Tag Family

The day I turned old

normanjameson Leave a comment

I turned old on August 30, 2025. I know the day. And the hour. And the moment.

No wonder the young lady stood to offer me her seat.

For much of my life, I looked younger than my age. I was a husband, father, and owned my second house before I shaved every day.

About age 26, I was in the barber chair with my hair wet and glasses off and my wife walked in, ready to take me home when I was finished, since we managed with one car. The barber noticed that she caught my eye, and asked, “Is that your mother?”

Later we listed some furniture for sale, some of our original “we-need-something-and-this-will-do-until-we-have-money,” pieces. A college girl called, said it would be perfect for her dorm, and arranged a time to come pick it up.

When I answered the door, she looked at me and asked, “Is your mother home?”

To say I was devastated is to say the Johnstown Flood was a trickle. I was floored. It took me days to get over it. Evidently, I still haven’t.

I was a college graduate, Army veteran, working a professional job with national connections and a college girl sees me in my Saturday morning T-shirt and jeans and asks if my mother is home.

I told her my mother lives in Wisconsin, 640 miles away, but if she’s here for the furniture, I can help. And then my wife picked me up off the floor.

Eventually, the sirocco winds of life aged my face, bleached my hair to arctic blonde and added enough wrinkles that I didn’t have to say, “No, really” anymore when my age came up.

My oldest son shares some of my facial features and when I’m introduced as his father, his friends invariably say, “I could’ve guessed.” I keep hoping one day someone will mistake me for his older brother.

Which brings me to the fateful day when the harsh reality of simple observation by a stranger shattered the mistaken impression that all the mirrors in my house are broken. I walk past a mirror, see the image it reflects, and I know that grizzled face can’t be me.

And yet.

In Budapest, Hungary at the beginning of a Danube River cruise taken to celebrate the 50th anniversary of marriage to a beautiful woman I had bamboozled long enough to convince her to marry me, the curtain came down on my illusion.

I stepped onto a tram car and a young woman stood to offer me her seat.

Glass shattered. Ego crumbled. Humility fallen over my shoulders like a granite yoke.

I implored the innocent to return to her seat. Over a language barrier, my pleading eyes, exasperated face and arm motions made my intention clear. “Please. No. Take your seat. ARRGGG.”

She politely declined, and I resolutely remained standing, amid the laughter of our traveling colleagues.

The insult of reality was exacerbated the next day when on a similar tram, my wife was warned that a conductor was on board and was checking tickets. In Budapest persons over age 65 ride public transportation free.  The local was kindly warning my wife that she needed a ticket.

Sue Ellen graciously informed her that she didn’t need a ticket, because she was 70. To which the kind commuter expressed astonishment, of course.

She then looked at me, seeing I was with Sue Ellen, and I swear I heard her ask, “Is that your father?”

 

‘/

Rod Stewart is 80! What does that make me?

normanjameson Leave a comment

I burst out laughing recently when I saw on the waiting room table the June/July issue of AARP magazine, the publication from what was once known as the American Association of Retired Persons.

On the cover, reverberating in neon colors, a knowing smirk and dust mop hair was Rod Stewart, the English rocker whose music dominated the sound track of my freshman year at Luther College.

The perennial young superstar is now 80 years old. But his penetrating eyes and feline, ready to pounce stage pose triggered aural memories as if I was still having nightmares about missing a test for a class I never attended and wondering why in the world I enrolled in 8 a.m. speech. 

“Maggie May” was Stewart’s break out song, originally released on the “B” side of the single “Reason to Believe.” It was practically on loop at the local radio station. Or if you couldn’t wait for it to come on after the next commercial, you just needed to walk down Ylvisaker dorm hall to hear it emanating from behind a door. 

For a naïve college freshman, away from his little farming community home for the first time, the song’s lament of a young man trying to leave an older friend who became a lover struck a fantastical chord.

“You led me away from home, just to save you from being alone,” the song says. Here I was, away from home and feeling very alone. 

“It’s late September and I really should be back in school.” Hey, it’s September and there I was, in school.

I wasn’t a rock and roll fan. The Carpenters, James Taylor and Simon and Garfunkel were more my speed. And frankly, I didn’t and don’t like Stewart’s gravelly voice. But even while writing this piece, “Maggie May” is an ear worm I can’t stop humming. 

My problem with seeing Rod Stewart on the cover of AARP magazine at age 80 is that in 1971 he was just a few years older than me. And now, he’s 80. What does that make me?

We all have triggers that remind us of how we’re aging. I think of the story of a woman who looked into the window at a hair salon and saw one of her classmates from 30 years ago. She was shocked at how the woman had aged.

She went in to say hello, introduce herself and remind her they were in school at the same time. “Oh,” the woman said. “What did you teach?”

“The morning sun when it’s in your face really shows your age,” Stewart sang.

I laughed at that line in 1971, about the sun revealing age. I still didn’t shave every day and was aggravated that I looked so much younger than I actually was. People thought i was a kid. Other guys had sideburns I envied because I just knew a strip of beard down the side of my face was the key to getting girls. 

I’ve matured from that, to the fact that I’m replacing all the mirrors in my house because they don’t work. I don’t know if the batteries are spent or what. But I’m certain the image they reflect is not the image I present.

I check the obituaries for any familiar names. There I see brief summaries encapsulating lives lived and lost that ended at ages younger than me. Persons both famous and anonymous whose roads on this earth ran shorter than the path I trod are signing off. Bon voyage.

Fifty-year anniversaries are cropping up. First, high school graduation, then getting drafted, then college. My wedding. Friends’ weddings, friendships started, events I participated in a half century ago.

About the time Rod Stewart struck it big with Maggie May.

‘Nothing lasts like it used to’

normanjameson Leave a comment

I once took it as irrefutable truth that “Nothing lasts like it used to.”

For the most part, I agreed that manufacturers were “building in obsolescence” so you’ll have to replace that refrigerator you’ve had for 25 years with a new one you can expect to last only 10 at best.

It’s easier and cheaper to replace appliances than it is to repair them. Good for the manufacturers, bad for service repairmen.

Credit that brief functional life to plastic parts. While it may take 10,000 years to decay in the landfill, plastic in the essential workings of everyday products seem to decay in 10 months. Plastic is so pervasive that we don’t even realize how many items that once were made were made with metal or wood and were strong enough to become heirlooms are now made with plastic and won’t get your kid through kindergarten.

To start a list of all things plastic would require more capacity than my computer has. You may be reading this through lenses held to your nose with plastic frames. You bring home groceries in plastic bags, or get fast food through your car window in plastic containers. Plastic is often useful but nothing plastic can be expected to last long enough for your child to use it as an adult.

Yet, I’m still using an electric grinder my dad used to sharpen the ax he handed me to split firewood. A brass lawn sprinkler I finally sprung for has outlasted a dozen plastic sprinklers.

So yes, I agreed for the most part that “Nothing is built to last” anymore. But then I thought of shoelaces.

Remember when you had to replace shoelaces? When you had to keep extras on hand because they always broke just when you were hurriedly tying a knot to catch the bus for school? Or when you’re trying to get your gym shoes on for phys ed?

And weren’t the only shoelaces available in the catch-all drawer never the color or length you needed? Lots of white laces in the draw when you needed black and vice versa. Don’t even talk to me about brown.

Now the laces in my shoes, from court shoes, to hiking boots to dress shoes outlast the shoes themselves. My sole was falling off my 35-year old Vasque Sundowner hiking boots, but the laces are unfrayed. How DO they do that?

And cars.

Car buffs wax nostalgic about the autos of our youth, but our love affair with those massive, ungainly hunks of American steel was more about style than quality or agility. They burned gas like the sun burns hydrogen.

I became a writer because I couldn’t fix cars. All my buddies, it seemed, knew how to adjust a carburetor, or set the gap on a spark plug, or adjust the timing belt. I knew where the gas went. And I could change a tire.

But, what future awaited in my rural Wisconsin community if I knew nothing about cars and didn’t have a farm to inherit? Cars are another thing better today than a generation ago. Even Car and Driver magazine says, “Cars these days are made to last much longer than those produced even a few decades ago.” Reason being, “car parts are now constructed to withstand more wear than in the past.”

New cars are basically computers on wheels. Electronic eyes can keep a safe distance between you and the car ahead; can keep your vehicle centered in the lane; go 5,000-7000 miles between oil changes; are just getting warmed up at 100,000 miles on the odometer.

Of course, people are driving more today. Commutes of 45 minutes each way are common and longer distances are not unheard of. But no one had 100,000 miles on a car when I was a kid. A guy would hesitate to buy a used car with half that mileage.

 And then there is the elastic that holds up my socks, and keeps my boxer briefs from falling off my hips. My socks never stayed up when I was a kid, and the elastic waistband in my underwear didn’t last many rounds through the wringer washer before they collapsed in their effort to stay aloft.

Today the elastic in my socks could cut off my circulation and that in my waistband could be a tourniquet for an elephant’s mangled leg.

So, it’s not true that nothing is as good or as long lasting as it once was. And if you argue about it, I’m going to throw my Walkman at you and tie you to the broken fridge in my garage.

Going to need extra chairs

normanjameson Leave a comment

Me in the middle, with Janet and Bill in 2021.

When my grandmother died in 1979, I drove my young wife and one-month old son from our home in Nashville, TN to the funeral in Wisconsin. Grandma was young enough to have a large funeral, just 72 years old. My age.

Of course, in Rio, WI, population 788, funerals were as big a social event as Friday night football at the field in Fireman’s Park. I didn’t play football. I ran cross country instead, which I convinced myself was harder.

But I was at the football games, either running the sideline keeping stats, or in the stands playing “CHARGE” on my trombone.

After grandma’s funeral service at Redeemer Lutheran, one of six churches in town – equal to the number of bars – everyone gathered in the church basement for a lunch prepared by women of the church. Because the meal was free, and there wasn’t much else happening in town that day, the room was crowded.

My wife was most concerned with the one-month old son not accustomed to the noise and crowd and whose only real concern was keeping his tummy full and his diaper dry. So, he started fussing and wailing and that’s not the sound you want to hear piercing the din of chattery family members chowing down on store bought dinner rolls filled with a slice of ham and a slab of butter, potato salad and red Jell-O with marshmallows.

Suddenly, from across the entire fellowship hall, packed hip to hip at the folding tables, my aunt Janet yelled, “Give that boy some titty!”

Now, in another context other than a rural Wisconsin farming community, that comment might have seemed out of place, even impolite. Certainly it caused all the blood in my wife’s body to flush to her toes and then recongregate in her face, making her flush a brighter red than the Rio High School Vikings mascot. But, it also gave her the freedom to excuse herself, find a quiet Sunday School classroom, and take care of our son’s immediate need.

Aunt Janet died this week, at age 91. She was my mother’s last surviving sibling and mom preceded her in death by 29 years. They were two of eight siblings, prompting my grandpa McFarlane to say he had “Two and a half-dozen children.” When grandma McFarlane died, petty sibling grievances broke familial bonds and later on, as one sibling after another died, obituaries did not list all surviving family members, as if they never existed.

But Aunt Janet was always a friend, in part due to the loquacious character of her husband, Bill, a former police officer and much longer a seed corn salesman who knew every farmer and what they needed most. Bill preceded her in death by three years.

I confess Janet’s was the first bare breast I ever saw, as I stood wide-eyed at age five while she fed her first born son, Mark, a man who grew up to be a Presbyterian pastor, nurtured as he was on the milk of human kindness. He could preach from I Peter 2, “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.”

Janet and Bill had five children and 10 grandchildren and money never flowed like water over Niagara. Janet always put her hand to the wheel to find additional resources, driving school bus for more than two decades and making wedding cakes for lucky brides and grooms.

She looked at driving bus as ministry, taking the opportunity to offer a bright, encouraging word to children with dour faces, lifting heavy, reluctant feet up the step on the way to school.

She was certain of opinion and ready with advice.

When Janet learned my cousin Allen smoked, she asked if he would rather kiss a girl or an ashtray. Allen, sarcastically defending his nasty habit, told me he responded “Ashtray.” He’s since grown beyond that – both in girls and habit.

 Janet and Bill built a house on a hill overlooking that of her mother Eva and she was diligent in looking after her mother to the end. Eva –my grandmother on my mother’s side – expressed concern that bad weather would limit the size of her funeral. She was mentally comparing her eventual celebration to the big crowd that showed up for her husband’s sendoff. In her mind, her funeral would suffer by comparison and somehow that would reflect negatively on her life.

Though such comparison is a false equivalency, if every person whose life Janet affected positively were to attend her funeral, ushers will need to bring in extra chairs.

Two Ways To Do It

normanjameson Leave a comment

I grew up working with and for my Norwegian bachelor farmer uncle Donnie, who made a living milking 19 cows on 80 sandy acres in southern Wisconsin. As a kid I tried to impress him with my strength by carrying 40 pound buckets of milk to the cooling tank when I didn’t weigh much more than twice that. I struggled to make it look easy, but he knew it took all I had.

I get to practice what i learned while young at White Horse Farm in Pennsylvania, where my son’s family lives.

In the ‘60s corn had to be cultivated to keep the weeds down before “poison ready” genetically modified seed became the norm. So I’d sit on the tractor with Don as he drove the little plows through two rows at a time to dig out the weeds. If he hit a stone or lost concentration and the cultivator dug out some corn, I’d hop off, stick it back into the ground, and run to catch up.

Building or repairing barbed wire fence, learning how to drive tractor and truck, milk a cow and slop a pig, being rewarded with a chocolate milk and donut at the Midget Kitchen on Hwy. 16 all were part of my kinetic education – along with learning how to understand the punchline of coarse jokes.

Once I reached about age 13 my services were much in demand by local farmers who needed help detasseling corn, baling hay, picking stones or cleaning out stalls and stables. I was a tall, thin kid who was young Sheldon in the classroom and who saw Arnold Schwarzenegger in the mirror.

Our local farmers were basically one-man-and-a-son operations, and I replaced the boy who had grown and gone to the city. To make hay while the sun shined, we cut the alfalfa, let it dry for three days and hoped for no rain. Then we raked it into windrows, scooped it up and compacted it into 40-50 pound bales with a tractor pulling a baler pulling a wagon with a kid on the wagon stacking the bales.

Most generally it was me and the farmer – baling, loading, unloading onto an elevator and stacking in the barn. There were two kinds of farmers when it came to engaging my services on a hot summer day. One I’ll call Uncle Donnie’s way, on account of it’s about my Uncle Donnie. The other I could call “the efficient way,” on account of it’s the opposite of my Uncle Donnie.

When Uncle Don picked me up in the morning, we’d get to the farm and have to gas up the tractor, grease the baler and put in baling twine, hook the baler to the tractor, connect the power takeoff shaft and move the elevator into position to carry the bales up into the hay mow. It wasn’t unusual for us to have round up a wagon or two that a neighbor farmer had borrowed.

All the while I’m looking at all that hay, laying expectantly in windrows in the field, itching to get out there and get started, knowing it was going to be a long day. And it was threatening to rain.

Farmers committed to “the efficient way” and to getting all the work out of me they could, completed all the preliminaries before I got there. The baler was greased and hooked to the tractor, which was gassed and ready. The elevator was in place, all the necessary wagons were lined up, and mother had lunch in the oven.

We got twice as much done in half the time. And there are few things as satisfying as looking over a freshly harvested field, seeing it cut and clean and all the hay is in the barn before the rain comes.

That, and the fact that the more efficient farmers tended to pay $1.25 an hour, rather than $1.00.

Readiness makes the difference. Many of you work with non-profit organizations. Respect the time of your volunteers. Don’t let them show up on a work day or at a fund raising event and have to stand around and twiddle their thumbs. If they are volunteer tutors, have a student already selected and matched.

Then, let it rain.

Don’t be like my dad

normanjameson 5 Comments
Dad and me around 1956.

Over a breakfast of toast, fruit and eggs plucked moments earlier from the coop next to the house, my wife said I’d given her too much food. She was stirring her eggs about like a kid wishing lima beans to disappear.

“Just eat what you want, dear,” I said. “Don’t be like my dad.”

My dad, Marvin. Gone now for seven years. A child of the Depression, frugal to a fault. As a young man, he worked two and three jobs to buy groceries for his wife and three children, ages four to infant, living in a 19-foot trailer. He loathed the idea of “wasting” a single morsel of food well into his prosperous 80s.

Dad cleared his plate, no matter how miserable those last forkfuls made him feel later, especially if it was a restaurant meal for which he paid. I never understood it.

“Dad,” I’d say. “Don’t let some anonymous cook in the kitchen determine how much you’re going to eat, and how you’re going to feel afterward.”

Dad and me in 2015. He died in 2017.

But the thought of sending food back to the kitchen or down the disposal was anathema to dad.

Immediately after I told Sue Ellen, “Don’t be like my dad,” regarding his relationship with food, Newton’s third law of motion kicked in and brought an “equal and opposite reaction.” I thought of so many ways I would want my wife, my children, myself and anyone else to “be just like my dad.”

Dad was devoted to his family, teaching us to work by example, never complaining about his long hours. He stretched his finances to buy “the old Peterson place on County B” with 80 acres of farmland and an acre of lawn and outbuildings. On and off he tried raising steers, pigs and chickens to supplement his income driving a fuel truck among farms in four counties.

We mowed the grass, tended the large garden, fed the animals and picked stones from the fields that the annual freeze and thaw pulled to the surface. A big bellied wood burning furnace in the basement heated the old farm house so each Fall we gathered fuel from the woods.

He loved my mother in obvious ways, not afraid to hug, kiss and be silly with her in front of his children. My most poignant memory is of dad kissing his hand and laying it against the cold glass window as the ambulance carried her body away from the house, when she succumbed to cancer. He never got over her.

Dad’s reputation as an honest man was unassailable. He gave up the gas truck to manage the local farmers’ cooperative store, while also being treasurer of the local credit union, before computers. He had an amazing mind for numbers, though he never graduated high school.

He left home at 14, riding his bike to a neighboring town to live with his teacher aunt and attend school. But the lure of earning money to drive a dump truck for the county proved more attractive than another day in the classroom.

Yet, when i showed academic promise, dad instilled in me an assumption that i would become the family’s first college graduate.

Dad held opinions about things, but he easily relinquished defense of those opinions rather than stress a relationship.

I never heard him or mom exchange a cross word.

I could go on. Every Christmas I remember how he accidentally shattered my myth holding about Santa Claus. That fall he’d given me a football, just out of the blue. Dad never played organized sports, but we tossed the ball around a time or two.

That Christmas when i opened up my gift of a basketball, he took it, rolled it about in his hands, and said, “Do you remember the football I gave you?”

I nodded of course.

“I got this basketball at the same time.”

Fantasy fractured. St. Nick deconstructed.

But from that seed of myth, cracked open with the hammer of reality, grew over decades a sapling of hope, that one day, i could be like dad.

Funerals, and other fun rituals

normanjameson Leave a comment

I attended the funeral of a friend and former colleague today. A man younger than me.

I learned of his death while driving home from a Florida vacation. I didn’t know he’d been sick, as he was a private man. As his son said in eulogy, “My dad was the most private public person in the world.”

The somber, intimate public gathering of persons who want to see and support the surviving family and who want to hear good things spoken of their deceased friend is a valuable human ritual. Loved ones recount memories and sometimes reveal things previously unknown.

Careful speakers offer subtle lines to confirm suspicions while lauding the deceased with praise most discerning supporters take with an appreciative grain of salt.

 I’m glad I attended the funeral several years ago of a former boss, who was the most difficult human I’ve ever worked with. It was healing for me to hear good things spoken of her, to hear friends recite positive qualities well disguised in our days together.

I delivered eulogies for both my parents. Some of my observations were meant specifically to comfort some quietly sobbing friend. Other words were to lighten the somber atmosphere.

My mother, who died at 64, was a very private, reserved person, not given to bawdy humor, even when the men around her were cutting up. The first night I brought my new bride to visit in the home, I found an apple on the bedside table. The next morning, I asked mom about the apple.

“That was a contraceptive,” she said. Immediately I thought of several ways that might work, none of which I voiced to mom. Instead, I asked, “Was I supposed to eat it before…or after?”

“You were supposed to eat it…instead,” she said, laughing. Those at her funeral laughed, too, at the telling.

My grandma was proud of the large attendance at grandpa’s funeral. She surmised that she didn’t loom as large in the minds of neighbors, community and family as he did, and she bemoaned that her funeral would be much smaller. “If it snows, nobody will be there,” she speculated.

If you want a large funeral, die young.

Part of my father’s lament toward the end of his 86 years was that all his friends had died. He was tired of attending funerals of his buddies, each of which left him lonelier.

I listened with great respect as the first born son of my friend delivered an insightful, humorous, sad and intimate portrait of his father. I knew this boy when he was just a kid and now he’s a man with gray hair at his temples. And I realized his relationship and age relative to his father, is the same as my oldest son to me.

And I imagined my son standing in front of my surviving friends one day. But I could not imagine what he will say.

I eulogized my father 21 years after my mother. Many of the same faces peered up at me. Many were absent, long gone to their own reward. And I realized the value of the ritual, the support those faces and kind words offered, the life they’d shared with my mother and father – experiences they recounted to fill my own my memory portfolio.

In his song “Standing Room Only,” Tim McGraw talks about this end of life ritual and encourages us to “Be somebody that’s worth rememberin’, to live a life so when we die “there’s standing room only,” at our funeral.

Since I’ll be laying down, or my ashes will already have been blown away by a strong wind, I’m not concerned about standing room. But when my children and friends go to rememberin’, I hope a smile crosses their faces.

Don’t miss it: put those memories on PAPER

normanjameson 3 Comments

Other than seven months in our second year of marriage, my wife and I have never lived closer than 600 miles to either set of parents. I grew up in Wisconsin, she in Illinois, and then Colorado, where we met.

We were faithful to stay in touch with our parents as we moved from Oklahoma, to Colorado, to Tennessee, to Texas, back to Oklahoma and then to North Carolina. Long distance phone calls were expensive so I consistently wrote weekly letters to bridge the miles and months between visits.

Each letter recorded the previous week’s events, which at our stage of life always seemed many – certainly more fascinating, important and original to us than to our families. But mom and dad always hung on every word and my mother was good to write in return.

At first, I wrote the letters in long hand, which to today’s teens is like code. Around 1980 our office moved from an exotic, spinning ball electric typewriter to early computers. Wow. The monitor itself begged me to write as it seduced me with the string of little green letters corresponding to the keys I pressed.

By the time children started arriving computers were more common and it was easier to chronicle the many initial, unique, and unprecedented achievements of Nathan, Erin and Austin – first smile, first roll over, first word, first step. I’m sure I went into detail ad nauseum. Eventually, I realized these letters were a chronos record of my children’s lives – and mine – and I started keeping four copies of every letter.

I wrote on different computers, duplicated them on various printers, was not consistent in type face, margins or paper quality. But my intention was to keep a file of these letters for each child and present them as a bound volume for a high school graduation gift – their life in print.

The books were such a hit the kids never pressed me for that new car I never offered.

They’ve used the books to reaffirm memories, to share with spouses – and eventually their children – something of their lives growing up. The first born – trying to recall for his wife his foray into independence at about age seven – rifled through the pages to the specific time he was running away from home, pulling his wagon, when I drove into the neighborhood from work, saw him and encouraged him not to be late for dinner.

Boyfriends, girlfriends, grades, sports activities, family moves, home building, job changes, awards and disappointments all are recorded in black and white in a bound volume, a ready reference for those mystical days when a fireplace, rain, wine and melancholy need a tiny, tangible toehold to step full blown into nostalgia.

Is our self-identity anything more than an accumulation of our memories?

We’ve moved a lot so to keep things simple we never clung to things. One moving team looked around our empty attic and spartan walls and said, “Mrs. Jameson, you don’t do clutter, do you.” I struggle against the tide of my wife’s tidying to cling to pool noodles of memorabilia.

Comedian Billy Crystal, in his hilarious memoir written upon turning 65, Still Foolin’ ‘Em, believes we ought to keep mementos that take us back to happy moments. Remembering them helps us to relive them, and who doesn’t like to go back to mental images that bring a smile?

The letters I wrote to my parents were subject to time, travel, USPS sorting and handling machines, the vagaries of weather, transportation and distribution. But each was a package of joy upon arrival.

Great historical biographies have been written based solely on the written correspondence to and from the subject. I join the chorus of lament that this kind of communication no longer is in vogue. It’s a lost art; a neglected source of historical reference, of anchors to memory.

My children have asked me to write letters to their children celebrating certain occasions, passages into “adulthood,” or encouragement in their Christian lives – requests I eagerly fulfill.

Perhaps one day they’ll come across such letters in their files or boxes of childhood treasures, pause and reread them, and whisper to no one in particular, “Ahhh, Papa. I remember him.”