I have his shaving mug and his last name. And I have a rough wooden chest in my office, knocked together in Denmark more than a century ago and addressed with brush and black paint: "F.H. Skow, Ellsworth, Antrim County, Mich., U.S.A." There is only one way to carry such a chest by yourself: pick it up and put it on your shoulder. When I do that, the hair rises on the back of my neck. I feel my Danish grandfather, old Falle Hansen Skow, picking up the chest one morning in 1872, when he was 16, easing it onto the back of a farm wagon, then riding with his father to the train station. The night before, he had carved his initials on a windowsill of his parents' farmhouse in Jutland, "so you won't forget me." A few years earlier, Germany had inhaled his part of Denmark, and thus as a teenager he was in danger of being drafted into the Kaiser's army. No thanks. His folks scraped together enough money to buy him passage to the U.S. So say the family stories, a bit hazy in parts, like everyone's family stories, though the windowsill and the initials were still there a century later.
Fast-forward to the summer of 1990: F.H.'s grandson is becalmed in his office, postponing chores by reading the New York Times food page. Abruptly, one of memory's custard pies sails out of a time warp and hits me in the snoot. The Times describes a fine restaurant, called the Tapawingo, serving cassoulet of morels, and veal with forest fettucine, dinners $22 to $32 with first course and salad, in -- SPLAT! -- Ellsworth, Mich. My reaction is dismay. Ellsworth doesn't belong in the Times. It belongs in my earliest memories, where it has been for the 40 years since I last saw it. Ellsworth is my grandfather's farm, with a huge scary bull, and the dark, musty air of the feedstore across the road, and railroad tracks, where I flattened pennies when the Chicago Flyer came by. Now some guy named Bruce is advancing on my boyhood with a gigantic pepper mill, saying he'll be my waiter for tonight. Yes, thanks, Bruce, I'll need a little time. Actually, I will need a trip to Ellsworth.
Fast-Midwestward to Michigan: F.H. died in 1937, and I was just old enough to remember him as a fierce-looking geezer with a sandy mustache. Today that would describe me, and at the coffee bar in Ellsworth's Viking Food Store, Pete Drenth, 77, said a couple of weeks ago that from the side he could see the resemblance. I was pleased to hear that. One of the other high-mileage gents passing the time over coffee heard my name and said, "You're the doctor who settled in Toledo." No, I told him, that was my father. "Oh, yes," he said, "I know who you are." He had me placed, and that felt good too.