the leaf and the seed

the leaf and the seed

are shriveled and brown today

tomorrow they're gone

Meekness

“Meekness is the principal protection from the prideful

blindness that often arises from prominence, position,

power, wealth, and adulation.”

David A. Bednar

Just because I’m broke don’t mean I must be very meek;

A poor man has his pride and does not turn the other cheek.

Poverty can be a stumbling block as well as wealth;

The arrogance of want has crept upon me with great stealth.

Save me, Lord, from self conceit, when charity I need;

Help me know that give and take are part of thy good creed.

Spiritual riches still await me; this I know!

If I will but learn meekness while I struggle here below.

Those Old Creature Features

As I have detailed elsewhere, my dad was not big on taking his children to the movies. On Sundays, when he was home in the afternoon instead of working at Aarone’s Bar and Grill on East Hennepin, he liked to sit in his easy chair, digesting the huge Sunday dinner my mother always concocted. He did not take kindly to pleas from us to go see the latest Jerry Lewis movie or Fred MacMurray in “The Absent Minded Professor.” The only Hollywood star that could pry him from his postprandial coma was John Wayne. Then he would gladly bundle us all up in the car and shoot out to the Cooper Cinerama in St. Louis Park. Since we little ones didn’t much care for the lusty brawling and cattle car antics of Wayne and his cronies, dad stilled our whines and murmurs with a handful of coins, which I and my sisters were allowed to spend on Jordan Almonds, Raisinets, Dots, Mike and Ike chewies, Nonpareil chocolate disks, and, of course, huge tumblers of syrupty Coca Cola and glorious tubs of popcorn dripping with melted butter (or whatever it was they used back then to simulate butter -- probably Brylcreem.) Glutted and satiated beyond the cares of this world, we sank back into our theater seats, as inert as gravestones. Of course, when we got home we’d have to be packed off to bed with hot water bottles on top of our palpitating tummies.

As I say, it was a rare occasion when we went to the movies as a family. But I gratefully recall many Saturday afternoons when my pal Wayne’s dad would take the two of us to see a feature over at the Hollywood Theater in Nordeast Minneapolis. It was an art deco joint that should have impressed the feculence out of me -- but the effect was somewhat ruined by the chow mein shop next door; the pungent odor of frying celery and onions drifted into the mezzanine to spoil the razzle dazzle effect of all those acoustical tiles and gilded pillars.  

Wayne Matsuura’s dad, Mr. Matsuura, favored creature features. Whenever a new fang flick blew into town he was sure to take Wayne and I to it. The late Fifties and early Sixties were the heyday of cheapie creepies -- I can only assume that these low budget films were meant for the Drive-Ins, where teenage couples could begin their grappling as soon as the cheesy monster popped into view, giving the girl ample excuse to clutch her swain in a half nelson. But little boys, like Wayne and I, were a bit more discerning in our cinematic tastes. If the monster was too fakey, he and I would hoot it to scorn, despite Mr. Matsuura’s stern injunctions to be quiet.

Through the magic of YouTube I recently reviewed one of those cheap old monster movies. The Giant Claw was a Columbia grade-B picture that featured a dismal creature that looked like a disgruntled turkey vulture in a Muppet movie. It was a ludicrous special effect that wouldn’t scare a babe in arms. Wayne and I gave it the loudest raspberries our lips and tongues could muster, in spite of Mr. Matsuura’s threat that such behavior would forfeit a visit to Bridgeman’s for mint chocolate chip cones after the show.

On the other hand, Werewolf in a Girls Dormitory, although a cheapie Italian production that featured a werewolf who sported the kind of fakey fangs you could get at Woolworths around Halloween for a quarter, was quite effective in giving Wayne and I nightmares for the next several days. We clung to each other in a terrified huddle as the not-too-hairy fiend stalked his prey -- always a fetching young girl in a flimsy nightie. (I have a sneaking suspicion that Mr. Matsuura took us to this film in particular so he could enjoy some, ahem, cheese cake on the side without Mrs. Matsuura being any the wiser.) I think what made this cheapo movie so scary to us little boys was that the monster only prowled at night, unlike The Giant Claw, which enjoyed swooping down on an unsuspecting humanity in broad daylight. We were in a darkened movie theater, and all that murk onscreen and off just pressed some primordial panic button in us. It’s easy to scoff at a fakey monster in the light of the sun -- but in the black shadows of night even a bad actor with a set of dimestore fangs becomes worrisome.

The scariest film Mr. Matsuura ever took us to was undoubtedly Michael Landon’s “I Was a Teenage Werewolf.” I tried looking this one up on YouTube, but they only have the trailer. And that was enough to remind me how effectively horrifying that movie was. It’s a classic finger peek movie, meaning that when the music turns ominous you know that Landon is ready to howl and rip, so the hands automatically come up to cover the eyes, with the fingers spread just a teensy weensy bit to catch some of the gruesome action -- but not too much! By the middle of that film I gave up any pretence of bravery and simply dove for cover under my seat whenever the snarling started. I came up for air at the end of the film, I remember, to watch the monster’s inevitable demise -- and Mr. Matsuura chose that exact moment, when I was leaning forward, eyes bulging in fright, to put his arm around past Wayne and clutch my shoulder to whisper “Pretty scary, isn’t it?” Thinking some creature had tagged me for its dinner, I let out a scream in a high register that even opera sopranos rarely reach, and immediately lost control of my bladder.

Wayne and his father, I am sorry to report, thought that this was a tremendously hilarious joke. Mr. Matsuura spread newspaper on the backseat of his car for me to sit on during the ride home. Wayne, curse his soul, kept breaking out in giggles as we passed Bridgeman’s (no chance of an ice cream cone now) and pulled up to the front of my house. I sullenly thanked Mr. Matsuura for taking me to the movies (as my mother had drilled into me ten thousand times in the past year) and silently wished Wayne in the deepest pit of Hell as he continued to ineffectively stifle his laughter.

Y’know, sometimes childhood isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

serpents of wood

such serpents of wood

coil around the trunk at night;

shrewdly still at dawn

The Watchman

“A prophet is a watchman on the tower, protecting us from
spiritual dangers we may not see.”

Neil L. Andersen

If you want to go through life without a single clue

As to what your enemies are planning now to do

Then disregard the warning voice of prophets, by all means,

And put your trust in feeble man and all his bright machines.

And if you think the spirit world is nothing but benign

And so you don’t need any shield from what they will design,

I have a little newsflash for you that will freeze your heart --

You have an adversary there who’s poised with blazing dart!

To heed the words of prophets will not bankrupt anyone.

Pondering their counsel keeps the devil on the run.

I’ve never yet regretted any choices that I’ve made

From following the prophet through the sunlight and the shade.

No one is more on our side than the Savior

“No one is more on our side than the Savior.”

Lynn G. Robbins

To realize the Savior’s in my corner is a blessing;

It keeps me going even when it seems I’m only guessing.

To have a backer like the Lord may seem to some presumptuous;

But I can testify it’s true -- and makes my life seem scrumptious.

He will back up anyone who’s trying to make headway;

He loves us so that all our faults he tends to often downplay!

The Death Stare

Unlike the Death Star, which was blown to smithereens and no longer exists, the Death Stare is still a very real and very sinister influence in the universe. I mean a child’s universe.

My mother had the Death Stare, in spades, and she was never afraid to use it. For those of you fortunate enough never to have experienced the Death Stare as a child, let me give a brief explanation:  Imagine a laser beam of such malign intensity that it could not only slice your head open but extract all your secrets and memories of naughty deeds and make you confess them unconditionally, blubbering all the while like an infant. That is the power of the Death Stare. Only certain females, usually mothers and sometimes young women, have this capability. Men never have it. If they did, civilization as we know it would be destroyed. Only the female of the species has enough intelligence and willpower to wield it righteously.

As a ten year old boy I used to hang around Harry’s Grocery, on the corner of Como Avenue and 19th Avenue Southeast in Minneapolis. Harry was a kindly, bald headed old coot, always wrapped in a full length green apron. He sold the usual staples like milk, bread, and eggs, plus a large selection of candy and household odds and ends like Mrs. Stewart’s Bluing and Brillo Pads. On Halloween he handed out Sputniks, a blue marble of bubble gum, to every kid who came in. He was a good egg. But as a ten year old kid I had jettisoned all my former Sunday School scruples, considering myself above the law. So one day, when Harry’s back was turned, I secreted a box of bird seed under my jacket and sauntered out of his store feeling like Raffles the Gentleman Thief after a big heist. I had absolutely no use for the bird seed, since we didn’t have a parakeet or canary -- it was more the principle of the thing; wanting to prove that I could move among the swirling masses of humanity invisible and undetected, filching whatever I pleased whenever I wanted.

But the minute I got home and took off my jacket the bird seed fell on the floor and my mother turned on the Death Stare without saying word one. I immediately fell to my knees and confessed all in a flood of tears. When I had finished she silently pulled me to my feet and we both trooped back to Harry’s, where I offered up the bird seed along with a lachrymose apology for my crime wave. Mom bought me a Fudgsicle and we went home, my head still reverberating from my encounter with the fury of her Death Stare.

Several of my daughters have developed the Death Stare, as I have witnessed them unleashing it on their own children and on obnoxious males who unwisely assumed they could chat them up when they were single. At a Welcome Home picnic when my daughter Virginia was mustered out of the Air Force, a young gallant, who lived in his mother’s basement and had a case of late blooming acne, began forcing his unwanted attentions on her. She politely rebuffed him several times, but then when he managed to sit next to her at the picnic table while the barbequed ribs were being dished up, she got him in her sights and let him have it. At first he seemed unaffected, but slowly the overpowering influence of the Death Stare penetrated his chunky skull, until he sort of flowed off the bench like melting ice cream, and slunk back to his Atari pursuits in his mother’s basement. Virginia was still a novice in handling her Death Stare, so before she could turn it off she left a long pyrographic line of smouldering wood on the picnic table top.

The only group known to be immune to the baleful power of the Death Stare are teenage boys -- and only of their own mother’s Death Stare. If a girl they happen to know gives it to them, they disappear in an instantaneous mist of vapor. When my daughter Madelaine’s boy turned 14 he began raiding the fridge in the middle of the night, denuding it of all leftovers and draining milk jugs dry before you could say “Bob’s your uncle.” Despite repeated dire threats from Madelaine, the boy kept ravishing the fridge at night until she decided to stay up and catch him in the act while delivering a particularly savage Death Stare. I was staying the night at their house, on the couch next to the kitchen, and witnessed the entire episode.

Right on cue the boy came into the darkened kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and began to gorge like a famished honey badger. Madelaine flipped on the lights, then uttered a triumphant “Ah-hah!” And turned on the Death Stare. It had no effect on the boy, as he finished off several chicken wings and a slice of sweet potato pie. Seeing that her Death Stare was impotent in the face of such willful appetite, Madelaine decided that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. She got out the Cool Whip and had a piece of the sweet potato pie herself, along with some leftover spare ribs. I got in on the act with a bowl of mashed potatoes and gravy, hastily nuked in the microwave. Gave me a terrific case of heartburn so I didn’t sleep a wink the rest of the night. Uff dah!  

From a Tweet by Caitlin Dewey Rainwater

Gradually coming to the conclusion that there are two types of

people in the world: the type who read an article about a poor

person and email me complaining about “that entitled little shit” ...

and the type who have literally any other reaction.

Tweet by Caitlin Dewey Rainwater.

Choosing to write about paupers

Upsets America’s shoppers.

Writers who dally

With those in the alley

Are labeled as penning big whoppers.

We should not be surprised

“We should not be surprised to know that those individuals called to do the Lord’s work are not humanly perfect.”   M. Russell Ballard.

I’m waiting to be perfect prior to accepting calls

From the Lord to serve abroad or in our temple halls.

That’s because I’m humble, knowing I’m a slender reed

For others to depend on when they’re in a des’prate need.  

Let others who are better carry on the work of God;

He surely cannot use a man like me, so deeply flawed!

So I will sit here idle as a mossy stone or sphinx,

Waiting for the Judgement Day while getting forty winks.

The Elms

The otherworldly power of majestic elm trees lining a street of sometimes shabby middle class homes was impressed on me one summer day when a great horned owl decided to hunker down in the top of a towering elm on 20th Avenue Southeast in the Minneapolis of my youth.

The tree this magnificent creature chose happened to be a Bazooka bubble gum wrapper’s throw from the house of my pal Junior Kryjawa. Junior was walleyed, like MAD Magazine’s Alfred E. Newman, and had six toes on his left foot. His pinky toe was split into two distinct lengths, each with its own toe nail. His father, like so many others in that blue collar neighborhood, worked on the railroad as a brakeman for the Great Northern. His teeth had rotted down to little black pegs while a prisoner in a Polish concentration camp during World War Two, and all he could eat was soft white bread soaked in milk. He refused to get dentures, or maybe just couldn’t afford them. Consequently he suffered from impacted bowels, which soured his disposition considerably. Whenever I came over to Junior’s house during mealtime (a dreadful habit I picked up early in life and have not yet rid myself of) I always noticed the large white bottle of Sal Hepatica that sat next to Mr. Kryjawa’s bowl of bread and milk.

Initially I was sick with envy at Junior’s good fortune in having this huge and ferocious looking owl lodged in a tree right next to his house. Why couldn’t that dumb bird have roosted in one of the dark old elms in front of my house? As soon as I was alerted to this fantastic happening I rushed over to his house. A crowd of gawking neighbors had already gathered, and soon the television vans from WCCO and KSTP arrived, with cameramen toting their bulky equipment around to get a good angle on the ruffled bird, who did not much care for the murmuring boors beneath its perch. It gave several tremendous hooty calls, spread its massive wings like Dracula spreading his cape getting ready to pounce, and then flapped away towards parts unknown. With a collective sigh, the neighbors dispersed and Junior was called back to work in the family garden, which consisted of rows upon rows of cabbage and kohlrabi -- two vegetables that were considered sinister foreign freaks of nature by my mother and never appeared on our table.

But I stood there for at least another hour, rooted to the spot, you might say, by the realization of how the overarching narthex of elm trees gave the street an a exalted green bliss. The wind blew through the elm leaves, making them scratch each other with a muffled rasp that reminded me of the sound of crickets. Gray squirrels flowed stealthily from one branch to the next like shadows, occasionally scolding each other over a disputed crumb. There was a peppery smell in the air, from the older leaves, ragged, yellowed, and brittle long before autumn, partially turning to dust each time the breeze rattled them. I ran my small hand over the deeply fissured bark, careful to avoid the large black carpenter ants that scurried up and down in the crevices. How had these princely things come to be here, I wondered to myself. Staring up into the tangle of black branches and dancing green leaves I felt uncomfortably humbled for an eight year old American boy -- scion of the prowess and plunder of the Military Industrial complex. Eventually I drifted back home, my head nearly snapping off its stem as I continued to gaze upward into that dark verdant welkin. My mother saw me stumbling along, long before I reached our front porch, and wondered out loud how I had managed to reach the house without falling and breaking my neck.   

After that experience I really began noticing and appreciating the canopy of elm trees that lined so many streets in Southeast Minneapolis back then. Later on, after they were all hewn down, victims of Dutch elm disease, I learned that in the early 1920’s, when the original meadows and potato fields had been divvied up into lots for houses, the developers insisted on planting hundreds of elms on the streets and boulevards -- ignoring the advice of landscape professionals that a mix of other trees such as red maple and red oak would be prudent. The developers were not interested in prudence, they were interested in creating the kind of green cathedral canopy of mature elms that had already existed for hundreds of years in places like New Haven in Connecticut. They got their wish; and I became the beneficiary of their shortsighted obsession many years later.

During the dreary winter months, whenever I came down with bronchitis (a yearly occurrence back in those unfiltered Chesterfield days, when everyone, even my sainted mother, smoked like a chimney inside the house day and night) I asked to be allowed to recuperate on the living room couch. From there I traced the patterns the bare elm branches made against the dull gray sky -- birds in silhouette; grotesque faces leering down at me; even a sort of eldritch writing, like Viking runes, foretelling, no doubt, a hideous ruin for little boys like me who sometimes faked sore throats to get out of going to school.

During the flash and crash of summer thunderstorms I doted on sitting out on the front porch to watch those sturdy elms, whipped into a frenzy by the tornadic winds, stoutly resist the forces of nature to uproot them and mulch them in the whirlwind. The weeping willow in our backyard toppled over during a ferocious storm, and the vagrant cottonwoods down by the grade school were shorn of nearly half their flexible smaller branches -- but my elms, my splendid elms, stood up to the storms with nary a casualty. They were invincible, just like me.

Only . . . they weren’t. And neither was I.

Dutch elm disease, spread by bark beetles from the Orient by way of Holland, started felling the stately elms in Connecticut in the 1930’s, and by 1978 my beloved elms in Southeast Minneapolis were on their way out -- already victims of or suspected of being accomplices to the cursed bark beetle. And I, well -- it’s been many a year since I’ve set foot in Minnesota, let alone Southeast Minneapolis. My osteoarthritis keeps me close to home here in Provo Utah. But like the green bay tree mentioned in Psalms, the memories of my love affair with the genus Ulmus still flourish amidst the desert sand and sagebrush . . .