Gramps

In our interview for Peace Corps back in 2010, we were asked if there was any reason we would choose not to do Peace Corps. Pat and I looked at each other and both said, "Grandparents."

With our grandparents all at a somewhat advanced age, we knew it was possible that we wouldn't make it through our two plus years without having to say a long-distance goodbye. When I said goodbye in March 2012, I sobbed on the drive home from my grandparents' house. But then we visited home and all was well, the goodbye wasn't as hard. It was only seven months.

My grandpa died yesterday. At 91 and suffering from congestive heart failure and moderate dementia, he fell and broke his leg. He had surgery and never fully woke up from it. The memorial service will be on Saturday, and even though we will do another celebration of life this summer, missing this service may be the hardest part of Peace Corps. My mom asked me to write something that could be read at the service, so this blog post is a bit of a draft for that and a lot of my mourning poured into words on a screen.

The other night, when it was becoming clear that the end was imminent, I was journaling as I prayed, and I caught myself trying to pray that this wouldn't be the end, that I would be able to see him one more time. Then I realized how selfish that was to hope that the end of his life would be dragged out simply so that I could be there. Beyond the standard peace and comfort, I grappled with what to pray for. It came to me to pray to be flooded with the good memories, the little things that made up the essence of Gramps. Here's the highlights:

My very first memory is of holding his hand. His and Grammy's, and trying to swing myself as we approached the hospital to meet my baby sister.

He had open heart surgery the same year I was born, and he always had to take a lot of naps. I loved tucking him in on the floor. Every single time, he would wake up and say, "Boooooy did I sleep!"

I wanted to be just like him in a lot of ways as a kid. Mostly I wanted to be a cowgirl, but when that didn't work out due to my sister's extreme horse allergies, I settled for trying to find a walking stick that he would approve of on every hike we took around the cabin that he bought in the 50's, the place I still claim to be my favorite on Earth.

When making phone calls from Bozeman to Livingston (the town twenty minutes away he and my grandma lived in for the past sixty years) changed from costing a long-distance rate, I became the happiest nine year old in the world. I would take the bus home from school every day, pour myself a bowl of Cheerios, and call my patient, patient grandparents, who would listen to the day's joys and tribulations as I slurpily recounted them.

In second grade, my class had an Africa day. I was so excited, because Gramps had been to Kenya and Egypt in the 70s. Somehow it got worked out for him to be a guest speaker, and I was so proud. And look at where I'm writing this from. Coincidence? I think not. I first started travelling thanks to a yearly spring break trip we took with them from the time I was in first grade until my sophomore year of high school. Thanks to his travel bug, I got bit early and hard.

He had very strict rules for making lefse, loved lutefisk, and hated Prairie Home Companion because "they make fun of Norwegians". 

When all of the valuable Molesworth furniture that came with the purchase of the cabin was stolen out of it, he started experimenting with how to replace it and came up with "Roaldsworth". His furniture was so beautiful. I liked to sit in his shop and watch him work and then claim to have helped.

I would sit on his lap after I was far too big for it to be comfortable for him, but he never said a word. 

He thought that our spaniel Lizzy was small and useless until she chased away a mountain lion that was sitting on its haunches watching my mom and uncle outside the cabin. After that he called her "Lionheart" and would permit her to spend the night in his workshop when we came over.

He was incredibly proud of his North Dakotan roots, a pride that grew with the Bakken Boom. "And they said North Dakota would never amount to anything," he muttered once.

He went through a bread making phase and would make what came to be known just as "Gramps' bread", which had no nutritional value but was my favorite food for several years. When my mom followed his steps and got a bread machine, I was not as enthused about her whole grain copy-cat bread.

I loved the story of how he and Grammy met, how she had a crush on him and would spread out her shopping at the pharmacy where he worked, buying one item at a time to increase her outings to the store. Gramps wanted the night off to go to a basketball game, but his boss would only let him, “If he took that blonde that keeps coming in here.” The image that will always stay with me now is of her holding onto his two fingers as they slowly made their way about.

He was infuriatingly slow at opening Christmas presents. He would take a knife and slide it gently down each piece of tape as we all would watch in indignation as the clocked ticked by and we had to wait an extra two minutes for our turn.

As a kid, I was very upset about the idea of smoking (as in, I was so upset that I would cry about billboards advertising cigarettes). I idealized Gramps to the point that when I learned that he used to smoke, I converted into a story in my head about how he’d been tricked and quit long before he actually did. I believed my version of this story until probably college.

 Some of my favorite childhood Christmas presents were the ark he made, complete with many species of wooden animals and the stable for my toy horses.

They say that he was a crier, but I only saw him cry once, and I don’t even remember what it was about. I definitely inherited that trait though. Yesterday, my mom put the phone to his ear so that I could say goodbye. Even if he was conscious, he probably wouldn't have understood what I was saying--thanking him for being the grandest of Grandpa's, for always making me feel so loved, telling him how much I would miss him. I cried so hard that my neighbor Kountimba, who is mostly deaf, came over to see what was wrong. People have a hard time grasping the idea that in America medicine is so advance that you can be pretty dang sure that it is the end of life. I'd been through this before, so I decided to tell just tell her that my grandfather had died. She put her wrapskirt up to her face and started to do a high pitched shriek, the death wail. This made me cry all over again, and she stopped to hush me. The whole exchange meant a lot, but I needed to just grieve in my own culture, one where I was allowed to cry. Pat sensed this and dealt gracefully with the growing crowd of neighbors as I retreated inside to contemplate having said goodbye.

Goodbye Roald Jasper Mogen.  You taught me so much about gentleness, steadfastness, generosity and love. Now you are teaching me about loss.

Most of my cousins and some significant others at Gramps' 91st birthday party last August. I'm so grateful to have been there. I'm the oldest grandchild, which, in my humble opinion, makes for an extra-special grandparental relationship.

Pat and I with Grammy and Gramps in probably 2008. He was a North Dakotan rancher, a small town Montana pharmacist, a father of three, a grandfather of six, an adventurer, and a stubborn Norwegian.

Grammy and Gramps at their 60th wedding anniversary dinner. They are not smoking cigars. Just holding fancy cookies.

Pat and I got married exactly sixty years after they did. Here's my cousin Colin escorting them to their seats at our wedding.

Gramps made it to the airport to welcome us home last August. He rarely left Livingston at that point. He never ceased to make me feel special.

Bending it Like Eto'o

Just over a year ago, the eight volunteers in the department of Saraya were sitting on the floor of our hut (it’s a good thing we have a giant hut—it doubles as a work zone office) going around and sharing about what we had been working on and our ideas for future projects. It was there that Marielle, who had just moved to our site to finish out her service, first got the ball rolling (pun intended). “I’d like to start a girls’ soccer team.”

Marielle is a great runner, and some of the kids in her compound had been tagging along on her runs (which is impressive…I never even tried to keep up with her). She also had been given some practice jerseys and a few balls. It was one of the moments in my service that I remember feeling giddy about an upcoming experience. I knew that I was going to love this. I wanted in.

The first challenge was finding a time to play. Girls are expected to help out at home with the never-ending chores: pounding grain, cooking, cleaning, laundry. Everything has to be done by hand and thus takes forever. Organized play is not something that they or their moms are used to, so it was tricky. Fortunately, we started during cold season, so playing in the afternoon was bearable. But they were always coming over to look at our watches and would throw off their jerseys and run home in the middle of the game if it got too late, and the average age of the girls who play has decreased with time.

Marielle finished her service last April, and, along with some of her projects, I inherited the head coach position. It was hot season then, so we couldn’t play in the afternoons any more. At the time, the water crisis was in full swing, and there was no water on Sunday mornings. Since girls couldn’t carry water those mornings, we chose that time to play and made it an official weekly thing. That worked, but then things got really busy for me when rainy season came and my malaria project started up. And they stayed busy, so I haven’t been able to keep soccer a regular thing. Every time I pass a group of girls, they’ll yell, “Sadio, when are we going to zouer?” (The French word for play is “jouer”, but the little girls can’t make that sound so it comes out as a z and is super cute.) I squeeze in games whenever I can—the girls love it, and it really helps me to feel present in the community.  The majority of my work has been in the villages surrounding my site, so it’s nice to do something here. I’ll tell the girls that we’ll play in the evening, and by mid-afternoon, a group has started lurking around the entrance to my hut.

It’s not always easy though. Once you get the girls to the field, the second challenge is to keep the boys away. They apparently have a sixth sense for knowing where a soccer game is happening, because wherever we play, they always show up and disrupt things, coming on the field and demanding to play. There are some that just can’t handle watching girls get to play a game with the toubabs. (The constant shortage of soccer balls does not help this. It is not infrequent that we have guests who come to see us just to ask to borrow a soccer ball. We stopped lending them out because they would always get destroyed or never come back.) Sometimes boys can be helpful and ref or explain more difficult soccer rules in Malinke, but sometimes I have to put on my threatening face and chase them away. They recently built a wall around the school, and the girls locked the gate from the inside when we were playing yesterday. All of a sudden I looked up to see boys scaling the wall not unlike the zombies in the Israel scene from World War Z. One day, we were walking from my hut to the school with the ball and jerseys and ran into the Inspector of Youth (real title). “Sadio, you are training the young girls! I should have been informed about this!”  Everyone wants in.

 

Playing with the girls is usually a blast, but it always makes me reflect hard on the differences between my own childhood soccer days and what these girls have to work with. Think of an AYSO soccer scene. Take away the grass and replace it with dirt and trash. Take away the cleats and replace them with one jelly shoe (two girls will share a pair). Take away the goals and replace them with some sticks. Take away the soccer shorts and replace them with wrap skirts that are so difficult to run in they often get ripped off and thrown on the ground. But the thing is, the kids are the same. There are the ones that are clearly natural athletes at the age of 6. There are the ones that sit down in the middle of the field and play with something they found as the game passes them by. They are more concerned with what color jersey they get and how it fits than any other aspect of the game. Herd-ball is definitely a thing. Depending on the day, either everyone or no one wants to be the goalie. And, despite conditions that would shock the average American youth soccer team, I am willing to bet they have just as much fun.

Coaching this team, however, has proved to be as challenging as it is fun. Since they have never encountered any other forum for learning sportsmanship, fights break out at a rate that continually shocks me. Having a large age range doesn’t help much, and siblings aren’t very graceful towards each other. I have had to scream my head off to break up fights…not the image I had of myself as a Peace Corps volunteer. I have decided that I won’t let them get away with acting like terrors, and I have stopped a game soon after it started.

In the end, though, all of my frustrations are trumped by the beautiful moments. Yesterday, for example, Kany showed up late but with a bag in her hand. Everyone stopped. They knew what was in the bag. Her dad had bought her lace-up shoes for playing soccer. She put them on the ground and looked at them for a second. Samouro piped up, “Sadio sits down when she puts on her shoes like that.” Kany proceeded to put on the shoes and then tie funny knots around her ankles. She was ready to play.