K is for Know

The Quote of the Day that inspired my A to Z Challenge theme -
A Word for the Day that takes on many meanings.

Quote of the Day: A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator. John Steinbeck

Word of the Day: Know, Knowing, to Know
This post is more on the different forms of the word, and a guest post by my sister Nancy. She wrote about her name for last year's challenge that was very funny. She's not, yet, blogging. Maybe next year.

In my family, we had a great role model for what it means to seek knowledge. Our
grandfather, Arthur Siberg was the kind of man who was always learning, and every
bit of new knowledge would be a remarkable thing that he needed to share with… well,
pretty much everyone he would meet.

The one thing I remember the most about my grandfather is how he was always reading.
But it wasn’t the quiet sort of reading I do. No, when he would read, it was a very active
and engaging process that he undertook. I have a vivid memory of him pacing back
and forth in his stocking feet, reading a book with a black cover. Years later, I came to
find out that what he was reading was a book by the great Danish philosopher, Søren
Kierkegaard. All alone, this knowledge wouldn’t be jaw-dropping, but my grandfather
was a Swedish immigrant to America, and he only had a sixth-grade education. My
uncle told me Kirkegaard was so difficult for Grandpa to read in English, that he tracked
down a copy in the original Danish, (because that language was closer to Swedish), and
then would work his way, line-by-line, translating the Danish into Swedish and then into
English so he could share his newfound knowledge with other people.

When he was young, my grandfather’s father died, so Grandpa had to go into the forests
and work as a lumberjack to earn a living for himself and his mother. In his memoirs,
he said this about the experience: “Being alone in the big forest, far from any person,
is an experience by itself. It is so quiet and so dark in the deep woods. It would be no
place for someone who is scared in the dark.” For him, discovering knowledge…really
knowing something, was like coming out of the cold, dark woods and stepping into the
light. He was a remarkable man; I wish I could have known him now, when I’m finally
wise enough to truly appreciate him.

Mary and Grandpa Siberg

(I'm either eating or blowing kisses.)

I Didn't Know
     --For Arthur Sexton Siberg

                Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
                - Søren Kierkegaard

I didn't know why you read
Søren Kierkegaard in your stocking feet,
pacing back and forth across the living room floor,
Fear and Trembling in one hand, the other directing
the symphony of line and syntax that only you could hear.

I didn't know why you would pause in the doorway,
peering over your glasses at the words on the page,
one foot crossed over the other as if you were
in your blue Lazy-boy recliner that always
sat empty when you were reading the heavy books.

I wasn't sure why you would ask my grandmother

to define word after confusing foreign word,
or why you would read a book that was so hard to understand.

I didn't know what it really meant to have

a sixth-grade education or why you said you cried
when your friends went off to seventh-grade
without you.  I couldn't really know the kind of poverty
that could force a mother to send a child off to work
in the forests of Sweden when he was only twelve. 

When I was twelve, I couldn't imagine why the trees
could still haunt you, how the forest could have
been that cold, how being away from your mother
would have felt.  I couldn’t imagine you, my little
Grandpa, at thirteen, and fourteen, and fifteen,
dancing with death on the pine logs as they
floated down the Dalälven.

I like to remember you in your stocking feet,

blocking the doorway to the kitchen, working your
way, line by line, through a theology that was years
beyond you.  I like to remember the way you would
get it, really get it, pushing up your glasses,
grabbing my grandma, and spinning across the floor.

                -Nancy Aalgaard Hanson          

Thanks, Nancy, you offer more insight into our Grandpa Siberg. I've had the thought that if I could go back in time, I'd like to meet my parents and grandparents as kids and young adults.

Journaling Prompt:  Do you know any stories about your grandparents, or parents? Does it help explain how they, or you, respond to the world?     

Go. Create. Inspire!                     

N is for Name

Letter of the Day:  N

N is for name and Nancy, my older sister.  I also like calling her my big sister.  She is the closest in age of my siblings.  I'm number four out of six.  She's number three, but tried to call herself number one at Mom and Dad's 50th Anniversary celebration. Our oldest brother Nathan quickly claimed the title.  Here's a picture from our teen years.  We've been arguing since its development who it is.  I say it's me.  Clearly, you can see my eye, the wisp of dark hair that I always had curled.  Plus, that's MY shirt.

This next one is of Nancy.  I know, because I took it just this past September, and she's wearing her own darn shirt!

As you can see, we have a complicated, yet loving relationship.  When I went to Germany in college, Nancy said to her friends, "Your friends come and go, but you always wait for your sister to come home from Germany."  And, when I talked to her about this guest post she said she liked this challenge because she could read my blog every morning while drinking her coffee.  I told that to Joy, the little sister, and she said she felt the same way.  When I wasn't posting very often, she'd keep checking.  Well, enough about me. Here's Nancy...

After reading Mary’s first blog post in her A-Z challenge, I was the one who suggested she write about names. A few days ago she asked if I would be a guest writer on the Day of N (I decided to capitalize it to make it more significant). So in keeping with the spirit of the challenge, I decided to write about my name, Nancy.



My name is Nancy Caroline Aalgaard Hanson, but I think if I had been named by description, my name would likely be Nancy Dead Horse or Nancy Working Horse, neither of which I would appreciate very much. There’s a story in our family about how dismayed my grandmother was to find out I was named Nancy. As the story goes, when my dad was just a boy, his mother had an old work horse named Nancy. I imagine her to be a sad old mare, hump-backed, broken with the weight of work. Back in those days, they didn't keep horses as pets, or even just as a means of transportation. The Nancy horse was surely a working animal, and I imagine her life wasn't a terribly happy existence. So when Grandma found out I was to be called Nancy, I guess she wasn't very pleased about my unfortunate name. She reminded my dad of the used-to-be horse she had, but it didn't make any difference. My parents liked Nancy, and so Nancy it was, even over my paternal grandmother’s objections.


I didn’t hear the story about the dead horse until I was ten or eleven years old, and at that time, I was toying with calling myself Jean anyway, and dreaming my real father was Howard Hughes, and one day he would reclaim me as his own and make me fabulously rich. I never did extend this fantasy to its logical conclusion, never did wonder how it happened that a small grain farmer and his wife could end up with the lost child of one of the richest men in the world. Billionaire. Two times over. The word didn’t mean a thing to me, other than it would mean I could do pretty much whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to do it. There’s no coincidence, really, that my Howard-Hughes-is-my-real-father-and-is-someday-going-to-make-me-fabulously-rich-scenario coincided exactly with feeling like I had landed in the wrong family. I mean really, who on earth would name a beloved daughter after someone’s dead horse?

(I'd like to interject here, again, to point out that Nancy used to tell me that I was the one adopted.  I used to fantasize that my real dad was Captain Kirk from the Starship Enterprise.)


I spent a lot of time thinking about that horse and asking questions, but no one could remember anything specific about it. Figures. I doubt very much the Nancy horse was a beautiful thing, and apparently not a favorite. Life on the prairie was pretty tough, and my namesake, like my own family, probably had to scrounge for food, and probably made do with very little. There might be a picture of my namesake, however, no one could confirm that the horse depicted in it was the actual Nancy horse—it could have been anyone, really. This picture shows my grandma, back in 1936, standing next to a single chisel plow that was hooked up to what can only be described as a reluctant beast of burden. I suppose that sad horse was my namesake: Nancy of the endless work, Nancy of the dirt and mud, Nancy of the sad existence.

(Grandma, Dad, and Nancy's backside)

It didn’t take me long to figure out that my name singled me out from my siblings. There were six of us in all, three boys and three girls—like the Brady Bunch. My brothers’ names are Nathan, Philip, and James. Nathan, after the Old Testament prophet who rebuked the mighty King David for his bad behavior with Bathsheba; Philip and James, after two apostles to Christ. My sisters are Mary and Joy. If you haven’t picked up on the theme yet, you probably haven’t been paying attention. By the time you get to Mary, you should be associating something about these names with other words, like “holy” and “Bible” and “religious.” Even Joy, who isn’t a character in the good book will probably make you think of something Christian-related—the result of Grace, for instance, or Faith. Those are my siblings. And then there’s me—Nancy. I wonder now why my parents didn’t consider naming me Naomi, or Rachel, or even Miriam, I would have liked that name. Instead they settled on honoring my great-grandma with my middle name, Caroline, and my grandma’s dead horse with my first.

Journaling Prompt:  Write the story of your name.