Standing tall in his rock garden

BY GAIL RAJALA HAYDEN

“Once in a while someone touches our lives, leaving us with water-colored moments that stay in our hearts forever.”–Anonymous

I am not 7 anymore. I just turned 55. So why does the approach of Father’s Day always make me feel the age I was the first day of second grade? I think it is because I had a confidante that year and a new bicycle.

I grew up in Coon Rapids. My parents bought the model home in a soon-to-be new subdivision called Anoka Gardens. They had moved to Anoka from Duluth, Minn., where I had been born two years earlier. The land our home was built on was neatly ensconced between the railroad tracks and Crooked Lake Boulevard. If you came from mainline Anoka, an old river city to the west, our side of the tracks put you on the wrong side of the tracks to graduate from Anoka High School after the new Coon Rapids High School was opened in 1966. Hence my older brother, John Jr., graduated class of ’63 at AHS—I was class of ’70 at CRHS, but both institutions employed teachers—greatly gifted teachers, who often played the role of confidante.

At seven, I could traverse the distance between the Land of Anoka and the Land of Anoka Gardens, because of my new bike. All I had to do was follow the railroad tracks. It was blue, and I won it in a drawing at the Saturday matinee movie. My brother was an usher at the Anoka Theatre so my parents thought it was safe to have my sister and I go to the movies on Saturday, so they could get work done. Dad headed for the sign shop, and Mom headed to the basement, where a washer and a mangle awaited. The clothes were carried up the stairs wet, and hung to dry on the lines out back by the septic tank. On cold winter days, they were hung on a line across the basement ceiling, imperiling anyone skidding across the forest green-painted concrete floor. Once the clothes were dry, or at least just slightly damp, it was my turn to use the dreaded mangle—a contraption I learned to use the same year I got my bicycle. That was why I needed my confidante—and my bicycle.

My father, in his very spare, spare time, was a labor union organizer. He always believed that the best end result of creating anything was by using a cooperative effort. I agreed with him. There had been an uncomfortable shift in the cooperative labor force in our home, which, in my opinion, my mother had uncooperatively organized around me. My sister Paula was 5. John was 16 and I was just the right age for the mangle—at least for pillow cases, dish towels, and cloth napkins. One might ask why we needed freshly ironed cloth napkins on the wrong side of the tracks and I would only answer that was when I realized I really needed my bicycle and that a good place to pedal to was my second grade teacher’s house—but I digress.

Mrs. Farr, my chosen confidante, met me at the door of my classroom the first day of second grade. What followed were some of the happiest days of my life — writing, art, laughter, gentleness, music, beauty, talking about feelings.
When she announced she would not be back after Christmas break because she was having a baby, I hated that baby —but not after I got my bike, because I knew where she lived. We passed by her home on the way to church. I remembered it was right behind the Standard Oil gas station my best friend Bonnie Rohde’s dad worked at. My father, in addition to the finer points of union organizing, had also taught me that sisu, a Finnish word meaing determination beyond determination, meant that I could pedal there even if I thought I couldn’t. So one day I did. I pedaled until I made it past the water tower my father had hand-lettered, all the way to where they were going to build the new Red Owl. Mrs. Farr graciously opened the door, albeit a little bit surprisedly, and gave me milk and cookies. I told her all about the mangle, and she let me cry. And then she called my father, who came to get me in his sign truck and asked me why I would do such a thing, scare them so badly, disappear on my bike over a mile away from home. I reminded him about the mangle. And because he had been drinking, he cried. We drove home to our rock garden with me holding on to his hand.

The rock garden I speak of was one I started building in the back yard from rocks I carried home from the railroad tracks. Being Finnish, I could have stopped there, but the concept of producing radishes and carrots for my mother’s salads pushed me further, so I asked for seeds to put in the garden and one year my father laughed and laughed because an unharvested radish I had inadvertently seeded too deeply lived through the winter and had majestically turned into a vegetative bowling ball.

I will always remember that laugh because it was in the same spot I had experienced a revelation. What if God was propaganda like Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny? But then I remembered the radish and knew there had to be a God to pull that off—and besides, I needed God to be there, because how else was Dad going to quit drinking, Mom lighten up on the mangle, and me get to have my bicycle back after my “Mrs. Farr Unauthorized, Self-Initiated Field Trip”?

I know now many of my life lessons began in that little garden my Finnish father helped me build. I know the radish is very much like my heart when Father’s Day comes around. I know my heart has survived many long winters of mangles and rocks and bicycle trips I took without permission. I am older now, but I can still feel the hand of the man who had the capacity to understand it all—with or without his alcohol. He was the greatest. He was my Dad.

(Excerpted from “Tales Of The Rum