I come from the heartland, I live in New York
The Column: 03.04.22
Now that we know the State of the Union is good and we’re into Lent, one should examine the State of the Soul, I suppose, but all I can think of are the dumb things I’ve done in my life, for which I hold an all-time record, hands down, shoes laced together. That is why I never looked for a shrink: they don’t deal with cluelessness; it is beyond them. I come from a family of capable people but I’ve ingested the wrong animal fats or maybe my pillow is too hard. I don’t know. Literally, I don’t.
I remember soul-searching when I was a boy, sitting under ferocious preaching in our evangelical church (we called it a Meeting to distinguish ourselves from the Papists), and the sermons were about imminent death and I imagined dying in a car crash, bomb explosion, sinking ship, and being ushered into Eternity and I wanted to accept Jesus as my Savior, but I felt it should be a tumultuous emotional moment with weeping in a prostrate heap, and not simply checking the “Yes” box, and I didn’t know how to make myself sincerely tumultuous so I doubted my own salvation. Now I’m old and never think about death and feel gratitude for God’s grace though I don’t claim to understand it. My weeping is due to nostalgia at old hymns such as “Standing On The Promises,” which we Episcopalians don’t sing but we sing songs that remind me of it.
I live in New York as an accommodation of my wife who likes it here, and I recently came across a gospel preacher in Times Square, a Black man holding a big Bible the size of a bread loaf with a voice like a bass trombone and I appreciated his dedication to his lonely calling. And then I attended to my calling, which was to sit in a big reading room of the public library and write, surrounded by students at laptops, many of whom I guess are children of immigrants, an archetypal American scene. I love being in their midst.
Mostly, however, I write at home so I can read my stuff aloud to my wife who’s reading about Putin’s criminal aggression against Ukraine. If I can make her laugh, when she has him on her mind, then I know it’s good. (Does Vlad know that “poot” is an American child’s word for farting? Does it mean the same in Russian? And why is it the middle syllable of “computer”?) But I digress.
I passed a café the other day with a sign in the window, “No Laptops,” which I tried not to take personally but of course I can understand that cafés want good eaters, not struggling writers who’d come in and order a cup of hot water and bring their own tea bag and occupy space for two hours to work on their mournful memoir about growing up with an unmarried Mennonite mom in Menomonie. Nonetheless, why welcome customers with a warning? The no-laptop rule suggests that maybe newspaper reading is off the table or checking the phone for email. It also suggests that if you misuse a nonrestrictive clause, the waiter may step over and correct you.
I was cured of writing mournful memoirs by meeting readers of mine, one advantage of having a tiny audience, and many of them are teaching third grade, which is exhausting work, or they’re therapists listening all day to depressed patients, which is depressing, or they work for executive vice presidents and resist the temptation to spit in his coffee, and so I set aside my memoir, This Strange Persistent Pain In My Lower Back, and I put the poot in Putin and this amused her. She had just returned from a long walk in Central Park where, she reported, a bird had pooped on her black jacket and she went to wash it. New York is a major flyway and the Park attracts birdwatchers from all over, you hear Arabic and Slavic and French and German, and inevitably a bird flies over and makes its mark on us. Accept it as a blessing.
My Ukrainian friend Peter Ostroushko didn’t live to see this moment of history, but I think of him often, and if you have a few minutes you could Google Pete playing “Heart of the Heartland” on YouTube and think of Russian tanks closing in on that mandolin player, and it will break your heart in two. As for the other stuff, history, culture, politics, economics, you’ll have to ask someone else.
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On sale at 11AM CT today. For Tickets.
So sorry your show in Newark, Ohio was cancelled last night. I was so looking forward to it. Since I would be missing crowd singing with you I stood on my front porch and belted out "The Star Spangled Banner" in your honor. Possibly my neighbors thought it a one woman protest over the situation in the Ukraine, but they probably became confused when I segued to "I Saw Here Standing There," and other songs you help your audience sing. Be well my friend.
As a Russian-speaking American, I welcomed the opportunity to become a member of a Ukrainian Pentecostal church when I retired to upstate New York. In the Millennial year, my pastor's wife and one of their sons invited me to visit the Ukraine with them. We flew into Kiev. I got to talk with a prison commandant on my visit to the prison missionary I was sponsoring in Kharkiv. - Despite my grammatical errors, he preferred deciphering me to allowing Vladik to possibly "edit" my words. We found we had a topic in common - former soldiers from the conflicts in Southeast Asia. As a whole, no matter which "foreign" uniform they were wearing, their involvement in Afghanistan or Vietnam led to serious readjustment problems once they returned home.
When I hear these cities mentioned, I recall being there. In Kiev, we drove down avenues with block after block of huge apartment buildings - six stories tall or so, a patio for every residence, and several hundred tenants - each sharing a communal toilet down the end of the hall. I remember horror stories of dwellers being killed by the icicles falling down from the roof onto the entrance way. And I recall the pride Vladik registered as he showed me a "root cellar" he had dug beneath his patio, to use as a cool storage place. He felt lucky to have a ground floor apartment, so he and his wife could have this "extra perk!" Of course, it also meant that there was a lot of pedestrian traffic outside their door, since the main exit to the building was nearby.
And I remember the huge billboard across the square that we passed each time we left the area. The sponsor, I think, was a German beverage company, advertising something like Sprite. A man tipping his head back stuck out his tongue, a green, spiny cactus at least a handspan long, as if to catch the every last drop of the contents of the bottle tipped toward him in his hand. I couldn't imagine such a picture gracing Times Square in New York. GROSS!
I think of the people I met in the Ukraine and wonder how they are getting along today. Those who live in the countryside, like Katya's mother and sister, are probably making do. It seemed to me that they lived as close to the land as those in "A Little House on the Prairie," 150 years ago in America. Katya's mother, when she had finished milking the cow, took glass bottles of milk to the village store and returned with a bag of flour. She fattened a pig to be butchered in the fall. The cured meat would then be stored in the underground hole that was the equivalent of a cold storage unit. The carrots and potatoes from their communal yard would last all winter. Katya's sister roamed the nearby woods and collected edible mushrooms which she then strung up to dry and add flavoring to meals all winter. The berries they picked ended up is jars as syrup.
Folks in cities like Kharkiv also had "rural options." As we drove into town, there were miles and miles of hillsides marked off in small plots - maybe a quarter acre each - and accessed by bus service from the urban areas. Folks with rural backgrounds were eager to grow strawberries, carrots, peas and beans - fresh fruits and vegetables to supplement their diets. With the Russians on the roads to Kiev, it could be that hundreds of families won't be able to take busses out to their plots, and get those seeds planted for this year's table. We hear about the military action on the news. But it seems to me that whole lifestyles will be disrupted by Putin's aggressions!