Salutations

Dad was in the service during WWII like most of his generation. Instead of going overseas, he was sent to Ohio to work on airplanes with a group of engineer-soldiers. They fought for their country with slide rules instead of rifles. I don’t know the exact dates of his military stint, other than that he and Mom married in October of 1943 and my brother was born in September of 1945. Mom and the baby went out and lived with him on the base, for she told me various stories about this time period. Army life for my young Mother, with knife fights and drunken brawls outside her doorstep, was quite a change from growing up in Beverly Hills. During this time, she learned to knot a sewing thread with a few deft twists and a quick roll between the thumb and forefinger. I remember so distinctly her showing this trick to me and telling me of the older no-nonsense female army sergeant who had taught it to her. In this photo, Dad is holding my eight month old brother Mike near their Army housing. I wish I knew what he was saying – the expression is an unusual one for him. Rather than a proud, beaming new father, it’s as if he were delivering a gangster impersonation or sarcastically barking an Army command.

He told me he liked carrying Mike in his arms around base all the time because it got him out of saluting.

Doors

With a brother 4 years older and sisters 5, 7 and 12 years younger, I had some breathing space growing up. Fascinated with the cool activities of my older brother, I too, drew pictures and made models (even though I didn’t particularity like cars and planes). Watching over my little sisters, I helped them build forts and arrange plastic animals in the sandbox, staying long after they lost interest to finish ‘our’ constructions. Escaping the hubbub of preschoolers, I often worked and read and drew and made things alone in my room - a lovingly built sanctuary, with a ready audience just beyond the door. Through that portal, there was always someone available - even if just to argue with, or to play cards with, or tell to shut up, or to turn down the TV, or to show what I was making. I remember working late out back in the rumpus room and coming into the house at 1 or 2 am to get a snack and say hello. It was dark and everyone had gone to bed. So immersed in my own creations - I had no sense of time. Hours flew by, and when I went to visit the ‘other’ world, it was already closed for the night. Dorothy opening her door to enter OZ and those space ships and time machines in Dad’s science fiction books were not such far-fetched ideas – they were just another way of describing that transition between imagination and reality. My Dad saw the world that way in his last years as his dementia increased. Science fiction WAS reality for him. The way his mind worked, he DID go thru doors and get transported to different times and places, for he was seeing with his mind, not his eyes. Sometimes he was on a cruise ship or at the beach house or at the airport or with his mom. His memory so often seemed so much more vivid than his failing eyesight that it overwrote his real-time mental processes. He evaluated his observations with a logic that worked for him and his reality was the reality of a dream state - like those spiritual American Indians in the movies having visions. The dream IS the reality - ignore what you see, go with what you believe, believing is seeing. As we would walk Dad down the hallway at the nursing home, he would suddenly step to the side exclaiming “Look out there’s the opening in the floor! See it! Step in it, WOOSH! You’ll go right through!” And he was right, for he fell many times at the home. Even now I watch my step in unfamiliar hallways, wary of those unseen doorways.

Akerholm Hair

Today is my Mom’s birthday, she would have been 84.

Here she is being held by her 71 year old Grandmother, Anna Catherine Akerholm.
I have always been haunted by this photograph of the two Annes. The stark look of another era, the breeze blowing my Great Grandmother’s wispy thin white hair - “Akerholm Hair” – Mom called it with a sigh as she tried to make it curl and look fuller on our heads. But that Akerholm hair would always cut loose and refuse to be managed, much like our unbending personalities. Mom would tell us about trips as a child to Mississippi to visit her tiny peppy Grandma Annie and how they would all jump on the beds together and have pillow fights. Gramma Annie in her seventies and still spry and FUN, that’s how Mom wanted to be.
Me too.