"Above the Horizon: Postcript"

Stop running away at the sight of this title, ya scaredy-blogger.

Really. I'm done exhausting and exhuming the story of my grandma and dad. But at this point, before I move back to the usual programming of posts that detail how Jessica Alba is somehow like a Shamrock Shake--and other random pop culturized profundities that are, in truth, what actually occupy my brain--I thought I'd squeeze one more drop out of this family tale.

By now, it's not much more than a vanity project. Interestingly, the vanity has come about because--and hold your mullet here, Wayne!--I've actually learned how to use our scanner, and therefore I am veddy, veddy proud of my small, delicate, "copy-button"-pushing finger, the one what has bravely helped a host of old family photos to become computer friendly. Honest to Edison, before these past weeks, when I'd use pre-2004 photos on my blog, I'd just prop them up on the counter out on the back porch and take pictures of them that way. Good, old-fashioned digitization and all.

So as long as I'm feeling flush with pride over my techno-smarts, and so long as I'm struggling to grade the work of 90 online summer students and therefore have smallish writing time, and so long as we're pondering family and how its members resonate through the generations, I thought I'd provide this mini-album of photos.

My dad? Was talented and pragmatic and gentle and awesome. My eight-year-old girl, who is talented in her own fashion but not necessarily musically, is doing her best to occasionally hit the right note and sporadically find the dominant beat. But she LOVES her music, as did my dad. And she's definitely pragmatic and gentle and awesome.

Look at these two Beethovens, in photos taken decades apart. Legacy, indeed.


Dad at the wheel


Girl in her first recital, last weekend


Dad, as I remember him best


Girl, feelin' groovy


Dad, in tails, directing his college choir


Girl, taking direction and managing to use her hands and voice simultaneously




And then.

There's Wee Niblet Paco Dinko, the five-year-old here in the house. As resident goofa$$, he is clearly mine. But how, exactly, can he be traced back to my dad and that serious branch of the family?


This might be our only evidence of a relationship.

"Above the Horizon: Part the Last"






My great-aunt Ethel and Grandma Dorothy as girls in Montana











The Saturday after his mother's memorial service, my Finnish father, who would regularly answer the direct question of "What are you thinking right now?" with "I don't know," talked to me about his life. As it turns out, he was more than just my parent, the guy who mowed the lawn and directed choirs and churned out homemade pear walnut ice cream (using Thomas Jefferson's recipe); he was a fully-historied human being with a holster of experiences I'd not known about.

Francis and Dorothy as a young couple, holding new baby Larry; my dad is the three-year-old in the front.

On that Saturday night, as Dad and I sat at the dining room table alone, I learned that my grandfather--reputed as gentle and taciturn in family lore--had, through wordless reproach, made my father feel stupid, even worthless, for my dad had the ill luck to be born with a beautiful tenor voice into a world where handwork was valued. On the ranch, that this boy, my young father, would someday sing Die Fledermaus was secondary to his inability to fix a broken combine.




My dad (looking a bit uncomfortable), my grandma Dorothy, my grandpa Francis, and my uncle Larry

Because of family expectations, my elegant, artistic dad spent his teen years on the back of a tractor, circling in the fields; it was then and there that he began to shout songs to the clouds, angling for any activity that would make the time pass and draw his attention from the worry of a mechanical breakdown--which would require he seek help from big men in dirt-covered overalls, men who would squint with quiet scorn at his "useless," tapered pianist's fingers.

That night, as words poured forth from my father, he admitted to me, "My father and I never had conflict. We always got along. But we were never close. In fact, Dad would never assign me chores or tell me what to do on the farm--I could have stayed in the house all day, as far as he was concerned. It was Mom who, to keep peace, would notice what needed doing and then send me out to work. I've noticed that Finnish families, maybe all Scandinavian families, are matriarchies in which the women take the initiative. And the men like it that way. They're comfortable with letting someone else take the lead and make sure things get done; that's one of the things I like best about your mother and what my dad liked best about my mom."

Awash in my dad's reflections, I also learned that after high school, Dad was going to attend the University of Montana-Missoula but first won a scholarship for the summer to Billings Business School for being the 3rd-fastest typist in the state. So he took shorthand there and a vocabulary-building class in the mornings. He lived that summer just outside of Billings on his Aunt Louise's farm (she who sang "How Great Thou Art" at the memorial), where he slept in the bunkhouse with his cousin Stanley. Everyday, Louise made my dad a lunch to take to school: a baloney sandwich. Part of the agreement about his living in Billings that summer and being released from ranch chores was that he would have to work, so he got a job with Service Candy and spent his afternoons filling vending machines with candy and cigarettes.

Then, one day, Phillip Turner, the conductor of the choir at the private liberal arts college in Billings, Rocky Mountain College, came into Service Candy and said he'd heard about my dad's voice (from whom, no one knows) and asked that he consider attending Rocky that fall. When Dad said that he already had a scholarship to attend the university in Missoula, and he needed that money, Mr. Turner pointed out that Rocky had a "valedictorian scholarship" for $300, and my dad would qualify for that. Thus, in the July before he started college, my dad changed his plans. Grandma liked the idea of Rocky, as it was a church-affiliated college. With her approval, his course was reoriented.

A year later, having completed his freshman year at Rocky, Dad was ready to get away from Billings--more accurately, to get away from the ranch that was a mere 40 miles from Billings, a place he was still dutybound to each weekend, a place with an endless expectation of willing work. Plotting his escape, my dad applied to three Minnesota schools (liking the fact that his dad had grown up there): Hamline, Macalester, and Carleton. Ultimately, he decided on Hamline...but his folks told him he couldn't go--they'd not help him.

He said he was going anyway. And he did.

For the next three years, every semester, just when Dad didn't know how he would pay the tuition, a check for $500, the exact amount of tuition, would come in the mail from his mother, my grandma Dorothy. Even thirty-five years later, both of Dorothy's sons remembered fondly, "If it weren't for Mom's egg money, we never would have gone to college."

My dad during the Hamline years and then in a professional picture a few years later


If it weren't for my father's talking that night in the wake of his mother's death, I never would have known that my grandma, the woman who, at the end of her life, needed an elevating chair to help her stand up, had loved to dance. My grandfather would not dance, being too shy, but while he leaned against the wall, she would circle 'round the floor at the dances held in the local schoolhouse, turning, swirling with other fellows in the community, a fact that made her two sons elbow each other and snigger that another man was touching their mother, and she was having fun at it, too.

Because of the words her death inspired in my father that night, I don't picture Grandma Dorothy in heaven as I remember her on earth--sitting in a purple recliner with an oxygen tank next to her, complaining of dizziness, elevated blood sugar, shortness of breath.


Instead, I see her younger,

more vital,

kicking up her heels

against the backdrop of a broad Montana horizon

as she waits for her cows to come Home.

"Above the Horizon: Part One"








I never felt particularly close to my paternal grandmother. She was pessimistic; she groused that I sat on the couch and read too much ("Don't you ever go outside?"); and the candy jar in her living room only ever housed lemon drops and restaurant-style peppermint circles, which are the Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt of the candy world: ubiquitous and completely without redemption.

However, she knew how to cook a goose, and I respected the fact that she was--and remains--the only person I've ever known who could actually cook my goose (and trust me, it's needed a good basting on occasion). Also, she was, fundamentally, a good person, and especially in junior high, a big part of me understood that finding a fundamentally good person was a rarity. I didn't "get" Grandma--we'd never hitch up into a shoulder-to-shoulder percolation of "Rapper's Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang--we'd never hip hop the hippie the hippie to the hip hip hop, a you don't stop the rock it to the bang bang boogie say up jumped the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat.

But Grandma was all right.

In the 7th grade, when I was assigned a biology project to collect and identify a slew of wildflowers, it was my grandma (having never sat on the couch and read all day thanks to the 80 cows on her Montana ranch with bulbous udders that had them lowing for relief twice a day) who walked the acres with me, plucking flowers out of the ground and handing them over for cataloguing with a terse, "Think this one's called Shepherd's Purse."

So when she died in January of 1999, at the age of 83, her passing meant something. On a deeply personal level, I wasn't affected, to tell you true. But she was emblematic of something bygone, and that fact moves me still.

She died in Montana, a handful of miles from her birthplace: a sod dugout on the family ranch, that passle of acres where she spent the majority of her life milking cows, feeding cows, cooking beans to feed the pigs, baking pies to sell to local restaurants. At 18, she married a Finn, and they raised two sons on their ranch of nearly a thousand acres (small stakes in Montana terms). In sum, she was a classic 20th Century Western woman, placing value on work and work again over words and emotions and how big and open the sky loomed above.

Despite my recognition that Grandma had represented something classic, her death came just as I was facing the first week of a new semester, just as personal debt was at an all-time high, just as I was willing to acknowledge that I had never felt intensely linked to this grandmother. I wasn't sure I'd be flying to Montana to attend her funeral.

Then a sage, in the form of a friend, planted herself firmly in front of my head-down horizon and made my flight to Billings possible, telling me, "Funerals and the like, these kind of things are more important than you know. I think you need to go do this."

I made my way to Billings to find that my friend had been smack-on right. On that trip, I found that, even though I hadn't felt a one-on-one connection with Grandma Dorothy, I could, after her death, appreciate anew all those she had left behind, the crazy-quilt of individuals who were patched together due to her life, stitched more tightly in her absence.

Wednesday, January 13th, 1999, was my grandma's day of memorial.