I\u2019m writing this on August 21st, my father\u2019s birthday. Norman Busk was born in 1916. My mother, Evelyn Anderson, was born two years earlier on August 30. They were married on August 24. That means that, growing up, the last week and a half of August was always time get ready for school and also a time of celebration.<\/p>\n
My mother, Evie, often merits mention in these essays because, as a full-time homemaker, she was a constant presence in our lives. Our father worked! At their 50th Wedding Anniversary party, our eldest sister, Janice, gave a talk, saying, in effect, that our father \u201ccouldn\u2019t hold a job\u201d and then proceeded to enumerate them all: farmer, underground miner, truck driver, carpenter, contractor, and finally life insurance agent. That one lasted for decades. By the way, when he finally retired from that, my mother told him, \u201cYou\u2019re retiring? I\u2019m retiring. The kitchen is closed!\u201d She made that stick, too. From then on, they ate out.<\/p>\n
My father grew up in a totally dysfunctional family. For ten years while he and his two brothers were growing up, they had to carry messages back and forth between their parents because Grandpa and Grandma Busk weren\u2019t speaking to each other. Why? Well, let\u2019s see. My father was in his seventies when he learned he had a half-sister who was five years younger than he was. Her mother\u2019s parents had been friends of the Busks and lived nearby. When their unmarried daughter turned up pregnant, they upped stakes and moved to California. I suspect that \u201ccatch colt child,\u201d as my mother would have called her, was one of the causes of that long-standing feud in the Busk household. And then there\u2019s the whole issue of Grandpa Busk being a pedophile. (Don\u2019t ask me how I know.)<\/p>\n
So that’s my father\u2019s family of origin, growing up near Marvin, South Dakota. At age eighteen, he went to the town of Summit, ten miles away, where he encountered a NORMAL family in the form of the Andersons\u2014A.G. (Andrew Gottfried) and Celia, along with their six kids, five daughters and a son. As soon as my father encountered normal, he grabbed hold of it and held on for dear life.<\/p>\n
According to Grandpa Anderson, my father originally came to Summit courting my mother\u2019s younger sister, Helen. Grandpa Anderson said, \u201cI told him, Norman, in this house we eat the old bread first,\u201d and that\u2019s how Norman ended up with Evie rather than my aunt Toots.<\/p>\n
Evie was two years older than my dad. She didn\u2019t want to be labeled a cradle robber and refused to marry him while he was still a teenager. He turned 20 on August 21,1936, they married on August 24, and she turned 22 on August 30. They spent the next 68 years together.<\/p>\n
Norman Busk was smart. He could do math in his head like nobody\u2019s business. For years we won movie passes once a month on an early morning radio show called Whiz Quiz. I\u2019d dial all but one of the numbers before the announcer even asked the question. Once he did, my father would supply the answer, and I\u2019d let that last number go. The question from that which I still remember is, \u201cHow do eight eights equal a thousand?” \u201cThat\u2019s easy,\u201d my dad said. \u201cEight hundred and eighty-eight, plus eighty-eight, plus eight, plus eight, plus eight.\u201d With those words that month\u2019s movie passes were in the bag.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since math was so easy for him, he couldn\u2019t understand why I was totally baffled by the multiplication tables. I remember several tearful sessions at the kitchen table when I was in third grade. When I learned to drive, it was on a 1949 Plymouth with fluid drive, so using the clutch was somewhat optional. When that car went away, replaced by a much newer Valiant with zero fluid drive, using the clutch was suddenly mandatory. I remember driving around Bisbee with my father crouched on the passenger floor board, bodily moving my foot as required until I finally got the hang of it.<\/p>\n
When it was time for me to go to college, my plan was to major in Journalism. I remember my dad telling me, \u201cThat\u2019s a hard job for a woman, maybe you should be a teacher.\u201d (He and the U of A\u2019s Creative Writing Professor were on the same page there!) But when, in my forties, I began writing murder mysteries, my father was one hundred percent supportive.<\/p>\n
And speaking of supportive, my parents knew my first husband was a problem the moment they met him. For the next eighteen years they held their tongues about that, but when I finally made up my mind to divorce the man, there they were helping me get the house ready to sell, with my dad up on the roof fixing the flashing in the middle of June in Phoenix.<\/p>\n
My Dad told me once that A.G. Anderson was always more of a father to him than his own had been. I\u2019m sure that\u2019s true, and all seven of us kids benefited from Grandpa Anderson\u2019s mentorship. He taught my father about family values, and that was priceless.<\/p>\n
My parents were full partners in everything. When they traveled, my father was at the wheel with my mother in the co-pilot\u2019s seat with the Rand McNally Road Atlas open on her lap. When they did carpentry work, they did it together. When their plan to remodel the house on Yuma Trail stalled out, my mother enlisted my younger brother, Arlan, home from kindergarten, to help her take down the block wall separating the living room from the sun porch. My dad came home that night, surveyed the debris field, and declared the remodel underway.<\/p>\n
And so today\u2019s blog is a celebration of Norman Busk, a principled man whose word was his bond. He wasn\u2019t in the house that much because he really did work, but he was our family\u2019s North Star and our mother\u2019s, too. When he passed away from a sudden stroke leaving Evie behind, she was utterly lost, and I don\u2019t blame her.<\/p>\n
They really were a match made in heaven.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m writing this on August 21st, my father\u2019s birthday. Norman Busk was born in 1916. My mother, Evelyn Anderson, was born two years earlier on August 30. They were married on August 24. That means that, growing up, the last week and a half of August was always time get ready for school and also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-RE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3326","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=3326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}