I hope Hollywood doesn’t screw this up. The plot involves Indian fighter/army captain Christian Bale, who is charged with escorting a captive Cheyenne chief, in what seems to be a brief moment of compassion in Indian policy, back home to die.

The escort, which is made up of Buffalo Soldiers (accurate to the setting, 1892) is set upon by a common enemy–Comanches, easily the most feared tribe on the Great Plains.

You know all those old Westerns that show Indians firing at full gallop while hanging along their horses’ flanks? Only the Comanches could do that. All the other Plains tribes–even the Lakota, the majority present at the rubbing-out of Custer’s command–fought dismounted, just as the Bluecoat cavalry did.

All the other Plains tribes reckoned their wealth in horses. The Comanche saw their horses as utilitarian only. They would ride them to death, it is said, and then eat them. The formidable Apaches, who shared territory, very briefly, with the Comanches, were terrified of them. I think that’s what makes one of my favorite Westerns, The Searchers, so riveting: when the Comanches show up, unseen except for a flickering mirror-signal and unheard except for their mimicking of bird calls, you know the settlers they’re about to attack are doomed.

The book about them, Empire of the Summer Moon, and about their leader Quanah Parker–and about the raid and kidnapping that inspired The Searchers–is first-rate. It would turn out that the only fighters equal to the Comanches were the Texas Rangers, and what gave them their edge was their scrappiness (think Woodrow and Gus from Lonesome Dove), and, even more important, the technological advantage the Rangers gained once they’d armed themselves with Samuel Colt’s revolver.

The about-to-get-here film features Wes Studi, a wonderful actor, as the dying Cheyenne leader. He was Magua in Last of the Mohicans [a book it is not at all necessary to read: Mark Twain’s essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” is far better] and the title character in Geronimo: An American Legend, which was a far better film that the stupid title would indicate.

My favorite Studi role, however, came on a chance viewing of Reading Rainbow. He read a Native American version of “Cinderella” to very little kids, who were enthralled. His remorseless Magua was just a role. This is a very gentle man.

Number One Son got me not one, but TWO books about golfer Ben Hogan. This is a photo of his one-iron to the green to win the 1950 U.S. Open on the last and 72nd hole.

Hogan was not a warm man. He loved golf. He loved his wife, Valerie, and there it ends. But the year before this shot, he’d thrown his body, instinctively, in front of Valerie’s as their car crashed head-on into a bus that emerged suddenly from a dense Texas ground-fog while they were on the road between tournaments.

The impact nearly crushed Hogan. He walked with a limp for the rest of his life. But he’d saved Valerie’s life, and his own, in that moment. Had he not loved her so much, had he not thrown himself in front of her, the steering column would have impaled him.

So the next year, limping, he won the U.S. Open with this one-iron, with a club so difficult to hit that almost no modern golfer carries it anymore. His shot ranks with breaking the sound barrier, with an Olympic triple-axel triple-toe, with climbing Everest, with baking a weightless souffle.

His talent was modest, compared to that of his contemporaries, naturals like Sam Snead, Byron Nelson and Jimmy Demaret.  But he had an engineer’s mind, and he rationalized the elusiveness of the golf swing and broke it down into component parts in a way that made sense to him. In so doing, he practiced , it’s said, until his hands bled, but he wasn’t a drudge. He loved to practice, loved to live for the moment when his timing and the impact point met to create a perfect one-iron–his described a gentle fade–in a way that seemed (it was a lie, of course) to be effortless.

Shagging balls for Hogan wasn’t effortless, because he could be merciless with the young boys who shagged for him in practice: he grew so accurate that he hit them repeatedly, and it hurt. He didn’t notice. He was focused on the impact as much or more than the shot’s destination. His cigarette glowed furiously between shots. Impatient, he motioned his shagger to move backward ten yards, out of the line of fire, until he changed clubs and started to hit him repeatedly with a six-iron rather than a seven.

Once a knot of overbearing Kern County oilmen begged Hogan, playing an exhibition in Bakersfield, to give them lessons. He would be paid handsomely. He looked at them narrowly through his cigarette smoke, and flat turned them down. He was angry. Didn’t they know what he knew? They already had the best teaching pro in America, a stubby little guy named Eddie Nowak.

Nowak, many years later, would teach me how to play at Black Lake, in Nipomo. Hogan was right: Nowak was one of the best teachers I’ve ever had, and one of the toughest. The discipline and the work ethic he taught me has lasted me all the days of my life, one in which golf has been mostly absent.  Eddie didn’t just teach me golf. He taught me how hard you have to work to take on life. He was my Hogan.

A few reasons why history isn’t boring:

Harington, as Catesby, at left, in the midst of plottage.

“Game of Thrones'” Kit Harington produced and starred in the HBO miniseries “Gunpowder,” which we watched last night. I enjoyed it, excluding the drawing-and-quartering but including the costuming, which was superb. Harington is a direct descendant, on his Mum’s side, of the plotter he portrayed, ringleader Robert Catesby–it was Catesby’s sidekick, Guy Fawkes, who was found with several barrels about-to-be-lit gunpowder underneath Parliament and the King, James I, who could have done with a little detonation. The three episodes reminded me of how savagely Catholics were treated in Stuart England.

Elizabeth and I loved “V for Vendetta,” based on a graphic novel.

Fawkes defied the executioner by diving off the scaffold and breaking his neck. In a later incarnation, the film “V for Vendetta,” Natalie Portman falls for him, so sometimes these things work themselves out.

Years before Guy Fawkes, plotters also attempted to blow up James I’s father, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, Mary Queen of Scots’ alcoholic, abusive husband. They were heard digging in the the dead of night in the basement of Darnley’s home, so his retainers lowered him out his bedroom window in a chair. Darnley, still clad in his nightie, took off like a jackrabbit as soon as his feet touched the ground. Sadly, for Darnley, if not for anyone else in the British Isles, he collided head-on with the plotters in the dark, who dispensed with their plan to blow him up and strangled him instead.

Darnley, with a little brother. One historian noted that royal blood ran in Darnley’s veins, along with generous portions of Scotch whisky. Mary thought he had beautiful legs.

Mary at thirteen, when she was already discovering that her eyelashes’ flutter could reduce men to puddles.

George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, James I’s favorite. The King thought he had beautiful legs.

Francis

When I was a high school history teacher, I took my students to Italy. We visited Assisi. We sat quietly in front of Francis’s little tomb–fitting, because he was such a little man–and we sat in perfect silence. It was in the silence where I felt the solemnity and the joy of Christ’s spirit washing over me and claiming me again. At the same time, and very appropriately,  little Francis made me feel very small again. He made me, a man in his fifties, a child.

Ayn Rand

This woman, the writer Ayn Rand, seems to be our secular saint today. It’s her nihilistic spirit that washes over Congress today, in late 2017, as it gleefully passes a tax bill so regressive that it would make Dickens’s Scrooge blush in shame. I have never seen anything like what they all tax “reform.”

And then I remember, of course I have!

I spent thirty years teaching history: I remember the English traveler Arthur Young’s letters home in 1788, scored with his disbelief in the inequity and illogic of France’s tax burden, which fell most heavily on those who could afford it least. He predicted the inevitability of revolution.

It came only a year later.

I  recognize, too, the disparity in today’s distribution of wealth., and I remember that there has been nothing this illogical in our own history–at least, not since the summer of 1929.

Of course, the politicians must be right: the poor deserve to be poor. They are hungry because they are lazy–or worse, because they are both lazy and less than Caucasian. The wealthy rise to the top because they are genetically and inherently superior–haven’t we heard this somewhere before?  They must be  inherently superior, for example, to my own father, a mere accountant.

And, easily, the most brilliant man I’ve ever known.

My Grandfather, John Smith Gregory.

My father inherited little from his father, an Ozarks tobacco farmer, except for a little lined notebooks, from the 1920s, kept in a little lined notebook that I still have, that recorded the sales, to his neighbors, of ginseng, of all things, because my Grandfather John ventured a century beyond tobacco and cotton and hogs and landed squarely in the frontier of New Age farmers of the 21st Century. Beyond that, he had a  gift for numbers that was both so imaginative and so precise that he could, as a lumber estimator, calculate a thousand-acre stand of Missouri hardwood to within 100 cubic feet of its eventual yield in a sawmill owned by wealthy men dressed in  double-breasted suits, felt hats and silk ties who lived in an impossible place that was far away, called Kansas City.

It was silk-tied men from Boss Pendergast’s notorious Kansas City machine who left bank-bags full of five-dollar bills on my grandmother’s kitchen table on the weekends before Tuesday elections in the Depression years. She was the local head of the Democratic Central Committee and one of the first women invited to a national political convention–1924, in Madison Square Garden.

A decade later, FDR never would never lose an election in that part of the Ozarks. In return, the Hill People who came down my grandmother’s home town, who came to schoolhouse to vote, never starved.

That was her doing.

Dad inherited that arithmetical gift from my grandfather, that gift for mathematics. Since gifts like that seem to skip generations, I inherited, from Dad, a gift for telling stories and from my grandmother, a love for history and politics.

A Higgins Boat headed for Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944.

And then–I am confounded by the irony of this–Dad’s generation, many of then rejected by the Draft for their teeth, rotten after a decade of poverty like that visited on many of the Hill People of Missouri-went to faraway places: New Guinea, Tarawa, Iwo Jima; to North Africa, Normandy, the Ardennes.

This generation repaid the injustice visited on them in the Depression by dying in hedgerows, their bodies caught within tangles of roots that had been planted in Agincourt’s century. Their only company, lying in the fields the hedgerows enclosed, were the bloated bodies of Norman milk cows killed in the crossfire.

Normandy, Summer 1944

In 1945, my father taught Army Quartermaster burial teams the basics of forensics:  his students were boys who had hoped to become heroes, but were born too late, so they came to a war that had become history.

Instead, their duty was finding dead teenagers, graduates from high schools the year before the teens in Dad’s Quartermaster Corps burial teams had graduated. They disinterred Lettermen and student body officers and what were once called “juvenile delinquents,” but these boys remained only in scraps of viscera and bone, sinew and hair that lay on heads once stroked gently by their mothers, and the young Quartermasters identified them, if they could, for burial.

I inherited, somehow, the memory of those boys, living and dead,  from Dad.

Dad, 1944.

I inherited from Mom the steel she’d kept deep inside to overcome the shame of her own father, a stereotypical Irish drunk and laughingstock of an oil boomtown in the San Joaquin Valley of California.

Yet beneath the steel, she became the kind of woman who would teach her children that there was nothing more important on this earth–there must have been something in her DNA that recalled in her ancestral memories of County Wicklow’s hunger in 1847 Ireland–that there was nothing more important, beyond the arts, than empathy, and generosity, and kindness. Most of all, there  nothing more dignified than Poverty.

Mom, and big sister Roberta, 1943.

She understood Francis completely. More than that, she accepted him completely. That took steel, too

These are the lessons I’ve drawn from my father’s stories and from my mother’s example. I’ve thought about them, still and quiet before her grave, in my California home town, and before Francis’s grave, in faraway Assisi.

Assisi.

Here is what I wish for you:

I wish that you get the chance to  gaze, in perfect silence, at the beauty of Umbria below you from Assisi’s hilltop, from that little town of stone and cobblestone. That is where it is so much easier to understand that what Jesus intended for us was love, what Jesus wished for us was love, what Jesus taught us until–and within–the agony of His death by suffocation, was love.

I am just beginning to understand, too, that what Jesus gave us, from His first moments of consciousness, shivering in the arms of his young mother, was His love.

Ashley and Isadora

This lovely young woman is Ashley, who was a student of ours when Elizabeth and I taught at Mission Prep. With her is another lovely girl, Isadora, her Wheaten. My sister, Sally, has a Wheaten named Tillie. They are lovely dogs–eager, frolicky, and more affectionate than your typical terrier, a prickly but adorable lot. Wheatens are charmers and even more charming because they aren’t pretentious about it. Their main business is going about being a dog.

Isadora has a tumor in her lung and so her days are  numbered. When I learned this, there was a deep and profound hurt inside.  I have a hard time with death.

The worst, of course, was Mom’s, who died at only 48. She was and will always be the most formative person in my life, the main reason I get into trouble (when I perceive injustice of any kind, I can’t keep my mouth shut), the main reason, too, for me becoming a teacher, and she instilled in me a belief in God that a lifetime of hurt and anger can’t dent.

One reason I still believe the way my mother did has nothing to do with Mom. It has everything to do with dogs. I’ve been around them all my life–beginning with a Scottish Terrier and a Cocker Spaniel in my first memories, on Sunset Drive in Arroyo Grande–and the dogs who complete my life today are Mollie and Brigid, our Irish Setters, and Wilson, our Basset.

Mr. Wilson

Mollie will leave us soon. I notice this more because the grizzling of her muzzle and the gradual slowing of her gait, her struggles to climb onto the sofa or our bed, make her aging so obvious.  (At sixty-five, I secretly identify with her, especially when I go to the gym and watch, out of the corner of one eye, twentysomethings doing workouts I could never hope to do. Damn them!)

Every time a dog leaves us, when we hold their heads in our hands and talk softly to them, we aren’t quite sure whether the last moments we spend together are somehow wasted, if the understanding between us and our dog is somehow incomplete. As I get older, I have come to believe these moments aren’t wasted at all. I think the animals somehow know what is happening and understand  the earnestness of our words when we tell them how much we love them. We are part of their passage and they need, as we all will someday, the comfort of company as they cross that fearful space that leads to the other side.

In a lifetime of dogs, I have loved each a little differently and they have loved me with no discrimination whatsoever. They are entirely unselfish in love, if not in food or rawhide treats. We don’t encounter that kind of love very much in life–the “unconditional” kind, to use a trite adjective–and that’s what makes losing an animal one of the most painful moments in any human’s life.

This how much they love us: When I was researching the book Central Coast Aviators in World War II, the historian for the 92nd Bomb Group told me that a dog would grow so close to her human that ground crews noticed that she would get noticeably excited when the B-17s returned to base. Of course, the dogs could hear the bombers long before the ground crewmen. But what they noticed was the dog’s excitement at the sound of her human’s B-17. She had learned to recognize the individual pitch of his airplane’s engines.

Brigid, with her ball, and Mollie

So it’s supposed to hurt because they love us the way God does: without stipulation, without judgment, without reservation, and so when they leave us they leave an immense empty space inside. I spend, and have spent, much of my life criticizing myself, condemning myself, and finding fault with myself. But every morning there is a miracle: Brigid is so transparently happy–and wiggly– to see me again after a night’s sleep that she gives me enough confidence to start another day. There is something in me that she finds invaluable and joyful. I think God must see that something, as well.

I think, too, that God understands that dogs and their humans need to be together. Ashley’s dog, Isadora, has a bond with her that can’t be broken. Heaven, I suspect, is a place for happy mornings where we will see each other once again and forever.

My kids, as JFK’s ExComm, debate what course they should take in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Life is short: Bunn, the young man in the striped shirt, was a delightful person and a gifted student. He was killed this year in an automobile accident.

I found the article below heart-breaking, in part because it was so familiar to my thirty years of teaching high school, in part because it was so alien to my own experience.

What marked my childhood and teens was the relative simplicity of those years. We got three TV channels, on a good day, on Huasna Road. There were land lines and, after school dances, pay phones, not “smart phones.” If I needed to take the pressure off, I would sneak into my Dad’s car, turn on the radio, and listen to Wolfman Jack and the wonderful rock ‘n’ roll that came from somewhere in Mexico via station XERB.

Another blessing was how unstructured our time was. I had endless room to breathe–lost in the pages of books, exploring the hills of the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, learning Spanish from braceros, trout-fishing in the Arroyo Grande Creek.

I am not suggesting an idyllic childhood. I grew up in an alcoholic, sometimes violent home, but my parents tried hard to be the best parents they could be, and the values I inherited from them made me decide to become a history teacher, and allowed me, in the teaching, to recognize and to love the vitality in the 32 teenaged lives arranged in rows before me every class period of every day for thirty years.

I have my parents to thank for that.

But I saw this anxiety, the kind documented in the Times article, over and over again in the kids I taught every class period of every day for thirty years.

It was as if they had to prove themselves, to prove their worthiness to themselves and to their parents, and there was no reliable inner measure for them to rely on. They had, instead, to do things–club volleyball, student government, six Advanced Placement classes (I would never have allowed my child to take six AP classes, and I taught AP for most of my career), or winning awards. If they didn’t have these extrinsic measures, they would never get into the college of their choice, never have a career that was rewarding, never have the spouse they deserved, never have the kind of validation that, ironically, God never requires nor desires.

Sometimes, when they were taking a test or writing an essay, I would just stare at them, my heart full, at the miracle of their youth and the promise of their future. (It saves me from the despair that is so much a part of our present political life. It is about all that saves me.)

Those were moments every good teacher experiences, and that fullness of heart stays with you all your life.

They never had anything to prove to me. I just wish I had made that clearer.

The shamelessness of powerful, predatory men has reminded me of Debby Applegate’s superb biography of the Civil War-era preacher Henry Ward Beecher, “The Most Famous Man in America.”

Beecher, a New England Congregationalist, was progressive,an immensely powerful preacher, a committed abolitionist, and he came from a stellar family (sister Harriet wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and my AP Euro students may remember sister Catharine as the inventor of the modern kitchen and a formative influence on the Victorian “Cult of Domesticity”)

The family’s patriarch, Lyman, was an unbending man who knew with certainty that Catholics, Unitarians and Methodists were going to hell, postage-paid. Lyman also forbade Catharine’s marriage to a young minister because the elder Beecher was unconvinced of the depth and authenticity of the young man’s conversion. The young preacher then sailed for England, in part to rededicate his commitment to Christ, and drowned in a shipwreck. Catharine never married.

H.W. strayed from his father’s path and instead preached a message that emphasized God’s mercy and love. The younger Beecher was never able to keep his trousers in order, however, was accused of multiple affairs, and was charged with adultery in one of the most sensational trials of its day.

Applegate’s biography won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize. She is an enormously talented writer and a steady, dogged and meticulous historian. It’s one of those books that’s more than a “mere” biography. It’s also a fascinating education on mid-Victorian American religion, politics and sexuality.

The Beechers. Lyman at center, Catharine on her father’s immediate right, Harriet Beecher Stowe at far right, her brother Henry Ward Beecher standing at far right.

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Branch School during, probably, the early 1950s. They had taken away both the steeple and the side windows by the time I went there, probably after an episode of Cupcake Mania at Hallowe’en.

We did not trick or treat on Huasna Road in the 1950s and early 1960s. The problem was that the houses were so far apart that children from the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, during the Great Depression, desperate for caramel corn, had been found wandering in Pozo with their sad, greasy little paper bags empty except for crushed candy wrappers, rusted “Keep Cool with Coolidge” campaign buttons, or  brown, withered apple cores.

The other problem occurred whenever there was a full moon. If you know the Arroyo Grande area at all, then you know that in moonlight the gnarled, twisted oak trees assume human shapes. Some of them have gaping knotholes in their trunks, just big enough to swallow unwary third-graders. Many children, in the 1930s Branch District, went trick or treating and were never found, not even in Pozo.

So, to avoid the alarming loss of Branch School children and the tax dollars they represented, we had, by the 1950s, a relatively safe Hallowe’en Carnival at Branch, at the two-room schoolhouse–the one with the pink asbestos shingles, which has had no discernible effect (pardon me: hack!) on my personal life as a large person.

The thing was, all the fathers would gather cornstalks for a properly decorative motif at school  (I don’t know where they got them. Branch Dads grew Brussels sprouts and cabbage, neither with strong Hallowe’en associations).  Stiff, dead, dry cornstalks, vaguely resembling skeletons, are very nearly as scary as the carnivorous oak trees that lurked at the edges of Branch Mill Road, menacing, silent, sometimes sibilant in the wind, occasionally belching. Moms would put out carved pumpkins, too, relatively harmless until you, at age seven, got around to watching Disney’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” narrated by Bing Crosby, whom you never trusted again.

I actually went to the carnival as “The Headless Horseman” one Hallowe’en. None of my classmates–not one of the seventy-four–spoke to me until Christmas vacation was over.

Damn you, Bing Crosby.

But we would have “fishing booths” at the carnival, where little kids tossed fishing lines –strings attached to willow branches– over the top of a newsprint-paper enclosed booth (Where did our teachers get the energy to do this stuff? They must have been worn out from the corporal punishment that was as indispensable as the Parts of Speech and State Capitals.) and reel in a small toy or bite-sized Tootsie Rolls, which we imagined to be fish doo, but only momentarily, because it was obvious that they were chocolate, which is the third-grade equivalent of catnip or, for the typical college student, grain alcohol mildly diluted by Hawaiian Punch.

The fishing booths were for Minor Leaguers. The climax of the night, after the Costume Parade–which, we all agreed, was pretty lame–was the eighth grade’s Haunted House. The eighth graders were monstrous and mature people to us. They all seemed to be in their mid-thirties and so with enough life experience to reduce the smaller children to gelatinous puddles of terror in their dark, spooky, cavernous Haunted House, also known as a “classroom.” They laid in enough dry ice, for dramatic vapors, to freeze-dry every airman in the Soviet Air Force–a group we feared, in those Cold War years, only a little less than the eighth-graders.

They had discovered, when third-graders are blindfolded, that cold spaghetti is a splendid facsimile for human brains, and that Jello does a passable job of resembling the Digestive System we had just finished memorizing for Mrs. Kaiser. The third-grade girls loved the Haunted House, which allowed them to emit high-pitched decibel-busting screams, which put most of us off girls altogether until the sixth grade, when they were suddenly taller than us and vastly mysterious.

Those who survived the Haunted House–and there were a few–were allowed to partake of the Hallowe’en Climactic Meal, which consisted of tens of dozens of heavenly cupcakes, in every flavor and color imaginable, except for Brussels Sprout or Cabbage, baked by mothers driven by a still-persistent, albeit rural, late Victorian maternal urge: namely, the more cupcakes you baked, the better the harvest would be for your husband’s farm.

So we ate them.

We ate the chocolate ones, of course, most of all.

We did not sleep for three days. We bounced off the walls of our two-room school, with Mrs. Kaiser using a steel-shod yardstick to herd us (sadly, they did not allow cattle prods, not even in the 1950s) back to our wooden desks with the vestigial inkwells, until we were quiet again, studying our spelling lists, our times tables, and our American history dates. And so we learned: Communism was Evil. Chocolate cupcakes were sublime.

I still  know my American history dates, my times tables, and my state capitals. I am a little weak on my measures–how many pecks in a bushel?–but that might have been a lesson that came the day after Hallowe’en.