I Heard the Bells of Christmas Day....

I heard the bells on Christmas Day...actually, 'twas the Third Sunday in Advent, but who's keeping track.  Earlier that morning, the angelic host had proclaimed  "Gloooo-ria in Excelsis Deo". Well, perhaps they were more energetic than angelic...Either way, a joyful noise was made.

Maybe even a little "yee-ha" before the shepherds arrived to tell the good news...

..and we dismissed to breakfast pizzas for the kids and Snickers and Butterfingers for everyone else.

There may not be snow on Christmas. Juggling the permutations of our big family means we may not open packages on Christmas. We may not always be together on Christmas. But there should always be music on Christmas.  Joyful, exuberant, waiting-for-this-all-year music.

For Unto Us a Child is Born, Schlueter Style

This year there is snow...perfect cold crisp snow...an unsullied expanse for kids and puppies to destroy....

And the rest of the family is nearby the fire; there are packages stacked haphazardly like the aftermath of an avalanche and shoes and boots thawing under the radiator.  The food that won't fit in the refrigerator is stored the old fashioned way: on the frozen back porch.  My Granny used to store her Christmas cookies in cookie tins and coffee cans on her back porch; one family friend used to come in that back way, eat himself full of cookies, and then go around the front to knock on the door for a visit!

Tonight there's  a fifty degree temperature differential between back porch and kitchen.

"Their old familiar carols play.

And loud and deep, the words repeat

Of peace on earth, good will to men..."

Lizzie, Gloria in Excelsis Deo

Out of nowhere, out of imagination and energy and the Spirit of Christmas and the sweetness of grandchildren toward grandparents, Aaron and Lizzie, Gabe and Abbie, Josh and Levi, have concocted the Redbarn Christmas concert this Christmas Eve (produced by the kids, with help from the adults says one sign)...

...Produced by the kids (with help from the Moms)

  For the adults (but mostly for Grandma)...

says the sign affixed to an empty wrapping paper roll and waved about like a heraldic flag by Joshua.

And in case we don't get the message, Levi is announcing the concert in stentorian tones , with a death grip on Lizzie's karaoke mike.  You can run, but you cannot hide....

Last Christmas, my mom and dad were up here in Tarkio for the first time in many years. This year we remember my mom's Christmas birthday with a bouquet of flowers.  Two years ago, the great grandkids listened to their grandpa play in a Christmas concert down at the Lake of the Ozarks; they marveled at the bass clarinet and tried spreading their fingers over the keys of his clarinet.

 

This Christmas, they decide celebrate his decades of music the very best way: by singing and playing together unselfconsciously, generously, filling the rooms of our house with big sound and big singing and being rewarded with hearty applause and proud smiles from everyone in the audience.

Gabe, trombone, Jingle Bells

Santa Claus is Coming to Town, Joshie

Till, ringing, singing on its way,

The world revolved from night to day,

A voice, a chime,

A chant sublime

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

How I wish my folks could hear their great-grandchildren's songs this Christmas.  Their hearts would have been touched: I can hear my dad say, "Yeah!"with an approving smile and see my mom grin with delight.

Aaron Proclaims Joy to the World

For everyone who is celebrating this Christmas with an empty place in their heart, there is cheer in unexpected gifts like this spontaneous concert, a grace note, a hug from your Father, a reminder that He understands our hearts better than we....

The First Noel, Abbie and Lizzie on Piano and Vocal

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

"God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!

The Wrong shall fail,

The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men!"

May we all be granted the eyes to see and ears to hear the blessings that are around us.

May we be granted wisdom to give thanks for them.

Let the love of your Savior and Friend be your comfort

And His words your blessing...

Christmas Blessings for this day and days to come....

Levi, With a Little Help from Kenzie, Jingle Bells

God Bless the Music Makers...for they shall bring Joy!

In Memoriam

His 84th birthday cake is still in the freezer. The Sunday we were to eat it with him, he was admitted to to the hospital after taking his third fall in less than 24 hours. Since then, we have have been waiting with him for what comes next. I've turned on the Big Ten network, on mute, where football players of the past are exhibiting highlight reel heroics. He likes football.

Mozart is the background music to the game. Over the past week, we've made our musical way through Bruckner symphonies, Brahms concertos, some Delius and Elgar and two somber symphonies of Vaughn Williams. Ben has contributed a six pack of Mozart hits, so this morning the Jupiter symphony accompanies Penn State and Wisconsin.

My father and I played a lot of Mozart in our day. Mozart and the clarinet are a match made in heaven. We played duets, stopping to repeat a phrase not for missed notes or a muffed accidental, but for style points....for playing too loud, for attacking too harshly, for not playing sweetly enough."One can never," he would say, "play Mozart too sweetly."

Not this side of heaven.

This is the man who taught me to practice, who led by example, whether the lesson was scraping rust with a wire brush and painting Rustoleum....preservation.....or keeping my chin down so my clarinet profile didn't resemble George Washington....perseverance....or picking up and putting away....well, maybe it took years for that lesson to stick.

"He was square with the world; he took good care of his tools."

He could make almost anything function.... ham radios, color televisions, non-destructive nuclear test equipment. The fixes were not always pretty, but they used what was at hand and they were constructed to endure the ages. Over built, in engineer speak.

What my father joined together, it was darned hard to put asunder.

He was the disciplinarian of our family. When I was very young, punishment meant standing in the kitchen facing the dryer.  Words carried more pain than the rare swat with the paint stick.  Our parents let us grow up and therefore we did, but on the few occasions he offered counsel or warning, I took his judgments seriously and pondered the implications.

He told me my marriage to Blake was for once and for all...there would be no "coming home".  His word was bond; the pledge he and my mother made to each other lasted through health and sickness, good times and bad, and only the grave separates them now.

My father was a most unpretentious polymath.  He read the German Abendpost weekly and the Spanish version of the National Geographic monthly and watched Spanish soap operas.  There was a planetarium in the milking parlor and all his older great grandchildren had the opportunity to look through the telescope. He loved wood and utilized an assortment of antique rough and ready tools to build book shelves, computer desks, and a customized dining table to accommodate the growing family.  He seldom sat still and always had a project on the work bench.  He knew every facet of Civil War history, was a lifetime member of the ARRL; he used to commute to Jefferson City on his motorcycle and check in with my mother every day on his mobile radio...  W0NWG to W0NWH. He and my mom developed their own photographs for years and shot targets at the gun range.

He fueled the curiosity of his grandchildren and great grandchildren; in photo after photo, he is holding forth, hands in the air, explaining something to one or more kids.  We didn't read at the supper table when I was young: we listened as my father expounded on one subject or another.  We even listened to him when the tornado warnings blew and the sky glowed lurid green, my mother fell deathly silent and I wondered whether the grand piano would hold us all down if the house blew away around us.

He had a wicked sense of humor...and I would constantly flounder trying to come up with a suitably witty reply. My sister and I longed for a horse and saved our nickels and dimes and birthday money for years in hopes of owning one.  When we moved to Missouri to a farm where we could keep one, my father's counter-offer was the purchase of a long horned Hereford we had named Brownie.  Soon, our quixotic dream of galloping the fields was replaced by the less romantic reality of a cow calf pair.  

He was upright, faithful, argumentative, obstinate, and a loving  companion to my mother for all his life.  I shall miss listening to him, working with him,  learning from him, and playing music with him.  

"Now lettest Thy servant depart in peace, according to Thy word,

For mine eyes have seen Thy salvation which Thou hast prepared

Before the face of all peoples."

Rest, faithful servant.  I look to the time when we shall plant together in the Lord's garden and play sweet music together in His orchestra.

C. John Renken, Jr.

May 14, 1933- May 27, 2017 

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524

524:

Five hundred and twenty four instants condensed from the hundreds of shutter clicks both actual and virtual.  Five hundred and twenty four images captured, each just a fraction of a second, less than the inhaled breath it took to keep the scene in focus.  It took more than an hour of squinting and sorting to winnow this year down to five hundred and twenty four vignettes. Like the famous film editor told us, "so much good stuff winds up on the floor..."

365:

The days of 2017 lay out in a grid of white on the computer screen.  Add in the ability to format the cover page to accept five or more photos on the top half of each month, that part usually decorated with snowy peaks, or wildflowers...compiled wisdom or poetry....cute kids, old tractors, fast cars,  appealing pets, or whatever catches the customers' attention in the auto parts shop. Tally those sums and 100 of those 524 precious, if insignificant slices of life must be left behind to be consigned to Time Hop, or Moments, or, horror of horrors, reduced to nothingness, non existence, with a swipe of a finger through the trash can icon.

See, when I put together a calendar, every day of the year gets a picture, not just major holidays like the 4th of July or Thanksgiving.  Birthdays get pictures; anniversaries get pictures; even dates like  Pitchers and Catchers Report and Daylight Savings Time Ends get a picture. Every Monday thru Sunday from January 1 to New Year's Eve gets a story from the previous year, unless the photo completely obliterates the birthday or anniversary already noted in print. It seems only logical: if one is going to purchase a calendar from a company that provides photo products, then MAXIMIZE THE PHOTOS!

That's the physical part.  Now for the metaphysical aspect, the essence, the lifeblood, the underlying part and parcel and meaning of every day to day to day up to three hundred and sixty five....

There's a sundial in a corner of my back patio, perched on a plant stand built of railroad spikes.  Soon after it was given to me, I discovered its defect; the gnomon is backwards, so the shadow is always pointing to the wrong time.  Despite its uselessness as a time piece, the sentiment imprinted on its surface is one I'm fond of: 'Grow Old Along with Me, The Best is Yet to Be.'   Season after season, as we plant and harvest, grow and work, gain and lose, we measure this motto against the times, adding to the sum of our days the blessings thereof.  Barbeques and birthdays, babies in bathtubs, banquets and bequests, ballgames and warm beds afterwards......hugs, harvests, helping hands, and homes.  Travels. Travails.

Not every "yet to be" is the "best".  The sundial counts "Only Sunny Hours".   The calendar measures only the happiest of times.  But that is as it should be.  We should build our year with the sunniest, the most blessed, the simplest, and the homeliest, of days.  At the end of this year, we are the most fortunate to count not just our daily bread, our daily blessings...not just the three hundred and sixty five and  the extra one hundred special moments pictured  on the month, but even more...overflowing on the unnamed, the unnumbered white spaces....  Count them all! Five hundred twenty four...

...and so many more...

P.S....Last year it was 530!

Vanishing Points

Anyone ever tear out the postage paid cards offering free vacation guides and roadmaps for prospective Great American Roadtrippers in the Better Homes and Gardens magazines in the checkout aisle? I was that kid, a sucker for free stuff, for maps, for sights to see and roads not taken. I diligently sent off for every free offer from any state from any magazine my mom subscribed to; magazines at the doctor's or dentist's or car dealer's were also fair game. Never mind that our family trips were predestined: no need for Delaware, Florida, or Maine. The maps themselves had power.

When the Missouri road map arrived, we unfolded to the listing of cities and counties to check the status of a place we had never been, never seen: a site as mythical as Brigadoon in our family lore. The state of Missouri listed every village, every borough, and, I assume, every wide spot off a lettered highway, including our very favorite town, a little place called Bado down in Texas county.

What made Bado special? With a population of just four people, it was the smallest town in the state of Missouri. We were entranced; not only with the notion of a place the size of our family being a town, but the fact that Missouri's highway map would recognize not just cities like St. Louis....but also a town like Bado, so unimaginably small that we figured its buildings must all be empty! The map told us Bado was a place, but it was also an idea, a coming together of the lines of perspective, a myth, a mist, that would disappear if we didn't check on it every year....or if we drove down to Texas county to find it.

Out here on the prairie, the wind, the rain, and time itself join forces to change landscapes until nothing is left but a name. A forgotten rural schoolhouse once stood south and east of Westboro along the gravel road I drive to work. For a while the rubble of bricks turned up at planting time, but the foundation is one with the soil any more.

There are a number of signs along the two miles of route O near the site of the old schoolhouse, put up several years back by a proprietor of Fourteen Pines farm. Alas, a casual traveler can no longer pick out the home place; age and disease have left nothing of the statuesque pines. I have enjoyed the place names on the signs in the fence rows, but they are deteriorating as well and will soon be as much a mystery as the name 'Rosebud' on a sled.

Farmsteads grow up and flourish, are absorbed or vanish; town centers migrate with the traffic patterns and schools consolidate, but while populations wax and wane, our cemeteries remain.

We honor those that came before: those who settled this country, built this country, fought for this country and ultimately came back to this ground to their earthly rest. Our cemeteries are beautiful places this time of year with the Stars and Stripes whipping in the wind and the peonies and irises in bloom. Our past is there...in all the names that seem familiar and the remembrances laid lovingly and dutifully alongside. But our future is there as well; for every tended cemetery is a mark of civilization and faith that our community will still be on the map in years to come.

Bado

A village in Morris Township. It was established during the Civil War (c. 1863) by Mr. Clabe Groce. The present (1933) postmaster has always lived within a mile of the office and has heard that it was so called because it was settled during the bad years. The name was used long before it became a post-office in 1888. (--Place Names.)

Bado was located at Section 34, Township 30 N, Range 11 W, on Highway M, south of Fairview, and north of YY.

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