The Pastor’s Kids

This post is a summary of what happens in the chapters of The Pastor’s Kids. If you don’t like spoilers, don’t read it.

The book opens with the four Mikkelson kids, who have been left alone for the day, peering out into a snowy night, watching headlights come toward them, hoping to see their parents’ car. The little wind-swept town on the flat, North Dakota plains is fronted by twin elevators to store wheat and a railroad track. Mother and Dad do eventually return, bringing valentines and paper dolls, and the world rights itself.

A small, forlorn four-year-old, Paul is whisked into a contagion unit in a hospital when it is found he has polio. When he gets better, he goes to a rehabilitation unit far from home, though Mother can now visit him in the afternoons. Paul wants a better wheelchair so he can race with the other kids at night, but Dad says they are hoping he gets braces instead so he can walk.

Line, who is eight, sympathizes with kids who are less well off than she. She has little sympathy for her older sister Ellie, however. Line wishes she were the eldest, but she does dominate her little gang of Marty, a year younger, and Paul, who is finally home. At Christmas Mother has lots of ideas to make the house festive. Line learns that “the mills of God grind slowly.”

Marty wants to have the pretty clothes and buckle shoes of her friend Eileen, but also loves being outdoors. She understands Mother’s house decor of pussywillows rather than felt roses. At Eileen’s house at the train depot, she finds there is no plumbing! On a rainy vacation, Mother ends up reading many books to entertain the kids.

The whole school plays wild games together, including the high school kids. Line idolizes the leaders. The family goes to a basketball game, giving Line ample opportunity to watch her favorite cheerleader and the spirited leader of the basketball team.

Dad takes Paul on a visit to a family where he gives communion to an older Norwegian woman who is dying. As they drive home, they see a twister along the horizon. Dad is also trying to get Paul to study Morse code so he can work toward a hamm radio license, but Paul enjoys a wild game of cops and robbers with the neighbors more.

Marty puts her hand through a window when Line yells that a circus train is coming. Dad telephones a nearby nurse and makes a butterfly-shaped tape suture, as there is no nearby hospital. The kids are invited to tea at the home of a rich farmer near town. Marty finds it is not quite what she had imagined, but Line gets to ride the horse, just for the asking.

Renting a cabin from a friend, Dad introduces his family to a northern Minnesota lake where they fish and swim. Paul limps around without his brace, thinking lake life is paradise. Line leads Marty and Paul on an adventure to spy on the old man who owns a trolley car parked a little way down the lake coast. They are frightened, but no one is there and they do not get in trouble.

Marty is miserable when she has a fight with Line and the shoe she throws at Line breaks a window. She hides in a closet all day, but Mother and Dad are mild about it, thinking she has punished herself enough. Later she rhapsodizes over a sunrise as she eats toast on a fall morning.

Line goes to the Young Citizens League, anxious to distinguish herself, but she jumps in too early. The group advisor describes what being a citizen is, and how they are using Robert’s Rules of Order. One of Dad’s parishioners adopts three part-native American kids and Line, Marty and Paul go to their new ranch house to roller-skate in the basement.

Paul loves Davy Crockett when the kids are allowed to go to their neighbors to watch Disneyland on television. Dad leads a drum and bugle corps which marches out to the cemetery with the VFW on Memorial Day. Paul’s feet are contracting, however, and he sinks down in pain when they finally get there. Dad’s brother Marshall was killed in World War II, in 1945, only ten years before.

Line tries to hide in the car when Mother and Dad take Paul for surgery in the summer. She does not want to stay with her cousins, but this ruse doesn’t work. The girls mark time through the summer and go visit Paul in the hospital. He is in traction, wan and immovable, with a calendar on the wall marking the day when he will be free.

At Halloween the town gets the kids to collect money for UNICEF and puts on a big party at the church parish hall. Marty enjoys square dancing at school and believes that the country kids are smart in their own ways, though she and her friend Michael remain at the top of their class of nine. At New Year’s Eve, it is Marty’s birthday and Dad takes them to watch him ring the heavy church bell at midnight.

Paul envies Marty and Line who can climb up in the “big tree” at the back of the schoolyard. After a communion service, the pastor’s family is invited out to a farm for Sunday dinner. Paul knows already that he, the only boy in the family, is expected to be a pastor like Dad. He loves the farm and finds that Ellie is tall enough to boost him up into the “big tree.”

Television arrives in the Mikkelson household and the family watches on winter afternoons. Dad brings home ice skates and they all go skating on the pond. Mother, however, is pregnant, and in February, a new little sister is born.  Mother and Dad also announce that Dad has accepted a call to a new parish in northeast Iowa, throwing all the kids’ plans askew.

As the Mikkelsons prepare to leave Bryson, boxes pile up around the house. They forget Mother’s birthday, but the parish gives them a lavish party. Line, loathe to leave, sits with her cat, harrumphing that in her mind, animals do have souls. She hates hypocrisy and looks for goodness deep in people.

The Mikkelsons stop at each of their grandmother’s houses as they make their way across Minnesota and have a makeup birthday celebration for Mother. Marty compares her grandmothers, both Norwegian, but with different values. Arriving in their new town, Marty is mesmerized by its beauty, nestled into the hills.

When Line and Marty start junior high, Line is thrilled by the idea of girls basketball and its coach. She can’t figure out what’s eating Paul or why Ellie seems happy. Marty becomes a cheerleader, but she is struggling also.

Summer is blissful for Paul, however. He loves the garden, a nearby creek and he doesn’t have to have surgery. At school the boys ran away and left Paul, as he couldn’t run. It hurts, as he is a sociable kid. But Marty introduced him to science fiction. At a fair at the end of the summer, Line, Marty and Paul love the acrobats and also see Ellie on the Ferris wheel with a boy.

Marty wants a crinoline like the other girls, but Mother wavers about letting her have one. She’s not athletic so sticks with the less popular girls. Her math teacher requests her help checking tests, however. She also begins a notebook, telling her troubles to an imaginary friend, Anna Frank.

Paul’s last surgery is really tough. He wakes up in more pain than he thought possible. Mother stays with him and then Line, who brings a radio so they can listen to baseball games, the Minnesota Millers playing a Cuban team! The doctors tell Paul that they have now done all they can for his legs. The rest is up to him. He tells Line and Marty his real love is wilderness.

One day the Mikkelsons come home to a “pounding” in which the congregation has gifted them with a lot of food, especially mounds of sweet corn. Mother organizes everyone into a processing team resulting in most of the corn going into the freezer for the winter. The whole family takes Ellie up to college and Line is thrilled by the idea that it will soon be her turn.

Marty practices with the high school marching band for half time during a football game. She also sings harmony with Line and Paul for church functions. Dad and Mother share their hopes for their kids when they hear from Ellie that she is unhappy at college. On a Luther League hayride and bonfire, Dad brings everyone together through song.

Dad brings home a Sheltie dog, which Paul immediately bonds with, calling her Foxy. Ellie comes home at Christmas and marries her boyfriend Bruce in a quiet family ceremony, leaving college at the end of the semester. When the family watches “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” Paul tries to prepare, but breaks down in any case.

Line babysits for some hungry kids, coming home to tell Mother about it. She also goes to a baby shower for a friend who has dropped out of school at 16. She tries to write a speech for her speech club. Her teacher tells her to put more of herself into it, and applauds the result.

The Mikkelsons go up to the lake in Minnesota where Mother’s brother is building a cabin. It is a pristine little lake made when the glaciers retreated. Line works on drawing. Marty takes care of Kristen and plays with forbidden cards. Paul helps his cousins build a treehouse. Mother is once again pregnant, helping cook for the family. The sky over the water is full of stars. The peace of the wilderness envelops them, along with the warmth of extended family.

One more Shepherd.com post

 

These lists are fun to do! Here’s the link:

https://shepherd.com/best-books/to-deepen-your-understanding-of-california-history

A new way to look for books

 

Shepherd.com is a new way to find books by subject, as well as a way for me to write “shelf talkers” about books I have loved, connecting them to a book I have written. It’s a sophisticated way to market books as well as a fun method of sharing your passionate love of them.

https://shepherd.com/best-books/siblings-who-help-each-other-to-evolve

Exogamy

Family gathering in Yorkshire, 2019

In my family of eight siblings, the first four, born just after World War II, all chose mates outside our family’s culture. It wasn’t what my parents wanted. They sent us to Scandinavian Lutheran colleges with the express hope that we would find upstanding Lutheran husbands (the first four were all girls). Coming of age in the late 1960’s, this just didn’t happen, which I believe to have been somewhat endemic to the times.

The second group of siblings stayed much closer to home and our childhood culture. They had watched the pain we caused our parents and, as one told me, “sided with them.” I have heard stories of other large families in which the same thing happened. Or, the younger ones, if they came of age in the 1960’s, were the ones to leave while the older ones found their footing in the towns, farms and cultures in which they had grown up. 

What I am pointing to is a particular time when it was possible to question whether the ideas and habits you grew up with were the best for you, whether you wanted to explore more diverse habits, and even move to a city where the possibility of meeting people unlike you was more common. It wasn’t necessary. It was just the fact of travel possibilities, educational opportunities and youthful excitement converging to create a desire for a more open field upon which to play. Institutions had cracks in them. We slipped through the cracks and didn’t looked back, though we came home often, and were welcomed.

Unlike Jane Austen’s “universally acknowledged” truth that young women must be searching for a man with a good fortune, my sisters and I were all equipped to work. We were looking for partners, not anyone in particular. My next sister met her British husband in India when they took the same train. After many adventures my third sister found a lasting partnership in Portland, Maine. The last of the four found her husband, of Welsh extraction and now a Zen Buddhist, in an office in Minneapolis. And I have settled in California with a native of the state whose parents fled the dust bowls of Oklahoma.

Exogamy, the custom of marrying outside one’s social group, has always had different positive aims: it helps keep the human gene pool strong and it promotes friendship between tribes or clans. When I began publishing my fictional series, So Are You to my Thoughts in 2015, I did not know what it was about. I wanted, in general, to show my younger brother and sisters what it was like for us. With fictional characters and incidents based on friends, cousins, and family, the series shows the truth of the post-war generation.

The United States is a tribute to the anthropological concept of exogamy. Go to any lively college town, or almost any playground in the country. You will see more displays of physical characteristics than you can imagine, and all of us human beings. In many other places in the world there is more constraint about who studies together, who plays together, and certainly who can be chosen as mate.

Most Baby Boomers will see some aspect of themselves in these exogamous matches. Why not? Why not find for yourself a partner who has a harmonic that matches your own, regardless of your two heritages. Of course it is easier if you share habits, foods, religious institutions, and values. But a couple can still make a strong family if you don’t. Strong families make resilient children, who in turn make their own strong families. This recursive pattern is the basis for healthy and progressive human lives. It is the basic theme of the exogamous matches in So Are You to My Thoughts.

My sisters and brother and I didn’t know just how far away from each other we would get, but methods of communication have improved greatly. As soon as Skype  existed, my next sister and I began a weekly phone call between Yorkshire and California. Travel is also much more common for our generation than for our parents. As children in an isolated town in North Dakota, our house was full of National Geographic’s and encyclopedias. We put a finger on the globe and spun it to see where we would end up. By this time, we know. The details of our long lives have included many chances to move out into the world. We mostly took them.

Voyage LA Interviews

 

Voyage LA has published two interviews with me, which you can find here:

Voyage LA

and here:

Shoutout LA

Writer and Editors at the Lake

Naomi, David, Connie 2019

This photograph surfaced this week, taken by Rachel Kronlokken at Kabekona Lake in July, 2019. I love it because it shows the main collaborators on So Are You to My Thoughts, all seven books. My sister Naomi, at the left, my brother David and myself sitting. I was writing the last book in the series at the time, which I published in March 2020. Naomi and David were the chief editors. 

One year ago, in September, I finished one more complete edit of all the books. There are still mistakes, I am sure. Susie Fehr, who read The Pastor’s Kids, now available as an audiobook, pointed out that I placed Winnipeg in Ontario! Not true. It is in Manitoba.

Permitting myself a look back, I am delighted the books have been written, the project completed with the same energy with which it was begun in 2008. I also have my husband, Don Starnes, to thank. He provided the stunning covers and technical help throughout. Our little publishing company, Lightly Held Books, continues to prosper.

An Unexpected Adventure

I took a B.A. Degree in Latin and English Literature at Luther College in1966. The next year I went to Oxford, England, as a nanny, with the chance to attend lectures in literature at the colleges. I didn’t know at the time how much the study of literature had been influenced by two traditions which were fought out in the 1930’s at the universities at Oxford and at Cambridge. Looking back, I see clearly that the struggle was still being played out when I got there. And of course I had a point of view.

At Oxford, colleges taught language and literature, with an emphasis on language. The people who influenced this teaching included J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and their fellows. For them language was more than human speech. It claimed a divine origin and was the means by which God created the cosmos. For Owen Barfield, “Language was the fossil record of the history of the evolution of human consciousness.” For Tolkien, it was “a fallen human instrument and a precious divine gift; a supreme art, and as Word, a name for God.”

At Oxford, most lectures were in early English and its origins. The professors felt you didn’t need a tutor to read contemporary literature! As I saw myself a future writer, however, I gravitated to the one professor, Francis Warner at the recently-built St. Catherine's College, who lectured in 20th Century literature. How did he get there? I look back and find that, of course, he had come from Cambridge!

At Cambridge, a more science-dominated institution, a revolution had been brewing. I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis felt that “English studies must be cut free from the classical scholarly tradition in every respect.” They developed what they called “New Criticism,” a formal technique in which the text itself was studied carefully without special consideration of its historical context or cultural influence. The two approaches to literature, from Oxford and Cambridge, were in underlying agreement, but bitter battles were fought. Looking back, I now see that the canon I was taught came straight out of Cambridge.

All of this was dramatized for me recently in The Fellowship - The Literary Lives of the Inklings, by Philip and Carol Zaleski. This book reminded me of how I had turned up my silly little nose at the “fantasy literature” of the Inklings, despite much involvement in it in my family. My mother was a member of the C.S. Lewis Society and many of my cousins read and talked about him. I read The Hobbit by Tolkien early, but never followed up with The Lord of the Rings, despite thorough reading of it by my siblings. As a result of the Zaleskis’ book, however, and also re-thinking of my own, I am now immersed in close reading of Tolkien’s masterwork.

When I was younger, the self-conscious exploration of modern literature was deeply interesting to me. I read some James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence E.M. Forster, and loved Virginia Woolf without reservation. The precision with which the self was described, the depths plumbed, the generosity of these authors with their lives appealed to my own determined self-making. By this time, however, my self made and accepted, I am considerably less interested in the personal idiosyncrasies in which this strain of literature continues to obsess. Perhaps the universal is getting lost in the process.

At any rate, my current crusade is for awareness of and attention to the value of everyday life, especially life lived together with our families and friends. Tolkien’s work speaks amply to this. For him, according to the Zaleskis, fantasy was a higher form of art, an elvish craft. Fairy tales were a door opening on divine truth. But he lived in an Oxford which was not much larger than a village. He could walk or bicycle from his home to the college. He could meet with his friends at a pub to drink, smoke a pipe and talk about stories in the center of town. Middle-earth was for him simply objective reality. Tolkien was a realist. He said, “I am in fact a Hobbit,” that his work “was written in my life’s blood.”

In my family, the unique combination of John Kronlokken and Florence Frost has become known as “ Kronlokken-ness” and it bears a great resemblance to Tolkien’s hobbits. Like hobbits, Kronlokkens are modest and generous, like gardens and trees, and are capable of courage when necessary. They tend to hide their light under a bushel and, I happen to know, some of them much prefer being barefoot! In the mid-80’s I published a family newspaper called The Intercoastal Hobbit. Some of the stories related in it made their way into the series, So Are You to My Thoughts.

The Lord of the Rings shows that it is only the truly humble who can be trusted with power. It is the homely goodness of the hobbits, the everyday wisdom of their shire, their voluntary suffering quest which saves the world from the horrors of a wielder of absolute power. Perhaps I cannot claim so much for Kronlokkens, my many siblings, their children and children’s children. But it is clear to me that they are the salt of the earth.