I ate almost as much popcorn as I strung.
We hosted Christmas dinner, complete with too-dry turkey and Mom’s creamy green bean casserole. Uncle Paul and Aunt Julia were there, as well as our cousin, Brent, and his fiancée, and a few of Mom’s cousins from northern Wisconsin. Jerry joined us, helping to cut the turkey with slow, precise strokes. “This man knows his way around a bird,” Dad had announced, clapping Jerry on the shoulder. With an apron tied around her neck and pot holders for hands, Mom was in her element. Grandpa gave horse rides on his knee to the toddlers, and Stacy stopped by, too, after the Lemkes’ family meal. Through it all, Johnny picked at his food like a fussy toddler.
It snowed every day of our Christmas break, and once the excitement of our presents had worn off, Emilie and I were mostly cooped up. She practiced the clarinet for hours on end, until even Dad requested that John Philip Sousa be confined to the basement, please. A friend rescued Emilie for a day of shopping in Milwaukee, and Mom took me ice-skating at the indoor rink in Waukesha with Katie and Kari Schultz and a few other girls from school, but otherwise, the weeks passed in a blue chill of boredom. Even as we watched TV or read books or played marathon games of double solitaire, it seemed our whole family was holding its breath for Johnny.
We didn’t miss a meet that season. Piled into the Caprice, we followed the Ships’ bus to tournaments in Kiel and Fond du Lac and Menomonee Falls, then spent entire Saturdays in the bleachers waiting for Johnny to wrestle, standing every so often to stretch our backs or relieve our behinds. Even Grandpa came along, although he complained that the car ride was too long and we sat in the bleachers too long and it took too long to make it all the way through the brackets.
Stacy was at every tournament, too. During the long lulls between Johnny’s matches, she sat in a corner of the gymnasium with the other kids from Lincoln High. The girls took turns braiding each other’s hair or passing around homework to be copied; they snapped gum and sucked lollipops and leaned close, heads together, for a whispered conversation that ended in a bout of hysterical laughter. Stacy carried a thick binder that was completely covered with doodles. Stacy and Johnny. I love Johnny H. Stacy Lynne Hammarstrom. It made me feel funny, to see her trying on our name for size.
She always crossed the bleachers to say hello to us, to chat about how Johnny was doing or how Johnny was feeling or who Johnny was up against. She had become a wrestling expert overnight. “See that one there, in the green sweatshirt? That’s Crowley, he’s in the 160s, too. That’s Johnny’s toughest opponent of the day,” she would say, bent into our airspace. From her necklace dangled the gold heart locket that Johnny had bought her for Christmas, with the money he’d saved from doing his chores and other odd jobs around our farm.
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