Well, I don’t plan to make a habit of writing a new post, every time I discover that someone else I knew has died. But this is the first time I’ve ever grown old, and I’m still getting accustomed to the idea that people who were part of my life won’t be anymore.
In this case, it’s a little odd to describe the person in question – Nelson Pankop – as “part of my life.” He was, to a limited extent, when I was a kid. But that was enough. Merely being a part of someone’s childhood is, itself, a way to be important to them. Even as a player at the periphery of my school years, Nelson will always be more significant, in my thoughts and feelings, than people with whom I have spent hours as an adult — partly because I haven’t actually spent that many hours with that many adults, and partly because adult activities are not necessarily as intense as those of childhood.
Nelson lived a mile and a half from me, out there in rural northern Indiana. He didn’t attend the one-room schoolhouse or the church next to it, just down the road from our house, and so in that sense he was a bit of a foreigner; but on the other hand he was the cousin of Tim, who did attend the school for a year or two – and both were descendants of old Herman Pankop, whose lovely little lake and evergreen woodlot, back a long lane, were the scene of many adventures. Sometimes, in winter, Dad would round up the neighborhood kids and haul a station-wagon load or more to go sledding, or to skate on that frozen lake. There, Dad did the strange but cool thing of starting a bonfire on the ice, for everyone to stand around and warm up and roast marshmallows when we got wet and cold.
It was at Herman’s lake, during one of Tim’s visits from Fort Wayne, that I nearly got trampled by a herd of cows. Tim and I were out screwing around in the field, when we came over a small rise and, whoa, there were a hundred cows, all looking at us. They started towards us. We started running. They started running. They were gaining on us. I freaked. Tim split off into the woods and was safe. I made the mistake of sprinting for the fence. It was a long run. Only time in my life I’ve ever just dove over a fence, headfirst. I cleared the top strand of barbed wire, but I landed in the gravel driveway on the far side and got scraped up. By that point, the cows were right behind me, right there on the other side of the fence, snorting and stomping.
I just saw a thing about the 40 or 50 people who get trampled by cows in the U.S. each year. I wasn’t one of them. But if I’d stumbled, during that flight of terror . . .
Mostly, when I biked over to Nelson’s, we just did stuff at his place. We used to play B-ball there in the winter, in his barn, Jimmy and Denny and Nelson and I – or, sometimes, in Denny’s barn. The three of us, excepting Nelson, had all been schoolmates at the one-room Lutheran school. At that point, transitioning from junior to senior high school, Nelson was over 6 feet already, whereas I was still just a little kid. He and Jimmy were two years ahead of me, Denny one. So I got to be kind of a long-range shooter in those games.
Nelson was a fun, loopy sort of guy. One time, I made up new lyrics to the old Dean Martin song. That song said, “There’s too many chiefs and not enough Indians around this house.” I sang it as, “There’s too many fish and not enough snails around this aquarium.” I know: dippy juvenile humor. Jimmy and Denny rolled their eyes, but Nelson loved it.
It wasn’t just wintertime basketball. I went over now and then in the summer too. Nelson had a big horse, Thunder, and a little pony, Lucky. One time, I tried riding Thunder bareback, like he did. I was going to just lock my legs around his belly and hold on, like the Wild West Indians that I was reading about. That worked, until Thunder started trotting up Nelson’s driveway. That shook me loose. I could feel disaster coming. I was like, whoa . . . I was tilting . . . I was tilting . . . I was sliding down under his belly . . . and finally, at the last minute, I let go, and my head hit the gravel, right beside his hoofs. And, once again, I lived.
What all we did at Nelson’s, I don’t recall very clearly. I think we might have built hay tunnels in the haymow; I believe he had a tire swing; I vaguely remember playing games in the house. As I say, he wasn’t one of the main figures in my childhood. It was just that he was part of the neighborhood. If you add up a half-dozen or a dozen people like Nelson, and have some good times with one and then some good times with another, spread out over a period of years, pretty soon it starts to feel like you have a home and friends and a place where you belong.
It’s certainly not like that anymore. Jimmy is in Fort Wayne; Denny is in Indianapolis; I’m long gone; and Nelson is dead. I was last up in that neighborhood in 2011, when I spent a year near Rome City, maybe ten miles to the west. What struck me about my old stomping grounds, during that year, was that the middle class really had been hollowed out. It was no longer normal to be a farmer of maybe 80 acres, as Nelson’s dad was, with a couple dozen head of cattle, and a wife who’d raise the kids and keep an eye on the place while you spent weekdays at the factory. The Rust Belt factories were gone – the Foundry was shut down, Flint & Walling and McCray’s had long since closed – and now it was a handful of well-to-do farmers with a thousand acres each, surrounded by a lot of Walmart employees living in rental properties. And, for that matter, the wives and the marriages and the kids were all a cluster too.
I still could have stopped in to visit Nelson while I was there. It seems he was already dead by then, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t really know where he was, but I did bike past his old house once or twice, during that year. I think I may have seen the Pankop name on one of the mailboxes, at the house and/or at the mobile home that somebody had planted in the field next door. But I didn’t even try. It felt awkward. It had been too long. I was afraid this would be another one of those conversations where I’m the ex-big-city lawyer, or the liberal on a bicycle, and it would be strange, and the old camaraderie would be gone. But Nelson had been such a friendly, easygoing guy. There was probably nothing to worry about. We’d probably have had a good time. If he’d been alive, that is.
It is peculiar, now, to try to catch up, a bit, with what happened to Nelson’s family, during the years after my departure. Not that I have a lot of information, but the online sources once again provide some food for thought.
It seems old Herman, Nelson’s grandfather, died back in 1985, at the age of 84. Herman’s daughter Norma – Tim’s mom – died in 2011 at the age of 78, and is buried in the cemetery next to the house I grew up in. Herman’s younger brother Harold – Nelson’s dad – hung on until 2015, when he died one day before his 99th birthday, the last survivor among his ten siblings.
So Harold might have still been in that old house when I biked past. He might even have remembered me. And that was something, because now I recalled seeing old Dorothy Rauh in the nursing home, a few years earlier; I remember I surprised everyone by bursting into tears when I saw her. It was just so wonderful and sad to see that that old woman, who had been my Sunday School teacher when I was just a little tyke, whom I had barely thought about during the intervening 40 years, was still there, and still remembered and cared about me. It was as though she was a last remnant of that time and place that had been my home.
Nelson was a grandfather, but apparently he was no longer a husband: the obituary says he was survived by his parents, three siblings, two sons, and six grandchildren. I looked for guidance on the etiquette of these things, but apparently it varies. But my sense was that, if the mother of his children had preceded him in death, the obit would have said so. So maybe there was a less-than-amicable divorce.
The newspapers say Nelson died on the night of February 14, 2010, at the age of 55. It could be a mere coincidence that it was Valentine’s Day. Remembering Nelson, I thought probably not. I had seen the research, and had experienced myself, that those who were raised in a certain pattern of abuse might tend to gravitate back toward that same pattern in their own relationships as adults. In other words, I recalled that the circumstances facing Nelson’s dad, Harold, were much like those of the farmer in that Kenny Rogers song:
You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille
With four hungry children and a crop in the field
I’ve had some bad times, lived through some sad times
But this time your hurting won’t heal
Not to say there weren’t reasons. I didn’t know anything about all that. I just knew that I was now wondering what my childhood friend Nelson was thinking and feeling, on the last Valentine’s Day of his life, not long before someone would pen an obituary, for him, that would not mention the mother of his kids.
They didn’t specify a cause of death. They said he died in the hospital, so presumably it wasn’t suicide. Whatever it was, 55 was a pretty young age for it, for the son of a man who lived 43 or 44 years past that.
In my experience, Nelson was a gentle soul. If he remained that way as an adult, then I suppose he may have found life in this world rather hard. The obituary said he had retired from Kraft Foods — from the Kraft marshmallow factory in Kendallville, I assumed — so apparently he settled in and made a go of it, there, for his working career, in a time when that sort of stable job had become scarce. I hope – I am sure – he found happiness in his life and family. I hope his death did not result from grief, loneliness, or anything other than an unfortunate physical ailment. And I am sorry he’s gone.
Grief, Pain, Fear, and Loss 