Allergies

My 5 yr old daughter at the supper table: “I’m allergic to ice cream, tall grass and beets.”
Me: “beets? I thought you loved beets.”
Her: “yep. I like beets. And shredded wheat.”

Part 2: This, a Memorial of Her (Mark 14:9)

“I’ve been blessed,” the old man said, “and I’ve made my money. Now I want to give something back.”

The old man explained to me how he had plans to donate the tractor museum to the city. He wanted to develop the property to the point that it was ready to operate as a museum. Then, he would place the title of the property into the hands of the city.

I listened to this with a mixture of amusement and sympathy. What can we do after we’ve gained the world, anyway? Giving it back is probably one of the better options, and the impulse to leave some public asset to the world is laudable.

“But that,” he said, motioning to the abortion memorial. “That little spot I gave to a church.”

“I was wondering,” I said. “It wouldn’t take long for a new mayor or city council to change your memorial.”

He smiled. “I know. That’s why I gave it to a church. I know it’s going to stay what it is right now.”

“So, what made you do that?” I asked. “You probably get all kinds of reactions to it.”

He paused a moment, thinking about his next statement.

“Let me tell you a story- something that that little cemetery has helped to do.”

I waited. He looked off toward the road.

“Did you see the cross with the ribbon on it?” he asked, without looking at me. “Probably didn’t. If you look, there in the back corner, there is one cross with a ribbon on it. Let me tell you about that cross.

“One evening, I was closing up the gates- those old Juniper gates. I lock them every night around nightfall. I had just done that and had gone inside the office. ‘Course, its a good 100 yard walk from the road to the office. I was getting a drink, and I saw headlights pull into the driveway, up to the closed gate. I stood inside the office just watching. After a minute, the phone began to ring. I answered it, and I heard the voice of a young woman.

“I knew it had to be the person inside the car. There’s a sign on the gate with the office phone number. She asked me if I was the one who owned the little cemetery. I said, “Yes, I am.” She then asked if she might put another cross into the cemetery. I didn’t know what to say, but she continued explaining. She said, “When I was eighteen, I made a mistake. I know what I did was wrong, and I would like to put a cross in your memorial for my baby. I want to do this.”

“Well, I didn’t know what to say. I said she could, so long as she made her cross similar to the existing ones; and I explained to her the dimensions of the cross and what I used to make it. She said she would make it just that way, she thanked me, and we hung up. And then the car backed out of the driveway and drove off.

“The next evening, about the same time of day, I saw a car pull off onto the shoulder of the road. I watched from a distance, and a young woman got out. She was dressed in one of those nurse’s outfits like they wear down in Tyler. There are so many hospitals and doctors and specialists, and she probably worked in one of those offices. Anyway, she got out and brought out a white cross just like I had described, climbed the rail fence, and put it just where I told her to. Then, she took out a ribbon- yellow- and tied it onto the cross. After that, she climbed the fence again, got into her car, and drove away.”

I listened to this in silence, and for a moment, neither of us spoke. “That’s really good,” I finally said.

“The ribbon eventually wore out. I put a new one on every so often. I think the one out there now is green.”

He focused on me. “She probably drives past this place every day, once going to work, once going home. She sees that ribbon regularly. ‘Course, she can’t change what happened; she knows that herself better than we do. But I’d like to think that every time she drives past, something happens. I can’t help but think it helps her to know she did something, just a little thing, to make it right- make it right in her soul.” He looked at me with his quiet mirth. “And every time she drives past, God is right there. God is right there doing what He does best.”

I thanked him for his time and quietly drove off in my pickup truck. On my way out of the gates, I looked and the old man was right. The ribbon was green.

Part 1: This, a Memorial of Her (Mark 14:9)

Rickety entrance gates cobbled together from Juniper cedars are not normally what stands at the opening of property on a busy highway in a boomlet town. But the gates were open and two men were at work, so I drove in. I was prompted to do so out of curiosity. The property on the whole was curious, slotted tightly between the town’s old business district on one side and new big box stores, like Lowe’s and Wal-Mart, on the other. Jumbled throughout the slice of pine woods, there was an old 100-foot-high look-out tower, unfinished metal warehouses, dirt roads and, conspicuously, an old-time water wheel. The entire property was apparently one of those last small town hold-outs against lucrative commercial development.

But the most unusual part of the property was as small parcel of land partitioned off with a white rail fence from the rest of the work-in-progress. A sign was planted inside the plot: “In Memory of Babies Killed by Abortion”. Inside the parcel of ground stood rows of white crosses.

I stopped the pickup close to the workers and walked up to them. They were digging a post hole beside the old water wheel. One of them was an elderly man sitting on a bar stool and the other was a thirty-something Latino with a post hole digger. And it turned out that the old man was supervising while the other piddled at the hole, speechless for as long as I was with them.

“What can I do for you, young man?” the old man asked.

“I was driving by, and saw you working,” I replied. “I was just curious what you are doing with this place.”

The old man looked around and then back at me. “I’m building a tractor museum,” he said, decisively.

“A tractor museum?” I asked.

sign says, “In Memory of Babies Killed by Abortion”

“Yep. You probably saw those two old tractors back by the office,” he said.

I had not seen them, but I looked through the trees and saw that there were in fact a couple of old tractors back by a metal building with a boardwalk porch.
“That one’s an old John Deere. The other one is an Oliver. My dad used that one for years,” he said.

He took his time telling me this and stayed seated on his stool. His merry eyes and his measured speech told me that I was caught by an incorrigible story-teller. He knew it. I knew it. There was nothing left to do. I settled in for a good story.

To be continued.

Part 3: Ranching: The Basis of Sorrow

“Of all the passions, sadness causes the most injury to the soul.” – Thomas Aquinas

The news of the missing steer brought me to reflect on the universal curse of sin and the unlikely prospects for happiness while still in this mortal coil. But as Emile Cioran said in ‘A Short History of Decay’, “We change ideas like neckties.”

My thoughts moved from the existential to the practical. Where were my 3yr old and my 5yr old daughters who, 15 minutes earlier, were directed to remain on the porch? And how quickly were the temps dropping and the daylight fading? And how far could a 500 lb steer have gotten in a quarter hour? And how much time was I morally obligated to spend in the predictably fruitless task of searching for an escaped steer possessed of the spirit of Houdini? What would Aquinas say about that one?

I found the girls and we piled into the cab of the truck. My son climbed onto the flatbed and we rumbled out into the field. Slowly, we traced the perimeter of the six acres of thick, brushy woods. Occasionally, we thought we heard the animal calling to us, like a siren through the splash and foam of the breakers. But we were only fooling ourselves.

We completed our circuit and began to slowly cruise the country road, peering into the neighbors’ fields, examining the barbed wire fencing for breaches. We came up with nothing.

The children loved it. We made U-turns in the road, circled the block, criss-crossed our earlier paths. Eventually, we parked the truck and went inside. Bathroom breaks were in demand and the girls needed long sleeves. We then began a search on foot; perhaps the diesel engine spooked “Brownie”.

We began strolling down the road- again. We saw the same cows from earlier, but no steer with the necessary markings.

Then our neighbor came by. He hopped out of the truck and began a search on bicycle. While he did that, we decided to go back to the truck and interrogate another neighbor. So even if we never would find the steer, we were still building community!

After making no headway with the other neighbor, darkness had covered the sky and we retired to the house. No steer. That night we slept.

Sunday morning came. Still no steer. We went to church. “Call the sheriff.” “Maybe someone has him penned and reported him missing.” “Put feed cubes in a bucket and shake them while walking around the field. He might come out of the brush when he hears food.” “Cows can smell sweet feed anywhere.” “He might be stolen.” “Cows can break your heart.”

We left church. On the way home, we saw him. We were two miles from the house and, on the shoulder of a long, sweeping bend in the road, our steer was tossed in a pile, dead. I stopped to examine him.

It was curious, and I’ll never know how it happened. It looked like a gunshot wound to the head. There were no tire marks on the road, no tracks in the grassy shoulder. Had the steer been wounded but not killed by a truck, and then mercifully put down with a gun? Had a hunter mistaken him for a deer and then disposed of him on the road? Was I simply misreading the signs? I still wonder, even today.

We finished the drive home in silence. We had found the steer. Our search was over.

Ranching is pain, and yet we return to it. We are turned to destruction. Even so, for all that we ranchers lost, Brownie lost more.

Part 2- Ranching: The Basis of Sorrow

I ran down the driveway toward the road as my 7 yr old son gave me the intelligence. The “breed cow” had run from the pen on the northeast corner toward the southcentral part of the land, then ran back northeast and onto the county road. The steer- Brownie- was still in the pen. When I arrived at the road, puffing like a somewhat overweight man in his thirties, I saw the cow, black against the early fall scenery. Actually, she was quite scenic: head alert and held high; muscles tense; partially hidden among the tall grass in the low ditch. Surrounded by green fields hemmed in by colorful oaks, she looked regal.

I inspected the fence for breaches, and quickly discovered a large one. The cow would stay put in the grass, I knew, so I took my time, opened the gates and lumbered back to the house for the truck.

Upon arriving at the house, I gave quick orders to the children to stay on the porch. Three of the five were with me while my wife was shopping in town, so I felt a little overextended in my responsibilities. “stay,” I directed. “Stay on the porch. I’m going to get Blackie.”

As I entered the road, the cow heard the diesel motor and began running away, down the road, away from the house. I accelerated, passed her, circled back and intimidated her along the fence line until she found the open gates to her pen and took refuge right back into her little 2 acre paradise.

I hopped out of the truck, closed the gates, and went to the cow shelter to find Brownie the Steer.

But there was no Brownie. I waved Benjamin over to me. “Was the steer out with the bred cow?”

“Yes, she [the steer] was by the chicken pen.”

To Be continued.

If not me, who? If not now, when?

I come to bury Facebook, not to praise it. Herein I offer sundry reasons for our separation.
1. My children. I don’t want my five children spending much time in digital social networks. It is harder to retract than it is to abstain from FB.

2. The entrenchment of uncommunication. When I was a lad, my parents and their friends would tell us that we should turn off the video games and “rediscover the art of conversation”. Facebook seems to provide the ingredients for just this thing, but somehow the alchemy does just the opposite. Instead of the art of conversation, there turns up a certain artless series of comments. Conversation is reduced to poorly devised thoughts buttressed by an eternal regression of informative web links.

It doesn’t have to be so. For a number of years I’ve enjoyed the company of a dozen or so friends in an email forum. (Two of them are actually FB friends). Via simple email, mostly in a lo-tech “dial up” digital connection, sturdy conversation is created, bringing friends together from as disparate locations as Texas, Costa Rica, Pennsyvania, Ontario, Guatemala and Florida. We call this forum “The Campfire” because digitally we are able to do what campfires enable: thoughtful social interchange, otherwise known as the art of
Conversation.

The promise of connecting that Facebook usage portends simply becomes a facile surrogate for genuine communion. I would drive hundreds of miles to visit with my FB friends, just so long as they don’t show me funny pictures of kittens, politicians or food. But FB connections have rarely resulted in in-the-flesh table talk, unfortunately.

3. Lack of personal control of the distribution of my content. This is a long way to say “censorship and surveillance”. FB controls the flow of information that appears on your screen. Not everything you write gets sent to your friends, and that is after taking the various restrictions and tiered lines of communication set up by users into consideration. Further, your communication is monitored; FB also encourages other users to monitor your communication. Your comments are subject to scrutiny based on key word usage, inclusion of certain persons within your social network, etc. by your comments (which might not see the light of day) you are categorized by FB and marketed to businesses and governments.

4. Facebook profits from your enrollment. They set advertising rates by the number of users and the details of their comments and personal info. I don’t really like that.

Ranching: The Basis of Sorrow

It’s no wonder that country music is sterotypically melancholy.

On Saturday, I broke my 7 year hiatus and again took up the art of ranching. Right now, we are running approximately one head, to use rancher parlance. That’s down from Saturday’s seven-year high of 2 head. Yes, within hours of beginning ranching anew, one head of cattle had already died.

We live on 28 acres, most of which is open fields of coastal grass. Over the summer, we partitioned off a 2 acre lot with barbed wire, gates, animal stalls and water tanks. I still have plans to reinvigorate the old shallow water well near the pens, but as of now, we are going to limp along with the 150 ft garden hose. We are prepared for winter with lots of hay from the field and a minimal amount of cattle knowledge from years past.

So, down to the auction (auwshkin, according to the 3 yr old) we went- “we” being me and four young children. That’s an adventure in itself, but suffice it to say that we came home much poorer with a 4 yr old bred beef cow and a 500 pound steer. The steer we planned to eat in a few months, after it doubled in size; the cow we plan to keep as a calf producer. The cow is scheduled to calve in late March, which is perfect for beginner ranchers: fresh grass and warm weather in abundance.

An hour after penning the creatures, my son came inside with news that the cows were out of their pen. Acute buyer’s remorse exploded within me, only to quickly give way to the more natural machismo of my inner cowboy. To be continued…

The Uncertainty of Setting Forth

You see it from time to time: people wondering on Facebook if they should cancel their Facebook account. “Friends” then leave two different kinds of comments. One kind expresses sympathy with the interest in canceling the account. “Yeah, I know what u mean. It’s so vapid sometimes. And I think I can get through life without knowing what your breakfast looks like. LOL!” Another kind reveals a dependence on the person’s important place in the Facebook world. “Awwww, don’t leave! I love your posts! I print them out and disperse them at work…. Uh, let me know if that’s ok.”

Ominously absent are the voices of the Facebookless. These people would add a third opinion, if they only had opportunity to share it. “Yeah, you might be able to get by. LOL!! Stay disconnected for a few weeks and see the world open up. If you don’t like it, you can always jump back into the stream of ads, likes and surveiled dialogue.”

Anyway, I’m canceling my account. Like the American colonists in 1776, I sense that I should give a declaration for the reasons of this action. I’m just not sure which should be my top concerns. Any suggestions? And what about suggestions of what to do with myself now?