PRENOTE: You may wish to watch this film trailer, in which you’ll see a familiar face – if you know me.  The film will be released in France and the U.S. in the next few months.

There have been three other posts this month: Hoops, Arraignment, Tennessee, access here, if you wish.

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Thursday morning I watched what appeared to be a full moon as it was setting.  It was a perfectly clear sky, chilly morning.  Indeed it was the “Easter moon” – Christian Easter is always after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox.

This Easter also coincides, generally, with Ramadan and Passover – I understand that such happens only once each 37 years.  For all of us, this is springtime, and all that means.

In my family collection of old postcards, most Easter cards were secular; here’s one which most speaks to me this year (Lidwina was Grandma Rosa’s youngest sister, probably about 8th grade when this was sent to North Dakota before 1910)

Easter season has its very dismal side.

Last Sunday was the annual reading of the Passion, with the annual “crucify him” from the “crowd”.  Here’s what was read to us (by two women and a man): Passion see p. 3.

Here are the precise words that have fueled hatred for perhaps 100 generations.  “The chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowds to ask for Barabbas but to destroy Jesus…Let him be crucified…Let him be crucified…he handed him over to be crucified…This is Jesus, the King of the Jews”  

The content/context is not optional.  Year to year, event to event, the way the narrative is presented and interpreted might change a bit, but the narrative is consistent and had a major part in fueling the holocaust – demonizing an entire people based on an ancient historical story, generation after generation, as I say, 100 or more..

My particular denomination has tried to soften the text over the years, but nonetheless it remains.  My guess is it will be read again tomorrow night at Basilica at Tenebrae (7 p.m. CDT which you can watch livestream if you like – check Mary.org if interested.  We’ll be there.)

Personally, I think the only antidote to the Passion is to let it be known, as I am doing here.  Eliminating or rewriting this particular Bible story won’t be dealt with in any committee at the Vatican, I’m quite certain.  We collectively need to be the “crowd”, the influencer of change.

A Personal Recollection: 

I’m lifelong Catholic.  I’m also a lifelong citizen of the United States.  Life is an endless series of affiliations: family, groups, nationalities, etc.

We are part of these groups; we are also individuals.  Labels lose something when we become a subordinate part of anything.

I can speak from personal experience about the Passion story, an annual reading during the Easter season, right before Easter, the Resurrection.

The words in the Bible – regardless of which version or edition – are essentially the same.  My Grandma Bernard’s 1911 edition says the same thing as in the Church version from last Sunday, except for slight changes in words – changes which make sense.

At the very end of the Passion, Mt 27-66 in Grandma’s Bible says “And they departing, made the sepulcher sure, sealing the stone, and setting guards.”  In last Sunday’s: “So they went and secured the tomb by fixing a seal to the stone and setting the guard.”  (The King James “Red line” Bible says this: “So they went, and made the sepulcher sure, sealing the stone, and setting a watch.”). And other versions would be similar.

In my growing up years, the scripture readings were always read by the Priest.

In the ecumenical years beginning in the 60s, there were moderate changes in practice by the year.  Typically, as I remember, when the duties came to be shared with Lay people, the Priest would be Jesus.  And there would be one or two lay readers – it is a very long reading.  Once in awhile, not always, but often enough to be remembered, the people in the pews might have a speaking part as part of the crowd calling for Jesus to be crucified.

There is only one specific reference to Jews Ch 27:37 “And they put over his head the written charge against him: This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.”

All of us know the potential and the danger of repetition.

Probably about all we can do is to be aware.  the Bible and the Constitution and all similar documents are subject to interpretation and the hands in which their interpretation is vested is important to note carefully.

COMMENTS (comments may not be enabled at end of post – technical issues still being fixed.)

from Joyce: When I studied biblical hermeneutics in college, I learned that, based on linguistic analyses, the Barabas story was inserted after Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire; it was added to make the Jews, rather than the Romans, guilty of crucifying Jesus, even though crucifixion was a Roman practice, not a Jewish one. That insertion was responsible not just for the Holocaust, but also for Jewish massacres for hundreds of years before that. Easter was always a particularly dangerous time for the Jews of Europe, when priests would order their flocks to murder Jews not only because of the Barabas story, but also because of the so-called blood libel, the claim that Jews used the blood of Christian children to make matzoh.

from Kathy: Thoughtful review of the Passion narrative…I never have liked reading “Crucify Him!” I am on the search for my Iberian Sephardim ancestors. Did any Iberian show up in your DNA? If so, quite possibly you have Jewish ancestry. That’s another story 🙂

from Jeff: funny, your website IP blocked my comment [see my response, below]…here it is:

I asked my search engine just now “how many people are arraigned in a year in the U.S.?“.  Of course, the answer was almost instantaneous: “There were over 4.53 million arrests for all offenses in the United States in 2021.”

Sometime later today one of those arraignments will happen on Manhattan, and sometime after that the indictment will be unsealed, and we will all have an opportunity to know what the charges are.

Virtually everyone knows who Arraignee #1 will be later today, and that person is not someone being arrested for possession of drugs or such.  Nuff said on that.

For weeks now there has been speculation filled with certainty fueling passionate opinions about what an unsealed indictment will say later today.  I know as much as anyone else, which is nothing.

To this point, I’m most intrigued by the fundraising by the victim-in-chief, claimed to be $7 million so far, but impossible to know for sure.

How much is $7 million, really???

Assuming it’s really 7 million, and that a reasonable average donation is $100, this money comes from about 70,000 people among the 330,000,000 of us in the United States, a minute fraction of the total.

My state of Minnesota with 5.7 million population has roughly 2% of the population of the U.S. which comes out to about 2,400 Minnesotans tossing coins in the kettle, perhaps 30 in my town of 70,000.

$7 million is not small change, granted.  A good share of those arrested today would not have a nickel of that for their own defense.  But it is important to keep such numbers in perspective.

There will be endless news once the indictment is unsealed, probably later today.

Joyce Vance gives a good preview with her overnight column, here.

Have a great day.

POSTNOTE 8:15 P.M.  I watched part of the events in the afternoon, and some of the commentary later.  I did not watch any of the talk at Mara Lago.

A commentary came this evening that describes the situation well: we are contending with a pretend Jesus among us who may as well be a divinity.  His base seems disproportionately populated with evangelical Christians.

This is not the first such aberration of the divine.  Back in 1993 David Koresh of the Branch Davidian at Waco, fancied himself, and was fancied as, a latter day Christ on earth.  The destination was catastrophic for Koresh and most of the followers and their children.  From the ashes came acolytes, like Timothy McVeigh, who two years later blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.

Jimmy Jones and Jonestown comes to mind, and endless others.

The legal issues will take years to sort out.  The next hearing on the NY case will probably not be till the end of the year.  Quite certainly there are other indictments ahead.  Will they make a difference?  Basically, I think it will be up to all of us who believe in democracy to stand up and be counted in all of the assorted ways we will be needed.

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Thursday Apr. 5 after the arraignment:  Civil Discourse; and Letters from an American.

Spring is almost here.  We expect perhaps 5″ of snow tonight and tomorrow – but next week perhaps to the 50s.  This weekend, a trip back to the 1880s.

Within this week, I shared the below photo with my siblings, and with my French-Canadian colleagues in the French-American Heritage Foundation.  This is a reminder about  the “old days”, specifically around Grafton-Oakwood ND, very likely pre-North Dakota statehood (1889).  The pdf has a larger scale version of the photo.  The specifics about the photo itself are unknowable, but this doesn’t mean the photo is unknowable…a bit of history of a historical area in the midwest.

Mid-1880s in Grafton-Oakwood Walsh County ND

The likely history of the photo is included in my family history, “400 Years, remembering the Cote, Blondeau, Bernard and Collette families”, compiled by myself in 2010: pdf enhanced by my brother : Collette Walsh Co Homesteads 1880s0001.

The fascinating bio of the likely photographer, Henry A. Ball, is found in the Centennial History of Grafton ND, 1982: Grafton ND Henry Ball.

Grafton, in northeast North Dakota has a present population of about 4,000.  Oakwood, a township four miles east of Grafton, is now primarily a farm township with about 250 people.  These are the communities where my French-Canadian grandparents lived their lives.  Grandma was born there; Grandpa came from Quebec when in his 20s.

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“Pitchers” (photos) were infrequent back in the 1800s, but always significant, including the one above, which I’d guess fairly represents the usual rural scene in the early days of settlement of the midwest.  These were not easy times, impossible for us to imagine in these days.

The photographer, Civil War Veteran Henry Ball, came to Grafton in 1883, the year after the town was founded in 1882, the year the railroad came to the area.  His home town was Berne NY, 25 miles west of Albany.  Some years later he took on a partner, and became a fixture in Grafton area for many years.  No doubt my grandparents and my Dad knew him.

Most any community of any size had somebody like Ball, a “pitcher taker”, as my homies in N. Dakota might say.

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My ancestors, Collette by name, took up homesteads just to the east of Grafton, in the town of Oakwood.  Their home country was rural Quebec. In between, for about 14 years 1864-78, they lived in what is now the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

My Grandma, Josephine Collette, was born in the summer of 1881, at St. Andrews, a landing where the Park and Red Rivers intersected.  Her parents had arrived in 1878, among a large community of French-Canadians.  Their Oakwood home was at the Park River, perhaps a half mile from the St. John’s church, still an Oakwood landmark and the place where she and grandpa married in 1901.

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The above photo is best studied by printing out the pdf and looking carefully at it with a magnifying glass.  Only one person is immediately obvious, but a closer look reveals up to 13 persons in the photo, of which several are children.  There are also two buggies, cattle and horses.

Quite obviously, the trees in the background indicate a river, which quite likely could have been the Park River, but could have been any river in the area.  French-Canadian settlers preferred river locations and long, narrow farms than  the later more common square quarter-sections.  There are, here, two apparently separate households next to each other.

I would guess that the photo was closer to 1883, than to 1890.

There are rich stories in the photo.

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In my treasure of photos are the below.  The first shows all of the Collette men, from January of 1887.  This was likely on the occasion of the death of their mother, Mathilde (Vermette).  In the photo is their father, Octave, and the Priest.  (There were Collette women too, at least two of them living in the area – apparently this was a specific photo of the men, and more than likely it was taken at the Ball studio in Grafton.). Almost without question, Henry Ball did the portrait.

Collette men January 1887 ND.  My great grandfather Octave is in back row, third from left.  He would have been about 39 years.

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Three more historical photos are below.  This column started with one old photo.  Similar stories can be found in every single family, everywhere.  What are some of yours?

My grandmother Josephine Collette with her brother Arcidas in 1898 Minneapolis MN.  They were there for the funeral of their grandmother Adelaide Blondeau, who settled in the 1850s at Dayton MN.

A tintype.  Octave Collette and Clothilde Blondeau, my great grandparents at their wedding in St. Anthony (later Minneapolis) in July 1869.  She died in 1916, he in 1925.

POSTNOTE:

After completing the above, I was in the local drug store to pick up some photos.  At the counter ahead of me was an older lady with her granddaughter.  The lady was deaf and having trouble communicating with the counter person.  A manager came to assist, and handwritten notes solved the problem.  Afterwards he and I chatted a bit about what had happened.  He regretted he didn’t have basic skills for such communications.  It was very positive.

The difficult exchange caused me to remember my Aunt Josie, Dad’s sister, born in 1903, who was deaf from early childhood – they believe from some childhood disease.

I seldom saw Josie – she spent most of her school years at the North Dakota School for the Deaf at Devils Lake, and all of her adult years in the deaf community in Los Angeles.  She worked as a seamstress in a factory making clothing – a place where deafness was in some ways a blessing.

When we saw her, we could cobble together understanding.  She could make understandable words.  But I’m sure the disability restricted her associations and opportunities considerably.

She was a neat lady.  She was fortunate in that she did have the deaf school.

She died in 1984.

Josie Bernard at right, next to my Dad, Henry. Their parents Josephine and Henry behind them.  By the time of the photo, Josie would have been deaf for several. years.  Very likely a Henry Ball or colleague photo.

COMMENTS: (WordPress comment section temporarily disabled due to technical issue.)

from Norm: I noted several similarities to what I remember from growing up in north central Minnesota including many similar old photos where people had obviously put on the infrequently sued Sunday best clothes to sit for the photographer

I remember an old log barn on my grandmother’s place that was used to house the two work horses that my bachelor uncles used for farming before they bought their first John Deer M tractor.

I understood that the “horse barn” had been the original house as well.

The wooden fences were still around during  my early years as were several long rows of fieldstone that had been picked off of the fields.  Lots of back breaking labor picking the rocks, setting them on the stone pony (sledge) and hauling them off to the edges of the fields.  A never ending task, of course, as the rocks kept surfacing and no doubt breaking some equipment from time to time as well.

On the other hand, wood was generally readily available and cheaper than barbed wire so with the presence of a strong back and good axe skills, they could be set in place at little expense.

response from Dick:  There is a tendency to romanticize those ‘good old days’. It was tough sledding even in the best of times, and they couldn’t take the first flight out, or even catch the train if things went south.  On and on.  My cousin remembered our Grandma (Mom’s mom) saying that early on there was an occasion where “if Grandpa had had a nickel in his pocket, we’d have left”.  Some struck it rich, but most probably left the dreams behind and moved somewhere to at least make a life.

from Jeff: good post, very much enjoyed reading it…great to have access to the photos.   8 inches here in Burnsville. yuk

Woodbury April 1, 2023. We apparently had 11 inches, and I can attest it was heavy, wet snow, that is even now beginning to melt.

Advisory: if you’re squeamish about, or have a special affection of, arachnids, perhaps pass this one by.  Here’s a primer from National Geographic.  It’s only a minute or so.

I was browsing a book about King Ranch in Texas, and inside was a sheet of paper, a story, by Elba Gobar, a neighbor and friend of my parents when they lived in San Benito TX from about 1976-87 (Mom died in 1981).  Elba, who died in 2005 at 85, was a hobby writer, like me.  Her writing speaks for itself.  San Benito is a half dozen miles or so from the Rio Grande, about 20 miles from Brownsville TX.  I’m guess this was written sometime in the 1980s, but it’s pretty timeless!

Elba:

“Holy Sh..!”  “Holy Sh..!”  Later I could not believe this came out of the same mouth that for the last ten days had been begging God to help me to handle anything that might happen.

This was my first night alone since Bernard had emergency surgery.  To stay alone is something in which I am totally inexperienced.  Five nights spread out over a period of forty-two years can hardly be passed as experience.  And no, in front of the stove, staring me in the face, was a tarantula legs and all the size of a coffee mug – a big coffee mug.  

Now just what in hell does one to at 11:00 pm with all the neighbors sound asleep?  I tiptoed behind it, got the Decon from under the sink and began “squeezing off”.  At the first spray, off it scurried under the stove.  I sprayed and sprayed.  Boy, did I spray! – under the stove, under the refrigerator, the door sill, a path to the bedroom, under the door and around the bed.  I locked the door and asked God to please leave the Persian Gulf long enough to give me paralysis of the bladder, at least until daylight.

The next day I brought Bernard home so I was much braver.  Besides having told Debbie of my “hairy” experience, I was ready to try her procedure for getting rid of tarantulas, lizards, crickets, frogs and roaches.

Take one big bowl

Plop down over critter

Weight down with a heavy iron skillet

Call someone braver than you in the morning

That night I was ready for that sucker.  I put out my ammunition and checked every half hour to see if he had returned.  I did not warn him as I do the roaches by saying, “I’m coming.”  Stomp!  Stomp!  “This is your last chance to hide.  I’m turning on the light.”  Stomp!  Stomp!   Not this time – I was out for revenge.  A flick of the switch – A flash of light! – there he was dining on a dead roach.

This time I figured I’d move him out in the open so I would have plenty of room for action. I took one swing with the fly swatter and damn’t wouldn’t you know, I missed.  Zip – under the refrigerator.  Again I sprayed in, out, and around everything.

I still checked every night and sprayed.  By this time I had enough dead roaches laying around to coax anything out of hiding.  No tarantula!  Several days later, in the middle of the day, I walked in the kitchen.  There it was dead in the middle of the floor.

Had it taken one daring chance to escape me, or had it wanted me to know the “Joy of victory”?

Bernard figures I got three roaches and one tarantula per two cans of Decon.

POSTNOTE: Elba reminds me of a close encounter with a gigantic centipede in a house on the Big Island of Hawaii seven years ago.  The centipede was just minding its own business in a shelf outside the house, and I was just taking something off the shelf.  You know the rest of the story….  Thanks, Elba.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.  We were to be enroute to northwest Minnesota to visit a friend but weather interfered, so the trip did not materialize.  In the twin cities, it’s sunshiny, with a very chilly wind.  Better weather ahead, but not today!

I did a post on Activism a little earlier this week.

Source: CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=482629

This column is about 2020, three years back.

I’m not Irish, but I have a good friend who is, and we arranged to have breakfast at the Original Pancake House in Edina March 17, 2020.

It was becoming undeniable that Covid-19 represented a very serious issue.  I had been an usher at church on Sunday.  It was to be the last such in-person Mass for a long-time; a workshop scheduled for earlier that week had already been cancelled.

March, 2020, Basilica of St. Mary, Minneapolis MN

But the Pancake House had notice that it would still be open on  the 17th.  So we decided to follow through, until my friend did a drive-by and found the restaurant was closed.

Basically, everything in Minnesota shut down, by Governors order, by March 18.  Normal became abnormal for everyone, for months.  I heard later that I was supposed to have a surprise 80th birthday on May 4.  May 4 I think we ordered in something for the two of us from Appleby’s, at least that’s how I remember it.  I took a brief solitary drive in the near vicinity on May 2, and took the below photo.  There were no social gatherings.  A suspicious neighbor nearby wondered why I was taking that picture.  I told him….  Oh.

80th and Kimbro Ln Cottage Grove MN May 2, 2020

I recall driving by what was almost certainly a funeral memorial service on somebody’s lawn.  Funeral gatherings were too risky. Even outdoors was a stretch.

So that is how the Covid-19 pandemic took charge, at least for me.  Most everything I valued was closed.  The death toll was just beginning to surface.  Denial was prevalent, but I think everyone was nervous.

Everyone has their own stories, particularly about the year that followed.  I certainly have mine.  (So far, no version of Covid has entered our house.  As you know, it’s not quite like swatting a mosquito.)

About this time of year in 2021, I bought my first book about the pandemic: Preventable, by Andy Slavitt.  It was an excellent choice.  Another author called the book “Painfully good”.

Andy was living in my twin cities at the time (Edina), and pages 33-36 in large part is devoted to his high school son “Zach’s Math”.  Succinctly, Zach computed “that one person could transmit the virus to 4,100 people at the average transmission rate.” (p 35)  Andy’s footnote 43 at page 265 dates this prediction at April 25, 2020….  The prediction was very accurate.

Of course, denial is still out there, but muted.  Something over a million deaths from the disease in the U.S. alone.  Mutations still doing their thing, though somewhat less lethal, it appears.  People still suffering from after-effects: “long-haul” they’re called.

We live in an international world.  There are no borders for things like disease.  What the wind used to transport, imperfectly, planes now import precisely and easily from most anywhere.  We humans are the ‘mules’ for disease.  The next pandemic will happen, and we best learn whatever lessons we can from the one now thought to be past.

But basically we’re back to normal; hopefully quite a bit more cognizant of risks.  So far Cathy and I have not been victims.  My friend was not so lucky – hers hit a few weeks ago, she thinks after a too-crowded birthday party.

My friend and I had an early St. Pat’s breakfast at the same restaurant yesterday.  Busy place, no masks that I saw.  No evidence of that long ago year of 2020-21….

This morning my barber was remembering the same March 18 that I did.  Theirs and all similar businesses were shut down.

Let’s hope for a good year.

A good day and weekend to everyone.