Ninety-Year-Olds

      The invitation came towards the end of September.  A quick glance at the calendar revealed three or four Veterans’ Day performances the week of the celebration.  We could not go.

      I thought we might get away the week following Veterans’ Day, but that week got filled in, too.  As it turned out, it would not have been a good thing.

      It was a 90^th birthday party for two, a surprise, prepared by their daughter.  The parents were both born in 1927.

    The birthday girl is the last survivor of “the cousins”, the grandchildren of Ole and Anna, my great grandparents.  She is the last connecting link to a bygone generation. 

     Last summer, we lost the last of my cousins who actually knew my paternal grandmother, Martha.  While I did visit with Barbara, I lacked a lot of getting everything she had experienced with our grandparents.  I thought of other missed opportunities.  Aunt Dell would have been six years old when the family moved from Minnesota to a homestead in the desert of Eastern Colorado.  She would have remembered that trip, but I never thought to ask her about it.

     I decided it was now or probably never, so we set off on our trip to Boise.  We could have flown.  The Goodwife found fares as low as $60 round trip.  We would have had to go on Tuesday and return Thursday.  It didn’t seem right to make a flying trip.  So we drove.

    It was a two-day trip by automobile.  We left on Tuesday and returned by the following Saturday.

     We arrived in Boise mid-afternoon Wednesday.  We found the 90-year-olds in good shape for having lived nine decades.  Both use walkers, but they get around.  Both are sharp mentally. There have been issues.  Had we visited in November, we probably would have had to visit one of the guests of honor in a hospital or rehab, recovering from spinal surgery.

      We originally intended to rent a motel room for our stay, so as not to be a burden, but they were fully prepared to have us stay with them, so we did. 

       We jumped right in to sharing what we knew about our extended family.  Out came the old suitcase with pictures that don’t see the light of day very often.  We also reviewed the family history book. 

     We dined on lasagna thoughtfully provided by daughter Mary (my second cousin).  Mary’s constant attention makes it possible for her parents to remain in their nice modern home. 

     It was midnight before we gave it up Wednesday.  Among the family “secrets”:  a bootlegger who had a hollow doorframe where pints could easily be hidden and easily removed for sale to customers. She would lie in the dark by the railroad tracks waiting for the train car that would expel a keg.   The keg’s contents would be transferred to pints, the pints hidden in the hollow doorframe.  She may have been a madam as well.  She was one of the few financial success stories in our family.

      Tragedy—the youngest brother died in the flu epidemic during WWI.

      A suicide using the gas from the lamps that provided the light in those olden days.  When the homeowner returned and struck a match to light the lamp, a mini explosion occurred.  Unfortunately, that isn’t the only suicide.  Suicide is a family plague.

      The number of violin or fiddle players in the family.  Music has been a part of the family for a long time, as Ole was the song leader at church where there were no musical instruments.  He apparently had near-perfect pitch.  Many of his children were musicians.

       The self-same Ole was somewhat of a sex fiend who mistreated his wife.  Some of his sons built a house for their mother and forbade Ole to enter therein.

      The homesteaders who ventured from Minnesota to Colorado.  My grandfather and two of his brothers made the first foray in 1907.  Carpenters all, they built a “suitable” dwelling (my older aunts referred to that house where they grew up as “the chicken coop”) and returned to Minnesota for the winter.  In the spring of 1908, the entire family moved to their home on the planes.

     Apparently, all three brothers filed homestead claims.  Two relinquished their claims and returned to Minnesota when Ole died.  They took over the Minnesota farm and cared for their widowed mother.

      A story I was able to add concerned my good Neighborly and a conversation we had one day.  He asked my Grandfather’s name.  I said John or Johannes.  No that wasn’t the right name.  Was it Joe?  No.  How about Ingeman?  That was it.

      The story Neighborly told involved his late wife and a grandson.  They were at an auction where the grandson took a liking to a framed document, which was apparently a charter for an insurance company, maybe Modern Woodsmen or something similar.  Shirley bought the thing for her grandson, who still has it today. The charter is signed by the charter members.  Among the signers was Ingeman, who apparently was around the country long enough to help start the organization.

      “Uncle” Joe, Mary’s grandfather, was a great letter-writer.  I remember a letter or two Papa got from Uncle Joe.  They were indeed entertaining.  He encouraged Papa to keep on living, as he was about to make it to one hundred.  (Papa lacked three or four years of making 100.  He always protested that he never asked to live so long.)  Uncle Joe was the last of Ole and Anna’s family.  He died in 1979.

        We spent much of the day Thursday immersed in the olden days until we all grew tired and had to take a rest.  Thursday evening, we were guests of Mary and Lance.  The evening was only slightly marred by the malfunction of the meat smoker, and for the locals, a bigger disappointment with Boise State’s defeat in the first round of the Mountain West basketball tournament.

      We took our leave on Friday morning.  Parting is always hard, particularly when you realize this may be the last time to visit each other on this earth. 

     I had hoped to visit Yellowstone on our return trip, but it would have been late afternoon Friday when we arrived.  We had no reservations and I wasn’t sure what the weekend traffic might be, so we opted for a more direct route.

       I had also hoped to find a hot springs to visit, maybe spend the night there.  My wires got crossed.  I thought Soda Springs, ID would be the place.  We went through Lava Springs on our way to Soda Springs.  No hot springs in Soda Springs.  Go back to Lava Springs, the store clerk told us.  We didn’t want to back track, so we pressed on, thinking maybe to stop in Kemmerer, WY for the night.

       We found a better solution, Montpelier, ID.  It had a nice motel at a not-too-bad-a price.  It was much quieter than the motel in Pocatello where we spent a noisy Wednesday night (a place two more than the one that keeps the light on for you).

       After a peaceful rest, we got some advice from the motel lady on which roads to take to Kemmerer.  At Kemmerer, we visited Fossil Buttes, which really took us back into the past, billions of years.  We lunched in Green River, WY, filled with gas at Sinclair, home of Sinclair gasoline refinery.  What a disappointment!  The refinery is less than a mile away, yet gas was $2.55.  (We paid $2.32 in Kemmerer.  We paid a high of $3.19 near Burley, ID.)

     We supped at our used-to-be favorite Korean place in Laramie (Goodwife says she won’t go there again).  We elected to go to Cheyenne and catch I-25 home—probably not the fastest route from Laramie to Loveland.  We arrived home about 9:30 p.m.

      We agreed this was probably the last trip for the old 2001 Chrysler.  Things are starting to fail.  The heater doesn’t work exactly right.  Everything, heat, AC, comes through the defroster now.  We had cold toes a place or two during our trip.   It’s hard to turn loose of the big old thing.  It averaged 30 MPG on our trip of 1600 miles.   But it turned over 189,000 on the odometer, or distance indicator, as we say these days.                

     We were glad we made the trip.  We were glad to be home.