month except July if necessary) the temperature is always perfect for the time (we can have 40 below or more than 100 above), the breeze always blows as briskly as 'tis appropriate for the day - in fact, in all ways, perfect for the day, every day, is the weather thereof in Dakota. My friend Tom Rowse from up at Noonan reminded me the other day of one of the stories of the creation of glorious Dakota, North Dakota to be exact. When God was doin' the creation, he looked down at the area around where the geographical center of North Dakota would be after the continental shifts and said, "This place shall be paradise." His helper St. Olaf said, "Lord, do you think this is fair to the rest of the world?" But the Lord God continued to create perfection as he said, "They shall call it North Dakota in time," and he gave this place the best of the mighty Missouri, rolling hills, tall grass prairie, the painted buttes of the western part of the state he jokingly called the Badlands, the most gorgeous spot in his creation. "Lord," repeated St. Olaf, "aren't you going to do something to compensate for the unusual favor you have bestowed upon this place?" The Lord God replied, "Ufda, Olaf, you know I always think ahead. Ja, I'll keep it fair - North Dakota is going to be surrounded by Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana, and the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Saskaskatchewan!"

Among those who were born on this day we have escaped from one of those places God placed around heaven on earth is Leesha Johnson, who know thrives in Dickinson after a childhood and youth in Montana. Leesha, friend of my lovin' spouse Leslie's nephew Jay Bleth, is a fun-lovin', pie-baking, tackle-any-job-with-a-smile kind of gal who turns a quarter-century old on this day.

'Tis the forty-ninth year of his passage in the middle world for my friend Clay Jenkinson, who spent his youth in Dickinson in glorious Dakota and as much of his adult life as he has been able - Clay carries Dakota with him wherever he goes, and he seeks a way to return home permanently. This next week, the state shall celebrate perhaps his greatest gift to all of us and to the world so far, a magnificent edition of all of the journals kept by Lewis, Clark, and the other members of the Corps of Discovery during their stay in North Dakota, one that features all of the entries by all journalists who wrote on any given day. Clay has illuminated the journals with notes on the same page as the journal entries, and the weather readings for the day are there for each day as sidebars. Illustrated with full-color photographs, the book includes all the writings done by the captains and Corps members in the state. In this work, Clay has set new standards for editing primary texts, for he returned to the original journals to check out remaining obscurities and sheds new light on all those entries that raise questions. 'Tis a grand achievement, friend Clay - aye, 'tis grand indeed. A Vast and Open Plain: The Writings of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in North Dakota, 1804-1806 just hit the shelves of bookstores throughout the state and region and will be available nationally within a week.

And Happy Birthday, my friend of some thirty-three years. May you soon realize your dream of returning to paradise for good instead of the week here and the day or two there that you always manage to come home.

Clay has also written a book about North Dakota in particular and the Great Plains in general, Message on the Wind: A Spiritual Odyssey on the Northern Plains (see complete details at Clay's web site. In Message, Clay offers an unvarnished account of coming of age spiritually on the Plains, a remarkably honest assessment of this best of places, including a day he spent with our mutual friend Jim Fuglie climbing Bullion Butte in the badlands --
If I could freeze my life at any single moment and live there forever, it would be that moment standing next to Jim Fuglie on the squat shoulder of Bullion Butte. As we stood there in that numb sweet mystic trance that comes from being with the right person in the right place in the right mood with his doors of perception open, in the words of Robert Frost, "we said some of the best things we ever said." It was an interlude of total harmony. . . .
Friend Fuglie just sold his house here in Bismarck - he's headed west, closer to the edge of the badlands and seeks a farmstead somewhere in Stark County or close by to live in total harmony with his bride-to-be Lillian Crook.

I don't know if Clay or Jim - or Dan Quayle - realize that this day is National Create a Vacuum Day, one of our most curious observances. I think that it has to do with recognizing the importance of teaching science in schools - and refers to the creation of a vacuum in a chemistry classroom. Metaphorically, it might serve as prelude to implementing the ideal propagated by Thomas Paine and eloquently expanded upon by Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States. Clay Jenkinson has been giving first-person humanities characterizations of Thomas Jefferson in the Chautauqua format he helped perfect for more than two decades. "Create a vacuum" could be the first step in "beginning the world anew," as Paine said colonial Americans had it in their power to do. 'Twas on this very day in 1789 that the United States got down to business in earnest when the electoral college met for the very first time and chose George Washington as president and John Adams as his vice-president. On the same day, the U.S. Congress convened for the very first time. Since then, the great moments of capricious grace that gave glimpses of the middle world beginning anew for the better have been few, but the promise and hope remain. The nation split, and Americans killed and horribly maimed each other with a brutality that equals any war in the history of humankind - that began in earnest on this very day in 1861 when the Confederate constitutional convention met and elected Jefferson Davis. On the Bicentennial of the beginning of the American Revolution, in 1976, we learned the first hint of what was to come in chicanery, bribery, and callous disregard for law and the consequence of their actions for fellow Americans - huge companies ripping off stockholders and the government treasury for the profit of a privileged few. On this day in 1976, Lockheed Aircraft admitted it had paid bribes of $22 million to sell its aircraft. Small stuff compared to what has happened since and continues during our time, February 2004, when we find ourselves occupying Iraq at enormous cost to taxpayers - while multi-national companies like Haliburton overcharge millions even though they enjoyed billions in contracts they didn't have to bid for. Haliburton was was awarded some $7 billion dollars. The company overcharged at least $61 million for fuel and another $67 million for army food services. Today, we learn that they'll pay back some $27 million -- the rest, I guess, is part of a guaranteed profit clause in the exclusive contract. 'Tis something like public utilities, which in Dakota are regulated, but guaranteed a profit. What's a few million dollars among friends?

There are Quayle's "misstatements," mostly harmless and often quite humorous, and there are the misstatements of the facts that are anything but harmless - offered by political leaders wittingly, in good faith, or with full or partial knowledge that they are not speaking the truth - such are pronouncements by our leaders that convince us to go to war because of imminent danger to the general welfare of the world and all those who sojourn in the middle world. Most Americans - and Congress - supported the invasion of Iraq because of the threat of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction - but, coming close to a year after our defeat of Iraq, we haven't found any evidence. Such misstatements are hard to stand by. In fact, a cynic of the ilk of H.L. Mencken (one of the best gifts I ever received was a collection of his works my friend Clay Jenkinson gave me) would suggest that talking about returning to the moon and going on to Mars is way to distract citizens from such nagging problems as special treatment of companies like Haliburton and going to war on the basis of facts of imminent danger that some would say were pulled out of a vacuum (if we go to Mars, we might want to take along oxygen for any exploration of the planet, just in case Dan Qauyle misspoke when he suggested there be some there). These are the glory days for the party out of power, the Democrats: as they stump the nation, they are unleashing attacks on the incumbent on everything from the fairness of the tax cuts to the war in Iraq and jobs leaving the country as companies seek to improve their bottom line by hiring cheaper labor. For the moment, it would appear that a slim majority of Americans are saying with H.L. Mencken, "In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican." Perhaps. But even if it's true for this moment, 'twill change, as certainly as does the delightful weather of Dakota. There are millions upon millions of dollars to be spend, hundreds of radio and television commercials, and thousands of chances to misspeak before the general election of 2004 nine months from now.

We live 99.9 percent of our lives in something far less than the total harmony Clay and Jim experienced on the top of Bullion Butte - and the threats to our common good are real enough - 'twould take a Machiavellian cynic of the worst possible ilk to plant the deadly chemical weapon ricin in Senate office buildings for political reasons. The best lead so far is that the stuff could have come from South Carolina where a fellow had made threats of unleashing ricin unless proposed new trucking regulations were stopped.

Meanwhile, the nation preoccupies itself with the diversions of the rich and famous on the ropes - from the trials of Kobe Bryant and Michael Jackson to the tribulations of Martha Stewart, accused of getting a tip that saved her from losing thirty grand or so on the stock market; from the California murder trial of Scott Peterson to the great brouhaha over the momentary exposure of Janet Jackson's left breast during the half-time show during the Super Bowl last Sunday night. Never have so many seemed to care so much and never has the media made more of a moment by showing it again and again and again. Jackson has apologized, the guy who grabbed the fabric and pulled, Justin Timberlake said he was sorry - so did MTV. But much of the nation is outraged, and moral watchdogs like the Reverend Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson are enjoying interviews on all the talk shows. CBS is running so scared that they are going to broadcast the Grammy Awards on a tape-delay so that they can catch anything untoward. Much to do about nothing - yet it says much about us Americans of the turn of the twenty-first century.

Perhaps it has always been part of us. Decades ago, H.L. Mencken observed that "Most people want security in this world, not liberty." He also noted that "Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed." To begin the world anew, we need to find that one time out of ten moment of truth - for only then can we come closer to a social compact of more harmony than discord. Fact is, sometimes fellows like Dan Quayle aren't all that funny - the misstatements they stand by bespeak a disregard for the humanity of their fellow travelers here in the middle world that, all things considered, is downright loathsome. For example, Quayle said of homosexuals back in 1992 during the re-election campaign, "My viewpoint is that it's more of a choice than a biological situation. . . . I think it is a wrong choice. It is a wrong; it is a wrong choice. I do believe in most cases it certainly is a choice." He told an eleven-year-old girl why he would want her to have her baby, even if the pregnancy were a result of her being raped by her father, "You're a very strong woman. . . . Though this would be a traumatic experience that you would never forget, I think that you would be very successful in life." And there's Quayle's famous attack on the television show Murphy Brown back in 1992 - and the decision of the lead character in that program not to have an abortion but to give birth to the child and raise it as a single mother:

It doesn't help matters when prime time TV has Murphy Brown -- a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid, professional woman -- mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another "lifestyle choice." I know it is not fashionable to talk about moral values, but we need to do it. Even though our cultural leaders in Hollywood, network TV, the national newspapers routinely jeer at them, I think that most of us in this room know that some things are good, and other things are wrong. Now it's time to make the discussion public.

​Well, Dan Quayle, you did indeed help begin the world anew, for the in the last dozen years, it has become quite fashionable to talk about moral values - ala a bit of breast baring on national TV. Your issues are in the forefront of our current debate about the degree to which the moral values of a particular group - even if they reflect majority values - should be enforced upon members of a social compact - especially when conflicting values in no way jeopardize the common good or in any way injure other citizens - beyond getting their moral hackles up. But tell you this, Dan Quayle - 'tain't no way to any kind of harmony, let alone total harmony.

What my friend Clay has said so well in his interpretation Thomas Jefferson over the last couple of decades - for many years now in his nationally-syndicated Thomas Jefferson Hour, heard throughout Dakota on North Dakota Public Radio and elsewhere throughout the country, is that there is an enormous cost for going along with the program, accepting business as usual, allowing encroachment of our personal liberty by moralists of any ilk, including the most well-meaning of those fervent believers who would save us and our souls from misery in a world beyond this middle one. I leave the last word today to German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born on this day in 1906. Bonhoeffer stood up to the Nazis, escaped to the United States, but returned to be with his suffering fellow countrymen, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, and died incarcerated two years later. But he wrote - and his writing survived. Bohnoeffer said from his time in extremis, "To renounce a full life and all its joys in order to escape pain is neither Christian nor human." He urged Christians, especially, to spend less time hoping for salvation and heaven and more leading the kind of life that involves our treating all fellow travelers as we would be treated. And to continue our search for elusive truth. Do take care of yourselves, kola. Please look out for each other with the kind of love that seeks harmony and world enough and time to engage in Frostian conversation that may lead to "saying the best things" you ever said.

Ev Albers

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2004
​Wise Words for Today --
"Inevitably, an individual is measured by his or her largest concerns."-- Norman Cousins (1912-1990), who was neither born nor did he die on this day - but the remarkable searcher for social justice was invoked the other day by my old friend Ray Wheeler from over in Dickinson. Ray was responding to my journal entry of the other day on humor ("Langston Hughes and Humor" - or choose 2/1/04 from the date selector above if you missed - and if you want to read it). Cousins, many of you will remember, created something of a revolution in the effectiveness of attitude - and especially the role of humor - in dealing with life-threatening illnesses. When he was diagnosed with a serious collagen disease in the 1960s, he insisted that his daily high doses of Vitamin C and a regimen of belly laughs would cure him - as Ray reminded me, he would order up such classics as the Three Stooges movies to serve as a stimulus for loud laughter. He recovered - and lived far beyond both that illness and a major heart attack. Cousins wrote about his experience in the best-selling Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing and Regeneration, published in 1979. Said Cousins of his conclusion that the life force of humans is much, much stronger than the medical community understood. "The quest for perfectibility is not a presumption or a blasphemy but the highest manifestation of a great design," he said. Cousins was the editor of The Saturday Review for some forty years. An unflagging champion of social justice, among the nation's most outspoken critics of war, and advocate of seeking to bring all the travelers in the middle world together in a community, Cousins was among the most optimistic of social critics of the twentieth century. He spent the last years of his life as a faculty member of the University of California at Los Angeles Medical School where he taught ethics and medical literature.

Now I'm not convinced, obviously, that laughter and Vitamin C can cure pancreatic cancer - that's why I get the aggressive treatment I'm taking at that marvelous place of hope, the Cancer Treatment Center of America at the Midwestern Regional Medical Center at Zion, Illinois. But I'm utterly sold on the idea that attitude and, yes, humor, play an important role in keeping insidious invaders at bay. My friend Ray also gently suggested that Billy Collins was really not the best of current poets, that many others deserved to be Poet Laureate more than he, whose verse Ray finds pretty vapid. Collins was designated Poet Laureate, methinks, because of a great break in getting extensive coverage by NPR, who touted him as being "accessible" - that is, common people could understand him without using a dictionary or trying to fathom a personal mythology. Yes, indeed, Collins is no Robert Frost - I can't disagree with my old pal on this one. But I still really like the poem I posted on earworms in "Langston Hughes and Humor."

What makes something humorous enough to evoke a belly laugh does not have a universal standard - just as 'tis true, as Cousins said, that we can judge character by what an individual is concerned about, what we laugh out loud at says a great deal about us. Why we find something funny is not easy to pin down - and on the surface, it may suggest an almost juvenile attraction to slapstick with a rather heavy dose of violence - ala the Three Stooges, whom I find absolutely hilarious. I also enjoy fart jokes - not as much as Mozart did - but I do laugh aloud at such as the scene in Blazing Saddles where the group of cowboys sit around the fire eating beans and cutting the cheese.

The other day, my friend Joy Meyers, who dwells with my lovin' spouse's brother Don Kubik in a magnificent manor over in a St. Paul, Minnesota, sent me a little story she received from the prioress of the convent where her aunt lives with her sisters in Chicago. Don't know why, exactly, but I really like this one, titled "Never Trust an Old Lady":

An old lady gets pulled over for speeding...
Old Lady: Is there a problem, Officer?
Officer: Ma'am, you were speeding.
Old Lady: Oh, I see.
Officer: Can I see your license please?
Old Lady: I'd give it to you but I don't have one.
Officer: Don't have one?
Old Lady: Lost it, 4 years ago for drunk driving.
Officer: I see ... Can I see your vehicle registration papers, please?
Old Lady: I can't do that.
Officer: Why not?
Old Lady: I stole this car.
Officer: Stole it?
Old Lady: Yes, and I killed and hacked up the owner.
Officer: You what?
Old Lady: His body parts are in plastic bags in the trunk if you want to see.
The Officer looks at the woman and slowly backs away to his car and calls for back up.Within minutes 5 police cars circle the car. A senior officer slowly approaches the car, clasping his half drawn gun.
Officer 2: Ma'am, could you step out of your vehicle please!
The woman steps out of her vehicle.
Old Lady: Is there a problem sir?
Officer 2: One of my officers told me that you have stolen this car and murdered the owner.
Old Lady: Murdered the owner?
Officer 2: Yes, could you please open the trunk of your car, please. The woman opens the trunk, revealing nothing but an empty trunk.
Officer 2: Is this your car, ma'am?
Old Lady: Yes, here are the registration papers.
The officer is quite stunned.
Officer 2: One of my officers claims that you do not have a driving license.
The woman digs into her handbag and pulls out a clutch purse and hands it to the officer.
The officer examines the license. He looks quite puzzled.
Officer 2: Thank you ma'am, one of my officers told me you didn't have a license, that you stole this car, and that you murdered and hacked up the owner.
Old Lady: Bet the lying bastard told you I was speeding, too.

'Tis funny, in part, methinks, because someone we generally think of as being at the mercy of authority getting the upper hand - besting those charged with keeping order. Jokes and incidents that bring belly laughs, laughing out loud, more often than not, have some element of violating social values - at best, they're impolite. We're not talking being mildly amused, or bemused - or appreciative of wit. We're talking belly laughs. 'Tis an infinitely fascinating subject. I do know that I love to laugh out loud - especially if it's with a group of friends - or an audience at a play or at the movie theater. And I love folks with a lilting laugh. "Laughter," said Cousins, "is a form of internal jogging. It moves your internal organs around. It enhances respiration. It is an igniter of great expectations."

Kola, igniting great expectations with laughter well could be the greatest gift of goddesses and gods to humankind. Without it, something dies inside us, and as Cousins said, "Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live." Friend Ray, thank you for reminding me of one of my heroes, someone I would emulate in almost every way - Norman Cousins. Many of his books are still in print - and most of the dozens he wrote are readily available at used book stores or from Internet out-of-print sources. For example, within twenty-four hours, you can receive Head First: The Biology of Hope and the Healing Power of the Human Spirit, and Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient. Yet another author to return to! I love it - means I have to live a good long while to get through the list I have.

My friend Ray writes great stories and truly humorous plays - he cracks me up. Cracking up at least once a day, if at all possible, is totally necessary to living instead of merely existing - as is music. One of the funniest stories I've ever heard is one I found as a sound file on the Internet - it cracks me up as well. It's about a woman who takes her car in for service and discovers a rather large piece of feces in the backseat - so she calls the service center.

And then there' s H.L. Mencken (1890-1956), the great American social critic, cynic, and certainly someone who would fill the bill of being, as Vice President Spiro Agnew said, "a nattering nabob of negativity." In general, Norman Cousins didn't have much time for cynics - "Cynicism is intellectual treason," he said. Sorry, Norman, if you thought that the curmudgeon H.L. Mencken was guilty of intellectual treason. Mencken said a cynic was "a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin." 'Twas on this very day that one of Mencken's comments brought a most charitable response - on February 3, 1931, the Arkansas legislature passed a resolution praying for the soul of H.L. because he had called their fair state "the apex of moronia." Mencken took on chiropractors, Mormons, farmers, people like me who hold positions as an executive director of a nonprofit agency, and priests, ministers, and religion in general - as well as politicians of every ilk. He would not be impressed with our current primary - and he was the weest bit skeptical of the motives of those who, on the campaign trail in search of votes, make promises. Said Mencken, "If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner." In response to those who were appalled by his cynicism, Mencken quipped, "It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office." Those who are not likely to ever be elected to the presidency of the United States are legion - idealists of the ilk of Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern didn't have a chance - but then there were such as Jimmy Carter and Hubert Humphrey - who almost made it - and Woodrow Wilson, who completed his journey here in the middle world on this day in 1924 at the age of sixty-eight. I haven't read many jokes or humorous stories told by Wilson - and not one that I can think of by Jimmy Carter, although he sure smiled a lot - still does. Wilson came closest with his comments on conservatives, such as "A conservative is someone who makes no changes and consults his grandmother when in doubt." Carter tried with such as "Whatever starts in California unfortunately has an inclination to spread."

It's hard to imagine either Woodrow Wilson or Jimmy Carter telling a fart joke or sitting through a screening of Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddle, in my top five of the funniest damn movies I've ever seen. I'm gonna keep in mind some of the scenes from that movie as I go through the challenges of this great day in Dakota. 'Tis about the nadir of some of my blood counts - especially hemoglobin and platelets - and I don't feel particularly energized this fine Dakota morn, beauuuuuuuuuuuuutiful Dakota, where the temperature's rising - but I ain't gonna let that keep me down - I'll go get a transfusion if I need it, because I have things to do if I can ever live up to what Cousins concluded was a reason for feeling good about what one has done for one's fellow travelers here in the middle world. Said Cousins, "I can imagine no greater satisfaction for a person, in looking back on his life and work, than to have been able to give some people, however few, a feeling of genuine pride in belonging to the human species and, beyond that, a zestful yen to justify that pride." That's why we're here, kola - so take care of yourselves - find time for some laugher today - a belly laugh if possible - and then give others that Cousinsian "genuine pride in belonging to the human species and, beyond that, a zestful yen to justify that pride."

Ev Albers

Monday, February 2nd, 2004

Words for Today --
" If the sun shines on Groundhog Day; Half the fuel and half the hay. "

Of course, the old saying above has things wrong -- but it's American. It's exactly the opposite -- if the sun shines, the ground hog will see his shadow, and we're in for more winter. It has to be cloud-covered to keep the sun from peeking through and causing a shadow. Ground Hog Day, 2004. Aye, and 'tis a grand one here in Bismarck on the shores of the once mighty, now dammed Missouri – gives rise to the earworm, "A row, a row a ree, across the wide Missouri . . . ." 'Tain't very wide anymore – nor very icy. That's because water is discharged daily from the dam north of here thirty miles or so as the river flows. In fact, a fellow died this past week when his truck went through the ice – he thought he was doing wheelies on a sandbar, not the river. 'Tis a lazy morn this Ground Hog Day in Dakota – not one of our bigger holidays, although it should be – we just don't know enough about our pre-Christian roots back in Europe and farther east and south, where many scholars believe the Indo-European tribes arose. Ground Hog Day observes a ritual deeply rooted in what Carl Jung called our collective unconscious, the memory of symbols and rituals that are our birthright as human beings. Out in Hannover Township in Oliver County in Dakota, the Garden of the Universe, we didn't hear much about bearsons and raising bears, keeping them as pets, and the ritualistically killing them a few weeks before winter was supposed to end. We did hear a great deal about a story at the heart of Christianity – the death of the son of God, Jesus, and his return from the grave three days later – Easter, the Resurrection. And we knew that Jesus had gone down to hell and then walked around for a few days in the middle world before ascending into heaven. He went to hell, of course, to let the devil know that he had died for the sins of humankind. But no one said anything out in Hannover about whether or not Jesus Christ had a shadow when he came back from hell to walk around the middle world. In fact, as far as I know, there's not much planned for Ground Hog Day out in Hannover – or much talk about Jesus' shadow during his walkabout after his return from the grave.

The most famous of the predictors of winter's end, Punxsutawney Phil, saw his shadow this morning in Pennsylvania – which is supposed to mean six more weeks of winter for folks there. There are other groundhogs who are brought on this day – including Georgia's General Beauregard Lee, Ph.D., who didn't see his shadow this morning – so the South gets an early spring. Dakota doesn't have a groundhog predictor – we don't need one. 'Tis always spring in beauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuutiful Dakota, kola, always spring. This is Camelot, after all.

Seeing (or having) a shadow is the key to understanding Groundhog Day, which is grounded (forgive the word choice) in ancient ritual that have nothing to do with groundhogs at all and everything to do with whether or not a traveler to the underworld has a shadow when he appears to an expectant group who have sent him down or hope to benefit from his descent. The ritual is all about bears, not groundhogs, and it has to do with to going to the underworld - to the sphere of death on behalf of the whole community. It's the story behind the story of Beowulf and The Odyssey, and it's as old as the tales of the first Cro-Magnum humans telling of bears mating human women. It's a remnant of among the oldest of rituals of Indo-European folk, including the Ainu of Japan, who were still raising bear cubs and ritualistically killing them as ambassadors to the underworld well into the twentieth century. Before bear cubs were raised as village pets, pampered and petted until they were sent to the underworld to appease those gods - by killing them - humans had to do it - special heroes. Bears are the most humanlike of mammals in many ways, so they were substituted somewhere along the line.

Somewhere, sometime, long ago, some group decided that it maybe they would just let the chosen bear go to sleep, as they normally do. But the bear would be watched when he awoke to make sure he didn't see his shadow - if he did, the community was in deep trouble, and it wasn't just a matter of a few more weeks of winter. So what's the big deal with the "shadow"?

Well, when you make a trip to the underworld, Hades, you lose your shadow. You've been where the sun never shines, and, even if you return, your shadow stays in Hades.

By the time German folk were practicing a version of very old rituals in the centuries before their descendants immigrated to Pennsylvania, bears were gone - there wasn't a bear version of Punxsutawney Phil to wake up midway between winter solstice and spring equinox, the community's sacrificial ambassador to the underworld. So they substituted other hibernating animals. In Germany, it was the badger. The German-Americans decided to use the groundhog. Now the consequence of the likes of Phil seeing his shadow is just the weest bit more winter (he's only been right about 39 percent of the time since records have been kept in 1887, by the way -- read all about it here ), but back when it all started, an ambassador coming back from the underworld meant that the sun might never shine again - or that there would be mighty tough times for a good while.

There's a most interesting connection to perhaps the two greatest heroes of western epic literature – Odysseus and Beowulf. Like Jesus, both were only half-human – and both went to the underworld on behalf of their community. Unlike Jesus, who was the son of Mary and God himself, the heroes Odysseus and Beowulf were, if we pick up on many of the hints in the epic, the off-spring of women who mated with bears. There's a great book on the subject, one I first found on the shelves of Dickinson State's library back in the late 1960s – unfortunately, it's no longer there – 'twas lost somehow – but it can still be had at used books sites on the Internet – 'tis classical scholar Rhys Carpenter's Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in Homeric Epics. Carpenter makes the connection between the Bearson story and the heroes --

Hope you see your shadow this morning, kola – unless you're the bearson. And I trust that you're taking care of yourselves and looking out for each other – the reason bearsons go to the underworld – for love of their neighbors.

Ev Albers

Sunday, February 1st, 2004

Wise Words for Today --
"When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul."-- Got that right, Langston Hughes - the American African American poet born on this day in 1902. He completed his passage in the middle world in 1967. I wrote about him at some length last year (God help me, I love referring to my journal of a year past here in February, which is about a year beyond what I once was given to live). You can check out some samples of his great poetry and more about him by choosing 2/1/03 from the selector above. Hughes considered humor among the greatest of human gifts - a way to greet each day with enthusiasm and yest - "Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you." The earth here in beauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuutiful Dakota is just the weest cool today - 'twill give us beleaguered natives some surcease from the hordes wanting to come to paradise, Dakota. But perhaps not, for 'twas considerably colder back in the last days of January, and folks from around the middle earth still wanted to come to Dakota. You see, as OMF (our mutual friend and Dakota's greatest gift to the millennia to come, the poet Thomas Matthew McGrath) said,

Dakota is everywhere.
                                A condition.

The condition is one of the very soul . . . and having heard somewhere, someplace, that the source of generosity of spirit and friendliness, folks want to come. We welcome them, of course - but the influx must be orderly - we're not ready for all who want to come.

We relish our undeserved - but we'll take it - reputation for less than clement weather. 'Tis one of the only things that keep some of the less adventurous from trying to come live with us. We have such slogans as "Forty below keeps out the riffraff," and we send it out far and wide. In our wondrously cool summers, we tout t-shirts with such as a mosquito with the label, "North Dakota State Bird." 'Tain't true, of course - Dakota comes as close to the perfection of any place in the world with its weather and climate - just as we advertised in German newspapers back in the 1880s when we were still trying to encourage folks to come. As those ads placed by the railroads said - this is indeed as close as any place will ever come to the Garden of Eden or Camelot.

I received a great note this past week from one of my oldest kola, Robert John Scheeler of Minot where he has professed English and literature for decades - formerly of Dickinson where we attend Dickinson State together back in the 1960s. He found a great poem about earworms by Billy Collins, the Poet Laureate of the United States who is truly one funny fellow, someone who uses humor to invite his readers to consider his great insights into the human condition - as much as anyone, Billy Collins is the Langston Hughes of the turn of the twenty-first century. I thank my friend Bob Scheeler mightily for introducing me to Collins' poem. It gladdened my heart mightily! Here is Collins' " More Than a Woman"

Ever since I woke up today,
a song has been playing uncontrollably
in my head--a tape looping

over the spools of the brain,
a rosary in the hands of a frenetic nun,
mad fan belt of a tune.

It must have escaped from the radio
last night on the drive home
and tunneled while I slept

from my ears to the center of my cortex.
It is a song so cloying and vapid
I won't even bother mentioning the title,

but on it plays as if I were a turntable
covered with dancing children
and their spooky pantomimes,

as if everything I had ever learned
was being slowly replaced
by its slinky chords and puffballs of lyrics.

It played while I watered the plant
and continued when I brought in the mail
and fanned out the letters on the table.

It repeated itself when I took a walk
and watched from a bridge
brown leaves floating in the channels of a current.

In the late afternoon it seemed to fade,
but I heard it again at the restaurant
when I peered in at the lobsters

lying on the bottom of an illuminated
tank which was filled to the brim
with their copious tears.

And now at this dark window
in the middle of the night
I am beginning to think

I could be listening to music of the spheres
the sound no one ever hears
because it has been playing forever,

only the spheres are colored pool balls,
and the music is oozing from a jukebox
whose lights I can just make out through the clouds.

You gotta love it, kola, you gotta love it! Also heard from my old friend Jim Fuglie whose fiancé Lillian Crook, the librarian at Dickinson State, put me on to the term earworm, the name for a song you can't get out of your mind. Jim's getting ready to head west to enjoy Dakota at its very best at more leisure than he know has as a gifted and most witty creator for a major Bismarck advertising firm. Jim was once the executive director of the North Dakota Democratic Party - he was the director of the state tourism department. Years ago, he put up great billboards throughout the state with such sayings as "Welcome to North Dakota - Mountain Removal Project Complete!" and "Welcome to North Dakota - Custer Was Well When He Left." Jim and Bob have great senses of humor - they've brought me many a chuckle, as has my old buddy Ray Wheeler of Dickinson with his outrageous rants laced with scatological references of the ilk spouted by characters in Elizabethan drama. Indeed, as Hughes said, humor is essential to survival here in the middle world, and the way in which we get to know each other as human beings worthy of our attention. 'Tis a fact that those who have the least, who are on the bottom of the pile in any social compact, laugh more together than the rest of us - from the American Indians facing cultural genocide here in Dakota to the Germans living in the Soviet Union prosecuted by Stalin, from the Jews in Europe facing with death-dealing pogroms to the Japanese-Americans interned by the United States following Pearl Harbor. Laughter is essential to survival - for all those assigned less than full membership in the human community. Humor takes us outside of ourselves and our problems - leaves us the weest bit less than comfortable, but deliciously so. Collins says of his effort to humanize fellow travelers in his poetry, "By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield."

How is it that folks who are most threatened in body or soul laugh so much? Well, for one thing, it doesn't happen in isolation - it takes a village, so to speak - a community of those in the same boat. One of the things that the Cancer Treatment Centers of America like the Midwestern Regional Medical Center at Zion, Illinois makes possible is a community of those who were given individual death sentences at different places of the ilk of the famed Mayo Clinic. You'll not find a more jolly group than the cancer patients at Zion, kola - 'tis true. There's a great deal more laughter than tears in the waiting rooms and on the floor where we're infused with chemo - healing humor. Hughes said, " Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it."

We fighting the Big C think that we ought to have health - and finding a way to laugh is one of the very best paths to keeping the insidious invader at bay. Same is true for those among us who are treated as less than human because of the color of their skin or the way they find solace in powers beyond this middle world, the faith in supernatural beings they profess - or any other reason that makes the dominant group in a social compact finds for making those different less than fully human. Its taken a long, long time for us Americans of white skin to acknowledge the basic humanity of their African American sisters and brothers - or the basic right of American Indians to be treated by us as we would be treated by our fellow humans. Today marks but the fifty-fifth anniversary of President Harry S. Truman designating February 1 Independence Day in the United States in recognition of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which finally ended slavery in 1865 - by law, if not in practice. It would take another hundred years or so - until the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson and the enactment of Civil Rights legislation - for us to even begin treating our fellow citizens, black Americans, as full human beings. Through it all, African Americans found a way to laugh. One of Hughes' greatest gifts was to be able to laugh at himself even as he poked fun at the dominant culture, as he did in the poem, "Dinner Guest: Me"

I know I am
The Negro Problem
Being wined and dined,
Answering the usual questions
That come to white mind
Which seeks demurely
To Probe in polite way
The why and wherewithal
Of darkness U.S.A.--
Wondering how things got this way
In current democratic night,
Murmuring gently

Over fraises du bois,
"I'm so ashamed of being white."

The lobster is delicious,
The wine divine,
And center of attention
At the damask table, mine.
To be a Problem on
Park Avenue at eight
Is not so bad.
Solutions to the Problem,
Of course, wait.

Hmmm. I got a couple of problems this fine morning in Dakota, kola. I awoke with an earworm, a bad one. 'Twas on the top of the charts on this day back in 1960 -- Johnny Preston's version of "Runnin' Bear" (the song penned by the Big Bopper himself, I think) --

On the banks of the river
Stood Runnin' Bear, young Indian brave
On the other side of the river
Stood his lovely Indian maid
Little White Dove was-a her name
Such a lovely sight to see
But their tribes fought with each other
So their love could never be

Runnin' Bear loved Little White Dove
With a love big as the sky
Runnin' Bear loved Little White Dove
With a love that couldn't die

It goes on, of course - with a stereotypical drum beat in the background - BUM bum bum bum BUM bum bum bum. It doesn't end well, for a raging river keeps the lovers apart, and when they finally tire of throwing kisses across the river they jump in to meet each other, and

As their hands touched and their lips met
The ragin' river pulled them down
Now they'll always be together
In that happy hunting ground

The tune reflected the prejudice of the times - in 1960, American Indians were still quite the other from all of us - at best, subjects of such songs as this. 'Tis a bad earworm, kola, a bad one.

My other problem is that both Collins and Hughes with their references to lobster have given me a powerful hankering for that most ambrosial of food. Best I do my best to deal with these two problems - they need some attention. Best I have the weest bit of such as a Malt O Meal - that will drive the worst of earworms away and stave off the craving for lobster. Or I'll think about the great pie I polished off yesterday, a Juneberry jobber hand-delivered this past week by my brother-in-law Dave McAdoo and my sister Linda - they picked it up from his mother Beth who lives with hubby Bob north of here up around the spot where Lewis and Clark wintered in 1804-1805. Bob and Beth are in their 80s and goin' strong - they've had more than a slice or two of Juneberry pie, I wager. Or maybe one of Jim Fuglie's best little shots will drive the earworm away - 'twas Jim, whose fiancé, Lillian is one of the greatest of pie makers in all of Dakota - 'twas Jim who offered the opinion that perhaps I made up the insidious invader as a ruse to get as much free pie as possible. I like that one - think I'm cured for today.

Today's final word we'll leave to Bill Cosby, the Lanagston Hughes of the early twenty-first century - he observed, "You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it." Cosby also said, "There is hope for the future because God has a sense of humor and we are funny to God."

I hope Bill Cosby's right, kola - I hope he's right. And I hope you are taking care of yourself by finding some time for laughter and song today - because that's how we best prepare to do what we're here in middle world to do - take care of each other.

Ev Albers

Saturday, January 31st, 2004

Wise Words for Today --
"The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them."--

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, was born in France on this day in 1915 and completed his passage in the middle world in December 1968. In between, he taught and contemplated here in America most of his life. Merton also wrote, "The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little." He certainly didn't. He was just hitting his stride as poet, perhaps the best apologist (in the sense of explaining, not saying "I'm sorry") for the monastic tradition who ever wrote in English, and a social critic when his middle world passage came to a sudden end at an international monastic convention in Thailand – electrocuted by a faulty wire. Merton introduced Eastern philosophy and thought to many Westerners in those heady days of the late 1960s – he inspired many to contemplate alternatives to such as the raging War in Vietnam and the madness of humans killing each other for their own good. How infinitely insightful, methinks, Merton's twist on perhaps the most recognized of Shakespearean sonnets, 116 (I know that many of you, my kola, have the sense of the poem, if not all the words themselves, stored in your mind and experience):

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

'Tis love alone, dear kola, that allows us to "bear it out even to the edge of doom," and to the extent we keep love at bay like some insidious invader, afraid that somehow contact with our fellow humans will compromise our tranquillity and self-satisfied withdrawal into ourselves, we scab our souls and close them to the greatest of all gifts from all the goddesses and gods to humankind, love. "Faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love." That one you had right, ole St. Paul, you troubled soul with a body ridden with boils. Now if you had just considered the possibility that women were human beings, you might have been on your way to a life less miserable.

'Tis anything but miserable here in Dakota on the final day of January. Fresh cover of pure snow, temperature at 5:30 A.M. already at 0 degrees, and I'm toasty warm with my tied blanket (aka "blanky – just shows you what a sixty-one and then some fellow reverts to when confronted with the weest bit of trouble – toddler talk) from my dear sister-in-law, my lovin' spouse's sister Janet from over in Dickinson. The last day of January here in beauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuutiful Dakota, and no few folks – wimps, mostly – complain that the weather this January is less than the tropical paradise I paint. Of course, as my lovin' spouse points out, I don't shovel, get into cold cars, or spend more than a few minutes actually out there – but I admire it mightily from my window here on Arthur Drive in Bismarck, a place especially blessed by the great goddess of Serendip. Besides, what's to be done? As my Grandpa Henke was wont to say – after asking "What do they do in Germany when it snows?" – "They let it snow." We ain't gonna change the weather, but in glorious Dakota it changes often. I know Dakota weather. Dakota weather is a friend of mine. And, believe me, kola – Dakota weather ain't no Shakespearean love – it alters mightily.

Perhaps Merton's greatest gift to us was to tell us again and again how important to our happiness was accepting ourselves – as he put it, "We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us."

What is known to me, kola, is that I've been mightily blessed by having such friends as you – among them the siblings of my lovin' spouse Leslie, all of whom have made an extraordinary effort to reach out to me during this interesting time in my passage here in the middle world. Today for my family and our extended families and friends throughout western North Dakota and the state - and far beyond - is a day to remember my brother-in-law, Joseph Hans Kubik - Joe. Joe was born on this day in 1950 - the day the St. Charles Hotel burned down on Main Street in Dickinson, North Dakota. He left us on April 13, 2002 after a battle with lymphoma. A lawyer, Joe was also a farmer for good while. The youngest of three sons with two older sisters - only his sister Janet was younger than he among the six in my wife Leslie's family - Joe spent a good deal of time with father Alfons on the 720-acre farm up north - and farmed it for all his siblings for a couple of years after Alfons got older. His family nickname was "Easy Joe" because father Alfons would pat the dashboard of any vehicle in which he was riding with his son and repeat as he beat the rhythm, "Easy, Joe. Easy." Few days go by that I don't think of Joe - his great humor under the most trying of circumstances - hell, when his white count went way down after chemo, he would do this routine about being Bubble Boy. Joe was an extraordinary, gifted, intelligent man who managed to pack more living in one day that any half-dozen the rest of us live. Much of what Joe did - beyond the spectacular from the time of his teenage years that included some most creative pranks - was done quietly. His family and law partners are still hearing about his extensive pro bono work he did - always without anyone knowing about it.

Allow one small indicator of the charm and grace of this fellow. When we had his memorial service on April 19, 2003, both his ex-wives and his current companion brought their favorite photographs and got together to swap stories and remember Joe Kubik fondly. No matter what he did, his two brothers and three sisters always forgave Joey - he was so damned likable. He was a great Dad and the best of uncles. I imagine Joe reunited with his Dad, Alfons - getting ready to go to the farm one more time --
Easy, Joe, easy . . .
"Easy, Joe, easy, now . . ."
Alfons Kubik advised his son,
The hard-driving boy at the wheel
Of the pickup careening in a sharp right
Off the blacktop of Highway 22
At the crest of the hill just
Into Dunn County.

Patting the dash where his hand
Had worn smooth a spot from
Thousands of rhythmic accents
To his daily paternal cautions
To his youngest son - named for
Both his grandfathers,
Old Joseph Kubik and Hans Goth,
Alfons tried hard not to smile
As the two rode east to the farm
To bury tractor and plow in the gumbo
On a wet, windy April day at least
A week before any neighbor even
Thought about seeding, sometimes
Even before the robins came back.

Whatever Czech gene took
Alfons to the wettest spot to be
Mud-up-to-the-seat-sunk each spring
Coursed his son's veins as well,
And Joseph Hans Kubik found
More than one piece of gumbo
To challenge as he plowed
Through life, pedal to the floorboard,
Daring fate break his luck,
Armed with a free-thinking spirit,
Shielded by an indomitable will.
His brothers and sisters called him "Easy Joe,"
In the impish Kubik clan way of
Nicknaming fat guys "Slim Bob" or
Those who sleep till noon "early birds."
A man looking for the path of least resistance
Pays his taxes on time, never drives on empty,
And, in general, leaves the gumbo patches fallow.
But not "Easy Joe" Kubik - after all,
Western North Dakota's finest hotel burned
The night he was born, and Alfons knew
He was in store for plenty of relief from any
Chance that this kid would be the quiet one -
But then, no child of Alfons and Dorothy Kubik
Could ever be accused of being just one of the crowd.

There's no surprise, finally, that "Easy Joe"
Met that greatest human fear, death, so well, that
"For sudden the worst turned the best to the brave."
He was supposed to slip into a quiet coma,
Unaware of what was going on or where he was.
I think that Joe looked out that window and saw
Alfons waiting in the pickup, hand on the dash,
With a Dorothy-packed lunch pail by his side,
Waiting for Joe to drive once more to the farm.
And the tear in his eye was one of joy,
Because he knew that Alfons was saying,
"It's just another gumbo patch."
Joe climbed behind the wheel,
Pushed down hard on the gas pedal,
And Alfons said once more,
"Easy, Joe, easy . . ."

Ev Albers, for Joe Kubik's children
and his nieces & nephews, April 19, 2002

Joey, I thought I might have caught up with you somewhere out there in a world beyond this middle one by now. Wherever you are, I want you know that you continue to be an inspiration for all of us. You lived a life of taking people as they were, not trying to change them into something you wanted them to be. I can only imagine the extent of your incredible generosity in reaching out to people who needed help – I know what you did for my own parents, just because I asked you to. May there be the most exquisite ice cream bars imaginable in the freezer of the fridge wherever you are (Joe loved Dove bars when he came down to Bismarck for his chemo treatments), may you have a thousand and one house improvements of places you had already made showcases awaiting you, and may the reruns of bad movies be unlimited (he liked those), and may you know that you will never be forgotten. Your hunting dog Sarah thrives in the home of your son Hans and daughter Tanya and her husband Colin over in St. Paul, Minnesota – and your infant granddaughter, Tanya and Colin's Anna Louise, is a gorgeous girl –her grandchildren will remember you, Joey.

My good friend – who just happened to be my brother-in-law, a friend who contradicted all of the stereotypes of the sponging, ne'er-do-well brother-in-law – 'twas absolutely opposite, as a matter of fact – my kola Joe Kubik knew as well as any human I've encountered here in the middle world that all political shenanigans are so much dross, that often such social compacts as ours, troubled as it is by divisions based on everything but that which matters most, try to find every way its leaders can to point to grand possibilities while ignoring the starving, ignorant, and clueless among them. This is the birthday of Norman Mailer – he's eighty-one today. I've spoken often of his 1970 book Fire on the Moon, in which he asked the question, "When you've been to the moon, what's left?" The cost of getting humans to Mars is enormous – and the possibility, even though technology has come a long way since Mailer offered his 1970 idea that there was no way to go farther than to the moon, that we can get there in the foreseeable future doubtful indeed. Going back to the moon and trying to get to Mars is the latest attempt, methinks, to get our minds on matters other than our troubles at home and abroad. We'd do well to think the weest about Thomas Merton's observation: "What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous." Well, I say to that, Thomas Merton – and I'll bet Joey would agree if he were sitting with me here before the gas fire having a Dove ice cream bar on this tropical Dakota day, "Damn straight, Tommy Merton, damn straight!" We have one major reason for being here in the middle world – the one Joe Kubik lived every day of his life. We would do well to begin by taking each other as we are, not what we want those we love to be. Ain't no perfect people here in the middle world, kola. As American writer, John O'Hara (born on this day in 1905), said: "So who's perfect? "Washington had false teeth. Franklin was nearsighted. Mussolini had syphilis. Unpleasant things have been said about Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde. Tchaikovsky had his problems, too. And Lincoln was constipated." I give the honors to Thomas Merton to say for us that which we all know, that we have to take care of ourselves (and that means, kola, knowing who the hell we are) and looking out for each other. I know that's what you'll be doing today. Herrrrrrrrrrrrre's Tommy! "The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another."

Ev Albers

Friday, January 30th, 2004

Wise Words for Today --
"If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships - the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together in the same world at peace."-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, born on this day in 1882, who also said "Selfishness is the only real atheism; aspiration, unselfishness, the only real religion." FDR was elected to four terms in office - all other presidents served no more than two. He didn't finish his fourth, of course - he died but a year into the last term - the last year of World War II. He seemed to many, during World War II, the only human we stood between some degree of human decency and freedom and a middle world ruled by a group of hooligans who make Saddam Hussein look like not such a bad guy.

'Tis not a day, this glorious, beauuuuuuuuuuuuutiful one in Dakota, of great acts of unselfish reaching out to one's neighbor in recorded history of humankind. 'Twas on this day in 1349 the good Christian folk of Freilsburg, Germany, massacred all they could find who were Jews. In 1939, Adolf Hitler, in power in Germany, called for the death of all those of Jewish faith. 'Twas on this day in 1948 that Mahatma Ghandi was murdered - for religious reasons by a Hindu extremist. On January 30, 2004, folks around the world continue to kill each other in the name of their God or to revenge the deaths of their fellow citizens who were in killed because of their religion. Of course, less we Americans feel too self-righteous, we had our own shameful record of treating some of our citizens less than kindly during World War II and at other times in our history. 'Twas during FDR's presidency that thousands of Japanese-Americans, including children, were herded into camps throughout the country - and many were forced to expatriate to Japan, including teenagers who were much more American than Japanese. Some of those who were repatriated back home after the war spoke to Bismarck folk at a public humanities program this past year - they were interned here in Bismarck along with German nationals before they were forced to leave their families and go "home" to Japan. Their stories were heart-breaking. Still and all, we did not herd our citizens into boxcars and transport them to death camps. Nonetheless, we treated our fellow travelers here in the middle world as being less than human for no other reason than their recognizable difference from us. Indeed, our short history has far too many moments of singling out people for treatment as subhumans because of the color or their skin, their accent, or the their religious beliefs, beginning with the American Indians encountered by the colonists and continuing into the twenty-first century with far too many Americans ready to judge every Muslim or person who appears to be so a likely terrorist who should be locked up or deported. Shame on us. FDR's most famous words - other than the speech after Pearl Harbor declaring Sunday, December 7th as a day that would "live in infamy," are "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." We might consider a bit of revision, given our history - "We have nothing to fear but ourselves" - for what we do in a social compact is each of our responsibilities, and we are all capable of what - in our finer moments - we ourselves would consider inhumanity of the worst ilk.

We Americans live in a compact that has institutionalized materialism as the highest good - things, not thoughts; money, not meditation dominate our lives - why should we be surprised by our selfishness and its natural consequence, a smug self-satisfaction that we are better than our fellow travelers in the middle world because we have have much more private property and can waste more than they can? The great American Dream we share is one of hitting the jackpot or winning the lottery, changing what Henry David Thoreau called our "lives of quiet desperation" in quest of material comfort to one of great happiness in suddenly finding ourselves with the wherewithal to buy our happiness. After all, strange and wonderful things happen - for example, on this day twenty years ago, in 1984, a couple in Florissant, Missouri (that part of greater St. Louis where dwell our friends and relatives, Leslie's brother Dave and his lovin' spouse Sue Shy Kubik), both bought lottery tickets - and didn't tell each other what numbers they picked. The numbers were identical, and Anna and Robert Rucker each won over a million dollars in neighboring Illinois's state lottery. Wonder how they fared since - did they have nothing to fear after winning so much?

Fear is a word, a state of being, of many meanings - and fear is not always all that bad. It can mean an acute awareness of the presence or probability of danger, but it also means to hold in deep reverential awe - to consider holy. We can, for example, fear God in both senses - be anxious about whether or not she/he exists and what she/he thinks and be in awe of him/her. 'Tis fear in the first sense that John Keats had in mind when he penned a sonnet about fear on this very day in 1818 --

When I have fears that I may cease to
   Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
   Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
   Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
   Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
   That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
   Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

'Tis a young man's poem, this: Keats was but in his early twenties when he wrote this sonnet - he would complete in passage in the middle world some three years later - he departed at the tender age of twenty-six. Most curious poem as well -- thinking to nothingness one's yearning for love and fame, both of which we would would buy had we but money enough. Ah, but, as Shakespeare's Lear says to his daughter Cordelia, his youngest, most-loved daughter after she says she has "nothing" to add to her two sisters' hypocritical lies of great filial devotion, "Nothing comes of nothing, so speak again." One may "think away," will that one's dreams of fame be gone, but the most soul-scabbed, soul-holed of humans cannot escape their need for love -of the ilk tht is the essence of the earworm I awoke with this morn, "Love, that's above, and beyond the call of love, 'ove, 'ove, 'ove, 'ove" - we all want someone to tell us that they'll give us love

. . . that's above and beyond the call of love
And I'll never ever make you cry
Yes I'll give you love that's above and beyond the call of love
And love's something that money can't buy

Aye, and how we of the 60s generation so fervently believed that the way money and materialism was madness! One of our theme songs was "Can't buy me love" ala the Beatles:

Can't buy me love, love
Can't buy me love

I'll buy you a diamond ring my friend if it makes you feel alright
I'll get you anything my friend if it makes you feel alright
'Cause I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love

I'll give you all I got to give if you say you love me too
I may not have a lot to give but what I got I'll give to you
I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love

Can't buy me love, everybody tells me so
Can't buy me love, no no no, no

Say you don't need no diamond ring and I'll be satisfied
Tell me that you want the kind of thing that money just can't buy
I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love

We were right, kola - and I've been reminded of just how right we were as I battled the insidious invader, the Big C this past sixteen months or so - the Keatsian "faery power of unreflecting love" comes as a gift of grace, we are fully human only when we can say with OMF, beauuuuuuuuuuuutiful Dakota's gift to the millennia, the poet Thomas Matthew McGrath words that I've appropriated as my daily mantra and prayer of thanks:

How could I have come so far?
    (And always on such dark trails!)
I must have travelled by the light
Shining from the faces of all those I have loved.

We have less to fear from ourselves if we let that McGrathian kind of light shine brightly - or as the old kiddie's hymn goes,

This little light of mine,
I'm gonna let it shine
This little light of mine,
I'm gonna let it shine
This little light of mine,
I'm gonna let it shine
Let it shine,
Let it shine,
Let it shine.

That's what you're gonna do today, kola - I know it, cause you've illuminated my path and brightened the days for me and my family in countless ways - and we all know that such is the only way we're going to avoid the worst we be - and that's pretty damned bad. Let it shine, kola, let it shine.

Ev Albers