The Old Man and the Porn Movie: A Love Story

Posted on by
Reply

Love Story

Prologue:

She asked him what he wanted to do with the time they had left the rest of the afternoon, now that they were done with the errands at the bank and grocery store. “To tell you the truth,” he said hesitatingly looking at her sideways with the beginnings of a shy smile, “I’d like to go see a dirty movie.”

Part I:

The Man

Tiny Marty Finder was a gentle and friendly octogenarian who had a lot more going for him than met the eye. He was a guy you might say was the embodiment of the saying that one should not judge a book by its cover. Or perhaps he was a reminder that what most people think of as “normal” for a guy his age is simply an arbitrary and random, not to mention false supposition that grandfathers don’t want sex and intimacy, aren’t easily aroused, and don’t wake up with the same aching erection and desires as do younger men.

Marty lived comfortably in a suburb of Boston in a subsidized senior living facility, where most of his needs were met. What he required extra in terms of logistical assistance, such as getting to and from his seemingly endless doctors’ appointments, he had hired a driver, a lovely Russian woman named Alina.

Marty was a Holocaust survivor, and had arrived to Ellis Island from Poland via Germany in 1948. Although he had lived a good life in America by all standards, he now spent three days a week at the dialysis outpatient clinic in Waltham, took about 18 different meds a day, and had diabetes. He did what is not uncommon among survivors: he kept meticulous records and minutes of all his medical and personal hygiene needs and events, in a hand written journal complete with columns and rows, additions and averages. This included notes on the size, consistency and number of his daily bowel movements.

Once married to an American Jewish anthropologist with a penchant for art, he had two adult kids who lived far away, and although they loved their dad dearly, they had their own full lives more than a flight away. Once his wife became a Buddhist and divorced Marty, he lived for his kids and the small but solid business he had built, a printing shop in a then bustling downtown neighborhood filled with mom and pop shops, delis and local urban old world flair, the kind he liked, as the ambiance would some times, on good days, remind him of a happy life in Poland before the war. Everyone knew Marty in the old Boston neighborhood where his print shop had been, for he was quick to befriend people, was pleasant tempered, and with his sweet smile and animated face gladly offered details about his fascinating life in hiding during the war. Even if people didn’t need to have anything printed or copied, they would stop by just to have a cup of coffee or chat for a few moments about the weather or the latest Red Sox results. Marty made people feel good, and having people around to talk to made Marty feel good in return.

He was also genuinely interested in hearing about other people’s stories. He had a sense of humor, despite all the horror he had experienced as young boy; the Nazis had wiped out his entire family. And Marty knew how to love. After his divorce, in the second part of his adult life, he had had two long lasting meaningful relationships; one with a Christian woman his age, whose sultry manner would make him grab her from behind as soon as she came through the door. God how he loved to reminisce about those crazy and delicious years they had shared, when they would go with the flow and enjoy the freedom of the empty nest, good health and decent income – life had been good then. They had talked about getting married, but the trouble was, she wanted him to convert to Catholicism. He begged her to leave things as they were; they were so happy, things were so good. But she wanted their partnership blessed by the church. Marty was a Jew, and had no inclination to change. So, it came to an end.

The other relationship he had was with a Jewish woman, also a survivor, with whom he shared a more balanced and less passionate life. But they spoke the same language – through their shared history – and this made room for such pleasant lightness of being, a sort of beautiful synergy that emanated a serenity he might have bottled and saved some up for rainy days. It surely made up for the lack of fun and raunchy sex, and he felt blessed to have met such a good “shidduch” in his older days. Where he and the Christian girlfriend had fulfilled each other physically in a dreamlike way, he and the Jewish girlfriend completed one another emotionally. Sadly, she died of cancer after they had 14 years together. Since then, he had been single, but remained amorously enthusiastic about women whenever he would meet one he found attractive. This happened often. The older he got, the younger the women would be. His imagination was roaring and his body was telling him he had still much to give in the way of love.

The Woman

The driver he had hired was by his standards a young woman – she was in her forties – and he had fallen in love with her after a few weeks. Alina was a Russian Jewish immigrant who had come to the States in the early 90s with her abusive, former world champion wrestler husband Slava, and their only daughter Sofia. They had gotten special help to come to the States, because Slava was a possible victim from Chernobyl, and showed early signs of Parkinson’s as well as a mysterious blood disorder that was progressively debilitating. She had wanted to divorce him for a long time, but once his illness was a fact, she could not find the courage. She nursed him to the end, and he died ten years after they had immigrated, to Alina’s great but secret relief. The day after his funeral she threw his trophies out in the trash container in the back of her apartment building, together with all the gaudily framed photos of him on top of winner’s stands at tournaments back in his heyday in Russia. Good riddance. She kept one picture of the two of them holding their daughter as a toddler, sitting on a park bench on a beautiful spring day, blossoming trees surrounding their smiling faces. There had once been happy times, and she wanted her daughter to know she had been conceived and nurtured in love.

Alina was tall, had high cheek bones and long, light brown hair that she usually kept away from her face with a comb in the back. Her kind warm eyes would always look straight at Marty, and she was quick to laughter and seemed courageous and brave, something he found sexy. There was something about her confidence that he thought was attractive, but most of all it was the way that she was so cheerful, funny and freely expressed herself that made his heart skip a beat. Like a breath of fresh air in his life. Marty could not help but notice the strong, soft lines of her neck, the round curves of her hips, and he particularly loved to watch her soft hands work as she would do whatever she had to do to help him get ready for their outings. He noticed he began to anticipate the days of her working for him, although the dialysis on those days was not at all anything he looked forward to. Maybe it was God’s way of finally giving him a small reward for all his suffering, by making that whole sickening ordeal tolerable. He couldn’t wait for her to come in the morning.

Three days a week she would show up at Marty’s apartment and help him get dressed, and while she carried his bag to the car, he would do his best to gingerly push his walker next to her, he really only needed it for a little support with balance, asking her how her daughter was doing in school, or how her pottery studio was going. Alina was an artist, and was part of a potters’ coop in Brookline. When she was not working for Marty, or helping her college bound daughter who had just been accepted to the Boston Conservatory with a scholarship to their dance program, she was at the studio, throwing clay, burning or painting, so full of ideas and inspiration she sometimes would forget to go home at night. Sofia would call her mother to ask what was for dinner, or to tell her she would be late because of a social commitment, not knowing her mother didn’t sit at home waiting for her, but instead was at the studio, lost in her own imagination, which together with the endless possibilities of the wet, soft clay was taking her to places expressing the deep creative desires she had repressed for all the years before her husband died.

A-Love-Story-Could-Begin-Anywhere

Yes, a love story could being anywhere.

And it could go anywhere.

And it could be anything.

So, stay tuned for Part II.

Permission to be Free

Posted on by
Reply

Seeking permission to shed a role

I somehow ended up with, despite it all.

Yearning for a sign from this life or beyond

Telling me I can and must and will in time

Courageously peel the mask, the scars and the skin

Away in favor of a splendid metamorphosis.

***

But perhaps the permission must come from within

If I listen close to the voice of my intuition

The one imprinted on every fiber of my core –

Not the voice of my mother, lover, or friend

But rather that of the woman I have become,

True to herself, fully, honestly, even brutally.

***

A writer once called out to her sisters near and far:

“To write is to try to understand…to repeat the unrepeatable,

to write is also to bless a life that has not been blessed.”

And I say: you draw, she acts, he dances, I write; together we shall sing:

I give myself permission to heed my calling and find true beauty,

Dedicating this one life of mine to the joy of being free.

Free

(Inspired from an African folk tale as told by Sara DeBeer)

It’s All in the Name

Posted on by
3

Reading the “About Me” part of my blog, my youngest son asked, “Aren’t you going to give them your name?” He has a point.

Whats-my-name-81444320611_xlarge

I know that I like to know the name of people I engage with, especially because even if I don’t know them personally I like to envision them, and for some reason, when I know their name, it helps me somehow have an idea about them, at least in my imagination. Which is of course kind of absurd, since Bubba does not have to be a big, jolly fella, nor Hildegard necessarily a rosy cheeked blond farm frau from Germany. But let’s be real, a name helps create a connection of sorts.

The story of how we get our names, or how we choose or change them, should we so be inclined, or lucky, or both, can add a layer to the complexity (read: interesting narrative) of who we are, and allow us to imagine or understand others in a more “contextual” way. For everyone has many layers of (con)texts embedded in their identity; a multitude of fibers, threads and colors contributing to the unique fabric of their being. In the end, a name tells a story of its own. When I have a new group of students, I usually give them an assignment the first day of class to post a short paragraph about their first name on our course blog. This is actually just a trick to help me remember 38 new names and faces with greater ease, since I tend to build stories around most things and humans I encounter. And if the student doesn’t know about how or why they were given their unique name (most are bearers of fascinating small tales about how names are bestowed in their families, and happy for the opportunity to share this piece of family tidbit with their new peers), I invite them to share anything they may have on their mind, about their name. This too, can be quite telling and entertaining, and it creates a connection.

So my name is Nina Boug Lichtenstein, née Boug Kristiansen.

When I grew up I used to dislike my common first name, and fantasized about a more exotic name like Anastasia or Isabelle. There were four Ninas in my school alone and it was definitely a popular name in the 1960s Oslo. Had I known then what I know now about my first name, I might have felt differently. Some of the meanings for Nina in various cultures are: “God was gracious or God has shown favor”(Hebrew), “nice” (Persian), “beautiful eyes”(Hindi), “mother” (Swahili), “strong or mighty”(Native American), “friend” (Arabic), “flower” (Old Greek) and “fire” (Quechua – the people and culture of the Central Andes in South America). Wow. I never knew that until recently.

And I feel better already. Talk about a name with good vibes! I wonder if my parents knew these meanings for my name when they chose it for me. Had they intended these strong attributes for me, as they gave me that first “selective” piece of personal identity? I really do believe in the power of intentions…

In the middle of my identity nomenclature there is Boug (my mother’s maiden name) which I decided to keep when I got married. Boug apparently is a derivative of the French bourg meaning “town” – you may recognize a term such as “bourgmeister” which is German for the mayor of the town. If my parentage hailed from a venerable mayoral family or were just simply “townsfolk” vs. farmers I have yet to find out, but what is clear here, is that the pure blood viking-idea is not in my gene pool (not that there ever was one, or that it was important). Explorers! Travelers and boarder crossers going way back and in all ways. Yup; that’s the genetics I’m carrying. That sounds more like it.

Then there is my maiden name Kristiansen, which I have thought about taking back now that I am divorced, to honor my father who recently died. Kristiansen. I’m The Viking Jewess. I hope you see the irony here. That is Kristiansen as in “son of Kristian” or rather, “of the Christian” (as opposed to “the heathen,” I suppose) according to the Scandinavian tradition of naming. While I did not undergo gender-reassignment surgery (as it is now called) and was never anybody’s son, I did shed my initially State imposed Christian religious belonging. My father, a self-proclaimed agnostic who had withdrawn his membership from the Norwegian State Church (and who took care of the paperwork for me when I decided to do the same) was born into this very common last name, and my grandmother once told me she had wanted to change it, but found the bureaucratic paper-mill overwhelming and so resigned her dreams of a more distinctive last name.

I have now carried the last name Lichtenstein for over 25 years, and I must say it has until recently been a pleasure. I did not mind changing my last name when I married at 23, since just before exchanging vows I had made another significant commitment: to be a Jew and live a life according to Jewish traditions. Somehow, that didn’t seem to fit so well with the last name I imported from Norway. This was engraved in my experience every time I met a new Jewish person and introduced myself – hyper-sensitive as I was about my difference –  culminating on the very day of my conversion, when three stern faced orthodox rabbis sat facing me and my Christian name came up, again and again, like lashes in an inquisition. Morbid exaggeration and reversed imagery aside, it just felt so humiliating, and I somehow imagine it would have been different if my maiden name had been Hansen or Arnesen.

I came to know and love the long-winded Lichtenstein name along with my ever evolving new identity. Spelling it out in almost a melodic manner for every clerk, salesperson or professor who looked like a question mark when I said my name, I adapted quickly. And how many times have perfect strangers not loudly associated my married last name with an entire country, or tiny principality if they are savvy enough to know the difference, and how many times have I answered “No, not quite like the country” or “Yes, like the country” depending on my mood and energy. At times it felt regal, especially in Norway, where it’s pronounced in a way that on a good day can give it an aura of lost grandeur and princely mystique. Not to mention the occasional association with the artist Roy Lichtenstein here in the States. People actually would ask me if we were related. I wish.

Deconstructing Lich

Deconstructing Nina Lichtenstein

About 20 years into my marriage, the Mr. and Mrs. Lichtenstein that we were became Mr. and Dr. Lichtenstein. Joining the two other doctors in the family, my father in law, a DDS specializing in oral surgery, and a sister in law with a PH.D in anthropology, this new, tiny, appendage to my name was hard earned. Eventually came my divorce, and swiftly enter from stage left a new Mrs. Lichtenstein, and here we are.

While enjoying a hike in the woods of Norway with my three sons last summer, I again brought up the topic of me thinking about changing my last name, something they had not been too receptive to last time I tried to air the possibility, and so I had just dropped it. “But why, mamma? You are a Lichtenstein!” they seemed to exclaim in emphatic unison. Yes, I said, it’s true I’ve been a Lichtenstein since the day I married your pappa and decided to take his name for that reason, but now we are not married anymore, and there is a new Mrs. Lichtenstein. Silence. Until the oldest, about to be a freshman in college reasonably offered: “That’s a good point” and the other two mumbled their acquiescence.

As much as divorce can be about loss and things ending, it is also about new beginnings. So, rather than answering the question, “what’s my name?” I sip my coffee and ponder: “what will my name be?” Or even more deeply: “What can my story become?” Being and becoming. As French philosopher Gilles Deleuze posited (as he, in turn was elaborating on Nietzsche’s philosophy), human reality is more about a constant becoming, not a static being. Being in a process, then, seems to at once welcome the idea of “I am” (“I exist” – a concept I like to admit and enjoy for now) to include the more open ended notion of “I am becoming.”

Perhaps all the empty spaces don’t have to filled in right away…

Hello Name

My Yoga Teacher Slapped Me

Posted on by
Reply

The other day I went to yoga and had a strange but familiar experience. As the students were finding their spaces and rolling out their mats, and I was wiggling into my spot on a bolster to begin a few stretches, happy to have made the time to once again return to my practice, our instructor passed by me and in an joyful movement of recognition and obvious pleasure to see me again, he slapped my shoulder. That’s right, he slapped me. It felt like the “hey dude, good to see you!” slap you give your buddy at a game, in a bar or when you pass him in the hallway going to or from class. Nothing wrong with that, really, and it’s nice to be recognized after such a long hiatus from this blessed Zen space where I return in yearning to again recover some sense of balance, insight and inspiration.

But a slap?

I promise, it really was a slap. And since I am neither a dude nor a college age kid, but a middle aged mother of three, there was an intuitive misalignment in this fleeting meeting of two souls, or should I say two physical masses. Immediately I noticed that I, well, noticed, and this made me think about what it might be about me that inspired my instructor Shankara – who used to be John in his pre-yogic life – to welcome me with this friendly, but what seemed to me strangely enthusiastic love-tap. For some reason, I did not inspire him to give me a gentle hug, a “Namaste,” or a harmonious smile followed by his genuine “how are you?” with the playful twinkle his eyes always seem to radiate. Shankara is a truly unaffected and earthy guy with a wonderfully quick and self-deprecating sense of humor, and he has an extraordinary amount of positive karma and yogic inspiration and knowledge that he gracefully, almost gleefully, shares with his students. There is a reason why I have followed him from yoga space to yoga space for close to 15 years, undeniably irregularly, but nevertheless faithfully. This yogi has a following.

I remained puzzled and a bit tickled at the curiosity of the love-tap, and heard myself quietly chuckle in disbelief, until we all settled into our seated positions and at his gentle prompts started taking deep breaths with our eyes closed. As he encouraged us to inhale the intentions we would like to bring to our yoga practice with the positive feelings we wanted to be part of us, we should exhale the negative stuff we would like to get rid of. I got plenty of both, so I was breathing in and out with ease. He then told us that breath is energy, and whether we realize it or not, with our breath we give off a certain unique energy, which again translates to individual vibrations, even smells, that influence how people respond to us. And that’s when it hit me. Again. Like a love tap, a truth revealed itself in the most gentle and loving way, and it carried a slight echo from Shankara’s earlier gesture. “Hey, dude(-sse), here’s the answer to the great mystery;” the mystery of my energy.

In a mostly unintentional manner, I must give off some sort of tough, fiercely independent Viking-like warrior energy. But the reality, as I experience it, couldn’t be further from the truth: I am just a vulnerable, overly sensitive, melancholic, weeper. Really.

When I think about it, I have intellectually nebulous yet emotionally vivid sensations from my childhood about being responded to by adults in particular in ways that gave the message that I was a daring, independent and rascal-y big little girl. Since I was never dainty, shy and delicate, but rather big boned, brave and doggedly curious, I often got in trouble, because I was always lost doing something away from home. In Norwegian we’d say I had “flees in my blood,” or in Yiddish we’d say I had the shpilkes. I was not the bookworm kid who got lost in books with a flashlight under my covers in bed; who found the real world overwhelming and created my imaginary existence with the characters on the pages of the great classics. Rather, I was one who created those marvelous experiences for myself: I held my own in schoolyard fistfights, interrupted class with words and movements out of place, and when not in school, I roamed around the neighborhood and saved baby birds fallen from the nest, snooped around in back yards and alley-ways for treasures or enjoyed sweets in elderly neighbors’ homes while looking through their family albums listening to stories from their youth.

If you’ve read about “Who is the Viking Jewess,” elsewhere on my blog, you’ve seen where it went from there; I was soon to set sail and continue my independent journey of exploration. My parents, in all their love for me, raised me to be free, or as my sister reminds me, their motto was ‘freedom under responsibility.” When I left, nobody stopped me. When I came back, nobody begged me not to leave again. Although looking back I might wish that some times those who loved me demanded more of me; expected more of me; somehow needed more of me…this freedom to roam, this independence, doubtlessly gave me my energy, and surely required much inventiveness in those formative years.

This unique brand of energy, which has taken me from there to here, but which keeps me definitely suspended in-between, ever self-aware of the constant movement of the ongoing journey; this energy transforms within but never disappears.

I wondered if, when Shankara changed his name from good ol’ John, with this change of self-ascribed designation there were also changes in the energy he radiated. It seems only natural that when a person goes through changes in life, and more significantly lifestyle, and decides they are momentous enough to make one feel and think differently about one’s identity, one’s intentions, and one’s presence in the world; the name must go with the flow of it all as well, and it becomes necessarily a package deal.

So this gets my running monkey-brain thinking about the significance of names, and what the implications can be when an adult chooses to change their name. More about this in my next blog, because it’s all in the name, is it not?

And in the end the slap was really just a love-tap.

New-Namaste-Seaglass

When Athens isn’t in Greece

Posted on by
Reply

Unless you are one of the twenty four thousand students enrolled at Ohio University, in Athens, or you count as one of the twenty thousand inhabitants of the town which is built around the university, chances are you think, like I did, that Athens is in Greece, and not an hour and twenty minutes south-east of Columbus, Ohio. At first sight, the conference call for papers for the African Literature Association got me excited when I saw that it was being held in Athens, thinking I may finally walk in the footsteps of the fathers of western philosophy, and possibly be inspired by pure osmosis. Of course I was soon to realize that the Athens I was headed for was not in Europe but slightly more westward. I admit my knowledge of names and places in the U.S. is a bit limited, since I still have a hard time dealing with the fact that Paris and Norway are in Maine, and not just two places in Europe where I like to eat crêpes sucrées and herring.

Anyway, after I attended the conference, I learned a few lessons on the way.

Lesson number 1: Don’t assume the shuttle service from the airport will actually coordinate with your flights, but shop for flights that will coordinate with the twice-a-day shuttle service.

Lesson number 2: Don’t get too excited when the domestic ticket seems inexpensive, as America is a place (ok, continent) with huge distances, and so when you travel from A to B, there is usually a C involved, and it’s even further away from A than you had initially imagined, and thus B usually turns out not be your final destination. This I learned after packing at 1:15 am the morning of my 5am flight from Connecticut, as I started cold sweating while clicking my way around the web, searching for alternative ways of getting from the airport in Columbus (B) to my final destination at Ohio University (C). Athens Car Service would take me in what seemed like style, though I didn’t care much about the style part (pictures of limos and sleek sedans on their website) since I just wanted to get safely from A to B, which had now become C.

As I arrived in Columbus and emerged from the baggage claim looking hopefully at the various drivers standing around holding little signs with hand scribbled names on them, my cell phone rang. It was Tony the driver, telling me he was just pulling up to the terminal, did I want to go out to the curb and look for him? Sure, I said, and we stayed on the phone while I made my way outside. I’m the tall blond Norwegian woman with a red suitcase, I said, thinking I’d stick out like a sore thumb with my near six foot frame, forgetting that he couldn’t see the “Norwegian” part. He informed me that he was in a non-descript retired cop car, with the search lights still intact. Ah, I said, I’ve always wanted to ride in a cop car. Tony pulled up and came out to greet me, and immediately offered an excuse for the banged up, dirty and decidedly tired looking vehicle, slightly off from the glossy images on their web site.

Lesson number 3: Don’t believe everything you see on the web. While Tony was shoving junk aside in the trunk to make room for my bags, I thought to myself, ok, Miss Snooty, let it go, the guy’s nice, it’s a sunny day, and after all, your plane landed safely. Tony was a doll; a young, friendly, inquisitive fellow, with a fashionably scruffy, grunge-ascribed amount of facial hair, an overgrown goatee, a generous middle and a few tattoos. I wondered briefly about how he perceived me. Did I seem older, foreign; could he tell I was a mother by the way I spoke, that my heart was broken? We talked about a host of different things on the road from Columbus to Athens; family, love, travel, education, religion, to name a few. You can cover a lot in an hour and twenty minutes when you don’t shut down, and find your fellow humans in general a source of endless inspiration and wonder. Each and every one of us has a rich reservoir of thoughts, ideas, feelings, passions and aversions, in short, a walking story to be told. Tony never knew his dad, and told me he was born out of wedlock. Young people still use those terms?- I thought to myself and listened to his narrative of Scottish heritage, dropping out of college twice, girlfriend woes and dreams of one day traveling abroad.

Almost at our destination, he pulled over to a liquor store, for I had asked him to stop if we passed one so I could pick up a bottle of wine for the hotel. I felt like I had been on a road trip of sorts, and for some reason unknown to me, I bought a bottle of gin also, thinking for a brief, impulsive moment I might want to have some booze after my cop car ride. Perhaps the cultural undertones of Appalachia were calling out to me, since I was after all in the neighborhood, just barely west, and I felt happy and almost excited, as I had enjoyed my unpretentious conversation with Tony.

But alas, I never opened the gin bottle during my stay, and that was probably a wise thing, since drinking hard liquor alone in ones hotel room is not necessarily a good thing, generally speaking. So, I was planning on offering the bottle to Tony as a token of appreciation for our pleasant conversation, when he was picking me up at 4 am a few days later, for the airport run in reverse. This time he had talked about bringing the limo, so that the dame (that was me) could travel in style.

While it is not fun getting up before 4 am, I was soon to enjoy a few smiles when I saw the limo pulling up the morning of my departure. At first I thought my early riser’s vision was still adjusting to the darkness but I soon realized that the blurry image of a long, gray, amorphous structure on four wheels with a grating sounding engine and tinted windows was indeed the royal limo of Athens, the pride and joy of the company, the hip–mobile for special runs and special customers. I imagined Quentin Tarantino or the Cohen brothers getting excited about having this kind of prop for one of their films. To my disappointment Tony had overslept, and in his stead was the company dispatcher Terry. Since I felt a little weird offering a guy I didn’t know a bottle of gin before 6 am, I decided to hold on to it, and gave him some cash instead for tips. Whisking past the sleepy small towns of suburban Columbus, nodding off from time to time with Terry’s radio humming low in the background, I appreciated the quiet and the opportunity to check out, while being transported, perhaps not in grand style, but in total comfort and a certain je ne sais quoi of recyclable hipness, and I was just happy that I was going from C back to B, and then eventually to arrive at A, where my kids would be waiting for their mamma’s safe return.

Thinking about the things I learned as I journeyed, the experiences that never make it onto our CV or matter when we interview for a job, I imagined that this Athens too had inspired me by osmosis. This is the stuff of life that is simply called living, another few days filled with seemingly trivial events as we journey on, insignificant happenings perhaps, but that we may share with our children or friends as we create the stories of our lives.  Every day, different and new adventures, through the letters of the alphabet, from A via B to C, until one day we reach the end. Z.

Except in Norway there are three more letters at the end of the alphabet: Æ, Ø and Å, and I think that’s why I want to retire there, so perhaps I will continue to be inspired, by osmosis, meandering the distance of a few more letters, giving way to another story or two.

Mat Fuglene Da

Posted on by
1

(“Please Feed the Birds”)

A musing in Norwegian; I wrote this one sunny morning on my friend’s balcony in Oslo last summer.

Fuglene fråtser igjen fornøyd på terrassen til mine venner, for jeg har endelig fylt på med både solsikkefrø i fuglebrettet, og hengt en stor, feit meisebolle som dingler fristende fra en spiker på veggen. De kvitrer, flakser, kommer og går, i et kontinuerlig etegilde og tydelig lykkerus for at de blir husket på igjen selv midt i fellesferien. Ja, for det er viktig, fortalte Anne på vei ut døren til familiens sommerhus Sverige, de trenger nemlig like mye om ikke mer mat om sommeren enn om vinteren. Motsatt av det vi alltid har trodd, vi som er glade i å mate fuglene, også.

Med familiens enorme van stappet full av unger, bikkjer, to hetterotter og sommerens grønnsaks-hage, klar for planting og tilsyn i vakre, sommerlige omgivelser ved en innsjø over grensa, i Värmlands sjenerøse natur, har min barndomsvenninne forlatt Oslo by for en måned, akkurat i det jeg kommer hjem på mitt årlige besøk fra USA. De pakker og drar, og jeg pakker og kommer. The story of my life. Det å «time» riktig sommerens Norges besøk med alles ferieplaner har jeg forlengst gitt opp. Men det er flott å ha venner som sier «dere kan bare bo hos oss!» for med tre tenåringsgutter på nesten to meter hver seg, er mammas tre-roms begynt å bli litt trang for hele klanen. Og selv om Anne og hennes livlige entourage og storfamilie glimrer med sitt fravær, er det å sove i deres senger og spise frokost av deres tallerkener en bra trøstepremie.

Men, prisen for å bo her, hadde Øyvind mannen til Anne spøkt, er å mate fuglene. Ja og så fiskene da. Så mens oppvaskmaskinen går en omgang, og guttene mine tok en tur til deres mors gamle trakter på Frognerbadet for å hoppe fra tier’n, sitter jeg her oppe i lia med fjordgløtt og slurker fornøyd til kaffekoppen mens fuglene kvitrer muntert i vei. Vi vet nemlig alle, både de og jeg, at det er hit vi kommer for å lade kropp og sjel. Spesielt om sommeren.

Oslo, 11 juli, 2013