Original anecdotes, commentary, rumination, and occasional pontification.
JULY 30, 2023 – After a proper thanks and farewell to Pete[1], I followed the welcoming committee—Gaga, Grandpa, and Uncle Bruce—up the sidewalk past the nicely appointed garden and patio, where a hot sun reflected brilliantly off one of those silver globes on a pedestal, the kind that I associated with rich people. The committee …
JULY 29, 2023 – Several years passed, and one Saturday afternoon in June 1961, while I was playing out in our spacious, oak-shaded yard, the newest, largest moving van in the fleet of Geo. B. Holman & Co., Inc., “agents for United Van Lines[1]” came growling down our quiet, sleepy street in Anoka, Minnesota and …
JULY 28, 2023 – When I was a little boy, there was a large, framed map on my bedroom wall. Mother told me it was of New Jersey, but she also told me that her home state was much older than Minnesota, so why it was called “New” and not “Old Jersey” was a mystery …
JULY 27, 2023 – It wasn’t until many decades later and Gaga was lying on her deathbed in the hospital, when I learned the origins of Uncle Bruce’s connection with the state of Vermont. It was 1994—four years before the fire, of course, and all that it revealed, and thus my accepting (if not positive) …
JULY 26, 2023 – For the next four years, my life was consumed by the violin, and nowhere close to the state of Vermont, except for a few days during each Christmas vacation, when Uncle Bruce would invite me out to ski with him at Hogback[1]. Despite all the runs we took together, Uncle Bruce …
JULY 25, 2023 – (Cont.) Before lights out that Sunday night, I decided to fiddle with the old clock radio that Uncle Bruce had left behind on Parents’ Weekend. Despite my best efforts, however, I could not get the alarm buzzer to work, and it was the buzzer that I had anticipated deploying in order …
JULY 24 2023 – (Cont.) Thus, in study hall the day after Uncle Bruce had surprised me with his phone call, I addressed my letter to him, the primary purpose of which was to answer his generous question, “What can I bring you on Parents’ Weekend?” There were two things that had been on my …
JULY 23, 2023 – (Cont.) So it was that in early September 1968, I joined 99 other “young men” from around the country (though mostly from the Northeast, despite the school’s attempt to achieve broader geographic diversity) in . . . wearing a coat and tie to all classes and sit-down meals served by student …
JULY 22, 2023 – What is life but fate, and what is fate but randomness woven into meaning through the course of life. As the plane floated down onto the runway, marking the end of my Vermont ski trip with Uncle Bruce, I couldn’t have guessed that Vermont lay not behind me but in front …
JULY 21, 2023 – (Cont.) We would also move on from Hogback—one day at Mt. Snow and another at Haystack. The day at Mt. Snow[1] was marked by . . . snow . . . but also sleet and unfriendly winds. I don’t remember much about the skiing, probably because pretty much all day long, …
JULY 20, 2023 – (Cont.) Uncle Bruce rewarded my efforts—and his own—on the slopes by taking us to dinner at the Skyline Restaurant. It was a Dick Hamilton family operation, Uncle Bruce explained, and accordingly, Uncle Bruce and I were treated royally thanks to his long-standing friendship with them. The host and hostess, our waitress, …
JULY 19, 2023 -(Cont.) The next day we drove east on Route 9 to Hogback Ski Area, officially in the town of Marlboro, except I didn’t see any sign of a town, just beautiful scenery in all directions and limited signs of development. There was the ski area on the south side of the big …
JULY 18, 2023 – (Cont.) In mid-December the following year—1967—the annual Christmas package arrived from Rutherford. Gaga had put the usual, “Don’t open ’til Christmas” stickers on the outside, but from Christmases past, I knew that we didn’t have to worry: she had fully wrapped the presents inside the large parcel. Thus, with one of …
JULY 17, 2023 – (Cont.) The next year would be the last year of Uncle Bruce’s Yuletide visits, but it was the first year that Uncle Bruce’s devotion to skiing crossed with my nascent interest in the sport . . . . . . When Dad was a kid, he had owned a pair of …
JULY 16, 2023 – As is the case with many geographically-challenged people outside of New England, when I was a kid, I had trouble remembering which of the two states sandwiched between Maine and New York was Vermont and which was New Hampshire. For the record, my self-developed mnemonic device was to think of the …
July 15, 2023 -(Cont.) After his appearance at the World’s Fair, we learned, Uncle Bruce traveled to Scandinavia and the United Kingdom. He sent post-cards to my sisters and me, and I regarded these as crown jewels within my collection of things. One of the post-cards, I remember, was quite large and doubled as a …
JULY 14, 2023 – The old terminal at the Minneapolis airport was a small, quaint foreshadowing of the current sprawling Minneapolis-St. Paul Lindbergh International Terminal. However, for me as a young kid, the original, three-story brick building with a windy observation deck on a portion of the second floor roof and the green-glass control tower …
JULY 13, 2023 – (Cont.) I remember especially well the Christmas when I was five. I’d begged Mother to allow me to stay up until Uncle Bruce returned from his day of shopping in downtown Minneapolis, but he was unusually late, and Mother finally insisted that I go to bed. She promised that when Uncle …
JULY 12, 2023 – We knew him as Santa Claus, and indeed he was. As reliable as the calendar, Uncle Bruce would arrive a week before the Big Day. He always caught a night flight from Newark to the old terminal in Minneapolis, where Mother and Dad would pick him up. His arrival was past …
JULY 11, 2023 – (Cont.) Grandpa died at 92. He’d been ailing for four years after he failed to negotiate an unusually high curb on his way to the post office on the other side of Lincoln Park in Rutherford. He fell and struck his head on the pavement. Grandpa fought back valiantly, but he …
JULY 10, 2023 – (Cont.) Back there in the dining room as I found it in 1980, I didn’t realize the full extent of the iceberg that had upset my perception of Grandpa. After all, what did I know? I was but the inexperienced grandson with a liberal arts education from a fancy school but …
JULY 9, 2023 – (Cont.) Not long after that, Gaga and I agreed on the next cleanup target: the dining room, which Grandpa had long ago commandeered as his evening office. Back in those days, no one—not even UB or Mother when she visited—questioned what it was that Grandpa was doing in there every evening …
July 8, 2023 – (Cont.) Feeling confident, I asked Gaga, “So, what do you think about my tackling all the junk in the driveway along the side of the house?” “Go right ahead!” she said. “For years I’ve been waiting for someone to get rid of it all, but no one listens to me.” In the …
JULY 7, 2023 – (Cont.) There was nothing more emblematic of the long history of the Holman business than a petrified banana that Grandpa had found one day in the drawer of a dresser, which had been abandoned close to 75 years earlier—and which Grandpa was only then in 1980 getting around to moving out …
JULY 6, 2023 -(Cont.) By this time (autumn, 1980) in the course of my evolving inheritance, Mother had been making regular trips back East. The stated reason was to “give [UB] some relief in caring for Gaga and Grandpa,” but in truth she was on a major guilt trip for having left her family and …