Immigrants

My mother's paternal grandparents were German.

Johann came to the U.S. in 1877. He was 18 years old, and came to join his older sisters who were living in Philadelphia. He lived in Chicago for a while and then in 1884 moved to Rock County, Minnesota, where he took up farming. He became a U.S. citizen in 1891.

Martha was born in 1863 in a small town in New York. Her parents were German immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. as children. They moved to Rock County, where Martha and Johann were married in 1887.

Johann and Martha's first two children died of diphtheria, and the third of whooping cough. With three more children, the family moved to California, where my grandfather John was born. They lived in a rural area where most of their neighbors were German, and their home language was German.

When the older kids started school, they discovered that English was the dominant language. As they learned, they also taught their younger siblings, so by the time my grandfather got to kindergarten, he was prepared.

The children were bilingual, speaking German at home with their parents, and English everywhere else. After their parents died they stopped speaking German altogether.

During World War II, when Japanese-Americans were hauled off to internment camps, the local German community was horrified. They feared that they would be next. The older people were especially frightened because many of them did not have their paperwork in order. In fact, a relatively small number of Germans (mostly non-citizens) were imprisoned, but as it turned out, there was no real threat to the members of my great-grandparents' community. Germans were safe largely because there were so many millions of them (either immigrants or the children and grandchildren of immigrants) living throughout the U.S. They also had the advantage of not being targets of blatant racism as the Japanese were.

All this happened long before I was born. Growing up, I knew little about the German branch of my mother's family until we traveled to Europe and she looked up some distant cousins. My grandfather and his surviving siblings hadn't spoken German in decades and were no longer fluent. They did not define themselves as German, or even as German-American. Like so many ethnic groups before and since, they were simply, and proudly, Americans.

 

Shorty

I had a summer job at a car dealership. I had not been introduced to the service manager, although I had seen him from a distance. As it happened, he was a Little Person. One day, I needed to talk to him about something, and I asked one of the salesmen what his name was.

The guy said, "It's Shorty," and I cringed.

"I can't call him that," I gasped.

"His real name is Elmer, but he hates that. Shorty is his choice -- he's got it on his business cards."

Well, if it's on his business cards....

I got used to calling him Shorty, and life went on.

Until the moment three months later when a customer asked me for the service manager's name.

"It's Shorty," I said, and she cringed.

"I can't call him that," she gasped.

"His real name is Elmer," I told her, "but he hates that. Shorty is his choice -- he's got it on his business cards."

She sighed and walked off, looking grim, for her conversation with Shorty.

 

Playing Doctor

"The Bad Doctors" (1892), James Ensor

When I was little, I had a lot of toys, and usually the things I really wanted appeared on my birthday or Christmas.

One wish-list item I still remember was a doll whose name I can't recall, but whom I'll call Medical Marva. Marva's role in life was to be a patient. She came with a hospital bed. Her accessories included arm and leg casts, a sling, crutches, a thermometer, medicine bottles and equipment, bandages, and plastic dots that could be stuck on her face to resemble measles or chicken pox.

I really wanted that doll, but it did not show up under the Christmas tree. My guess is that my mother found it extremely unappealing, too much like a sick child. Of course, I saw it from a different angle, envisioning myself as the heroic doctor who would make the doll well again.

Once or twice I've searched online to see if I can find Medical Marva. It doesn't help that I don't remember her real name. Even so, searching for "doll" and "hospital bed" sometimes yields interesting results. I tried it yesterday, and found a company that crafts miniature insane asylum furnishings for dollhouses. Crutches and a few bandages seem pretty tame by comparison.

 

Jean

I went to see a band at a club last night, and the singer suddenly reminded me of Jean. She was fresh and bold, enunciating the lyrics in a clear contralto, prancing across the stage in denim shorts and torn fishnets. She was relaxed and aware, fully present in the moment, having a wonderful time. It was her smile, and the way she tossed her hair back with a quick turn of her head, that put me in mind of someone I knew one summer when I was young.

Jean and I were party friends. We first met at a party, and I often ran into her at parties, or she would call me and we'd go together. She was pretty and vivacious, someone people loved to invite. Jean was easy going, and always seemed comfortable no matter what was happening. Once, some awkward person spilled a drink on her sweater, and she immediately, and quite naturally, peeled it off. She wasn't wearing anything underneath, but no one was shocked. Jean was no exhibitionist, just a girl who wanted to get the stain out as quickly as possible. She took the sweater into the bathroom to rinse it, and later I saw her dressed in one of our host's t-shirts.

There were a lot of parties that summer, somwhere to go nearly every weekend. Sometimes we would just go out for drinks, and talk about boys. It wasn't a very deep relationship, but we laughed a lot.

Jean drove a van. I never saw the inside of the van, because when we went out together, she came to my place and parked on the street, and we took my car, or we met at the destination. Looking back, it occurs to me now, as it never did then, that she may have been homeless. She used an answering service for her phone calls. That didn't seem unusual at the time. I knew a lot of actors and others trying to make it in the business who used a service. They thought it was more professional to have their calls answered by a live person rather than a machine. Someone who didn't have a stable phone number (or no phone number at all) could just keep the answering service as a permananent contact number.

Once when Jean and I had been out somewhere and came back to my place, she asked to use my shower. That didn't seem odd to me. The weather was hot, the party had been intense, and she probably felt sweaty and wanted to freshen up before the long drive that would mean arriving home quite late and tired. That long drive home might have been fiction. I had never visited her inconveniently distant apartment. Thinking about it now, I wouldn't be surprised if there was just a special location where she parked the van to sleep.

At some point, Jean moved away. I heard from her nearly a year later. She had been diagnosed with an STD and was calling me as a courtesy because we had once, very briefly, dated the same guy, and she was concerned that I might have been exposed. I was okay, but I thanked her for her consideration. That was the last time we talked.