This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Father Bonn was one of Rock Island's saints. He lived in a dark two-room basement apartment with a hot plate in a dying corner of Davenport, Iowa, across the river. He had retired from the priesthood, but often, from his small cupboard, he fed the hungry with rabbit stew, clothed the poor and uplifted the drowning in spirit.
I got to know him because he supplemented his small pension by teaching writing classes part-time at local colleges, and he became my colleague for two years. I was adequately clothed and far too well-fed, but he had a richer gift for me. With the wisdom of a Jesuit's lifetime of disciplined study, he had narrowed the 339 rules of correct writing in the typical freshman reader down to two.
Rule number one, he told his students: "See what's there." And rule two: "Tell the truth."
See what's there and tell the truth. "Pay attention," Father Bonn was saying. What else is there to an education? The good lawyer, the good doctor, the good carpenter, mother, father, have become good at their jobs because they have learned to pay attention to smaller and smaller clues.
I erased my own blackboard of comma splices and fragments and dangling modifiers. Father's students found these simple rules very hard, for we Americans are restless. Lest we should miss something, we rush around the world collecting airports while overlooking our own back yards. Every catalog has something new to order.
The painter, Cezanne, once remarked that he could spend his whole life painting from one spot, just by turning from left to right. That's what Father Bonn taught.
At this very moment, in the northeast corner of your own back yard, what battles are taking place in the perennials, fight for life between spider and fly, robin and the worm, what news from the front lines of the marching red ants? Is the high castle in the apple branches safe? If you don't stop and see what's there, and tell the world, who will?
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
