“A few figs from thistles…”

by Howard A. Tabor

“…the gift that goes on giving…”

As small-town newspapers like The Plantagenet withstand the digital assault, Mark Twain and paper share one important truth: Reports of their death have been exaggerated.

I got a letter yesterday, as an example — actual personal communication written on sheets of paper — from a friend in Minneapolis, which set me to locate my own writing supplies and organize my response. I shall craft it with care and deliberation during the next few days. Yes, this all takes time — gathering tools, structuring ideas and setting them on the page — but think it, rather, one of the finer gifts of friendship. Where, indeed, would the New Testament be without Paul’s compulsion to correspond [“correspond = to be in agreement,” according to my dictionary]?

One of the contradictions of letter-writing is its tactile intangibility. Electronic communication offers speed but ink on paper has greater presence and commands more attention; a different species of immediacy. For expressions of emotion, compassion, or consolation, we’re over-inclined to let Hallmark be our default. I prefer something personally composed, apropos the moment, handwritten: Letters of Protest or Resignation or Recommendation or Testimonial. Letters-to-the-Editor. Letters of Love or Farewell. In an envelope. With a stamp. [Do you miss stamps that required licking? I do.] The walk to the post office affords time for reflection; for reconsideration or amendment. And that last physical contact at the mail drop is a commitment like few others. My words are on their way. I have lobbed them across the metaphorical net.

Today’s letter arrived just as I was thinking about a different sort of commitment: the longer-term communication called The Book, whose demise has also been promised but remains contentiously unfulfilled. We have a few — books, that is — around our house and I want to tell my Minneapolis friend about one of them: WAH-TO-YAH and the Taos Trail, written by seventeen-year-old Lewis Garrard and published in 1850 when he was twenty-one; a narrative adventure in the early American West. Garrard’s words were made better (if that’s possible) because mine is the 1935 reprint by the Grabhorn Press, willed to me in 1959 by Hamish Brookes, Agincourt’s long-time purveyor of that other sort of paper, the gift that goes on giving, The Book. Brookes deserves a few more words but that will wait another day. In the meantime, you can read about him in Ghosts of Christmas Past #5.

[#784]

cru·ci·ble

“For he is like a refiner’s fire…” Malachi 3:2

“A few figs from thistles…”

by Howard A. Tabor

Ghosts of Christmas Past #12: Brother Crucible

Brother Crucible (seated) and his two companions had come to Agincourt in the early 1920s. This photo was taken in my great-grandmother’s garden.

The brothers were staying in great uncle Anson’s old apartment above the stable [a typical ecumenical gesture for a woman whose religiosity, for her generation, was demonstrably small-C catholic], humble quarters convenient to the three Agincourt projects they’d come to build.

Before taking vows, Brian Havergal Armitage of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, had been an undergraduate student of architecture but found the prospects of professional life dispiriting. “The people who need architectural services aren’t always the ones who can afford them,” he told his host Martha Tennant, eighty years before the starchitecture of our own time. So he left school, apprenticed as a carpenter, and joined the Franciscans, to share building skills with a different audience.

Crucible recruited Brothers Andrew and Jerome and approached their abbot with the idea of a constructional swat team, to serve the diocese in a pilot program. But sixteen months into their new calling—repairing God’s foundations and fascias—their reputation spread beyond central Pennsylvania; invitations came from New York and Indiana. Then came their ecumenical moment: Father Farber at St Ahab’s and his Episcopal counterpart Chilton Fanning Dowd pitched a three-part project to the Building Brothers.

Agincourt’s Roman and Anglican church buildings have resolutely ignored each other on East Agincourt Avenue for decades. Contrarily, their resident clergy have often been on far friendlier terms than their upper administrations: covering for one another; performing baptisms and weddings long before the Spirit of Vatican II took hold; even their choirs shared voices, regardless whether the hymns were unfamiliar.

But the Fathers Farber and Dowd were aging, and building maintenance is a problem at the best of times. So matters of rotting window frames, leaking roofs and such were beautifully resolved with a visit by the “Property Brothers”. Martha Tennant offered shelter in her stable loft and Mrs Breen fed them at Saint Ahab’s rectory.

On the job, you’d never guess they were in vocation; the three resembled any tradesman of the 1920s: capacious canvas pants and blue-stripped cotton shirts made from mattress ticking; well-worn brown boots and tool belts from the 19th century. And after work and dinner, a clandestine beer—whose origins were less clear than the beverage itself—completed the day.

The brothers broke the rhythm once, helping the Schutz family harvest their corn crop. And their last day in town—a Sunday—involved a barn dance and picnic, where we learned that Brother Andrew fiddled a respectable toe tapper.

Such were the ways of Agincourt ninety years ago, and such might be their way again, if we play our cards right.

“A few figs from thistles…”

by Howard A. Tabor

Ghosts of Christmas Past: Whitey

Long before it became a forbidden word—a simpler time when lightening bugs animated the night sky and cicadas made unholy racket; when being “It!” in a game of Kick the Can was the height of childhood sturm und drang—I knew a boy named Whitey.

It was the summer of 1954, about the middle of June. Andrea Dillon and her parents had come to Agincourt for the week; Andrea’s maternal grandparents the Enfield’s lived here, in a big cream-colored house north of Darwin school, and the Dillon’s came more regularly as their parents aged. This summer’s regularity was supplemented with a guest: Henry Malone, a.k.a. “Whitey.” Or was it Maloney?

He was about nine—my own age that summer—and, like me, he’d just finished the third grade. His family lived in suburban Chicago near the Dillons but there were special circumstances surrounding his visit here, something we kids weren’t supposed to know but did anyway. Figured it out, the way kids do. It may have been the summer I was no longer a child: the summer when grown-ups morphed into adults; the summer I was spoken to, not talked about, as though I weren’t there in the midst of the conversation; it was the summer of inclusion. I’d sensed my older sister Catherine making that transition a couple of years before; saw what seemed at the time to have been the contradiction of her growing independence and simultaneous participation in family decision-making. Was it because she was a girl? I wondered. Will my time come?

Henry stood apart for a couple of reasons; things that made him different beyond being someone who was simply “the new kid on the block,” even if only for a few weeks. First, his hair was so blond, his complexion so fair, so pale, as to be borderline albino. I’d heard the story of our albino calf—a long night in 1883 when a pure white Highland calf brought short-term fame to the McGinnis farm out beyond Fahnstock—but had no idea humans could be born with pigment deficiencies, too. Henry was a living tintype. His appearance wasn’t as distinctive as his behavior, though, which existed somewhere outside the bounds of childhood.

He was feral, but not some 19th century waif living in the Schwarzwald, uneducated in the ways of his kind. Henry’s presence had been cobbled from other disparate sources. First, he was prematurely old—an Old Soul, like a handful of others I’ve known—in the sense of reticence that comes from seeing things we ought not; of wandering too near the edge; of Trust betrayed, the contract of childhood broken. What you heard contradicted what you saw and what you heard was not the childish talk of pre-adolescence. Henry did not speak, so much as converse.

Oh, sure, we played. I recall a Maxfield Parrish afternoon on the merry-go-round in the park behind the Methodist church when we spun faster than astronauts. Dizzy, giddy, laughing hysterically, for a moment barriers fell and the gaps between us closed. For a moment, Henry’s armor lay on the verge, safely out of reach, until the moment passed, so much salt in water. There were one or two similar events in the next few days. Then the Dillons and their guest went home. I wrote him now and again during the following months—those “penpal” letters are somewhere in the house, even yet, lingering like these recollections—but I do not know what became of him.

Perhaps google knows. It knows everything.

“A few figs from thistles…”

by Howard A. Tabor

The Village Atheist

How has “Red” Anhauser escaped notice here? This may be a case of not knowing something or not sensing its value until too late. Mea Culpa.

On Thursday week, at half past seven that evening, we gathered at The Why to note, to celebrate, acknowledge, verify or otherwise share the passing of one disinclined to have been the reason, cause or excuse for such a gathering. Had there been an actual body, one or two of those assembled might have brazenly held a mirror to his nose, alert for evidence of vapor, and would—with the slightest hint of any condensate—have, with equal boldness, held a pillow on his face for fifteen minutes or so just to make sure. It should also be said that another two or three, with equal gusto, would have applied CPR to bring “Red” back among us. Those opportunities, however, had faded several days before when “Red” slid into the crematory oven, at a toasty eighteen hundred degrees, the closest he believed would be his brush with Hell.

Several venues could have held this throng; indeed, a murder of its crows were here representing the major denominations: Candy Varenhorst from Asbury UMC; Fathers Chisholm (C. of E.) and Shannon (Romish), among others. Even Rabbi Mandelbrot drove from Des Moines to bid a crisp farewell. In the early mumbled rumblings of the crowd, one wondered What did they come to hear? What had they come to say? First, some background.

Many in Thursday’s audience had come to simply see inside The Why, home to Agincourt’s free thinkers for seventy years, a re-purposed railway water tower given by the Milwaukee Road when two pre-fabricated units had arrived, not one. Ernie Anhauser had been its sexton until cancer made the stairs, already steep, too difficult. In his retirement Ernie was its librarian, keeper of a collection admired by schools of theology: The disputation of theology requires an intimate knowledge of that which you would deny. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” wouldn’t be accurate in this case, however, because Anhauser respected honest disagreement. Contention fueled his belly, no quarter asked, none given. But victory or loss would bring the contest to an end and sadden him, regardless of the outcome.

Ernest “Red” Anhauser [1924-2014] was eighty-nine when he died last week, a retired watchmaker who’d worked for fifty years at Salmagundi. Ernie’s wife Lucy died in childbirth about 1945 and their baby passed a few weeks later, a little girl they’d named Annette. His faith (of whatever stripe it might have been) was already shaken by the Depression and the war, however, so the loss of spouse and child drove the little that remained from his heart and Ernest Anhauser joined The Why, immersing himself in Bradlaugh, Ingersoll, et al., and becoming a formidable disputant beyond the high school diploma he’d earned in 1942.

Anhauser never led the group—the Fennimore County Free Thinkers—that was not his style. But if he were not its head, he was assuredly its heart. To claim him as its soul, however, would bring Red back more surely than electro-shock to deny with well-reasoned vehemence the existence of such a thing.

At the center of The Why will be his memorial: an orrery, a clock-work universe that was his gift to reason. And one of its outer planets will house a spoonful of his ash.

“A few figs from thistles…”

by Howard A. Tabor

Ray Benson [1924-2006]

As the 2014 campaign runs its course, I recall our neighbor Ray Benson. Some of you do, too.

Rowan Oakes’ mother Rosalie lived next door to Ray Benson until she died in 1999, which is how we got to know him. We’d have dinner with her every Sunday afternoon at 3:00, then play Monte Carlo until “Sixty Minutes” came on and she’d announce that it was “Time for you two to head home.” Rosalie didn’t mince words any less than her neighbor Ray, however, and most of our Sunday afternoon conversations were seasoned with stories of their verbal sparing during the week. “Benson shook his fist at me Tuesday. Said I shouldn’t use pesticides on the tomatoes. What the #%$* does that man know of gardening!” That last sentence wasn’t a question. Then she’d chastise him about recycling and he’d wonder aloud why she hadn’t gone to “The Home” years ago.

But then Rosie would find that he’d cut her lawn while mowing his own (“Well it just saves gas to not start the mower twice”) or that her walk was shoveled or her leaves raked (“There weren’t enough to fill just one bag”). She never had him over for a meal (“He’d think it’s too salty and then ask for the salt.”) but I know that one-in-four of her canned goods appeared on his back steps on a regular basis. And that her magazines found their way into his mailbox with the mailing labels carefully removed.

Ray’s parents farmed north of Fahnstock, so he went to Fennimore high and graduated in ’42 or ’43, then joined the merchant marine. Going round the world a dozen times or more, he came back to Agincourt twenty-five years ago. Never inclined to pull his window shades, Ray’s accumulation of tchotchkes from Borneo or Shanghai or Tenerife or Trieste were shelved for all to see. I think Rosie’s carved teak elephant might have come from him—”anonymously,” of course, and with the greatest discretion. Wouldn’t want to leave a paper trail.

Ray’s politics were anywhere but Right. The rear window of his Chevy was an evolving mini-billboard of in-your-face observations, hand-printed on poster board: “Drive a Japanese car? Thanks for shipping American jobs overseas.” Or supporting a flat tax. Or simply “Buy American.”

Ray moved into the nursing home about the time Rosalie died, though it never occurred to me until today that those two events might be linked. Though love often manifests itself in strange ways, our acknowledgment and involuntary reaction to loss is far too predictable.

“A few figs from thistles…”

by Howard A. Tabor

The English People, Part 1

Agincourt has had its share of foreign visitors.

My own family counts for some of them: Aunt Grace’s husband is French and Great Uncle Anson’s wife and their three children hail from the Euskadi, the Basque homeland of northern Spain. But in this neck of the woods, someone from Alabama might be considered “foreign”, so let’s set our sights a little higher.

Two of our most interesting foreign visitors with no local connection may have been Alec and Margaret Parks, who came for a two-week visit in the Spring of 1990.

It all begins with our late great local historian Hal Holt in the 1980s. Hal had been investigating some of the British wheeling-dealing in Iowa agricultural land a century earlier, most of it in Larchwood up in Lyon County. Some of you will know that the Close Brothers organized the “Iowa Land Company” for investment by British capitalists, acquiring nearly 50,000 acres toward that end. Much of it was intended to be sold as small holdings—the sort of homestead farming seen in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois in the relentless march of Manifest Destiny— but the sale of large acreage involved others in the speculative game. Richard Sykes was one (owner of the Larchwood townsite) and Francis Logie-Pirie was another. Hal became interested in Logie-Pirie and opened a correspondence with the local historical society in East Sussex, Logie-Pirie’s county of residence.

Volunteers, many of them retired, handle inquiries in Britain’s local history network, and Hal’s letter (this was long before email expedited this sort of thing) came to the attention of one Alec Parks, retired headmaster of a school in Durham far to the north. Parks replied to Holt’s questions, providing insight to the wealth that had enabled the displaced Scotsman Logie-Pirie to engage in American speculation. And that might have been the end of it, if we were dealing with folks other than Holt and Parks, cut from similar cloth and curious about each other as much as their historical interests. Hal shared their evolving correspondence with me; Alec was someone he had clearly begun to like.

Then, one evening, Hal got a phone call: a cheery British accent at the other end introduced itself as belonging to Alec Parks and wondered if a visit to the Colonies might be in order. Alec and his wife Margaret proposed a visit in the Spring, a prospect eagerly accepted by Hal and his wife Muriel. The insertion of the Parks into the rhythm of local life will not likely be forgotten by many of us for years to come. But the details of that visit will have to wait for another installment.

In the meantime, enjoy the image of a memorial bench placed in Alec’s memory along the Cuckoo Trail in 1995. It seems entirely in keeping with the man we met nearly twenty-five years ago.

I hope to rest on that bench some time soon and savor a few of memory’s happier moments.