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 . . .