FEBRUARY 21, 2025 – (Cont.) “I saw a stupid accident in Champlin on my return from the airport,” Dad wrote.
A teenager on a bike tried to dart between the cars waiting for the stop light and got hit by cars in the third lane, which he didn’t notice were moving. He hit (or got hit by) a pickup truck & thrown in the ditch. I don’t know how badly he was hurt, but some of his brains must have been missing before the accident! (Gosh!)
When I got home I washed the Pontiac (I do this every February 18th when the temp is 50° or above, whether it needs washing or not!)
Today will set another temp. record—it’s about the same as yesterday.
Love,
Dad
It was classic Dad—on the one hand, pointing out the carelessness of an unthinking (“stupid”) youth, and on the other, expressing his sense of humor about something over which he had no control: the record warm weather.
In a tilt of his hat to my Grand Odyssey, he added at the bottom of the one-page letter, “P.S. Bon Voyage!”
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I next turned to Jenny’s letter. It was dated the same day as Dad’s—February 19—and sent to me at the home of my Swedish grandmother’s sister, Jenny, and Dad’s cousins Harry and Bud, in Cupertino, California. As I studied the envelope bearing their address, the time machine carried me back to my stay with them 44 years ago.
There I found my great aunt and Harry in the small garden paradise behind the house. Jenny, in her 80s, looked as elegant as ever, seated in the shade of an orange tree beside a row of rose bushes. Harry sat at a table nearby, enjoying a cigarette and reading the newspaper. His neat grey hair, eyeglasses and well-trimmed mustache gave him the appearance of a veteran of the foreign service. Given the year—1981—Bud was at work, still some distance from retirement.
Aunt Jenny and Harry greeted me warmly, touching off reciprocal feelings on my part. My great aunt was a less serious, less reserved version of my grandmother but spoke with the same Swedish lilt that had edified “Ga’s” (what my sisters and I called our grandmother) spoken English. Jenny’s voice brought back memories of Ga, for whom my sisters and I—her only grandchildren—had developed such close affection before her untimely death so many years before. Though she and Jenny were years apart in age, they’d become quite close after Ga’s younger sister had followed from Sweden. Surely Jenny missed her older sister every bit as much as the rest of us did.
Harry was Dad’s favorite. Just a year older than Dad, he and Dad had been close ever since early childhood. They shared common interests in history, geography and philately. Both had traveled to Sweden and Norway, but during World War II, Harry had wound up in India and spent time in England, where he became an Anglophile. His articulate speech, high intelligence, knowledge of the world, and natural curiosity gave convincing substance to his diplomat-like appearance. After the war he’d returned home and gone to work as a purchasing agent for the state of California. He’d retired a year or two before my stay in Cupertino.
When I was growing up, Dad often told stories about their escapades. He later wrote about them in a memoir that revolved around all the automobiles in his life from his early childhood up to his 80s. He called it his “Auto” Biography.
For a number of years, every summer, the Winthers—Aunt Jenny, Harry, Bud, and their sister Dorothy—would take the train from their home in San Francisco to Minnesota for a long visit with Dad, Ga and Grandpa. Their Norwegian husband/dad, Sigurd Winther (whom my sisters and I called “Great Uncle Sugar,” when we were kids), worked on a boat used by the Santa Fe Railroad, which, I believe, granted his family passes on the railroad while he stayed behind and worked—at least until the Depression came.
When clearing out my parents’ house after Dad died, I came across the two black and white snapshots that Dad had described many years before; photos of him and Harry when they were seven or eight years old.
“Harry and I always got along great,” I remember Dad reminiscing. “But there was one occasion when we got out of sorts. Your grandpa had gotten us an Indian costume—one for Harry and me to share. “Ga [what my sisters and I called our grandmother] took a couple of pictures of us out in front of our house. In one of the photos, Harry was wearing the costume. He was all smiles, while I stood next to him with a sour-puss face. In the next photo Ga took, I was in the costume—smiling away—and Harry, standing next to me, was the sour-puss.”
A couple of years later, the Depression hit. Sigurd lost his job, and the Winthers fell on hard times. (Cont.)
Suddenly the time machine jumped to life, which sent the datometer into a whirling blur and yanked me almost 44 years into the future: January 13, 2025.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
