Beyond Mid-Century (a segment from a chapter in my family history entitled Parents)
The earth spins out the fabric of time on its inexorable orbital journey through the solar system. Day passes into night, season into season, year into year. The four Anderson children progress through the city schools—Auer Avenue for grades one through six, then Peckham Junior High, finally graduating from Washington High School on Sherman Boulevard. Ronald chooses to attend Rufus King High School instead to take advantage of the special courses in shop and auto mechanics it offers. Only Richard decides to continue into college.
Ed and Helen become empty nesters by the end of the decade. Audrey marries Ron’s friend Carl Anderson in February 1951. She does not have to decide whether to change her last name or not. Ronny marries Virginia Ware in October 1954. Richard is serving his military obligation with the Army in France and misses the wedding; he marries Shirley Krahn after returning home in January 1955. Buddy, their baby, or Edward Arnold, marries Jean Smith in February 1958.
Ed attends the Koehring Company Quarter Century Club dinner with Helen as his guest. The annual event is held at some local restaurant with a room big enough for a large group—the company is prospering and growing. He bowls in the company league. He has always loved baseball. Now, he excels at a dartball version of the game as a member of the Resurrection Church team. He takes up woodworking with hand tools and fashions small pieces of furniture and other items for the “children’s” new homes. He starts a small savings account and, at 55 years of age, buys his first new car.
Helen finds time to practice new hobbies and demonstrate her artistic skills. She installs a large wooden loom in the corner of the well-lighted vestibule that otherwise serves only to hold the Christmas tree a few weeks of the year. She passes the shuttles back and forth, back and forth by hand, moving the warp threads with foot treadles to create beautiful and original designs. Some become placemats to decorate holiday tables. Later, the fabrics are fine enough to be tailored into skirts, jackets or dresses.
In 1959, Helen is featured in a Sunday Milwaukee Journal article showing her in full color with the collection of miniature hats she has fashioned from bits of cloth and ribbon. After the physical stress of weaving becomes too great, she takes up other creative handiwork with threads and yarns. As she sits, her hands are never idle, while she creates beautiful and useful items of macramé, knitting or crochet. She works with Styrofoam and foil, plastic and glass. The variety of decorative items she creates is myriad. Many will decorate walls or Christmas trees of latter generations for years to come.
A ringing telephone shatters their peaceful world on 29 October 1964. “Dad, I’m sorry to have to call you like this.” Ed recognizes the voice of Buddy’s wife, Jean. “It’s Buddy,” she whispers, barely audible. “He was killed this morning in a car crash.”
The rest of the call is a blur of sorrow and disbelief. They learn that their youngest son has died in a head-on crash while driving to work on a rainy highway in Boca Raton, Florida. He is 26, making a life for himself and his young family. Jean will be left alone to care for their three sons, David, Dean and Victor, all under age seven.
Jean returns the body to Milwaukee for interment at Wisconsin Memorial Park. At the funeral visitation, Helen and Ed stand with Jean, supporting each other before the coffin that holds the broken body of Ed’s namesake, Edward Arnold Anderson. Helen, the mother, thinks the unthinkable, Oh, I hope he died instantly. The man in the other car too. Please God, I hope they didn’t suffer. My son . . . my baby boy. Dead. Stifled sobs wrack Ed’s sparse frame with grief too great to bear. It is the first and only time I have seen him cry.
Ed turns 65 in November 1966 and retires after 42 years at the Koehring Company. They sell their home on Hopkins Street. It feels a little empty now, too big for their needs really, and the neighborhood seems not as safe and friendly as it did 20 years ago. They rent a lower flat in a slightly newer and much quieter section of the city a dozen or so blocks farther west.
Helen descends the stairs into the vestibule after taking one last look around the rooms upstairs. She waits for Ed who is loading the mops and rags and buckets into the car. The old place is spic and span, ready for the new owners. Memories flicker across her mind in slow succession. Audrey descending the stairs in her debutant gown. Richard and his friend Roger splashing red polka-dots up and down the stairwell in a stocking-cap battle, whirling the soaking wet red caps around their heads like medieval weapons. Funny now, she thinks, but wasn’t then.
What’s keeping Ed? she wonders, just as he enters the rear door.
“Picked you some peaches,” he says.
“Oh thank you. I’d forgotten they were ready.”
“Sparse harvest, but they’d probably go to waste, otherwise.” He sets the basket on the floor, picks out a peach and hands it to Helen.
“Beautiful fruit isn’t it,” she says, turning the firm, yellow and red orb in her hand. The pit she planted that first year in their house on Hopkins Street had grown into a tall and bountiful tree. Now it was near the end of its productive life.
“Well, let’s go.” Ed takes the small basket of fruit out to the front porch. He takes the key from his pocket and together they turn it in the keyhole, locking up the house and its memories one last time.
They have no schedules to maintain now, no need to labor every day. When they are not exploring scenic areas of Wisconsin, they visit their children’s homes or age-old haunts of their younger years. By the end of 1970 their 13th and last grandchild is born. Ed buys another new car, an Olds 88 coupe, and in 1973, the pair of happy wanderers set off cross-country to the Pacific shores.
They visit relatives and attractions along the way in Fargo, North Dakota and Salt Lake City, Utah before finding Helen’s younger brothers, Harold and George, and their families in Hillsboro, Oregon. What a thrill, after all these years. George, 63, is a widower with four grown children and six grandchildren. Harold is 61. He and his wife, Doris, reminisce over breakfast with Ed and Helen, remembering the old days in Wisconsin when they owned a restaurant in Oconomowoc. They exchange stories about the two older brothers, Walter and Roy, who died years ago. Ed records the visits with his new Polaroid Camera. At home again, Helen mounts her favorite shots on a few pages of a photo album, scribbles some notes in the margins and stores it away for the future.
“I now pronounce you man and wife,” oldest granddaughter Lauree recites in September 1976. Helen has donned a veil and Ed wears a carnation boutonniere as they reenact their wedding vows in a mock ceremony. Their kiss lingers just a moment as 50-year-old memories flash in their minds. Where did the time go? Where did the time go?
Dear friends and family have gathered from near and far for the celebration, many rarely seen, some not to be seen again. It is the last time all seven of Agusta and Edvard’s children are together, though most live on many years more. Caroline is 83; Stella, 81; Josephine, 80; Walter, 77; Edward, 74; Nora, 72 and Evelyn, 70. Helen’s nephew, Elmer, and his family attend, but none of her siblings is able to come to the anniversary party.
Ed’s 80th birthday in November 1981 is reason for another celebration, another joyous gathering of family and friends. Helen’s 80th birthday does not come to pass, and the gathering for her funeral in June 1982 is a mournful one. She is 77.
Acute leukemia killed her. It seemed to me then that it struck quickly, sinking its venom into her marrow like a deadly viper. Looking back, I think the suffering began months earlier, maybe the previous Christmas when she seemed weak and tired, symptoms she had never shown before. Then we got the call in May that said she was in St. Mary’s Hospital awaiting her fate in the hospice unit. She had decided not to fight but to accept the disease that claimed her, not to submit to the discomforts, indignities and expenses of dubious medical treatments that might add a few months to her full life. I have often questioned but always admired that decision. I wrote.
Spring 1982 Words I must say to my mom.
Dear Mom,
I love you.
If only I could help you in your pain and anguish.
You are strong, but this is a severe test.
I am proud to be made of the stuff that you are, to be your son.
I thought, “The world won’t be the same.”
And “Oh God, how I’ll miss that woman so dear to me.”
But then I knew you will always be with me, with us all.
You have given yourself to us all, with so much love,
you are part of us, that can’t be taken away.
Each day is guided by your teaching, lighted by your love.
And on a spring or summer or fall or winter day
when things are just a certain way
we will feel your touch and see your face
and hear your words and know your love again.
You will be with us always.
Richard
Dolly and Dad occupied the two guest chairs in the hospital room. I sat on the edge of the bed with Mom. “I got your letter,” she said, motioning to an envelope on the bedside table. “Thank you.”
“Yeah. You’re welcome.” How inadequate I felt. We chatted about how she had enjoyed laughing with our kids while watching the old slides we showed after last Thanksgiving’s dinner and other seeming trivia as we avoided mention of the monster that possessed her. It seemed trivial then to me, but it meant everything to her.
She really looks good, I thought. Her mind is clear. Because she refuses the medication, I suppose. Then she moaned a little, bending forward and folding her arms tightly around her abdomen. Her pain grew more intense, and we quickly said our good-byes, leaving Dad alone with her. “We’ll come again, soon,” I promised, backing toward the door, holding back tears of grief, attempting a brave smile. We never saw her alive again. She died during the night, alone in her hospital bed, on 4 June 1982, nine weeks before her 78th birthday and the birth of her first great grandchild.
Ed moves in with oldest son Ronny and wife Ginny. They are empty nesters now, except for their youngest daughter, Karen, who attends the local technical college in Menomonee Falls. The doctors diagnose Ed with an abdominal aortic aneurysm, something that instills more fear in him than other potentially fatal conditions he lives with. He takes digitalis to quiet his angina and other medications to control his blood pressure. He is taken into at St. Joseph’s Hospital briefly with a kidney ailment and readmitted in May 1986. He dies there on 29 May, age 84.
A quiet life. A quiet death. A quiet man. Not stern, shallow or morose, but quiet, Too quiet. He rarely spoke of things that mattered to him most, at least not to the children. He subscribed more to the philosophy that children should be spoken to only when necessary than children should be seen and not heard. Still, he offered bits of offhand guidance at times of need that never seemed critical or shaming, nuggets of wisdom or practical advice to last a lifetime.
His frown was fierce. His smile was warm. I cannot recall his laugh. He was thoughtful, patient and gentle, but be careful if his forbearance broke. His fire smoldered just beneath the surface and could quickly flare if fanned by some injustice or wrongdoing, no matter who the culprit. Hope it was not you.
Sometime, somehow, he found keeping emotions within himself preferable to wearing his heart on his sleeve. Maybe the childhood experience of losing both his parents before he was ten years old influenced his calm reticence, his Poker face in playing the cards that life dealt him. He was a good card player, though he preferred Sheapshead to Poker. The game called more for ad hoc strategies and aggressive maneuvers than adherence to more rigid rules of play, and he often won.
When queried about his heritage, Ed always replied, “Norwegian!” with no mention ever of a Swedish father. In 1871, when she was just two years old, his mother, Agusta, emigrated from Oslo with her mother and an older sister and brother. Edvard Anderson, his father, emigrated from Sweden in 1880 at age 20. Curiously, Ed was not just silent about his Swedish heritage, but even disdainful and derogatory. He sometimes quoted from an epic poem that ended, “Ten thousand Swedes went through the weeds, pursued by one Norwegian!”
One must pause to wonder, Why? But we will never know. A quiet man, too quiet.
