Day 363 - More Reflections - On Family and Careers

The subject of Mom's second assignment was her family. As I read that piece, I was surprised at how much about her family - my family - that I didn't know.

Great-Grandma Tangen and six of us oldest ones

I still don't know when or where our grandparents were born, but Mom knew details about hers. I didn't even know where my parents were born, whether on the farm or in a hospital. I just remember that Grandpa and Grandma Wenner lived in the big house at the edge of Hitterdal, at the top of a long drive up a hill that leads away from Hitterdal Lake, which used to be a potato field. And Grandpa and Grandma Dauner lived in Hawley, in a house with a screened-in porch that became the bedroom for Lois, Diane, and me when we all got to stay at Grandma's house in the summer.

The Dauners

I remember Great-Grandma Tangen when she lived in Hawley with Grandpa and Grandma. And I remember trying to figure out a way that she wouldn't have to go to live in Eventide when it became too difficult for Grandpa and Grandma Dauner to continue to take care of her at home. I couldn't understand why she couldn't come to live with us if she had to move from Hawley to Moorhead. Great-Grandma had tried to teach me how to crochet, but I didn't catch on until years later when Maryann from the other end of Dudrey Court taught me. All I was able to learn from Great-Grandma was how to do the chain stitch. But I wanted to learn how to crochet because she made so many beautiful things -- lace for pillow edges, bookmarks in the shape of a cross, doilies, and even ladies' high-heeled shoes that were starched to stand up by themselves.

So many cousins

I knew we were lucky to have so many cousins. And since so many of them lived near one another, I never knew whose house we were going to stop at when we went visiting on Sundays until we drove into the driveway. I knew that Mom and Dad didn't spend as much time with their cousins as we kids got to spend with ours, and I was always a little sad to think that as we grew up, we would probably stop seeing the cousins so often. But so long as Lois didn't have a sister, and Joan was so much younger than we were, I felt as though Lois was more like a sister than a cousin, so I was sure we would always remain close and visit one another often.

I remember the Lysne Christmas pageant as part of our family's Christmas tradition, even though I don't think we ever went to it. It is just that Christmas Eve was always spent at Grandpa and Grandma Dauner's house -- until they moved to Arizona -- and the cousins who attended Lysne always had to recite their "pieces" on Christmas Eve for all of us.

The Wenners

Christmas always meant peanuts and other nuts to me as a child, too. I don't know for sure where Dad got them, but it seems like it was somewhere near the river, and we only got nuts -- almonds, hazel nuts, peanuts, Brazil nuts, and walnuts -- at Christmas time. That's when we got to use the silver nut cracker and those other implements with the tiny, pointed scoops at the end which we used to coax out the bits of nuts that inevitably got smashed as we crushed, not cracked, the shells.

I remember Mom telling us that Grandpa always joked about getting married on the longest night of the year, but Grandpa to me was someone else -- Mom's Dad -- and I knew my Grandpa and Grandma got married on the day before Grandma's 18th birthday, which was in June, not December. For years I tried to figure out how a wedding in June could have been on the longest night of the year. It should have been the shortest night. But after reading Mom's assignment, after nearly 50 years, the mystery was solved.

One paragraph in this piece confused me for awhile:

The last two years [of high school] my sister, Madelyn, and I stayed with Grandpa and Grandma Tangen who had moved from the farm. It was during this time that I met Arthur. He and his uncle Bill came by to say goodbye when they were on the way to California to enter the Merchant Marines.

That paragraph tells when Mom and Dad met, although for some reason I thought it meant they met when Uncle Bill and Dad went to say goodbye to someone else in that house, but not how or where. I thought everyone could tell the story of when and where he or she met that special someone.  So I asked Dad, but he said he couldn't remember. He said he always knew who Mom was. If he did, he must have kept it to himself. But then, he was always the introvert; Mom was a bit further out on the introvert-to-extrovert scale.

The topic of Mom's third assignment was careers. Not surprisingly, she wrote of being a mother and later working for Trinity church. But I was surprised to learn she had wanted to be a singer or an actress. How little I knew of Mom's early thoughts.

I don't know if I ever really thought about careers. I grew up assuming that I would get married and have kids. When in high school, I wrote out my life's plan. When I found it many years later, it included steps such as:

• Finish college
• Have a career for two or three years
• Get married and have kids

Silk kimono

And when I finally did get a job after finishing college, it wasn't what I had expected. I expected to teach English in high school. But, having swapped the order of the first half of my third step with my second step, I had gotten married and we moved to California where I expected to start my career for a few years while Don finished his Masters degree. But California didn't need any more high school English teachers. It was difficult to reconcile having spent four years in college to get the magic piece of paper that was proof that I was qualified to teach, and instead spending my time at a desk in an office typing and answering the telephone.

But, as Mom said in her assignment, each step is really training for the next one. Because I wasn't hired as a teacher, I volunteered to teach English in Oakland's Chinatown, and that led to a return to school to get certified to teach English as a Second Language -- first in California, then Iran, Romania, and Illinois. And when there were no options for teaching in Minnesota, I had to switch again. The plan that has since evolved was a most unlikely one -- certainly not one I would have written in advance: secretary to teacher to software engineer to diplomat may look like an entirely serendipitous path, but the connection throughout was the fascination with people and places unlike me, a fascination that started very early in my life, with glimpses of kimonos and silk skirts in a wooden trunk in the basement of 307 Dudrey Court.