The following is a Blue Ribbon winning essay by our grandson, Braden James Dahl. Braden will be nine years old on June 18 and has completed the third grade in the Boulder, CO school system:

Japan

Japan is a fantastic and wonderful place!  It is an island on the Pacific Ocean!  It’s located in Eastern Asia.  Many animals are located in Japan.  One animal is a japanese bob-tail.It is a type of cat.  Japanese kids really like to have cats as pets.  The Japanese bobtail has a very short tail.  There is also a dog called Akita.  Children really like dogs too.  Their favorite dog is the Akita. There is also an amazing fish, it’s a blue puffer fish.  When it’s in danger it blows itself up like a balloon so other animals won’t be able to eat it.  In Japan this fish is named Fugu.  Some Japanese like to eat Fugu because it is very yummy. But it’s very poisonous.  Only specially trained cheifs can prepare fugu.  They know how to remove the dangerous parts!  Japan is a very intresting place.

Dad’s Love of Classical Music

Where did your dad get his love of classical music

Asked my wife who never knew the man but knows

Me.

I said I didn’t have a clue.  Immigrant swede kid

Orphaned at thirteen and passed, by the skin of

His

Teeth, tenth grade on the south side of Chicago,

Who had the audacity to apply to the University of

Chicago

And get roundly rejected.  He built his own stereo

System and bought the Readers Digest Classical

Masterpieces

And Light Classical Music which had short bio-

Graphical blurbs with drawings or photos of the composers to

Go

With the selections to which I listened in the music

Room in our home, which had been my bedroom

Until

My sister got married and moved out and I got

her room.  Right now I’m listening to channel

943

Light Classical to a really nice little French Im-

Pressionistic piece by (I thought Debussy until

I

Looked and saw it was) Ravel and was quite pleased

With myself until my wife asked the question to which

I

Had no answer.

Ruined Rites of Passage

He dreamed about his mother last night

and in the daylight he thought about

rites of passage.

For high school graduation, his sister

reserved a table at a nice place and

his mother said

sorry but your dad died and I don’t

have any money for a present. For a

play in college,

his sister brought his mother and

her critique was about as harsh as

the reviewer who

wrote nothing about his part. When he

graduated his sister bought him a class

ring and his

mother just looked at it covetously.

Four years later when he graduated

from divinity school,

his mother told him that the president

had told her that her son

had a long

way to go, when in reality,

the president said he would go

a long way.

When he got his doctorate, his

mother told him not to let it go

to his head.

It didn’t go to his head, but his

heart ached and twenty-seven

years later and

long after his mother had died

at a ripe old age alone and

not very popular

he still had thoughts of that

ninety-five pound, ninety-three

year old woman

who lives on way beyond her

years in some nightly rituals

called bad dreams.

Tell Me About Your Life, Dad

At sixty-seven, I still feel like a little boy when I think about my dad who died when I was seventeen.

How could I feel any differently?  My life with dad never went past that.

I’m living time standing still and then in reverse.  I’m getting older and he’s getting younger and younger and

I’m tracing him through photos back in time to when he was a little, blond-haired, round-faced boy in scratchy, woolen

knickers standing next to his father, my grandfather,

an incredibly handsome dark-haired, dark-eyed man with a long slim face, my dad’s little hand on my grandfather’s forearm.

Tell me about your life, Dad, my little boy. Tell me, my poor boy, how sad it was to lose your full-bodied, big bosomed, round-faced,

beautiful, blonde mother and then that tall, dark handsome man within a few short years of each other while you were just a little boy and left all alone.

Tell me about it, Dad, and maybe, just maybe, I can help save you the terror and help you cope, cope, cope so that you wouldn’t leave me alone and fatherless at seventeen.

From Here to Eternity or From Gas to Liquid to Solid and Back Again

After he made poisonous gas for his country for WWI,

a really brainy German Jew confronted with

the limit of food available for his fellow

citizens put his

considerable acumen to the task of concentrating

on what needed to be concentrated and as he

breathed in he realized most of the

air in his

lungs was nitrogen, so he huffed and he puffed

and he blew the nitrogen into ammonia

and he huffed and he puffed and

he huffed some

more and the liquid became solid and

ammonium sulfate nitrogen was

born and the Germans got

their food and

so did former, self-sufficient hunting-gathering

Native Americans and everyone in between,

and the population grew beyond

all imaginings. And

then the genius Jew figured out a way to make

fertilizer into insecticide to protect the crops

that were the food for all. But

he had made

that poisonous gas for his country long before

he left Germany for safer shores and the pseudo-

Arians/pseudo-intellectuals remembered his

insecticide sitting on the shelf, took

a work of

genius and simply reversed the process from

solid to liquid to gas undoing the good the

brainy German Jew had done and

gassed some of

his relatives and good friends and about six

million more who were then considered

highly expendable, the population explosion

being a nice

excuse if need be, when in reality, the Jews just scared

them to death.  From afar, did the genius provider

of the world’s food supply second guess

himself when his

genius was used to kill his kin by

nationality and blood?

Every Sunday morning

she would put on her robe and stole

and wonder if anyone

would show.

They did,

not for her, usually,

but for themselves and

presumably God.

The Scarlet Tanager

Standing on the back deck, I absently looked up into

The yard; can I call the lush ever green, red and

White pines, Arborvitae, flaking bark Birches, Hem-

Locks, ferns, and now blooming Japanese Iris and

Other flowers galore a backyard? It is a myriad of nature

Domed with huge Choke Cherries, maples and then

The thirty-some goldfish in the pond refreshing themselves

Where the waterfall tumbles food from the upper pond into

Their mouths.

There on a branch of a birch is a stunning, brilliant

Red bird with a black mark on its wing.  I thought

I was in a photographer’s developing room seeing

The negative.  Is that a red-winged black bird, I’m

So accustomed to seeing?  No, it’s a Scarlet Tanager,

My wife says. Is that Scarlett O’Hara tired of the

Stress of today and thinking only about tomorrow

On the plantation as she closes the door? Am I Rhett

Butler saying,

“Personally, my dear, I don’t give a damn?”

When, in reality, I can’t believe how beautiful he

Is and how lucky I am to be seeing him. My wife

Has the bird book, page 232 in her hand and I shout

Across to the yard behind us, beyond the white pines,

The birches, over the heads of the gold-fish who go

On eating the spiral algae, which I understand is good

For us too, “Hey, we just saw a Scarlet Tanager.”

Bonnie, the neighbor

Working on her flowers, calls back, “A Scarlet Tanager?”

It was only then I thought, No, It’s Rhett Butler in all his

Glory cracking the whip on the backs of the horses and

Flying way.

He Sets the Trap

He sets the gray plastic trap, putting peanut

butter on the triggering mechanism.  Once

in a while he sprinkles bird seed on the butter

and leaves a trail of seeds up to the opening

of the entrance to the animals’ den.  Once in

a while from his back porch he hears the trap

trigger and once in a while the weight of the

butter prematurely sets it off.  But more than

once in a while, it’s triggered by the prey.

Friends call him the chipmunk killer or Valde-

mort, the evil slayer of Alvin, but he knows

Alvin and the Chipmunks burrow against

his seventeen thousand dollar rubber lined

pond and water fall and scratch and bite like

crazy to extend their tunnels of love. He carries

the entrapped chipmunks to the Hades

behind his house and with one swing opens

the trap and watches the critter fly in death

like he never did in life. One day he caught two

and left them side by side with a second accur-

ate toss. The next day he caught one and as he

was about to grant the postmortem flight to chip-

munk heaven, he noticed the two were gone.

Ah, ha, he thought.  Justification.  He no longer was

the vile killer of cute critters.  He was a scientist, a human-

itarian, a conservationist, an environmentalist enlisted to

affirm Darwin’s work on the necessity of the food chain

for balance and harmony in life.  It didn’t work on

his friends but the neighbors’ de-clawed cat purrs as

she rubs against his pant leg.

The First Spring Day at the Farmer’s Market

The farmer’s market opened today.

He walked and walked and made his way

Among the people with short-sleeved shirts

And short shorts, which are back (not) to stay

Because of the way they look. It hurts

His eyes to see the pink, white side

Which a mid-summer’s tan might hide

From all the veins and spiders and blotches

Standing out with a long winter’s pride

Of cellulite stacked like a gun’s notches

On the cover of a girl’s white Bible

Given at Confirmation and liable

To keep the boy’s black faux leather

In it’s own place on the coffee table

Of life, the meeting of two happening never.

He went home and got ready for bed.

He stood in front of the mirror naked and well fed.

Without his pajama bottoms, he gazed at all

The bumps and lumps where muscles had been instead.

It was then he felt ashamed which cast a pall

On his supercilious judgments of those in short shorts.

So he decided to wear long pants of various sorts

To the gym and to the market all summer;

He didn’t want those who then looked great in shorts

To look at his lumps and bumps and think it’s a bummer.

Some old guys just don’t get it.

At some point, long pants are really with it.

He was afraid they would judge him accordingly

But he could daringly wear the shorts that fit

and hope they would treat him mercifully.

And not laugh behind his back.

In the Warmth of Winter      

It was cold and clear the night we walked down the rural Kentucky road.  We had parked the cars in the gravel driveway of one home, and after squeezing thirteen teenage and four adult bodies into the small, enclosed porch and singing three familiar carols, we were walking toward another home nearby.

The stars were all over the sky, but the moon must have headed south for the winter.  The faint light emanating from the stars wasn’t enough to illuminate the road ahead, so we groped along by memory and by the sound of our shoes striking the recently laid macadam.

The young people weren’t as cautious as we adults were, and I worried that one or two of the more rambunctious youths would twist an ankle running off and on the road or would dart into an unseen barbed wire fence and tear a new winter coat or, what’s worse, some tender adolescent skin.

I also kept my ear attuned to the sounds around us in the hope that the shrill bark of a farm dog would not pierce through the sounds of the incessant giggling and periodic shouts of trumped-up, young, male bravado.  After riding my bike over country roads and being chased seemingly for miles by huge, farm mongrels, I had developed not only respect for but a dreadful fear of those dogs.

Walking behind the teenage voices, which served as a directional guide, I ventured a prolonged gaze at the moonless, December sky.  It was kaleidoscopic.  As I turned my head, the black and white patterns seemed to change.  I was taken back in time to the warm summer nights when, as a teenager myself, I worked as a church camp lifeguard and recreation director.

After all the campers and counselors had gone to their cabins and were asleep, I would leave my trailer, walk up a treeless hill next to the camp custodian’s house, lie back in his chaise lounge and stare into the heavens.  The winter sky was as magnificent as I remember that summer sky to be.

A number of years had passed since that camp experience, and I wondered why I had never really taken the time to explore and study the astronomical sights above me.  How little I knew of God’s universe.

The porch light directly ahead signaled the next stop on our winter’s pilgrimage.  As we all gathered at the side door of that small, old farmhouse and began to sing, “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” an elderly couple came to the door and stepped coatless into the cold night.

I wiggled my now numb toes trying to get some circulation going, pulled back the top of each glove and blew my moist, warm breath over the palms of my hands down to the freezing fingertips.  The old couple wasn’t even shivering.  He put his arm around her delicate but stooped shoulders and she snuggled against his once strong but now aged chest.  Their eyes were rimmed with water and as a tear fell upon her cheek, I wondered if it would feel cold on her face as the night air blew against it.

We stood there no more than a few minutes.  When the songs were over, the carolers waved, shouted “Merry Christmas” and, now that they were more familiar with the contour of the land, began to run back to the cars.  I walked up to the couple and, in silence, shook his large and still calloused hand and then leaned over and pressed my lips to her soft, tear-moistened cheek.

As I walked back to the cars with the other chaperones, I felt very good and very warm.