July 2020 – Welcome

The Formative Years: Pt. 1

Many believe that the formative years are your life between birth and eight years old. Although I can see what they mean by that as that is the time when who you are begins to take shape, I feel that what you remember and your experiences can affect who you are as a person just as much as what you are taught. Yes, early years teach you the basics, walking, talking, feeding yourself, potty training, but I feel that you learn so much more between ages six to twelve that truly shape you. You learn to read, basic math skills, socializing with classmates, communication skills, history, geography. You start to understand the world outside of just your neighborhood. You do kid stuff.

This is the period of my life where I lived in Redgranite, Wisconsin. A very small town that only had about six hundred people living in it when we moved there. At one time it had been a much larger community of over two thousand inhabitants when the granite quarries in the area were in full swing. In the twenties, the change from paving block to concrete and asphalt for roadways began to put the dagger in the granite business there. The great depression twisted that dagger and did even more damage to the community as a whole. Not long after that the quarry began to fill with water. With no one working it and pumping the water out, it didn’t take long. I heard a lot of rumors of what’s at the bottom of the quarry growing up. Everything from cranes and mining equipment to cars to campers to complete trains to mobster bodies. Almost all of these have been disproved over the years by divers, but they were fun stories back then.

Living in a community of this size means that everyone pretty much knows everyone. You’d go to one of the four local restaurants at the time and everyone greeted you by name and asked how your family was. In some ways it was nice, in others, well let’s just say you get a speeding ticket, and everyone knows before you even get home. My mother could have attested to that. I believe her one and only ticket in her life was gotten when she was coming home from Oshkosh and was a bit distracted and in a hurry. She got pulled over for speeding, and by the time she started her shift at the restaurant, they had a little toy police car with her name on it proudly displayed in the pie case for all to see.

We got to Redgranite the summer before I started first grade. At that age and in a community that size, it was easy to make new friends. My first good friend was a boy nicknamed Popcorn. He shared my love of Matchbox and Hot Wheels, and he had a basketball hoop on his garage. It was also nice that he lived right by the softball diamonds and the park and was only a block away from our house. We had so much to do around there that we were never bored.

As the school year started, I got to meet the rest of my classmates and I latched on to even more people. Even some of the girls in my class were fun to hang out with. I didn’t really have that “girls are icky and lame” idea at the time, because my female cousin was one of my best friends. Always has been. I also think that being a small community and small class size helps boys and girls to interact with each other much better at that age, and I personally feel it lends to more respect between the sexes. My Mom worked the day shift at the restaurant known as Griff’s and Dad was out doing his Real Estate selling thing, so when I got done with school for the day, no one was at home to watch me. The solution was for me to walk from the school, that was a block from our house, down to the restaurant downtown and sit there doing my homework and watching Woody Woodpecker until Mom got off work. I must have been a hit with the other waitresses there because one would always bring me a dish of twist ice cream with butterscotch topping when Mom wasn’t looking. I wonder where those magical powers over women went when I got older?

About once a month or so, we got to go to Elmer’s Pizza for dinner. To this day, I love their pizza. So much so that it’s my go to for my birthday every year. It’s become a tradition that means more to me than it probably should, but hey, you only turn….every year once. My family and friends look forward to making that run too. They just wish it wasn’t in February because it always seems to snow that day. I’m saving a discussion on the day of my birthday for another day, but just know that I’m not super exited that it lands on the day it does. For that purpose, I started doing what I like to refer to as an Un-birthday. I share it with a close friend who also has a birthday at a cruddy time of the year, and we share it with all you people out there born during Wisconsin winter. This Un-birthday is a floating day. It happens some Saturday in June or July, when you know the weather will most likely be pretty nice. We just celebrated this yesterday as I’m typing this, and we went to (drum roll please) Elmer’s of course. Its pretty amazing the amount of memories that flood your brain just from the taste of a particular food. I practically relive those six years there every time. Almost all those memories are good too.

As with my hometown in my last post, many things have changed over the years there, but a ton haven’t. Our old house has been re-sided and changed very little. Our old garage has been torn down and a new larger one fills the back yard. The F/S Service Station kitty corner from the house hasn’t been in operation for years, but it still stands. Our old church burned down several years ago. The building that housed the arcade has been torn down. The building my Dad ran his business out of still stands and I think is an antique store of some kind. My Uncle’s Real Estate office is gone. Griff’s hasn’t been Griff’s for a long time, and I think is closed completely now. But that small-town feel is still in the air there. And going back there still brings that good feeling in me. Would I feel the same way if I had continued to live there through my High School years, or would I have gotten to that “I can’t wait to get out of this place and never look back” stage that so many do. Who knows?

That’s all for now. I decided to split this up into two parts because I want to start telling some of the many stories of my years in Redgranite. Many of them I find quite funny, silly, stupid, you know, kid stuff. I felt if I did that on this post it would be way too long. So, if you want to read about those, tune in next week.

We’re all in this together. Luv Luv.

Who Says You Can’t Go Home

Throughout my life, when I’ve been asked where I was born, and I responded with “Hartford,” more than half the responses were, “Connecticut?” Hartford, although the largest city I’ve ever lived in, is considered a small community. Back when I lived there, it was just under 9,000 people and is currently around 15,000 strong.

Although I was only six when we moved, many bits and pieces of the memories I have are pretty clear. I’m sure some aren’t totally accurate as your mind has a tendency to fill in the blanks when you forget things from long ago. But I’m going to tell you about them as if they were gospel. It’s my blog, I do what I want.

Right now, you are saying, “how does this tie in with your title?” Well, stop being so impatient. I’ll tell you. Recently I took a motorcycle ride and ended up in ‘my hometown’. (Queue Bruce Springsteen) You expect there to be changes when you return to places from your youth, especially thirty-six years later. Being that young, I didn’t go downtown often, so I don’t have any memories of main street. But when I got to my neighborhood, nothing looked the same. Our house was completely different. The big side yard had another house in it. Our big back yard now had a big garage in it. I thought the end of the street was the alley, but I found out from my siblings that the road carried past that by at least two more houses.

The big hill I used to push my big wheel up and then stand on it while I rode it down, barely looks like an incline now. I remember my best friend, Davey, lived across the street, but I have no idea which house was his. None of them look familiar. There’s still a car wash behind the old house, but it looks nothing like I remember. I don’t think our old church is a church anymore. When I rode past, it looked like there was a mannequin dressed in 80s female concert goer gear out front. Thrift store maybe, or just some strange event going on.

Although a little saddened because things weren’t exactly how my mind remembered them more than thirty years later, I began remembering fun times (and not so fun times) that still made me smile. I rode around some more and saw an alley that I’m pretty sure my brother’s friend lived on. He had a Saint Bernard that I got to ride like a horse. Rode past the mill pond where my brothers would take me to go frog hunting. We’d bring them home and Dad had to cook them because Mom said they looked like little baby butts so she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

There were also lessons learned. I remembered my middle brother pushing me on my pedal tractor as fast as he could run, then losing control of said tractor which netted me a lovely smiley face scar on my knee. What lesson did I learn you ask? Was it to hold on tighter to the steering wheel of my tractor? Nope, the lesson is, “it’s all my brother’s fault.” I remembered walking outside and seeing the same brother and our cousin looking in the trunk of a car. I walked up and wanted to see what they were looking at. Not seeing me come up behind them, my cousin closed the trunk on my head. You guessed it, my first head scar. Six stitches I believe. What was the lesson here? To make sure people know you are around them before sticking your head in a trunk? Nope, somehow that was my brother’s fault too. Trust me, everything was his fault back then.

There were some lessons learned through observation as well in my youth. The large tree in our front yard grew at a bit of an angle. Not like a 45, but not a full 90 either. I witnessed my older brother try to ride the middle brother’s bike up said tree. I don’t think he got the desired result. Lesson learned: when trying a stunt that may wreck a bicycle, never use your own bicycle. I watched my brothers play catch with a metal tipped dart. How you say? There was a piece of round metal ductwork pipe hanging from the ceiling in the basement. They each had a piece of wood. One would throw the dart through the pipe, and the other would catch the dart with the piece of wood. This was fun to watch, until one of them caught the dart with the hand that was holding the board. Then it went from fun to funny…. because it wasn’t me. Lesson learned: don’t play darts with my brothers.

As my ride to the next stop continued, I started thinking of those trips “up North” we took in the summer to go stay at my Aunt and Uncle’s land. Riding minibikes and sleeping in the pop-up. Riding up there “in the way back” of the station wagon. Good times, but still, lessons learned. Lessons like deep soft sand is hard to ride a minibike through, you can only hold your shoe on an exhaust pipe for so long before you foot starts to get hot, people who don’t swim so good should not follow their much taller sibling out into the lake, marshmallows taste better brown than black (again, my blog, my opinion….but I’m right), and of course, bed wetters should not sleep on the table made into a bed if you ever plan to eat on that table again. Feel free to ask my therapist about that last one.

What does all this mean? What can I take away from all this? What does it mean that you can’t go home?

The general consensus is that “you can’t go home” refers to things physically changing over the years. Going back to your hometown, you won’t recognize it anymore because everything will have changed and evolved over the years. Time doesn’t stop.

I tend to see this a little different, because, well, I’m a little different. Can you physically go home? Yes, of course you can. What you can’t do is change anything that happened there in the past. You can remember as much as you can possibly remember from your past, but you can’t change it. The past is set in stone. You can only learn from your past. Try to repeat the good if you can. Try to do similar activities to what you remember fondly. Try to learn from past mistakes and not repeat them, over and over and over…….

I went home. It wasn’t what I remembered, but it triggered so much more. It triggered smiles and happy memories of a simpler time in my life. A time of virtually no responsibilities. No concept of time. No stress or anxiety. And of many lessons learned.

Thanks for taking the time to give this a read. I hope you enjoyed it and maybe took a little something away. Or it at least put a smile on your face. We all need that these days.

We’re all in this together. Luv Luv.

Welcome to my life.

Good morning… afternoon, evening, whenever you are reading this. Welcome the “The Life of Bart.” I know what you’re thinking, “Most blogs I read are about something specific. Something like cooking, camping, carpentry, technology, finance, or something like that. What’s your blog about?” Well, I don’t think of myself as an expert on any one thing in particular. But I do feel that I’ve experienced a lot of things throughout my life that some may find interesting. I’ve also learned a lot of lessons along the way due to the multitude of mistakes I’ve made. I thought that I might be able to share those with others to potentially help them along the way, in case they run into the same situations I did. So, I guess you could say it’s sort of a narrative, self-help, cautionary tale with a bit of humor thrown in for good measure. I hope you enjoy it and continue to check it out for new content. I’m looking to try and add at least one post per week at the start. I’m new to this, so I’m feeling the water so to speak. Without further ado, here’s my first official post.

I’m going to start by introducing myself and giving you a background of my family and where my life basically started. I was born in Hartford, Wisconsin the youngest of four children. My sister being the oldest, two brothers, and myself. At the time, my father was a manager of a local welding facility and my mother worked as a waitress. Our house was on a quiet street, but on the back side of our block was the main highway that cut through town. We lived in this town until I was six years old.

A little bit about my parents as some have found this interesting as well. My mother was one of seven children. She was the youngest of the first five with two half-brothers. Her mother passed away when she was quite young. From my earliest memory of him, her father was wheelchair bound as he had lost one of his legs from the knee down to an illness. Her grandfather was a Reverend although I’m not positive where he practiced. She was a wonderfully kind person. In my entire life, I have never heard one person say a bad thing about her. She was almost so polite it was scary. Profanity was not allowed in our house to the point where I can remember being scolded in my teens for saying the word “fart.”

On to my father’s family. My Dad is one of twenty-one children. I’ll give you a moment to process that. He is near the end of the first sixteen with five half-brothers and sisters. His early life was a bit rough as the dairy farm and cheese factory were a no go, he lost his mother, and his father just walked away. He quit school in his early teens due to having to work to survive. He never graduated high school, but he had the work ethic of those of his generation and those before him combined. He was never tied down to one kind of job either. He tried his hand at a lot of things throughout his life. He swept the foundry floor, welded, ran a gas station, built houses, sold houses, insulated houses, sold cars, and worked maintenance at the Green Lake Conference Center as well as Ripon College. No matter what his daily job was, he always had side work going on. It also seemed like whatever house we lived in; it was never quite finished. He has an uncanny knack for being able to just figure things out. It isn’t so much book smarts as his mind just works in a way that he can look at something and just figure it out. As most people, he was not without his flaws and had a knack for making people mad at him. A trait I learned from and do my best to avoid.

My sister is eleven years older than me, has been married twice (she got it right the second time), and had four children. My oldest brother is nine years older than me, has been married twice (we won’t discuss this one), and has two children. My youngest brother is seven years older than me, and like myself, remains single. Many of my life experiences and lessons learned involve these folks so we’ll get into them more as time goes on.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I was the “whoops” child. I was also spoiled rotten because I deserved it. At least I think I did. When I was six, we moved to the town of Redgranite, Wisconsin as Dad was “changing careers.” He started selling real estate with his brother. I was ok with the move because I was just out of Kindergarten and really only had one friend at the time. Plus, my cousin, who was the whoops of her family lived there and we were quite close. I’m sure you’ll hear some stories involving her as well. My older siblings were not quite as “ok” with the move as I was. My sister was about to start her senior year and now had to do so in a new school. At the time I didn’t realize how hard it was on them, but as I got older, I understood and felt bad for them.

At age twelve, some issues arose between my parents and I moved with Mom to Ripon, Wisconsin. Things got worked out in the end, and Dad moved in with us a few months later. Aside from a few years living in the local township, I’ve been in the thriving metropolis of Ripon and its eight thousand people ever since.

Well, that’s it for your introduction to me. I’ll have something a little more for you to sink your teeth into next week. If you enjoyed this intro to some of the main characters of my life story, great, I hope you come back for another taste and a riveting story. If you didn’t, well, that’s ok too. I just hope you give me another chance with my next post.

Remember, we’re all in this together, luv luv.