Category: Living in Society

LAKE MACBRIDE— Today will be a work day, but before I get to it, there is this image of a fishing trip to South Dakota from the 20th Century. Among the men in the picture are my great, great grandfather, and my great grandfather. We don’t have a lot of photos of them, and this is the only known image of my great, great grandfather. He is seated in the foreground, baiting a hook.

With the explosion of photography, there are too many images to count and assign a meaning. So many people carry cameras all the time, on devices that are more powerful computers than were imaginable during the 1990s when I secured this image by photocopying the page of the book where it was published.
We select and bring artifacts into our narratives, just as this photo is now part of this blog.

Behind every narrative, there are moments in time when they are made, and when they take on meaning. In a consumer society, we can forget where things come from, the meaning of an artifact being the fact of its collection. That someone planned the fishing trip, invited guests and made this image using technology of the era is forgotten.

We seldom see the face of the photographer, but he or she is an unseen part of the narrative, as is the technology and the people who created it. The narrative of our lives is unavoidably collaborative, with people we know and those we don’t.
It would be presumptuous to pretend otherwise.

Today, I feel the presence of so many people who have influenced, fed and nurtured me. Whether they are here or not doesn’t matter. What matters if continuing the search for truth and meaning in the world, and creating a useful narrative out of these moments in time. Something that serves a greater good than a single life on the Iowa prairie.

LAKE MACBRIDE— My grandmother was born on June 24 or 25, 1898 at home on the farm, west of the Catholic church in Wilno, Minn. The official record is unclear as to the precise date, and the clerk in the recorder’s office in the county seat told me that often births were not directly reported, but only when someone from the farm made it into Ivanhoe.

The church records show she was born Salomea Nadolski on June 25, 1898, and baptized on July 10, 1898 by the Rev. J.F. Andesejewski. Her godparents were Ladislaus Kuzminski and Maria Nadolski. I believe this version of the truth is closest.

The certified copy of the birth record I got from the county seat in Ivanhoe listed place of birth in Royal Township, Lincoln County, Minn. as Soluma Nadolski on July 10, 1898. Parents listed as Frank and Katie Nadolski.

Her certificate of death lists June 24, 1898 as the birth date of Mae N. and then Selmae M. Jabus, and those names and date were provided by my mother. The newspaper listed her as Mae M. Jabus in the obituary. Whatever may be official, we called her Busha after our daughter was born.

She told countless stories of life on the farm near Wilno and those stories came to life when I visited the home place, the church and the county seat after she died. If I am a story teller at all, it is because of her.

Her birthplace was still standing when I visited, and the owner kindly let me look around inside. I think he and his wife were looking to tear it down and build a more modern home for their growing family, although he didn’t say it. By today’s standards, the house was very small. There were shirttail relatives everywhere I went, including a gent who lived across the road from our home place. He was not doing well so we chatted only for the briefest of moments. He was connected through my great grandfather.

Like many descendents of Polish immigrants, my grandmother was fully assimilated. She still spoke Polish, but only with her sisters, and to the occasional wrong number who also spoke the language. There are stories about that for another telling.

Despite all the stories that have been and might be, I’ve been thinking about Busha’s life as I knew it the last couple of days. When I last saw her, she had moved to a nursing home where she used to work. She was mentally alert, and worried that the staff was stealing from her, even if there was not much to steal. She fumbled with her hearing aid so she could pay attention to what I had to say.
She got it to work, and we talked as we always had.

It has been 115 years since she was born, plus or minus a day. I feel so lucky to have known her for so long. The memory of so many things we did together persists as the sun sets over the Iowa prairie. I’m glad for that.

LAKE MACBRIDE— The pledge was to downsize by 1,000 books and this time I mean it. In fact, here’s photographic evidence of my commitment to this round of downsizing. The books in the photo will go to the local library for their used book sale. I really mean it.

Inculcated by American consumerism, it seems normal to collect stuff for later use whether it is books, groceries, clothing, shoes, tools, whatever. As the years aggregate, there is less of later in which to use all of this stuff. Using an on-line life expectancy calculator, mine is 89 years with a 75 percent chance of making it past 81. At two books per month, I can expect to read about 675 books during the my remaining time and that would be a hopeful schedule. Suffice it to say, in a time where publication on the Internet is exploding, there will be no shortage of articles and books to read. Downsizing by 1,000 books is a modest start to a much bigger downsizing.

When I visited the Library of Congress in 2009, there was a display of the books Thomas Jefferson sold to the government after the British burned the Library of Congress in 1814. That is, of what remained after a second fire in 1851 destroyed two thirds of Jefferson’s books. The exhibit was a reconstruction of Jefferson’s library using the original bill of sale. It is a cool display for book lovers, and my inevitable conclusion was that while Jefferson may have been an avid reader, there is no way he read all of the books he accumulated. I didn’t feel so bad about the size of my library after that.

There may have been a 19th century reason for personal libraries of books, and even a 20th century reason, but libraries today serve a more varied function than being the repository of printed matter. Public library programs like downloadable e-books and audio-books press the limits of copyright laws to make written material more accessible. In a corporate culture that seeks to make a fungible commodity of everything, books have been and will be included. Already some of the books in my photo are available on-line, some for free. Among other reasons, we keep personal libraries for sentimental attachment, to work on specific projects, and for convenience. All valid reasons, but how many books need to be on hand? The answer is less.

As spring turns to summer, some of my time will be taken counting out the books to be donated to the library to make my pledge. It’s time to let go and focus on more important endeavors, like sustaining our life on the prairie in a turbulent world— something that does not require a large personal library, as comforting as one might be.