The Reindeer Sweaters

Looking through a collection of old photographs of my Grandfather, I stumbled across a snapshot of him wearing one of the reindeer sweaters.





I had always assumed that those matching powder blue and white sweaters belonged to my parents first, having seen them in old photos of Mom and Dad as newlyweds. Now I realize that, even then, they were hand-me-downs. They were kept in a box of 'snow clothes' for our occasional winter trips up to the family cabin near Lake Arrowhead. In that collection were old fashioned jackets, mittens, boots, hats and various other bizarre cold weather apparel alien to our warm Southern California lifestyle. When we were up in the mountains, we would dig through the box trying on various articles of clothing, looking for a good fit. During this process, Mom would chatter away about whose boots those had been or whose hat that was and as those histories were recounted, regrettably we paid little attention. We were too keenly focused on colors and styles, fighting over especially interesting items - like the sweaters with the reindeer on them. Being big enough to wear those coveted sweaters, much too large for the little kids, marked our passage into adulthood. Over time, they became itchy and less pliable, much like our aging bodies. They had been worn by a doting father and his lovely daughter, next by a youthful couple unaware that they would one day parent our rowdy brood, then by an older brother and sister who were caretakers for four little sisters, and lastly by twins, who felt that logically the matched set go to them. The reindeer sweaters are long gone - preserved only in an occasional photo. Their woolen fibers have stiffened and crumbled into obscurity, but are forever woven into our collective memories.

Catch of the Day

Our Family would often go to the tide pools after church on Sunday afternoons. We wore our beat-up old tennis shoes and carried buckets in hopes of bringing them back brimming with treasures. The rocky ponds were filled with creepy gooey sea life, an occasional sea slug, but mostly anemones. Our local variety was a dull grey green in color and had hundreds of wriggling tendrils. When we dropped a pebble in them they would close up around it trying to swallow it - which naturally led us to try larger stones on bigger anemones, leaving them struggling under way more than a mouthful - ah the cruelty of youth. Sea urchins were everywhere, a deep purply-red in color, their mostly empty shells eaten out from the underside. We'd sometimes take them home and boil them in bleachy water to kill the remaining smelly innards, leaving us with a nice shell for our collections. Our buckets would fill up with all manner of creatures picked up with the scientific zeal of 10yr olds. Once home we would lay out our display of prizes on the sidewalk to admire. We would play for the rest of the day with any live crabs we managed to smuggle home. Building walls with blocks to form a racecourse, we'd goad them on cheering and screaming and poking them with sticks. We regarded them with fascination and fear, never daring to pick them up with our bare hands. Getting them to grab onto a stick was our technique for moving them around and threatening younger sisters by waving the scary sea spiders in their faces. If they let go and got loose, we all scrambled to safety, rescuing out bare toes from those treacherous pinchers. During the week they would mysteriously disappear from their corrals in the yard - usually right after trash day - by then we had usually lost interest anyway. At that time I was in my Marine Biologist phase, obsessed with the sea and all of it's strange inhabitants. I remember coming up with the idea of splitting anemones for a science project in Jr.High. My premise was that they might be able to regenerate from pieces - like starfish are able to re-grow a lost leg. With the feverish perseverance of a 12yr old, I cut them apart by endlessly sawing back and forth with one of our hopelessly dull kitchen knives. They lay in pieces, limp and suffering at the bottom of the tank. They sat for weeks in a salt water aquarium with the filter bubbling, ugly and smelly and doing nothing. Creepy and repulsive as they were, I still have pangs of remorse about what I did to them in the name of 'science'. I watched and waited, taking daily notes, eventually concluding that they did not possess the same capabilities as starfish and at long last they were joyously disposed of by my Mother. How she put up with my research I cannot imagine. It didn't end there - years later my youngest sister boiled down a horse leg in the kitchen to study the bones for a class. The tradition continued when my own daughter dissected a road-kill possum for a college course. We cooked the skinned carcass down in a canning pot on a Coleman stove OUTSIDE on our deck. I was not going to do it in our kitchen - Mom's spirit guiding me against going down that road.

Moustache Night

Like my Grandmother before me, I had two daughters a little later in life. They are close in age, but wide apart in temperament. They cope with life's adversities, picking and choosing differing weapons from their arsenal of responses. The elder is prone to swift untempered reactions, while the younger one diplomatically bides her time and moderates her replies - perhaps as a result of years of witnessing the consequences of her sister's rash outbursts. Attempting to assemble some very upscale hanging lamps inherited from her elder sister, daughter number two sat up in her room sweating amidst a pile of wires hangers and folded paper shades. The instructions were long gone. Usually the whiz-kid of the family, she sat alone seething with frustration and disbelief - she had been beaten by a lamp. Fortunately her sister was living across the street at the time and was summoned over to assist in sorting out the tangled mess of parts. Up the stairs stomps elder sister, grumbling about this disruption of her personal life. Her upper lip was etched with marker and we stared at it surreptitiously, afraid to comment lest we irritate her further and trigger a sudden and premature departure. All too aware of our guarded curiosity she announced, "it's moustache night", in the same way one would say "it's Saturday" - and promptly, deftly assembled the mass of parts into several fixtures, turned and disappeared across the street.

Bad finger

One afternoon during her first year of elementary school, my daughter came home and gravely took me aside to reveal some new found knowledge. Holding out her chubby hand and speaking in a lowered, reverent, confidential tone, she said - " Mom, did you know that one of my fingers is a 'bad' finger?" One of her ten fingers was arbitrarily singled out to be given a life sentence by some ancient schoolyard morality codex. The finger that yesterday was an innocent appendage today has been branded as corrupt and evil. What crime did it commit? It will look just the same as it did yesterday, but from this day forward it will forever bear a stigma and serve as a reminder of lost innocence.

Unwrapped

I make specialized hand carved and painted wooden sculptures for a living and just finished another Holiday season. The biggest giving time of the year when Yuletide trees fill underneath with presents, charities ring bells and inundate us with telephone solicitations and our mailboxes overflow with catalogs. There is no escaping the call for gifts. Our emotions are played upon with the tunes of holiday favorites, seasonal renewals of friendship come with each card, co-workers friends and family gather and the pressure is on to give tokens of affection, respect, fealty, and kindness. There is little escape lest we be branded a Scrooge or Grinch. We 'must' give - and that we 'must' somehow diminishes our gift. So we are compelled to annually exchange presents, burdening one another with mementos of relationships. Periodically I attempt to scale back these accumulations, sorting them and setting aside the 'keepers' while tossing out items never really liked or wanted. I hold fast to some if they were given by a loved one, or perhaps remain the only physical token of a long ago friend, or just because they possess that magical aura of having been a 'gift'. And yes, there are a few things that I have guiltily passed on to others. Re-gifting seems to me a cheaty way of dealing with an unwanted object. We'd like to convince ourselves that the item will find a loving home and useful purpose. Perhaps it will, perhaps it won't. Perhaps instead it will carry cooties of distaste from every hand that held it, bacteria of repugnance growing with every transfer. When my creations leave my hands what do they become? a cherished keepsake or an embarrassing white elephant? And do I really want to know?

Waterworld

Growing up with a swimming pool my parents built when I was in the fourth grade, we kids played watergames as much as yard games. Our Birthdays and Christmases provided us with a continual supply of fins, facemasks, and various flotation devices. We went through endless quantities of goggles and masks, compensating for their frequently broken straps by squishing them onto our faces and inhaling repeatedly until the suction pressure held it in place. The residual headaches and red marks on our foreheads were a small price to pay for razor sharp underwater vision. Swim fins were a must for our pool length races, enabling us to fly back and forth with lightening speed. Full of initiative like our do-it-yourself Dad, we became aqua-engineers, building floating structures out of stacked innertubes and Styrofoam paddle boards so that we could swim around in secret, peeking out of slits between the tubes while immune from water gun attacks. We piled up tubes at the steps on the shallow end, roofing them with upturned wading pools and deflated rafts to make aqua forts. Inspired by TV shows like Seahunt, we longed to spend our days submerged. We tested our endurance by doing as many underwater laps as we could on one breath - in case, like Lloyd Bridges, we would have to perform underwater rescues when our aqualung tubes had been slashed by the bad guys. We would kick around the pool with an inverted bucket over our head and try to submerge with it as if in a diving bell, an exhausting endeavor later replaced with the technique of sitting on it to keep it submerged and taking turns diving under to get a breath from the air trapped inside. Mom was given a metal ornamental frog as a garden sculpture – whose weight, when gripped tightly, made it an excellent device for a quick drop down to the bottom of the deep end for a meditative moment. These underwater activities led to numerous ear infections and much of the time I remember being in the pool protected with cotton, ear plugs, and a stiff rubber bathing cap - which kept out the water as well as much of the sound. After each swim, I learned to shake my head sideways with a NO NO NO NO on each side, hearing the sound of liquid inside slosh back and forth until I could feel the trickle of warm water finding its way out. Eardrops were dispensed daily - I can still hear my Mom timing each side after a dropperful with “one, two, button my shoe …three, four, shut the door… all the way to nineteen, twenty – that’s aplenty”. She stuffed cotton wads in afterwards to keep the medicine inside as I slept – a dry land treatment that shut out the sounds of my busy home much like my waterworld sojourns. My submerged activities were a constant source of enjoyment and even now I thrill with the freedom of a comic book Aquaman, undulating underwater with a dolphin kick and arms stretched out in front as if in liquid flight. The world above becomes less real and I return to those childhood bottom of the deep end moments with the frog, looking up at the rippling surface and wondering what strange land is that above me.

Structural Engineering

Dad built so many items for our home – partially due to the economic constraints of our oversized family, but mostly because he loved being a ‘do-it-your-selfer’. Dad would look over whatever Mom was currently admiring in a magazine picture and figure out how to make it for a fraction of the cost. It was a mission and a challenge! Each project began with a Saturday morning trip to the lumberyard. We would be there for hours, Dad searching for items on his list and calculating costs; us killing time wandering around the sawdust covered floors, inhaling the sweet smell of cut lumber and looking for the vending machines. They always had a row of them tucked into some corner near a doorway luring us with their colorful packages filled with stale Tom’s peanut bars, cheese cracker snacks, beer nuts, Chuckles candy and other delectable items. He’d give us pennies for the gumball machine and like juvenile gamblers we’d try our luck – hoping for a jackpot to come through the chute. On this particular Saturday we were shopping for redwood for outdoor armchairs that Dad had decided to make after seeing them in a Sunset magazine. Ours were designed to accommodate square vinyl covered foam cushions that we had purchased at the Akron discount store. These plastic cushions were water and soil proof, perfect for a large family with grimy little kids. We sat on them when watching TV, stacked them on top of one another for thrones and forts, used them as landing pads for indoor sporting events, or lined them in twos or threes for makeshift mattresses during sleepovers - the slippery vinyl units inevitably sliding apart by morning to leave us in a tangle of blankets, pillows, and cushions on the hard floor. Being cheap and plentiful, they became the key element in the chair design, their yellow and orange 60’s colors stylishly complimenting the redwood frames. Dad had opted for ¼” plywood as the supporting surface for the seat cushions, figuring that would keep the structure light and thus easy to move around. The plywood was set into narrow slots in the side rails of the seat frame. Unfortunately over time, weathering caused the plywood to shrink and warp, popping out of the slots when too much weight was applied to them. Seeing the grownups suddenly finding themselves in a near fetal position with their knees up under their chins was a source of great amusement for the younger kids, whose lighter payload made them immune from such catastrophes. But Dad was a problem solver and design tweaking after test flights was a naturally occurring part of his job. Undaunted by this minor setback, he seized upon some old tire inner tubes, (a supply of which no household in those days was without) cut strips from them and stapled the straps across the chair bottom in place of the plywood. The result was enhanced security and far greater comfort. No longer suffering the shock and surprise of splintering crashes, the occupant would sink incrementally in an almost genteel fashion as the aging rubber tore through the staples one by one, relaxed in the knowledge that escape could be made before disaster struck.
Now when I open the door of my shop and step onto the sawdust covered floor, the aroma of lumberyard imbued with Dad’s spirit fuels my efforts, bracing me for whatever daily obstacles my work may encounter.

Happy Birthday Dad - Roger Westvig 1/24/1919 - 9/27/1997