Ms Sparrow

Dad would come home from work for supper at 6:00. We always knew when it was 6:00 because the whistle on the town water tower would blow. It also blew at noon and for fires, but the supper whistle was the one that really mattered.
    (I was tickled to find the actual water tower on Google.)
Mom wanted to have supper on the table when Dad came in the door, so the sibling responsible for setting it would have to have everything ready. Mom would be at the stove frying supper--and it was always fried food--usually fried in Crisco or Spry shortening, bacon grease or lard (never oil). We would have boiled potatoes one night and fried potatoes the next night with fried meat--hamburger or pork chops, liver, sausage or ham steak.

Vegetables choices alternated between canned corn, green beans and pork and beans. I never tasted broccoli until I was an adult. The only salad we had was chopped iceberg lettuce with sliced bananas and a dressing consisting of Miracle Whip mixed with a little sugar and milk. We loved it.

On those occasions when we were treated to dessert, it was either canned fruit (called sauce) or cooked pudding with milk. During peach season, however, we had peaches and cream every night because it was my dad's favorite.
(Apparently nobody serves simple peaches and cream any more. I had a hard time finding an illustration!)

When supper was done, it was time to do dishes. One night it would be my two brothers and the next, my sister Karen and I. This would sometimes result in arguments over whose turn it was and who left the crusty pan soaking in the oven.

Years later when my own four kids would fight over doing the dishes, I posted this poem by the kitchen sink for them. (Of course, it didn't do much good.)

I really love the local Renaissance Fair held every fall outside of the Twin Cities. I wish I could go again this year because it's iffy whether there will be one next year. It turns out that the tract of useless, un-arable land that has been home to the fair for many decades is now valuable real estate--for fracking!

As a result, the Renaissance village with all its structures will be torn down. It's not known where or if it might be held next year.

It was great fun to go out for the stage shows, jousting, scotch eggs and shenanigans.
There were so many specialty shops, foods and sights to bring out the crowds every weekend.

But, the frackers are lusting over what lies beneath the festivities.

Here's a family portrait from 1982. My mom and dad are in front. In back are my sister with her son and me (the chubby one) with my son. We had some good times there.

I love libraries. Of course I love bookstores too, but in libraries everything is free. You can browse all day if you want. You can relax and revel in being in the company of kindred souls.

I was introduced to the library at an early age. One memorable fall morning, my second grade class was escorted across the street to the imposing Carnegie Library. Around on the right side was a half-flight of stairs leading down into the children's section. We were all seated in a half circle around a tiny woman named Miss Mole (or so it sounded to me) who read us a story book. The book was about a little boy who ate so much, he turned into a balloon and floated away. This concept was confusing and a little frightening but I was enthralled--there were lots and lots of other books in the library with other stories. We were each issued our very own library card so we could come back and check out books again.

The prestige of being the holder of a library card was pretty heady stuff.  I was hooked!

The adult section was up the outside flight of stairs and we were not allowed to check books out of the adult section until we turned thirteen. It therefore became a "rite of passage" to ascend the steps and be issued an adult library card.

Oh the wonderful things that were to be found in the upstairs library! There were books on archaeology and foreign countries, murder mysteries and science fiction, biographies and even humor! I loved reading so much, I would smuggle books to my upstairs bedroom and read far into the night. 

Of course, that old library no longer exists. It was built in an era when nobody gave a thought to providing access to the elderly or handicapped. It also became far too small for a growing population and too expensive to maintain. I'm sure that was the fate of many Carnegie libraries around the country.

But how wonderful that we had those treasures while we did!

Today is Pearl Harbor Day. The sneak attack was 72 years ago and killed 2400 Americans  in a bombing that sank the battleship Arizona. I was a little over a year old at the time. The news stories today reminded me of my encounter with the father of a sailor who died in the attack.

When I was eleven years old, my family was living in a tiny town in Minnesota called Dovray. My dad was the contractor on a Norwegian Lutheran church being built in that farming community of 100 people. The town was really behind the times in 1950. My younger siblings all went to school in the one-room school house down the hill. (I've often felt envy that they had that experience while I had to make a one-hour long bus ride over to Westbrook for 7th grade.)

There was a general store called Smestad's Mercantile a block away. I was sophisticated enough that I knew how old-fashioned the store was compared to other places we had lived. It was just like the general stores I saw in old cowboy movies. On one side of the store the old man and his wife sold "dry goods" like flannel shirts and four-buckle overshoes. On the other side they sold groceries from a counter just inside the door.
                                     (Borrowed image)
There were open cardboard boxes of cookies and sheets of saltine crackers standing by the counter. The customer could take a brown paper bag and fill the bag to be weighed and priced. With no air conditioning and sealed packaging, the cookies and crackers were often stale. I don't remember if I was in Smestad's for cookies that day but I remember standing by the counter as he told me that his boy had been at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed. 
                                      (Borrowed image)
He was terribly sad and I was very confused. I'm not at all sure that I responded appropriately. Being a kid, with the off-kilter sense of time kids have, ten years seemed so very long ago that I wondered why he was talking about it.

Now that I am 73, I realize how very recent his loss was and how much he was still hurting from that dreadful day.   

On that fall day of the assassination, it was overcast and windy in Worthington, Minnesota. My oldest child was four and a half. The youngest was four months old. We lived in a trailer court on the edge of town in a two-bedroom mobile home. At 40' by 10', it was really crowded with our family of six, a dog and a cat. I was 23 years old.

The Mickey Mouse Club came on TV every afternoon at 4:00. When I turned on the TV for the kids to watch, there was only "snow". The TV antenna was positioned on a pole standing inside a cement block and braced by the trailer hitch at the front end of the trailer. The wind had spun it around it so it wasn’t picking up a signal from the TV station in Sioux Falls fifty miles away. Since this happened often, I ran outside to turn it so it would pick up the signal. I ran back inside to see if the picture was coming in. It was, but it wasn’t the Mickey Mouse Club. It was Walter Cronkite saying the president would be “lying in state".  I was confused and stunned as the terrible details were slowly revealed over the next hours and into the night. As the reports were repeated over and over, the reality slowly sank in. 

I had the TV on constantly for the next several days watching the continuous coverage in black and white. In the confines of the small mobile home, I was never far from the TV set so I was watching when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald live in front of millions of people.

I remember being very sad and feeling disconnected from the events so far away, and yet transpiring right in front of me on TV.
           This was taken in the mobile home the following year. 

It was four years ago today that I posted my first blog. I was quite enthusiastic and titled it, "Hallalujah I'm a Blogger!" I didn't have any followers at the time so there were no welcoming comments, but I was undeterred. I wasn't savvy enough to realize that the way to acquire followers was to find other blogs you like and become their followers. It took me a while to "get on board" with other blogs.

Over the years, four or five of my favorite bloggers have died and more than a dozen have stopped blogging or just faded away. Every once in a while, I see I have a new follower but discover there's no link to get back to their blog. I've also signed on as a blog's follower on impulse and discovered that it's not what I hoped it would be. It's hit or miss, like paging through a magazine looking for an interesting article to read. It seems that the best place to find good blogs to follow is on your favorite blogger's list of followers.

I noticed that the groundhog/woodchuck above has a Dragon voice recognition system. I tried working with a Dragon when I was going through a particularly bad spell of arthritic hands. I found it incredibly frustrating, and correcting the errors it made was more trouble than it was worth. It truth, the bigger problem is my arthritic brain!

So anyway, here's to year number five. May it be more productive and interesting than the previous four!

I first published this back in February of 2009. It still haunts me.
"I was reading a friend's blog today and she writes about being troubled by a worrisome incident in her past that she was powerless to do anything about.

This reminded me of an incident in a grocery store some years ago. I think about it every once in a while and it continues to bother me.

I had pushed my cart half-way down an aisle when a family of four was coming toward me. The father, a 40-ish beer-bellied type was pushing the cart. When our carts came side-by-side, the man was barking orders to a boy of around 10 on what grocery items to grab and put in the cart. The boy darted back and forth frantically while the man kept harassing him and calling him names.

The scariest part was that close behind the guy were huddled a thin, pale woman and teenage girl. They cowered close together with expressionless faces. The disturbing scene screamed ABUSE. I was angered and appalled that this was going on right in front of me. I desperately wanted to do something. I stood there watching for a moment while I debated whether to ask the woman if she needed help but she avoided making eye contact with me. I was terribly conflicted but afraid of making the bad situation worse. I looked around and other carts were now coming down the aisle and those shoppers were trying to ignore the whole situation. Reluctantly, I moved on and I have felt guilty ever since.

I always wonder what happened to that poor woman and her kids. I stew about what I should have done--alert the store manager? Intervene no matter what? Call the police?

I try to comfort myself that maybe the management saw the incident on security cameras and stepped in to help. But to this day, I wonder what would have happened if I had been more courageous."

( I wrote this several years ago. The wooded lot has changed since then. Several large trees have fallen opening it up to more sunlight so the wild cucumber isn't as bad as it had been.)

One balmy summer morning, I noticed that there were large-leafed weeds snaking up the trees and shrubs outside my bedroom window.  On days to follow, I could see the vegetation was rapidly spreading higher and wider.
Armed with this knowledge, I went back home to fight the good fight.  I made frequent forays into the woodsy lot over the summer pulling more of the weeds and concentrating on those producing seed pods.  If the plants are uprooted before the seeds are produced, the annuals can’t seed back the following year.  By the end of the summer, I was smug in the belief that I had won the war against the enemy. 

We had a little neighbor kid named Josh back in the seventies. He was an average boy with Dennis the Menace blond hair. His mom left for work in the afternoon before his dad got home, so we would take care of him for a few hours every day.

Bren's boyfriend Steve was over at our house one afternoon soon after we got our first TV with a remote control. Steve was sitting on the couch with the remote hidden next to him where Josh couldn't see it. He soon had little Josh tricked into believing that he was magically changing the channels on the TV by walking past it or making "zapping" gestures. Josh soaked up our admiration at his abilities. He was having great fun; magic powers are pretty heady stuff for a 5-year-old.

A while later, Steve was teasing Josh. The little boy turned to him and said, "You better stop that or I'll zap you and you'll be dead!" We were blown away at how we had created this little monster. We quickly showed him the remote and how it worked and explained it was just a joke.

Since Josh was "babysat" by whoever was around when he came over, we pooled the money earned and bought a new stereo system to replace the old HiFi. Those were the days of LP records so it only had a turntable. My dad built me a big record cabinet because we had a very large collection by the late 70's.

I finally sold all those LP's to Cheapo Records for $20 in 2005 since nobody in the family wanted them. Most systems no longer had turntables and it was difficult to find needles for them.

In my lifetime, the recorded music format has gone from 78's to LP's (with an overlap of 45's) then on to 8-tracks (big mistake) to cassettes to CD's and now...MP3's and ?

            



            And one that makes me cry.
              Pepper-John died in 1982 and is still missed.

We have our Johnson family reunion coming up this Saturday in a little town west of here. It's on my mother's side of the family. Sadly, all of the aunts and uncles are gone so it's just cousins and second cousins getting together. We always have a good time, but some of the older cousins aren't getting around much anymore either. 

I called my cousin Paul to see if he would make it and he said that not only would he come but he's bringing peach pies! That brought back memories of peach season from my childhood.

Peaches used to come in big baskets that were repurposed as laundry baskets to haul the wet laundry out to the clothesline. Sometimes, mom would just buy a "lug" of peaches in a flat wooden crate.

In any case, that meant it was time to can peaches for the coming winter. As the oldest child, I was given the task of bringing up all the dusty canning jars from the basement. Even worse was having to scrub them in hot water on what was invariably a miserable hot day. The kitchen would be steamy and sticky from blanching and peeling the peaches before cutting them in half and packing them tightly in the jars.

I swore that I would never can peaches when I grew up!

My dad was really fond of peaches and cream so we had that for dessert every night after supper during  peach season. I was in charge of peeling and dicing the peaches into six dishes to serve with half-and-half and sugar. There is no fancy dessert that can surpass a fresh, juicy peach--unless it's peach pie!

Yesterday, I took the kids back to their homes--well half-way, anyhow. I met my daughter (Allen's mom and the girl's grandma) at a Dairy Queen off the interstate and transferred them back to her. After having lunch, we said our goodbyes.

I admit I headed back home with mixed feelings. It's always such fun doing things with them and interacting with them. I get them just one week a year and each year they're a little older and their personalities are more developed. Kristie loves to cook and set the table. Kylah loves art and computer games and Karley, the youngest is a regular chatty Kathy. And, of course, they all love shopping and movies.

Every morning they slept late so I would get up and take my newspaper, coffee and the cats out on the patio. Karley, age 7, would wake up first, get dressed and pop out to join me. I got a bang out of the way she would talk non-stop. Karley had a hard time learning to talk but she is making up for lost time now. One morning, she told me she had gone into the room where her teenage Uncle Allen was sleeping. She told me, "I was watching him sleep and he is just adorable!"

I laughed out loud!

Allen is so cool and every inch the doting uncle. He is always watching out for them and guiding them, but is never cross or critical. They are so very lucky to have him in their life.

It was really amusing to hear Kristie and Kylah lecture each other over some supposed rudeness with, "That is inappropriate!"

On the plus side: no more macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, sloppy joes, tacos or chicken strips! Also, no more Disney kid's channel.

I sent them home with some baby hen-and-chicks to grow. They each got a drawing pad and a journal to write in. I found a treasure trove of stampers at the Unique Thrift store for a fraction of their cost and they they had a lot fun with them. Allen assembled a model Star Trek vessel and he got a copy of "The Hobbit" to read before the new movie comes out. He was an avid Harry Potter fan.

Anyway, good bye kids for another year. It was loads of fun and hard work, but I'm looking forward to doing it again next year!
                               Is it safe to come out now?

Back in 1959, my  husband had a job interview in Duluth, Minnesota. Duluth is a port city on the western side of Lake Superior. There's a lot of iron ore and grain shipping traffic going out and coal coming in through the harbor.

I had never been to Duluth so it was a really big deal to travel the 300 miles and spend a night in an hotel. We arrived in the early evening and drove around sight-seeing. One of the iconic sights in Duluth is the Aerial Lift Bridge. It's unique because it's constructed so the entire roadbed is raised to allow ocean-going vessels to pass underneath.

 We drove across to the residential side of the bridge and turned around to head back. Just as we started across the bridge, we saw a man come running up behind us shouting and waving a gun. Then he started firing the gun at a man running up ahead of us. It wasn't until the man ahead turned around and started firing back at his pursuer that we realized we were in the middle of a gun battle. The bullets were ricocheting off the bridge girders around us.

We sped up and went to the other side and parked near other witnesses. The cops showed up soon after. By then, the man who was being chased had gotten away. The pursuer, who was barefoot, was out of breath and very angry as he told the cops what happened.

The victim owned a vending machine business and had made his collections for the day. He brought them home, kicked off his shoes and lay down on the sofa to take a nap. He woke to find the robber standing over him with a gun. As soon as the robber fled with the money, the victim grabbed his own gun and went after him.

The cops took our statement and we left. Afterward, we went to a bar to talk about it with other folks. We bought a copy of the local newspaper the next morning, but the robber hadn't been caught.

In retrospect, it seemed like the entire event was merely a part of the whole trip experience. We just went back home and left it back in Duluth. As it turned out, the job offered didn't pay a high-enough salary that the move would be worth it. So, I just filed it away in my memory as the only time I have been shot at.

 
(My son is a "luthier" who repairs violins and string instruments. He once attended a small convention of luthiers in Duluth. He told me afterward, "I was the Lutheran luthier in Duluth."  He loves wordplay like that.)

My mom, bless her heart, did not have a green thumb. As much as she loved houseplants, she could not keep them growing to save her soul.

Her favorite plant was the Gloxinia, a showy floral with large flowers of magenta, purple or vivid pink. A healthy plant would bloom enthusiastically until it gradually declined and stopped.

Now, the wonderful thing about Gloxinias is that after they die back, you can rest the plant in a cool, dark place for a month or two. The plant will then “return to life” and, with proper care, it will blossom once more.

This was a big factor in her love of the gorgeous plants. While all the African violets, amaryllises, Easter lilies, poinsettias and other plants that died in her care were gone for good, the Gloxinia had the potential to live again. My frugal mom also loved that idea that she could justify the cost as a good buy since the plant could come back to bloom another time.

Every Spring, she bought a beautiful, healthy Gloxinia covered with buds and blossoms and brought it home. When the plant finally died back, she carried it into a dusty corner of the basement to rest-- and then forgot about it.

After Mom died, my siblings and I were faced with the task of cleaning out her basement. Among all the boxes of clutter were dozens of old plastic pots, still wrapped in pastel-colored foil and containing the desiccated remains of old Gloxinias.

I like to think of this as a sweet testament to Mom’s enduring belief in some kind of afterlife—and just maybe, that we all get a second chance to bloom.

                           Resurrection   
                                                             

When I was a kid, Minnesota was a hotbed of Lutheranism. The countryside was littered with small white churches topped by steeples. The church usually had the parsonage (where the minister and his family lived) on one side and the cemetery on the other.

As the years went by, the old farmers retired, sold their farms and moved into nearby towns.The little family farms were absorbed into bigger farms. Fewer farm families meant the congregations declined until the remaining members couldn't sustain the cost of the building and pastor. The old church buildings and land were sold off and the only remaining evidence they ever existed was a small cemetery notched into a farm field.

When I was eleven, we moved to the tiny town of Dovray, Minnesota where my dad was the contractor on construction of a large new church to replace the old one. There was a single church serving the entire predominantly Norwegian Lutheran community. The old building, a typical white country church, was far too small for the growing congregation even with the basement.

                                           (Borrowed images)

I have fond memories of the old church basements where weekly Sunday School classes were held, the Ladies Aid and church groups met, and church suppers were served. The most popular of these was the annual Lutefisk supper.

Norwegian immigrants had brought with them the exotic dish called lutefisk (loo-tuh-fisk) from the old country. In his book, "How to talk Minnesotan", Howard Mohr describes the dish thusly:

A translucent, rubbery food product with a profound odor, created by soaking dried cod in a solution of lye, although equivalent results are claimed for doing the same to gym socks."

 
The oldtimers really loved their lutefisk with melted butter and potatoes. The suppers were so popular that arrivals had to take a number and sit in the pews upstairs while waiting their turn. The church basement was lined with rows of tables as the hungry throng slowly passed by the counter where the food was served. In the kitchen, on the other side of the pass-through, the church ladies were bustling to keep up with the demand.

Out of courtesy, those who did not want to put any lutefisk in their mouth were offered the option of meatballs. That's what I ate. To this day, I have sucessfully avoided eating lutefisk despite the fact I was born in Madison, Minnesota which claims to be the Lutefisk Capital of the World! (It may well be true since the Norwegians no longer eat it in their country.)

After Pearl Harbor, there was a big need for workers in the aircraft industry on the west coast. They were so desperate they were even hiring women. My dad had not been called up for the service. I'm not sure if it was his age or the fact that he had a family--maybe both. In any case, he decided to move to California and work at Lockheed Aircraft Plant.

We settled in Van Nuys where my three siblings were born in quick succession. After the war ended, Dad built a sturdy two-wheel trailer and loaded it with our possessions. They packed us four kids in the back seat of the car with a potty chair and we headed back to Minnesota.

We arrived in the late fall and it was the first time we kids had ever seen snow. My mom loved to tell of how my brother Bob woke up, looked out the car window and asked, "What is that stuff?" We stayed with relatives until Dad found a job and rented an old farmhouse.

It was a very cold winter when we moved in. The main heat source was a washer-sized space heater in the dining room. The old fireplace in the living room was not working and apparently the furnace wasn't either. Incredibly, the space heater provided almost all the heat for the house. The big upstairs room where we four kids slept was unheated. We would get into our pajamas then run up the icy steps and jump into the cold beds. My two brothers in one and my sister and I in the other. We'd huddle together for warmth shivering while the bed slowly warmed up.

In the morning, we'd race back downstairs to stand by the space heater and get dressed. To this day, I need a cool bedroom to sleep well.

Today, being a girl is waaay more fun than it was when I was a teen! My granddaughters can experiment with different hair colors, decorated nails, an endless variety of cosmetics--and even tatoos!

My experiences were much tamer. Of course, I wasn't inspired to use much makeup since my mother never used anything but lipstick to "dress up".  Dyed hair and rouge were for hussies. When I turned 13, I began to use Tangee orange lipstick. It would turn a soft pink on your lips.


As I grew more adventurous, I would buy envelopes of hair tint to change the color of my hair. The result was so subtle that nobody noticed. The only way to curl your hair was if your mom gave you a Toni Home Permanent and then set it with Bobbi Pins.
When I got a little older, I became more daring and started using Maybelline mascara. The little box had the brush on one side and a strip of brown paint on the other. You had to moisten the paint and work it around to get it on the brush ( as I remember, I just used spit to get it going. I know--ewwww!) Note the use of the head scarf to hold the Bobbi pins in place, otherwise they were dropping all over the place.

For those awful teenage skin breakouts, I had a jar of Noxzema skin cream in the medicine cabinet. To this day, the smell of Noxzema brings me back to those years. For "personal daintiness",  the only deodorant I had was Mum Deodorant that came in a jar and had to be applied with the fingers. Thank goodness, the marketers eventually came up with the roll-on idea!    
I certainly did not have a lot of confusing decisions on what to spend my meager allowance on during those years. I probably would have chosen to spend it on movie magazines anyway!

The Star Tribune stopped carrying the daily Ballard Street cartoon to my great disappointment. It's always full of oddball whimsy and social misfits. I'm trying to get the cartoons emailed to me daily so I can get my Amerongen "fix".

We once had a dog who was always struggling to be the pack leader. Her name was Kippy and she was a small black mutt of terrier descent with brown eyebrows. Whenever we were out walking she had to be in front, sometimes straining so hard on her leash she'd choke and cough.

Once when we were camping in the woods, the whole bunch of us were walking down a gravel road surrounded by forest. Because of the remote location, we let Kippy and our male spaniel Pepper off the leash. As we strolled along, Kippy was happily leading the pack when I spotted a porcupine on the road ahead. The dogs hadn't seen it yet but I knew when they did, they would take after it. Porcupines are slow and dumb but they can do a lot of damage to an unsuspecting attacker.

I told everyone to turn around quickly and we started back the other way. Kippy, desperate to lead the pack, raced back to get ahead of us and good old Pepper followed. Disaster averted.

Kippy and Pepper are long gone now, but they were family members for many years. We still talk about them fondly from time to time.