We flew to the United States in January. Our leg from Miami to Chicago was diverted by snow to Denver, where the airline put us up in a hotel to wait for better weather. The TV in the hotel room was in color. The garish over-hued reds and greens of the football players’ uniforms floated around in swirling snow, some of it real, some electronic. After that there was the Bob Newhart show, I think. We gaped at the brightly leisure-suited actors with their cruel wisecracks. The words “color TV” still taste like steak and potatoes in my mouth, after all this time.
The only TV we had seen in the last four years had been a tiny black-and-white tabletop model that my Dad had borrowed for us to watch the Apollo 11 launch. There was some kind of delay, and it was after breakfast before the countdown got down into the minutes. The hired car had arrived to take us to school, and the kids who were already in it piled into our kitchen, and all our mouths hung open until the rocket was a speck at the tip of a long white line.
Anyway, in Chicago at last, our grandparents picked us up and drove us the three hours to Madison, where my father’s father was the pastor of a Lutheran Church a few blocks from the state capitol building, with a parsonage next door. A few days there, then back in the car to drive eight hours to Ashland, on the south shore of Lake Superior, where my mother’s mother still lived. Ashland would be our base for the six months in the US.
Ashland was a little surprising to a kid who had pretty much assumed that the things in the US were pretty well squared away. This was one of the towns that had been drained by the industrial decline of the 1960s. If you’ve been to Lowell, Mass. or one of those other depressed industrial towns you know what it looked like. Grimy blond kids playing in the rainwater in the potholes on the street; 30-year-old men staring incuriously from park benches. The bitterest kind of cold I had ever felt: you can’t physically remember what that cold is like, because your body disbelieves it, even if your mind recalls the pain. It’s new every time you feel it. I remember coming into the house and crying while taking off my wrappings, less from any particular hurt than from the overwhelming cruelty of the cold.
We moved into the semi-separate apartment on the second floor of my Grandmother’s house, a few blocks from the church where her husband had preached until his death two years earlier. I was placed in Mrs. Jablonicky’s fifth grade at the neighborhood school, a five-block walk from the house. I was nine, a year or two younger than the rest of the kids, but early reading had put me ahead of my age group, and the rules said I had to sit with the big kids. Comparative physical prowess being the basis for social interaction in this environment, I didn’t make very many friends. For a nine-year-old I think I was pretty average, but when the time came for us all to be tested for the Presidential Physical Fitness program my peer group was the 10- and 11- and 12-year-olds of my own fifth-grade class. I did poorly at the bizarre contests, such as throwing a softball for distance. I could do perhaps two pushups, but the President wanted a dozen or so.
Some of our weekends were spent visiting Lutheran churches within driving distance of Ashland, where my Dad would take a guest preacher turn and my mother would entertain the women in the basement after the service. Her topic was the culture in which the mission effort was being carried out, and her props were her collection of folk instruments, some pictures, and her four older children in traditional Peruvian ponchos and hats singing “Jesus Loves Me” in Spanish, accompanied by her guitar. It wasn’t without payoff; after the ordeal there was usually a potluck lunch or dinner, with Pastor Kuster and his family invited to lead the buffet line. We became familiar with the range of rural Midwestern cooking: the famous casseroles and hot dishes, the coleslaws, the innumerable ways diced fruits and marshmallows can be suspended in Jello. (Any fruit except pineapple, which somehow keeps the gelatin from setting.) I still love a nice uncomplicated dinner of stuff baked together in a big pot, well salted and a little overcooked.