Tag Archives: nils

My Grandma’s scrapbook

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I have many memories of our family living in Detroit, MI with my maternal grandparents in their basement at first, and then living in our own house down the street later on. This was from 1970-71, a relatively short period of time but one filled with a lot of experiences. I was about three years old. This photo of my grandparents was taken around this time, I believe. grandpa-and-grandma-mccallum.jpg

As anyone knows who has children of their own, it can be hard to get the little ones to take their afternoon naps. All of my own children stopped doing that right about the same age I was in this story. When I was three years old, I didn’t like taking naps any more than my own kids do. I distinctly remember my Grandma telling me, “Steven, if you take a nap this afternoon, I will have a surprise ready for you when you wake up!” So I took my nap.

I wondered what on earth my Grandma would give me. I was really surprised and delighted when she presented me with my very own scrapbook that she had made for me. I still have that scrapbook; it is one of my most treasured possessions.

My Grandma made the scrapbook out of clippings from magazines and little odds and ends that she had collected from her travels and elsewhere. For example, one of the things she particularly liked, and always had a supply of in the house, was a brand of tea bags named Red Rose Tea. It was only available in Canada at that time but that wasn’t a problem for her to get, living just across the river from Windsor. Each box of this special tea came with a little surprise such as a pack of little, colorful cards, about one inch wide and two or three inches tall. Each card featured a picture of an animal with its scientific name at the bottom. On the flip side of each card was a brief description of the animal, its habitat, etc. I loved those cards! Grandma kept them in a collection on her kitchen counter and some of them she included in the scrapbook. I remember sitting on her counter looking through those cards. Later on, Red Rose Tea stopped including the little cards and began to include one little china figurine of an animal in every box. Grandma collected all of those, too, and I loved them just as much as the cards. I kept as many of them as I could for a long time when I was a kid. Nowadays we are able to buy Red Rose Tea here in the States in most grocery stores. It’s been many years since I bought a box and I wonder, do they still include those little ceramic figurines in each box? But I digress.

That scrapbook fascinated me and still does to this day. It is like a snapshot of American life and customs and products from the early seventies. It’s hard to describe how much it means to me because of the memories it evokes.

Unfortunately now almost forty years after it was made, my Grandma’s scrapbook is a little worse for wear. I now have children of my own who aren’t particularly careful about how they handle this book and consequently, some of the pages are ripped out and some of the clippings have been lost or come unglued. For a long time I have thought about how to somehow preserve it (other than locking it away somewhere in a dark, safe place). A few nights ago I decided to take a photograph of each page just to see how it might turn out. You can see them here if you’re interested. My camera doesn’t have the high-powered resolution, and the setup is just my kitchen table, so the photos aren’t as clear and professional-looking as they could be.

grandma-mccallum.jpg I dearly loved my Grandma, who died October 25, 1982, surviving only a week after a severe heart attack. (The photo on the left is the last one taken of her before her death. It shows her with her only great-grandchild at the time, my nephew, Nils.) Her features are a little fuzzy in my mind’s eye, and although her voice was distinctive, I can’t exactly recall it as I used to. But her scrapbook lives on and provides me with an important link to an important time, and a very important person, in my past.

P.S. After writing this I discovered that Red Rose Tea has its own website at http://www.redrosetea.com/ There is a page that talks about those little figurines and there is more information about its history. This is still my favorite black tea in the world to drink.

Time passes by

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There are so many balls that I have figuratively dropped these past several weeks, it’s disgusting. I am trying to make up for it or just get over it with not much success.

Here’s to new beginnings, then. My oldest nephew, Nils, married his fiance, Emily, this past Saturday. (Some photos of the wedding are available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/steve_oberg/sets/72157594287976715/) We drove down from the Chicago area to attend the outdoor wedding held on the bank of a local river in the town where I grew up. It was late afternoon, the sun was shining, and the temperature was nice and warm. It was a great experience and we are thrilled for this new beginning for Nils and Emily. We were able to see many friends and acquaintences whom we haven’t seen for quite a while, so that was an added bonus. Just as happened at my niece, Britta’s, wedding a year and a half ago, I had this sense while watching the whole event unfold that I was a modern day Rip Van Winkle who had just woken up out of some sort of dream to find that the whole world had drastically changed while he was asleep. I found it hard to come to terms with the fact that this person whom I have known since birth is now a married man, and that means that I am no longer as young as I once was. My older brothers and sisters are approaching middle age, and so am I. My mother may someday soon become a great-grandmother.

This sense of unreality was compounded by a chance encounter this weekend. I met a former elementary/junior high/high school classmate who was working at the local gas station and whom I hadn’t seen since graduation more than twenty years ago. My, how time changes people! It took me a few minutes to realize who she was. And she didn’t recognize me at first, either, so I introduced myself. In our brief conversation I learned that she has a daughter who is now a junior in high school; that she had been married to a military guy and had lived in such faraway places as Fairbanks, Alaska, and Washington State. How or why did she end up coming back to her hometown, I wondered? I didn’t have a chance to ask.

Time passes by so quickly. I blink, and my own children are no longer babies or toddlers or a young adult but instead are young boys, a little lady, and a high shool aged young man. More and more, I think God is reminding me of what really matters most: relationships. This was recently made even more obvious to me by the sudden death of Steve Irwin, the “Crocodile Hunter,” in a freak accident. Like millions of other people around the world, I did not know this man personally at all yet I felt a sense of real connection with him and his young family through watching his shows on TV. I am sure that Steve Irwin was no saint yet to me, he was a wildlife hero. I admired him for many reasons but especially for his neverending enthusiasm and zest for life, and his championing of wildlife conservation. I mourn him and I have shed tears for his wife and his two little kids who clearly meant the world to him. Call me crazy or overly sentimental or apply some other negative epithet but yes, I cried when I heard the unbelievable news.

I ask you to take time to assess your own life. What motivates you? Where do you put your energies, your hopes and dreams? I hope your focus is not on materialistic things, ambitions, careers, and honors, which are like fool’s gold. Instead, seek after what is true, what is real, what is relational. Seek, and you will find the One who created relationships and who made you for relationship: God.

The sound of silence

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The entry title is a nod to the classic Simon and Garfunkel song…and is meant as a lead-in to an explanation of why there haven’t been many entries in this blog of late. Stuff happens. Mostly, I needed a bit of a break from blogging due to preoccupation with other matters. There is always plenty to discuss here, but the motivation isn’t always plentiful!

During the 4th of July weekend, my family and I went to visit with my side of the family in east central Illinois. We had a good time, and it was especially good to spend time with my mother and to see my many nieces and nephews. They have all changed and grown up a lot somehow in the last six months or so, especially one nephew, Ben. I really enjoyed perusing a scrapbook of his recent three-month stay with his cousins in Manitoba, who own a farm and raise pigs and cattle. The scrapbook of photos and a diary of the daily events was put together by his aunt. It was quite well done and gave me a real picture of the fun, but also hard work, that Ben had on his trip. Ben’s dad, my brother, Tim, had just finished laying new hardwood flooring in his house and that was duly admired. Michele wants that kind of flooring in our house, so I asked some questions of Tim as to how to lay hardwood floors. He and Linda chose a nice birch flooring from Bruce Flooring.

Keegan had a lot of fun Sunday night (the 4th), playing with his cousins and lighting off lots of firecrackers. One of the days we were there, we drove through some of my old stomping grounds, the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It has changed a LOT since I was a student there. Of particular interest was the new Siebel Center for Computer Science, which just opened and is likely one of the world’s most technologically advanced buildings. I was pleased to hear that my oldest nephew, Nils, recently began a full-time job as a systems analyst for the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, working on a five-year grant that relates to the Deep Tunnel Project in Chicago.

Another highlight of the trip was going to an incredible bakery in downtown Urbana, called Mirabelle’s. I bought an olive rosemary loaf, as well as a honey walnut loaf, and some raspberry brioches — all very delicious! I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t have their almond horns, which is a kind of pastry that, well, is to die for. Michele’s comment was, “We badly need a nice bakery like this where we live!” To which my response is, Amen.