Posts Tagged ‘Love’
What About
What about the Hays family Christmases? How could we fly off to the tropics for a week over this holiday!? Well, it’s not for lack of love to my birth clan, that’s for sure. Here’s a shout out my siblings and their families.
I see the difference between Cyndie’s and my family as an asset. Basically, it starts with the difference in age of our parents. Ralph and Betty were nearing the end of their high school years when Fred and Marie were born. I was the fifth of six kids, while Cyndie was the first of five. Our combined perspectives are broader than they would be, each on our own.
Now my parents have moved on to the world of spirits and my siblings are all grandparents. They are the matriarchs and patriarchs of their own respective families. My siblings and I haven’t maintained a specific Hays tradition of celebrating Christmas together.
However, the memories of our glorious past endure and I’m sure have directly shaped the new traditions of our kids and grandkids.
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Just three years ago, Cyndie and I had the pleasure of hosting a gathering of Hays families at Christmastime and I wrote about it here on Relative Something. Here is an excerpt from December 2014’s “Sibling Revelry.”
Despite a sloppy wintry mix of precipitation doing its best to dampen our spirits (sorry ’bout the pun), the gathering of Hays relatives was a joy and a half. As always happens to me at family gatherings of limited duration, the riches of access to siblings I grew up with is enticing, but the reality of our usual chaos leaves me wishing there was more time. It is hard to finish a story, and sometimes a single sentence, without interruption. My attention is too often wrenched away from the person I was listening to, and time flies by so fast, the hour of departure comes up way too soon.
Regardless, every moment was precious. Reconnecting after long periods of separation, with siblings who share so many tendencies and characteristics, is refreshing and invigorating. I tend to feel a kind of validation of who I am, discovering the brothers and sisters that I grew up with remain so similar in behavior and perspectives. I am among my people again.
I’m lucky that, as a family, we all get along. These are the people who inhabited Intervale Ranch with me from the day I was born until 9 years later, when our family moved out and the property was razed for development into an industrial park.
With technical assistance from my son, Julian, I was able to display a digitized version of a slide show I put together close to 30 years ago, which featured that old farm property. It provided an opportunity to exercise our memories, as we analyzed some of the images and compared recollections.
Meanwhile, there was non-stop food to be consumed, youngsters to get reacquainted with and entertained by, and horses to visit…
Love you, Hays relations! Hope you all had fabulous Christmas celebrations at home while we were away!
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Fiftieth Anniversary
The big five-oh. It is a milestone that deserved the biggest family trip yet. To celebrate 50 years of marriage, Fred and Marie found a way to include all of their children and grandchildren into one awesome week of vacation. They rented a mansion that could house all of us on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.
Spending a week at Hilton Head together was so much more than just a vacation to the beach. We weren’t staying in hotel rooms. We had an entire house. Granted, it was a mansion large enough that we could retreat to our own rooms, just as if it were a hotel.
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A significant difference was that family prepared the meals right there in the kitchen. Cousins had some extended quality time to develop greater bonds. Kids all got a dose of supervision and play from aunts and uncles that gave parents occasional breaks and expanded everyone’s understanding of the rest of their family.
Staying together in one house was the big key that set this trip apart from all the others. It was like a week at Wildwood, except on the ocean with an expansive sandy beach.
And, well, it was extravagantly luxurious, too. It felt like a dose of what being rich and famous might be like.
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Those stairs. So big, it was hard to capture in a picture. Walking up them inspired feelings of royalty.
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It’s comical, really, that part of the regal impression was created by the simple fact you could choose to walk to the left or right. They both lead to the very same place.
Having a pool right outside the back door was rather plush, given the Pacific Ocean was just a stone’s throw beyond.
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We played games beside the pool, we made castles in the sand.
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It was an absolutely grand time. I believe it set the stage for what might be possible a decade later.
When it came time to celebrate a sixtieth anniversary, how would they ever top that week at Hilton Head?
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Winter Olympics
Among the too-many-to-count moments of my life thus far when I have found myself in the midst of something that my wildest dreams never imagined possible, attending the 1994 Winter Olympic Games in Lillehammer, Norway, was off the charts.
That Fred & Marie were able to consider this a viable option for a family vacation, and then pull it off with such incredible results, is enough to leave me at a loss for words to adequately describe.
I love sports. Olympic competitions are some of the best. Winter is my favorite. A trip to Lillehammer, Norway? A bonus on top of a bonus and a bonus, and another bonus.
This trip was spectacular! To be able to do this with family was wonderful (although we left our young children at home with a nanny). The other family (Friswold friends) traveling with us were precious. The authentic accommodations were priceless. Obviously, the Winter Games were world-class. And Norway did a fantastic job as host country.
We were able to stay in the home of a farm family. The boys gave up their rooms and slept somewhere else, but they still had to come home to do chores, so we saw them at breakfast.
Through the Friswold connections, we ended up attending a black-tie dinner event heavily themed with Norwegian culture. We had an opportunity to do some nordic skiing in a gorgeous mountain forested landscape blanketed with deep snow. We attended a hockey game, a downhill skiing event, saw the luge up close –nothing like it with the roar of speeding blades grinding against ice as sleds rocketed past our heads– and watched moguls freestyle skiing.
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This trip was so much fun that the experience lingered for a long, long time as one of the best things I had ever done.
Other than the week Cyndie and I spent learning winter survival skills from Will Steger at his homestead property in Ely, Minnesota, and the lodge-to-lodge dogsledding adventure vacation we took our kids on with Sue and Paul Schurke, the trip to Norway for the Winter Olympic Games fulfilled my snow-season passions better than I thought possible.
The success of this family trip went a long way toward showing me how much fun was possible, traveling with this clan.
Even if the next excursions weren’t likely to be headed to a cold weather climate zone, it was pretty easy to talk me into going along with whatever wild idea the family was plotting next.
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Club Wildwood
Becoming a member of the Friswold family also made me an instant member of their vacation home association, Wildwood Lodge Club. It is an awesome amplification of everything precious about the Friswolds. It’s as if the things that make them a special family is taken to the 7th degree by six amazing other like-minded families that join together with a common zest for loving life and other people.
Located in the beautiful northern Wisconsin woods, spending time at Wildwood is inherently enthralling. There is always something to do, even if it is simply sitting quietly and soaking up what nature has to offer. But that doesn’t hold a candle to the energy and love shared among the people who truly make Wildwood what it is.
In a way, traveling the roughly 3-hour drive from home to be at WWLC was the first version of Friswold family trips. That is why I am featuring it near the beginning of this little series highlighting our travels with Cyndie’s family.
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There are often community games spontaneously forming –basketball, soccer, boot hockey, tennis, card games, night games– and shared meals are a common occurrence. For some years, there was a progressive dinner to each family’s “cabin” on New Year’s Eve.
There are often themes devised for Wildwood events, such as “paint your own t-shirt” for Independence day (seen above) or “make your own holiday hat” (below).
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Wildwood Lodge Club could be seen as my gateway into the next level of travel adventures I would continue to experience after becoming a member of the Friswold Family.
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Getting Married
After six years of off-again, on-again navigating our growing relationship, Cyndie and I committed to cementing our connection in marriage. During a summer break when she was home from a graduate program at San Diego State University, we decided to begin the process.
I remember pausing on a bench in the 50th & France shops area where we asked each other, once and for all, if we were prepared to make this commitment. Then, we walked into a store to talk to a jeweler about making a ring that we designed ourselves.
We didn’t specifically speak about it again until I made a formal proposal in the form of a Christmas present I gave her at a Hays family gift exchange in December, 1980.
During the intervening months, I worked on a wax model of the ring, delivered it to the jeweler for casting, and asked for the blessings of our parents.
I’m pretty sure I surprised my parents by even asking. My father’s reaction was to say that I didn’t need his approval. Happily, Mom and Dad both offered their support.
Asking Cyndie’s parents, Fred and Marie, was a lot more nerve-wracking. All these years later, the thing we laugh about is that Marie was in the middle of untangling Christmas lights when I finally summoned the courage to utter the request for their daughter’s hand in marriage.
“You’re asking me now? In the middle of this tangle of lights!?”
Caught them by surprise, too.
I was incredibly relieved to find they were able to maintain their composure and avoided grilling me too hard about what the future might hold. Despite my worries, they accepted me as I am and gave me permission to marry their oldest child.
To this day, I have difficulty comprehending how they were able to process the reality of the events I had set in motion that day.
Marie was sworn to secrecy from that moment until I “officially” popped the question, but she didn’t know exactly when that would be. It was a wonderfully joyful night when we finally were able to share the news with Cyndie’s whole family.
I’m the fifth of six siblings, and my getting married was not incredibly dramatic in the grand scheme of other Hays family significant events. Cyndie is a first-born, their oldest daughter, and the first child to be married. I knew this was a big deal.
Beyond the amazing bond being put in place for Cyndie and me, the next biggest impact was that I was becoming a member of the Friswold family. That brought benefits and responsibilities that stretched the limits of my ability to grasp.
It is inextricably linked with the soul-connection Cyndie and I share. It is an honor of epic proportions that I am humbled to be able to claim.
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The Note
In the fall of 1974, a group formed to attend an October session of Bill Gothard’s Basic Youth Conflicts Seminar at the Civic Center in downtown St. Paul. Cyndie was not only in the group, she offered to drive. It would be my second opportunity to spend time in her proximity and she was a powerful blip on my radar.
On the second to last night, after we pulled out of the parking ramp, a 3-ring binder that someone left on the roof of the car slid off, hit the road and burst into a cloud of pages. What a disaster.
Without wasting a second, Cyndie choreographed a controlled response where we pulled over safely, everyone jumped out (probably dangerously) and chased down pages. Shrieking and laughing, we saved every last page and made it back into the car without further incident.
We drove on as if nothing had happened.
It was such a combination of out-of-control chaos, yet at the same time, calm, controlled recovery, that I struggled to comprehend what I had just experienced. Cyndie didn’t show any sign of stress over the situation. I was captivated by the mastery of her response to the calamity.
I ended up in the passenger seat directly behind the driver in a station wagon packed with bodies. Suddenly, Cyndie’s arm swung around and the huge parcel she carried as a purse landed in my lap.
“Hold this while I drive.” I was instructed.
I’m not sure how I managed it in that car full of rowdy teenagers, but with little light and less space, I decided to write her a note to express how taken I was by her impressive handling of the event and the screaming car-full of panicked kids.
It was a little scrap of paper that I slid into that huge bag, wondering if it would ever be found.
Wanting to convey that I was falling madly in love with her, but not knowing her well enough to justify it, I remember ending it with the precautionary qualification.
“Too mushy?”
The following day, the last one of the seminar, I learned Cyndie did indeed find the note. She handed me an envelope filled with multiple handwritten pages in response.
We were sensing a similar vibe.
Sometime after that, we went on our first date. My mom dropped me off at Cyndie’s house and Cyndie drove us to the Southdale shopping mall. I was fifteen years old, she was sixteen.
Cyndie saved that note I slipped into her purse. Last time she pulled it out again to show me, I had a hard time reading it. I don’t know exactly what that was about. I’m probably just too old now to deal with the fifteen-year-old version of myself.
I’m so grateful that she was able to accurately interpret what I was trying to say that crazy night in the seat behind her in the car.
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A Beginning
If memory serves me correctly, it would have been sometime in the summer of 1974 that a friend of mine, who had taken interest in a girl from the class ahead of us in high school, was looking for someone to join him in a long bicycle ride. We weren’t old enough to drive yet, and Cyndie was working at a home in Minneapolis, caring for a family while the mother convalesced from surgery. He wanted to go see her. I agreed to go along for the ride.
This would be probably the longest bike ride we had endeavored to complete at that point in our lives, and I think the adventure of that was the big draw for me. I didn’t even know who this girl was that we were going to see.
Struggling now to excavate details of that day, I come up with two specific tidbits, and neither of them have anything to do with the cycling. I think that is funny, but I guess it makes sense. I expect we must have needed to do some degree of planning a route, and then labored over the effort of so many miles, but I have no recollection of doing either.
I remember feeling a very specific spark the moment I laid eyes on that girl. Is that love at first sight?
I’m pretty sure it was that instant which probably obliterated memories of anything to do with the bike ride. There is an image in my mind of this alluring girl in a red halter top, up on a step stool, reaching for something in the glass-faced cupboard overhead.
Oh, hello!
That is the first specific memory. The second one is a moment of connection that felt very rewarding. We walked down to Lake Harriet with young John Magnuson, the youngest of the boys in the family Cyndie was working for, so he could go swimming.
We sat on the sand to chat while John played in the water. In getting to know each other better, Cyndie and I discovered we had both worn braces on our teeth and shared a wealth of experience in the related hassles.
It obviously wasn’t anything earth-shattering, but it allowed for a happy, silly conversation that just plain felt nice.
That feeling, and the memories of that first sight of her, provided endorphins that made everything else that happened that day inconsequential.
It probably wasn’t a beginning, but it certainly was a seed of potential.
Looking back from today, given everything that has happened since, it absolutely was the beginning.
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An Idea
I have been trying to picture what I might be able to do with the remaining trunk after cutting off all the dead branches on the large tree at the corner of our property by the road.
Here is a mockup of what one idea I have been pondering might look like…
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It would be a subtle, perpetual message to passing neighbors and travelers, and can serve as a compliment to our banner flag with the word LOVE across it when we put that out at the end of the driveway for events.
My main question for myself is whether, or not, I could even achieve this sculpting despite my lack of experience. I would certainly need to deal with an aversion to working in such a conspicuous space.
No hiding this project from curious passersby.
How bad do I want it?
The answer to that will determine whether this project is ultimately attempted, or just remains a computer image of an idea I once had.
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Relative Something 