Dear Dawdling DayDreamer

September 6, 2015February 17, 2026JT Twissel 24 Comments

If you could write a letter to your 14 year old self, what advice would you give her/him? Here’s mine:

Dear Dawdling DayDreamer:

Learn to forgive yourself. You are not the saint you think you are. You are impatient and will make many mistakes. But it’s okay because those mistakes will lead to experiences you may never have had, had you been more deliberate in your actions. Thus, learn to forgive yourself.

Beetlejuice — Maybe it’s not a good idea to give this guy a second chance. Remember, you are not a saint!

Always give someone a second chance. You are not the best judge of character and, although you rarely judge someone by how they look or talk, often your first impression of a person will be wrong. Of course, because you think you’re a saint, you will try to make the best of bad choices when you should be running in the opposite direction but then again, forgive yourself. There are lessons to be learned in even the worst of experiences.

Never say “I would never…” because you will. Accept that there are no absolutes in life. When you find yourself in a situation you never imagined being in, remember to forgive yourself. It happens to everyone. Even saints.

The temp — You will do things you never thought you’d do! Like work nine to five in an office.

Learn to listen. You think you are a good listener but often you only hear what you want. Let people finish their thoughts and carefully reflect and don’t assume the worst. Lack of confidence is a thief of time.

Friends are not perfect. Many of your closest friends will be the type of people you never thought you’d enjoy hanging out with. So keep an open mind. Don’t make a list of what a friend should be. Just enjoy the ones who somehow get through your hard shell and remember, you are not a saint.

In conclusion, you will be brave enough to take risks and fool-hearty enough to pursue your dreams. Your smile will always get you through so use it generously.

Balancing — Get used to balancing Dawdling Daydreamer! You’ll be doing it the rest of your life!

Talle Svenska? Ney…..

August 3, 2015August 4, 2015JT Twissel 18 Comments

Many of my blogging buddies have hung up “Gone Fishing” signs and closed comments until September which means they had the good sense to shut down for the month and either work on a novel that’s been suffering from terminal bloggerhea, or maybe, just maybe, they’re actually on vacation.

I wish I’d done the same but alas my head got stuck on another planet. I decided since I’d spent three whole years studying German, which shares its roots with Swedish, it would be no sweat to translate The Letters from Sweden, sender unknown that I talked about in a post a few weeks back. All I needed was a Swedish/English dictionary! Easy Peasy, hey?

Inte satsa på det ! (Don’t bet on it)

At the library I was disappointed to learn there aren’t many people in my small town with the urge to learn Swedish. There was only one Swedish/English dictionary. One! However there were books on Amharic, Gujarati, and Slovene – languages I’ve never heard of, have you?

Undaunted I checked out the one book and hurried home, confident that the secrets of the letters were about to be revealed.

Ha!

Lovely lettering but what does it say?

The problem, as you can probably tell, is deciphering the handwriting. The letters were probably written by three different people – all of whom undoubtedly received straight A’s in penmanship two hundred years ago – but I couldn’t tell their a’s from their e’s which meant I had to guess. And I’m not very good at guessing.

After several word by word attempts I realized you can’t translate word by word because the meaning of so many words changes depending on how they’re being used. So I decided to attempt an entire passage and see if Google could make any sense out of it. This method is rather like speaking in tongues but I was getting desperate.

The letter below had the clearest handwriting and so I selected the second sentence, the one that begins “Du skribner,” for my little experiment. I chose this one because I knew the word “skrib” meant “write” so at least I had some idea what the sentence was about.

Here’s the result of my effort:


Du skribner att ni amnar att visa fron den platoon fom vi ar men vi tysken att mikar gerna blifrader mi an ack inte olag ga negra . . .

Here’s what Google came up with:

You write that you intend to display from 
Pluto we are but we German to pickups 
willingly and not illegally.

“What does it say?” My mother (who’d been waiting anxiously for proof of her oldest child’s brilliance) asked.

“Well, I think your grandfather asked his in-laws to do something illegal so that he could display evidence that the family was from Pluto. Apparently it is illegal in Sweden to reveal that you’re a Plutonian.”

“Don’t you go writing anything nasty about the family!”

“Who me? Nah!”

My next brilliant idea was to “read” through the other letters looking for proper nouns that might reveal at least where they were from. A couple of the letters contained the word “Herran,” so I googled “Herran Sweden.”

“Do you mean Herrang?” was the response.

WTF I thought. Maybe I meant Herrang.

According to Wikipedia Herrang is a town with a history of industry and mining located on the northern coast of the county of Stockholm. Although the population is only in the 400s, it does have one claim to fame. It’s the site of the largest Lindy Hop dance camp in the world. The Herrang Dance Camp.

I must confess I had no idea what Lindy Hop was so I hopped back to Wiki and asked. Here goes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQrQhdJH4tM

Pretty wild, hey? Apparently this dance is a cousin of the breakaway, the Charleston and the Texas Tommy and got its start in Harlem, New York in the late 1920s or early 1930s. It was apparently named after Lucky Lindy (Charles Lindberg). I must admit it looks like fun.

So what have I learned? Well, at least my ancestors knew how to read and write although what they had to say, I may never know!

Our Lone Dove

July 25, 2015December 14, 2018JT Twissel 22 Comments

I found this guy lying on the concrete patio near where I’d chased away a grey cat who likes to tease our indoor cat. At first I thought he was a goner but as I drew closer he started flopping about in a vain attempt to fly. His wing looked crooked and he couldn’t stand. His pinprick eyes pleaded with me – don’t leave me here, easy pickings for whatever predator might happen by. So I ran inside, found a shoe box, laid a piece of soft linen in the bottom and rousted Joel from his sudoku. He’s the animal person. Oh, I love animals but I don’t know how to handle them like he does. He gulped, donned his garden gloves and then followed me out to where the dove still awaited a painful ending. Luckily I knew – from years of field trip carpooling – about the wild animal hospital near us and so, after a quick phone call, off we went.

Pamphlet urging people to keep cats inside

At the hospital a soft-hearted volunteer took our dear friend into the examination room and asked us to sign in. The walls of the lobby were filled with stories about other wild animals who’d been brought in and rehabilitated, giving us hope, although it was hard to imagine a bird with a cast on his wing. When she returned I asked why we’d been asked to sign in and she explained that “our” bird had been given the number next to our name so if we called in they could tell us how he was doing. She also said his hopes were slim. We haven’t called in.

Did you know that mourning doves are monogamous? Not only that but legend has it that once a mourning dove’s mate dies, he will not take another. Kind of hard to believe, isn’t it? Well, here’s my story:

Many, many years ago – so many that I’ve lost track – we decided to built a teahouse on a lower meadow where only weeds grew. It took a long, long time because we were working full time, raising children, and trying to see some of the world while we were still relatively young and so it was a weekend only project further winnowed by family visits and the like.

It was also a family affair; my father architected the elaborate roof, my teenage son buffed up during the summer months by hauling blocks and concrete down the hill for the foundation, and hubby, of course, acted as financier and project coordinator. They would work together all day often squabbling over the how-tos and then after supper fall asleep on the old blue couch (which even then had seen better days) while watching British mysteries and drinking red wine.

Two Doves, by Connemoira

One evening Joel decided to finish off a few things down at the teahouse. He didn’t notice that Mr. and Mrs. Dove, a lovely couple who’d visited us routinely in the past, had followed him down, probably because they knew he generally carried bird seed and peanuts in his pocket.

With a screech that set his hair on end a hawk, talons drawn, buzzed past him and grabbed Mrs. Dove by her long slender neck. She didn’t stand a chance.

After that Mr. Dove held vigil in the oak near our deck. Always a welcome visitor, a he was a mannerly gent among the raucous jays, chickadees and wood peckers. We will miss him.

Letters in Swedish . . . author unknown

July 17, 2015JT Twissel 23 Comments

After taking a break to ponder the delights of gibberish, I’m back to pulling skeletons out of the family dirty laundry hamper. Perhaps I’ll find an even more illustrious ancestor than Deacon Samuel Chapin! What do you think?

This is one of fourteen letters which were written in the late 1800s to my great grandmother, Nellie Nelson, from someone in Sweden (supposedly . . . we do not have the envelopes to prove this fact). Nellie died after many years of ill health when her daughter (my gram) was only fifteen years old. After her mother’s death, Gram’s father, who must have been a dour old poop, refused to translate them for her. He refused to even tell her who they were from. His stance was “good riddance to old rubbish” and apparently Sweden and every thing Swedish and every one of their Swedish family and friends were old rubbish.

The only clues I have are the notes in my grandmother’s handwriting on the top of a couple of the letters, conjuring up the heartbreaking image of a young girl kneeling beside her mother’s deathbed hoping to learn something about her heritage. Probably while her father was out of earshot.

Although she had little idea what was in them, Gram cherished these letters her entire life as my mother does now. Today they are very brittle, falling apart in my fingers as I put them on the scanner. Paper that old should probably be handled by an expert and not someone as klutzy as me but time is of the essence, at any point they could be lost or turn to dust.

The one above seems to be in a different hand, meaning that more than one person sent Nellie Nelson a birthday wish or wrote to tell her of family events. However, the only thing I can glean from these fossils is that Nellie’s real name was Pettrunella Johansson (no wonder she went by “Nellie”). What will happen when I do find someone to translate them? Do I really want to know the secrets they contain or do I want to assume they were filled with cherished stories from the old country?

Bobbins, Shuttles and Shekels

July 6, 2015February 18, 2026JT Twissel 9 Comments

Daisy spent much of her life in museums and churches transcribing records relating to her husband’s family history. Otherwise, I don’t much about her, nor did my mother (her niece).

She was married to my great uncle Henry who was about ten years older than my grandfather and, from the photos I’ve seen, very handsome. I never met him. I don’t think. Although my mother often mentioned Marie Ange, her French Canadian aunt, with a softness so uncommon in her family.

And so I assumed (as did Mother) that the exhaustive research on Henry’s background had been done by Marie Ange.

Her intent was to prove a link back to Henry’s famous ancestor, Deacon Samuel Chapin, one of the founders of Springfield Mass. However because Chapin arrived in this country in 1635 and fathered seven wildly fertile children, the family tree is split into a thousand tributaries. Still Henry’s wife persisted. It was an endeavor that took her all over New England and even across the pond to St. John Baptist Church in Paignton, England which houses Chapin family records dating back to the 1500s .

Will2 — Family history written in 1910 by Daisy

Once she completed her investigation she sat down to write an account of the family history. The problem is, she was a genteel lady of her times, devoutly religious and intent on writing a glorious account of the family that would make us all proud. For this reason certain not so glorious moments were carefully wrapped in delicate lace and sweetened with lavender, such as this account of my great-great-great grandfather, Samuel Jameson.

Permit me to say one thing: he was a man of strong intellect and reasoning powers: but few men had such a memory: he could repeat any passage of Scripture you might mention.

Wonderful! Sounds like another jolly fellow to hang out with! However, reading on we learn that this scripture spouting dude went south “for his health” leaving his wife and four children to fend for themselves:

Note: Mrs. Samuel Jameson became housekeeper for Dr. Lucius Wright of Westfield, working for her home and from time to time the Dr gave her money for what clothes she needed, in lieu of wages. The children were placed in homes and had to work for their board and living. Mrs, Jameson died in the Dr. Wright’s home.

shekel — Hebrew Skehel courtesy of Bing images

I don’t know why this detail is in a note. Perhaps so we won’t think unkindly of one of our noble ancestors. Who knows.

On the next page she details the fate of the poor children of Mrs. Samuel Jameson: Philander (what a name, hey?) became a manufacturer of bobbins and shuttles* who married – what else? – a dressmaker! Samuel Jr went west in search of gold and was never heard from again. Abiezer married Mahala Chapin, evidently in an attempt to improve the gene pool. Lastly there was poor Calvin. After being “mustered” and then injured in the Civil War he became a collector of rare coins, including: “a Hebrew shekel of a very high antiquity and 2 cent English pieces of the years 1001 and 1098.” Who knows what happened to those rare family gems? At this point she’d reached Abiezer, my great-great grandfather, and thus proven the connection between the Jamesons and Chapins. Hurrah! My claim to fame has been validated.

Despite my sarcasm, it is a truly wonderful document, even if the interesting and telling sections are housed in notes.

* bobbins and shuttles = parts of a sewing machine

**muster = to call the troops to action

Reindeer Herders and Lovesick Photographers

July 2, 2015April 30, 2017JT Twissel 21 Comments

Sorting through old pictures and documents has left me in a funk, primarily because they detail lives I know were hard, where victories were probably few and disappointments many. However, given the fact that over half my ancestors came to this country in the late 1800s, a time when travel was arduous and a future uncertain, I have to conclude that conditions in the countries they left – Ireland, Norway and Sweden – were much worse.

Citizenship papers circa 1880

The Irish diaspora has been widely analyzed. As anyone who’s read Angela’s Ashes knows: “Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.” So no mystery there. However, over one million people migrated from Norway between 1880 and 1920, which represented almost a ninth of their population. Can you imagine? One in every nine people suddenly disappearing? And to where? Some barely settled land across an endless sea.

The number of Swedes fleeing the motherland was far higher, however they had more folks to piss off and so Norway wins the distinction for the biggest brain drain of the north. There’s only one explanation officially given as to why Nordics fled the land of cod liver oil in hordes: crop failure. Really? In a land of long dark winters and never-ending summer days, what crop could have survived in the 1800s? Other than cod, that is.

I suspect there were other reasons such as lack of opportunity, however you’d think those poor souls who left behind beloved grandmas, mothers and cousins would yearn to return to the warm hearth of youth for at least a visit, wouldn’t you?

Well my ancestors never did. Once in the US, they turned their backs on the old world including its customs and languages. As a result I never heard tales of the old country nor did I hear mother tongues being spoken. And so, I did what any ordinary child would: I made up stories.

Just a couple of wild and crazy reindeer herders from Lapland!

These two love birds supposedly stole away on a merchant ship from Stockholm in the 1880s. Because they had the same last name my mother theorized they were cousins who fell in love and had to run away in order to get married. I went a little further and decided they were brother and sister. (I’d been reading far too many Swedish novels and plays at the time.)

Lars and Helga won’t you please come home? Mother misses you!

Someone who knew the real story wrote a letter to my grandmother in the 1930s. Sadly the letter is in an obscure Swedish dialect that no one can translate. This has lead me to conclude my great grandparents were not Swedish at all but incestuous reindeer herders from Lapland.

My great grandfather on the other side was from Vang Norway but the only way I found out anything about him was through a google search.

Ran off with a Sioux Warrior Princess?

He had the misfortune to die just after my grandmother’s birth and, after his widow married The Judge (by all accounts a man sans any sense of humor or love for children), Gilbert Flaten’s memory was left to wither on the vine. When I asked my father what happened to his real grandpa I got this answer, “he just died.” No matter how much I nagged him, I got the same response, “he just died.” When I asked what he did for a living all I got was “he was a photographer.”

And so naturally I assumed that while photographing prairie life around his home (Fargo North Dakota), young Gil fell madly and passionately in love with a Sioux warrior princess and, unable to resist the temptation to ride the plains on horseback chronicling the lives of the noble Sioux, he soon abandoned the restraints of Victorian life.

My version of his story seems logical, doesn’t it?

Well, that’s not exactly what happened. After my father’s sudden death, I sat down at the computer and out of nowhere got the urge to google Gilbert Flaten. Here’s what I found out.

The real reason they never spoke of him is that he ran a saloon during prohibition. Horrors!

But he also ran a successful portrait studio and worked for the volunteer fire department before his premature death at 40 from some ungodly flu.

Okay – now that I’ve got ancestors on both sides rolling in their graves, I’ll sign off with a salute to all those wonderful folks who left family and homelands to travel to this crazy country! Happy Fourth everyone!

STUFF

June 28, 2015June 28, 2015JT Twissel 14 Comments

This house in Monson MA is rumored to have been the town’s first elementary school and because the town predates the Revolutionary War nary a floor is level. The original structure had only two rooms whose blackboard walls are now hidden by layer upon layer of wallpaper. From this simple dwelling, my ancestors added two bedrooms, an indoor bath, a kitchen, covered patio and small television room. The room to the left was probably built by my great-grandfather as storage for his three children (two of whom are in the above picture along with a girl identified as only “My cousin Myrtie.”) Because the toddler in the picture is my grandmother, born 1899, I figure this picture dates from the early 1900s. The original deed is handwritten.

Receipt for the house on Main Street

Here’s the same house on Main Street in a photo probably taken in 1910 after they added the porch :

This porch (now screened in) overlooks a boulder-filled creek where as children we played for hours, always within shoutin’ distance of Gram. The last time I visited, the untended blackberry vines choking the creek and newly constructed storage facility on the other side stole all hope of a return to what once was. Nonetheless, the house’s eventual slip from our fingers still stings.

I know that, in the end, old houses and photos are just stuff, stuff our children probably won’t give a hoot about, stuff that will end up either in a garbage dump or in some moldy basement, pages stuck together, edges eaten by rats. I’ve accepted that eventuality however for some insane reason I decided to go through the five million boxes of unorganized STUFF I rescued from my mother’s house. If you’ve ever had to clean out grandma’s house and go through her stuff then you’re probably thinking what an idiot I am. And I admit, it is exhausting, unrewarding work that has kept me from blogging, writing, exercising and cleaning house. But every now and then I’ll find something which might be mildly interesting to the kids. Know what it is?

Bowpea

June 21, 2015November 15, 2025JT Twissel 17 Comments

Today it seems appropriate to wax on about one’s dad, however my father was far too complicated for tearful remembrances thrown together with favorite photos and sage advice and so I will save him for another day (truth be told, he hated sentimentality and, truth be told, I may never be able to write about him).

Instead let me say a few words about my Bowpea. This gentleman was the father of three children: my party-loving mother, rowdy Oncle Boob, and Poor Charlie, whose wife, Auntie Dottie, lived with such unrelenting gusto that no one in the small town of Monson Mass could figure out how he put up with her!

Bowpea was a man of high moral standards who probably didn’t deserve his wacky family but he endured their shenanigans with a sly smile and occasional word aside to “The Enforcer,” my depression-hardened grandmother who could have stared down the Gestapo. He was given his peculiar nickname by his oldest grandchild (yours truly). Don’t ask me why.

The Preacher’s Family – Bowpea is between his father’s legs.

My grandfather had, from all reports, a strict childhood, the result of generations of puritan ancestors dating back to the 1600s, most notably Deacon Samuel Chapin founder of Springfield Mass and yes, there were some witch-burners hanging about in the family tree.

Bowpea shipped off to Europe at the start of WWI a skinny, hopeful lad, and returned with lifetime health problems, allegedly the result of mustard gas. If he spoke about his war experiences to any of his children or wife, I would be surprised. Certainly they don’t remember. He never returned to Europe.

A few years later a steam-engine explosion at the factory where he worked brought my grandparents together. He wasn’t hurt but a fellow worker wasn’t so lucky. As Bowpea waited anxiously in the hospital corridor, a young student nurse appeared from nowhere and took control. She sat beside the scalded man all night long, holding his hand and applying cold presses and my grandfather fell in love. Of course, the downside of this lovely story is that Gram never accepted the fact that a man like him could fall in love with her. To her dying day she claimed it was gratitude. She was just too plain (according to her father) for any man to really fall in love with her. Sixty some odd years of faithful devotion and she still felt that way.

In all honestly, I only saw my grandfather during the summer so my impression of him is formed by lazy summer days spent playing croquet on their back yard, scouring the hills for blackberries, going downtown for a soda, or settling in for the evening listening to the crickets as a summer thunderstorm moved over head. Sometimes he would smoke a pipe as he read about his beloved Red Socks or have the one Scotch he allowed himself nightly. He had accomplishments which he never dwelt upon: a membership in the Hole-in-One Club (for non-golfers that means you’ve scored at least one hole in one – he had three) and a state ice-skating championship in his youth. Probably more, but they were never touted.

I’m sure he had his faults, certainly allowing Gram to become the Enforcer was one of them. But to me he’ll always be the modest, quiet man who smelt of Old Spice.

Oskar Schindler was the greatest aid worker of all times

June 17, 2015JT Twissel 3 Comments

Our buddy Duke Miller’s brilliant post on Aid Leap – a motley group of international aid bloggers – check them out!

AID LEAP

Author: Duke Miller, hardened aid worker and author

Aid Leap outlines problems and then offers solutions and that is the professional way. Yet, year after year, we are confronted with the same old difficulties requiring wheel reinventions. Refugees die, money is chased, programs collapse, agencies and governments position themselves, wars continue, stars fly in, and R. Kipling smiles. We are caught in a continuous loop of assessments, proposals, M&E reports, coordination meetings, and training workshops created by donors, headquarters, and paid consultants.

When was the last time you met a really happy and satisfied aid worker?
I have an observation. Try not to judge me too harshly. Most aid workers should be subversives. I make this statement only with the finest intentions that a good bottle of tequila can engender. My sentiments are absolutely glowing.

I see a “Books” tab on the Aid Leap home page. I suggest the…

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Mud Season

June 3, 2015June 3, 2015JT Twissel 29 Comments

Aspens near the valley floor just beginning to blossom

Other places have spring, but up here in the Colorado Rockies they have Mud Season. Mud Season spans from mid-April to approximately the second week of June, a time when it’s generally too warm to ski but too cold for the aspens to have leafed. The weather is extremely unpredictable. A few years ago when we were here we took a few hikes in shorts, however this year we rarely got out of heavy winter coats, especially on our visit to the Maroon Belles where we encountered three feet of snow.

Mirror Lake by Carol Teltschick

To get to the lake in the photo above we had to trudge uphill often through fields of melting snow in the rain. I slipped once, fell in the snow and had an icy butt all the way downhill towards the car (did I mention it was my birthday?).

During Mud Season many of the restaurants and shops are closed and the ones that are open offer deep discounts on their products. The town goes into a frenzy of preparing for the summer season. Restaurant facades get a facelift, city gardens get an infusion of snapdragons, petunias and other annuals generally associated with the spring, and its famed gondola only runs on weekends and holidays.

View from the gondola of the road far, far below

Thus the city is void of its usual throng of tourists and/or seasonal residents and/or celebrities willing to overspend on just about anything. Except the rock sculpture gardens. They’re free.

One of my favorite places in Aspen is the John Denver Memorial. It’s on the riverbank just beyond a children’s park. A simple memorial – several large boulders in a Stonehenge pattern with the words of his most popular songs carved into their smooth faces.

If you can’t read the lyrics, here they are:

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy
Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry,
Sunshine on the water looks so lovely,
Sunshine almost always makes me high.

If I had a day that I could give you,
I’d give to you a day just like today,
If I had a song that I could sing for you,
I’d sing a song to make you feel this way.

If I had a tale that I could tell you,
I’d tell a tale sure to make you smile,
If I had a wish that I could wish for you,
I’d make a wish for sunshine all the while.

I must admit that when I was a kid I thought John Denver’s songs were a little too saccharin sweet and that his whole public image, too squeaky clean considering we were in the middle of the Vietnam War, the race riots, the clashes between generations – all of which he seemed to ignore, however, being high up in the Rockies, beside a healthy stream, soaking in the incomparable greenness of a newly budding aspen tree, I couldn’t help but savor his words.