Saturday's Old Photo

Well, three photos, actually.

Having oldest daughter back with us has reminded me once again that while the rest of us are gentle summer breezes, she is a whirlwind. From the day she was born, she has never stopped moving—unless she was sleeping or reading a book—often leaving chaos behind her. When she’s not here, we settle into a calm routine that suits the rest of us just fine, and when she comes back, we all have to readjust.

When she was a child, as long as she was awake, I couldn’t relax, because, for one thing, at any moment I might need to make a trip to the emergency room. At two, while I showered at my parent’s home, she went out the unlocked screen door and ended up standing in the roadway with a steam roller bearing down on her. That summer, she also rode her tricycle over a two and a half foot rock wall. Somewhere, there is video of her at fifteen, standing on the seat of her bike as it travels across the lawn, then flying headfirst over the handlebars as the bike tire hits a tree root.

There’ve been finger stitches (uneven parallel bars), toe stitches (mini-trampoline and balance beam), several dislocated knee caps and a few pieces of furniture destroyed, but no broken bones until she broke her toe performing that same aerial cartwheel shown above for the wee ones at the children’s home in South Africa.

While in South Africa, by the way, she did the world’s highest commercial bungee jump, amazingly, without incident.

In this photo she’s jumping rope while jumping on the pogo stick. If you could hear her, she might be counting “257, 258, 259…” or something like that as she jumped. Yep, she was always driven to do more and better.

When she was four or five, she and her younger brother rode in the car somewhere with my husband. He told me later that in the course of his conversation with them, he’d said, “If I hadn’t married your mother, she’d be a librarian somewhere.” Without skipping a beat, oldest daughter responded, “Well, if she hadn’t married you, you’d be in jail.”

Which is why I love her even if she sometimes turns my tidy world upside down.

[In one of life’s little ironies, I have recently become the librarian for my church. That explains, in part, why I’ve gone some days with very little or no blogging. I’ve been busy  reorganizing and cataloging.]

Saturday's Old Photo: Better Than Disneyland

That’s what you’d call a big hauler. Don’t ask me for specifics; I think it’s a Caterpillar. [Update: Silly me. I know nothing. The photo above is the kids playing on some miscellaneous piece of mining equipment. Okay, it’s a giant loader.] The littlest guy at the bottom is youngest son; climbing the ladder is youngest daughter; and on the platform are their two cousins and uncle.

[The big hauler is below, and it is, as you can see, Lectra Haul. Unfortunately you can’t see the whole thing because the photo was taken indoors and up close.] At the time this photo was taken, it was the biggest dump truck anywhere except for a few used in Russia, but it has since then been surpassed a few times over by others.

 

Uncle Greg works as a mine electrician for what was, at the time of the photo, the National Steel Pellet mine in Keewatin, Minnesota. Since then, another company’s taken it over, but I know less about that than I do about the truck. All those years when I knew my brother-in-law worked as an electrician at a mine, I didn’t understand that this meant he worked on these trucks. After all, in my experience, electricians wire outlets and change breaker boxes.

On that thrilling evening ten years ago or so, Uncle Greg took us on a tour of the open pit taconite mine where he worked. Not many people get to tour (It takes special arrangements.), so even his own kids were getting their first—and only, I’m betting—tour of their father’s workplace.

What we didn’t know (and neither did Greg) was that his boss and the drivers of those big trucks had planned a surprise for us all. Greg and his visitors got rides in the trucks, two at a time, around to pick up a load and back to dump it.

My husband was more excited than anyone. Kids take experiences like that in stride; so many things are new to them that they can’t distinguish once-in-a-lifetime from just-for-the-first-time. Youngest son was as pleased to be wearing a hard hat as he was to ride in a big dump truck, I’d say.

And the drivers!  There aren’t many men who do what they do and these aren’t the sort of trucks you drive in parades, so they were tickled pink to have someone—anyone—to show off to.

Greg, by the way, is the uncle we all think looks just like Jim Croce. I know you can’t see well enough to judge, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

And the Mesabi Range where Greg’s mine is? It’s important for a few reasons. There is, of course, all that iron ore; but it’s also the place that gave us two other good gifts: Bob Dylan and the Greyhound Bus Line.

Saturday's Old Photo

 
The other blonde girl in this photo is my friend Suzanne. When we were in high school we sang duets occasionally in our little country church. Back in those days, I sang alto to Suzanne’s soprano. Our specialty was an obscure song called Dear Jesus, which, like all obscure songs, has lyrics posted on the web.

We weren’t all that good, but we were told we sounded like sisters, which must mean our voices blended well.

This photo was taken after a wedding in the big Lutheran church in town in 1973. Yes, someone was crazy enough to ask us to sing at their wedding. We were used to singing in front of a small congregation of people we knew, so this gig was a little frightening. We had to sing a couple of song from Fiddler on the Roof that neither of us liked with the guitar guy in the photo. He was the bride’s friend from university and we didn’t meet him until the rehearsal, so I don’t remember much about him, but the back of the photo says his name is Fred. The pianist’s name, it says, is Vicki.

We made our matching dresses for the occasion; or at least, I made mine. Suzanne’s mother was a wonderful seamstress so she never had to learn to sew. 

I always wanted Suzanne’s hair. Hers was nice and straight and silky, and those were the days when very long and very flat was the only acceptable way to wear hair. I had to brush my hair dry—there were no blow dryers or straighteners in the olden days!—to get it as straight as it is in this photo and it still took only a little bit of humidity to make it go—poof!—into something more like my photo in the sidebar, or worse. Some people without naturally straight hair ironed theirs with a clothes iron, but I was too afraid of split ends to go that route.

I still remember the cup of coffee I had at the reception in the church basement after the wedding. It might have been the best cup of my whole life. It was—wouldn’t you know it!—Swedish egg coffee, also known (appropriately, in this case) as Lutheran church basement egg coffee. 

To this day, I love a good cup of black coffee and hate the song Sunrise, Sunset from Fiddler on the Roof. And I’ve made peace with my hair.