More forgetfulness

I've certainly been neglecting friends and relatives this year when it comes to their birthdays.

My friend Carmen, whose birthday was March 3, had to wait until February for her Christmas present and will probably have to wait until June until her birthday card arrives.

You see, I make or buy birthday cards for people. I even address them, but then they get stuck in my car for weeks since I never have time to go to the post office.

Poor grandma, my aunt and my dad. They never got any cards at all. I did remember to call my grandma, though, a day later, but not my dad.

And no, I'm not pregnant.

Today, I was the guest speaker in a journalism class at Middlesex Community College (they had cake and everything!). When I got back to the office, I realized I'd left the power supply to my laptop in the classroom back at the school.

My staff and I scheduled a whole bunch of community meetings for next week, and were just about to publish the schedule in the paper for tomorrow, when - and hour before deadline - I realized Monday is my first wedding anniversary and I'm taking the day off. Whoops.

Oh, and I just pulled into my driveway at home tonight when I remembered I never returned my husband's movie to Blockbuster. It's still in my car.

Can I please order some extra memory for tomorrow? I would only need like 5 gigs or so.

Another batch of food bread

About a week ago, I made batch of what is in our house called "food bread," a direct translation from the Swedish matbröd. It's basically any bread that you can have cold cuts and cheese on, (so not muffins or pastries).

My grandfather would have called this particular bread siktkakor, and the rye bread recipe is straight from his secret black baking book, via my grandmohter dictating it over the phone.

It was the first time I ever tried it by myself, and all things considered, it came out pretty decent. The best part? If I have half a slice of this for breakfast with some butter and cheese, I am full until lunch.

The Berlin Wall

I don't remember much about the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was 10 years old at the time, and I remember that a few weeks later - probably over the Christmas holidays - a classmate of mine went to Germany with her family and came back with a piece of concrete.

"What's that?" we all asked as she showed it off in school.

"It's a piece of The Wall," she said.

The wall was, of course, one of the stops on my trip to Berlin in 2001 when I went with my friend Jenny (above). Part of it still stands, showing a clear division of East and West that is not easily forgotten.

Apparently, when it happened, I wrote a song about the wall coming down. My grandmother just reminded me when I spoke to her last week. I vaguely remember hitting some keys on our old, out-of-tune piano and trying to compose some ugly notes on a sheet of home-made music notation paper.

My grandmother, who had just been released from the hospital after a back surgery, remembers laying in bed as I played and sang to her from across the room.

"Oh, I wish we had recorded it," my grandmother said.

All I can remember is that I - when I was 14 or 15 - found some badly written piece of pink paper, and when I tried to play the notes on it, it sounded like the theme song to "McGyver." I tossed it on the spot and never thought about it again.

About Easter

Easter was always my favorite holiday when I was a kid. Sure, it was great to get presents for Christmas and my birthday, but it was always such a big deal and so many people would come over and it was a bit annoying.

At Easter, I got to dress up like an Easter witch and like every other child in the neighborhood, go out and wish people a Happy Easter. The preparations took about a week. Not only did I need to choose the particular shawl I was going to wear over my head, but I had to make all the Easter cards to hand out to people.

My grandma would sit down with me at our large kitchen table and we would draw roosters and eggs and flying witches on little pieces of paper before folding them up and putting them into a little basket. I knew that when I got home on Easter Eve, all the cards would have been replaced by candy and money. I would make up to $15 from handing out the cards with my friends, money that would then last me for weeks when buying candy every Saturday.

In a way, a Swedish Easter is a little bit like Halloween, although there is nothing scary about it and you don't threaten to egg or toilet paper someone's house if they don't give you anything. You just get mad and walk away, and then you vow not to come back next year.

The reason people dress up as witches (some boys dress up in black like a chimney sweep) is because the superstition goes that on Easter, witches were especially active and their black magic especially powerful. On Maundy Thursday, the witches fly off on brooms to consort with the devil at some place called "blåkulla," returning on Easter Eve.

(The photo above is of my cousin many years ago in my grandmother's kitchen before heading outside for Easter)

I'm not the only talker

Some people think I talk too much. Well, they've obviously never met my grandmother.

My grandmother is one of those amazing women who can talk for an hour and never once stop to draw her breath. On the phone, she will let me chime in every once in a while, but it is not always necessary.

While I enjoy speaking with her - and convince myself that I am at least doing something that makes her happy - it can get tedious. Today, I played two games of spider solitaire, three games of regular solitaire and two games of mahjong during our conversations.

You see, the normal stuff doesn't bother me. The "what are you having for dinner?" questions or "how is work going?" inquiries are fine. Some stories she tells are even intriguing, like the ones about my childhood friend who now has two children and a husband who works three jobs to support her but wants a divorce since she has spent thousands of kronor on getting her teeth chemically whitened.

I always like to keep up with the local gossip. However, we seem to always end up with a few topics I cannot stand. First, my grandmother insists on telling me about friends of hers whom I have never heard of and never met. I understand she likes to share parts of her life, which is fine, but she always talks about them like I should have known them for years and should remember them from my childhood when, in fact, I am sure these people didn't even live in town when I was young.

Then, of course, my grandmother now insists on discussing items like the American economy and the new president. She watches CNN. She knows what is going on. And who am I to correct her when she says that no Americans know that their country is in debt? She saw the interviews. She knows how it is.

After some arguing, she always falls back on this: "Well, what do people think over there? What are people saying?"
"About what?" I usually ask.
"Well, you know," she replies. "About that bank closing down (substitute Wall Street bailout, Obama's speech, George W. Bush leaving, America's influence in Europe...)."
"I'm not sure," I say. "It's sad, I guess." (or "good, I guess")
"Yes, but what are people saying at your job? What are your friends saying?"
"Nothing."
"You must be talking about it?"
"No grandma," I say, now very irritably. "We don't talk about this kind of stuff. We just work and sleep and try not to worry about anything."

And then the topic eventually fades out. But I guess I should be happy and thankful that my grandmother still has her wits about her. Last week, for example, she was watching a movie about a terribly woman terrorizing a couple living in a downstairs apartment just so she could get ideas for what to do about her drunken neighbors.

The week before that, we got into a surprising discussion about birth control, which I will not recite here. It finally faded out after she had said "but where does it all go?" multiple times and I gave up trying to explain that the whole purpose of the pill is that you do not ovulate, so there is no "all" that needs to "go" any place.

As usual with our conversations, today's talk came to an end after a little over an hour - just to be resumed next week. With new topics in mind, I hope.

Grandma warnings

My grandmother was always trying to protect me when I was a kid. I could be pretty wild and impulsive when I wanted to, but I always listened well when told what to do.

As I grew older, I realized that not everything she told me was true. She would often warn me of things and come up with crazy stories to back up her warnings. Some of the warnings I would pass along to my friends (about the crazy deer in the woods, for example).

She always told me I had to be careful not to sit on clothes hangers if they had fallen onto the bed or the couch, because they could end up in my stomach. I think I was 12 or 13 before I asked my aunt “how could they get into my stomach?” She laughed. Grandma had told her similar things as a child. I then asked my grandmother what she meant. She told me “well, the hangers can be very sharp. They cut through your skin.” But somehow, I knew deep down that wasn’t the message she had been trying to convey.

Another thing she taught me was that soda was good for you. One summer, I wasn’t drinking enough liquids and my grandmother was afraid I would get dehydrated. She would place a glass bottle of Tom & Jerry soda in front of me and, before going out to play, I had to drink at least half of it (or down to the ears of Tom the cat). The soda was a nauseating pink (the food coloring is now prohibited) and the bubbles made me want to cry as they irritated the inside of my nose.

Swimming, of course, was not allowed until one hour after dinner. This has been proven to be a common myth parents use to get some quiet time after dinner. My grandma even went as far as to say that I couldn’t take a bath until at least an hour after dinner. Which mean that sometimes I took a bath pretty late and then went straight to bed, wet hair and all.

In the summers, however, I had to always put water on my head when being out in the sun. This helped me stay cool, grandma said. While it’s true it made me feel a bit better when it was hot, she always made me think this was a law or something. Then I realized none of my friends’ parents made them dip their heads in the water before they were allowed to run around outside.

Once grandma gets something into her head, it sticks there. I got sick from the smell of paint once when I was 6. She is now very concerned about my home improvement projects, constantly asking me how we can live in the condo while we are painting. As I try to explain that it really doesn’t smell that bad, paint nowadays has improved greatly, etc., she hits me with the one line you can’t argue: “Well, sweetie, you know I just want what’s best for you.”

Scary big dogs

My grandmother is afraid of a lot of things. One of them is horses, which is why she never let me go to riding school when I was a kid, even though all my friends go to go. When I moved to a farm a few years ago, she thought I was crazy and constantly worried I would get kicked by a horse.

My grandmother is also scared of big dogs. This weekend, I went to dog sit the above crew (plus two bunnies) while their owners went out of town for a wedding. Sadie the St. Bernard was there, as was Lilly the Newfoundland, Peppi the pug and Lucy the Bernese mountain dog. (If you don't know much about dogs, all three breeds except the pug are huge dogs that can knock you over with the swoosh of a tail, if they wanted to).

I first dog sat this crew a couple of summers ago. When I told my grandmother about the dogs, she was - again - very concerned for my safety. I was, after all, going straight from the dangerous horse farm to these three giant, monstruous dogs.

Now, Sadie, Lucy and Lilly are all extremely well behaved. They do not go outside unless you tell them to. They do not touch their dinners until you give them a signal, and they never ever jump on you (unless, of course, you stretch your arm straight out, pat it and say "give me a hug").

To calm my grandmother down, I had to send her pictures of the three big dogs rolled over on their backs with their bellies in the air. They do it all the time when I brush them, or even when I just look at them, sometimes.

"See?" I told her. "Does this look like a scary dog to you?"

She relaxed a bit, finally realizing I must know what I'm doing.

I just don't understand what is so scary. I mean, I was terrified of dogs when I was 4 after beeing bit by a little dachshund (tax), but after spending time with well-behaved dogs, my love of animals overpowered the fear.

To me, St. Bernards represent safety. Growing up, I always heard of them as rescue dogs from Switzerland, who work as part of a team. And in "Peter Pan," a St. Bernard is there to protect the children at night.

The Newfoundland is just a big, fluffy mess. And the mountain dog, she's as sweet as can be. In fact, she is so annoyed with the other two that she mostly goes off by her self to do her thing, like moping in the driveway or sleeping behind a recliner.

Of course, if you don't train big dogs, they can be a hassle. But these dogs? Piece of cake!

Grandmother selling her house

I grew up with my grandparents in an old-fashioned house. From what my aunt tells me, the house was old-fashioned 35 years ago when my grandparents bought it.

In 1986, they built a bathroom and added a hot water heater. They also “modernized” the wallpaper in one of the bedrooms. (Well, they came across some orange and brown wallpaper that nobody else wanted and put it up.) Everything else is pretty much the same as when they bought it. No central heating, just wood-burning stoves in the kitchen, living room and bedroom.

After my grandfather died in 1991 and then again when I moved out in 1995, my grandmother was talking about selling the house to move to an apartment. I always thought it wasn’t going to happen. When I moved to the United States in 1998, she put the house on the market for a little while, but got no offers.

A few years later, my grandmother realized seriously she wasn’t getting any younger. Carrying in wood every day to start a fire was wearing her down. She decided to get serious and put the house on the market again.

None of the people who came to look at the house were really interested. It just wasn’t modern enough for them, my grandmother said. So she asked my aunt for help putting an ad out on the Internet.

Shortly thereafter, a man in his late 40s contacted my grandmother about buying the house. After spending numerous hours on the phone with my grandmother, he offered her $28,000 in cash for the house. But my grandmother was suspicious.

“I think he’s more interested in me than the house,” she said. When I asked her, “How so?” she told me that the man proposed to her, just a couple of days earlier.

My grandmother turned down his offer, and he eventually bought another house in the south of Sweden. Then he started calling her again asking her to come visit him. He called her almost every day for a while, and my grandmother, being the nice person she is, just patiently explained to him that she is old enough to be his mother.

“That doesn’t matter,” he told her. “I like mature women.”
She did not, however, mention that she has a boyfriend. Nor did she tell the boyfriend about the proposal. All she told me was, “I’m selling the house because I want to get rid of all the inconveniences, not because I want more of them.”

She did finally get her house sold. A Stockholm couple bought it as their summer home, fixed it up, then sold it to a Dutch family. And my grandmother lived happily ever after…