In the days prior to flying to Puget Sound, I found myself composing a toast to Harold, and since the gathering in Olympia was not the kind that raises a glass and toasts, I shall raise it here:]
* * *
Wallace Stevens has a poem titled, “A Postcard from the Volcano”
It begins like this:
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;
And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;
And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt
At what we saw.
Some of you, at least, know that I am Conrad: one of Jennie’s kids.
Jennie was one of Harold’s sisters: Magna, Aleda, and Jennie.
And while I am not, and do not expect ever to be, ninety-nine,
and counting still, I am old enough to understand
something of what Wallace Stevens was talking about when he wrote,
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill,
but it is the line about leaving what still is the look of things,
leaving what we felt, at what we saw, that I am thinking of.
Not ninety-nine years ago, but surely seventy-five years ago,
and more, I was one of the grandchildren, one of the nephews,
that ran loose on Grandpa and Grandma Jacobson’s farm,
there where Harold and Oscar and Hans—our uncles—like our mother
and our aunts, too, had grown up.
When I think about what was the look of things,
there where Harold grew up, where many of us
came along like the next crop,
something like children picking up the bones
of the generations before us,
I think of three places especially,
and I want to tell you a little of what I felt at what I saw.
I am thinking about the horse stables
in the southeast corner of the barn that is still there,
and of the woodshed, still more south,
and of the blacksmith shop, up toward the bull pen.
It is impossible for me to think of those stables,
with the harnesses along the wall,
without also thinking of the shoemaker’s bench
upstairs in the house itself.
One of my earliest memories, is of Big Grandpa
sewing layers of leather together to make a new tug
for one of those harnesses. I smell the leather still.
I always associate Hans with those stables:
the youngest son, the biggest son, with a body
more like Olina, his mother, than Jonas, his father.
Hans and those knot-headed horses were a match.
They came always, finally, to a kind of negotiated stand-off.
I associate Oscar more with the woodshed,
not because it was Oscar’s place, as Hans and horses belonged together,
because the woodshed was Grandpa Jacobson’s place.
It wasn’t just a shed for wood: It was a shed for wood
carefully split, and stacked more carefully still,
so that it could dry, and when dry, to be split again
and stacked on the wheelbarrow to be trundled to porch side,
from where it would be carried in to the woodbox.
There was something precise in that woodshed:
it had a kind of unspecified order.
It was not wood heaved in on its way to the stove.
It had secrets. Oscar was like that, too.
Oscar had his own order for things.
I never knew quite what they were.
They were not dark, nor secret:
they were stacked inside him with an order
and in the way he wanted.
I associate Harold with the blacksmith shop.
I do not actually recall ever having seen Harold work in that shop,
but my feelings, from when I watched Grandpa Jacobson
there at the forge, and at the anvil, at the drill press on the wall behind,
have always been that Harold, and his Dad—
Harold, who even looks like his Dad—
had something in common there.
Harold, like his Dad, is a man who makes things work.
I suspect Harold knows a lot more about electric and acetylene welders
that he does about the tools Grandpa had,
but both of them made things work.
They bent steel and shaped wood, and made them work.
I recall how Harold made a house from concrete blocks..
Harold made iron and steel work for him.
He and Ruth went to Africa in the Peace Corp, and made things work,
and came back to Washington and Oregon, to do it again.
Harold . . .
Harold Jennings Jacobson. . .
we admire you,
and we love you.
Happy birthday!
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