The Norwegian Butter Knife

The Story of my Wonderful Grandmother, whose Beautiful Memory Makes me Feel like a Terrible Person

In a story my grandmother often told, it was winter in Minnesota and the snow was deep. She was a child watching out the farmhouse window as her father put a few bricks into a Franklin stove and hitched a pair of horses to a sled. She showed me a faded old photograph of the sled, once. It looked like a tiny carriage, with a bench for a driver and an enclosed cabin too laughably small for an adult. Her father was still a farmer in those days, so everything he owned either came from a Sears catalogue or was something he built himself. The sled was one of the things he had built himself.

After enough time had passed, her father took the hot bricks from the Franklin stove and put them into a metal container in the sled filled with rocks. Only after this was done did my grandmother and all of her sisters file out of the house and into the sled. Picture four, bundled-up, white-blonde Norwegian girls with good genetics for snow. My grandmother often shivered at the memory and insisted that without the bricks they would have all been freezing. All four of the sisters would then hold out their mitten-covered hands over the heat. When she told the story it was like she could still feel the warmth in her fingers. Her father remained out in the elements with a scarf wrapped around his face and a hat on his head as he guided the horses to the bus stop. In the winter, he did this five days a week.

He must have been so cold, my grandmother insisted. Each time she told the story, it was as if it was her first adult realization of her father’s separate and private inner life. Again and again, always that line at the end. He must have been so cold.

I think of that story, not because I have some particular affection for my great grandfather. I know precious little about him other than that his name was Alfred and he always tried to do right by his family. Instead, I think of that story because it typifies the way my grandmother always pushed others forward. There was never any virtue to be claimed for herself in any story she told. Never a story to be told only about herself. Nothing was ever hard for my grandmother in her memory, it was everyone else who was carrying a burden.

The way my grandmother told it, it was hard for her father when the big industrial farms started to pop up all over the country, but she never mentioned going without. It was hard for her mother when they had to give up the farm and move to a smaller house closer to the city, but not for my grandmother when she had to say goodbye to all the animals. The same was true of her sisters who had to share all of the precious little they owned. The way she told it, she always had all she wanted.

She admitted to some attempted selfishness, as things got tough. As money got tighter and tighter, each night she would wonder if any of the six children on the farm could be sent elsewhere. To stay with relatives or do other jobs, or strike out on their own a bit early. Anything to reduce the burden on the farm. And yet her attempts at selfishness failed. Every night in her prayers she could determine nothing less than that each of the children were absolutely necessary for the continuation of the family.

She’d relate that last part most often when I told her that I hated my sister, but I didn’t pick up on the message. I was too proud, too vain, and too stupid. Too caught up in the idea that my pains were my own, which of course they are, and that they are therefore unimaginably unique, which of course they aren’t. Pain isn’t any kind of virtue until it is overcome.

Being the oldest, she took in her dying mother when the time came. That’s my earliest memory of meeting my grandmother and one of my earliest memories in general. She put out the call that the end was close, and everyone in the family made a pilgrimage to visit. I must have been only slightly verbal because I remember holding up some fingers to indicate my age to some impossibly ancient creature. My great grandmother was on a sick bed in some enormous house my grandfather bought when he still worked at the phone company. My only other real memory of ever being there is when a withered, possibly monstrous, hand reached out from that bed, guided by my grandmother’s relatively human hand, to touch the top of my hair.

I get it now. It was a message in a gesture to say what words cannot.

“See, mom? The line continues. Life continues. You passed on the torch. You did your job and I did mine. There will still be light when you step into the dark. You can rest easy.”

I hope my kids do the same for me, but I admit my memory is that I found the whole thing terribly unsettling. However, it’s my first memory of my grandmother so it has become pleasant in recollection. Life has a tendency to work out that way.

You want the stories of how she would clash with my mother, of course. How she would step into some kind of crazy situation that had no reasonable explanation and then help her grandchildren through. We’ll get there, but those aren’t the most important parts of who she was. You want the drama, but such dramatic acts could never have occurred without her countervailing order. To me, she was a saint whose only flaw was that she sometimes cheated at Solitaire. If I seem uncaring or unfeeling toward my mother, it is because I transferred those feelings of reverence back one generation. My grandmother was a better mother to me than I could have ever possibly deserved.

Like all grandmothers, she owned the best most magical things in the entire universe. She had a butter knife somehow better than all other butter knives. Not narrow at the end, but fat and broad. A curvature like no other butter knife I have seen since, perfect for smearing. It was a butter knife to make all other butter knives laughably inadequate. Some wise but practical butter-knife-smith of yore must have crafted it before fashion overtook practicality. Sometimes, I would imagine that butter-knife-smith in the winter’s snow, like my great-grandfather Alfred, looking down at a half-forged narrow tipped butter knife and striking it one last time to broaden the still-molten tip in a moment of inspiration. I don’t know who got it after she passed away, but it was the one thing she owned that I truly wanted by the time I became an adult. It was like her, unique and perfect. A metafactual artifact, existing both in reality and as a metaphor of reality.

There are a hundred other memories, like her potato ricer, which appeared to my young eyes to be some kind of medieval torture device. She had a glass fruit knife covered in Norwegian patterns of… I don’t know. It was always birds and flowers. They all look the same to me. She learned to paint birds and flowers when she and my grandfather got older. She painted them on lots of things. A thimble from a world fair in the late 1800’s. An amethyst geode that was surely a powerful magical artifact. Pictures of her ancestors in black and white, who looked like they were definitely ghosts trapped behind a pane of glass. That she owned them, that they were a part of her life, makes them all sacred to me.

And her spoons! Hundreds of tiny, collectible tourist spoons. She had a spoon for every state in the U.S. and dozens of spoons from each country she had visited in Europe. Spoons for monuments. Spoons for cities. Spoons for every holiday. I have some of them in my garage. I begged for them to stay together after she passed, but nobody wanted to take that many spoons. Surely, if someone truly loved the spoons, I said, they would rather give them up rather than have them be separated. My appeal to the wisdom of Solomon failed. Blasphemy of all blasphemies, one of my cousins who is a “jeweler,” melted one and made it into a ring. More blame to me, I suppose. I didn’t have a place to bring them yet, either.

Alongside my grandfather, she just began to appear in my life every day sometime in early grade-school. My mother was going insane. I didn’t know that at the time, and nobody called it that or would have even described it that way, but looking back it’s the best description of what happened. There was a huge fallout when my mother showed up at her cousin’s marriage as a bridesmaid, then broke up her cousin’s marriage to my father, slept with my father on the wedding day, and later married him herself. That’s a complicated sentence so if you need a minute to sit with it, please do. I never feel quite so regal or white trash as when I say, “my dad’s second wife was my mom’s first cousin.” It’s not quite inbreeding, but it’s a bit too close for my comfort.

I think us kids getting older smoothed over some of those wounds and tamped down the embarrassment both my grandparents must have felt. My grandmother never talked about it, but I’m sure it had to be hard to talk to her sister after it happened. “Sorry my daughter blew up your daughter’s marriage and humiliated her,” doesn’t seem to quite meet the mark. I suppose both my grandparents hoped it was a “phase.” Unfortunately, it wasn’t. They must have known that, deep down. My mother was so young and was already once divorced when it happened.

My older sister was born shortly after the dramatic disaster. A living, breathing, brand new, blameless human being. I think that’s when my grandparents accepted something had gone loose in my mom’s head and whatever it was, it wasn’t temporary. It was a permanent thing that would require constant attention. My grandparents uprooted both of their lives to keep an eye on her. You’d only have to turn around and they’d be there.

Whenever people read my stories and tell me that I had a rough childhood, or that I was “unlucky,” or some other such thing, I tell them no. You’ve got it all wrong. You’re missing context. I had my grandparents. I had a winning lottery ticket. I was very lucky. Sure, some things could have been better but I had a chance. Not everyone gets a chance. Maybe I wasn’t advantaged but I had a chance. One day, I’ll write something down about the kids I grew up with who didn’t have any chance, and you’ll see what I mean.

She was an island of stability in our chaotic world. There was no formal mealtime at our house, because my parents would be too busy arguing about money or sex, but when grandmother stopped by suddenly it was as if there had always been a formal meal time. We all sat down for dinner because my grandmother brought real food! Stuff that came out of Tupperware instead of a box. When she was around, there was never a time when we had to eat things that happened to be left over, like cereal for every meal for two or three days because my parents had overspent again. My grandmother brought over wonderful, nutritious, amazing food. Fresh-baked bread! And sometimes, greatest of all… groceries from Costco. To this day, I still associate Costco with the pinnacle of luxury and prosperity.

They took all of us kids on trips. Not stressful bullshit trips, meant to patch over a failing marriage or to meet someone else’s standard of happiness. Not a weird play in which our real life was meant to be a kind of television show we were acting out for ourselves. My grandparents took us to nearby places like Cannon Beach to go look at Haystack Rock. We road bikes all around state parks. Only once did we go on a “big trip.” They took me and my cousins on a giant motorhome trip, where we visited almost every state west of the Mississippi.

They were everywhere, all the time, making up for the failings of my parents.

While I am not perfect, and have certainly had periods of feeling bad for myself for one thing or another, when I think about what they did for me the only thing I feel is incredible gratitude. I can’t ever live the life where they didn’t show up to help, but I can’t imagine that life turning out well. And now the thought occurs to me, as I look at my own children… well, she must have been so cold.

Once upon a time, before I was born, my mom was a baby. My grandmother’s baby. That’s an obvious statement but full of implications. My grandmother must have had all kinds of dreams for my mom. She certainly provided a stable home for her daughter to have a happy, stable life. Before my mother was a tree, she was an acorn and that acorn must have seemed like it could grow into anything. Maybe my mom grew up wanting to be a famous singer, but what kid doesn’t want to be famous? I wanted to be an astronaut.

It must have all seemed to be going well, at first. My mom got married straight out of college to her high school sweetheart, someone I understand was a respectable person. The divorce must have shocked her parents, especially my mother’s lack of any good reason. He’s boring, she said. He’s too boring. My sister Facebook stalked him once to establish that he was married with a family, and that he was relatively wealthy. She once drunkenly confessed to lying to people that he’d slapped her, just so they’d stop asking questions. Maybe my grandmother wrote that down to the foolishness of youth. Divorce was already starting to sweep the country, after all. What a terrible shame it had come for her own daughter, like a plague. Life would teach her better. Next time, she’d be resilient. The embarrassment and hardship of it would teach her not to enter into a marriage so lightly again. Except, as you know, she never learned.

When did all this go from something alarming and temporary to something that never quite went away? And when did my grandmother start to understand that her daughter wasn’t going to live a normal life?

My grandmother had too much dignity to ever broach the topic, but there must have been some moment at which she understood that her daughter —her baby— had broken up a new marriage. Not only that, but her own cousin’s marriage. A cousin she knew and had a relationship with. At a wedding where she had been given a place of honor as a bridesmaid. Then, after that, married the man she’d had the affair with even though she’d only known him a very short time. Her second marriage, where she should have definitely known better. And while of course I wasn’t around yet, I have seen enough of the aftermath of similar events that I can imagine my mother’s giggling and faux bewildered why-are-you-looking-at-me attitude.

That must have been the moment she understood, right? She never said, but I can’t imagine she didn’t see it.

You can’t live your children’s lives for them, but you can try to help. There was never any thought, or word spoken, about all the things her and my grandfather would have rather been doing than moving to the rainiest county in the United States. Her daughter was there. Her grandchildren were there. She was needed. Nothing else could be nearly so important. Not for a farm girl from Minnesota whose parents had sacrificed everything to keep the family intact.

She never stopped trying to instill those values into my mom, even though my mom clearly didn’t want any part of it.

“Of course I can make the kids their Halloween costumes this year! Why don’t you come by and we can—”

“Can’t mom. I’m busy.”

“I brought you by some groceries, I’ll just drop them off—”

“Oh mom, thanks! Can you make the kids dinner?”

“It looks like the kids need new shoes for sports…”

“Oh mom, thank you. That’s so generous.”

One time a girl at school came up to me and sneered, “Your mom is a slut.” I barely knew her but thought my mom might have done something with her dad. And I just looked down at my feet, ashamed, and said, “I know.”

I hope my grandmother died never knowing about my mother’s multiple affairs. The ones that were small enough and discrete enough that my parents never got divorced over them. I remember how much that used to make me sick to my stomach. Like my gut was full of snakes and slugs. Maybe it’s worse for a mother to know that about her daughter than for a son to know it about his mother. Whether you want it or not, your mom starts out being your image of goodness. I don’t have a daughter, but I suppose it is a similar feeling. It’s too much to hope for, but I still hope she never knew.

She could never be induced to speak an ill word about my mom, unlike my grandfather who would at least grunt in acknowledgement when I said I thought my mom was crazy. And if my grandmother would exclaim, “George!” in response to one of those grunts, my grandfather would sigh, “Well she is. It’s not like he doesn’t know.”

What was her thought when she learned her daughter let her know that she was getting divorced a second time? And this time, definitely because she’d been cheating? She was already pregnant again, after all. Not only that, but as her grandchildren’s entire world was disintegrating, why was her daughter always breathlessly talking about Karaoke? In my child memory all of this took years to unfold, but in adult time it was days and weeks.

Imagine it…

Your grandson is calling you in the early hours of the morning with a crying baby, because his middle-aged mom hasn’t come home from the bar. The baby is sick and he’s panicking because he isn’t sure how to give her medicine. You get dressed, rouse your husband, and drive out there. It doesn’t happen a lot, but it happens often enough you already know what the call is about when it comes in the middle of the night. Your husband even installs a special ringer to make sure you’ll never miss it.

Another call in the middle of the night, this time your daughter got caught cheating with her third husband’s crackhead brother, a new low even for her. There was a big fight, your grandson tells you, the police are involved, and there’s blood everywhere. Your grandson wants you to take the little kids, who are now toddlers, out of the house so he and his brother can clean up all the blood. He says he’s fine but he has to clean up the blood before it sets.

Your grandson calls you again. There’s a weird Russian guy coming around the house, a friend of your daughter’s third husband’s crackhead brother. He seems skeevy, and your grandson wants to know if all the kids can come out to your house for the weekend. He doesn’t think it’s a good idea to leave little kids around that guy.

Then there are the other calls, the ones from your daughter. She needs money. Lots of money. It’s an emergency of her own making, of course. She doesn’t present it that way, but it’s obvious. She has all those kids, you think, so how do you tell her no? She always “accidentally” makes her kids a hostage in these circumstances.

You, Dear Reader, want to wave a magic wan and make this all go away. Put my mother into a psychiatric institution. Give custody of all of us children to my grandparents. I often wondered why such a thing never happened, and the complications were always easily glossed over when I was young.

The truth is that mental illness of the variety my mom suffers from is frustrating. She can mostly hold a job. She can appear totally normal for lengthy periods of time. She lies very well and is very image conscious. There’s even something like a “real her” that isn’t sick that you want to fight for. It’s only if you’ve been around her for an extended period of time that you start to even suspect. And the episodes where she just goes completely batshit insane are infrequent and totally unpredictable. There’s no hour-long psychiatric evaluation where you’re going to get lucky and observe her in the exact state where she’s decided that she absolutely has to fly to Turkey for three months because she’s definitely been having a romantic relationship with Andrew Ridgeley, the back-up singer from Wham! on Facebook. It’s only during brief seasons of madness that such things become impossible not to see.

When my grandfather passed away, a critical part of the machine that kept my mother’s life stable broke to never be replaced. My grandmother always tried to be kind, to teach my mother the value of things. To try to bring her daughter back to sanity. My grandfather was the bad cop, haranguing her, insisting that she knew better, forcing her to accept shame for what she had done even if I only ever heard him do it by eavesdropping on a telephone conversation where she was begging for money. When he died, it was like a load-bearing pillar in a tall building had collapsed. For my mom, it was only a matter of time until she lost everything. For my grandmother, it was a time of stoic perseverance. I don’t think she’d ever even paid a bill before.

My step-father took the death as a chance to become ever more outrageous. He had feared my grandfather and without that fear grew wild. He buried some dildos he found on the ocean in my grandmother’s vegetable bed. She threw them away and never mentioned them. I only found out later. I think she did it quietly so I wouldn’t get into a fist fight with him.

The fights between my mother and step-father got more frequent. The police had to be called more often. They separated and got back together, and separated and got back together. During a several month breakup, my mother moved in his crackhead brother and tried to have a relationship with him. Us kids rallied together and threw him out of the house after he stole all of our stuff. My mom just laughed and laughed. What were we even talking about? What stuff had he stolen? Drugs? We were making things up. Crazy kids. Kind of disgusting they were thinking about her having sex, and maybe we all needed to get out heads examined.

No time for grief, my grandmother stepped in to help with my little brother and sister nearly every day. She downsized as much as she could. Sold the motorhome. The tools. The photography equipment. My grandfather had left her enough to live out the rest of her days comfortably, but no one could have enough money to satisfy my mom’s ever-expanding needs. I told her to stop giving out money and she learned to harden her heart, as we all did. My grandfather wasn’t around anymore to bring in an extra income from his photography business.

Sophomore year, my mom lost her job. One too many blow-up fights that made its way into the office. One too many multiple hours long lunches. One too many unannounced and unfathomably late arrivals to work. She wanted to move to chase some other job that I just knew she wasn’t going to be able to do for very long. She was too far gone.

I hardened my heart and said goodbye to my little brother and sister, and I fought back tears for weeks and still hate myself a bit for doing it even if I came back later. I think of heroic stories of people younger than me getting jobs and stepping in and taking their siblings on as their own kids. My mom would have fought me, and she could probably appear normal in front of a judge, but all of that feels like an excuse now. I can’t forgive myself too much. I was old enough to know what that house was like when only my mom was in charge. The only way I could even pretend to justify it to myself is because my grandmother would be checking in on them.

Which she did, unfailingly. What she had done for me, she did for my little brother and sister. Being there. Making sure they had good food. Caring about them. Being stable. Trying and failing to convince them that Norwegian lefse is a suitable replacement for a tortilla. Listening to them repeat my tired high school joke that all Norwegian just sounds like people saying, “Dee Dardy Durdy Dar!”

And so passed her late sixties, and early seventies, and mid seventies. And all the money with which she might have gone on trips, or done something nice only for herself. The truth is that she was so good and so pure that there was no place on Earth she would have rather been. Until she got too old to keep up with it and settled into a retirement home.

I should have called more often. I should have visited more frequently. I was embarrassed to not always have the gas money and too proud to admit it. I wanted to invite her to live with me in my little house I was renovating but was self-conscious I did not yet have the money to redo the floors. I couldn’t imagine having an eighty year old woman walking around on subfloors. As an adult with a flush bank account, I know it would have been nothing for her to give me the money to pay for it. She paid something like several thousand dollars a month to live in that care facility. Three thousand dollars so I could buy flooring material would have been well worth the trade. The same with furniture, of which I had almost none. I had resolved to never ask her for money, ever, under any circumstances, and so did not invite her to live with me.

She called me once, in the middle of the night. I had my ringer turned off and didn’t answer. The next morning I woke to a voicemail of her frantically telling me that she was ready for my arrival, that she knew it was an emergency and she was ready. There would be a place to sleep on her couch as soon as I got there. She’d had a stroke a month or so previous. She got confused. I’d made no plans to visit her. There was no emergency.

Of course, Dear Reader, I should have gotten in my car and driven the eleven hours to visit her as soon as I got the voicemail. I could have burned up my sick time. I could have asked for my schedule to be moved around. I could have charged the gas to a credit card and worked overtime to make up for it later.

She liked when I’d carry her oxygen machine and walk her around with it, like a dog on a leash. It had wheels but they were burdensome and clumsy. She laughed when I made that joke, although I regret to say she didn’t often find me funny. I was too absurd, trying too hard, and she liked stillness and quiet and sincerity.

I didn’t go.

We talked about it that morning when I called her back. She admitted she got confused. Of course I had to work on my house and that was important and I needed to concentrate on moving up at work. All of that was crucial. We agreed we’d see each other around the holidays.

Still, I should have gone.

She died not long after. Another stroke. She was incapacitated and unable to live off of a machine. One of my aunts had to go and pull the plug. I got a text message at work and took a break. They put a phone up to her ear long enough to say goodbye. I thanked her for my life, for everything she had done for me. I told her I’d have nothing if not for her and that I owed her everything. I told her that I loved her and always would. I told her that I’d remember her forever.

And they pulled the plug and she died and I went back to work and finished my shift.

I did not have any children to bring before her, then. She did not have the comfort of ruffling the hair of a young child. No torchlight to assure her that her gifts would be carried forward to the next generation. She never saw me get married or even date. As she left this world, for all she knew I would never be anything other than a miserable old man too afraid to start a life or a family of his own.

We did not have many common interests. She didn’t like science or engineering or any of the things that made me happiest apart from ice cream. She really, really wanted me to value Norwegian culture and I just couldn’t ever pretend that lefse was as good as a tortilla. Yet she was precious to me as I was to her, and she taught me that love is a grown thing and that the best happiness isn’t from some frivolous fashion but from finding your duty and doing it.

She could have gone to Hawaii, where she’d lived for several years with my grandfather when he was still in the Navy. She could have gone to one of the islands off the coast of Seattle and lived in nice neighborhood. Instead, she lived to be close to her family. To see them and help them and watch them grow. To be there when she was needed. And if you were to hold each of those possible lives side by side, I don’t doubt which one she’d pick.

Love is an almost inevitable thing if you put in the time, and if you don’t expect it be some fiery and foolish thing of passions. I take the Aquinas view, that to love is to will the good of another. You start to grow inside of other people, the same way they grow inside of you. You sew the seeds and you reap the harvest of your affection. And it doesn’t particularly matter if you’re the same as the people you love, or not. All that matters is that time and attention. You start to see the world anew through their eyes, and it comes up in all kinds of boring and practical ways. “Grandma would love this” or “Grandma would hate that.” Do that enough, and “Grandma” becomes a part of you even after she’s left the Earth. She will be part of me for all my days on this Earth.

I hope she can see my boys, in that other place outside of space and time. I hope she’s happy to see me married and settled and doing well. I hope she is happy and free from worry and well rewarded for all that she did for me and our family. I hope she is warm. I hope she would approve of my writing this and she would see it as a warm brick shared with others to spare them from the cold. I hope one day I can do something like warming the bricks for my children so that they are some equivalent of warm on some equivalent of a sleigh ride to school, and that this will honor her culture enough to make up for me not liking lefse.

If I am ever blessed with a daughter, my wife has agreed that daughter will carry her name. I love you grandma. You were like the butter knife to me, indescribably better than all other grandmas and I have never found your equal.

If you liked this piece, you can find more stories of my life at this link