writing

Want to hear a good story? Listen to your elders…

Steve · May 31, 2011 · 4 Comments

IMG_8437_2 — Daytona Beach, photo by Steve Givens, June 2011

Out on the beach today, I saw an old guy sitting in a wheelchair, staring out at the surging ocean. The waves off Daytona Beach were crashing loudly just 50 feet out, but by the time they reached the wheels of his chair they were just harmless bubbles and foam. He sat there for some time, and I wondered what was going through his mind.

Likely, he was wondering how it has all come to this – sitting in a chair and staring at the ocean instead of plunging headlong into the oncoming waves. Perhaps he had been a championship swimmer or a surfer dude in the 1950s. Perhaps he stormed a beach in France and can never shake those gruesome memories. No doubt he saw the hard, fit bodies of the young men and women running and playing around him and remembered his own halcyon days of summer. But I’ll never know what he was thinking because I didn’t ask him. I just saw him as “an old guy in a wheelchair.”

The Spirit of a Piece of Land: Nearer My God to Thee

Steve · October 31, 2010 · 2 Comments

Sue and I own a sloping patch of land in central Missouri where we have a small, 50-year-old weekend cabin on the shore of the Lake of the Ozarks, a sprawling, man-made, spider of a body of water, created by the damming of the Osage River back in 1931 and dotted now with houses and jet skis. But it’s a nice quiet getaway, especially this time of year, when the crowds and most of the loud boats have disappeared for the season. It’s our favorite time of year.

The dam created one of the Midwest’s favorite (and most beautiful!) summer playgrounds, but it no doubt took with it the history and culture of those who lived here before, and I do think of that often. What exactly was right here on our little plot before the dam I cannot say. Maybe just a shady corner of a majestic and ancient forest akin to that which still exists as you move in all directions away from the lake, but perhaps more. Maybe someone’s home, someone’s church, someone’s grave.

And before then? Before the coming of the white man? Perhaps where I sit right now typing on my laptop a young tough-skinned Osage Indian crouched in his very first hunt, his bow drawn and his eyes locked on a 16-point buck making its way gingerly through the trees to drink from a sliver of a stream.

The point is this: We don’t really own the land. We are given the blessing of calling bits and pieces of it “home” for a while, but it belongs to the creator and to the lives of all who have touched it and worked it and walked it over the years.

Tim Grimm performing at our house concert series. Photo by Fred Volkmann.

Trapped in History: The Strange Case of Levi Dust

Steve · October 21, 2010 · 3 Comments

“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” — James Baldwin

One day back in the mid-1980s, I was walking through the Missouri Historical Society’s History Museum in St. Louis’ Forest Park. On display was an exhibit of paintings by 19^th-century St. Louis artists. They were very nice, I guess. But one painting reached out and grabbed me by the lapels, shook me violently and said, “Pay attention here!” The person portrayed in the painting, Levi Dust, has been with me ever since and has played a key role in several creative endeavors.

The painting, by artist Matthew (Mat) Hastings, showed an older African-American man in the middle of a dirt street, children running around him and tugging at his clothes. In his upraised hand he held a handbell. I was intrigued. What was going on in this picture? I leaned in. How could I not?

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.

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?