Childhood Memories

April 9, 2021April 9, 2021

Saturday Sandwiches

Dad’s favorite foods are picnic foods and sub sandwiches. The menu includes macaroni and potato salad, corn on the cob, hotdogs, baked beans, chips and cookies. Every Friday night I make him beanie weenies, we have corn once a week and a variety of salads with lunch. About once a month we go out to lunch for subs. Interestingly, he no longer enjoys chili, hot peppers or anything spicy. I can remember walking into the living room when I was about eight years of age to see him sitting on the couch snacking on jalapeno peppers right out of the jar. As I sided up next to him, he said, These peppers are so hot! I asked him, Why don’t you stop eating them? Dad replied, They don’t get hot until I stop eating them. They are so hot I can’t stop.

A jar of jalapeno peppers was always on the table for Saturday lunch. On Saturday Mom would bring out the leftovers from the week and we would eat whatever was on the table. If there wasn’t quite enough Mom would cook up a little bacon. Sometimes Dad picked seasonal fresh pear tomatoes he grew in the side yard. I brought radishes (red and white), carrots and lettuce from my corner garden. I’m not sure exactly how it started, but I can hear my sister saying That’s gross, as Dad sliced hardboiled eggs and radishes and stacked them on top of white Wonder bread covered with barbecue beans. I placed a few slices of bacon on my bread and peanut butter. Dad winked and we just kept going. We started to combine anything we liked to eat onto our sandwiches. Sometimes we toasted the bread or added another slice of bread in the middle. I don’t know where we put all the food, but we ate everything on our plates. The messier the better.

We came up with some traditional combinations like creamy Limberger cheese and onions and added the liver too. Our bologna and mustard layers were usually topped off with potato chips. If there were leftover Bisquick biscuits, we used them instead of bread. There are many recipes that taste just as good cold as hot. Cold split pea soup with ham makes a great spread. Cold SOS is great with lettuce tomatoes and radishes. Who needs mayo when you have gravy? Grapes and onions stick to cream cheese. Macaroni, potato and egg salad are no brainers with sliced hot dogs. There was usually some canned Spam or corned beef and occasionally sardines. If Mom was making pickles, we added the pre-soaked Persian cucumber slices or the Butter Pickles. The more Mom and Sis fussed the more creative we were. Before we took our first bite, we carefully smashed the layers from the top down hoping to get a bite tasting of every flavor at once. We had so much fun.

Dad’s Dagwood inspired Saturday Sandwiches became a tradition. We eat much healthier these days, but when we have BLTs I always make them with peanut butter and Dad makes them with peanut butter and mayo. Dad is almost always willing to eat up leftovers so food doesn’t go to waste. Yesterday during his picnic food lunch he crumbled his chips onto his macaroni salad. I’m grateful he is a good eater. Tomorrow is Saturday. I think we will get out the Borgasmord.

March 24, 2021March 24, 2021

An Alphabet Morning

Dad walked out of his bedroom this morning with an old brown leather address book in his hand and began to read it to me from the beginning. Yes, the letter A. With each name I asked him about the person listed. Several were woman that were described as “just a friend”. Which is understandable as Dad was married, divorced, widowed and dated during different times in his life. There was a man that went by the name “stick” because he was tall, and according to Dad, the nickname “stuck to stick”. A man that ran a tractor business, the local realtor, friends made through the radio club, tractor club, and his automobile restoration and antiques hobbies. We chuckled when we read names like “5 Star ED”.

When Dad found the name of a close friend or family member, he read the address and birthdates, most of which have changed. A couple included short directions like “left 6 blocks then right” or “exit then stay for 2 miles”. Local phone numbers were written without the area code. Dad read the name of his sister, her birthdate and said, “in case you need it.” He remembered I had recently looked up her address. “Okay, now be really careful to keep this one”, Dad said, then laughed. It was his next-door neighbor and friend of 40 plus years.

When he made it to the letter L, Dad said, “We can do this til the cows come home. It goes all the way to the back still with numbers.” When he reached the letter N, Dad said, “It would be nice if I talked to some people once in a while.” Dad has outlived the majority of his friends. Knowing this he would occasionally say, “There’s not much use in this number.” Sometimes he would read a number as …3057 or 8. About one long-lost friend, Dad said, “We know where they are because of all the traffic noise.” He remembered a few young friends like Gus and his brother. Gus was the little brother to a childhood friend of Dad’s that followed the bigger boys around. Dad said, “He cried a lot.” There were also quite a few names Dad could not recall. When he got to the letter T, Dad hopped up and went to get his teeth, which I had not yet noticed were missing.

As he continued to read, Dad mentioned “On this page there is an arrow going all the way to the next page.” While there was only one Barney, Bud, Doug, Dale, Gus, Macel, Meleese, Robin and Roger, there were half a dozen Bobs, several Joans, a few Johns, a couple Bettys and Maries, and the copious amount of Eds, Barbaras and Charles that run in our family. In some sections several generations of a family are listed. Dad thought the entry for his father at the family home was instead for himself. The entries traveled across the country through Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, Utah and more. In the middle of the letter V Dad realized his untouched breakfast was cold and we stopped to warm it up.

The last entry in Dad’s book is my younger sister and her family. Like many names in his brown leather book, we lost her a few years ago to a complicated illness. Her birthday is in a few days. After Dad read all their names and birthdates, he asked, “Guess what?” and without waiting for an answer said, “My book is empty from here on – two blank pages. That’s all there is of that.”

This alphabet morning, we found some of Dad’s life in his address book. Time was forgotten and people were remembered.

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February 21, 2021February 21, 2021

Dad tells great stories about his childhood. I heard most of them early in life and know the difference between the stories then and the stories that have evolved with dementia. He grew up on 60 acres of land in upstate New York where the woods and creek were his playground. Swimming in a water hole in the creek and lounging with a book under the apple tree are just a few of the images I can capture in my imagination as he describes them. He built several forts throughout the property. Some near the ground, and some in trees that most likely doubled as deer blinds.

One of my favorite stories is hearing about Dad, his young friends and his brother hanging out in their clubhouse near the millrace. As the story goes, brother caught a minnow in a can, and we decided to keep it in our fort. When we came back the next day, the water in the can was frozen and so was the fish. As the morning air warmed, the icy can melted and the fish started swimming around again. That happened for a few days in row. That fish would freeze overnight, then thaw and swim the next day. Dad has shared this story many times over the years. Even today he has never told me what eventually happened to the fish.

Dad loves to tell me about a time when he watched an interaction between his dog and the farm cat. Trixie chased the cat everywhere all the time. One day the pup went racing toward the cat, only this day the cat held its ground. Trixie put on the brakes so hard she flipped up and over the cat. This memory makes Dad laugh every time he tells the story.

Although our family moved to the southwest, I visited Dad’s childhood home several times. When I was eight-years of age my grandmother and I picked blackberries just outside the back kitchen door. She placed them in a small bowl with a little milk and a sprinkle of sugar. Best of all, Dad hooked up a flat trailer to the tractor and took us to the swimming hole at the creek. The road was narrow and lined with trees with a grassy ridge running along the center. It was referred to as the lane. Dad backed the trailer into the water, and my sister and I jumped off it, and spread out our towels on it while we played. That day I lived one of his stories.

During a visit in the winter when I was 16 years of age, we enjoyed a great family gathering and snowmobiling. A few days later, Dad and I took a quiet walk in the woods. It was a wonderland with sun glistening on the snow clinging to leafless trees. The only footprints were the ones we made together. On this visit I sketched the old barn covered with deep white drifts.

The old barn was torn down some years later, but there are still remnants of old tree forts. The property was sold and the home remodeled. The new owner sent Dad fresh maple syrup from the trees every year for a long time. Dad and I stopped for a visit once and toured the remodel. It was beautiful with an entire wall of windows looking toward the woods. As we were getting ready to leave, we paused for a moment to look at the woods one more time. We noticed a particularly tall old tree that I imagine recorded memories in its rings as Dad grew up and played with his friends and pets and worked the small farm with his family. I learned of aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins visiting the woods too. I am grateful that the tree also journaled the next generation while I played there as a toddler and my daddy, like the tree, watched over me. The old tall tree is now home to a pair of Osprey which seems apropos. Most of Dad’s new stories are for the birds.