Saturday, November 24, 2012

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.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

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.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Election eve musings and mutterings



I’m cursed and blessed by being the only Socialist in a birth family of Republicans. Before you go making a crack like, “Yeah, that’s because you’re the only one with a PhD,” let me tell you that I became a Socialist long before I graduated from college, and that I know very intelligent and informed people who are Republicans. I think it has more to do with remembering what it was like to enjoy the abundance of Food Stamp arrival day, knowing that my mom worked harder than any one I knew (or know) but was still not making it, being grateful for how we were taken care of anyway. (Somehow, the time the California welfare system decided to audit my mother and didn’t make payments for a whole month – and my college savings from babysitting money was swallowed up into a black hole – hasn’t shaken my belief that we need governmental social services for the most vulnerable.) Maybe it had to do with the bags of hand-me-down clothes or the Christmas turkeys that would appear from time to time, and knowing it wasn’t my fault, or that of my siblings, that we had so little. (And if I were permitting myself to write about religion and politics in the same blog post, I would talk about the socialistic early Christian church, but I’ll save that.) It also has to do with the fact that I lived in Sweden for two and a half years, a place where ‘Socialist’ wasn’t a dirty word, and where people I admired actually were, and are, Socialists. And they didn’t, and don’t, go around making life hell for Americans or making sure nobody celebrates Christmas, which is the impression I got as a child in the US.

For whatever reason, I believe strongly that we’re in a social contract not so that businesses can have the right to shove advertising into our mailboxes, computers and ears any chance they get under the guise of ‘free speech’. I believe we’re in it because life is dangerous and unpredictable, and if we band together, we can help each other navigate those dangers better than if we do it alone. And included in those hazards are things like mental illness, job loss, cancer, depression, chemicals in the drinking water and hurricanes. I don’t think people should be helped around, through and with those things solely by means of the generosity of others or the trickling down of wealth from above. I think certain things should be guaranteed by our system of government, such as education, medical care, food and shelter. If we’re all taken care of, we’ll be kinder to each other, and we’ll be less aggressive and desperate. And nobody, but nobody, needs enormous mansions or multi-million-dollar sports cars or any of the other trinkets or status symbols that the very wealthy have. Sure, there are those who will abuse such a system, but I think that some of that abuse in our current system stems from people feeling utterly defeated and disenfranchised. I believe there’s enough abundance out there for everyone, even the lazy. Our bodies were made for work, and, given a task that appeals to our abilities and pride, who wouldn’t want to work?

So here I sit on Election Eve (or rather, very early on Election Day) wondering how it’s going to go for the US. This is the first presidential election I’m not home for, but it doesn’t mean I’m any less anxious. I care about the US, and I care about those who live there. 

But I’m not going to sit here and bash the presidential candidates because they aren’t Socialists. I want to talk about working together, which is something Finland seems to do better than most countries. I know, it’s easier to do in a place where there are fewer citizens than in the state of Maryland. But the system itself is better. There are several parties (I think about nine), and they send representatives to Parliament in proportion to the election results. They need to work together to get things done. Our system is so adversarial, it’s no wonder we stagnate.

I wish instead of all the venom-spewing and sound bites about 47% and exaggerations of what will happen if so-and-so is elected and how people who vote for X will go to hell, we could focus on what we have in common, and why we have different ideas about how to achieve it. We all want food and clothing and shelter and decent medical care and an education and something to look forward to at the end of the work day. We want meaningful work and safety for our children. We want to be able to afford our lives. Why is it so hard to agree on the things we have in common and figure out, together, different ways to accomplish them? 

I have to admit, I slip into the maelstrom of nastiness. I repost the latest gaffe by Romney and complain when the other side does the same about Obama. I have taken malicious pleasure in seeing the meme of Romney’s jet with a race horse strapped to the top. I’m as guilty as anyone else of partisan solipcism.

So I guess I have to say that writing this blog is helping me to exorcize some of that – to get it out of my system and admit that I really just want this election to be over, because it makes my blood pressure rise and brings out the uglier side of myself. I’ll heave a big sigh of relief no matter who wins. Because then I can stop getting upset at my siblings and right-leaning friends, and we can move on to our usual ways of supporting each other no matter what our political persuasion.