Cheerfully Morbid
By Katy Spindler

I love my mother. She’s quite refined and sweet, but every once in a while, usually in the middle of an otherwise ordinary conversation, she’ll tell me something that makes my hair stand on end. It’s usually a small tidbit from her childhood, which is enough to shock an apathetic modern slacker like myself. It probably doesn’t help that she has a surprisingly dark sense of humor.

Mom grew up in Crookston, Minnesota, a little town not too far from the Canadian border. Her father was a doctor and her mother, a former nurse, raised the kids and made doughnuts from scratch. In the winter, neighbors would flood their back yards to make skating rinks, kids would trudge with their sleds up to the top of "Gut-Shaker Hill," and sleigh rides were a favorite birthday excursion. During the summer, they’d travel to far-off places like Bimidji to see the giant folk art Paul Bunyan (my mother assures me it was much larger when she was small), eat maple long johns at the sweet shop, and hunt for wild blueberries. Up until this point, it all sounds gloriously like a Saturday Evening Post cover complete with football games and adorably rosy-cheeked Scandinavian children. Listen closely, however, and it has its Twin Peaks-like qualities. On Mother’s Day, one of these occasions presented itself.

"When I was a little girl," my mother remarked casually, "my mother took me to the morgue to look at a little boy who had been run over by a car."

This extraordinary comment occurred as we drove to Margie's Candies to get sundaes. It was prompted by a guy trying to cross a busy Chicago street. I did a mental double take and, because I am my mother’s daughter, probed.

"Was he all squished?"

"Not really. She wanted us to learn to look both ways before crossing the street. I can just see him."

"Did that boy's parents know other people were taking their kids to see him as a lesson?"

"I don’t know. It was a long time ago. I’m not even sure if my brothers came along. I just know I was!"

"Hmmm…" I thought. "This probably explains why my mother is always so reluctant to cross busy streets."

Surprisingly, this wasn’t my mother's only trip to the morgue to goggle at complete strangers. She explained that she had gone to see the body of a teenager who worked in the meat processing plant. He was chopping meat with a big blade and hit a bone. The knife rebounded and he stabbed himself in the chest. She didn't know him personally and there really wasn't any lesson to be learned other than "Be aware of your cleaver."

Apparently, this morgue trip was just for curiosity's sake. I have heard of high-risk teenagers being taken to the morgue in hopes of scaring them straight, but Mom was always decorous and gentle. Maybe this is just what passed as entertainment in the far north, where the undertaker doubled as the ambulance driver.

Similarly morbid, my mother's big elementary school field trip wasn't to the zoo or a museum, but to visit The Institution for the Feeble Minded. They crossed the state border to North Dakota to visit the largest state hospital for children with a rainbow of mental, physical, and genetic disorders. It was a Victorian extravaganza of brick buildings including what looked like a watch tower, but was probably a bell tower. Mom recalls her group of two dozen school children making their way through the sterile hallways, visiting shrieking patients, and learning the 1950s methods for preventative healthcare—sterilization. The director, mom recalls, was most proud of their "gargoyle," a stunted child with a shriveled appearance. "Gargoylism" or Hurler Syndrome is, thankfully, extremely rare. Apparently the institution counted itself very lucky to have one, presumably to the envy of similar asylums. My mother will say this for the field trip: she never forgot it or the unfortunate patients. If you are a teacher and you would like to present your students with a similarly traumatizing field trip, you are out of luck. The buildings are now listed as vacant.

Not everything was quite so grim. Mom fondly recalls the favorite treat at the drug store soda fountain in Crookston. You could buy a sundae with vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, and chopped nuts served in a little Coca-Cola glass for only a few cents. The downside, of course, is that you had to ask the teenaged soda jerk for "a Little Dick." Mind you, this was in the age of modesty so it is just possible that no pun was intended. I asked Mom if they had anything a little larger and she just blushed.

My grandmother was a nurse and the daughter of Norwegian farmers, so she was tough. She was also a great cook and made many things like blood sausage and potato dumplings. The combination of nursing and farming did result in some unusual personality quirks. Mom cheerfully recounts how she would stand on a stool next to her mother at the kitchen sink while she eviscerated chickens. As the various organs and parts fell out of the carcass, she taught Mom all their names. This is the sort of home medical teaching that is sorely lacking in the modern home.

This knowledge of anatomy served Mom well when she studied dietetics in college. One of the field trips was to a big slaughterhouse in North Dakota so they could learn how meat was processed. The trip included all parts, including the killing floor. It was pretty disgusting, to be sure, but potentially useful to burgeoning dieticians. This all makes sense to me up to the point where Mom tells me "It was just awful! I don’t know why my mother and I went to another one in New Mexico."

Admittedly, Mom has told me that Clovis, New Mexico is the most boring spot on Earth. When her parents moved there, Mom became an expert bowler just because that's what there was to do. Apparently the archeological discovery of Clovis Points is the only excitement to have occurred there. However, visiting a slaughterhouse for fun does seem like a public outcry for a miniature golf course. For the record, she and I have never taken any mother-daughter trips to meat processing plants.

Now by this point you'd think my mother would have become a serial killer, or least hard and jaded. In reality, she's a smart, caring, and thoughtful person who will drive elderly patients to the doctor when it's too snowy for them to be on the road, contributes to the church rummage sales, and eagerly sews tiny ruffled dresses for her granddaughter. Despite the fact that she is beloved by children, seniors, and wiggly puppy dogs, she hasn’t lost any of her toughness. For instance, she can sit through any amount of movie gore as long as there's no bad language. In fact, Fargo is one of her favorite movies. It reminds her so much of home.

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Katy Spindler takes after her mother and grandmother. A lot. Read more at http://thoughtfulrabbit.blogspot.com.

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