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Wild Krumpos

Category

Inheritance

9 entries

1960

  1. Friday, January 1, 1960 · Don Krumpos

    Before He Was My Father

    His history was very hidden. Maybe that was trauma. Maybe it was temperament. Maybe those are not as separate as we pretend. His father died when he was thirteen. His sister Catherine died not long after. Houses burned. More than…

1964

  1. Thursday, June 11, 1964 · Don Krumpos

    The One Photo

    My grandmother had one photograph of my grandfather. Just one. It sat for as long as I can remember on a shelf in her house on Nicolet Drive, so constant I almost stopped seeing it, though it watched over everything.…

1965

  1. Wednesday, January 13, 1965 · Don Krumpos

    Lot 50-B

    She was buried in Lot 50-B. My grandfather, seven months earlier, in Lot 50-C. The plots sit beside one another in Section A of Mount Calvary Cemetery in De Pere, father and daughter sharing ground, their names joined beneath a…

1980

  1. Tuesday, January 1, 1980 · Don Krumpos

    The Pedestal Board

    For a man who had once been president of a college chess club, my father did not actually play chess with me very often. Maybe a dozen times in all. Memory makes it feel like more. Perhaps because each game…

1984

  1. Sunday, January 1, 1984 · Don Krumpos

    The Books in His Bedroom

    My father had a massive collection of books from college. At least it felt massive to me then. They lived in his bedroom, which made them different from ordinary household books. They were not simply around, not part of the…

1986

  1. Wednesday, January 1, 1986 · Don Krumpos

    That's How I Learned

    My father was involved in so many building projects that I sometimes have trouble separating them. They blur together now into one continuous image of him: work clothes, tools out, some old building opened up around him, a problem waiting…

1988

  1. Friday, January 1, 1988 · Don Krumpos

    What Others Threw Away

    The first time I understood my father was a kind of lumberjack, I was carrying his supper out to a stand of trees at the edge of a Royal Scot subdivision. He was up in one of the trees with…

1993

  1. Friday, January 1, 1993 · Don Krumpos

    What He Couldn't Give

    The question is harder to answer than it looks. If you ask me what my father could not give, I have to pause. Because in the obvious ways, he gave plenty. He gave hugs. He said, "I love you." Not…

1999

  1. Friday, January 1, 1999 · Don Krumpos

    The House That Held Him

    My father, with my grandfather's help, put a full new central chimney into our farmhouse. That sentence seems almost unbelievable to me now. A chimney is not a shelf or a bench or a toy barn. It is not a…