Author: kwundrow

4th Generation

Posted on by kwundrow

It was one of those rainy days you experience on vacation. Our family was holed up in our cottage waiting for the rain to let up. My grandchildren, Jackson age 9, and Adela age 6, were doing their best to keep themselves busy but there is only so much you can do inside. We had already used up the TV time and were working into the kids games, when my daughter decided we should try cards.

I come from a long line of card players, Sheepshead, Solitaire, Euchre, and Cribbage are a few of the games we played. I had taught my daughter to play cribbage as soon as it was possible for her to deal with the math and strategy the game required. I relied on the same tactic my dad had used when he taught me so many years ago, show them a hand played out, repeat the rules once, and then play for blood. The result was that my daughter was a show no mercy cribbage player. She would steal your points if you miscounted and harangue you if the rules of the day were gentleman’s cribbage with no point stealing allowed. We were starting our third game tied at one each, There was the usual heated conversations over who had the advantage and the third game, being for bragging rights, was already heating up when we noticed Jackson off to one side, checking out the game as we played. It was at this point that Bailey and I looked at each other with that “he’s ready to learn look”.

Generally, when indoctrinating a newbie to the game of cribbage, it will take several open dealt hands and games before they even catch on. After that, one must allow for another raft of games before they are not a straight up easy mark for the seasoned player. Jackson seemed to have some inane logic / intuition for the game. We wrote off his first win, after just three hands, to pure luck. But as the week wore on and he began to best both his mom and I, we began to concede the fact that we might have created the fourth generation cribbage playing champ in the Wundrow bloodline. Game after game, he either bested us or at the very least, held in there to make the game tight.

Just as I was with my daughter, and I am sure, my dad with me, Bailey had to be proud of the fact that Jackson picked up one of her favorite games so quickly and so avidly. There really is no greater pleasure to be had than when the protégé is able to beat the teacher. To watch something taught to me by my dad now being taught to my grandchild, reminds me of the legacy of family that is passed down through the generations. I am sure my dad was there watching over Jackson’s shoulder each and every hand. At least that would explain how easily he learned and how quickly he excelled. Way to go dad, way to go Jackson.

There is a metaphor in here somewhere. Every great teacher appreciates that moment when the student becomes the teacher. The passing down of a skill learned is a testament to the generation before. Never stop learning from the generation that came before so that we might pass that what was learned to the generation that follows.

I need to close now as I have Jackson, cribbage board in hand, asking for one more game before bedtime.

Hello World, I Have Arrived!

Posted on by kwundrow

Faye Wundrow Peterson entered into our world this morning weighing in at 7 pounds 9 ounces and measuring 20 and 1/4 inches. Her parents, Kathryn and Eli have just made me a new and very proud grandparent.

Let’s explore some obvious truths. It is a given that Faye will call me Opa and that she will melt my heart a thousand times over in her life time. She will manipulate me, enthrall me, and generally keep me on my toes. Faye will con me into trips to Culvers and McDonalds. She will convince me to buy her milkshakes, slushies and cndy even when I know her mother would say no. She will take me on adventures and all the while keep me young at heart while she does. In short, she will rock my world and I am ready to be rocked.

When I look at this picture of her, swaddled in her hospital bassinet, I can’t help but speculate on what her future holds. Will she ever actually drive a car, or will she simply ride in self driving vehicles? Will she ever keyboard as I am doing right now, or will she simply think and the computer will record her thoughts? What will her career look like and would I ever have seen that coming? For that matter, will she be rich by today’s standards, or will she live in an entirely different world where success is measured by her worth and not her wealth? Will she grow up in a society that values all of its members, no matter their race, creed, or gender? Please let at least that one be true for her.

As I look at Faye in her innocence, I am filled with hope that her life will be all that it can be. That she will feel love and happiness in the world she grows up in. That she will find success and recognize it when she achieves it. That she will seize the opportunities every time one presents itself. That she won’t lose that innocence before she replaces it with the experience to make her best decisions.

If years from now you are reading this Faye, know this about your Opa. No grandfather could ever love his grandchild any more than I love you right this very moment, nor could they ever compete with how much I will love you for all of the life I get to share with you. Know this Faye, you are loved, now and forever, no matter what.

Welcome to the world Faye. How would you feel about sharing some of your journey with me? All you need do, is hold my hand.

Opa

The Friends We Make

Posted on by kwundrow

I have been getting over a bit of writer’s block lately. Plenty of thoughts, but just not connected. In the midst of that, a title came to me and after a lot of searching for inspiration, I think I am ready to tackle this piece.

Deb and I just returned from some long-awaited travel. We started the winter with a two week stay on Kauai and Maui in the Hawaiian Islands, returned home for a quick two-week catchup, and then went down to Cancun for one more week. Hopefully you are not judging me for my irresponsible galivanting, but we had saved up for this and Covid-19 had left us longing to start traveling again. Regardless, we took both trips looking forward to the memories we would make. And we made memories.

These two trips, in some ways similar, had marked differences. Hawaii was activity driven. With my faithful travel master friends, Larry and Annette along for the journey, we never lacked purpose on any of the days. There were waterfalls to hike into, zip lines to tackle, whales to watch, and fish to snorkel among. Every day had a hike planned for at least part of it. Cancun, on the other hand, was meant for soaking up sun, walking the beach, and eating at a different restaurant every day.  We were in an all-inclusive so why wouldn’t we. Where our purpose in Hawaii was exploring and, as it turned out, exercise, Cancun was about down time.

We met random people throughout our stay in Hawaii, but they were usually “one and done” as we moved on and so did they. Cancun was different. As it was an all-inclusive resort, it was like being held in this exotic, beautiful prison. There was no need to venture outside of the walls and the food and the guards were incredible. The offshoot of this kind of vacation is that all the guests are traveling in the same circles. We were all there together and seeing a couple multiple times a day was the norm and offered the chance to make new friends, which we did. Though there were multiple couples, Chris and Sammy, Kristy and Chuck, not Paul (inside joke), half the state of Nebraska, and a very friendly group from Green Bay, Wisconsin, there were two couples who merit recognition.

Marcello and Julianna from Sao Paulo, Brazil were there to do a recommitment of their marriage vows on the occasion of their fifteenth wedding anniversary. We met them one of our first nights. They had come into one of the lounges and Julianna’s beautiful wedding dress caught our eye. Something told us they were looking for company. They had, like us, made the trip alone. As we started a conversation, we discovered that Marcello was able to speak some English but Julianna could only speak her native tongue, Portuguese. After spending some time apologizing to each other for not being able to adequately speak each other’s language, it was decided that we could fill in most of the gaps and we would not let it get in the way of what instantly felt like a friendship in the making. By weeks end, I was improving my very limited Spanish, and Marcello, his English. We had spent hours learning about each other and forming a friendship that just might, with the help of Facebook, last beyond our week in Cancun.

On night two of our stay, we sat across from a couple playing cards and talking with each other. As is the way with me, my incessant belief that people want to join in a conversation, I asked what game they were playing. That is all it took. By the end of the evening, we were making plans for breakfast the next morning. Erin and Alex, as it turned out, were from St Louis, a city we visit often and, by the end of the week, a city we now had a new reason to visit.

In our everyday lives, we pass by so many Marcello and Julianna’s, so many Erin and Alex’s, but we never get to meet. When we travel, it seems so much easier to take the risk and start that conversation. In the case of Marcello and Julianna, we had to overcome the language barrier, but I will tell you that the challenge made the friendship all the sweeter. With Erin and Alex, the conversation was easier, but we still had to take the risk and put ourselves in play. In both cases, we formed a friendship that just might last long after the vacation ended. That is, of course, if both sides make the effort to keep the conversation going.

We are home now and the world is back to passing us by on the street, but what if we just once in a while mustered up the courage to talk to that person across the aisle or at the next table over. Who knows whether or not that is a friendship waiting to be formed. Don’t be afraid to take the chance. After all, can we ever really have too many friends?

72 years and a cloud of smoke

Posted on by kwundrow

Appleton Post Crescent

February 1951

Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Wundrow of Rt 4 Appleton, Wisconsin, announced the birth of their first born son at 2:25 AM on February 25th at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Appleton. The baby boy named Kenneth, apparently by the attending nurse, weighed in at 8lbs 8 oz and joined the family previously ruled over by two earlier sisters, Karen, aka Peaches, and Kathleen, aka Kay also both named by same said nurse. Kenneth will now attempt to take his place on the family farm and attempt to survive the bossy nature of his two siblings.

As time passed, Ken, Kenny to his parents and absolutely no one else, was joined by another brother, Karl. Ken and Karl were to become fast friends and thick as thieves. There was no challenge that once thrown at one brother by the other wasn’t met by the other, no matter how great the danger. In time, mom and dad Wundrow would add two more brothers, apparently just to keep the two sisters in check.

Kenny would eventually become Ken, enter high school, and graduate summa cum average. Woodstock was in full swing that summer as was the Vietnam War. Ken wanted UW Madison, mom and dad, wanted Fox Valley Tech. A compromise was struck and Ken was off to Wisconsin State College at Oshkosh, later UW Oshkosh. He entered as a science major, apparently aiming to be a scientist, and left as a math teacher with a degree in education. Seems the counselor thought he’d make a better teacher than a scientist. That, or the fact that scientists didn’t get draft deferment status.

Loyal Middle School (Loyal, Wisconsin) needed an interim math teacher and four years later, Oregon School District (Oregon, Wisconsin) did as well. Twenty-five years later and an illustrious career in education coming to a close, Kenneth Wundrow, EA. sold his blossoming tax business to the highest bidder, left teaching, and entered what would be a tax and financial planning career.

Now entering his sixth year of semi-retirement, and because a reasonable number of people still feel he has a little bit of wisdom left to share, volunteers as a business mentor. When able to say no, he travels the “world” with his wife of forty-two years, Deb.

And that’s it. seventy-two years summed up in two or three paragraphs. Some where along the line I have grown a little over four feet and gained roughly 180 pounds. I’ve added two beautiful, incredibly bright daughters to this world (Bailey and Kathryn), inherited two well appreciated son-in-laws (John and Eli) and at last count, two incredibly sharp grandchildren (Jackson and Adela) with a future draft pick to be named in June.

Life IS good and on this day each year, I want to thank the countless number of friends who wish me happy birthday, support me in my endeavors, and generally make living so worth well. Age is just a number and whether or not I like mine being such a big one, I will savor all the years that have passed and wisely spend all the ones that remain.

My Bucket List of Thrills

Posted on by kwundrow

I long ago created a list in my mind of the five daring feats I wanted to complete in my lifetime. They were in no particular order at the time, to jump out of a plane, parasail, paraglide, bungee jump, and zip line. The first one that I accomplished was to jump out of a plane. I had a friend in the Air Force and while visiting him in North Carolina, he informed me that he had begun a skydiving school and wanted to take me up. The following day, I mustered up my courage, listened to the lesson, practice jumped off a picnic table (not sure that was convincing), and the next morning I was crowded into a plane full of skydivers. Back then, they were not doing tandem, so I would be jumping alone and being a beginner, would come out of the plane at 10,000 feet on a tether. The tether being what would pull my chute at the end of a 200-foot freefall. I steeled my courage as I approached the open door of the plane and then summoned my innards to stay put. I not only managed to exit the plane, there had been some doubt, but I thoroughly enjoyed the rush and then the reassuring opening of my chute and the reasonably gentle ride to the ground. Number one was off my list.

Parasailing came next. I had arranged a family trip with my wife and two young daughters to Mexico. On day two of our trip, the parasail boat pulled up to our beach. The girls were definitely game, my wife was not, but after a brief negotiation, more so with my wife than the boat driver, we were harnessed up and getting ready to be launched from the back of the boat. My daughters were first and went tandem. Watching from the back of the boat I caught myself wondering why I had had to wait so long to do this. They sailed for some time and eventually were winched back in and then it was my turn. They hooked me in and away I went. Some seventy feet in the air, I felt an urge to show off for my daughters. I would pull on the harness and swoop from one side and then back to the other. It was on one of these graceful swoops that I looked down at my harness and suddenly realized that I was hooked to the tow rope, not with a locking carabiner, but rather a simple S-Hook. I decided it might be time to sit still, very still. Again, I survived, and the experience was well worth the time and the money. Number two had been completed.

It would be another thirteen years before I got a chance for my next bucket list feat. My older daughter and I were in Columbia visiting my younger daughter who was spending the summer in an internship for study abroad. We had barely settled in when my younger daughter informed us that she had arranged a paraglide adventure for later in the week. Paragliding, unlike parasailing, is done without any connection to the ground. It is in actuality, flying sans an engine. We would at least be flying tandem with an experienced pilot, interpretation here, a thrill junkie. Our glide would take off from the edge of a three-thousand-foot cliff, ten-thousand feet up a mountain. Our lesson, all five minutes of it, consisted of three commands that our non-English speaking pilot had learned, possibly sometime during the five-minute lesson. The first command was “walk”, the second was “run”, and the third was “sit”. I was ready, or so said my daughter, and the pilot said “walk”. So I walked, waiting for the next command, to run, all the while noticing that we were terribly close to the edge. “SIT” screamed the pilot. My mind, already racing, was asking what the heck happened to “run”. Fortunately for both of us, the pilot was so forceful in his command, I sat! And in that instant, we were airborne. For the next fifteen minutes we literally soared like a bird. We would turn on edge and drop several hundred feet only to turn again and gracefully sail upward on the updrafts coming from the valley below. There are no words to describe the sensation. The flight ended far too soon. As I checked off number three, I promised myself I would find some way to do this again. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened, but then I’m not done yet.

This morning, as I awoke to our third day on the Island of Kauai in Hawaii, I was greeted by Larry, our traveling guru, with “Do you want to go zip lining? There is an opening if we get there in the next ten minutes.” My response was immediate, “Of Course!” or some slightly more colorful version of that. We got to the Koloa Zip Line Company in time to join our group of fellow zip liners. We would be doing eight different zip lines ranging in length from 400 feet to the last one at 2,600 feet, half a mile. We were told that on the last zip line, we would hit a speed of 54 miles per hour. I was stoked (apologies for the obvious reference to my age). I was also nervous, but that soon turned to excitement. With each zip line accomplished, confidence grew. Where there was hesitation on the take off for the first zip line, it became wanting to go before the guide was even ready to let you go on the remaining lines. Each line offered the chance to try a different technique. Though I balked on the first chance to go superman (on your stomach, arms outstretched in flying mode), the next chance up, I agreed, got strapped in, and took off. Our guides were incredible, they kept us safe, challenged us to try new techniques, and bonded us as a group. As with paragliding, it ended all too soon. I had flown over a valley, a gorge, and canopies of trees. I had a blast. Number four, done.

I still have number five out there. My wife says, “And that’s where it will stay!”, but we will see. I have climbed a mountain, made it to the top of Half Dome, albeit via the trail and cables, and have so far accomplished four out of the five thrill feats I decided on so long ago. Each one of these had an element of fear that I needed to deal with, but I have found that by spending less time thinking about the what ifs and more time thinking about the sense of accomplishment and the ultimate reward of the experience, the easier it is to take that first step; the first step out of the plane, the first step off the boat, the first step off the cliff, or the first drop onto the zip line. In every case, the rest was a piece of cake! A delicious, exciting, and rewarding piece of cake.