Alfredisms

The Polk Progress was a Nebraska treasure that ceased publication in late 1989 after 82 years as a weekly newspaper. From 1955 until its last issue, the editor and publisher was the late Norris Alfred. In its last few months, the Progress had 900 subscribers in 45 states. Alfred was a remarkable Nebraskan with an uncanny eye for connecting the present with the future. Prairie Fire has collaborated with the Alfred family, the University of Nebraska School of Journalism and the Nebraska State Historical Society to locate and archive many of Norris's writings. We are capitalizing on our good fortune to present many of the Norris Alfred writings to our readership. We believe that his observations are as fresh and relevant to today's world as they were when originally written.

“Polking Around”
Oct. 24, 1974

While bird watching one noon we were walking a stretch of graveled road and caught sight of an old tone in a ridge of gravel. Ira Glasser had told us how he sometimes found arrowheads and pieces of worked tones in the gravel spread on roads and we always have that in mind when on gravel and occasionally turn our attention from the roadside bushes, grass and fence to the road surface.

This stone has the shape of a small human ear, though we know it never was. A narrow ridge makes an almost complete and perfect circle on both sides, broken at the thin edge of the “ear.” Within the circle is a darker brown round blob than the brown of the stone. Between the blob and circle are tinges of orange. The circular blob is full of minute convolutions, indicative of a life center that pulsated, and perhaps breathed, millions of years ago.

It was the unrocklike circle design in the stone that caught our eye. Life has shape and there are the remains of life in that circle and its hard blob. It has once been alive and is probably of marine origin when Nebraska was an inland sea. It is a time-sculptured memorial to life’s continuity. Its antiquity is humbling. The stone is an example of a Great Truth. To live is to die.

A 103-year-old man was reported, on a television news broadcast, to have chewed tobacco for 90 of those years and to have indulged occasionally in alcoholic drink. He had a simple explanation for death—“Your days are numbered and when they’re up, they’re up.” This is also an adequate explanation for length of life and is probably the reason he never worried about tobacco and alcohol “shortening” it. His rationalization of death can probably be described as logical considering his age.

Not so logical is the complaint of a woman who was prevented from making a suicidal leap from the Golden Gate bridge by several soldiers. We can’t locate the Lynn Ludlow story but think she said, “I’d be safe and dead now if those heroes hadn’t come along.” She was intent on shortening her life (the number of her days was too many) and to chance being a fossil. Loren Eiseley observed in “The Immense Journey” that we are all potential fossils.

We look at our stone and know this is the perfect cemetery marker. It records both life and death and shows its form.

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