Who Am I? Fall, 2022.

You are each the hero of your own story

Joseph Campbell

Here I am, in my fish earrings and being all mattery.

I’ve been asking my classes this question for years now. This year I finally have an answer.

Who am I? I am a story: Rather, I am a series of stories. Imagine, if you will, that we are standing together on the front porch of my little house. All the things that make up my life are in my house, but I am more than those things. There’s a story here, a story that begins, “Once upon a time, a woman and her son moved to Milton Freewater. It wasn’t where they wanted to go, but there weren’t a lot of choices. They had to move because the story they had been living in Gresham had become unhealthy and dangerous to their bodies and souls….”

We look to the left, and there is a little brick house, with a younger woman and a younger boy standing out back in front of a door leading into a daylight basement. Water pours out of the door, soaking the woman and boy’s feet and legs. There’s a story in that house, too.

Beyond that stand the burned ruins of a townhouse just outside of Medford, Oregon. A young woman and a baby lived there before the fire.

We walk down the front steps and look down a whole row of houses disappearing into the distance. As we look, we realize that the house next door isn’t the only one with water around it—a river weaves between and around some houses. Some stand in the desert, where there is NO water.

The woman and the boy don’t live alone for much of the time. Other people move into their stories, and tell stories of their own which shape the woman and boy’s stories. Sometimes the stories are happy; sometimes sad.

Understanding who my son and I are now means understanding who we have been in the past. It means knowing the stories in which we lived.

Understanding who my son and I are now means understanding who we have been in the past. It means knowing the stories in which we lived.

Me in the fish earrings, 2022

So who am I? I am the sum of all of my stories. I am also the foundation upon which every story in my future will rest. I build from here, and from now.

But what does this mean in practical terms? What does this tell you about me? Here are a few ways that seeing my life as a story will shape our time together:

I believe things should make sense. If they don’t make sense, I need more information.

I believe life has a beginning, a middle, and an end—but the beginning rests on the foundation of others’ stories. My story, in turn, will serve as part of the foundation of stories yet to come. 

Your story is exactly the same. What does that mean? It means that each of us matter. A lot. I matter to you. You matter to me. That just leaves one question: How will we matter to each other? Because we are here in this room together, our lives have become linked. What will that mean to each of us?

I believe that while we cannot control all of the events that find their way into our lives, we can choose how we use those events in shaping our stories. Joseph Campbell has it partly right: We are indeed the heroes of our own stories—but we can be far more than that. We can be our own storytellers, too—and in choosing how we tell our stories, we choose how we will see our lives. 

Have you ever felt like you were waiting for life to begin? Have you ever experienced something so painful that you thought your life was over? I have.

Again me

We can choose when we see our beginnings. And we can choose when we see our endings. Have you ever felt like you were waiting for life to begin? Have you ever experienced something so painful that you thought your life was over? I have. And yet here I am. And the reason? I’m a part of my son’s story. I’m a part of my community story. And now I’m a part of your story. More important, I’m still exploring my own stories. I’m telling my stories, and in telling them, I’m learning who I am.

And that brings me to the last point I’ll make here—The part of me that sees life as a story has offered me a way of surviving another part of myself. I live with clinical depression and anxiety. Those are part of my story. Learning to understand how those factors became a part of my story, and learning to understand what parts of my story help me to claw my way through those dark times, has been a huge part of understanding not just my story, but my parents’ story, my grandparents’ stories, and even my great-grandparents’ stories. 

 I won’t go into great detail here because I am quite literally writing a series of memoirs and a screenplay on the subject (I told you I was all about the stories), but understanding that part of my story means that I have a set of tools to offer others who grapple with those particular challenges. I’m not any kind of mental health professional. But I am the granddaughter of an amazing man who also grappled with depression and anxiety—and who also saw his life as a story. You’ll hear a lot about my Grandpa. Here’s the first thing you should know. 

 My grandpa was the person who taught me how very important one person can be in another’s life. He taught me that I mattered, that I was an important part of his story. He taught me that when depression and anxiety strike it’s important for all of us to understand that while we might not be able to “fix” those things (if we should even try—and more about that later, too) but we can sit beside each other in the darkness. We can offer a hand in the dark. We can offer our ears. We can offer simple care. We can understand that loving each other means that sometimes we go to dark places together, just so our friends and loved ones, who must travel those dark paths, don’t have to travel alone.

We can understand that loving each other means that sometimes we go to dark places together, just so our friends and loved ones, who must travel those dark paths, don’t have to travel alone.

and me once more

 And the payoff? The last lesson for today? No matter how very final those shadows may feel, they do not have to be the end of the story. If we can hold on, the sun will rise again. The clouds will part. The failed exam will become part of our story rather than our agonizing present. The lost love will become part of our history or herstory—and we will learn to love ourselves and others better for the experience. We will remember that we matter. And that others matter to us.

A Mighty Fortress

Today I listened to my son perform with the university symphony orchestra. It was church, so I had a lot of downtime while I wasn’t listening to the various appeals and sermons (there’s a long story here; suffice it to say that I have decades of practice at this. In fact, the only reason I am ever to be found in range of a Divine Service is when my son is performing. I go for him, because I love hearing him play.) So there I was, lying in bed, nursing a sore neck, back, hip, and leg, eyes closed, listening to incredible music. And it was incredible. It was SO incredible that I did something I never, ever, do—I texted my son while he was onstage.

To be fair, he had texted me first, informing me he had seen my semi-illicit groceryorder, sent to Safeway during the “Welcome.” I hadn’t really planned to be a scofflaw, but I had looked into the bread cupboard and seen that we were down to a single loaf, and then looked in the refrigerator and had seen only the one gallon of milk, and told myself, I must immediately order Artisan French Bread, and potato chips, chocolate milk, and chocolate croissants, and some soda, and…but you get my drift.

What I forgot was that Safeway, who understands that I have been semi-banned from ordering groceries unsupervised (see above—I forgot to include milk and sandwich bread in my eventual order), kindly sent a note to both my son and to me, conveying the joyous news that our order had been processed and was on the way. My son alerted me to this from the stage at church, between the prelude and the offertory, where he, of course, played beautifully.

“I just can’t leave you unsupervised at all, can I?

I bristled a bit at this, but upon reflection realized there was some justice to it. Not much, though, and not enough for me to apologize for ordering four different kinds of chips (hey, three were on sale for less than half price a bag, and I don’t even care much for those weird flavors, so they were really for him). Also, I noted that he had found time (presumably during prayers, or long rests in pieces) to edit my list. The deli turkey had disappeared.
So that’s how it came about that we were doing something we never, ever do—communicating from stage to bed during performances. It turned out Special Music was an amazing song that made me think of sunlit forests, meadows, prairies, and possibly abandoned ranches and maybe covered wagons.
“What’s the name of this song?” I texted him. “This would be perfect for part of my show—maybe the part about the woods camp, and Desolation Creek.”

He texted me the name, which now escapes me, along with the name of the organist, a Man of a Certain Age who I went to college with, and whose name I can never remember. And then we fell silent, because he was, after all, onstage, and performing, even if he was hidden behind the organ, an edifice the size of a mid-size Winnebago, not including the massive wall of pipes.

I went back to doom scrolling while I waited for the sermon to be over. And then it was. The church fell into that peculiar silence unique to an orchestra lifting its instruments. And then, into the silence, mallet strokes—a metal mallet, hammering spikes into a wooden door.

I jolted nearly upright until my neck protested.

“THEY’RE PLAYING OUR FAMILY SONG!” I scream-texted to my son, who could not reply because he was, at that very moment, engaged in playing a song that has been linked to our family for more than 500 years.

The song? “A Might Fortress.” The link? This is going to take a minute.

See, I am descended from one of the ruling families in Thuringia. The family seat was the Wartburg, which my family held on behalf of Frederick the Wise. In the earliest days Thuringia was quite independent, and the Wartburg was known as a center of music and culture. One early lord of the Wartburg surrounded himself with bards, poets, and minstrels, and hosted an annual “battle of the bands” each year. An ancestress who “married in” was so socially conscious she alienated her Thuringian in-laws by caring excessively for and about the poor and sick.

Eventually she was canonized—St. Elizabeth of Thuringia. In short, the Wartburg was an important place both culturally and spiritually—it tended to give rise to people who, if they might not start major movements on their own, certainly supported people who started movements. These were people who enjoyed a good song—and a good think.

Certainly that long-ago Herrmann’s love of music, literature, and culture has carried down, as has St. Elizabeth’s commitment to a spirituality rooted in lifting up the poor, sick, and weak—in doing good not to earn heaven, but because her adopted people were poor, hungry, and sick, and needed help.

So the years passed—about 500 of them, and it was the Reformation, and Martin Luther had just nailed the 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenburg. Those were the mallet blows I had just listened to in my son’s performance.

The Diet of Worms followed—Martin Luther was ordered to meet with church authorities in Worms, and explain himself. Given the state of play in religious and secular matters at the time, it was important that Martin Luther went to Worms enjoying a Safe Conduct both to and from the Diet. Luther and his fellow rebel clerics marched into Worms singing a little thing that Luther had just written: “A might fortress is our God….a bulwark never failing…” The Safe Conduct had been authorized by Frederick the Wise. Old Fred was a devout Catholic—but he was also committed to the idea that everybody deserves a fair hearing, and that even more than that, a man should keep his word.

When he learned that his boss, the emperor, had no plans to honor the safe conduct when Luther left Worms, Fred swung into action. As Luther and his fellow clerics traveled back toward Wittenberg, a group of masked horsemen swept down on the travelers, seized Luther, and sped off. Together with our ancestor, who held the Wartburg, Frederick had arranged for Martin Luther to be “kidnapped” and spirited away to the Wartburg, where he hid out for nearly a year.

Think of it, Luther had written about God as his fortress—and at the time he needed it most, my family offered him refuge in a real fortress which was not just a place of safety for him, but a place full of music, culture, and critical thought. It was a place where Europe’s most skilled musicians and writers gathered. It was a place where people in power found it possible to sometimes realize that wealth and power meant responsibility. It was a place where a princess—Elizabeth of Thuringia—had believed that so deeply that she not only fed the poor thousands of loaves from the castle kitchens in time of famine, but built hospitals to care for the sick, put on her apron and cared for the sickest patients herself, and even gave away clothing and ornaments from the castle to help support the poor. It was no accident Luther found himself at the Wartburg. It was a place where thought and ideas—even non-main-stream ideas, were not just accepted but celebrated and nurtured.

While Luther was at the Wartburg he finished translating the New Testament into not just one of the many German dialects that were—and are—spoken in Germany today, but into a kind of “Hoch Deutsch,” a super-dialect—a true German Language, that could be read and understood across the German-speaking world. And he did it at the Wartburg, where poets, writers, singers, and philosophers could make full use of the new, super-German language to spread culture and ideas farther than ever before.

Luther went on to use his new universal German language to spread his philosophy, and his new, more accessible, translation of the New Testament—and he used another new invention, the printing press, to do it. And he used methods that graphic designers—us graphic designers—still use today. He considered his font choices carefully, He hired artists and illustrators to make his pieces beautiful. He designed them as not just pages of text, but as true “designs”—beautiful pieces that people would want to hang up on their walls. It was sheer genius, and my family. Martin Luther and I could sit down and have a conversation about design today, if I brushed up on my German.

My family ended up embracing Luther’s ideas, becoming some of the first Lutherans. They lost the Wartburg and ended up moving to “White Russia,” an ethnically German part of Poland that experienced constant conflict. While they were there, though, they continued bucking trends. They made strong friendships with local Polish families, one of whom traveled to America, and became my great-grandparents’ sponsors when they eventually emigrated. They opened a pub. And eventually, when my great grandmother fell in love with my great grandfather, her parents looked beyond his common birth to his big brain, and gave their blessing to the marriage not because he was well-born or rich (he wasn’t) but because he was smart.

Like St. Elizabeth, my Grandma Emma cared deeply for those in her care. My mother speaks often about how she loved children and welcomed not only her own grandchildren into her home with hugs and gingersnaps, but the children of family and friends who emigrated from the Old Country throughout the first half of the century. That tradition of love and care passed to my Grandpa, who passed it on to his grandchildren. I remember sitting with him in the garden as he tended young plants, watching his thick, trembling fingers carefully tease Morning Glory roots out of root balls, and then then carefully pour in a little fertilizer water and then knuckle dirt gently over the tender roots. He treated us grandchildren with the same care, offering us stories, refuge, caramels, and the occasional cheeseburger. He also gave us his unwavering love, faith, and acceptance.

He also gave us another family legacy—a deep love of stories, poetry, and music. Stories and poetry poured out of him. He created parodies and used them to prank classmates and delight us. And he sang, because that was his other legacy. He was very deaf and didn’t sing well, but he loved listening to music. He often told about a boy he had known, Lester who loved to play the guitar. He played all the time—even when was supposed to be sweeping out his father’s auto repair shop. Grandpa and Lester made a deal—Grandpa would clean up the shop as long as he could listen to Lester play. This man Old Man Polfus furious. “You’re spoilin’ that boy,” he snarled at Grandpa. “He’ll never amount to anything.” The boy, of course, grew up to be Les Paul.

Like his deep ancestor, Grandpa wasn’t a musician himself, but he knew enough to identify and support talent when he heard it. That’s not to say that there wasn’t talent in his family. His siblings formed a band, “Ernie’s Orchestra.” The Orchestra once performed at the Wisconsin Dairymen’s Ball. They had a hit single, which they had typeset and sold as sheet music. I once asked Uncle Fred, the band pianist, about it.

“What was the song?” I asked.

“It was called ‘The Song that I’ll Always Remember,” Uncle Fred told me, squinting at me through the brilliant winter sunshine.

“How did it go?

“Oh,” he laughed, “I’ve forgotten.”

Loving music, stories, and the young are in our DNA and have been for a thousand years. Like Grandpa, I’m no musician—when my son was three one of his first sentences was, “Please don’t sing to me, Momma—it hurts my ears.”

I was crushed, of course. I loved singing to him. But I honored his request. I stopped singing, broke out my Gilbert and Sullivan tapes, and set out to introduce him to music that did NOT “hurt his ears.” We played Gilbert and Sullivan, Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven and German folksongs.

Because he loves me and is very tired of this story, my son took me to karaoke a year or so ago, and not only invited but urged me to sing—which I did, joyfully, loudly and off-key, as is my way. And my son listened, and smiled, and clapped. I love him for that.

And so today, when I heard the mallets driving the spikes into the church door, I felt a surge of recognition, and chills, and pride, and just a little irritation that I hadn’t known to look forward to this. The music surged, and the grand chords marched on just as they had when Luther sang them as he marched into Worms, as he defended the idea that we all have the right and responsibility to find God for ourselves, that salvation isn’t a commodity or a path to power, and that it is wrong for God to become a business.

I listened, and thought of St. Elizabeth, bucking her family and religion to give to the poor and sick around her. I thought of my long-ago ancestors giving up the Wartburg because they agreed with Martin Luther. I thought of my great-grandmother, choosing to “marry down” because she loved a man and saw something in him she could respect. I thought about how, in a world where it looked like the Kaiser would last forever, my great-grandfather packed up his mother, his sister-in-law, his two children, and his very pregnant wife, gathered together all the cash he could, and sailed for America, where he and my great-grandmother made a haven—a fortress, a refuge—for families fleeing a war-torn Europe. I thought of my grandfather, who became a mighty fortress for me and kept my soul safe at a time when my own world was a harsh and too-often violent place. He stocked his fortress with Zane Gray novels, risqué postcards, and caramels, but it was no less real for that.

I think of myself, striving to make my home and classrooms comforting, safe, creative places where students can first of all take a deep breath, then seek and share their true selves as they wrestle with ideas, and how we communicate them. We all need a mighty fortress from time to time—and some of us are descended from builders. I am no musician, but I have raised a musician, a kind, caring man who understands how to tend to others’ roots gently. My son played “A Mighty Fortress” today. More important, he has become a might fortress for many. Even me.

Who Am I Now?

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As I was preparing for the last week of College Writing, I found myself reflecting on what we’ve been exploring this term: How regular writing—even if it’s not long, or even directly related to a single subject—can capture the essence of experience. Joan Didion calls it “keeping in touch with our past selves.” I call it a survival kit. Let me explain.

Almost exactly a month ago I got a “friend” request on my Facebook page. It was from a gray-haire but otherwise beautifully preserved man who called himself “David,” which, in the reality of internet security, I understood to mean that his name might or might not actually BE “David.” I don’t judge; I am known in some internet circles as “Bodie Parkhurst.” I have a friend who goes by “Shamala.” This is common practice. But I digress. 

Unlike many of the men from whom I get “friend” requests, David wasn’t a three-star general, a Nigerian prince, nor even a doctor with Doctors Without Borders. He said he was a marine engineer. Given a steady diet of generals, princes, and philanthropists I was understandably eager to learn more, but David proved surprising coy. “I don’t want to talk about work,” he said. “I talk to you to escape from work.”

I thought about that, and wondered if I wanted to be anybody’s “escape” from life, but I didn’t worry too much about it. After all, I had a good friend in law enforcement who once told me that she told people I was her “Bohemian” friend, because I lived below a tattoo parlor and designed things on the computer rather than going to a regular office job. Maybe being trapped on a ship doing machiny and engineers things got old for David. Who was I to criticize?

In the beginning most of our conversations were of the, “Hi, how are you/Fine, I’m just headed out the door/Okay, have a good day” variety. David was invariably polite and supportive of my busy schedule. He never implored me to switch to What’s App, which seems to be the generals’, princes’, and surgeons’ platform of choice. He never became angry when I couldn’t or didn’t respond immediately. In internet friendships on my page, this counts for quite a bit. But then a few weeks in things started to shift. Maybe David caught me on a good day or maybe the long series of tiny polite exchanges just gradually evolved, but one evening I was somewhat startled to discover myself in a real conversation with David.

We talked about his daughter. We talked about my son. We were suitably guarded and respectful, but it felt real. And then one day David said it: “I’d really like to meet you. I feel like I’m developing feelings for you.”

Well. I am not a person for whom men readily develop feelings, particularly on such a scanty basis. I’m more the “wear them down and then pounce in a weak moment” kind of person. When David said he had feelings for me, it took me by surprise. What surprised me most of all was that I wasn’t terrified. Something in my brain woke up and said, “This is the point where you’re usually scared spitless. Why do you just feel good about this?” A part of me worried that maybe I SHOULD be scared, but the larger part felt a little bit proud. Maybe the thirty years of therapy were finally paying off! Maybe at last I was figuring out how to be comfortable with being courted? Maybe I could learn not to laugh at romantic overtures? Maybe I was finally learning how to be normal?

So I took pride in my lack of fear, and chatted happily back. David talked more and more about his feelings. I took some time to reflect on my own. I didn’t love David, but I thought that maybe, once his current contract ran out, it would be nice to meet and see what, if anything, developed. As I have said, I’m not the sort of person who provokes amorous intent in available men, so I was prepared for David to retreat hastily to friendship upon meeting me in person. Still, though, it was nice to think that someone found me worth pursuing. Someone said I was beautiful. Someone enjoyed my conversation, even if he was strangely leery about offering details about himself.

And so it went. Until David’s birthday came up. “I have a small favor to ask of you,” he wrote. “I need you to buy $500 of Steam cards and send me the numbers. I need them for my phone. I’d like to do a video chat on my birthday.

“I’d like to help,” I chatted back, “but I’m not made of money, and $500 is a lot for me. Also, isn’t Steam just for gaming?”

“I use the software on my phone,” he responded, somewhat ambiguously. Still, though, we had been talking for a month. He had feelings for me. More, he made me feel beautiful. “If the money’s a concern I’ll send you my banking information and you can transfer the money out of my account into yours.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay,” I said. “Let me get home.”

At home I told my son what was happening. My son is the tech savvy member of our household. Also, my son had not been chatting with David, so he tended to see things a bit differently. “This sounds scammy, Mom,” he said. “Why does he want Steam cards? You can only use them in gaming. They won’t help with his phone.”

“He says he uses them to run the video chat software on his phone.”

“How long is he planning on chatting?” my son asked, and he asked it with a certain tone. At least I thought I heard a tone.

“He’s going to be at sea for another couple months,” I answered.  “And he’s not asking me to front the money; he’s given me access to his account.”

“He gave YOU access to HIS account?” my son asked. 

“Yes, so I can transfer the money.” I clicked into his bank account. Lines wiggled. Bar graphs shot up. It looked far more creative than what I was expecting. Also, the spelling on some of the terms was creative, to put it mildly. Maybe it’s a bank from a non-English-speaking country, I decided. Maybe this is badly translated.

“Call your bank,” my son insisted. “This sounds like a scam. Listen…” and he started reading from some site discussing scams and Steam cards. 

“But David’s not asking me to spend my own money. He wants me to transfer the funds to my account and then buy the cards. How could he be scamming me?” I asked. And I defiantly pushed the button. 

“Call your bank,” my son said again. “Ask what they think. This sounds like a scam to me.”

Every time he said “scam” I found myself getting more and more irritated. Finally I offered a compromise. “I’ll call the bank. Whatever they suggest, I’ll do.” 

This would probably have been easier to say if I hadn’t just spent the last couple weeks congratulating myself on having moved past my fear of intimacy to the point where I could feel good about chatting with David.

You probably know how this story ends. The bank called back. “We’re locking your account, closing it, and opening you up a new one. This is a scam. When you put in the money transfer information they have your banking information. They get you to give the Steam card numbers, then they reverse the transaction. Sometimes they empty  your account.”

I felt heartsick. David had been my friend, or at least I thought he was. Worse, I had had all the old messages from my childhood, that romance wasn’t for me, that people wouldn’t care for me for myself, and that I was only worth duping, reaffirmed. Suddenly I was right back at the “self” I had been in the bad old days. I felt worthless. I felt stupid. I felt embarrassed. I felt ashamed.

How had I, veteran kicker-to-the-curb of three-star generals, Nigerian princes, and philanthropic doctors, been fooled? How had David slipped past my defenses? And then it occurred to me: I could know exactly how it happened. I had our chat. 

And so I went back and started reading, analytically this time. I noticed how often David evaded responding to questions about himself. I noticed how his language challenges—he said he was Norwegian—ebbed and flowed. I noticed how often the details he offered reflected details about myself that I had previously offered. 

And then it hit me: David had provided me a framework—a few chats and a few pictures—and I had constructed a person. And then I had decided that person was my friend. I had participated in my own scamming.

The people who know about this all said I should block David, but there was still a part of me that hoped for some explanation—even as the smarter part of myself recognized that the most overwhelming possibility was exactly what appeared to be the case: David wasn’t David at all. He was probably some kid seeking out vulnerable people online, and then scamming them.

David and I had a final conversation. I told him that what had really tipped the balance for me was the long list of evasions. When the time came that I really, really needed to trust him, there simply was nothing there to trust. He responded sarcastically, telling me he had been “straight” with me, and answered every question.

I sent him a list of all the questions I had asked, questions he had carefully slid around before charging off on another conversational tack. 

“That’s what you’re basing this on?” he asked. “Those are details.”

And then he informed me—in perfect English, yet, that I was the “sketchy” one, and that he would never trust me after the “stunt” I had pulled. 

“I googled your bank,” I said. “I couldn’t find it.”

He shot me back a screen capture. “Here’s the bank you “googled,” he said. “Click the link.”

I read the name of the bank, went into my search engine, and entered the name. “The bank’s name is different,” I told him. And it was. The screen background was the same. The client information box style was the same, but the bank’s name and logo was completely, completely, different.

“There were a lot of misspellings on your account page,” I typed.

“Probably because you were making an unauthorized transfer,” he shot back, conveniently bypassing the fact that he had instigated the whole thing and had, in fact, pressured me to transfer the money.

“People who have seven-figure bank accounts don’t need random people on the internet to buy Steam cards so they can use their phones,” I finally said.

And that was when he told me that I had been a waste of time, and that I had “trust issues.”

I thought about that. “In this case, you’re right,” I finally typed. And then I blocked him.

***

So what is the meaning of this? Why am I writing about this? Because tonight I found myself thinking that the record of our conversations—a kind of journal, certainly a kind of notebook—I had kept had, combined with my son’s sharp eye and persistence, had first, saved me from quite possibly devastating financial loss. More important, though, they showed me what it meant to be me in this last month—and what it meant to be David. In the end, that chat has shown me that I don’t know myself as well as I think I do. When I look at that I see a woman who is not as ready to give up on the idea of love as she has thought. I’ve seen a woman so entranced by the idea of being thought beautiful and valuable that she was willing to risk far too much to perpetuate the illusion. But it also shows me a woman who, once she has a place to start, can analyze, evaluate, and learn from an experience, no matter how embarrassing. Finally, I see a woman who, while she might be embarrassed, refuses to be ashamed. She speaks up. She tells her story—even if she doesn’t look particularly good in it. She owns her truth. 

The truth is that David was a scammer. But I helped. And in looking at HOW I helped, I am learning a lot about who I am, and who I want to be.

Emma’s Family

This is Emma and Rudolf, close to their wedding day.

I only know Emma in flashes. In the first flash she stands with the man she loves, my great-grandfather Rudolf. She is persuading her parents to overlook his less than aristocratic birth, to see instead what she sees—a man with a fine mind and a drive to succeed. She wins that battle, though her family never really forgives her for taking Rudolf’s name, leaving her “von” behind her.

In the next flash she stands on a rough pier in Bremen, enormously pregnant, clutching her toddler daughter’s hand, keeping an eye on her energetic son as he runs back and forth, shouting, “Wir gehen nach Amerika! Wir gehen nach Amerika!” Rudolf stands with her, holding their tickets. He has $3,000 dollars in his pocket along with the Kuypchinski’s address. The Kuypchinskis are their destination in Wisconsin, the bit of home they will find waiting for them in America.

I see her next in bed in one of the Kaiser Wilhelm II’s cabins, dreadfully seasick, and in labor. The ship rolls in a storm, back and forth, back and forth. She heaves, and pushes, heaves, and pushes. At last she gives birth to a tiny daughter, Alitor.

Emma spends the remainder of the voyage in the bed, Alitor beside her, and small Meta in a basket on the floor. She tries to keep a hand on Meta’s basket, but seasickness and birth have weakened her, and the basket slips from her fingers and slides across the cabin when the ship rolls one way. It slides back to her when the ship rolls the other. Emma keeps grabbing for the basket, and losing her grip, and watching her daughter sail away from her, only to return, time after time.

I see Emma next in her house. Snow lies deep and pristine all around. Branches snap and crack in the cold. Emma’s mother-in-law Anna sits on the porch, holding Alitor wrapped in shawls and blankets. It is Wisconsin, and midwinter, and that night Alitor begins to cough. In a flash and an eternity, baby Alitor is gone. Emma’s arms are empty.

Emma (left) Bill (second from right) and cousins, I believe.

In the flashes, Emma is never center stage—she is the woman at the stove, a gentle presence at the heart of a family whirlwind. Her eight surviving children grow strong and musical. They start a band, and travel the area, providing dance music at house parties. They court, and marry. The family thrives.

That’s what’s important to Emma: family. Emma and Rudolf’s farm becomes a safe haven for more and more of her family. They set off from Klein Morin in Posen, journey to that pier in Bremen, cross the Atlantic, pass through Ellis Island and New York, then venture home to Emma in Wisconsin. They stay until they have enough English and money to navigate in America, then buy their own farms close by, or, in the case of the daughters, become farm wives or maids for wealthy families.

Emma, front and center, with her children behind her.

And still Emma is there, in her house at the farm. She is there the night the house catches fire. The family wakes and flees the blaze searing their backs and heels. Morning finds them with the clothes on their backs and a box of pictures—all they salvaged from the fire.

Rudolf, their sons, their friends, and their scattered family rally around to rebuild. And still the family in the Old Country keeps on coming. When Emma’s first child after Alitor, her son Wilhelm, marries, he brings his wife Gladys to the farm. His first two babies are born in the new birthing room just off Emma’s kitchen. It feels very modern and convenient, does that birthing room—purpose built with cupboards for all of the linens and paraphernalia birth requires, and close to the stove for hot water.

When Bill’s family moves into their own home a few miles away Emma misses her grandchildren terribly and woos them with gingersnaps with they come home to the farm each Sunday for chicken dinner and baseball. It all feels very American.

When Bill has a truck accident the children come back to the farm to live, while Bill’s wife goes to work in a furniture factory to pay their mortgage. Emma feeds the children, and her youngest sons—still little more than boys themselves–drive the children to school each day in their Model A’s and play with them when they aren’t working with Rudolf on the farm. Her oldest daughter Meta takes a shine to Bill’s oldest daughter. And so the farm becomes home to her children’s children.

Emma, with two of her daughters

Those are good days for Emma, at the center of the family from Posen, and the family from her body. And then one day Rudolf goes to bed, sick with some mysterious malady. The doctor says he can smell the cancer on Rudolf. Maybe he can. Rudolf lies in the birthing room just off the kitchen, dying in the bed where his grandchildren were born. He becomes convinced that Emma is trying to poison him, and refuses to eat. His grandchildren stand in the birthing room door and throw shoes at him until Emma makes them stop.

Emma and Rudolf, in their driveway

When he dies Emma goes on keeping house for her youngest sons, the two designated to stay home and care for her in her old age. Bill’s children grow up. Her granddaughter, my mother, moves across America with her own husband and young daughter, to start again. And then, amid her dwindling family, Emma herself begins to slip away.

It’s little things at first: A burned pot of potatoes, laundry left wet in the basket rather than hung on the line. The gingersnap jar stands empty. The vorgarten–the flowers she loved and planted on the gentle slope between her new house and the road–lies indifferently watered and poorly weeded. It gets worse. Emma, for whom home and family has always been everything, forgets them. While her sons work the family farm she begins to wander. Her sons seek her out when she goes voyaging alone and confused on roads and paths that have become foreign to her. They find her clothing first, and then Emma herself, naked, lost, seeking the home and children she can no longer find.

Emma, with two of Bill’s grandchildren.

Emma, who has been the center of the family, swings in increasingly irregular orbits. She cannot hold, and so they put her away. It’s called the County Home. Emma’s grandchildren call it the Poor Farm. It’s where families put people like Emma in those days before nursing homes. It’s where the county also houses the orphans, the indigent, and everybody else who no longer comfortably fits in the world.

And there Emma stays. Alone. My mother says they didn’t visit her because “she wouldn’t have wanted us to see her like that.” Maybe she’s right. I know my mother loved her—she wept bitterly when Emma died three months after I was born. At least the people at the County Home probably kept Emma clothed, inside, off the roads and out of the Wisconsin winter. But even now, nearly sixty years after my birth and her death, I think of her, spending her last days in a strange place, amid strange people, strange sounds, strange food, and strange smells, far from home and family. I wish it could have been different.

I never knew Emma, but the world she built lives on for decades after her death. The year I turn ten the whole family meets at the farm for a picnic and baseball. Dinner is an enormous cauldron of what Emma’s family call “barbecue” but most people call “sloppy Joes.” Emma’s daughters cook the barbecue over a fire outside the back door of Emma’s kitchen that green, humid summer day. We, Emma’s family, fill the farm to bursting, children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren running, laughing, arguing, and eating. Women wear light summer dresses. The men wear plaid shirts and khakis, or bib overalls. One or two bold sons-in-law wear bermuda shorts. The air is filled with German and English, spoken in rich Wisconsin dialect.

The last flash comes one winter’s day. I am young and lost, and far from home. Somehow I find myself back to the farm. I sit in Emma’s kitchen with Great Uncle Fred, who has custody of the pictures rescued from the fire long ago. Thin winter sun pours over us, and over the pictures Uncle Fred has spread on the old formica table. His thick brown farmer’s fingers gently slide the pictures around as he tells me stories and laughs gently. Across the kitchen stands Emma’s stove, not far from the birthing room door. The winter house smells sharp, like cedar and damp wool. The sun warms my head, though icy air swirls around our ankles. At last I understand that though Emma and I only shared the world for a few short months,  I have found my family right where Emma left it for me.