My Aunt Selma and Our Learning
On one of those wonderfully clear and warm October days you get frequently in this country, I was outside the Wisconsin Historical Society on some research business, when I diverted myself for a moment to walk up the sidewalk on Bascom Hill alongside what was, in my student days, Science Hall. I got about halfway up that walk—it connected at an angle to one of the two walks on either side— and bent to touch one of the cement squares of the sidewalk.
It was about here. This may be the exact place, I thought, paying no attention to the hundreds of students trudging by me who must have wondered why the stocky old duffer was bent down staring at the cement and touching it.
- That block of cement was sacred space.
Well, that may be a bit extravagant. It was important space, at the very least.
It made me think about how I got my name.
And then (the most vivid memory of all) I saw something in the apartment next door that was so disgusting, so awful, that I don’t talk about it. I don’t because I have no idea what happened or what the context of it was. I still won’t talk of it, though over 60-years-old, the memory of it is gaudy. Forgotten. Beyond my own ken. But still vivid.
Memory lost. Context lost.
I was about that same age and was living, before South Carolina, in Cleveland, when Albin and Anita took us on a lake boat tour, on a vintage (before 30s) steamer. An elegant thing. With iron plate decking, white painted railing and brass fittings. I’ve seen a picture of me from that time: Four of us on that deck; Albin, already in a new khaki army uniform as a newly minted second lieutenant, hair blown by the wind, in dark glasses; Anita in a flowered straw hat and dark knee-length coat, a large purse hooked over her left arm; John, the baby, swaddled in a white blanket nestling on his father’s chest (he was born in Rocky River in 1939, in what would become a suburb of Cleveland, eventually); and me. I am in a beanie hat with matching gray overcoat, but bare-legged. I appear to be looking back over my right shoulder behind us, my attention caught by something other than the photographer.
The back of the snapshot is dated June 18, 1940. I don’t remember anything surrounding the taking of that picture. How cold it was. Why we were there. What I do recall, quite vividly, was steering the ship. We were out in Lake Erie some distance from shore. As a joke, Albin put me on a shiny brass button atop the steering column, the giant wheel of the ship before me. I put my hands on it and turned the wheel. I steered. And bounced on the shiny brass button—it was some four or five inches in diameter and I fit on it nicely. And the ship’s horn sounded. Blasted.
I could have screamed and not have heard my own voice, it was so loud. But the horn blasted. That button I sat on was what activated that sound. The horn. Or so I thought. It was so shiny, so official. The mate attending us laughed, as did my parents. He said, “Well, you’re the skipper now!”
- “That’s a good name,” Albin said. “Skipper.”
My name. Skipper. Skip.
I recall that little bit. But not much else.
Memory lost. Context lost. Again.
Here’s what happened:
My freshman year at the university was mixed. I did well in classes I liked and not so well in those I didn’t. In addition I had discovered pool and giant Butterfinger candy bars at the student union. I played a lot of pool and ate many candy bars. Meanwhile I got the obligatory D in freshman composition, suitably necessary for an aspiring writer, even though two of my essays were used as exemplars in class. I never could figure out that darn Mamie Hefner. The comprehensive grammar test must have been what sunk me. GPA a 2.00.
Second semester I got busy and improved to a 3.20. But at the same time I discovered that my talent lay in science and philosophy where I got some good grades—this at the university, before grade inflation due to the Vietnam War made grades meaningless. I continued to be an erratic but a good student, excelling in courses I favored, barely scraping by in those I didn’t. (I barely survived my bizarre semester in the School of Business studying accounting. Though I did learn the beauties of double-entry bookkeeping which got me part-time work at one point.) I did what I wanted to. Why not? I was paying for my own schooling.
In any case, I busily got about getting a good classical education: history, literature, philosophy, three semesters of Greek. And classics. If you’re in Business School or the School of Engineering you got trained, not educated. But no virtue redounded to me in all this. I was following my own preferences. My education was largely accidental. I hardly thought about it. Until that first April.
I was walking down this very sidewalk toward the Student Union. I hit this very square of cement and a little epiphany of sorts happened. This would be the spring of 1957. And a cool day. What I was. What I had become. Through something so unexciting, nearly banal, as learning, a vision came to me. I hit that square of sidewalk at the end of my sophomore year and the words in shining light bounded up into the heaven of my mind: How much I have changed!
That was it. How much I have changed! I was not who I had been but two years earlier. It was uncanny. And memorable. And I forgot it for a whole year.
Albin used to say that our Aunt Selma was the advocate for education in his family. Grandpa Hans Thomas was a traditional man. Why not? Born at the beginning of our Civil War, he believed that his brood of children should be workers. On the farm.
Selma was the first in the family to get an eighth-grade certificate. She had been converted. She started in on her father. Perhaps she thought of the brilliant but now dead Susanna whose clearly exceptional gifts had been wasted.
“They must go to school,” she said.
Though she had a lovely alto singing voice, her speaking voice, her nagging voice, was high, abrasive, strident, as penetrating as a dental drill. Albin said she never let up on the old man.
He finally relented. Albert went to academy at Red Wing. Tom to my university here. Henry graduated from high school in distant Menomonie, the school that Albin also attended. Grandma Maria moved in with them to cook and keep house. The sacrifice was significant. They never had much money. But Selma was unrelenting. Schooling happened. Albin won a scholarship to Concordia College at Fargo-Moorhead.
The habit of education formed, even for the girls. Myrtle, for example, went to Normal, became a teacher, and eventually got her baccalaureate. Some of the boys never went beyond high school. Henry could have. He was smart, as Karn used to say, but not educated. The generation following, mine, those who were able, knew without question they were going to college. And many went. One, Adrian, Nettie’s son, earned a doctorate in physics and worked on the Manhattan project and at Oak Ridge during the war. Selma’s hectoring had changed the family.
The next year, unanticipated, I stepped on that same square of sidewalk, in April and unbidden the second epiphany: How much I have changed! Out of the blue, like gratitude, or prayer answered.
Selma’s own two boys, Stanley and Konval, went to college, of course. That little farm of Nelmer’s supported them. It hadn’t been easy. Stanley became a teacher. Konval worked for the Minnesota DNR. Both became professional men. John and I were in school together. Kendall would join us in a year. Meanwhile I was careening about like a particle in Brownian movement in the humanities getting educated. I was heading for the seminary, but thought seriously about an academic career in philosophy.
At the end of my senior year, sleepwalking down Bascom Hill in my usual academic daze, I was not thinking of anything in particular, and then trying to remember the declension of a particularly difficult Greek verb. Then I was thinking about, when all three of us boys were in university at the same time, how Albin would boast about his University Men! I hit that square of concrete and it came again: How much I have changed!
Only this time it was much stronger than usual. I was about to graduate. My degree was in Philosophy. And the changes had been profound. How much I had changed; I was not close to the person I had been when I entered this school four years ago. I was almost entirely somebody else.
How mutable we are!
Skipper.
A flat stone slithering across the surface of a lake, sinking, ripples spreading and spreading.
I thanked my Aunt Selma for that.
—Steven Fortney
Steven Fortney has lived in Stoughton since 1961. He was raised in a military family that traveled extensively all over the United States in Army Posts, including childhood residences in Germany and Austria. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin in Classics and Philosophy, he then attended Luther Theological Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. After a stint as a newspaperman, Fortney graduated from the School of Education in Madison and taught high school for 31 years. He has published poems in numerous magazines and anthologies and has been listed in A Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers since the 1989-90 edition.