spread like sweet butter

spread like sweet butter

the winter dawn rolls beyond

the dim white wrinkles

sécurité scolaire

Décrochez les panneaux indiquant la zone libre d'armes à feu et affichez «Protégé par RP P M, Police à la retraite et Militaire» (ou trouvez un autre nom). Il pourrait s'agir d'un organisme bénévole de la communauté formé et approuvé. Ils travailleraient avec les écoles pour assurer la sécurité quand et où nécessaire. Les conseils scolaires pourraient parrainer des classes de portage dissimulées pour former les enseignants qui veulent porter et ceux qui sont formés et qualifiés demeureraient confidentiels. Le tournage de nos écoles deviendrait rapidement une mauvaise idée. La Constitution des États-Unis, dans le deuxième amendement, stipule que «le droit du peuple de garder et de porter des armes ne doit pas être violé». Nous avons le droit de porter les armes et la responsabilité de protéger nos écoles et nos familles. Le 10 novembre 2017, un homme armé a tué 26 personnes dans une église baptiste à Sutherland Springs, au Texas. Stephen Willeford, un voisin vivant près de l'église, a tiré deux fois sur le tireur avec un AR-15. Puis, il a raccroché avec un passant et a poursuivi le coupable jusqu'à ce qu'il saccage son SUV et se suicidait. Voir mySanAntonio.com.

The Windsor Hum

They say that up in Canada a subtle humming noise

Is causing mass hysteria and loss of equipoise.

Governments and colleges have looked about in vain

To find the cause of this selective auditory bane.

For some can hear it constantly, while others are untouched --

Those who fall beneath its spell have heads quite tightly clutched.

Victims of this baffling sound cannot sleep through the night;

Their heads do pound like pistons and their nerves are dynamite.

The eggheads say that infrasound may be the culprit here.

But what the hell that word might mean they cannot make quite clear.

Blast furnaces on Isle de Zug are blamed for all the din;

But operators there refuse their thick lips to unpin.

The ghostly racket also runs in towns like Kokomo,

Where people have been known to flee to far off Borneo.

Me, I think the spectral hum comes from the faint kazoo

Of Mother Nature, who in Trump has met her Waterloo.

alone in the white

alone in the white

stiff brown cylinder waiting

on a passing wind

My Grandmother's Boarding House

(The following narrative is based solely on my own faulty memory and with conversations with my older brother Bill. Any kinsmen who remember things differently are welcome to contact yours truly with alternative versions of the Torkildson universe.)

My dad was uncomfortable with the bourgeoisie standards of 1950’s Minneapolis. He liked to pretend, I think, that he was a tough guy with no tender feelings for anyone. He drank too much, he smoked too much, he gambled obsessively, and he didn’t think much of monogamy or of family values. Yet he stayed married to my mother for forty years, usually worked two jobs to provide for us kids, and dutifully visited his own mother every Sunday -- although he professed to find the chore onerous in the extreme.

Before Bierman Field Athletic Building and other University of Minnesota structures were raised on the west side of 15th Avenue Southeast in Minneapolis, the neighborhood consisted of old gabled houses with large screened in front porches and capacious backyards. One of these belonged to my dad’s mother, Olena Christina Torkildson (nee Gullikson, of Lake Mills, Iowa.) I remember her from our Sunday visits as a large and fretful woman, who rented out rooms to U of M students, and who was death on tobacco. Her son, my dad, never dared to light up in front of her.

“Dey are smoking upstairs again! Yoost dey vait till I catches dem!” she often said to me, her Norwegian brogue thickening with rage. She was a large, homely, woman, with thick eyeglasses that gave her a female Peter Lorre look, and her nose was enormous; shaped like a new spring potato, I’m certain that I inherited my schnozzola from her.

I remember the screens on her front porch being rusted so brown I could barely see through them. I was fascinated with her pyramid bread toaster -- bread slices were laid vertically on it to be electrocuted by exposed glowing coils, carbonizing the toast before it could be turned. And in the backyard she kept chickens. She used a lot of eggs. She was a dab hand at making angel food cake, although the rest of her cooking apparently gave her boarders nightmares and indigestion in equal amounts.

She fried everything with lard, from chicken to pancakes. When I think of Grandma Torkildson I don’t remember the scent of lavender or vanilla -- just simmering leaf lard.  

She made huge casseroles of macaroni and cheese, which she stretched with several cans of Veg-All. It did nothing for the overall visual appeal of the dish, which she served to her boarders at least three times a week. She baked her own bread, which I recall as having the mouthfeel of leather gloves and the taste of library paste. She created a sinister hotdish that she deceitfully called “Potato Delight.” As far as I can tell it consisted of crushed Old Dutch potato chips mixed with Campbell’s Cream of Chicken soup and Green Giant canned peas, flung together and baked into a gluey block. Many of her boarders elected to get their meals down the street at Bridgeman’s in Dinkytown. This didn’t offend Grandma Torkildson -- she still charged them the full rate whether they ate at her table d’hote or not.

In the early 1960’s the U of M Alumni Association demanded that the Gophers be given better and larger training facilities commensurate with their increasing status on the national college sports scene. Dozens of well heeled alumni poured their mazuma into the Association’s coffers, with the understanding that their donations would mainly be used for athletic boosterism. And so it came to pass that the great University of Minnesota, aided and abetted by the state of Minnesota, exercised the right of eminent domain  -- buying up dozens of houses on 15th Avenue Southeast, including Grandma Torkildson’s. She didn’t want to sell; she didn’t want to move. She was old and arthritic and even after she was paid well for her property she felt isolated and threatened; asking my dad if she couldn’t move into our detached garage in the backyard.

My last memory of her, before she passed away in 1970, is of her complaining to my dad, her son, about the pipe smokers in the lobby of her nursing home one summer Sunday.

“Dey stink up da place someting turrible -- ish dah fey dah!” she sighed bitterly. Dad nodded wearily and gave her a Whitman’s Sampler box. Then we left to drive over to Lake Johanna for the rest of the day, where my sisters and I built soggy castles on the gumbo beach and caught shiners in our cupped hands. I decided that day to never grow old and homely, but to stay young and laughing forever . . .

the white of pardon

embrace the whiteness

the stainless whiteness in all

the white of pardon

il n'y a qu'un seul moyen de préserver notre sécurité sociale

La seule chose qui sauvera la sécurité sociale aux États-Unis est l'entrée sans restriction des immigrants dans notre pays; ils travaillent plus dur et plus longtemps - et ont souvent deux emplois à la fois - que le reste d'entre nous, et ils paient toujours leurs impôts. Ils ont beaucoup d'enfants qui, à leur tour, vont travailler et payer des impôts. Et, s'ils ne se comportent pas comme de bons citoyens américains, nous pouvons les expulser avant qu'ils puissent collecter eux-mêmes un centime de sécurité sociale. Sans cet énorme réservoir d'immigrants actifs et payants, si prêts à faire le travail le plus humble, notre sécurité sociale deviendra un mendiant édenté - un sifflement et un synonyme pour les nations.

the anchor

the cold blue vacuum

tugs at the sluggish branches

but their anchor is strong

Ledes & Limericks. Monday February 19 2018

“There’s been a movement away from pageviews as a
key performance indicator,” said Devin Smith, a senior
manager of audience development at The Boston Globe.
“They’re often viewed as a vanity metric.”
 from Digiday

Reporters with many pageviews

Are simply stuck-up buckeroos.

The readers who pay

And come back each day

Are what owners crave like cheap booze.

The world’s biggest mining companies are again poised to
shower investors with billions of dollars and make deals,
a turnaround fueled by the global economy’s renewed
appetite for raw materials and by the burgeoning
electric-vehicle market.  From the Wall Street Journal

To bring in the cash, pound for pound,

Just dig a big hole in the ground.

There’s paydirt below

Your feet, dontcha know --

Who cares if your drilling is sound?

How Unwitting Americans Encountered

Russian Operatives Online  from the NYTimes

The normal American fool

Who laps up Facebook like it’s gruel

Will always confuse

The real with fake news,

So Russians give them a cesspool.

How Peter Oscar Torkildson Lost His Farm

My paternal grandfather Peter Oscar Torkildson was born in Vienna, Clark County, South Dakota, in 1885. The town got it’s name from an influx of early settlers from Austria, who fondly envisioned the dusty brown plains as a cultural mecca like its namesake. The collection of tar paper shacks they erected, however, never had more than 800 living souls in it, and nearly disappeared during the Great Depression. Today it holds a mere 50 persons, according to the U.S. Census. Residents of Clark County pronounce the town’s name as “Vie-enna,” accented on the first syllable.

Peter’s father, Ole Torkildson, who was a skilled telegraph operator, left behind the abundant salmon rivers of Nord Trondelag in Norway to become a homesteader just outside of Vienna. Although he has left behind no written record that I know of concerning his decision to up stakes from the lush green forests and towering mountains of Nord Trondelag to plant wheat which was regularly eaten by locusts, withered by drought, or burnt by prairie fires, I suspect that great grandfather Ole must have had some dour second thoughts, like a character out of Rolvaag’s novel “Giants in the Earth,” as he contemplated his dwindling bank account and increasing family. He had five children that we know of -- Peter was his second born and the first boy.

My dad, Peter’s son, wholeheartedly condemned agricultural pursuits of any kind his entire adult life. Removing the expletives, my father’s opinion of farming was basically: “Any appleknocker who can make money with a farm must be robbing banks on the side -- and those crooks deserve to be robbed.” So strong was my dad’s aversion to anything associated with planting and harvesting that he stoutly refused to water, cut, or weed our lawn. Our grass alternated between luxurious tropical canebrake and sere brown sagebrush. Until I was put into harness, that is, as lawn caretaker at the tender age of eight, for a measly allowance of one thin quarter a week. Hard work never killed anyone, but it sure ruined my Saturdays!

Gleaned from my memories of comments from my dad and his mother, the redoubtable Olena Christina Torkildson (nee Gullikson), here is how the Torkildson homestead was finally lost during the stewardship of Grandpa Peter . . .

Peter’s father Ole kicked the bucket at the start of World War One, 1914. As oldest son, Peter inherited the farm, lock, stock, barrel, and McCormick Reaper. Peter had no intention of selling the place and divvying up the proceeds with his siblings, and so the other four were left out in the cold and eventually drifted away from Clark County to make their way in the world as best they could.

For reasons that are shrouded in Federal fol-de-rol, Uncle Sam decided that the Dakotas were prime breeding ground for carrots, not grain. In 1917 Peter Torkildson, along with other farmers in Clark County, were given bags and bags of carrot seeds to plant, on the cuff. As patriotic as the next farmer, and unwilling to look a gift horse in the mouth, Peter tilled and manured his fields, then struggled to hand plant the carrot seeds -- there were no automatic planting devices for such teensy weensy things. The rains were abundant for the next few years and the carrots grew like a house afire. Plus the crickets and locusts, apparently sharing the same universal dislike as human children, gave the carrot fields a wide berth. The Federal government bought up all the carrots he could produce, so Peter was in the chips for several years.

But then the War to End All Wars itself ended, and Uncle Sam saw no more need to hand out free carrot seed. Peter reverted back to hard red Turkey wheat. The rains began to fail sporadically, the land itself began to grow restless and drifted off in dark gray clouds, the price for grain tumbled, and Peter was forced to get a mortgage on the old homestead to keep going. He, too, produced five children -- four sons and one daughter. And the land continued to disintegrate before their red rimmed eyes. When the Great Depression hit in 1930, Clark County was already one of the poorest counties in the whole state, with population draining away like bubbles down a sink.

In 1932 Peter and eleven other farmers in Clark County formed the Last Man Standing Club. They each put ten dollars in the pot; as each one gave up or was dispossesed of his farm, he lost his ten dollars. The money, all of it, would go to the last farmer left -- if it got down to that. And it did. In 1934 the bank foreclosed on the Torkildson homestead, making Peter next to last. The $120.00, so I was told, went to a shifty-eyed Swede who used a good part of his meager corn and wheat crop to make moonshine.

My dad, Peter’s son, hitchhiked out to San Diego after the farm was gone, where his older brother Albin was a cook on a Navy ship. For the next several months, said my dad, he lived off of donuts and coffee smuggled off the boat by Albin, and slept on the dock nestled in giant coils of manila hemp rope. Dad told me that this was when he decided that families were no damn good, and that God, if there was one, was no damn good either.

**********************************************************************************************

(a response from my nephew in Spain)

SiffyandTor Torkildson Oh did I laugh when you mentioned getting put into harness. You forgot to mention the 2am pee spot on the lawn, buried coffee cans of gambling money, and Tork hitchhiking back from San Diego, breaking into a jewelry store to get a hot rack and meal in the local jail, before the final push back to Minnesota to become an egg seller (when I lived in Japan, I heard a song one morning on the radio, it was, The Egg Seller from Minnesota, and I wondered if it was Tork. Actually, it wasn't about the eggs, it was about prohibition, and selling whiskey door to door. I have a million stories about Tork during the years I hung out with him and brought him home after long nights. He always wanted me to take him to after hour joints over Nord East and when we walked in, all the Italians would cheer that the "Swede" had arrived. Tork would shoot right back that it looked like a room of Dago's needed to buy him a drink and lose some money at the card table. In the morning he would call me up and demand to know where all his money went. Interesting times!

And from a distant cousin:

im's article is very interesting. I don't know much about the history of Vienna but he is right that it isn't a very big town now. Ole was a Telegraph operator in Norway. I believe he worked for the railroad or was involved in the building of the railroads in Norway before he emigrated. He was born in Asker, Norway, which is in southern Norway but apparently moved northward as the railroads were being constructed. He met his wife, Ellen, in Hegra in the Nord Trondelag region and lived there for several years, having 3 children. When he came to America in 1880 he went first to Goodhue county in Minnesota. His wife's family had emigrated to America earlier and were living there. I imagine that is why they went there. Ole & family moved to Claremont in Dodge county, Minnesota at some point where he worked as a clerk for a while. He then moved to South Dakota in 1883, receiving land as a homestead grant from the government. He actually had 11 children; Peter is the 6th child and the 4th son. They left Norway with 3 children under the age of 5. One of these children, the first Gunhilda Christine, was only 7 months old when they left Norway. She died right after they arrived in Goodhue county in 1880. We think she is buried in the Minneola Lutheran Church (the church still exists!), although there is no record of where. But the date of her funeral is recorded in the church records. Her grandparents (Ole's wife, Ellen's, parents) are buried there as well. Jon and I went to a church service there last year. It is a lovely church. Ole and Ellen lost three other children between 1900 and 1902 when they were living in South Dakota; looks like all of three died of tuberculosis. Ole did die in 1914 but I have never found anything saying Peter took over the farm. He may have but the only hint that he had anything to do with farming was the 1900 census which indicated he was a farm laborer (perhaps on Ole's farm since he was only 15 at the time). Peter went to high school at Augsburg Cemetery in St. Paul for three years from 1902-1904. He was a blacksmith (sometimes with 2 of his brothers) in 1910 and 1915. He apparently spent a little time around 1915 in Mankato, Minnesota. I believe your dad was born there, wasn't he? I don't have his birth certificate but there is a database on Ancestry.com that shows his birth place as Mankato, MN. Peter was back in SD in 1915, however. He is listed as a blacksmith again. His 1918 draft registration card lists his occupation as auto repair at Torkildson Brothers and in the 1920 and 1925 census records he is listed as a machinist. In 1930 he is listed as a Grocery Store Merchant. Lillian told me that her mother first met him in a grocery store when she went to buy something. They married in 1926 so apparently he worked in the grocery store for several years. He must have moved to Watonwan County by 1931 because his daughter, Ellen, was born there in November 1931. He lived there for many years, working as a gamekeeper. Lillian remembers living on the game farm and said it was a lovely place to live. He did die in Mesa Arizona. His sister Joanna was living there. Lillian told me that his doctor recommended he should go there for his health. He died shortly after he got there, however. Peter certainly could have been a farmer in addition to having the other jobs. Even today most family farmers have to have other jobs to make ends meet. There should be a copy of Ole's will filed in South Dakota that would state whether or not Ole left the farm to Peter. But the part about the Last Man Standing Club doesn't fit too well with the census records since Peter clearly was living in Watonwan since at least 1931.