When I went off to college, it was right after my family had moved back to the States from Germany, and none of us wanted to go home. We wanted to stay in Europe, but that was the beginning of the military downsizing and subsequent closing of bases, so my dad couldn’t find a job to stay at that point. We spent the summer sweltering in the unbelievable humidity that is Maryland, and then I left for MSU. I went home the first summer for 3 months, but after that I worked summers in the dorms throughout the rest of my university career. My sister and brother got to live through the worst of my father’s increasing alcohol problem, but I was mostly subjected to phone conversations, and the occasional holiday.
Two days ago I found a letter that my brother had started and my entire family added to, sent to me at collage and dated January 1983. It’s single-spaced, typewritten on what seems to be tracing paper, and is a portrait of my family caught in that particular time. My father had just bought a brand new electric typewriter (aaah, the good old days 🙂 and while my family took turns typing their portion of the letter on it, every time one of them made a mistake, my dad would push them happily out of the way and correct it with the super-neato electric correction functions. They complained about it all through the letter, and it’s hilarious. I can just see my dad doing it. He could be so incredibly annoying, but this brought such a smile to my face. It was so DAD.
I miss him a lot.
He would have loved the kids. He would have loved our house. He would have loved coming to Sweden to visit us.
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What Martin told his farmor recently when trying to explain to her about the Halloween party: “Farmor, there’s no use in you coming. They all just speak English all the time. You can come if you want, but you can only listen and not talk.” 🙂
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Beautiful bit for today: …for there is hope in two women, help in three women, strength in four, joy in five, power in six, and against seven, no gate may stand. Sheri S. Tepper, from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall