Morfar and Mormor

"How are your folks?" is a question I get asked at every happenstance encounter with family friends at Fred Meyer or out and about around town. My reply has barely wavered in twenty years: "They are fine." They are always fine, at least, relatively. Nothing really major to report.

But two decades' worth of the nothing-major kind of change does add up. Just as looking in the mirror everyday hasn't gobsmacked me with a surprise sudden transformation from high school ingénue with freckles and dimples to proto-crone with strands of gray and fledgling smile wrinkles––day to day, it was difficult to see the active transformation of my older parents into elderly grandparents.

Proto-proto-proto-crone c. 1978

My father and mother were 46 and 40, respectively, when I was born. It might be commonplace now, but for the late 70s in Alaska, it was a unique circumstance to be an only child of older parents. Most of my neighborhood chums had a sibling. My best friend from down the street was the eldest of three. (Three children – can you even imagine?! As an only child, I thought a family of three obscenely abundant.)

Three is perfect, though not always perfectly manageable (Photocredit: Takenya Grace Photography)

Those other families were complex and mysterious, chaotic and loud, with uncountable people popping in and out of the orbit of daily life. Those families of multitudes were utterly unfathomable to me, with sisters and brothers fighting over He-Man and She-Ra dolls, fireworks and water pistols, top bunks, and the root beer popsicles from grape-banana-root beer variety pack. They had minivans crammed full of rowdy kids sitting on each others' laps, American cheese and gigantic family-sized value packages of ground beef for taco night, and younger mothers who still shopped in the Juniors section and smoked Virginia Slims.

My family was staid, calm, nuclear simplicity: a helium ion with my parents as the electrons that orbited around me. Some signifiers of my childhood spent with these older adults: evenings spent flipping over an Anna Moffo record on the turntable or practicing the piano while my dad read his daily newspapers (not just the Juneau Empire, but the Anchorage Daily News and the Seattle PI) in the evening; ordering my steaks medium rare and my Shirley Temples with extra cherries at dinners out; sitting contentedly on an immaculate couch in an immaculately-kept house (not my own) while my parents chatted over snifters of cognac with their friends. I was well-behaved and quiet, a cloistered mini-adult by ten.

Today, I am three years shy of the age my mother was when she had me, an age I thought just as impossible to reach as me actually becoming one of those scary Juneau Douglas High Schoolers I watched jogging up and down Behrends Ave from the kitchen window of my childhood. Time scales are almost sci-fi bizarre when your parents are old enough to be your grandparents. My paternal grandfather, who died in the 1960s, is a cipher of history to me. Someone whose birth date was 1885 seems more like a character out of a Ken Burns documentary than an actual biological relative. My father's neighbor saw Abraham Lincoln's funeral procession. So that means I know someone (my father) who knows someone (his neighbor) who saw Abe Lincoln's body. Six (two) degrees of historical separation. I am the daughter of not Baby Boomers, but the Silent Generation.

The first time I really noticed my father aging was when he greeted me at the airport terminal after I flew home for winter vacation my freshman year of college. After three and a half months of being homesick for Alaska/shell-shocked by the Main Line of Philadelphia, to step off the plane and see him in his familiar ancient wool Kangol was an instant heart melt of homecoming. But that feeling of relief and happiness soon lurched into the realization that something was different, slightly off. He had changed. He was perceptibly (if ever so slightly) older; his mustache a shade grayer, his posture perhaps a millimeter more stooped. Nothing dramatic, just noticeable. After 19 years, you'd think I would have noticed something by then.

At that stage of my life, my mom and dad were less forces of nature than a kind of pleasant background noise of stability and comfort. I thought of them all the time, but I don't think I really thought about them beyond their parental roles. They were my doting older parents; I was their only child. I took their existence, their immutable permanence, for granted. Our nuclear family was in the most stable of atomic states. Sunday dinners, table for three. When I pictured them in my memory, they were at familiar, well-trodden posts: my father reading his endless scores of newspapers, New Yorkers, and mystery novels in his chair; my mother reading magazines on the couch or standing at the sink in her apron, trying to choke down a vitamin.

My father, knowing my time for pleasure reading is limited, annotates the table of contents in each New Yorker for me so I can quickly get to the good stuff. His rating system usually consists of "Skip," "Good," and "Very Good," but sometimes gives me deeper, if laconic, commentary.

Perhaps when I left for Bryn Mawr, my father might have supposed he was done with me. After all, when he left home, at the age of 19, he left Nebraska to carve out his own fortune and never really looked back. Not so, me. I clung to the old homestead. Every winter and summer break, I returned. At exorbitant cost and racking up thousands of Delta SkyMiles, I returned. It definitely had a lot to do with not feeling at home or fitting in on the Main Line. My dad warned me before I left for college that I would encounter true social castes for the first time, and that I might not like or fit in with East Coast elites. I ended up spending my junior year at UAF (finally getting to experience the luxury of being an undergraduate and having my laundry done by my mother on the weekends). My father was grateful for my proximity, but perhaps just a little perplexed by it. He seemed incredulous that I'd actually want to spend time with him. But I really did and do. Skiing, cribbage, traveling, concerts, cocktails, eating dinners out ... what's not to like?

Morfar (at his usual post at the counter) and Theo

Mormor and Théo-bébé

Mormor attending Theo's end-of-year Montessori celebration

As an only child, I grew up knowing that I'd always want and need to remain close to my parents. Though they never held me back, they certainly never made any effort to push me out of the nest. My room, virtually unchanged since high school, waited for me upon each homecoming. "In the natural course of events, your mother will outlive me," my father would tell me. And I promise I will take care of her, I thought. A tacit contract between father and daughter.

Even the decision to move to Seattle after college seemed a part of the natural course of events for our relationship. It may be 1500 miles away by air and over 2000 by road, but really, Seattle is just the farthest flung suburb of Alaska, and I always felt comfort in knowing my parents were a mere three and half hours away by direct flight. Dad would come down to Virginia Mason for routine medical check-ups and take us out to eat on First Hill. Mom would come visit and lavish grandmotherly attention on my cats. For the decade I lived in Seattle, I returned to Alaska, if not every summer, at least every winter break. I have yet to experience a Christmas not by my parents' side.

Moving back to Fairbanks was a guaranteed way to hook my parents into the contract of grandparenthood (we just never realized how quickly after our return we'd be able to engage them in their new roles). And being grandparents and close to their grandchildren might be enough incentive to eventually lure them away from Fairbanks (at least during the winter) and to a convenient Mother-in-Law apartment in Seattle. I envisioned my dad joining the Elks Club on Shilshole. I planned to teach my mother how to ride to Nordstrom on Metro without panicking. I drove through Blue Ridge and Seward Park selecting one-story ranch houses with easy access for my mother. I never shared these fantasies out loud with my dad, but that was the unspoken plan––to bring my parents into my fantasy Seattle life where everyday was sunny and the lavender bloomed eternal.

According to my mother, the plan was that she would follow us anywhere, and to hell with my dad. She would take him or leave him. That didn't seem like a feasible plan.

My parents don't like to talk about the future. So they don't. They're not (terribly) disorganized about it; they have a living will in place (though one that hasn't been updated in probably thirty years). As delicately as possible and over just the right amount of wine, we've broached the topic of what might happen when John graduates and we move back to Seattle. But those conversations end quickly as they make my dad anxious. My father is a creature of routine and doesn't like change. It took him almost five years from decision to execution to buy a new car. It took years of cajoling (haranguing) from my mother for him to finally decide it was time to sell their two-story house and buy a more senior-friendly one-story condo. He doesn't like change; he doesn't like spending money; he doesn't want to travel anymore. Not a real promising start for a plan to move him to Seattle. My mother would say, "Let's just cross that bridge when we come to it." What did you mean, Mom? When Dad wasn't coherent enough to have his own say? When, in what could be many years, a decade or more (the Johnsons, knock on wood, have good genes and tend to live long lives), he eventually dies?

He has a life in Fairbanks, and even though many of his cronies are snowbirds, even though his tennis game has slowed to a crawl, even though his collection of newspaper clippings of the obituaries of his acquaintances and friends has started to overflow from the file cabinet, Fairbanks makes him happy. How can I think about taking him away from everything that he knows?

This is Nell (probably?) taking a walk with Morfar and me right before the flight to Seattle in May

So, when I got back to Fairbanks after a visit to Seattle in late May (a visit that was as idyllic and exhausting as usual; two weeks of living and breathing the desire and expectation that we would definitely and soon and not just possibly maybe move back), I was ready to form a battle plan. Our tribe exists in Seattle even five years on (five years to the day as of August 10th), ready and willing to accept us back into, if not our old lives, then something just as comforting and familiar as it is different and changed with new children, new jobs, new houses, new identities. It's been five years since we left Seattle in the motorhome with our hundreds of books and our crappy Ikea furniture and our three frightened cats, and I still have boxes in the basement of my house in Fairbanks that I haven't unpacked. I still feel like my life is half-lived, with chicken coops unbuilt and renovations postponed. Because we'd be leaving for Seattle sooner or later––why bother with the investment of putting down deep roots?

(Possibly taking care of three children puts something of a damper on the getting-out-there-and-living kind of chutzpah attitude needed to start making new friends and putting down roots. Just a thought.)

I left Seattle this May with the intention of starting some really uncomfortable conversations about The Future with my parents. And I hoped to somehow convince my dad that Seattle was in the cards. Because god knows, my mother was ready and willing to leave.

Nothing changed. Nothing happened. I still yearn for Seattle, a city that has changed and will move on with or without me. Nothing happened except for this:

I was sitting on our deck. In the sun. The view of Ester Dome and the west side of the Goldstream Valley might have looked pretty appealing. Maybe I was thinking about Theo starting kindergarten in a mere year. Or I was thinking about blueberry picking. Or I was experiencing the first flush of satisfaction of having something of a hobby again (late night printmaking sessions). Maybe I was thinking about and pining for winter. (Actually reminiscing about winter––that has to mean something, right?) Or I was just anxious about the potential for antagonism between me and my dad and I didn't want to be the daughter who forces her father into a decision he doesn't want. And I thought, "Is this so bad? Maybe we could stay here for more than a little while."

I told my dad in an oblique way that we weren't going to try to force him to leave Fairbanks. And in his laconic and now-softspoken-in-old-age way but one full of meaning, he told me he is grateful. There are plans for a chicken coop next summer. And an "art cabin" (8x12, bare bones but heated) for me, so I don't have to get paint on our dining room table. A home renovation project to get more playspace for these three (THREE?) kids is now finally in the works. And as luck would have it (or fate or just plain old age and time), my dutiful daughter chip is finally being called in; tomorrow I'm taking my mother to her first doctor's appointment in years. Theo will probably go to Pearl Creek for kindergarten, or maybe Montessori. Maybe the girls will too. Probably. I still probably can't get my father to decide he wants to travel to Hawaii for Christmas, but maybe we'll start trying to do that on our own. Maybe I'll sort through all these boxes of memorabilia that I moved from my high school bedroom in Fairbanks to Seattle and back to Fairbanks again. Planning a new garden area, planning a trip by myself (like a real adult) for a long weekend in Seattle this September. Making plans, making roots, planning to stay here. For probably more than a little while.