Depression Depression

I am a child of children of . . . well, as like most of us, several things. We all have several legacies from our parents, some good, some bad. But at the moment I am thinking about being a child of children of the Depression.

The great event of my mother’s life (1917 – 2009) was The Great Depression. She went to her grave predicting the next great depression, predicting in rapturous gloom and doom that people no longer knew how to shift for themselves, to live a self-sustaining life. To farm. No doubt she was disappointed that it never happened; not that it won’t. So we lived a nearly self-sustained life on our 105 acres west of Two Harbors. One reason for that life choice was, of course, so we would survive the next depression.

My mother often said, in response to requests from us children, “If it does not put food on your table or money in your pocket, there is no point in doing it.” Among the requests we children made were to participate in sports and arts, like play an instrument or sing in choir. Arts were out. Almost entirely. She did buy me a John Nagy art kit when I was about 10. She was a master quilter, truly, a master. But quilts after all have a practical purpose and are made of scraps and recycled cloth. (She cheated on that last part, about recycled cloth, in her older age.)

My life moved on from the farm; I left the self-sustained life and came eventually to my own retirement. With both physical and economic limitations upon my wife and myself, I have not a lot I can do in retirement. I am left with arts, at my minor level of achievement: drawing, pastels, writing, and carving. All depend upon my hands, my fingers, which are limited. But my big limitation is that legacy of “If it does not put food on your table or money in your pocket, there is no point in doing it.”

It is a classic male dilemma; to come to retirement and be left searching for fulfillment. For most men retirement is marked as a major life-changing event but only a minor one for most women. It was hard on my father, a man who felt all men were measured by what physical labor they did and what physical skills they possessed; so hard on him that he several times cut his wrists in his stumbling senile way. He died of heart failure in the end. I have not the problem of my father’s point of view about fulfillment, but only the voice of my mother in my head, a voice I must learn to silence.

To create art of any kind for no purpose except self-fulfillment is ars gratis artis. The level of achievement is insignificant in ars gratis artis. Let me repeat that to myself: The level of achievement is insignificant in ars gratis artis. So I am trying to make my inner voice say “ars gratis artis” and not “If it does not put food on your table or money in your pocket, there is no point in doing it.”

Tuxedo Boy and Sister

For those who requested the tuxedo boy. This is he with his sister.

Memories for My Sister’s 70th Birthday

Seventy people wrote memories of my sister, which were given to her as a surprise of her 70th birthday. I wrote only of our childhood shared on Birchwood Hill.

I think we were as children and especially as teens much closer than were most brothers and sisters. To a certain extent the isolation of our childhood home forced us to be playmate. Being soul mates was our mutual choice.

All my memories must begin with Playing School. She would come home from school; we would set up the living room as a mock classroom using a school play-set she was once given for Christmas. We would do roll-call, with me deciding who was present or absent. Then she would teach me what she had learned in school that day, which put me in many subjects three years ahead of classmates, to the consternation of a few of my teachers. But it leaves me firmly convinced of the power and importance of early learning.

Second has to be the hours and hours we spent on the Three-Quarter Mile Road to Our House. Our parents made a point not to spoil us by making us walk that road unless it was very cold. Did we spend more time on the walks to and from the bus or the hours we spent riding back and forth on the flat top part of the road, playing games, the favorite of which I think was mail man, delivery letters at the imaginary addresses we created? A flat rock lay just inside the fence on Victor Johnson’s land, a rock we used for many things, such as a post office, cafe, etc. In those years we used to see how many army worms we could ride over until it was uncountable because they were almost a carpet.

For Breakfasts before the walk to the bus was a regular routine menu, certain foods each day of the week, while we listened to Eddy Williams from 7:15 to 7:30. Any mention of the kitchen table must include Cleo the impetuous mover, who would Wrap Her Legs Around the Chair Legs and then move before unwrapping them. I bet she only fell once, but my memory says otherwise. From where did we both get our need to do everything quickly when neither parent did so?

Our rooms were next to each other. The plaster wall between us had separated from the outside wall leaving a Crack Through the Corner through which passed light, notes, and once a string to try to set up a can telephone, which did not work, of course, since the string would hit the wall and then not transmit sound.

The crack and the wall itself allowed me to hear the current rock songs which she played over and over again on her 45 RPM Phonograph which she got one year for Christmas. Is that why I cannot stand Elvis Presley today?

Once we Canned Pea Pods which ended up very stinky. We used to take carrots and turnips and rutabagas, from the garden, clean them at the pump eat them raw, Pretending the Turnips Were Ice Cream Cones.

On Monday wash days it was Cleo’s job to haul water from the pump house to the house. Once a Rooster Chased Her As She Carried Two Pails of Water. She is remembered for not putting down thew pails but running with them full, well not full for very long. She helped hang the wash, too, of course, first on the lines by the house and then later at the new lines over by Victor Johnson’s fence, near where we canned the pea pods.

I remember after we saw the movie Ivanhoe, a movie which is now very painful to watch, we three kids Played Knights with Swords and Shields we had fashioned, mostly, as I remember under that second clothes line.

We used to build Tree House, rough things eight feet or so off the ground, fashioned mostly I think by Lawrence, from junk lumber from sheds my father would buy to recycle. The best were in a set of birch trees just across the fence from the clothes lines. That happens to be where the new house for the property now sits. They must have about the same view out their living room as we had from our open-air play room.

We can both tell our kids that we walked to school three-quarters of a mile up hill both ways. The hills at both ends were perfect for Sliding, more dramatically at the hill overlooking the town and the lake as it was the steeper hill, quite steep actually at the top. There it was easy to meet neighborhood kids with whom to slide and have dog fights with our sleds. Sometimes two or three rode on one sled, especially Lawrence’s longer sled. One night we build a bonfire on top of the hill. When someone came to investigate, I think a deputy sheriff, we hid off in the woods, while he shined his spotlight trying to find us.

We played many Simple Games, such as hide the thimble, often using as a hiding place the spinning wheel she now has. Over the pump house we often played a game with many names but which we called it Annie-I-Over. Kick-the-can was best at night after we got electricity and the yard light. In season we played our limited versions of baseball and football in the front yard.

We spent hours and hours Berry-Picking, wild and then tame raspberries, blueberries, and wild strawberries (how awful that was, so hard to get many of them) and later tame strawberries. One or more years Cleosold tame raspberries from our garden. Cleo remembers best of this, I guess, when our mother got lost blueberry picking and we all ignored her cries for help, not understanding why she was calling. I remember best of blueberry picking the time our parents went to where we had lived at Sawbill Landing, which was just a barely visible clearing by then. My first memory is the day we moved into the farm, but Cleo remembers Sawbill and, I think Sebeka.

Sometimes we also picked June berries, pin cherries and choke cherries, many of them down by a Creek in Our Pasture where we used to play as a threesome, sometimes catching polliwogs and bringing back cowslips of our mother, when not building bridges over the creek. How far and wide we roamed as small children!

Lawrence, his friend Johnny, and I once marked a trail from our farm down Knife River, where there was a beaver dam. We waded and sort of swam in that pond. But my best memory from there was Skating on Knife River. One year it was cold but we had little snow. So we skated from the dam to the Stanley Road, back to the dam, to the Valley Road, and then back tot he dam, which is a three-mile round trip.

We Played in the Hay Mow, often leaning a ladder up into the lower door, up which Boots would scramble. On the whole I do not remember the barn as a favorite haunt of Cleo’s, but she did once while trying to climb over a gate catch her foot and go Face First into the Gutter, a full gutter. I think she also broke the strap on a prize pair of patent leather shoes.

Is this one really true: One morning our neighbor Floyd Swartout stopped at our house after a night’s work on the ore docks, as he often did. He said that it was so foggy an Ore Boat Got all the Way to James Drug Store before it knew what it was, to which Cleo is supposed to have said in awe, “Really?” A family legend, like the time I said I fell in Lake Superior when I fell in a pool of water on the rocks at Gooseberry Park.

We did Trips of various sorts. To the Range, to what is now called Thunder Bay, now and then back to Sebeka, many picnics to our father’s chagrin, once to the Cities where a couple of second cousins at Dewey and Ruby’s thought it was just beneath them to eat with two country hicks like us. Once or twice to Lamberton to visit Wetters there. We had the signs memorized between Two Harbors and Duluth playing the alphabet game. (Not the cheesy one my wife and most people play but where the word had to start with the letter.) Once astoundingly our parents surprised us with a trip to a country music show at the Duluth Armory with real big-name stars we saw on TV, I do not remember who. But the train trip to San Francisco was a true bonding event, the hours together looking at the West out the windows. And we drove all the way to Shelton, Washington to visit the other Cleo and some of the Wetters. We must have had many territorial disputes on the small back seat of that car (A 36 Chevy Coup as I recall), but I do not remember them.

We would go to Saturday Matinees in town and then walk home. We played lots of Board Games, I only remember by name Sorry, Parchisi, and Chinese Checkers. Lots of Card Games, like war and authors. I remember when we discovered by virtue of Jeno boxed mixes that exotic new food called Pizza, which we often had on Sunday evening. We had many Cats and their kittens to play with. We used to compete for the Warm Spot in the Kitchen between the wall and the stove. I remember all that Time She Spent in Bed in junior high, with what now turns out to be mono and not rheumatic fever. She was diagnosed with Flat Feet and had to wear shoe inserts. The senior English teacher quit calling me by name because he kept calling me Cleo by mistake. The football coach once called me Cleo during a game. We used to call each other Jessica and Lorenzo, sometimes in public. Of course, I was Jessica and she was Lorenzo.

Which Farm Is the Real Farm on Birchwood Hill?

I just completed a fictionalized version of my childhood. It only took me 44 years.

When I was in graduate school I needed one more course offered by the English department. However, in the summer of 1978 they only offered one at graduate level which I could take, “Writing Fiction,” taught very poorly by a man who admitted he knew nothing in particular about the subject. His specialty was poetry. I struggled to find a topic about which to write, finally settling on narrating my childhood as a novel. I got about 75 pages done, which fulfilled his requirement.

I set it aside. Ten years later I saw it in a pile of papers. Slowly I added pages here and there, now and then, hit and miss over the next few years. In 1994 I had about 160 pages, but typed pages, badly typed pages in the era of word processing. I told myself that I was never going to reenter those pages. However, a man in the office next to mine offered me a flatbed scanner which included OCR (optical character recognition). It took a Saturday, but I had all the pages scanned into Word with most of the errors of the OCR process fixed. There it sat until a year ago.

There, too, I sat a year ago, retired, with major pain in my hands and the rest of my body, that made carving and pastels difficult. So I went back to the novel, never really intending to finish it, at least that’s the lie I told myself. I was not sure quite why I picked it up again. No doubt one reason was to have a creative outlet. In the end I do not think the pain of typing was less than it would have been to keep doing pastel. A second goal was self-discovery, not clearly defined at the time, which in the end may have been the largest reward. Now I know I started writing it again for the purpose of just getting it done, to check it off my to-do list. I told myself it would not be finished because the ending was problematic, at best. I knew where the story was going, there was only one path it could follow. That path led to a climax too early, or multiple climaxes, or a drift off into, to borrow a metaphor from painting, “mud.” Tolkien got away with multiple climaxes, but I am not Tolkien.

A satisfying ending was hard to envision; I struggled over it for weeks as I was writing. One night, at about 4:30 I woke up, which I do about five times a night from pain. But this time in my head was the end of the narrative. It was the second out-of-the-blue moment in three weeks. Earlier I had sent my main character as an eleven-year-old boy into town with his mother and sister because he needed to have new dungarees. It was all an excuse to get him to the library, which could only happen if his mother needed to go to town for some other reason. From that store a girl, a classmate whom he barely knew, followed him out and up the street to the library. It was all her idea, not mine. She walked herself right into the story and became a major character from that point on, providing a thread by which to stitch an ending.

Now it is ended and done, except for a thorough proofreading job. Some big-picture editing might be a sound choice as well. If I were going to do anything more with the novel, that is. I had long thought that 200 pages was all there was to tell, but it ended up at 350 pages of single-spaced word-processing. How did I do that? How in less than six months did I write 200 pages and do all that editing? Every one of the 350 pages has been revisited at least five times, some ten or more.

It tells the raw facts of my childhood, except it does not. Because nobody’s life is a story, the demands of fiction required changes. I had to delete, blend, color, reshape, alter, and invent. For instance, it has two climaxes, one of which never happened at all and the other of which is faithfully rendered as well as my words and memory serve. But, then, does memory serve? My sister and I have two radically different memories of elements of our shared childhood and the background of our parents. Since I was the author and not she, it was my memory that I used.

Also, I had to decide which was the master, my memory or the inventive process, which included the demands of narration and fiction as I understand them. The pure raw invention may have been more exciting to write than the memory. I cannot, however, conceive how authors invent tales completely.

I have not given the novel to my sister to read. She is barely aware it exists. I am not quite sure why I am reluctant. Will the mix of fiction and truth confuse or offend her? I always knew what the real climax had to be, all 44 years. The question was whether or not I had the fortitude to write it, which I finally did. Will she find that too personal? It is not a deep dark secret, just a highly emotionally-charged event from our childhood. I know she will say she does not remember it that way. What if she says it did not happen at all?

Remember the girl who followed my main character up the street? Candy I named her. If I say so myself, she is quite delightful. My wife says so too. My wife keeps asking me upon whom I based her. It is a fair question for my wife to ask since all but one other character, as my wife knows, is based on a real person. She is having trouble accepting I invented Candy, much less, as I tell her, that Candy invented herself just as she walked into the book by herself. I tell my wife that she is in part Laura Ingalls, part Anne Shirley, and part Margaret Farquar, who worked for bats.

In the end I am the summation of all that I have acquired through reading and the arts as well as what happened to me, by which I mean what my memory says happened to me.

So which farm on Birchwood Hill was the real farm: the one my sister remembers, the one I remember, or the one I invented?

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started…

and know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot “Little Gidding”

Another Two Missing Peelers

Slow Down, You Idiot

I just peeled a batch of sweet potatoes and a batch of regular potatoes with a paring knife, which made me appreciate the wonderful invention that is a potato peeler.

Why didn’t I use a potato peeler? Didn’t have one. Why didn’t I go buy one? Even though we are five minutes from the mall and a grocery store, there was no time. Big turkey dinner to get done. How is it I came to not have a peeler? The answer to that is pure genetics.

In my family you inherit one of two paces of life. 1) My father’s, which was to get up early, set a steady and unrushed pace to follow for sixteen hours of hard work. 2) My mother’s which was to get up early, rush through a task as fast as you could, take a break, rush through the next task, take a break and so on for sixteen hours, often having to fix what went wrong because you rushed. Not that my father did not have many things go wrong.

I inherited my mother’s pace, and sped it up, as did my sister. She was famous as a child for wrapping her legs around the chair at the kitchen table and getting up to go before she had freed her legs. Boom!

So, you see, I peel potatoes dropping the peelings in the sink, hurry up and get the potatoes on the stove, hurry up and grab the peelings and throw them in the garbage, and hurry up to the next task. Often a day or two later we discover the peeler has disappeared, no doubt I dropped it in the peelings and then threw it away. Don’t look; just grab and rush. We have gone through several peelers this way.

You maybe thinking that we should have two on-hand. We did, but somehow I threw them both away in the last two days. At my age anything is possible. I am going to do to peelers what they do with pens at checkout counters: chain it down, tie a plastic spoon to it, attach it to a big feather.

But it was a good dinner. Anyone want to do the wishbone with me when I get back from peeler shopping? Guess what my wish is.

Flocking Birds

ON BIRCHWOOD HILL in my long-departed youth in Northeastern Minnesota we often saw those eye-arresting flocks of little birds, of some species, I do not know what species. My poor eyesight and random brain are not attuned for bird identification. But you know the kind of flocks I mean. Hundreds or thousands of birds flying en masse, in no order of any kind, which suddenly shift directions, all members of the flock at the same instant.

Is one, which we can not identify, a pilot? Do they speak by some sub-woofer across distance, as do elephants, only theirs would be by some ultra-tweeter? Why do they want to all do the same shift at that same moment? What mysterious purpose does it serve? Food? Sex drive? Some undiscovered social purpose? Orchestration by an omniscient and unseen power? Astounding animal behavior.

OUTSIDE MY MANKATO APARTMENT, a building I share with many college students of both sexes, some in co-habitation and some awaiting the courtship rituals of the southern migration, in exact opposite of the birds in the spring, exiting the door from which I can watch them in my camouflaged nature blind/apartment window, come the young men and women, who suddenly all at once shift their plumage, but, unlike avian species, the females moreso than the males

This year the females are either storks or penguins. As storks, they strut on tall, very thin legs covered in tight stretch material, usually of black, which provides stark contrast to the white ground, enhancing courting behavior no doubt with the males. Yet other moments, these same females appear as penguins in baggy sweat pants, the crotch of which hang down almost at knee level despite the females’ height. One would assume that such a low crotch, or short rise as tailors would say, are a part of pants of very large waist and long leg length, but not so. Someone suddenly decided to make them this way and somehow communicated this shift in design to the young females of Mankato, and I can only assume elsewhere, all of whom suddenly somehow decided en masse to follow that lead.

Is one, which we can not identify, a pilot? Do they speak by some sub-woofer across distance, as do elephants, only theirs would be by some ultra-tweeter? Why do they want to all do the same shift at that same moment? What mysterious purpose does it serve? Food? Sex drive? Some undiscovered social purpose? Orchestration by an omniscient and unseen power? Astounding animal behavior.

The View from Birchwood Hill

I am a life-long Minnesotan, except for two years AWOL in south Chicago. I write about 1) my childhood growing up on a self-sustaining farm on the North Shore from 1948 to 1963 and 2) the unfolding pageant of life out my apartment window in Mankato.