One Who Got Away

I'm almost 48 years old, but I haven't lost too many people. My beautiful and young friend Jon died; a great magazine writer who had greatly influenced me, and whom I worked with briefly, Lou Stathis, died; and my father died. Then there was my gramma Inga.

Inga Lund, daughter of Ole and Tomine Lund, was a second generation Norwegian-American. She was a strong, sensible woman who didn't suffer fools gladly. She married John Blashill, and they had three children: Richard, Helen, and Donald James, who became my father. They were poor. John Blashill died when my father was two years old, so Inga had to raise her three kids by herself after that.

She always called my dad "Donnie."

After my dad and his brother and sister had left home, Inga moved out to her brother Oskar's farm. Oskar sometimes worked sixteen-hour days, and Inga took care of the cooking and cleaning for him. When I was a boy, we always visited Inga and Oskar at the farm. One summer, we picked and ate fresh strawberries until I turned red.

Years later, after I'd finished college, and Oskar had died, my father and I went to visit Inga in South Dakota. She was selling the farm, which had always been profitable, and finally moving into town again. One afternoon, after she had withdrawn a couple hundred thousand dollars from one bank so she could move it to another bank, we stopped for lunch at a diner. Gramma Inga was usually a pretty sober sort, but as we sat down to eat, she grinned, patted her handbag, and said, "Go ahead, Pat--order anything you want. It's on me."

A few years after that, Inga had a stroke, and her health gradually deteriorated. In the last few years, she didn't always even recognize my father when he came to visit her. And because of this, I thought I had already said goodbye to her. But then, when she died--my gramma!--it slammed me. Even if you expect it or think you're prepared, death can surprise you.

Maybe it's the only way to understand the word "forever."

Anyway, in case you are wondering, dear reader, there is a hook to this post, and it's sad news. On Saturday, September 12, my wife's mother, Resi, died. She was two weeks shy of her 80th birthday.

She will be missed.

montafone, part 2

Eight Possible Heavens

1) A long night in a small Texas nightclub, circa. 1977, with one or both of my old friends Steve C. and Simon R. On the table in front of us: cold, cold Lone Star Bock, and a big sloppy plate of nachos with beans, cheese and jalapenos. Onstage? ZZ Top, fresh from recording El Loco, and ready to play till the cows come home.

2) An endless tour of the Earth, with Anette (in her hiking boots and black leather jacket), with enough time and information to eat well in every town. And some sort of universal translator device that would enable us to talk to taxi drivers and bartenders everywhere. First stop: the Norwegian town where my great grandparents were born.

3) An endless tour of the Universe, with Anette (wearing the same outfit), but also with Adinah and V., in a rocket ship with a Gottlieb pinball machine onboard.

4) An extremely comfortable (and well-lit) Moroccan lair, amazingly stocked with every great or important book ever published. And the time to read and understand them all, with the option of interviews and explanations from the authors in the flesh.

5) Reincarnation as a super-intelligent (and immortal) bird, flying from one cozy aerie to another, in the Himalayas.

6) Command of an elite squad of ferocious monsters—including the Wolfman and the Creature from the Black Lagoon—who would jet all over the place, righting wrongs, fighting injustices and never actually hurting anyone!

7) The slow and delicious discovery, then mastery, of an entirely new and unprecedented form of music.

8) The ability to channel surf between all of the previous seven Heavens, at will, Forever.

School Days

In case you've joined us late, much of the subtext of this blog was more humorously expressed in the scene in Pulp Fiction where J. Travolta and S.L. Jackson discuss the "little differences" between the US and Europe. I got an eyeful of these little things the other morning, because it was Adinah's first day of First Grade.

It began in church.

Being both an American and an avowed Satanist, I should have burst into flames as soon as we walked into the joint. But I survived long enough to hear the school's religion teacher lead the kids in a song about how the (Christian) God will help all children. I even stood up for it. Then I started wondering how I would feel about all of this if I was Muslim. Then I sat down.

It's not that I'm godless. I just care less for religion when it's used as a blunt instrument. And I won't let my dark-skinned daughter be seduced or cajoled into any of the ideological rat paths of this deeply Catholic, conservative and racist country.

I watched Adinah's eyes as she watched the well-combed goodie-goodies from the older grades at her new school, as they marched up to the lecturn to recite epithets and other monkey tricks. It looked like she was taking notes on who is cool and how they get points from their parents.

It could only get better from there. And it did.

One of the other differences about the first day of school in Vienna is that the kids only really go for about an hour. And they can bring their parents and little sisters along for the fun!

So after the Mass, Adinah, V., Anette and I crossed the street and piled into a classroom with twenty-two other kids, and a couple dozen parents and assorted close relatives, to meet Adinah's new teachers. Before they came in to introduce themselves, I crouched in a corner and photographed Adinah, as she grinned and worked her corner of the room: Oskar, Teresa, Susanna and Magdalena--all her best friends from kindergarten, all sitting next to her! She looked like she was already preparing to announce her candidacy for First Grade Class President.

This is more like it, I thought. I always liked school, and I never had any doubts that Adinah would like it too.

The teachers came in and said hello, and I was especially pleased to see that Adinah will have a good, and good-humored, English teacher. The most moving moment for me, though, was watching the teacher call the roll, which she did by taking each of 23 name cards off of the white board, showing the written name to the class, then calling out the name.

Some of the boys and girls stood up and walked to the head of the class to get their cards as soon as they saw her reaching for what they recognized to be their names; some had to wait until she spoke their names; and a couple were still staring into space even after she'd called their names twice. Anette told me later that some of the kids may not understand much German, let alone English.

It was like watching these kids, in the first moments of their Austrian personhood, already slipping into the familiar dramatis personae of any classroom anywhere in the world: the Smarty Pants, the Class Clown, the Loser, the Princess, the Secret Weapon, the Heroine. It was sweet, and heartbreaking. There was something both reassuring and quietly terrible about it.

School can be so brutal, these roles so imprisoning.

There I was, squatting in a corner in a Viennese public school classroom, thinking about the way that kids grow into big people. I should have just been proud of my eager, bilingual and beautiful 6 and 1/2 year-old-daughter. Instead, I found myself hoping that it won't be too painful and difficult for her, and her classmates, to find out who they are.

(parenthood) business not personal

(An old friend was asking some very serious questions of herself and her parenting, so what did I do? Made a smart remark, naturally. She was wondering aloud about taking your kids behavior personally, and being responsive to them. I told her a parent should never take (mis)behavior seriously. Which isn't true. This is what I meant....)

Okay, I was being a bit flip there, a leftover from too may years as a magazine writer. Sometimes as a parent you have to take your kids’ behavior personally because you are the SOURCE of some of their struggles. You should deny them the fun of automatic weapons, for example.

But one also has to remember (and honor) one’s own adulthood and life experience. Your kid is six? So’s mine, and if so inclined, she will howl at the vast injustice of being denied almost anything. I believe she is her own person, and I think I take her very seriously, but there are many things she is just not ready to do for herself. This is a loaded phrase, but I really do know better, and I know (mostly) what’s best for her. The trick, as you allude to, is knowing when you are asking too much as a parent or not listening well enough or pushing your kid too hard. That’s one of the most difficult parts of the job. Hell, I’d say listening, in and of itself, is one of the most difficult things about being a person.

You wrote that your “elder child’s development has changed the game” on you, and I think that’s brilliant. I would restate it though: parenthood (and kidhood) is itself the game that moves as you play. It sounds like the tagline for some old Parker Brothers game, but it’s true. Knowing how and when to listen to your child changes as they develop and grow. You do have to stay awake. But asking questions of yourself—maybe even answering them—is a form of being responsive.

My harder work right now is with our three year old. Like me, she can be a motormouth, but she hasn’t really gotten the hang of listening to other peoples yet. This has caused me to think of Jesper Juul, who wrote something to effect of, ‘If you kid isn’t listening well, maybe you’re not saying much worth listening to.’

So I’ve been chewing on that lately.

end of a holiday

We’re just off an alpine forest trail near the Kristberg peak, high above the Silver Valley. V. is asleep on Anette’s jacket, and I’m lying on pine needles in the sun. Anette and Adinah are up at a panoramic lookout and goddamnit, they took our lunch of liverwurst and bread with them! We’ve been in the mountain region of Montafon, in the far west of Austria, for almost a week now. I’m taking pictures of tiny little mountain flowers. It is clearly time to go home.

Please don’t misunderstand: it’s been wonderful, it’s been great. These Heidi valleys and lunar mastiffs are gorgeous. Our daughters have been super troopers about hiking with us. And we’ve been staying at a “wellness hotel,” with sauna and indoor heated pool, where they do everything but pour the breakfast buffet down your throat for you.

But every vacation comes to an end, and I’m always ready for the end credits before anyone else. I’m usually set to get back to work—looking forward to it, even. I am American, after all. Plus, when you stay in one place for more than a few days, your hosts’ initial hospitality usually starts to thin. I regard this as a natural reaction to feeding and housing strangers, and despite all the smiles, hotel workers are, in the end, sort of human. This summer, when we camped next to the ocean in Sardinia, the campsite staff had had their fill of us after the first week or so, even before we melted one of their kitchen cutting boards on our grill. This week, our romance with our hotel ended when the owner told us Adinah and V. are not allowed in the sauna after all. This may or may not be because V. had just pooped on the floor outside of the steam room, but we’ll never know.

I’d like to come back here next year. I adore mountains, of any shape or divination, on any continent, all the time. It's just that enough is enough.

in the highlands again