Little things are bigger in a place called home

I was in my hometown the past few days—getting to see people I love, do things I enjoy, visit places I cherish. 

I spent time with my parents and my young adult grandson, I attended a writer’s workshop and concert at Carl Sandburg’s birthplace, and I visited two libraries that helped in many ways to nurture my interests and provide resources as I completed my late-in-life college degree. 

It’s funny how such things, which appear small on first glance, can be so large when viewed through a stronger lens. 

My parents, as do I, continue to grow older – no brilliant observation, but one that grows clearer over time. Our time together, because of this, becomes more precious with each visit.

My grandson, once in our lives day in and day out, has grown up and no longer lives in the same community in which we do. It’s a joy to get to know the older him as he discovers who he is and where his life will take him.

The Sandburg Days writer’s workshop, an annual affair for me for a number of years, has become with distance a rare treat. Yet each time I attend, regardless of presenting author, I grow myself as a writer – and remember with renewed clarity how much and why I love what I do – putting words on paper.

Something that I find most encouraging about Galesburg’s event in honor of its hometown poet is the way the “Festival for the Mind” celebrates a diversity of arts, from poetry to photography, from encouraging budding writers to showcasing gifted musicians. It’s a special treat when one of those musicians happens to be a high school classmate come back to the ‘Burg to play a few tunes. 

I can’t remember a time I didn’t love books or libraries – from the first ones my mother read to me as a small child, to the ones I chose from book order forms in elementary school, to the diversity of genres I’ve savored as an adult. 

One thing is certain. No matter what community I called home through the years, one place always made it so – the library. And, of all the libraries I’ve visited in the past six decades, two stand out above all others – the Galesburg Public Library and Seymour Library at Knox College. 

At tables in the corners each of these repositories, I took sanctuary so I could study in tranquility. In the stacks I found books about subjects I was assigned and those I enjoyed. I savored and used as reference volumes about regional topics, looked with longing at names of people from West Central Illinois who worked with words – Carl Sandburg, Earnest Elmo Calkins, John E. Hallwas, Martin Litvin and more. 

As I did, I often mused, “Someday, perhaps, my name will be found upon these shelves.”

Though it still doesn’t appear as author, today I delivered to the archives at each library a volume I had the privilege to see even before it was a book – “Abraham Lincoln Traveled this Way: The America Lincoln Knew“ with photographs by McLean County’s Robert Shaw and narrative by Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame. 

Way in the back, on a line that credits those who helped to edit the copy, you’ll find this name: Ann Tracy Mueller. 

It’s a little thing – that string of 15 letters and two spaces – but gigantic to a former Galesburg resident who hoped for a half-century to add, if even a little, to the literary tradition of her hometown. 

In a way, perhaps, I have. 

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2013

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Galesburg’s native son celebrated on PBS special tonight

About a year ago, while I was still living in Central Illinois, my husband and I drove one evening from our home south of Bloomington to Champaign for a long- anticipated viewing of filmmaker Paul Bonesteel’s documentary, “The Day Carl Sandburg Died.” 

A student and enthusiast of Sandburg’s work for several decades – one who has two Sandburg Days trivia contest trophies to prove it – I’d eagerly awaited the film since I first learned of Bonesteel’s work on the six-year project. My husband, not a Galesburg native, became a new Sandburg enthusiast that evening, thanks to Bonesteel’s magnificent rendering of the poet’s life and legacy.

Tonight, Monday, Sept. 24, at 9 p.m. Central Time, you, too, can see this film. 

At the Champaign screening last year, Bonesteel announced that he’d just learned the film would be featured on PBS’s American Masters, something the filmmaker had hoped for since he first began work on the project chronicling the touch of the Galesburg-born poet, author and Lincoln biographer, and troubadour. 

Sandburg, the son of Swedish immigrant parents, born near the railroad yards where his father worked dawn to dusk seven days a week , captured a great deal of Galesburg history and the story of his early years in his autobiographies, “Prairie Town Boy” and “Always the Young Strangers.” He also captured the living, breathing soul of early 20^th Century Chicago and its people in his poetry. 

Early morning walks across Galesburg’s Knox College campus, home of an 1858 debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, where he’d stop “in winter sunrise, in broad summer daylight, in falling snow or rain, in all the weathers of a year” to look at the plague commemorating the debate, aroused an interest in the 16^th President so strong that it led Sandburg to write a six-volume Lincoln biography.

And I’ve only touched upon the man and his work…

Whether you’re a Sandburg enthusiast as I am or know as little as my husband did before our trek to Champaign last year, you won’t want to miss the film this evening. 

Paul Bonesteel is also a lifelong Sandburg enthusiast, one with roots not in the prairies of Central Illinois, but in the mountains of North Carolina, where Sandburg made his home for several decades at a home called Connemara. The large Civil War-era estate where Sandburg did much of his later writing is a National Park Service site with trails, mountain overlooks and goats descended from Sandburg’s wife Paula’s herd. It’s a delight to visit.  

What impressed me most about Bonesteel as he worked on this project for more than six years was his diligence, moving ahead with the project though he didn’t have a stamp of approval, commitment or funding from any major network, capturing interviews with creative legends such as Studs Terkel, Pete Seeger and Norman Corwin, connecting with Sandburg’s grandson John Carl Steichen, who shared never-before-seen family video footage. 

What impressed me once I saw it was Paul Bonesteel’s gift as a filmmaker, his ability to put a storyteller’s story on film with a depth of detail, passion and artistic talent that parallels that of the Galesburg-born poet we both admire. 

“The Day Carl Sandburg Died” airs tonight, Monday, Sept. 24 on PBS at 9 p.m. Central Time. Watch the trailer and learn more here: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/carl-sandburg/homepage-the-day-carl-sandburg-died/2267/. 

The film is sure to create a new appreciation for Sandburg and his work. 

Don’t miss it.

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2012  

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