I am now 77 years old

I am now 77 years old… this is a strange time of life, but then, I guess every stage of life has its strangeness… anyway…  I lived my first 11 years on a failing dairy farm near Baldwin, Wisconsin…  I have lived most of my life since then in the East Metro suburbs of St. Paul, Minnesota… about 45 miles from where I was born… as a kid, the trip to “the cities” was a huge adventure…  but today, it is just minutes away on the freeway… while the farm was going broke, my dad worked on the I-94 freeway which was cutting through the countryside about a mile from our farm… his job was sharpening pilings with a chain saw… this was a terrible job…  the construction companies would hire local farmers to do these miserable jobs while most of the work crew was tradesmen who lived elsewhere and moved around to follow the work…

the pilings were like telephone poles that were driven into the ground in wet areas as supports for the concrete columns that held up bridges…  the telephone poles were treated with creosote as a preservative for when they were driven into the ground…  the creosote was a black, tar like substance that would cover dad’s hands and face and permeate his clothing when he came home from work…  the farm did not have running water and we only had hot water from heating it on the kitchen stove, so getting cleaned up from all this creosote was pretty much impossible… not to mention that it was summer, so a person got hot and sweaty working on the construction sites…  and then coming home, there was field work to do by the dim single light of an old John Deere tractor… no wonder he often went to the bar after work with the construction workers…

my dad had one sister who was a few years younger than him… she was married to a guy from Thorpe, Wisconsin about an hour east of Baldwin where my grandparents lived at that time…  the sister and her husband lived between Withee and Owen, Wisconsin…  they had one child, a son, who was two years older than my older brother, so four years older than me… he was named “Bill” after his dad… for my brother and I, it was a real thrill to see Bill whenever his parents came to visit us and the grandparents in Baldwin… we thought that Bill and his family were tremendously rich although, in reality, they were simply middle class while we were poor…  we got “hand me down” clothes from Bill… some of which were crazy fancy to us…  I remember that I got a brown suit that somehow bypassed my brother…  I was about ten years old and really had no use for a suit… I don’t think I ever wore the suit outside the old farm house, but I thought it made me look like a billionaire…

so, at some point in maybe 1958, my brother and I got to spend a couple weeks with our aunt and uncle and Bill at their house near Withee… one of our dad’s drinking buddies from the construction site was a guy named Cliff, who lived in Wausau and who offered to drop us off at Bill’s house on his way for a visit at his home…  so, we got in the car with Cliff and off we went to Withee… Cliff proved to be a perfectly decent guy and dropped us off with no problem…  strange to think of in 2025…  sending 10 and 12 year old kids with a stranger, no less, a drinking buddy from the construction site…  but although the usa was in some ways very harsh in those days, it was in some ways less distrustful and worried than today…

anyway, Bill was maybe 14 and so, it was so exciting for us to be away from our crazy home, with all the drinking and fighting… and Bill’s house seemed an island of tranquility, although, it was maybe not so tranquil when we were not there…  but I don’t really know about that…  so, the house seemed a virtual palace compared to the threadbare old farmhouse… it had running water, hot and cold! indoor plumbing, central heat and it was clean and neat with polished furniture, tasteful end tables with lamps and knick-knacks…  there was a curved stairway that my aunt had designed herself and had built going upstairs leading to the bedrooms and the attic… over the front door was a long shelf with a collection of beer steins, ranged by size from tiny cups to the huge two foot stein in the center… the kitchen was modern with a range instead of a woodstove and their were folksy rugs on the polished wood floors…

then Bill took us up to his room which we had never seen before…  Bill’s dad was an auctioneer, and at that time the auction business was booming as the small farms were going bankrupt and being bought by the more successful farmers to make much larger farms… this consolidation was made possible by increasing mechanization…  combines and hay balers, bigger tractors and machinery of all kinds was making it possible for one farmer to vastly increase his productivity and handle lots more acres and milk cows…  our farm had 16 milk cows and today, farms in that area have hundreds of milk cows…  so the industry was really changing and all these big changes were just getting going in 1958… whenever my uncle had an auction, he would look around first and pick out anything that seemed interesting or unusual and buy it for himself…  lots of those old farmhouses had military stuff in the attic that soldiers had brought home from the two world wars and even from the civil war, and my uncle liked collecting guns and old military stuff…  Bill got his pick of this stuff, so, Bill had in his room all kinds of items that we found fascinating…

he had several civil war swords and a civil war pistol… he had muskets and a real German Luger… he had a big red nazi flag with a white circle and a swastika in the middle as well as a German army helmet and a confederate flag… he had a horse pistol which was a pistol that fired a 410 shotgun shell and a complete civil war uniform…  all of this stuff was in Bill’s room… across the hall in the attic, his dad kept the rest of the gun collection with all kinds of old and odd guns…  our dad came home from World War II with a strong dislike for guns and shooting, but our uncle was an avid hunter and fisherman…  so, this whole thing was a new world for us…

our aunt was into “antiquing” furniture, taking newer furniture and treating it to make it look old and beat up… this astonished me because the furniture I was used to did not need any treatment to make it look old and beat up… in sheds behind the house our uncle kept his collection of odd old cars that he had picked up at the auctions including a Model T, a Model A, and several others…  Bill let us climb in these old cars and look them over…  then even though he was too young to actually drive, Bill showed us an old car that his dad let him drive around on their property…  they had even built a dirt track oval in a pasture next to the house where Bill and his friends, who also had old beater cars, would race their cars… and, I think the most amazing thing of all, was when Bill got his 22 rifle out and was shooting out the back door of his house at fence posts across the back yard…  at one point our aunt took us and some friends, loaded into a big fancy station wagon to go swimming in a local creek…  I think it was called Rock Creek… anyway, it was a hot summer evening and the water at the swimming hole was cool and crystal clear…  I was terrified of the water as I could not swim… but, I found the whole scene just fantastic, like something that would be in a movie or on television…  the sound of the stream rippling over the rocks, the dark trees, the kids splashing around…  the moms sitting on the side smoking and talking… the whole scene lit by the headlights of the cars…  it was like a fairy tale in the middle of an enchanted forest…

well, shortly after that time, my grandparents moved from Baldwin to Withee to be near their daughter… but then in 1961, their daughter, Bill’s mom, died in a car accident…  Bill had been a wild child as a teen and so had finished high school at a private military school his parents sent him to to get straightened out… my last real memory of Bill in those days was from 1963 when he got married…  he had joined the Air Force right out of high school so, in the years after his mom died, while we regularly saw our Grandparents in Withee, and our uncle, we did not see Bill…   

I vividly remember Bill’s wedding…  he wore a fancy Air Force uniform and he and his bride walked down the steps of the church with uniformed Air Force guys on either side holding sabers up crossed over the heads of the bride and groom…

so, many years passed…  my dad died in 1984…  after a suitable period of mourning, my mom started dating my dad’s cousin, who was a widower… when dad’s cousin died, after he and my mom had dated for several years, she got into contact with my uncle, Bill’s dad…  Bill’s dad had always been a colorful character… he always had a bright red Ranchero car/truck and I remember him tooling around Withee back in our early days of going there to visit Grandma and Grandpa…  he was kind of a wheeler/dealer who always had business deals going, fishing trips, hunting trips, etc…  he owned a small airplane back in the years after the war and there was a story that he had tried to take my Grandpa for a ride in it but couldn’t get off the ground because my Grandpa was a pretty big guy…  this airplane was a framework covered with fabric… it was apparently very small and could land and take off from the farm fields… by the time I knew Bill, the plane was gone…  our uncle was a nervous guy and a slick talker…  he was always kind to my brother and I and showed us his rock tumbler and how he would make jewelry out of agates he found here and there… he would cut and polish the agates and glue them into clasps for pins, earings, etc… I remember an old person in Withee who knew our uncle all his life, saying that he had been much calmer and more relaxed before he went away to the war…

so, anyway, after our uncle’s wife, my dad’s sister had died, our uncle had remarried and moved to a different town… I remember hearing sometime down through the years that he had gotten divorced… and then, he and my mom started dating… so at some point, maybe around 2000, I had driven with my mom, one of my sisters and my wife to visit my uncle who I had not seen for all these years…

my uncle was living in his parent’s house in Thorpe and it was fun to see him…  he had not really changed at all…  he showed us his gun collection which he still had and which was stored in a locked room in the basement of the house he lived in…  then he offered us some homemade blackberry wine which my wife said was very tasty…  I do not drink alcohol, so did not try it… then, he showed us a small triumph sports car which he said he had found in a barn and had restored…  it was a really cool little car…

anyway, he said that my cousin Bill was just across the street if I wanted to see him…  of course I did… it was so exciting to see my cousin again after all these years…  he actually looked so much like my dad that it was really cool…  he had the same curl in his hair that my dad had except that like his mother, his hair had gone entirely white at a very young age…  his dad mentioned that we had partaken of his homemade blackberry wine and Bill looked at me and said, “would you like a Diet Coke?”  so, yes, we were both middle aged boomers… and I was much more excited about the soda than the homemade wine…

he was still with his wife and we had a great afternoon of conversation about how our lives had gone… only too soon, the day was getting late and we had to leave for home…  I never saw my uncle or my cousin Bill after that…  the uncle died in 2004 and my mom died in 2017…  in the intervening years, I made some half hearted efforts to get in touch with Bill, but never got any reply…  last summer, my wife and I were driving to Wausau, Wisconsin to visit our daughter’s in-laws…  driving out I-94, within a mile of the old farm, and then on Wisconsin 29 past Thorpe and Withee, I got to thinking about the days of my childhood and so, later that day, I made one more attempt to find my cousin Bill… when I did a google search for his name, I immediately found him, but unfortunately, it was his obituary…  he had died of Parkinson’s disease four years ago…  he had been very ill with this disease for many years, which explained why I had never heard back in my attempts to contact him… he had acquired the disease as a result of exposure to agent orange in Vietnam…  this was a hazard of our generation…  I well knew the horrors of Vietnam because my own older brother had been killed in action in Vietnam in 1968…  

so, I missed one final visit with my cousin… Bill was the only cousin on my dad’s side…  on my mom’s side, I had and still have dozens of cousins but on dad’s side, there was only Bill… well, I felt bad that I had not made more of an effort to stay in touch and so I decided that I would send Bill’s widow a small drawing as a memorial to Bill…  so, I made a drawing of some trees in black ink with an orange border…  I then went on line to see if I could find an address for Bill’s wife to send her the drawing…  well, when I typed her name into the google search, her obituary popped up… she had died last spring…  so, I still have the drawing…  

I am still breathing the sweet midwestern air and walking around in this glorious world of trees and sky, houses and people, friends, relatives and strangers…  every day is a blessing and every day is a reminder of the beauty and fragility of life… I have been very lucky and blessed in this life with a happy marriage, beautiful children and grandchildren and love and kindness in abundance… I have lived the life that my brother never got to live and have enjoyed the health that deserted my cousin Bill…  and I have definitely learned that, if you want to reconnect with someone or reach out to your past, you have to do it now because the future is not promised to any of us…