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English and Hebrew were not a perfect marriage when it comes to man figuring out exactly what God wanted in communication with man (we English speaking people) but with some help it has been done fairly well. When Creator God was “working out” the world, or things in the world, as we know it, the appointed historian Moses, who could be credited for the actual writing of the first books of the Bible, expressed various steps with the phrase, “…and it was so…” Sometimes in the creation story as recorded in the book of Genesis, the historian wrote “And it was good…” Conjecture is something anyone can do so I will put my “conjecturing hat” on and do some guessing why these two phrases were used to sum up the various steps of announcements of the creation of the universe, how things like light, days became numerable, the separation of land from water—boundaries in principle and fact. No, when all this was going on I wasn’t standing by giving God ideas—remember, I am just conjecturing.
I find it interesting that when God created what we call Earth, or dry land, and the gathering together of the waters, the words, and “it was good” were used. The verb can easily be changed to present instead of past tense for the sake of my conjecture and in doing so a little bit different expression is brought to mind. Not only were the earth (land) and water good, but also they continue to be good until this day. The Amish folks have often been denigrated by us moderns; consider this criticism by a Soil Conservation Service: “The Amish minds are too ‘unscientific’ to understand the intricacies of proper soil management, so they should learn to rely on outside experts for advice.” (I wonder who is the dumber or smarter?) I have gained much from my wife’s handing me a book written by David Kline. If you want to take the time to hunt up this book and read it for yourself, I think you will come to some of the same conclusions my wife and I have.
In David Kline’s book, Great Possessions, Wendell Berry wrote these thoughts in the book’s Introduction: “The Old Order Amish communities, of one of which David is a member, have preserved profound connections between things that conventional American society has normally separated. David’s way of life, for example, does not divide the life of the mind from the life of the body. That he lives by physical work has not denied him an active mental life, nor has it denied him both physical and mental delight. In the same way, his work does not involve or imply the rigid divisions of human domestic life from the life of nature that is now normal in the industrial economy.”
“This book announces on every page that the world is good, an article of faith that is here brought to rest upon experience. That David Kline and his neighbors look at the world and find it good, and that they honor its goodness in their daily work, permits them to say something that, after a decade of severe agricultural depression, is at once astonishing and profoundly reassuring: ‘Farming is good.’”
David Kline’s usual three-word phrase, “Farming is good.” is found through this fine book. It might surprise the typical modern American to find a principle or two that makes it perfectly clear why the Amish think as they do. For example: “The Amish are not necessarily against modern technology. We have simply chosen not to be controlled by it.” The very fact is that they’re not terribly concerned with a few weeds in their cornrows. The very presence of some weeds can be a positive when storms come along and the Amish explain they can “depend on a smattering of quack grass and on sod waterways to hold the topsoil.”
At another farmer-advisory meeting when the jargon began to revolve around “input – output” “acre-eaters,” “work-is-drudgery” and the “bottom-line” the remark was made, “No-till sure beats plowing.” David Kline probably remained silent at that meeting but in his regular essays in the newspaper he dropped the bomb: “…I enjoy plowing. Just this past year the SCS technician told me, in all seriousness, that if I’d join the no-till crowd I’d be freed from plowing, and then my son or I could work in a factory. He insinuated that the extra income (increased cash flow) would in some way improve the quality of our lives.”
Another perspective should create profitable ruminations – “no-till farming with its dependence on vast amounts of chemicals is being touted by the experts as the way to guarantee green fields forever. What they fail to say is that these green fields will be strangely silent—gone will be the bobolink, the meadowlark, and the sweet song of the vesper sparrow in the twilight.”
Somehow, someway I rather feel the Amish farmer regards the “good earth” a bit differently than the big farmer consortiums. Interested in reading David Kline’s “Great Possessions”? The publisher is NORTH POINT PRESS.
THE WORDWRIGHT
If three words could be lumped together instead of the customary two, I suppose this could be classified as an oxymoron. When is war or politics not involved with greed somewhere along the way?
I was about nine years old when World War 2 started and about 13 when it ended in 1945. I say that because memories of a pre-teen boy could be jaded I am sure. Even though such a serious situation as a war might not have been regarded as it was to adults; although I have vivid memories of some of the side effects of war. I remember those little flags that hung in the windows of families whose husband or other male in the household was in the war and if there was one star or two or three. Then it might be changed to gold -- that was not good news.
I remember getting what was called V-Mail and thanks to my wife’s mother (and my wife’s further saving graces) we have several copies of mail my wife’s family received from two uncles while they was in the European theater of the war. For years I remember a photo of my Dad’s brother standing with a bunch of other G.I.’s in front of a tent somewhere in the South Pacific. I remember paper drives we used to have as Boy Scouts to “help the war effort”. I remember scrap drives, again, held by Boy Scouts. I remember my Mother, as other Moms did, taking a container of Lard or grease to the store to somehow aid in the war effort.
I remember the gas cards where there were three classifications, A, B and C and if you had sufficient reason, you were allowed to buy gasoline proportionate to your status. Farmers were allowed to buy more gasoline than others, if I recall correctly. Sugar was not always available in the stores because it was rationed. Other items, such as coffee were also affected. In 1895, C. W. Post created a kind of roasted grain beverage known as POSTUM and marketed as a healthy alternative to coffee. The Post Cereal company was quick to take advantage of this opportunity to tout their caffeine-free product. Even then, and I wasn’t a coffee drinker at the time, I thought it was a pretty shabby substitute for coffee. Rationing was a government-imposed system that forced people to think twice before they did anything.
Many manufacturers were literally changed from manufacturing certain items and somehow directed or ordered by the government to manufacture a military item in place of their regular or typical manufactured products. Guns, ammunitions, and such were top priority. The average citizen, really any citizen, could not buy a “new car” during the war for at least four years. The newest car we had was a 1938 Chevy and it wasn’t unusual to see a lot of cars in the model of the late 1930’s downtown on the weekends. Patriotism was something everyone became involved in.
Why am I bringing up all these bits of information? Look around you. You can buy sugar any time you want it. Coffee, even decaffeinated coffee is abundantly available. You can even buy several different specialty brands of coffee. You can buy Postum today but have you noticed it is as expensive as coffee and we all know why that is – pure and simple, greed. The manufacturer knows some people cannot drink coffee, even decaffeinated, so they provide the product on the basis of “supply & demand”— they supply the product and demand the price they want.
Automobiles are abundantly available. Chevrolet, Ford and Chrysler are no longer the Big Three because “imports” have flooded the American market and you see cars produced by countries barely known (at least as auto manufacturers) 60 years ago. You can buy cars with 3 cylinders, 4 cylinders, 6 cylinders and if you are really gung ho, eight cylinder cars or SUVS are plentiful. The only requirement is how much money you want to spend, or borrow. The thing that surprises me most with automobiles or larger vehicles, even during this war in Iraq, and the other recent war efforts, new cars have never been unavailable. The biggest surprise is the obvious greed that exists in auto manufacturers – what else could it be when one of the most popular units being used in the Iraq war is the Humvee? Want one? All it takes is a deep pocket and you can get one – almost like the ones driven by our soldiers. I guess the main difference is the kind of seats or upholstery, cd deck or drop-down TV. Whether bulletproof windows are available I don’t know, or the steel plated extra protection from land mines. I imagine there are some big city neighborhoods where those options wouldn’t be a bad ideas.
I am quite sure many young teenagers, and a few Dads I knew in the mid forties, that would have been tickled to death to be able to buy a JEEP just like the soldiers used to roam all over battlefields and would-be roads in whatever war theater they were in — drive right through a creek! Something like Jeep’s power takeoffs would have been real handy for a farmer. Forget that though, they were simply not available.
I know I have missed some items but I hope this has allowed you to mentally shift gears a bit and look around you and ruminate, “What is this thing called WAR, or POLITICS?” Why is it that in the mid 1940’s WAR was so important and restrictive that people had to “do without” a lot of products? Even if you could fork out the money to get a JEEP it would never happen! When was the last time you had to “give up coffee” to make sure some soldier in a damp fox hole in some jungle could have real coffee – sorry, not even that soldier had a good perked cup of coffee because the government provided what they called “soluble coffee”. We call it “instant coffee” today. And the automatic transmissions that became possible in the late 1940’s were a result of auto manufacturers developing automatic transmission for tanks! Your grandmother can probably tell you about “nylons” and how scarce they were. Women even painted their legs because they couldn’t get nylons!
You know what? I am rather confident the kind of citizenry we have produced today, in our advanced “throw-a-way and casual society”, would not put up with such things as rationing, using special stamps to be able to buy an extra pound of sugar or being content to buy just a few gallons of gas because you had a “C” sticker on your windshield. Our present culture is a “give me because of a I-have-rights mind-set”. Sacrifice? The only kind of sacrifice we know today is whether we want an order of small fries instead of a BIGGIE fries. Or be satisfied with a hot fudge sundae instead of a strawberry sundae.
We need BIG everything today – big 2-3 story houses, with a mud room, a great room and a 3-car garage or maybe a two-car garage with a third garage, its door big enough to get a motor home in. Or whether we want a “regular” truck or maybe “go for the extended cab” and why not get leather seats while we’re at it. The merchants are more than happy to extend interest free loans (yes, with NOTHING DOWN) – why should they worry about you going bankrupt trying to pay all your bills?
I’m glad I was raised during a time when people thought more of their country than they did themselves. I’m glad my neighbors were equally involved in being proud of their service men enough to save papers for the scrap drive and postpone their long vacations for the duration. Seems I recall reading something in the Bible about being content with what we have and loving others more than ourselves. And yes, President Roosevelt was as human as Bill Clinton or George W. Bush are and FDR’s marriage wasn’t exactly a perfect one either. How many people knew or thought about the fact President Roosevelt was unable to stand on his own two feet and the media was kind enough to not zoom in on his shriveled polio-stricken legs?
Ask your grandfather or grandmother about all this — if they’re still around.
THE WORDWRIGHT
Just asking the question is therapeutic, at least I hope so. As I get more in touch with our changing world and its electronic nuances I often wonder if any normalcy is possible. I probably will have to admit that being into the middle 70’s age bracket has a lot to do with it but regularly I still wonder why so many things have to change, or do they?
As this week began I had a very personal experience with a nearly 4-month-old laser photocopy machine “go crazy” on me. I will not honor the actual brand name with you because that is a little too much like name-dropping and I would not want to do free advertising for the company that made the machine. I am a bit weird on such advertising anyway – I remember a new car I once bought and a few months later had it in for service. I had removed the dealer sticker from the trunk deck (or wherever it was) and while it was up on the hoist one of the sales supervisors went by and for some strange reason asked, “Whose car is this?” I wasn’t sure what I was in for but I felt qualified to reply, “Mine, why do you ask?” “Well, it doesn’t have our dealership sticker on it.” He seemed a bit perplexed about that and I continued, “It’s my car and I removed the sticker.” He walked off with a rather obviously confused look on his face. The Service Manager was nearby and I said, “Did I say something wrong?” He laughed, “No, you said something right!” To this day I am amazed at people who will display commercial logos on their cars like they were being sponsored by the corporate firm bearing the same name. Secretly I wonder if they need to be reminded what kind of a car they are driving and seeing that name in their rearview mirror confirms they’re driving a Ford (or a Chevy, or a Cadillac – come to think I don’t think I have ever seen a rear window with a “Cadillac” logo).
But back to my photocopy machine. The machine, all of a sudden, started making very poor copies – streaked copy, mottled dots or smudges. Earlier it had given me some problems (today these are called “issues” but I prefer the word “problem”) whenever I used the feeder feature. I had found the feeder feature rather handy with a stack of data to copy—it worked like a charm and I didn’t have to lift the lid, place another page on it, shut the lid and etc etc. The only problem was, again, all of a sudden a thin black streak appeared on the left margin of the photocopy. One of the clerks at the store suggested I “clean” a little window near where the originals enter the machine because there might be a little spec of dirt there and that would account for that streak. Sorry, that didn’t do the trick but maybe I needed to get more light and a bigger magnifying glass – I never found that spec although I wiped it sufficiently.
Well, this crazy story had a happy ending but getting there took some doing. After no less than four phone calls to the manufacturer of this electronic marvel and a kindergarten variety e-mail (from the manufacturer) for the customer (me) to “fix the problem” simply. By the way, I rate the suggestions as “kindergarten variety” because they directed me to “clean the glass” to get rid of specs and any other dirt and another little “window”. I had already done both of these nifty suggestions—on my cognition as a result of being 75 years old – I’ve learned a few things, you see. Some knowledge is applicable to a lot of different subjects. With this last “tip” and my reaction to a problem, I am encouraged to quote Will Rogers, “There is nothing as stupid as an educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.” Well, Will, there are some areas where you can utilize information in unrelated fields.
The happy ending was when I called “the store” where I bought the copier. Just so I won’t be “out of order” by this web logging service and give an advertisement I will resort to giving a hint or two as to “the company”. There is the word “office” in the title and also three other letters that suggest you might get the maximum service when you shop there. Two great ladies saw my exasperation and recognized I had (for a change) bought the “extended guarantee” (which I rarely buy) and simply said, “Bring in your machine and we will replace it.” The new copier now sits where the old one did and I expect it to work fine. If it doesn’t I know where to go to get satisfaction.
Oh, a bit more about this crazy world. In all seriousness and honesty it would be unfair if I left this story hang on a sour note. Where else but in this electronic wizardry world could you punch a few keys, sending a file that mysteriously contains “pixels” (an unknown term 50 years ago, or less I’m quite sure) to “somewhere” and an hour later go to the store and pick up great color photos. Not too many years ago we used to mail a roll of film and were happy to get the prints back in about a week.
One more success story and I will close for today. Our 2001 Chevy Lumina has a way of giving you messages you would rather not see but sometimes they are important. It may not be common knowledge but if you own such a car and they “change your oil” they are supposed to re-set the system to update the computer verifying you got your oil changed. Unfortunately customarily the place I get my oil changed (a certified Chevy dealer by the way) forgets to reset the system. I got my oil changed last Friday and sure enough, the “Check your oil” light came on. Since I know how to do it, I reset it myself. Story over? Not quite. A few hours later another light came on – “Service your engine soon”. I thought it would be a simple trip back to the dealership and they would do what my son had always done (in the 22-1/2 years he worked there): Grab a scanner and plug it under the dash, push a few buttons in several different modes and said, “Dad, you need this or that done…” Since my son now works at our local public school transportation garage I had to ask the service writer if they would have someone check this out, to which he said, “Mr.Venrick, I will have to charge you $80 to do a diagnostic.” Don’t think so, I thought as I walked away from the counter. After supper we stopped out at our son’s house and he grabbed his personal scanner (bought it for himself while he worked at the Chevy dealership—has the receipt to prove it’s his), plugged it in, punched a few buttons and said, “Dad, I will have to clean your…(whatever the part was) but I’ll have to get a couple gaskets first.” Seems a bit odd to me that when you buy a car that is smart enough to let you know “something is wrong” that the dealer has to charge you $80 to plug in a gadget to tell them what it is that needs fixed, and you also have to buy the parts too! Yep, we live in a crazy world. Glad our son is a trained certified mechanic – not all are, so I’ve been told.
If it wasn’t for this crazy electronic world the garage would have had to tear my upper engine all apart to tell me what was not working.
THE WORDWRIGHT
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Written by Mrs. Wordwright
We own no animals but we have a backyard with wildlife and domestic cats that visit regularly. The cats probably come because of the birds – I see them “eyeing” the birds from time to time. Seems our backyard sanctuary has been the “National Cat Highway” for years. They come from the front yard, walk cross-wise either to the back fence or from over the back yard. Why our place is so well liked by cats I’ll never know. A few wanted to stay, two did. I make the mistake of talking to them but have since tried to stop that.
There are a few who sneak through, acting like they are intruding on property that isn’t theirs. We have even had to bury a couple; one got caught in the [criss-cross] lattice around our back porch. (It died before we discovered its predicament – our noses knew it first.)
I mentioned other wild life but the birds are most plentiful. We do not have fancy feeders nor birdbaths. Our feathered friends eat bread on the ground and use a former oil-drain pan which we keep filled with fresh water – they think it’s a great birdbath and it just sits in the grass. We may not have exotic birds but we enjoy the sparrows and the grackles who like to “dip their bread” into the water before eating it. We laugh at the starlings and call them “junk food junkies” because they will eat anything! Rye bread, though, does not seem a favorite for any of the birds.
Here are a few other creatures that have frequented our backyard--then back to my cat story. We’ve had bunnies, squirrels, chipmunks, a vole (a little mouse or mole-looking creature) and on occasions maybe the wild, wild creatures like opossums, ground hog (with four babies trailing behind), a raccoon, an owl and even a hawk stopped by twice.
Here is the most recent cat episode. There’s a beautiful gray-black patterned cat (sort of a wild cat) that frequently wanders by. What neighbor he belongs to I haven’t found out.
We have a building where my husband Bill stores lumber and a lot more. He often gets something out of it, leaves the door open and takes that something to the garage shop or in the driveway. This happened on a Monday or Tuesday. I saw an all black cat go into the building and watched to see that he came out. He did. Building was closed and all’s well.
I began hearing a meowing sound. It would be loud sometimes and seemed to stop when we went out to locate it. We looked in the bushes, under the building, in back of it and even up in our walnut tree near the building. Never entered our minds to look in the building. I continued to hear the meowing, wishing it would stop.
Sunday morning after church our neighbor called saying she and her daughter were in their backyard (which joins ours) and heard a sound of a cat meowing inside our building. Bill went out to look, opened the door and there was that pretty kitty, at the door. The cat was afraid to come out so I asked Bill to move and go fill the watering pan with fresh water. We continued to coax the cat to come out. His voice was stuck on one sound, meow, meow and meow. Finally he decided it was safe to come out of the building and headed straight for that pan of water where he drank and drank. We talked to him and he seemed quite content to have a friend. Back to the water for another good drink.
The neighbors were still in their yard and he decided to go see them. They petted him and made over him and he enjoyed every moment of it – like he knew whom to thank for his release.
This cat was in that hot building for at least five, maybe more, days because I had told our daughter and son-in-law about the meowing sound on Wednesday, July 4th, when we were with them. It was Sunday, July 8th, when he was discovered – a bit thinner but alive and well. Now that cat has used up a good portion of his nine lives.
THANKS JEAN, for your cat story!
THE WORDWRIGHT
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