My Grandfather (Reinhardt Theodore)

I was pitching a fit; it was my day to ride our pony and my visiting cousin was on him. Suddenly my Grandmother quietly said to me “Your Grandfather thinks so highly of you; how do you think this would make him feel?” I was stunned to silence. I hadn’t known that my Grandfather even knew I existed. He lived in a higher world than I, benignly remote; he was always in the background, quietly smoking his cigars.  I don’t remember ever talking to him, but I recall him sitting in their Living room, with a spittoon and a totem of chewed gum next to him.

He sang for weddings and funerals in his beautiful tenor voice. My Aunt Darlene often accompanied him with her flawless soprano (a they did at my wedding). My aunts sang when they did dishes ranging, from alto to soprano. Aunt Angeline had her own radio show when I was growing up singing and playing the guitar, and probably accordion, but that’s another story.

Grandpa’s hands were legend they were so big. Forgetting his sports jacket in the car that drove off with a relative after my sister’s wedding, he borrowed my Father’s for pictures and had a hard time getting his hands through the sleeves.

I know most about Grandpa from stories told about him: his days running a lumber camp in Northern Wisconsin when my mother was young, being knocked out by his Percheron workhorse team as they ran on either side of a telephone pole with him between them. I also know him from images, some of which I took. My favorites are of him as a middle-aged man sitting listening to the radio, with my Grandmother when they were old, and as he met my nephew for the first time (unfortunately on a slide I have not converted to digital).

While in the hospital shortly before he died, I heard my Grandmother say to him, referring to Jesus "He is our lifeline." After he died, walking across a park in Platteville in 1982, on my way home from work, a scent reached my nostrils and I immediately thought of him. It was cigar smoke.

My Grandmother

My Grandmother’s name was Elenora, Wilhelmina, Johanna, pronounced “yohanna”. My name, a shortened version of hers, was one of many gifts from this intense woman.

During the Great Depression, to make ends meet, she ran the dairy farm as Grandpa ran a logging camp further north in Wisconsin. After Grandma and Grandpa left the farm and moved into town, they were fortunate to land in a place where they could in effect keep on farming on a smaller scale. They raised and sold produce from their “Garden of Eat’n”, raised chickens, geese, sheep and even a heifer. From that “farm,” she created goose down pillows for all her grandchildren.

The town decided to put fluoride in the water system. Incensed, Grandma took a dead chicken, to the hearing and slung it in front of whoever was in charge. She wanted to make the point that she used fluoride to kill the lice on her chickens; that it was poison. She was hauled forcefully out of the room.

I was enchanted by both my Paternal and Maternal Grandmother’s homes. One day when I was around eight, I told Grandma how beautiful I thought her chandelier was. When they left the farm, it was mine. The structure of the chandelier has not survived the years, but I use ten of the crystals on our Christmas tree; the rest I gave to my nephew.

Even after she left their place in town, after Grandpa died, Grandma raised chickens until she went to the nursing home. She couldn’t stand store bought food.

Next to Grandma’s kitchen sink, only a few inches deep, was a glass cake pan in which fluttered fan tailed gold fish amid feathery water plants. A philodendron grew out of the water. The set up was enchanting, especially looking down on the undulating fish. She created many such beguiling environments, including the gardens that surrounded their home.

Grandma wore her wedding dress dyed gold for their fiftieth anniversary, and trundled Grandpa into the church in a wheelbarrow.

At her funeral my sister was scandalized when the pastor said “Now, there were some who did not like Nora.” I found it wonderful – he clearly knew her and was not of that group. Not long before she died, she wrote a Christmas play with parts for people from the congregation. Not only did she write the play, she also sewed costumes for everyone: elder men as wise men, younger as shepherds, Mary, Joseph, and so on. She was annoyed that someone switched out the hymns she had chosen. At the time I thought “Good grief, Grandma, they did your play.” Now I am in complete agreement with her.

She was intense; she was not a sit back and criticize kind of person, she was a go for it and put in a lot of work to make something excellent kind of person.  She was not always easy for people to “take”. I share that quality of her intensity; I hope I share her excellence.

Being German

These days, we can find out definitively where we came from – we spit in a cup, send it in and tada; we know.

I’m going on the information I was given by my family, the traditions we continued from our ancestors; both sides emigrated from Germany. My grandparents spoke German until WWI, when it was dropped for obvious reasons. That meant they spoke it in front of my parents as children so they could carry on a private conversation. It seems a shame to me that the language was not passed on, though I do find myself saying “ya, ya,” with no compunction.

When my parents, my brother, and his then girlfriend, helped me move to Iowa for graduate school, my roommate and landlord John, another German, directed us to Bill Zuber’s restaurant in the Amana Colonies for dinner. It felt like going to grandma and grandpa’s house. The smell was the same, the colors on the walls, the decorations – the food – it felt like home.

When we left the farm and moved, eventually ending up in western Wisconsin, among Norwegians (my younger sister became Norwegian), I was baffled by what they ate; and what they didn’t eat. They ate a wide variety of elaborately fashioned items all made from the same thing – butter, flour, sugar and cream. I’m not complaining – I love butter, flour, sugar and cream. They didn’t make cut out Christmas cookies, intricately decorated and hang them on the tree. They didn’t make lead dumplings slathered in rich gravy; they didn’t have a crock of sauerkraut fermenting on the back porch. We did.

Grandpa marveled that my Mother knew to make his favorite meal when they visited: pork chops, dumplings and gravy. She didn't have to think twice about it.

During my second year in Iowa City, my roommate’s cousin, Markus came for an extended visit from Germany via the Pacific Rim where he had been traveling for half a year. He’d saved his money teaching newly freed East Germans (The Berlin Wall came down while I was in Iowa), and took a year to travel the world before he settled down. We became fast friends and I enjoyed introducing him to many Americanisms, such as big hamburgers, root beer, popcorn, road trips and buying a used car.

Ironically, his American cousin moved out of his own house the summer Markus came to visit. One of my favorite memories was discovering rural Iowa together with Markus and my new roommate, Skip, fifteen years my junior, from California. We toured a giant flea market around the entire racetrack of the county fairgrounds in What Cheer (pronounced “Watcher”), Iowa.

During that fall Markus took his newly purchased Toyota north to visit my parents in Wisconsin. I couldn’t go, but Mom made sure to serve him sauerkraut and dumplings. He returned reporting that they were more German than he was.

Switching to Blogger

I’ve made the decision to switch to Blogger. It is free, and one can go back to the entirety of my posts. This does not seem to be true of my current blog, or at least I can’t find my early posts, so I assume others can’t without some effort either.