Dedication for Exile on Maine Street
There’s a special bond formed between cousins during early childhood. Sure, the neighbor kids can be cool, but with a cousin, you have shared DNA. Heck, they’re 25% similar to you, and aside from siblings, that’s the closest you get in the world to having somebody wired just like you.
For me, I only got to visit with my maternal cousins since my paternal side of the family was estranged. The Guertins (Dan, Tricia, Josh, and Sarah) were nearest to us in Granite Falls, so we saw each other multiple times during the year. I have dozens of stories involving the Guertins. The Bollers and Heitbrinks, however, lived by the Twin Cities, so a visit from rural Minnehaha county in South Dakota meant a serious road trip. Thus, I only got to see these cousins once or twice a year, usually around the Fourth of July.
The Heitbrinks (Brooke and Sommer) were the farthest away in Forest Lake, which meant some very stressful times in the car as Ron navigated several interstate exits to go from one end of the cities to the far northeastern corner. In my dreams of childhood, I can still remember all the little details like weed beds off the end of the dock, where Uncle Denny parked the boats, and all those dark acorns dropping onto the deck while we grilled.
The Bollers (Lori and Geoff) lived on Lake Minnetonka, which meant a pitstop in Granite Falls and then a pretty easy drive into the edge of the Twin Cities with Excelsior. From what I can remember, the Bollers only came out to South Dakota on a couple of occasions. After all, the Twin Cities were the entertainment capital for folks west of the Mississippi River. Coming to visit was an adventure.
When we neared Excelsior, the geography changed from the Great Plains to a far more mysterious, wooded Minnesota. Even the roads were more mysterious, such as the enigmatic Manitou Drive and that pillar of brick that marked the spot for us to turn. There were rumors that Prince and the guy who owned the North Stars lived in the area, so our heads were always on a swivel. We took a narrow road flanked by ponds filled with lily pads and looked for a unique landmark to identify the Boller home: the ham radio tower.
You see, the most mysterious part of Lake Minnetonka was not its purification rituals (Sorry, Prince), but my Uncle Steve. He was a pilot for Braniff International Airways (before all the mergers happened), but we’d never been on a commercial plane. The home was filled with oddities and eccentricities. We weren’t allowed in the basement (I think that’s where he kept his Ham radio station), and the living room had a banjo and a bare-breasted woman (not my Aunt Diane). The woman was a wooden (and quite shapely) figurehead meant for the prow of a ship. As an adult, I think both items would be pretty cool in my office, but as a kid, I couldn’t understand why there weren’t Star Wars toys and Battle Star Galactica posters instead. Uncle Steve also had a pretty busy schedule, so he wasn't always home when we visited.
During family get-togethers, all the descendants of Duane and Bonnie Guertin would put aside our quirks and anxieties for several hours of fun in the sun. Whether Forest Lake or Lake Minnetonka, my first instinct was to go fishing. As a kid, it was fishing and boating, but as a teen, who could turn down some time fishing. There’d be a buffet of food from the four families, movies, and games. Our host? That was Uncle Steve (or Uncle Denny when we were in Forest Lake).
Despite being a collection of rural kids and “city kids (that was my perception), we attacked those get-togethers with fervor. Mona and Diane were clones of my mother, so those hugs always felt so familiar. My Uncle Dave, the animated storyteller, teacher, and adventurer, was a grown-up version of me. With the other adults, things were slightly different since their DNA wasn’t resonating like magnets to metal. Aunt Nancy, Uncle Denny, and Uncle Steve looked different, talked differently, behaved differently, and reacted differently. It was obvious they were not Sibley, Iowa stock. While my dad’s Michigan DNA certainly must’ve been jolting to my cousins, Uncle Steve always seemed to lay low, and despite being a fixture at all these family gatherings, he didn’t create many indelible marks or traumatic scars upon the fabric of my childhood.
Then I became an adult.
Oh boy, when the Willis or Doman cousins got together, and you were now the parents, it was a new type of chaos. The volume got loud, every single toy came out, and the host site would be ransacked in minutes after a week of cleaning to get things ready. A cousin gettogether was riding the whirlwind.
Upon becoming grandparents, Ron and Coki, Dave and Nancy, Denny and Mona, and Steve and Diane let the “Guertin get-togethers” naturally fade. After all, they’d put in their two decades of cyclonic chaos and it was now our turn.
I saw Steve several more times as an adult. There was the infamous “dirty boat” scandal (not the Vikings 2005 scandal) during one of our final multigenerational reunions involving my brothers-in-law. My favorite memory likely came at Lori’s wedding. When a Polka came on, the Father-of-the Bride jumped up ready to dance. The only problem? No one could polka! My wife jumped in and whoosh…off she went with Steve bouncing and spinning her all over that dance floor.
And then my time with him came to a sudden end.
I heard news about how he was dealing with cancer, but with my own family firing on all
cylinders, I barely had time to take it in. Strangely, Uncle Steve was the first of my family that left the big family picture. Those twenty figures that I grew up with stayed with me until my forties. How blessed is that? I lost my grandparents when I was very young, and Great-Grandma Lily’s passing felt more celebratory than tragic, but Uncle Steve’s passing came out of the blue and served as notice that those golden days of youth were never coming back.
At his “celebration of life” ceremony some time after the funeral, I jumped at the chance to attend. When I saw my cousins Geoff and Lori, the images of grieving adults didn’t jive with my mental image of the devious cherubs I’d known from the 1980s. My daughter Jordan and exchange-student Lea did know Steve, and my wife only knew that the man could really polka. To them, he was a stranger.
But as I sat and listened to Steve’s countless friends and acquaintances share anecdotes about him, I began to realize how complex he really was. The man wore many hats, and each circle of influence seemed to know him in the same way yet also distinctly different. Who was this guy? Was I at the right place?
I felt cheated.
Suddenly, I wanted to hear more of his stories from his travels around the world. I wanted to listen to him and those peculiar musician friends. I wanted to learn more about Ham radio and how to communicate with people from all over the world without the use of a computer. It was no wonder he was quiet during family celebrations: he was exhausted. I’d spent over four decades with a guy who’d rival the Dos Equis guy without asking questions and taking notes.
Then it dawned on me that we often go through life like this: cruising through life at a superficial level. Folks are interesting, and if you take a few minutes, you can really get to know them. If there’s a campfire in the Northeast corner of Heaven, I’d love some quality Uncle Steve time that I didn’t get in life.
After pondering it, I decided to turn this into the theme of my Mixed-Tape Mystery series. Cassie Campbell never really knew her Uncle Brian even though he was there on the periphery of her life for three decades. Only after his passing does she start to get to know the man.
Within my Gen-X peer group, we’re losing many parents, aunts and uncles, and other members of the Baby Boomer and Silent Generation, and ultimately, we are left with the responsibility of sorting through the stuff that filled and decorated their lives. So as Cassie goes through her Uncle Brian’s music collection to try to understand who this guy really was, it becomes a larger metaphor for dealing with the loss of loved ones and the mysteries that are their lives.
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