Creating A Monster

Over the holidays, the kids and I were reminiscing about the strange menagerie of pets they had growing up. From a turtle that was supposed to live forever to bunnies that died after Easter, the list was a bit unconventional. We also had parrots and cockatiels, an errant snake and plenty of fish (life expectancy of one week). Over the years, the animals came and went and none held on for very long.

Living on a golf course has provided Sharon and I with another kind of menagerie. Over the years, we’ve played host to a wide variety of desert creatures.

Road runners would occasionally amble through our yard. Herons and geese were more elusive, if for no other reason, than the whirly coyote always on the hunt for them. Mountain lions and bobcats were even scarcer and seldom seen in daylight but they were there. Coyotes were around day and night.

This Christmas, the kids were awakened around 3:00am by a pair of coyotes digging frantically under my shed looking for rabbits. Those predators left quite an impressive hole in the ground.

It’s not unusual to find animal tracks in our sand and sometimes scat there too. I’ve often thought it would be fun to have a night camera to catch the animal action that happens long after we’ve gone to bed.

Now the main attraction seems to be coming from our winged neighbors, hence the monster I speak of.

My first introduction to our winged neighbors began with a set of hummingbird feeders we placed strategically in our backyard. Soon, nests began to appear and the tiny families moved in.

A bird bath began to attract even more larger birds and the final step was a plastic container filled with bird food. I got into the habit of filling it each morning and hence the monster was born.

There seems to be a kind of caste system going on here. First, the small birds find that the tray is full again. They begin congregating and enjoying the mornings feast. All it takes is for one dove to appear and the scramble is on. More doves appear very quickly and soon the tray is swamped by all forms of winged hungry eaters. That’s when the caste system kicks in.

There are several large doves who usually appear after the feeding frenzy is on full-tilt. They’re mean, obnoxious bullies who push and shove and wing-flap the other birds away. The jockeying for someplace to eat never works when they’re around. It’s a free for all and the larger doves edge out the smaller birds for the best spot to gouge themselves. I’ve tried to capture this scene in a video clip or photo but I can’t get close enough without them scattering to the winds.

I have a little buddy who often sits with me to watch this social strategizing going on. He seems content to let the bigger birds fight their morning fight since he has their own feeder just a wing flit away.

Of course, an outsider might surmise that this is what happens when one has time on their hands, ravenous birds to entertain him and a background setting that can’t be beat.

I am one lucky guy….so say the birds and me.

Why Didn't I Ask?

Last week’s blog ‘When You Were Young and I Was Poor’ reminisced about missing out on so much of my own backstory as I was growing up. My mother, indoctrinated by her staunch German Catholic upbringing, would not allow herself to talk about the past. That reluctance to share with my sister and I her own history has left Marlene and I with a void that’s never been filled. Sharon and I didn’t want to make the same mistake with our grandchildren.

Our shared history is, in a very real sense, their history dating back through the years. Through my blogs and Sharon, through her dialogue, we have made the occasional effort to share our past lives with our grandkids. We felt it was important for them to know about those life events that brought us to where we are today.

Like most grandchildren, ours weren’t that interested at first. But gradually, they’ve come to realize that our world growing up was vastly different from their world of today. The contrast surprised and sometimes perplexed them.

So, this Christmas when both families were together, Sharon and I made a concerted effort to talk about our past and welcome questions from the grandkids. The grandchildren, ages thirteen through eighteen, through their probing questions highlighted the stark contrasts between respective young lives growing up.

Sharon shared photos of her birth place in Elgin, Nebraska. It was a two-bedroom farm house on land her father rented. They were two miles out of town and Saturdays were ‘go to town’ and resupply day.

In contrast, I talked about the first place I remember which was a six-plex apartment building near downtown St. Paul. After that, we moved to another neighborhood farther away.

Photo Credit: Jerry Hoffman

Sharon talked about moving to Minnesota when she was eight to the 100-year-old farm house in Wabasha, Minnesota. I showed a photo of the house my mother built by herself in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Sharon talked about her one room school house out in the country before she went to town for high school. I took a city bus to my grade school in downtown St. Paul and walked to high school.

The differences of Sharon growing up in the country verses me in the city were clear enough. It was the questions the kiddos asked that surprised me the most.

They had never heard of a ‘paper route’ or side gigs like ‘cleaning the bulk tank’ on the farm or working at the ‘neighborhood grocery store.’ They asked me about the draft and my time in the Army. They had no concept of the Selective Service or what an ‘internet café’ was. They couldn’t understand why I chose to use hitch-hiking as my primary source of transportation while living in Denmark.

They knew little of Vietnam and less of student protests. Unfortunately, a couple of other wars came after that one. Their world began with cell phones, the internet, family vacations, comfortable homes, and access to good education. Theirs was a world radically different from the one Sharon and I grew up in.

Yet, it was very important that our grandchildren understood their heritage and background and that of their parents and grandparents. If for no other reason than to better understand their own advantages and the expectations placed on them because of those advantages.

I can’t make up for the lack of information I had growing up on my own heritage. My kids and grandkids won’t suffer the same fate.

When You were Young and I was Poor

It was the only tangible, written legacy my mother left my sister and I before she died. Ten pages, single spaced, documenting a lifetime of hard work, unbroken faith in her God, loss, rejection, betrayal and heartbreak. There was also a tremendous (though hidden) pride in her own survival and personal accomplishments.

The title she had scribbled on the top of the first page, almost as an afterthought, was so well crafted, it took me years to understand that it’s brevity spoke volumes.

There was no mention of meeting her second husband, Erwin, or the thirty wonderful years they had together before he passed at age 104 and she a little later at 92. References to my father were few and cryptic and left me nothing tangible to hold on to.

Fortunately, my sister conversed more with my mother in her later years than I did. Unfortunately, my mother’s strong rural German Catholic legacy of never bringing up the past and keeping secrets had rubbed off on me. She never talked about her past and I never asked.

Now with that written admission, confession, revealing document I could finally gleam some of her and my own history during those early years; hers and mine.

Hildegarde only went as far as the sixth grade in the small hamlet of St Martin, Minnesota. She dropped out to take care of the chickens and other livestock. Since she was the youngest it was expected that she would stay home to help out her aging parents and work the farm as her siblings gradually left for greener pastures.

My mother grew up a beautiful and ambitious young woman. The Twin Cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis proved irresistible to Hilde when she cautiously toe-stepped away from home for the first time. She was hungry enough to break free of the life-choking reins of farm work by testing herself in the cities. But with just a sixth-grade education, the only work she could get was house-keeping for wealthy clients, odd jobs as a seamstress and cooking. She became a maid on Summit Avenue. Not quite Downton Abby but close.

Despite the occasional homelessness, abject poverty and lack of support from relatives, my mother soldered on, and with the help of one brother, actually built her own house in a tony neighborhood in town.

I never felt poor growing up. Part of that I’d attest to the fact that we lived in a house not an apartment. My classmates in grade school all came from the same lower to middle class background. High School was a little different with more solid middle-class kids but few if any who showed their wealth.

Micky, my best friend, lived across the street. He had three brothers, a mother with issues and a father who worked for the post office. They had no car like us and didn’t take family vacations either. They didn’t feel poor either but at least Micky had a father.

At some point later in life, I came across some photos of my father and myself. Of course, I’d seen those photos before but back then my inexperienced eyes were vacant and mind-closed. This time around I looked at those glimpses of my past with a much different attitude. All of my friends had fathers growing up; some good, some present, some never talked about but there nonetheless.

For me, it’s always been a vacuum in my memory bank that’s never been filled-in. There were no pictures or other mementoes of him ‘ever’ in our house. It was as if he never existed in the first place. By the time I had finally matured and became curious about my lineage those memories of her distant past had become a fog clouding my mother’s mind. About the only thing I could be sure of was that I once had a father and he died at a (relatively) young age. End of story.

There were clues in those pictures…in the clothes, mannerisms, posture, location and a hundred other enounce that spoke volumes about the man that gave me life. By reading into them with the inquisitiveness of a writer and a curiosity of past traits passed down to me, there are answers (unconfirmed, of course) in what those pictures were saying.

So, without being clinically antiseptic, I began to study the clues some unknown photographer presented to me. There were stories in those images that said so much and yet revealed so little. I did my surgical inspection without the benefit of that brief written journaling pasted down from my mother. I was also cognizant of her refusal to recognize that part of her past life. If there was any prejudice, hard feelings or hidden shame in their relationship it had slipped away with her last breath here on earth.

So, who was this man that was a part of my life for less than two years then was gone forever? Who was this Arthur LaComb whose lineage could be traced back to Quebec, Canada but little else beyond that?

I’d been told that my grandmother (on his side) was in our lives for a brief period of time but she never a part of my life afterwards. My sister said she visited us once then disappeared after her son died.

Turns out, I have a step-sister. My mother remarked once back in the eighties, “Oh yes, you have a step-sister who lives in a trailer park in Florida. She came to visit us once.’ I guess I was in the fourth or fifth grade at the time but I don’t remember her visit. We never heard from her again.

The story of my parent’s breakup has been clouded by time and my mother’s selective memory. As the story goes it was a Catholic priest who declared that their marriage wasn’t valid because my father’s first marriage hadn’t been properly annulated in the eyes of the Catholic Church. The priest declared that therefore they couldn’t live together...in sin. My mother, being a devout Catholic, complied. She told me there were no jobs for a short order cook after the war and thus my father had to move away. That was in 1945. When I asked my mother if my father ever wrote or sent money to her over those four years that he was gone, she said no.

The story of his death is also a vapid cloud that kept changing tones and colors as it was retold over the years. It seems that in the winter of 1948 my father was traveling back from the West Coast to be with us for Christmas when he stopped in Missoula, Montana. He died of a massive heart attack the next morning and was buried there. My sister’s been to his grave. Neither my mother nor I ever have.

Growing up, I was vaguely aware of other nuclear families that had a father and mother. But we had our home on Randolph Avenue and that was our abode; minus all the trappings of Ozzie and Harriett and the Cleavers. It never registered to me what a real family might be like.

Martin Noll, my grandfather, died seven years before I was born. That’s really a shame. I’m guessing he would have been one hell of an influence on me had he lived long enough. So, it was left up to his youngest, my mother, to show me the value of hard work and steel hard, forged determination to get ahead. A legacy that has driven me all of my life.

I’ve had a good life. I’m married to a wonderful woman, fifty-three years and counting. I’ve got great kids and wonderful grandchildren. It’s been ‘all good.’ And for a very brief period of time back on Smith Avenue in old Saint Paul it looks like we were a family… a family just like everyone else when I was young and mom was poor.

Speaking to Me in Many Tongues

Each morning I’m greeted by dawn in the desert. The beautiful sunrise brushes finger-thin rays of lemonade pink against the still sleeping mountains. Occasionally there are fleeting glimpses of coyotes on the golf course returning from their nocturnal hunt. Those hours just after dawn seem to draw out an interesting assortment of desert characters (human and otherwise) intent on enjoying the cool of morning before the heat of the day.

Dawn in Minnesota presents a different picture. The Midwest is less dramatic and more serene than California. For me, it’s two different two points of view, each speaking in many different tongues. Yet there is a similarity there for me. It’s a comfort zone where I can think and feel as I wish without judgement from others. It’s a far cry from the strict, regimented ‘follow the rules’ upbringing of my youth.

Geographically, California and Minnesota are thousands of miles apart yet they are still connected by out-of-the-box thinking and a deep-seated pride in pioneering frontier values and driving ambition. There’s a common thread running between the two with openness for all and acceptance of different points of view. Both offer a realistic view of the world and not a closed-minded myopic wish for what used to be. They focus on what could be and not what once was.

On the night America took a sharp turn to the right my two adopted states continued a long tradition of progressive thought and action. Certainly, there were blips along the way. Neither party got everything they wanted but the human fabric and soul of both states remained intact.

I started out last summer with high hopes for a continuation of my ‘Coffee and Chat’ sessions. Very quickly, reality crept into the picture and several past participants choose to go their separate ways. My remaining cerebral partners and I shared a wonderful summer, meeting up at parks, beach fronts, patios and coffee shops, to engage in a wide variety of verbal bantering, mental jousting and comradery.  A wonderful salon for an exchange of ideas, thoughts, hopes and dreams.

Then last fall, as always, my tenure in Minnesota is challenged by my West Coast other-half knocking on the door of residency. Now that I’m part-time Californian, my perspective about my home state has changed. I love California. It appeals to my restless youth, errant and wandering mind, free soul, sometime corrupt and tranquilizing imagination.

I have had a long and fractured romance with California. Its part delusional, part opportunistic and part magical. Mostly it’s a comfortable relationship that seems to bring out the flip side of

me that a lot of folks never see. It is at once my friend, advisor, irritator and councilor. It forces me outside of my Midwestern comfort zone.

It’s the cradle from which my imagination gives birth to creative, frivolous, silly and enlightened ideas, concepts and storylines. It inspires me and mocks me at the same time. It’s the flip side of that routine called lifestyle. If ever there were a strange balance in my life it might be labeled the Minnesota-California connection.

I live in two different worlds and I’m comfortable in both. One is progressive, adventurous and sometimes a bit outrageous but always leaning forward. For half a year I wear my Southern California flip-flops as comfortably as any other seeker. But I also live in the Midwest and I’m darn proud of that too.

Yet I know for a fact that come next spring, the same magical force will once again draw my attention back to Minnesota. There’s a quote I love that goes something like this: “At some point in the journey, you realize it’s time to head back home. It doesn’t matter where you are in the journey, the Gods begin calling and you must return home.” I think there is something about that mysterious force called ‘home’ that calls to all of us. It happens to me every fall and then again in the spring.

Both states have become home in more ways than one. They’re like a cradle upon which my imagination gives birth to creative, frivolous, silly and sometimes enlightened ideas, concepts and storylines. It’s the flip side of that routine called your average lifestyle.

What can I say; it works for me. I’m born and bred Minnesotan with a strong streak of California to taint my mind. I wouldn’t have it any other way.