Sunday Conversation Potpourri

Around 11:30 in church this morning I had an unsettling thought. Did anyone put that roaster full of baking potatoes in the oven.

I had scrubbed them individually and piled them into the blue enamel roaster, but the lid had fallen behind something on an upper shelf in the pantry and I couldn't reach it. Joel to the rescue. He obligingly retrieved the lid and put it on the roaster.

While he was doing this, Hiromi was busy figuring out the oven setting so it would come on at 10:30 and bake for two hours. I was putting the finishing touches on the sloppy joe mixture.

Hiromi saw how things were stacking up and decided to ride to church with Joel since he needed to be there to start up the sound system.

I finished the sloppy joe stuff and hurried off.

Our extended family had planned an after-church picnic at the Partridge Park in honor of my brother Marcus' birthday and in honor of Sanford and Martha from Costa Rica, parents of Judy, my sister-in-law.

I confided my fears about the potatoes to Hiromi on the way home and realized they were well founded the minute I stepped inside the door at home and saw the roaster on the counter. Three people worked on this potato project and the potatoes still didn't make it into the oven. Sigh. Two hours at 350 degrees for an empty oven. Another sigh. I hurried to put them on to boil while I did a few other things and reasoned that as soon as everything else was ready I'd take the kettle to my parents' place and let them finish cooking there while we got started with the rest of the meal at the nearby park.

When we got to Mom and Dad's house, Myron was there performing a salvage operation on a bowl full of diced cantaloupe. His young son had accidentally dropped the bowl and spilled the cantaloupe onto the mulch around the play structure in the park. Myron couldn't stand to see it all go to waste, so he carefully washed each piece individually and kept them in a bowl separate from the unspilled cantaloupe. He notified everyone about the cantaloupe's history and let people decide what risks they were willing to take. Most of it disappeared.

Back in Mom's kitchen, Myron suggested we finish the potatoes in the microwave. Good idea. Five minutes in the microwave, and we were off to the park, baked potatoes in hand.

As usual, the afternoon was full of good visiting, much of which I've already forgotten. We talked briefly at least about the dust bowl days, about the current earthquakes in the financial sector, about the presidential candidates, about the 600 bushels of apples Lowell got shipped in from Missouri last week, about the well-known atheist who now concludes that intelligent design is evident in the universe, about the attitudes toward education Hilda encountered when she taught school in Copeland among German-Russian-Mexican-American Mennonites, and about when life begins.

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Myron told the story of how they got the large decorative rock in their yard with "Miller" carved into it. Myron worked for years for "Pack," and his family claims Myron as one of their own. Pack's son-in-law works for a bank, and when the bank he works for foreclosed on a property, and bank personnel arrived to take possession, there was a "Miller" rock in the yard. "I'll just take that to Myron," he announced, and apparently no one objected. So he did.

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Lowell: Psst. Bryant, your epidermis is showing.

Bryant: What? Where?

Lowell: Right there between your collar and your hairline.

Bryant (Beginning to reach for the spot, and then grinning) : It's supposed to be showing.

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Sanford, in a prelude to the sermon he preached this morning, talked about roots. He was born in this community, and moved with his parents to Nowatta, Oklahoma when he was a year and a half old. (This afternoon we heard that Sanford's mother said of him that "he was the prettiest baby in either of the two church districts" in Kansas--something she probably would have been too modest to say out loud at the time.) He credits his mother's Kansas upbringing for insisting that her children make learning well in school a high priority.

Growing up, he often heard "Da Dawdy Mosht hoh-ut ksawt. . . . " (Grandpa Mast said . . . .) Dawdy Mosht is the Amish equivalent of Kansas' patron saint. His given name was Daniel E. Mast, and, because he did a lot of writing, as well as being a warm human being and a preacher who spoke in a memorable and engaging way, he was widely known, loved, and quoted. He was a pioneer in introducing Sunday School to the Amish in Kansas, and he is indeed a grandfather of many who live here--my great, great grandfather. He authored the book Salvation Full and Free.

Sanford also repeated a story his father often told about how he came to Kansas to live. His father, Ben, married a Kansas girl, and then moved to Oklahoma for several months right after the wedding to take care of an ailing parent. When they were ready to move to Kansas they set out with a covered wagon, pulled by a team of green (barely broke) mares. Public roadways traveled through farm and grazing land, and he had to stop periodically to open and close gates as he passed through. The weather turned bitterly cold, and his mares got sore feet and traveled very slowly. Ben coped as best he could by stowing his bride inside the snugged-tight covered wagon, and he himself walked, perhaps to lighten the load for the horses pulling the wagon. He got frostbite, but he kept on going and eventually arrived in this community.

I heard Ben tell much of this story in 1983 when our community celebrated its hundredth anniversary. I don't remember any dates I heard, but my guess is that Ben came to Kansas around 1920.

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One of the stories Joel and I pieced together scantily and told the others today was about an event in Washington (in 1936?) when Hugh Bennett, who had worked for the US Department of Agriculture doing soil surveys, made a presentation to Congress which he hoped would influence them to enact soil conservation measures. His alarm at what was happening on the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl days hardly registered on the consciousness of eastern politicians, and Bennett had become frustrated. On April 19, after having postponed his presentation for a few days, he finally had his opportunity to address Congress. Bennett had been in touch with weather stations to the west, and he was banking hard on an object lesson he hoped would coincide with his presentation. Aides kept him posted throughout his talk, and he dallied for about an hour, going into detail about the terraces advocated by Pliny of Rome, contour plowing practiced by Jefferson, and about his father's soil conservation measures in South Carolina, adding details about his own experience with working the soil. Then a bored senator who had been looking outside said, "It's getting dark outside." It was early afternoon in April, and it was getting dark outside. Just as Bennett had known it would, a duster that had gathered up its dirt load 2,000 miles away in the Midwest had arrived in Washington. The sun vanished and the air turned brown. Dirt rained on the Capitol. "This, gentlemen, is what I'm talking about," said Bennett. "There goes Oklahoma."

According to the the book The Worst Hard Time, "within a day Bennett had his money and a permanent agency to restore and sustain the health of the soil."