History

A lesson from the sea: The view from Glass Beach

Steve · August 27, 2010 · 4 Comments

“You make everything glorious. And I am yours. What does that make me?”

– David Crowder

Here’s what I learned today standing on a beach in Fort Bragg, California: Even if time can’t heal all wounds, it at least can make even the seeming dregs of our lives beautiful. Just add water and an overwhelming force.

While it may seem unbelievable in today’s more environmentally conscious society, for many of the decades of the 20^th century, the people of Fort Bragg threw their household garbage over the cliffs and into the sea. They threw their garbage and their old cars and appliances. And they threw their discarded glass bottles. Lots of them.

Memorial Day: Elegy Written in Thomas Gray’s Country Churchyard

Steve · May 31, 2010 · 3 Comments

Here’s a poem I wrote about 15 years ago when we were living just west of London in Buckinghamshire. Only a short drive from our house in Gerrard’s Cross was a little village called Stoke Poges, whose claim to fame is a beautiful little country churchyard in which the English poet Thomas Gray reportedly wrote his most well-known poem, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which begins with these lines:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

I visited the churchyard occasionally to experience the peace, beauty and quiet of both the churchyard and St. Giles Church, part of which dates to the Saxon era. On one visit, this poem emerged, a reflection on the death of my father just a few years before.

We Been There Before

Steve · May 5, 2010 · 2 Comments

(for the 100th anniversary of Mark Twain’s death, April 21, 1910)

This poem recently won first place in the Big River Writing Contest sponsored by Chesterfield Arts and Stages St. Louis. The contest celebrates Mark Twain & the Missouri River Valley region.

It is you, the spinner and weaver, we see
big and brash and full of life
a painter with the finest and sharpest of tools
a splendid fool
squatting like a tired but ever-watchful sentry
on the corner of a raft of rough-hewn logs
floating freely down the mightiest of American rivers
in the dark of night
listening in on the quiet, guarded, late-night conversation of three boys
fleeing civilization in search of adventure.

[Read more…] about We Been There Before

Help Wanted: Some More Thoughts on the Ghosts of History

Steve · April 27, 2010 · Leave a Comment

window — Window at Old State Capitol, Springfield, Illinois. Photo by Steve Givens

“Marilla says that a large family was raised in that old house long ago, and that it was a real pretty place, with a lovely garden and roses climbing all over it. It was full of little children and laughter and songs; and now it is empty, and nothing ever wanders through it but the wind. How lonely and sorrowful it must feel! Perhaps they all come back on moonlit nights…the ghosts of the little children of long ago and the roses and the songs…and for a little while the old house can dream it is young and joyous again.” – Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne Of Avonlea

I do, in fact, believe in ghosts. But not in fleeting gauzy images and rattling chains and, God help us, ectoplasm. I believe in the worn and tattered memories of those who have come and gone before us. For if we do something with our lives that makes a mark and leaves an impression, isn’t there something to be said for the idea that the maker of that mark might linger, too?

If a person raised their family in an old wooden house in an early French and German settlement just to the west of the Mississippi River, if they gave birth there and toiled there and celebrated there and ultimately suffered and died there, shouldn’t there be something left of them besides a portrait or a name in a Bible? Shouldn’t the echo of their footsteps somehow reverberate down through the stairwell of the ages and find the ear of a willing listener?

Way Down the Old Plank Road: History and Faith Under Our Feet

Steve · April 10, 2010 · 4 Comments

Footbridge on the path behind Faust Park. Photo by Steve Givens

I went for a short hike last weekend in the beautiful, hilly, wooded area behind St. Louis County’s Faust Park, located just off the busy, four-lane, suburban neighborhood-lined Olive Street Road. Less than a quarter-mile off the noisy road I slipped silently into the woods and back in time. Entering the canopy of ancient oaks and elms, I knew I could have been walking where Native Americans and pioneers tread hundreds of years ago.
The narrow, rough path through the woods is contemporary and no doubt made by park rangers and summer workers, but the land belongs to another time and to generations of walkers, workers, hunters and gatherers. As I completed the mile loop through the woods and emerged on the other side of the park and just a stone’s toss west of the traffic-filled road where I started, I came across a historic marker that brought me up short. It read:

Pioneer Path
Olive Street – Central Plank Road