We’ve never formally met. But almost any night, some time between three and four an almost tangible presence enters my room. Clouds part, thoughts flow. Diffuse notions coalesce. I am overcome with a creative impulse as ideas rush toward me from all directions. My neurologist has referred me to a sleep specialist, however, so it may be the muse will pass me by.

One motivation for this blog has been an attempt to reconstruct the simple ideas that drove the beginning of the Agincourt Project. Hindsight shows me a random series of events, complex interactions, and unpredictable consequences that created the 2007 exhibit (far more successful than I could have hoped) and the somewhat disappointing (from my point of view, though friends have tried to convince me otherwise) exhibit of 2015, which certainly had its moments — Daron Hagen and Matthew Peterson and their interpreters deserve the musical credit, while Dan Salyards, Christopher Meyer, Mr Vandervort, and a wood craftsman who prefers to remain anonymous gave us  important artifacts I could only imagine.

The muse’s continuing visits have generated new ideas that keep me busy, though few of them will see completion. Still, there is much here to occupy the rest of my creative time. Whatever unfulfillment I feel comes from the project’s ability to generate interest and even enthusiasm, but not actual engagement.

I forget, people have lives.

I wonder how Archers — that’s what the citizens of Agincourt call themselves — may be celebrating Pride this weekend. Would we need Gay Pride if there had been no Gay Shame?

Howard was accidentally present at the first same-sex marriage in Fennimore County, though his column about it has been lost when the original blog shut down and I failed to transfer everything. Somewhere there may be a back-up file. For Iowans, the story  begins with Varnum v. Brien, a lawsuit filed by six couples who had been denied marriage licenses. The 2007 decision in County Court was upheld unanimously by the Iowa Supreme Court on 03 April 2009. Licenses became available statewide on the 27th and Agincourt’s first ceremony took place not long after in a back booth at The Periodic Table restaurant. The ceremony was conducted by Rev Candace Varenhorst from Asbury United Methodist. I’ll hunt for Howard’s piece, because the vows were memorable.

Iowa’s court-based acceptance of same-gender marriage was joined by Minnesota’s legislative decision on 14 May 2013 and the first statewide marriage celebrations took place at midnight on August 1st. [We were there!] Ultimately Obergefell v. Hodges made marriage equality the Law of the Land. But if you thought the battle has been won, think again.

While no minister of the gospel has been forced to perform a same-sex ceremony — not one — clerks-of-court, justices-of-the-peace, and judges have refused to perform their secular duties based on sincerely-held religious beliefs [marriages are civil ceremonies; only weddings are religious]. Though public acceptance continues to rise, the issue is far from settled. Given its complexity (and the demographics of Iowa’s Fourth Congressional District, represented by the Hon. Steve King), the day may not have gone smoothly.

While Agincourt doesn’t yet have a “Westboro,” there are conservative Christian denominations that not only refuse to accept the principle; they work to undo the progress that has been made:

• Is there an LDS stake? The Mormon church has contributed millions to legal efforts to fight marriage equity.
• For every UCC, UMC, UU and Episcopalian who supports gender equity, there are at least two Missouri or Wisconsin Synod Lutherans, miscellaneous Pentecostals, or Southern Baptists who take the opposing view — and put their money behind it.
• Father Dorffman at Christ-the-King probably doesn’t tow the party line, like so many of his Progressive predecessors (Bishop Nickless to the contrary), so let’s hope he doesn’t get found out.

So how Proud were my Archers?

SU⋅DO⋅KU

Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru (数字は独身に限る), which can also be translated as “the digits must be single” or “the digits are limited to one occurrence.” —Wikipedia

As the only child of an only child; as the consequence of a divorce unusual in the 1950s (Roy got custody after Marge evaporated into a warm spring night and was never seen again), I became a feral child. Now, at seventy-one years of age — sixty-three of them in this feral state — I try to explain me to myself, without success. One thing is clear: because humans (one of them in particular) had proven unreliable, I chose instead the comforting company of numbers; indeed, as a Capricorn, that disposition was present from birth.

Numbers were a refuge from human relationships. [Duplicity was a word I learned years later.] Mother was gone and dad had about as much experience with children as I’d had with parents, next to none, so much so that our relationship became a living laboratory. The realization that numbers held a special fascination came in fifth grade in the person of Veronica Piper.

Miss Piper was a teacher in the classic sense; what I call a “secular nun.” Women of her generation “came of age” facing a stark choice: marriage and family OR career; one could simply not do both. And the career choices were severely limited: secretary/stenographer, nurse, teacher, or nun.

In her fifth-grade classroom, I answered to the name “Roy” for fifty minutes each morning because she had taught my father. I hadn’t wondered until recently about the mathematics of our trinary relationship, given that there were twenty-eight years difference between my father’s age and mine. How could she have taught us both? Genealogical records reveal that she had been born in 1913 and was, therefore, just four years older than dad, which means his class must have been one of her very first. No wonder he had made an impression.¹

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry. — Bertrand Russell

For an hour each day, Miss Piper drilled us in what might have been the Paris Island of mathematics, though I never regarded it in terms of Marine boot camp. Rather, I saw it as an introduction to the universe of numbers, what Einstein saw as “the poetry of logical ideas.” No other subject in my primary education seemed so natural, so innate, as though an echo of something already known but half forgotten. No, let me amend that: Art was equally “familiar,” I think now because it also concerns the primacy of pattern; the recognition that universal, underlying ordering systems exist in two, three, and even four dimensions.

Any success I have had in life, I owe to the “parenting” of many people. Most of them were unrelated to me. Veronica Piper was one of them.

¹Veronica Piper died in 2003 at the age of ninety. I have thought of her often since our time together circa 1956 and regret not having found here in retirement to express my gratitude for the discipline she had imposed on my thinking. I wonder only now if her second Ramsey had met the standard set by the first.