O Little Town of Sandy Hook

It’s probably too soon after the blood bath in my sweet little New England home town to be writing about it intelligently. This post won’t be pretty and it may not even make sense. But I have to get this out.

When I got accepted into grad school at Yale and my husband at the time got a job at General Foods, we were living in California. We consulted a map and realized we should live in Stamford if we wanted to live equidistant from our respective jobs. Once we got to Connecticut, however, we realized that there was no way we would be able to afford to live there. We moved the midpoint farther north until the apex of the triangle reached the edge of Fairfield County. Sandy Hook. What an odd name. I thought it was in New Jersey? We’d hear that a lot over the years.

We were able to afford a house there – near a freeway and somewhat eclectic as they say. It had a rugged wagon wheel chandelier in the cavernous living room, a back yard too steep to do anything with, and a row of hemlock trees (since chopped down) in front of the house – trees that made the livingroom even darker. But it was ours, it was near Lake Zoar, and we loved it. Both of our children were born during the seven years we lived there, in Danbury Hospital.

Coming from Los Angeles, we were charmed by living in New England. There actually were white wooden churches, blazingly beautiful leaves in the fall, maple syrup running in the late winter, and reminders and relics from the Revolutionary War. Sandy Hook was its own entity, but part of Newtown. In the center of Newtown's Main Street, there was a flag pole in the middle of the road. It was considered a traffic hazard, but nobody ever removed that pole. A church nearby had a weathervane that Revolutionary War soldiers had used as target practice. The rooster still had holes in it.

As our children grew, we took them apple picking and sledding. We baptized them both in the Newtown Methodist Church. I joined playgroups with them and took Erik to nursery school two days a week. They rode with me to school – an hour to New Haven each way – and had a wonderful day care provider. They had birthday parties at a local farm. They had an idyllic early childhood – as idyllic as it can be when your parents are stressed from overwork and from straining to be good parents and from letting their marriage suffer – and it was partly because the setting was so peaceful, so self-evidently healthy.

Now all of a sudden, everybody is talking about Sandy Hook. They’re talking about Newtown too (though many are spelling it “Newton”) and about those children.

Those children. My son was one of those children 21 years ago. I had one scary experience with Sandy Hook Elementary School. Erik’s first day there, my first day waiting for him at a bus stop, he didn’t get off the bus. I was a hysterical, sobbing wreck. I got in my car and drove much faster than I should have been allowed to do in such a peaceful, safe town, screeched to a halt in the school parking lot everyone has now seen on television or on Youtube, and ran into the school. There was my precious little boy, sitting on a chair in the hall. I can’t remember now if he had been crying or if he knew that I would come get him. I’m not sure I remember what actually happened, but I think he had gotten on the wrong bus. No matter – we were reunited, and he was safe.

Those children that were shot – did their parents throw themselves in their cars, their hearts in their throats, sobbing, driving too fast down those same roads? How could anyone survive panic like mine multiplied by thousands? Or what came after?

Why would someone come in and shoot them? Alright, he was mentally ill. Like all these shooters are. Who knew that he was? Who let him get his hands on weapons?

And why are there automatic and semi-automatic weapons for sale to the general public anyway? I hear all this talk about how if you make guns illegal, then only criminals will have them. But this is a red herring. It’s not the having of guns that is the problem. It’s the having of guns that can kill 20 small children in the space of minutes. What do we need such weapons for?

We need to ban assault and semi-assault weapons. There is no reason to have them. I can see having a hand gun. I sure feel like carrying one now, once I’m properly instructed on how to use, clean and store it. But come on. What are all these weapons catalogs for? What is this glorification of shooting things in video games and in movies? Why is American society so bloodthirsty?

The well-meaning posts about ‘if only people would love each other’ and ‘if only they let God back in the schools’ – sorry. These don’t address the issue of mental illness. It doesn’t matter how much love and how much God. Mental illness makes people do irrational things. And there are plenty of gun-toting Christians.

The US has to invest money in the treatment of mental illness and it has to ban weapons that aren’t going to be used for hunting or simple self defense. I think it would be in the NRA’s best interest to help make this happen. With freedom comes responsibility. If you’re going to be free to have weapons, then you’d better work to make sure that the weapons don’t get into the hands of the mentally ill.

Sure, there are people who collect semi-automatic and automatic weapons because they are interested in them and not because they plan to kill a lot of people. Why can’t we just sell those and not sell ammunition?

In any event, there has to be a dialog about weapons in the US – preferably one that stops calling names on both sides and works to solve problems cooperatively. But that hasn’t been a strength of ours. I suspect that in a week or so, people will have forgotten Sandy Hook again. There will be hugging of beloved children, and there will be prayers of thanksgiving that family members are safe. But somewhere there is another ticking time bomb, making purchases, making a list and checking it twice.

In the Night Kitchen

Maurice Sendak’s book “In the Night Kitchen” was one of our read-aloud favorites when my children were small. We delighted in the idea of falling into a big bowl of cake batter, of flying a bread plane, and of crowing like a rooster at dawn when the cake was finished. Its message, as I remember it now, is that all kinds of odd things happen during the night, strange and good, before ‘normal’ morning comes again.

There’s something like that here in Finland at the darkest point of the year. It feels like it’s almost always night. There are a few hours of daylight, but it’s subdued and the light is diffuse. (The few times I’ve seen the sun, it’s felt like a holiday or like dawn; it’s been so close to the horizon and all light, no heat.) And there are strange and good things happening in the winter, some of which I’ll talk about here.

But unlike Mickey, I can’t run around Joensuu in the altogether. I now understand more of the reasons behind the huge variety of winter clothing items. I know why people wear mittens rather than gloves and I’ve grown less hostile towards turtlenecks. I realize that knitting is not just something to keep your hands busy while you listen to someone. I understand that scarves are essential, not decorative, and I get why there are so many kinds of boots. Dressing is serious business when the thermometer can reach as low as 35 below. Frostbite is a real concern, not something that only afflicts mountain climbers. I’ve been biking along feeling my thumbs go numb and my thighs sting under three layers of clothing. You have to plan out what to wear so that you not only have the right kind of warm material, but so you also trap air (which provides more warmth) and make sure you don’t sweat so much that you chill. It’s a new process to me, one that takes a lot of time, and one that has made me very crabby on more than one occasion, especially when there’s a social function on the radar that will require getting into and out of these clothes more than once because said function is not in my building at school.

Winter ninja

But I’m over whining about clothing. I’m grateful for every piece I have, whether I brought it over from Oregon, acquired it at a second-hand store, or splurged on the advice of Finnish friends. I don’t even mind that these items spill out all over the place near my front door and take considerable time to get into and out of, because they help me feel more confident about venturing out when it’s really cold. I’ve made a few wardrobe adjustments that make life easier (a fleece-lined cap with ear flaps, wool-silk thermals and a puffy coat), and I’ve decided to store my bike until it’s not as cold and the snow isn’t as deep.

Rather than whine about clothing, let me tell you a little bit about the good things from the “Night Kitchen”. A new network of friends is slowly taking shape, and I keep meeting new people. I can’t possibly replace my friends at home, but I am no longer lonely here. Today, for example, I met a friend at the weaving studio in town and through her met a few more people. We had coffee and shared a shamefully rich chocolate truffle, and I am now scheming about making rag rugs for my summer cabin. My cell phone rings more often now with calls from two particularly close friends and the occasional text message from others. I see that I haven’t scared away my students – several of my classes next term are already nearly full. I’m looking at the pictures of Finnish Facebook friends and seeing all kinds of winter delights – long-distance ice skating on lakes, ice fishing, “spark” riding. Now that I know how to dress, it might actually be fun to be active outdoors rather than coo at the pretty snow from behind triple-glazed windows.

My bus stop

And during the Christmas season, people here create loveliness out of the dark. Shops have luminaria or simple fat candles planted in the snow outside their doors. Light garlands stretch across the streets downtown. The shop windows are bright and inviting. And yesterday I went to a Christmas market. I met   Santa Claus (joulupukki), saw ponies visiting with children dressed like the Michelin man, and envied adults carrying steaming beverages in their mittened hands. It wasn’t terribly crowded, but the wooden stands and the hand-made items for sale made me feel like I had dropped into the 1700s. 

Christmas market, 3 p.m.

I know I’ll crow the first time the sun is still up when I come home from work and rejoice when I can put all the winter gear away, but for now, I’m content to live, and maybe even thrive, in this wintry night kitchen.

Kaamos

If you look up the word ‘kaamos’ in the dictionary, it says “arctic night”. In other words, this term applies officially to the complete absence of sunlight above the Arctic Circle during the darkest part of fall/winter. However, it seems it’s used by Finns to describe the general waning of light during the darkest time of the year, whether or not the sun completely disappears.

As far as I’m concerned, the difference is laughable. It’s dark, and I’m suffering. During the past week or so, I’ve noticed a definite change in my mood. I’m no longer can-do Kathy, bravely and good-naturedly meeting all obstacles in my path. I’ve become a candy-craving sloth with dark thoughts and moods heavy enough to sink a ship. I find myself feeling resentful about social engagements I agreed to of my own free will weeks ago, and around 5 p.m. I’m already wondering if it’s too soon to go to bed.

How dark is it? Today, November 24, the sun came up at 8:43 a.m., and it’s supposed to set at 2:52 p.m. That’s a day of 6 hours and 9 minutes. But don’t let that fool you. When the sun is above the horizon (and I haven’t seen it for over a week), it doesn’t get any higher than it does in late afternoon in the winter back in Oregon. So if 90 degrees is straight overhead, it’s at about 30 degrees at its highest.

That’s not a lot of light.

It’s also been cloudy for weeks, it seems. It feels like dusk all day long. Even if I bike home by 4, it’s dark. And this morning, to make matters worse, it’s foggy.

No wonder the Finns can’t wait for snow. At least then things look brighter. But they’re used to this, and they have found ways to dispell the gloom even if there's no snow on the ground. On the café tables at school, candles burn all day long. There are so many ‘pikkujoulut’ (Christmas parties) coming up I can’t keep them straight without looking at a calendar. And there are charming decorations hanging over the streets downtown, lovely white lights arranged in decorative patterns, as well as the Christmas window displays.

My mood makes it difficult to get anything reasonable done, so I started to sort papers this morning, an activity requiring little brain power. I opened up the local weekly, ‘Karjalan Heili’ (a droll combination of local news, personals, public service announcements, ads and contests for tickets to a local movie theater), and the first article I turned to must have been written for me: “Kaamos järkytti valoon tottuneen Minnin” (Getting used to ‘kaamos’ was a shock to Minni). 

The dramatic picture showed Minni, an exchange student from Viet Nam, sitting on a bed in a dark room, her depressed-looking face turned downward. It talked about how she stopped wanting to do things with friends, felt depressed and listless, had heavy arms and legs, was gaining weight and had started to crave sweet foods. Sweets! I’ve never gone in for sweets except chocolate before, but now I find myself grabbing a bag of assorted gummi-snacks, sugared licorice and candy bananas. Gross! At least, now, there’s an explanation. The article talked about how Finns may experience a slowing down, but most don’t feel the kind of painful impact that the lack of light has on exchange students.

The article recommends getting a sun lamp, the best weapon against SAD. My friend Kate says there are even SAD cafes where she lives – you go in for a cup of coffee and you come out singing at the top of your lungs. Well, maybe not that. This is still, after all, Finland. But it must work if cafes invest money in this sort of thing.

So after I post this, I’m going to force myself up out of this couch and get on my bike to go look for a sun lamp. OK, I admit it, and another bag of sweets. This could be a prolonged fight, and I need all the weapons at my disposal. At least I know that there’s only three weeks left of this lessening light, and then the winter solstice marks the turning point. And by then, I’ll be on my way to Zurich to see my children for Christmas. Now there’s a bright prospect.

Ingrid Ann-Christin Hahn, 1945-2012

A creamy envelope with unfamiliar handwriting lay on the floor of my apartment when I got home last Wednesday. How wonderful, a letter! I thought. There was no return address, but the stamps were Swedish. I set it aside, getting a glass of water so I could sit down and savor this note from some unknown person, maybe someone I had known when I lived in Sweden but hadn’t heard from for years.

It was a shock to read the first line: “I’m sorry I have to give you some bad and tragic news.” And as my eyes scanned the note and registered that it was my beloved Swedish teacher who had passed away, I refused to believe it, forcing myself to go back and read very slowly to correct the mistake.

But no, Ann-Christin is gone.

I still don’t believe this is possible. Maybe I will believe it when her annual wall calendar from Sweden fails to appear. She always sent it wrapped in traditional Swedish Christmas wrap with ‘tomtar’ (elves) and red curly ribbon. Always the same greeting, never a letter. It was a Christmas tradition in our home, my gift from the Swedish teacher I had when I was 19 years old and living in Sweden for the first time.

In 1975, a group of us students from various University of California campuses traveled together to Europe, enroute to our universities in Norway and Sweden. We spent a week traveling to Paris, Copenhagen and Oslo before splitting into two groups, one which would stay in Bergen for the year, the rest of us who would be in Lund. We all had ‘language camp’ for nine weeks to prepare us for our studies. Our camp began in Malung, a small town in the heart of Sweden. We bused in from Oslo, and it took several hours; the road was windy and the bus was hot. At some point the brakes started smoking. I remember we were all jet-lagged, probably hung over, but excited about finally getting to our country of residence for the next year. We met our teachers that first evening. Ann-Christin was in charge of our group, the most advanced students who’d been lucky enough to have Swedish at our home universities. I can’t remember that first meeting, but I do remember hearing her voice for the first time and thinking “Oh no, I can’t understand her!” Ann-Christin was from Simrishamn in Southern Sweden and spoke ‘skånska,’ a dialect that the rest of Sweden likes to make fun of, and, I blush to say it, I had made fun of myself.

But once I got used to her strange ‘r’s and her dipthongs, I soon realized that she was an excellent teacher. You have to be to keep the attention of eight students for six hours a day, five days a week. We raced through the material. We never spoke English. (In fact, I can’t remember hearing Ann-Christin speak English until years later.) We studied grammar, did skits (I still remember a hysterical one in which the father of the family insisted on reading the phone book to everyone else), baked from Swedish recipes, had daily preposition quizzes (which always had a picture of Snoopy saying something encouraging), wrote essays, and talked, talked, talked. I not only credit her with taking me far down the road of fluency, but also with modeling excellent teaching. If I am a good foreign language teacher, it’s largely her doing.

Her care didn’t end in August, when we dispersed to our various dormitories and our new lives. She was always happy to have us come for tea, and different constellations of students would walk down to her part of town to visit her and her boyfriend, Christer, and feel like there was life and warmth beyond being a somewhat lonely and maybe slightly scared exchange student. She called us her ‘smågrisar’, her little pigs, and so we would bring her marzipan pigs, drawings of pigs, pig souvenirs of all kinds. We even made her a gingerbread ‘doll house’ with pig figures representing all eight of us. I later found out that we were the last nine-week class she had, and that she started teaching English after that. I don’t think it was because we were a tough crowd, but I think it may have had something to do with why we seemed to have a special place in her heart.

Over the years, Ann-Christin and I kept up a regular correspondence. She never wrote a lot, and she never said much about herself. She talked about baking cookies, about the snowy weather, about other students she had heard from. When she and Christer broke up and she married her high-school sweetheart, Tommy, moved back to Simrishamn and had a little boy, it was communicated in just a couple sentences. She was a very private person, and the fact that she hated having her picture taken probably had something to do with this.

We talked about my coming to visit her for a longer period of time so we could go to a medieval fair in Southern Sweden. I finally got the time to see her for a whole day in the summer of 2011, though it didn’t correspond with the fair. The day was magical. We met for breakfast at the bakery I had worked in during the summer of 1976, Ramklints Konditori. Then we drove around southern Sweden, taking in Ales Stenar first (Sweden’s Stonehenge), then, after it started to rain too much to be outside, having coffee in a former manor near the coast, visiting her husband in his bookstore, and stopping briefly at their home which was an amazing restored farmhouse from the 1700s in the village of Gladsax. She showed me the archaeological dig next door which was uncovering the remains of a castle from the 1300s. We talked about our families, our worries for our children, the things we found important in life. I saw new sides to Ann-Christin, and I looked forward to more visits with her in the future, especially if I was going to be on the same continent finally.

We had pizza for dinner and then walked to the bus back to Lund. I wasn’t allowed to pay my fare with cash so Ann-Christin paid it, smiled and told me not to worry, hugged me and waved goodbye. It was the last time I saw her, though I had no way of knowing it, no prescience about it at all.

I’m so grateful for that time together. It felt like we were no longer student and teacher, but friends. Apparently she got the cancer diagnosis five months later, a month after her final calendar arrived. She died in July, while I was bustling around trying to get ready to move to Finland. I sent her a birthday card telling her about my arrival and wondering if I could see her in the week between Christmas and New Year. This must have been why her husband wrote to me, although I can't imagine the pain he suffered doing so.

Ann-Christin is gone. I could say something brave and appreciative about her legacy and her students, but I just feel sad, bereft and shocked. She was so young, only 67. And I didn't thank her enough.