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Wild Krumpos

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Family

38 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…

1978

  1. Sunday, January 1, 1978 · Don Krumpos

    The Ditch

    One of my earliest memories begins with a car in a ditch. Not metaphorically. Literally. My father was driving home from work at the Royal Scot, where he cooked long hours, and somewhere only a country block from home—so close…

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…

  2. Tuesday, January 1, 1980 · Don Krumpos

    Work Clothes

    My father was always steady and sturdy to me. Physically, first. That was how a child knew him. He had huge biceps and forearms, the kind made not in a gym but by work repeated over years. Lifting, hauling, carrying,…

  3. Sunday, June 1, 1980 · Don Krumpos

    Donny, Going On Your Own

    I got my first bike for my birthday — a Huffy, blue and silver. It was a big deal. For the longest time, I could only ride on the driveway, which was slightly on an incline. I'd glide down the…

1982

  1. Friday, January 1, 1982 · Don Krumpos

    Chess-Club Farmer

    I often return to an image of my father in the hayfield: plaid shirt darkened with sweat, straw hat pushed back, a stem of hay sometimes held loosely in the corner of his mouth like he belonged to an old…

  2. Friday, January 1, 1982 · Don Krumpos

    Mader's

    As a child, Milwaukee felt less like a city than a foreign country. To get there from the Door Peninsula farm already felt like crossing worlds—leaving fields, machine sheds, and county roads for expressways, brick facades, traffic, and the unnerving…

  3. Friday, January 1, 1982 · Don Krumpos

    The Keeping of Things

    We had horses my whole childhood. That was one of the facts of the farmstead, as natural to me then as the barn, the garden, the chickens, the machine shed, the old trees. Horses were not decoration. They were part…

  4. Friday, January 1, 1982 · Don Krumpos

    The Salesmen at the Kitchen Table

    Two salesmen came to our kitchen table when I was young. One sold my parents knowledge. The other sold them death. That sounds too dramatic, maybe, but that is how it arranges itself in memory now. Both visits happened early,…

  5. Thursday, July 1, 1982 · Don Krumpos

    Parent-sickness

    One summer my mother went to Maine for about a week, though at that age a week felt nearly geological. An era. My sister and I stayed with my grandmother at the cottage on the Bay. Ordinarily this sounds idyllic,…

1983

  1. Saturday, January 1, 1983 · Don Krumpos

    A Consummate Maker

    The little projects with my dad were not so little. At least they were large in my heart. When I look back, some of the deepest intimacies we shared did not happen through long conversations or dramatic father-son moments, but…

  2. Saturday, January 1, 1983 · Don Krumpos

    Harold and the Laying on of Hands

    Some of my clearest childhood memories of church are not from Sunday worship itself but from the odd currents that swirled around it—potlucks, basement coffee, revival language drifting through fellowship halls, and certain visitors who seemed to arrive from a…

  3. Saturday, January 1, 1983 · Don Krumpos

    Light on a Living Room Wall

    Before I knew Europe as geography, I knew it as light on a living room wall. My father had a slide projector—I can still hear, or think I can hear, the dry mechanical click of the carousel advancing, the brief…

1984

  1. Sunday, January 1, 1984 · Don Krumpos

    Not Made for the Fair

    Every year of grade school I built something. Second grade was a papier-mâché earth, cut open to show the layers. Crust, mantle, core — the planet sliced like fruit so you could see what it was made of. I did…

  2. Sunday, January 1, 1984 · Don Krumpos

    One Railing Off

    It rained most of the weekend, and when we came out onto the overlook the valley was giving itself up to mist. The trees below were half-erased, the far ridge gone soft and white, the whole place breathing through wet…

  3. Sunday, January 1, 1984 · Don Krumpos

    That Was Our Land

    Every year our parents gave us new boundaries. At five and six we could only go to the end of the driveway. The next year we could go out onto the road, but only in front of the driveway, to…

  4. 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…

  5. Wednesday, August 1, 1984 · Don Krumpos

    The Cook

    Once a year, my father had a reason for me to skip church. On the morning of the Grace Lutheran summer picnic, we did not put on church clothes. We did not sit in the pews. We got up early,…

  6. Saturday, December 1, 1984 · Don Krumpos

    Keep Playing Here

    It was winter in Wisconsin, sometime in the mid-eighties, when snow came in deep drifts against the hedgerows and the cold had a blue cast by late afternoon. My sister and I had been outside for hours, tunneling through snowbanks,…

1985

  1. Tuesday, January 1, 1985 · Don Krumpos

    The Man Who Didn't Like Music

    Once I asked my father what kind of music he listened to. I expected an answer. Everyone had music, I thought. Everyone had songs they loved, records they returned to, singers who belonged to them somehow. Even if the answer…

  2. Tuesday, January 1, 1985 · Don Krumpos

    The Silent Curriculum

    There were things the farm taught without explanation. No one sat you down and said, this is what country life requires. The lessons arrived through chores, accidents, deaths, and the strange adult certainty that some hard thing had to be…

  3. Monday, July 1, 1985 · Don Krumpos

    Talked Us Free

    My father believed in long drives. Not the modern kind, broken by motels and careful pacing, but marathon drives measured in thermoses. Twelve hours. Sometimes fifteen. He did almost all of it himself, hands steady on the wheel, one elbow…

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…

  2. Tuesday, July 1, 1986 · Don Krumpos

    The Cost of Work

    I grew up believing my father could do almost anything. He could fell trees, pour concrete, rebuild chimneys, coax tomatoes from difficult soil, repair old machinery with improvised brilliance, and somehow keep a farmstead, a house, gardens, animals, and a…

1987

  1. Thursday, January 1, 1987 · Don Krumpos

    Tea on the Back Porch

    I could tell my father loved my mother dearly. Not because he said it often. Not because they were romantic in any dramatic way. They were not a movie kind of couple. Their love belonged to a different language: rural,…

  2. Wednesday, July 1, 1987 · Don Krumpos

    The Tape and the Tower

    The summer between sixth and seventh grade, my father drove me to Chicago. It was a father-son trip, and it had an official purpose, though no one named it out loud. That was how my parents handled preparing us for…

1988

  1. Friday, January 1, 1988 · Don Krumpos

    Something Good to Reach For

    One of my special memories is movie night. Usually it was Sunday, and usually it was the Disney family movie hour. That phrase alone carries a whole atmosphere for me now — the television glowing in the living room, the…

  2. 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…

1989

  1. Sunday, January 1, 1989 · Don Krumpos

    The Beast

    Cars were one of the ways my father measured time. Not deliberately. He was not sentimental about them in any obvious way. A vehicle was a tool first: something to get to work, haul lumber, carry children, survive winter, and…

1991

  1. Tuesday, January 1, 1991 · Don Krumpos

    The Good Money

    Around my freshman year of high school, my father finally moved to day shift. I do not remember the exact date. It may be in my mother's journal somewhere. What I remember is not the calendar but the feeling of…

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…

1995

  1. Sunday, January 1, 1995 · Don Krumpos

    Call Me, I'll Come

    After my mother died, something in my father loosened. Or dimmed. As a younger person I sometimes thought of it as him not paying as much attention, and there was truth in that. Some vigilance left him. Some energy that…

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…

2015

  1. Tuesday, March 17, 2015 · Don Krumpos

    His Fantasy Land

    The oxygen machine hums all day. It doesn't stop. The morphine pump beeps at intervals I've memorized by now. These are the sounds that fill Dad's house — not his whistling, not the clatter of tools, not the screen door…

  2. Thursday, April 9, 2015 · Don Krumpos

    The Dash Between the Years

    The last couple of days, Helen and I sat at Dad's house making a photo board. We spread everything out — shoeboxes, envelopes, loose prints — and just started sorting. That was the best kind of therapy. Not talking about…

2025

  1. Tuesday, March 11, 2025 · Don Krumpos

    Gertie, My Fierce Little Shadow

    I met her in December 2008, in my Minneapolis apartment. I set down a fresh bowl of food and watched her take her first careful steps into our life together. She was a tortoiseshell — bold, independent, a little unpredictable.…