My Thanksgiving surprise. I’m sorry.
I got to spend sometime with my dad, Loran Nordgren, over Thanksgiving when we gathered at my brother’s house, in Athens, Georgia.
My father is a remarkable man, in so many ways. He is a classic self-made man–he dropped out of high school to join the Navy during World War II and went on to be a innovative business leader in the HVAC space. He’s incredibly vital at the age 86, flying his airplane, an Air Cam, every day the weather permits, for instance.
And he is a great storyteller. I wish I could do an Irish accent the way he can, or Swedish, or just about any one of the many he heard growing up in Chicago during the Depression.
It’s nearly unbelievable to me that I didn’t know the story he told a bunch of us gathered around him as our feast was settling. It’s a story about his grandfather, my great grandfather, Carl Gustaf Nordgren. He told it in the first person, channeling his grandfather telling it to him. Set sometime in the 1880’s or early 1890’s, the story he told went very much like this:
“I wanted to go to the United States of America to be a cowboy, ya. An’ so when my countrymen stopped in Minnesota, I yust kept going west, to North Dakota, to work on a ranch. I vas a good cowboy, you betcha. I could ride an’ rope an’ brand them little calves. An’ I could shoot them Indians.
“An’ I was a good lookin’ young man in those days, ya, an’ the rancher, well, ya see, he was an older fella, who had a very pretty young wife, an’ well, one ting led to another ting, an’ you know what ting I am talkin’ about, ya…
“One day one of the ranch hands came up to me an’ said ‘Carl you better skedaddle away fast for the rancher has found out what you’ve been doin’ wit his wife.’ So I yumped on my horse an’ rode away fast, an’ kept goin’ an’ goin’ until I reached St. Louis where I met your grandmother.”
My dad has so many stories he was off on another as I sat there stunned. Did I hear him right? That my great grandfather used to kill Indians? My wife assured me later that she heard the same thing, and when I asked my father to add anything to the Indian killer angle of his story he said that my great grandfather’s understanding, while still in Sweden, was that was one of the jobs a cowboy does in the United States, is hunt down and kill Indians so the settlers can, well…take their land.
And the Dakota’s, in the 1880’s, is where the Indians–mostly Lakota–were mostly being killed.
I have work to do.