Tag: Robbinsdale

Demonic Attack?

As I sit in our living room waiting for the sunrise, with the right side of my neck covered in steri-strips over just under my partially shorn beard, the still painful reminder of last week’s right carotid endarterectomy, my mind goes not to the ER visit that led to this particular knife fight, but to my first ever trip to an Emergency Room. I was four years old. I was playing in the sandbox, next to the garage, behind our little Dutch colonial on Shoreline Drive in Robbinsdale, Minnesota. My sister, Sue Ann, was swinging on the swing set, which our neighbor, “Grandpa” Olson had made for us. I ran right under the swing and the exposed end of a bolt on the bottom sliced my scalp, right in the middle of the top of my head. I stumbled, then got up, screaming, and ran, bleeding profusely, to our backdoor.

Grandma Ingham was visiting. She grabbed the beautiful afghan she had knit for us, wrapped me in it and scooped me up. I asked her why the afghan. She said it was to protect me against shock. I didn’t understand. It was the middle of summer. Why would I possibly need an afghan? I couldn’t believe she used this and risked it getting all bloody. At the same time, I felt honored and comforted: honored, that she was willing to spend something so precious, that represented so many hours of work, on me; comforted, because it was softer and less itchy than any of our blankets. My mom grabbed her keys, and sent Sue Ann, Alison and Tic over to the Ericsons. I rode in my Grandma’s arms to North Memorial Hospital’s emergency room in our brand new 1959 Pontiac station wagon. The doctor handed me a spool of black suture thread to play with, to distract me, while he stitched up my scalp. He must have used a bit of a local anesthetic, because I remember it just sort of tickled a little while he was working up there. Then we went home.

Thankfully, my blood washed out of that beautiful afghan.

Now, why does my mind go to this when I started out thinking about Sunday’s visiting nurse asking me, “Have you ever considered you may be under demonic attack?” while I was opening the three window shades on the southeast front of the house in the dark? I’m just three months shy of 64 and I can recall those scenes from 60 years ago as if they happened earlier today. Part of me is still that spastic, precocious four year old. And, the nurse asked that irrelevant question after I had already told her I was an atheist. I also explained that when I believed in God, I didn’t fear demons. “The only power they had were lies.” Twisted people were another matter. I didn’t fear them enough to modify my actions, but I received my share of threats. A Mennonite pastor threatened to kill me. The Fruit of Islam leader at Graterford Prison put out a hit on me at one point. A gang of street punks threatened me. A high ex-offender took me from my day job at gunpoint to drive him to a rehab. Bishops, priests and pastors of every stripe slandered me, lied to me, and bullied me. Police under four different mayors of Philadelphia harassed and threatened me. This was just part of my job of serving the poor.

Of course, she was talking about my health history: the mysterious infection on my spine, the vancomycin causing kidney failure, then Stevens-Johnsons Syndrome, the six strokes, the atypical migraines, the 47 TIAs, the damaged aortic valve, the allergy to 12 meds, etc. I don’t think it was demons. I think it was more likely that my shell was softened when I was a young eagle by the spraying of DDT over our house and yard to kill the mosquitoes in the swamp at the end of our backyard. Every day is Earth Day. See what I did there. That was a Rachel Carson reference. Does your brain work that way, or is it just me?

The sunrise was beautiful!

Ericsons, Hostermans, DeLays, etc. (rwbb-3)

I have already mentioned one neighbor. Aunt Helen didn’t have any children; at least none that we children knew of. The families who really formed the neighborhood were the ones like ours: with kids! The mother-lode was across the street, on the shore of Crystal Lake. Immediately across the street were the Ericsons with Carol, Jane, Molly & David. Then the Hostermans with Gretchen and Charlie. Then there were the DeLays with Jimmy and his older sisters. After that, it was Dr. and Grandma Hosterman’s place. He was a hoot! He had been a dentist. He was also on the local school board. He and his wife always had an open door to young people. As Robbinsdale Independent School District #281 expanded and the suburbs were populated with new developments to house all of us Baby Boomers, new schools had to be built. My dad served on the building committee for the new Robbinsdale High School that was finished in 1958, allowing the old high school to become Robbinsdale Junior High. I went to kindergarten at RHS, then returned for 10th through 12th grades. They tucked in a couple of kindergarten classes in buildings all over the district wherever they could for a couple of years. It was an emergency situation, after all. Going to kindergarten in the high school had definite advantages. The high school students were very entertaining. They dressed up in costumes, like the Easter Bunny, or Santa Claus, or Pilgrims and Indians, and came around the corner of the building three floors below outside of our windows. They did dramatic and art presentations in our classroom. It was great.

Dr. Hosterman was one of two people whom two new junior highs in the district were named after. The other was Carl Sandburg. I was at the dedication of both. I had the honor of meeting Mr. Sandburg at the dedication in 1959. He shook my hand firmly and looked me in the eye. He did not pat my head as so many adults did to four year olds wearing suits and ties in those days. He told me to take my reading seriously. How unusual that a junior high would be named for a living socialist in the 1950s in the heart of a solidly GOP district in the McCarthy era. Hosterman Junior High was dedicated in 1962. Our family attended with the guest of honor and his extended family. I still remember the talent show that the faculty put on as part of the evening’s program. I was seven. In September 1967, I would begin junior high at Sandburg. That year, it was the largest junior high on one floor in the nation with 2200 students on one floor. It had been built for 1800. The next year half of my friends would be transferred to the newly opened Plymouth Junior High further out in the suburbs; one of the pitfalls of being born at the crest of the Baby Boom. Hosterman Junior High succumbed to the wrecking ball in 2010, during the tenure of Gretchen Hosterman as CAO of the school district. Sandburg has been used for administration, adult education, vo-tech, etc. RHS has been rented out to the Shriners; been used as a senior center, as a Spanish immersion school, etc. Several of the elementary schools are now old age and convalescent homes. So they have come full circle. Yes, and the Robbinsdale Branch of the Mpls. Public Library that I used to haunt is now the Robbinsdale Historical Society.

I should get back to the neighborhood now.

We all played together. It was expected that the older ones would hold the hands of the younger ones when we crossed the street. We would let our moms know if we were going to the other end of the block, I guess, but not every time, just that we would be going back and forth. There were no “helicopter parents”. There also was no air conditioning, no stereo or loud radio, no daytime TV. So, moms could hear if something were to go wrong.

When we played cowboys and Indians, David Ericson liked to get killed just outside his back door. He would lay down dead. Then he would scramble into the kitchen to get some ketchup to put on his face, just for added realism. He then had to also grab a few potato chips, because, you know, you don’t waste good ketchup.

On the 4th of July, the whole neighborhood (plus some) spread out blankets on Ericsons’ front lawn to watch the fireworks over the lake.  They were beautiful, reflecting on the surface of the water.  The front lawn was a pretty steep hill down to the lake. It should be noted that the front doors of houses on lakes or rivers or any body of water is the door facing the water. Ericson’s house had screened porches on both the first and second floors facing the lake. Dick and Jane Schirmacher still live in that house to this day.  They bought the house from Jane’s parents after her brother David died in a plane crash on Christmas Eve, 1971, in Peru, while serving a gap year mission assignment with Wickliffe Bible Translators. That so tore up his dad, Les, that he retired from Pillsbury Flour. They spent 3 months with their daughter, Carol, and her husband, Jim Daggett, at Wickliffe’s mission base in Peru. Les engineered and installed refrigeration for the medical compound. They sold the house to Dick and Jane and moved to a small farm in rural Minnesota.

I loved the Ericsons’ house. Many times, when my mom was working for the 1960 census,  she let me stay with Lois. My sisters and brother and all the Ericon kids were in school. I remember playing with David’s Lincoln Logs on the floor of their living room while Lois was baking in the kitchen. Their house was one of the few places I felt safe as a child.

Jim DeLay was in the grade between David’s and mine. David graduated RHS in 1971, with my sister Sue Ann. Jim was in the class of 1972 and I was in the class of 1973. Jim was always a friendly and expressive kid. He got into acting in our high school, starring or playing supporting roles in several school plays. We had a fantastic theater program there. By high school, Jim was pretty flamboyant and made no attempt to hide the fact that he was gay. His strict, Catholic father had beat Jim his whole life. On several occasions in our teen years, Dr. Hosterman could hear Jim and his dad fighting in their house next door. He would call my dad, even though we had moved to Golden Valley in 1961, to come over to intervene. At least once, Mr. DeLay’s service revolver was brandished by one of them. My dad could talk Jim’s dad down. Jim was among the first wave of AIDS related deaths in Minnesota, in the 1980s. His dad died in 2016 or 2017. His obituary did not even list his son, Jim.

My sister Sue Ann committed suicide on Nov. 30,  2000, at age 47, leaving behind three children and her husband. After being sober from alcohol for several years, she had succumbed to a gambling addiction. When her boss discovered she had embezzled a large sum of money from him, she took a drug cocktail, leaving her note as the final entry of her diary.

So, in our little neighborhood, after what looked like a fun, balanced, playful childhood, we have had our share of tragedy.

First Haircut & Robin Center

Mrs. Pool lived next door (on the back door side). All of us kids called her Aunt Helen. Her husband, at least I think he was her husband, who had very little hair, gave me my first haircut in a little shop in the back of the house. I’m not sure of the relationship. I didn’t like him. I am told that I cried and screamed when he cut my hair. He didn’t seem to be around much. It wasn’t a regular barber shop. He was very quiet, unlike any other barber I’ve met since. Aunt Helen’s house was the one house in the neighborhood that was the typical cottage style, with a white picket fence. She baked cookies for the kids, too. It was a little creepy for a lot of the kids. I liked Mr. Kuperman much better. He had the shop in Robin Center. We could walk down there. It was only a block and a half away. He would always wink at my mom and give me the quarter change from the haircut, if I “was a good boy.” He was Jewish and had escaped from a concentration camp in Germany. He talked with a Yiddish accent, I ended up going to kindergarten and all through school with his nieces and my older sister was in his son’s class. I think his son and my sister ended up practicing medicine in the same hospital for awhile.

Robin Center was built in 1955, the same year I was born, the crest of the Baby Boom. The land it was built on had been turned over to the state as useless swamp land by someone who was fed up with paying city taxes on unbuildable land after the town had encroached on what had been a rural area prior to WW2. An enterprising citizen of Robbinsdale redeemed it from the government; then shipped in fill. At some places the swamp was forty feet deep. The shopping center had to be built on pylons. It has stood the test of time. It has had two face-lifts, one in the 1980s and one at the turn of the millennium. At this writing, it is still prospering.

Mr. Kuperman’s shop, the Mother Goose Stride Rite shoe store and the Fanny Farmer candy shop were all in a row there. A giant goose in the middle of the shoe store would dispense a genuine, 1921 or 1922 silver dollar each time we bought a pair of shoes. I was born with malformed joints in my ankles, knees and hips. Until I was three, I had to wear braces on my legs and feet when I slept. Whenever it was time for me to get shoes, there was only one choice for me to make: brown or black. They were always corrective wingtips. I couldn’t wear them home, because the special heels had to be installed. For all the good they did! I spent my entire childhood with bloody ankles because of those shoes! I remember the feeling of jubilation of successfully rounding the landing going up the stairs in the house on Shoreline Drive, only to have my face firmly hit the top step as my right toe predictably hooked my left ankle.

More than three decades later, October 1993, in a follow up visit with an orthopod after my acetabulum had been shattered and my ilium fractured in a motorcycle accident, the doctor asked me if I could walk. I told him that I had walked into his office, so, yes. He was looking at my hip X-rays and told me that this was impossible. He had been practicing his specialty for over 40 years and had never seen anything like this. I told him that it was rather difficult for the first three weeks after the truck hit me, but I was OK now. He said, “No, I’m looking at your good hip. You should not be able to walk!” I told him that I have congenital hip. He said that he knows congenital hip, and that there is no way I should be able to walk with these hips. This is not that. “Are you sure you can walk?” I told him that I used to run cross country. He looked at the X-rays again and just shook his head and said that it was “weird” and asserted again that with my hips, it should be physically impossible for me to walk. That’s how I received a professional evaluation that I am weird to the bone.

Revisiting that first haircut, many children have traumatic reactions to the first clipping of their hair. Tonsuring in the taking of monastic or priestly vows in various religious traditions is rooted in this primal, childhood reaction to this. The first haircut signifies the infant’s entrance into the community. All transitions have their measure of stress or trauma. There was always a small clipping of hair, or tonsure, at infant baptism in the ancient church, and to this day in the Orthodox Church. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, hair, length of hair, hair styles, were all a big deal, and focus for fashion, discussion, and even conflict.

In Minnesota, it was against the law for women’s beauty shops to cut and style men’s hair or for barber shops to cut and style women’s hair. I knew this, because my mom told me about her beautician’s (who was a gay man) after hours business for gays, transvestites, etc. My parents were very active in the Republican Party. They had met in law school. They had no fear or problem with homosexuals. They would have defended this man had he ever gotten in trouble for his practice. I ended up disagreeing with almost all of their political views, but I am indebted to them for my basic sense of justice and the respect of true equality of all regardless of race, gender, mental ability, nationality, birth status, or age. They taught us very clearly that no human is illegitimate! Our next-door neighbors, who had escaped Auschwitz, were shining, ever present examples to never let anyone tell you that anyone else is sub-human!

How’d we get from haircuts to here? This is how this memoir will go, I’m afraid. I am in tears and catching my breath.