I'm going to finish by reading from the new book.
And just to introduce it a little bit,
it's called Daddy Long Legs, The Natural Education of a Father.
It's what I would consider a braided memoir,
and there's three sort of major strands in it.
One has to do with turning 40 and some serious health
issues I was facing early in that spring, and all the issues
of mortality and thinking about the meaning of life that
occurs at middle age, especially my life as a father
and as a husband.
At the same time, my grandmother,
who I mentioned earlier, the one that took me on the tour,
who lived in Green Valley for 20 years,
she had moved back to Fort Dodge after my grandfather--
she could no longer take care of him, he had suffered a stroke--
and had been in Fort Dodge for quite a while.
She was 92.
And she decided that she'd had enough of the medications.
They'd made her uncomfortable.
They made her foggy.
She wanted to end her life with some dignity and pain-free.
So she just decided, that's it.
I'm not going to be taking those.
You know Grandma Katherine.
Once she decides something, that was it.
She was going to end her life on her terms.
And so the doctor gave her a couple of months to live.
I was very close to her, as some of you
who have read this book know.
My kids were very close to her, my young boys,
the youngest of whom was Spencer,
who was three at the time.
And she was very open with them about this.
And so the challenge for Steph and I
became how to talk to the kids about this impending loss.
Nature, the surrounding environment,
kind of provided the vocabulary for that,
in particular the Loess Hills, where we live.
Some of you are familiar with Iowa
and know about the Loess Hills.
They're a international treasure.
They are glacial drift hills, 300 feet high,
on the western borders of Iowa.
They go along the western edge of the state,
along the Missouri River, from Minnesota down to Missouri.
The only place in the world that has Loess deposits like that
is China, along the Yellow River,
which is where the Yellow River got its name, from that soil.
But those have been mostly destroyed.
So these are truly unique landforms, but also endangered.
One day they'll be there, and then,
the next day, an entire hill will be gone,
used for landfill.
So there's some ongoing challenges
in trying to preserve this unique ecosystem.
So there's issues of mortality and renewal
flowing through that landscape that
fed into the conversation we were having with the kids.
This piece is called "Praying Mantis."
And I think you'll see some of those themes in here.
This is all taking place in the spring of 2006.
Ben spotted the praying mantis from the back seat
of our parked car.
She was in the window of the Chinese buffet
we had just left, a good 15 feet away, an indistinguishable
twig, from my point of view.
"It's not a twig, Dad.
It's a ginormous bug."
Then again, this is Ben.
At five years old, he can spot a terror at almost any distance.
With him along, no spider web tragedy goes unnoticed.
"I guess that fly wishes he'd slept in today, right Dad?"
No roadkill goes unquestioned.
"I guess that deer didn't look both ways before crossing
the highway, right Dad?"
No trip to the movie rental store is ever entirely benign.
"I guess we won't be able to rent that movie way over there,
the one the scary man with the bloody chainsaw, will we Dad?"
"So what are you waiting for, Dad?"
Ben said.
"Go and save that bug before it gets hurt."
He was right.
The window of a Chinese buffet in downtown Omaha
did not appear to be ideal mantid habitat.
A rescue operation seemed in order.
Still, given our history with this insect,
Ben's request struck me as a little surprising.
His first encounter with a mantis
occurred the year before when I took him to see an IMAX film
called Bugs!
A Rainforest Adventure.
The newspaper described it as an exciting, informative film
about endangered rainforest ecosystems,
as seen from the perspective of insects.
"Good for the entire family," it said.
And even better, it was 3D.
Soon after Ben and I settled into our seats at the theater
and put on our glasses, we found ourselves
lost in the lush, life-tangled tapestry of the Borneo
rainforest.
The plot alternately followed the lives and adventures
of two insects, Papilio, the butterfly, and Hierodula,
the praying mantis.
We watched Papilio from her early days
as a caterpillar to her emergence from her chrysalis,
becoming a glorious flicker of color
against the mass of green.
Hierodula, along with hundreds of his siblings,
burst from a papery egg case and set off
to eat his way through the jungle,
consuming a number of anonymous insects, just inches,
it seemed, from our faces.
As the film progressed, the stories
of Papilio and Hierodula became intertwined,
both of them occupying the same abandoned decrepit
hut along a river.
I suppose I should have known what
was going to happen, especially with narrator Judi
Dench tossing out lines like, "You're on somebody's menu
the moment you hatch."
But I didn't see it coming, not even when
Papilio landed on the same leaf occupied by Hierodula.
What were the chances?
Not even when they moved closer and closer to each other,
the music rising dramatically.
I didn't see it until the moment when, with a quick jerk,
Hierodula snatch Papilio with his four legs and ate her.
There was a collective gasp in the theater
and the children started crying.
Ben was furious.
"Get away from her," he screamed, whacking
at the screen, "Get away!"
I'm not sure what I or anyone should have expected
from a meeting of mantis and butterfly,
but, like Ben, I was outraged.
Why had there been no parental warning?
Good for the entire family?
This wasn't some anonymous fly in a web,
this was Papilio, with whom the creators of this little horror
flick had encouraged us to become emotionally involved.
Now I, along with the rest of the parents,
were left to deal with the aftermath.
My first impulse was to comfort Ben
by telling him that Hierodula would soon get his head eaten
off while copulating.
But that might have provoked even more uncomfortable
questions.
During the film's half-hearted denouement,
I recalled similar nature films I'd seen
during my own boyhood in Iowa.
There was the one about a cougar and his mate.
And though I can't remember the title, I do recall,
after following their courtship for most of the film
and then the birth of their cubs,
the female fell to her death while trying to escape hunters.
Typical Disney.
The worst, though, were those television reruns,
in the night, of 1940s and '50s animal films.
Like Old Yeller, in which a boy is
forced to shoot his beloved dog after it
contracts rabies from a wolf.
Yeah, see, we're already--
people are-- feel free to get into the fetal
if you're having a flashback.
And The Yearling, where another boy is forced to kill the deer
he'd raised since it was a fawn because it began
eating the family's corn crop.
"Who cares about the stupid corn?"
I bawled at the television screen
as the boy walked off into the woods with his gun.
For a long time afterwards, I had a hard time
looking at a cornfield with anything but hatred, gagging
whenever my mother put a steamy, buttery cob on my plate,
which is a major problem in Iowa.
The intended moral of The Yearling
was the same as the other films.
Death is a part of nature, a part of life.
At least that's how those films were explained to me
by the nervous grown-ups with whom I shared my feelings
and questions about them.
Now though, it seems to me that what those films were really
about was teaching young boys that the first step
toward becoming a man is killing what you love,
killing your ability to love.
But it wasn't just a boy thing.
One Saturday while in junior high, my wife Stephanie
was invited to go to the movies by a girl in her class
whose older sister was dying of bone cancer.
When the girl's mother picked Steph up in the car,
the balding older sister smiled at them from the front seat.
At the theater, they all settled in for what
appeared to be a cute live-action film
about a glacier fox and her pups.
Within the first few minutes, however, the mother fox
got shot, dragged herself back to the tree where she'd first
met her mate, and died.
Then, one by one, the pups died, including the blind runt
who, one moment, was sitting near the rough Arctic
sea shore, and, the next, was gone,
the waves washing away his tiny paw prints in the sand.
Steph remembers them all sobbing in the theater, especially
the girl's mother.
Even now, Steph can't talk reasonably about this film.
"Abusive" is the term she uses.
How is that film informative?
What did it teach them that they didn't already know?
Thankfully, Ben shed no tears after the IMAX film.
And though angry with Hierodula, it
seemed not to have prejudiced him against mantids in general.
In the parking lot of the Chinese buffet,
Ben continued to plead with me to help the mantis perched
in the window.
Steph even chimed in.
"What are you waiting for, Jim?" she chided.
"Get out there and save that mantis."
She was referring to Jim Fowler, from the old Mutual
of Omaha's Wild Kingdom television
show, which ran on Sunday nights during our childhoods.
On Wild Kingdom, any problem could
be fixed if you had a muscular white man, a large net,
a tranquilizer gun, and a helicopter.
The episodes, hosted by silver-haired Marlin Perkins
and his pencil mustache, took place all over the world,
but inevitably included moving the featured animal
to more ideal habitat, which, to my way of thinking back then,
meant it would never be hunted, never be in danger
or know pain or fear.
The images of various kinds of legs and tails
sticking out from a net or a cage,
then going airborne into a sunset,
is probably one of my earliest impressions of mercy.
So I retrieved the crumpled sandwich baggie
from beneath my seat and stepped out of the car.
As I approached the mantis, which
Spencer, our three-year-old, had already named Penny,
I noticed she was much larger than expected.
Perhaps six inches, and not at all grateful looking.
I retreated to the car, enduing a number of jeers,
to grab a pencil which I could use to guide her into the bag.
Penny was having none of it.
She reared up and snapped at me with her big spiny four legs.
There I was, just like Jim, with his rippling tanned muscles
and big net, facing down the giant anaconda or lion
or crocodile, except I was a skinny middle-aged man
with a pencil and a sandwich baggie.
Ben was Marlin Perkins, narrating and shouting
out instructions from the safety of the helicopter.
"Watch out, Dad.
She could bite.
There you go.
Get her-- don't let her escape, Dad.
Don't-- just get her in the bag, Dad."
Which I finally did.
And, mission accomplished, we transported the mantis
to more ideal habitat, our backyard.
Near the lilacs at sunset, Ben and Spencer
took turns holding the bag to look at her up close.
Penny took a couple of snaps at both of them.
She was truly ferocious.
And I experienced a moment of sympathy
for all the unsuspecting bugs in our yard,
including the local Hierodula, who
would make the mistake of falling for her deadly charm.
We let her out onto a rhubarb leaf, another very dangerous
thing, where she continued to face us down,
swaying back and forth, poised to strike.
As we stepped away, we looked back one more time
to see the dark slice of her body move off the leaf
and disappear.
It would be the last we saw of Penny.
But when winter came, we'd find a number of empty egg sacks
in the overgrown, jungly areas of the yard.
Back inside, we tucked the boys into their bunk beds
and turned off the lights.
Ben folded his hands and started his nightly prayer,
the children's prayer.
"Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
Guide me through the starry night,
and wake me up in the morning light."
This was the modern, toned-down version,
which he had learned from a musical book of prayers
their great grandmother Katherine had given them.
This version replaced the final line
that haunted me and so many other children
from my generation and earlier.
"If I should die before I wake, I
pray the Lord my soul to take."
The lost line hearkens back to prairie nights
during previous decades and centuries,
when children did, in fact, die in their sleep, in droves,
of disease and hunger and other deprivations.
Their tombstones fill the small pioneer cemeteries
dotting the rural Midwestern landscapes, hidden
among patches of prairie grasses and wildflowers, a remnant
of the land as it was then, when it claimed them,
as wild and beautiful and dangerous as the rainforest.
There are still dangers here, anywhere,
but who wants to think of them?
Ben did.
"Please God," he said, hands crossed
under his chin, his eyes staring through the ceiling.
"Take care of Penny.
And help her find lots to eat, and don't let anything
hurt her."
Outside in the yard, beyond sight, was the answer.
Not quite the spirit of mercy that
inspired Ben's prayer, but a prayer nonetheless.
Four arms crossed, eyes on the promising darkness.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.