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Around the time Peter Pan made its Broadway debut, two twins were born in a hospital in New York City, my grandmother and her twin brother, my great uncle. When coming up with names for the twin babies, my great, great grandparents on my father’s side decided to be hip with the times and pay homage to Peter Pan. The boy would be named Peter and the baby girl would be called Adrienne on her birth certificate, but would eternally go by Wendy for the rest of her life, a nickname that stuck.
Given our often disjointed and complex histories, as Americans, there always seems to come a time when we want to make sense of our existence and piece together a family tree. On my Dad’s side, we have had the advantage of Great Uncle Peter, who has deliberately and delicately woven together our family story on my Grandmother Wendy’s side, character by character, migrant ship to migrant shore. My Dad’s father was also originally from New York, and I recently came upon a site, ancestry.com, which has given me access to ship records, to a passport application form of my great Aunt Constance, “Connie,” and some census information with both included. I also saw death certificates of both Delafield and Wendy (Grandparents, whom I would never remember meeting, thanks to the popularity of cigarettes during their adult life). At any rate, these documents have filled me with a sense of wonder. Why did Delafield go to France when he was just a teen? Connie was awfully short, just 5’3, and had blue eyes and brown hair, just like me. What was her life like?
Now, my Swede’s mother has created a neatly documented book for him, going from Farfar and Mormor (Grandfather and Grandmother), to several generations back, including names and pictures. His history, though also quite interesting, including several relatives who fled from a small island between Estonia and Sweden during the war, seems so well documented, so cared for and straight-forward. Though global, transcontinental, and transitory, perhaps deep down we are all a bit tribal, searching ultimately for that which makes us, us. My Dad always tells me that I look a lot like his mother.
When I examine her black and white photos, I wonder about this woman. I wonder about her two years of college, her four sons, her late calling to become a minister, her thick coke-bottle glasses, her deep, gray eyes and heavy eyelids. I wish deeply to have met her, to have known her in her old age. For now, she will remain Wendy, the baby born in the Bronx who would become the matriarch to a family beyond her capacity of imagining.
      
With the New Year just two days away, it is time to start making promises. Promises to ourselves that we will forget about come March if we aren’t diligent, or maybe even by mid-January if they are outlandish enough. There is something very American about a New Year’s Resolution, I dare say. It seems we always think that things could be just a touch better, we could push ourselves just a touch farther, be skinnier, have whiter, wider smiles, be fitter, richer, sexier, better read or better travelled. Perhaps with this in mind, I have become mildy infatuated by the goal of being lagom*(not too much, not too little.) That said, I am all for self improvement. It is always good to face our little demons head on. And of course, like many of you, I admit that I do have my resolutions neatly lined up in a list too. Here are just a few resolutions and some anti-resolutions for a smile:
· I resolve to call home more often.
· I resolve to find my calling, whatever that means.
· I resolve to speak better Swedish and read the newspaper more often.
· I resolve to be more conscious of what I eat.
· I do not resolve to eat more vegetables and eat less chocolate cake, which will be done consciously, see above. (Ups! How did that get in there?)
· I resolve to learn another language this year.
· I do not resolve to talk less or more quietly, or to cure my annoying (dare I say, addictive?) laugh.
· I resolve to worry less about the future and live more in the present.
· I resolve to take a walk in the woods at least once a week.
· I do not resolve to run a marathon.
· I resolve to be more generous with my time.
· I resolve to save more and consume less.
· I resolve to wear more color.
· I resolve to sing more, laugh more, love more.
So dear friends, if you have any resolutions, don’t be shy. A few anti-resolutions would be good too. Happy New Year and may the next one bring you all joy and a dusting of magic and wonder.
     
The truth is I didn’t want to be here this Christmas. This is my second Christmas in Sweden and I wanted to go back to see my family for the holiday (funny how we take the holidays so personally). The second of anything is always a little bit lack-luster, I suppose, but after a year here, a recent birthday in London, and a general feeling of winter/holiday blues given the 2:30 pm sunsets, I really just wanted to go home.
For the sake of the season, I woke up yesterday morning and told myself that even if this wasn’t going to be my variant of Christmas, by golly it was going to be a good one. Now, Sweden is a little bit closer to the North Pole, as a friend recently reminded me. By default it is also closer to Santa and all of his reindeer (I dare say, I have been served reindeer here more times than I can remember). With this proximity and a naturally cozy (mysigt) driven culture in mind, why was I complaining so much?
The truth of the matter is, this Christmas was lovely. It was candle-lit, filled with lots of Swedish children, glogg, meatballs, herring, pastries, porridge, spicy Czech beer, potatoes, gravy and turkey (especially for me a la Thanksgiving), ribs, chocolates, coffee, tea, crisp bread, rye bread, cheese, schnapps, gingerbread cookies, almonds, raisins, chocolates, and love. I felt like a spoiled-rotten Swedish kid on his birthday. We sung songs, we sat by the Christmas tree, we were gluttonous, lazy, lingering and loud, with heavy doses of yuletide and joy.
Oh, did I mention that I got to play Santa this year? Yes, with a heavy American accent, I put on a red Tomten (Santa) costume and brought presents and good tidings to the little ones. Despite my reservations, my Swedish mother-in-law noted that Santa could very well be a foreigner. Now if that isn’t integration, what is?
On that note, I hope you are all enjoying your varieties of Christmas this year. Signing off from the North with a proper, Ho, Ho, Ho!
//Santa
     
In the highly volatile global labor market, where a Master’s, M.D, J.D or a PhD have become the BA of yesteryear, there is a generation of young people trying to find happiness. We’ve been told we were bright for a while now.
Just as we are settling into all this praise, the dreded Master’s dissertation is finally written. The sobering reality of finding a job is cast upon us and we are thrust into the world, prepared, we are told, for anything. Reconnecting with old friends across the last few years has taught me a few interesting lessons. To begin with, life is complicated. There is no ideal job and it may take years, thousands of kilometers and the occasional stroke of luck to find a profession that can meet our demanding profiles. The problem with the gen-Y twenty-some-things today is that we are impatient. We expect constant change, challenge and excitement. Come one, we are the first generation that had email accounts by our mid-teens, children of the extravagant 80’s where Reagan/Thather economics taught us to be good good consumers. Fast-paced, high-volume, high-action, that’s how we like our information consumed. Unlike our parents and grandparents, we cannot often conceptualize staying in the same job for three decades. The pressure is also great. For every entry- level position there is a troop of rising stars popping out of university hungry for the kill. For every mid-level position there is a line of those who are more experienced, better-connected. What is comforting to know, four years after my BA and just two years after graduating from my Master’s is the myriad of experiences and lives my friends and classmates have led, with paths leading them to the Philippines, Dubai, Sweden, London, the US, Africa, among them budding doctors, teachers, humanitarians, lawyers, journalists, academics, designers, architects, artists and dreamers.
Nearly all have taken the path less travelled by, and yes it has made all the difference. But it isn’t that easy. There is no quick fix, no magic bubble, or experience or internship that is going to solve all of our problems. Each one of us reaches our point of saturation at a different moment. This might happen two years into a consulting gig, or half-way through med school. It may hit us on a flight back home to a country that was never ours to begin with. Or maybe it comes in a long observation of ourselves in a bathroom mirror in between meetings. Have we made the right decision? What were you going to be when you grew up, I asked my Dad once. He says he still dreams of that same question, a practicing physician of more than 30 years. For now, he says, eat your vegetables, sleep well, and dream well. That may just be the soundest advice I have heard since graduating.
     
A chocolate cake and a bottle of champagne. Three old friends and a Finsbury Park apartment. A telephone call from a faraway boyfriend and an all-day sprinkling of text messages and emails. This year I am thankful for my friends, for the old ones and the new ones, for the long-lost ones and the present ones. For the tall ones and the short ones, the skinny ones and the fat ones, for the ones with funny accents and the ones who can appreciate my funny accent.
We all get older. We can hold our breath and fight against it. Alternatively, we can exhale, pop a bottle of champagne and take in the blessings which surround us. Daily. Interminably. Remarkably and incredibly. We are blessed. This year started out a lonely one in a faraway land. It ended in an incredibly accompanied way, in a land that felt a little more human, closer, and dearer.
On that note, thanks for reading this blog. Thanks for your emails and your text messages and for keeping me company on this long and bumpy ride.
     
One of the only good things about a long commute is the time it gives you to read. I have read more fiction in the last year, than I had in the past three, an indulgence that I rarely allowed myself when faced with the tremendous amount of non-fictional reading in grad school. My latest discovery has been a Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami. A friend of mine whom I see periodically in Cambridge, has the habit of letting me borrow her books, the latest being Dance, dance, dance.
A funny thing happens in this novel. About a third of the way into it, it becomes fantastical, allowing for elements of the surreal. As if awoken from a dream, the story moves on, not dwelling on these events but not forgetting them either. Our protagonist is in his mid-thirties, divorced, and a bit of the writer’s version of a short-order cook. He is observant, sensitive and fallible, expressing moments of great dignity and character throughout. Anyone who has lived alone and experienced the bitter-sweet melancholy of this contemporary solitude will be able to relate well with him.
Marukami weaves together the life of our protagonist with a series of sub characters, mostly women, who are impactful to him both in the simple sense of finding solace in company, but also help him to progress emotionally. Dance, dance, dance’s narrative is elegant, with an economy of words that is sometimes hard to find in more classic literature. With just ten pages to go, I sat an extra ten minutes in Uppsala station, determined to finish before I went to work. As I turned to the last page, I could feel the momentum of the train preparing for its return trip to Stockholm. With a minor stroke of luck, I escaped onto the platform. That, it seems, is reading at its best.
     
A funny thing happened to me recently. I woke up one morning and could speak Swedish. What no classes, newspapers, or even Swedes could teach me, was to feel comfortable in their language, and I finally do. I understand about 80% of what is going and and can speak pretty decent conversational Swedish. How this happened, don’t ask me. I have felt quite dismal in Swedish for the past year. In fact, it almost feels like a bit of a miracle, really. Maybe after you digest something long enough, you finally internalize it.
I leave you with an essay I wrote about language learning recently:
Having grown up in rural America, my window into the world came in the form of a foreign language, one that would jump from the blackboard and came alive for me in Germany during one particularly rainy summer. Ten years later, this continues to be true. What began as a passion for German, spawned into studies of Spanish, then Italian, Arabic and Swedish. Each language has provided a unique platform for discovery, only building on each other across time and space. Learning languages opens the tiniest crevices in your brain, creating sparks and connections, facilitating epiphanies where misunderstandings once thrived. Mastering a language is a hard and arduous process. It is painful and embarrassing, and perhaps because of this, incredibly rewarding. It is a raw and vulnerable experience, one that invades your dreams, if you are lucky. When you master multiple languages, you have dialogs with yourself in a handful at a time, without ever considering the oddity of it all.
These experiences have shaped my understanding of what it means to be a global citizen as well as the function of languages. The learning process provides unique cultural and linguistic obstacles, teaching you both the meaning of linguistic marginalization and also how and why linguistic minorities unite. Indeed, being the “other” in any language community facilitates a series of endless linguistic case studies. Each one unique and noble, and above all, incredibly personal.
     
Sweet potato pie, a staple of the American Thanksgiving fare. Spicy, sweet, Carmely, doughy, buttery, heavenly. This rare little concoction was brought to little Sweden last night when a friend of mine came over for a bit of baking and red wine (never a bad combination). Among other things, she brought with her a bag of Sweet potatoes and a great story to accompany them. In the US, sweet potatoes are called “yams,” their denomination originating from a tribal word used by the slaves. She told her Swedish boyfriend he better get his little hands on some yams for her pies. ICA, a major Swedish Supermarket, looked high and low for some “yams” and instead of what they actually are (sötpotatis= sweet potato), they shipped in a barrel of Ghanaian “yams.” These ended up being the size of a small dog and basically a large root. When Mr.Swede brought back the yams, a good laugh was had and sweet potatoes were used instead. Ah, the linguistic subtitles in our sweet nothings.
Well, we both made our pies, and today on probably our most representative holiday of the year, we celebrated at work with homemade sweet potato pie. Verdict was good. Thumbs up from all of my colleagues, Swedish and otherwise (as if they would have the courage to break the heart of a girl holdng a home-baked pie).
     
This past week I have been in Montreal. What started out as a business excursion, slowly melded into a visit with an old friend. How blessed I have been as of late to be able to reunite with so many kindred spirits. This was not my first time in Montreal; though my encounters with the city seem to linger in my memory. As a kid, my brother and I were first stunned by the city. We had driven through the night, as my parents often did, and woke up in our impressively foreign hotel room. Hearing our beloved cartoon shows in French, my brother remarked with a heavy helping of eight-year-old enthusiasm, “Holy shit! We’re not in Kansas anymore!” No, we were a long way off from the Midwest indeed.
Time number two to Montreal was to visit the same friend I saw this weekend, who was then studying at McGill. We were stupid enough to travel there during our spring break (not recommendable) and basically walked around in knee-deep slush for about a week. Our only reprieves were Ethiopian food (the Blue Nile, go there!), Quebecois, and same feeling of utter transformation that my brother and I had felt as kids. Indeed, Montreal is remarkably different from the rest of Canada or the US. You go there feeling transcended, transformed, lifted into a neo-colonial, charming, winding, cobble-stoned city.
My third journey to Montreal was with a friend from LA, who studied with me a few summers back. She and I journeyed from our campus in VT to the city, in her disgruntled, old and delightful car, lovingly called Rosinante, after Don Quixote’s dying but beloved horse. Rosinante was leaking antifreeze as we crossed the border into Canada, but eventually he chugged his little way into one of the most breathtaking revelations of all time, Montreal in the Summer. As we made our way up the crossroads and biways of a dozen intersecting highways, the main road opened up like a blossoming orchid right into the heart of the city center. Among other adventures, that visit was characterized by bare feet in the park, French feasts, and our denouement, the last evening on which we hung off of a low- lying tree with a friend of hers, reading an English translation of the Odyssey and drinking red zinfandel with hand-woven crowns of leaves on our heads (I kid you not). Life does not get much sweeter, I dare say.
This last trip to Montreal involved more conference centers and world trade centers than previous ones, but the results were nevertheless sweet. After a few days at the conference, I shifted hotels and spent the day working. In the evening I headed out to the Old part of the city, and saw a magnificent light show in the Notre Dame Basilica. Though truly impressive architecturally, the show provided just the right touch of nationalism and history to remind you that it was funded by the government of Montreal. It is funny how historical figures in films on cities always seemed to be so well made- up and cheerful. “Why yes, we shall build a school and make peace with our native brothers” (yeah right). I guess they knew we were recording them, even then. My friend arrived the next evening, and we celebrated, as always, with a lovely meal. The next day we walked around for a good nine hours, discovering, re-encountering, and mildly freezing our butts off. We ended that evening back in the Old Town, where I had quail and a glass of red wine, she lobster and a Martini. We then returned to the hotel and watched part of a film on her lap top, falling into a deep slumber, coaxed by the lull of our own chitter-chatter just as the clock struck twelve.
In the morning, I hopped in the cab, noting the fantastic weather that characterized my departure. The taxi driver was silent enough to allow me to have my last moments with the city. We drove through the sparkling high rises, the slums, the highways, byways, and freeways. Just as the city had once opened up to me a few years back, she seemed to be waving goodbye in a swirl of cement, frozen parks and concrete. Au revoir, Montreal, thanks again for everything.
     
After months of separation, I am back in the US on business, staying in San Francisco. Yesterday, following a long day’s work from the hotel room, I ventured out in the evening to have dinner with a friend who lives in the area. She and I decided to just start walking, with no particular route, meandering our way to an Italian restaurant where she had made a reservation. The temperature was pleasantly mild, the vibes positive, and the smells in the air rich and diverse. At a number of crossroads along Market Street, which spliced its way through the Mission district, I was taken aback by the breathtaking aromas of all sorts of cuisine. There seemed to be fresh cut flowers on every street corner, lots of unique types of people, and an impressive diversity all around me. Life is just bursting at the seems in this city with a pleasant dose of chaos that seems often lacking in Northern Europe. One thing that did impress me, however, were the pockets of poverty all around the city. I realize now just how out of touch I have become with the homeless, living in Sweden. This is not to deny their existence in Stockholm, but it really just isn’t the same.
My friend and I talked about politics, our lives, futures, dreams and ideations. She is at the mid-way point in her language PhD at Berkeley and was a glorious flurry of thoughts. Dinner was followed by a three hour walk, ending in Dolores Park, which had a sparkly view of the business district with its bright lights and towering buildings. Some bridges glimmered in the distance, allowing for just a slivered peak of the Bay. I felt lucky last night. Lucky, blessed and incredibly alive. I have missed the US in a way which is hard to solidify in words. Returning to the hotel late, my legs felt like jelly and my back ached. I fell asleep with a thousand new images in my mind of the evenings sights and discourse. However briefly, goodness, it´s good to be back.
     
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