It\u2019s the last week in August and so, as usual, my thoughts turn to my parents, Norman and Evie Busk.\u00a0 My dad was born on August 21, 1916 and my mother on August 30, 1914.\u00a0 They married on August 24, 1936 just after my father turned twenty and just prior to my mother\u2019s twenty-second birthday.\u00a0 Since my mother was the \u201colder woman\u201d in the relationship, she said she didn\u2019t want to be a \u201ccradle robber,\u201d so she wouldn\u2019t marry him until he stopped being a teenager. \u00a0The marriage endured for sixty-eight years!<\/p>\n
My father came from an incredibly dysfunctional family.\u00a0 His father was a pedophile.\u00a0 (Don\u2019t ask me how I know!)\u00a0 My grandmother on my father\u2019s side was and remains to this day one of the meanest women I ever met.\u00a0 She greeted Evie, her new daughter-in-law, with the words, \u201cIt\u2019s too bad your ears are so big!,\u201d and my mother was self-conscious about the size of her ears from then on.\u00a0 In 1968, on a cross-country trip, I went out of my way to stop by the farm to visit.\u00a0 I arrived in the middle of the afternoon\u2014after lunch and well before dinner.\u00a0 Grandma Busk came out on the steps and allowed as how it was \u201cinconvenient to have unexpected company.\u201d\u00a0 I didn\u2019t let the door slam on my butt.\u00a0 I drove back out of the yard and never crossed her threshold again.<\/p>\n
According to my dad, his mother never told him she loved him.\u00a0 For ten years, while my father and his brothers were growing up, his parents didn\u2019t speak, and the boys had to carry messages back and forth between them.\u00a0 On the occasion of their 50th anniversary, it seems to me as though those ten years ought to have been deducted from the total.<\/p>\n
But coming from that background, I think it\u2019s amazing that, while still a teenager himself, my father was able to venture into A.G. Anderson\u2019s clan of mostly girls in Summit, South Dakota, take one look at Evie, and decide she was the one for him.\u00a0 They were true partners in everything.\u00a0 When they lived on the farm, my mother milked cows, fed threshing crews, raised a garden, and canned quart upon quart of meat and vegetables.\u00a0 (When we made the move from Twin Brooks, South Dakota, to Bisbee, Arizona, my father said that the trailer was overweight due to the 300 quart jars of home-canned food lurking under the bed.)<\/p>\n
We always teased our dad by saying he couldn\u2019t hold a job.\u00a0 He was by turns a teacher, a farmer, a miner, a truck driver, a contractor, and finally a life insurance salesman.\u00a0 He may have moved from job to job, but he always worked.\u00a0 There was always food on the table, hand-cooked by our mother without benefit of a microwave to feed a family of nine!\u00a0 Someone asked me once if my family ever owned a diner.\u00a0 The answer is no, they didn\u2019t own one, but our mother RAN one.\u00a0 And the rules of the household were pretty simple\u2014you eat a little bit of everything and everything on your plate.\u00a0 Meals were always eaten together at the Formica-topped kitchen table.<\/p>\n
My father worked; my mother ran the household.\u00a0 When he was a farmer she brought \u201cfore-noon coffee\u201d to him in the field.\u00a0 When he became a contractor, she brought the coffee to his job sites.\u00a0 She washed on Monday and ironed on Tuesday.\u00a0 While they were living in South Dakota, she won an Easy Spin Dryer washing machine at a county fair.\u00a0 The problem was, their farm had no electricity, so the washer came to Bisbee in the trailer, right along with those quart jars of canned food.\u00a0 She was careful with water.\u00a0 The white load went first, the colored clothes were next, and the jeans came in dead last.\u00a0 But she reused the same wash water each time\u2014draining it out into a wash tub for the rinse cycle and then returning it to the washer for the next load.<\/p>\n
My parents raised seven kids.\u00a0 I believe there may have been a miscarriage or two along the way.\u00a0 How else to explain the four year hiatus between me and my next older sister and the next four year pause between me and my younger brother?\u00a0 There may have been some family discussion about that, but it was never mentioned to me.\u00a0 As far as discipline was concerned, my parents always presented a united front.\u00a0 Period.\u00a0 But our mother wasn\u2019t one of those \u201cwait \u2019til your father gets home\u201d kinds of mothers.\u00a0 When one of us stepped out of line, she wielded a pretty mean flyswatter!\u00a0 (Don\u2019t ask me how I know that, either.)<\/p>\n
Evie was the one who kept the schedule for everyone–kids in band, glee club, Pilgrim Fellowship, Brownies, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts and whatever else was out there.\u00a0 For years she oversaw our family\u2019s delivery of the Arizona Republic in town\u2014two bike routes and one auto route.\u00a0 She also managed the sale of countless boxes of Girl Scout Cookies and Boy Scout mistletoe.\u00a0 Our mother wasn\u2019t a drill sergeant, but she certainly could have been.\u00a0 She made us all toe the line!<\/p>\n
Our parents loved to travel.\u00a0 They racked up thousands of miles by car, driving back and forth across the country with our father at the wheel and with our mother riding shotgun with a highway atlas laid out on her lap. One of her most infamous detours was in the middle of New Mexico where, to dodge a freight train crossing, she launched us off on a series of dirt roads that led us through a ranch (between the barn and the house) but eventually got us back to where we were going.<\/p>\n
In later years, when a relative died in South Dakota, my parents chose to drive from Arizona rather than take a plane to Minneapolis.\u00a0 When it was time to go back home, my mother said, \u201cYou know what, we\u2019ve never made it to Yosemite.\u201d\u00a0 So that\u2019s how they came home to Arizona from northeastern South Dakota, by way of Yosemite, but they were slowing down by then.\u00a0 My mother said, when she realized they were crossing into Yuma on that last drive home, she shed real tears, crying for miles, because she knew they wouldn\u2019t be doing that again.\u00a0 Maybe they\u2019d take another driving trip, but it probably wouldn\u2019t be just the two of them.<\/p>\n
They loved practical jokes.\u00a0 Laughter was part and parcel of every meal, right along with the food.\u00a0 Once they lost my younger brother Jim, at age fifty due to an undiagnosed heart ailment, a light went out of their lives and so did most of the laughter.\u00a0 Jim\u2019s presence in Bisbee and his ability to look in on them was one of the reasons they were able to live independently for so long.\u00a0 Eventually my father began to develop short-term memory loss and couldn\u2019t remember how to get home.\u00a0 By then my mother had macular degeneration and couldn\u2019t see well enough to drive.\u00a0 Thanks to cataract surgery, my father\u2019s vision was better than it had ever been in his life, so he drove\u2014with my mother telling him where to turn.\u00a0 For years there was a sign on their refrigerator that said: IF AT FIRST YOU DON\u2019T SUCCEED, DO IT THE WAY YOUR WIFE TOLD YOU!<\/p>\n
Finally, though there was nothing for it but for them to move into assisted living.\u00a0 Not long after that, my father passed away from a sudden stroke, leaving my mother behind–lost, lonely, and heartbroken.\u00a0 And that really brought a final end of her laughter because \u201cNorman had no business going off like that and leaving me alone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those last few years after my dad\u2019s passing, Evie was not herself, and I choose not to remember her that way.\u00a0 I choose instead to remember her as part of a team–two strong individuals, yoked together by love and always pulling in the same direction.<\/p>\n
So today, on August 24th, the 82nd anniversary of their wedding day, I\u2019m remembering and honoring Norman and Evie.<\/p>\n
Happy Anniversary, you two, and many happy returns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s the last week in August and so, as usual, my thoughts turn to my parents, Norman and Evie Busk.\u00a0 My dad was born on August 21, 1916 and my mother on August 30, 1914.\u00a0 They married on August 24, 1936 just after my father turned twenty and just prior to my mother\u2019s twenty-second birthday.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[53,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bisbee","category-family"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-qM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1660"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1661,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1660\/revisions\/1661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}