Top: Eleanor in 1940. Bottom: Eleanor with Dora in 1949.

Above: Eleanor and Aldridge with Dora, 1948. Below: Eleanor and a snowy friend.

Eleanor

By Daniel Johnson, son

Eleanor was generous with the poor, particularly elderly men and single mothers with children. I remember that in Isle there was an old man who lived in a little white house across the street and east a half block from our home. He was my first awareness of the old-man fragrance, and my native fear of him was mitigated by bringing the occasional fresh loaf of homemade bread to him from Mother. Usually, she brought the meals or treats herself during the day and enjoyed a conversation with him, but sometimes she was so busy she had to delegate this task to a child.

It wasn’t superficial charity -- he became a friend who she enjoyed visiting and whose history she learned, as with everyone she helped. Sometimes I wonder whether her affection toward old men is that her revered father was one -- she was born when he was 61 and was 13 when he died in his mid-70s.

Though she had only a nursing RN diploma and a high-school education, it was a good education. She was articulate, and deeply enjoyed enriching conversation. When she died, I missed those conversations more than anything else; they were my mother-hug equivalent. Very few people are capable of such intellectual and deep exchanges, so there’s been no replacement.

Grandma — her mother — disciplined her eight children with sarcasm, I was told. Eleanor fell under that tree. Happy, she was inventively witty; angry, she mocked the miscreant’s character sardonically. Communication in our extended family was always indirect and usually ironic. 

Grandma Keillor lived at our house for long stretches after about 1952, when she was 72. She and Eleanor always seemed to be happy to be together. I don’t remember a harsh word or argument between them, and a steady stream of conversation.

Eleanor really suffered physically. She had a variant of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, with loose stretchy body tissues. Slight blows would break veins. Her shoulders were loose and chronically painful (which never stopped her from working continually, though it slowed her). And she had prolapse of her heart’s mitral valve, that made her often feel during the night as though she was smothering, related to terribly slow irregularities of her heart’s rhythm.

Eleanor turned eight in the summer of 1929, and so grew up in a big family on a farm with 80 acres of sandy soil during the depression. Forty years later, Aldridge said to me, “Your mother talks often about how hard they had it during the depression, and they did, but at least they had food to eat.” 

I expect that she and her family were mocked for being “poor” because later in life I accidentally discovered she was hypersensitive to the idea that the family may have been. In any case, she was always completely empathic with the poor unless through their own foolishness, in which case she did not respect them.

Eleanor always had a big garden. I never knew whether this was chiefly because she loved gardening or because she and Aldridge were continually anticipating the next big crash and depression and were ready for it. After they turned 50, she directed the purchase of 80 acres of farmland near Isanti, and thereafter also raised animals for meat and chickens for eggs. She loved her animals, always grateful for the sacrifice they made to nourish us. One Sunday, as we lifted pieces of tender roast beef onto our plates, she said cheerfully, “This is Bessie — isn’t she delicious?”

Eleanor truly understood play and how to have fun. Of her children, Philip inherited this most clearly. I think that a sense of play correlates well with a sense of humor, both of which she had supremely. She loved to teach children how to play, she loved sports and physical activity, and thought they were very important for health. She was something of a tomboy when a child. She preferred pants to dresses, and spent much time running around outdoors and doing physical activities rather than being an indoors girl learning womanly skills.

This led to her being teased that she was not really a girl, that she was really a boy. This seems to have led to inner conflict about activities and sexual identity, and although she made sure that her boys knew how to play ball and insisted that the outdoors burning off energy, she did not permit our sister Elizabeth to do this and kept her in the house teaching her women’s work. This created a fractious and damaging relationship.

Eleanor was a great woman: she was an intent observer of the people and world in her view. She couched her understanding of politics, economics, and environmental issues in terms of character, derived from her understanding of the moral teachings of Christ. She valued integrity above everything, and always tried to do — and to enjoy doing — the things that she was convinced were morally and ethically right objectively rather than what she might have personally preferred. Her mistakes were related to incomplete knowledge and understanding rather than lack of concern or selfishness. Late in life, she came to understand many of them, and felt deep remorse for each. I wish she had been better able to forgive herself, as God in Christ had forgiven her.