End of Year Holidays

On the shortest day of the year, I grabbed a couple of stacks and started going through artifacts of my life. The current pile is mostly cards and notes sent for occasions long forgotten. I developed a new rule: If I can’t recall who sent an item, it’s off to the shredder.

The owner of his namesake home, farm, and auto supply company used to send an annual, hand-written birthday card while I was employed there. Apparently, I kept them all. Amy Klobuchar sent a Christmas card in 2019 when she was running for president. I think she will run again. Tom Harkin’s operation was a Democratic machine and I have a couple of his Christmas cards. I am sorry to see him gone from the U.S. Senate.

My friend Ed sends irregularly arriving letters about the Veterans for Peace chapter we founded. In one was a photograph of 16 of us at the Iowa City Public Library. I pulled that out and put it on the magnetic white board next to my writing table. The group suffered a bit as the World War II and Korean War veterans died. In this month’s letter it was uncertain whether our chapter would survive.

There was a ticket stub from the June 13, 2009 performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. Riverside Theatre produced the play on the Festival Stage at Lower City Park. Our child and I spent several nights there through those years, guarding the property from vandals. After our shift, we had breakfast at Hamburg Inn No. 2. I found a card from Ron Clark and Jodi Hovland thanking us for our support. One season, they both played mechanicals in Midsummer Night’s Dream, although I don’t recall if it was this performance. Theirs were some of my favorite performances in the many Shakespearean plays I have seen.

I found one of the last letters from Mother in an envelope addressed by my sister. Mother apologized for not baking a fruitcake due to complications with the aftermath of a root canal. I’m afraid the fruitcake tradition is barely alive at this point. If we were to make one, it would not be anything like hers. I believe we have family fruitcake recipes stashed away in piles and cookbooks. So, there’s that.

I found a recipe for Date Pinwheels provided by a friend from when we worked at the university. It is written in his hand. I pulled it out of the pile to stick in my hand written cookbook. My spouse and I were visitors to his apartment a few times. He was a fan of the Star Wars movies and had copies on the new technology of VHS video cassette. We watched a movie or two with him on VHS. We won’t be making any date pinwheels because one of us is vegan and we’ve yet to find a good substitute for eggs and butter in baking.

I finished the first stack and the next is a pile of letters, drafts and papers. Most of this pile is related to my autobiography. I kept most letters I received and there are many tucked away in different places. This pile has ones to which I referred in writing the first part of the work.

I printed the State of Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics Report on the Cherry Mine Disaster on Nov. 13, 1909. My grandfather worked the Cherry Mine although was not present the day of the fire which claimed 259 lives. He worked in several mines over his long career as a coal miner. I learned more about coal mining than I thought possible from reading this report. It explained the mine, how it was dug, and has a detailed description of the sequence of events during the disaster. Being a coal miner must have been a drudgery, one with constant danger of being buried alive. This is a common thread throughout my side of the family where both Mother and Father were descendants of coal miners.

Eventually I will dispose of all this paper. There is too much to leave as an inheritance. The purpose of my autobiography is to distill a narrative from these diverse documents. For now, having gone through them, they are back on the sorting table until I refer to them again. It’s a fit way to spend part of the holiday season.