Leif Wrestling With His Cousin Tim

Sometimes I think the photos on this blog leaves the impression that Leif had a sort of solitary existence, since I don't post many pictures with other people in them, but it's a false picture. Leif had friends he cared deeply about and an extended family he enjoyed. Like me, he was more of an introvert and never had a crowd of friends, but he enjoyed and was committed to the ones he had, and he had a good time at social and family gatherings. It would have been fun to show more of that on the blog.

This photo I had never seen until the end of March when my sister, Lannay, brought several photos she had taken years ago. It was taken in 1985 when Leif was ten years old. He's on the floor in the red shirt, wrestling with his cousin Tim. Tim's sister, Holly is peeking over Tim's shoulder at the top left. Leif would have loved to do some of the things that Tim, and his dad, Leif's Uncle Donovan, got to do, like race stock cars. Instead, he raced his used RX7 and later RX8 on the highways. (Not a good idea and it scared the daylights out of us.)

I still wonder how many more photos of Leif I've never seen, that someone else took. Maybe more will surface.

Imagicat and Leif

This week I've been doing writing workshops with third through fifth grade classes at an elementary school in Brandon, and using my book, Imagicat, to illustrate both the elements of story and how a kid could write a book. The main characters of the book are an eleven-year-old boy named Jeff and his alter ego, a snippy cat he calls Mortimer.

Jeff's character was modeled on some of the personality traits and actions of my brother Donovan and Leif, so I've been talking a lot about Leif this week and showing a photo of him, along with other photos of people in our family who influenced the characters in the book.

I talk about how Leif, at the age of eleven, didn't really like doing school work, much like Jeff. He didn't mind going to school, he just minded it "following him home." He hated homework. And, like Jeff, he liked to find some way to put his own, original "stamp" on an assignment.

Leif also chose the little kitten that we named Scamp, who became our favorite cat. Scamp was full of fun and we all loved his antics. The kids love hearing about them and how they came to influence the character of Mortimer in the book.

How I love this photo of Leif and Scamp, who provided us with many hours of entertainment and affection. Leif, at eleven, cuddling that little rascal, and wearing his signature black leather Members Only jacket, in the days before he wore glasses, the days before he knew he couldn't achieve his dream of becoming a pilot, the days when he and his friend Robert would come home after school and ask what was happening the the book NOW, and I would read them the latest chapter, the days when they would snicker over it and give me ideas about how to make it better.

Imagicat will always be linked in my mind to Leif, Scamp, and my brother. I'm glad I can share it with over three hundred children this week.

The Old Stone House in Mahattan, Kansas - Part 2

Leif lived at 804 Moro twice, once when he was a baby from birth until he was a year-and-a-half old and we moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, and the second time from July 1992 when he moved back from Puerto Rico until he moved out to live with Nikko, which must have been the sometime between the summer of 1994 and 1995.

That seems like a short time, but that house had been a sort of constant in Leif's life from birth in 1975 until it was demolished in the summer of 2005. While we didn't live in it all that time, traveling and living around the world, we owned it and his grandmother, my mother, Marion S. Kundiger, lived in it for the years we were gone. We came back there to visit, had family reunions there. In short, it was home, the home we knew we could always go back to, the one constant in our lives besides each other.

It was where he saw his grandmother, his Uncle Donovan; his cousins Rick, Holly and Tim; sometimes his Aunts Lannay and Sherie and their families. It was where we celebrated Christmas when we could.

After he moved out, it was still the place to go back to Mom and Dad's for dinner, for holidays, to celebrate Christmas.

Leif moved back there two months ahead of us in July 1992 while we were still in Puerto Rico, to live with his grandmother and take a driver's ed course at the high school. We arrived in September. Then the grueling work began. When we had lived there before, we didn't have nearly as much "stuff" as we were moving in this time and we consulted a structural engineer to be sure the house could handle the weight, and find out where to place it.

Although we had renovated in when we lived there from 1973-1976, and had worked on it several times during the intervening years when we were there for visitis, it needed a complete renovation again. This time, we decided to tackle refinishing the floors, knowing we would never manage to do it once we had everything moved in there. Little did we know what a mess we would get into. We knew that the first floor was oak. We rented a huge sander and ran it practically around the clock, the three of us taking turns with it. It was hard work, but it was nothing compared with the second floor.

The second floor was covered with old linoleum which was on it when we bought the house in 1973. By 1992, it was badly in need of replacement, or having something else done to the floor, and we decided to rip it up, not knowing what we would find underneath. We paid Leif to help us and the three of us spent days and days on it.

First we ripped up the linoleum, which we discovered was glued to Masonite which had been stapled to a yellow pine floor with a staple gun. Whoever did it had gone nuts with the staple gun and there were thousands of them. I counted over 200 in one square foot. Leif was so strong he could rip up the Masonite and linoleum in large chunks, which he threw out of the second story window. This left all the staples stuck in the floor, and some nails, too. In one chunk of the ripped up stuff, there was a long spiky nail that was sticking up out of a pile waiting to be tossed out the window and Leif stepped on it. The nail went right through his athletic shoe and into his foot. That necessitated our first trip to the emergency room that was caused by working on that floor. Luckily, it didn't continue to cause him pain, didn't get infected, and he healed fast.

Once we had all the linoleum and Masonite up and were faced with removing thousands of staples by hand, we also saw that the flooring was in lousy shape. It had apparently never been refinished after the house was built. The walking pathways were worn down to bare wood but those areas not trodden by feet for years and years were still covered with thick brown shellac. One place in the hallway was missing several boards and the area had been "repaired" by flattening an old turpentine can and nailing it over the hole.

The three of us spent days on the floor pulling up the staples until our hands and fingers were swollen and painful, but we finally got them all removed. About this time, I think everyone was about ready to curse me for insisting we refinish the floor. Then it was time to remove the shellac. It's impossible to sand off shellac. It just gums up the sander and starts to smoke. You have to dissolve it with denatured alcohol and sop it up, removing as much as you can that way before you can sand it.

Leif was removing a section at a time in this way, by pouring denatured alcohol on, spreading it around, leaving it for a few minutes to soften the shellac, and then wiping it up off the floor with rags and paper towels. He was working around the corner in the upstairs hallway, on the way to the back bedroom, when my mother came rushing up the stairs and around that corner because she had a doctor's appointment and hadn't been watching the time. She knew Leif was there removing the shellac and how he was doing it, but she somehow didn't think there would be a slippery puddle right in her way as she rounded the corner.

She slipped in it and took a terrible fall. She knew right away she had done something bad to her back so she lay still. I called the ambulance and they put her on a board to immobilize her back and neck and took her to the hospital. She had fractured two of the vertebrae in her back. She was in terrible pain. To my shock and surprise, they sent her home, even with that broken back, with very little instruction in how to care for her safely. That in itself is a long story, and we are just grateful that she healed and wasn't paralyzed. My brother, Donovan, had an old crank-style hospital bed that he got when the contents of an old hospital he tore down to build an apartment building were auctioned. He put it in our living room and I took care of her.

Meanwhile, we continued to work on the floor. Once the shellac was off and it was sanded, I had to patch innumerable holes with wood paste before I could apply the finish. While i was sliding around the floor doing this, I wore heavy jeans and sat on a large foam pillow to try to avoid the splinters in the old pine, but I wasn't successful. I got a very large one stuck in my fanny and had to make the third trip to the emergency room. Leif thought this was quite funny and loved to tease me about it.

Eventually, the floors were done, including putting in new boards instead of the turpentine can, and we went on to other things that needed fixing. Leif helped his dad install a split rail fence in the part of the property on 8th Street that didn't have a large hedge, helped paint, work on the yard, and much more. He had a lot of time, sweat and effort invested in the old place.

The old gravity hot water furnace was out into the house in 1904, according to a sooty old paper that was stapled to a floor beam in the basement. It had originally been a coal furnace but had been converted to natural gas years before we bought the house. Peter Anthony, who was four-and-a-half years old when we bought the house, thought it looked like a scary monster. It never seemed to disturb Leif, though. It's amazing that it was still working over 100 years later when we finally sold the house for demolition in 2005. What's amusing is that we found out that our neighbor when we children lived on Fairchild Street, Dr. Oscar W. Alm, had lived in that very house in 1929 when he moved to Manhattan, Kansas with his bride. They had a chance to buy the house in the 1930s but didn't because they thought the furnace was too old!

The photos of the house show the south and back sides, the picnic table we used so often, and Leif and Peter W. working on that floor. The odd thing is, we took many photos of the exterior of the house and yard, but foolishly never took before and after photos of the interior . . . or much of any shots of the interior except what showed up in the background of the many, many shots we took of people in the house for all the occasions we celebrated. The only time I systematically did take photos of the interior was when we cleaned it out right before we sold it, and then the rooms looks sadly empty and forlorn.

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The photos from top to bottom are:
1. Leif and Peter W. working on the upstairs flooring in our bedroom, August 1993.
2. The surprise Kundiger family reunion in 1993 in the backyard, held in honor of Leif's grandmother's 75th birthday, early on July 4, 1993. Leif is on the far left all in white sitting by his cousin Holly Kundiger.
3. The backyard picnic table, taken February 10, 1999.
4. The old gravity hot water furnace from 1904.
5. Looking at the southeast corner of the house and lot from the intersection of 8th and Moro Streets on March 18, 2001.
6. The east side of the house taken April 4, 1999.
7. The back of the house taken April 1999.

Leif & Holly - Fort Sheridan, Illinois - July 1987 - Age 12

Our sons grew up without the frequent closeness of our extended families except for some brief periods.

Peter A. got to spend quite a bit of time with his dad's aunts, uncles and cousins in Germany starting when he was 6 months old until he was 4 and a half years old.

Then there was a short time when we were back in Manhattan, Kansas that he was around my mother and my brother, Donovan and his family (cousins Rick and Holly; Tim wasn't born yet), but we left when he was only seven and Leif was just a year and half.

We were close to Lannay for a year when the boys were 2 and 8, but her daughters weren't born yet.

We also had the four years at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, when we were a few hours away from my sister, Sherie, and her family in Michigan, with cousins Shane, Brenda and Derek. Peter A. was only there for his senior year of high school and then back for Christmases, but Leif had time with his cousins the whole four years.

Then Leif spent more time with my mother and my brother Donovan's family when he was a senior in high school and a couple of years of college back in Manhattan, Kansas. By that time, Rick had left for service in the navy, but he saw quite a bit of Holly and Tim.

Otherwise, were were far, far away from our extended families, so our sons didn't grow up with a continuous sense of larger family and we traded that experience for the travel and life in Germany, Japan, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

However, Leif always enjoyed his cousins, and I think he if he'd had the chance, he would have spent a lot more time with them. They had a lot of interests and ideas in common.

He did have a chance to spend more time with his cousin Holly during two of the summers we lived at Fort Sheridan. Donovan sent her to stay with us for a few weeks each time and we had a good time together. We visited all the museums, downtown Chicago, and lots more.

You can see how Leif was starting to shoot up in height like a beanpole here. That year he was a gangly kid at the age of 12 and by the time he was 13, he was 6' 1" tall and shaving! It must have been an incredible transformation for him, but he took it in stride.

Leif & Us - Colorado Springs - May 28, 1991 - Age 16

It's hard for me to believe that the Leif I knew when he was a child and in high school, the one who loved the water, swimming, playing in the waves, SCUBA diving, became the man who wouldn't go in the water after the army. We couldn't get him to go to the pool with us, and if he went to the beach, he didn't go in the water. I don't know whether it was because he became self conscious about being overweight, or whether it was a symptom of depression, not enjoying things he had previously loved to do.

This photo of him was taken at the hotel pool where we were staying when we flew from Puerto Rico to Colorado Springs for Peter Anthony's graduation from the Air Force Academy. He sure looks right at home, doesn't he? At 16, he was tall and slim. His hair was getting long, and he looked like he belonged on the cover of a romance novel.

The evening after the pool photo was taken, we three went to one of the Academy Graduation Balls. My sister, Lannay, and my brother, Donovan, and my mother were also there. Leif was dressed in his snazzy, stylish "silver" suit. My, how all of us have changed! Peter W. is in his Army mess dress blues.

That was quite a trip. After Peter's graduation, he took off for South America with his best friend Dave, and we flew to California to visit Peter W's parents and then to Oregon to see Jerri's Uncle Jerry and cousin Marji. We all enjoyed the trip. It was a welcome interlude from the stress of being with the military during Desert Storm, the first Gulf War.

Leif's 21st Christmas 1995 - Manhattan, Kansas - Almost 21 years old.

The two Christmases that I remember Leif being happiest were when he was in love, 1995 and 2003. Leif fell in love and married young. I've already written about his marriage to Nikko and posted this photo of them on Christmas Eve 1995. They were newlyweds, both just 20 years old, and married only two months when this photo was taken. They were playful, cute, full of energy. We were all at my mother's house on Pottawatomie Street in Manhattan, Kansas, quite a crowd of us; my brother Donovan and his family, my sister Sherie and her family. I think all told there were 16 of us there. If I remember correctly, they were living in a basement apartment in the 800 block of Bluemont Street, just a block from our house. Leif was a student at KSU and working to help support them and Nikko had a job, too. I remember the jobs they had, but I'm not sure what they were doing in December 1995. They were still full of optimism and hope. How I wish all their dreams together had come true.

Leif's 18th Christmas 1992 - Manhattan, Kansas - Almost 18 years old

We only lived in Puerto Rico for two years and then Peter W. retired from the army after 24 years of service. We moved back to Manhattan, Kansas, to the old stone house and Peter elected to use his GI Bill benefits and go to back to school at Kansas State University to get a teaching degree.

We bought the old stone house in September 1973 when we moved back to Kansas from Germany. When Peter W. got orders to the JAG School and we moved again in the summer of 1976, he talked my mother into living there and taking care of the place, and renting out the extra 3 bedrooms to KSU college women. Now we were going to "kick her out." She always knew she would have to move if we came back and wanted to move it, in after living there for 16 years, I know it was a shock.

My brother, Donovan, was a custom home builder at that time, and he built a house for Mom in the "Kundiger Addition" on the south side of town. It was quite a rushed time for all of us, as she was packing to move out, we were trying to move in, and at the same time, doing a lot of painting and remodeling. Leif was a great help with all of it. He was strong and capable, and also had many good ideas. I'll write more about working on the house later.

It would have been better for Leif if he hadn't gone to three high schools. That made it hard to have the friendships and kinds of experiences so many teens take for granted. Unlike his older brother, Leif was reticent, shy, and did not mingle and make friends easily, so leaving his Puerto Rican friends behind and going to a new school wasn't easy for him.

Leif could be talkative, open, full of fun and had a great sense of humor, but he didn't show those characteristics until he knew someone and felt comfortable with them. On top of that, he had his own sense of style, which was also influenced by his two years in Puerto Rico. He didn't fit any of the cliques in Manhattan. He said there were three main ones, the jocks, the skaters and the farm kids. He didn't mention the academic types. Leif wore colorful clothing, let his hair grow very long (which wasn't the style then), and liked to wear a long, brown leather coat and combat boots.

Leif was 17, and although he was born in Kansas and had lived there as a very small child, we had moved away when he was only a year-and-a-half old. He had been back for visits when he was five, ten, and a young teen, so he did know the house, neighborhood and something of the town, but had no friends there. He did have two cousins still living in the area.

He didn't have his driver's license yet. Both my sons surprised me by not even asking to get their driver's licenses until they were 17. I didn't want him just learning to drive from us, partly because I felt someone with a different authority would make more of an impression, and partly because there would be a discount on the auto insurance if he took driver's education.

We found out that Manhattan High School was offering driver's ed in summer school, but it started before we were able to make the move, so we put Leif on a plane and sent him to Kansas to stay with my mother and take the course.

We got back to Manhattan at the end of August 1992 and Leif was already starting his senior year at Manhattan High School. He tried out for a part in the school musical, but didn't get one and was very disappointed. He felt that the parts all went to kids who had been there at the school for their whole high school careers and that even though he was really good, he didn't have a chance. I didn't see the tryouts, but having seen him as Kenicke in "Grease" at Antilles High School, I know how talented he was. After his experience in Puerto Rico, I didn't try to go out for soccer. I wish he had.

Leif did make some friends at MHS but only one really close friend, Jason Palenske. They remained friends for the rest of Leif's life.

Our first Christmas back in Manhattan we still had the small tree (artificial). You can see that it wasn't any taller than Leif. All our Christmas ornaments, and the tree, fit into one large box. As the years went by from 1992, Leif would tease us about the accumulation of Christmas decor, which mushroomed from one box to six and the tree "grew" much larger. Leif never seemed to care about Christmas decorations. What interested him were the family gatherings, the food, and yes, the presents.

This photo of him on Christmas of his senior year in high school, shows a tall, slender young man who had learned in Puerto Rico to carry himself well. He was becoming the "GQ Pirate," which was his "handle" for a long time.

January 28, 1993 he turned 18 and he got his first job, working for Idelman Telemarketing, and had some significant spending money, which he used to get a cell phone when it wasn't yet common for high school kids to have them, and for music CDs and cool gadgets, and began his "career" of introducing them to us.

Leif's 12th Christmas 1986 - Lawton, Michigan - Almost 12 years old

In the summer of 1986 we moved from Honolulu, Hawaii to Fort Sheridan, Illinois, a small army base on the north side of Chicago sandwiched in between the suburbs of Highland Park, Highwood and Lake Forest. Peter W. was actually assigned as the Staff Judge Advocate for the U.S. Military Entrance Processing Command (MEPCOM) at Great Lakes, a few miles farther north. We could have gotten quarters there, or lived in any of a large number of the northern suburbs, but after a thorough investigation of the schools, it was clear that the best place for our sons to go to school was in Highland Park, and accepting quarters at Fort Sheridan would put them into that school system. For Peter Anthony, it was a critical senior year, but for Leif, we knew it would be at least three years, and it turned out to be four.

Our sons had grown up so far away from my family for most of their lives that they really only knew my mother, who came to visit at least once a year wherever we lived. Moving to the Chicago area brought us closer to them, because my mother and my brother Donovan were a day's drive away in Kansas; my sister Lannay was a day's drive away in Maryland, and my sister Sherie was just a couple of hours drive away in Michigan. We were able to see them a lot more again and Leif took to his cousins very quickly.

1986 was the first Christmas on the US mainland since 1976, ten years! We spent it at my sister Sherie's home in Lawton, Michigan, and my sister Lannay and her family came, too. It was great to have a house full of family to celebrate with, and Peter Anthony and Leif got to know four of their first cousins. In the photo above, left to right are Peter Anthony (18), Derek, Leif (almost 12), Shane, Jacquie and Brenda. It was Peter Anthony's 18th birthday, my Christmas boy born on December 25th.

Christmas in the north, cold and snowy, seemed more like what we were culturally used to as Christmas weather, but it was a shock after three years in warm Hawaii!

Veteran's Day - Honor, Pride and Tears

Our family has so much to be proud of on Veteran's Day. Leif's father served our country for 24 years in the army. His brother, Peter Anthony, is in his 17th year of service in the Air Force (21st if you count his four years as a cadet at the Air Force Academy). My brother,Donovan, served in the army in the late 1960s. His son Rick served in the navy and his son Timothy served in the army. My brother-in-law DeWayne served in the army.

And Leif served as an infantry machine gunner, from January 1998 until May 2001, when he was medically boarded out of the service due to asthma that was somehow caused by his service and exacerbated by it when he was required to be out in freezing temperatures or to overexert carrying his incredibly heavy gear and gun. This was a terrible blow to him, but he was proud of his service and identified with it, considered himself a warrior, and was fiercely dedicated to his oath to uphold the United States Constitution.

Today was a day of honor, pride and tears, honor for Leif and all the military members of our family and nation, pride for their service, and tears for those who have fallen, whether in battle, because of their service, or otherwise.

Yesterday there was a piece on television about servicemembers and veterans committing suicide, and how the rate has climbed precipitously. Leif could be counted among those numbers, a medically retired, disabled veteran who never found his place in the civilian world.

Today we went to Bay Pines National Cemetery where Leif is inurned. I wore one of his dog tags, which you can see in the photo above. I knew I would break down, and I did. Peter and I both cried our hearts out for our lost son. I kept saying, "I want him back!"

I know that's impossible. I know the truth. But that's how I feel, and I'll never stop feeling that way. I miss him so!

I suppose that a grief counselor would say that I'm in the denial stage, but I would deny that. I know Leif is dead. I know he isn't coming back. I don't say it can't be so. But I also don't want to let him go.

I ran my hands over the stone, over his niche. I leaned against it and cried and cried.

Leif's friend and former girlfriend, Donna, came there today, too. She placed a single red rose for him and cried with us. Thank you, Donna, for caring and for honoring him.
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The photo of Leif at the top of this post was probably taken in 1998, before he was promoted to Specialist 4, before the problems with asthma set in.

Jerri, Peter Anthony & Leif - US Air Force Academy - May 1991

We were extraordinarily proud of Peter Anthony's acceptance to and graduation from the U.S. Air Force Academy, and no doubt visits to the Academy while Leif was in junior high and high school continued to excite him about a career in the Air Force like his brother, though Leif wasn't willing to compete academically for a spot at the Academy. I don't know whether at that time he had thought about Air Force ROTC, but I do know how much he wanted to be a pilot in the Air Force.

Ironically, Peter A. hadn't pursued an appointment to the Academy specifically to become a pilot, but he did become one, and that route was barred to Leif due to his nearsightedness.

This photo was taken of me, Peter Anthony and Leif in May 1991 when we were in Colorado Springs at the Academy for Peter Anthony's graduation. It was gorgeous weather and we had a wonderful time. There were ceremonies, parades, dress balls (fancy dances) and more. We flew there from Puerto Rico and were joined by my mother, my brother Donovan, and my sister Lannay, as well as friends from Hawaii and more. Note Leif's signature Oakley sunglasses.

Peter Anthony is still serving his country as an Air Force officer and is now a lieutenant colonel.

By this time (1991), Leif could dream about the Air Force in other ways, but he already knew he could not fly. In earlier visits to the Academy, I'm sure he still ahd those dreams. Leif was just completing his sophomore year in high school in this photo and was 16 years old.

Leif could easily have starred academically. He was brilliant, and he could get through school, including college, without taking notes or studying. He hated studying and homework and all the things that went with achieving academically, and he aimed for a B average and that's what he got.

His reasoning was that he wanted to be above average (and get the good student discount on our auto insurance that we told him he had to have if he wanted to drive), but wasn't willing to put in the time and effort to get As. He wanted to spend his time on other things, or as he put it, "to have a life."

We could never convince him to do otherwise, and it's a shame, because he wanted to meet "smart people," but didn't want to get into the kinds of classes or activities were he actually could do so. He would have been outstanding in several fields as long as he could do the practical, actual things of the work world, but he could never get there because he wasn't willing to punch the academic tickets needed.

He admitted one time that he probably should have gone into science, for his mind excelled at scientific concepts, but he wasn't willing to take the math courses required.

How I wish that today's world would have had more possibilities for a man like him with a mind and abilities but without a formal education to get him in the door. (He did have a bachelor's degree in general social science, but that is not a degree in demand in fields that would have been good for him.)