Remembering My Sister Irma

Irma taught me how to do the Twist in the kitchen of our house on Satsop Street in Shelton.

She used to sunbathe on the roof of that house with Annemarie by climbing out their bedroom window.

Irma once tried to force me to eat artichokes when I was a child but finally relented.

I believe she was the first person I ever played tennis with, at Kneeland Park in Shelton (though it could have been Annemarie).

When I was in grade school, she tried to tame my hair with Dippity-do.

I also remember her teasing her hair and waxing her upper lip.

In 1967, Irma played “Little Bit o’ Soul” by the Music Explosion over and over on her portable stereo. 

She bought me my first fish sandwich at the A&W on Mountain View—it was a revelation!

She was the only person I ever knew who owned a sunlamp—so she could work on her tan during  Washington winters when we were growing up.

Irma drove me and my brother Harold all the way to Seattle to see our first concert—The Monkees—though she did not attend.

She introduced me to the pleasures of tomato, onion, and black pepper on an open-faced sandwich. 

And she was the one who got me hooked on tacos—though it was bound to happen anyway.

Irma also loved German deli meats, cheeses, hard rolls, and above all pickles.

She drank Coca-Cola in the morning.

She once put a nail in a glass of Coke and left it overnight because someone told her Coke would dissolve the nail. It did not.

Irma seemed to walk as fast as most people run.

She continued to call me Freddy, my childhood nickname, long after I switched to Al (short for Alfred). I kind of liked it, though. It reminded me of who I was.

Tribute to the Old Man

Albert Johnsen loved books and fishing and books about fishing and the sea and flying.

His favorite drink? Coffee. Black. Any time of day.

His signature dish: meatloaf.

Also waffles, served with strawberries and whipped cream.

He loved calliope music, pipe organs, big bands, folk, country, rock'n'roll ...

He played the sousaphone in high school.

He learned to fly at an early age, and once had to crash land in an orchard outside Hood River, where he was born and raised. He was not a religious man, but often told of the presence he felt in the cockpit with him, letting him know everything was going to be alright.

He climbed mountains and weathered storms.

He sat in a wooden tower and watched for forest fires, sold shoes in the family's store, fought fires as a volunteer, was elected port commissioner, drove truck, routed freight, and sold real estate.

He married his college sweetheart, a bathing beauty from Baker, and they had four daughters. He loved them all. (I married one of them and love her to pieces.)

Like his father, he was always on time and expected you to be on time, too.

He always wanted to write but never got far. Instead, he painted, carved, sculpted, and drew faces.

He liked Buster Keaton and Red Skelton and was a bit of a clown himself.

If you asked him an obvious question you got a smart-aleck answer and a goofy look.

His daughters learned not to pull his finger.

All his life he loved vanilla ice cream, and that was his last meal, fed to him in his hospital bed by his oldest daughter. He was 84, often confused but still funny and charming.

I think of him whenever a plane flies overhead.

It's easy to picture him soaring over Mount Hood and Lost Lake—and here, now—along with the mysterious presence that keeps him safe.

Christmas, remembered

This is me and my big brother, Harry, with our mom behind us and our sisters all around.

This is how he once was and always wanted to be.

In the years since Harry's death I've come to realize just how hard he tried to keep alive the boy inside.

He was a Scout Master and  skateboard maestro to the end.

God hug you, my brother. I'm grateful for everything you taught me.

(The stuffed animals are from our bigger brother, Rudi, who's probably the one taking the picture. I'm grateful to you, too, Rudi, for a Christmas to remember and so much more.)

The Good Brother

Shelton, Washington. 1960 or thereabouts. My older brother and I are in the basement of the house on Satsup Street. We're fighting. I run for the stairs. Two steps up, I turn.

"You want me to slug you?" he says.

A stupid question, I think, but it lets me know that he has the power to hurt me. As if I didn't already know that. He's 8, I'm 6.

"You want me to slug you?" he asks again. "I will."

I should run upstairs. Our mother is up there and she'll protect me. I'm the favorite. Her good son. Still, I don't move.

"You want me to slug you?"

Again with the question! Does he think I'm stupid?

"Yeah, I want you to slug me," I say.

I am stupid. He slugs me in the gut. Hard. It hurts like hell.

Our mother intervenes, and my brother Harold has the perfect defense: "He told me to slug him."

Mom tells him he should be ashamed of himself. Perhaps he is.

Perhaps he is for the rest of his life. He tries to make it up to his little brother, the innocent victim, but the relationship remains strained until the day he dies, young, of lung cancer.

The truth is he was the victim of a little brother, me, who knew how to play his parents.

He was the good brother, and now I'd like to set him free.

Let your spirit fly, Harry. I forgive you if you forgive me.

Mom and Apple Pie

When she was alive, my mother made what I considered the best apple pie in the world.

The key to its flaky crust (even on the bottom) was in her fingers. She never used a recipe but knew by the feel of the dough when it was just right.

"When it's too wet you feel it's gooey," she told me. "If it's too dry, you can't roll it out. Then it crumbles too much."

She was 63 then and I was 23, interviewing her for an article I was writing for The Community Press, where I had landed my first job as a reporter.

"I have the feeling — how it's supposed to be," she said.

This small German woman had never even tasted pie before coming to America in 1952.

"I learned how to make it in my second year here," she said. "A neighbor girl came over and showed me how."

She had watched the girl — "I don't remember her name, but she was a very nice girl" — as she carefully measured the ingredients.

"I couldn't read the recipe. That's why I had to see it — what she put in," my mother recalled. "That's why I never used a recipe. I couldn't read English."

At the time she could hardly speak English, and the neighbor girl had to show her, rather than tell her, how to make the pie.

"She measured everything. At first I measured everything, too, but then I just used my own judgment."

If you asked my mom, "How much flour?" or "How much sugar?" she would say, "Until it looks right."

I could never master it, but I did pick up a little secret for anyone who aspires to flaky-crust perfection.

"What makes the best pie is to use lard and shortening together," she told me.

This was not something the neighbor girl taught her, though. She discovered it on her own.

"I didn't have enough shortening one time," she said, "so I had to use half lard."

Don't have any lard on hand?

Get some.

Unintended Consequences

When I was very young, maybe five years old, my mother asked me what I wanted to be.

This was in the living room of the house on Satsup Street (still the setting for occasional dreams, since I spent so many of my formative years there). A number a people were around and I was vaguely aware of an older brother answering the same question.

I think I gave the same answer he did, though I don't remember what that was. Fireman, perhaps. I had never thought about it before.

My mother said, "Wouldn't you like to be a pastor?"

Being an agreeable child, I said yes.

She then told everyone what I had said, and I knew right away that I would never be a pastor.

I still find it funny how that worked. I was an agreeable child, as I said, and eager to please, but I felt tricked. This was so clearly what she wanted; it had nothing to do with me.

I did end up being a serious student of religion in college, but I'd be damned if I was going to be a professional.

Another Sister's Perspective

My sister Irma remembers being impressed with our father because he taught himself to read and write in English without much help and doesn't know how in the world he ever did that.

She remembers coming home to see him sitting at the kitchen table reading the World Book encyclopedia. She thinks he probably read the whole series cover-to-cover. He must have, she says, because of all the many times she saw him doing that.

He was so hungry for knowledge, he read constantly.

He always knew everything that was going on all over the world, she recalls, and he used to get disgusted with Americans because nobody knew anything. He'd ask them who the leader of Germany was and nobody knew. He couldn't get over that.

She thought he would have been a great politician, but of course that was not to be.

Another thing she remembers is that Dad couldn't stand it when people sat around in bathrobes, like she used to do, until 10 o'clock in the morning. It about drove him crazy. He just did not like that look. He felt you should get dressed and eat and start the day dressed.

On the (somewhat) humorous side, Irma recalls, he hated seafood — any kind of seafood. It was almost as if he thought it was a sin to eat any of it. Anyway, one time she was fixing razor clams, dipping them in flour and frying them like cutlets. He said, "Oh, those look good" and she said, "I'll give you a plate."

So he sat down and started eating. "This is good," he said. "What is it?"

Not being able to lie to him, she told him — kind of jokingly, like she'd pulled one over on him.

He picked up the plate and flung it across the room.

He was very upset with her for deceiving him, so that was the first and last time she ever did that to him.

A Sister's Perspective

My sister Hanna says she did not get to know our father well. After all, she did not live at home much of the time. In her teens, she worked as a live-in housekeeper.

Here's what she does remember ...

She remembers talking him into buying a typewriter when she was in school, promising to type his letters for him. She does not remember typing any for him. He never asked.

She remembers that Dad did not make life easy on himself. He had a car in the garage but walked to work.

She remembers that Dad did not like his daughters to wear lipstick -- so they would put it on while on their way to school. Hanna got caught, though. He saw her his way to work, or maybe it was coming back, and she had not wiped her lips hard enough.

She did not ask our parents to attend school activities, because she was embarrassed to be seen with them. (I remember feeling the same way because our parents were different from other parents, foreign.)

She remembers that Dad did not like things broken down. Shortly after she and her husband purchased their house, he drove down with a trunk full of stair forms and put in new front steps. Those steps are still in use today, 40-some years later.

About My Father

My father was born in Russia, to German parents, and grew up in Poland.

After his father died from cancer and his mother remarried, he was kicked out of the house. His stepfather already had enough kids. He was about 12.

My mother was not his first choice. He was turned down by one of her sisters before he proposed to her.

He worked for a railroad before the war and drove an ammunition truck during the war.

On the battlefield, a dying soldier called out to him to come and pray with him. He did, and it was a good thing because the next bomb hit right where he had been.

After the war, he worked in a foundry.

He brought the family to the United States in 1952 and immediately regretted it, but there was no way to go back.

His first job in this country was shoveling manure.

The cousin who sponsored our family couldn't understand why he was in such a hurry pay his debt, leave the farm, and go to work for the lumber mill in town.

I don't remember this but he was very strict and once chased my oldest brother around the barn with a belt, trying to beat him for being late. It was a turning point. He had lost it and he knew it.

With me, the last of six children, he was always very gentle.

He liked to watch pro wrestling — cheering the good guys and booing the bad — and refused to believe the fights were fake.

He liked beer but preferred Coca-Cola.

He and my mother added a wing to my childhood home without the benefit of blueprints.

When the rest us were in the basement watching TV, you could find my father upstairs in the living room most nights, reading.

Like his father, he died of cancer at an early age. Fifty-three.

I'm fifty-two.

Playing with Guns

I remember a first-grade classmate saying, "You mean your dad and my dad could have been shooting at each other?"

It was possible.

I hadn't really thought about it before then, and it felt funny to admit it, but it was possible.

It was no secret that my dad and mom were born in the old country. For one thing you could hear it. Even when they spoke English, which was most of the time, my parents didn't sound quite like other people.

If you looked close you could see that my dad had been in the war. It was evident in the half-thumb of a war-torn hand. (The left, I think, though I'm no longer certain.) You could see it even more when he was working in the sun and took off his shirt. There on his back was a long, deep crater about the size of a razor clam. The first time I saw it I asked him what it was and he said, very simply, that a bomb exploded near him during the war and a piece of it landed in his back.

I could see that it had been bad, but as a young boy I never even thought about how much worse it could have been.

The day my classmate told me, toy gun a-blazing, about his dad fighting the Germans, I asked my dad about fighting in Hitler's army. I don't recall exactly what I asked, or all that he said, but I do remember the look on his face and the way he shook his head.

He made it clear that he hated Hitler and the Nazis, but then he surprised me with this:

"Hitler did a lot for the German people," he said.

"He did?"

"Ja, sure, in the beginning we were much better off than before ..."

Then, I think, it was impossible for him to tell a young boy everything that was going through his mind.

Forty-some years later, I would sooner forget that my father said what he did about Hitler doing a lot for the German people. But there it is. I remember interrupting — "He did?" — because it shocked me, even then, that the name Hitler could be connected with anything but evil. I was too young to realize (as I'm sure my father did) that the connection was there in what he had just told me -- the division, deprivation, and depravity already implied.

Remembrance

My mother survived a world war and the early deaths of two husbands. Cancer took the first, a passing car the second. Through it all, she retained a steadfast faith in God and showed an uncanny ability to find contentment regardless of circumstances.

Or so it seemed to me.

I cannot claim to have known my mother well. She was not given to talking about herself without prodding. But I learned from her example. (I don't know how else to explain my ability to be happy even when things go wrong. Not that I don't have ups and downs.)

Although my mother was not well-educated (she had the equivelent of a grade-school education), she was smart and talented.

She taught herself to play the mandolin by ear.

She was a gifted gardener — a talent she passed on to some of my siblings.

She made the best apple pies anyone has ever tasted.

She and my father added a wing to my childhood home without the benefit of blueprints.

On the other hand, she had a terrible sense of direction and a fear of getting lost — surprising (or maybe not) for someone who came halfway around the world to start a new life and learn a new language.

When I lied to her, she believed me, which made me want to never lie again.

Her lasting legacy will be the large and loving family she left behind — a family I am pleased to be a part of.

It's been nearly seven years since she died.

I did not cry at her funeral.

I Wonder ...

At an early age, my brother Harry gave me some advice that would shape my life.

"That doesn't sound like you," he said. "You should write the way you talk."

I was maybe 10 years old and he was reading my homework. God knows why. I thought he was crazy.

More than a year before he died he said to himself, "I wonder if I have cancer." But he didn't do anything about it.

I'm remembering these two incident — unrelated, really, except that my brother shows up in both — because I'm trying to figure out why we listen to some people and not others. To others and not ourselves.

In my case, I didn't really believe my brother because, well, he was my brother. What did he know about writing? Anyway, I didn't really care because, at the time, I wasn't planning to become a writer.

In my brother's case, maybe he didn't trust what his body was telling him or maybe he was afraid of the truth.

I wish I could tell him he was right in my case.

I wish I could tell him he was wrong about the cancer.

Before I Was Born

Before I was born, my family was huddled in a basement praying that the bombs falling above them would not blow them to smithereens.

I don't know how many other families were in their basements praying or what happened to them, but my family survived.

This was in Germany during World War II. My father was in the German army. Suffice it to say it wasn't his idea, but he was German and there was this godawful war.

I came along years later, after the family moved to America, and my parents almost never talked about the war when I was growing up. Only if I asked them something and only enough to answer my question.

All wars are awful but this one was especially bad, and my family had been on the wrong side. I guess I didn't really want to talk about it either.

When I was growing up, America went to war again, this time in Vietnam, where our purpose was less clear, and when I was 18 I was among the last Americans to receive a draft card. What would I do? I waited to see if my number came up. It didn't, and so I didn't have to decide.

My older brother Harry did have to decide. He decided to lie, twice. He lied to the army so they would declare him morally unfit, and he lied to the family so we would think he had flunked the physical.

Many years later he told me the truth and it didn't matter. Either way, I was glad he didn't have to go.

Anyway, he decided and acted, and that took more courage than I seemed to have.

I'm told that one of the first things my nephew Mike learned to say was "Peace in the Middle East." He grew up in a hopeful time and the phrase was on the TV so often he just picked it up.

That was more than 30 years ago.

Lately things have been much worse, from Baghdad to Beirut, and it feels as if the bombs that were falling before I was born will never stop falling.