Language Development

A geezer poem

When Oom Pa Pa from the North

Met Cha Cha Cha from the South

A new word, Ooh La La, was formed.

You Sure Are Wobbly Grandpa

My brother Tom and I awoke early that Christmas morning. I was 10, he was 9, but taller then me.

We raced down the stairs to the balsam fir Christmas that my dad always perched at Wenner's Hardware store in town. He would drill holes and refit nature's work to my mom's specifications by putting branches in gaps with his brace and bit, down in the basement before setting it up in the dining room.

We found under the tree that early Christmas morning for each of us a pair of tan and black hockey skates, probably purchased at Jim's summertime bike repair, winter time new and used skate sales and sharpening shop, located in St Cloud, Minnesota, boyhood home of my dad, he long gone now, me sixty-seven.

Five AM we laced them up right under the tree, walked out the back door, then walked and slid three blocks to the back side of our grade school.

We sat on our haunches, knees outstretched, using our skates as rudders, slid down the embankment to the volunteer fire department water flooded ice rink, kept clear of snow by Clarence Schmidt, the town maintenance man.

It was dark and cold that long ago Christmas morning, but Tom and I didn’t notice.

We skated away many Minnesota winter evenings on that lighted pond. Great fun, going to the warming house, a concrete block building with a wooden floor, benches all around the perimeter with a pot belly wood stove in the middle, all the walls filled with happy young skaters.

I got fairly good at racing through the tag line, and playing a rudimentary form of hockey, for the next four winters before moving on from the skating rink to 14-year-old interests, a job spotting pins at the bowling alley.

At age 60 I took my grand baby to the heated indoor ice pavilion in Portland, were a carousel of wooden ponies danced overhead and the ice was maintained by a Zamboni.

She soon skated off leaving me clinging to the railing, until I finally got my stride, arms and legs synchro-meshed bending low in case of a fall, and feeling good about myself as I skated around at good speed.

Grand baby skated over to me and said

YOU SURE ARE WOBBLY GRANDPA

Aunty, Grandma and Jewell

Sister Joan

Sweet Joan, always a smile, never a mean word, never learned or was interested in driving a car, even though she and her husband Herb raised three children while living in many parts of the country.

Didn’t need to, she filled her life with her children, cooking, sewing, crafts, and people.

Died too young of the family scourge, heart problems.

Although those last ten years, living at the lake, one quarter-mile from Herb's family farm amongst the red oak and birch, must have been heavenly.

A Chat with Pam

At sixty, you should have no debt, an extra bedroom and bath. A new sports car, and a fine study built to your specifications.

How did you go so wrong, Joseph? Or as a bankers ex-wife asked me at dinner, Where have you been?

My answer, not always understood by today's consumer-driven, daycare-loving society was:

I have

A FINE SON AND HIS WIFE WHO CARE FOR ME

A KIND DAUGHTER ,THE LOVE OF MY LIFE

AND

A MOTHER-RAISED GRANDBABY, JEWELL MONTANA, THE ROCKET GIRL

That's what I got.

Pam answered, You got a lot, Joseph.

My family

My Dad the Stonecutter

Today, few people know what a stonecutter is, even though until recently it was a common trade that was often a preparation to architectural training. Stone was, and in some ways still is, the fundamental building material for construction.

My dad the stonecutter practices trade between 1920 and 1970 an era when architects were still allowed to put art into architecture.

My dad practiced his trade in a large steal and glass building along with 50 or so others in a building we called the stone sheds in St Earns County, Minnesota, where the glaciers did all the heavy work eleven thousand years earlier.

The stonecutters and carvers and many related trades walked to work from their homes in khakis or blue denim often with aprons on, lunch buckets in hand, not unlike there predecessors 500 years before them in constructing cathedrals of Europe.

In his lifetime the stonecutter moved from job site to quarry site, primarily due to improvements in transportation and sawing technology, and for the most part disappeared from public view.

They were unassuming men whose children probably never knew what their fathers did in the stone sheds.

They including my father and his three brothers, Ted, Richard, and Larry. All were stonecutters and carvers, a dicey trade at best in those times of pneumatic tools. Some lived, some died.

But they were all wonderful artists and craftsmen who left their footprint on every city in America.

When my father the stonecutter learned I was following him in the trade, he gave me some practical advice that would serve many of us well:

“KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT AND BREATHE THROUGH YOU NOSE AND YOU WILL GET ALONG JUST FINE.”