Tag: family

My mother was born on this day in 1923.  I never got to know my mother after I was an adult.  She died when I was seventeen.  So my memories are seen through the eyes of a child or at best a teenager.  The one thing that I remember very clearly was that I was always sure that she loved me. Everything else is less important after that and I know that she shaped a lot of my character.

Our house was the center of family activity while my mother was there.  She had three sisters (Mabel, Florence & Lorraine) and two brothers (Harold & Hermann) and we had much of the extended family, minus Harold, who I don’t remember ever meeting.  The family didn’t get along with his wife, Sophie.  I don’t know why.  All the other aunts and cousins would come over to play cards. Usually the cousin would come too, so while I had only one sister, I feel like I had lots of siblings. I really don’t know what card games they played.  I just recall the constant chatter of a kind of mixed German-English.  “What’s spielt is spielt” and “now who’s the high hund?”   

As I wrote above, I didn’t get to know my mother as much as I would have liked to and I am astonished at how much I don’t remember or maybe never knew. Kids are rarely interested in their parents’ life stories until they get older, maybe because they just cannot believe their parents were ever young enough to have anything to say. Besides, kids in my generation spent most of their time outside and away from the house.  Parents and children have much more intense relationships these days, if for no other reason than that they are together when parents drive the kids everywhere and arrange various teams, trainings and activities.  We didn’t have a car and we didn’t belong to any organized activities. I spent most of my days hanging around outside with my friends who lived nearby and I didn’t ask much. I know she was born Virginia Johanna Haase (Mariza has her middle name). Her father was Emil and her mother was Anna (Grosskreutz).  She grew up on the South Side of Milwaukee and married my father after the war. Of her childhood, I know little. Her father was an engineer who remained employed throughout the Great Depression, which was evidently a rare achievement. She was an unenthusiastic student in HS and dropped out in the tenth grade, but she always encouraged education for my sister and me.  She worked at Allen Bradley during WWII but not long enough to get Social Security benefits.  After she married my father, she no longer did any paying work, besides occasionally free-lance catering with her sisters.  My mother made really good German potato salad, which was always in demand at family gatherings.

Ma was phenomenally good natured and I remember her always being cheerful.  My father told me that he was lucky to get my mother to marry him, since she was extremely popular because of her open personality.  She later became a woman of substance, as you can see in the bottom picture.  My father was fond of big women, so I guess they had a good thing going.  

My father enjoyed beer, but Ma drank only a little.  She had one bottle of Gordon’s Gin in the downstairs refrigerator. She had a drink at Christmas and that bottle was down there as long as I remember, only gradually emptying.  It was still half full when she died.

Sad to say that my most vivid memories are from the end of my mother’s life.  I was riding my bike up to the Kettle Moraine State forest when my mother went into the hospital for the last time.  It was a big trip that I had planned for some time.  My parents kept my mother’s urgent condition from me so as not to ruin it.  When I called from the pay phone at the lake, my father told me that ma was sleeping.  I thought that was odd, but didn’t think that much about it. When I got home she had gone to the hospital.  I never saw her again.

We talked on the phone, but my mother didn’t want us to visit her in the hospital during the last days. I feel a little guilty about that, but it was a good decision. She wanted us to remember her from better times and I do indeed remember her healthy and happy instead of what I imagine it must have been after the chemotherapy and ravages of cancer.

My father got a call from the hospital about dawn on the day before she died. I heard him talking on the phone and inferred what was happening, but didn’t come out of my room when he went to the hospital.  We didn’t handle the whole thing very well, but in retrospect I am not sure how it would have worked out any better if we did things differently. I lived in dread the whole day, but she didn’t die that day. I know it is illogical but I convinced myself that she would be out of the woods if she only survived the day.  

But miracle recoveries happen only on television & in the movies.  

They cut down the last of the big elm trees soon after Ma died. I thought it was symbolic and I paid special attention. She loved those trees and felt bad as they succumbed, one-by-one, to the Dutch elm disease.  The tree by the alley was the last survivor near the house, and Ma was happy to have at least one left.  It was in its yellow fall colors as I watched it fall to the ground.  It was a pleasant fall day with wispy clouds.

I don’t want to end on this sorrowful note because that is not the end of the story. Among many other things, my mother left me a special legacy. Ma followed my various interests and encouraged them. All I needed to do was mention an interest in something, and soon a book appeared about it.

I have to thank my mother for all the books on dinosaurs, ecology and history. Even more important, she gave me the gift of reading itself. A well organized or impressive child I was not, but my mother had confidence in me anyway in a way that only a loving mother can. My first grade teacher put me into the slow reading group and I lived up to the low expectations. My mother complained to the school, essentially arguing that I was not as dumb as I seemed and my problem was not that the reading challenge was too great, but that it was not great enough to hold my interest. She convinced my teacher to put me into a higher reading group. Although I couldn’t meet the lower standards, I could exceed the higher ones with Ma’s help. This kind of paradox is not uncommon.  I wonder how many kids w/o mothers as good as mine were/are trapped by the gentle cruelty of low expectations. Ma saved me from all that. She just expected me to succeed. I did, by my standards at least.

Thanks Ma. I wish you could have met the grandchildren.  They would have loved you.  

Please check out what I wrote for my father’s birthday at this link. 

The development where Carl and Elise live in Marana near Tucson is very pleasant.  The developers were careful to leave nature intact whenever possible, so the houses blend in with their surroundings.    The area in back of their house is devoted to natural desert landscape and will not be developed.  Elise and Carl told me that they have seen or seen the signs of many sorts of animals, including bobcats, coyotes, lots of snakes, hawks and even cougars.  In fact, they worry that some of the local wildlife might make a meal of their little dog.   

Elise makes custom Jewelry, concentrating on unique styles and colors.  Some are very attractive as you can see in the nearby picture.  I got Chrissy a nice bracelet with a colorful interplay of silver and copper.  I am not a big fan of jewelry in general, but I do like it when it is unique and/or has some significant back story.   The bracelet met both of these criteria.

Carl has a passion for genealogy and was interesting in hearing whatever I knew about my family history.  Much of it overlaps with Elise’s family, but he was also interested in my father’s side of the family.  He quickly found a record that recorded my grandfather’s arrival from Russian Poland, via the Port of Hamburg, on March 19, 1899.   He arrived with his brother, Felix.   Interestingly, the record records Matel spelled with a double l on the end – Matell.   It appears like that again in census records and then we lost the extra l sometime after 1910.  It lists his residence in Sakolle in Russia and lists his nationality as Russian.  Of course most of Poland was under Russian control in those days.

Elise and Carl were very hospitable.  Among the rare and wonderful things they had around the house was Mexican Coca-Cola.  It is evidently made with sugar-cane instead of the corn fructose we use in ours and it tastes subtly different.  My pallet for “real” coke has atrophied since I started to drink mostly Coke-Zero, but I can still taste the difference.

Carl took me around to look at the whole development.  The Ritz-Carlton is developing a whole complex.  Even though it is only a couple hours difference, I am feeling a little tired from travel and jet-lag, so I will write about that and show some pictures next time. 

BTW – the picture up top is the view from Elise and Carl’s back yard.  You see Elise in the next picture and some of her creations below that.  Caril is working on his genealogy in the next picture and at the bottom is Mexican Coke.  Maybe I should restate that, Mexican Coca-Cola.

My father was born on this date in 1921. I don’t really know much about him and some of what I think I know is probably wrong.   We didn’t have much contact with his side of the family.  Both his parents died before I was born.  He and his fraternal brother Joe were the youngest.  They were born twenty-two years after their oldest sister, Helen.   

On the left are my grandparents.

I was named after my father, so I am technically John Matel, Jr. John Matel Senior was born in Duluth, Minnesota.  His father, Anton,  had come over from Poland a few years before.  I don’t know when.   His mother, Anastasia, was of Polish ancestry too, but she was born in Buffalo, NY.    My father never told me much more than that, although I understand that her family was from Galicia in the Carpathian Mountains.  

I found out later that my grandfather’s family was from what is now eastern Poland: Suwalki and Mazowieckie.   I learned this from a cousin called Henrick Matel who found me in Poland.   His father was my grandfather’s brother.   His father & another brother went to France to work in coal mines there.   My grandfather made a wiser choice and went to America.   Henrick didn’t know much else.   His father had been killed in a train accident when he was only eleven.  Henrick unwisely returned to Poland after WWII, believing the communist promises that things would be good there. Young men make bad choices. 

Henrick lamented that the Polish side of the family were a bunch of drunks. Things didn’t change much in America.   Now you know as much about my father’s prehistory as I do and I suspect a little more than he did.

My father talked about growing up in the depression.  He kept some of the frugal habits from those times.  He used bacon grease as butter, for example and would get really upset if we threw out any food.   His childhood home was small and crowded. It was on 4th Street.  I went up there to see it.   Of course, by then it was different.   It was in a yuppified neighborhood and a small home for a single couple.   My father’s home housed eight.   Their toilet was in the basement, which has a dirt floor back then.   He told a funny story about his youth.   The family went to see “Frankenstein” and it scared my future father.   His brothers set up a dummy in the basement and the made it sit up when little Johnny went down to use the toilet.  He said he no longer needed to use the toilet.

He got a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and was stationed near Superior, WI.  He planted trees and cut trails.   It gave him a lasting appreciation for forestry, which I think he passed to me.  How else can you explain a city boy so attracted to the woods?   Some of it is myth,  or just a feeling, but whenever I look at the groves of trees planted by the CCC I think of him.   They are mature forests now, but in the Dust Bowl years they were pioneers.

After getting out of the CCC, my father got a job at Medusa Cement, where he stayed his whole working life, except for the time he was in the Army Air Corps.    He was drafted into the Army soon after Pearl Harbor.   He would never tell me much about that part of his life.   I know he got seven battle stars, so was a participant in all the big action of the war in Europe.    Of course, he didn’t really have to be there for all of them.   Anywhere the planes went, he officially went.   He landed at Normandy a few days after D-day.   According to what he told me, the only time he actually got near the Germans was during the battle of the bulge, closer than he wanted.   He got a Purple Heart. 

They had a point system for discharge from the military.  My father had a lot of points because of those battle stars & Purple Heart mentioned above, so he was among the first U.S. soldiers discharged.   He always expressed a special fondness for Chicago, where he was discharged.   Since he was among the first to come home after the victory in Europe, people were eager to welcome him and buy him drinks.

I am embarrassed to say that I don’t know exactly when he married my mother, but it was soon after the war. They told me that it took nine years before I was born. I was born in 1955, so counting back we get 1946. 

On the left are my uncle Joe (blond), Ted (tall) and my father. 

Our house in Milwaukee was full of artifact of my father’s work.  He and my mother’s father built the boiler, constructed the steps in the back and built the retaining wall, for example.   All these things worked, but they were odd.  The boiler threw most of the heat out through the sides.  That meant that the basement was very warm – the rest of the house not so much.  The steps were all uneven.  The wall leaned and the drainage holes were lined with beer cans cut out on both ends.   The evident surplus of beer cans explained much of the other things.

During my childhood, my father mostly worked.   That’s what I recall.  It was the time when they were building the Interstate freeways and there was a big demand for cement.    He regularly worked twelve hour shifts and was tired when he came home.   He drank a lot of beer, at first Schlitz, later Pabst and then Budweiser, but he never missed a day of work because of it, or for any other reason.  I don’t remember him ever taking a sick day.   Maybe he just denied sickness because he hated doctors.   He went to the doctor only once from the time he got his discharge physical out of the army in 1945 until the time he died more than fifty years later.   On that occasion, he had a cyst removed from his stomach.  The doctor forgot to sew it up.   After that, he said that the medical profession had their chance and he was not going to give them another.   When the doctors finally got their second look at him, the day he died, they couldn’t believe my sister when she told them that he didn’t take any medication besides Budweiser. 

I really didn’t get to know my father until my mother died in 1972.   He was grieving too, but he tried to make it easier for my sister and me.   He tried to cook, but wasn’t very good at it.   But my father was nothing if not stubborn. He ate what he cooked and made us eat it too.  I remember watching some bread bake in the toaster oven.   The old man asked if I thought it was ready.   Just at that point it burst into flames. 

My father dropped out of HS in the tenth grade, but he made sure I went to college.   He also got me a job at the cement company, where I got to work those twelve hour overtime shifts and make the big bucks.   At one point, they assigned me to unloading hopper cars.   I worked from noon to midnight, which was great.  I could sleep late and then meet my friends at the bars at midnight.   At the job, I got to lift very heavy tools and smack things with sledge hammers (something young men like) but in between the hard work I got time to just hang around by the river and wait for the cars to empty (something else young men like). Then I got to ride the cars to the end of the dock, applying the brakes and jumping off just before the rammed into the car in front.   I mentioned to my father that I thought this was fun.   The next day, he made sure the boss gave me the midnight till noon shift, which didn’t suit me at all.  He told me that the worst thing a young man could get was a job he liked that didn’t have a future and he was going to make sure that I would not get it.    He wanted me to stay in school and I did.  Thanks Dad.

I worked hopper cars during Christmas break and it was less fun, BTW.   I remember working in the evenings and looking at the temperature on the Allen Bradley clock tower.   It always seemed to be 5 below zero.   I would work as fast as I could out there by the tracks, get the cement moving and then rush into my father’s office and sit in front of the heater.   My co-worker, LC Duckworth, used to sleep in front of his own propane heater very close.   I couldn’t stand it because it let out these terrible fumes.   He had no complaints until he started his pants on fire.  We put him out w/o any lasting damage, but he never sat near that heater again..   LC was the strongest man I knew, but his ability to sleep almost any time was his unique skill.  I learned it from him.    

My father retired when he was only fifty-six. He already had thirty-six years in, since he got credit for his time in army.   I can understand why he wanted to quit.   The job was noisy, dusty and hard.  But the plus side is that he had lots of friends.   His job involved loading trucks and he knew all the drivers.  It was fun to watch.  It was a different man I met when I went with my father to work, a happy man with lots of social connections.   Retirement was a bit of a mistake, IMO. But I suppose he thought it was worth it.  At first, I think it was.   He had time to read and relax.   It deteriorated after that.

We drifted apart as parents and children often do, when we moved away.  In the FS, you are FAR away.  My father had a blind spot when it came to this career, BTW.  It was the only time I had to really disagree with him.   When I told him that I planned to take the FS test, he told me not to waste my time.   He said that such careers were “only for rich kids” and that I could never get a job like that.  Had I taken his advice, it would have been true.  I can’t blame him.  It was just farther than he could see.  I think that is a big problem for the “disadvantaged”.  They hold themselves back with low expectations.

I didn’t make it back in time when he died. My sister called me and I got on the next flight form Krakow. But the next flight was the next day and then I got stranded in Cincinnati. When I called to tell my sister I would be late, my cousin Luke answered and told me that my sister was at the hospital and my father had died. I figure he died as I flew over Canada.  I remember looking down at the savage beauty, the forest and the frozen lakes and thinking it was over. I don’t know if I REALLY thought that or if I have just created this memory ex-post-facto. The mind works like that.

My father never made much money, but after my mother died he spent even less. He never went anywhere, didn’t waste money on clothes and ate mostly bean soup, cabbage soup and kielbasa.  He used to talk about his stash of “cold cash.”   We didn’t think much of it. But when my sister was cleaning out the freezer, she found around $20,000.00 in $100 dollar bills, wrapped in foil like hamburger. The old man hated banks and didn’t want to have any money that would earn interest that he would have to pay taxes.  When dealing with old depression era people, it was a good idea to look around and don’t hire stranger to clean up those nooks and crannies.

According to what my sister told me, my father fell down and couldn’t get up. When asked how he was, his last words were, “I can’t complain.” He used that phrase a lot and it was not surprising he would fall back on it, but it seems an appropriate thing to say at the end. Happy birthday, Daddy.   I still miss you. I hope my kids will be as lucky as I was. I can’t complain.

Today is our anniversary.   I am not going to share emotional things on the blog, but rather just the memory.  Chrissy & I have built a life and a family.  It began twenty-seven years ago.   I could not have guessed how lucky we would be.   

Things were not looking so good in 1982.  I had just found out that I couldn’t get into the Air Force because of a misdiagnosed ulcer when I was fifteen.  In theory, I was still chronically sick, ironic since I was one of the fittest people I knew back then.  I had not taken the FS test that would end up getting me the job I have now. It would be two years before I got my MBA.  Unemployment was over 10%.   I was working for “flexi-force” sometimes. Chrissy had a part time job at First Wisconsin bank, which was a small ray of lights, but we had no assets, no prospects and a negative net worth.

We couldn’t afford much for the wedding.  Chrissy wore her mother’s dress.  I wore my best (only) suit.   Chrissy’s mother and grandmother did most of the planning.   Chrissy was very generous – and wise – to  let it be.   (All those silly ideas that the bride should get all the indulgences she wants just creates lots of heartache and makes even nice women into those bridezillas they show on TV.)  

We got married in Holmen Lutheran Church with Pastor Evavold doing the ceremony.  A local singer called Walton Ofstedahl sang for the ceremony. He was an old farmer with a really good voice.   The thing that made it special, however, was how much he loved to sing.  We had the reception at the Moe Coulee game farm. Chrissy’s father knew the guy who owed it.  Actually, that was a great place to have a reception.  It was not just a wilderness.  They had a nice cabin with a pretty pond and picnic area and you could watch the animals wandering around.  Chrissy’s relatives and her family’s friends and neighbors brought things – including the red jello – and helped make the reception very satisfying.  It was sort of thing you might expect Garrison Keillor to talk about on the news from Lake Woebegone.  Of course, before we headed off, Chrissy and I had to pitch in to put away chairs and tables and that also made the experience memorable.

Our honeymoon was at Chrissy’s parent’s farm in Holmen, Wisconsin. They cleared out for a couple days and left the place to us.  These days you might call it “agro-tourism.” We just liked it because it was free.  I remember the cows mooing waking me up in the pre-dawn twilight.  The Johnsons had switched from dairy to beef cows a couple years before, so we didn’t have to milk them and there were no other urgent chores.  Today we would say they were “free range” cows, but back then it was just that cows hung around in the fields and ate grass during the summer. You really didn’t have to do much except move them around to different fields in rotation.  That’s about all I knew (or know) about that.

Since the cows eat grass and there seemed to be a lot of grass, I guessed that once in the proper pasture they would just look bucolic and take care of themselves, but they evidently like their special hay for breakfast.  Chrissy informed me that they don’t actually eat grass, or at least that is not their preferred food.  They like alfalfa.  Cows are more complicated than I thought. Anyway, they complain loudly when they don’t get what they want, so at dawn we had to toss a few bales of whatever Chrissy’s father prepared for them over the fence. The first morning I learned that hay bales don’t fly as far as you think they would when you throw them off the truck.  One landed on the barbwire fence and broke it.  Cows aren’t ferocious or eager to escape and they didn’t try to stampede out through the newly created opening, but we had to fix the fence before they aimlessly wandered off.

It is true that anyplace is great when you are with someone you love and things started to improve for us soon after.  We were lucky starting off  behind the eight ball.  You can take more satisfaction in how far you have come, but more importantly you have a lot less fear of failure after you have experienced it. I know that I could live off peanut butter, sauerkraut and potatoes (I still really like those things) if I had to and hard times really aren’t so bad if you have a good partner, family and friends.  Besides, it is good to get that failure vaccination when you are young and resilient.

Twenty-seven years is half my total life.   We can probably do at least twenty-seven more.

I took Espen to his new dorm today. It was an easy move. He didn’t take much with him.  I have been bragging that when I went to college I had to hitchhike up and could have only what I could carry in my duffle bag.  I think that helped make him want to show his own capacity for simplicity.  Anyway, he is not very far from home, so he can come back and forth.  The dorms are simple, cinderblock.  The kids share toilets and showers. Small rooms are good because they don’t hold as much stuff.   Kids today have too much stuff. 

Espen actually could commute to school, but we think it is useful for him to be immersed in the college environment.   The place is very young and lively, with gyms and basketball courts nearby.   He will be studying computer engineering, which is tough program, so I figure it will not be all fun … but I hope he will have some.   College is a magical time and I want that for him but I will miss him.

I was reminded of the void his absence will create when I stopped at the grocery store on the way home.   I will have to buy less food and it made me sad to think that I would now not need to buy some of his favorite foods.  We had a little ritual putting the food away. I would toss it to him and he would put it where it belonged (or not).    We started doing it when he was little and not really a very good catch.  As he got older, he often complained that I made him do it and said it was silly, but he did it.  The tossing was one part of the game and the complaining was another.   Little things, but important.

I still have Alex for a couple more months, but he will be leaving and going to James Madison University this spring.   Alex was unenthusiastic about education when he graduated from HS and I think we made a wise decision to give him the space to make his own decision.  Soon he decided to go to Nova, where he started to study and his grades got better and better.   He will be a junior next year when he starts at JMU, so he is essentially on the track I would have wished /planned for him, but he made his own decisions and along the way saved me a lot of money.  Nova tuition is only about 1/3 as much and Alex lived at home.  But he  deserves the college experience too.  JMU is in Harrisonburg in the Shenandoah Valley.  It has a good reputation and the kids who go there all seem to love it.  I think it is great that he will be going, but I will miss him.

There is an ironic imbalance in the parent-child relationship. When they are little, they follow you around and you have to watch them all the time.   You look forward to when your time will again be your own, when you can read when you want, eat where you want (i.e. not only Happy Meal providers), and watch the television programs you want.   Then they transition and by the time you have the freedom you think you wanted, it is not as sweet as you thought. I have been enjoying my time with the kids and I will enjoy the visits with them, but the time is passed when we are really together. So sad.