Keeping Vigil

I signed up online to take the 4:00-5:00 a.m. time slot at my church’s 24-hour vigil against racism because I’m up then anyway.  I have this moveable hour or so when I wake up, for no particular reason, and think about all kinds of things.  Sometimes it’s the worry hour, sometimes the planning hour.  Whatever it is I rarely get out of bed.  My goal is to get back to sleep if even for a little while.  Usually I succeed.  I thought I might as well be awake downtown than lying in a bed on Field’s Hill.

It’s pretty quiet downtown at 4:00 a.m.. After the transition from the family who began at 3:00, I checked in and reviewed the rules, which I always consider suggestions.  The organizers agreed to have an Open Table congregant there at all times, we were to direct and inform visitors how to handle bathroom use, call the cops if something went wrong, etc..  Everything was covered.  Although the event was put together quickly, we had over 120 people committed to keeping vigil with us, either in person downtown or virtually at home.  I had never participated in a protest quite this organized.  

I was at the opening ceremony held in the park across the street Monday June 8^th, and I would attend and play a part in the closing ceremony June 9^th, but it was that hour in the dark beginning at 4:00 which proved to be most meaningful.  I was personally moved and didn’t expect to be.

Ten minutes after arriving it was just me, and a quiet man sitting on one of the lawn chairs behind me who had been there since the vigil began.  It was me that asked, at an Open Table organizing meeting in preparation for the event, what one did when they kept vigil.  I learned from our pastor the event was intended to Acknowledge, Amplify, and Act to end racism in our country and beyond.  Our presence is our testimony.

You could pray, you could simply be silent, and you could respond to questions from visitors if asked.  There was chalk for creating art or leaving messages on the sidewalk.  There were candles those attending could light and leave on the steps of the church.  But the event was not about activity.  It was about presence.  It was about standing up and showing the community exactly where you stood.

Our church is on a busy street, Columbus Street in Ottawa, which is also Illinois Route 23, but it wasn’t very busy between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m. Monday morning.  I stuck my rosary in my pocket before I left the house.  It seemed a perfect time to pray.

The rosary takes a while.  It always settles me down, getting through all the prayers, remembering which comes next.  The task of rote recital tends to push out the clutter in your mind, but it does not tax it so much that you can’t think of other things as you pray.

In the summer of 2018, I made a solo road trip in the Buick through Alabama on the Civil Rights Trail.   I came home and began to blog about the experience.  I wrote 13 posts in all, beginning on 3/29 and ending on 7/26/19.  They are still there if you scroll down far enough. 

Most of the writing summed up my times in Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma where I followed the paths walked by the Civil Rights leaders Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, along with Governor George Wallace and Eugene “Bull” Connor who blocked their way.

By visiting historical sites and museums I learned vivid lessons of racism in America that took place when I was a kid on the farm.  Some of it I had watched on black and white television.  I stood in the park in Birmingham where dogs were set on children and protestors were knocked down by fire hoses and rolled down the sidewalk.  Racism in America is a long and extensive story.  None of it made it into my textbooks at school. I was amazed at what I discovered.  I knew the awfulness of it in a fashion, but it didn’t hit home till I saw it up close.    

I followed my observations on that trip with basic history and facts from Wikipedia and more in depth reading other various other internet sources.   The history of racism in America is all there, but its buried away from white America’s consciousness.  Personally, I don’t think white people want to know.  I wrote so many posts on racism because I wanted to shine the small light of Dave in the Shack onto the injustice I discovered as a 67-year old white American Yankee.  I found it hard to stop writing about it, but I did.  I lost readers steadily as the posts piled up. 

I moved on to other topics.  And then racism coupled with violence, as American as apple pie, slapped me in the face again with the murders of Amaud Arberry and George Floyd.  Now it seems impossible to move on.



While I prayed the rosary, I bowed my head and closed my eyes.  When I finished, I looked up at Washington park, the Ottawa main square directly across from Open Table church.  In the middle of the park are statues of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, and on a wall facing the park a mural of them debating.  They commemorate the first Lincoln Douglas debate held in the park on August 21, 1858.

The big issue of the debate was the question of extending the right to own slaves to the western states about to be formed.  Lincoln, a Republican, was solidly against the proposition, representing the views of many who called themselves abolitionists, proponents of the abolition of slavery.  Douglas was a Democrat who was opposed to the federal government making that decision.  He favored states be autonomous and free to make their own decision on slavery.  He feared abolishing slavery, or even preventing its expansion, would lead to civil war.  The issue was the morality of slavery, the ultimate subjugation of black people, and the country was divided.

Lincoln and Douglas were vying to be elected to Congress as senator from Illinois.  Lincoln lost his bid for the Senate, but became a national figure by representing those who favored the eventual abolition of slavery.  He was elected President in November of 1860, and took office in March of 1861.

Eleven states seceded from the union almost immediately after Lincoln took office.  America’s Civil War began in April with the siege of Ft. Sumpter.  Lincoln eventually presided over the Union Army’s victory when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on May 9, 1865.  He was assassinated 37 days later on April 15^th of that same year, at age 54, not quite seven years after speaking out in the park I was gazing at in the middle of the night.  He was both elected president and assassinated for putting his belief that slavery was wrong into action.  

The church behind me, Open Table, was established as a Congregational church in 1840.  Congregationalists in the mid 1800’s predominately favored the abolition of slavery, though each congregation was autonomous and fiercely independent. Owen Lovejoy of nearby Princeton, a Congregational minister in that community, was a prominent abolitionist in Illinois and a friend and early supporter of Lincoln and the Republican party.   No doubt he was across the street listening to that debate.  The history of the struggle for black equality has deep roots in America.  I felt as if I was still standing in the middle of it. 

The Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the civil war did not achieve equality for black people, nor did the 13^th ,  14^th , or 15^th amendments to the constitution, the Federal Reconstruction Act following the Civil War, or the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1875, 1957, 1960, 1964, or the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  Legislation hasn’t created black equality because discrimination based on color is baked into the very fiber of America. It is systemic and pervasive.  Racism is rooted in our hearts.  At least it has been.   

The vigil I participated in was conceived and carried out by a 14-year old member of our church.  She felt she, and we, had to do something.  We supported her. That is how we will reach true racial equality in our country.  Young people, both black and white, will demand it.  And I believe they, along with awakened Americans of all ages, will accomplish it.  Young people and their unabashed rejection of discrimination against the LGBTQ community led us to embrace the federal approval of gay marriage.  I think they will succeed in defeating systemic racism where other generations have failed. 

As I looked into the park I considered the many lifetimes devoted to bringing racial equality to America, from Harriet Tubman to Abraham Lincoln, from Martin Luther King to Ta-Nihisi Coates, each with an intense desire to affect change, but frustrated when it was not achieved.  Then a bird began to sing.

Birds don’t know the time, but they sense the coming of the dawn.  And when their day begins, they celebrate with song.  I’m not often outside when the birds begin to sing.  Sometimes I’m awake in the house and hear their songs faintly.  But usually I don’t notice, or I’m asleep.  Standing across from the quiet of the trees in Washington Park, more birds joined in and their song formed an early morning choir. 

When I was young, I would occasionally stay up all night.  Those were typically good nights, so good I lost track of time.  When the birds sang, I was surprised.  My thoughts often ran along the lines of “oh no, I have to be at work in three hours.”

Now that I'm older and for the most part much more sober, I find the sound of the birds a blessing.  I think you and I, led by the good young people of America, are on the brink of a new day.  Listen for it, be supportive, don't lose hope, and for God's sake don't sleep through it.  It is going to take all of us to make this happen.

Digging Thistles

I was fortunate to be given space on an organic farm to plant a row of vegetables.   The farm is six miles from my driveway.  It has buffer zones separating it from the flat Illinois corn and bean ground around it.  One of the big crops on the organic farm this year is sunflowers.  That stand of flowers is going to be beautiful. 

The plot where my row is planted is part of a large garden that I would call a truck patch.  Big garden with rows of all kinds of vegetables.  I would show you a picture, but my row is embarrassingly crooked.  Next year I’ll use a string. 

I have forty plants.  Four kale (two Red Russian, two long leaf), twelve tomatoes (plums and slicers), and twenty-four peppers (serrano, habanero, cayenne, poblano, Thai hots, various others).  They are in full sun.  My hosts supply saved rainwater for watering from tanks connected to the gutters of their big metal shed.  A long hose stretches to all parts of the garden.  It is a great system.  We’ve had lots of May rain, so the tanks are fairly full. 

As an organic farm, there are of course no herbicides, pesticides, or chemicals of any kind.  The ground is enriched by pelletized chicken manure from an organic chicken operation.  I like the concept, but when you are up close to an organic plot you quickly see the difference between the neighbor’s corn and bean fields.  Weeds.

Modern herbicides do a frighteningly thorough job of eradicating weeds.  Weeds were a fact of life on the farm I grew up on.  There were all kinds of weeds we knew by name and fought annually; butter print, ragweed, giant ragweed, lambs quarter, foxtail, pig weeds, thorny pig weeds, jimson weed, goose grass, bull nettles, horse weeds.  The list goes on and on. 

At some point in the sixties my Dad bought a sprayer, actually just a cart for two fifty-gallon drums with booms and small sprayer heads.  He was never comfortable mixing and handling the cans of expensive liquid weed killers.  He mowed weeds before they went to seed, and cut them from the beans with weed hooks, but what he liked best was digging them up by the roots.  Especially the thistles. 

Canada thistles could grow to be the size of small Christmas trees.  At the very top where a star would go a purple seed pod formed.  If and when it opened the seed would scatter in the wind.  I always thought of that line from the Christmas poem “and away they all flew, like the down on a thistle.”

Canada thistles were the bane of my Dad’s existence.  Well, that may be a little dramatic, but he hated them.  I don’t think he ever blamed the Canadians, but he was always on the lookout for fields where farmers let them go to seed.  He believed there should be a special place in hell for those farmers, and he was determined not to be one of them.

And so, on our farm we dug thistles.  It was a job always waiting when it seemed there was nothing else to do.  Dad taught me how to dig thistles in great detail, telling me about the plant..  He studied things like that.  He was most intent on getting thistles out of the pastures.  They could be easily seen there.  And Dad would never use chemicals where the cows ate grass.  It had to be done the old-fashioned way.

Some part of weed control was related to what the neighbors thought.  Yes, weeds rob crops of nutrients from the soil and its true they sometimes shade crops from the sun, but they are also a blemish on a farmer’s reputation.  Dad wasn’t having it.  Especially when it came to those damned Canada thistles. 

We strode out to the pasture, each with a spade, and approached an invading thistle.  Dad began explaining his personal technique for combatting thistles. 

“You gotta think of thistles like icebergs.  The most dangerous part of them is below the surface.  That’s why we dig them instead of cut them.  Cutting thistles only sets them back for a while.  Digging them gives you a chance to kill them off for good.  It’s the roots.  All about the roots.”

He jammed his spade up close to the base of the thistle and drove it deep in the ground with his boot.

“Good to dig thistles after a rain.  The ground is softer.  They come up easier.”

He pried down on the spade handle, using it like a lever to lift the thistle up.

“Watch that dirt around this thistle.  If the dirt begins to lift and the thistle stays put, like this, you’re not deep enough.  You want to get under it.”

He pulled the spade out and reset it on the other side of the thistle, this time jamming the blade in deeper.  He pried it up again.

“OK, see how I’ve got the whole thing coming up?  That’s what you’re looking for.  On a big thistle you many have to use your spade all the way around it to get it to lift.  But that’s what we want.  The goal is getting the root out without snapping it off.”

He pried some more and then lifted the thistle up and out with a big dirt ball around the root.

“Look at this.”

He hit the dirt ball with his spade revealing a long white tap root with smaller roots and tiny white root hairs branching off.

He knocked the dirt off the root completely and scraped it back into the hole where the thistle once stood.

“Leave it out in the sun to dry out and die.  If you dig it out and leave it lie there with the dirt on the root it will re-root itself.  Especially if it rains.  I’ve seen it happen.  It sends down roots, curves its head up toward the sun, keeps on growing like nothing happened.  There’s a reason there are so many of them.  They’re damn tough.”

“But if we dig ‘em out good we get rid of them, right?”

“Well, we knock them back considerably.”

He didn’t want to tell me he’d been digging thistles his whole life.  Canada thistles are a weed you can control to some degree.  But without chemicals you can’t defeat them.  It is impossible for every root hair to come up out of the ground when a thistle is dug.  And then there’s the problem of those downy seeds.

“So, we’re going to have to do this again next year?”

“Yeah, most likely.”

That realization dampened my enthusiasm for thistle digging considerably.  It was hot out there.  Digging, stooping, slapping the dirt off those roots was hard work.  And monotonous.  I looked across the pasture at the job before us.  There were potentially days and days of thistle digging ahead. To make things worse, that first day turned out to be a teaching day for Dad, a learning day for me, and the last day Dad helped me dig thistles.   From there on out it was just me. 



That’s what I’ve been thinking about since the day I put my plants in the ground on the organic farm.  There’s a lot of thistles out there.  After that first day I put a spade in the trunk of the Buick, along with a hoe.  There used to be golf clubs there.

I went after the big thistles first.  They were on the edge of the plot where the ground had not been tilled.  They had long roots, probably from being mowed rather than dug.  It was hard to stop.  I wasn’t sure how long it would be before they went to seed, but I wanted to get ahead of them.

I’ve been going out every morning.  I say I’m going out to check on my plants, but to be honest I go out for my sanity in equal measure.   Most days it is the only place I go.  I haven’t put gas in the Buick for three weeks.  I water, prop up plants that are leaning, pick blossoms off the tomatoes and peppers.  It’s too early to make fruit, I want big healthy plants first.

When I am satisfied my plants are in good shape, I turn my attention to the thistles.  As my plants grow, benefitting from the sun and the rain, so do the thistles.  I’m getting tiny thistle sprouts in my row.  I’m nipping those bastards in the bud.  I attack them just like they were big, get way under them, pry them out, break the dirt off from around and inspect the root to see if I got all of it.  Sometimes I dig deeper trying to find and destroy pieces of root I might have missed.  It’s a little obsessive I agree.  But it feels good.

When I’m done, or tired, I sit on the edge of the trunk with the lid up, have a cup of coffee from my thermos, and look around.  I listen too.  There’s a lot of birds out there, especially in the buffer zones.  I check out the conventional farmers around me.  Sometimes I finish the crossword puzzle.  I try to keep my phone in my pocket.  It’s a nice part of the day.

I last dug thistles fifty years ago.  Dad, if he were alive, would be 111.  Yet sometimes when I’m out on that farm it feels like he’s with me still.