Gentle People

Missive

A friend gave a talk to a women’s church circle yesterday

(see below date)
And I went to hear him;
His subject was his Quaker minister father
And being brought up in rural Iowa and Wisconsin

There were nine children born to this family
and my friend was the middle child
which gave him a perspective of up and down
from the ideal place, sandwiched by six other boys and two girls

When they would go riding in a wagon or a Model A
Sometimes people would stare and silently count
With their fingers, one, two, three, four………
And one of the brothers once leaned out and said,

“There’s NINE of us!”
The parents loved their children greatly;
Times were hard, and struggle to make ends meet
Was a fact of life for the well-knit family

Although the children thought it was just the way life was
Because making do was how everyone else
In their impoverished communities lived too
And their parents did not show much concern;

The father when someone broke a solemn tenet
Sent the child out to cut a switch
And he applied the discipline generously
Which seemed to break his heart

And after awhile it wore on him so hard
That he was doing all this switching
He said to them,
“You ALL go out and cut switches!”

When they came in, puzzled and worried,
The father said, “Now I want you all to
Switch ME! I must be doing something wrong.”
The children complied, though astounded at this turn;

It was uniquely educational for most of them
To apply the lash to their beloved father
Which may have been behind
The creative idea;

Time went along and he still was unable to
Bring about right behaviour from his tribe;
Naughtiness prevailed, it seemed to him,
Too much, so he called the children to formation;

Forlorn, the tender father, caught
In a parenting vortex,
Looked up after holding his head in his hands
For a long silence, searched his nine children’s faces

And asked them, beseechingly,
“Something is wrong here, I can’t seem
To get you to be good! What are we to do?” Whereupon
One little boy said, “We could try whipping you again?”

All those children somehow got college educations
Though the father, who had the gift or oratory,
Only went through eighth grade before having to quit
School and work to support his ailing father’s family

He worked hard at several jobs beside what he got
As a small stipend from his ministry work
And he never complained or let the children
Know how close to the edge he was

My friend in his talk to the church ladies and me yesterday guessed
His father frequently asked the Lord how he was going to make it;
Anecdotal evidence pointed to that: One time the father,
Sometimes given to depression, trudged home through the field

Where he’d been farm-handing - he told his son
Much later in life - and he was anguishing how he was to
Be able to keep going, praying for strength, when all of a sudden,
Whoomp!

A rabbit fell from the sky at his feet.
The father looked at it incredulously; then gazed
Upward, and there, circling above him,
Was a hawk.

[David Dix 10-9-2002]

……………………………………………………….

Reply to anonymous commenter on Hunting the White Deer posting:

^.^

From SRN editor - who is in fact a simple man with a computer:

This comment begs a reply.

Your arguments are some of the traditional defenses for hunting.

Stopping hunting, by my reading, is for some (many) a gradual process of elevating one's awareness. Seasoned hunters laying down their guns or bows and arrows, hanging up their "kit" in favor of simple observation and appreciation of nature's (God's) creatures, those events are pleasant ones to learn of, and to learn from.

Witness this from our last night's reading, Henry David Thoreau's words in his 1864 book, - The Maine Woods.

Traveling by batteaux and birch canoe through wilderness timberland in then wilder Maine, the trees being only slightly diminished by rugged timbermen, and in the company of a moose hunter, he penned:

"There is a higher law affecting relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man. Can he who has discovered only some values of whalebone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale?

Can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have "seen the elephant"? These are petty and accidental uses; just as if a stronger race were to kill us in order to make buttons and flageolets or our bones; for everything may serve a lower as well as a higher purpose.

EVERY CREATURE IS BETTER ALIVE THAN DEAD, MEN AND MOOSE AND PINE TREES, AND HE WHO UNDERSTANDS IT ARIGHT WILL RATHER PRESERVE ITS LIFE THAN DESTROY IT."

...........................................

This appreciator of your words, sir or madam, is quick to allow that he imperfectly eats an occasional hamburger, wears leather shoes, and as recently as a week ago was at the Pick N Save counter securing a jar of Ma Baensch's herring.

Thanks for writing.

The killing of the white deer kindled an age-old argument.

Zep