An elephant has a very large brain for its size and the ‘temporal lobe’ region responsible for memory is more developed with a greater number of folds – this results in powerful abilities to ‘download’ important survival data, such as who is friend or foe.The ease at which my grandmother could fall asleep in the most random of situations makes me believe she possessed some of these same qualities. I saw her take an Elsie nap at Petermeir’s funeral home. At Jerry’s Jack and Jill. In a chair for sale at the neighbor’s auction. In the back seat of the car while we were being pulled over by the highway patrol. At the kitchen table during a dice game. In the police station in Wisconsin during a snowstorm. In the church basement. In the Herberger’s basement. In her basement, while guests wandered above.
I envied this about her. This trust. This comfort. This certainty of the friendly place. She, having never used a computer, was able to ‘download’ all of this survival data. Knowing where she was safe enough to rest her weary eyes. I write of her again and again, hoping the words bring that same knowledge to all of us.
I suppose it’s always the matriarchs of the herd. They say that during droughts, these grandma elephants lead family members to watering holes by recalling detailed maps they’ve made spanning hundreds of kilometres. I say it’s even more than that. Grandma Elsie is still leading me. I am a country and a lifetime away, and she guides me to the safe places. The resting places. I, we, live a little easier, because of her.
Maybe we were all just as fragile as the sticker we stood behind. This sticker with only three words. But three chosen words could bring us together, couldn’t they? Hadn’t they brought us together so many times? So we wrote three new ones at the moment of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris — Je suis Charlie (I am Charlie). And we marched. We gathered. Together.
Lifted by the scents of the boulangeries, we asked for the same — something new, something fresh. We weren’t just journalists and jokers. Not only French, but humans — humans all over the world. People standing up for the rights to be free, and to be safe in that freedom. Safe to laugh, to create and to grow and to love. So we shuffled from foot to foot, knowing there is never really “safety” in love or creation. Knowing that there’s risk in both. But we lifted signs above our heads and out of our hearts, believing still, the risk was never, is never, meant to be our lives. We had to be secure in the living. Standing next to the ones we loved, and the ones perhaps we’d love to know, we said we were one. We said we were together. We said we were “Charlie.”
I can’t tell you which tragedy happened next. One blurred into the next. And we changed our pictures on Facebook from one flag to another. Vowed our support on Instagram. Shouted our discontent. And changed our banners the following week, and sometimes daily. And it was never enough, and too much for others. So we went back to our smiling selfies, and soon stopped changing our banners altogether.
I don’t want to grow immune to it. To look away at injustice. I don’t want to merely shrug my shoulders and move on. But neither can I, we, carry the weight of it all on our shrugging shoulders. Our weary hearts. Somehow we must keep standing, for and with.
This painting is of that day, that day when we claimed who we were. Standing behind the sticker is Pascal. He is my brother-in-law. Really, he is just my brother. The sticker of “in-law” has long worn off and dropped. Maybe that’s what family is — those who are still there once the stickers have worn off. Once the flags have been changed. And changed again. It is who we really are.
Maybe we need to ask ourselves each day, “Am I a part of this world?”; “Am I a part of the human race?”; “Am I a part of this family?” — look in the mirror, look at those around us, and proudly answer, I am.
It fills today’s square on my mother’s calendar — Phyllis Norton’s birthday. Yesterday my mom told me to send her a message on Facebook. I will, I said. Maybe you should do it today, she suggested. I’ll do it tomorrow, I said. Don’t forget, she said. I won’t forget, I promised.
It seems I, we, have made that promise to this day before. September 11th. We all know where we were 21 years ago. How we felt. The fear. The uncertainty. I was going to pick up an order of frames from Metropolitan Picture Framing. I had a big order to fill. The Minneapolis Streets were almost empty. People were paralyzed. The skies were empty overhead. Do I still get my frames? Do I just keep doing what I’m doing? Did any of it matter? We all had the questions. But this was the life I had promised myself. The life of an artist. Painting. Writing. Creating. I had to keep going. We all had to. And we did feel like a “we” then…didn’t we. Together. We banded together. Vowed to ourselves and the world that this would not break us. Not individually. Not as a nation. No, we vowed to be strong.
And I think we were, for a while. Together. We braced hands on each other’s shoulders to lift us off of our knees of prayer. Shook those same hands and vowed to work together. Clapped those hands together in praise and we did survive. Stronger. And then years went by, as they always do, and hands unlocked. Waving goodbye to all those promises we had made, all those promises that said, if you just get us through this, we will be better, we will never forget. And worse yet, some of those waving hands turned into fists. We started to lose our way, and more importantly, our “we.”
I suppose it is human nature to move on. But we promised to never forget. So how do we keep those big promises – the big promises of a nation to do better, live better, be stronger together? As I look at my mother’s calendar, maybe the answer is, we keep all the little promises. All the little promises we’ve been making since we were young. Be a good girl, my mother told me, as I went off to school. I promise. We promised our teachers to follow the golden rule. We promised our friends that we would be forever. Our neighborhoods that we would watch out for each other. We wrote birthdays on calendars. Anniversaries on cards. We promised to be loyal. To be kind. To be there. For each other.
So this is where it begins. Again. Today. We keep those beautiful little promises. We remember. Each other. Happy Birthday, Phyllis Norton.
I don’t really know how he got his name. Was he always Big Ole? He was to me. He was just always there. Could it be that we were really the birthplace of America? We had the Rhunestone too. Or a copy. We never spoke of it in school, never read of it in books – but there it was – the claim that was so large, Birthplace of America. True or not- everything that happened was on either side of Big Ole. So, it was right in that sense. It was our birthplace. It was all we new of America. Of our dream.
I have a memory of a neighborhood. For it was a neighborhood, you see, we had neighborhoods back then. Do we still? We had houses and people that matched them. Cars that matched the houses and the people. We knew the houses and cars and the people, and the wood, the linoleum, the carpeting, the clotheslines. We knew the jobs, the gardens.
Mrs. Muzik lived next door to the Nortons. She had a daughter. Melody. Say it in your head, Melody Muzik. Mrs. Muzik had the greenest lawn. We all had the same weather, yet it favored her. Her lawn was always freshly cut, thick and luxurious. You weren’t allowed to walk on it. I didn’t want to. Not because my summer bare feet didn’t imagine it to be magical. I didn’t want to because there was no Mr. Muzik. I never asked where he was. I assumed he died. Until my own father left, I had no reason to believe that anyone did, or would. Just knowing that a Mr. Muzik was missing, I remember thinking, but she has this, this green lawn, these perfect flowers. She should have this. This was hers. I didn’t walk on her lawn.
Dyndas lived across the street from them. It was Frank and Sylvia Dynda, with his parents, Grandma and Grandpa Dynda. It was a neighborhood. It felt right to call them Grandma and Grandpa Dynda. It was not too familiar. It was just familiar. Oh how glorious it was to be familiar. To walk in between the sheets that Sylvia had hanging on the line. To let them brush, cool and wet against your sun drenched legs, to walk through the open screen door, to say, hello Grandma, and to get a cookie that she had made, to answer her grandma-like questions, and leave through the same screen door, never worrying of when you would see her again. Nothing was disposable.
Alf drove the oldest pickup in the neighborhood. He might have scared children from a different neighborhood, but I, and maybe we, had thought his name was Elf. An Elf wasn’t scary. An old Elf on Van Dyke Road. He lived next to the Schultz’s and the Weiss’s. The Shultz boys would give us all a good reason to behave. Most of us, under the age of 10, were threatened when rooms were left uncleaned and beds undone, “Do you want to go live with the Shulz boys?” The Weiss family was older than the Nortons, younger than Elf – Alf. They were quiet and reliable. As quiet as the peach that colored their quiet house. Then the Mullens. Maybe it was Carol Mullen that drowned out the sound of the Mr. and Mrs. Weiss. She had the loudest voice for the dinner call. “Patsy!!!! Patsy!!!” She had three children, but I only remember her calling for Patsy. She was the only one to stray I guess.
As I rode my bike further down Van Dyke road, the names became less familiar, but some stood out – The Lords, The Lees, The Vaceks. And how comforting to put a “the” in front of these houses and cars and people. Because they were the families. Each family had cupboards of cereal and single-line telephones and one television and tables and grocery bags from Olson’s super market and we knew them. We knew who and how many and how long and where the baby aspirin was kept, and the color of bikes and the grades in school and the wet hair and the bus… we were part of something, behind Big Ole. We were a neighborhood. We were people listening to “open-line” on the radio, running barefoot, through swinging doors, not just your own, and we were home. That’s what I tried to stuff in my pocket. That’s what I stuffed into both pockets, my lungs, my toes, deep inside my heart, when I rode my bike home from volleyball practice and there was a sold sign in our driveway. My father had walked away. Sold the house. My mother and I would move to the other side of Big Ole. To an apartment. With Van Dyke road still on my shoes.
The Norton girls anchored Van Dyke Road. They were the team leaders – without the five of them – there was no kickball, no kick the can, no softball. They led us each summer night to the empty field next to Dynda’s house, and we played until the sun lay low. And a little longer. Until our parents called us home. And a little longer. They were the gatekeepers of the North End. The last to get on the big yellow school bus. The Tech School student studying law enforcement, who drove the bus, turned us around in their driveway, and brought us back up the gravel road. I don’t think there was a time when all five Norton girls were on the bus together. The driver would open the door and one, two, maybe three would run in with books and wet hair, smelling of shampoo and the fresh air that clung to it. We didn’t take selfies. It would have been absurd to take a picture of someone on the bus and then take the film to Peterson Drug store and wait for a week to see an out-of-focus girl hiding behind her books, with a glazed look of sugared cereal. We didn’t text. We didn’t have Google. We had to be curious. If we wondered who was the actor who played Peter on The Brady Bunch, we had to wait a week until the next episode and watch the credits. We also had mystery. I didn’t know what was in the North End, though my imagination had conjured up many stories of runaways and robbers and other various Nancy Drew cases. I didn’t have the words for it then, but I needed them. The Norton girls. They were pretty and athletic and accessible. They were older and younger and I found myself wedged in the middle. It was familiar, and possible. I can hear the creaks on their staircase. The screams running down their backyard. The running. The biking. The breathless racing of secrets and time. And the bus door would open, with the certainty that one Norton girl would get on board. I needed that. We all did. We needed each other. We needed the lawns and the fields and stories and this building of lives. This neighborhood. We claimed each other. We grew up together. This was the birthplace of our America. Our pockets were full.
Sometimes I stop myself and think, did it all really matter that much? Did it change us to know the wood work, the bed times… and the linoleum? The linoleum. Decades later, at the Atlanta Gift Mart – 7.1 million square feet hosting over 200,000 people, I would run into Melody in the passing crowd. With instant recognition and a calm that only a shared past can contain, I simply said, “Oh, hi Melody,” as if she just got off the bus in front of her house on Van Dyke Road. Did it matter to remember the sound of lawn mowers and cards in bicycle wheels? Decades later, changing in every way, every direction, even moving to another country, I would come home for a visit and Lynn Norton would pass as I climbed a tree over Lake Agnes wearing my mother’s coat. I would see her the next day and she would say, “Didn’t I see you up a tree yesterday?” It did matter. To be known. To be seen. To be held in the arms of 5 girls, an empty lot, an unrelated grandparent, and the swing of a summer screen door — it mattered. It still does.
