James Lileks says he doesn’t like the weather today. I ought to agree with him, since in general my rule is “the warmer the better,” but I have to say I like days like today. Cool and bright.
I remember coming back to Minnesota for a vacation back when I was living in Florida. I went to a movie with my brother Moloch, and we were walking back to the car. (This was actually in Iowa, now I think of it.) It was fall, a cool day, almost chilly, but the sun shone on us. And I thought, “This never happens in Florida. In Florida, if the sun is shining, it’s hot. If it’s cold (a rare thing, but it happens), it pretty much has to be overcast.” I thought, “This is nice weather, and I’ll almost never see anything like it as long as I live in Florida.” And for some reason that seemed to me very sad.
So now I’m here again, and I’m enjoying my early fall day. My afternoon constitutionals call for a sweatshirt, and that’s really the best way to do a walk, I think we can all agree.
I think I’ll handle the looming prospect of approaching winter with denial this year. I’ll try to convince myself that, what with all this global warming and stuff, it’ll just be like a beautiful autumn day all the time until April.
I note from looking at our blog stats that most of our casual visitors come looking for the pictures I post from time to time. So I’ll post a picture tonight. But, to keep the riff-raff out, it’ll be the kind of picture that brings in the fewest Googlers: one of my family photo scans.
This is a picture of my great-grandfather, Hans (seated), and some of his numerous children. It was probably taken in the early 1950s.
The tall fellow at the upper right is my grandfather, Jack. The fellow on the left end is (if I remember correctly) his brother Peter. The others, I’m pretty sure, are some of the sisters, but I couldn’t put names on them for you. It’s been too long, and I never knew them well.
I actually knew old Hans, slightly, when I was very small. He died in 1957. He was born in 1862. It sometimes amazes me that I knew an ancestor who went that far back in history. He was born in Denmark and immigrated in the 1880s. According to what my mother told me, he left his wife and two kids in Denmark, promising to send for them when he’d saved the money, but never “got around to it.” So eventually she came over on money lent by her brother, who’d already come to America, and just showed up on Hans’ doorstep. One can imagine his delight.
I wonder if she came to regret it herself in time. Hans was (I suppose it’s a sin to speak thus of an ancestor) a man of whom nobody I ever met had a single good thing to say (except that he mellowed when he got old, and too weak to bully anyone). He drank heavily and brutalized his children. Grandpa told me, “I got a whipping every day when I was a boy. My father said that if he didn’t know of anything to whip me for, there was bound to be something he didn’t know about that deserved a whipping.” By all accounts my grandfather was Hans’ least favorite child, and he got the worst of a situation that was pretty much a snake pit to begin with.
I trace my own dysfunction back to Hans. He started (or passed on) a sequence of abuse that dominoed down to me in time.
When I get around to upgrading some of my ancestors, Hans is one of the first I’ll trade in.
My grandfather had an evil step-mother. I have a family picture taken just before his father died. That made things even worse, as one can imagine.
Many times I’ve thought of sticking a ‘happy face’ sticker over her nasty looking face, but, she is the mother of the kindest most loving great uncle that anyone could ever have had.
“One can imagine his delight.” – I will be laughing over THIS line all day.
If you look close enough, most every family as a skeleton or two in the closet that they’d like to hide. It helps remind us why we need redemption.
My maternal Grandmother was murdered in 1947 by her second husband. Her grieving family only put her first name on the tombstone. It reads, “Daughter Clara.” They couldn’t bear to carve his last name into the granite. It came out later that his four previous wives had all died in mysterious circumstances, but Grandma was the first one that resulted in prison time.
I’d love to paint her as a saint who was victimized by an evil man. However, everyone I’ve talked to who knew her has said something to the effect that she deserved it and they don’t blame him. She was was an angry, malicious, vindictive woman. You can see the results of her dysfunction in her children. Both of my uncles were alcholics. My aunt went through seven husbands and kicked her kids out when they turned 16 so they wouldn’t make her look old.
My mom was headed down the same path till God got ahold of her life and turned it around. She was 17 when her mom was killed. She dropped out of school to help raise her 12 year old little brother. By the time she married my dad, she had a baby from a guy who died of alcohol poisoning a few years later. My older siblings tell of the vicous fights my parents had the first years of their marraige.
But I never experienced that. I grew up in a very stable and serene home. A few years before I was born, my folks stopped drinking, dropped out of the Friday night dance club and devoted that time and money to their kids. They never talked about it much. Children of Alcoholics know how to keep the skeletons in the closet. Therefore, I have to read between the lines to find out what happened. What I do know is that the cycle of dysfunction was broken.
What a tremendous story, Greybeard. Thanks for telling it.