Memories are Made of This

Our parent’s generation had their Brownie cameras, thin airmail letters, and sketchy oral history sessions to collect a lifetime of memories. They had little else to encapsulate their era, decades of living and snippets of generational history. My, how times have changed.

A while back, I was able to escape Minnesota for a week in Palm Springs. It was a respite from the craziness that had become my life over the last six months.  A retreat to the desert was meant to being clarity to my brain and recharge my batteries for the continuing challenges ahead for me as a caregiver back home.

Not surprisingly, my long list of have-to-do projects was pretty quickly set aside for quiet times on the back patio and time to reflect. I made a point to playing catch-up with our neighbors and little touch-up tasks around the house. Most importantly, I made a point of seeing several close friends, one of which was Howard. 

Howard is a wonderful man at ninety-three who has had a good life. We were lunching at the Senior Care Facility where he now lives. Bob, his partner and husband of 54 years, had passed away this fall and Howard was struggling with his new reality of living alone again.

One particular statement he made touched a nerve with me. “All I have left now,” he said “are my memories. I lived the first fifty years in a straight world and then the next forty-four years with Bob.” A smile slowly escaped from his face and it was all good. Despite being almost totally blind now, living in an assisted-living facility, Howard still had his memories to keep him alive. He is keeping busy, reading through an instrument from the Braile Institute and making new friends and, most importantly, cherishing those memories of ninety-three good years well lived.

It was only in her later years that my mother was able to recollect and relish (to some small degree) her life growing up on the farm, the early years working in the Twin Cities as a domestic, then raising two children on her own and finally meeting her second husband and another thirty good years spent with him. Unfortunately, collecting memories weren’t paramount on her mind back then.

Handwritten notes (really scribbles) of her life are now the only tangible thing along with some photographs that she left behind. Her later-in-years recollection of past events were often clouded by old age, memory loss and fractured truths that often didn’t pass the test of reality.

Howard’s comments about holding on to memories brought up an interesting realization. While my parent’s generation wasn’t very big on picture-taking or memoir-writing, my own generation was and is. With the advent of the iPhone, everyone can now be a photographer and able to capture any of life’s moments in an instant.

With Cloud storage and digital capabilities, the total amount collected is almost limitless. The same can be said for data, documents, videos, and any other form of digital-capture. More memories can be captured, created and stored in one day than our forefathers could muster up in a lifetime.

When both my kids did their semester abroad sessions while in college, I was able to capture their experiences on video (now digitized). It’s a visual benchmark upon which their kids can compare their own future explorations abroad. We captured the same precious moments when Sharon’s parents were interviewed about their early years growing up in Nebraska and then Minnesota.

Over the years, I written more than 700 blogs. Each is my own version of a memoir, covering various aspects of my life, interests, failures, success, places I’ve been and dreams I’ve captured. Writing my own obituary and that of Sharon is simply another way, she and I can capture (in our own words) a lifetime of living. For us, memories are made of that.

Cousins

Several years ago, Sharon did the whole Ancestry thing. She was able to trace her lineage back to Germany in the mid-eighteenth century. She even found a picture (supposedly) of the clipper ship that her ancestors came over on. My own family tree began and ended abruptly in Canada with no ‘came from’ or ‘went to’ ancestral lines past that spot on the map.

My own mother’s reluctance to talk about her past (well documented in past blogs) left me with little tangible facts or rumors to go on. She had left her past history cold and unforgiving except for those rare moments of clarity or lapses of revelation when something from the past was revealed. So, what I had to go on was the fact that four women, all sisters, were born in Sterns County, Minnesota on a small farm just outside of the small hamlet of St. Martin.

The four sisters were part of a family of eight; four brothers, four sisters. Each with their own hopes, promises and secrets. Never really very close was the common thread between them. Their children, the cousins, followed suit and never established strong inter-family bonds. That lack of kinship is a sad yet realistic result of ‘family dynamics’ so common among many families.

I always had the impression that my mother was a lot closer to her dad than her mother. She spoke more often of her girlfriends growing up than time spent on the farm. All four sisters ended up getting married and settled in different neighborhoods of Saint Paul. Two ended up in Highland Park, one in the Como area and the fourth in East Saint Paul.

From those four sisters came eight children, all cousins with little in common and less time for making acquaintances. There were a few family gatherings but not enough to solidify a sense of community among the group. Family secrets were still there but kept hidden as per their rural German Catholic culture.

All of which leaves many unanswered questions and fewer answers. For a while one of the cousins, Dr. Ron Pizinger, began collecting information on the Noll family and its many mutations since leaving the farm. He held several extended family gatherings and produced some fascinating information about our elders sailing over from Germany and settling eventually in Sterns County. Unfortunately, his early unexpected demise left many unanswered questions that have never been addressed or resolved.

Since then, offspring from the four cousins continue to grow, abet far apart and seldom in communication with one another. Whatever bonds began with the four sisters at the turn of the century has long since dissipated and faded away with the years passed.

I’m guessing this is probably more normal than not. For generations to continue a bond of friendship and familiarity in this era of constant moving, evolving interests and social changes must be a monumental challenge. Old bonds grow weak, splinter, and fail. New interests supersede old ones and new directions are followed by some and ignored by others. Nothing remains as it was. Nothing stays the same.

And as the cliché says: Life goes on.

A Mystery Unraveled

Only now, years after her passing, am I finally getting a closer look at the ambitious, liberated, free-spirited, adventurous woman gave birth to me over eighty years ago. Then forgot about the role she was supposed to play in my life after that.

Up until this point, with the rare exception of a couple of old black and whites, all I had to go on to retrace my mother’s life story was a series of hand-written notes detailing some of the sequences in her life growing up. It was a chronical of her experiences from youth to old age. Unfortunately, the notes were written later on in her life and was rife with errors, misstatements, and voids that she had purposely created to leave out specific parts of her story.

Then one day my sister, Marlene, met a cousin who had a treasure-trove of old pictures, many of which include our mother in her youth growing up on the farm. It suddenly opened up a whole new insight into our mother’s adolescence and young adult period. From the cars to clothes to rural surroundings it was a glimpse into a past long since shut dark by time and old age.

Closer examination of the pictures along with her own scribbled notes provided some clarity in my mother’s early life. There were pictures of her with her mother with whom she was never close. My grandfather whom my mother adored was there. There was her brother, Frank, a man wrapped in mystery, who died relatively young in his thirties.

Farm life around the turn of the century was a hard-scrabble life; twenty-four hours a day. Horse power provided the engine to harvest crops, move machinery and take folks to town. Our grandfather was the first in Sterns County to have a horseless carriage, one of the few in all of Minnesota at the time.

Fortunately, a few of the pictures had hard to-read-scribbles on the back that named names and connections. There were snapshots of mom’s close girlfriend, Delta, with whom she shared many adventures in and around Saint Martin, Minnesota and the twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Union depot always took my mother and her siblings back to the farm.

Our mother’s time, spent in the Twin Cities, was chronicled by pictures of girlfriends gathered on Summit Avenue where they all worked as domestics. Then there was an afternoon stroll over the Mendota Bridge with a friend.

There was a gap of time, sans photographs, between our family restaurant; ‘Frenchy’s Eats, our first rental on Smith Avenue, the six-plex we lived in among the DPs (displaced refugees from World War Two) and finally a real home my mother built herself on Randolph Avenue.

Unfortunately, there are only a couple of pictures of the house she built on an empty lot. I know she had the basement excavated by a contractor. Then professional framers came in to construct the walls and roof. After that, she and her brother, somehow managed to build the rest of the house from the frames on up.

There are only a few pictures of my mother and her new friend, Erwin, a recent widower. She met him at one of the many dance halls in the Cities and they eventually got married. My sister thinks there may be more photographs coming from that cousin. That would be a good thing. Any image would help in filling in the gaps of this mysterious, fascinating woman whom I called Mom a long long time ago.

Hilde and the Old Man

Back around the turn of the century, Martin Noll’s neighbors would have been polite and simply said that Martin had a stern expression on his face most of the time. Today, medical research has a name for it: RBF. RBF, or ‘Resting Bitch Face’, is a configuration of facial muscles that make a person seem to carry a perpetual frown most of the time. Truth be told, it said a lot about him. Martin Noll was a stern task master of his farm, his large family and the surrounding community. To many folks in Sterns County, Minnesota, he was simply known as the old man.

Martin Noll was a taskmaster over his children and hired farmhands. He dabbled in several business ventures. He purchased the first automobile, a Studebaker E.M.F., in all of Sterns County. It had solid rubber tires, a fake door in front and carbide lamps on the front fenders for headlights.  Martin knew his way around local politics and never suffered fools in the town council who didn’t know how to run their town the way he knew farming. Over the years Martin bought and traded more cars but that first one was his most prized possession. 

Much to the chagrin of her older brothers and sisters, the youngest of his brood became the apple of Martin’s eye. Hildegarde, Hilde to her friends, wasn’t like the others. Her father sensed in this young child a longing for something more, something better, something undefined yet rock solid in its determination. He took a liking to his youngest and showed it. He taught her how drive horses at four, a car in her teens and travel solo in her twenties. Hilde always claimed her love of dancing came from her father teaching her how to dance the polka on Saturday night barn dances. He instilled in her a love of dancing that lasted a lifetime.

Life was always tough on the farm even for the youngest. It was a regular routine of field work, caring for the livestock, feeding the chickens, sewing old clothes and walking miles to school in nothing more than a woolen coat and rubber boots. A fireplace heated the farm house and there were corn husks for bed mattresses.

At four, Hildegarde took the horses and wagon out into the forest to gather wood. At seven, Martin let her take the wagon into town for supplies. She rode in her papa’s automobile and thought it great fun when he backed up over the outhouse by accident. By ten she was in charge of cleaning out the barn and managing the chickens, a main source of food and income. That same year, her father shot an American Bald Eagle that was killing their chickens. Hilde rescued the bird and when she realized it could no longer fly, she persuaded her father to sell it to the zoo in Minneapolis for ten dollars which she got to keep. Hildegarde shared one winter coat among her three sisters; each going to mass at a different service in their brand new Sears Roebuck catalogue coat.

Farming kitchen

Farming with horses

Hildegarde went as far as the sixth grade at the Catholic school in St Martin then 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.

The depression hit everyone very hard but especially the farmers. Sterns County was an agrarian society back then. Martin Noll had to free-range his cattle further north so they wouldn’t starve. A lot of his brothers and fellow farmers lost their farms. The largest town was St. Cloud which served as a magnet for most of the uneducated and unskilled young women anxious to get ‘off the farm.’ Hilde’s sisters all went off to secretarial school in St. Cloud. Hildegarde stayed home to take care of the farm.

Hildegarde 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.

In her early twenties, Hildegarde struck out for the West Coast. She went to California at the bequest of an old girlfriend and for a short while led the life of a single young starlet. Together, they moved from San Diego to Salinas. By then there were four of them, young working girls just wanting to have fun. They had their employer’s new Lincoln to tour around town in. 

Hilde got a new job on ’17 Mile Drive.’ Even back then it was an exclusive enclave of retired Army Generals, titans of business and industry and movie stars. Her employers had her over to their house on the Del Monte Golf Course regularly to meet movie stars like Joan Fontaine and Olivia DeHavelund. Together they went to the horse races in San Francisco, the youngest trailing along as their guest.

Working days and hanging out with the movie stars at night. Hilde was making good money, dancing every night and having a grand old time. Then her father fell ill and wrote for his youngest to come back home before he died. She did and shortly afterwards Martin Noll died.

The farm was sold shortly after that and as had been tradition for hundreds of years, the boys got all the money. The girls got nothing. So Hilde hired an attorney and sued her brothers. They finally settled out of court.  Hildegarde and her sisters each got $4000 dollars. The brothers each got $6000 dollars. There was no extra compensation for the youngest and all the years she had spent caring for her elderly parents. Nor did her sisters ever pay her back for the money she lent them over the years. But that’s the way it was back then.

Hildegarde continued to do summer chores for her mother and work during the winter months in the cities. It was the height of the depression but the youngest had ambition. She worked hard, saved her money and knew how to spend it when she had to. While others were going broken because of the depression, Hilde took whatever jobs she could get and thrived. At her father’s encouragement she alone traveled to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1934.

Hilde earned enough money to pay $326.00 cash for a practically brand new 1934 roadster. The previous owner had bet on the farm and lost both it and the car when the bank came calling. Her brother, Frank, lusted after that car but Hilde was no fool. It was never available for his forays into St. Martin Township or the Twin Cities.

Hildegarde met her future husband at an ammunition plant on the outskirts of Minneapolis around the beginning of World War Two. That chapter in her single life ended with her marriage to Arthur in 1942. 

It’s truly a shame that none of this rich fascinating ancestral information was passed on to me until just before Hildegarde died. She wrote out her life story in long hand on a faded gray tablet of paper. Ten pages, single spaced, documenting a lifetime of hard work, unbroken faith in her God, loss, rejection, betrayal, heartbreak, and a tremendous (though hidden) pride in her own survival and personal accomplishments.

Unfortunately by then they were just fractured words pulled from a failing memory that left me with many more questions than Hildegarde could possibly answer and leaving a vacuum in my life that has never been filled.

Mom and us kids

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.