If You Carry Your Childhood With You, You Never Become Older

Me and Some of My Buddies
Friedens Lutheran School, Kenosha, WI
circa 1960

There is nothing especially special about the picture - it's a B/W and not centered very well, and its not even that clear. It is a favorite of mine though. 

This is the only picture memory I have other than official school pictures (you know, the ones everybody usually hates because you always seem to look dorky!) of my three years at Friedens Lutheran School in Kenosha. That makes it a keepsake - in my humble opinion anyway. I don't know  who took it, or why, or how I ended up with it. But I like it.

When I came across the quote on the top of the page, this is one of the pictures I  thought of that I could use for a vignette that would illustrate the thought. I attended Friedens for 1st, 2nd, and 4th grade. This is  either 2nd or 4th grade - probably 4th, huh? Our Saviors in Zion had no school yet, and  this was a good example of the kind of stuff Pastor Carl Leyrer brought to Our Savior's in Zion - love and desire for Christian education that would not see carpooling a bunch of kids each day to Kenosha as an obstacle. I'm sure that our family connection to Friedens (with Gramma Haubrich and Uncle Kelly and Aunt Norma living just down the street) didn't hurt. 

The quote was in my email inbox today (Goodreads Quote of the Day) and caught my eye. Perhaps it can help give you another explanation on why I do the things I do with  the things of the past. I wonder how many times in my life I've been told to "grow up." But I don't want to - so there!! And isn't it true? If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older. Is that such a bad thing?

(The Picture: The faces are all familiar, even though I'm not sure of the names. On my right is Richard Kellner (sp). I remember that  his Dad died when we were in 2nd grade, and I remember him breaking down in class one day and got sent home. The 2nd from the right was by best friend at Friedens, Bobby Hoffman, the grandson of Gramma Haubrich's good friend, Emma Hoffman. The other two guys I remember so well, but the names not so much. One of them I am pretty sure was another Richard - Richard Lemke. Even the girl in the background, although not part of the picture, I remember  her face, but not her name.)

That's all I an say  about  this picture for now.

(The Quote: Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever (born July 15, 1913) survived Lithuania’s Vilna ghetto during the Holocaust, producing some of his finest work during that time. He eventually settled in what would become Israel, where he founded the country’s leading Yiddish literary journal and devoted himself to keeping the Yiddish language alive.)

A Russian Proverb

"You live as long as you are remembered."  (Russian Proverb) A couple of weeks ago I was in Kenosha and Zion - visiting cemeteries. It had been a while since I had tended the grave sites of my family. Sister Mary was with me. She wanted to help. I welcomed it. It was sunny, but hot, and we had a good number of graves to spruce up. Just west of I-94 on Hwy 50. Great Aunt Lina Haubrich Wickham is here. I remembered thinking (and this was not the first time I thought it), "Why am I doing this?" Why have I spent so much time over the past 35 plus years wandering about and grubbing in cemetaries. Why spend hours in dark LDS research centers and libraries pouring over microfilm and other records. Why study and sort scores of photos late into the night at home. Maybe the above proverb can help explain these "whys". I like to remember people, especially people from my family's history. I really believe that they (at least most of them, anyway) should be remembered. And, like the proverb says, these moms and dads, brothers and sisters, grammas and grampas, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends, keep on living when we remember them.  As I trim away the grass overgrowing their gravestone, I hear my Grampa Dolan calling me "wee Johnny" in his Scottish brogue, and the Lancashire dialect of my Gramma commenting, "it was a lovely place, you know." When I sort through countless pictures of my aunts and uncles I see things like Aunt Estella beautifully presenting what seemed to me then like a huge turkey on Thanksgiving Day in Zion. I hear the Haubrich clan gossiping about Myron Florin or Norma Zimmer from the Lawrence Welk Show on a Sunday night. Although I never knew many other relatives, and many more ancestors lived and died long before I was around, I often feel like I know them. I got to know then by studying their often stoic and unsmiling faces on black and white photos, or seeing their names on church registers and civil records. They all keep on living as long as I keep on remembering. I tried stamp and coin collecting once, but that never really turned my crank. The patience and attention to detail that is needed for things like model making and woodworking always alluded me. I'm dangerous with a tool in my hand. Gardening, fishing - no thanks. So I go ancestor hunting, tend the branches of family trees, dig through boxes of pictures, and wrestle with genealogical relationships and mysteries. Almost four years into the Psalmist's three score and ten, one thinks a bit more about the fact that you're not going to live forever. True enough. But that's okay. I promise, I'll keep living - if you keep remembering.