Slide 21

The  Slide:  My sister Ingrid

The Date: Early Spring 1964

The Photographer:  My sister Sally

  It is late Saturday morning in my older sister Sally’s bedroom.  Our two-year-old sister Ingrid sits in a tangle of bed covers.  She wears cold weather pajamas—the kind with plastic bottomed feet.  Her left leg is not pulled fully into the PJs so the empty foot, beneath the twisted ankle, dangles comically off the edge of the mattress. Minutes earlier, Sally rinsed Ingrid’s hair and set it in rollers.  Now for the first time she sits inside the inflated helmet of a modern home hair dryer circa 1964.  She cringes in delight as a din of rushing air flows up the corrugated plastic tube covering her head in noisy warmth.  With adoring smiles, the rest of her family gathers in the doorway as her big sister snaps a picture to be enjoyed for years to come.

Nearly half a century later, I study the slide and feel my eyes pulled steadily away from it’s subject to the back left corner of the room. There, a phonograph sits on its own tubular metal cart.  Beneath the phonograph, a wire rack holds a dozen record albums.  I remember them all.  In the picture I can clearly see the smiling face of a very young Steve Lawrence, but in my mind I see the other albums nearly as well.  There are three by Ricky Nelson, two Bobby Vee’s, a Kingston Trio, a Brothers Four, a couple Henry Mancini’s, an album of Ferranti and Teicher piano duets and one other… which was a treasure. 

All but the last one was sent to our home from the Columbia Record Club in Terre Haut, IN.  After much discussion my parents allowed Sally to join the club.  Many other teenagers in our town and presumably across the country were doing the same. Had this not happened we could not have afforded to buy even this small collection.  As I recall, the club worked something like this.  Club members were required to buy a few record albums at full price.  This was the tough part because albums cost over three bucks—a hefty sum for a teenage girl who might only earn seventy-five cents for a day of babysitting.  But here’s where the rules of the club got exciting.  If you bought those first ones at full price, you got the next four hundred for a nickel.  Maybe my numbers are off a bit but it was something along those lines. 

You chose from a huge selection of albums and if you didn’t choose the club chose for you and another record would arrive in a cardboard mailer.  Unfortunately most kids discovered pretty quickly that there weren’t all that many albums they actually wanted.  The Columbia Record Club didn’t care.  The albums kept coming anyway and that explains our Mancini’s and the piano duets.

Steve Lawrence was one artist that Columbia chose for us but he was worth whatever we paid if only for the song “Go Away Little Girl”.  I ignored most of the other cuts that sounded like “grown up” music but that one I listened to hundreds of times carefully placing the needle as close to the beginning as I could and then lifting it off at the end. Eventually I ruined that song and the ones on either side.  I remember every word of the lyrics and often stood before the high closet door mirror, holding my sister’s hairbrush mic and harmonizing a third part to Steve’s lush double tracked vocals.  The end was particularly moving.

 

When you are near me like this

You’re much too hard to resist

So go away little girl

Call it a day little girl

Please go away little girl

Before I beg you to stay

 

I was eleven so the little girl I sang to was probably in the second grade but… what a song! 

During this time my favorite albums were those of Ricky Nelson.  I felt like I knew him personally because my family watched his family on the Ozzie and Harriet show every Saturday evening.  I thought the Nelsons were very normal… much like us.  Ricky was their youngest boy and during his teen years he often closed the shows with a song.  He’d be on a gymnasium stage, strumming his leather-covered acoustic, licking his lips while mouthing his latest hit.  Beautiful pony tailed girls in saddle shoes, poodle skirts and tight cashmere sweaters held their hands to their mouths waiting for him to finish before erupting in cheers.  Jumping and clapping they glanced at their boyfriends as if to ask, “Isn’t Ricky so much more handsome than you? Don’t you love his dreamy voice?” And the boys clapped along as if to answer, “Oh yes we do! Honest we do!”  That’s what they got paid for.

Despite my best efforts to be careful, I destroyed Ricky’s albums.  It was just too easy to inadvertently drop the player’s arm and watch the needle bounce noisily over a new disc of shiny black vinyl.  It was too easy to bump the cart and jump to the screech of the needle scratching a new gutter across five pristine songs.  From then on, each trac had one more annoying crackle per revolution.  When a record was scratched badly enough the needle couldn’t decide which groove to follow.  That’s when I taped a couple lead toy soldiers to the arm hoping the additional weight would hold the needle where it belonged.

Technically all of our albums belonged to Sally.  She was, after all, the Columbia Record Club member. I was just a human being.  My music collection was strictly 45s.  The Five and Dime was the one store in my town that sold music and my friends and I spent a few hours a week there.  The storeowner allowed one of each new 45  to be used as a demo. As long as we behaved ourselves, we were allowed to quietly listen to them all.  They cost eighty-four cents apiece so every few weeks I was able to scrape together enough nickels and pennies to buy one. On a display rack to the left of the 45s were the albums. They were way out of my price range. 

One winter day during my sixth grade year, I walked into the store after school.  A new shipment of records had arrived that afternoon. There on the display rack, from a cover photo, four men stared.  The photo was dramatic, high contrast black and white, with the light source streaming from the left.  Their hair was unusually long and oddly combed straight forward.  They wore high dark turtleneck sweaters and the background was black so their faces were only visible from the eyes down.  Three men made a row across the top. The fourth, (and probably least attractive) nestled beneath the others in the right corner.  I knew who they were. 

Grabbing the album and franticly looking for the Columbia Records logo, I felt my heart sink as I read the word “Capitol”.  I knew I had to have that album and I knew now that it wouldn’t be arriving in a cardboard mailer. 

Fortunately for me, Sally’s birthday was only a few weeks away. It took very little persuasion to convince my mother and father that I knew the perfect gift.  When the big day arrived, Sally sat on our living room sofa and excitedly opened a box that looked to me to be just about the right size.   Both of our faces registered disappointment as beneath the birthday decorated paper we recognized a familiar cardboard mailer. 

“Oh Mom… Dad… thanks,” she said allowing sarcasm to leak into her voice.  “Did you give me my own records for my birthday?”

“Well now Sally,” my mother said, “you need to look closely.”

There were three albums.  The top one was a Perry Como for which neither of us could even fake a smile.  The next was the original Broadway cast recording of  “The Music Man”.  On the bottom my parents had snuck in, “Meet the Beatles”. 

“Oh, thank you!” Sally cheered.

“Let’s go listen!” I said, and with that we ran to her room and closed the door.  She split the cellophane sleeve with her fingernail and removed the shiny record with the rainbow label.  As she placed it over the player’s metal stem, I sat on the bed staring at the picture on the back jacket. The four stood smiling in their collarless grey suits and pointy boots.  They appeared to be very happy guys.  Sally swung the stabilizer bar over the stem and flipped the switch to automatic.  The disc dropped on to the turntable. The arm lifted, moved over the edge of the record and then lowered with a soft rumble onto the vinyl—four bars of joyous guitar and a voice began.

 

Oh yeah I’ll tell you something

I think you’ll understand

When I say that something

I want to hold your hand

I want to hold your ha aa aa aa and

I want to hold your hand

 

We sat motionless, taking in every sound and at the end both of us laughed out loud.  Just for the joy it—we laughed.  Four more bars,  the same guitars and the voice continued.

 

Well she was just seventeen

If you know what I mean

 

Well, to be honest I didn’t know what he meant. I’m still not sure I know what he meant though I suspect he meant that she could have been just thirteen or just fourteen, fifteen, sixteen or nineteen but the syllables would not have fit nearly as well… if you know what I mean. But it didn’t matter because I was caught up in the most joyous sound I ever heard.  I would be wasting words to explain the effect the Beatles had on my generation.  Too many have done so and besides, the whole world knows it’s true.  But I will share one extreme example.

In August of ’65, two girls from my school—one from my class and her older friend—talked their parents into driving them to Toronto to see the Beatles at Maple Leaf Gardens.  This was in itself an amazing thing.  Toronto was over five hours away not to mention in a foreign land. But somehow they got their parents to agree.  A couple days later I rode my bike to the Tastee Freeze and saw her seated at a picnic table surrounded by a gaggle of friends.  She excitedly shared her experience, speaking oddly in a Liverpool accent.

“It was the coolest thing evah!” she said.  “Everyone was screamin' and cryin' and one bird passed out clean away.“

“One what?” I said.

“Bird,” she said. “That means 'girl'. The bird just fell plumb ovah and the bobbies came and auled her away.”

“The bobbies?” I said.

“Yeah the bobbies… the constables.” She looked at me with exasperation. “The POLICEMEN,” she said.  Perhaps a dozen of us stared as her accent thickened with each phrase.

“Why are you talking like that?” I said.

“Like whuh?”

“Like that,” I said.  “Why are you trying to sound like you’re from England?”

“I’m naw,” she said. “I’ve always talked ligh giss.”

“No you haven’t,” I said.  “Why are you doing it?”

“I doan ave to ansah yo questions,” she said, “and besides, why are you gettin' yo knickahs in a knot?

“My what!” I said.

“ Ooo ahh you to criticize ow I speak?” she said, “I’ll speak anyway Oi bloody well please.”

And she did.  I swear—she and her friend spoke that way for two full years.  A few weeks later, when we began the eighth grade, some of our teachers were not happy about the accent but decided to ignore it hoping it would go away.  Eventually it did though upon graduation five years later she was still the only person in our part of Pennsylvania who pronounced the word "either" with a long “i”.

Now, nearly half a century later, I stare at my little sister sitting on the bed.  The kind of hairdryer she enjoys would only be sold a few more years before the design gave way to a better idea. Some ideas, like The Beatles, would last longer than most could imagine. They would even change the world. That’s the thing about ideas.  You never know what they might lead to. 

 Sally and I listened to the album clear through and then we listened to it again.  In fact, for many months, I listened to little else.  Later, Steve Lawrence, Perry Como and Henry Mancini were replaced by The Association, The Beach Boys and Peter Paul and Mary.  I loved them all.  I loved all the music.   But more importantly, I loved the idea that there were people who could make a living by writing and performing. That idea transformed my life.

Slides 12, 56 and 57

The Slide: A family on a highway

The Date:  Around 1970

The Photographer:  Unknown

 The picture was taken from our car’s passenger side window.  The subject of the photo is a young American family—father, mother and toddler—off for a motorcycle ride on a summer day.   The father wears a white t-shirt and long cotton trousers—the mother, shorts and a sleeveless blouse.  The toddler, a little boy, wears a one-piece sun suit and is sitting in a child’s travel seat behind his mom.  The seat is strapped onto the bike’s luggage rack above the back fender. A small sneakered foot dangles close to the rear tire.  The father is driving fast and the woman’s hair flies in the wind.  None of them are wearing helmets.  I’m guessing they didn’t bother with the sunscreen either. They’re off for the afternoon and having fun.

Today the parents would be prosecuted for child endangerment. It’s hard to look at the photo without shuttering. It’s hard to imagine that in 1970 we thought this photo was cute but that’s because… well… things were different then. 

Safety was not a cultural priority.   I suppose the farm kids learned about the importance of being careful.  They were probably taught to keep their heads out of the hay bailer—maybe told to stop pullin’ on the bull’s nose ring—but we didn’t get many of those warnings in town.  I do remember it was important to wait an hour after lunch before swimming.  Observing this summertime discipline was important in preventing death.  Sure, we missed the best pool hour of the day but we all survived.

I also remember a catchy safety jingle that filled our airwaves for nearly a decade. 

 Buckle up for safety

Buckle up

Buckle up for safety

Always buckle up.

 It was a nice little ditty—a wonderful safety campaign—which would have been far more effective had they, in those days, sold cars with seat belts.   In the late sixties my father bought a new Ford Tempest and that car had belts in the front but one of the buckles fell off and got stuck beneath the seat.  We tried for a few days to get it out and then gave up.  It wasn’t much good with only one side to the buckle so we tucked the belts under the seat too.  It wasn’t a great loss.  It’s not like we would have ever worn them.   They seemed unnecessary.  After all, these were the days when, if I fought in the car with my sister, my father sent me to the back window for a time out.  I liked it up there lying in the solar heat. It was especially nice in the late autumn.  Sometimes on short rides around town my father let me sit on his lap and steer—and more than a few times, just for fun, he’d let my sister and me ride in the trunk. These were the same years my wife’s family vacationed with all five kids laid out playing games on the back deck of the station wagon.  They probably didn’t even lock the doors.  Safety wasn’t a big deal back then.  

It was a different world in which we could not have imagined the culture of today.  For example, restaurants were places you ate next to tables full of chain smokers. The smoke was so thick you couldn’t see the menu.  Nor could you taste the food.  Oddly, I don’t ever recall anyone complaining. It was part of the culinary experience.  And of course it was worse on airplanes. Back then, as now, I flew nearly every week. On many flights I was the only one who didn’t smoke.  I swear, in the bigger planes, from the front you could not see the back rows.  You found your seat by following the tract lighting on the floor.  This is nearly unimaginable now in a day when the entire country of Ireland has gone smokeless. 

It’s as if safety consciousness had not yet evolved.  Coffee cups did not display warnings that the coffee might be hot.  Everyone figured it probably was.  The manufacturer of Super Glue did not warn us to keep the drops out of our eyes.  Most of us never felt the urge.  Frankly other warnings from Super Glue might have been more helpful. I could have used one that said, “Not for use in practical jokes involving toilet seats.”  Though even in this case my classmate survived and is nearly scar free which proves again that time heals all wounds.

Still, when I look at the picture of the motorcycle family I cringe.  The parents are smiling as if they can’t imagine that anything could go wrong.  I ask myself, "What’s the matter with these people?  Are they that stupid?" Of course the answer is… Yes!  But so are we all.  Honest parents with even a few short years of experience know how foolish they can be.  And most of us looking back recognize how foolish, at times, our own parents were.  That being said, is it not a great a marvelous wonder that any of us are still alive? 

I first understood this truth about my own father when I was fourteen.  Until then, I’d always seen him as the intelligent, loving dad that he was.  But that changed during Christmas vacation. My cousins from California were coming with their parents for the holiday.  This family was, as we used to say, pretty well off.  They lived in the hills above Oakland in a big home with lush beautiful landscaping.  Our whole house would have fit in their living room.   I’d spent the entire previous summer with them and now nervously anticipated their visit.  They planned to stay for nearly a week and I was concerned that we wouldn’t have enough to do.   This is the family that took me to the beach in Santa Cruz where we killed entire days at the amusement park on the boardwalk.  We visited Yosemite, Monterey, Carmel, and Disneyland.   We drove over to San Francisco one night where we ate in China Town and then saw Yul Brynner  in The King and I.  Several times we watched the Giants play through the fog at Candlestick Park.  These people had given me the biggest adventures of my life. Now they were coming to my home in rural Pennsylvania and I was concerned that they’d be bored. 

At first it seemed my worries were unfounded.  I’d not considered that they’d spent almost no time in snow—and snow was something we had lots of to enjoy.  For a couple days we played snow football in the front yard, did some sledding on the hill behind our house and had a few good snowball fights.  Then we began looking for something more exciting. Fortunately, I had an idea.

A couple summers earlier one of my buddies, who lived by the river, found a big rectangular piece of floating Styrofoam caught in the branches of fallen tree.  We hauled it to his house and sawed angles in the front creating a boat shape. Then we hollowed it out and hauled it back down to the river where we spent many summer days just floating around.   At the end of August we talked our parents into allowing us to take an entire day just to see how far we could float down river.  As it turned out the river was very low that summer. We had to get out and let the boat float by itself most of the way but that evening the odometer in the car said we traveled about five miles.  Of course, we’d floated much further because the river always takes the long way around.

Now a year and a half later I worked in the backyard with my cousins shoveling two feet of snow off the frozen Styrofoam.  Peter, who was a year younger than me and a little over weight looked concerned, “So you’re telling me this will float. Right?” he said.

“Sure it’ll float,” I said.  “That’s not the problem. The problem is getting our folks to let us do this.”

My older cousin Tom looked inside the boat. “ You know,” he said, “I don’t think I can fit in there.” At nearly 6’5’’ Tom had reason to wonder.

“You’ll fit,” I said.  “You can sit on the back ledge if you have to.  Pete can sit in the middle and I’ll paddle on my knees up front. What do say?  Shall we ask them?” They agreed and we headed inside.

I knew it wasn’t a good idea.  That’s the reason I’d brought it up—it sounded adventuresome.  It sounded perilous which put me in a good light with my cousins but I’d only suggested it knowing we wouldn’t be allowed. The river is dangerous in the winter.  It is not only deeper and flowing more swiftly but ice encroaches from both banks—the water is swirling in places and, needless to say, it’s cold. I knew we weren’t going anywhere.

Our folks were all in the kitchen putting Christmas leftovers on the table. “Hey Dad,” I said as nonchalantly as possible, “we just shoveled off my Styrofoam boat and I was thinking we could take it up the river and then we could float back toward town and you could pick us up at the Mill Street bridge. Would that be okay?”

“Sure,” he said.  “Let’s have some lunch first.”

Pete and Tom let out a, "Woo hoo!"

“Okay you guys,” my mother said, “who would like the last spoon of the corn pudding?”

  I couldn’t believe what I’d heard.  But he said it.  He said, “Sure. Let’s have some lunch first.”  So we did.  Then we went out and hauled the hunk onto the top of our car and twined it down.  We drove a couple miles up Route 6 to a place where the river almost joins the highway and pulled over.  It was two in the afternoon and getting very cold. We cut the boat off the car, slid it down the bank and crawled in.  Tom was right.  He didn’t fit.  But the boat floated and we started down stream. 

“We’ll see you at the bridge in an hour,” my dad shouted.  Then he snapped a couple pictures, hopped in the car and drove off. We sang the theme song from Gilligan’s Island. 

That was the highlight of our trip.

The photographic evidence is clear.  We could have been killed.  We didn’t even have life preservers.  We couldn’t move in the tiny space—didn’t dare move for fear of tipping and our bodies were freezing.  The river is particularly circuitous in that stretch meaning it didn’t take us an hour.  It took us three hours and by the end it was starting to get dark. Before we could see them, from far off, we heard our fathers. They were shouting our names.  There was a sound of desperation in their voices.  When we shouted back they responded joyously as if they knew they had done something foolish. A few minutes later we floated around a bend and saw them where they'd been waiting for a long time.  My father snapped a picture. 

We crawled onto the bank beneath the bridge, miserable, unable to feel our hands and feet. We scrabbled awkwardly up the steep grade to the warmth of the car.  I was not happy with my father but didn’t want my cousins to think any of the experience was other than normal. My father opened the car door and said, “Do you want me to try to pull the boat up the bank?”  I didn’t hesitate.

“Leave it,” I said. 

Later that spring the high waters washed it away.

My father’s actions were the winter equivalent of putting the toddler on the motorcycle.  Every parent is guilty of the same.  Some parents are more cautious than others but the very nature of parenting—twenty-four hours a day, day after day, year after year—insures that mom and dad will make some terrible mistakes. The old adage, “Accidents will happen”  is closer to a law of nature than we would like to think. Serious accidents will be carefully avoided for years and then someone will say, “Hey Honey, do you suppose that car seat would fit on the back of my Honda?”  Or, “Hey Dad, we just shoveled off the Styrofoam boat and I was thinking….” At those times one can only pray to God as my father did standing on that cold bridge. At those times one can only pray that everyone will be okay. Of course some people don’t believe in God so even that option is off the table.   I’m guessing most of them are not yet parents.  

 

Slides 61, 34, 87 and 75

The Slides: Bernt Goran and me

The Date: Summer 1975

The Photographer: My wife Judy

Recently I received an encouraging e-mail commenting on a piece I’d written. The e-mail said, “This… is… genius!!” Reviews like this are not common but it’s not the first time my name has been connected to the word “genius”. It is, however, the first time I received such a comment and read it more than once. It is the first time that I called to my wife shouting, “Hey Honey, come here for a sec. I want to read you something.” The reason I was encouraged, and yes a little inflated, is because I respect the person who sent the message. This is not always the case.

Recently an audience member approached following a performance. “That was pure genius!” he said. I would have been more impressed had his next sentence not been, “Dude you rocked!” The boy was thirteen. He had mustard on his glasses and his belt buckled just beneath his butt. It was clear to me that he wouldn’t know “pure genius” if it crawled out of his cotton boxers.

Sometimes the word “genius” is misused as a superlative to communicate appreciation. Many words are misused this way. Take the word “brilliant” for example. I had the opportunity to work for the better part of a year in a Dublin theater. I was so impressed the first week to have patrons say, “You were brilliant! Just brilliant!” This was very encouraging. I’d been called many nice things but never had I heard the word “brilliant”. It took a couple weeks for me to understand that “brilliant” is used commonly in Ireland. It can mean anything from “pretty good” to “better than okay”. I once asked a waitress, “Are the baked beans in your traditional Irish breakfast of the canned variety or are they freshly prepared?”

She remarked, “Oh… em… well they do come from a can but our chef prepares them quite brilliantly.” Which is to say, my performances in Ireland were about on par with canned pork and beans.

Last week though, I received the e-mail and it said, “This… is… genius!!” I respect the woman who wrote it. I appreciate the comment. I too think it was a good piece, maybe even “brilliant”. But “genius”? Probably not, and I’m okay with that. I think “genius” is highly over rated.

As a child, I knew that some of my classmates were a little smarter than I. Actually I knew that many of them… okay most of them were. I even suspected that a few might be geniuses. They were the kids who never had to study and yet they got straight A’s. I remember one girl in particular. Her name was Andrea. She always finished her tests with half our class time to spare. I would have just completed signing my paper and figuring out the date… maybe I’d scanned down to see if there were any easy questions. She’d be done. Then she’d file her nails while casually glancing over at my paper and smiling.

Was she a genius? I don’t know. Maybe. There was no way to know for sure because “genius” had to do with IQ scores and those were unavailable to us. Supposedly we’d all been tested at some time and somewhere in a dark office, probably underground, someone guarded a file full of IQs. But we were never to see them… ever! That was fine with me because I didn’t remember taking the test which meant I’d probably only signed my name and scanned for the easy ones before the bell rang. Best we leave the IQ file closed.

Honestly, I don’t think there were many geniuses among us. If there were we probably wouldn’t have known it. There was one boy in my sister’s class who we all thought of as the dummy. That’s saying something because even though I was three years his junior, I thought he was stupid. He’s now a world-renowned brain surgeon. I’m not saying I’d trust him with my grey matter but supposedly if anyone could find it, it would be him. I also wonder about this guy because he always seemed unhappy. This might be attributable to the fact that we all thought him stupid, and more than a few told him so, but maybe he was unhappy because he was a genius. The two do seem to go hand in hand. I’ve met only one person who I believe to be a genuine, honest to goodness genius.

In 1975, Judy and I had the opportunity to join my grandmother and my parents who were vacationing in Sweden. Together we traveled to my paternal grandfather’s hometown. It was there that I met my distant cousin Bernt Goran.

He was a young man my own age, bearing a remarkable resemblance to my father’s family- in some ways a smaller version of myself. Like most Swedes of his generation, his English was quite good but he was soft-spoken, serious in his demeanor and didn’t seem to have a lot to say. I found him intriguing. When he sat, he looked straight ahead. Even when crossing one leg over the other, as if relaxing, he looked on edge… he looked ready to bolt. His face would change appropriately with the room’s conversation, smiling when he ought, shaking his head in agreement or raising an eyebrow in concern but he seemed not fully engaged. Some underlying preoccupation gnawed for his attention. Judy and I liked him very much. We found him to be kind hearted and oddly apologetic. We’d traveled enough to know that the latter quality can be the result of using a second language, or it can be the result of shyness but we sensed there was something more.

“Bob, Judy,” he said to us one afternoon, “tonight I wish to prepare a meal. Will you enjoy to come to my house then?”

“Yes of course,” Judy said, “We would enjoy that very much.”

That evening he picked us up at exactly the time we’d arranged and drove us far into the countryside where we saw nestled in the woods a small cottage. It was stained a deep iron red with white painted trim and fully blossomed window boxes. The roof was hand hewn wooden shakes and the evening sun, casting long shadows, gave it a soft mossy texture. Even from outside I could see that the windows were old wavy bubble glassed panes.

Inside, the floors of wide hardwood planking were covered with woven rugs the color of wild flowers, the same flowers that decorated the hand stenciled walls. The dining ware was set upon a lovely pine table its design and patina perfectly tuned to the rest of the room- down the center of the table a fine linen runner of blackberry purple, raspberry red, celery green. Around us, every detail was exquisite. I’d only a year earlier moved out of my own bachelor dwelling. I remembered it being not as nice.

Judy walked from vase to lamp to place setting admiring each article, softly touching the fabrics, running her fingers over each surface and then standing for a long speechless moment before the stenciled walls. Finally she spoke softly. “Bernt,” she said. “Everything is so beautiful.”

“Yes, thanks very much,” he said. “It was many long hours.”

“What was?” I asked.

“To make this house,” he said.

“You made this?” I said. “You did it by yourself?”

“No,” he said. “Sometimes I have a little help with heavy things.” Choosing his English words carefully, he spoke quietly, mostly looking downward. “I must first dig a hole for underneath,” he said, “and there are many large stones. So I use them for the foundation. Then I must cut some trees and make boards. And I have found glass for the windows in an old house, which has being taken down. And I must make the shingles for the roof. It has been much work.”

To this point in my life I had learned to do almost nothing of a practical nature. I could not have measured a board much less cut it out of a tree. I was an aspiring musician. I’d written a couple dozen forgettable songs. That was the sum of it.

Judy returned to the table where she admired the linen runner. “This is a wonderful old linen,” she said. “Where did you find it?”

“Oh,” he said, “I have not found it. I have made it.” At this I laughed out loud only to realize he was serious.

“You made it?”

“Yes.”

“How?” I said. He looked directly at me and for a brief moment his expression changed. It was just a flash but I wondered if he thought I might be a bit slow.

“Well,” he continued, “first I must take a grown sheep…”

“Wait,” I said. “You grew a sheep?”

“No,” he said, “The sheep grew by itself but I shaved off the wool and spun it into threads on a… what do you call it?”

“A spinning wheel,” we chimed.

“Yes, yes and then I must make dye with flowers that I have grown. And the green color was very difficult because I must go into the forest for one kind of …” He searched for the word and made like he was digging.

“A root,” we said.

“Yes, yes.” He passed his hand over the linen and pointing at a thin line of mossy green thread, he said, “It is a rare root but I think it makes a very nice color.”

He had prepared a traditional meal of fish with dill sauce, boiled potatoes and summer beets. While we ate we asked about the leather shoulder bag and hat. We asked about the candlesticks, the flower arrangements and the woolen wall hanging. He made them all. Words like “master craftsman” and “renaissance man” came to mind. Two times I thought the word “moron” but both were in reference to myself. I did not wonder if he was a genius. Not yet.

Following the meal we drank dark coffee and he showed us a dulcimer… that he had made. Then I saw the accordion case in the corner. For anyone who plays the instrument the case is easily recognized. It can be for nothing else.

“Do you play the accordion?” I asked.

“Yes, this is a new one,” then he added with a smile, “but I have not made it.”

“I play the accordion,” I said. “I took lessons when I was a young boy.”

“Well then,” he said, opening the case, “you must play a song for me.” He put the instrument in my arms. I knew then that I could not play him a song. Even if I could remember one from my boyhood I could not play it on his instrument.

“Bernt,” I said, “I’m sorry but I can’t play this kind of accordion. I learned on what we call a piano accordion. On my instrument I have keys for the right hand. But you have no keys. There are only buttons. I have no idea how to play even the simplest song.”

“Well give it a little try,” he said and unwisely I did. With the left hand I could produce a polka oom pah pah, but that was it. The right hand was as foreign to me as spinning thread, weaving linen, turning pots, digging foundations, tanning leather, planing wood, shingling roofs, growing flowers, dying fabric, stenciling walls… well you get the idea. “I’m sure this one is very much the same as yours,” he said.

“No,” I said, “not really. I mean both have bellows and they get squeezed but that’s about it. I think you’ll have to play something for me.” I secured the bellows with the snap and handed him the instrument.

“Alright then,” he said and he left the room. When he returned he had the accordion on and was adjusting a large harmonica to a neck holder.

“Alright then,” he said. “This song I have written.” He closed his eyes and began.

I don’t remember how long he played. I do remember though that he did not play a song. He played a masterpiece… lyrical and intricate. Melodies from both hands and another from the harmonica wove together. Once I thought I heard Copland and then again something like Bernstein. Always it was wholly Scandinavian, intrinsically Swedish, moody with long mossy shadows and then flashes of midnight sun that stole my breath. How does one describe music with words? Let me fail even more and say it felt like Van Gogh.

When he finished he smiled.

We sat in silence.

“It is just something I have made,” he said softly. I shook my head. That’s all I could do. If I were brighter I might have told him that it too was exquisite. Like everything else in his home, its design and patina were perfectly tuned to… well to their maker. I was unable to find those words.

“Bernt,” I said, “I have never heard an accordion played that way. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe any of this. Bernt, do you know how remarkable you are? You are… you are... “ and then the word came. “I think you are a genius.” He lowered his gaze to the floor and shook his head side to side. “No,” I said. “I mean it. Everything you’ve done. And what you have just played… Bernt it is genius.”

Perhaps I expected a nonclaimer or at the least a “thank you”. Instead still shaking his head he said sadly, “It is not so good to be like this. My mind… it always goes. I sleep very little. Almost never. It won’t stop. My mind, it is always going round and round. I am always thinking, trying to… “ Still shaking his head he said, “It is just not the best.”

I don’t remember leaving that night but I will never forget being there. I was awed standing in the presence of a genius and yet so thankful to be me.

I think of my cousin Bernt very often. I always hope he is well.