Mother daughter and me

I could tell that the show was in part for my benefit - the somersault, the cartwheel, and all the aborted attempts to stand on her head. Charmed no end by this toddler, I had to share my delight with her mother who also stood nearby. I noticed that the mother was observing her daughter as though she were reading a book, silently seeking protection from the world - and probably from me - by burying herself in identification with its narrator. The young girl was her possession and her extension. I could see too that mother and daughter both sought my approval. Though this mother never acknowledged it, I am sure that every inflection of my voice was registered.

All of a sudden, the little girl jumped up on a chair in front of me. Eye-to-eye, but too close to focus, we rubbed noses. As she backed away I could see that the chair had disappeared and that she wasn’t a little girl any more, that she was in fact just as tall as I was, grinning from ear to ear with a mouth full of braces. What a sweety I thought to myself.

The next thing I knew she was running out the back door in tears, crying ”Mommy, mommy why do you keep coming in and out”. I also began to wonder where and why her mother had suddenly disappeared. With hardly a chance to reflect on the chain of events, I heard the young girl call out: ”Mommy, why do you keep running in and out, it’s making me so sleepy.” This was the first time I had ever heard my niece speak Swedish. (While Swedish is her mother’s tongue it is not her own native language.) Given the intensity of this young girl's pursuit, I thought to myself that she must have confused the Swedish word for ’tired’ with the word for ’sleepy’. But to tell you the truth I was still so very sleepy and tired myself when I woke from this dream, that we are all certainly one .

Withdrawal

I remember how happy I was to have finally met the bitch – face-to-face, eye-to-eye. I had heard so much about her, about how ugly she was, that I was actually surprised to find that I liked her. I let her hang around my apartment for a while. Then one day, sensing that she was wet behind the ears and way too demanding, I brought her down to my storage space in the basement. In retrospect I think that I did that to protect her. Furthermore, a friend whose opinion I respected at the time, complained that she was barbarous and uncivilized. Since I wasn’t sure I understood what he meant by that, we withdrew. I didn’t bring her up again until he had - for all intents and purposes - disappeared for good.

Eye to eye

Her students learn by simply watching her, keeping an eye on her. She never judges them. She speaks with difficulty and despite her silent, rather stern appearance, she is oddly very close to them. Or is it they who are very close to her? They feed on her and keep her company. I think it is because she actually hates teaching, hates telling stories, that she is such a good teacher. She doesn't want to say too much, and definitely not everything all at once. She prefers to use words to investigate her surroundings. It is a curious relationship.

Self-portrait

" While the portrait is anything but flattering, its colorful uncanny aura has continued to fascinate me over the years. In fact, I brought it up from the basement just yesterday to reacquaint myself with her. She’s a young redhead, set off against a green background and a house with no smoke stack. There’s a crow with a mossy green breast perched on her left shoulder. The shadow of this feathered friend is cast across my chin - just below my lower lip - as if to make sure my mouth is kept shut. My eyes are steadfast in their look-out, as some distant gulls seem to have sighted prey beneath my brow. What am I thinking? What is it I see? What have I heard? What do I mean? What is it that I am apparently so loath to disclose?" excerpt from Living with Gerdie's diary, "Fuel for thought", March 4, 2007

Between the living and the dead

Ever since I studied history at Berkeley in the late 1960s I have been fascinated by a human being's ability to transcend what separates the living from the dead. In fact, in my disseratation for my undergraduate degree in history, I used a conversation between a well-researched historical figure of 18th century Europe and a well-known student of the 60s in the US as the medium of my thesis. The paper, however well-received then by the faculty at Berkeley, was considered "wooly/fuzzy/muddled" in Europe. Attitudes have changed since then, and nowadays this approach (the blog is a given medium) is "house-broken" in European intellectual circles, and well 'on its way' even in some European academic insitutions.

In 2005 the Swedish-Finnish writer Monica Fagerholm published a novel entitled Den Amerikanska Flickan ['The American Girl'] that opens onto the mysterious death of an American woman/girl who came to Sweden from San Francisco in 1969, and the subsequent Americanization of Scandinavia. We know a little about Finlandization, likewise the Cold War, but from whose perspective? Perhaps all things and everyone are related? The book was well-received in this neck of the woods, but has yet to be translated into English. Fortunately I have been thrown out of Monica Fagerholm's own blog into the briar patch of intellectual encouragement where I grew up, poked out of the nest and under the wings of my initial mentor, my paternal grandmother. Thanks ladies.

In 1996 my paternal aunt, Virginia Ryan Shores, gave me her mother's (my grandmother's) diary written in San Francisco during the Second World War. She also gave me some yellow 'legal pads' containing my grandmother's poetry. Over the years, I have often thought about 'corresponding' with my grandmother, the most well-educated, responsible (economically and ethically), creative and thoughtful woman in my life whose needs and desires were far from craving. I thought that I might 'converse' with her - in the tenor of my first major academic paper. I know that she loved to sing too, and that the timbre of voices can mature agreeably - even for our surroundings - as we grow older, if we are prepared to work at it.

I believe that "Mago", as we called her (go Ma, backwards, and abbreviation of grandmother) had a very common, however, undocumented perspective on World War II. She was waiting, for her children to return from the eastern respective western fronts of the war where they served. Aunt "Ginny" was in Pearl Harbor when it was bombed in December 1941, and "Dad" was on his way to France. Mago was expectant, hopeful. She waited. She didn't go to church on Sundays, but to the "Crow's nest", a lookout from the hills of San Francisco, where she and many like her could watch the ships and aircraft carriers as they sailed in under the Golden Gate Bridge, and were moored along the San Francisco piers. Perhaps her most sustaining hope was that her daughter, with whom she had been having difficulty exchanging mail due to the war, had managed to come home, however unexpectedly. Curious? then visit: Living with Gerdie's diary