for Stanley Larum
(A few words spoken at Dad’s memorial service)
Places are powerful,
Not only for the meanings that we impose upon them,
But also for the meanings they impose upon us.
They shape our identities.
They form the ‘who’ of what we are.
So in a real sense, we do not possess places
So much as they possess us.
Our being here today is testimony
To the power of such a place.
Dad was born in this county.
He grew up here,
spoke his first Norwegian words here,
Went to school here, was left here
When his family moved west.
He went to work on ranches here.
He met his wife here.
His children were born here.
And this weekend, he is taking us home
To the first place he ever owned.
In a way that we can only understand
When we each find our own place,
Stanley Larum loved Spring Coulee.
He put heart and soul, muscle and bone into it.
He left it only because he felt an obligation to his family
That was stronger than the obligation he felt to himself.
I can still remember, as if it were yesterday, watching him
Turn down the wooden block catch on the screen door;
I remember walking beside him through the yard gate
Where a wooden propeller clicked in the eternal wind.
I recall climbing into the cab of a tiny 1949 Ford pickup,
Scrunching up beside him, Mom, my brother and baby sisters
And watching as he drove away into the night, never to return.
Years later, when I was driving him and Mom home from Texas,
He talked about how special that place was.
“I know,” I told him. “I know.” It was special to me, too.
I told him that I understood its ‘specialness’
Because until I found my own place,
No place meant more to me than that place.
Young as I was when I left,
I understand how much meaning it has imposed on my life.
When you have lived at a place like that –a place still in the 19th century,
It puts everything about the present into a perspective few can understand.
And this weekend we are going back. It’s Dad’s gift to us – this taking
His ashes back to Spring Coulee to scatter them in that place he loved.
And it is not a desolate place, no matter how it looks now.
It is totally inhabited by memories of the dearest people I know.
My Dad. My Mom. My brother. My sisters.
It’s a place inhabited by horses:
The two-horse team, Babe and Roanie;
Dad’s sorrel saddle horse, Baldy;
Skittish broncs and stick horses.
When I close my eyes,
I see Dad sawing blocks of ice
From the reservoir to put in the icehouse;
Mom stripping frozen Levi’s from the clothesline,
struggling up the hill with a pail of water;
And my older brother Chuck
Crawling over the net wire fence
That framed the prairie yard.
I see a forge blossom with flame
As Dad pumps the bellows.
I see yet the silhouette of a horseback rider
On that south ridge, the jumping off country
For the Missouri River Breaks and beyond.
All those memories and so many more.
I don’t know what Heaven will be like.
Magnificent, to be sure.
But I like to think that when we arrive we’ll find
It’s the place we’ve been looking for all of our lives.
That’s what Dad thought Heaven was:
It was having a place of his own.
Today, he’s just reminding us
Of how important it was to him
–And the meaning it gave to us all.
Glen Larum, September 1, 2004 – The Little White Church, Malta, Montana