parting

Grandma and Grandpa Grohn lived in Minnesota, and we in Oregon.  After we had visited them, or they us, Grandma would cry at our parting.  She couldn’t help it – she was old and thought she would not see us again here, though she expected to see us There.

That tension which runs from one eardrum to the other, just in back of the soft palate, that tension stealing the voice, is part of the reason I have never moved too far from home.  My brother, herculean, must be stronger than I as he wends his way back toward the airport.

sepia rainshowers

The Weather Channel app on my Android device said that dry conditions would continue for my bicycle ride home.  After a mile, however, I stopped to put on my rain-jacket.

I work in Oregon and live in Washington, twice a day crossing the mighty Columbia River that separates these states.  The 8.8-mile ride includes a two-mile span over the Glenn Jackson bridge which carries four lanes of Interstate-205 in each direction over the river.  Between the north- and south-bound lanes, is a 9-foot wide pedestrian and bicycle lane.

My greatest pleasure during the commute comes on clear days at the top of the bridge in Washington State, overlooking the Columbia River.  In the morning, the sun rises behind the sharply-peaked Mt. Hood, reflecting over the expanse of water to the east.

It's only a lousy Android camera, folks.

It’s only a lousy Android camera, folks. – A sunny morning, September 2012

This Monday past, however, an unlikely thing happened.  A spring shower, forecast to begin later, started up as the sun was setting, and as my commute home began.  As I approached the bottom of the bridge, the declining sun cut in under the clouds, and shining through the showers over the river, painted the bottoms of the clouds, the river, the shore, and even the rain itself in sepia tones.Rainbow

The rainbow to the east was so wide it seemed to land on either side of the river.  Cars were stopping on the bridge to take photographs.

At the top of the bridge, the sun setting in the opposite direction of the rainbow made it worth being drenched.

Rainshower Sunset over the Columbia River

If such reminders and gifts could be predicted, I would happily pack the real camera on such a day.

most unique, but still the same

Last month, I traveled to Atlanta as a trainer in the repair of one of my company’s music delivery platforms.  As nice as it is to meet people and see another of my company’s offices, it was pretty much just work.  But there were two things that were really great about this trip.

First, my brother, Austin, who works a few hours from Atlanta, managed to come over for a visit one night.  My food was all coming from the Publix supermarket down the street from the hotel and office, so this was my one real meal out.  We were in the Atlanta suburb of Norcross which neither of us knew, so GPS was how we selected our restaurant.  We settled on Polish.  For some reason, the restaurant was not there, but in the strip-mall where it should have been was a place called China Garden.  We were both starving, so China Garden it was.  But as we approached, one glance in the window told us to keep walking – the only people in the restaurant at 7:00pm were behind the counter.  The last suite in the mall had a sign for tacos, and nearing it, we could see the place was hopping, and the whole waiting area was full.  It was worth the 20 minute wait for a table: a conversation about life, remodeling, careers, neighbors, disappearing garbage cans, and theology over a couple 32oz Dos Equis, fajitas, and a shrimp quesadilla.  So if you’re in Norcross Georgia and the choice is Polish, Chinese, or Mexican, head for Kiko’s Tacos.  Taking your brother is recommended.

Second, I was looking for an Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod congregation that held a Lenten service on Wednesday.  I went to the Synod website, www.lcms.org, and started looking near the hotel.  To my surprise, I had to go thirteen miles before I found one in Tucker.  There were a bunch of them closer that had “family night”, or youth group, or some other function that night, but none closer than St. Mark Lutheran Church had an actual Lenten Service.  I was surprised because of the four LCMS churches I have been a member of, all have (or at least had) Wednesday Lenten services.

I wasn’t sure what to expect.  I’ll be honest here – this is in the South, and population demographics are somewhat different than in the Northwest from whence I hail.  My high school had one black student, the Student Body President in my senior year.  My university had three black students, one of which I sang with in the men’s choir.  Perusing St. Mark Lutheran’s website I saw the pictures of three pastors –  two of them were black, and the white one was an interim pastor.  I just wasn’t sure what it would be like.  Would I know the hymns?  Would they even sing what I know as hymns, or would it be some other kind of songs?  Would I even be able to follow along?  Of the three Sunday services described, one is English, one is Wengalawit Eritrean, and the other appeared to be another congregation.  What is Wengalawit Eritrean?  But for whatever reason, this is the congregation I found, so this was where I was headed.

St. Mark Lutheran, Tucker Georgia

I was greeted by several parishioners just as soon as I chose a pew and sat down.  Of course, they asked my name, where I was from, and how long I would be there.  They seemed disappointed I was leaving on Friday.  They had Lutheran Service Book in the hymnal racks, much newer than The Lutheran Hymnal that is at my home congregation in Vancouver Washington.  The sanctuary was modest, and not too big, with old stained glass windows set into thick walls.  Rev. Dr. Wilton Heyliger approached me and asked some of the same questions his parishioners had, although I had more questions for him than he had of me.  I asked about the three different services on Sunday, and he told me that this is one of the most unique worshipping communities in the United States – St. Mark has two services, one in English, and one in Eritrean, and then the third is a separate congregation, Incarnate Word Lutheran, that uses the facilities of St. Mark.  Rev. Heyliger is the pastor of Incarnate Word, and since this was a joint service, he would do the liturgy, and interim pastor Rodger Meyer would preach the sermon.  I asked what Eritrean meant, and he said Eritrea is a country, very small and right beside Ethiopia, and the language there is the Tigrinya language, in case I know it.  I replied that I not only didn’t know Tigrinya, but that I did not even know a place such as Eritrea existed!  Rev. Heyliger smiled, and assured me it did, and that this community of immigrants to the United States worships here on Sundays.

Looking back, I don’t know what all my apprehension was about.  It was mostly the same as back home.  When I Survey the Wondrous Cross (LSB 425), Psalm 119, John 14, Let Us Ever Walk With Jesus (LSB 685), Law and Gospel sermon, Offertory, You Are the Way (LSB 526), Prayers, Collect for Peace, Lord’s Prayer, Luther’s Evening Prayer, Benediction, Oh that the Lord Would Guide My Ways (LSB 707).  And though the words were all printed in the bulletin, I was actually able to use the hymnal here.  I loved it.

The cross over the chancel in St. Mark's is made entirely of square nails brazed together.

The cross over the chancel in St. Mark’s is made entirely of square nails brazed together.

back on my octopus again

I knew who Ronnie Milsap was before I knew who The Beatles were.  I mean the real Beatles, not the Beetles muppet band on Sesame Street – I knew the Beetles before The Beatles or Ronnie Milsap.  But sometime between age 15 and 25, I stopped listening to Ronnie Milsap and began listening to The Beatles.  A lot.  As a result, when I hear Ronnie Milsap’s Back On My Mind Again, I automatically think of Ringo Starr singing Octopus’s Garden.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QboA41mP7qg

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne_lq4wwOu8

How unfortunate – even if huge amount of the music was . . . borrowed . . . Ronnie did it better.  And his song actually makes sense.

Russ and Helen’s

There is a bend in Highway 20 between where I grew up and the freeway.  At this bend there stood the Cottonwood Ballroom.  Grandpa said that Harry James played there, back in the day, but I remember it as being dilapidated and unused.  At that same bend is an intersection, and the road that goes off to the East is the way to Russ and Helen’s.

Every Friday night, the Grohn’s would go there, often stopping at the Cottonwoods convenience store where Dad would pick up a two-liter bottle of soda.  In the fall and winter, we got there in the dark, and as we reached the end of the gravel driveway, Dad would swing the car wide so the high-beams would scan across the empty field and we might see the glow of deer eyes looking back at us.

It was an old two-story farmhouse, painted white, built on a high foundation because in the years before the dams were built, it would flood every year.  Just inside the back door, the wood stove was burning full tilt.

This was Quartet practice.  The Quartet was Mom and Dad, and Doug and Sandie, another couple from church.  They sang four-part harmony on many Sundays in church.  Helen was the organist at Bethlehem Lutheran, and she played organ for the Quartet too.  From her Hammond and the four voices practicing in her living room, I learned the sounds of harmony.  This is one of the three things in my childhood to which I attribute my musical affinity for harmony.

I grew up out in the country, outside of town a few miles, but this was farther out.  It was quieter at night, farther from the highway.  The big white barn no longer sheltered livestock, but there was still some mouldering hay in the loft.  Bats and owls were the occupants of the space, evidenced by the piles of guano and some owl pellets.  While the guano was bat droppings, the owl pellets were something else altogether.  The undigestable remains of the rodents the owls had dined on became smooth round balls of hair and bone which the owls then horked up and left for us to find.  Gross?  No – awesome!  By disassembling these dried out pellets the skeletons of owl food could be recovered.  This was much easier than getting skeletons in other ways that involved a live or recently deceased animal, but relied on the great fortune of finding owl pellets in the first place.  (Have I mentioned that Dad was a science teacher?)

At Quartet practice, us kids would play while the grown-ups sang.  There were a couple tins of classic Tinkertoys, the pieces skinnier than the ones made today.  There were matchbox cars and children’s books.  I read about the Pilgrims, and how Squanto taught them to plant corn.

Russ was Helen’s husband and a man of few words.  There was a joke about one of his phrases being “dad-gommit!”  He had his special chair in the living room.  One Friday night, Dad said that Russ wanted to show me something, so I went to Russ who was sitting in his chair.  It was a BB gun, the plastic stock slightly melted, probably from being too close to the blistering heat of the stove.  He showed me how the BBs were loaded into it, how to pump it, and how to use the safety switch.  He gave me that BB gun to share with my sister and brother, and seemed very pleased about it.

In the bathroom at Russ and Helen’s were funny clear soaps in lots of colors.  There was a bathroom scale with a big lens under which the numbers spun and finally came to rest under a red line.  And the toilet had a funny carpet-like cover on the lid.  This cover and the u-shaped rug around the base of the toilet changed periodically.  At Christmas, the toilet lid cover had Santa’s face on it.  When the toilet lid was lifted, the cover on the underside had Santa covering his eyes with his mitted hands.

When the practicing was done, it was time for snacks, sometimes followed by dessert.  Snacks and dessert – no actual meal, just good stuff.  Snacks might be Russ’s pickled herring, which I am reported to have eaten enough to turn my lips white, or it might be Sandie’s cheese fondue, or something else good.  The bottle of pop Dad got on the way was for us kids to have with the snacks.  The grown-ups got various grown-up beverages, but we pretended that our soda-pop was beer.  Snacks were the best part of Quartet practice.

When snacks were done, the cards came out, and it was time for us kids to go to bed.  The stairs were very skinny, and very steep, the narrow steps covered with black rubber treads.  Jugs of Russ’s homemade wine were perched on the lower steps, off to the side as out-of-the-way as they could get.  Rhubarb, raspberry, currant – wine made from fruit grown behind the house.  While my house only had an attic at the top of a folding ladder, this house had bedrooms at the top of this skinny staircase, one on each side at the top of the landing.  The ceilings were at funny angles with the roof of the house.  The three of us were tucked into one bed, and expected to go to sleep while everyone else played Pinochile downstairs.

The bed had an electric blanket.  The only other electric blanket I had ever seen was at Grandma and Grandpa’s.  But this electric blanket was better – it had a controller with a dial at the head of the bed.  When you turned the dial, a different number would light orange.  We turned this glowing orange dial in the dark, counting the various numbers as they clicked by.  What a marvelous toy!

At some point we must have fallen asleep.  Magically, we woke Saturday morning back in our own beds at home.  In later years, when I was a little older, I was woken up and walked out of the house under my own power down the long sidewalk to the car.  I looked up and saw Dad carrying one of my slumbering siblings.  I watched out the front window of the car from the back seat as we went home, the voices of those awake muted.  As we approached the intersection at Cottonwoods and then made that hard left turn back toward home, it was like crossing the threshold between the world of Russ and Helen’s, and the world of my own home.

Just before Russ and Helen’s 50th anniversary, Russ wasn’t doing too well.  One night, the mustard colored rotary phone on our kitchen wall rang.  I was at the kitchen table.  Mom picked up the phone, said “Thank you,” to the caller, and hung up.  She called across the bar to Dad who was in the other room, “Honey?  – Russ died.”  A few days later, there was Russ, asleep in his casket, at his funeral at Bethlehem.  We went to the graveside service.  I saw the vault lowered into the earth at the Oddfellows Cemetery.  I saw the earth filled in, and the little metal frame holding a typed marker pressed into the ground.  Dad explained that it took some time for a proper stone marker to be made.

Helen said it meant a lot to her that my sister, brother, and I were at the funeral. I don’t know if we had the choice to go or not, but at the time it seemed right to be there.   We had spent most of our Friday nights in his home, and did a good bit of our growing up there.  We still went to Helen’s on Friday nights for practice.  It was hard to stop calling the place Russ’s too.  Russ’s chair was empty.  I didn’t want to sit in it because it was Russ’s.  It was still his chair.

Tonight I drove down Highway 20 in the dark, away from Mom and Dad’s and toward the freeway.  In the daytime it wouldn’t cross my mind as I rounded that corner where the Cottonwoods Ballroom once stood.  But in the dark on a cool spring night, I can’t help remembering the right turn off the highway and over the threshold into the world of Russ and Helen’s.  Passing by the intersection I remember a blazing wood stove, pickled herring, a Hammond organ, four-part harmony, homemade wine, Tinkertoys, a glowing numbered dial, cards, merriment, and sweet dreams . . .

The Amazing Human Eye

I think I do a decent job of taking photographs, but I’m no pro, as evidenced by the strategy of taking 100 shots to get one good one.  In the critical moment, as when the opportunity for a shot is fleeting, it probably won’t work out.  The focus will be off, I will be moving too much, or some other circumstance will keep the image from being useable.  But when I can control the conditions and set up my shot, things generally work out . . . as long as I remember to set the white balance first.

Grunnow Tube Radio

My equipment is pretty average these days, and not very new.  My camera body is a Canon EOS XT.  It is an 8 megapixel camera, not even up to the entry level DSLR camera Canon builds today.  I have three lenses in my bag.  The first is the standard 28-80mm lens that came with the camera, and the second lens is a basic 75-300mm telephoto for those situations were I can’t get very close to the subject.  But my third lens is the one I always use whenever possible.

My 50mm prime lens (EF 50mm f/1.4 USM), is my favorite.  What I see through the viewfinder is pretty much what I see with my naked eye, no bigger and no smaller.  Also, because the largest aperture is f/1.4, I can shoot in low light conditions without a flash, or take a photo that draws attention to the subject by leaving everything in front or behind out of focus.

Exposure time 1/200th second, aperture f/1.4, iso-1600

There is one drawback.  Because it is a prime lens, which means it has a fixed focal length of 50mm, it does not zoom.  I don’t really know what “focal length” is in the technical way, but 50mm is a good number for me as an all-purpose lens.  Because the lens doesn’t zoom, it means camera placement relative to the subject of the photo is critical.  If the subject doesn’t fit in the frame, it means I have to take the photo from further away.  But the positive in that trade-off is that the prime lens does not have the optical compromise that a zoom lens does, and the photos I take with it are much clearer.

A photo taken to remind me to look for a replacement dummy knob for Grandpa's Atwater Kent model 60.  I should really get on that.

Combined with my B+W circular polarizer and UV filter, that is the best of my photography equipment.  There are certainly better camera bodies out there, and I could use a change up, and the Canon 50mm prime is also available with an even wider aperture of f/1.2, but that runs $1500 (Yes Jef, I know you have one!)  Better glass is expensive!  Let’s face it – at $350, the 1.4 is plenty good enough.  I figure that I should take better pictures by being a better photographer and not by upgrading equipment – I won’t be needing a bigger camera bag anytime soon.IMG_4353b

All this is to say that, despite being able to take a decent shot or two, the naked eye seems much better to me.  No matter what I do, I am not able to capture the spectrum of a beautiful sunset – the kind that comes in from over the coastal range, cutting in below the clouds, lighting them flamingo pink . . .  No matter what I do, the blue of the sky isn’t as blue as what I actually see, and the pink isn’t as vibrant as that moment before dusk.

An old photo I took on film at the International  Rose Test Garden in Portland Oregon.  This color is something I have yet to acheive on digital.  This is a flatbed scan from the negative.

An old photo I took on film at the International Rose Test Garden in Portland Oregon. This color saturation is something I have yet to acheive on digital.  It is an unedited flatbed scan from the negative.  I don’t have the print, so maybe the color is a result of the scanner.

Maybe it’s just that I’m too lazy to work with the raw data and instead I just use the compressed jpeg, and maybe I don’t know all the features of my camera as well as I should – I’m pretty much an Aperture Value & Auto Focus kind of guy.  But there are so many times when I take a shot and and expect something good, only to be disappointed.

Zimmer & Sons Opus 327

I think this really goes to just how amazing the creation of the human eye is.  In a photograph, the pixels, or data points, are evenly distributed.  But God made our eyes with a concentration of light sensors just for the thing that the eye is focusing on, and still gave us enough sensors around the rest of the eye that we can know what to focus on for detail.  It isn’t an accident – the level of complexity in the human eye is simply amazing.  All the parts work together with a specific purpose, none of which is dispensible.  If any of the parts have a problem, it affects the entire outcome.

My Canon 50mm prime can focus on an object as close as 18 inches away, but my eyes can focus on something much closer.  This is critical for detail work such as rebuilding a clock movmement.

Clock movement

And the human eye is so adaptable!  In the dark of night, I can make out just enough to get around my apartment without the lights on.  My camera would only take a completely black frame under those conditions, unless I used the manual mode to set up a time exposure, and in the dark that would be a difficult task.  My human eye does all of this automatically.  Everything is automatic with every movement of the eye – automatic focus, automatic aperture, automatic white balance, and all of it very quickly.  To focus my camera on ten different subjects in sequence is time consuming, but my eyes do it in mere seconds.

Dad, Grading the Lane

The human retina has at least 75 million light sensors in the eye.  Of course they are not evenly distributed, but how can my mere 8MP camera compare?  Standing on the shipping dock of the warehouse at work, I can look down to the pavement ten feet below my eyes, and see the individual grains of white grit washed off of the roof lying on the black asphalt.  At best, these would each be a single white pixel as represented by my camera.

I know, I know . . . even though I am comparing primes, I can’t really compare the two because the human eye does not take stills.  It more or less collects data continuously, and the brain renders it.  Indeed, this seems much better than a single snapshot.

Hog Nose Durangos

It is true that this amazing creation, as perfect as it should be, is not.  It has been corrupted along with the rest of creation, and so fails, usually over time.  Now that I am well on the backside of thirty, my once acute vision is quite noticably compromised.  At first the prescripiton was planar, meaning flat glass, with minor corrections for blur and distortion.  But two years ago, one eye became a +.25, whatever that means.  All I know is that the correction is no longer a flat lens, and the corrective numbers will probably get bigger every time I go to see the eye-guy.

Even so, I still prefer my God-given twin lenses over my cheap Canon glass.

Boys in the Orchard

The Amalia

For my cousin’s wife who shares the name:

The "Old Lutherans"

The Johann Georg was one of five ships that carried members of the Saxon Emigration Society to America in 1838/1839. C. F. W. Walther, first president of the Missouri Synod, sailed on the Johann Georg . . .

The Saxon immigrants numbered nearly 700 people. One ship was certainly not large enough. The immigrants traveled on five ships—the Copernicus, Johann Georg, Republik, Olbers and Amalia. The first two left Bremerhaven on November 3, 1838, the Republik on November 12, and the last two on November 18. The immigrants faced hardships on the journey, including extensive storms and some deaths. They also experienced many new things on board, such as watching porpoises swimming alongside the ships and warm temperatures in December as they neared the Gulf of Mexico.

The first ship to arrive in America was the Copernicus, reaching New Orleans on December 31. Three more ships would arrive in the following weeks. One ship, however, never reached the United States. The Amalia was lost at sea, carrying seventy passengers. Rev. Otto Hermann Walther, older brother of C. F. W., wrote a stirring poem in response to the loss. Written as a dialogue with our Lord Jesus Christ, the poem gives both comfort and the Gospel message to the author and his fellow immigrants.

Otto Hermann Walther's Poem on The Amalia

Here are the first two stanzas in English:

Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus, the ship has not come,
The ship named Amalia is missing!
When wilt Thou, O pilot, convey her back home
From the storms that are howling and hissing?
Have we, Lord, been favored Thy mercies to share?
Was their ship too small for Thy kindness and care?
Lord Jesus, come, still all our yearning
And hasten Amaliaʼs returning!

I granted her prayer
For kindness and care.
She was not too small
For tempest and squall.
My love went with her a-sailing,
My power and presence prevailing.
My sheep, neither hopeless nor craven,
Were led to a beautiful heaven.*

*Translated by W. M. Czamanske. Reprinted from August R. Suelflow, Servant of the Word: The Life and Ministry of C. F. W. Walther (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2000): 46, as quoted from the Concordia Junior Messenger 17 (March 1939).

 

Text: Concordia Historical Institute, April 1, 2013
Photos: Concordia Historical Institute Museum exhibits, Saint Louis, Missouri, June 5, 2012