Apologies to Eric Clapton

When we took our high school students to Ireland many years ago, we of course visited the General Post Office, the GPO, the headquarters and last stand of the Easter Rising in 1916. And, yes, you can still the gouges and chips left by British Lee-Enfield rifles (the same weapon that killed American civil rights leader James Meredith) in the columns and the face of the graceful Neoclassic building on O’Connell Street. That attempt to free Ireland from British rule was a disaster: poorly conceived, poorly equipped, a grand vision of noble Romantics. When they surrendered, they were vilified by Dubliners as they were led off to gaol.


This clip, from MIchaell Collins, captures the end of the Rising (Alan Rickman is Eamon de Valeara, the future president of the Irish Republic.)

The Rising didn’t work. It was the executions that did. Sixteen rebel leaders were shot (one hanged) at Kilmainham Gaol. One of the rebels, James Connolly, had been so badly wounded in the assault on the GPO that he had to be propped up in a chair for his firing squad. Another, Joseph Plunkett, was given the brief mercy of marriage to his sweetheart, Grace Gifford, on May 3, 1916. The couple were allowed ten minutes together. Plunkett was shot the next morning..

Grace kept his eyeglasses, and they are now on exhibit at the Kilmainham museum. She was later a prisoner there, where she painted the image of Our Lady on one wall of her cell.

The British made a mistake in executing the sixteen men. The prisoners whom Dubliners had hissed in April had become martrys by May.

We had an uncommonly wise bus driver on that student tour to Ireland. “JIm,” he said to me, “the winners write the history. The losers write the music.”

And so that is what the Irish did.

This song, with Sinead O’Connor and the Chieftains, memorializes The Rising. (The Middle Eastern place–names refer to distant battlefields where irish soldiers were giving their lives for the British Empire; the “LIffey” is the river that bisects Dublin and connects to the Irish Sea.)

It’s the same old theme/Since 1916 …

As Faulkner famously—and accurately—proclaimed—“The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” That snatch of lyric above comes from eighty years after the Rising, in a song that led to one the most extraordinary music videos ever made. From Dolores O’Riordan and The Cranberries:

So history has a habit, life the cottony contrails of an overhead jet, of leaving a trail behind it. The problem with Irish history—or, in my experience, wtith Mexican history or Civil War history—is that the vapor trails far above us, unlike those of airliners, never quite go away.


And this is “Zombie,” as performed by Australians. Some of them have Maori ancestry, some had parents from Singapore or Indonesia, and maybe some are descended from the Irish banished to Australia when it was a penal colony. The losers write the music, Ken said. There’s not a loser in this video. For a few minutes, they are, instead, Irish. Every last one of them.

Sandy Mershon is a friend Elizabeth and I love. And she just had the audacity to post THIS song on Facebook.

So hearing this song again led me to several more meditations, none of them invited. Mind you, the Seventies was when I was wearing embroidered cowboy pearl-button shirts, listening to the Eagles, the Allman Brothers and the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. And then something like this would come on the radio:

And I was reduced to Silly Putty. Or maybe a Slinky going down a long, long staircase.

This one might come on the radio, too. I loved the singing, so smoooooth, and maybe I loved the costumes just as much—you will notice that winged shoulders were in vogue.

It didn’t take very long for Funk to kind of meld with Disco, which, among my people back then, was about as popular as Pneumonic Plague. I’d graduated to Fleetwood Mac. But, every once in awhile, I’d kind hop up and down in my car seat when this came on the radio.

This song is sublime.

And then there was that whole “Toot toot! Beep beep!” thang.

We’re talkin’ mid- to late-1970s here. But my whole thang began when I was nineteen, a student at Bakersfield College, and so deeply depressed–I’d just moved from Arroyo Grande, okay? I was on my way home from school and four kids needed a ride. Three girls, one boy. All Black. For whatever reason—I’d prefer to credit the Lord God Himself—I pulled over my little yellow Mustang and beckoned them to hop in.

The girls were packed, uncomfortably, in the back. The guy sat next to me, looked through my eight-track tapes, uttered a little yelp, and put this song in. It was performed at Woodstock in 1969.

We all danced, all five of us, as much as the confines of a 1965 Mustang would permit, all the way home, until I dropped them off.

I won’t say that I have loved Black people ever since that day, because that would be a generality just as pernicious as any hateful racist generality can be. But I will say this: That ride home made me love being an American.

Many years later, for John’s birthday, we went to a Niners game during a woeful season. We had seats in the end zone at Candlestick, facing the sun, and so resembled lobsters by the fourth quarter. But when Our Guys kicked a field goal with no time remaining and won–one of their two victories that year–I jumped up and yelled. So did the Black woman next to me. We turned to each other without hesitation and hugged. And then we jumped up and down, still hugging.

That ride. That hug. Those are the kind of moments the Good Lord intended for me, from the moment He knit me in my mother’s womb.

How I concluded a lesson on the Risorgimento–the unification and creation of modern Italy. I do love that place.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hhaS_FHHmCIr7cuG_UYvEVj6csP8QEJ5/view?usp=drive_link

Bryson DeChambeau is leading the Masters with a first-round 65. About him I do not give a damn. He’s built like a middle linebacker and hits the ball just that violently. His swing, looks like he’s splitting rails inside a porta-potty.

But that’s not the problem.

The problem is That De Chambeau plays on the LIV Tour, sponsored by, among others, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who is prone to having his political opponents whacked and who believes, bless his heart, in the moral instruction conferred by public beheadings.

So I’m rooting for the guy in second place, Scottie Scheffler. I might even root for the ghost of Gene Sarazen. This guy:

In 1935, Sarazen, was very unlike Bryson DeChambeau. Sarazen’s legs, in his plus-fours, looked like toothpicks. He was playing in his first Masters. His partner was Walter Hagen, the suave party boy who urged Sarazen, as they marched down the 15th fairway, to hurry up for his second shot. Hagen had dinner to get to. There would be Martinis and honey-baked ham and smoked oysters. That was where he was headed, maybe in a yellow Stutz-Bearcat convertible.

Sarazen was diplomatically ignoring Hagen. He instead haggled with his caddie, invariably, back then, a Black man. The caddy, in the convention of the time, referred to Sarazen as “Mr. Gene.” They were debating which club to use. Sarazen thought he’d need a brassie, a 2-wood, a club that is today obsolete.

The holes at Augusta have nicknames. The fifteenth is called “Firethorn.” Sarazen’s caddy had a nickname, too, in the days when Black Americans were meant to be invisible. They called him Stovepipe.

No, Mr. Gene, Stovepipe must’ve said. A brassie is too much club, sir.

As Hagen lit another cigarette, Sarazen took his caddie’s advice. Stovepipe handed him a spoon–the modern equivalent of a 4-wood–and then Sarazen hit his shot. It must’ve felt good, but Sarazen didn’t know how good it was until he approached the 15th green and saw the crowd–that would be about twenty-five people, back in 1935–jumping up and down. Then he heard them hollering.

He didn’t know just yet why they were hollering, but among the golfers who did know, because they saw Sarazen hit the fairway wood, were Bobby Jones—the closest, outside Hobie Baker and Brad Pitt, that we Americans have ever come to blonde Adonis–Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan.

The spoon traveled 215 yards in the air, rolled another twenty, and dropped into the cup.

That’s a replica of the club Sarazen hit, thanks to Stovepipe. The ball is the original.

That did not win the comparatively elderly Masters rookie–Sarazen was 33–the tournament. It took him another day and 36 holes to break the tie with Craig Wood, who’d been three shots ahead going into the 15^th hole.

But the newspapers had already labeled Sarazen’s spoon at the 15th “the shot heard ’round the world.”

When I was a little boy, I used to watch Sarazen, as a commentator, on Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf, and I was charmed by both his knowledge of the game and the grace of his manners. I am sure the same things could be said about Stovepipe..

Call me old-fashioned. I don’t mind. But I’m not so old-fashioned as to wonder what became of Stovepipe, the man who made this moment possible. I hope to somehow find him someday and find out what his life was like after the 15th hole.

I’m in a kind of spiritual desert right now, so I went to visit the Rev. James Johnson-Hill of the SLO Agape Church in SLO, a church far afield from the structured tradition of the Episcopal Church in which I was raised.

As neglectful as I’ve been toward my faith, and how much I’ve tried to hide it, are hallmarks of my life. But in every minute of my teaching, I was also artfully and subversively, preaching, the message that we are all brothers and sisters, even with the dead, and that the membrane–Walt Whitman’s word choice–that connects us is love. This is the message my mother, a devout almost-but-not-quite Roman Catholic, taught me. Mom and Jesus were always there with me in the classroom.

Maybe missing my kids also means that I am missing the passion I felt in teaching.

So I drove up to San Luis to visit James, the husband of a former Mission student, Anicia Bonds, who is very dear to me.

I just needed another perspective.

Once we’d finished talking, I understood that what I take for a crisis is really an opportunity to come closer to God. Talking to, and learning from this wise and wise man, was an immense gift.

Guess whose gift he really was.

And when we were done talking and praying, Anicia was there and we shared a hug. I needed that, too.

Thank you, Pastor James. Thank you, Mom. I think you were right next to me today.

The story that Sugarcane tells , the stunning documentary from Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, is set in British Columbia. But it resonates even here, in San Luis Obispo County.

The last speaker of her dialect of her language, referred to by scholars as Obispeño Chumash, was named Rosario Cooper. She died in Lopez Canyon, east of Arroyo Grande, in 1917, but her language was recorded and so survives. Many Chumash—the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini (ytt) people—went to the Sherman Indian School in Riverside, where they were punished for speaking Rosario’s language.

So were the children of the Williams Lake First Nations of British Columbia when they were sent to the St. Joseph Mission Residential School, which closed in 1981. The school that Sugarcane (the film takes its name from a nearby reservation) depicts punishments that are unbelievable for little boys and girls. A barn was used to tie up miscreant students and whip them. Six-year-olds who talked in class were made to hold oversized Bibles, the weight of cinderblocks, over their heads for an hour.

The intent of schools like these was, as the film points out, was to annihilate the Indian.

It wasn’t enough to “annihilate” living Native Americans, the little boys who learned manual labor and wood shop and the little girls who learned baking and canning and dusting.

Even the dead have suffered.

In the 1880s, a ytt burial ground that lay in the path of the Pacific Coast Railroad near Avila Beach was obliterated. In the 1890s, crews installing a new water main beneath Chorro Street, near the Mission, did the same to the remains of the indigenous people buried there.

Near the St. Joseph School, a preliminary scan from ground-penetrating radar revealed at least ninety-three potential burials, likely the bones of residential school students whose names will never be known. One former student remembered nuns carrying the body of a newborn infant inside a shoebox down to the school incinerator.

Julian Brave NoiseCat’s Father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, was luckier. A dairyman found him, soon after his birth, in an ice-cream carton hidden inside a dumpster.

What makes the film powerful is the story of reconciliation between Julian and Ed Archie, abandoned by a mother who was ashamed to bear him.

Why was she ashamed? Another former student, at his wife’s behest, has a DNA search done. He is an indigenous Canadian, but his DNA reveals that he is 50% Irish and 5% Scots, and a match is made with a distant cousin named “McGrath.”

Father McGrath was a teacher at the school.

The same priest who heard his confession, one former student remembered, pulled him out of his bed in the boys’ dormitory at night.

Every year, in the first week of September, a cattle truck arrived at “The Rez” to take the children back to school. Parents had to drag some of those students, crying and shrieking, to the waiting truck.

In the late 1940s, the ytt children at the Sherman School were summarily dismissed and replaced by Navajo children. They were no longer wanted.

Neither were the children whose parentage, thanks to the Oblate fathers and brothers, were partly White. They weren’t wanted by either world, Native American or White.

This is a sobering film. It is not hopeless. The grace with which the two NoiseCats find healing is Sugarcane’s pivot, and the courage with which an indomitable investigator, Charlene Belleau, pursues the fates of the missing children and the priests who abused them is remindful of another powerful film about a similar subject, Spotlight.

It’s not incongruous to call this a beautiful film: Dust mites dance in a shaft of sunlight, Native American horsemen pivot together to run down a hillside, rain-slick roads penetrate thick stands of pine.

Above the little Mission cemetery is a statue of Mary, Queen of Heaven, the marble turning mossy.  The same statue, draped softly in snow, reappears later in the film, and it is beautiful. Many indigenous people remain Catholic, to the point of defending their churches in the wake of a spate of arson fires set as retribution as more and more unmarked graves were revealed across Canada.

The sounds, too, are evocative: a horse pulling grass just beyond the cemetery fence, crackling embers as men prepare a sweat lodge, a spade hitting the ground and striking wood, the harsh clank as a gate flies open for a bronco and rider at the Fort Williams Stampede, the cooing of doves within the tragic barn where little boys were once whipped.

The most stunning sound is a long moment of silence, when Rick, a tribal elder, confronts the Superior General of the Mission Oblates with the story of three generations of physical and sexual abuse. The priest is numb, and the filmmakers allow his silent hurt to fill the space.

Near Surgarcane’s end, Ed Archie kneels in the way boys once did in what were called the “Indian Schools” across the United States and Canada. They did so to prepare for the switch.

But this is what happens instead: Julian Brave NoiseCat gently waves an eagle feather above his father’s head and then brushes it along his body in a healing ceremony. It is a moment of redemption that the Mission Oblates had no power to confer.

And, in mid-grilling, noticed the kite flying over the playground at Harloe Elementary. Another sure sign of Spring.

And, doggone it—you’ll forgive the pun—Spring also means new life. We have one example. He’s our neighbor’s German Shepherd puppy, Ralph, who’s just taken up residence in his Forever Home. Walter, our Basset, loves Ralph already.

So, yes. Life is good. It takes Spring to remind us of that fact.