Category: boyhood

Why do they call it Good Friday?

Now, looking back from a half-century on, I know our differences in ancestry, ethnicity and prejudice blinded us to what we shared in common. Maybe that’s why it was a good Friday. In those three hours, we were of one spirit in reverence for something we held in common even if we refused to recognize it. These days, three hours of publicly shared and reflective silence could help us all see some greater good we share lying just beyond our immediate prejudices and passions.

Janesv41[1]
Janesville, Minnesota, 1950
Good Friday? As a boy, I wondered why they called it good? What was so good about getting killed? As a ten-year-old in the 1950’s, I took certain things for granted because adults didn’t encourage questions about basic assumptions. And besides, we lived on a farm and I had other, more immediate things to do—like feed the chickens. That’s just the way things were.

Our family shopped in the Minnesota village of Janesville, population 1,100. It had a stoplight, a town cop, a volunteer fire department, a public school and one of every necessary commercial service: grain elevator, drug store, coffee shop, gas station, furniture store-funeral home, hardware, dentist, doctor, veterinary, butcher, beer joint, five and dime, feed and hatchery. There were three active churches: Trinity Lutheran (Missouri Synod), St. Anne’s Roman Catholic and St. John’s Episcopal.

In those days, your particular denomination defined you and your associations socially much more than it does today. Your church reflected your ethnic origins, beliefs, state of spiritual salvation (as seen by others) and whom you might marry. The German immigrants and their children attended Trinity Lutheran, the children of Irish and Polish immigrants went to St. Anne’s and the Yankees, like my family, belonged to St. John’s Episcopal. Ecumenism wasn’t in anyone’s lexicon and a “mixed marriage” was an anathema, a kind of cultural treason that could get your exiled from the family.
The Missouri Synod church was a particularly strict and conservative sect. When boys were invited to join the town Scout troop, the Lutheran pastor said “no!” because—God forbid—his boys might come into contact with Catholics! To keep the children faithful, the church had an elementary school (grades one to eight) conveniently located across the alley from the public school. We farm kids lived adjacent to each other and rode the yellow buses to our respective schools.

During recess on winter days, we public school boys took on the ‘Dutchies’ (for their ancestry) in epic snowball wars across the alley. We organized. Those with the strongest arms threw and the rest of us packed ammunition. It didn’t matter who threw first. The tribal response always came in force and dense salvos of hard-packed snowballs flew back and forth. Sooner or later, someone laced snowballs with pebbles. Tears and blood followed. When the bells rang, the day’s war ended and we returned to classes gloating over our victories. Later, we boarded the buses and sat with the foes we fought so viciously earlier in the day. No one held a grudge.

Despite our sectarian prejudices, Lutheran, Catholic or Episcopal, we reverenced Christmas, Holy Week and Easter. That said, we had no ecumenical services until after Vatican II, and then only on a limited basis. Instead of ecumenism, and despite the narrower opinions and preferences of that time, we gave each other space to observe holy days and ceremonies without interference or criticism.

St. Johns
St. John’s Episcopal Church

Everyone celebrated Christmas in a cheery and quasi-secular way but Good Friday felt different. It passed as a subdued afternoon, as if a storm brooded, and adults said little and children were shushed. Whether by custom, ordinance or informal agreement, Janesville seemed to shut down between the hours of noon and three o’clock. The bank, drug store, five and dime, grocery and even the bar closed to observe the hours when Jesus suffered on the cross and darkness covered the land. Many of us sat in our respective churches, our altars bare, the crosses draped in black veils and listened to the Gospel lesson about betrayal, death and forgiveness—the same Scripture in each church. During these hours of sober self-examination rose the prayers asking forgiveness of our sins.

Now, looking back from a half-century on, I know our differences in ancestry, ethnicity and prejudice blinded us to what we shared in common. Maybe that’s why it was a good Friday. In those three hours, we were of one spirit in reverence for something we held in common even if we refused to recognize it. These days, three hours of publicly shared and reflective silence could help us all see some greater good we share lying just beyond our immediate prejudices and passions.

Watching a Calico Cat while eating a bowl of tomato soup

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “An Odd Trio.”

The world of my childhood had two kinds of cats – house cats and barn cats. House belonged to the people who lived in town and pampered them. Our cats lived in the barn and hunted mice that got into the chicken feed. George was the most famous of our barn cats.

The house where I grew up, home of memories.
The house where I grew up, home of memories.

One summer day in the mid 1950s, at the age of 10 or 11, I was eating lunch on ourthree-season porch because it was slightly cooler than the rest of the house. We usually ate together as a family, but today my Mom just fixed a meal of of Campbell’s tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. Noon was normally our big meal of the day, every farm wife called it ‘dinner’ but today we had soup and a sandwich because I was going to town for swimming lessons in Lake Elysian. Mom thought a light meal would prevent stomach cramps that caused drownings. I sat on my chair in a swim suit and T-shirt with a beach towel – well, really a bath towel – over the back of my chair. I as ate, I watched our barn cat named George come limping into the yard.

George , a calico cat of tan, white and gray, was missing the lower part of one front foot. I never learned why my parents her George but, beyond this mystery, I do know she was the best mouser on the place. Despite losing her front paw and ankle, perhaps to some kind of steel trap, she had learned to move easily with a rhythmic limp. Even at a distance, I spotted her by her up-down, up-down gait.

George, the three-legged calico cat.
George, the three-legged calico cat.

And, could she catch mice! She was so stealthy I never saw her catch a mouse, so I don’t know how she did it with only the claws of one paw, but many times I saw her trot into the barn carrying a mouse. We had no ‘tom cats’ on the farm but that didn’t prevent George from finding them – or they, her – and getting laid. She was a fine mother and, over a number of years, birthed, fed, and cared from many litters of kittens.

What to do with a litter of barn kittens? Getting rid of them – humanely – is difficult. I know some people who put them in a weighted sack and dropped them off the steel bridge over the LeSueur River. That was cruel and we didn’t do that. We gave them away – most of them. Year in and year out, we tried to keep our feline population to roughly four cats, either females or neutered males.

One of George’s many offspring was a big, black male cat – a tom – whom we neutered. After ‘Tom’ lost his ‘family jewels’ – as we said back then – he was no longer a Tom cat but a Tim-kitty – a pussy. Regardless of this, ‘Tim’ inherited his mother’s gift for mouseing.

The barn where mice ran freely - until George.
The barn where mice ran freely – until George.

Feeding chickens and collecting eggs was my major chore as a boy. I saw Tim-kitty’s prowess one morning when I fed chickens before I got on the school bus. We fed our chickens oats and ground feed from barrels we kept in a small egg room inside the barn. Mice are good are finding their way to food, nothing we did kept them out entirely, and we locked ‘Tim’ inside the egg room as a deterrent each night.

Opening the door one morning, I didn’t see Tim-kitty anywhere. Then I heard a scrabbling sound in one of the nearly empty feed barrels. Looking down, I saw Tim-kitty at the bottom and he seemed perplexed. The cat had a mouse trapped under each foot, and one in his mouth and clearly didn’t know what to do next. In the end, we got rid of the mice. George died a year or two later but I don’t recall the date or circumstances.

Did this really happen? Memories can be so fickle and change abruptly, like Midwestern weather. As years pass, certain memories fossilize into established stories filed under a formidable heading I call “Truth.” Fragments of past experiences, covered with the emotional fingerprints of events, endure because they are useful to me. I use these memories like nails to anchor the past in place so I don’t lose it and my place in it. Unfortunately, my sister doesn’t necessarily remember the same events I do. So, am I nailing my memory, my “truth” to something as plastic a peanut butter?

No. George will live forever in my mind and memories, so will Tim-kitty, along with the fact I learned to swim that summer in Lake Elysian, even if the water was murky and the bottom was spongy. Tomato soup still isn’t one of my favorite soups, and I still don’t own a beach towel, but I can still see George limping along with the tail of a mouse dangling from her jaws.