RIP Hassler, Abigail, and Agatha McGee

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Two lights have dimmed and flickered out in the heartland, and their passage needs noting.

The author Jon Hassler was a renowned Minnesota author, beloved for his tales of Staggerford and Agatha McGee and simple truths of living that transcended their small town settings and ordinary-seemingness. Minnesotans have a way of doing that. As more nationally well-known Minnesota cultural lights have also done, Garrison Keillor, the Coen Brothers, among them.

Staggerford is just up the road a piece from me this evening. Oh, the map makers might know it better as Park Rapids…or Bemidji…or…

There is a sweetness and beauty to small town America that too-often gets overlooked. These are the towns that raise the men and women who fight our wars and our floods.

The big media go looking for dark instead of light. Allentown. If you listened to the media today, you’d think it was all a town of bowlin’ rednecks barely hiding their “biases.”

Tonight, I prefer to believe that Allentown, too, has its Agatha McGees.

Late in life, Hassler takes his beloved character on a journey to Ireland to meet the pen pal she’s corresponded with for years only to learn he’s a priest who’s led her along.

We can still learn, late in life. And be the better and wiser for it.

A much younger light was Abigail Taylor, a child of six. She sat on a swimming pool drain and had part of her guts sucked out, and went thru organ transplants and testified before Congress and then succumbed to a cancer that can too frequently strike those who have organ transplants.

Her journey was much briefer in time than 74-year-old Hassler, who died of a chronic Parkinson-like disease. Much briefer than the life of Agatha McGee in Staggerford and on her Green Journey.

But she had a lesson to teach us as pure and honest as the lessons Hassler, the former schoolteacher, taught in his writing. That people matter.

That honor and honesty matter.

That the corporate “cost of doing business”--which a swimming pool manufacturer rationalized as justified not to fix a known flaw—is what Agatha McGee would call a sin.

Their passage dims life for all of us, and we note their lives with reverence…and tears.

And the hope that justice is done, for Abigail’s wrongful death, for all the people who are forgotten by the corporations and the Very Important Villagers as a “cost of doing business”--in war and in life.