Hans Nottestad

Hans Nottestad

I can remember Grandma Lill being so excited when we would drive up to Westby and see her parents, Grandma and Grandpa "two".  Her and Grandpa Lee would dress up almost like they were going to church.  The ride seemed to take forever for a little child.

Grandpa "two" had a real name, of course, and it was Hans.  It was pronounced as if to rhyme with "dance".



This is an old picture of Grandma and Grandpa Two.

Grandpa Hans was blind and I can vividly remember going up there around Christmas time.  He was sitting in his chair in the front room almost next to the Christmas tree, which was all decorated with colorful old fashioned ornaments.  My favorite was the string of "bubble lights", colored bulbs with extrusions like small test tubes about two inches long and filled with fluid.  When they heated up, little bubbles jiggled through the extruded part.  There was a time when Christmas trees were decorated with little platforms that held small candles.  What a fire hazard that would have been!

Especially with someone like me poking around.

Grandpa Two would be sitting in his chair, his eyes open but not seeing, and kind of whitish looking.

My uncle, John, and his cousin Ron have some great stories about Grandpa Hans.  He says that when he and Ron were young, Grandpa Two told them not to goof around in his wood shed, because he had everything where he knew just where it was.  Grandpa would apparently split kindling with a hand axe even though he was blind.

They were goofing around in there where they weren't supposed to be and Grandpa Hans made an appearance coming from the house.  They quickly hid among the stacks of firewood, but he walked in and right up to them and gave them a paddling.  He could hear their breathing, of course.

When he'd ushered them outside and gone back into the house, and when the sobbing subsided, Ron apparently proclaimed, bitterly, "He's not blind!"

By the time I was old enough to have many memories of him, Grandpa Two was pretty far along the sedentary curve and I remember him just sitting in his chair, very weak but happy to see everyone.  He seemed sallow, sort of dark and quiet, but imposing just the same.  But he pretty much just sat in his chair in the semi-dark front room.

I had no comprehension that he and Grandma "two" had raised four daughters and a son.  Their little house was sparse compared to the big house Lill and Lee had raised their kids in and to the house on the farm.

Grandma Two was still quite formidable, a clone of Grandma Lill, only just a bit older from the point of view of a young child.

The day came when Grandpa Two passed away and Lill and Lee got us dressed for the sad trip to Westby to attend his funeral.  I didn't really know what all this meant, but it was adequately explained to me that when people died, they never could come back and that we put them in a fancy box and buried them in the ground.

This seemed quite outrageous to me.  I must have been subdued enough for them to trust me attending the funeral.  I remember that a lot of people attended, including Grandma Lill's sisters.  The funeral was like any church service, but I don't remember misbehaving during this particular one.

When the time came to walk past the open casket, the grown-ups had a little debate about whether I should be included.  They decided that I should and I remember solemnly filing past the casket and peering in, much like I had peered into my cousin's bassinet when they brought him home.

Grandpa Two was lying on his back in there, among satin cloths with his head on a little mini-pillow.  His eyes were closed.  He looked good but he certainly didn't look alive.  It was as though he were made of wax.

It was the first time I had laid eyes upon a dead person.

It was also the first time I got a glimpse of my caretakers and relatives in so much pain and sadness.  We went to the cemetery and, sure enough, they put the box down into the ground, just like they said they would.

After she lost Hans, Grandma Elsie would visit the farm on occasion.  One time she brought me a gift, a little glass sculpture of a dog, which she insisted I would probably break before the week was out.  She was so certain of it, that she made me a little bet, which Grandma Lill would occasionally remind me of in the weeks to come.

The dog ended up in Grandma Lill's china cabinet along with her precious things and I could have it taken out so I could handle it whenever I cared to.  I still have the dog.

Grandma Elsie, or Grandma "two," was diabetic and took insulin.  I didn't understand anything about it, but it was an amazement to me that she would produce this little tiny bottle with an orange rubber plug in it, then pull out this hypodermic needle.  The needle scared me because I dreaded getting inoculations as much as the next little kid.  She would stick the needle right through the rubber stopper and turn the bottle upside-down, pulling back on the handle and filling the syringe.

Then, to my utter amazement, she would hike up her dress and pinch together some fat on her thigh and jab the needle right into it.  Deep!  Then she would depress the handle and the insulin would go into her leg.

Pulling it out and dabbing the spot with a cotton ball, she would proclaim, "There!"  She would then admonish me not to eat too much sugar all the time or I'd get sugar diabetes like she had.  I don't recall her warnings ever to cause me to refuse any cookies, desserts, or candy offered.

Years later, when I was a bit older, I stumbled upon a plastic phonograph record in a box of old letters and pictures that Grandma Lill was sorting through.  It was about the size of a 45-rpm record but it was thinner and had the small hole in the middle instead of the large one.  It did not look like a professional phonograph record.  I asked her what it was.

She said it had belonged to Grandma and Grandpa "two" but that nobody could get it to play.  She had a small phonograph and I put it on.

She was right.  It would not play.  The tone arm of the phonograph just clicked once every time the turntable rotated but it would not grab.  This seemed preposterous to me and I fooled around with it quite a while before realizing that if I rotated the turntable backward, the needle caught in the groove and would track inward.

Baffled, I played around until I realized that I could put the needle near the center of the record and that would be the equivalent of playing it backward.

Voila

The record played, but I had to stop it and turn the speed up to 78 rpm.  When I did this, a man's voice said some things and then, very clearly, "Hello Hans, are you still living yet?"

The record had been made at the state fair, or somewhere like that, who knows when.  No one could say who the voice belonged to.  The little record disappeared somewhere along the years and I have never seen it again.