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Today is the centenary of my dad’s birth. Gordon Leslie Register was born on January 16, 1912, and died on November 30, 2004, six weeks short of 93. I could go many directions from here, but ultimately my subject will be the maintenance of family ties.
For too long already I have been doing research for a book about a rather obscure historical event in my home landscape: the drainage of an 18,000-acre wetland between Albert Lea and Austin, Minnesota, by non-resident land speculators. I’ve been curious about my ancestors’ experience of the affected landscape, their attitudes toward the drainage, and its impact on their lives. Of course I also want to trace whether they influenced my orientation to the natural environment and to socioeconomic issues. I know that my dad’s maternal grandfather, E.H. Ostrander, was a vocal opponent of the drainage project. Dad’s paternal grandparents, John and Amanda Register, were more directly affected by it: Turtle Creek, the natural creek that was reamed out and turned into Judicial Ditch Number One to empty all that surface water into the Cedar River, ran through their farm.
Ancestry.com carries incomplete collections of a couple of newspapers from the area: The Freeborn County Standard and the Austin Daily Herald. Earlier I had searched the word “dredge” on the Ancestry site to find mentions of the drainage project, and I have skimmed reels and reels of microfilm of the Standard at the Minnesota Historical Society. Last week I decided to search the name of the township where the Registers farmed in Ancestry’s copies of the Herald. These small town newspapers carried news from each of the rural townships, and since the Registers lived nearer to Austin than to their county seat, Albert Lea, I figured some of their news might get reported there. My keyword search for “Moscow” yielded a good many items, even excluding the reports from the 1905 revolution in that other Moscow.
I learned that my grandfather, “Little Leslie Register,” suffered a sore throat in May of 1898, when he was nine, and that the family lost four head of cattle to a lightning strike in August of 1911. My dad took pride in being the third generation of the family born on the farm that his great-grandparents, Robert and Mary Speer, had settled in 1855. Now I wonder if he was indeed born there. For the birth of her first child, my aunt Vivian, in November 1910, my grandma, I learned, had moved back home with her parents in Alden township to spend her lying-in time. Did she do that for Gordy’s birth, too? As I finished my search through the 1911 Herald last Friday and signed out of the Ancestry site, I thought I would soon know. But the next morning I discovered that Ancestry’s collection stops in 1911 and resumes in 1951. I’ll soon be skimming microfilmed copies at MHS. I imagine the Ostranders would have had a harder time accommodating my grandma the second time around, since her mother was also about to give birth–to her eleventh child, a frail boy who died months later. We’ll soon see.
My most striking find in this collection of township “gossip” was the effort the Registers put into maintaining their family relationships. As John and Amanda’s children married and moved to other townships and counties, the frequent visiting began. The married children came home to visit their parents; the parents and family went to visit the married children. The children still at home in Moscow spent days and weeks with their married siblings. The Minnesota Registers visited Registers in Kansas, North Dakota, and Iowa, and Speers in Iowa and Wisconsin, and received their visits in turn. They probably had a local telephone by 1907, when the lines were strung to Moscow, but long distance came later. We can be smug about our instantaneous online connections–oh, wow, Skype!–but the Moscow Registers could step onto a train at several times of the day and travel in any direction. Judging from the frequency with which they did so, access to family mattered a great deal.
My dad’s experience as the fourth generation to live on a single farm (until his parents lost it in the recession of the 1920s) obscures the fact that his family was more mobile than stationary. Robert and Mary Speer were part of a gradual westward migration typical of European American families. They left his parents in Wisconsin to find land in Minnesota. His parents had left an older generation in Michigan after a migration from upstate New York. The New York Speers had come from New Jersey, where a boatload of Dutch immigrants had arrived in the seventeenth century. Some of our Dutch ancestors were descendants of exiled English Puritans. We have long been on the move. Even so, the impulse to connect with family took my parents and sisters and me back to our grandparents’ homes every Sunday.
All that impressive visiting in the Herald obscures another truth about the family: its internal rifts. Those become apparent only when I stop to notice who is missing from the record. There is no reported visiting to or from Ottertail County, where John’s brother Leroy ended up. George Speer, Amanda’s brother, disappeared from the U.S. Census, and, I thought, from the earth–until he turned up visiting “friends” in Moscow months after his father’s death, apparently when the will was settled. We visited elderly Great Aunt Hattie and her “nervous” brother Bert on a farm near Austin, and we drove Great Aunt Isabelle from Austin to Albert Lea for family occasions. Yet there were other Austin relatives I never got to meet–something to do with the loss of the farm, I guessed. I have cousins from Arizona I am barely beginning to know, because their dad and mine–brothers–were estranged for 27 years. Knowing that family legacy of orneriness, I understand why John and Amanda held on so tightly–or might it have been Amanda’s doing?
I would like to give the last word about family ties and legacies to my daughter, who posted this lovely entry on her Facebook page just before Thanksgiving:
With the holiday just around the corner, I find myself thinking a lot about family, like who I may see next week for dinner, ones who will be out of town, and those who are no longer around. I am so thankful to be part of such a loving family. Today, I recall my grandma’s beautiful, clear blue, caring eyes and how active and involved my grandpa was throughout his entire life. The two of them have passed down so many great traits to their children. My mom found her own way to give back through her church, and more recently, through volunteering her literary skills at a correctional facility. I ♥ family.
In nearly all the classes I teach at the Loft Literary Center, I declare the classroom sacred writing space from 10 minutes before the official start time to 10 minutes after. Besides allowing people to straggle in from rush hour gridlock and the hunt for parking, it affirms the mission that brings us together and guarantees that everyone present will have had some time to write during the week. Each class session also includes a take-home writing assignment.
Some students use the 20 minutes of writing time to catch up with the week’s reading assignment. Loft students lead busy lives, I know. Without the pressure of grades and degrees, only a fraction of the class turns in the writing assignments each week. So I chuckled a bit when I read the evaluations for my recently completed Personal Essay class and learned that one student would have liked more writing exercises, including some to take home.
I do have a collection of writing exercises that I’ve used over the years, and I’m happy to publish some of them here from time to time. Most are intended for writers of memoir and essay. If I have evidence that they’re actually being seen and used, I might create a separate page and post a couple each week. Here, for starters, are five:
Finish this sentence and continue writing: “It all started when . . .”
List or draw everything you remember along your route from home to school. Choose one item and write what it meant to you then and what it means to you now.
Pull a sentence out of a piece you have written and rewrite the sentence five different ways. Choose the version you like best and use it as the opening sentence for new writing.
With the project you are working on in mind, think of something relevant to it that begins with the letter “a” and write about it. Work your way through the alphabet, a letter-a-day.
Junichiro Tanizaki writes in his essay “In Praise of Shadows” that “elegance is frigid” and that tarnished objects are more beautiful than polished ones. This runs against the grain of Western aesthetics. Does manure smell pleasant if it reminds you of childhood? Are rough textures ever soothing? Can a foul mood be enlightening? How might you write against the grain? Where in your own experience have you found the tarnished beautiful?
A core mission of the Loft Literary Center, where I teach, is to foster a writing community. A tangible sign of this mission at work is the independent writing groups that students form after a course is finished. Some last for years; others dissipate due to busy lives, mismatched skills, or issues with group dynamics that arise when there is no teacher to maintain balance.
In recent weeks, two students have come to me with concerns about faltering writing groups. In both cases, the problem was one endemic to groups engaging in mutual critique* of personal non-fiction, such as memoir and personal essay. I fight it weekly in the classroom. It is the tendency of commentary on writing to drift into discussion of the personal experience the writing is meant to convey. Sometimes the writer feels safer talking about difficult experiences, especially, than exposing them on the page. In this case, discussion that ought to be about craft gives way to bad amateur therapy. Sometimes a reader feels compelled to offer condolences rather than critique, especially if the writing seems raw and the writer, fragile. Sometimes readers pass judgment on experiences that trouble them or urge the writer to tone down revelations that upset their image of the writer-as-person.
The solution is to set clear boundaries: Discussion should focus on the effectiveness of the writing about personal experience and not stray into the living of it. Given that memoir can range over a lifetime, it’s important to remember that the narrator on the page is not exactly equivalent to the writer asking for comments or to the person the group has come to know. Yes, members of writing groups can become friends or even adversaries, but when they have a piece of writing in front of them, they are writers and readers first and need to focus on the literary quality of what’s on the page. It is not rude to suggest that a more precise word choice or simpler syntax would improve a piece about the tragic death of a loved one. It is rude to presume that the writer would rather have sympathy or advice about how to handle grief than honest comments on her/his writing.
Here is a set of rules I have developed for use in writing groups:
Set up a rotation schedule that assures fairness and balance and also functions as a deadline.
When you hand out work, include a list of questions or problems you have been contending with and would like your peers to help resolve.
Offer written as well as spoken commentary on your peers’ work.
Set up a schedule to trade off responsibility for facilitation. One person might prepare to make the opening comments on a piece, while another might watch the clock and make sure time is allotted equally. One of them, or another, might call the discussion back into focus if it strays from the work at hand.
If you can’t help but be absent, read the work distributed and send your comments in promptly.
Draw clear boundaries between useful commentary and distracting or discouraging commentary. For example, commentary should support the author’s own intention and not ask for material that simply satisfies the reader’s curiosity or tastes. Commentary should aid the development of craft and not take issue with content or views expressed. Commentary should focus on the work at hand and not divert attention to the commenter’s personal stories, viewpoints, or writing struggles—unless they are truly relevant and helpful.
Take responsibility for keeping the discussion balanced by pausing between comments to allow others to make theirs.
Use discussion time efficiently by nodding or saying “me, too” rather than repeating comments that others have already made.
Remember that even if the work at hand is tragic, disturbing, controversial, or distasteful, you show the greatest respect for one another’s efforts by offering comments that help improve the quality of the writing.
*I refuse to use “workshop” as a verb or “workshopping” as its gerund noun. My choices are either “mutual commentary” or “mutual critique” and “comment” or “offer critique.” “Critique” as a verb is awkward, and “criticize” has a connotation of finding fault. Also, I never offer “feedback” on written work. I don’t believe any work-in-progress deserves that awful screechy noise produced by malfunctioning microphones.
Education in the humanities is under siege again . . . or still. In a period of joblessness, training people in the barely lucrative fields of art, music, literature, language, social and cultural history may seem like an indulgence, as Florida’s governor Rick Scott recently proclaimed and as Mitt Romney apparently believes, having said he might eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It wasn’t always so. During the Cold War, the U.S. government promoted humanities education and cultural exchanges to help secure Western democracy against incursions of Soviet-style communism. My graduate education in Scandinavian languages and literatures at the University of Chicago was financed by a National Defense Foreign Language Fellowship, instituted by Congress to foster the study of “critical” languages and cultures. I never faced off with a Soviet agent, but I did become fluent in Swedish and pretty well-versed in Scandinavian literature, culture, and history. I published a couple of books on Swedish women writers and taught for seven years in a one-year renewable (non-tenure track) position, but beyond that found little practical–i.e. remunerative–use for my degrees. Nevertheless, I will never regret learning to see a “language area” whole–to see how a certain population’s artistic and spiritual expression relate to its material situation, its history, its landscape, and how all these factors shape the language with which it perceives and describes everything. My education in Scandinavian studies has given me a template for understanding other cultures, other places, other times.
I believe that our current political polarization and the uncivil behavior it breeds betray an inability to think contextually. The humanities teach us to see relationships among, for example, material circumstances and values and behavior. We come to understand why other people are not always like us and to regard them on their own terms, instead of judging them against ours. Rather than dismiss them as alien or “real differ’nt,” as we might say in Minnesota, we come to appreciate their art and music and literature as a turning of the kaleidoscope, a shifting of vision that helps us see splendor we would otherwise miss.
My formal education in the humanities–designated as such–began in my junior year of high school in Albert Lea, Minnesota. A two-year interdisciplinary program, Hum I and Hum II, offered a new vision of our national heritage and taught us to apply that broader vision to the rest of the world. Wallace Kennedy taught us American literature, drama, and art. Nicholas Cords taught us U.S. history and American music. In our senior year Orville Gilmore introduced us to “Western civilization”–literature, philosophy, art, and architecture beginning with Ancient Greece. An unusual number of us Hum graduates ended up working in the arts and humanities, and the program itself became a model for humanities in secondary education across the country. Yes, Albert Lea, Minnesota, a blue-collar town in the Midwestern cornbelt, was a humanities hotbed.
While I was composing this blog, sad news arrived of the death the day before Thanksgiving of one of my favorite high school classmates, Bill Yost, whose life itself is an argument for humanities education. Bill, like me, had a dad employed at Wilson’s meatpacking plant. His mom, like mine, worked to supplement the family income, despite the reigning “feminine mystique.” Mine was a salesclerk; his operated a beauty salon in the family home. Our ancestors had farmed in the same township and fared poorly in the Depression. We knew each other from the First Lutheran church nursery on, but didn’t talk all that much, being of different genders. It was only in our middle age that Bill and I turned our pleasant co-existence into friendship, when we discovered how appreciative we both were of our working-class upbringings and our public education.
Bill didn’t take the humanities class. I’m not sure why, but seem to remember him telling me that he didn’t know he was capable of it. But he did enroll in a summer school English class taught by Wally Kennedy. That class transformed his life; I’m certain he told me that. It awakened and validated his artistic creativity and geared him up for a lifelong vocation in the humanities. For thirty years, Bill Yost served as the Cultural Arts Director of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He brought plays and concerts and dance performances to the Eisenhower Hall Theater, set up art exhibits, and taught elective classes in the humanities and fine arts to our nation’s budding military officers. I like to think that Bill enlarged the context in which they view both allies and the people identified in wartime as the enemy.
As an arts administrator in a nationally visible post, working in proximity to New York City, Bill had access to high-art circles, but kept his humility. Among wealthy people with privileged private school educations, he reminded himself that he went to “the Albert Lea School on the park in midtown.” When Wegener’s disease caused neuropathy in his legs, he walked with a cane or two from an assortment he bought at yard sales and painted in “a decorative and sometimes alarming fashion.” He used his canes on visits to the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, then joked that he had shown his work there.
Even as illness sapped his strength and “the Reaper nipped at [his] heels,” Bill kept living his vocation. He painted every day, and sculpted as well. His mixed media Doppelgänger portraits are my favorites, especially “Verna Under the Dryer” and “Saturday Night Special,” which hark back to his mom’s work. Three weeks before his death, Bill opened a solo exhibit of his art called “Face to Face: Assemblages” in the campus gallery at SUNY Orange/ Newburgh. It is scheduled to remain up through December 16.
In addition to his daily commitment to painting, Bill read one new poem a day, a habit he picked up from comedian Red Skelton. There was a story behind that, one that he would rather tell me in person, he said–a story I will now have to do without. His excitement about poetry was palpable, even via email. He wrote me to share the joy the day that Philip Levine, “one of ours,” was named Poet Laureate, and he was moved by a reading he arranged earlier this year for W.S. Merwin in an intimate conference room at the Storm King Art Center, where he volunteered as a docent and walked almost daily. Another source of excitement was his volunteer advisory work on the restoration of the Ritz Theater in Newburgh, NY.
Aside from his own artistic production, his knowledge of the humanities, his acquaintance with many accomplished artists, his commitment to making the arts accessible in his local community, his enthusiasm for his students’ creative endeavors, the most important quality that his humanities education instilled in Bill Yost is good will. I never knew him to disparage anyone or turn his quick and quirky wit into sarcasm. He saw people and their creative expression in a broad context, on their own terms, and sought to understand them. That, in the end, is what matters most about a humanities education.
(Read the New York Times obituary. A celebration of Bill’s life will be held on Saturday, December 10, at 1:00 p.m. at the Class of 1929 Art Gallery in the Eisenhower Hall Theatre at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.)
In his introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay, the text for my fall Loft course, Phillip Lopate quotes the early eighteenth century British essayist Joseph Addison: “I live in the World rather as a Spectator of Mankind than as one of the species.” In fact, Addison and his co-editor, Richard Steele, chose to name one of their periodicals The Spectator. The other was The Tatler. I am guessing that many writers, both those inclined toward essay and those who create fiction out of their observations of “real” life, could comfortably clothe themselves in Addison’s self-definition. The term “Tatler” fits us, too, because we make tall or true tales of what we observe.
We are the people who drift around in social gatherings, tuning in to conversations in progress but seldom initiating our own. Eavesdropping on others’ conversations yields a wider comprehension of human life than we can attain through our own narrow lines of inquiry. Mine is limited by my knowledge, my imagination, and my Scandinavian American sense of propriety. As an oral historian, too, I look forward to the moment when the interviewee launches into a story that opens the memory wide and loosens the tongue, and I can set aside my prepared questions and relish the unexpected.
We spectators tend to get pegged as either shy or aloof. People who perceive us as shy and want to invite us into conversation begin with the kind but dreaded question, “What are you writing now?” We dread it because material not yet fully articulated in writing is even harder to express in speech–especially with pleasant spontaneity. We may have an answer at the ready that sounds so pat it discourages further conversation. If we fumble to describe our work in the moment, we entangle ourselves in a monologue of arcane information and half-baked ideas that drives the listener off to fetch another drink. We could, of course, forestall the question by asking one ourselves, but hmmm, which question? The proper, expected how are you? A quirky, revealing one? The one we are truly curious to have answered? No, we’d rather watch and listen. A cloak of invisibility would be nice.
Our writing vocation requires us to spend most of our working hours in solitude. We string words together, rearrange them, delete some and replace them with others. We become, at times, too mired in language to speak it fluently, or too rapt in fertile silence to break it easily. This habit of solitude has led me to identify with other solitary creatures. My totem, if I had one, would be the white egret standing alone at the edge of a wetland, all senses alert to fish. The sight of an egret turns a bland day euphoric. One gorgeous day this past August, I left the usual freeway route and took a road that crosses a floodplain of the Minnesota River. Standing in a wetland alongside were scores of white egrets, each at its own post, focused on its own fishing task. The scene reminded me of Ragdale, a writers’ and artists’ retreat in Lake Forest, Illinois, where residents wander the adjacent prairie alone, sit in the garden alone and daydream, or pass each other with a quick meeting of the eyes, mouths resolutely shut. At dinner at the end of the day, we are happy and ready for conversation. Awkward conversation, sometimes, but no matter. We know most of us would rather spectate, then go back to our desks and tattle.
The weather forecasters say it will hit 85 on this golden-hued October day in Minneapolis, yet I see the evidence of a long winter ahead. I have only to look out my bathroom window. The eave trough along my porch roof is lined with walnuts. The planter box on the deck, with impatiens still in bloom, is heaped with walnuts. Do the squirrels know what’s coming, or are they as deluded as we humans are in the face of global warming?
The transporter of all these walnuts is him/herself a sign of change–Darwinian adaptation, maybe? It is smaller than our typical gray squirrels, and its tail is less bushy. Its fur is tinged with red, but it’s not a true red squirrel either. Might it be a hybrid? Do gray squirrels and red squirrels crossbreed? In my 27 years in this neighborhood, I’ve noted generation after generation of albino squirrels–usually just one in the population at a time. Maybe this busy little squirrel is just another creature of recessive genes. I’m struck, too, by how much faster it moves than the “normal” squirrels along the dwindling squirrel highways in my block’s interior–dwindling due to Dutch elm disease, oak wilt, and, soon, the ash borer. For now, the tall, fully-leaved ash in my backyard is a bright yellow-green.
Up the street, another house is being torn down–another former lake cottage. Back in the early twentieth century, when this neighborhood between lakes was still fields and wetlands, city residents built cottages here for weekend and summer use. One pair of cottages is now on the National Register of Historic Places, but the rest are being bulldozed or enclosed inside larger floor-plans. It’s eerie to see the house where Myra lived until recently roofless and gutted, its walls looking as fragile as cardboard. Soon we neighbors will adjust to the commotion we endured last winter on the lot next door to Myra’s: trucks roaring by, workers with visible breath hurrying inside the Tyvek-wrapped skeleton of the new structure, construction debris mounting up in dumpsters. I will never quite get used to this change: cottages gone or grown huge, distinctive bungalows disappearing inside featureless foursquares. What will become of my thoroughly lived-in Dutch colonial when I’m gone?
Meanwhile, change is hitting the old lumber baron district along St. Paul’s Summit Avenue, too. Yesterday, as I drove the scenic route home from the Minnesota History Center to avoid rush hour on the freeways, I noticed one “for sale” sign after another, and the thickest stretch ran atop Cathedral Hill, where the oldest and largest mansions sit. I had assumed, wrongly, I guess, that the people who live in those houses count in the one per cent that is still accumulating wealth in the recession. Yet maybe these high livers are merely overextended—stuck with underwater mortgages and heavy credit card debt. Is our economy falling to the level at which stately old mansions get subdivided once again into substandard housing? But then how are we to understand the replacement or encasement of cozy-sized cottages? Is there any connection to be drawn with the fervid stockpiling of walnuts?
P.S. When I let my dog out into the backyard this morning (October 11), I noticed that all the walnuts had been removed from the planter box. I hadn’t seen it happen, so I can’t say whether the squirrel transported them to a safer location or some other creature stole them. Now I’d like whoever it was to come back and clear out the eave trough.
I have neglected this space for nearly a month due to a road trip with friends, a much awaited visit from my daughter and son-in-law, and the gearing up of a new teaching semester. It’s the road trip that inspires this post, namely because it renewed my appreciation of people who see to the preservation and interpretation of local history.
First, kudos to Linda Evenson, the librarian-archivist at the Freeborn County Historical Museum in Albert Lea. Just prior to the road trip, I drove down to Albert Lea for the day intent on retrieving some obituaries from the file I knew that FCHM kept. I figured obituaries might yield a little better sense of the “characters” in my current research. I came home with more than I had anticipated. Linda has made worthy use of volunteers’ time to compile name indexes of old newspapers, plat books, and other records. In a previous post, I wrote about Fred McCall, a postmaster and drainage opponent who cast his opinions in poetry. Looking up his name in the indexes showed me the location of his farm, led me to newspaper accounts of his and his wife’s birthday and anniversary parties, and brought me a poem he wrote, in his 80s, on the occasion of his wife’s death. The man behind the name is coming clear. The finding aids Linda Evenson has prepared are supplemented by her intimate knowledge of the archives she oversees, some of which still awaits cataloging.
As my friends and I drove down the Mississippi toward our lodgings in Decorah, Iowa, we thumbed through a stack of backroads travel books and kept alert to brown historic site signs. We would not let the pressure of “getting there” dissuade us from seeing what lay along our route. Our favorite surprise required a two-plus-mile drive along a loosely graveled road lined with orange cones and construction machinery. The road took us through a lovely valley between river bluffs. Finally, a bit after the odometer signaled that we should be there, a bend in the road brought us in sight of the Pickwick Mill, a restored grist mill first opened in 1858. We pulled up just as an elderly man climbed into a pickup, the only other vehicle on the property. He had just locked the place up and was heading home. Our questions must have piqued his pride, because he quickly offered to let us in. We had a choice between watching a 20-minute movie or paying $3 a person for a guided tour of the first floor. We chose whatever he planned to tell us. He apologized for not being able to show us any working machinery, because the power was turned on only for tour groups with advance reservations.
I would call his presentation style laconic enthusiasm. His voice was quiet and unmodulated; he rarely cracked a smile, but his knowledge of every item on display was extensive and illustrated his passion for the mill and its history. He told us, for example, that he kept busy between visitors cleaning out nooks and crannies and sorting the material found there. Among the recent finds was a paybook showing the names and pay of the first 6-man (or was that 5?) team employed at the mill in the late 1850s. He didn’t seem at all displeased that we took time to read and discuss the names and speculate about their working conditions. He asked us if we would like to step out onto a balcony on the river side where we could get a view of the millwheel. As we did, expecting a quick glimpse, the wheel began to rumble and turn. He had surprised us by switching it on–a great favor that enhanced our fascination with the site.
He explained to us that the mill had been in danger of demolition back in the 1980s, until local citizens banded together to save it and organized as a non-profit to secure funding and guarantee its future. He had farmed in the area and was one of several volunteer tour guides. We were welcome to explore other floors (there are 7 in all, two of them underground) on our own, and my friends did. I am not fond of steep, open-slatted stairways, so I went outside to look closer at the river and millpond and to admire neighboring Lake LaBelle.
Near the door I spotted another reason to be appreciative: a sign announcing that the mill restoration had benefited from a Minnesota Legacy Grant. In the election of 2008, Minnesota voters approved an amendment that would increase the state sales tax by three eighths of one percent through the year 2034, with receipts dedicated to water and wildlife conservation, parks and trails, and arts and culture, including local history. At a time when some politicians are signing no-tax pledges, we citizens agreed to tax ourselves to care for treasured aspects of our state’s heritage. The legislature has created a Legacy Amendment website where Minnesotans can keep track of how the funds are spent. Thank you, Minnesota voters, for the privilege of visiting the Pickwick Mill and for all the other benefits the funds provide.
I first learned the word “aleatory” in reference to music. The first FM radio station of my life, WFMT in Chicago, would occasionally introduce a piece as “aleatory music,” sounds arranged randomly or by some pattern other than the usual rules of harmonics. My college dorm social circle included a composer of aleatory music, although I never heard her claim the term “aleatory,” nor the title “composer.” Carol Gutstein, who played piano by ear and instinct, asked people to call out their phone numbers or student ID numbers, then played them on the corresponding piano keys and turned them into a composition in whatever style you chose. She had already worked out pieces based on Avogadro’s number and pi. Yes, this was at the University of Chicago, nerd heaven. I loved it.
Since those days, the 1960s, I’ve applied the word “aleatory” to much of my life, especially the aspects subject to chronic illness, which upsets rules and expectations and sets its own seemingly random course. This summer, largely because of illness—and the oppressive heat and humidity of July, a hint of global warming—I’ve found “aleatory” a redemptive word to describe my untended flower garden, my scraggly bushes, and my wild and overgrown back yard. It helps me set aside frustration and see their unkempt beauty.
My daughter snapped this photo on her way out of the house and sent it to me as a thank you for dinner. (No, she doesn’t own the Prius; that’s the neighbors’.) I’m glad to be growing something of service to butterflies–and to honeybees. I planted a bed of purple coneflowers (echinacea) in the northeast corner of my garden many years ago, alongside equal-sized beds of white coneflowers and yellow coneflowers (aka rudbeckia or black-eyed susans). By the next year the purple coneflowers were marching across the garden, and I was assiduously pulling them up, while the white ones cowered back and, after a year or two or three, disappeared altogether. The rudbeckia kept to its allotted space and just grew thicker there, until it, too, ran out of energy and chose stasis. This year’s neglect, along with July’s unusual heat, has done wonders for these lovely prairie flowers. The echinacea has arranged itself, star-like, at all four corners of the garden, with a patch in the center. The rudbeckia is flourishing as never before, stretched across the front of the garden. All over my neighborhood I see thick, healthy plots of rudbeckia where I don’t remember it before. Both are more vibrantly colored than in the last few years, when the purples were closer to pink. According to one global warming observation, the prairie is moving both eastward and north, turning Minnesota eventually into Kansas. My beautiful, butterfly-pleasing coneflowers may be the advance guard.
My larger intention was to make this a daylily garden, so I bought bulbs of many varieties during the thinning season at Noerenberg Gardens. I arranged them with close attention to color, expected height, and predicted blooming date, and wrote their common and scientific names on a map I had drawn. Their first year in bloom, the colors were disappointing. Whether red or violet or peach, they all seemed to be shades of the same hue. Other years, including this one, the colors are distinct and brilliant. I have long since misplaced the map. As much as I appreciate the Swedish sense of order, which found its apotheosis in Carl Linnaeus, I have to admit I really don’t bother much about botanical names–or even the standard common ones. I call my lilies the big buttery ones and the peach ones and the scarlet ones and the tall orange invaders and those sneaky white dotted ones that Gerri Perreault gave me bulbs for. Each year they battle each other for space, and usually the tall orange guys claim the larger turf. In fact, the single lily in bloom today–the last of the summer–is one of those. They did not come from Noerenberg Gardens, but strode in from their intended home on my boulevard, where they are crowding even the blazing star and the little bluestem.
A new flower turned up in my garden last year and has returned this year. I have no idea what it might be, but it has small magenta blossoms that give way to crinkly paper pods like the covering on ground cherries or gooseberries. It’s pretty when it blooms, so I don’t trouble it until it really looks like a weed. I don’t mind most volunteers, and some I welcome. Every spring I note down the first appearance of dandelions in my daybook. And every spring, following a different instinct, my daughter, eager for exercise, digs them out by the roots. This year my lawn is overgrown with plantain, which is generally considered a weed. It grows wildly and natively around here, and it has a long history of medicinal use. Why should it yield to turf grass? And who wants a monoseeded yard with no surprises?
When I walk my dog around the neighborhood, we pass a house that gives me the creeps. It is immaculately maintained, and its front yard plantings are perfectly symmetrical. The bushes alongside the entry sidewalk are like globes, cut to a uniform diameter, with no stray branches poking out of bounds. I look at that yard and think, How would a girl like me with a double cowlick have survived here? It could be the setting for a horror movie.
Order and control in the garden are generally meant to achieve an aesthetic end. I must admit I admire my neighbors’ well-tended gardens, as long as I can find some little aleatory gesture. But horticulture is not merely an aesthetic pursuit. Jamaica Kincaid has written an essay called “Alien Soil,” in which she discusses the effect of English colonialism on the flora of her birthplace, the island of Antigua in the Caribbean. She reveals that the breadfruit, “the most Antiguan (to me) and starchy food, the bane of every Antiguan child’s palate,” was brought to the Caribbean from the East Indies as “a cheap food for feeding slaves. It was the Cargo that Captain Bligh was carrying to the West Indies on the ship Bounty when his crew so rightly mutinied.” This past Sunday I heard historian Carrie Zeman talk about her research into the role of hunger as a cause often cited by the Dakota for the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, a tragic turning point in Minnesota history. She found that the U.S. government’s efforts to turn the Dakota into farmers (to keep them from leaving their reservations to hunt in European-settled territory) stressed the efficiency of deep furrow farming, of planting crops, particularly corn and potatoes, in uniform rows. The Dakota practice had been to mix seeds in hills, to plant corn, beans, and squash together. Their traditional ways gave them a full meal: corn for carbohydrate energy, beans for protein, squash for Vitamin A. (Abundant berries furnished their Vitamin C.) The new row planting brought them malnutrition and the diseases associated with vitamin A deficiency, especially scrofula.
My writing tends to be more orderly and controlled than my gardening, but today, I’ve followed the aleatory impulse, and I’ve come to an end that I didn’t foresee. My blogging may resemble my gardening from here on out. And I’ve barely mentioned my impenetrable back yard. That would be the setting for someone else’s horror movie.
Here is a recent video of interviews with two people whose lives were touched by the 1959 strike at the Wilson meatpacking plant in Albert Lea, MN: Robert Pleiss, a management employee, who was required by terms of his job to work throughout the strike, and Robert Anderson, a laborer and member of the United Packinghouse Workers of America, who went out on strike. I didn’t interview either of these men for my memoir, but after the book was published I received a nice letter, one of my favorites, from Bob Anderson, who was the last ’59 striker still employed at Farmland Foods, a later owner, when the plant burned in the summer of 2001. The plant burned just after the paperback edition of Ph.D. went to press, so I was unable to insert that news. It has since been torn down, so my description of the plant from several vantage points in town is no longer valid. If you’ve imagined how it looms, you’ll be surprised to see the large, empty lot where it used to be. The site is now called, with stunning optimism, “Blazing Star Landing.”
1959 Wilson Strike
You will note that both men’s accounts of their worklives and their roles in the strike show an ambivalence that underscores how complex an event this was. This ambivalence is typical of the people I interviewed as well. The strikers valued jobs that were grueling and unpleasant, because the work was skilled and steady and paid relatively well. The management enjoyed relationships with the union members as neighbors, fellow parishioners, even as family. Demands for company loyalty strained these relationships and broke some, but by no means all. “Fairness” was a community value, and I found little love for Wilson & Co.’s top management in Chicago among the local management employees I talked to.
I have two quibbles with the visuals chosen to illustrate the men’s recollections. When Pleiss refers to the “riot” at the plant gate, the photos shown on two occasions are of the solidarity march held more than six weeks later. The march, on January 30, 1960, was a peaceful event that drew union members from as far as South St. Paul and Cedar Rapids. The violence outside the plant, on December 10 and 11, 1959, after “permanent replacements” had been brought in, was a local affair. Second, when Pleiss refers to “the railroad bridge” where spectators had gathered, the video flashes on an iron-canopied trestle alongside a lake. The “bridge” was likely the viaduct over railroad tracks on East Main Street, which carried both U.S. Highways 65 and 16 through town. That trafficked thoroughfare was where the crowds gathered to watch what was happening below.
Thank you to photographer Brie Cohen of the Albert Lea Tribune for shooting and editing the video, and to my classmate Neil “Gunnar” Berg for calling it to my attention. If you had difficulty viewing the video, try it on Berg’s website.
