Mental Scrap--book: September 2006 Archives

Gramma and I got along because she had zest, loved people, and enjoyed knowing about them and the way the world works as much as I did. I've spoken of her imagination before, how on any trips, long or short, she kept us entertained--and, as children, awed--by her biographical fictions. She simply knew everyone we met and could recite extemporaneously small family trees, usually funny ones filled with gossipy meringue. "Oh, that's Mrs. Bridgeburner. That woman is astonishing. She can fire a shotgun better than her husband--and did--at him. Poor man had 43 buckshot in his rear after she caught him kissing the hired girl." I'm doing a poor imitation, but that was the way she wove tales just as skillfully as Sheherazade, much shorter and more locally, of course. She enjoyed meeting people and could probably have made a milder, certainly politer version of Babwa Walwa, as Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In retitled Barbara Walters, because Gramma could extract information as deftly as any pro. This extended to her interest in family histories, which in turn was how she and I would end up traipsing through cemeteries without any silly horror show nonsense, simply enjoying the names, epitaphs, if there were any, the old-fashioned grave markers like lambs and angels for children, the geneaologies lying there to be knitted together.

This extended to traveling, which she dearly loved, and I attribute at least some of my lifelong quest to know everything about everything, that curiosity which teachers finally kill out of children by conformity, the irksome basis for manners and social behavior and being a good little brainless consumer who has to have the latest fashions and wants everything standardized and sterile. One can argue the pros and cons endlessly, but one of the worst insults I've ever been skewered by was a relative's sneer that I had more useless knowledge in my head than anyone that person knew, which probably means that that relative's acquaintances would be boringly, safely tedious to me. I'm firmly with Ethel Barrymore, whom I suspect would have gotten on well with Gramma: "You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about--the more you have left when anything happens." Likewise, Dorothy Parker: "The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." From my viewpoint, curiosity is the most important motivation in human evolution, the fuel for science against stifling religion and politics, the dangerous trait that makes popes and kings shudder but got us out of Africa to the moon.

So, anyway, between my books and Gramma I was doomed to wonder why and how, and that has given me a good life whatever material wealth and social acquaintance I lack. I really should pour champagne over her grave.

That's why she insisted on certain stops and I was sent, for instance, crawling through ditches and fences into the fields or pastures to pluck, say, a Kansas sunflower or a Texas cotton boll to wonder at, and that worked for our trip to Montana too. She and Mom belonged to the American Red Cross--one took classes at the courthouse in Center and became, I guess, licensed--and that's how it happened that, like Lewis and Clark long before us, we filled the pages of a bright blue Red Cross magazine lying in the rear window with botanical specimens and also ended up with an pint ice cream container filled with betonite, another with some cave crystals from outside the entrance, found quartz, a shard of obsidian, pine cones, souvenirs for several years' reminiscence. Obviously, aside from an abiding passion for rocks--I really should have been a geologist--I gave up that kind of collecting as an adult, but wonder what would've happened had she been along as I took all my wildflower pictures. As it was, we had magic talismen to touch and wave the memory wand over. She saw to that.

I want to save this space for some pictures if I can find them and if Cousin Ryan can insert them, but I need to weekend, so watch this space!

I had every intention of daily entries for a big change, but I've been wrestling a horrific cold since Sunday, and it tag-teamed me with a body slam and threw me out of the ring yesterday. Anyway--

I have never figured out how Dad and [Great] Uncle Joe drove to Yellowstone and back in the Twenties when few highways existed and certainly not many filling stations. I do remember he said they carried spare tires and fuel. I don't recall the first long trip I had with Mom and Gramma and Grampa Koftan because I was only pre-school, but I know we went to Clarence, Missouri, to see Great Grandpa Koftan and I was very scared upon seeing my first blacks in a town that was very dark and in a house that was lit by only one or two kerosene lamps at a time, mustached Great Grandpa Koftan rocking in the darkness.

But the next big trip was after Gramma and Grampa bought a grey Kaiser Manhattan, and we went off to see [Great] Uncle Forrest in Deer Lodge, Montana. Uncle Forrest was the fifth Peters but considered the family black sheep, having left home young--I think like Dad's brothers later, he didn't get along with his father--and went out to Montana to work on the railroad. At least I have photo postcards of Libby and Kootenai Falls: "This is a picture of Mane (sic) St I marked X on the Depot roof" and "This is Kootenai falls 12 miles from Libby we were there twice last summer." He was also married to Celinda, called Linda, but I remember nothing of her. Gramma had kept in touch with him over the years, and he visited their Bloomfield farm (another picture).

In those days long before Ramada and Holiday Inns and Motel 6 and all the other franchises that help make the U.S. a generic whole, motels were tiny individual wooden huts, much like one I stayed at a decade ago while touring Minnesota's most beautiful route up the North Shore. The Minnesota cabin was a large room with bed(s), kitchenette with two-burner stove, sink, table and chairs, some dishes on shelves, bathroom walled off. The main room wasn't the size of my living room, with less walking space. That's what we stayed in on our trip when we didn't camp out.

For that was in 1948, after World War II, when Army surplus was the usual camping gear, certainly where Dad got all of ours, so that we had khaki green Army cots, a portable cylindrical aluminum stove that used white gas (I think), Army dinnerware, tarps. We added skillets, silverware, a large squat thermos for water, smaller ones for coffee and juice, a small cooler for foodstuffs. So part of the time we stayed in the separate little motel hut, and part of the time Mom or Grampa asked a farmer for permission, and we slept along their entry road or at the edge of their yard, Gramma and I on the car seats, Mom and Grampa on the Army cots. Part of the time we ate in roadside cafes, usually following the urban myth that truckers know where the best food is, and part of the time we fixed our own meals in the motel cabins or on the roadside. I'm probably wrong, but it seems like most of our breakfasts were somewhere along the road after we got an early start, coffee (not for me) perking, then the skillet frying eggs and bacon bought at the last local store. As far as Gramma and I were concerned, it was a grand adventure. We sat in the back always, and it became a kind of joke that I was always looking out the big back window where I had the best view of whatever attractions we passed. Mom and Grampa traded driving chores, mileage being kept and maps carefully followed so we could get from gas station to gas station.

I had been responsible for the planning, which meant that I had gone to Dad's town rival, the Crosley brothers' Conoco station, and filled out one of their Touraide cards with our destinations so that we got a kind of tourist brochure of that time, with the page on one side a road map with the suggested route highlighted, the other page with notes on the attractions of that particular map section. I should add that the Touraide brochures of the 1930s-1940s and all road maps were free then. I also had looked up in the encyclopedias what major attractions we were going to see. While I'm at it, I'd recommend the Reader's Digest's Off the Beaten Path for the same Touraide purposes, as I found it a major resource for vacations in my working years, though I know most use computers now.

Our trip was in 1948, as I said, and we were headed first for the South Dakota Black Hills, partly for the scenery and partly because Grampa's sister, Ella, lived in Belle Fourche at the northern tip with her second husband and her sons, Raymond and Lloyd Adel, but not Lloyd's twin sister, Lorraine, who must have been married then. I don't think we got off the highway to see the surreally barren Badlands I did some hiking in decades later, but I know we went through Wall because Wall Drug Store advertised from coast to coast then and so was a necessary tourist destination.

Gramma Koftan was short and stout, meaning not fat but certainly not skinny, corseted solidly, thin-lipped, once red-haired, extremely industrious, argumentative from her family's side, wrote poetry of the Edgar Guest kind and had Guest and Service poems well memorized from her father's social literary gatherings. "A House by the Side of the Road" hung on her living room wall. The first verse was:

Let me live in a house by the side of the road where the race of men go by,/ The men who are good and the men who are bad, as good and as bad as I. / I would not sit in the scorner's seat or hurl the cynic's ban./ Let me live in a house by the road and be a friend to man.

She and Mom recited such verse as James Whitcomb Riley's "When the Frost Is on the Punkin" and "Little Orphant Annie," which the first verses for each are:

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock,/ And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin' turkey-cock,/ And the clackin' of the guineys, and the cluckin' of the hens,/ And the rooster's hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;/ O, it's then's the times a feller is a-feelin' at his best,/ With the risin' sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,/ As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock,/ When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

Little Orphant Annie's come to our house to stay,/ An' wash the cups an' saucers up, an' brush the crumbs away,/ An' shoo the chickens off the porch, an' dust the hearth, an' sweep,/ An' make the fire, an' bake the bread, an' earn her board-an'-keep;/ An' all us other childern, when the supper-things is done,/ We set around the kitchen fire an' has the mostest fun,/ A-listenin' to the witch-tales 'at Annie tells about,/ An' the Gobble-uns 'at gits you Ef you don't watch out!

Cousin Linda had Gramma's poems printed and bound, which I can't find at the moment; but they follow this kind of versification that Aunt Audree and her granddaughter were/are most persistent in imitating. Gramma also played the piano passably well, undoubtedly a big help to Mom's singing, and it was her upright I learned on.

She'd begun teaching country school out of the eighth grade, as did her older and younger sisters, setting up the teaching tradition that Mom and I followed. Great Aunt Nellie married John Feddersen, who was superintendent at Stuart, Nebraska, I think; she also mimegraphed her own teacher's magazine for the area, the copies of which Mom had and I enjoyed for the playlets, the seasonal diagrams for coloring, as well as various hints for different courses of study. One of her two sons was later head of the Speech Department at Northwestern University. Great Aunt Myrtle taught at Stuart, and, after divorce, for a century or so at Randolph, where their brother was the town doctor (and Great Uncle Glenn had taught briefly at some point before he became a doctor). A very voluble quartet, I think of them as the Peters Debating Society, for they liked nothing better than to hone their minds and tongues, generally on politics, swarming a hapless Republican like army ants with their Democratic fervor.

Gramma was a hard-working farm wife who baked her own bread and cakes and pies and put out big meat-and-potato meals for Grampa, including breakfast, and ran the separator for milk, cream, and butter, always had hens for eggs and meat, took care of a large garden, canned enough to keep the dug-out cellar full of food for the winter from beef to peas and carrots, yet also belonged to various clubs, ultimately to become a Royal Neighbors of America deputy, meaning a regional insurance saleswomen, who had her first martini in San Francisco at a national meeting not many years before her death. I generally picture her in a bib apron with rickrack edging she'd made herself, though, of course, she dressed up in print jersey with a hat for Project Club, Bloomfield Womens Club, Royal Neighbors fraternal meetings, not quite so fancy for their farm couples' card club.

Mom said she was much more difficult to get along with in their youthful years when Gramma was a very strict, stern black-stockinged Methodist in the Twenties, though I always thought of her as affectionate if sharp-tongued. I do have some black-stockinged photos of her with her Harry Potter glasses. Linda said I was her favorite. Actually, I was simply the oldest grandchild, a very well-behaved one because of Mom, as well as very literate. She was sharp-tongued with me to insure I didn't become a snob, especially after I went to college, and skewered me accordingly, as she could anyone verbally. (Sorry, Gram, with my Forties and Fifties standards, I am just what you feared.) We got along mostly grandly because I was an avid reader and she liked to know about the world. This worked out especially well on our trips, when she depended upon me to know the background for what we saw. And that's where I'll go next.