Giving Thanks: Breakfast With Ghosts

A dapper young skeleton

The first weekend in November I travelled back to Winona for a couple of reasons–one, to take my grandmother out to lunch and catch up with her;  two, to visit the Prairie Moon Sculpture Garden in Cochrane; and three, to attend my friend Kathy's Dia de los muertos celebration. 

It was great to spend time with my grandmother and catch up, I don't get to do it as often as I like, nor engage in it as often as I should. The Prairie Moon Sculpture Garden was fun; it's one of those weird slices of roadside Americana that people either find curiously fun in a kitschy way or wrinkle their brows at ask "Why?" while driving by. I'm ashamed to say I'd lived mere minutes away from it for nearly two decades, and it took two more after that to realize the place was there and coordinate a visit to it. Well, it's one of those weird slices of Americana that I find intriguing and see less as a quirky roadside road trip footnote, and more as a shrine to outsider folk art. Some of the pieces were in poor shape, particularly the coral snake, but it was a delightful shrine to one retired farmer's artistic vision. 

It's pretty impressive actually, and ballsy when you think about it. Here was Herman Rusch, a farmer, son of Prussian immigrants, who decided to keep the boredom of retirement at bey by building these bizarre concrete sculptures and having his friends make concrete sculptures of dinosaurs and animals and even a man knife-fighting a bear! In the rural farmland of Cochrane/Fountain City and the Coulee Region, that's the sort of eccentricity that would tend to serve as a red flag for Jeb and Skeeter to think maybe you ain't the way you oughta be, but hope the judicious application of work boots to head might properly recalibrate. Probably to the tune of "We don't do that 'round here." I know, I grew up in the area. Not that it's solely a haven for backwoods ignorants and Trump voters (nor am I suggesting everyone who lives in the woods is ignorant, lord knows I'm itching to join you), but casually suggest to a Cal or Rick working mandatory overtime at one of the factories keeping the town afloat that you don't eat meat, and to this day there's a bit of a straightening of the neck and a looking-down-the-cheekbone "You don't say" sort of response. But he had a yen to do this out of the ordinary thing and did it!

Here (above) is a video that gives a little detail about Rusch and his legacy. 

Later that evening I attended a wonderful Day of the Dead celebration organized and hosted by my friends Kathy VanCor and Brandon Rustke. I even got to operate the piñata! It was a great time and a call to remember and celebrate the lives that may have left us with little but memories in their wake. In fact the idea struck home hard enough to inspire me to visit my grandparents early Sunday morning. 

I hadn't been to Oakland Cemetery in Stockton since my grandfather was interred there, the day before Thanksgiving 2010. It's a small, unassuming collection of headstones; definitely a country graveyard, and it suits him to a T (though I'm still not sure what that idiom means, really). It's quiet, rural, surrounded by farmland and rolling bluffs, and, as in life, has a set of train tracks running right next to his home. 

It's a bit hard to see but Ralph has a fish jumping out of the water near his name. He loved fishing.

 The road into Oakland Cemetery is a dirt and gravel road, accessed across a field. The land where the cemetery rests is butted right up against Garvin Brook, and faces a wide stretch of Stockton valley in the other direction, a panoramic view of the humpbacked bluffs and all their various color changes throughout the year. Ralph always was an outdoors kind of person who loved country music and professional wrestling. He loved being outdoors and watching the birds and squirrels. He gets the quiet of a country graveyard now, the trickling current of the brook behind him, the direct sun above him, and all the wildlife the area has to offer. 

A few other Haedtkes are resting in Oakland as well, including my
great-grandparents.

That morning I also visited my paternal grandparents in the certainly more "metropolitan" St. Mary's Cemetery, which is in Winona proper, right next to the armory (where my senior prom was held). It's a sprawling, multi-tiered cemetery on the town's east side, not far from where my grandparents lived, actually. Bob and JoAnn lived in an amazing mid-century split-level on East Lake Boulevard, a house that I had decided I was going to own one day when my grandparents either moved into a retirement community or, god forbid, passed on. That didn't happen for a number of reasons, but it was an amazing place with some choice mid-century decor and an amazing finished basement. It sat on a hill at the foot of the bluffs, right below Sugarloaf, and overlooked the twin lakes. But I digress. 

Bob and JoAnn's headstone suits them as well. Quiet, polished, with a classic
sensibility that ties some mid-century modernism with traditionalism.

Something struck me while I was out walking around these tombstones that frosty morning. John Waters once said something (I'm paraphrasing here) about how people's homes should be filled with all kinds of "weird art" and wall colors that reflect their personalities, rather than something just picked up at Sears, hung on the ever-present off-white or beige walls. But people largely don't. I've been in a lot of homes and I see a lot of off-white and beige walls with the same Terry Redlin prints and hotel-friendly abstract art picked up at Home Goods or something. That's fine, if that's what you like, but a home, the place where someone would hopefully go to decompress and remove the normalcy filters they need to put on while out in the general public, should ultimately reflect the person living in it, right?

The same goes with tombstones. Now, I know there's more than desire and personal vision that goes into the choosing of a tombstone. For example, there's cost. Expense is prohibitive for a lot of people, myself included, when it comes to making decisions on anything. I see a lot of old headstones that are just sometimes-smoothed blocks of stone with a name chiseled into it. Then there are the obviously wealthy folks who have the massive stone angels and the large sepulchers. But as I toed my way around the headstones at St. Mary's, I saw all of these amazing headstones that reflected some aspect of the individual they stood sentinel over.

For example, this headstone with the image of Elvis and a flying monkey on it. What the hell is that all about? I want to know more about these people and why this was chosen as the imagery best to reflect the memory of their presence on Earth? It's fantastic!

Or how about this die-cut marker with the etched portrait in front of a palm tree in the setting sun? Winona, Minnesota is diametrically opposed to a tropical seascape sunset in so many ways, why was this chosen to be what this woman will be forever memorialized with? 

Or this stand up bass iconography I saw in Oakland near my grandfather:

Personally, I'm not sure I even want to be buried. I don't know, maybe cremation is the way to go. I haven't really given it much thought. There are days when it seems like a high dive off of a bridge might be the best route to take. But the trip to the cemeteries was cathartic and necessary; it had been a while since I had a chance to sit and talk to my relatives and just say hello, even if it was a one-sided conversation. It's really more of a balm for the psyche than anything else, I suppose, helping you feel like that connection is still there even if they aren't. Like Herman Rusch we all kind of want to leave something to be remembered by after we're gone, whether that's a kind impression on the people we love and hope love us back, or a concrete replica of our features, sternly watching over what we had the audacity to dare to build in life. It's a good reminder to appreciate the people that flavor our lives in a positive way, and restrict the time given to those who do not. There are a lot of things to be thankful for, whether hidden in the minutiae of our daily struggles and pursuits, obscured by the folds of frustration, or sitting in plain sight. There's nothing wrong with being happy, and pursuing that happiness by being yourself and reveling in your own interests, even if there's a lot of unhappy people who would like to take that away from you. 

As mach as it sounds like off the cuff, platitudinous pablum, be yourself and be kind. Appreciation is one of the best gifts you can give to someone, and a little goes a long way.

For clarification, I'm on the right.

Carry on you wayward spirits.