Mora, Minnesota. 1976 or so. It's an idyllic little town about 70 miles north of Minneapolis off of Highway 65. Population somewhere around 2000. As you leave town to the north, obviously en route to your favorite fishing spot, the Sportsmen's Cafe bids you farewell. If Mora IS your destination, more than likely, you'll drive north up S. Union Street which will take you past the fairgrounds, elementary school, pool, Dala Horse, and dump you into downtown, a gloriously quaint and boring place.
At this particular time period in the Earth's rotations around the sun, if you were to take the first left off of Highway 65 on to S. Union St. and then your second left you'd be on Riverside Dr. Immediately upon turning onto Riverside, to your right was a giant empty field. This is where Dean, Jason, Chris, Steven, David, and a bunch of other little kids whose names I no longer recall would play baseball. Then you'd pass a tree line on your right. Nice, lush, green, evergreens that hid the Heitkamp residence from the harsh light of public view. Right across the street from the Heitkamp's was a delightfully mid-century dual story house with more deck space than it really needed. This is where the Junila's lived. Aunt, Uncle, Cousin, Cousin. If you headed south from this property, through a gully that was home to a productive garden in the summer, you'd hit Westwood Circle where yet more of my family lived... still live actually!
Across the street just ever so slightly to the northwest was another residence shaded from public view by another barrier of evergreen trees. Large driveway leading to an equally large garage housing two super ugly cars appropriate for the time period. A Plymouth station wagon, and a Chevy Impala of a shade of green usually reserved for brands of spearmint gum. Up the path from this was a nice two story home complete with a comfy basement where the residents could hide from nature's biggest asshole... the tornado.
I resided in this home with my mom, dad, older brother, and a dog. If I have an "ancestral home" this is it. Not Biri or Bergen, Norway. Not Mora or Stockholm, Sweden. Mora, Minnesota. Boring, quaint, little Mora. My great great grandparents were from here. My great grandparents were from here. My grandparents... you're smart, you get it.
My earliest memories of Mora are of this house. Particularly our kitchen, living and dining rooms... and one bathroom in particular.
This place. This time. This is where it all started going awry. Not colossally bad, but wrong.
Why? How?
Well, at a very early age, my parents and teachers started informing me that I was smart.
At age 3, I came down with pneumonia. The memory of the illness is hazy at best, but I remember very clearly hanging out in the living room with my then 10 or 11 year old brother. I was tiny at this point, so he wasn't a total asshole to me yet. Quite the opposite. During my tiny and cute phase, Eric was really very cool with me. While I was sick, we built couch cushion forts in the living room and listened to Queen and KISS and Led Zeppelin. Inside those forts, he taught me the alphabet to keep my mind off of my fever and general feeling of ookiness. My brother, who in the coming years would torture and torment me endlessly, set the stage for me learning to read a couple year before most kids would be able to. "Krk's only 3 and is already reading? What a clever child. You must be so proud!"
The expectations had been established.
For a couple of years, mom, dad, and brother would help and encourage me to read.
My birthday is in October, and our elementary school had a policy that incoming students needed to be 5 years old by September of the school year to enroll. So... I had another year of time spent at home with no clearly defined academic structure... and smart. Therefore, I read and listened to music.
The year was 1977. KISS released both Love Gun, and KISS Alive II. STAR WARS CAME OUT! From January to early September that year, I read, listened to KISS, and wouldn't shut up about Star Wars. I wrote primitive stories about Luke Skywalker and R2-D2. I envisioned myself playing a laser shooting guitar, spitting fire and blood for no other reason than it was super cool to my 5 year old brain.
Kids, even the smart ones, are stupid.
September 1977. That fateful morning... lunch box. LIttle backpack. Terrible plaid clothing in mostly brown and orange tones. Bowl cut. Check. Get on a bus and head to Quamba, Minnesota for the first day of Kindergarten. The teacher was nice. I'm sure she's dead now, and if not, very very old. We have that lined paper with the dotted line running down the middle indicating the transition between capital and lower case letters. (47 years old and my handwriting is still like a fucking child!) The alphabet! Yawn! I learned this shit almost 3 years earlier. Oooooo! Numbers! Yawn. I was doing basic arithmetics with mom and dad at the dinner table.
Can I please just go read a book while you all catch up? No, not Dr. Seuss. I've read all that. Nothing else? Really. Ok. I'll get reacquainted with Horton, and Yertle and the rest.
I'm smart... which means that, largely, I was bored all through Kindergarten. I couldn't wait to get home when I could play in the snow, or with the dog, or watch Battlestar Galactica with dad, or eat mom's famous Hamburger Pie for dinner, or listen to Queen, KISS, and Led Zeppelin with Eric.
Enter 1978. Summer in Minnesota is... unpleasant. Upper 90s Farenheit. A humidity level that baffles the fields of mathematics and physics. Mosquitoes with their own zip codes. Some so large their gravitational pull lulled smaller mosquitoes into their orbit, creating swarming masses of itchiness.
I swim a lot. I play tee ball because baseball is too dangerous or we're too uncoordinated or some combination of the two. I suspect the parents do it more for cheap laughs than taking any sort of enjoyment in the sport of it all. Very little in this world is funnier than a little kid taking a huge swing at an immobile whiffle ball on a pedestal and missing by a mile. I'm sure I provided my family with many well deserved laughs. I don't remember being terribly good at this sport.
First grade. I'm 6 years old. Almost 7 when class starts. I was way ahead of my Kindergarten class and only got further ahead during that year. Class was easy. It was boring. The teacher, sensing my boredom, and the potential for calamity that comes with a bored smart kid, took me and one other student aside who was also bored and had that look in her eyes, and asked us to start writing plays. We wrote nonsensical passages about frogs and puppies and dragons and all sorts of stuff that 6 year olds find fascinating. Luckily my writing partner prevented me from writing about "The Demon Man from KISS" or the second chapter in the Star Wars saga.
It kept me busy. It kept me reading. It kept me learning. I generally had a good time.
I continued with the academic play with mom and dad at home. I rode my Big Wheel all over the place. Played baseball in the field. Snowball fights all over the yard and neighborhood. Frisbee with the dog. Being generally terrible at hockey.
I'm 7.5 years old. I have friends and family in abundance. I'd become accustomed to the daily routines of life in small town Minnesota. In the early spring of 1979, everything would change. I'd get in a commercial airplane for the first time in my life and travel with mom, dad, and brother to San Jose, California.
Life as I knew it was about to change in a very substantial and radical way.
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