Blogger’s Note: Of 182 posts to date, this is the first to exceed the self-imposed cap of 500 words. It will remain the exception. In the writer’s opinion, slavish adherence to the rule, even via serialization, would detract from the story.
NOVEMBER 4, 2019 – This past weekend up at the Red Cabin, I sifted through some photos of my grandparents, Hilda (née Svensson in 1890) and Ragnar Nilsson (b. 1891). I don’t need photos to remember that eminently civilized couple; whenever I’m at the lake, I think about them.
As I myself approach their ages when my memories first formed, I see more clearly, not only the influences that my grandparents had on my life, but the influence that their times had on them. For the reader who never met my grandparents, this latter perspective is what perhaps will stir reflection.
When my oldest sister, Kristina, was at the babbling stage, she assigned our grandmother the name, “Ga.” The name stuck. Ga was the most refined person in our young lives—she died when I was only 11—and I think to this day she retains that distinction. Everything about her was refined: her culinary skills and presentation of a meal; her elegant attire, much of it made by her; her poise for a photograph—knowing how to place her feet, her hands, and what countenance to assume; her love of art and music; and of course, her command of language, spoken and written, Swedish and English.
At Christmas, she never gave us toys, but always something to wear—folded inside a Dayton’s box and perfectly wrapped by her.
Grandpa was a violinist. In his early career, he played in pit orchestras for silent movies screened at theaters along Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis. Later, he co-founded a music school. During the Great Depression, he and his business partner—an accordionist—went door-to-door rounding up students. Grandpa garnered as many as 65 violin students a week at a buck a piece—not inconsiderable income in those days; plus, he worked the nightshift at the main post office in downtown Minneapolis.
By way of the post office gig, he became a semi-professional philatelist, and in the 1940s, he founded, published, and edited an international collector’s magazine called, The American Post.
It was the stamps and the magazine that made Grandpa a geography expert. But he was curious about a lot of other subjects too and subscribed to many periodicals and “self-teaching” guides.
My sisters and I associate Bjōrnholm with our grandparents. Years after they died, my dad told me that we had a business conflict to thank for our family’s lakeside woodland retreat. In the late 1930s, Grandpa and his accordion-playing business partner were no longer on the same page, as it were. The accordionist acquired Grandpa’s interest, and with the proceeds, Grandpa bought the stretch of undeveloped shoreline property on Grindstone Lake in northwest Wisconsin. That was 80 years ago this year.
Among my many memories of Ga and Grandpa at the cabin is how they’d dress up to “go to town.” “Town” was Hayward, which in those days had only one street worth talking about. It was an eight-mile drive away from the cabin. Even as a young kid, I was amused by my grandparents’ formality. After all, except for summers, they lived in the middle of Minneapolis. Hayward was hicksville. Didn’t matter. If you were Hilda and Ragnar Nilsson, you got dressed up when you went to town, even if “town” was hicksville.
Their refinement was unlikely. Ga grew up on a farm in Småland, Sweden, much like a lot of other farms in that part of the country, where the main crop was rocks. I once visited the humble country schoolhouse where she got the extent of her formal education. But her first job in America was as a cook’s assistant for a Yale professor of English—who, by Ga’s good fortune, insisted that all the “help” learn the King’s English. She most certainly did.
Grandpa, meanwhile, led a tough existence, albeit an urban one, in Minneapolis. His mother died at 25 when he was just 18 months old. His father, Johan, a Swedish immigrant (as the son of “Nils,” he was the original “Nilsson” of the family), was a streetcar conductor who worked 16-hour days. For years, home was one boarding house . . . or another. Left to his own devices, Grandpa had a number of close calls.
Time for discipline. Johan found it by way of the violin and signed up his young son for lessons to keep the kid out of trouble. It was not a far-fetched idea. In 1900, music was a common pursuit. A piano in the home was nearly as common as a television would be a couple of generations later. The violin too was a popular instrument. Before the day of ubiquitous, omnipresent options, you had to create your own music.
In any event, Grandpa obviously took to the violin. Not only had Johan figured out how to keep his son out of trouble, but unwittingly, the father had opened the door to his son’s future career. But there was more to Grandpa’s violin-playing.
He turned 27 the year America entered World War I—at the time, called “The Great War for Civilization.” He became a soldier of that horrible conflict. During my own battle against the violin, Grandpa didn’t appeal to the beauty of music. He recalled the horrors of war and how his violin-playing had kept him out of harm’s way. As the Vietnam War raged its way onto the front page, Grandpa lectured me as to how the violin could keep me out of harm’s way too.
I now see my grandparents’ unusual refinement as pragmatism. Grandpa and the violin; Ga’s explanation of the practical reasons for proper placement of table utensils, quality clothing instead of junk at Christmastime, and so on. If her employers—including for some years, the Dayton family—expected their house staffs to assume the graces of aristocracy, Ga learned the pragmatic aspects of those graces.
On her bedroom wall hung a quotation by Goethe—“It is not doing the things you like to do but liking the things you have to do, that makes life blessed.” Even as a kid, I recognized that as a mark of what could make us all more civilized.
With Ga and Grandpa we attended symphony concerts regularly at Northrup Auditorium on the U of MN campus near their home; and visited the Bell Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the American-Swedish Institute. They didn’t go to “check the box” or “to be seen.” They went because however humble their origins and limited their formal education, they understood the intrinsic value of fine art, great music, and learning for learning’s sake.
Though my grandparents lived to see jet planes and watch television, they belonged to a much older age. When Ga was dying, right around Christmas, 1965, I bought her a traditional Dalarna (Swedish) horse as a gift. Dad took me to their house so I could present it. When we entered where she lay in bed, we saw her facing the wall, her back to us. We greeted her, but she was in too much pain to roll toward us. I described what I’d gotten her and that I was placing it on her dresser. She said she wished she could get up and ride the horse.
Grandpa was never the same after Ga died. His loneliness sapped his will to live. The day before he died, he slipped into delirium. When my parents visited him, he murmured that he was exhausted from having “been out riding my horse all day.”
But if my grandparents were born in horse-and-wagon days, the refinement they exuded throughout their lives is timeless. May their ageless example, remembered, make us in the current age a bit more civilized.
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© 2019 Eric Nilsson
