new books make everything better

scene of me yesterday: i'm sitting outside of visionary eye care professionals at clark and foster. i kind of want to cry. i had an appointment for 5:30pm. i biked down and filled out the new patient form. when i brought it up to the front desk, i handed them my insurance card as well and asked if they accepted blue cross. he played around on his computer and told me i wasn't in their system. i asked how much an appointment would be and he told me $100 if the doctor had to dilate my eyes, and more if he wanted to see me again. i asked if that would be necessary. he answered with a blank stare, (slash didn't). i told him i just wanted to buy contacts. i don't even need him to look at me. i'm sure i sounded dramatic, and it's not this dude's fault, but what the f? i hate dealing with this sort of stuff, (p.s.). clearly, because the contacts i have in right now i should have thrown out a couple months ago. anyway, i cancel my appointment and walk outside and i'm frustrated with the whole impossible medical/insurance bullshit system and even more frustrated with myself for always being such a baby about dealing with this stuff. fortunately my favorite bookstore is across the street. i figure as long as i'm down here with the afternoon free now, i may as well stop in, and ultimately spend money i don't have to spend. which i do. i have three books in my hand after wandering the store, but i talk myself down to two: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and A Field Guide to Gay and Lesbian Chicago by Robert McDonald and Kathie Bergquist. the one that gets put back is The Rivals by Johnette Howard. all three of these books have been on the constantly growing list in my head. my friend marian told me about bechdel's graphic memoir over breakfast one morning last spring. marian and i have some stuff in common with bechdel: we're homos, we went to oberlin, we're creative (marian makes pretty postcards and is entering a master's program in book and paper arts at columbia college in the fall, i'm hoping to get into a master's program at northwestern for creative nonfiction writing). i was pretty excited to find it yesterday. it took me awhile to track it down because i was looking too hard--it wasn't in the mix of other comicesq books, it actually had it's own table and a sign with a picture of ms. bechdel herself, to let us know she was stopping by to say hi and sign books in a couple weeks. the field guide i read about in the reader last week. i think the woman author of it actually works in the bookstore i was wandering around in. she may have actually checked me out. it seemed like a book i should own, loving the gays and exploring this city as much as i do. a small part of me is against guide books though. i worry that the great places they describe will suck once they are populated by people following a guide book to their entrance. and i'd kind of like to discover them on my own. anyway, i caved. the rivals has been on my list since it came out. i try to read everything on women and sports, especially with a queer edge, as research for my own project/future and because i can't get enough of it. but i also need to branch out, hence the decision to postpone my purchase.

i bike home and decide to do laundry so my day can still feel somewhat productive. mostly, i'm just excited to sit down on the curb and start reading fun home while i wait to move my clothes to the dryer. my girlfriend meets me at the laundromat with the same look of frustration that painted my face earlier. she has spent the whole day working on a finance assignment. she expected to be done hours ago, and instead feels she still has hours to go. i tell her it's okay because i have a new pretty book to distract me. which is the truth. she is sitting over my laptop at the kitchen table. i am propped up in my bed, the next room over. i have twenty pages left when she finally decides to quit. she tells me she wanted to take a break a while ago, that she was staring at me waiting for me to look up and tell her to take a break, but i was absorbed in my book. i shrug and smile. 'i would have looked up if you said something,' i say. 'i know,' she replies.

rugby

April and I needed rugby. We didn’t keep the team going so that Davi and Jenny and Buster would have rugby at Oberlin, we kept the team going so that we would have rugby at Oberlin. If there was someone else to do it, we would have gladly let them. It was in the last couple weeks of my freshman year at Oberlin when I walked into that rugby meeting. I wasn’t sure of my role on the team yet, having only played a season, but I knew I wanted to at least voice my passion for this sport and this team and its existence. In electing officers, and namely a president, I was going to vote for the person that would build the program back up, get us the numbers to play a full game without having to borrow players from the other team, make sure we had cars lined up to travel, and jerseys and balls packed, that there would be more than five people at practice and that when we were at practice we would do something more than gossip and toss the ball in a circle. I was quiet for the first part of the meeting, listening to the discussions among the upperclassmen about who was going abroad next year and who had too many other commitments, a couple people threw out names of people that weren’t at the meeting, “Maybe Chris would come back. What’s Flinch up to next year? Is he graduating?” April and I shot worried glances back and forth to each other. The lack of commitment in the current season had been frustrating, but I couldn’t stand the idea of no rugby at all.

“We just need to recruit more—update the website, put flyers up in the fall. April and I will be here during preseason/orientation week. We can try to get the freshman before Frisbee gets to them.”

Everyone in the room nodded at my suggestion, looking a little more hopeful. I fed off that hope, and fell into a motivating speech listing what we already had and what would be easy to acquire, the same sort of speech I had made time and again when my high school soccer team was not only lacking varsity status, but sometimes enough players to field a team, a coach, a smooth grassy field with lines and regulation size goals, and even a bus to our away games.

I didn’t intend for my speech that day to be an election speech. I wasn’t trying to be president. I’d been playing wing for a season. I had just started to get a handle on what everyone in the backline is supposed to be doing. I was clueless about the pack. They were that mess of people that smushed their bodies together and drove over the ball, so that we could get it out and run with it. I was also only going to be a sophomore and I planned to play varsity soccer again in the fall. The other committed upcoming sophomores were voted in as treasurer and match secretary, and then Sarah Cole nominated April and I for president. April could head things in the fall while I was playing soccer, and then I could take over in the spring when April would be occupied with varsity softball. We had no choice but to accept.

We started in right away. I made a new flashy rugby website as my final project in my web design class. I wanted to have an opening page that would stream some sort of ode to rugby across it. I requested April’s help in composing it. A couple of nights later, my roommate and I were up chatting after going to bed, when April burst into the room clearing her voice and reciting from a crumpled sheet of paper:

Rugby?

Isn’t that like football, they ask.

Yeah, but without the pads, I respond.

Before any other game I wonder if I’ll win.

Before a rugby game I wonder if I’ll survive.

But with each successive tackle I am able to forget

the paper that was due four days ago,

the fight with my ex-girlfriend,

and the bloodstain on my shorts from my overflowing keeper.

I laugh through my mouth guard and let all the bullshit slip away

because I can say ‘Saturday’s a rugby day!

April found a book on rugby rules and drills and we put more time into studying it than we did studying in any of our classes. Another night she ran into my dorm room at two in the morning with a rugby ball and pulled me out into the hall. “When you played basketball, could you make a behind the back pass, right? Can you do it with the rugby ball? Do you think that would be obstruction?” We practiced our behind the back rugby passes in the hall for a little while and then moved out to the grass in front of the dorm, yelling at a friend walking past and asking if she would come run at us while we ran our play.

April and I talked about rugby so much that my roommate developed a hand signal to indicate when she was annoyed with us for “talking rugby” as she called it. "Talking rugby" included reminiscing about past games and practices, dreaming up rosters, plays, and drills for future games and practices, drooling over new balls, uniforms and ruck-pads, and listing the people we knew that would make good rugby players and strategizing how we would get them to join the team.

Fall semester, we arrived on campus two weeks before classes started. I had preseason training for soccer and April was working as a dorm R.A. We taped signs in every stall in every women’s bathroom and on the tampon dispensers too that read “bleed more than once a month, play women’s rugby” and had the website address printed on little tear off strips at the bottom. We had a ton of freshman trying out for the soccer team that year. At the first meeting, we went around the circle making introductions. When it was my turn I said, “My name is Magdalen. I’m a sophomore, from Wisconsin. I play rugby. You should too. In the spring. (Or if you get cut, I thought.) Soccer players make great rugby players.” My coach shot me a look from across the room. She had tolerated me playing rugby. I think she knew that if she made me choose, I wouldn’t be playing for her anymore. But she wasn’t too keen on the rest of the team dump tackling, rucking, and mauling for their off-season work outs. More than the risk of injury, I think she feared the risk that players wouldn’t come back to soccer. I didn’t care. Soccer would always exist. Soccer didn’t need to fight. It was Varsity. Varsity was fresh jerseys, different colors for here and away, clean and folded and laid out in front of our lockers on game days. Varsity was a coach bus parked outside of the gym half an hour before the scheduled departure, stocked with bagels and water and granola bars and movies playing on mini TVs above the seats. Varsity was game stats posted online so when you scored a goal everyone knew it and congratulated you in the cafeteria lines at dinner. With Varsity, I didn’t need to worry about anything but myself. Everything else was taken care of. Out of my hands.

It was also out of my hands when I sat on the bench knowing I could contribute so much more if given the chance, when my teammates told me the same, when I stayed after practice to practice my cross and finish and the only coach that stayed after with me was my best friend on the team who had all the technical skills I lacked, seeing as she had been playing since she was five and I hadn’t started playing until my sophomore year in high school. Just as it was out of my hands when my high school wouldn’t let my soccer coach give out a MVP award at the athletic banquet because soccer wasn’t a varsity sport, even when he said he would buy the plaque himself.

I’m not usually a crier. If I get hurt I play through it or come out. I always hated the girls that cried on the bus after losing basketball games in high school. I didn’t really see it as the end of the world. We lost every game. Did they really think we were going to win? Or that crying now would make anything better? Get over it. But after the last soccer game of my junior year season, I lost it. It was a frustrating game to begin with. We were capable of winning, but didn’t. We were all off of our game and playing harder, but not smarter, to make up for it. All of the seniors were sad because it was their last college game ever and it wasn’t how they wanted to end the season. In the back of my head I knew it was my last game as well. I had been frustrated all season and my heart wasn’t in it anymore. We would do sprints at the end of each soccer practice and I would rock them because I was so annoyed with everything and then I would pick up my bag and walk to the very north end of the athletic fields where the rugby team practiced and I would watch from the sidelines, cheering when there was a good play and instructing when there was confusion. After practice I would join the circle of ruggers and we’d all sing: “Rugby women are the biggest and the best, ‘cause we never need a break and we never take a rest, and we set a better ruck, and we give a better fuck, and when it comes to rugby we never get enough. Out on the pitches, out in the scrum, rugby women will make you come. We’ll build mauls, kick balls, score on you, and when it comes to tries, we’ll take two, three, four, sixty-nine.” On game days I would get back from soccer and find the rugby girls drunk and sprawled in my yard, handing me their beers so I could catch up, and filling me in on their game and the social that was held after where both teams got together and drank and sang. Even though I hadn’t decided yet that I wasn’t going to play soccer after my junior year, I knew. I came out of that last game biting my lip, trying to keep it together. My coach brought me aside, thinking I was crying because she had taken me out, or because we lost, or because I had messed up a penalty kick. I just shook my head as she searched for an answer to my sobs. She had never seen me like this. But I didn’t even have it sorted out for myself then. I just knew that soccer wasn’t right for me anymore. It was like moving on from a relationship that you know isn’t working, but you still have so many memories and attachments to. On the bus my best friend, the same one that had stayed after to coach me so many times, held my hand and tried to cheer me up by making jokes. Every time I looked up at her, I just cried harder, hers was the face I was leaving. But I knew she would be fine. I needed rugby. And rugby needed me.

It’s definitely easier to have things be “out of my hands.” Easier to not be the one in charge, not be responsible. But I get bored when things are easy. I don’t see the point. I want it to be raw, messy, real. And that’s rugby too: no pads, no time-outs, no fouls, continuous play. There are rules. You can’t tackle above the shoulders. Passes must be backwards. You can only tackle the person with the ball. You can’t play the ball on the ground. Once a ruck is formed you must drive over the ball in order for it to be playable. There is an order, but the theory of the game is simple. You hold the ball in your hands and run forward in an attempt to place it over the line. You can stiff arm. You can pass. You can kick it ahead. To defend, you tackle. Unlike soccer and basketball that have so many rules about where and how you make contact, in rugby you can never be too aggressive. The players that excel at rugby are the ones that go out full tilt. You can’t hold anything back. You’re going to come off the field muddy and bruised and bleeding. And weightless.

Grandma Dale

[May 2026- My dad gave me several pages of family history written in my Grandma Dale's hand that I have transcribed and interspersed with this story that I wrote in 2006, a year before she passed.]

pictures and captions from a photobook my Aunt Judy put together

     When my dad told my grandma that I was a lesbian, she paused and then said she had always wondered about her Aunt Anna. I’ve only seen Aunt Anna in a small black and white photo, framed in a thick gold oval and resting on Grandma’s bookshelf. Her hair is short and gray and permed. She has a short string of pearls and pursed lips. She doesn’t have the soft roundness or smile to her face of an Aunt who comforts with candies and kindness; her cheekbones cut sharply, her stare is direct and firm. I think she was a schoolteacher, never married, a reader, she owned a canoe. When I picture Grandma as a girl trotting down the block to visit her Aunt Anna, she looks a lot like me running up the driveway or taking the shortcut (that was actually longer) through the woods, stretching my steps to take the stairs up her porch two at a time, knocking on the door and walking in before she had answered, kicking off my shoes, lifting the cookie jar lid more out of habit than hunger, plopping down in the easy chair and surveying the room: the full bookshelf (my books—a series of Raggedy Ann and Andy adventures and later the American Girl books—were on the bottom shelf), flowers freshly cut and centered on the table, empty vases along the top of her cabinet, birds outside her glass doors at the feeder and on the deck where seeds had spilled. We would sit and chat. I would tell her all the ways in which my brother’s had been mean to me, probably exaggerating to get more sympathy. As I sat in her lap and she read aloud, I would poke at the veins that protruded on the top of her hand, trace them and push them together under her skin. Her knuckles were thick with arthritis. She would pause in her reading to comment on how ugly they were, saying that’s what happens when you get old. I look down at my own hands now, squeeze tightly at my wrist until my veins fill and pop a little, imagine her loose pale skin over wiry veins and knotted joints. Those hands: bizarrely strong in the places they are flawed, like scars, thicker and tougher where there was once hardly any protection at all.

my grandma and me

I, Ruth Wilhelmina (Anderson) Dale was born to Ernest Edgar Anderson and Joyce (Mathieu) Anderson in Crary, N. Dakota May 2, 1915.  My father was cashier in his father's bank.  My mother was living at home.  I had one sister, Frances, a year younger, and one brother, Ernest Jr. 3 yrs younger.  We stayed in this quiet little town until my father's bank was closed.  Both grandparents lived nearby--I spent a great deal of time with them and learned much from the Grandmothers, especially.  To this day, I reflect on those experiences.  In 1925 the family moved to Langdon, N. Dakota, where the folks bought and operated a movie theatre.  I graduated in 1932.  I had to remain at home--we were feeling the financial pinch of hard times.  My hopes for college and a teaching career were out.  I agreed to go into nursing.  I started school at Northwestern Hospital Feb 1933 and finished in 1936.  I decided to go into a specialty--x-ray, which I liked very much.  Fortunately I found a good job in the St. Paul Medical Arts Building.  Two years later I met Stan.   

     When Grandma was a girl she wanted to be a schoolteacher like her Aunt Anna. It was the depression and her dad was drunk and then gone. It was her and her sister and her brother and her mom. She did what she needed to do to keep going, found refuge in the bookcases that walled her aunt’s cramped apartment, saved the money she made working at the local movie theatre and babysitting in a bank account that she had opened herself. She was going to be a schoolteacher like Anna. She would wall her apartment in books like Anna. She would get out, get away from her mom and sister who pretended as if things hadn’t changed, who bought new clothes and dainty shoes that were too small. She couldn’t leave them completely like her dad had. She was still subject to their pleas, they were still her family, but she knew she was better. She was like Anna. She finished high school and went to collect the money she had been saving, dreaming of college and escape; instead she found that the account was empty. That was when she learned how her mother and sister had been able to keep pretending. It was needed to get by, her mother responded nonchalantly when confronted. It was used for the family. How else could they do it with their father gone? What does she need school for anyway? A husband is what you need. And you won’t get a husband looking like that, that’s for sure. I’m just looking out for you. I am your mother remember.

Actually, My mother was hoping I wouldn't marry.  

     Grandma signed up for nurses training. It didn’t cost anything, as long as she committed to work. She didn’t particularly like taking care of people, but she was good at it, practiced at it, she’d done it most of her life, and it was the closest she could get to independence. She left home and lived in the dorms in the attic of the Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, practiced sticking needles in oranges, worked as an aid, changed sheets and bed pans, and handed out little paper cups of pills. Every morning she would get up early to swim. In the summer some of the other girls would come down with her to the river, they would all pile in a cab and split the fare. In the fall and spring the other girls complained the water was too cold, and Grandma would get up earlier and walk. In the winter she went to the Y. She liked swimming she told me. She laughed when she described her suit, one piece and rubber.

Stanford William Dale was born to John Ingvald Dale and Lily (Overby) Dale in Blair, Wisconsin March 26, 1911.  His father was a butter-maker--his mother, a country school-teacher.  They moved to Mindoro, WI for awhile and then to Wanamingo, MN, where [Stan] grew up and finished High School, as Valedictorian.  He was an avid sportsman--participating and as a spectator.  He attended Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.  These were "hard times--depression years."  There were 10 children in his family.  Needless to say, his schooling did not continue.  This was a disappointment.  He liked writing and reading--was gifted in both.  There were some years of "drifting"--working in Rochester, MN as a bread salesman and later moving to Mpls to locate work.  He was with Rap-in wax in SE Mpls when we met.  We decided to marry, in spite of the times--so eloped to Northwood, Iowa--a popular place (not far away and could be taken care of quietly) Not much money and my mother was hoping I wouldn't marry

 
     She married and raised four kids. My dad was the third.  His older siblings, Judy and Stanford Jr. (who they called Bill) were born while they were living in Minneapolis.  

March 30th 1946 about 1pm Richard was born to the proud, pleased parents--Stanford W and Ruth (Anderson) Dale.  This event took place in People's Hospital, Akron Ohio.  I had a very easy pregnancy and birth.  We came home in an ambulance (being done there at the time).  A beautiful spring day--the attendants drove by a magnolia tree (100 years old & huge) in full bloom--they were so kind in granting my request.  Rick weighed 8# 9oz--so pretty, I had to be careful how I dressed him--people would mistake him for a girl.  He was a very happy, bubbly--"noisy" youngster--very generous and always willing to share.  That first summer we drove back to Mpls, the car broke down many times and it was a rough trip both ways.  The children were so good through it all.  Our visit went well and it was rewarding to see family and old friends again.  Rick was baptized at Forrest Lake--2 1/2 months old.  The Fall of 1947 we returned to Minnesota and lived with Grampa & Gramma Dale in Forest Lake until we could establish ourselves again.  They were special people it was a good experience living with them and sharing. 

 

The summer of 1948 we moved to Marshall, MN.  Stan was an insurance salesman for Hardware Mutuals.  Two years later we returned to Mpls.  We shared "Nana's house"--she lived with us again.  Stan was out in the territory as sales manager.  1950 now and Brian (Ernest) was born July 17th, about four weeks after our move.  Gramma [Eliza] Mathieu spent this winter with us too.  I returned to part time nursing--encouraged by Mil, my sister-in-law.

     She kept nursing, picking up night shifts and putting away the money she earned. Checking it weekly to make sure it was still all there. She put all four of her kids through college, starting with Judy, the eldest and only girl, who became a schoolteacher.  When dad was a kid they moved a lot.  Grandpa would get a new job or lose the one he had and they would up and leave, always in the middle of the year and always to the protests of Grandma and the kids. After one particularly bad period when they moved three times in two years, Grandma finally said no, that he could leave but that they were not leaving with him.

My Dad, Aunt Judy, and Uncles Brian and Bill in Bemidji

Richard started school in Mpls at Folwell--he thoroughly enjoyed it--very outgoing--liked people. 1952 Nov 11th we moved again--to Bemidji.  The moves were hard to adjust to, in school and community.  We found a good family house close to schools, town, and church.  We all became involved and loved the town.  Rick fit into the school and found neighborhood friends immediately--the Byrnes & Skinners! He loved the Cub Scouts and later Boy Scouts--very fortunate to have fine leaders in the program.  A sad day when we left and moved to Park Rapids.  Rick found friends wherever we went.  Soon we left again for Alexandria and were on our way to Willmar in less than a year.  By now, Rick was starting Jr. High--he fit in well with his many new found friends--many have been lifelong.  He finished High School with many honors too.  He was very active in Explorer Scouts and went on to become an Eagle--was busy in church and community affairs too.  He went to college in Decorah, Iowa, spent a year at Hothorpe Hall in England--continued on at Luther Seminary--decided not to go into the ministry--worked with PCYC, met Janet Heist--they were married Dec 31st 1970.

     I never met my Grandpa Dale. He died of a heart attack, soon after my parents wedding. After the kids had grown and Grandpa had passed, my Grandma started traveling. She went to Europe and Australia. She gardened, she read, she owned a camper van. When my parents bought our farm in Bayfield and built their house (before I was born), she had hers built just up the driveway, tucked away in the woods. She woke up early and did her stretching exercises, made coffee, and visited with my dad before he started his day working between the blueberry rows. Sometimes, I would wake up early and run up the driveway and join them. This is how I know her: in a house walled with books, alone but not lonely.

Aunt Judy and cousin Gretchen (Bill's daughter) visiting us at the farm

     It has been this way for as long as I can remember—a constant. The garden has fewer and fewer annuals each year, the cookie jar is more often filled with cookies bought at the store, conversation becomes more disjointed, but she is still always there in her house with her books and her vases and her birds and her strong knobby hands gripping her coffee cup. I pick a book up off of her coffee table and ask her how it is. She wrinkles her nose, oh that’s just something light that Judy sent me, it’s okay, and she goes on to tell me about how much she really likes reading biographies and how she read this great biography on Truman, and what a good president he was, what a good person really, down to earth and honest. We talk about this book every time I visit.
     This is the memory I keep anyway, because really I know that she has since had to move out of her house into assisted living and then into the nursing home. Her house is still there, just up the driveway from my parents, and the cookie jar, but they are empty now. In her room at the nursing home, the framed picture of Aunt Anna is propped on her dresser, next to a vase of fresh flowers. She is ready to die. She has been ready for awhile. She is content to live each day and go when she is supposed to. I am surprised, and not, with each day that she keeps on living. When I go to visit her and the confused look on her face doesn’t match the confident look I remember, I worry she’s not even really there anymore, that she doesn’t know who I am, or what’s going on at all, but then she squeezes my hand, those same firm fingers gripping my own, and she smiles. She asks me how I am. Her face is blank as I respond, telling her about Chicago and work and rugby. I know there is nowhere for her to store new information any more. It won’t be kept straight. She won’t remember. But then so clearly, so confidently she looks at me, and tells me I’ve done well, I’m doing well, I will do well. I don’t remember the exact tense and really it seems as if all three tenses were used and implied at once, that I’ve got it together, always have and always will, that she is confident in that, that I have that strength, that she continues to pass it on to me as she presses my palm in her own.

* * * *

Now to go back and put down a few facts on the family tree and experiences as I remember--was told--and read...

[My dad,] Ernest Edgar Anderson was born June 1, 1892 in Decorah, Iowa to Edgar Anderson and Anna (Hartwick) Anderson.  He had one older sister, Lorine--one half-sister, Anna, and two half brothers, Howard and Norman.  (Grampa married Helene Egge from Decorah in 1902, four years after his first wife died.) Edgar was teaching school in Texas where he met his first wife, who was a nurse from Germany.  She was caring for the sick and wounded near the Rio Grande.  They married and settled in Decorah where he worked on the local paper.  Later they moved to Crary, N. Dakota.  Grampa homesteaded land, practiced law and went into the banking business.  He had three brothers that I knew--a lawyer in Devils Lake, ND, a farmer in Decorah [Oscar], and the third lived in International Falls, MN.  [According to their dad's obituary, there were nine siblings total and three ended up in Seattle.]  Grandpa also ran a printing press and gardened--as I remember he was into many "things."  His family comes from Norway--(Father Erick 1827-1906 & Mother Lorine 1833-76--buried in Decorah) I was told that my Dad's mother was kept busy caring for others--often doing the work of a doctor, traveling by horse & buggy.  She was very highly regarded.  Unfortunately, she neglected to care for herself and developed cancer from injuries at the time my father was born.  She died when he was only six.  Four years later 1902 [Grampa] married the Gramma I knew and loved.  Dad and his sister spent a lot of time in boarding schools--namely Shattuck at Faribault and St. Mary's.  Aunt Rina (Lorine) rebelled and married at 15--she later left her husband to return home.  Her second marriage to Jay Johnson--a banker and later, insurance salesman--went well.  They moved to Pennsylvania in the 1920s.  Dad was sent to business school in preparation to going into the bank with Grampa.  He was musical--played the coronet and string instruments well.  He also ran a small "Opera House" where local talent and silent movies were shown.  He met my mother and they were married in her home in 1914.  They had three children--I'm the oldest, a year later my sister Frances, and two more years my brother Ernest Jr.  Grampa Anderson died at the age of 75 after several strokes.  Gramma then took time to have some long overdue surgery for breast cancer.  I was in nursing school at the time and was able to spend some time with her--a wonderful, patient woman.  She had cared for her own mother many years before marrying.  There was a remission and she lived to be 80.  Both she and Grampa are buried in the Crary Cemetery.  The first wife is buried in Decorah--the Washington Prairie Church Cemetery--my father's "ashes" are buried at the foot of his mother's grave.  

I have to talk about Anna--Dad's half sister--she was an important person in my life.  I knew her very well and loved her very much.  She was fun to be around--intelligent, sensitive to others' feelings and had a keen sense of humor (my father too, had this trait).  Anna took a two years leave of absence from teaching in Minot High School, so she could be with Gramma in Crary.  She was able to teach in Crary the first year.  It was difficult for them--both proud and independent--determined to have it as Gramma wished to the very end.  Anna, too had developed breast cancer--both breasts removed and later she died of metastasis of the bone and elsewhere.  She was traveling in Norway when her hip broke--we managed to get her home, which was Decorah--she had retired one year earlier.  She died Dec 18th 1969 and is buried in Washington Prairie Church Cemetery.  She is one who gave so much to so many.  She loved life and people.  

Returning to my father, he was ill, but we didn't recognize it as such.  Alcohol was "consuming" him--no one seemed to know how to deal with it.  He spent times in Jamestown, ND, supposedly to "dry-out." In 1938 he received money from an old family friend and headed west alone.  Early in 1939 we received a telephone call from Mpls paper--he had taken his own life in Seattle, WA.  There was an Uncle and Aunt living there--I think he tried to get in touch.  Mother later went to Wash--had his body cremated and buried in Decorah.  My sister Frances died of cancer 1979.  My brother Ernest has married and is in California.  Frances [married Pete, a milkman in Minneapolis and] had 4 children [Steven, Howard, Bruce, and Lois].  Ernest had 3 [Dennis, David, and Joyce--their mother is Elza.  She remarried a man Heine after Ernest left for California.  Dad shared memories of these cousins with me on Saturday, but he couldn't remember Joyce's name until this morning.  He called when it came to him and told me about the summer Joyce lived with his family.  She and Brian were close in age and went to swimming lessons together.  Later she worked for the Guthrie theater styling wigs and costumes.] 

I started immersing myself in these new found pages of history from my grandma last week and the first night was dreaming a lot.  Like many dreams I remember, I'm organizing others, looking for something, maybe something nice or of significance happens in the midst of this.  That night in my dream I asked a new acquaintance, a charming man in touch with his feminine side if he would go boil water for tea, he said his friend would do it, that she liked to, and then kissed me near my lips without asking permission jolting me to the present for that moment...then I'm leaving them and searching again for my room and my bag where I packed the teabags for myself and others and come into a room with lots of mattresses and beds already claimed.  I'm sorting through the mattresses, some are stained and damp, but they don't smell.  I set one aside as a possibility, but then find a bed with double sheets and double blankets.  Just as I'm thinking it's okay to claim this one, my dad comes in the room, and I quickly offer the bed to him, separating the sheets and blankets so that we'll have at least one of each.  

I'm shedding the dream as I walk the next morning and also thinking of my Grandma, of her relationship with her mom, imagining a girl, the eldest of her siblings, stepping into her father's absence.  He taught her to drive before he was gone.  Her mother Joyce never learned.  Nana didn't want her eldest daughter to be a woman like I wrote in 2006.  She had Frances for that.  She wanted a co-parent--someone to drive the car, to keep the kids in line, to pick up the pieces of their fractured life.  

Joyce Mathieu Anderson Victor was born April 10, 1894 in Verdon, SD to Francis Mathieu and Eliza Perrin Mathieu.  They had nine children.  Ruth the first child died in infancy--Joyce was second. Grandpa was in the General Mercantile business with a brother.  They came from Alsace-Lorraine France.  Grandma's family was from England--Stradford on the Avon.  [From my ancestry research I'm thinking this may be a romantic version handed-down of a more complicated truth that was harder to imagine for a generation removed and before we had what we have now for researching and organizing the many lines of ancestors.]  She was 5 when they came to Canada and into the U.S.  Her mother died of childbirth (twins) and was buried with the infants.  Her mother's maiden name was Mary Ann Griffin.  Grandpa Perrin homesteaded in S. Dakota.  Aunt Em was the oldest child (13, I believe) and helped care for the family in a sad hut on the prairie--living was very hard and meager.  I remember Great Grandpa's farm--he had prospered over the years.  He lived to be about 96--was hoping for 100.  Grandma must have met Francis Mathieu (Frank) somewhere in S. Dakota.  They married--and moved about the Dakotas and Minnesota many times.  It required a boxcar each time for the store and household goods--also a team of horses and other animals--Grandpa rode in the box car--the family by passenger train.  Grandma was a natural-born nurse and always found time to nurse a sick neighbor or relative in addition to her own family responsibilities.  She and Grandpa were excellent gardeners and had ways of preserving their produce for the long winters.  Grandma was an excellent mother (and Grandma)--caring for her family--an excellent cook and homemaker.  I don't know where they found the time nor the energy to accomplish so much.  She was pretty much "self-taught" after the 4th grade.  She was concerned that her children be educated.  One means of raising money was through her singing canary birds.  Her two youngest--Cleo & Burtis received their schooling from the "bird-sales." Olive and Gladys too went to Normal School--one taught--the other went into office work.  I don't know much of Grandpa's family--his brothers and sisters (and seemed there were many) all ever doing well.  Jim Mathieu, a lumber baron in Ft. Francis was reputedly a millionaire--not once but twice.  Grandpa died of a heart attack in 1936 in Elliot, ND.  Boyd the oldest son was tending the store at the time--six months later Cleo, the youngest girl died of childbirth in Oregon--then the same year Boyd was killed in an auto accident.  All this was almost too much for Grandpa.  Byron came home to take over the store.  He married and Grandma gave up the store and her home to him.  She was restless and lost--bouncing from place to place--finally died at 82--buried in Lisbon, ND in the family plot.  My mother was buried between her folks (she was cremated after her death in 1976)--mom's request.  My mother lived at home until she met and married my father.  Dad was in the bank with his father.  They lived in an apartment over the bank--this is where I was born.  Mother was a beautiful young woman and Dad was a handsome young man.  They had many friends in Crary and loved to entertain.  Mother was an excellent cook and seamstress--she enjoyed both.  We were always well dressed--for she could sew garments from most anything available.  She was called on by other members of the family too and she was always glad to help.  It was a struggle for her coping with Dad's drinking problem.  She finally had my brother in a trade school and came to keep house for Frances and me in Mpls.  She had a break down and needed help too.  She continued to live with my husband and me after our marriage.  When we moved to Akron--it was difficult for her to stay with Frances, who really needed her.  In Akron, I received word she had re-married and left for Oregon.  It was not good.  She left and returned to Mpls where she invested in a large house and rented out rooms.  She tried marriage again--which accounts for the name "Victor."  It didn't work out--she left--and spent her time between her children's homes.  She fell--broke her hip--was hospitalized and a long-time convalescing.  We had her in a nursing home in Willmar.  Stan was ill and when he died, Mother was moved to a nursing home closer to my sister Frances.  She was there several years and there she died.  

Dad telling family stories at Grandma's grave to me, Oscar, and my cousins Gretchen and Paul (2024)

During COVID I started reading Resmaa Menakem's book My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies and digging into family history to better understand my family’s traumas and journey.  

When Menakem asks readers (on p. 49) to consider "what traumatic events directly affected your grandparents," I think first of my Grandma Heist--her mother dying when she was four, her father dying when she was seven, and the roughness she endured in the care of her grandmother--then I think of my Grandma Dale and a story she shared with my dad about being beat by her drunk father on Christmas Eve and him eventually leaving his family.  I started to trace the pain inflicted on my grandma back to the pain her father carried.  I calculated the difference between birthdates and death dates and realized for the first time that this man who hurt my grandma was only six when his mother passed away. 

After this discovery, I sent a messy email to extended family, who continue to be spread between the Midwest and West Coast, and who are not generally in regular contact.  I wanted to share what I had realized and attempt to gather and understand more. 

In an email reply, my Aunt Judy wrote, “Mom said that her dad gave his family ‘grief’ after the remarriage of his father, Nils Edgar, to Anna Helene Egge, so he was sent to Shattuck military boarding school.  His sister, Larina married a man named Jay Johnson.  They lived in Harrisburg PA.  Somehow I got to visit them when I was a little girl with Mom?  Nona?  We went by Greyhound bus during the War years, of course, and I remember soldiers sitting on the floor in the aisles because the bus was so crowded.  I shared my comic book with them!”

My dad replied, “Let me tell the story of your Grandma (Ruth) Dale as I remember her telling it to me.”  Abbreviated: “When the depression hit in the 1930s…Grandpa Anderson lost the Bank, the newspaper, and all of his farm businesses.  He and Grandma Anderson were able to hang on to their Crary house and 160 acres of Western Dakota farm land only because Ruth's Grandfather had shrewdly deeded his house and that acreage in his wife's name (a loophole allowed by the laws of that time).  

Ruth's father lost everything, including his job and his future.  He slipped into depression.  All that remained was the motion picture projector.  When the movie theater in Langdon, some distance to the north of Crary, closed, somehow Ruth's parents were able to acquire it--or the use of it--move the family to Langdon and went into the movie theater business. The theater provided a meager living--not what the family had been accustomed to.  Mom and her younger sister worked--sold tickets and ran the concession stand--popcorn mostly.  They didn't get paid, but her mother (Joyce) told them she was depositing their earnings in bank accounts for each of them.  Ruth had a dream of becoming an English teacher.  She loved literature and idolized her Aunt Anna.  She hoped to be able to attend St. Olaf College at Northfield.  During those years after moving to Langdon, it became tradition for the family to travel to Crary to spend the Christmas holiday with Grandma and Grandpa Anderson and the extended family.  These were painful occasions for my mom as a young girl.  An annual pattern established, with her drunken father always ruining the celebration--lashing out at his parents, his siblings, and his wife.

As a young girl, but as the oldest of her siblings, Ruth learned to drive a car at a very early age--and she often drove for the family--because she had to.  Her father might be too drunk to drive.  Her mother had never learned to drive--and any thought of learning to drive terrified her.  The family was on the road headed to the family Christmas gathering in Crary.  Dad was driving--he started out sober--but along the way, despite Prohibition, he knew where he could buy liquor--every alcoholic does.  When he returned to the car it was evident that he had already started drinking and he ordered Ruth to drive.  Her dad continued to drink.  As it grew later, everyone in the car except my mother, who was driving, fell asleep.  Ruth made a decision.  She turned the car around and headed home to Langdon.  She just couldn't bear another Christmas like the last.  As the car bumped over the railroad tracks entering Langdon people in the car began waking up.  Realizing where they were--realizing what Ruth had done--all hell broke loose.  As soon as the car stopped, Ruth grabbed her small suitcase, which had been on the seat between her and her father, and broke for the house.  Her father, mother, and her siblings tumbled out of the car after her.  The kids were upset and crying and Joyce was screaming for her husband not to hurt the child.  Her dad caught up with Ruth at the door and yanked the suitcase from her hand.  Pushing her inside he threw the suitcase at her. When it hit her it opened spewing clothing into the room and knocking down the family Christmas tree.  He grabbed her by her hair and began to repeatedly bang her head against the floor until she lost consciousness.”

Judy: “The story you related concerning the Christmas Eve incident is sad.  Mom did tell me about that… she said that they turned around and went back home to spare the feelings of the elder Andersons. Mom said her dad ripped her dress right off her back; poor girl!  She also said and actually chuckled when she told me that her sister, Frances, ran to the kitchen, got a cast iron skillet, and whacked her dad in the head with it.  Knocked him cold!  According to Mom, that wasn't the first or last time Frances stood up for her sister against bullies.  Mom was always small for her age, and in addition, she was forced to skip a grade in elementary school.  Frances would literally ‘put up her dukes’ and defend Mom on the playground.  Frances was younger than Mom, but she was physically larger in size.

I don't know how old Mom was when her dad left his family; my understanding was that he was still in Crary when the family was running the theater.  Mom did not share all the details with me; in fact, I didn't know until I was an adult when or how her dad died.  (Or for that matter, that her beloved Grandma Anderson was our step grandmother.  Which made a big difference relative to the fact she and Anna both had double mastectomies due to breast cancer!)  Maybe those facts were too sad to share before a significant number of years had passed.

I discovered our grandpa Ernest's death certificate online when I was using Ancestry.com years ago.  He died in the King Hotel in Seattle; hanged himself.  Nona went out by train to recover his ashes.  She buried them at the foot of his mother Anna's grave in Decorah...Washington Prairie Cemetery.  Such a sad story from many perspectives.

My mom's mother, whom we called Nona[/Nana], was Joyce Mathieu.  Her dad was a merchant, and I was told by mom that he would move his store from town to town depending on the expansion of the railroad. The entire stock from the store would be loaded into a boxcar and moved down the track!  G. Grandpa Frank Mathieu was also a postmaster in later years. G. Grandma Eliza Mathieu, Joyce's mom, was a kind of traveling nurse.  I remember her; she celebrated her 80th birthday with us in Minneapolis at Nona's house.  (I turned 81 this year!)

I remember Nona fondly; she was my caregiver until we moved to Akron.  Years ago I found myself wondering how it was that I knew the words to Playmates and Buffalo Girls.  Then I realized that Nona must have sung those songs to me when I was a little girl.  (Dad used to sing big band songs to me!)  

 

Dad: I'm glad you have some warm memories of Nana,  As you can glean by the recollection I sent to Magdalen, I do not.  She was mean to us small boys when we lived in South Minneapolis: lots of corporal punishment, sitting in corners for long periods, forced feeding of distasteful foods (unflavored gelatin, perhaps head cheese) when in her care, keeping Brian as a toddler on a leash and harness staked in the back yard.  Mom told me she never trusted her mother when she cared for us but had to work and had few childcare options.  Life was better in Bemidji when you took over childcare and Nana was not present (although you did force me to eat chocolate fudge once).  My perception of Nana fits with the "Cinderella" role Mom grew up with in relation to Francis--"the pretty one."  Isn't it interesting how memories can be so different shaped by experience and perspective.