ABCESS MAKES THE HEART GO FOUNDER

Update on the tooth situation. The good news: the abcess has been cleared out and the socket where the pulled tooth was is healing successfully. The bad news: since the area was so large, it will be a year-long process now. First, allow the socket to heal (2-3 months), then do a small bone implant to generate new bone area as a base for the new tooth, then do an implant (possibly a year from now), then finally cap it with a crown. I guess the dentist didn't want to overwhelm me with all of the bad news the day of the surgery. I was a bit shocked when I found out it was going to be more than a few months. Running around with a missing tooth that long makes me feel a bit like a street person, but I guess it can't be rushed.

RIVERSIDE PART II

Last October I mentioned in this blog that I visited the Lutheran Church in Riverside that my grandmother had attended when she first came to the US from Sweden in 1908. At the time, the church secretary kindly allowed me to inspect the old membership book. This last weekend (March 4-5), I was making a semiannual trip up to the mountains to check on Aunt Helen, and since Riverside is practically on the way, I decided to attend a Sunday morning service at Eden Lutheran. (My first visit had been during the week.) It's not the original building (that spot is now occupied by the Riverside Police Department), but there are over a 100 years of continuity in the congregation. After the 10:30 service, I went to the coffee hour to meet people and ended up talking with a bunch of the old-timers. When they got over their intitial guest shyness, they were interested in learning my family connections with Eden, One woman across the table at coffee had even attended the Immanual Lutheran Church in Omaha that my great-grandparents had helped found back in the 1880's! And everyone mentioned Elvera Elmlund's name again and again. "She the church history person. She's known everybody ..." Unfortunately, she was in a care facility temporarily after a broken hip. (She's old enough to have overlapped Grandma Sundberg's era (1980-1915), but since she was born in 1912 (96 years old!), she naturally doesn't remember her.) Elvera and I will definitely be talking in the days ahead!

In the afternoon, I set up camp in the Riverside Library to do family research, finding more information on Grandma's two Riverside uncles, Ernest and Carl Carlson, who had lived in Riverside for years and attended Eden Lutheran. (Elvera knew them and their family well, but not Grandma.) Every city in California had a city "directory" in the era before phonebooks, and the two uncles' names showed up every year, along with their occupation "orchardist", employer, and their home address. I searched in vain for any mention of Selma in the relevant years, but her brother Frank showed up as "F. Carlson" in the 1910 directory. They obviously left for Kansas and college soon afterwards because that's the last mention of them in the city books. I drove out to Dewey Road south of town to see if I could still find the two brothers' houses after all these decades (nearly 100 years now), but the numbering system had obviously changed. It was all suburban house plots now along a railroad road. Elvera could probably tell me the exact location today.

I also was looking for any information on my grandparents' 1915 wedding in Riverside. The Riverside Daily Press did have a society page with weddings, etc., but theirs appeared nowhere. (Not "society" enough, I guess.) There was a tiny legal notice of their "license to wed", however, in the August 23 newspaper on microfilm. A bit disappointing, but some corroborating evidence, at least.

AUNT HELEN

I found Aunt Helen about where she was the last couple of visits: short-term memory is spotty and she repeats the same questions every five minutes; health is not great but ok. The main "progress" this trip was talking to a real-estate agent in Crestline about selling her present two-story home (Dad had it built for her in the early '90s) and moving to a one-story in the village closer to services so she could do some of her own errands by walking out her front door. (The current house is isolated on the far end of the lake, and Helen doesn't drive and no longer walks outside the house.) The real estate agent, Steven, was very helpful and gung-ho, so by the end of the week he had already contacted Ann, and talks were on about selling Dad's empty lot on the lake to pay for the downpayment of a house in the village. Apparently, after a number of years of slow land sales in the San Bernardino mountains, this year land is hot, so he was really pushing us to sell before summer.

Of course, there's no telling whether Aunt Helen will be persuaded to move when we find something appropriate, or whether we'll have to carry her bodily from the house! (We wouldn't go that far, obviously!)