“What kept him from remembering what it was/That brought him to that creaking room was age./. . . . . . ./A light he was to no one but himself/Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,/A quiet light, and then not even that./. . . . . . ./One aged man—one man—can’t keep a house,/A farm, a countryside, or if he can,/It’s thus he does it of a winter night.”
—Robert Frost, “An Old Man’s Winter Night”
Like patient Penelope’s to stave off the usurping suitors in The Odyssey, my tapestry of constantly weaving-unweaving connections, shifting pattern changes, ripped-out seams, repaired tears—the last word works either way—continues, one of the many crafts I was taught to occupy myself with. This morning’s newspaper brought an abundance. In “Baby Blues” Zoe says, “I need to write a current event report. . . . I want to do a good job, so we should make it extra-current. And super-eventy . . . Let’s not scrimp on that, either!” In “For Better or for Worse,” Elly Patterson is led by an automated voice into a tantrum that deletes all her “Yaptel” messages. (It involves PINs, of which I have a surplus, a different one for every credit card, as many do—and we’re expected to memorize them all??) “Prince Valiant” has a Freudian typo in meeting a trio of hags Macbeth style: “One of the hags croaks, ‘Welcome O Price Valiant of Thule.’ “ “Luann”s parents are into Casablanca-film noir: “I love these old movies. That snappy tough talk they all do.” “ And the clothes. Men in suits and hats, women in fur-lined gowns,” to which Luann and her brother say, “Mom and Dad are so weird sometimes.” “Are they makin’ out or fighting?” “Pickles” is about hobbies, an unwritten entry as yet but something Mom and Grandma insisted upon that led to certain family traditions. The Sunday O W-H Parade magazine Q & A—the most standard court-reporting format—deals with trendy too-long trousers for women and hanging shirttails for men with “Don’t worry: This too shall pass.” (See 19 December entry.) The “Howard Huge” cartoon reminds me he is a St. Bernard (see last entry). In my favorite part, “Ask Marilyn,” Marilyn vos Savant has the following Q & A:
Please explain to Hollywood why a spaceship would not make any sound when blown up.
—R.C., Denver, Colo.
Aww, that would be like pointing out that sunsets are not accompanied by background music. People don’t go to movies because they want to experience real life; if they did, space movies would have a lot in common with silent movies: There is no air in space, so sound waves are virtually absent.
Which reminded me of an end-of-the-year Time article on new skyscrapers with photos, most leaning, bulging, curving, one even patterned after a Mobius strip, right angles rare (see 15 December entry). The January 2005 AARP Bulletin’s “Humor” dealt with a television pilot writer’s [Alan Zweibel] actual experience with “an unnamed executive at an unnamed movie studio” about a script on President and Mrs. Roosevelt in which the latter suggests Queen Latifah for Eleanor—”. . . Eleanor Roosevelt wasn’t black.” “Why are you being so difficult?”—and then a “big dance number”—”Maybe a hip-hop thing in the White House or in front of Congress.” “But FDR had polio. He was in a wheelchair.” “The unnamed executive at the unnamed movie studio told my agent that I was out of touch with today’s audiences.” And in “The Science of Things,” the January 2005 National Geographic, Joel Achenbach wrote:
The world, we strongly suspect, is real, and not an illusion. But there is no getting around the fact that many of our perceptions are internally constructed. It’s like a movie constantly being filmed, edited, and sometimes censored by an idiosyncratic director running around in our skulls. And there are plenty of special effects.
Well, I beat him to dwarfs in the skull, but I need all the above to combat January, enero for crossword puzzle lovers. With the same 31 days as some others, this month stretches relativity-ly into twice its length, a hazardous piece of road for me always, when I changed jobs, made drastic shifts, broke habits, “cut off my nose to spite my face,” as Mom used that cliche, which, from my reading, apparently comes from nuns’ deliberate mutilation to make themselves unattractive to would-be pillaging rapists, like Attila and the Huns, back in the Dark Ages, albeit slicing off noses is also an ancient punishment for traitors and other criminals.
I’m meandering from being Up West with my maternal family amid outlaw tales over to my paternal side, with its own western resonance. George Washington Luckert, my grandfather born on Washington’s birthday, came out here from Newark, New Jersey, his birthplace, in 1891, looking for his father. John Charles Luckert, Captain John in family gossip, immigrated with his parents from Saxony, the German province of Leipzig and Dresden, next door to the Czech Republic with Prague, from whence my great grandparents Koftan came. According to Mom’s “Ancestor Chart,” his parents were Andrew J. and Henrietta Luckert, about whom a distant cousin keeps asking but I know nothing. Dad told me long ago that the name was German and French; the way his high palate pronounced it, auto parts salesmen often misspelled it Teutonically. He had also said one of our ancestors was hanged from a bell tower during the French Revolution, certainly an apocryphal story. We know Captain John was born in Saxony from his marriage certificate, a copy in my Luckert scrapbook—but that’s getting ahead of the story.
Captain John somehow passed through West Point Military Academy and had a New Jersey family. He left George, a “slow” son, Charley, who died rather young, a daughter(?), and his wife, Cathryn Brummerhauf, in Newark to go West to fight in the Indian wars. As an Army captain, he would’ ve gone to Omaha, the territorial capital and Army headquarters at Fort Omaha (with its General Crook House Museum now), from where he was apparently stationed up at Niobrara City, the state’s second oldest settlement after Bellevue, between the Ponca Reservation from 1865 and the Santee Sioux Reservation established in 1869. (Nebraska became a state in 1867.) At that time Niobrara was the county seat of L’eau qui Court County, the French for “Running Water” betraying early voyageur trappers intermingling with the Indians and leaving several names I grew up with like Frazier, Rouillard, Robinette. “L’eau qui court” is Niobrara’s oldest cemetery and Running Water a tiny settlement on the South Dakota side of the Missouri River, where the ferry ran to in my childhood, the county name changed to Knox in 1873. We’ re not sure what all Captain John was doing, but the family also thinks he spent a mysterious year out in the California gold fields. When he decided to settle in finally at 36, he wed 21–year-old Julia Dannert on 7 August 1880 and had a second, larger family. (I grew up hearing her referred to as Widow Dannert, but the marriage certificate says Miss, not Mrs.) In the meantime after a suitable period, his Eastern “widow” remarried, which is where the Brummerhauf comes in, I think, for [Great] Uncle Al Hermes, married to [Great] Aunt Daisy Brummerhauf, came in summers with his family to visit Aunt Lizzie and the rest of us when I was little. The paternal family tree thus has two major grafts, and Grandpa had several half brothers and sisters to my confusion. (I went to school and danced with their children, my second half cousins, I guess .)
Grandpa came out here at 18, possibly to escape a pregnant well-to-do(?) girlfriend, to confront his father in a western soap-opera, for his stepmother refused to acknowledge or even talk to him, as did his tight-mouthed dad, plowing in the field, till George simply stood in front of the horse team and made his dad recognize him. The new family of children all received $10,000 each at Captain John’s death, very sizeable sums then, while George got a gold watch, which I have handed on to Jared, a fifth-generation Luckert Nebraskan (his surname is the Swiss Rohrer). (I have given my other nieces and nephews keepsakes, lest you think me unfair.) Four years later Grandpa George married into an English-Welch family, Jones, his wife’s having come to Nebraska at 2, Iowa-born at Schleswig.
I don’t intend here to drive far into my paternal history, but I do want to mention some other Western notes, such as George and Anna’s living in a dugout Dad and his brothers remembered very well, and that does mean a home dug into a hillside, like Grandma Koftan’s canning/storm cellar but a bit larger. One of his stories had the family rifle, propped by Grandma at the doorway, stolen by Indians—reason for the Army presence, I guess—and, weeks later, when Grandma put some pies out to cool, the pies stolen and the rifle left in payment, the butt studded in nail designs. Dad also recalled an aunt and uncle taking a team and wagon for an all-day trek—in our Knox County hills!—to go up to the Missouri and dig up trees to bring back for planting, so bare was the landscape, some of the many who led to our becoming the Tree Planting State with Arbor Day. (J. Sterling Morton, the salt king, pushed for that holiday from his Arbor Lodge at Nebraska City before he moved to Chicago.) Another story has it that Dad, John Herbert always known as Jack, was named for Grandpa’s half brother, Johnny, who died in a bizarre accident at 19 in December two years after Dad was born. Having the team and carriage ready to go to a dance, Johnny got a rifle to shoot some birds on the way. Somehow dropping the rifle or stumbling against the carriage, he killed himself. I’ve already mentioned that his and all the other second-family graves cluster around Captain John’s at the crest of the Bloomfield Cemetery’s highest section.
And, in connection with George Washington Luckert’s birth date of 22 February, his son, Chester Winford, was born on April Fool’s Day, his daughter, Bessie Liberty, was born on the Fourth of July, and his grandson, my cousin, Alton Lincoln, was born on 12 February, though his and Grandpa’s birthdays have now been merged into Presidents Day. Grandson George Washington the 2nd, however, was born on the same day as my oldest nephew, Justin, 8 January, his name simply Uncle Rich’s flattery of Grandpa. And my being born on Good Friday doesn’t count but maybe was a nice try.
“I know I pass around the mute dead/And hold within myself my own death./But I have lost my being in so many beings,/Died my life so many times,/Kissed my ghosts so many times,/Known nothing of my acts so many times,/That death will be simply like going/From inside the house into the street.”
—Sophia De Mello Breyner, “I Feel the Dead,” trans. Ruth Fainlight, The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry
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