Scribblings from Memory

Parkinson's Black Cloud

2012-01-22T09:53:00.001-06:00

Parkinson's Disease forces a person to face their mortality every day...
Photo Credit: Salon / Shutterstock

My father had Parkinson's. He was diagnosed with in not long after he retired. At first, the symptoms were hardly noticeable, and with low doses of medication, didn't affect his daily life much at all. But as it always does with the disease, it progressed. Medication dosages increased, and despite them the signs such as decreased speech volume, trembling, and general weakness heightened. Mom tried not to show it, but she grew angry, taking it very personally. To her, Parkinson's was a very real enemy, and she resented the fact that just as Dad and her were not only alone, but free to travel and enjoy their golden years, there was a black cloud over them.

In 2001, my sisters and I found out that Parkinson's was taking a heavy toll on both Mom and Dad. We brought Dad and Mom came back from New Mexico for good., I didn't know I had so little time left with him.

During the quiet moments when Dad and I were alone, he would share with me what it was like to have hallucinations, a common side effect of his meds. How, although he knew he was awake and "they weren't really there", he often saw wee, little people sitting on the end of his bed, or climbing up his dresser. He said it was a surreal experience, something he couldn't explain away. I asked him how he dealt with it. "I just watch them, remind myself it's not real." What else could he do?

Dad had a dignity and pragmatism about his growing frailty. He cherished Mom while at the same time being very concerned for her, recognizing that the mental health concerns and emotional weakness he had long been aware of, was now growing stronger for her. He had been shielding her from their consequences as much as she had been helping his due to Parkinson's. They were a team.

Dad went first, only a few months after their return; in the end, it was his heart that gave out. Mom went with him that day...but her body held on for another six years.

Violated

2012-01-11T15:27:00.000-06:00

I was groped once, aggressively groped. I was coming out of science class in high school. I and two boys were the last to leave class. The boys were brothers. One came up behind me just as I was exiting the science room and reached around and grabbed one of my breasts. I stopped dead, then he let go, walking on with his brother, both laughing. I stood there for a minute, then went into the girls' lavatory just down the hall on the left. I didn't understand what just happened, not really, but I knew it wasn't right. My first reaction? Anger. Anger at being violated. I never told anyone that time, but if it had ever been attempted again, I would have...

Clotheshorse

2011-12-30T13:45:00.000-06:00

The Clotheshorse, aka drying rack. I grew up using one, and have had one one off and all my life. I now am using it exclusively for all my winter drying and to supplement my clothesline drying in the summer when necessary. It saves a considerable amount of money on our monthly electric bill, and provides much needed (and appreciated) humidity in the home...

Coop

2011-12-26T15:55:00.000-06:00

Coop Door - 2010 [Click to see larger version]

Grape Vine Ivey is growing on, and INSIDE, the chicken coop of mychildhood homestead.

Once, at age 3, I chased a cat through that door...

Brick Wall

2011-12-06T15:27:00.000-06:00

Carpenter: A few of my Great
Grandfather's tools...

You could tell my Grandma was a daughter of an Irish carpenter; she knew how to design, build and repair just about anything.

I still have her father's carpenter saw box, and use it to hold books I'm reading. It's dark with age, but still strong. His old saw is with me now, too, inherited from my parents after they broke up housekeeping. The wood handle has a soft patina from years of use.

William Fitzgerald married a Prince Edward Island wealthy farmer's daughter, took her half-way across a continent to Minnesota, where they did whatever they had to, to make a living. I know very little about him, but what I do know is not good. He was known as "...a man of intemperate means", and died that way - run over by a train, 5 years after his wife died shortly after giving birth to their 14th child.

Mom had told me that one time he came home and Mom was only 7 years old, and was ironing clothes with the old flat irons, and he got abusive with Mom's mother. Mom took after him with the hot iron, threatening him to leave her mother alone. He responded, "And who is going to stop me?" And she said, "I am, and I have two brothers out there looking in the window that will help me." After that, she said he was pretty docile when he'd come home drunk. Mom didn't like her Dad very much. In all the conversations we had during the time Mom lived with me never once did I ask what his father's and mother's names were... - From a letter written to me on May 15, 1990 by my Aunt Pat (Alberta Fitzpatrick)

Article describing my Great
Grandfather's horrific demise,
Hallock Weekly News
Saturday, July 26, 1913
[Click to Enlarge & Read...]

No known photographs exist of either Great Grandpa Fitzgerald or his wife, Elizabeth Clow - it was through following her family line that I came to know what little I do. If it wasn't for his notorious death, a handful of newspaper references of his life, and the tools he left behind, I would have nothing to go on at all.

My great grandfather's end came in a most gruesome, but not entirely surprising, manner. The article to the right describes in graphic detail what became of him. The events leading up to the "accident" are speculative but likely, based on his activity just prior to the event. The Kittson County Enterprise, July 1913, had the following article about the aftermath:

William Fitzgerald, a pioneer citizen of St. Vincent, was run down and killed by a Canadian Northern train near Emerson last Saturday night. Coroner R.B. Johnson was summoned but upon reaching the scene found that although the victim was a Kittson County man, the accident had happened over in Canada, and therefore could not exercise any authority in the case. The body had been so ground up by the cars that the remains had to be gathered in a sack.

When I discovered the newspaper articles about his death several years ago in the microfilms of the Kittson County Museum, I tried to obtain a death certificate for William. According to both North Dakota and Minnesota, as well as Manitoba, none of them had a dead record of any sort on file for him. After reading the above about the confusion at the time of exactly where he died, it appears he fell through the cracks for that particular record!

I have no proof of the following, it's purely conjecture: William's oldest record is a census record in 1881 PEI where he is listed as a farm hand in the Samuel Clow household, with a place of origin listed as "N.S.", or Nova Scotia. Down the list of sons and daughters of Samuel is Elizabeth, who he would marry later that year. I have wondered if he may have been Catholic while the Clow family he married into were most definitely Protestant.

I have attempted on my own to mine the records of PEI and Nova Scotia to no clear end, and I have attempted to hire professional genealogists, who have looked at the case and told me they can't crack him. He is my 'holy grail', my brick wall...

McIntosh Apples' Bicentennial

2011-09-12T12:48:00.000-05:00

My favorite apple is celebrating it's 200th birthday this year.

McIntosh apples, which began in Canada, have mysterious origins.

Thank you, John McIntosh!

Old-Style Hacking

2011-07-09T16:44:00.000-05:00

When I was a little girl, our 'sidewalks' were made out of wood.

To be more exact, the sidewalk was made out of what my Mom and Dad called "grain doors".

When it rained, they were as slippery as snot, which I found out by running on them, only to slip and fall hard on my backside.

Before my folks put the grain doors down, there was no sidewalk at all. The doors were what people nowadays would call a hack - a creative solution to a need, often using recycled products. Back then it was called common sense and making do.

Hanging Clothes

2011-06-11T12:56:00.000-05:00

We dried everything on the line when I was growing up.¹

Today, I'm hanging clothes out for the first time this spring. The weather is iffy, but I'm going for it. I figure if they get wet, it's rain water, the best there is...and they'll dry eventually.

I love it all out on the line. And I actually LIKE the stiffness line drying can put in things like sheets. At least the old-fashioned heavy cotton white ones. The ones you buy now are so limp and wimpy - they are not as heavy and don't last as long. I decided to find some and did (online) - linen, heavy weight, white, and a bit pricey. But they will be well worth it if they are as advertised. They'll last, and we'll enjoy them while they do.

Nothing stopped my Grandma Fitzpatrick
from hanging clothes - not even a flood!

Once again, I will jump into a bed made with freshly dried sheets - not just the smell of the outdoors but the stiff crisp FEELING of them.

¹ - We used to find twigs and worms and other bugs snuggled into the creases as we took items out of the basket and folded them. All part of the process.

Mom's Sewing Machine

2011-02-13T13:23:00.002-06:00

I learned to sew on this machine...
[Photo: Betty Jean Short Thorsvig]

Earlier today, my sister Betty posted about our mother's old Singer sewing machine. Mom passed it on to Betty, and over the years it has served (and still does) her well. They don't make 'em like that anymore. It's the one I learned on.

Workhorses, that's what the old Singers are. Solid metal throughout, working parts made with clockwork precision. My Mom always said, keep it clean and well-oiled, and it'll serve you all your life. But they're more than workhorses - they are things of beauty.

I remember when I joined the Humboldt Stick-to-It 4-H club. I was 9 years old, and I did two projects - food and sewing. For sewing, I had to demonstrate I had learned the goals of the project by sewing a simple garment; I chose an apron. I was entering the strange world where you had to measure once then measure again, and precision was preached. Exactness was the gospel, and nothing less than aspiring to (and hopefully achieving) excellence would do. There were right and wrong sides to fabric, you did not 'go against the grain'. If you were daring enough to choose a complex pattern, you soon learned the art of matching so a pocket would blend in like camouflage. Inset sleeves and zippers were years away.

I completed that apron - a purple, green and white floral calico print - on my mother's old Singer.

"Make a wish..."

2011-01-16T10:20:00.004-06:00

From our recent chicken
dinner roast - Bill won!

A tradition my family practiced, not only at Thanksgiving, but whenever we had a chicken throughout the year, was drying the wishbone, then later pulling it for a wish.

1917 Recipe

2010-12-27T13:05:00.002-06:00

Hand-written recipe by Elizabeth Jane (Fitzgerald) Fitzpatrick,
my grandmother - used in the "Economy Cookbook" of 1917,
put out by the Ladies of St. Vincent...

Transcription of text in document

War Cake (Eggless, Butterless, Milkless)

Put in a saucepan 1 cup raisins, 1 cup sugar, scant 1/2 cup lard, 1 1/2 cups water, 2 teaspoonfuls cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoonful of cloves and nutmeg, pinch salt.

Boil them for five minutes and when cool add teasponful soda dissolved in little warm water, then add 2 cups of well-sifted flour with 1 teaspoonful of baking powder.

Bake in a shallow greased pan for 30 minutes in a moderate oven.

Hinterland's Who's Who

2010-10-14T17:39:00.003-05:00

I grew up listening to Hinterland's Who's Who on CBC television. These nature viginettes were spellbinding to me, because they were focused and short. Ahead of their time, really. The haunting theme¹ immediately catches your attention, and you never forget it.

¹ - The original Hinterland Who's Who music is called "Flute Poem" and was composed by John Cacavas

MN90: The Greatest Minnesota Athlete to Run on Four Legs

2010-09-08T14:24:00.004-05:00

MN90: The Greatest Minnesota Athlete to Run on Four Legs

My father often talked about Dan Patch, the great harness racing horse. His father saw him race, and he grew up hearing about him. We had a love of horses in common and often watching horse racing on TV (I began following the Kentucky Derby in 1970) and we tried to attend the harness races every summer at the Pembina County Fair in Hamilton, ND...

Dad's War

2010-08-21T02:00:00.003-05:00

I first found out that my father had been a soldier when I was a little girl watching television with him one night. The show was Combat!, a World War II drama set in the European Theatre of the war. I was in awe of the characters on that show, and learned about the Second World War through it. Dad shared he had been in that war, but in the other main area of it - the Pacific Theatre.

Later, as I was growing up, occasions came up where Dad would share a little bit more about what he did in the war. I noticed my Mom was a bit concerned about Dad talking about it, saying it might bother him. I found out when he first came home from the war, he had nightmares, sleepwalked, etc. One dream he would have, Mom said, would cause him to mutter '...no place dry to sleep', recalling time spent in foxholes during tropical rains. He'd get out of bed sometimes during those dreams and try and get into dresser drawers to sleep, as if it was a dry corner of the foxhole he had found. He'd thrash around during his sleep, waking Mom and she'd try and help him calm down. Even after many years, by the time he was talking about it to me, there were times I could see tears coming to his eyes as he recalled a friend named Alabama having his head blown off in front of his eyes.

So learning about Dad's experiences in WWII came slowly. As years passed, he would talk about them more. I interviewed him in high school when I started being more active with family geneaology (I hope to make available online his oral histories someday...) During family gatherings, he'd sometimes talk about it with my brother-in-laws, and I'd stick close by to hear what I could. Later, he recorded memories on tape and wrote many of them down on paper. I learned many of his army buddies' names - Alabama, Wassing, Sickles, Stoneroad. I met Wassing - Marv Wassing - a few times when I was a little girl. Later, when Dad and Mom had their golden wedding anniversary, I attempted to invite Marv and his wife to attend, but he was very ill. Dad and I called him on the phone and spoke with him for awhile. It was the last time they spoke - Wassing died a few weeks later.

Dad had lost contact with Stoneroad. He mentioned often how he'd love to get in touch with him again. In the late 1990's, I made it my mission to track him down. I did a lot of searching online, including military reunion groups. After a lot of research and many emails, I located someone who knew how to get in touch with him. I emailed a relative, and soon we had his current address and phone number. I passed it on to Dad, and shortly thereafter Dad called Henry Stoneroad, his old friend. Stoneroad was very surprised - but pleased - to be hearing from Dad. Tentative plans were made for them to meet as soon as they could. Ideas were tossed around. Alas, due to circumstances and Dad's decreasing health, they never were able to meet in person. They spoke a few more times on the phone, but that was all. I'm still thrilled to have been able to get them back in touch with one another...

Dad was in the 127th Infantry of the 32nd Division, or the "Red Arrow Division". When Dad was with the 127th, they were involved in the campaigns in New Guinea, Philipines, and mainland Japan (occupational forces...)

I loved my father for many reasons - he was a loving, gentle man with a quiet sense of humour and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. His humble beginnings and later life may appear unremarkable, but he was anything but. He showed me how a man should love a woman, by the loving and warm way he cared for my Mom (and it wasn't always easy...) I was very proud of him.

Not long after we lost Dad, I discovered the Veteran's History Project. I sent for their Project Kit, filled out the paperwork, and sent it in with a DVD of his voice and images, plus copies of his written memiors. They are now part of the official record in the Library of Congress...

Army Buddy

2010-08-18T11:21:00.007-05:00

Second row from the back, third from the left, is my Dad, Gordon Short. In second row, fifth from the left, is Henry Stoneroad, his friend. In same row as Dad, two to his right, is Marvin Wassing, another good friend of his from his Army days...[Click to enlarge]

In early 1999, I was doing family history research on my father's military service in WWII. I began wondering if a buddy of his that he would often talk warmly about was still alive. I began researching his unit, found a website with forums for veterans of his unit, and posted about Dad and Henry, hoping against hope someone would see it. Someone did. Henry's nephew contacted me months later, and I called him and we talked, he explaining that his uncle was still very much alive and well. I passed on Dad's contact information saying I know my Dad would love to hear from his uncle.

A little while later, in August 1999, my Mom called one Saturday. She told me that Dad's buddy Henry C. Stoneroad, Sr., had called, and they had just spent the past hour talking. They were so glad to hear from one another after over 50 years! They planned on keeping in touch and trying to visit one another in person. Dad and "Chief" (as Henry was commonly known then) were in two training camps and overseas together. Henry was a sergeant in the supply/transport unit Dad drove truck in for part of the time overseas. As they talked, they remembered Henry as a leader who tried to give less chancy assignments to men with families. He was a Oklahoma Pawnee, and worked all his life for the BIA when he got home, just retiring in 1986 around the time Dad did.

In 2000 there was a national reunion of the 127th Infantry, and ironically it was held near where my parents lived by that time (Truth or Consequences, NM) in Albuquerque, NM. Due to poor health, Dad couldn't make it, although he would have loved to. My nephew did on his behalf, but to our knowledge, Henry wasn't there either. I don't think Dad or Henry were able to get to visit one another in person, but I hope they had a chance to talk again a time or two.

My parents' health began failing in late 2000, and we brought them home in early 2001. Dad passed away that August. I am so very thankful I was able to given him and Henry this last gift to one another...There is a level of camaraderie and friendship that people develop when in war together that the rest of us cannot know. I can only imagine and honor it, which is why I did what I did. I wish I could have met Henry, but I'm sure glad my Dad did...

NOTE: Just today as I was researching this post, I came across an academic article “They Had a Chance to Talk to One Another . . .”: The Role of Incidence in Native American Code Talking, written by Dr. William C. Meadows, on the subject of Native Americans in WWII, particularly code talkers, but also others that used their native languages for war purposes. Henry was featured in it!

I hadn't been sure if Henry was still alive, but he definitely was in 2006 when this interview took place. Dad may not have known everything Henry revealed, but I have a hunch he knew about some of it...

Although not all Indian servicemen in World War II were fluent in their native language, for many, their first or native language was their tribal language (Meadows 2002). While in basic training at Camp Roberts, Henry C. Stoneroad Sr., a Pawnee, was instructed that he could not declare English as a foreign language. “That’s what I was telling everybody and of course we always laugh about [it]. When I was in Camp Roberts they called me in and they were like, ‘How come you say that your foreign language is English?’ When he told them that he only spoke Pawnee before entering the local Indian school, they instructed him to change the form he had filled out. “And they said, ‘No, change it because you’re an American soldier...’ So that’s why I had to change that. I didn’t have any foreign language” (Stoneroad 2006b).

The following case demonstrates a recently documented example of incidental code talking among the Pawnee in World War II. This event occurred on Luzon, in the Philippines, in June or July 1945. While relieving troops near Tarloc, in a valley leading to Cabanatuan, Platoon Sergeant Henry C. Stoneroad Sr. (1st Cavalry Division, 112th Regimental Combat Team, Reconnaissance Troop) encountered Sergeant Enoch Jim (Company C, 33rd Division) as Jim’s unit was leaving the front. They greeted one another in Pawnee and visited for a few minutes. As Stoneroad described:

Yeah, we met. It was just a chance meet. In other words he was coming out, like I say he was coming out and my—our group was going in. That’s when I met him. And we saw each other and we talked, you know, “hello,” and that sort of stuff in Indian together. And we talked for a little bit there and then he had to go. They were going back and we more or less likely were relieving them and we were going up. (Stoneroad 2006b)

When their orders for the following day were issued, Stoneroad realized that his squad would be entering the same area that Jim’s unit had just left. Later that evening Stoneroad had his radio operator call Jim’s unit to see what information they could provide on the area they had just withdrawn from. Stoneroad’s operator reported that he had a “sergeant chief” on the line. When Stoneroad took the radio, he recognized Jim’s voice and the two began talking in Pawnee with one another. Jim was able to warn Stoneroad of a unit of around 150 Japanese. Stoneroad described the conversation:

That’s where, that evening is when I had an opportunity, a chance opportunity to talk to him on the radio...He was able to warn me about the number of Japanese troops that were in that area...that night we was more or less you might say waiting or getting ready to move out early [the next] morning. And that night I asked my radio operator, I said, “That bunch that just came out, why don’t we try to get a hold of them and see if we can’t get some information on [the area]” you know. That’s the first thing I thought about, how many troops was up there or where were they concentrated and that sort of stuff. We had sketches of a lot of that stuff but a lot of that stuff in the past had proven, you know, it wasn’t like they said...And the operator said, “Well let me let you talk to Sergeant Chief, he’s here.” And that’s when they said well they’ve got the sergeant there, Sergeant Chief or something like that. Well when I got the thing [phone] that was the first thing I told him in Indian—Pawnee—was our way of saying ‘Is that you?’ And when he said, “Yeah,”...you know he told me in Indian, [in] our language, that it was him. Then I ask him about the troops that were up there and if he knew. And he said, “Yeah I know,” and then he told me in Indian, he said, “Don’t say Japanese in our Indian language you know like you say slant eye.” [That’s] just how we said about the Japanese, say Germans so if anybody is listening that might decipher anything in our language they would think we were talking about Germans or something like that. So that’s the way we talked. Then I asked him how many were in there? I’d ask him in Indian if it were a lot of them or was it not too many. And he said it was a lot. And then I asked him in Indian, “How many?” And then he told me it was around about, at that area, there was about 100–150. And we were going to walk right into them if we hadn’t of gotten that information. So that’s where we made a roundabout turn and outflanked them all the way. But if it hadn’t been for me talking to him maybe a lot of us wouldn’t have made it. (Stoneroad 2006b) And that’s the way we were going. In other words we’d have walked right into it or went right into it if we didn’t go on around. So that’s my story of when I talked to him...But like I say, he saved a lot, he saved a lot of my men by doing that. And that’s my part of talking Pawnee. Now we wasn’t trained for it...But us, mine was just chance talk. But we did talk Pawnee...and I know other tribes did the same thing; they didn’t have companies or anything like that but they had a chance to talk to one another. (Stoneroad 2006a)

This information allowed the three American squads to avoid a potential ambush and to outflank the Japanese unit. As Stoneroad explained:

I think there were about three different squads and we were the ones that were going to go right square into where the enemy was the thickest. If we hadn’t of found out then we would have walked right into them. But we managed. We skirted around to the left and outflanked them from the left. The other two squads went around the same way...We bypassed them and more or less got them from the rear you might say. (Stoneroad 2006b)

While Stoneroad attributes this one instance of using Pawnee in combat to coincidence, it demonstrates how other similar situations likely occurred and that it was natural for individuals, upon establishing contact with a fellow tribesmen on the radio, to switch to their native language whether visiting socially or conveying important information. As Stoneroad remarked, “That’s the only one, the only time that I used it for war purpose. Now I had met others in different places and...you know we talked Indian. We’ve always talked Indian if we meet somebody that will talk with us, you know” (Stoneroad 2006b).

The Swing - Revisited

2010-08-05T00:11:00.000-05:00

Oh, the stories those rings could tell...

This photo was taken (by Bill) this past weekend of the old swing tree - if you look close, you can clearly make out the iron pipe my Grandpa put there many, many years ago, which the tree has long ago grown around, and the rings still around the pipe, just waiting for someone to re-string it with some good rope and make it a swing again...

Dust in the Wind

2009-12-17T13:52:00.001-06:00

I sometimes drift in thought during my days. Daydream. Reflect. Streams of consciousness. Memories come flooding in from dark and dusty corners of my mind. With each of them comes a feeling, a mood, a smell, a taste. I am there again, it brings back the feelings of isolation that play off the feelings of freedom that the isolation allows, yet I realize I am lonely also. I like the power the isolation gives me to do what I want to do, but I want to share it with someone and often there is no one to share it with. I learn as I grow up to entertain myself within worlds I create in my mind. I am my own best friend, yet I yearn for much more. Here I am 50 years later, and the melancholy is still here, permeating everything in my life - my work, my friendships, my lovers. Even in the midst of happiness, I always look over my shoulder as if I'm being chased by catastrophe. Life is hard, my Irish grandmother always said. Many of us fool ourselves otherwise, but I think my Grandma had it right. That's why despite my seemingly 'doom and gloom' attitude, I actually treasure the precious moments I get in life more than most do. At the same time I treasure them, I realize they are slipping away. Solomon said it - all we are is dust in the wind...

My Health at a Glance

2009-12-01T14:47:00.002-06:00

Procedures:

Post endoscopic sinus surgery (Dr. Tsen in Fargo)
Post Tonsillectomy
Post gall bladder removal surgery
Post kidney stone removal

Conditions diagnosed with:

Interstitial Cystitis (IC)
Raynaud’s Phenomenon
Sjögren's syndrome
Hypertension
Hypothyroidism

History of:

Chronic bladder & kidney infections
Chronic sinus infections
Irregular periods
Periodic Amennorrhea

Chronic anemia
Constipation (sometimes impacted, sometimes small hard balls, sometimes thick, dark, and tar-like)
Deep tissue pain
Numbness of toes/ball of foot
Periodic Plantar Fascitis
Hear arrhythmia
Anxiety

Medications:

Atenanol (Hypertension & heart arrhythmia)
Elmiron (IC)
Evoxac (Sjögren's)
Restasis (Sjögren's/eyes) (Dr. Scheel in Fargo)
Levothyroxin (Hypothyroidism)
Generic Flonaise (Periodic Rhinitis)
Prevident (Sjögren's/dental)
Premarin (Peri-menopausal vaginal dryness//thinning tissue)
Nexium (GERD)
Paxil (Anxiety)

Humility

2009-06-27T15:43:00.007-05:00

The man who lives in the home I grew up in - the home my mother grew up in - the home my grandparents built - told my cousin Delphine (when she visited up here last month), that "...the garden grows best where the horse manure was, the horse the girl that used to live here had..." It was interesting to hear myself talked about in the abstract, second-hand, from my own cousin, from a man I had once met a couple of years ago myself, but have never known his name. He doesn't live in our old house anymore, telling my cousin that the house needs too much work and costs too much to heat, but he does putz around the place almost daily, and grows a garden on the land.

I wonder what will eventually happen to the old place. The yard, and the woods beside it, will most likely, eventually, consume the house and outbuildings, as they fold themselves back into the ground from whence they came. Like so many abandoned buildings and cities, it will be as if they never were. How fleeting it all is, and how humbling...only existing, in the memories of those of us still alive...

Finding Your History

2009-03-30T22:28:00.001-05:00

Irish Mouth Music

2008-03-16T16:36:00.006-05:00

My Grandma Fitzpatrick, and my Mom Harriet, both would sing and whistle a lot as they performed their work during the day. It was a way to make the work less a drudgery, and help pass the time in a more pleasant way. A long tradition in many cultures, my Mom and Grandma would sometimes do it in a very specific manner known to many of Irish heritage; they were a kind of Irish 'mouth music', with much 'diddly dee'-ing and other sorts of amusing sounds. I always loved to listen to them and have attempted to recreate them, but I think I am a poor reflection of how they did it...

Corny and Proud of It

2008-01-29T16:34:00.000-06:00

"Yeah, Man!", my Dad used to say, when he was expressing delight, especially about a meal he was about to dive into. My sister Sharon also has been known to say that, and sometimes I hear myself saying it, and immediately think of them, that it is _so_ 'us'. Our family has many little sayings, way of talking, of relating, and little rituals (as opposed to traditions, which we also have...) We would probably be called corny and quaint by many, but those same people probably secretly envy us corny people. They see how happy we can be doing simple things like having a good conversation, breaking bread together, etc. We don't need fancy cars or guns or motorhomes, although the more affluent our family gets, the more junk we _have_ admittedly accumulated. However, I still see very thankfully an acknowledgement, even among the younger generations, of what is truly important: Each other...

My Daughter's Memories

2007-07-21T10:35:00.000-05:00

Prologue
I always knew my parents didn't get along. Some of my earliest memories were of my Dad and Mom fighting. Sad, huh? Years later, after they divorced, I still thought my Dad was one of the best people in the world (you know how kids think...)

I thought of him this way even though I had memories of him sniffing cocaine and treating my Mom like dirt. I didn't think of him differently until after my brother and I stayed with him the summer of my 12th birthday.

I guess I was like my brother - I tried to deny it.

Chapter I - The Reunion

"He's here," my Mom yelled.

"He" was my father. He had come to pick my brother and I up for the summer. Boy, was my brother and I excited!

"We're coming," I replied.

We raced up the stairs into our father's arms...

Strong to the Finish

2007-07-19T18:32:00.001-05:00

An amazing DVD set is coming out honoring the greatest cartoon character ever (in my humble opinion) - Popeye!

I spent many afternoons glued to the TV watching old Popeye shorts in reruns on a local independent TV station with my Dad. If only Dad were here to watch these restored to all their glory...

School Bell

2007-07-05T16:51:00.000-05:00

I recently attended a class reunion. Actually, it was much more than a class reunion; it was an all-school, all-class reunion, done at the same time as the town's centennial (which I have found out - long story - is something of a mystery since there are other dates considered to be when the town was established, incorporated, etc., but I digress...)

The photo here is of a new memorial, dedicated during the weekend celebrations. It is on the site of the old school, which does not exist any more. Except in the memories (and my dreams...yes, I dream often of walking the hallways of my old schools...) of former students, etc.

What was really strange is coming across an old teacher who I swear looks younger than she did when we were in high school.

It was amazing to talk to old classmates, and meet 'new' even older former students. I finally met Michael Rustad, without whom this site would not exist. I also met Allen Ahles, who assisted me with some of the Ahles family history on this site. And of course, I not only met, but stayed with, Chuck Walker, whose story of his ancestor is being serialized on this site.

All and all, an amazing weekend I will never forget!

Humboldt School 1906-1956
Humboldt-St. Vincent School 1956-1991

Dedicated to all the teachers, administrators, students, custodial and transportation personnel who so faithfully served
and attended this school.

Bell monument provided by Garylle B. Stewart, Class of 1958. Construction and installation of Bell by Wayne G. Stewart, Class of 1964. Masonry work by Steve Olson and Grandson Construction, Fargo, ND. Bell saved from school and provided by long-time residents Curis W. Miller and Brad Hemmes.

Dedicated at Humboldt Centennial and All-School Reunion,
June 22-23, 2007.

Trivia: The bricks forming the base of the memorial were once part of the old-wing of the Humboldt School

A Walk in the Rain

2007-06-17T20:10:00.001-05:00

Arrangements were made for the cremation. This morning it took place. My companion and I met Tom the undertaker, at Riverside's crematorium at 8:30am.

We met the two men who do the cremations. We watched as the box with Mom's remains was taken and placed in the furnace. I thanked the men, and Tom, and we walked away.

It was gently raining, and as we approached the car to leave, I asked my companion if he'd mind taking a walk through the cemetery. We got our umbrellas, and proceeded.

I don't often have a chance to walk through a cemetery when it's raining. No wind, so amazingly quiet, peaceful, and empty...except, of course, for the silent city around us.

The huge, old trees throughout the cemetery made me think of home, the home my mother lived in most of her life. It, too, had great old trees surrounding it. There's something amazing about trees, and seeing such trees gave me comfort as I glanced back at the crematorium and saw the waves of heat rising out of the chimney on top.

As we walked past the gravestones, we noticed white-tailed deer further on, one standing, and one beyond that was laying down under a tree. I watched them watch us.

We turned a corner, then another, heading back to the car, when we noticed a small flock of birds in the distance coming out from behind the mausoleum. Wild turkeys, a small band of males. We headed up the small hill and around the building, and caught them as they disappeared behind, shaking their feathers, looking up, and stepping ahead under the falling rain.

It was a magical morning walk, a very special walk I will never forget...

Still Life

2007-05-08T13:25:00.001-05:00

Still Life from JoshFlowers

Writing our Family History

2007-04-15T15:00:00.000-05:00

An amazing book called Battersea Girl is out. It's about a woman who lived a century, what she saw and did for those 100 years, written by her grandson. As one reviewer puts it, the writer "...doesn't do a lot of embellishing or pontificating. He lets his grandmother's story speak for itself."

Child of Television

2007-04-15T02:06:00.000-05:00

"There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to... The Outer Limits." — Opening narration – The Control Voice – 1960s

As a fellow couch potato (and proud of it!), I have been feasting at the altar of TV since 1962. I cut my teeth on such entrees as the original TWILIGHT ZONE and THE OUTER LIMITS, which gave me delightful nightmares and set my imagination on fire.

I remember being chastised by my Mom for procrastinating at getting dishes done after supper because of running back and forth between the kitchen and the living room so I could catch snatches of DANIEL BOONE or TIME TUNNEL or VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA.

Yes, I have watched the bad with the good, but I like to think my 'bad' was still better than most. Speaking of which, I now bow at the altar of TiVo, which has allowed me the heretofore unimagined ability of customizing my viewing such that I pack even MORE into my viewing regimen. Between reading, writing, TV, online, etc., it's a miracle I have time to work or sleep...zzzzzzzzzz....

Pastor Ericson

2007-04-09T20:47:00.000-05:00

The above photo is one of many from Joan [Ericson] Swanson. Her father was Pastor Ericson, who served as pastor at the church I grew up in, the St. Vincent Evangelical Free Church (now known as the Pembina EFC...) It started out as a small non-denominational group that came to be known as the Valley Community Church. At some point they affiliated with the EFCA. Anyways, back to the photos and Joan...

I was doing a search on Flickr to see if there were any images posted from my old hometown area. Lo and behold there was. It was an image of a home I didn't recognize at first, but after contacting the user found out it was the parsonage, and she was the daughter of a former pastor of my old home church. In fact, her Dad served from 1957 to 1959, and was the one that conducted the dedication ceremony for me as a baby.

Although I never knew the Ericson family, I felt I did in a way thanks to my parents talking about them. Pastor Ericson had a special place in my parents' hearts since they were led to dedicated themselves and their family more to the Lord due to his influence. Pastor Ericson lent a helping hand and showed Christian love in practical terms, when assisting my father in building a much-needed addition to our humble home. It was acts like that, that cemented in my parents' minds that their faith was more than words.

I contacted the user, who turned out to be Pastor Ericson's daughter Joan. During our brief exchanges since then, she has kindly posted more photos of their years in St. Vincent, including group shots of the St. Vincent EFC congregation, choir, and parsonage, and a few of the town itself.

What the term 'Free Church' means; also, "Forerunners of the Swedish Evangelical Mission Covenant were the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Ansgar Synod and the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Mission Synod. When members of the two synods dissolved and the Swedish Evangelical Mission Covenant was formed, some of those who did not enter the Mission Covenant formed the Swedish Evangelical Free Mission (now the Evangelical Free Church of America). The Evangelical Covenant Church maintains ties with the Swedish Mission Church (formerly known as the Svenska Missions-förbundet; see Svenska Missionskyrkan and CIPE), and the other churches in the International Federation of Free Evangelical Churches." - From Answers.com

"...I'm Popeye, the Sailor Man!" TOOT TOOT

2007-02-08T17:05:00.000-06:00

Great news for Popeye fans! There is a fantastic Popeye website that a fan like myself has put online, and I want to share it with you, dear reader, whoever you are.

Popeye will always have a special place in my heart because of my Dad.

"Button Up Your Overcoat..."

2007-02-06T23:29:00.000-06:00

Mrs. Isley was the wife to the agent at the depot in Noyes where my Dad worked. She was also a school teacher. She was my Kindergarten teacher.

The things I remember about Kindergarten are:

- Mrs. Isley singing Button Up Your Overcoat and encouraging us to sing along

- Learning the letter U's "short" sound - she taught us by using the example of what happened when you tried to lift a bucket full of sand - "...ugh" She had me demonstrate it in front of the class

Mom's Plum Pudding

2007-01-03T12:57:00.000-06:00

My Mom did a spectacular plum pudding* (which is somewhat similar to fruitcake...but not really...!) She was carrying on a tradition that her mother, my Grandma Fitzpatrick, had done before her.

She always shopped for the best suet fresh from the butcher's, dried fruits, etc. over in Emerson. She canned some every year, and it was like wine, getting better the older you let it sit. At Thanksgiving or Christmas, we'd pop open a jar, steam the pudding until it was warm and plump, and then pour one of the two homemade sauces she made - lemon and caramel/butterscotch over the top of each serving - it was amazing. Sometimes, she even hid a coin in one of the servings to make it more fun!

* AKA Christmas Pudding; while my mother's pudding was heavenly, not all puddings are created equal...

"Only Available in Canada?...Pity!"

2006-12-31T23:16:00.000-06:00

A wonderful article by Sean Paajanen that I reproduce here in full (since it is the ONLY article I have found that encapsulates Red Rose tea history so well, and who knows if it will be online for the long-run...) about one of my great simple pleasures in life - RED ROSE TEA...

Red Rose is a well known name in tea, especially in Britain and Canada. The company started in Canada, but in more recent years has split into a US version and a Canadian version. Some say the tea is the same, but many think the Canadian Red Rose is superior. I have to agree, and I'm not just saying that because I am Canadian.

The company was started in 1894 by Theodore Estabrooks. He dealt in the import and export of various commodities, but felt that tea was his future. During the first year of business, he only sold $166 in tea. Even with such weak beginnings, he did not give up. In just 6 years, he was selling over a thousand tons of tea per year.

The Red Rose brand was born in 1899 when Estabrooks met M.R Miles (who was a member of a prestigious tea-taster family in England). They came up with the idea to create a blend of Indian and Sri Lankan teas, rather than the more common Chinese and Japanese teas. The result was a rich and flavourful tea, that they sold under the name 'Red Rose'.

Their tea quickly became a household name around New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (their company was located in Saint John, NB). And Red Rose's popularity also spread down into the New England states. They were so successful, that they expanded their product line in 1901 to include coffee.

In the 1920's, Estabrooks met Gerald Brooke, of Brooke, Bond & Company. They became friends and when Estabrooks made the decision to retire, he sold his shares of the T.H Estabrook company to Brooke, Bond & Company. He wanted his share of the company to go to someone with the ambition to carry on the Red Rose legacy.

After WWII, Brooke Bond expanded to create Brooke Bond Canada. This new company established new packing plants in Montreal, but kept the original facility in New Brunswick.

Unilever acquired Brooke Bond Canada in 1984, and the plant in Saint John, NB was closed. The plant is still there as a heritage building. The remaining US business of Brooke Bond was acquired by Red Rose USA Management, who was then bought out by Teckanne in 1995. I won't pretend to understand the nuances of big business, but the end result was that Red Rose had become two separate entities, a Canadian one and an American one.

Even non-tea drinkers, would recognize Red Rose as the company who made those little figurines that people are still trading and collecting today. My grandmother had a collection too. I wonder what ever happened to them?

Note of Confusion: I am not the only one that is confused about Red Rose Tea history!!

Tea Granny

2006-12-14T17:27:00.000-06:00

My grandmother, and all her friends, used to get a kick out of my love of tea. I would insist on my milk in it, as taught to me by Grandma, and of course three sugar-spoon spoonfuls of sugar, mixed just right...then I would ceremoniously and most carefully sip my tea spoon by spoon, blowing on it a wee bit to cool, then slurp it up with gusto. "You're quite the tea granny, Patricia Kaye," Grandma or Toots would say, as I sat at the little table in the kitchen. It was right by the back door with the frosted glass showing a scene of a hunter with his dog in the woods. Behind that door was the back porch, with the wringer washer and the slop pail. That's where Grandma put all her vegetable and fruit peelings, etc., and it had a complex organic odor that I didn't dislike, but definitely identified as uniquely Grandma's. She would use it on her garden in the spring, mixing it in to help the next batch of vegetables grow. She had a small garden by her outbuildings, a line of small sheds in the back yard, ending with an outhouse. Looking out the back door was her clothes line, which she used year round, even in the winter. I learned from her that clothes could also 'freeze dry' just like coffee! I even have a photo of her standing in a boat hanging clothes during a flood. I tell you, nothing could keep my Grandma down. She was a stubborn and persevering Irish woman if there ever was one. Life experience had taught her that if you want something done it's best to do it yourself, that God helps those that helps themselves, and that hard work never hurt anyone. She had a lovely touch about her that people remembered for years afterward, whether it was because they had stayed at her Fitzpatrick maternity home under her care, or knew her as a town resident and neighbor in another capacity. Her friends could count on her, and she was generous with her hospitality and time. I knew her for far too short a time, and of that for even shorter when she was still in her prime; but I remember enough to have been inspired down through the years by her, and feeling very blessed to have known her, and to have had many days and even nights where I spent them with her and got to see her make many things with her hands - amazing baked goods, knitted mittens, embroidered dish towels, scrumptious meals, or ingenious wheelbarrows made out of what was at hand (including tricycle wheels for the front wheel...). She had a strong large body, and wore her hair long all her life, always up in a top bun during the day out of the way, but down at night and brushed well before bed. In later years I got to help her brush it out. Only at the end, when she was tired and in the wheelchair, did she allow it to be cut, and even then under protest. I think it was one of her only vanities, being a fairly plain woman. I can surely understand that and not begrudge her. But she was a lovely woman all the same, and I smile to think that Grandpa saw that too, those many years ago when he admired her carpentry handiwork upon meeting her...

Grandpa's Blindness

2006-10-17T00:48:00.000-05:00

I was lucky enough to know my Grandpa Fitzpatrick. I say lucky enough for a couple of reasons. For one thing, there was a large gap between when he was born and when I was born, relatively speaking when compared with the average; he was born in 1876, and I was born in 1959, making him 83. However, fate was kind, and I was able to know my Grandpa for 6 years before he passed away.

Another reason I was lucky to know him, was because he was a very special man. Of course, I never knew him when he was younger and in better health, but the kind of man he always was, I was told, was manifest in my experience with him - kindness, intelligence, wit, a great sense of humour, and a very loving human being. A great reader, appreciator of music, hard-working, loyal. My few surviving memories of the time spent with him, are very precious to me.

One aspect of my experience that was unique was that he was blind for much of the time I knew him, so in reality that is the only way I remember him. I don't recall that being an especially limiting handicap for him, as he taught himself well how to get around his own house and yard, and appeared to enjoy life as much as ever.

He became blind through a unfortunate accident. Grandpa and Grandma Fitzpatrick (my mother's parents) were visiting Grandpa and Grandma Short's (my father's parents) home. He asked where the lavatory was, was directed to a door down a hallway, and - unfortunately - mistook the wrong door for the bathroom. He assumed that the door he opened, although dark, was simply the bathroom without the light on. It was actually the basement door, and as he stepped forward, he fell, hitting his head upon landing. In the end, that accident caused permanent blindness.

I remember admiring the cane he used, and being quite amused by his joy in the simple pleasures of life - good food, good conversation, being outdoors and feeling a breeze on his face...and even a good backrub against an old oak tree in the front yard. His example as a man, a person, and as a partner that showed much affection towards my sometimes cantankerous (but loving) Grandma, made a lasting impression on me that I have never forgotten...

KCND

2006-09-24T21:35:00.000-05:00

KCND was the name of a television station in Pembina, North Dakota, which first signed on in 1959. KCND was purchased by Winnipeg, Manitoba businessman Izzy Asper in 1974 and relocated to Winnipeg; the station signed off as KCND for the final time on September 1, 1975 and signed back on as CKND later that day.

OK, that's the very short, official history of KCND. But MY history of the station runs a bit more like this...

- Chiller Thrillers! Mom and me, Saturday night, stay up to midnight, scared silly and loving it, chomping away at homemade buttered popcorn; we couldn't get enough of Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, or the old Hammer films with Christopher Lee & Peter Cushing, all thanks to scratchy old films KCND ran.

- Saturday & Sunday afternoon movies! All the classics from Errol Flynn's Robin Hood to Abbott & Costello Meets Frankenstein (I have never laughed harder before or since...); we didn't need cable or Turner Classic Movies - we had KCND programmers who got ahold of bad copies of great films and we the audience were all the beneficiaries.

- Christmas Concerts! All area schools would be invited to come and present mini-concerts on "Live TV", as a community service to the viewers at Christmas time.

- I met my first best friend! Thanks to KCND, I met a great friend when her Dad moved their family from Indiana to take an announcer job in Pembina where we met at a church youth group.

KCND Trivia: A modern pop band named Typewriter - once known as The Lucy Show - one of whose members lived in our area and grew up listening to KCND, eventually wrote a song directly relating to KCND, an homeage to their beloved Saturday night horror film series. It is aptly named, Channel 12 Chiller Thriller (KCND 10:30)!

The Piano

2006-08-26T20:27:00.006-05:00

I grew up with a piano - it always a part of my life. Before I was even born, my family had the piano. It was first owned by my grandfather's brother, my great uncle Dick. Eventually it found its way to my parents' home, where my sisters learned how to play on it. Then one day I wandered up to the tall bench, looking up to the even taller upright, its oak wood golden, and its brass foot peddles heavy and mysterious. I crawled up and pressed the white and black keys, and was delighted by the sounds they made. My older sister showed me how to play a song with her, a silly song, but fun, and I laughed with her. She told me it was called 'Chopsticks'. I had learned my first song...

When I was in second grade, my mother found a piano teacher in Emerson, Mrs. Forrest. She was very strict, teaching from the Royal Conservatory of Music (Toronto) style. She stressed proper body posture - how I sat, how I held my arms, wrists, and hands - and never ever let me forget to keep those hands up. An arched hand was a happy hand; a lazy hand got a ruler. "Never look at the keys," she would drill into me. I found out that for every song you played well, not only were hours practiced on that composition, but many more hours were spent dedicating yourself to the mechanics that underlay each piece of music: The Notes! Hours were spent learning each key white and black, each octave, how keys connect; scales, arpeggios, the Latin terminology, reading music, learning the history of the great composers.

While I initially lived a little in fear of Mrs. Forrest, I learned to respect her, and eventually realized she gave me an incredible grounding in the basics that I benefited from throughout the rest of my training.

Back to the piano.

The piano was a Bush & Gerts*, one of their tall uprights. I didn't notice that right away. To me, it was just a piano. But as I learned how to play, I began taking a pride in the piano I was playing on. For instance, the piano case was made out of the most beautifully-grained oak. The white keys themselves had a swirling translucence that I learned was for a very good reason - they were made from real ivory, something that is illegal nowadays (for good reason...) It became one of my chores to dust and polish the piano, and I always made sure it was done impeccably.

I took a peek under the top door one day...it was like another world. I pressed keys and watched the action - the hammers, the dampers, the frame itself with all the strings. It was also then that I noticed a fascinating label, in gold, that talked about the famous Exhibition in Chicago many years ago, and how this piano was made by a company that won awards there.

It was then, when looking even deeper inside, that I discovered handwriting near the top of the soundboard, above the strings. It was like a time capsule, dates and names of tuners over the years all the way back to shortly after my uncle bought it, all written in pencil.

* - Bush & Gerts pianos were manufactured in one of the largest and most thoroughly equipped factories in the world. The company controlling the Bush & Gerts was one of the strongest in the piano industry and the aim was to sustain the distinction which the instruments have gained in the long and persistent reaching out for perfection in tone production. In the ware rooms of the foremost piano merchants of the world the Bush & Gerts pianos were presented as instruments worthy of the highest and most discriminating trade. The Bush & Gerts factory was located at Rockford, Ill.

Grandma was not amused...

2006-07-31T07:29:00.000-05:00

The Volstead Act of 1919, named for its author, Minnesota senator Andrew Volstead, made provisions for Prohibition's enforcement, but it contained loopholes that invited abuses.

Somehow, I don't think that writer meant my grandfather, but in his own little way, Grandpa Fitzpatrick was flouting the law of the time when he was making beer during this time period, using honey from his bees in the process. They lived in the north part of town, a bit off the beaten track and somewhat private. Maybe Grandpa thought it would be OK if he kept it low-key.

Grandma wasn't thrilled about the idea, since it was illegal at the time, but she put up with it...He was even known to sell a bottle now and then to someone. Grandma herself, after a hard day's work, would drink a bottle against the heat. However, one day Grandpa crossed the line...On that day, my mother, who was around 9 years old, was uptown with my grandma visiting friends. Upon their return a few hours later, they came upon this scene...

Walking up the road to the house, we came upon an unbelievable scene: Men, women, sitting around, having a good time...drinking Grandpa's beer! It was a regular outdoor honkytonk. *

Well, if you only knew my Grandma, you could imagine what happened next: She was not amused. People knew my Grandma well enough that just her arrival meant they had better clear off. As they did, she proceeded to grab the remaining bottles of beer within her reach and smash them against the side of the shed.

* - Harriet Short (my mother)

Sunsets

2006-06-19T21:30:00.000-05:00

My recollections about sunsets in my hometown are many and varied, as are the sunrises, the northern lights, or the sky itself, whether it be going on forever on a fine summer day bright blue with white popcorn clouds, or pitch black night with stars shining so bright and many that you couldn't believe there could be that many suns who were the people who lived around those suns my Mom and I speculated as she pointed out the constellations sunsets were long and varied, some orange and pink some red orange and purple others casting a magical glow that turned the landscape and everything in it a golden color as if someone had put a filter over the sun itself in winter the cold would make rainbow sundogs in so bright it hurt days and rainbow northern lights danced across black skys so deep the sunsets lasted long, past 10:00pm, and you went to bed with the sun still peeking over the horizon saying goodbye for today see you tomorrow some nights could would join the sun and the colors would play behind them like giant shadow puppets in the sky sometimes they were so beautiful my mother would stop gardening or my father would stop mowing or I would stop playing and we would say to each other look how beautiful the sunset it and we would look in awe it never got old

Radio

2006-05-26T15:54:00.000-05:00

My grandparents had this box I thought was so beautiful, the grain of the wood on the back where it wasn't painted. I wondered what it was - there were telltale grooves in the inside, and holes in the back; for years, all I knew was that it had been a radio once, that it had been painted over multiple times.

When first married, I talked my parents into letting me have it, and I stripped it down to the bare wood - boy, that took a lot of elbow grease! The effort was definitely worth it, though - I revealed a beautifully-grained wood underneath! I oiled and varnished it, and used it for years to store doilies and afghans in. Recently I came across a website with images of old radios and saw it. I recognized the shape immediately. It had been a Freshman Masterpiece radio. A bit more research and I found it was probably a 1926 model...

Grace

2006-04-08T19:51:00.000-05:00

I grew up across the field from the town cemetery. My grandfather was the caretaker, and later my father. It was a part-time, voluntary town position which they gladly undertook. I think both of them enjoyed the solitude of the cemetery and felt it was a duty worth doing.

My Mom would walk with me up and down the aisles between plots, teaching me to respect the graves and not walk on them, not to mention they could sink in from settling. We'd talk about who some of the people were, some were relatives, some she had known. Some she didn't know. Both she and Dad would show me subtle depressions in the grass in the lower portion of the cemetery that indicated those that were pauper graves, unmarked and forgotten by most. My grandfather had shown them where they were, and I in turn now knew. I often wonder if anyone back home knows anymore.

I've been doing some research on poor farms or poor houses in Minnesota, and it brought to mind those graves. Listening to this documentary touched me greatly, and made me think how there are always those among us, as Jesus said, that need a helping hand. There but for the grace of God go I...

Grandpa's Swing

2006-03-07T21:45:00.000-06:00

The Swing...the hours spent in it, on it, swinging, sitting and twirling, laying back hanging on looking through the trees, at the sky, at the trees, noticing the iron bar the big oak trees had grown around, that Grandpa Fitzpatrick had placed there many years ago when my mom was a little girl, the iron rings still there, never changed, only the ropes when they wore out, or the wooden seat our family would make and notch and put onto the rope just so…jeanie with the light brown hair…walk right in, sit right down, baby let your hair hang down…the woods just behind you, the tips of the trees brushing your legs and back on the backswing, dragging your feet in the well-worn dirt path to stop, jumping off into the pile of leaves in the fall that Dad would make just for you…hearing Mom whistling in the house making supper…walking from the swing to the house, crunching acorns under your feet…dew on the grass on early morning swings when Mom would be by the clothesline hanging the clothes, whistling, the bright morning sun making the white sheets so brilliant you can hardly look at them, spiderwebs gleaming, worms hanging, dandylion seed floating, distant crows cawing…year pass, and there are your own children, swinging on that same swing, the same iron bar, the same iron rings...there comes a day when the auctioneer sounds in the front yard and strangers look through your things, your memories, and you quietly walk past the crowds to the swing and take one last swing before leaving it to your past, and walking on...

2006-02-07T17:35:00.000-06:00

What life was like when I was 4 years old...

Chickens, Smoky chasing chickens, me chasing Smokey chasing chickens...fitting through the chicken house chicken door and squeezing through between the gate and the fence (was I ever THAT small?!)

Butcher shop and bakery and luthweit druggist in emerson

Mccall's in pembina, george's store in st. vincent, sawatski brother's in emerson...hardwood floors and high tin ceilings, bolts of cloth so high it took ladders and hooks to bring them down to measure and cut

Visiting dad at the depot, big trains smoking and clanging and squeeling and chugging

Friehboldt's garage scantily clad women on calendars in the pits where oil ran black and slick and a grape soda was only a fridge door and 10 cents away

Collecting bottles of candy money, collecting acorns in cider jugs for grandma, following dad and big sisters while they mowed cemetery

'helping' in the garden, hoeing, collecting raspberries, going out on chokecherry pickings in the river woods

Milk pods and birds nest and blue robin eggs

Neighbor cows and horses, high pasture grass, dragging the road and nuisance ground runs

St. vincent fair, quansot hut bbq's and pies and 4th of july parades

Church potlucks jumping off the high church front steps, basement Sunday school, prayer meeting circles all heads bowed who prays first? Amen.

Running away, on my tricycle, running away to grandma's house, Mom running after me, me hiding in the woods in the ditch by Skjold's pond, Mom sounding so sad and desparate but me so mad I won't say a word if it kills me

Climbing the storm-pushed, might oak tree, fallen by the clothesline, shouting see me see me up here mom, up here mom continues to whistle and hang clothes she's younger than I am now were we ever that young she and I?

It's all like it's yesterday and all like it's another life and all like it's yesterday I want to go back there was something so NEW so amazing, so possible...

2005-12-19T21:53:00.000-06:00

I often wonder what happened to all the cool stuff that Grandma had left over from her Maternity Home days - stuff like the breast pump I saw once - a real antique version if I ever saw one! It was made of glass, I think, the 'horn' part that went over the areola, and the pump part made of rubber I think was rather old and brittle. I saw it once when snooping in her bathroom, I think it was in her sewing machine cabinet that was in there at the time...I think I saw a bedpan and maybe even a urinal (but that may have been for Grandpa later on...) I also always wondered why in the world she had a prism like they would have in a scope in a submarine, in her buffet drawers!

2005-11-29T10:16:00.000-06:00

When attending Bible College in the late 1970's, we were required to do two things in addition to our studies - something called gratis (non-paid work to support the campus like kitchen duty, janitorial, library work, etc.) and service (community volunteerism of some sort...) On the service side, I visited the elderly at area nursing homes. Mrs. Tawes (pronounced tayvs) recounted 3 husbands to me, the first who died by a freak accident early on; the other two she also outlived. She told me the first was the love of her life. She also said that when she looked in the mirror it seemed like a stranger to her, because she remembered what she looked like when she was young, and to her that was the real her. She said that she still felt 16 in her heart and mind, despite what the body was. I have never forgotten that.

I've been listening to stories recorded by regular people like myself across the USA, in mobile booth run by StoryCorps, stories like this man who, like Mrs. Tawes, feels young, despite being old.

I've been doing as much documentation of ordinary people and places from my own life experience as possible. I want to share with my friends, family, and even strangers who we were, what we were, and that we all have much to offer one another in one way or another...

2005-10-08T17:12:00.000-05:00

'Uncle Mark Miller' brought me from the station with his ancient buggy and what he calls his 'generous purpose' horse. He is a nice old man and gave me a handful of pink peppermints. Peppermints always seem to me such a religious sort of candy -- I suppose because when I was a little girl Grandmother Gordon always gave them to me in church. Once I asked, referring to the smell of peppermints, 'Is that the odor of sanctity?' I didn't like to eat Uncle Mark's peppermints because he just fished them loose out of his pocket, and had to pick some rusty nails and other things from among them before he gave them to me. But I wouldn't hurt his dear old feelings for anything, so I carefully sowed them along the road at intervals. When the last one was gone, Uncle Mark said, a little rebukingly, 'Ye shouldn't a'et all them candies to onct, Miss Phil. You'll likely have the stummick-ache.'

- from Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of the Island

The 'pink peppermint', or the English mint as it's sometimes called, is actually flavored with wintergreen. It was a favorite of mine and it seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth now.

I will forever associate them with my Grandpa Fitzpatrick, and how he fed them to me...along with whisker rubs and sloppy kisses, calling me his 'little girl'...

"I'm so tired of gray worsted and sensible things. Of course I can't have a tree, an' I don't suppose I really want it; but I'd like somethin' all
pretty an' sparkly an'--an' silly, you know. An' there's another thing I want--ice cream. An' I want to make myself sick eatin' it, too,--if I want to; an' I want little pink-an'-white sugar pep'mints hung in bags. Samuel, can't you see how pretty a bag o' pink pep'mints 'd be on that green tree? An'--dearie me!" broke off the little old woman breathlessly, falling back in her chair.

Ella was the first to speak. "It's too bad, of course, but never mind. Mother'll see the joke of it just as we do. You know she never seems to care what we give her. Old people don't have many wants, I fancy."

Frank stirred suddenly and walked the length of the room. Then he wheeled about.

"Do you know," he said, a little unsteadily, "I believe that's a mistake?"

"A mistake? What's a mistake?"

"The notion that old people don't have any--wants. See here. They're having a party down there--a party, and they must have got it up themselves. Such being the case, of course they had what they wanted for entertainment--and they aren't drinking tea or knitting socks. They're dancing jigs and eating pink peppermints and ice cream! Their eyes are like stars, and Mother's cheeks are like a girl's; and if you think I'm going to offer those spry young things a brown neckerchief and a pair of bed-slippers you're much mistaken--because I'm not!"

- From Eleanor H. Porter's When Father & Mother Rebelled

I found this link today on a Canadian site I will try. I am abound and determined to track them down...

Roots

2005-09-11T17:25:00.000-05:00

My great grandparents emigrated to Canada from Ireland. I was born in Canada (to Americans, and raised in USA…) I attended university in Canada. I vacationed there. I learned many things about different cultures, foods, and ethnic groups there that were not available where I grew up in a tiny rural village in northern Minnesota. I hope to visit again, especially the Maritime provinces such as Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, two places my ancestors arrived and first lived in…

See more progress on: Canada

2005-09-04T15:10:00.000-05:00

On my Dad's side of the family, his mother being Norwegian, he attended Lutheran churches as a child, what little he did attend. His mother was the one who saw to it, when she could. His father was a very profane, abusive, and unreligious man, right to the end. He could be somewhat pleasant, but even I, who knew him not that well, was never very comfortable around him. Everyone else who did know him better, including his own son my father, painted a very negative picture of him. At one point, when my Dad was still at home but was a young man, he had to lethally threaten his own father to prevent him from beating his mother to death. My Dad is a sweet guy - he could have been a wife beater himself, but turned out just the opposite - a kind, thoughtful, inquisitive, funny, inspiring man.

However, I learned later in life that my Dad may have had a dark side.

My daughter and his granddaughter, Eva came to me in 1989 when she was around 10 years old after kids club at church one night. She slowly told me with great difficulty that my Dad had been molesting her.*

I supported Eva and gave her the benefit of the doubt from the very beginning. I felt to do otherwise would not only break trust with her, but put her at a very possible further risk. In my heart, I couldn't be sure, but that said, I couldn't be sure either way; with my Dad's family history, it's quite possible something like this behavior could come out for any number of reasons.

I reported it to the authorities, and my father was notified by his local county sheriff that my county was aware of the allegations. However, since I was not pursuing a private action, it was not up to me to file charges, but up to the local county attorney where my father lived. They chose not to.

I did use my church and they used their church, setting up a meeting in Grand Forks midway between us with both our pastors present. We talked many things out, and aired concerns, but I never did get a definitive denial OR admission of guilt from my father.

Dad cried a lot, wanting to know if I would ever forgive him. He was very broken up about it, and concerned about my love for him. He asked specifically if I had lost my love for him.

I wrapped my arms around him, and said that even if I never knew the answer, I can live with it. That was my way of allowing him not to have to admit it, right or wrong, I just let him off the hook. "God knows, and you and Eva know. I forgive and yes, I love you."

I put parameters on Eva's being alone with them. For a year or so, she was never allowed near him. Then we visited together. The next two years she spent a week or two alone with my folks during the summer, and she felt OK about that.

It was very hard for Eva to tell me because we had lived full-time with my folks for 18 months in 1985 to 1986, and had lived near them when she was a toddle, so she feels very close to them.

Eva has told me long ago that she forgave her grandfather, and she feels similar about her own Dad (another long story, for another time...); I was concerned for her that she may have been negatively affected in a way that would affect the rest of her life. However, so far she has risen above it with her love of learning, excelling academically, and finding a wonderful life partner in her husband Meran.

She deserves it, God bless her...

* While it never went to full penetration of any sort, it did involve heavy fondling of the lower body and digital penetration, which was plenty traumatic enough...

Circus Train

2005-07-23T20:57:00.001-05:00

The greatest show on earth...

One of my early memories is one night my father working a late shift at the depot, and calling Mom to hurry and come over there. Very unusual for him to do. Mom didn't tell me why, wanting to surprise me.

When we got there, it he took us out back, on a deck by the tracks. It was pitch black, but a clear night with stars twinkling overhead as I looked up. As my eyes adjusted, I looked straight ahead and noticed a stopped train. I could hear the engine down the line idling, and once and awhile I could hear a car shift and bang against the next one. I soon could make out smells like a farm, and colorful pictures on the sides of the cars.

"It's the circus train," my Dad said, a smile in his voice.

"Really?" I exclaimed, all wide-eyed.

"Yep...it's the Barnum and Bailey, Ringling Brothers, too - the Greatest Show on Earth - see it on the train?"

There it was, in large bold letters, along with pictures of elephants and clowns and horses.

"Can we go closer, Dad?" I asked.

"Sorry, but it's just made a quick stop before going into Canada. You can't board, and it's too dangerous to go closer."

I was disappointed, but that passed quickly. Just to get a chance to see the train was magical. I knew it even then...

2005-06-24T22:48:00.000-05:00

I grew up in 'the church'.

Someone from the area I grew up recently asked me,

"...One of the things I have been dying to ask you is how you were able to transcend the narrow world view of the Evangelical Free Church. My sisters are members and it seems to be a narrow, constricted and very boring way to live. I cannot imagine myself going to a Bible College or even spending one hour with this group. I really resent the way that the Republicans use the evangelicals. I cannot imagine how JC would be giving tax breaks to the wealthy, plundering the environment, or really any of the policies. How have you been able to find the balance and have an interest in books, art, etc. other than the Holy Book? My sister [censored] in particular sees everything through that lens, but [censored] at least does not press it on me. I would like to understand more about how one can be an evangelical and see other dimensions of life."

I answered him after some thought...

"I admit I'm not your average joe in the EFC church, but I know there are others like me in the church. I am not 'in' the church anymore, but still consider myself a Christian of sorts. Mostly out of habit, I admit. I mostly tell people that nobody knows anything and to say otherwise is pure arrogance. I think atheists are just as bad as fundamentalist anything else. 'Believers' can be very narrow-minded no matter what their agenda. One thing I liked about some of the stuff I grew up with was that there was truth in some of it that made sense to me then and now - 'all have sinned' - ain't it the truth!"

2005-06-07T00:06:00.000-05:00

As we grow older, even as we face our parents' mortalities, we face our own.

I was reading about the home funerals movement tonight, and it made me think about how ever since my Dad passed away, and I was involved in helping with his 'arrangements' for the funeral, it has made me rethink everything I ever assumed about the end of life and how it is handled. I've spent a good deal of time researching what the laws are on how bodies can be handled, what are the legal methods of disposal of a body, and what rights I have as an individual to have a say in how my body is disposed of when I die.

I've taken steps to have my body used, then disposed of, in what I feel is the best way possible. I want to share anything useful of my former 'house' before it rots and is no more, by donating anything that can be reused for others whether that is an organ or tissue or whatever. I want to spare unnecessary and wasteful expense by having my body either donated for a medical student to dissect, or if nothing else, cremated. After reading the article on home funerals, I can imagine how nice it would be if people had a chance to really meet and say goodbye to me, to have a chance to heal, to be 'up close and personal' with my old body, macabre as you might think that sounds.

Personally, I find it comforting to have the chance to be near someone I love after they leave their body. I watched as my own father died, the life going out of his body even before the last breath was drawn, and I could easily see he was long gone, to where, no one knows, because once you are 'there', you don't come back to tell anyone. Anyone that says otherwise is just guessing, don't let them fool you. Some hope for the best, prepare for the worst, while others ignore it. Whatever you believe, it's just that - a belief, and not a fact. Time will definitely tell...

2005-04-11T23:04:00.000-05:00

My Grandpa Fitzpatrick curled. I never had a chance to see him on the ice - at least I don't remember him on the ice - but I do remember at least once being taken to the St. Vincent curling rink on a very cold winter day, and sitting on some low bleachers, with glass separating me from the lanes of curlers. I was very small, and thought it would be heated, but it wasn't. I was so busy trying to keep my little hands warm in my mittens (knitted by my Grandma Fitzpatrick), that I didn't watch much of the action. At least that's the way I remember it.

The rink was only a block away from my grandparents' home, down the same road that if you took if a few block more, led to my own home. My home used to be their home; they built it, in 1906. Later, they sold it to my parents, and moved 'uptown' to a house on the main street of St. Vincent, Minnesota, our little village. The town pump was right outside the curling hall, and there were times, when I was small, that Grandma had me fetch a pail or two of water from the pump. Sometimes, it would take many pumps to get the water going. Other times, it was stubborn; that was when Grandma taught me about 'primeing the pump'. Like magic, water would come forth again...

Later, after Grandpa died, I would spend more time with her. Grandpa's old bed in the porch, that he took naps on, was now passed by on my way into the main house to hang out with her while she baked, or outside while she hung clothes, or gardened. Grandma loved to putter around her yard, especially her sheds, and create useful things out of leftover lumber and other parts.

A memory I'll never forget is how she included me a wee bit in creating a homemade wooden wheelbarrow, and then made a larger one for herself to use around the yard to haul trash, tree cuttings, weeds, etc. to be burned or whatever. She used old tricycle and baby buggy wheels for the wheelbarrow wheels, making her own frame, handles, wheel assemblies/axels all by hand, out of wood scraps. You could tell she was a daughter of an Irish carpenter. I still have his carpenter's saw box, and use it to hold books I'm reading. It's dark with age, but still strong. His old saw is with me now, part of what I inherited from my parents after they broke up housekeeping in 2001. The wood on the handle has a soft glowing patina from many years of use. Great Grandpa Fitzgerald married a Prince Edward Island wealthy farmer's daughter, took her half-way across a continent to America, where they did whatever they had to, to make a living. All I know of him besides his carpentry is that he died drunk, run over by a train, ground to pieces and decapitated, 5 years after his wife died shortly after giving birth to their 14th child. R.I.P....

2004-10-15T11:38:00.000-05:00

Just a short comment in defense of gramatical diversity...I for one would rue the day that everyone wrote alike. While there are 'rules' we are taught in school about our languages, our languages are also living, evolving, and vital things that are not static. I welcome all types of communicators, and relish many considered 'wrong' or 'bad'. Not all, but many.

2004-07-05T22:47:00.000-05:00

I was born in 1959. I read this about my year of birth...

Things can change a lot in 45 years. Here are a few things that Americans were saying in 1959:

I'll tell you one thing, if things keep going the way they are, it is going to be impossible to buy a week’s groceries for $20.

Have you seen the new cars coming out next year? It won't be long when $5000 will only buy a used one.

If cigarettes keep going up in price, I'm going to quit. A quarter a pack is ridiculous.

Did you hear the post office is thinking about charging a dime just to mail a letter?

If they raise the minimum wage to $1, nobody will be able to hire outside help at the store.

When I first started driving, who would have thought gas would someday cost 30 cents a gallon. Guess we'd be better off leaving the car in the garage.

Kids today are impossible. Those duck tail hair cuts make it impossible to stay groomed. Next thing you know, boys will be wearing their hair as long as the girls.

Also, their music drives me wild. This 'Rock Around The Clock' thing is nothing but racket.

Pretty soon you won't be able to buy a good 10-cent cigar.

I read the other day where some scientist thinks it's possible to put a man on the moon by the end of the century. They even have some fellows they called astronauts preparing for it down in Texas.

Did you see where some baseball player just signed a contract for $75,000 a year just to play ball? It wouldn't surprise me if someday they'll be making more than the President.

Do you suppose television will ever reach our part of the country?

I never thought I'd see the day all our kitchen appliances would be electric. They are even making electric typewriters now.

It's too bad things are so tough nowadays. I see where a few married women have to work to make ends meet.

It won't be long before young couples are going to have to hire someone to watch their kids so they can both work.

I'm just afraid the Volkswagen car is going to open the door to a whole lot of foreign business.

Thank goodness I won't live to see the day when the Government takes half our income in taxes. I sometimes wonder if we are electing the best people to Congress.

The drive-in restaurant is convenient in nice weather, but I seriously doubt they will ever catch on.

There is no sense going to Lincoln or Omaha anymore for a weekend. It costs nearly $15 a night to stay in a hotel.

No one can afford to be sick any more, $35 a day in the hospital is too rich for my blood.

If a few idiots want to risk their necks flying across the country that's fine, but nothing will ever replace trains.

I don't know about you, but if they raise the price of coffee to 15 cents, I'll just have to drink mine at home.

If they think I'll pay 50 cents for a hair cut, forget it. I'll have my wife learn to cut hair.

We won't be going out much any more. Our baby sitter informed us she wants 50 cents an hour. Kids think money grows on trees.

Dad

2004-07-03T21:41:00.002-05:00

My Dad was in World War II. He passed away in August 2001, and before and after, I pondered that defining time in his life. I pondered it after 9/11, when people suddenly became super patriots, flags everywhere, spouting off about subjects they knew next to nothing about, emotions overtaking what sense they may or may not have had in the first place.

I read an excerpt from a book that sounds like it asks some good questions, and has some interesting things to say, called Homeland. In it, it questions why people react the way they do to defining events.

I love and appreciate America, but I also feel many actions we do can and has been wrong. We that live here should always question what's going on. If that makes me a troublemaker, then so be it.

My Dad loved America too, laying his life on the line many times during WWII. He came back quietly as most men did, no parades, no fanfare. He didn't fly a flag either, but neither did he get angry over it. He just went on with life. But one thing he always taught me not by empty words but by his example, is that you do what you can, you work hard, and you DO ask questions.

2004-06-23T12:04:00.000-05:00

Twenty-five years ago, I had a dear friend move away. We kept in touch through infrequent letters. A few years went by. She wrote me to say she'd joined the Hare Krishnas. At the time, I was a passionate evangelical Christian, young and naive. I was horrified for her salvation and blissfully ignorant of who the Krishnas were.

The last time I heard from her, I was in living in California and she was downwind of me at a base there just having joined the Army, and was in basic training. Alas, the Army didn't care that I wanted to get in touch when I attempting to find out her mailing address (which she had neglected to provide in her short letter...)

I wonder where Carol is now.

It's sad, but at the same time rather nice, how people come in and out of our lives.

2004-05-06T23:07:00.000-05:00

My parents' home was in the north of town, at the end of a long road. They sold it in 1998. Even at that time, when I was there for the auction, it was surreal. Now, 6 years later, I am contemplating a pilgrimage there this summer, and simultaneously look forward to it, and dread it. Of course it will not be like it was. I don't know how to digest how it will be. But I feel I must go...

Going Home is Never the Same

2004-04-25T16:22:00.001-05:00

I have made trips like Chris Ware made. They are indeed, very bittersweet. I find that for myself, I have to make them. I am being pulled right now, to make such a trip. I plan on going alone, with one friend, to the village of my birth this summer. I have to go, I don't have any choice. The pull is like the pull animals feel when they migrate. You just know you have to. I'll be making my pilgrimage to see where I as, who I was, who they were, and reconnect with the past.

Chris Ware says it well...

I am only one of many grandchildren, my grandparents having had two children, my mother and my uncle; my uncle’s children also spent many a night at my grandmother’s house, not to mention my mother, who of course grew up there. Thus, not only are my memories of my grandmother and Omaha not unique, I suspect they are generously gift-wrapped by my special position as a child who could be indulged as one’s own might not be, and through which one’s own regrets might be replayed and ‘fixed,’ perhaps. There were dozens – scores – of times my grandmother would slip and call me by her son’s name, never noticing or even correcting herself. As well, I’m certain I’ve afforded a large measure of rosy joy to swell and spill over into the glass that was, at the time, filled by the dry humdrum of life, running the ribbon of my overly-precious memories against the edge of my mental scissors just one more time to give it that extra, fancy curl. But I can’t help it. And why, when my grandmother decided to move away, did she take me to all the houses she’d lived and grown up in, if not to convince herself of something similar?

I had prepared myself for the visit to Omaha in 2002 with the steely reserve one might save for open-casket funerals; I’d expected it all to hit me like a blast of winter air the second I stepped off the plane, grateful tears filling my eyes and nose, ‘mine homeland,’ etc. – but the actual experience was much more flat than that, almost clinical. The airport had been renovated, expanded; gourmet coffee kiosks, backlit advertisements for cell phones, and travelers with PowerBooks plugged into the wall reminded me that life had indeed continued here since I’d left. Even so, I still couldn’t believe that I was actually here, in the literal city of my dreams; I wanted to stop and grab one of the agreeable Omahans by the turtleneck and say, ‘Don’t you realize how lucky you are? Don’t you know that you’re living in the most magical place on Earth?’

In my shiny red rental I felt like an ill-outfitted time-traveler. The ridiculous plasticity of the vehicle clashed with the felty grey memories passing by and through its windshield at me, one after the other, details missing, others plumped up by my thirsty sentimentality. I drove and redrove routes that I used to take practically every day while living there, from my school to my house to my school to my grandmother’s house, and back again. I took hundreds of pictures. I unrolled the window, trying to smell something I’d forgotten. I stopped the car, got out, and stood. I ate snow. I was looking, listening, for something, my wife patiently weathering my prattling on and on about the amazingly familiar cracks in the sidewalk, the hill down which I used to coast on my bike, the grocery store I’d give every cent I’ve ever been paid to revisit with my mother and grandmother for just one hour.

But the more I drove around, looking to see what was still left of me, I began to realize – intuitively at first, and then more sensibly – that the details I was frantically trying to scrape up, dust off, and pick out of the landscape (and, more often than not, not finding) weren’t affecting me anywhere nearly as deeply – as silly as this sounds – as the curves of the streets and the shapes of the hills and bridges that I was traveling around, over and under. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made, both to my memories of the real place, and the dreams I had about it: houses and buildings and tress looked both strange and oddly unfamiliar, of course, due the time that had passed, but the spatial rivulets that had patiently eaten away at my mind from riding in a car from house to store to house countless times as a child were as real to me as the back of my hand, and as immediately familiar as if I’d just been thinking about them a few seconds before. I could anticipate the crest of a hill or the drop of an alley like the passage in a well-known piece of music; I sensed the turn of a corner like the expected sighting of a loved one in a stadium crown; these routes had eroded unique tunnels in my mind through which everything else in my memory – at least it seemed at that moment – to have been poured, a molten lead of three decades of digested experiences slowly setting into its heavy shape in the intestinal ant farm head of an Omaha Nebraska brain.

When my grandmother was dying in the nursing home in Texas, I was able to witness the steady almost measurable deterioration of both her mind and her personality. All her life she’d been one of the most generous people I’d known, the checks and clipped newspaper strips and frozen boxes of Ho-Hos (unavailable in Texas) arriving at my dorm mailbox just a small part of her largess. She’d given of herself in a way that most people don’t try, radiating a reassuring warmth that preachers and proselytizers talk about but I’ve never felt anywhere they tell me to look for it. But in death, she became alarmingly demanding, petulant, almost spiteful, cruelly alienating herself from my family’s memories of her with an unfamiliarity that was only matched by the bloating of her body and the gradual curling of her limbs. Our phone calls, which had been placed every other day for years since I’d moved away, became infrequent, and eventually were so inchoate that they were more of a torture than a relief.

During her steady decline I continued my weekly comic strip for the student newspaper in Austin, but found that I was only able to draw stories of my increasingly littler mouse wandering alone, through a large, unoccupied house – my grandmother’s house. Every week was a torment of my trying to do something that might mean something to a reader waiting to take a Calculus test and balancing the inevitable erasure of one of the most important people in my life. One of her last nights, when we arrived, I looked in on her, and she was laying there, breathing heavily, the blanket clutched tightly in the wads her fists had become, her eyes and tongue lolling back and forth behind half-closed lids and mouth, the machinery was shutting down, the gears were grinding to a halt. Amazingly, however, the attendant nurse said that the had been talking in her sleep, and intelligibly – and that she said she’s ‘gone back’ to the house in Omaha – but that all the rooms were empty, and that, horribly, she didn’t know where anyone, or anything, was.

She died a day or two later, and my mother and stepfather – I don’t know how they did it – took care of all the ugly details; actually seeing her dead, signing the papers, arranging for cremation, the transportation of the body, etc., etc., et cetera. My life went on, amazingly; I moved to Chicago, started drawing a new comic strip, got married, saw my friends have children, get married, slip up, die. Somehow, things happen, and if you spend most of your life sitting at a table starting at blank sheets of paper, they happen fast.

I had driven by my grandmother’s house already on this trip in 2002, but the tongue-scum beige the church had painted it – not to mention the boxy cinder-block addition they’d attached to the former entry, blotting out the window to the kitchen which was, to me, the center of the house – was more than I could stand to see again. My own memories of my grandmother were already so reconstituted by having seen her dwindle from the vital person I’d known all my life into the demanding patient she became that somehow seeing this house, with which I’d so completely associated her, chopped up and redone, was too much of a parallel fro me, and I’d driven on each time. But here I was. What was I going to do, not go?

Though the house was still there, at least in part, it had ‘cooled,’ for lack of a better work, like the remnants of an exploded start. My every-expanding orbit had taken me back; here was possibly where the most ‘me’ used to be – I could still look at the yard and the windows and imagine myself as a kid, playing, and as a teenager, trying everything possible to grow up faster and get away. But whatever solipsistic wonder I had imbued it with was now static, frozen at absolute zero…

2004-04-19T23:52:00.000-05:00

Tonight I saw a documentary about a tiny village in Russia. So very quiet and simple their life. Early mornings heavy with mist in the low areas, waking up with the dawn, taking care of the animals...

It took me back to my childhood in rural Minnesota and a small village I grew up in. I could feel the dew on my skin, smell the grass and manure, feel the soft velvet of my horse's muzzle nudging my hand as I poured the oats...running back in the cold to the house to grab my books and run to meet the bus way down the road...like it was just yesterday.

2004-03-13T22:54:00.000-06:00

Several years ago, my daughter Eva came and told me something out of the blue one night.

After Wednesday night kids club at church, she told me about her Grandpa (my father) doing things she was uncomfortable with, and he shouldn't have been doing. It involved taking advantage of her closeness when holding her on his lap and touching her inside her panties sometimes.

You have to believe a child and give them the benefit of the doubt in such situations, at least that's what I think. At the time, I took her to the police where they talked with her while videotaping her. The county attorney where I now lived
contacted Kittson county and the sheriff deputy from Hallock paid my parents a visit. No criminal charges were ever
brought, nor did I file any civil action. To be honest, it was difficult enough doing what I did since it involved my Dad who I loved dearly.

My mother and sister Betty got very upset with me for taking it that far, but I felt strongly I had to not only for Eva's
sake so she knew she could trust me that I cared for her, but if it was true, that my father would be held accountable as I feel he should be. Only three people knew the truth - my father, Eva, and God.

In the end, I met with my father in Grand Forks at an Evangelical Free Church there, halfway between Fargo and St. Vincent, together with each of our pastors, and had a very awkward but necessary meeting to try to facilitate getting at the truth, and, hopefully, begin a healing process.

I cannot remember much of the conversation, to be honest. I do remember one thing: When I asked my father point blank if he was guilty of what Eva accused him of, he did not deny it. I also remember that I offered my forgiveness and continued love, and he wept. I guess you can read into that whatever you want.

Eventually, our family healed, as much as you can after something like that. But I never allowed Eva to visit my parents again alone...

2004-02-29T17:48:00.000-06:00

My ex-husband died today. It was his 46th birthday just this past Wednesday. Even though he's never on my mind anymore, part of my past, he's still the father of my two children, and when Eva called today, it was quite a shock, and yet not surprising. He died during the night, afixiating on his own vomit. His own father found him when he didn't get up as usual. He is known to have recently using marijuana, as well as multiple prescription drugs he obtained from various doctors using false ID. An autopsy will be performed tomorrow. No matter what they find out, one thing can be said: If Tom had lived a different life, he would be alive today. For now, I am there for Eva and Daniel. Eva called Daniel, and he did not have much reaction. He was in shock, silent on the phone, mumbling he would come if a way could be found. I hope there is a way. It might be helpful for Daniel to have this chance to visit relatives of his Dad's, as well as see Eva, during this time......

2004-02-11T00:22:00.000-06:00

I never have enough time. To that end, I have fought sleeping for over 20 years, sometimes successfully, but mostly not. I call sleep the living death, stealer of my life. I love night, and how I feel in it. I also love the cleanliness of dawn, how work accomplished in the early morning after it seems to be much more fruitful than a slow magical night of striving. I want it all, but alas my body only allows some.

2003-12-17T22:16:00.000-06:00

...and now, for something completely different...

ChiChai

There once was a gal named Trish
Who had a very strange fish
It could do Tai Chi
It could drink chai tea
And would only grant her one wish

2003-08-05T21:47:00.000-05:00

Aunt Pat's daughter emailed me about a tough weekend...

Had quite a day Sat. as Bill (Mom's boyfriend) took it upon himself to go & take Mom out of the nursing home & take her home. Had a bunch of people pretty shook up. My son Daryl got called & came & told me so all of us went to Mom's Daryl, Audrey, Lee & I.

Talk about a scene. Bill threatened all of us with guns if we tried to take Mom back. Police got called by the home staff. It was a mess. Finally got Mom into a police car & took her to ER at the hosp. APS got called. Once we got Mom away from Bill we could calm her down & reason with her. It went on from around 10 a.m. til 4:30. She was given the choice of being taken to a psych ward in Las Cruces or go back to the home. So she chose to go the home but thinks she will be there only a few days more.

Now I was told by the multiple of people that got involved that I have no choice but to get a lawyer & try get legal guardianship. After all those hours of trauma & gun threats & a ride to the hospital by police. Just before we took her back to the home she looked at Audrey & said what happened to me anyway how did I wind up here in the hosp. No memory at all what had gone on all day...

2003-07-24T20:18:00.000-05:00

An email conversation between my second cousin, Deanna, and myself:

From: "Deanna Anderson"

Talked to mom again today and she was told today that Grandma Pat may not go home at all. They said her memory is definitley a factor and her mind is so bad that she no longer controls her own rights, Mom does not have Power of Attorney because it was never officiated but she does have something they told her is "surrogate". Her name is also on the house, cars, and all accounts. Grandma has real lucid moments but then a few minutes later she will forget what was told her. Everything else is coming back slowly but she was given a memory test this morning and she did not do well at all. Mom has a meeting tomorrow regarding all this so she will let me know what happens with that. One year at Thanksgiving (about 3 years ago) my fmaily and I were in Las Cruces NM and we went to T or C for the day. Harriet, Gordon, Gram. Pat, my brother and his family and mom were all there. When I went home friends of ours asked what we did for Thanksgiving and I told them I sat around with my grandmother and great-aunt and told jokes. No one believed me! :)
___________________

My response:

Boy, that sure sounded good, that Thanksgiving you're talking about! I wish I could have been there. I brings smiles to my face and tears to my eyes all at the same time. I can just imagine that group all together! I'll tell you, my folks and your grandparents had some fun times together in their little house in Bemidji when I was growing up, playing cards and getting the giggles!

I think the leaning towards Pat staying in the home is safer for her. Did I tell you I worked there in 1985? It was a nice place then, and I know they were doing a lot of work to it improving it since then, according to Mom. In fact, she and Dad had once thought about moving into their assisted living but never did. Partly that was because we talked them into coming back here. I'm glad we did - We got to be with them for a few months before Dad passed away, and we could be there for Mom. If they had stayed there, it would have been harder on everyone.

Mom talks about her years in TorC very fondly. I often wondered why they didn't travel more before Dad got Parkinson's, but I guess my parents were rather conservative that way. They loved family and friends and a nice home more than rambling all over creation. They did talk years ago about retirement travel, that the good old US of A had plenty to see without going overseas, which is true enough! They did get to see a lot of the southwest, and continued doing train trips to Chicago to visit my sister Sharon. They even came out to California to see me in the 1980's a couple of times, which is saying something, since my Mom hated with a vengence California (it had something to do with bad memories from living there during WWII...) Even my old cat Dusty made the trip, and my daughter Eva, who knew Dusty, took him with her for 'show and tell' to her Kindergarten class in Long Beach, CA! That cat was one travelled kitty!! *smile*

Well, we'll talk more tonight. Betty hopes to get online. I hope Eva can be, too...

2003-07-24T11:35:00.000-05:00

My cousin Deanna (my Aunt Pat's granddaughter) emailed me letting me know how she was. Aunt Pat recently had a stroke, losing her speech, etc. She's in a nursing home, but the doctors are giving optomistic prognoses. She has started speaking again, but has serious memory problems.

I'm glad to know the doctors are being so positive for Aunt Pat. I know that time marches on, but it's so hard to think of her this way. She will always be in my memory as this fun, strong woman...

My Mom is doing well. She, too, has her moments with memory, but overall isn't too bad. For her, it's mostly missing my Dad. I always knew they loved each other a lot, but when he passed away, I found out a whole other level to that love on a more personal level. I have been the one that hangs out with Mom the most, and take her places. It's been a special time for me to get to know my Mom more as a woman and a peer rather than just 'Mom'!

She met Dad at age 16 and he was 19. He was her first and only love. It hit her very, very hard when he died. She's still mourning. She's gotten better, less crying jags, but she still gets very sad when she hears a train whistle. My Dad was always such a positive force in our family, teasing Mom and keeping things light. Mom had her moments, too, becoming a bit sentimental despite her tough exterior when she was around certain people.

Mom and Aunt Pat have always been very close. They get cranky with each other sometimes, but really, I have always known they loved one another a lot, and had been there for each other many times over the years. Currently, Mom has been cranky because Aunt Pat wouldn't come visit because of her dogs!! I just smile and let her talk; she says, "I could drive her to the bar every day!" Yeah, right! She hasn't driven in 2 years!! It makes me sad knowing that she dreams of doing just everyday things but can't. I try to dwell on the positive, but the knowledge that she's slowly drifting away from me makes the time I spend with her bittersweet. It also makes it more precious. Mortality brings (or should bring) perspective...

2003-07-21T17:31:00.000-05:00

Mom has been gone nearly a month now, visiting Sharon in Chicago. While it's wonderful having a break, it's a two-edged sword. I also miss her very much.

I wish I could find more ways to stimulate conversation with Mom when she's here. I've felt at times as though I'm missing precious opportunities to connect with her, either not knowing what to say, or being distracted during our times together. It's frustrating, not knowing how to talk to someone you love so much.

Mom's very quiet compared to the way she used to be. There are moments when she comes alive, but overall, definitely more quiet. It's like she's drawing within more, and we are being left behind. I imagine a whole world of memories inside her that she floats along day and night, whether in sleep or lost in thought. Train whistles immediately cause her pain, reminding her of Dad. Like Job, she continues to have a struggle with God about his wisdom in taking Dad but not her.

There's a side to Mom I've seen more of, though...it's her ability to have fun, to laugh...I saw some of it growing up, but I was a kid then, and she was busy being a mother and wife. Now, while still being mother and daughter, we are also women, hanging out together. The dynamics have changed. Time pushes us sometimes very reluctantly forward, into the mystery of the future. We laugh together at it...

2003-06-22T21:08:00.000-05:00

I recently 'met' a fascinating individual named Margareta. I say 'met' because it was over the telephone. Margareta called me out of the blue one evening, and after a puzzling introduction of herself, I began to understand her connection to me when she mentioned Meran. I asked about how she knew Meran, and a long story poured out...

She first met Meran as a ten year-old boy in a Turkish refugee camp several years ago in the late 1980's, after his family fled Iraqi Kurdistan (due to Saddam's persecution of the Kurds...) She was there in her capacity as an aide worker, and to observe the conditions of the refugees in the camps. I haven't had the opportunity to ask Margareta why she became attached to Meran as opposed to the many children she must have seen. But for whatever reason, she did. She told me that he struck her as very intelligent, warm, loving...and open. I also learned it was thanks to her special interest in Meran and his family, that they found out about the resettlement program that eventually led them to my area. In a very real sense, without Margareta, my daughter Eva would never have met Meran, and I would not have him as a son-in-law, nor would there be a Salih, Bilal, or Mu'min (my grandsons). I am in her debt, also...

Although I don't know Margareta like Meran does (he has kept in touch with her through all of these years, even asking her advice on whether or not to go to Iraq for the job he's doing there right now - she said, by the way, that she thought he should, that he could have a very positive and important impact...), her caring came across very obviously in her voice as she talked about him. She is an older lady, a native of Sweden, that divides her time between Vermont (where one of her children lives) and Sweden. She said she has had an avid interest in human rights, particularly the Kurds, for many years. The Kurds, she said, are a kind and generous people...a people that the other ethnic groups in the region, could take a lesson from in how to cooperate and live together. She has never been affiliated with a particular NCO or aide group, but freelances where and when she sees fit.

A person like Margareta is someone I greatly admire. I often contemplated doing work like she has actually done. All of us can do what we can whereever we are, so there is no real excuse, is there?

The poem below was written by Margareta about Meran. It is all true, based on recollections and memories shared with her by Meran. It was published in a boook called "Kurdistan Times", a biannual publication of the Kurdish Human Rights Watch, Copyright 1997...
__________________________

MY HOME IN KURDISTAN
By Margareta Hanson (Human Rights Activist)

My home, so
my father told me
was in a valley
in the mountains,
with a river
clear and cold,
its water running
from the snowfields.

In the garden
fruit trees grew.
We had cucumbers,
grapes and melons.
In the barn
there were, of course,
cows and sheep and
my father's horse.

In our home,
heated by
the baking oven
were handmade carpets
of all colors.
It was my home
until 1980 when
I was two years old.

Then came Saddam's soldiers.
Iraqi troops
bulldozed our house
and the barn,
destroyed the garden
and drove us out
from our valley
in the mountains.

Hunted, homeless,
frightened,
we had to flee.
My father's horse
carrying some
blankets, pots and pans
and my older brother
carrying me.

For years we walked
at night
lighted by the stars.
We were hungry,
cold and ill,
sleeping in a tent
as from place
to place we went.

Like that
we lived
until 1988
when I was
ten years old.
Then planes flew by
and chemical bombs
exploded in the sky.

I had run, was
hiding in the mountains.
When I returned I found
that my mother,
my father, and my brother
were laying dead.
Peshmergas helped me
bury them, and then I fled.

Four years went by.
I stayed with
thousands of other Kurds
in a Turkish camp.
We lived in tents.
For hear the sun,
for light at night
the shining stars.

Now I am in another world
of neon lights and cars.
Here in the United States
I go to school and work at night.
I call myself a man and say
"Forgotten in the pain,
I am on my way."

But when I sleep
I am a child at home
in the valley
in the mountains
with the river
cold and clear,
its water running
from the snowfields.

In the garden fruit trees grow.
We have cucmbers,
grapes and melons.
In the barn
there are, of course,
cows and sheep
and my father's horse.

In my dream
I clearly see them,
my father, my mothers
and my older brother,
in our home
in the valley
in the mountains
in my country, Kurdistan.

I am asking you, my friend,
is there a Kurdistan,
a land that is mine,
that will welcome me?
Is there a land of peace and democracy
where all people are free
and living in harmony?

Where hate and murder
does not exist
and every mand and
woman is a friend?
If so, Kurdistan, I am
your long-lost son
who wants to go home
and never leave again!

2003-05-17T14:43:00.000-05:00

I recently read an essay by a guy who grew up in the same area I did. He was recalling memories of the people he knew in his hometown, Humboldt, MN. His memories made me both laugh and cry. I remembered a lot of those things from my own acquaintance with Humboldt through people my family knew through school and church, as well as distant relatives or family friends.

For example, I identified with his loving memories of Alfred and Clara Loer. They were, indeed, two of the nicest people I've ever known. They were compassionate, loving, had great senses of humour, and were very positive people in their outlook on life. Alfred was supportive to me as a young girl when I had a horse and had problems figuring out where to find hay for my horse, or transport it, offering his farm truck. I remember a golden lab dog they had later on that had belonged to one of their girls originally, but they took him on. Alfred taught him tricks that he would show off to guests like us over for a Sunday afternoon dinner. Toyvo, yes, I think that was the dog's name...

My own children, Eva (age 24) and Daniel (age 21) lived in St. Vincent with my parents from March 1985 to August 1986, almost 18 months, while we were transitioning from California to Fargo. During that time, they attended church and school there, and got a small taste, especially Eva, of what I, and others of the older generation, grew up with. Eva has never forgotten walking down Grandpa and Grandma Short's road to catch the bus, or the town dogs, or the playhouse, or the barn...or Grandpa and Grandma's workshop...Eva remembers the open fields and sky, and the security of small town life, and treasures those memories. I am thankful that out of a sad situation (the eventual breakup of my marriage) came a very positive experience, living with my parents. My Dad and Mom both told me later that it was a very very special time for them, having us living with them. People asked them how they could handle it, after being alone so long and being retired, but Mom surprised me later by relating to me how she felt at the time - i.e., she considered that time period as one of the happiest for her and Dad. Later, after I moved down to the Fargo area, they took the kids and I on two family trips to Medora and Mount Rushmore in the late 1980's. Those have become great memories for all us, too.

St. Vincent is a ghost town now, little of what it once was is evident except to those who know its history. Families still live and grow there, but it's more like a settlement, a cluster of homes, for those who farm in the nearby fields, than a town. Community is still in the hearts of the people there, no doubt, but it's changed.

One thing that I've always felt about the river towns, as I call towns like Pembina/St. Vincent, Grand Forks/East Grand Forks, and Fargo/Moorhead, is that they are less separate than together. You can't really separate them from one another. Today, the most northern twin cities on the Red River of the North have shrunken greatly, but they are still very important to the people that live there, and to those that don't - we depend on them to grow the food we eat, and caretake the land that provides it...

2003-04-28T09:40:00.000-05:00

I attended Humboldt-St. Vincent High School, class of 1977. The last time I was there was in 1992 when there was an all-class reunion. I took the time to walk around the school. It was very strange for me to see it all again with the distance of time and experience. I could literally hear the ghosts of the past as I went from area to area.

I could remember sitting in the hall at that spot on a stool after being sent out of Mrs. Younggren's first grade class in disgrace for talking during class; I could remember having a bloody nose all alone in the girls' lavatory; I could remember the strange smell of the milk that came from the white tubes at the cafeteria; I went downstairs and could almost hear Mr. Martin or Mrs. Docken telling us to sing a song during music class...

Walking in the gym, the old bleachers seems so much smaller than they once appeared. While all the past students milled around, I recalled ham suppers that took place there, with green peas and mashed potatoes that my mother always derided ("...they are INSTANT!" she would say) but we never missed a supper because it was a social event where you saw people from around the county you never saw the rest of the year.

I thought of the people no longer with us, who had died during the intervening years, from students to teachers; of the sadness that began during their school years that eventually consumed some of them to point of taking their own lives. I smiled when I thought of how once, it was thought almost scandalous to leave the school grounds to go up to Iten's to grab a hamburger. How innocent the time was...or was it just us?

2003-02-27T22:23:00.000-06:00

During Prohibition (1920-1933), when my mother was about 8 or 9 (1930 or 31), one day she and my grandmother went uptown to visit friends.

Grandpa was making home-brewed beer back then. Grandma wasn't thrilled about the idea, since it was illegal at the time, but she put up with it...He was even known to sell a bottle now and then to someone. Grandma herself, after a hard day's work, would drink a bottle against the heat. However, that day, Grandpa crossed a line...

Walking up the road to the house, we came upon an unbelievable scene: Men, women, sitting around, having a good time...drinking Grandpa's beer! It was a regular outdoor honkytonk. Well, if you only knew my Grandma, you could imagine what happened next: She was not amused. People knew my Grandma well enough that just her arrival meant they had better clear off. As they did, she proceeded to grab the remaining bottles of beer within her reach and smash them against the side of the shed.*

[NOTE: My Mom told me this story a few other times in my life when circumstances brought it up. On evening last June, she brought it up again when talking about her sister, my Aunt Pat. How Aunt Pat is scared about her health, and very lonely. She talks about coming up here to be near Mom. We hope she does. Mom said Aunt Pat likes her bottle or two of beer every day...and it went from there...]

* This scene evokes a connection in my mind to the story of Jesus clearing the moneylenders from the temple, for some reason!

2003-02-18T15:18:00.000-06:00

In the northern-most section of Iraq are where the Kurds live. My son-in-law Meran and his family came from from this area. They lived in a small village named Bigdowdi. Several of Meran's uncles were Peshmergas, or guerilla resistance soldiers against Saddam's regime.

In March 1988 Saddam began campaigns against Iraqi citizens specifically the Anfal campain targeting the Kurds; it began with Halabja...later in August, they gassed Bigdowi.

Meran's mother and father were with his family when they first left for the mountains for safety. However, they realized that in the rush to escape, they had left important papers. Despite the risk, they felt they needed to go back and retrieve them. A relative went with them to assist. They never made it back.

Later, after the family felt it would be safe, they went back to try and find them. They eventually did, but it was sad news. The gas had overcome them; they had safely retrieved the documents, and were on their way back, but couldn't quite make it. The family had to bury them there, and continue on their way.

During the next 4 years, they lived as refugees in Turkey. My daughter told me their camp was near Mardin, Turkey. They were fortunate enough to be sponsored by Lutheran Social Services to come to the United States in 1992. It was here in Fargo, ND that my daughter met Meran...

2003-01-21T12:28:00.000-06:00

Awhile back, I was in contact with Kevin Slator, the grandson of the man who killed my cousins in a drunk driving accident. It was rather surreal at first to be contacted by him out of the blue. He had seen some of my family history I had posted online somewhere, and was hoping to collaborate with me to find out more about the story. In the end, I could only give him some oral history about how it affected our family, which he greatly appreciated. However, I received in return a rich background on who Jack Slator, his grandfather, was. By all accounts he was a decent man, hardworking, liked by all, who did a very foolish thing of drinking and then getting behind a wheel. But for the grace of God could go all of us...

...and, ironically, he was a native-born Irishman...

Family history tells the story like this: One day my cousin was walking home from church with some other kids just having attended Catechism. A drunk driver coming from Pembina came down main street St. Vincent and ran into one group, then crossed the road and hit another group. The driver kept going.

In the end, two children were dead, including my cousin.

The deaths hit the community hard. My Uncle John and Aunt Lena were devastated. Later the same year, he and my other two cousins - the remaining children of the family - all died in a freak drowning at the family farm. There were no witnesses, and only assumptions and speculations to this day as to what really happened. Some said that John in his deep grief either purposely took his own life and his daughters, or took an opportunity that presented itself to do so. Others were more charitable and assumed he was attempting a rescue of the girls and it went horribly wrong. Either way, my Aunt Lena was overwhelmed, and ended up having a nervous breakdown in her attempts to cope with her grief.

For years, the man who did this to my family was just a faceless monster. Now I know he was much more than that, and that life is never that simple...

2003-01-18T10:49:00.000-06:00

My grandfather, Sheldon Albert Fitzpatrick, was an extraordinary man. He kept bees and made his own honey. He ran a farm, and did the family's cobbling. Much to my grandmother's chagrin, he made homemade beer. A man of letters, he loved literature, passing that love down to my mother and thus to me. He cared about his community, and was Treasurer, Mayor, and keeper of the cemetery books and grounds at various times for our little village. Most of all, he was remembered as a warm man with a wonderful sense of humour, well-loved by all who knew him. I was only 5 years old when he died, so my memories of him are limited. I remember an old tall man who wore a hat, took naps on the porch, let me sit on his lap where I would give him sloppy kisses and in retaliation he would give me whisker rubs (I would squeal with laughter and love every minute of it)...and oh yes, the pink peppermints, the peppermints he would share with me that he loved so much...

I sat with my grandfather sometimes during his last days on this earth, when he was laying in his bed at home. When I would come to him and talk to him, he would call me his little girl, and my mother would weep saying I was the only one now that he seemed to recognize. I didn't fully understand that then, but cherish that memory now. It reminds me of when my own father said his last words to Mom and I, Mom saying "No more Hawkeye and Chingascook"...an allusion to other memories of a time when I shared special moments with my father as a little girl...

2002-12-08T15:19:00.000-06:00

When I was a little girl in the 1960's, I was far away from the hippies, anti-war demonstrators, the ecology/pollution protestors, riots, etc., but at the same time, I was riveted to them through television. Television was coming of age then, and I was a child of that age. If I had been a bit older, as I look back on it, I'm pretty sure I would have been like the older sister in THE WONDER YEARS - i.e., I would have packed up and went to join the revolution. As it was, I read, I watched, I'd have little philosophical self-talks; I'd discuss topics as they came up with my parents, discovering that while they had strong beliefs, they also surprised me with their intelligence and open-mindedness. It was a great example to me of how to exercise my mind, how to think, and not being afraid of standing up for what I believe yet allowing for flexibility and always desiring to understand more...

2002-11-17T17:04:00.000-06:00

Family Skeletons

Mom has shared many, many stories of her family down through the years. Some are a bit rough around their edges since I didn't put them on paper right away. I do my best here to relate them, and in this case, to relate some that were buried from public knowledge for the most part...

Like the one about my Mom's sister Irene, who went to work for a couple in Canada, ended up getting treated like a real-life Cinderella, returning home worse for the wear and expecting a child. The baby ended up not only my Mom's nephew, but a playmate of hers as she was growing up. Irene ended up marrying a wonderful guy who loved her so much that he took the child under his name.

Like the one about my Mom's sister Alberta, who when attending nurse's training in the big city became entranced with a college football player, became pregnant and had to make the hard choice of placing that child for adoption. And yes, she did wonder at times whatever happened to that child...

What a difference time can make. I found myself in the same position, expecting a child without marriage many years after my Aunts, never even knowing they had faced the same situation. In my case, I didn't have to marry anyone, but chose to. As it ended up, it wasn't for the best. But in the end, I am still glad I had all the experiences that came out of those difficult times, as well as my two kids, Eva and Daniel. Whatever we do, whatever we choose, it is what makes us who we are...

2002-08-13T21:34:00.000-05:00

Tonight I was cleaning out a closet of mine, and as often happens, I digress from one task to another. At one point, I'm at my desk rearranging and clearing out to make room for this and that (it's a long sad tale), and I come across a slip of paper taped to a cubbyhole in the desk. Document "Uncle Henry" and "Aunt Daisy" in family history it says. For a moment, I wondered what in the world, then a split second later I smiled, remembering Mom telling me last year, in the midst of her first flush of grief and confusion. "I want to tell you before I forget..."

"Uncle Henry" and "Aunt Daisy" were Mom and Dad's code phrases in their early love letters to each other, especially during the war when they were quite aware that many letters were read by the Army censors, for their genitalia. When they would write to one another that "Uncle Henry misses Aunt Daisy", they knew exactly what the other meant without being crude or letting anything slip to the censors.

Mom has kicked herself more than once for having Dad take out the bundle of their love letters and burn them. She can't for the life of her remember why they did it, either. What she does remember is Grandpa Fitzpatrick, her father, joking that "...that's the hottest fire ever seen around here..."

The evidence of our existences are fragile at best. All too easily it disappears and no one knows we were ever here...

2002-08-02T08:51:00.000-05:00

I was raised drinking tea like fish swim in water. It was part of our daily lives. I came to adore it, the whole process, from preparing it to slurping it noisely by teaspoon from my teacup full of tea, milk, and 2-3 teaspoons of sugar! As time went by, my inquisitiveness discovered that the tea was Red Rose, a brand from Canada. It's a strong black/orange pekoe tea with a touch of bergamot oil in it.

We lived on the border, and I didn't think of the small town by us - Emerson, Manitoba - as anything other than, well...Emerson - another small town like my own. I was born there, we shopped there, I attended piano lessons there, etc., etc. Border guards waved us through both the US and Canadian ports of entry. People knew each other. We were rarely asked to declare anything or how much we had purchased. Those days are definitely gone...

My grandmother and mother owned ordinary everyday teapots, but they also had highly decorated china pots made in England, brought out for company. With these were beautiful porcelain china teacups and saucers, so beautiful they were works of art as well as items of service. It was a ritual that made the act of drinking the tea that much more special.

Later on I tried other teas, and have enjoyed many. But I still adore Red Rose the best - strong, sweet...the taste and smell brings back a flood of memories of a time, people, and something very, very comforting...

2002-07-24T21:57:00.000-05:00

Years ago I was deeply touched by a film short I saw several times on a local public television station. It was entited "Appearances", in reference to the fact that certain characteres in the film were more concerned with how things looked to others, than in showing compassion to those they were responsible for...

Fast Forward about a decade or so. I'm reminded of it somehow, and decide to finally track down the person or persons who put it all together. I finally identify and locate him, writing him a letter....

You ask for a bit more about why it touched me...Many reasons, I guess. I was brought up in a small village in the 1960's and 1970's with a lot of supportive people in my life. I was exposed early to people of all ages, but especially older people. My own grandmother lived down the road, then later with us. I helped play piano and serve communion at nursing homes with my church. I saw on the one hand how people said you should respect your elders but on the other hand many didn't - they were discounted or ignored. My experience was that they were interesting people. In college I visited nursing homes and talked with older people coming away fascinated by their life experiences, realizing once again that the body is simply a shell, but that many cannot get beyond it to see the person.

My father had a younger brother who was mentally fragile, mostly due to environmental reasons (meaning home environment in this instance). My Uncle Grant eventually became unstable enough that he no longer could live on his own. From the stories I heard, from the denigration of his spirit and self-esteem he experienced from his father, he definitely came to mind when I saw your film. I saw it for a wider context, yes, but we all tend to personalize. Some people react to such emotional abuse by getting angry, while other quiet souls retreat as he did.

I think your choice of hard transition, no faces, anchoring the feelings of freedom with the artistic expression of the child with the music refrains, was powerful. It's funny how some things burn into your mind, but "Appearances" definitely did for me...

I try to remember to be compassionate to people, but I admit there are times when thoughtless words come out of my mouth. I am reminded by certain things that cross my life - Christ's words, your film - and I am reminded again, rebuked, and humbled. That is a good thing...

"I have a heart for the physically/mentally disadvantaged...my film pays homage to 'The Elephant Man' and also tries to bring about a new way of looking at persons with disabilities."

- Torry Nordling, producer/director of Appearances

2002-07-07T17:39:00.000-05:00

When I was growing up, there were only a few years that I remember my sisters being around. I was the baby of the family, and my two sisters were much older than I was. Betty was nine years older, and Sharon eleven. I remember fragmented memories of them at home - Sharon's high school science project of breeding hamsters getting a bit out of control in the old barn. Taking Sharon to the depot to take the train to Illinois where she'd be attending college, Mom and I very sad, crying as she stepped onto the train. Betty dating, and being picked up by her boyfriends. One boy took her to the fair and won her some stuffed animals which I eventually inherited. Another became fairly serious - Charlie was his name - and I was very sad when Betty broke his heart by breaking off with him after meeting Bill (now her husband of over 30 years!) Betty taking out the first new car my parents ever owned, my parents later finding out she had driven it in a farmer's field.

After Betty graduated in 1968, I was all alone with Mom and Dad. I was only 9 years old, and just starting to be more social, coming out of a shell where I mostly played alone. Part of that was due to my physical problems when I was younger. Part of it was due to the geographical isolation of where we lived. So, as you might imagine, quite a bit of my growing up was as an 'only child'...

My parents didn't take vacations like many people would, where you'd go on a road trip across America, or to a Lake Cabin, or to Disneyland, etc. When we did go somewhere, it was usually short trips on the weekend, to relatives living in the county - a 'Sunday drive'. You'd enjoy the drive, the country air and nature on the way, and drop in on cousins to visit, have a meal. A clear memory of these journeys were being in the back seat sleeping, awakening to sun strobing through the trees...

On the rare occasions my father had some time built up - and a bit of money saved up - we'd go on trips to visit other relatives near and far. One relative we visited more often than others was my Mom's sister and her husband, Aunt Pat and Uncle John Beaudette. Uncle John was a small, wiry fellow, French ancestry, who ran a body shop fixing cars. Aunt Pat was a working woman, always seemed a bit mysterious and glamourous to me. Uncle John smoked pipes, and both he and Aunt Pat were drinkers. My parents had drank alcohol once upon a time, too, but quit it more or less before I showed up. They felt it was the right thing to do when they got serious about their religion. However, when they visited my Uncle and Aunt, inevitably they would end up playing cards, having a drink or two, and laughing the night away in Aunt Pat's small kitchen. I would be left to myself to explore their house, which always fascinated me. I would always find the licorice in the candy dish, or marvel at the beautiful bedroom set in a hallway side-bedroom.* Sometimes I would sneak down into the basement and snoop around the old trunks and boxes to see what I might find. In the end, Aunt Pat would usually make me a malted milk, which I would eat slowly, then go into the side bedroom to fall asleep listening to the grown-ups talk...

* Ironically, years later, Aunt Pat gave me that set knowing I always admired it...

2002-05-07T21:58:00.000-05:00

I'll be leaving Thursday for a long-anticipated holiday with my daughter and her family. I'll be seeing her graduate from college. Hard to believe. I remember the day I came home, tired and bedraggled, VERY unsure of myself as a new mother, with this little lump with blue eyes and golden downy hair on her little head, wiggling and looking at me...As if I knew what to do! But she trusted me, so I pulled myself together and stumbled along as best as I could, learning as I went by the seat of my pants. Making mistakes, I also tried to be open and honest about them.

So much has happened since then. One thing for sure, there's never been a dull moment with Eva. She's been the most fascinating person to watch grow into herself. So many wonderful things to come yet.

Mom has often said similiar things. Remembering me and my sisters when we were young, when her and Dad were young parents. It's said with a mixture of happiness and sadness. Happiness because of the blessing of those experiences, sadness because they are long in the past, and so bittersweet when reality of her present forces itself in front of those memories.

2002-04-28T19:51:00.001-05:00

From my journal, nine months ago...

"How quickly things change...On June 30th, Mom and Dad called. Mom scared. Took Dad to ER. Had heart attack. Released after testing July 4th. On July 13th, second bad attack. This time, the Cardiologist, Dr. Evans, did an angiogram, angioplasty, and echocardiogram. Dad is in ICU with breathing tube, IV feeding him, catheterized, with a blood pump. Also had to have dialysis for awhile. By July 16th, breathing tube removed. Two days now he has slept, moving around and trying to turn this way and that. Who knows what dreams he dreams?

"Mom cried when we drove to the hospital. 'No more Hawkeye and Chingascook...' was all she could say, over and over. In ER, Dad motioned us over to his bedside, saying if he doesn't come out of this, he knows he'll see us on the other side. I'm so glad I took their photos on Saturday, July 7th, as I did. Images of them kidding with each other, smiling at each other, goofing off, holding hands, kissing, or just gazing into the camera naturally.

"As I write this, I am alone in the ICU waiting room except for one solitary woman, and Mom. Mom plays solitaire quietly, across the room on the coffee table. She keeps asking me, when I go over to her, why she's paying two months' rent for the old apartment. I explain we're late this month and we need to give notice. Where are we moving to, she asks. I tell her, but a few moments later, she has forgotten and asks again. 'Oh yes,...where Dad needs to go...' I smile inwardly as the solitary woman leaves us alone.

"Mom remembers enough of a conversation a few days before when we told her and Dad they had to move to a nursing home. Then, I could see Dad's face become relaxed and visibly relieved, knowing finally that someone could be there to help them.

"My ears notice that Mom is whistling as she plays cards. Cards and whistling - how appropriate. Two things burned into my mind from my earliest memories that I associate with Mom.

"I hear Mom moan...she says she has eaten too much, and decides to quit playing cards, and lay down for awhile.

"Sharon and Bill, arriving in the afternoon, are with Bill and Betty running errands.

"The hours as this goes by seem surreal. Time passes differently. You don't acknowledge it. Instead, you ignore it, withdrawing into a safe, emotional cocoon. At one and the same time, you reflect superficially on memories that surface unbidden but don't surprise you, but you never let them manipulate you into giving way to any emotional release. This is your way, you say. Maybe so. Maybe it's just your defense against facing mortality head on instead of intellectually, the way most of us most of the time deal with it, if we deal with it at all..."

Stream of Consciousness IV

2002-04-24T09:07:00.005-05:00

Interior of The Spot, during it's heyday...

McCall's (Henniman's). Skogmo's. The Spot. Dick's Corner. The Hartz Store. The Tastee Freez. Coast-to-Coast hardware. Ice rink on the banks of the river, lights strung overhead. The dam. South Pembina. The airport. The museum. Crossing the Red, then the Pembina. Ukranian church dome. Old 81. Old Pembina with the vines growing up the side of the old Methodist Church. Ancestors' rocking chairs in the museum...the old museum that seemed like a treasure chest of old area artifacts. Many a summer was spent touring the row upon row of exhibits, taking in as much as possible. Imagination working overtime wondering who the people were that once owned that dress, that gun, that book. So MUCH stuff that each display area was a mini Fibber McGee open closet. Even the walls were covered with treasures all the way up the the ceiling. The Park nearby had a monument towards the back, almost hidden by the now older trees. The white pyramid-like steps led up in the center to a pillar. Names and a dedication, barely legible, told of a war to end all wars, and the local boys that wouldn't be coming home again. I would climb that monument thinking it was magical, touch the white stone, rough and hot in the summer sun. Who were these people who were just names now, I wondered as a child. I was in awe of someone who would sacrifice so much. Bike home over the bridges, daring to stop and look down to the river below. Such a long way it felt, and sometimes there would be a pull in the back of my mind to jump...jump! A little thrill would run up my spine at the thought mixed with incredible fear. I almost drowned once. I was with my mother and her friend Glennis Friebohle at the Emerson pool on a sunny summer afternoon. I wandered away from the wading pool area. I was little, but could see more people were having more fun in the big pool. I wasn't afraid to try it. I tentatively lowered myself over the edge into the pool, intending to hang onto the side. But the pool was very busy that day, many jumps, splashes, and waves. A wave caught me and lifted my body, and I panicked. My hand slipped, and before I knew it, I was floating away from the edge, I couldn't grasp it, and I was sinking...I was scared, but at the same time, as I went below the surface, I kept my eyes open...I was facing up, looking up, seeing the light above me grow smaller as I sank...The next thing I knew, I was laying on warm cement, coughing up water...Glennis was there. She had seen me as I began to sink and dived in and rescued me. Years later, despite still not knowing how to swim, I love water, and remember that day, and how peaceful it seemed. A few moments of panic, then quiet...

2002-04-23T20:52:00.000-05:00

I've suffered from urinary tract/system problems all my life. Since early childhood, I've had unusual amounts of bladder and kidney infections. I suffered from bed wetting until I was nearly 12 years old. I can't remember how many times my mother would be awakened by either me timidly calling to her, or hearing me rustling around after waking up in a cold, wet bed. She would either silently, mechanically change the sheets with hardly a word, or (more likely), scold me as she worked for wetting the bed, telling me not to drink before bed, and later saying I could stop if I 'really tried'. I was very confused when she'd say that, because I knew if there was any way, I would stop. No one was more motivated than I was. But I didn't stop. Not for years. In the meantime, I had such severe infections, I was tested, prodded, catheterized, pumped full of dye and x-rayed so many times, that if anyone should be phobic of hospitals and doctors, I should have been. I wasn't, and still am not. I just remember coping with it all, and sometimes learning interesting things from it. I was fascinated with the instruments, how my body reacted. Overall, I met some very caring people. I had interesting experiences! I guess, looking back, I'm rather glad to have went through it all...

In my adult life, things settled down a bit, but I've had my moments...several (but not nearly as often or as severe) urinary tract infections, plus I had to have a kidney stone removed. After that, I had to have a couple of treatments where dye was injected via the urethra; it contained medicine for treatment of a condition I have developed in recent years called interstitial cystitis. These treatments were some of the most painful I've ever had. After the second one, I vowed NEVER AGAIN. I went in search of a second opinion from another urologist. He told me about a new drug called Elmiron. Thankfully, it has worked for me. It helps the body develop a thickened lining in the bladder, which in turns helps prevent inflammation of the urethra (my condition) which can be painful in various ways. It's rather hard to describe to someone that hasn't experienced it, and it varies from person to person in the way the pain manifests itself.

Dreams of Home: Eaves in the Trees

2002-04-07T16:45:00.002-05:00

An email to my mother in July 2000, 8 months before my parents' health worsened and they came home to Minnesota from New Mexico, for good:

I just had a dream last night with Dad in it...I was out in the pasture by the barn, Sunny's barn, that is, and looked up into the branches of those trees that were in and around the corral area, and up in the branches, Dad had installed eave troughs to drain rain water from the trees like on a house. They were painted a rusty red, barn color, beautifully painted, as Dad always painted everything...I have NO idea why he put them up there, but I thought, don't they look beautiful? Don't even the trees look beautiful?

When I think of home, I think a lot about the trees. I love the big canopy of trees that surrounded the house, like big arms hugging us. They kept us cool in the summer, provided a 'jungle gym' for the squirrels to run across and hop down from then scamper over the roof, for the birds to build little villages in each with their own nests and families. Walking over tons of acorns in the fall, crunching under my feet, and raking leaves in the fall, working like mad to make the biggest possible pile, just to run like crazy a few times and JUMP in them for all I was worth, laughing madly.. .then the smell of them burning (when you could still burn them!) Drives down the road with Dad with my hands out the window, letting the long grass on the side of the road whip against my hand, stinging but in a strange way feeling good, at the same time feeling the wind rush against my face and drive down my nostrils straight into my lungs.

Or in the back of the nuisance ground trailer, on our way to the nuisance ground, going up the 'new' dike, pausing at the top, looking SO steep and SO far to the bottom where we would dump our stuff, and then going down with a scared but fun feeling in my stomach, jumping off to look around for 'treasures', but usually only finding burdocks. Or begging to be let to go in the '52 Chevy while Dad dragged the road, always fascinated and looking out the back window as the teeth raked the stones back onto the road from the shoulder.. .Well, I could go on and on. These memories have been with me for a very long time, but tend to rush out of my mind at times like these.. .Love you, Mom and Dad.. .Be sure and read this to Dad, Mom.. .I want him to know I think of these things.. .Trish

Stream of Consciousness III

2002-03-26T20:04:00.002-06:00

silver threads among the gold rope swings I dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair Grandpa napping on the porch Grandma making pound cake with that broiled coconut brown sugar butter topping in the kitchen bike riding down the center of main street look no hands discovering hidden paths back alleys abandoned house begging to be explored the river always the river bridges looking down wondering what it would be like to jump scared yet excited floods dikes sandbags moving away until the water goes down taking the army 'duck' through the waters to the parked cars marooned at the junction Sunday afternoon drives to nowhere cousins dropping in food laughter catching up part of something bigger roots family history cobbler aprons long hair in buns large hands in bread dough warm arms wrapping themselves around you feeling like you are SO special because you are loved so loved those capable arms and legs that love you sucumb and it's your turn to be strong for them wheelchair cat-in-the-cradle those last years together end too soon and you're weeping at the coffin bending over kissing cold lips not caring what anyone thinks feeling for the first time real loss Grandma I will miss you so much you are my best friend remembering sleeping with her, breakfasts of cocoa and brown sugar toast only she makes that special smell of her body as you snuggle with her at night after Grandpa is gone and she's alone Grandpa who gave you pink peppermints whisker rubs and called you his little girl Grandpa who napped on the porch age made no difference they were love

Stream of Consciousness II

2002-03-24T19:01:00.001-06:00

overalls wide paintbrushes kerosene cleaning tree swish swosh swish swosh bark stained with years of paint leading down a path to a pet cemetery and Hawkeye and Chingascook can I be Chingascook today Popeye shared bathwater Iten's water service cisterns graindoor sidewalks hand-me-downs Outer Limits ceiling grate peek nightmares slanted ceilings that certain smell as I press my nose against the window screen noon 6pm 10pm town whistles county fair quansit hut blue ribbon jam Egg Pants Tonto George's general store from another time Friehboldt's Garage dime fridge pop swinging from the gas sign Dad filling up Old Man Friehboldt checking the oil exploring behind discovering old jail bars ghost firehouse horse-pulled truck curling rinks town pumps Bordnick's farm equipment cacophony vs. Hughes' livestock menagerie potato bugs canning wringer washer hanging reaching pinning squinting gathering folding the smell oh the smell crisp stiff alive tarp paper garages anti-anti-I-over scared running laughing screaming late Sunday night meetings jumping off church steps hide 'n seek around the church in the fall cold running until we see steam rising off our skins in the moonlight breathing so deep sore throats in the morning no regrets alive so alive so young was it all a dream

Stream of Consciousness I

2002-03-18T19:40:00.001-06:00

it's still there the memories are strong tins cans crisco cans raspberries gardens straw hats belts chokecherries bread canning cowboy cookies and teaspoons tea Sunday dinners with Grandpa and Grandma leaf piles nuisance grounds hands out of car windows whipped by long blades of sharp grass Canadian geese honking won't be long now fires burning pastures mowing gardens plowing bed making hospital corners dumping the pot porches and slop pails screen doors slamming on the way to Toot's house PK gum and rolled chins tall imposing steps old persian rugs pianos and women talking playing alone imagination running wild looking up through tree branches wind kissing cheeks tasting milkweeds playing house mud pies bugs barn spiders haylofts Dusty Smoky prairie roses peonies in water veined hands crocheting Dad's hands on Mom's legs cattails in kerosene floods trains trips cousins driftwood hospitals piano lessons dreams horses bicycles freedom washing dishes and Star Trek books on shelves discovering new worlds wallpaper transister radios late in the night Macabre Theatre door creaking no borders everything possible no worries love always love changes but it's still there the memories are strong