Summer on a Sheep Ranch

By Marilyn Jaeger

Sheep.  It’s always about sheep; it’s ALL about sheep.  No, wait a minute.  Psalm 23 begins and ends with God.  “The Lord” is my shepherd….house of “the Lord, forever”.   Without Lord God, nothing.  With the Lord, satisfaction, leading, restoring, presence, comfort, food, anointing, goodness, mercy, eternity.

But let’s get back to sheep.  For being such a blah, docile, timid, follow-the-leader animal, it sure does get a prominent place in the zoological hierarchy of Scripture.  What saved Abraham from killing his son Isaac?  A sheep.  For that matter, what do we call it all the way through to Revelation?  A sacrificial lamb – which becomes the Lamb upon the Throne!  What did Jacob use to clever his way out of servitude to his father-in-law Laban?  Sheep.  What was David doing while writing his psalms?  Tending sheep.  What seems to be Jesus’ favorite name for his followers?  “My sheep hear my voice.”  “I know my sheep.”  “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it?”

We write for a blog called “Stillwater Symposium”.  Probably the major source for that “stillwater” part is the Twenty-Third Psalm: “He leads me beside the stillwaters.”  Would that all our writing be lifted up in glory to the Shepherd of our souls who leads us to serenity!

I was twenty-one, not at an especially serene time of my life.  Graduation from Concordia College held a little extra excitement – well , I was magna cum laude, after all (woo woo!) – because the following day the Concert Band, in which I played alto clarinet, embarked on a first-ever summer tour into western Canada, hitting major new coliseums in Calgary and Edmonton.  To complicate this personally, I had committed to a job for two weeks leading a Vacation Bible School in Chester, Montana.  That meant breaking from  the tour early.  I’m not sure of the logistics.  Somehow I recall being dropped at the border at night and a person from Chester – who had driven seventy miles – picking me up.  I stayed with the Wigen family, Bob, Ella, son Clint and daughter Bodeil (I remember her very Norwegian name!)  Bob had employed Joe Vold on his ranch forty-five miles south of Chester for several summers, and Joe was again coming to work for him.  Does it look like there is a plan here?  Joe and I had been dating for about six months on campus, and he encouraged me to apply for the VBS job in Chester, with a second stint west on Highway 2 a ways.  It was up my alley, as my formal training at school was to become a parish worker, and I trained to be a teacher.

So that was all well and good.  But a long summer stretched out past the Bible school weeks.  And I would not start my parish work job at St. Philips Lutheran Church in Fridley, Minnesota until September 1.  That’s when Donna Madison Jacobson would be leaving, to go with her husband Don on Luther Seminary internship.  Donna was the sister of Carol, who had started dating Joe’s best friend John Haakenson.  The Madisons were from Big Sandy, Montana, not far from Chester.  While at Concordia they were, of course, members of the “Montana Club”, and while they may not have used it as their club cheer, they surely got razed by the rest of the campus as belonging to the “Monta-a-a-a-a-a-a-na (sheep) Ella had heard of a woman up in the Sweetwater Hills, forty-five miles north of the “HiLine” near the Canadian border, who was dying of cancer and needed a housegirl for the summer.  Margie and Bob Sutton and four of their five children lived on – you guessed it! – a sheep ranch.  I got the job and was installed and in training by late June.

These were not ordinary sheep.  The Suttons ran Targhees.   According to Wikipedia:

            The Targhee is a breed of domestic sheep developed in early 20th century by the USDA's Agricultural Research Service.^[1] Targhee sheep are a dual–purpose breed, with heavy, medium quality wool and good meat production characteristics. They are hardy, and are especially suited to the ranges of the West where they were developed.^[2]Targhee are especially popular in Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota, where their ¾ fine wool and ¼ long wool breeding is favored by western ranchers.^[3] This breed is raised primarily for wool.^[4]

Lest you surmise that I became an expert on Targhees and spent all my time snuggling with these woolly critters – no.  I had plenty to do in the house.  It was called cooking, cleaning, laundry.  The first task Margie set me to, however, was dusting the extensive bookcases in the living room.  She was not feeling good, but sat there as I went through the shelves, and said, “The girls that have helped me always seemed to enjoy dusting these shelves – and looking over the books.”  It was also a way to become acquainted that first day.  Margie, as well as all the family, lived out her Christian faith and endured her suffering with hope.  She generally had a patient, sunny disposition.

Since it was an authentic ranch house and had only two bedrooms, I was assigned to sleep in the double bed with the youngest son and daughter.  Next to us in the rather cramped room were the older boys.  Wish I could remember their names.  The setup worked out pretty well.  We could tell stories to each other and play games, making a tent of the sheets.  The older boys were usually out by sunup to do chores.

In the kitchen was a huge table, and often there were a dozen around it for every meal.  I really knew very little about cooking, but I guess had learned enough at my mother’s “knee” to manage.  Margie tried to give advice and assistance as often as she felt able, but I was winging it a lot of the time.  I would bake bread every day.  Butter had to be churned regularly.  The garden always needed tending.  They didn’t just have sheep, they had cows and hogs and chickens, all which I helped butcher, all providing for the family’s livelihood.  I tried out many recipes, but I always knew those many serving bowls had to be full to overflowing by mealtime, so there was nothing fancy.  We ate a lot of mutton (certainly not lamb chops – they went to the market!)  The children were in 4H, and the ten-year-old daughter was learning her project for the county fair: how to make sandwiches right, with the filling going all the way to the edges.  She was a pretty good help in the kitchen.

Often we also had to take meals out to the men working in the fields.  I remember one disastrous time, I made coffee.  Started with a large full enamel pot of water – the water was already in the pot, for some reason! – and added the coffee to boil well before toting it off to the truck.  It didn’t take seconds for the men to take a sip of their steaming coffee. . . and sputter it out with a ghastly look on their face.  The coffee water had soap in it!  Someone had made it ready to wash dishes.  So much for shortcuts.

In the evening after supper dishes were done and the oatmeal was set for the next morning, I had time to myself.  The thirteen-year-old boy, a friendly, freckled redhead, would help get me a horse and saddle it up.  After initial rides with the kids into the hills, I sometimes would go alone.  I know at least once that I actually rode into Canada, though there was no indication of a border there.  The Sutton ranch was that close to the boundary.  We were remote!  The Sweetwater Hills, really mountains, flanked their land to the south, and the only way to get there was by a dusty, winding road through the range.  The whole rest of the summer I never got beyond the teeny town of Whitlash, where we bought groceries and went to church, and the nearby farm of a Mennonite family, friends of the Suttons.  But that was enough activity.  Actually, evenings spent in the Mennonite home gave a warm glimpse of simple life where they created their own recreation.  They did have electricity, but were very plain – and happy.

One evening after kitchen work was done, I decided to just go walking in the hills beyond the ranch.  I was lonesome.  Joe and I had been in touch, but barely.  He was busy on the ranch ninety miles away from me by this time.  Sunsets are often glorious in the Big Sky Country.  I was strolling along, watching the interplay of oranges and purples and brights, and suddenly heard a whooping from far away.  Squinting my eyes, I could just make out a gangly figure coming toward me and waving.  Joe!  It was my beloved, Joe!  We ran across the range toward each other and embraced, just like in the movies, just like in a girl’s dreams of loving and being loved!  He had borrowed his boss’ car and driven up, so we spent a lovely evening exploring the hills before he had to head back to his ranch.

Wildfires were a great threat on the range.  Smoke arising into the sky toward the east warned us one August day that nearby neighbors were in trouble.  Everyone put down what they were doing and hustled over with rugs, brooms, rakes and very little water to help extinguish it.  The conflagration covered many acres, and just as we felt we were on top of it, another flame would burst out in the dry grass.  We did an exhausting lot of beating with rugs and sweeping to try to contain the tongues of fire.  Range grass, while spotty and dry, was also precious, a different kind of cash crop.  The sense of neighborliness and community was very strong.  The tired group shared food and drink and thanksgiving after this menace was conquered.

All too quickly my time on the ranch was over, and I hopped a ride with friends Don Nelson and Ruth Langemo back to the Twin Cities.   To join a new group of sheep.  To help tend sheep working with youth and education and visitation.

The summer of 1963 Joe and I were back in Montana.  We had married, Jonathan was a baby, and we moved to Billings where Joe was a district salesman for Dun and Bradstreet.  We took a trip to the east of Flathead Lake, where Suttons had bought a sheep ranch and moved.  Margie had died the year after I worked for them in 1960, but she always dreamed of a place in the Rockies, away from those interminable dry plains where they had been.  Their place only had outdoor plumbing, which I thought was a challenge with a baby in diapers, but we had a nice visit.  The next summer , I think it was, Bob Sutton was president of the Targhee Sheep Association of western Montana.  He learned that Joe was by that time headed for the seminary, and invited us to join him at their banquet in Billings, asking Joe to give the invocation.  Though we kept in touch for a few more years,  that was the last time we saw the Targhee sheep rancher Bob Sutton.  But I’ll never forget my summer on his sheep ranch in the Sweetwater Hills.  Sheep would always have a special place in my heart.

  

The Elephant in the Room

Blue Jasmine (2013), written and directed by Woody Allen, featuring Cate Blanchette, Sally Hawkins, Alec Baldwin, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Dice Clay, Michael Stuhlbarg).  Rated 8 out of 10.

There is an interesting elephant in the room of Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine. If you go looking for it you will see it at every turn and start to enjoy its presence, but if you didn’t know it was there you would like the movie all the same.

The elephant, for those who haven’t heard, is Allen’s source material:  Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire.  And maybe it should not matter, even as we do not need to know the plays behind so many Shakespeare plays, just as we can watch Crimes and Misdemeanors without having recently read Dostoevsky, or as much as we can enjoy Allen’s films in general without knowing much about his early hero Ingmar Bergman.

Blue Jasmine is another highlight in Allen’s late career renaissance, alongside Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Midnight in Paris.  In all of these films, Allen adeptly balances the familiar and the fresh.  He likes to start with the same black screen typescript and thirties jazz track and alphabetized cast list, then quickly shows us how adept he is at casting and bringing out the best in his actors.  More and more, Allen’s films are stepping away from their home setting, yet as we visit England, Spain, Paris, Rome and now San Francisco, each new film offers snapshots as impressive as Allen’s earlier New York collages in Annie Hall, Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters.  And the auteur is now regularly keeping himself off camera, and yet his writing skills have not diminished and his sense of comedy continues without his personal delivery.

About casting: How brilliant was it to give Andrew Dice Clay a serious role?  Or to let Michael Stuhlbarg from a Serious Man play a bit role as a dentist!  We might even grin at the resonant choice of Cate Blanchett as a modern Blanche Dubois, except that she plays her role so perfectly and is almost certain to be an Oscar contender this year.  The rest of the cast is notable too, but here is where the Streetcar elephant looms a little more:  Bobby Cannavale as Chili (Stanley) makes a noble effort in following the method acting footsteps of Brando; Sally Hawkins, playing Ginger (Stella) in the shadow of her sister does her best in the shadow of Blanchett; and Alec Baldwin does a good job, if not much of a stretch, as Hal (Blanche’s late husband, completely rewritten);

About the setting: it is not only wonderful to see San Francisco on Allen’s screen, it is refreshing to view the city without a trolley and with only one distant shot of the Golden Gate Bridge.  But here comes the elephant again: the choice of the city is an intriguing revision to Williams’s play, and not because it has streetcars: San Francisco moves Jasmine far (if not far enough) West from her Park Avenue/Wall Street East, just as the French Quarter of New Orleans contrasted with Blanche’s plantation south.

But it is Allen’s writing that makes the elephant irrelevant: unlike the original Streetcar, there is a subtle mix of comedy in Blue Jasmine.  The blend of comedy and drama is well-developed, not as the back and forth experience of so many other Woody films, but as a dark humor that catches you laughing at the most unexpected moments: Jasmine’s lunch with the kids and Chili’s “Stella” moment, just to name two.  The writing is also strong beyond the comedy: the flashback scenes are carefully crafted and wonderfully appropriate in how they show Jasmine as a static character despite all of her turmoiled past; but best of all, there is (I will not spoil this one) a surprise ending that leaves you wondering.

So how does Blue Jasmine compare to its Streetcar source?  It is an interesting exercise, but we must be fair.  Allen probably knows he can never be Williams, just as he is not Bergman, although he probably draws more laughs than either.  But this is a serious effort on Allen’s part, and despite all the liberties he takes (Stella/Ginger is in her second relationship and has two bratty kids, for instance), he produces a quality film, with and without the elephant, not because it tries to stand up to Elia Kazan’s 1951 film (or, for that matter, tries to rehash a 1995 TV movie starring Alec Baldwin as Stanley), but because he makes it his own.

A word about the title.  In the play, Blanche mentions how Stanley is not the type who goes for her jasmine perfume, and Williams has multiple stage directions for a background “blue piano”; he also allows at least one low clarinet to set an early scene.  Meanwhile, in the movie, Jasmine is stuck on the song “Blue Moon” (“You saw me standing alone”), just as Blanche was fixed on the chorus of “Paper Moon” (It wouldn’t be make believe...”).  And there’s that elephant again.

Song of Annie

By Marilyn

“Unky” Marvin was on a mission.  Maybe that should be mission with a capital “M”.  For the “mission” included: Marilyn; music; and marriage, for starters.  Oh no, not marriage to him, but the fact that his name also started with “M” might fit this tale as well.

It was not that many months after I started as organist at First Baptist Church of Park Ridge in August, 1974.  One of the delights of the position was Wednesday nights in choir rehearsal; I have always loved to accompany.  In the choir were several couples: Owen and Ruth Davis, Iraina and Var Murnieks (he was the choir director), Dick and Joyce Lucaccioni, and Marvin and Ruth Koehn.  Ruth was the church secretary, so I had gotten to know her upon starting at First Baptist.  They discovered that I did not live too far from their house in unincorporated Des Plaines and they had already met my three boys who lived with me in The Greens apartments on Lincoln Parkway.

One choir night, for some reason, Marvin offered to pick me up and take me home after choir.  No problem.  But that is when he started selling me on…..

His brother-in-law, Donald Lamken.  With words like, “nice guy”, “loves kids – he’s crazy about our five-year-old daughter Beth”, “never been married”, “always lived with his parents, but in 1969 he bought a house in Park Ridge and had them move in with him”, “makes good money as an electrical engineer for Commonwealth Edison”. 

Don was church treasurer, so I knew him slightly.  He gave me my monthly paycheck.  In October his parents, Carl and Helen Lamken, had been recognized during a church service for their years of marriage (couldn’t have been their 50^th – I recall celebrating that some time later with the family by attending the Second Baptist Church of Chicago and having a dinner at a German restaurant in the Logan Park area.)  At the time, when Don stood along with his parents during the service, I mused on where his wife must be.  Rather nice looking, very tall, but alone.  “Single” did not register in my mind.

On a Sunday morning later that year I was warming up before church service when this tall Treasurer man waved from the back of the church and hollered, “Hello, Virginia!”  I feebly waved back, not bothering to set him straight.  Weeks later I asked him why in the world he named me “Virginia”, and he said, “Well, I knew it was one of those first 13 states!”  He called me “Maryland” for the next sixteen years!

He started coming to choir rehearsal and singing with the group – couldn’t carry a tune, but that didn’t matter.  Guess he was on a mission too!  But it wasn’t until a bus trip the congregation took to Judson College in Elgin that I realized he was pursuing me.  What a warm wonderful feeling!

Tammy (Wynette) and I could both sing the song “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”.  It was a word we did not like, hated to speak out loud.  Nothing positive could be said about it, and when children were involved, it was especially painful.  I had been divorced in 1974 after two years of separation and over a year in group therapy at Lutheran General.  My former husband, Joe Vold, was returning to Minnesota to work at Luther Seminary, and he shortly got a call to be a pastor in Bijou, Minnesota.  Jonathan, Daniel and Joshua lived with me but our joint custody meant at least one big trip a year for them to spend time with him.  They got to know and love the people of Joe’s parish, and Joe continued to form them into thinking young men.

Being divorced with three children seemed to me an obstacle to a serious relationship with a new man, especially a devout Baptist.  It was not a problem for Don.  We started dating, but it was not long before his mother, Helen, cornered me at church asking if maybe I shouldn’t be returning to Minnesota where I came from!  For that is certainly where the boys really belong, she said.   In fact I had started putting out applications for teaching jobs in Minnesota, and the very weekend we started dating I had gone up for several interviews.  (In August, after our marriage, I got a call from Moose Lake School District with a job offer – too late!)  But I eventually learned that wasn’t the first time Don stood up to his strong-minded German mother.  When Marvin and Ruth were getting married back in the sixties, she also tried to break up that relationship, and Donald’s intervention the day of the wedding apparently made her accept the inevitable and attend their wedding after all!

Don gave me a ring during a small ceremony we held after choir practice one night.  June 25, 1975 we became man and wife.  Ruth was my matron of honor, and Ray Linke, a lifelong friend and neighbor of Don’s from the Logan Square neighborhood near Kelvyn Park High School, was his best man.  Dick and Joyce Lucaccioni gave us a garden reception at their home in Northbrook, and our wedding dinner was at the Como Inn in downtown Chicago.  Continuing that Italian theme, we honeymooned at Lake Como near Lake Geneva in Wisconsin.  Shortly after that we moved into the brick ranch Don owned at 840 Parkwood in Park Ridge.  (First he had to move his parents out of the house into an apartment.  That was not a comfortable scenario.)  We took a trip to Germany, Holland and Austria in October, and it was there that Don had first symptoms of gout.  But before that pain started, we had spent precious days with the Schwengels and Lamkens in the Halsbek and Westerstede communities in Ammerland, Germany, not so far from Bremerhaven, from where Carl, and then Helen, left for America in the twenties.

The Parkwood house was rather small for a family of five – two bedrooms with a den that we used for a bedroom for Jon.  As we would take evening walks we considered expanding upward, maybe adding a second story with a mansard roof.  We were casually biking around town the October Saturday after returning from Europe when we happened upon a house ‘way over on the east side, south of the downtown area.   It had a small yard, but what attracted us were the leaded-glass windows.  And it was for sale!

By December, 1975, we moved into the beige stucco house, circa 1912, with slanted pillars at the corners, and we asked our pastor, Dick Mitchell, to come for an evening visit and conduct a dedication of the house.  We wanted our life, every part of it, to be given to the glory of God.

Settling in included getting Dan and Josh transferred from Edison to Roosevelt Elementary School.  Jon was established at Lincoln Junior High School.  We made good use of the city pool, and it was there one sunny afternoon in 1976, while treading water, that I informed Donald we were going to have a baby!  That would not stop us from our planned trip to England, Scotland and Ireland, however. 

Anneliese Ruth was born April 28, 1977 at Lutheran General Hospital.  We were thrilled to have a little girl, and Helen and Carl were too!  That little 9 pound blonde changed Helen into a loving, accepting mother-in-law.  (That’s not quite fair; she needs more credit.  Those trips we took to Europe, and at least one camping trip to Starved Rock State Park nine months before Annie was born? We needed a kid-sitter for the boys, and Helen and Carl usually filled that role!  By then the Koehns and her parents were living two blocks away from us, near Hodges Park.)

The boys loved their new little sister too.  So did the members of First Baptist Church.  Anne brought joy to many people, but most of all her parents.  What a perfect gift of God for a 46-year-old father and 38-year-old mother.  The middle bedroom upstairs was decorated in a soft blue with yellow daisy accents, and it became a lovely sanctuary as I would nurse her in the old rocking chair I had gotten from my Aunt Viola many years before when Daniel was a baby in Maddock, North Dakota.

She grew, and Josh and Dan enjoyed flying her through the air (holding on firmly, yes) saying, “Super-Anne!!!”  Her giggles delighted us all (still do!).  Jon was fourteen, and he decided he wanted to move to Minnesota to live with his father and go to high school in Mahnomen.  So he was in the house just a few months after Anne was born, but visited every summer and many holidays.  And eight years later, after his four years in the Air Force, he came back to the 520 Stewart house to live, found a job at a factory, and began going to the University of Illinois Chicago campus.

Favorite recollections of Anne in her early years: many evenings she and I would meet Don at the train, three blocks away.  As she learned to toddle, then walk, she would see him walking down Courtland and run to meet him.  But as she got close, she would turn around with her back to him.  Guess she figured that would be an easier way for him to pick her up!

Her earliest friend at church was Allison Wenk.  Allison had to wear a cast on her lower body for the first year of her life when both girls were in the church nursery, but by the time they were three they happily pranced off to their Sunday School class hand in hand.  Following the lead of her cousin Beth, Anne went to St. Andrews Lutheran School and made good friends there who would help her celebrate her birthdays with Maypole dances and games.  She starred in plays, performed in dance, and played the piano.

Her best friends in the neighborhood were the Canfields next door.  Anne would spend hours with Veronica and Kay, two spinsters, and their elderly mother.  I never saw the inside of their house, but my daughter found it fascinating, and they loved her!  Beth Bransen was also a neighborhood friend, younger by a year, but a good playmate – although she was afraid of Anne’s big brothers!  Really scary.

Anne’s big brothers always called Marvin “Unky Marvin”.  His mission was accomplished and his favorite brother-in-law became a family man heart and soul, hook line and sinker.  The apple of Marvin and Donald’s eye, Beth Christine, had  Lamken cousins at last. 

Plasma (Reunion of 1971)

Say ‘Montessori’ in any kid’s ear, and visions

of raptors will likely appear. I pre-schooled at

home, nineteen-seventy-one, touched the flank

of a moose and told everyone, and some made me

doubt the experience was real. Comme ci comme

ça, phenomenology hatched in the deal! The moose

sauntered up to our parsonage door, and I from

inside eeked my way out… More happened then

than memory holds, yet as anything since, the

moment only unfolds to say ‘seize!’ and ‘let go.’

Like Polaroid plasma framed in our hands, that

tangible summer engrained who I am: a grandson

of John and Berenice Sluphaug Vold, whose children

(without them, now fully grown) posed for a snap

shot in front of that stoop: the first Vold reunion—

now a biennial loop—for children of children

of children and more… We sat indian-style the

parsonage wide: dozens of cousins it seemed

(and would be). Central to all, enjoying the sun,

Uncle Paul sat, the last family gathering he saw.

The term ‘Montessori’ emerged some years on,

when my young brother’s teachers urged deliberate

play, connecting the dots, caring and sharing and

carrying the day. Lots of free choices, more to be

found, turned up-side-down, rejected, discovered

again. The summer of seventy-one affected all

things; when Leo the Lion (our golden retriever)

got caught in the wheels of a sugar beet truck, and

Josh was a toddler and Jon was at school, and

I montessoried that cruel stroke of fate, and

nothing again from a parsonage view meant

anything easy. In seventy-two we moved to

Chicago and learned a new life. Dad brought us

to Wrigley and (allaying all strife) pointed out

curiously José Cardinal, now playing for the Cubs,

erstwhile a Red Bird, his St Louis background

and our feeling-way-forward. We cheered, among

chants, for the short gift of Leo, in heaven

of sorts, and for Paul, who’d live twenty years

away from us all. We cheered and we cared.

And post-Montessori we do so again. For such

is the litmus of forty-year olds (or fifty or sixty):

raw learning done, wisdom begun, some Polaroid

pictures of what we’ve become. Will we be raptors

to some point of view? Roaming and ruling ‘til

meteorite doom, whiling away definitive days?

Maybe we’ll “rage, rage against the dying of the

light”, or rather embrace the year seventy-one,

and seventy-two, and children of children as

heaven ordains. I will then ‘seize!’ and ‘let go.’

The Place Beyond the Pines

Thank you Dan for another challenge - and let me add to it:  For every post we put on this blog, consider also posting that piece somewhere else.  This is, of course, another backwards invite to Anne to share some of her other blog material with the symposians, but it can work for all of us - make your own blog, or post something on a school site, or write a letter to the paper.  For my “poem” of the day (the last six not quite making the Plath cut), I am offering a movie review, and this one I will post on IMDb.com.   (And thanks Dan, too, for telling me about this movie in the first place.)

The Place Beyond the Pines (2012).  Derek Cianfrance, Director and cowriter; featuring Brad Cooper, Ryan Gosling, Eva Mendes and Emory Cohen.  Rated 8 out of 10.

This is a movie about fathers and sons.  There are all too brief glimpses of wives, a mother, a daughter/sister and a stepfather —the last painted with broad strokes to be a strong character but, sadly, never fully developed —but there are three stories in this film that come together and share the theme brilliantly: an elder father and his impressionable adult son; that son, years later, and his prodigal child; and another father and son who barely, yet indelibly, get to know one another.  It would be enough, perhaps, to have just one of these stories.  The first one, of a judge who steers his son into politics in a do or die moment, hints at an L.A. Confidential plot, and while the direction and writing are not quite of the same caliber, this story has its own intrigue.  The second, of a son who divorces and pursues a public career and all but forgets his own child and his father’s example, is also compelling and well acted by veteran Brad Cooper and newcomer Emory Cohen.  The third, of a son who grew up not knowing his father and a father who lived and died thinking only of his son, is the most wrenching of the stories, and this one, too, with motorcycle and money motifs, scenes from the circus and parries into the worlds of crime and drugs, could stand alone.  But instead we get the stories in the form of a triptych.

Triptychs (Greek for threefold) are usually considered in the artistry of paintings (e.g. Hieronymus Bosch) or photography, with three panels presented side by side, but the term can also apply to films in which three separable plotlines are offered.  And what better way to consider this theme?  After all, we who are fathers are also sons, and we fathers and sons will always be in parallel with others who walk the same path.  This could, of course, get quite profound (the either/or dilemma of Abraham, Isaac, God and all future generations comes to mind) or muddled (see Bosch’s depictions of Hell) and in the world of film triptychs could quickly trip up on the trickery of it, but The Place Beyond the Pines manages to make it work, maybe because it is neither as deep as Kierkegaard nor as detail heavy as the paintings of Bosch.  There is not a complicated weave, and we are not bogged down with imagery or allusions or heavy thought: we are simply given three examples, side by side, of the instance and pull of the father and son relationship.

There is more I would have liked to have seen in this film.  I mentioned the stepfather.  I could also complain about some of the pacing or a few plot contrivances or some of the unoriginality of the direction.  What prevails, though, is the way the film captures the fundamentals of its theme: the duty of fathers, the humanness of sons and the destinies we struggle to find.

homing instinct

two gnats upon my study window

uprightly dance to work their way out,

even though their comfort lies within—

they entered deliberately, no doubt.

At home enough, I wanly try to

see a world upon a plane of glass;

Boeing gives a cabin view that tints

to traveller’s choice (not just business class)

so day across Atlantic hours can

look like starry night. Those gnats could use

such sleight-of-hand to make their trap seem

not so bad—it’s nice to have a ruse.

What wealth beyond conception, to live

in several homes, to see as we see

fit, to fade away what looms too large

or figure out a way to ecstasy,

an Either/Or, an I and Thou, a

window to our souls. Who knows? the gnats

may have an equal Weltanschauung,

and much depends upon that perhaps.

A July to Remember

A July to Remember

5,000 miles of rubber on the road: Above average.
1,200 miles in the air: Too frequent.
60 miles of running: Keeping pace.
10 miles in kayaks: Whenever we can.
24 miles in canoes, including 400 rods of portaging: Timeless!

10 nights in hotels: Downtime.
1 night in someone else’s house: Family time.
For Andrew, 6 nights in a camp cabin: Summer time.
3 nights in a tent under the stars: Timeless!

23 real estate closings: Routine.
10 hours prepping a big hotel purchase: Billable.
1 week of coordination with three attorneys covering for me: Overtime.
3 full days away from internet, phone and roads.  I’ve got to do this more often!

Kirsten wondering if the wilderness is her “thing”: Time will tell, but she does love to paddle!
Andrew questioning his dad’s fishing abilities: Worth every snag to see him catch his own fish!
A half-centurion Minnesotan finally getting up to the Boundary Waters: It was about time!
Finding three days of motorless peace and loon call quiet in the middle of July: Timeless!

And priceless!  Thank you, Jack and Reeni!

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And thank you everyone else for a memorable month- I could keep going:

Two family reunions: The best of times!

A memorial service for Julie Beth: A precious time.

Church service at the brewery: God with us time (Thank you Deb Carey)

Chalet Landhous and Shakespeare: Thank you Mom and Dick!

PNC Park with Andrew and whiffle ball with all the cousins: Play ball!

Getting Yoshi reports from Zylka: For the love of a dog!

Camp Woodward, Pennsylvania: Hang time!

Columbus Nationals: En guarde!

Steely Dan at Ravinia - Oh, wait, that goes on August’s list!

It’s all priceless!