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.