Father, Mother and Best Friend

This time every year always invokes memories for me.   January 7th was my father's birthday, January 8th my mother's and January 9th my best friend Randy Cooke's.  All are gone.

Dad was born 98 years ago, in 1918, which still amazes me.  It was the year that World War I ended--a war that involved 70 million combatants and took over 16 million civilian and military lives.  It was also the year of the most deadly flu pandemic in history.  Casualty estimates vary wildly, ranging from 20 million to as high as 100 million.  In the U.S., the average age dropped ten years.  It was also the year of the Cloquet-Moose Lake Fire, near Mahtowa, where Dad was born, which killed 452 people and destroyed 38 towns and villages.

Sorry for the tangent. The second oldest of 13 children, Dad spent much of his youth working on the family farm.  A graduate of Barnum High School, he got his B.S. from the University of Minnesota, a Master's of Social Work from USC, and served in the Army in World War II as a medic in New Guinea.  He was humble, hard-working and honest as the day is long.  He loved to visit relatives, take saunas, garden, cook and play cards, especially bridge and solitaire.  He spent most of his career as a social worker in the St. Louis County Welfare Department. Looking back, I wish we would have talked more, but that wasn't the Finnish way.

Mom was born 10 years and a day after Dad, in Kettle River, Minnesota, also to Finnish farmers.  She fell in love with the violin at an early age and moved to Duluth to live with a violin teacher during high school.  Music would be an important part of her life, as she spent her years teaching high school orchestras and playing in a string quartet and the Duluth Symphony Orchestra.  She was an inveterate learner, but would jump from one interest to another, flitting like a dilettante from cross-stitch to refinishing furniture to learning Chinese and joining Toastmistress.  She was perpectually engaged in something new, but always had time to talk to me, or play chess or Stratego with me (which I always won) or Scrabble and Milles Borne (where we were more evenly matched).

But the thing I remember most is her generosity of spirit.  She served tirelessly in church, and tended to the needs of those no one else would find time for.  It struck me that these wounded spirits were weird, and I wanted nothing to do with them.  Mom could somehow overlook their faults, and refused to judge them, or at least to let any judgment influence her willingness to serve.

Mom and Dad married late in life, he a life-long 45-year-old bachelor and she a divorcee, both steeped in the Finnish culture and recent converts to the LDS church. Unable to have children of their own, and given their advanced age, they adopted me as an 11-year-old hellion.  Being adopted was an unusual blessing for someone of my age "in the system."  It changed the trajectory of my life and for that I will always be humbly and profoundly grateful.

And then there's my best friend growing up--Randy Cooke.  He died of cancer in 2008, but I still think about him and our many adventures, and sometimes he appears in a dream, usually outdoors, and always speaking softly and walking with long strides.

January 7-9, 2017.  Thanks for the memories.