Talahi Diaries, September 10, 1966 / 2005

In a fitting piece of irony, synchronicity, coincidence... or whatever you may call it... the very first entry in the Talahi diary was written on the same day that the very last entry was entered, 39 years later:

September 10, 1966

Drove to Lake Geneva to look at property for a summer home. Went to Joerm [?] Realty. Mr. Clifford showed us several. We fell "in love" with a house in Indian Hills. [Grandpa]

That's the house they put an offer on two days later (according to the diary). The offer? $14,000. I don't know if that offer was accepted, but the house was purchased, and they closed on October 14, 1966:

Closed deal on purchase of property in Fontana. Will name it "Talahi" (our T.C. annual) which is Chippewa Indian for "Under The Oaks." Very appropriate w/ our oaks. [Grandpa]

"T.C" refers to St. Cloud State Teacher's College, as it was called then, and is where my grandparents met. Here's a picture taken just three or so months later, early in 1967:

Fast-forward 39 years to September 10, 2005. My grandparents were now living in Dallas, but were spending the summers at the lake house. However, we didn't want my grandfather to make the long two-day drive, so the last couple of years I'd drive them up there and fly back home. At the end of the summer I'd fly back up there and drive them back. After 2005 we didn't think it was a good idea for them to be up there for three months by themselves, so they stayed year around in Dallas. This particular September day was the last time my grandfather was at Talahi, and, as usual, I made a diary entry:

September 10, 2005

Breakfast at Hot Diggity Dog. Today we'll make the house ready for the winter. Will leave tomorrow in the AM. [Hank]

"Hot Diggity Dog" was a hole-in-the-wall eatery of the type that my grandparents were so fond. It was in Walworth, and was open from 5am to 1pm, basically serving breakfasts to local farmers and the occasional hot dog to tourists.

Now, I was up at Talahi last summer (2008) to load up a U-Haul full of furniture and boxes that I then drove back to Dallas, but I was unable to make a diary entry. I really wanted to, knowing that it was the last day I'd ever be at Talahi, but unfortunately the diary had been packed in one of the boxes and I couldn't find it. I contemplated "faking" the entry, adding it after the fact, but in the end chose not to. The entry of September 10, 2005, coming 39 years to the day after the first entry, thus, is the final entry.

Here's a picture of the house from 2004. (Click on it to see a larger version). In almost 40 years the pine trees at the front of the house have grown from about 3 feet high to about 40, and the new edition that we built onto the house is visible on the left. The composition is kind of odd, but I wanted to capture the feeling of the tall, majestic oaks that surrounded the house and property. They were, after all, the inspiration for the house's name:

Talahi Diaries, July 28, 1967

In a previous Talahi Diary entry, I erroneously stated that the May, 1967 entries were my grandfather's last. As it turns out, there was one more, and this was his actual last diary entry:

July 28, 1967

Hankie, w/ popgun, basket of grapes & jar of fire flies, goes to sleep by himself in tent @ 8:00pm - Awakened at 1:30 am, & came in. [Grandpa]

The tent in question, here, was a small, two-man pup tent. I remember this night well, and I remember it was thunder that woke me up and frightened me enough to want to go inside. What I didn't realize then, however, was that evidently my grandparents were very concerned about me sleeping alone in the tent (in the front yard, mind you... not even in the back) and kept wanting to go out and tell me to come inside. My mom, however, was one of these "let him learn things on his own" types, and kept telling my grandparents to let me be, that I'd be okay, etc. Followed by my grandmother doing some more worrying and asking again if maybe I should come inside, followed by my mother getting more aggravated with them and forbidding them to "rescue" me.

I find none of this surprising in the least, as it fits with everyone's personality traits to this day.

Not mine, of course; it's not like I'm still afraid of thunder. Just so we're clear.

Moon Over Talahi

Forty years ago we watched and waited for Neil Armstrong to take his first step on the moon up at the lake house, Talahi. We'd invited two other families up for the weekend, the Muellers and the Flannerys. The Muellers had five kids, the Flannerys had seven kids, so it was rather crowded. The two-bedroom addition had yet to be built on to the cottage, so us fourteen (!) kids slept in this huge army-surplus tent outside. At least, it seemed huge to my five-year-old self. I remember the smell of wet, rotting canvass that was the tent.

It was dark, and we were watching the landing on an old black & white 19-inch TV that got horrible reception, but we didn't care. When my mom told me that the module had landed, I went outside and looked up at the moon, trying in vain to see the little astronauts walking about on its surface. Needless to say, I did not succeed, and it had to be explained to me that the moon was very far away.

I based "farness" when I was young on how long it took to drive up to the lake from Oak Park (about two hours):

How far away do great grandma and grandpa live? Answer: it's like driving to and from the lake four times.

How far to California? Fifteen Lake House Round Trips. (LHRT).

"How much longer do we have to drive?" "Only about one more LHRT".

So, when I asked how far it was to the moon, I was told it was something like ONE THOUSAND LHRTs:

"Well, if we drove to the lake, turned around and drove home, we'd have to do that one thousand times in order to get to the moon!" my dad told me.

I thought he was nuts, and it sounded like a booooring trip, but it was no wonder I couldn't see the LEM on the moon that summer night in 1969.

So here we are, forty years later, and nothing really more has happened vis-a-vis manned space exploration. By now I expected us to all to be able to have cottages on the moon, for chrissakes.

Oh well.

The Halloween That Almost Wasn't

When I was young growing up in the 'burbs of Chicago, we had a season called "fall" that many of you here in Texas are probably unfamiliar with. The highlight of "fall", or "autumn" if you will, was of course Halloween, when we'd all go trick or treating, unaccompanied by an adult, from the moment school let out until about 8 or 8:30. My friends and I would cover at least ten blocks, easily, sometimes making a pit stop at home in order to unladen ourselves of a full bag of loot and grabbing an empty one, then quickly continuing our autumnal journey into the quickly approaching night.

Every year there'd be at least one house, usually inhabited by an elderly couple with a strange ethnic accent of some sort, that would provide a stumbling block for our candy-grabbing sojourn. First of all, these people would give out something like apples, or a shiny penny, or worse yet, some home-made thing involving raisins, nuts, and what appeared to be lint. When the old lady handed out the "treat", moreover, she'd invariably insist on placing it in our hand, rather than tossing it in the bag, which was creepy enough, but then she'd smile a (mostly) toothless grin while patting us on our shoulder with her boney fingers.

*tap-tap-tap* "There's a good boy. Now run along!" (toothless grin).

I'd take her advice and quickly go down the front stairs, feeling her rheumy eyes burning a hole into the back of my vampire costume as I found sanctuary in the company of my friends on the sidewalk.

That was the best-case scenario.

However, every other year or so, this old couple would not be content with freaking us out with bruised fruit or questionable home-made "things"; no, sometimes they'd want us to come into their "front room" for a second. They'd have cookies there, or so they'd claim, and we simply had to come in, since we reminded them of "our Henry" or something. So of course we'd go in, since none of us wanted to appear to be scared of a harmless old lady in front of the others. We'd go into the front room and be forced to sit upon a "davenport" covered in dark red faded worn velvet that smelled of a mixture of mildew, cigarettes, and Ben-Gay while the old lady passed around a tray of "cookies" sitting on an ancient tattered lace doily while her cat meowed constantly in the kitchen.

I'd keep one eye on the old lady and one eye on the front door while I pretended to eat a "cookie", shoving it under one of the understuffed sofa cushions when the old lady would turn to yell at her cat or something.

"Would you boys like some milk?"

We drew the line at drinking stuff in the front rooms of strange old ladies on Halloween, so we'd tell the lady we had to be going and start heading for the door. Somehow, this frail old lady would suddenly possess the speed and agility of a world-class sprinter and beat us to the door. She'd have something in her hand that she'd place in our hands forcibly and then forcibly close our fingers into a fist so we couldn't see what it was.

"Stop by again. Our Henry would have simply loved to have met you!"

We'd finally get the courage to open our fists to see what was inside when we were approaching the next house, invariably finding a questionable after-dinner mint or something inside.

Yeah, I don't see how the title of this blog post applies, either.

You Spin Me Right Round

Speaking of records, when I was eight or so my stepdad was letting his old band practice in our basement on Friday nights. This was around 1971 or so, and they did covers of bands like Rare Earth, The Guess Who, CCR, etc. I eventually got to keep the 45s they used to practice to, and thus is was years before I realize that "Get Ready" was originally a Temptations song, or that Frijid Pink playing "House Of The Rising Sun" on the Parrot label was not the originator, either. But I digress. The point is I loved how those labels looked... the twisted tree, vulture, and dark orange background of the Rare Earth label, and the parrot with the straw hat on the Parrot label, in particular.

I saw some of these labels before I knew how to read, and thus always associated the songs on those labels with those images. They were so much more interesting that the dull bell-on-gray-background that was the label of my "I Think I Love You" b/w "Doesn't Somebody Want To Be Wanted" Partridge Family 45 that I purchased at Korvettes.

Later, when I was about 11, I sold all those old 45 singles to my then 8 year old sister for 10 cents each. The transaction was nullified a few hour later when she went crying to our mom that I'd cheated her out of her hard-earned allowance. After that, I lost track of those records, which is a shame, because I'm betting that they'd be worth a bit more than 10 cents each today.

Of course, this is if they were sold on eBay or something, not at my store.

The Obligatory End Of Summer Post

Summer to me will always be the summers I had as a kid in Chicago. Not having to get up to an alarm. Watching the game shows, Dick Van Dyke, and Bewitched in the morning, reading a book while eating lunch which usually included Mr Salty(tm) pretzel sticks. Then there'd be the Cubs game on channel 9 after lunch ("It's a beautiful day for a ball game, for a ball game today!"), followed by bike riding and general outside horsing around until dinner, then a game of team hide and seek, running bases, or kick ball until it got pretty dark, which thankfully wasn't until 9 or so. Then a can of pop, which was a rarity in our household, and a couple of those Flav-Or-Ice (r) popsicle thingies up in my dark attic-converted bedroom, with no AC and only a box fan in the window to provide any relief from the heat, the only light coming from my 12-inch black and white TV where I'd watch old movies until 3 am.

Summers as an adult pale in comparison, but at least I have AC, now.

Second Time's A Charm

I'm going to tell you a story now. I'm going to say that it happened to my friend. I'll even give him a name. Karl. There. So now we all know that what follows are a series of events from my dear friend Karl's life.

One fine summer weekday when Karl was about six he thought he heard his father in the basement. This was odd, because his father was usually at work during the day. Karl, being an inquisitive lad, made the trek down the rickety, dark steps that led to the basement done up in the mod stylings that were common in the late 1960s. Being a basement, it was kind of dark even during the day, and yet there was no light on. Karl could just make out his father, however, sitting in the easy chair at the far end of the basement.

And he could hear him. He was making some weird kind of sound that was familiar to Karl, though at first he couldn't place it. He was crying! That's it! But Karl didn't know that men cried; he thought only children and women cried. He didn't like this at all.

Karl's dad noticed him and beckoned him over. Karl asked what was wrong, and his dad stared back at him with his red eyes and told him between stifled sobs that "mommy doesn't love me anymore, and I have to go away." Karl always says he doesn't remember anything after that. His next memories sort of begin when Karl, his mom, and sister move into an apartment. He used to tell me interesting stories about the Apartment Era, too, but that's for another day.

Evidently Karl's mom remarried pretty soon afterward, and since Karl and his sister were still relatively young, Karl's mom wanted her children to call their new stepfather "dad", something that came easy to his sister. Karl, on the other hand, found this uncomfortable. However, the stepdad eventually became "dad".

Flash forward about 12 years, and Karl is a freshman in college. One day he gets a call from his "dad" asking if he knew where his mother was. Karl had no idea and told his "dad" this. Just then, as they were on the phone, Karl's "dad" said to hold on, that the doorbell was ringing. So Karl waited. When Karl's "dad" came back on the phone, his manner had decidedly changed. This time Karl knew his "dad" was crying right away. He was becoming an expert at this.

"What's the matter?" Karl asked.

"Your mom has just filed divorce papers on me. I guess she doesn't love me anymore" was his dad's reply.

Karl always wonders what the odds are that a child would get to have this conversation twice in a lifetime. I always tell him they are low indeed.

The Range Girl

Back in 1941 my grandfather was a senior at what was then called St. Cloud Teachers College (and is now St.Cloud State University). My grandmother was a sophomore. They were both music ed majors, but there the similarities ended. My grandfather was a BMOC: president of the senior class, popular, and a Good Middle Class Protestant Amercian Farm Boy from central Minnesota. My grandmother, on the other hand, was a CATHOLIC, Italian, poor, and from the Iron Range of Northern Minnesota. She was a Range Girl!! Evidently it was assumed that all Range Girls were sluts for some reason. Loose women. Dirty first-generation immigrants who worshiped the Pope. That sort of thing.

Well, my grandfather needed a pianist for his choir, and my grandmother was one of many that tried out for the job. She got it, and my grandfather was smitten. You know the old chestnut where a guy will claim that the first time he met his future wife he knew they'd marry? Well, this was the case here. Grandpa told one of his friends that first day that my grandmother would be his wife.

And it happened in the end, but not without a fight. From whom? Not their parents, who I guess where pretty enlightened. Neither really cared that their child would be marrying outside their faith, or outside their ethnic group (my grandfather's family were German). No, the family didn't care, but the school administration did care. Evidently the dean of students called my grandfather into his office one day and told him he had a promising career in front of him and thus why did he want to get involved with that Italian girl? I mean, heck, all her clothes were hand-made! He could do much better.

My grandfather still rants and raves about this to this day, and who can blame him.

Newspaper clipping

From November, 1976. Guess which one is me:

I Used To Miss You Before You Were Here

I've mentioned this to people, and they think I'm odd. To whit: how is it possible to miss someone retroactively, if indeed that is even the proper nomenclature? This is what I mean:

I have a pretty good memory of my childhood, going back to when I was still in a crib to about college time, at which point my memories all get clouded and jumbled together. But my early life: clear as day. However, when I think back to, say, first grade, when I was building a "King Kong" plastic model, or when I remember when I was four or so learning to ride a two-wheeler for the first time (begging my mom for what seemed weeks to take the training wheels off the purple Schwinn I had), or the time I hit a home run in little league... I suddenly realize that my daughter's not there.

Where the hell is she? Here I was, living my life, as happy as a clam (well, I wasn't that happy; maybe I was as happy as a scallop. Yes), yet my daughter wasn't alive. How could I have been happy without her? Why didn't I "miss" her? I certainly "miss" her in my memories. See what I mean about "retroactively" missing someone?

I go through an old family photo album and find a group picture of our family. Everyone's there... with the exception of my daughter. Yet we're all smiling, totally oblivious to the fact that someone isn't there.

Etc.

Now of course I know, intellectually, that this is normal. Of course my daughter isn't there; she hasn't been born yet. There was no one to miss back then. But what the hell does that mean? Where are we before we're born? It doesn't bother me so much wondering where I was before I was born, for I take it as a given that I simply wasn't. But my daughter? That's another story.

People miss people when they die, of course, and some wonder where they are (since the Vatican got rid of Limbo recently, the possible answers just became fewer). What I experience is the exact reverse of this: missing someone before they were born, and wondering where they were before their birthdate.

I thought that perhaps I was the only one that ever thought about this, but the other day I heard on the radio someone talking about just this. So while I may be crazy or odd, at least I'm not alone. So there.

Little Hank Thwarts Time

One day, when I was about three, I wanted cookies. My mom, being indulgent back then, decided to honor my request and put a batch of chocolate chip cookies in the oven (which was this one, in white, which Rachel Ray now uses on her show). However, I was an impatient lad, so after about probably six or seven minutes I went to her and asked if they were ready yet.

"No, they have a few more minutes," she replied. "I've set the timer. When it goes off, they'll be ready."

After receiving this news I nonchalantly walked back to the kitchen and advanced the timer until it was right next to the zero. About 10 seconds later it went off and my mom removed the cookies from the oven.

"See what happens when you're patient? You get rewarded!", she said as she handed me a yummy hot cookie fresh from the oven.

I ate it with smug satisfaction.