Disco line

Do I know this guy? Maybe I do and maybe I don't. I've known a lot of fat guys in my time. They all wore their fatness like a badge of pride. The fool in this picture --- do I call him that? He might come back with, "The Bible says you're not supposed to call people fools." Does your Good Book say anything about dancing with cows? Or dancing disco with a line of cows framing you as if they're a stillife? I don't pretend to know the answers to deep questions circling the disco ball of the earth and accompanying cosmos. But it's like this. Years ago, my friend Steve and I saw Chris Farley, his fat gut bobbing, as he auditioned for Chippendales, cheered on by a muscular Patrick Swayze, on Saturday Night Live. "What'd'ya think of the fat guy?" I asked my buddy.

"I love him," he said.

It's kind of like listening to a Muddy Waters tune about getting a hook on with some big, smokin', up-to-here, dusky thing. You gotta love it.

Mother's Day 2013

It's here again, Mother's Day -- a holiday originally proposed by Ann Jarvis in 1858 to improve the lives of impoverished women and their babies in the Appalacian region of America. The day has grown and let's hope -- to God -- that there is never ever a paucity in the love we show our mothers.

There's so much to do for my mother right now, but thankfully I get help here and there. My mom was far from the model of preparing for the end of the tunnel, but she did well in one area that's paying off with interest. She was adept at making friends -- through church, the neighborhood, civic clubs, work...One of those friends, a woman who knew mom through an organization they both belonged to around 20 years ago, offered to drive her to and from church.

"I really thank you, Nancy," I told her. "Are you going to take her to Sunday school, too?" Yes, Nancy told me she planned to do the Sunday school thing as well.

"She may not understand everything you're talking about, but she'll enjoy the social connection," I told her.

Everything went beautifully, Nancy told me later. Mom thouroughly enjoyed Sunday school as well as the preacher's sermon afterward.

"She answered this question about a parable of Jesus," Nancy told me. "She expressed herself so articulately. I couldn't repeat exactly what she said. She understood the parable in a way I hadn't thought of."

People like Nancy are a blessing, not only for their helping hands, but for the way they raise your spirits. Aren't we in need of hope today? A revival?

"Your mother never talked bad about anybody else" in the organization they belonged to, Nancy told me. "She was always ready to help other people, always positive. Other women there gossiped like crazy, but Vickie never got into that."

Hmmm. That's not exactly how I've always known Mom to be. I could tell some other stories. But isn't it interesting how a family member might present herself among others, how others might have perceptions of her that broaden your own?

                                                           Mom and my son Max

Anyhow, my mother was born Sept. 24, 1945 in Larned, Kan., a Western Kansas town that has been unfairly stigmatized over the years for being home to a state hospital for the mentally ill.

"Oh, that's why you're like you are," a bunch of nimrods would say when they learned of her birth place.

Her parents named her Victoria Lou after her paternal and maternal grandmothers, respectively. She goes by Vickie. Her last name was McElroy, and when she was in elementary school, the little imbeciles called her "macaroni."

Mom never wanted to be here, going to school with the little boneheads anyway. She held a grudge against her parents well into adulthood for leaving the beloved mountains of Colorado where she lived as a small child and began school.

Her dad ran a sawmill out there. A fellow in a company truck got killed in a wreck. There was some kind of lawsuit, it cleaned my grandfather out financially, but I don't know the particulars. Neither does Mom. She was, but a little girl at the time. Some say Grandpa could've rebounded and made a go of it in Colorado, but he was too emotionally tied to the land where his mother had lived out her last years and died 20 years earlier. So it was back to Kansas.

The family lived in a shack in the town of Jett, Kan., population 3,500 at that time. Her girlfriends from school were surprised when they came over and found out she had to share a room with her brother. In those middle childhood years, she didn't know the family was poor because her mother did everything she could to make it a happy home. As she got older and entered junior high, she became self-concious.

There were only two houses in Jett, still without indoor plumbing, and Mom's was one of them. Sure it was fancier than some. A concrete floor. Two-holer. But it was still an outdoor shitter.

Her dad worked in construction where the work was seasonal. Her mom worked as a waitress in several restaurants before she hired on at Ben Franklin, the dime store where she would work for the next 23 years.

"So where'd you get your clothes, the salvation army?" some girls at school would ask her, hotsy-totsy types who thought their shit didn't stink. "Your mom still work at the DIME store?"

Screw 'em. Mom had her pocket of friends she was comfortable with and that was her circle, exactly the worldview her son would take some 20 years later. She did want to join Pep Club at the highschool, though. With envy, she looked on those girls with their pretty, pleated skirts, the kind she wanted so bad. But her parents didn't have the money to buy her a pep club outfit.

Her dad had a hot temper, but he had good moments too. When Mom's black cat, Nosey, ran away, she cried for three days, but one morning her dad opened the door to a shed at a construction site he was working at and..."Look, what I found," he told the girl, holding the cat in his calloused, carpenter's hands, that evening. He didn't even like cats.

It was a good time when the radio would play, what forawhile, was her favorite song. It was -- even for then -- an old, outdated radio, a 1940s wooden Philco floor radio, the size of a bookcase. Mom could be at one end of the house, but when she heard that song, she'd sprint forward and turn up one of the bakelite knobs that adjusted the volume.

Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket
Never let it fade away

Her favorite teacher at Jett Highschool was her English teacher, Mr. Ralston. I looked him up in an old yearbook. His first name was Melvin, but he went by Duke.

"Nobody wanted Duke Ralston for English," she said. "He was tough. You were gonna learn something in his class or else."

Mom wound up learning more in his class than any other in high school. She never accumulated more than, maybe nine hours of community college. My dad was just out of the Army when they started dating and she married him, mostly to get out of her parents' house. They divorced, she married a second time, and divorced a second time. Never married again.

But that's life. I have friends, some married, some who've been divorced two, three times. People struggling to bring up their kids, people who have lived through job losses and other indignities of life. That's been Mom's life, and no, I haven't always seen her positive as her friend Nancy has. But she's always loved gardening and Mom has planted a few good seeds in life.

In the early '90s, thirty years after she'd had him for a teacher, Duke Ralston was back in town, selling real estate or something like that. When someone suggested to him that he hire Vickie McElroy as an administrative assistant, he remembered her fondly.

"Oh, she struggled in my class, but she worked really hard," he said. "She made out pretty well."                                                                                             

                                                       Melvin "Duke" Ralston, Mom's
                                                       favorite highschool teacher.


All those years later and he remembered her.

I take her walking around the city lake, frequently. She loves the breeze, watching the bicyclists and joggers along the path, the geese babbling along the water.

"You're in good shape, Mom," I tell her. "I know 30-year-old lardasses who wouldn't make this as well as you."

I ask her about her about things like working with her mother at the dime store. She remembers with clarion recall.

"My mom was assistant manager," she said, adding that her mother didn't want any appearance of nepotism. "She always made sure I worked in a different department than her. If I came to her with a question, she always said, 'Go ask so and so.' She wanted me to fend for myself."

I change conversational topics as if they were waves shifting in the wind.

"So what do you think of Texas, Mom?" I asked her.

"Well, I don't like it," she said, then gets some of her information correct, some half-correct and some completely incorrect. "Jeff had some job there at a newspaper after highschool, but some bad people came along and wouldn't let him write. I don't know the whole story."

"That's me, Mom," I said. "I'm Jeff.

"You're Jeff?" she said.

"You betcha," I answered and she laughed into the halcyon breeze.

Her dad had Alzheimer's and died at age 78. I knew there was a possibility she would catch it some day, but I didn't expect her to show signs of dementia in her '60s. What can I say, you play with the deck you're dealt. Not that I say that with any sense of bravado. I think the whole damn thing sucks. That phrase, "It is what it is" -- I hate that. Hate it almost as much as that freakin' serenity prayer: God grant me wisdom to accept the things I can't change.

Later, we took a walk to the library. I took her to where the old Jett High School yearbooks were shelved and grabbed the one dated 1963. "I haven't seen that in years," she said. (Her yearbooks were destroyed in a flood.) I turned to a page full of senior photographs, she pointed to a picture of young girl in a black dress cut low to the shoulders and said, "That's me."

                                                       

                                                            Mom's senior picture

Extracurricular activities were listed next to Mom's picture. She was in glee club, worked as a student librarian, belonged to a Christian organization called Y-Teen, maybe one or two other things. Interestingly, pep club was listed as one of her activities. Did she get one of those skirts after all?

These days, Mom loves eating at the senior center, dining out with her friends and God forbid if she misses church. She laughs more than ever, loves to rave over my kids (her grandkids) and how they're growing up even if she doesn't always remember their names. Sure, she could have hatred and bitterness toward people, but she chooses to think positively. There's still time to learn things.

still time

Your mother has a story. If she's around today, and even if she's not, it would do you well to find it out. It's your story too.

"Catch a Falling Star" -- Perry Como

Shockers: Believe again

I'm sad that Wichita State, my alma mater, won't be playing for the NCAA championship tonight. It was a heartbreaker, but my sadness is mitigated by the fact that they played their hearts out. The Shockers played mean, with no let-up, right to the end. They owned the court for most of the game.

In the end, the only thing standing between the Shockers advancing toward the NCAA championship game was a controversial call by a ref in the final six seconds of the game. At that moment, the die was cast. Up to then, a Shocker championship was a real possibility. What seemed unrealistic at the start of the season was, near the end, plausible. The loss was a close shave.

I'm so proud of the Shocks. They never let their fans down. Their rise from obscurity to national prominence and the eyes of the world this season was miraculous. They lost most of their starters and scoring power from last year, they were undervalued, underrated. (They were picked fourth to win the Missouri Valley Conference.) They didn't even win the conference, yet they came back to prove the "experts" wrong at every turn. Beating a no. 2 ranked Big 10 school -- Ohio State. Beating no. 2 seeded Gonzaga!

I remember when upstart school, George Mason -- an urban school much like WSU --made it to the Final Four in 2006. Who were they? And to think, this year it happened for WSU. Was afraid I'd never see this again.

When I was a kid, my parents took me to see the Shockers play at the old Henry Levitt Arena during the Shockers old glory days of the late '70s-early '80s. There were all these dry years afterward, but now the Shockers are seeing a new renaissance. It's actually better because the coach Greg Marshall is really of a higher caliber than the old Shockers controversial coach Gene Smithson of some 30 years ago.

Marshall is a class act. Read up on his record. All the Shocks are upstanding, hardworking guys and they deserve all the love, all the praise they are getting from the community -- all the respect they have earned from their competition and the nation.

My son told me to calm down as I yelled at the TV, but it's all right. We got home from his Pinewood Derby tournament just in time to see the game. Gotta go to a Scout meeting now. Love my boy. Love my friends. Wish I'd been watching the game with my buddy Adam. Wish my old journalism instructor Les Anderson was here, but it's all right.

Life is sweet. It's time to believe again.

Play angry

Busy morning. Getting tight here. Time drawing near. Writing and re-writing. Wife's coming home from Dallas today. Gotta take my boy to the district Pinewood Derby race. Registration by 1 p.m. Have to be back to watch the Shockers play at 5 p.m. For any non-WSU alum or readers not up on sports, they are playing Louisville.

In Atlanta! My friends and I have fb messaging back and forth: "Final freaking 4!" "Un frickin' believable!" "Wild!"

They're on a Wheaties box and the cover of (damn!) Sports Illustrated. Oh I bought that thing. This may never happen again. It's a keepsake.

So much I want to say, but I gotta get my ass 'outa here. A lot to do, but I'd be remiss not to put something up here before the big game tonight. I do want to say, though, that the Shockers have earned everything they've got. They have worked, sweat, cried, sacrificed -- individually and as a team. They have earned the right to be where they are.

I'll be back. Go shocks!

P.S. Here are some articles from the Eagle. Enclosing an interesting article on former Shocker coach Mark Turgeon who turned the then-faltering Shocker basketball program around in the late '90s and '00s.
http://www.kansas.com/2013/04/03/2745015/shocker-families-head-to-atlanta.html http://www.kansas.com/2013/04/05/2748197/turgeon-will-have-his-eye-on-shockers.html http://www.denverpost.com/colleges/ci_22967503/wichita-going-wild-over-final-fours-wichita-state

http://www.kansas.com/2013/04/05/2748125/bob-lutz-wichitas-success-story.html

At the movies with Ebert

I was on flat Kansas highway, too close in propinquity to where the damn road started for me, when it came over my car radio -- via Robert Siegel and All Things Considered -- that Roger Ebert died. The day prior I'd read on social media that the cancer was back and he was taking a break. It's the kind of announcements celebrities make right before the inevitable. Gene Siskel made such an announcement 14 years earlier before dying of his own cancer.

Had I never watched an episode -- had Siskel and Ebert at the Movies never existed -- I would have nevertheless discovered and played in the art of film criticism somewhere, but it would have come harder. As is life, from cradle to the hearse, the road's had a lot of potholes and drop-offs anyhow.

I was elated to win awards for film review writing on my campus newspaper at Wichita State University (Go Shocks!). My editor friend Mary -- a talented review writer who considered pursuing a PhD in film studies -- encouraged me. Like Ebert, who considered his newspaper columns his identity, Mary and I both caught that sickness unto death like it was yellow fever. "It gets in your blood," she said of reporting and newspapering. Unlike Ebert, always original in his critical style, Mary did like Blue Velvet.( "Heineken! Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!") Of course, Mary, myself and our contemporaries are as far away from Ebert's raw talent as a coke-addled 1970s Dennis Hopper was removed from reality. We're unfit for many things, the least of which --- kissing Roger Ebert's ticket stub.

Tributes to Ebert have been falling over cyberspace like the papers rolling off the presses and on to the sidewalk newsstand at the opening of every Siskel and Ebert show. He generated respect, while alive, as evidenced by his Twitter followers and the readers of his blog. But it was respect acquired over time, deadline stress and tears.

"The skinny guy's all right sometimes. I can't stand the fat guy."

That's the kind of thing my classmates in the community college theater department would say about those two guys on TV who (gasp) dared to dis top Hollywood stars and the money making crap they squeezed out.

"I think they were no-talents who couldn't make it as actors so they have to tear everyone down," the young thespians would say.

Actually, the only real thing Siskel failed at was his plan to become a lawyer. Ebert? He never got that English lit doctorate. Damn.

Back then, the only one of my friends who shared my appreciation for these film reviewers was my fellow writer-and-cigarette-smoking friend Steve. When I mentioned to Steve that I liked watching Siskel and Ebert, he replied, "I love 'em." We respected these astute critics for one reason:

They could back up everything they said.

Steve and I would sit in front of the TV at 10:30 p.m., Sunday nights and critique the critiquers.

"I hate reviews like that," he said, feeling their review of Naked Lunch was wishy-washy. "Be definitive. Make a damn statement."

On a special At the Movies, in which they discussed "guilty pleasures," Ebert admitted a fondness for a maudlin Bette Middler movie, Stella about a feisty, uncouth singer and single mother, tending bar and trying to give her daughter a better life. Not my thing.

In a regular episode of the show, Siskel gave Rocky IV thumbs up and said, "I can't wait to see Rocky V". No Gene. Should've stopped after one.

What I now realize is that we were studying Siskel and Ebert and they were teaching us to become informed, critical thinkers and consumers of film art. From them, we learned that reviewing a movie -- or anything -- is much more than saying, "That movie rocks! That sucks." Judging a film's merits entails evaluating the dialogue, scenery, camera angles, writing, film editing, direction, plot believability...more than a critic can summarize into one review. It's the writer's role to discern the most salient points to mention.

Siskel and Ebert called the Hollywood Establishment to the carpet, when they felt it was warranted. These guys weren't taken in by celebrity, weren't like "insider political reporters" getting drunk on the power of a cocktail party. They were critical of the pomposity, prejudices and politics of the Oscars academy.

It's appropriate that non-actors and non-filmmakers scrutinize movies. We're buying their mansions, dishing out a ridiculous $10 a ticket, paying for the Netflicks and the damn popcorn. Probably what I've most taken from Siskel and Ebert, is that as an audience member I don't want to be taken for granted.

Around 20 years ago, Sly Stallone made a sorrowful action comedy, Stop or My Mom Will Shoot. One look at the trailers and I was saying Siskel and Ebert are 'gonna slam this." A week later I saw them on Letterman with Ebert calling it "the worst movie of the year."

And it probably was. It was laziness. It was Mr. Hollywood Superstar saying, "Hey, you love me. You're 'gonna pay to see me. I wrote my brilliant Rocky script in the '70s. I don't have to work for your love anymore." So he --- you know the formula. Mr. Action Star shows his softer, comedic side with some hackneyed, rehashed storyline about the perfunctory Tough Cop who's secretly a mama's boy. This Big Boy meets his match when diminutive spitfire Mom Estelle Getty comes to town and we're supposed to laugh when Little Miss Golden Girl takes down the criminals herself, while babbling about her little boy's diaper rash.

I'm calling bullshit. I'm offended, pissed off, when cynical Entertainment-Complex types insult my intelligence like that.

Apparently I owe a big thank you to a guy like Roger Ebert. He helped me see outside the Entertainment-Blockbuster-Complex box. A film about two guys having a conversation from across a table might be more entertaining than something chockablock with fight scenes and explosions. A documentary about a pig farmer or kids gearing up for a spelling bee might be riveting. If not for Ebert and his skinny rival, would I have written a review of a foreign film, Cinema Paradiso? Not at 20 years of age, not for an English assignment, I'll tell you that. I learned that if I were to watch a documentary about black drag queens in Paris and give it a thumbs up, I wasn't going to turn queer. (It was much more homophobic times 20 years ago.)

So yes, Ebert, like any gifted writer would, enlarged my mind. As his online columns of recent years have shown, his own mind was wide open. Along with his reviews, Ebert also weighed in on social issues like the Tea Party, racism, gay marriage and right-wing textbook revisionists. Not surprisingly, he was liberal. You can't be a puritanical social conservative and be an evaluator of art as he was. It'd be impossible.

Ebert's worldview complemented his approach to watching movies. As I listened in my car, NPR played archived audio of an old Ebert interview. He said through watching a great movie "I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief."

It's happened in my lifetime. On occasion, a great film has prompted me to question, change or modify a particular view. Watching for and noting such things is part of what makes film review an art form.

The form been devalued in recent years. In the 1980s, my metropolitan area newspaper, The Wichita Eagle, had two film critics. Now it has none. Local TV stations will sit two bubbleheads on stools and they banter about how many boxes of popcorn to give a movie without any substantive explanation why. Critiquing is a craft and not everyone has a talent for it.

At the Movies jumped the shark after Siskel died and somewhere in Chicago, a balcony is closed forever. But when talking about Ebert's death, think about saving the art of film comment in our clickety-ADHD generation.

Loved it when they would fight.

Pungent air and piss

Maria, her brother Matt and I were gone --- a narrow, torturous road stuck in place camaro-hot purgatory. Road was a narrow staircase of crude tar patches. No shoulders to wake you up when you get slit-eyed at the wheel. No warning before that long drop into the dry weeds of this time forgotten,

Nothin' like driving south with the one you love. Oklahoma, baby. That's where our salvation awaits. The poker and blackjack tables. Slot machines. Lucky Ducky. Liberty 7. Kingdom Cash. Maria would go gravitating toward that thing before the night was over -- a game. Just stick it right in the slot. Nothin' like an electronic device called Girl's Best Friend. Yeah, I got your best friend right here, baby.

We never made it to one of the swanky gaming houses in the more prosperous of Indian nations. But the place wasn't complete confederate flag trash either. A moderate level above low life, I'd say. Classy crowd. People were there to gamble, not get drunk. Air was a zeppelin-like cloud of tarred nicotine bearing over a puddle of piss.

Maria lost $20, got $15 back. Matt won $20, lost $50. It's the nature of casinos. People win and lose a dollar, a five here and there. Once in a while some smart, lucky or cheating sonovabitch hits pay dirt.

The woman screamed ecstatically, breasts bobbing up and down as she jumped with unbridled joy. She placed a dollar at Mr. Moneybags and here she hit a jackpot of -----

Six thousand dollars!!!

Because there is no love and happiness like material possession. Especially the kind you lucked into. She was all over her husband, gropin' and scopin', kissin' and a-huggin' as the tears drew black mascara down her face like it was erosion. It was an emotional moment. Probably a relief. Why not let it out? Why hold back?

She was so excited she (I couldn't believe it. My mouth went agape.) undid her jeans and dropped trou right there. Head still cackling with laughter as she squatted her big ass over the tile floor. She must've pissed the Cimarron River over that floor.

By the way, April Fool.

Good things, not finished

Wow! What a great time to be a Shocker! A historic win. Such joy in Shockerland! WSU, my alma mater, ranked no. 9 seed. What's that? They upset the top ranked team in the nation? Something not done in 50 years? http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/2013/03/23/wichita-state-pulls-off-ultimate-shocker-knocking-off-no1-gonzaga/2014323/ http://www.kansas.com/2013/03/23/2729997/wichita-state-upsets-no-1-gonzaga.html http://www.kansas.com/2013/03/23/2730603/bob-lutz-shockers-are-some-tough.html

Facebook posts and tweets inundated me late Saturday night and into midnight. People I've known for years -- hung out with, worked on the campus paper with, gone to sports bars with and consumed the humiliating, heart attack wrenching "super slam breakfasts" with --- all over glass and plastic screens.

"Shox rock!" "Wu-hoo Shocks!" "So sweet!" "Sweet 16 here we come!"

If I have to go back to my job today, I'll get a boost, taking this with me. Twenty years ago when Wichita State basketball's glory days seemed finished, I didn't see this coming. Back then, WSU was solely a baseball powerhouse. The Shockers won the College World Series in 1989 and came close to repeating that before losing in a heartbreaker four years later.

The Shocker basketball team has had a resurgence within the past 10 years. It's something to be proud of, but the thing in all this, that gives me the most hope is knowing that all those great things your parents always told you about like the virtue of hard work, efforts paying off, showing confidence with humility -- they still exist.

A few years ago I read this article in the Wichita Eagle, quoting teachers, parents, high school and college students. The gist of the piece was how so many young men today lack ambition, motivation and a work ethic. It made me sad, reading Shocker baseball coach Gene Stephenson's quotes about how the young men he was coaching today didn't quite have that same inward desire as the guys he coached in '89.

Now I read quotes from Shocker basketball coach Greg Marshall, extolling his young men as tough, the type who go to class, contribute to their communities and don't embarrass their team and school with trash talk and getting in trouble with the law -- tough guys who have come from behind and seen it pay off.

"Nobody in our program came from basketball royalty," Marshall told a reporter anfter they beat the top ranked Gonzaga University. "We're all blue collar."

Reporters and headline writers characteristically went wild, running with the news gods present of a team called Shockers winning a shocking upset.

 I hope it's not a shock that the sweet virtues -- the things parents, teachers and coachers -- always preached haven't gone from this world. It helps me feel a little secure on this earth.

Feel happy inside

              49 Years ago today, how many Beatles fans actually watched this in 1964?

I think they should make some TV show, some really big show. They could have, like, plate twirlers, Broadway casts, sock puppets, comedians, ballerinas, ventriloquists...and hey, how 'bout some rock n' roll for the kids?

Peace with you

The Bethany Mennonite Church awaits from time immemorial, atop a hill that sweeps downward over sprawling farmland cut by ages of toiling people who gave thanks over the bread that feeds soul, like body. Straight east of the sea-shelled stone church building, beneath the shelter of cottonwood trees, the thin graying headstones stand in safe keeping within a rusted gate.

Near dusk, the flock will begin coming through the door, this Sunday evening. They hail, many of them, from the village of Valley Groves, the little town two miles north from the church to the bottom of the narrow slope along Purity Springs Road. Valley Groves, founded 1880, incorporated in 1901.

"You think they'll call me a Jezebel?" my wife Maria asked as I maneuvered the Hyundai on U.S. 77.

"What?"

"I'm wearing makeup," she said, pointing to the rouge on her cheeks.

"They don't wear makeup?" I said, thinking I should've figured that out. "Well, from what Matt says, they're nice people, non-judgmental. I don't think they'll call you the whore of Babylon or anything like that."

Her brother Matt sat in the backseat next to our 11-year-old son Max. Yvette, the sixtyish matelteral woman who works with Matt in the cafeteria of Susan B. Anthony Memorial Hospital in Skelly (an old oil boom town that made it big with the county seat, a couple of colleges and a hospital that's proven durable). She's all the time bringing him homemade cinnamon rolls and -- when he's stopped up with the cold -- nasal sprays from Wal-Mart or home remedies like elderberry and buckwheat honey.

"So what would possess an agnostic like you to go to church?" I ask Matt. "I'm sure you're not the only person from work she's ever invited to church."

"Well, you know how a lot of Christians are all for show?" he says. "They have an agenda, all hypocritical. Well, she's genuine. She doesn't go around shouting about herself, she has -- a quiet peace."

"Uh-huh."

"If a person can be -- what do they call it -- 'Christlike' -- she actually lives that way."

I'm glad he has a Yvette in his life. Matt -- well, he's in his early 20s and looking for his footing in life. Seems his other friends are meth heads, jailbirds and truck stop hookers.

Driving down the road, past the distractions of subdivisions, smelly convenience stores and toll booths, I'm happy to tell that town of Skelly, Kan. goodbye. I'm relishing this opportunity to attend a Mennonite service. I once heard a Quaker service, but not a Mennonite one. It's so dry here. Just give me --- experience, a life again.

Floodwaters

"I want you to remember those people for the rest of your life," Mom told me.

Along with the Red Cross and Salvation Army, Mennonites came to our aid that summer in 1979 when all the houses in our neighborhood were hit by a flood -- resulting from the rising Walnut River and our low plain area.

I became aware of Mennonites, watching a character in this TV mini-series Centennial -- based on one of James Michener's mammoth novels. Then in Mrs. Cruit's 4th grade class, I had to give an oral report on Mennonites. I stood next to the blackboard, reading what I'd copied from the World Book Encyclopedia the night before.

Years later, as an adult, I wasn't going to miss the chance to hear an afternoon presentation by alumni of a Mennonite college who had marched in the South for Civil Rights during the '60s. They spoke at their alma mater, Bethel College in Newton, Kan. A gentleman there played an ancient tape he had recorded of Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking on campus 50 years earlier. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122612938 http://www.mennoworld.org/2010/1/11/bethel-recovers-lost-king-recording/

Vincent Harding, an activist, theological scholar and Mennonite who worked with Dr. King, spoke at Bethel that night. A woman in the audience, obviously referring to the pugnacity of the Religious Right, asked Harding, "How do we reclaim the word, 'Christian?"

House of clay

We were early, among the first to enter the church building. Rhonda, a middle-aged woman stood alongside her teenage daughter and answered our questions about the church, the town and the cinnamon rolls at the bakery she runs on the single downtown block of Valley Groves. She spoke kindly of Yvette and the many years she worked there.

"She's a darling," Rhonda said.

Yvette is Rhonda's aunt.

Others filed inside -- men in black coats, shirts buttoned to the neck, all with beards neat and tidy. All the women wore modest dresses and bonnets. None wore make-up and all were --

beautiful

Everyone offered their hands and took us in -- their interest in us, sincere and natural. They asked our names and told us theirs -- Prusso-German names of sturdy people who fled religious persecution in Europe and brought wheat and industry to the Plains -- Klaassen, Thiessen, Hartzler, Baumgartner, Schmidt...and Koehn, so many Koehns, so many familes and generations.

"Just walk around, make yourself at home," Rhonda said.

Naturally, I gravitated to the library and scanned old books. Around the time I led my family inside the sanctuary, others had the same idea. Men sat to one side, women on the other. "But you don't have to," Rhonda had told us.

There, just before we got seated on the opposite side of the room, I was introduced to Yvette. The teeth of her smile were effusive, a bridge of friendliness, and she touched Matt's arm,saying, "I am so happy to see you." Then she took a seat next to Maria on the other end of the room while Matt, Max and I occupied the pew across the aisle.

A quartet of men sang a cappella. I think because Mennonites don't use instruments in their services, they have honed the instrumentation of their voices to a degree at once heavenly and close-to-the-soil earthy. We sang with them from church hymnals.

How fragile is existence here here in this world of toil and tears...My Lord is building me a home that's eternal in a land that's free from sin. There's no decay. He's coming soon to take me there.

The congregation knelt on the floor for prayer. I used to wonder why anyone would bother getting on their knees to pray. Crouched to the ground, I had a moment of clarity. Kneeling is a sign of humility, an acknowledgement that our lives are fragile and we need a power far bigger than ourselves to guide the way. It's a show of gratitude that we don't have to carry life's burdens alone.

The visiting preacher, a tall dark-bearded man from northern Iowa, read from the 26th chapter of Genesis -- a passage about Issac, the digging of wells and man's selfishness. I loved the way he used the King James version. As one with a life long reverence for words and language, I'm partial to the Elizabethan euphony of the KJV's prose. However, I was afraid that Max would be bored. He looked fine, though, sitting by me and following along in my Bible, unfazed as names like "A-bim'-e-lech" and place names like "valley of Ge-rar" were read.

This Mennonite service was a cultural departure for our little group, but I especially wondered about Max. For the past couple of years we've been going to a church where the pastor wears faded jeans and a rock band lays out spiritual crescendos like Stone Temple Pilots meets Silverchair -- a here-now emulation of King David rocking out to the timbrels, cornets and cymbals in the house of Israel.

That's all fine. People are moved in many ways, but if there truly are differing seasons for events and emotions as Solomon wrote about some 2,500 years ago, then I believe there's a place for quiet, as well. For silence. Tranquility breathes life to contemplation. A spiritual aspiring -- faith, hope, life -- are given form in the unsaid.

The stillness.

We turned to the third chapter of Romans:

What then? are we better than they? No, in no wise: for we have before proved both Jews and Gen'-tiles, that they are all under sin.

Not one among us in the human family can call ourselves good men. Like Paul, we want to do good, but we're inclined to keep doing the thing we hate. Sure I've been abrasive, caustic, hurting others with thoughtless things I've said and done. Maybe we all have.

Their throat is an open sepulchre: with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips:

The preacher noted Isaiah's words: "peace like a river."

(Peace like a river? Wasn't that? -- yeah, it was the name of a novel by Leif Enger. The phrase is found in the 19th century hymn, It is Well With My Soul. Paul Simon -- Jewish, but captivated by the black gospel that launched the rock n' roll of his adolescence -- wrote a song called "Peace Like a River" in the early '70s.)

"Wouldn't you like to have peace like a river?" the pastor asked. "Do we all just dig our own wells and say, 'This is mine. I'm not giving another inch?' Have you ever known somebody who went beyond the mark? That person knows a great secret, that there's enough for all of us. There's an abundance. What is communion, but a big feast? Why not share in the water that quenches all thirst?"

Peace like a river

Nearly all the people in attendance were congregated in the vestibule at the conclusion of the service. We shook more hands. Yvette introduced us to her husband, Amos. There was a metal hook where his left hand had been. He lost it in a farming accident when he was 19.

Max gracefully shook the hands extended to him, smiled sweetly while inadvertently revealing his braces, and said his name audibly as he looked each person respectfully in the eye. My boy has a poise I never possessed at his age.

"It was pretty good," Max told Maria when she asked him what he thought of the service. This boy who, like his dad, prefers rock music to pop or rap -- this kid who cannot live without his minecraft or DS -- if he didn't like the place, we would've heard about it. But there it was. No bells or whistles. Not even a power point to illustrate the pastor's sermon and Max was good with it. He may not have felt an emotional stirring in his soul, but he liked the church. Pretty good.

"They were genuine," Matt said as we pulled out of the gravel driveway.

"The word that springs to my mind," I said, "is ____

humility

We were quieter, more reverent than usual as we were leaving. There wasn't a lot of laughing in the car, no cussing. No coarse talk. That may not have lasted long, but it held for the time we were on the narrow road of the countryside.

Back on Main Street in Skelly, Matt was on a rant about the "derelicts" he works with at the hospital. Human train wrecks like the coke-addled guy who was giving Matt lip and got put in a headlock.

"What about Christian love?" I asked him, half facetiously.

"If they turn the other cheek to me, I'll punch that too," he quipped.

"You know Matt, the older you get and the more you screw up, the less judgmental you'll be of other people."

I could always blame it on the refinery fumes of Skelly emitting viperous chemicals of suicide, violence and sex into Matt's head. But I think it's something still inside him. Not me, though, I'm tired. Too many years spent angry.

MLK said hatred and bitterness "poisons the soul and scars the personality" and I have to concur. I disagree with Nietzsche's view that loving one's enemies shows a weakness in the Christian ethic. It's a strength.

As much as I admire the thought and writing of existentialists like Sarte' and Camus, I have to concede that I don't want the burden of having to find my own meaning in the cosmos. I want to believe peace and righteousness to be an immutable law of the universe, that divinity and the personal can be found even inside infinity.

Yes...springs and harvests to sustain over the droughts and disappointments, hope sprawling over the fields and rocks and 20 thousand roads of this life.

Green thongs and beer

St. Patrick's Day. The thing I love about the holiday is that  -- like Christmas and Mardi Gras -- it's a holiday ostensibly rooted in Christian tradition (with holdovers from good ol' fashioned ancient paganism meshed in), yet has come to be epitomize night time debauchery -- bacchanals lit with shots, beer and Irish pubs.

And why not, I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints any day. St. Patrick's Day -- like so much of Americana -- is a dichotomous blending of the sacred and profane. St. Patrick's Day isn't quite as American as the 4th of July, but it's damn close. I mean firecracker lust and shot glass to the lips close. America is nothing, if not multicultural -- a technicolor amalgamation of every race, culture and religion that ever immigrated here. I believe there were more Irish-Americans than there were Irish in Ireland as early as the Guilded Age.

The easy, non-puritanical, non-Austere approach of St. Patrick's Day was really in the mix from the beginning. When St. Patrick was converting the inhabitants of the emerald isle back in the 5th century, he was cool with the converts keeping their native polytheism, their Druidic mythologies and letting them co-exist with the Catholicism he introduced. He was fine with the natives mixing their pagan sun cross with the cross of Jesus to create a celtic cross. It's not clear if he really used a shamrock as a metaphor for the holy trinity, but who cares? He did not actually drive the snakes out. That much, we do know for a certainty.

But the inclusion of Irish and many other cultures in America has sure driven out a lot -- definitely not all -- bigotry, hasn't it?

As a young small town newspaper reporter, I took a photo of a priest who hailed from Ireland, as he was blessing a beer keg in the kitchen of a local brasserie called O'Dells. He poured holy water on that thing and prayed earnestly, thanking God for this gift of the barley and the "good cheer" it brought to peoples' lives.

My jaw about collapsed. I was brought up Baptist, raised to believe Jesus turned the water into Welch's Grape Juice. (Remember the scene in My Left Foot? Right after leaving a funeral, Daniel Day Lewis  -- loved Lincoln -- and his family, not only go to a pub, they get into a brawl, a donnybrook.)

Well I'm not going to convert over some non-written, tacit doctrine on beverages. Although Catholicism might go back in my family somewhere and somebody probably married a Protestant and went heretical. I say this because there's definitely Irish in my heritage. Genealogists discovered it in our family tree. My mother's maiden name was McElroy. 

Years ago, my co-workers and I used to celebrate "good cheer" at our favorite neighborhood dive every St. Patrick's Day. It wasn't an Irish pub, but so what. The spirit was there. No signs for Guinness outside the door. Just working class old man beers like Old Milwaukee and Schlitz.

And if I was having Pabst Blue Ribbon, so what. That's what my grandpappy Mac drank.

"How I Got Over" - Mahalia Jackson