this past weekend was the arnold family biannual reunion. the arnold family in question is that of peter and magdalena arnold of gladstone, north dakota. peter and magdalena had 10 surviving children: ann, ernest, william, frank, peter, antone, john, raymond, walter, and helen. antone (tony) was my granddad. those 10 siblings and their children and grandchildren get together every two years.

my granddad died in 1998, followed shortly by his brother pete. but the combined essences of the other brothers makes him come alive again. they look alike, the brothers--they have the same long noses, high cheekbones, soft grey hair, and smiling eyes. they speak with the same german/north dakota accent. they lean back when they laugh. they all have hands made crooked and callused by years of hard farm work.

peter arnold came to north dakota from what was austro-hungary. the town is gone, but we think it was in what is now romania. peter married magdalena in 1915, and they had their first child, ann, in 1916. ann was followed by 8 boys, useful on a working farm. the last child was helen. she was sent away to be raised by another family when her mother died shortly after childbirth. ann took over the responsibility of the household, until peter remarried. his second wife, margaret, was apparently the black sheep of her family, and became an arnold as part of a deal: her family got rid of her, and peter got housekeeper. ann hated margaret, who was only about a year older than her, and ran off to montana and got married the first chance she got. the boys hated her, too, for replacing their mother, and making ann leave. margaret and peter had one daughter, arlene, who currently lives on the farm with her husband.

life was hard on that farm. they had no plumbing, just an outhouse and a washtub in the kitchen. the farmhouse had two bedrooms (for the 12 people that lived there). it was heated by coal that the boys mined themselves. peter arnold was a strict disciplinarian, free with the belt. there was a stream that ran through the property, between the farmhouse and the road. in the winter, when it was frozen, you could drive right up to the house, but in the summer your path was determined by how much rain you had gotten, and how well-behaved the stream was being.

the boys had a hard time in school. not only were they forever being pulled out to do farm work (harvest, fight a fire), but they didn't even speak english when they first went to first grade. even still, all of them but walt, the youngest boy, graduated. they all played sports--they *were* the basketball team--and even found time to cause trouble. lots of trouble, from what i hear.

the best parts of the family reunions are when the brothers start talking about their pranks as kids. there was the time they stole a farmer's outhouse, brought it into town, and somehow convinced him to set it on fire (he didn't realize it was his). they stole watermelons from that same farmer, and he ran after them with a rifle--putting bullet holes in their truck as souvenirs. they took apart one resident's wagon, reassembling it on top of the town gas tank, 18 feet up. when he got back to his wagonless horses after dark, he couldn't see the wagon. only discovered it the next day. one of the boys' favorite pranks was to, one at a time, sit on a bench with the poor man who collected the mail off passing trains (the trains didn't stop--they just tossed the mail over). as each brother sat down, the man would be forced to scoot toward the end of the bench. once he was all the way over, the boys would stand up, on cue, leaving the man as the only weight on the bench, all the way to the end. he ended up sprawled on the ground repeatedly. the boys were always in trouble, and were familiar with the inside of the town jail. but, the town jail was not our modern high-security institution, and could be broken out of with a screwdriver. they never stayed in long.

as each boy got old enough, they ran off and joined the army. got the hell off that farm and out of north dakota. all except ray, who has a bum leg, and couldn't go. that's how my granddad ended up in georgia--he was stationed at fort benning. 7 boys served in world war 2, and 7 came home alive. they were very lucky. john and bill served in the battle of the bulge--they were picked to run across an open field, to draw fire from the germans hiding in the woods on the other side, so the allies would know where the germans were. that day, the german army was too smart to fire on those sacrifices, choosing to keep their position a secret. so john and bill lived. in an "it's a small world" moment, two of the boys ended up on a truck together in italy. they didn't know they were both on the truck until one of their fellow soldiers pointed out that they looked very much alike. my cousin tony asked walt what it was like, fighting the germans when they themselves spoke mostly german at home. he said they didn't think about it--they had a job to do.

the last time all the siblings were together was in 1965 at their father's funeral. they were a good-looking group then, and continue to be now. i look forward to seeing them all again in 2004, in tuscon arizona.