Ebeling Hardware as I remembered it had dark wood counters with open bins of nails and bolts, cabinets for small parts, a comfortable feeling of preparedness. When I stopped in after Christmas this year, high metal display racks filled the middle of the store, loaded with small appliances, home decorating hardware and cooking utensils, obscuring the checkout counter in the rear across from where the steps go down to the basement. They were into horses too, the plastic ones girls collect in the years before they get their first period, plus stuff for real horses. Just inside the front door, a life-size black and white fiberglass pinto stood fitted with a bridle and blanket.

On the left of a narrow aisle, across from reels of galvanized chain, a yellow cast metal road grader caught my eye. It was part of a fleet of miniature earthmoving equipment arranged in a glass-fronted cabinet. My grandson was into “diggers.” The grader would be perfect. They had just one left, amid tractors and wagons, dump trucks, backhoes and bulldozers, built-to-scale earth-expert machines in John Deere Green and the creamy yellow acquired by road machinery after long days in the sun.

A lady ahead of me at the counter was buying some shelf brackets. They had six inch and eight inch. She went for the eight inch.

“You can return them for the six inch if they’re not right.” The clerk dropped the brackets into a brown paper bag without a logo. “Do you have one of our new calendars?”

She was a sturdy woman with tightly curled dark hair, glasses and a blue apron that came up just short of the neck. The woman with the brackets had not gotten a new calendar. The clerk handed her a white envelope from a stack piled by the register.

Varnished dark wood ran along the edge of the Formica counter, past an aluminum scoop sticking out of a wide-mouth jar of glistening amber candy raisins, just like when I used to come here in the eighth grade. The woman with the new shelf brackets thanked the clerk and left, her calendar’s unsealed envelope flap hanging open.

I have to get one of those, I thought. I was betting on a picture for each month of the year, local scenes. I paid cash for the road grader, setting it on a patch of counter where beige had worn through to chocolate brown. Sure enough, she asked.

“Do you have one of our new calendars?” She gave me change for the road grader, handing me the calendar with a pleasant smile.

“Thanks,” I said. The envelope was snowy white, about an inch wider on each side than its contents whose edges were palpable through the paper. I turned around, sensing someone in line behind me.

Gerald had a fresh violet scar running down his cheek from his right temple to just above the jut of his jawbone. I hadn’t seen him for probably twenty years and hadn’t actually talked with him for forty. Other than the scar, he had the same angular sunburned face, the same quiet blue eyes beneath a black wool visor cap, its ear flaps tied up at the top in a small bow. Checkered flannel padding showed at the edges of his denim jacket.

“Hello, Gerald,” I said. The words came out gently, probably because I was surprised by his scar, so fresh. He moved his weight to the other leg and tapped it with a big gray rubberized flashlight he was holding, the kind that gets advertised as “weatherproof” and “heavy duty.”

“Doesn’t work.” He didn’t press the on/off button, just stood and waited. He said it as if either he did not remember me at all or I was so completely remembered that acknowledgement of my name was unnecessary.

Gerald wasn’t getting any younger. He couldn’t have expected to run into me. Maybe he never addressed anyone by name. I shook his hand. It was callused and warm. His eyes seemed searching above graying stubble.

The Ebeling on duty came over from the next aisle.

“This flashlight doesn’t work,” Gerald offered, holding it up, this time flicking the button on and off to show nothing happened.

“Let me have a look.” You could tell right away he was an Ebeling, round-faced, capable, with a ballpoint pen in his shirt pocket.

I nodded goodbye to Gerald and walked out the front of the store, my footsteps thunking over the wood between the coffeepots and racks of chain and rope to where the plastic horse gazed out across the blacktop road.

Late one afternoon forty years before, Gerald’s little brother Vernon got caught in a corn chopper. I never got over wondering how it must have been for him, a sixth grader yanking on stiff greenish-yellow stalks behind the orange tractor, feeling a sudden tug as the red conveyor of the machine gripped his sleeve and pulled him in, anticipating in lonely horror the clean surprise of knives before they took the ends of his fingers, then the knuckles, inching higher until his body blocked the influx, too large to enter the chute.

Ronny, a friend of Gerald’s, said Gerald told him that the day after it happened he walked out to the field where the tractor sat and began driving it toward the barn with its partial load of chopped corn. There was a spot in the woods he passed, an opening into which he could back the wagon and dump the load. I imagined it as a place where he stopped occasionally afterward, with the tractor turned off and blue sky overhead as the seasons went along, the load’s outline beneath red and gold maple leaves followed by the overlying snow becoming gradually smaller and after a few years melting nearly away, perhaps some stalks of corn growing in an unfamiliar place the first spring and after that, nothing.

I drove down the hill from Ebeling’s, the yellow road grader in its pasteboard and cellophane package on the passenger seat. I imagined how a person might go about starting up a hardware store these days. You’d probably need a theme, maybe a logo. The easiest might be to get a franchise and color code yourself (orange or red maybe, something powerful).

What isn’t usually in the picture these days is the basement underneath the store where you repair screens in the late winter, keep plumbing stuff for outcalls, listen to people walking on the creaky wood overhead while you cut and thread pipe. Still, you try to stock stuff people need and to be there when they come in for faucet parts, for packaged fasteners, for grass seed.

The problem with the color-coded model is that you don’t know the stories. You don’t end up being a place where people let down when they meet someone they know. You have to be efficient because it’s a big box and everybody has stuff they want to check out and push their cart across the parking lot to their car and leave the cart at the cart corral.

My father was the pastor of the village church a mile from the field where Vernon died. The police chief knew him, called him to the scene. I remember him saying the chief was crying. I could see it in my mind as if it were a movie I wasn’t supposed to be watching. It never went away.

The white envelope, propped on the seat behind the road grader, flopped forward when I turned onto the highway. I pulled over and slid out the calendar.

It’s quite a thing. There is only one picture, a southern Wisconsin scene but nobody’s place I recognize. It’s a photograph of a spring pasture with a dozen Black Angus cows and several calves, a bright red barn with a gray metal roof, a cobalt sky, a few puffy white clouds. It’s oddly pleasant, with newly leafed trees countering a dead elm by the creek and in the distance, a leftover windmill. Most of the cows stand head-deep in overpoweringly green grass between patches of yellow flowers. The calves look at the camera.

The whole calendar part is complex, very analog. The cows’ picture on the top half is actually the front panel of an envelope. A black string runs through little brass eyelets at the corners of the picture, so that when the calendar is hung on the wall you can tip the cows and their pasture forward, revealing the phrase “For Mail Storage” on the inside back of the envelope.

Each of the months on the bottom half is a separate sheet folded as a pocket. The dates are very easy to read with Sundays, federal and Christian holidays in red. There isn’t much space in the square around the number to write what you have to do that day.

On the pocket for each month in small letters it says, “For Bills and Receipts.” At the end of the month you can tear it off from the two staples holding the year together and start over.

I don’t think I’ll hang it up. I don’t really keep track of things in my life that way. My life feels sort of digital. But the more I look at it, the more I’m getting used to the idea of continual increments, month after month going through what comes into a life and what goes out, trying to break even.

Maybe that’s as good as closure gets.

Of course, there will be carry-overs from time to time. January is done, tear off the sheet. Make adjustments.

Start February.

In New Letters, vol. 79, No. 2, 2013

Through the train window streaked with dissipating rain on a late October morning, the asymmetric towers of Chartres’ cathedral loomed like stalagmites over hills of yellow grass. Walking up from the station, Carolyn and I leaned into the gusty wind, stepping through a small entry cut into the large western doors of the church. Once inside, all was quiet, damp and cool, bathed in blue light.

“1793 was a terrible year for Chartres Cathedral,” announced the visitor education board in French and English, describing statuary mutilation during the French Revolution directed at the monarchy and its religious connections. Happens everywhere, it seems: desecration of others’ beliefs to confirm one’s own; violence in the service of faith.

Perhaps a cathedral absorbs the perpetual mix of peacemaking and violence which characterizes its human family. Maybe it is an architectural expression of passive resistance, the power to assimilate and absolve the rage of a few on behalf of the many who love what its symbolism recalls — peace, forgiveness, hope.

It is lighted by the sun, this place of stained glass and limestone, through a uniquely penetrant shade of blue. It seemed more than color as I stood there, a blueness drawn to the breaking point of blue, as if the sky one winter evening sent a message to this little town in northern France saying, “This is the moment; take down this blue; this is the color of faithfulness.”

Weeks later, wandering through a chilly Berlin square filled with the scents and sounds of a Christmas market, we noticed a brooding, jagged stump of tower next to a new church. The tower is a remnant, as it turns out, of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church destroyed in a 1943 Allied bombing, intentionally preserved as a relic alongside the replacement church.

We crossed the street and went in. Others were already standing inside the church, saying little as crowds and traffic fell away in acoustically-designed silence. Hundreds of polygons of stained glass in a beige concrete honeycomb transmuted the evening light into a deep, penetrating blue.

The glass is French, said a brochure offered in a wooden rack by the door, specially stained panels made in the Chartres studio of Gabriel Loire.

… French? Chartres??

I e-mailed the church when we got home. The Pastor kindly responded. Egon Eiermann, its German architect, he said, had simply found in Gabriel Loire the ideal partner for his design.

So that’s it. It’s a prayer. The whole building, glass and all. Especially the glass.

They saw it. They felt it. Eiermann and Loire. The thing is, they just went ahead and did it, designing a tangible peace, a celebration of faithfulness, a recognition of the divine within each of us as we stood there on a December evening, flooded by blue.

In Still Point Arts Quarterly 30, 2018.

The stories at School Number Five filter out like water through a logjam, written in the first ten minutes of class using magazine pictures they have selected from a pile I spread out as starters. As they read their work aloud, we adjust syntax, mine intuitive as a native speaker of English, theirs percolating through a mixture of learned grammar, magazines, TV, the Internet. Eventually their stories are complete in powdery white chalk on a blackboard in front of the class of a half dozen middle-schoolers. Six stories, fifty minutes, wiped from the board after the bell with a rag dipped into gray water in a red plastic bucket.

Why do they want to learn English? To get a job, says Mihai, a self-professed computer fanatic in 8A, one of the two sections of 8th grade. Besides, he points out, you can’t really use the Internet unless you know English. Nearly every website worth visiting is in English (all nod), as are the instruction windows which tell you what’s the matter with your computer.

Hadn’t thought of that. Other reasons?

Watch American movies, ignore the subtitles. Read books. Read magazines.

Two days later, three seventh grade boys, lounging in their desks after class, offer a discussion of “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.” It’s their favorite computer game, about stealing cars and fighting the police. I express interest.

Out of their pockets come word lists, code for the game. Code sheets, computer print-outs in English and Russian, each with handwritten Romanian equivalents.

Is this why I’m here, to teach English for computer games? The game is violent, not something I would choose. Yet it’s in English, the language they want me to help them learn. They have taken the initiative to translate. They’re using words, concepts.

Really, how bad can a computer game be? Romeo and Juliet, my backup lesson plan for next week, thrives on street warfare, three murders, a double suicide and a near miss on bigamy. It’s taught people English for three hundred years.

Walking “home” over broken streets in the afternoon dusk to the two-star hotel where we volunteers stay for the three-week life of this project, I wonder if I will ever know whether I am making a difference by being here.

The house in the yard, so-called by the Romanian teachers in the main building of School Number Five, consists of two small classrooms in one story of beige stucco capped with gray metal. It’s where I teach conversational English. Nearly all buildings in town are roofed with the same material, even the three domes of the Orthodox church looming behind School Number Five.

Everything is starting to feel gray to me. The chill is constant and damp. An overcast November sky mirrors grim resolution in the faces of people I pass on the way to school. The terasse regulars down the block nurse their beers inside now; the weed patch next to their favorite outdoor table is frosted over. Everyone smokes.

Even problems, finally, look alike. There is not enough money for anything, whether roads, health care, heat or education. Everyone is adept at making-do or going without. Design seems unaffordable. Carpeting, tile and wall coverings from available sources coexist in clashing patterns.

I find myself searching out pre-communist buildings to appreciate their ornately sawn wood roof-trim boards. I enjoy the clopping of horses pulling farm wagons full of cabbages over concrete streets, the clang of the handbell rung by the hall monitor starting and ending class. I like watching the Romanian flag wind-drifting, splendid in primary colors of blue, yellow and red, through some political accident virtually indistinguishable from the flag of the Republic of Chad.

It is the first day of snow. Three boys sit in the house in the yard: Ionut, doubling as the fire-tender; Cesar; Marius. They were part of another class I had last week. Actually, they were the entire class that afternoon, three girls never showing up. It was the day they told me about Grand Theft Auto.

They wear their hats and jackets at their desks. I huddle by the warm brown ceramic stove, listening while they work on The Old Man and the Sea, reading passages I have marked. They like the ones about the sharks.

During a break Ionut stuffs a split of poplar into the stove, then goes to the board beside me and begins to write the names of his siblings and their ages in a column. All older, three brothers. Then the name of his father and the number 43.

Below that he writes the number 39. What would that be?

“My mother’s age.”

What is her name?

“She is dead.”

What happened? He hesitates. Am I prying, I wonder?

He’s still not saying anything, looking at his classmates for help. Probably doesn’t know the word. Marius gives it.

“She was pregnant.”

Maybe writing on the board is easier. You get your thoughts up there for people to respond to if they like. You can be more fluent in a second language while writing than while speaking. And while you are communicating, you face away.

The afternoon class of ninth graders over at the High School, four boys and a girl, are waiting in the library when I arrive. The girl seems studious, treated by the boys as an equal. I tell them I’d like to have us talk about “People Who Changed Our Lives.”

It starts off slowly.

Let’s use examples of people who invented things we use now and what change they made. I’ll start.

Alexander Graham Bell. The telephone. Can you tell me what the effect has been in your life of his invention?

We can talk to each other.

Go on…

Over long distances.

Great!

A boy volunteers: “Bill Gates.”

What was his innovation?

“Microsoft.”

What was the resulting change?

Murmured conference in Romanian, some English. Back and forth.

Finally, adjusting syntax, we conclude (in English) that he made it easy for the average person to use a computer. I write “Bill Gates” and “Computer” on the flip chart, large enough for everyone to see, under Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone.

What about ideas? Can people make a difference inventing an idea?

Silence.

OK, I’ll go.

Abraham Lincoln. He freed slaves in the United States. Resulting effect? He changed North American human rights.

Mohandas Gandhi, another idea innovator. He demonstrated the power of a specific idea, non-violent resistance, in securing the freedom of his people.

I may be getting too complex. I’m doing all the talking. This should be about their stories. Where can I go from here?

“Mihai Eminescu.”  The girl is speaking.

I turn from the flip chart. The others are nodding agreement. I ask for the spelling of the name so I can recognize what they are saying. They spell it, mixing Romanian and English pronunciations of the names of the letters. Finally, I get it right.

Who was he? They point to his picture on the back wall of the library.

Oh. What did he do?

They confer briefly.

A poet, a writer. In the 1850’s.

What did he write about?

Love poems, things about personal life.

Why is he so important?

The girl takes over. She has a long, braided ponytail. We are at a hard spot. She hesitates, dives in.

“He wrote about personal feelings. Before him, everybody wrote superficial things.”

Did he actually change Romanian literature?

“Yes! Yes!”

She is smiling now. I’ve gotten it. She’s made me understand. In English.

I look at the picture again, one in a long sepia row along the back wall. This is a library, after all; these are probably all famous Romanian writers. And he was the one they picked.

It looks like a formal sitting: a young man with longish brown wavy hair, black bow tie, a vest under his coat, gazing into a middle distance somewhere to the left of us. After a hundred and fifty years, he still moves them.

It is the afternoon of Friday, my last day. The English teacher assigned to look after me shows up, Larisa. The High School is her first assignment. She has been at it now for seven weeks. Class is over, she announces.

Larisa looks at the flip chart. I have used up what was possibly their last, perhaps their only, blank flip chart.

She smiles. I have seen that smile before. In Paris. At the Louvre, on the Mona Lisa. She walks me to the door, says goodbye.

I walk back to the hotel through the city park, past old people on benches. Young women tend toddlers in a new playground donated by a Turkish man who bought the ball bearing factory here in Bârlad from the Romanian government. The park benches are painted blue, green, yellow, red. Some slats are rotted, others are missing. People sit on them anyway.

Mihai, the computer wizard I met in class at School Number Five on my second day of this project, diverges toward me through the park with a couple of his friends. He extends his hand.

We do the handshake that starts horizontally and switches midway to thumbs-up, the solidarity shake.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”  Grins all around.

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.” Again, smiles.

Everybody moves on.

In the Wisconsin village church where I grew up, Harry was the janitor. Harry, every Sunday morning, rang the bells. While people sorted themselves into pews, waiting for the service to start, the organist would play some music to set the congregation on the road to worship. The music reached its natural conclusion or tapered off mid-page, ending at the sounds of footsteps shuffling upstairs in the loft, then a door shutting and a pause before the bells began.

Harry enlisted an assistant bell ringer, usually Carl who lived down the blacktop road from the church. Carl had a natural ear. He could play the piano in the dark. I saw him do it once when we were helping clean up after a dinner in the church hall where the organist led songs on the piano.

We had maneuvered the piano back into the storage closet. While we went to collapse the folding chairs, Carl seated himself at the piano and played something which sounded vaguely classical. His brother told us to watch, turned out the light and closed the door. Carl kept on playing as if he were reading sheet music in broad daylight.

When I was about fifteen, Carl got sick on a Sunday. I was hanging around in the back of church, participating in our congregation’s tradition of teaching high school boys responsibility by being ushers.

Harry began his ascent to the organ loft, setting each foot deliberately on the maroon linoleum of every step, even though the organ music was still going and a creak here or there wouldn’t have made much difference.

Harry turned around, pointed at me and motioned upward.

I followed him up the steps, across the choir loft, past the organist sitting in a pool of lamplight watching notes go by through his trifocals.

Harry opened the white painted door to the bell tower, waiting for the organist to quit, music fading from the pipes. We stepped into the bell tower. Harry closed the door. He pointed to the thickest of three hemp ropes, making a pulling movement downward with his fist, then opening.

Harry nodded and I pulled, the familiar note of a single bell beginning high above us, ringing over the dry, cold farmland below. Every time he nodded, I pulled the rope, releasing it so as not to be carried off the floorboards on the way up.

It was winter, way below freezing. Harry paid no attention to the cold. He worked the other two ropes, head down, arms outstretched, listening to the clang overhead, chiming their rhythm in his own peculiar sequence. The ropes whirred through worn holes in the pine ceiling. Eventually Harry quit pulling and nodding and the bells finished the sequence on their own, one ending on the upbeat.

On the way down the steps I realized I had learned the bell prayer, a ritual which had focused scores of people every Sunday morning in that limestone building for a hundred years.

“You must pull the bell with your heart,” it went.

“The rope descends beneath your feet to the bones of your ancestors. If you pull in this way you will feel the bell’s true sound. If you ring in this way, you will live forever.”

In The Lutheran Digest, Fall 2013.