Sunday morning meds from Psalm 32

 “. . .surely when the mighty waters rise, they will not reach him.”

I’ve been to Japan, studied Shintuism a bit, and not been seduced.  I’ve listened to ex-Buddhists describe their childhood faith but never felt much inclined to Buddhism either.  Native American religion interests me greatly, but I’m not about to jump into a breech cloth or a sweat lodge—well, maybe a sweat lodge.

 Last week, our preacher said the first commandment—to worship no other gods—is often a piece of cake if we think of Mohammed, for instance, or Buddha as God’s rivals.  He’s right. Most Christian believers aren’t tortured by their closet animism. 

 The god most of us really want to worship, our preacher said, is ourselves.  Pride is the first of the Seven Deadlies, and it has been since someone wrote up the list, since Adam and Eve wanted the apple God forbade, and since the instinct-like will to live was born in each of us.  We want what’s best for us—for better or for worse. The god God almighty doesn’t want us to worship is the glorious, omnipotent Me.

 I say that because I don’t always trust David. I trust the Word that emerges from his songs. I trust the God he trusts. I trust the truth of the scriptures themselves. But I don’t always trust him, and I don’t because, in this psalm at least, I think he’s protecting himself, like all of us do. Why shouldn’t he?  He’s human. 

 Psalm 32 starts so very well—a clear sense of intent, the thesis, proudly and yet lovingly proclaimed in the opening verses.  Then the story central to all believers, told well, convincingly, in the next four verses: he sings for joy because he’s been—hallelujah!—forgiven of his sins and miseries.

 Then things get messy. What he says next is understandable: Given what I’ve been through, he says, I hope all of you experience what I did of the glorious freedom of grace.  Fine. And then, “if you can.”  Odd sentiment, suggesting, of course, that our timing—or worse, God’s—could be off. Things may not work out. Strangely undercuts his enthusiasm, doesn’t it?  And then, “surely.” I don’t like where that word is positioned because it feels tentative—“surely you’ll not be harmed in danger.” Surely. Surely.  

 And then “you are my hiding place.”  Is David, post-Bathsheeba, post forgiveness, looking for a place to hide?  “You will protect me from trouble”???  From more Uriahs?  The great problems of the opening verses were not caused by enemies tearing down palace walls; they were created totally by destruction, pride as much as lust, David’s fierce desire to serve the great God of self—my wants, my needs, my sweet Bathsheeba.

 Even though he begins this psalm with triumph, there’s some shakiness.. He’s sure God’s forgiveness is the greatest thing that ever happened to him, he wants to sing his joy; but there’s a tentativeness in verses six and seven that has him pressing for words and even losing focus. He’s not even as sure as he’d like to sound. He’s not lying, but he sounds more like a salesman than a devout. 

 But then that very oh-so-human tenderness may be his greatest gift to believers thousands of years later, to us—that gift being that he sounds like we do.  Human.  Sometimes confident, sometimes not, sometimes wanting to be more confident than he is.  Sometimes even when we wants like mad to get it right, he gets it wrong.  So much like us. 

And—get this--still so much loved by the Lord. 

Rev. Tony Van Zanten (1935-2025)

It could be that I have no place in the commemoration, but something in me says that I do. The two of us hail from the same background, although I was never, as he was, a farm kid from northwest Iowa. But we were and are generational members of the same ethnic and religious tribe. We know and own the same culture markers--views of the Sabbath, the importance of Sunday worship, the sacraments, just two of them; we both have a Dordt diploma. Both of us have families who came to America from the 19th century Netherlands.

I honestly have no memories of him--of his reputation, yes, certainly, but of him, none. If I hadn't seen his pictures on the obits I picked up on the internet, I wouldn't have known what Rev. Tony Van Zanten looked like.

All of that having been said, I knew of him, knew, greatly, of him, knew him as a man who'd given his life for inner city ministry, mostly in Roseland, Illinois, a place largely abandoned by another band of 19th century immigrant Dutch, who found the Great Migration of African-American refugees from the American South too difficult to handle and therefore pulled up stakes and left for distant western and southern suburbs of Chicago.

Except Rev. and Mrs. Tony Van Zanten. They didn't leave. They came to Roseland precisely because of the people from the Great Migration. They came because a couple Iowa farm kids--Tony, from Rock Valley, his loving spouse Donna from Kanawha--decided somewhere in or around a stay in Harlem that inner city ministries was for them. They stayed. They put down roots. They loved and were loved.

Rev. Tony's death reminded me of a story that was, in all likelihood, vintage Tony Van Zanten. I wrote and directed a theater piece that told the history of the denomination in which both of us--all three of us, all four of us really, my wife too-- held membership, a theater piece, if I may say so, that was dearly beloved by a generation just a bit older than my own, a generation of the same tribe. Because it was so loved, the denomination determined to keep that theater piece around historically, so they found a place for a performance that could double as a stage for a video of the entire show--a high school performance hall on the west side of Chicago. 

Must have been a strange performance to witness because every few minutes the stage director would move the cameras or tell the cast to do the scene over again to get it right. 

That one-night event--staging and shooting--was very well attended, even though it was neither fish nor foul. But if you have access to a video of the show sometime, it's difficult not to notice that when the camera pans the crowd it picks up a row of four African-American men, maybe the only black faces in the crowd that night. Honestly, I didn't even notice them until I saw the video.

I got a letter from Rev. Tony Van Zanten sometime later. I may still have it, although a flood took out lots of those things from file drawers. I remember being shocked to read the return address was Rev. Tony because even though I don't think I ever met him, I most certainly knew of him. We had many mutual friends. During most of my life, few members of our tribe were as beloved as Rev. Tony for his peculiar and successful ministry.

The letter--handwritten--was maybe three pages long. It explained how he'd picked up four men from Roseland Christian Ministries, and told them he wanted them to come with him to this performance of sorts happening across town. He explained that he didn't tell them much about what they were going to see, but the five of them had hopped in the church van and made it to the performance hall in time to see the whole thing.

He wanted to see what they would think, he told me. He wanted to take four inner-city men along to the history of the very white CRC just to see what they would think. 

When it was over, he was thrilled, he said, because they loved it--not because of its spiritual content or because it offered a full gallery of music with which to sing along, although those things were part of its success. 

They were taken by the story, he said, because they never, ever presumed that the white members of the denomination that sponsored Roseland Christian Ministries were ever, ever poor. They had no idea. They only white people they knew, Pastor Tony told me in that letter, were, by their estimation, unimaginably rich. They had no idea that once upon a time they were dirt poor. 

That note stays with me, not simply because these four African-American guys really liked the show but because the show had presented an image of the white people they likely knew best as church people of limited means, almost half of whom had died in their first winter on Lake Michigan. 

He was thrilled because the story on stage had shaken them into a new and broader vision of members of Rev. Tony's church, and that's what Rev. Tony wanted me to know--that a show about Dutch immigrant ruffians, cultural inquisitors who loved nothing better than theological fencing, had made them readjust their perceptions of the white folks who came to Roseland Christian Ministries.

In all likelihood, that letter was swept away in the flood, but it's stored deeply in my heart, a story I've never told. 

Rev. Tony Van Zanten died on December 15, just a couple of weeks ago. 

There are hundreds of Rev. Tony stories. I have just one, a story I've never forgotten.

Should you care to visit his funeral service, there's a live stream available here.

Like Saints

When it came time to play them, we couldn't help wonder what the Catholics were thinking when they named the school "Immaculate Conception." Weird. If you're a sixth grade boy just about everything has something to do with sex. That Catholic school's weird name, whatever it meant, was about something good Christian boys had no business thinking about out loud, and the kids from that school plastered it on their uniforms? Seriously?

But we played 'em, weird name or not. As far as I remember, no teacher or coach from our school ever said much about the name. "Okay, guys, tomorrow we'll line up against 'Immaculate Conception.'" I don't think we giggled. It's just that when you thought about it a little--well, you know: it was something like foreskins and circumcision and all of that embarrassing stuff. When you're twelve, it's just weird that you'd say those words out loud.

When you leave the Raphael Rooms of the Vatican Museums, massive frescos that fill every square centimeter of your consciousness, you follow the flow into another space so laden with life-sized art you don't know where to look first because you're sure you'll miss something. And you will. 

Anyway, there she was, Mary mother of Jesus, Virgin Mary, in a bigger-than-life statue and surrounded by massive frescoes featuring dozens, even hundreds of human figures, some with addresses in this world, some, clearly, very much at home in the next.

It's the Room of the Immaculate Conception, and while I'd long ago come to understand the phrase in a 7th grade-boy way, I never took the time to think much, really, about the adoration of Mary, except in a very Protestant way--as silly. In this immense room, everything was the Immaculate Conception, not the divine act itself (although a score of artists have taken a shot at that), but the act's honored and historic place in Roman Catholic dogma and culture. 

In the huge wall behind the statue features two worlds. The world below is Rome--the Vatican, Pope and Cardinals all aligned for the celebration of the formal acceptance of the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The world above features heaven (far left) and that other brimstone place (far right, where the sinners are, at this moment, falling from grace). Fig-leafed Adam and guilt-ridden Eve are on the cloud, upper right, Adam seemingly protecting his sinful mistress. 

But at the heart of the Heaven is the Trinity. There's a dove (the Holy Spirit) above Mary's head (she's in blue, traditionally), and she stands (while Christ and the Father sit) just a bit lower in foreground. Telling placements.

For centuries, the Roman Catholic church had accepted the belief that Mary was not only a virgin, but also, alone of all mankind, sinless. Not until 1854 did her divinity become defined as Catholic dogma, an act signed into canon law by Pope Pius IX. That moment is prominently featured in the center of the fresco, the Pope standing before his throne, surrounded by Cardinals, all of which makes this particular room, the Room of the Immaculate Conception, of far more recent vintage (1860s) than the Rafael Rooms next door (300 years older). The paint is still wet. 

Rome didn't make me any more Roman Catholic than I ever was, but for two weeks 

I was most definitely more of a disciple of that whole world than I'd ever been. Somehow the visual grace, art that attracts millions annually, helped me understand far more than I ever had about the historic church, even has me smiling in a whole new way at those grade school kids with that weird name printed on their basketball uniforms. 

It really, really was a big deal. That big, in fact.

I never had a problem with that wonderful last line of the Luke 2 story--"and Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart" (NIV), nor did i ever fume about her remarkable--"divine"--compliance to the angel's bizarre directives a chapter earlier: "May it happen to me according to your word,” she says at the angel's annunciation. She's what?--13 maybe, and she's about to be pregnant while unmarried, and, as yet, untouched in any ordinary ways.

The Lord God almighty knew what he was doing when he picked Mary out of the gallery. He wanted--and he got--someone who'd do whatever had to be done. "Of course," she could have said. "When should I write it in my calendar?"

But just last night, we listened to Rev. Andrew Kuyvenhoven point us at the strangely, and equally compliant husband-to-be, who likely understood he was going to have to fib to get this one through the ringer.

They're hardly human, those two. They get visited supernaturally--who's to say it wasn't just a bizarre dream?--and just like that, they fold, both of them. "Sure, Lord God," they say. "When does this whole thing begin?"

"How about this?" the Creator might have told them--"at the beginning of time,'"

I doubt that would have stopped them either. They just trust too much. They're like saints.

 

A Prayer for the Dead -- vi

Technically, the story is over when Bea ponders the star her mother deliberately placed beneath the linoleum cover they put on their kitchen table. At that point, Bea had begun to wonder whether she'd lived her life in the right way with respect to her missionary parents. That moment was the technical climax of the story.

The writer (that's me) has to make sure, as sure as my artistic sense will allow, that my readers come to see that, once this Christmas night is behind them, something big and basic will have changed in the way that Bea remembers her parents and sees the world. 

I've got to use that star.

_____________________  

She pulled her jacket over her shoulders, looking back at the dead baby, a gift for her blessed parents [she means that sarcastically, of course]. She stepped outside where Shorty was already waiting, and when he opened the door, she saw a bottle of beer between his legs. She pulled herself into the Pontiac and stared back at the porch light. It was the same car she would drive back from California herself a year later, alone and penniless, their little Frank, hungry, in the front seat beside her. 

What she'd done, Char had said. [She hasn't forgotten her daughter's accusation.] 

She put the cap back on the stripper and tossed the steel wool in the garbage, still holding the star. She'd had enough of refinishing for Christmas Eve. It was a holiday. There'd be more to get off and the legs to do before the dark cherry stain could reach into the old surface and pull out all the edges of the grain. 

She took Myron's flannel work-shirt off her shoulders and hung it from a nail, then used the rubber gloves to pick up the soggy steel wool and drop it in the can beside the door. She kicked clean newspapers over the clots of stripper that had dropped to the floor from the table, and rubbed the back of her hand over the clean wood. She walked over to the door and looked outside over the neighbor's fence at Christmas lights down the street where families stayed together [a bit of jealousy here]. 

She went inside and plugged in the coffee with her left hand and opened the refrigerator to a cake pan of brownies she'd made just that afternoon for Char. She slipped open the silverware drawer with her little finger and took out a paring knife, then carried the fudge back to the kitchen table, the medallion in the same hand as a paper plate she took from the counter. Behind her, the coffee maker snorted. It would be ready for Myron later. 

What would she do with the star? [That's the question I'm facing when I'm here in the writing of the story.] She sat at the table and laid it in front of her. Someone had lifted it finally from its secret place. It wasn't hidden anymore. She had to do something with it--her mother's desert star. 

She sliced through the pan of brownies in perfect squares, lifted one from the pan and ate it from the spatula, then took another piece from the pan and laid it on the edge of the dinner plate, then another and another. When she filled the plate with two circles of fudge, she reached up for wax paper to cover the bottom layer, then started in on more. 

It didn't really belong here in this house, she thought. Her mother had buried it for some reason she might never know or understand, stuck it away like a secret, and now it was unearthed. She reached in the junk drawer and found a piece of red thread, then poked the end through the weave of the star and held it up to dangle like a Christmas ornament. It needed to hang somewhere, she thought. Char already had the table. She could keep it herself, she thought--something from her mother, something from the grandma Char said she'd never had. [I'm running through some possibilities.]  

She emptied the pan, she ripped another piece of wax paper from the roll and covered the brownies completely. It was her mother's star, she thought, her mother's secret, something she would never under­stand, and her mother deserved it now, in the Indian way, part of herself, a memorial. [I've figured it out, but the mystery remains for you, I hope.] 

She left a note for Myron that said she loved him and not to wait up because she'd be back all right and she'd tell him about it in the morn­ing. Then she drove out of town, past the lights and the traffic until the city was a glowing dome in the darkness behind her and the edges of the mountains seemed a shroud thrown down at the horizon to cover stars in the dark desert sky. She knew she could find their graves in the darkness because they would be the only uncluttered stones in the cemetery, the only sites not decorated with offerings for the dead. She could find them. She had never been there before-even though she should have been, never having said good-bye, never really letting go. [She's bound for her parents' graves in a cemetery at the mission.]

Peter had said there were so many of them at the funeral, but there would be no one there at Christmas. She could leave the star with a plate full of brownies because her parents' graves should be honored for the holiday, she told herself, decorated in the Indian way to look a part of the world that they'd sacrificed so much of themselves to save, she thought, even their children.  

_____________________________ 

And that's why. Let's just step lightly through this last part of the story. 

She had never been there before-even though she should have been, never having said good-bye, never really letting go. ["Should have been," she tells herself. This self-criticism is new; the Bea at the beginning of the story would not have incriminated herself that way.]

Peter had said there were so many of them at the funeral, but there would be no one there at Christmas. [Way back when, this friend of mine told me he hadn't really stopped resenting his parents until he saw the many Native folks who came for the funeral. When he noticed specifically who his parents had given their lives for, he was overwhelmed, even thrilled. I bring it back here to suggest that Bea was equally moved by her brother's report.] She could leave the star with a plate full of brownies [this is a very Native thing to do, which is why Bea adopts the idea. If she puts the plate of brownies alongside the star, it will likely be the only decorations on her parents' graves--and her parents' graves may well be the only stones left undecorated since her parents' views of the afterlife differ clearly from Native rites and rituals. Protestant Christians don't "pray for the dead." Bea puts those things on her parents' grave on Christmas Eve because she blesses them, in all likelihood for the first time in her life.] because her parents' graves should be honored for the holiday, she told herself, decorated in the Indian way to look a part of the world that they'd sacrificed so much of themselves to save, she thought, even their children [ouch, but that she says it makes her just as human as you or I].  

A Prayer for the Dead -- v

If we were to analyze the arc of the story via traditional means, we could say, right now, that the story itself--the conflict that pushes it--is over. The story is finished because Bea has changed. She isn't who she was when the story began. For the first time in years, this Christmas Eve, Bea is allowing herself the space to think that maybe, just maybe, she had judged her mother and her mother's life too rigidly. Maybe her mother wasn't the pariah she'd built her to be in her mind, her memory, and her imagination.

But there needs to be more--the bit of story structure English teachers call the denouement, the untying or the "un-knot" of the story. Stories begin with knots, with tangled lines or messed-up conflicts. When those conflicts unravel, things get straightened out. 

Now, the writer--me--has to figure out how to artfully untie the knot--the major conflicts present in the story.

The first paragraph of this last section is rife with possibilities--she's pregnant, her parents don't know yet, and she's met at the door by a woman who brings a dead baby.

Such things happened frequently in the early days of the mission. Navajos had long nursed a deep fear of the dead, so much trauma, in fact, that they would bring dead bodies to the missionaries to take care of things; they knew that, for whatever reason, white people didn't harbor that fear. 

That's what's happening in the flashback Bea now explains.

 _____________________ 

The last prayer she'd spoken aloud she'd delivered over a dead baby brought by a Navajo woman to the mission house on a night both her parents were doing camp visits somewhere beneath the open desert sky. She'd come home herself earlier that afternoon without telling them she was on her way because she was pregnant with Frank, by Shorty Toledo. They knew about him-and she'd come home to tell them she was leaving with him, quitting the boarding school. 

It was 1946 and Shorty had come back from the war in his uniform, wild. She was seventeen, and when she'd come in the back door, bold and rebellious, she'd found the countertop stacked with empty cake pans and cookie sheets, and the Bible in its place on the table, its black covers worn away from the pages. She'd run through the house when no one answered her calls, thrown open the closet doors upstairs as if she would find her parents hiding from her, then slammed them shut behind her. 

She'd been home for an hour, maybe more, sitting on the steps, cry­ing in anger, when the bell rang. Some Navajos were afraid of evil spirits still inhabiting the dead. It had happened before. The front bell would ring and some woman would be standing there in silence, her long, pleated dress tossing softly in the breeze. If she would ask her father to come out to bury the dead, sometimes he would build a coffin in the horse barn while her mother packed extra clothes, baby clothes. 

"If Mother Van is not here," the woman had said, "then you will take him?" She nodded toward the bundle in her arms and held it out to her. "Pray now, please," the woman said. "Pray for my child. So Bea had taken the body, stiff beneath the blankets, and prayed then and there on the front steps, some chanted memory prayer that came to her in anger and remorse, pagan too, her father would have said-a prayer for the dead. She spoke only a few repeated words because she knew the woman needed only to hear supplication from the Anglo girl on the porch, Mother Van's own daughter. When she opened her eyes, the woman smiled, then started back up the road, leaving the body. 

[Bea's prayer was hardly that; yet, it's clear to her that it was just what this mourning young mother needed.]

She was seventeen, pregnant, full of silly plans. She came down off the steps and walked to the gate at the front of the yard, the weight of death in her arms, then ran a ways up the road. But the Indian woman set herself resolutely into the night, her agony gone. It would be useless to try to give the baby back, a betrayal. 

It was spring and the night's mellow warmth promised the summer that was surely to come, the dark skies embedded with stars. The wail of coyotes broke the desert darkness, and amid the snarls of Indian dogs shivering through the stillness, she stood there hoping to see her parents' headlights emerge from the horizon of darkness, still holding a dead baby. A baby-and not a baby. The child, stiff and heavy in her arms, was nothing but cold weight, host to legions of evil spirits. She opened the blankets to a face that paled even in the darkness, its eyes closed, a shock of dark hair clumped over its pointed gray forehead. 

Her parents would want to know who: maybe Eloise, or Christine, or Francy? "Did you see her face-maybe the way she wore her hair?" her mother would say. "Who was in the family way?" her father would ask, frantically. "What do you remember-something to distinguish her clothing-some jewelry maybe?-a sash?" her mother would wonder, and the moment they would hazard a guess, they would leave to find the woman, to comfort the pain. 

The night was moonless, she remembered, as dark as night can be on the desert, the cottonwoods behind the mission house full of mournful owls. She'd held the body with her left arm and gone into the house, pushed the light switches with her right hand until she got to the kitchen, where she laid it down, the blankets closed up tight around its face. When she looked out the window, she saw lights finally coming up the road. She glanced at the clock and knew it would be Shorty. 

She took a pencil from the kitchen drawer and some envelopes from between the pages of the Bible. "Mother," she scribbled in the margin, but even the word sounded wrong. She glanced again out toward the road. It had to be Shorty--he was coming too fast. How could she say what she had to? How could she explain why she was home? How could she tell them everything? "Mother," she wrote. "I was here and you two were gone." That was all.

____________________ 

One more bit to go, not much. 

"I was here and you two were gone" is a summary of what Bea believes her childhood to have been. This time, however, it's not a metaphor. She had so much to say and no one to say it to.

Prayer for the Dead — iv

There's a significant revelation in the next two paragraphs. You'll see it. Remember, what I want to do with this story is somehow bring Bea back to peace. It's an easy thing to do--just introduce the Holy Spirit. But if my writing is going to score with people who don't share my view of "revelation," I've got to make the shimmering moments glisten. I can't simply bring in the Big Guns: ". . .and there stood Jesus before her. . ."

It's Christmas Eve remember, and Bea is alone--not a night to be alone. Not only that, but she just got a tongue-lashing from her daughter. And now this little piece of homespun craft carefully sealed up beneath a layer of linoleum her parents had put there to prevent extra wear. 

___________________________________

Bea pulled her gloves up above the wrists and took two steel wool pads from the box on the shelf, balled them together for heft, then scoured a two-inch circle down to bare wood to see which direction the grain ran.

But if her mother had wanted to put the medallion out of her mind forever, she could have walked any direction from her back door and simply buried it—no one would ever have found it. She wouldn't have to slide it into an envelope and hide it beneath the surface of the
table she used every day. She wanted it there, Bea thought. She needed it there for some reason. Maybe late at night, her husband out on camp ministry, her own children miles away at the mission school, after a dozen Indian children had eaten her cake and listened to Bible stories, she could shut the door, steal a few moments alone here at the table, stretching her fingers over something like a fetish, an outline so faint she was the only one who knew it existed. Her mother the heathen. Maybe the two of them were more alike than she'd ever thought.

She stripped off the gloves, picked up the star, and studied the knots at each of the points, remembering how easily the shuttle flitted be­tween her mother's fingers as she turned out stitches so effortlessly that the whole action seemed instinct. Her shuttle was inlaid, she remembered, turquoise and something dark--maybe petrified wood. It might have been a gift, something from an Indian woman, almost certainly Indian-made.

She turned the star in her fingers. Maybe she never knew her mother at all.

She pulled a glove back on her hand and picked up the steel wool. Maybe if she were to find the tatting, she thought--that carpetbag her mother kept in the bottom drawer of the buffet--maybe there would be more. She looked up at the clock. She could still call Peter. It was early, and Myron would have lots more stops. She scoured the stripper she'd painted on the surface in firm scrapes, pushing it away from her and with the grain into globs thick with dirt and finish and scraps of the old adhesive, leaving bare wood beneath.

She found her brother's number penciled in the back of the book hanging by a shoestring from the phone. "Peter," she said when he finally picked up the receiver, "it's your sister. Listen, I know it's Christmas Eve, but I was wondering-" she stopped, trying to arrange a question she hadn't yet worded. "Mom used to do tatting."

"Bea," he said, "are you drunk?"

"No. Listen, she used to do tatting--remember?"

"Tatting," he repeated, not as a question.

"Fine little things, like doilies. She'd sit in the chair by the pole lamp-nights? You know those things she'd made to go on the arms of the sofa? Little handwork stuff, lace."

“Okay, okay,” he said.

"When you cleaned up her place, did you find that carpetbag, her sewing things--did you find a little shuttle? --she called it a shuttle. Silver ­inlaid, like Zuni stuff?"

"What's it look like?" he said.

"Thin, streamlined-like a lipstick tube, a little bigger--a spool in the middle. She'd wind the string around that spool--"

"I don't think I saw it," he said. "You want it?"

What could she say? When her father had died, Peter had asked whether there was anything of her parents she wanted, anything at all, and she had told him to give everything away, every last bit. "Dump what you can't sell," she'd told him.

"You okay, Sis? What's got into you?" he asked.

"I just wondered," she said.

"It must be worth something," he said.

"It is," she said.

"How much?"

“I just wondered if you saw it anywhere--tiny as a minnow, even shorter. Inlaid. She had it for years.”

He laughed. "How much is it worth, Bea?" he said.

"A lot."

'Tm down to one box, here--mostly little stuff. I gave away most of the sewing stuff. I could look, but if I'd have known that you wanted it--"

"Would you?" Bea asked him.

"Now?"

"Please?"

"It's Christmas Eve. How much is this gadget worth?"

"Trust me," she told him.

"Silver thing--inlaid. How big?"

"Thumb-size."

When he put down the phone, she heard the low pitch of adults laughing softly, interrupted by busy voices of children. A shuttle, it was second nature to her mother to use it. It would slip between her fingers almost as if it were alive, even while she was reading or talking. She cradled the receiver in her neck and held the star up before her eyes.

"I looked through everything I got here--you know, there's some stuff you might like, Bea. I know how you feel--"

"You don't have it?"

"There's really not much here anymore, you know. It's been three months since the funeral."

"You never saw it?"

"What're you getting for it anyway? Must be worth a mint."

"It's not that," Bea told him.

"Then what is it?"

Tell him, she thought, go on and tell him. "I want it myself, Peter," she said. "It's something of mother's, and I guess I just want it."

He was stunned, then chuckled a little. "Is that right? Christmas spirit or something?--you're sure you're not drinking?"

"I wondered if you had it," she said. "She used to work at nights sometimes, and that shuttle slipped through her fingers as if it were alive. When we were little-"

"I don't have it, sis," he said. "I wish I did, for your sake--and hers too."

''I know, I know," she said. 'Tm sorry."

"You are--really?"

'Tm sorry for not asking--"

"Oh," he said. "You wouldn't believe how much stuff I left there." There was laughter behind him. "I only wished you'd asked."

“I figured your daughter might like the table--it's an antique, you know?"

“I know—it’s here.”

"You’ll refinish it for her?"

She waited. "It's a lot of work," she told him. "I don't think I got the time."

She heard her brother breathe heavily over the phone. "Bea, you should have seen them at the funeral--all the people. They came from miles around. Seriously, hundreds of people. Remember how the folks used to spend years without seeing one new face in that little church?--years, Bea. Not one. If it was a business, they would have shut it down. But you should have seen the people. They came from all over the reservation--"

"Merry Christmas, Peter," she said.

He stopped, waited. "Same to you, sis," he told her.

She hung up the phone and looked at the star as if there were more to the mystery, more to her mother than she'd ever thought. Then she brought it up to her eyes in a fist.

_____________________ 

So this friend of mine, who was reared on the reservation, an MK (missionary kid) told me he was all of 35 before he could forgive his parents. And he knew the exact moment he could forgive them--it was at his father's funeral when literally hundreds of people showed up. He had had no idea. They were there for Rev. Van. All those people--all those Native folks--he couldn't believe it. Made him see so much of his life in a different, wider setting.

And now I have to write my way out of this story. There's already a new interest and sympathy, but there's the matter of that little embroidered thing she found buried beneath the linoleum and the hardwood beneath.

One more day.

Hope in the Longest Night

This edition of my weekly radio podcast Small Wonders (KWIT, Sioux City, IA, an NPR affiliate) has to rank as one my all-time favorites. It's seven years old, but it attempts to satisfy all kinds of people and their various ambitions for the holiday seasons we're beginning, or in, right now. 

I really do love this one.

Listen in here,