Boomers . . . and How They Got That Way
Epistle 15 – Roots
I’m half German. At least I think I am. All my life my mother told me the other half was Danish, but that was a lie. Scandinavian, yes; Danish, no. The truth came out around the time she turned 80 and being older now had status. It was then she magically found her birth certificate, which proved she was one year older than she thought. Not that she had been lying about her age, mind you. (Why bother to lie about just one year?) Well, that was no big deal but from out of the Bible containing the birth certificate and the debris of a pressed flower fluttered a newspaper obit that said I was a Swede and a Norwegian and 1/8 Finn. Can you image the shock of that? Not a drop of Danish and a Finnaroon, for God’s sake! No wonder the woman was social climbing. Must have been the lutefisk.
Anyway, back to my German roots. There’s no doubt my paternal grandmother was German. She ruled the family with an iron fist, never smiled, and drank beer like a trooper. She also put a mustard plaster on my chest to cure a cold when I was a kid. Starve a fever, feed a cold, she said. Well, she fed the cold. I got pneumonia and my chest still smells like a ballpark hot dog.
In Brewster’s Mill, being both Scandinavian and German was considered racially mixed. To add to my tender childhood angst, we also had Catholics and Lutherans in the same family. Well, can you imagine the terrible trauma from all those confused genes? You can’t? Well, there was no shortage of causes to blame for all the family misfortunes. The German side was sure that too much herring had made the Norwegians a little goofy, and the Swedes blamed German surliness on too much gas.
They were both right. Bratwurst and cabbage can react explosively while a fish boil with onions can produce a deady counterattack. With one side in lederhosen and the other wearing a furry hat with cow horns, it’s great entertainment unless you’re downwind.
So you see, children, lethal gas attacks have always been a part of certain cultures and not exclusively the tools of terrorism. In fact, Brewster’s Mill nearly had to be evacuated until an Irishman moved in and convinced the Catholic church to make peace between the warring factions with an annual spaghetti dinner. Everyone attended and we, of course, sat on the Lutheran side of the church basement. Lord only knows where the Italians came from to cook the spaghetti, but after a lifetime of wurst and cabbage, we wouldn’t have known if it was any good or not. The point was that it was new, so it had to be a good idea.
Of course, social change is an evolutionary process. When pizza came along, my mother made ours with boiled fish. Being a Finnaroon ain’t easy.
We Will Win
