On a Mission to Dubuque

 On a Mission to Dubuque

1.

My mother is 88.  At that age, one of her problems is stuff.  Like most people who have lived a long time, she is drowning in stuff: books, old snapshots, souvenirs of various adventures and journeys, sentimental gifts and knickknacks.  Her cupboards are full of pens, flashlight batteries, old check registers, paperclips and rubber bands and calendar books, some of them decades old. Whatever value or meaning these things once possessed, it has leached out of them.  Stuff is inert and has lost its energy; these sorts of things never had much intrinsic value but, now, it is all just junk.

You spend most of your life accumulating things.  But, in the end, it has to be given away or taken to the landfill.

Every time, I stopped in Eden Prairie, a west suburb of Minneapolis, to see my mother, she pressed upon me bags of old photographs, legal documents, jocular mementos of ancient political hatreds.  Of course, I didn’t have any space for these things myself, although I sorted through them, organized the fading, murky photographs, and stashed some of the stuff in corners of my house, next to cardboard boxes full of gift foods (exotic mustards and oils and vinegars), piles of clothing, and towering stacks of books.  What else could I do?

Then, my mother told me that she wanted to dispose of the German books, a collection of about 20 antique volumes.  This posed a problem.  The valuable stuff, like the useless detritus, is not challenging – you keep the things with value and, even, protect them and the garbage gets sent to the landfill.  Clutter, however, consists of things that are midway between valuable and worthless – what do you do with impressive stuff that might have some value or meaning to somebody?

2.

All my life, we referred to the crates containing the old volumes as the “German books.”  They were a relic of an ancestor who had been a preacher and learned man, a collection of treatises all written in German and published between 1650 and 1786.  Because the books were about the Bible and religion, of course, no one had touched them for hundreds of years.  Used bookstore owners will tell you that theology books survive for hundreds of years for several reasons – first, the books have an aura of the sacred about them that makes people think twice before destroying them, and, second, no one can summon the energy and fortitude to read them – undoubtedly, they are unbearably tedious and obscure and, therefore, not likely to be marred by oily and injurious human hands.  

The “German books” as we called them embodied a rebarbative, fierce inviolability.  They were heavy, bricks of print, lettered in the old Gothic style used in German publishing.  The covers of these volumes were worn and expressed an aspect of geological time – the bindings were rent, blemished, splotched, as if with lichen, more boulders than books.  All of the books were the color of some sort of organic secretion – turd-colored in other words or a yellow vellum like urine, or slippery leather (said to be unborn calf-skin) that was the texture and tint of an Egyptian mummy or a body fished out of the dark tarn of a bog.  The books looked vaguely humid, decomposed, and smelled of death or, at least, moldering fabric.  Some of them were sealed with latches, or equipped with brackets to which chains could be attached.  Each of the books began with an elaborate frontispiece, a woodcut block-print or, perhaps, a copper-plate engraving, depicting allegorical scenes, tabernacles in a stylized desert, the instruments of the passion, or baroque worthies with pointed Taliban-style beards wearing frilled collars and clutching quills and small devotional books.  Heavy marbled front- and end-papers decorated the volumes.  The books were heavy, things of darkness – it was as if they had absorbed the residue of the centuries, seized time itself and locked it into their densely printed pages.  The volumes bore names like Herzens-Postille (“The Homily of the Heart”), Zullichau, 1742, Seelen-Schatz (“The Souls’ Treasure”), Leipzig 1682, Israels Trost und Freud (auserlesen Psalmen) (“Israel’s Joy and Consolation – selected Psalms”), Nuremberg 1660 – there was a three-volume dictionary of place names and Biblical terms (Chemnitz 1721 to 1722), a small catechism with sermons explicating the creed (Frankfurt-am-Main 1711), and a travel itinerary describing places in the Holy Land (Erfurt 1754).  The grandfather of these volumes was a mighty Luther Bible (Luneberg 1711), with both of its heavy board covers, exquisitely marbled, detached from the yard-tall, 18 inch thick block of print.  This monstrous thing was equipped with triple columns of annotations and a giant frontispiece showing the entirety of scripture, synoptically displayed in schematic vignettes arrayed around a tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, an exotic-looking plant, more serpentine than the rather companionable, puppy-like viper coiled around its scaly trunk.  This huge volume was the commander-in-chief, the general among the smaller books – the thing made you dizzy just looking at it.

All my life, I was aware of these books and, on infrequent occasions, looked at them, never for more than a few minutes at a time, The books defeated your attention.  They were too strange and alien, dense impenetrable masses of letters barbed like hooks.  

I read German and, for that reason, I suppose, I was charged by my mother to get rid of these volumes.  

3.

The books were acquired, on the evidence of marks in some of them, from an Antiquariat (that is, “Antiquarian bookseller”) in either Cleveland or Cincinnati.  Their owner, the formidable George J. Zeilinger, wrote his name on the front-papers of some of the volumes.  

George Zeilinger was my grandmother Helen Beckmann’s father.  He was born a little after the Civil War and lived until 1934.  For more than 20 years, he taught English (I think) at Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa.  (This part of central east Iowa, bordered by the Mississippi River was the place from which my people on my father’s side came.).  George Zeilinger was a dapper man who wore his clerical garments like a costume, as if he were playing the part of an ecclesiastic in a stage play.  He had a pointed beard and was near-sighted.  He wore glasses and, in some pictures, seems to be slightly cross-eyed – strabismus, it seems.  He was vain and appears in hundreds of photographs, sometimes clutching a Bible to his breast. No photographer ever caught him in a smile.  English, the subject that he taught at the seminary, was not in those days a trivial curriculum.  George Zeilinger spoke German in the home, preached entirely in German until World War One, and his children, of course, were fluent, native-speakers of the sort of Deutsch used in Iowa small towns and farming communities 125 years ago.  After retiring from the seminary on the bluffs above Dubuque, Pastor Zeilinger was called to a parish in Oelwein, Iowa where he served until a few years before his death.  I have photographs of him in the pulpit, his pointed face and pointed beard, aimed like a lance toward heaven, one arm outstretched to receive the afflatus of the Holy Spirt, a white chapel and altar behind him that looks ornate and formal, a bit like an old-fashioned wedding cake.  Helen Zeilinger, his daughter, married one of her father’s students John Herman Beckmann, my paternal grandfather.

I thought that, perhaps, I should return the books to Dubuque and Wartburg Seminary.  So I sent several emails to the librarian and archivist at the seminary, Sue D—.  She expressed some mild, polite interest in the books and asked me to compile an inventory of them.  Our email exchanges began in late Summer 2024 and continued intermittently for several months.  Around Thanksgiving, we agreed that I would retrieve the books from my mother’s house in Eden Prairie and drive them down to Dubuque where the seminary agreed to accept them as a donation.  There were 20 books, including one 1902 volume about the history of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, copiously illustrated with photographs and reproductions of paintings and engravings.  (This volume, printed in Dresden, was apparently a book presented to pastors when they were ordained at the seminary.)  I told my son, Jack, that I would retain one of these volumes for him.  Accordingly, there were nineteen books that I proposed to donate (on my mother Geraldine Beckmann’s behalf) to the library at Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque.  Sue D–, the librarian and archivist, sent me a printed form for my mother to sign, confirming that she had donated the books free and clear to the seminary with no strings attached – the seminary could do what it wished with the volumes once it had them in its possession.  

4.

The German books traveled wherever my parents lived – they went from Ames, Iowa to New Jersey to New Brighton, a suburb of St. Paul to Richardson, Texas (north of Dallas) and, then, at last, to Eden Prairie, Minnesota, their location when I negotiated the donation with Wartburg.  There were other artifacts more appealing to me as a boy then these musty old books.  Several of my Lutheran forbears had been missionaries to Africa, serving in what is now called Tanzania.  We had pictures of pale men and women in long black garments, dark from ankle to buttoned collar, standing among half-naked tribesmen on an arid plain under the white dome of Mount Kilimanjaro.  In some photographs, bare-breasted girls posed in grass skirts in front of small stucco-walled chapels also adorned with grass-thatched roofs.  There was a book about a leper hospital in Tanganyika as it was earlier called (before World War One, the land was German East Africa) – that book exercised a sinister fascination, disfigured patients standing among gardens or against white-washed plaster walls.  In the European branch of the family, some cousins and uncles were missionaries to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, also German colonies before the Great War.  We had several masks retrieved as artifacts from the islanders, dark and grotesque objects that my parents (they were very young at the time) displayed on the walls of their little house in Asbury Park (actually Wanamingo), New Jersey.  I recall creeping by those glowering masks, keeping as close to the wall opposite them as possible and averting my eyes when I came from my bedroom to go to the toilet.  The masks were cruel and malign and they haunted my dreams.  Later, I discovered that we also had a lance made from iron-like wood and several bull-roarers. When you whirled those things on a string over your head, they cut through the air and shaped it into a sort of pulsing howl.  I don’t know what happened to those things.  

5. 

Seven degrees below zero when I take the dog out for her walk.  The streets are dark at six in the morning.  In the distance, an array of brightly colored Christmas decorations are bunched together in someone’s front yard.  It’s as if the festive season is all concentrated on one lawn.  Inflatable plastic snowmen guard a fence-line, hissing a little with the air blown into them.

The roads are dry and the traffic to Minneapolis surges northward across the empty, brown farmland. The marshes along the freeway are frozen into an elegant calligraphy of reeds trapped in grey-green ice.

My sister’s husband is hospitalized with COVID.  My sister is sick as well.  My mother reports by telephone that she is feeling ill also.  She tells me that she has tested negative for COVID but that she will stay in the other room when I come to her house to pick up the German books.

The drive is uneventful.  The traffic, all moving eight to ten miles faster than the posted speed-limit, is efficient and mannerly.  I’m at my mother’s house about when I expect to be.  

The books are located on a bench near the kitchen table, three stout boxes or totes full of the old volumes.  The Luther Bible, an obstacle and stumbling block in its own right, sits apart from the heavy boxes.  My mother directs me from the dining room, leaning on her walker.  She wants me to come into the house and inspect some construction work that is underway on the lower level of the house.  I can hear a power tool abrading a wall somewhere below.  (My sister, Melissa, has agreed to move with her husband from Reding, California to the family home in Eden Prairie so that she can care for my mother.  Of course, my mother doesn’t want to move into Assisted Living or some other kind of care facilty and, so, housing my sister and her husband in my mother’s home will allow her to stay there until the end.  At present, my mother is alert and fairly vigorous – she walks daily and spends several hours on Bible study – but, sooner or later, she will be too frail to care for herself.  For this reason, the “basement,” as we called it, of the split-level is being remodeled into an apartment with its own kitchen and bathroom.)

My mother can no longer safely navigate the stairs leading to the lower level of her home and, so, she dispatches me downstairs to assess the progress of the project.  It is December 12 and the job was estimated to be complete on the 13th, but it’s obvious that this schedule isn’t even remotely plausible.  A handsome young man who appears to be of Somali background is painting the ceiling in the basement.  There are buckets of white paint on a saw-horse table.  In the old utility room, some dry-wall partitions have been raised and an iceberg of cabinets covered in a white tarp sit in the middle of the room.  I ask the young man when the job will be complete and he tells me in two or three days. 

“So almost on schedule?”  I ask.

“Well, that’s just my part, painting the ceilings and drywall. The cabinets still have to be installed and the electrical completed and the plumbing also,” he says, adding: “It’s, at least, three weeks.”

I go upstairs and tell my mother that the job will not be finished until the end of January.  She isn’t much concerned.  Melissa and her husband, Steve, haven’t even put their home in Reding up for sale yet.  

The books are heavy but not backbreaking.  I carry the totes to my car, set them in the back, and, then, bring the Luther Bible, with both of its endboards separated from the slab of printed pages, to my vehicle.  Everything fits snugly in the rear of the SUV.  The Bible and the other books sit crouched in the vehicle, vaguely sentient, like dogs or rabbits about to be transported cross-country.  When these books were printed, of course, no one had any idea about motorized vehicles and interstate highways.  I suppose it will be a new experience for the old volumes.  

The sun is shining brightly over the suburbs.  Where cars are lined up at traffic lights, little puffs of white exhaust billow skyward.  It’s about zero degrees now.  My SUV slips into the groove in the highways and is borne south.  After about thirty miles on the interstate, I can see a vast cloud looming over the south, a huge tilted awning of rumpled grey.  It’s only two p.m. but already the winter afternoon is preparing for night, dimming with the sun no longer casting shadows at all, in fact, no light coming from the sky or the earth and grey covering the frozen landscape.

6.

I leave for Dubuque at eight in the morning on Friday the 13th of December.  An ice-storm is predicted for evening all across central Iowa and the overpasses flash warnings, digital displays on overhanging signs.  But, for the time being, the morning is well-lit and cold, the skies blue and featureless.  Grain elevators are drying corn and beans and puffy clouds of steam rise above the edges of the small towns scattered across the prairie.  

Someone told me that you can buy wonderful caramel rolls in Osage, Iowa, about 45 minutes from Austin.  In fact, I’ve got directions to the bakery.  But the place isn’t where I expect it to be, and, after driving up and down the deserted main street in the small town, I give up the search and continue southward.  The old seminary building, the school attended by Hamlin Garland, the novelist, stands at the edge of the red brick downtown in Osage.  The Italianate eaves of the white brick building are garnished with Christmas lights – the place is large and looks like an austere villa by Palladio. 

Beyond Osage, the highway – the so-called Avenue of the Saints (St. Paul to St. Louis) – skirts the little towns, bypassing them on the way to Waterloo. The route leads through Waterloo, pausing at several stoplights and, then, on the outskirts merging with a four-lane highway (20) aimed straight east across the flat terrain toward Dubuque.  This last leg of the trip is 80 miles.  All told, it takes three-and-a-half hours to travel from Austin to the heights overlooking Dubuque where Wartburg Seminary stands.   

7.

A few miles to the west of Dubuque, broad valleys open downward to watersheds draining to the Mississippi.  The plain is dissected by creeks and rivers tributary to the Father of Waters and the highway rides up and down on great waves of parallel ridges.  From the crests, you can see for miles, an intricate landscape of criss-crossing ravines and deeply incised river bottoms where pale hillside suburbs are flanked by old forests growing on the steep slopes.  

Tucked into an alcove cut into the hillside, I see an Olive Garden restaurant with an apron of parking lot on its tight level shelf of property.  I recall that I ate in that restaurant twenty years ago, the last time I visited Dubuque with my kids on a long weekend in the Summer.  It was hot, then, and humid and the deep, green valleys were steamy.  Some confusion ensued, I recall, driving to Dubuque where we intended to stay for the night.  I took the divided highway with the utmost confidence and landed, at last, on the river-front in Davenport, Iowa; among the casino riverboats and grassy levees, I realized that I had taken the wrong exit in Waterloo and traveled to the wrong city.  It was seventy miles back to the north, through Maquoetka, to reach Dubuque, an older, more genteel city on the Mississippi beneath sheer bluffs climbed by narrow residential lanes, old mansions like mountain goats perched on the heights.  We rode a funicular from the brick downtown to the hilltop where there were a couple of old restaurants, some street vendors at a little overlook, and more ornate Victorian homes crowning the hilltop.  Somewhere on those heights, we stopped to admire the statue of Martin Luther at the seminary that my great-grandfather and grandfather had attended.  I recalled the place as high, open to the blazing sun, and hot.  Later, we checked into a motel and the kids splashed around in the swimming pool and, then, we ate at the Olive Garden restaurant, the place I now was passing on this cold mid-day, starting and stopping in the hilltop traffic at the traffic lights on the broad boulevard.

I found the seminary, exiting from the four-lane thoroughfare on a residential street lined with big old houses, much of hilltop bare because of diseases that had slaughtered the old trees here. The place stood at the high-point on a narrow ridge between two great valleys, a pile of limestone blocks with turrets suggestive of a castle on the Rhine River.  But, at first, I didn’t stop but reversed my course and drove back to the highway four or five blocks away.

Freeways in Iowa, for the most part, aren’t interstates, nor are they even limited access roads.  (For most of their lengths, there’s nothing requiring access, just farmland with tiny villages far off on the horizon.)  These roads don’t have rest stops and they generally pass two to three miles from the towns on the old two-lane highways.  As a result, there’s a dearth of toilets roadside and, needless to say, after hours in the car, there was some urgency about seeking a restroom. (I didn’t want to use the toilet at the seminary since my business in that place was complicated and vaguely sanctified.)  In Iowa, Kwiktrips are called “Kwikstars” and I had passed one near the Olive Garden on the way into town.  Retracing my route, I pulled into this Kwikstar, also occupying a small terrace chopped into the hillside.  The place was circumscribed by steep slopes and fantastically busy: all the pumps were occupied and big trucks were blocking lanes near the convenience store and cars were coming and going with the peculiar heedlessness that characterizes these sorts of places, everyone hurrying to and fro, tradesmen coming into the store to buy their lunches, old people in walkers or leaning on canes on the sidewalk, people backing without looking to their rear and semi-trucks bullying their way through the small parking lot toward the white pavilion of the building.  I had to park along a curb on the lane near the gas station.  The store was crowded, but transactions were efficient – people are familiar with these places, know their layout, and enter with a precise plan as to what they intend to purchase.  You don’t browse in a place of this sort.  I found the toilet and, fortunately, a stall was unoccupied.  With a full tank of gas, I departed, driving back onto the congested boulevard to the seminary exit.  

8. 

My instructions were to park on the street a little beyond the area reserved for the handicapped.  An icy wind was blowing over the hilltop and I could see down into the both deep hollows, to the front and back of the seminary grounds, steep slopes lined with what seemed to be orchards or vineyards and, far below, residential streets.  The influence of the Mississippi is evident – the river exerts a hydraulic pull that cuts up the landscape, but the main bore of the Mississippi is not visible from this place, indeed, as I recalled, invisible until you reach the bottom of the valley occupied by the old brick buildings of Dubuque.  (There’s a riverside park on a hogback marked with some Indian mounds and some squat observation towers and, across the iron bridge, pits and ravine, remnants of  an old lead mine with a shot-tower atop a stony height.)  I had a phone number written on a 3 x 5 card and I called the seminary.  A woman answered, a bit brusquely, but said that she knew who I was and why I had come.  My contact, Sue D– , had the day off.  In fact, the Seminary was between the Fall and Winter seminars, on break for the Christmas Holiday.

I was told it would take a few minutes for someone to come to my car with a cart to move the books into the buildings.  I paced up and down the sidewalk, walking into the small quadrangle between the seminary’s administrative offices and chapel and the limestone-block wings extending out from core of the building.  Luther stood on his plinth, larger than life, a blunt bronze instrument like a wedge for splitting wood or a sledge-hammer.  The Reformer looked truculent and indignant, his metal jaw clamped shut like a vice, and one of his feet was stepping forward, as it to take the plunge from the rough-hewn block on which he was displayed.  On a nearby wall, a concrete plaque inset in masonry displayed these words: Gottes Wort und Luthers Lehr / Vergehet nun und nimmermehr – a vaguely defensive slogan that means “God’s Word and Luther’s teachings do not fade away now or ever.”  Over the chapel, a square, castellated tower rises surmounted by a lethal-looking spike of steeple.  The grounds were empty and the windows in the building dark despite the bright Winter sunlight.

A door opened and I heard a metal trolley clattering a little as it was pushed over the sidewalk.

9.

The woman pushing the cart was heavily bundled.  Her face was robust and square and she spoke with an accent.  On a windy hilltop in Iowa in December, you tend to interpret foreign accents as Slavic, Finnish, Estonian or Latvian.  But, for all I know, perhaps, the young woman was from sunny Italy or Spain.  She was a formless shadow with round glasses, wearing gloves like oven mitts on her hands.   

A minute later, another woman appeared, ambling down the sidewalk, also in a heavy coat with a scarf tucked under her chin.  She was smaller than the girl with the metal cart and had a band-aid covering the tip of her pointed nose.  Her glasses were also round, imparting a bit of breadth to her otherwise narrow and vulpine features.

I picked out a couple books from my cardboard boxes and opened them to show the women my treasures.  On the yellow page, naked allegorical figures representing Truth and Revelation shivered a little in the breeze breathing up from the hollows encircling the seminary on its height above the valleys. The girl with the accent showed some interest in the Baroque engravings.  The other woman, clearly her boss, was noncommittal, emitting a sound midway between a sigh and groan.  The cold upset her and she wanted to go inside.  Certainly, this street in front of the seminary was no place to inspect these books.

I followed the two women as they pushed and tugged the cart bearing the three boxes of books and the Luther Bible to the door at the center of the quadrangle.  Luther’s shadow cast as if by a gnomon, extended across the winter-burnt grass.  Inside the building, the cart’s wheels rattled over the tiles that seemed vaguely Spanish.  Down a hallway, some stained glass flared like a small bonfire in a window.  The place was orderly, silent, very clean and uncluttered – in this lobby, the moldering books with their shaggy pages seemed an embarrassment.  

We took an elevator down to a subterranean hallway, brightly lit by florescent fixtures embedded in the ceiling.  One room was marked “Archives” with a brass or tin plate on the door showing the name of Sue D–, the woman with whom I had negotiated the donation.  The door opening into the suite of rooms comprising the archive was heavy, a massive metal slab like the door to a bank vault.  Some metal utility shelves were burdened with boxes and stacks of paper; a metal desk stood between filing cabinets.  On a stark metal desk like an antiseptic dissecting table, several empty cardboard boxes were stacked-up, labeled “ZEILINGER” with a post-it sticker.  We lifted my boxes of books from the cart and set them on the floor.  The girl with the accent, still encased in her coat, raised the Luther Bible and its detached endboards and put it on the desk top next to the empty boxes.  She passed through the heavy vault door and vanished.  

The lady with the band-aid on her nose led me into an adjacent room.  More metal shelves were lined with cardboard boxes stuffed with papers.  The woman told me that when a parish is dissolved or a church congregation becomes extinct, baptism, wedding, and funeral records have to be preserved.  These nondescript boxes, each named and numbered, represented churches that had vanished and their official documents, retained in perpetuity in this large, silent room.  These records were preserved in this underground room with concrete floors and walls, a vault sealed against fire by the heavy metal door opening into the basement hallway.  

We passed through that door and across the hall to another vault, also sealed by a fire-door.  “This is our rare books collection,” the woman told me.

More bland, grey metal shelves stood in rows in another chamber with poured concrete floors and an infrastructure of fire-sprinklers among the overhead lights.  Packed onto the shelves were several thousand books, more or less identical to the volumes that I had transported from Eden Prairie to the seminary.  The books were dark, pressed together, and emitting, it seemed, a kind of muddy gloom.  On their spines, most of the books were ribbed like human bodies, but eyeless and larval-colored, like grubs unearthed from the black topsoil in Spring.  The profusion of these volumes explained the relative unenthusiasm with which Wartburg had accepted my family’s donation of the old books.  The place already had these sorts of things in abundance.  There were too many books for me to examine them and volumes of this age are blind – they don’t bear any writing on their withered, leathery skins.  But I saw several enormous Bibles similar to the big ornate book that I had brought to Wartburg.  No doubt there were duplicates in this collection of the books that my mother had donated.  On the floor, I saw several boxes of books, stacks of old volumes, presumably, awaiting cataloguing and placement on the shelves.  But the shelves seemed to be full, all spaces occupied by the antique books.  To put something on those shelves would require that some other volume be discarded or moved into another collection. The press of the books and their profusion was like a natural phenomenon, an ecology of some sort and I felt vaguely reassured that the books now resting in the archives across the hall would soon be among their own kind; they were with others of their obdurate and eternal species, whispering in German and subsisting on dusty air under the colorless, abstract light cast from above.

I felt like I should apologize for burdening the collection with more books.  But I said nothing.

10.

The woman with the band-aid on the tip of her nose led me on tour of seminary.  We went into the modern library, two floors of books arranged on efficient-looking metal shelving similar to the stacks in the rare book vault below.  A fat girl sat behind the circulation desk.  My guide showed me two or three books about law and religion – the volumes were weirdly exotic, strange: something about Congo tribal law and procedure in light of local religious practices.  The place was bright and airy and the girl at the circulation desk had a jar of red and white striped candy-canes next to her computer monitor.  The lady with the band-aid told me that she wanted to introduce me to the donations and resources development director.  She vanished for a few moments while I lingered in the library.  I asked the girl at the desk if I could take a couple of her candy-canes.  She nodded yes and seemed amused at the thought.

When, the woman returned, she apologized for not being able to find the person that she was seeking.  She took me into the chapel where I admired a big, burnished pipe organ and some bright stained glass windows.  The doors to the chapel were decorated by bas relief bronze figures under a runic inscription: “Whatever you do to the least of them, you do to me.” The angular letters were hard to read against the heavy dark metal patina on the arched door.  Figures imitating German expressionist woodcuts or sculptures were providing succor to one another – clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, visiting those in prison.  I mentioned to my guide that the bas relief panels on the door seem to be derived from Ernst Barlach’s art.  

“Oh, no,” the woman said, “it was done by a local artist.”

It would be too difficult for me to explain the notion of influence and imitation and, of course, I regretted the showy allusion.  Barlach means a lot to me.  I visited the elegant Barlach museum in a Hamburg suburb and one of his massive monumental sculptures stands next to the entrance to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, a huge winged angel, aerodynamically conceived like a rocket ship, bearing a lance and perched on a massive shaggy lion.  I’ve known and admired this huge bronze figure since I was a small child – the 1928 sculpture, cast for the Lutheran church at Kiel, is called “Fighter of the Spirit”.  The angel’s furry plinth, the fierce, predatory lion (looking a bit like the she-wolf who reared Romulus and Remus) is supposed to represent the forces of materialism over which the armed and winged figure rears up into the sky like a praying mantis.  These are things that I know, but, I suppose, the reference was opaque to my tour guide and, so, rather than deepen the confusion I decided to keep my mouth shut.

In a small alcove, there’s a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe.  Some religious art from around the world is framed in the hallways that form the outer perimeter to the chapel.  Between the paintings, there are photographs of each year’s graduating class.  In the pictures taken before 1920, Dr. George Zeilinger with his spade-shaped goatee and vaguely crossed eyes under his pince nez sits next to his colleague, the formidable Dr. Reu. I search for my grandfather’s picture among the graduating class photographs but without success.  I’ve taken up too much time here and the road back to Austin is long and cold and so, I suppose, it’s time to leave.

Wartburg Seminary ordained 12 to 15 pastors annually until the late forties when class size increased.  Graduating classes today are about 45; and almost all of the students are women.  (Until the era of Vietnam War, Wartburg’s students were entirely male.)  The development director is standing in the refectory.  The place smells of a buffet lunch but no food is visible.  The director is young with a Beatles’ haircut.  I suppose he thinks that I am positioned to make an financial donation to the seminary.  He tells me that students pay $30,000 per year for tuition.  After a short conversation, he withdraws into his office behind the refectory.  

I thank my tour-guide, shake her hand, and go outside into the bright shadowless winter afternoon to begin my trip back to Austin.   

11.

Truck traffic is moving with a certain palpable urgency.  The ice storm is approaching although, for the time being, the skies are cold and clear.  Dyersville is about 25 miles from the seminary in Dubuque, a straight shot on State Highway 20.  I’m hungry and I take the exit for fuel and food.  A Quizno’s sub-sandwich place is near the 20 overpass and, so, I pull into that place.  Dyersville is famous for a baseball diamond in a cornfield east of town – this was where the Kevin Costner movie The Field of Dreams was shot.  A lot of local people, cops and realtors and farmers with community theater experience got their International Movie Data Base (IMDB) credits as extras in that film.  (The Arts Administrator in Austin appears in the background in some shots in the film and, in fact, assisted the production by casting his Dubuque friends and neighbors in the picture – he earned a credit both as an actor and assisting casting director for the film.)  Dyersville also boasts a so-called “Minor Basilica”, the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier, one of the few churches of this status in the United States outside of a major urban area.  From the exit by Quiznos, I can look across the flat expanse of houses and commercial buildings to the twin spires of the basilica, inconspicuous against the vast empty sky and the featureless, flat horizon . 

Twenty years ago, there was a Quiznos place in Austin, a storefront in a mall that was always perpetually failing.  The restaurant didn’t survive, presumably due to its location.  In a small town, people are spoiled.  If you have to drive three blocks out of your way for food or services, you will regard this as an inconvenience and not patronize those businesses.  I recall that the subs at that restaurant were good, but more expensive than the sandwiches at Subway.  The Quiznos in Dyersville is convenient to the highway, next to a pet hospital and boarding place, and across from a medical clinic and, so, it seems prosperous.  I order a sandwich called “the Ultimate Italian” and eat it while driving.  Perhaps, I am very hungry or, maybe, the sandwich is particularly well-crafted, on slightly toasted and chewy bread, but the sub seems fabulous to me.  The sandwich justifies the drive, justifies the ways of God to man, justifies life itself.  Ahead of me, the sun is sinking from its meager height in the sky, the winter solstice approaching in this season of cold and dark – although it’s still light and bright with visibility measured in miles, the darkness is advancing, and the shadows are stretching away from their sources as black meridians inscribed on the plain.  I reach Waterloo in the odor of sanctity, that is, the smell of fresh-chopped onions and vinegar that suffuses the warm cockpit of my car.  

In Waterloo, there are a half-dozen cross-roads running over the four-lane thoroughfare and each of the overpasses is displaying a warning storm advisory.  It still seems improbable that an ice-storm is imminent – the sky remains vacant, washed over with a pale blue tint like glaze on fine china.

I’m talking to my mother on my cell-phone, reporting on the mission, at the place where the freeway between Waterloo and Cedar Rapids divides, several lanes suspended on round concrete stilts exiting north and south.  I end up on the wrong exit flung off the freeway in a direction that will take me not to, but away, from home.  It’s distraction that has caused me to err.  Finding my way back to the route, I drive north by northwest and the road gradually becomes more familiar to me as I approach the border with Minnesota.  The sun is low now and its heat and light have drained away into the grey and brown earth.  At the border-line, a huge corn-fuel (ethanol) plant shows a constellation of lights under an immense baldacchino of steam scaling the heavens. 

The sun has set and its dark when I reach home. 

12.

The book that I retained for my son, Jack, is small, a modestly sized volume that fits snugly into your hands.  The title of the book is Ein und Funffzig Geistliche Andachten oder Heilige Betrachtungen Zur Ubung wahrer Gottseeligkeit that is Fifty-one Spiritual Reflections or Sacred Meditations for the Exercise of True Holiness.  The book was written by Johann Gerhard with a preface by L. Joachim Fellers, the librarian of the University of Leipzig.  Johann Gerhard is identified as a Doctor of Holy Scripture and P.P. (Pastoral Professor) at Jena.  The publisher of the book is said to be Johann Christoph Mieten in Leipzig and Dresden.  Beneath a stylized cherub shown as a child’s face borne up on a scroll of wings, eagle feathers it seems, the book is dated Im Jahr 1692 (“the year 1692").

On the frontispiece, an oval cartouche depicts Gerhard, a middle-aged man wearing an elaborate white ruff under his bearded chin.  The author holds a Bible against his belly.  His chest and forearms are covered with a robe that seems to be made of fur.  A ring around the portrait is engraved with a Latinized version of the man’s name and more abbreviations signifying his rank as a doctor of theology and pastoral professor. Vegetal scrolls flourish around the edges of the portrait in its oval compartment.  Baroque loops and ribbons of scroll wrap around two smaller vignettes in the upper corners of the engraved frontispiece.  In the left vignette, an emblem shows a wayfarer walking away from a round globe on which a map and a small square hut with a single window are printed.  The wayfarer carries a sort of cane over his shoulder.  The band around this emblem reads spes et for / tuna valeta.  These words are a translation of a phrase in a Greek epigram into Latin: “I have reached the port; hope and fortune farewell; you have made sport enough of me, make sport of others now.”  The emblem in the right upper corner above Gerhard’s portrait depicts a cross against which someone has leaned a ladder, a skull and crossbones sits at the base of the cross.  Above the instrument of execution, a small hand seems to extend from a cloud holding a crown.  The emblem is labeled In hoc Signo – that is, Constantine’s motto “Under this sign (I have triumphed)”.   Two vignettes under the author’s portrait show a flower irradiated by smiling sun and a flaming heart afloat on a troubled sea.  These images illustrate verses from the Canticle, that is, The Song of Songs in the Bible.  8:7 is the verse associated with the flaming heart floating on the turbulent sea: “Unleash God’s Word! Many waters can not quench love! Rivers can’t sweep it away!”  Some Latin words to this effect surround the emblem.  The friendly sun casting its beams on the flower refers to Canticle 10 although mislabeled 7:  “I to my beloved and his turning is toward me” – the flower, apparently, is imagined as turning to the rays of sunshine beaming down upon it.  

Johann Gerhard was a Lutheran theologian who lived between 1582 and 1637.  He wrote many books translated into a number of languages and was reputed to be the greatest Protestant scholar of his generation.  As far as I can determine his 51 Spiritual Reflections are composed in verse.  The diction is ardent and the meditations read like love poetry. The volume is posthumous.  Gerhard had been dead for 55 years when the publisher printed this book.  His fame outlived him and he is not wholly forgotten even today – Gerhard has a brief Wikipedia entry on the Internet.  Spes et fortuna valeta...   

13.

Although it was bitterly cold on December 13, 2024, the weather warmed enough by midnight for sleet to fall all across the State of Iowa – that is, from the river to the river (defined as the Mississippi to the Missouri).  It was the end of Autumn and the ground was brown and frozen and the trees were bare, a stubble of trunks and branches embedded in decaying leaf-litter.  Green spots of torch-shaped arbor vitae marked country cemeteries, little encampments of the dead scattered across the land.  The steeples of churches standing along two-lane highways pricked the sky at the horizon.  The congregations of those churches were perishing and, soon enough, I supposed their registries of baptisms and weddings and funerals would be locked away at the seminary behind the kind of fire-door that protects currency in banks.  

The season was ending and winter, astronomically defined, was a little more than a week away.  The transfer of the books marked the end of something.  For a hundred years, the Beckmann family had harbored those old volumes, a symbol, I suppose, of certain pretensions toward theology, the divine, and writing.  But those day have ended.  The secret cache of meaning is now dispersed and the emblems are set aside.  Soon enough, it will be a new year.