“Mom, Mom. Guess what? There’s no school for two weeks and me and Alice are going to a farm next week to pick potatoes,” I crowed. “And, guess what,” I added smugly, “we even get paid,”
“You’re going to do what?” she asked in a voice that showed she did not share my joy.
With my 7th grade, know-it-all intensity in full gear I explained the program again, slowly this time so that even a mere mother could understand the fun and adventure in store for me.
“The potato harvest is in full swing. Every autumn all the farm kids get to stay home to help pick potatoes before the frost hits. That leaves small classes, so this year the administration is going to cancel school during the harvest. It means we’ll have to stay in school later in the spring but we don’t care because we can earn some easy money just by picking potatoes.”
“Honey, that’s hard, backbreaking work. I did it when I was young because I had to do it. It’s terrible. You’ll hate it.”
“Why do you think we work till midnight at the store six days a week?” exclaimed my dad, who was much more upset than my mom. “Do you think we enjoy it? No, it’s to get you kids as far away from that life as possible. We do it so that you and your brothers will never have to go out into a field and work like slaves the way we did.”
“It figures,” I muttered to myself. Parents never want you to have any fun.”
“Okay,” they finally agreed after much pleading on my part. “You can do it. But you’re not going to enjoy it.”
On Monday morning all the high-spirited would-be harvesters boarded a dilapidated farm-bound vehicle and, like proverbial lambs to the slaughter, we headed for the countryside.
“Let’s sing ‘Off we go into the wild blue yonder’,” suggested Helen, and we sang to celebrate our new freedom and the adult status of going to a job, following up with our school’s football victory song and finishing off with a chorus of “Stout Hearted Men.”
“Wow! There’s nothing here but dirt,” moaned Alice when we piled off the bus and stared at fields that stretched as far as the eye could see and beyond.
The young bus driver laughed at us and asked mockingly, “Have any of you guys ever seen a potato in your lives that your mothers didn’t bring home from the grocery store?”
Trying to outdo him in sarcasm, I retorted, “Nope, I have personally had no direct contact with any potato that wasn’t fried, boiled, or baked. But how hard can picking them be?”
“Now pay attention and I’ll tell you which potatoes are worth gathering and which to reject.” The hard-bitten foreman with a weather-beaten face and worn blue overalls looked at his new raw crew dubiously.
“See that windmill across the road? You can pump your drinking water over there. On down that road is an outhouse, where you can do your business. Use the Sears and Roebuck catalogs for paper. You got half an hour to eat your sack lunches under the trees after the dinner bell clangs, and then you get right back to work. Now each of you take one of them there gunnysacks and go to your assigned rows. Two boys to a row. Four girls to a row.”
We didn’t consider that gender bias, an expression we had never heard in those days. It just meant more fun chattering and giggling with our girlfriends as we merrily picked up the potatoes the disc harrow had uncovered only hours before. What a lark!
And it was great fun . . . for about an hour. We tossed potatoes into the bags to the tune of a childhood jumping rope ditty:
One potato, two potato, three potato, four;
Five potato, six potato, seven potato, more!
After a few more games and a couple of jokes, the whining began.
“I’m bored! This is hard work!”
The complaints multiplied along with much grunting and groaning as we took turns dragging the bag, which got heavier with each potato. Twelve-year-old girls, whose most taxing chores had been washing dishes and dusting furniture, were crawling on their knees through rutted fields filled with creepy, crawling things that resented our presence and made their displeasure known through painful stings and bites.
“Look at how much fun the boys are having. It’s easy for them to lift these heavy bags.”
“Just listen to those crows up in the trees cawing at us! They sound like schoolyard bullies taunting us.”
“Can you believe this miserable hot sun? It’s burning my back through this hot shirt! I shouldn’t have worn flannel! I wonder what time it is. Doesn’t it seem like it should be lunch time by now?”
Silence set in as our drops of sweat dripped down on the dusty potatoes, giving them a strange freckled appearance. Worst of all was the ever-present wind of the Nebraska plains. It howled in fury and flung angry handfuls of dust into our soft, unused faces, stinging our eyelids and making our noses run. None of us wore watches, and we hadn’t been taught to tell time by the sun the way farmers do, so we had no way to judge the slowly passing hours.
At last the dinner bell clanged. We dragged our tired bodies to the shade trees where we chug-a-lugged our soda pop in loud, thirsty gulps, and listlessly nibbled at our lunches.
“Here come the boys,” one girl whispered, bringing some sparkle back to our eyes. We pretended to enjoy ourselves as much as they were. One boy caught a small garter snake from an irrigation ditch, and delighted in scaring us with it. He was cute, so we had to act our part as silly girls and scream our heads off when he thrust it in our faces.
“Let’s go down to that rusty pump and fill our empty bottles with water,” said one girl.
“No way,” I protested. “Helen and I have already tried it. It took both of us to pump the handle before a few drops came out and it tasted really strange, like licking a metal post.”
“Here’s your pay!” barked the foreman when the endless day was over at last and he noted our pitiful output. As he handed us our meager pay, he managed to refrain from adding, “And don’t come back!”
We sat in silence on the bus home, with any conversation being more words of complaint: “My back aches.” “My knees are killing me.” “My arms and hands are throbbing so much, I’ll probably never be able to write again.” “My hair is covered with dirt.”
“The dust of the ages,” someone remarked, “probably the same dirt that blew up against the covered wagons that crossed these prairies in olden days. I think our day was just as full of hardship as anything the pioneers had to go through.”
“My goodness,” sympathized my mother as I dragged myself through the door, “just look at your poor chapped lips! They’re covered with sores.” And they were still there when school reconvened two weeks later, muting any pleasure I took in my three-dollar earnings.
To my parents’ credit, they never uttered a single “I told you so.” I’m sure that when my dad saw my closed bedroom door the next morning, he was confident that I was still snoozing away in my soft bed and wouldn’t see the light of day for another hour or two. As
he left for work, though, a satisfied smile must surely have played about his lips.

I came from the typical American family; the kids grew up and moved out of state. So I didn’t grow up around relatives. But the distance from my father’s family was more than physical, it was intentional. Mom once told me that insane asylums were filled with people more sane than my father’s father.

Grandfather could be charming, but he could also be cruel. He was critical of his daughters-in-law and of his grandchildren, and tried to pit one against another. Grandfather told Dad that Mom’s droopy eyelid is a sign of incurable insanity and Dad hadn’t checked his bride out carefully enough. Mom didn’t find that funny.

In school I avoided taking classes in physics because that’s what Grandfather taught at City College of New York.

Grandfather was a miser (a trait that was unfortunately passed down.) Early in her marriage Grandfather berated Mom for spending money he had given her for Christmas, this seemed to be a pattern. Mom found that his objections were limited if his money was spent on something intellectual or for learning, like binoculars and books on identification of on birds, shell, trees. I still travel with a bag full of nature books.

When I was eight years old Dad established a Credit Union. To add needed capital, Grandfather put a chunk of money in an account for me and one for each of my sisters. The interest was to be spent on birthday and Christmas gifts for the rest of our lives. Mom knew better than to spend the money. So on every occasion we wrote Grandfather, “Thank you for the money. I left in the account so it will grow.” How weird is that. I vowed I’d never do that to a kid. It was as bad as Dad making us keep track of every penny we spent. Complaints just brought the story of how everyone in Dad’s Sunday school class made fun one kid who had to keep track of his money. The kid’s name is David Rockefeller. Grandfather was proud that his granddaughters had learned accounting. And, for me that translated into employment in the field.

I saw Grandfather very few times, but Dad flew to visit his father when he was able.

A few years ago friends ‘adopted’ me into their family. On gift giving occasions I’ve watched way too many presents showered on the now 6 year old granddaughter. I think, “Do you suppose I can be like Grandfather and open a bank account for this kid?”

Children’s Birthday Party

“Hey, Akelex! Welcome!” Denise wore a giant smile and a green balloon tied to her belt. “These kids will settle down as soon as they get some lunch. We got two kittens upstairs in our bedroom. I’ll call you when the grown-up lunch is ready.”
Denise and I had been great friends at work until she quit to become a mom. Now we were celebrating the first birthday of her second child and the house was packed with people and kids of all sizes and ages. I glimpsed grandparents in the big easy chairs. Young mothers were clustered in the kitchen or trying to control toddlers or comfort wailers. Three or four kids in party clothes were flying around corners, chasing each other. It was a happy American family scene, I thought, as I deposited my present on a pile of presents and gratefully found the steps to the haven of quietness upstairs.
In this circle of friends I was still kidded for having sincerely and absolutely proclaimed, that kittens were cuter than human babies and that if human babies had fur, they would be much easier to love. I was convinced of that until I was thirty. During the last three of four yours I had begun to see that some human babies did become charming after a few months and in fact, Denise and Ricky’s four year old, Evan, and I had a great rapport. Everyone there calls me Aunt Akelex, the name Evan used for me when he was learning to talk even though by now Evan could say “Alex” perfectly well.
Sure enough, the kittens were playing in a playpen. I sat down on the floor and they were soon tumbling over my legs and falling on their faces. The fact that they didn’t cry displayed yet another superior trait. With their little tails sticking straight up into the air they attacked each other and ran back and forth. Kittens really know how to have fun.
“Hi. Are those your kittens?” a young voice demanded.
“No, they live here with Evan and Samantha. Do you want to hold one?”
“Will it bite me?” She hesitated but then sat down on the floor next to me.
“Well, they do bite and claw but look how little their paws and teeth are—they don’t really hurt very much. Here, try this one.” I plunked the flailing orange kitten into her striped party dress lap and watched as she petted the kitten’s forehead with one finger. She was ten or eleven and a very thin but pleasant looking girl with short dark curly hair. Quite unexpectedly, the kitten curled up in her lap and went to sleep. The other one had found a scrap of tissue paper that it was shredding.
“Does it have a name?” she wondered then added, “my name is Jennifer.”
Jennifer must have felt comfort from that hot little ball of fur in her lap because she relaxed visibly and continued to stroke the tiny forehead with her finger, very slowly, very comfortingly.
“I had a cat once. His name was Paws. But my Dad kept it.” She hardly paused. “I had a baby brother, too, but the babysitter didn’t know he had trouble breathing. She put blankets in his crib and he died.” I stared at her. I hoped my “Oh!” sounded sympathetic because I didn’t know what else to say.
“After that, my parents were always fighting and then they got a divorce.” The words just rolled out of her, expressionlessly, as if she were reciting a shopping list.
“Then my mom married Jake. He was my step dad.” Short pause. “But they got divorced, too. Now I have two ex-dads.”
So many losses in one little life seemed overwhelming. I caught up the other kitten and tried to make it lie down in my lap, too. I looked into Jennifer’s ten-year-old face and saw calm. I felt I had been momentarily pulled into this child’s soul and felt sad for her. Yet here she was, hopefully, a survivor.
“Do you ever visit your cat, Paws, at your dad’s?”
“No, he’s dead, too. He was fifteen so he died. Do you want to go downstairs to the party with me now?”
The change of subject was a surprise but I was ready. I wanted to meet who she had come with and hoped so much that it would be a wonderful, supporting person. We put the kittens, now wide-awake and feisty again, back into the playpen. Jennifer took my hand and we went downstairs. Apparently the kids were eating their hot dogs because the sound level was bearable. I squeezed Jennifer’s hand.
“Oh, boy, food! By the way, my name is Alex but here in this house I’m called Akelex. Who did you come to the party with today?”

The "early bird" class, as I like to call it, had been in session for nearly two weeks, meeting on Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 6:10 a.m. Those who hear about it are usually in shock and awe at the hour but I think those folks just don't thrive on such early morning adventures; the class is uplifting and the students enrolled are usually extraordinary --or maybe I just say that because I'm the instructor.

So here we are, week two, fourth meeting about thirty minutes into the day's activities when the classroom door opens and a sleepy young man in his late teens or early twenties enters. He is African American with a broad smile, though somewhat sheepish, and mid-length dreadlocks.

"May I help you?" I asked.

"I'm in this class." He responded.

"Not any more," I said.

"But you still have seats!" He argued, seeming surprised that I wasn't being more inviting.

"I gave yours away," I said. "After all, it's the second week of class --not to mention that you're 30 minutes late today!"

"So you dropped me?" He asked.

"No. At least not officially, but I dropped you in my head. I have a strict attendance policy and if you miss over three times, for any reason,you won't pass the class. You've already missed three times and do you really think you can get through the next 14 weeks without missing again?"

"Probably not." He said. Then he added, "Can I stay?"

"I'm not sure. Where have you been for the past two weeks?

And this is where he got me. No phony stories. No made-up excuses, no lies, no contrivances. He simply told the truth.

"In bed."

I had to laugh. How could I not like this young man. Having taught college courses for 24 years, I have heard just about every excuse in the book. It is a rare thing to actually hear the truth.

"Okay. Sit down. We'll see how it goes from here, but if you miss again, you're gone. Understand?"

"Understood."

Now you might ask if I think he's going to make it without being absent again in the next 14 weeks. To be honest, I'd have to say, no. But I'm willing to give him a shot because telling the truth ought to be worth something and it did give me a small glimpse into a part of his character, which, I admit, I found quite refreshing.

Autobio. 6
Character

Uncle Herman

Uncle Herman was a farmer. He stayed on the farm where he was born and lived to see it renamed “A Century Farm.” Two years younger than my mother, they played together as kids, riding their ponies Roman style. The tomboy sister and little brother team were risk-takers and dare-devils growing up on an Iowa farm, where they learned that hard work was never something to be feared.

Somewhere along the way, Uncle Herman learned to laugh. He would throw his head back and let out one of those accordion laughs that just kept rolling out of his mouth and bounced around in the air for a long time. He loved to laugh. It became his most endearing quality.

As a child he was known to walk and talk in his sleep. One summer night he rolled out of bed, through an open second story window, picked himself up, walked to the front door and up the stairs where he tossed his body into his bed—all without waking up. He learned of his night-time adventure the next morning from his older brother.
Uncle Herman just laughed and laughed.

After Uncle Herman married my Aunt Doris, they built a new house on the farm. Aunt Doris announced that she would have dinner ready at noon, not a minute before or after. Uncle Herman reacted to this command with, “I’ll be jiggered if I’m gonna let that woman tell me how to run my farm.”

He brought his family to town every Saturday night. Dressed like most of the country folk, he sported a striped cowboy shirt that fit snugly around his expanding middle that hung over an oversized belt buckle. Cowboy boots and slim jeans made the lower half of his body appear a size smaller than the top half. The boots made his body tilt slightly forward when he walked the walk of a farmer—never in a hurry. In the warmer months, his tanned skin looked leathery. His blue eyes and broad forehead went unnoticed because of his Dagwood-style shocks of hair that stood straight up at the temples.

Friendly with everyone, he might start a conversation with, “Howdy, Harve, how ‘r your beans comin’ along? Gonna have a good corn crop this year?”

Uncle Herman liked his meat cooked to a well done state and even beyond. On one occasion in a restaurant his steak came to the table with a small amount of blood oozing from the steak. In sending it back to the kitchen to finish cooking, he summed up the condition of the steak with this line, “I’ve seen cows hurt worse than that, get better.”

One summer afternoon Uncle Herman was driving his Chevy back to his farm with his two kids, ages five and seven. The roller coaster hills throughout the Iowa countryside can cause a tummy tickler at the moment the car tops the hill and begins the descent. “Give us a tummy tickle, Daddy.” the kids said. Topping the hill into the glaring sunset, Uncle Herman’s car was hit head on by another car. His car rolled backwards several times coming to a stop at the bottom of the hill. The two children were thrown from the car. Uncle Herman crawled from the flattened vehicle. Seeing his daughter lying in the ditch, he reassured her and began looking for his son. The little boy’s body was visible, but his head was beneath the overturned car. Uncle Herman immediately lifted the car off of his son’s head and managed to walk to the nearest farmhouse for help. He did this with a broken back. The children had broken bones and concussions. Several months and a lot of miracles later, they all made complete recoveries.

Uncle Herman was very protective of his kids. One night, his advice to his teen-age son was, “Now son, you high-tail it home by midnight, ya’ hear? Almost nothin’ good happens after midnight.”

Uncle Herman loved to ride horses, owned several, and entered every horse race in the area. One year he built a ‘chariot’ with the bottom half of a 55 gallon barrel. He attached a set of old car wheels at each end of an axle beneath the barrel, hitched it up to a team of horses and set out for adventure. He won the ‘chariot races’ at the fair, laughing all the way across the finish line. His laugh could be heard above the cheering spectators. Uncle Herman knew how to have fun. “By golly, I reckon that dad-gummed chariot had ought ‘ta win another race or two. I’m a keepin’ it.”

Uncle Herman and Aunt Doris made the long car journey from Iowa to Southern California several times to see their daughter and grandchildren. To say that they disliked California freeways is the biggest understatement of the year. Uncle Herman’s summary of freeways was, “That’s a huge racetrack out there. Blast it all, I like to see a finish.”

Uncle Herman’s health began to fail in his mid-seventies. His respiratory illness caused alarm for the whole family, especially my mother, his closest sibling and life-long friend. When their oldest granddaughter invited them to her wedding in California, Uncle Herman and Aunt Doris promised they would be there. During their flight to the west coast, Uncle Herman told Aunt Doris that he had an important phone number in his suit pocket. It was the number of the undertaker back home. “Just in case this trip does me in,” he said.

They arrived at their daughter’s home two days before the wedding. Relatives in California were not prepared to see his frail body. He was no longer strong enough to give us one of his endearing laughs. He spent the first night in the hospital emergency room. His coughing could not be controlled. He died early the next morning, the day before his granddaughter’s wedding.

It was time to use the telephone number in his suit pocket.