My Father

Until two weeks ago my father was a strong 88-year-old who could spend eight hours in his garden planting potatoes and onions, tilling, riding the mower. But he had stopped eating much because his esophagus had shrunk because of acid reflux. I always remember my father's car had various plastic bottles full of pastel Tums. Apparently he took them all the time. So when my father came down with pneumonia, and then a heart attack and stroke, it was in part to the fact that the food was not going down his esophagus, but coming up again. When this happened, part of it lodged in his trachea.
Perhaps my father could have avoided all of this if he had seen a doctor. But my fahter prided himself on not taking any medicine. When he had his hip replaced at 86 and they asked him to write down all of his medications, he proudly left it blank and when they insisted that he write them all down, he explained that he took nothing. The same was true when he had a pacemaker put in because his pulse was so low and his heart would occasionally miss a few beats. In both cases, he claimed to feel not different after these "improvements" to his body.
My father was a product of the eastern Montana dust plains. Both of his parents came from green watery areas of Scandinavia. His father's home in Sweden had been along Lagen, a broad river-like body of water and his mother had grown up in Denmark, not far from Rys, which was the largest fresh water body of water in Denmark. They planted trees in their yard that grew in the wet years and died in the dry years, a cycle that has perhaps occurred for thousands of years.
Being born in 1920, my father was nine years old when the depression began officially in 1929, but it had begun for farmers before that. My father's parents were in bad shape until the late 40s when my father had come home from teaching each summer to manage the farm and get them out of debt. So my father never threw anything away, including food that had turned some other color. There was always part that could be saved. And when he saw a deal he stocked up. All of his life he has been preparing for the next disaster, trying to become self-sufficient, but also becoming a low-scale consumer. He and my mother went on canning food and shopping for bargains for six children and themselves, long after the six children were gone. They filled their house with clothes from stores that went out of business as the bigger stores took over and from the bigger stores when they went bankrupt. Each summer my father had a huge garden and freezer after freezer filled with frozen apple sauce, blueberries, cauliflower, peas, corn, string beans, mashed potatoes: all of his garden. The root cellar added more jars of tomatoes or spaghetti sauce until there were several hundred jars and my sisters who lived nearby took jars, but could never consume as much as he produced. There are still jars of tomatoes from ten years ago or more that I open up. The seal is still tight. The jars smell of the dusty potatoes and onions that overwinter and often must be thrown out in the spring.
It is as if my father has built his life as a storehouse of provisions, enough for the next life and perhaps the life after that, like ancient burial sites where the dead are given food and provisions for the journey.
My father was cautious about not being poor. Both his parents had been poor. His mother's mother, mormor in Danish, had been the servant girl who married the drunken younger son of the owner of a small farm and with him had ten children. They sold their small farm and moved to the United States, where according to the story, my great-grandmother Jensinde refused to do the farmwork anymore. In America, the man did the farmwork. My father's father, farfar, had a gambling problem and lost the farm in Sweden. Some of his children had already immigrated and his daughter Jenny saved up her money as a housekeeper in Chicago to send for her indigent family. My grandfather Walfred was one of them. The first winter in Chicago, the family legend goes, they bought a large sack of beans and survived on beans, before moving on to North Dakota.
From my grandmother, I gathered that they worked hard to be middle class. My father told me that he had had bed bugs, but told me to tell no one. Obviously he was afraid of being labeled as poor. When we once visited Montana, my sister played with the Mexican migrant children on the farm of one of my father's cousins, and my grandmother became worried about lice and made all of them shower and be combed carefully. My father also told me the family secret when he was 85. My grandfather had been a religious fanatic and had been so insistent on converting his neighbors, that they had him committed to a mentil institution. He proved to be so helpful and benign that they let him go after a while. When he married my grandmother, they were both beyond the prime age for marrying, my grandmother stipulated that the children would be raised in the Lutheran Church and not in a pentecostal church. My father kept this from everyone for all those years. He often spoke of being shy, even though as a Lutheran minister, he was suppsed to speak and have authority and this persona fit him perfectly. He did not have to be himself. He did not speak as himself but as a representative of the church and God. Who he was, the poor farm boy who was good at school, but not very sociable no longer had to risk embarassment.
There is a long list of stories that little by little have come out. My father wet his pants at school. He had a hernia after running into a post in town and the doctor he went to gave him a large truss that he wore for years, even though it was probably unnecessary. It was a constant embarrassment. His sister's teased him about a very poor girl named Bona Dea Parker, who had once said to him in front of my aunts, "Oh Gene, didn't we have a fun time in school." His grandmother Jensinde had dropsy and supposedly hops tea was good for dropsy so he was sent to the store to buy hops. The grocer and the other people in the store joked about how the teatotalers were buying hops, insinuating that they were hypocrites and drank secretly.
My father was also a mommie's boy. His mother Inga bought him books about a boy called "Sunny Boy" and that became my father's nickname. Sunny Boy was always positive and good. He was as one-dimensional as possible and my father kept the books until my sister's took them as adornments for their bookcases. They were for boys who would later read Horatio Algers.
Of course, my father's life and personality is much more complicated than this. He surprised me many times with his actions that contradicted his stern Christian background. He was raised in a Lutheran group that was called the Inner-Mission in Denmark, because it saw its purpose as reforming the Danish church that was too indulgent. It was against playing cards, dancing, and movies when they finally arrived. It took my father 20 years to move away from these ideas, so when I was the rebellious teenager, he was not shocked, or if he was, he did not let me know.
The problem with this blog is that I will always feel like I have not done him credit, not shown enough of his weaknesses, the complexity of his background, that I do not really understand. Who can know the Great Depression, the sense of family when there is no one else around for a mile or two, the disappointments of droughts, killing the livestock because there is no food or water, unless you have gone through it.
But I want to write about this again, but perhaps not as a blog.