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.

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.

Losing my religion

Losing my religion

It’s risky, writing about something as personal as religion. If you are one of my friends but don’t really want to hear me talking about religion, I don’t mind. You’ll still be my friend. Religion makes some people uncomfortable. And to be honest, I have a very fuzzy notion of what ‘religion’ actually means. I think it’s organized spirituality with assumptions that all members ascribe to. I know that horrible things have been done in the name of religion, but that’s true for almost everything else – from education to mother love – so why you would throw the baby out with the bath water is not something I understand. My religion is a large part of who I am and why I act the way I do. I’m not saying I’m a goody-goody or better than anyone who doesn’t go to church. Maybe I just need that support more than others.

So here I go.

I was baptized a Lutheran when I was two months old in Zion Lutheran Church in Fairport Harbor, Ohio. This church had Finnish services at the time, but I think I was baptized in English – at least my baptismal certificate is in English. We went to Sunday school though I don’t remember my parents going to church a lot. It was probably difficult with six children.

One day, when my sister Kris and I were little, we came home from our Lutheran Sunday school class in tears. I think we had forgotten our offering, and we had heard that people who don’t give money to the church would go to hell. My mother (who was raised Presbyterian) apparently put her foot down then, and we started going to a different, non-Lutheran church that didn’t tell little children they were going to hell.

When I was 12, I was attending confirmation classes at St. Paul’s Methodist Church in Encino, California, and a few weeks before our big confirmation ceremony, my parents split up. Dad drove the car to Northern California, and we were left without a vehicle. Because I couldn’t get to church, I was never confirmed. I wonder if the pastor called my mother to find out what happened. Like so many other things that happened in my adolescence, I didn’t question it. It was just another loss.

During those years, I read the Bible a lot. When things got very difficult, I found comfort there. I didn’t go to church regularly again until I was married and pregnant. But I always believed there was a God – just not that He (I admit, yes, old-fashioned as I am, I think of He) always answers our prayers the way we’d like.

When I was pregnant with Erik, my oldest, my husband and I went looking for a church in Newtown, Connecticut. We went to several. After the Lutheran service, which I was eager and curious to try out, he had the same reaction my mother had had: “So grim!” We ended up in a Methodist church instead, a loving and accepting community where both my children were baptized and where my daughter Maija first showed her keen musical perception by crowing “Yay” at the end of every hymn.

After my divorce and a move to Oregon, weekend mornings became too precious to spend on sitting in a church pew with two squirmy young ones. But a letter from my ex-mother-in-law arrived,  scolding me for not bringing my children to church. I will always be grateful to her for that, because if she hadn’t written that letter, I would have continued to catch up on sleep on Sunday mornings instead of eventually finding my church home. I could write for hours about it, but it’s important to know two things: it accepted me and my two kids without asking about the absence of a dad, and it was no doubt significant in sending my children down the path of professional music.

I have to write about my pastor, Tom Dodd. He’s not your smiling, smarmy ‘God-blesses-Americans-and-the-rich’ type of guy. He’ll be the first to tell you that being a Christian is hard, not least of all because it means you have to love everyone. His sermons always talk about the Bible and how it applies to your life right now, and they are always really, really smart. He will also be the first one to admit his own faults and shortcomings. Once he told me the story that saved my life. I was at the end of my rope because nothing in my life was working. I’ll spare the details because they are pretty personal, but they had to do with tenure, parenting and men. I asked him how God could want me to be this miserable. He said there was a book in which rabbis put God on trial for the Holocaust. They brought evidence, they deliberated, and they eventually convicted Him. ‘So what happened next?’ I asked. He said, “They continued to worship.”

So here I am, a very flawed and petty and impatient and often ungrateful Christian. I can’t tell you why I believe. I simply do. I may have ‘lost’ my religion, but not my faith. I’m not a theologian. I’m not someone who loves to discuss Bible verses with other people. But I do like being in service to other people, and that’s probably why I’m a teacher.

With this long background, now we get to what I really want to talk about, and that is the experience of being a Lutheran in a country where that is something people can be without thinking about it at all. If you are born in Finland and your parents are Lutherans, you are assumed to be a Lutheran, and you have to go to the parish office to remove yourself from the church.

When I arrived in Finland, I went to see about joining a local church. The woman in the parish office seemed angry, not happy. I figured out why: almost nobody comes to that office to join a church. They come to get out. And she had no idea what to do about signing someone up for membership. And I found out that joining the church means you pay more taxes, which go to maintaining all the old and beautiful buildings where very few people actually worship anymore. But this was the thing that puzzled me most: in order to join and be able to pay more taxes, I had to provide proof of my baptism and my confirmation. So I can either go out and get confirmed really fast so I can be a member and pay taxes, or not join the church, not pay taxes and get to attend anyway.

I had a good chuckle about this, and you can guess which option I chose.

The parish office told me that ‘my’ church was the huge modern one on a hill not far from my side of town, Pielisensuun Church. So for my first Joensuu church visit, I went there. There was hardly anyone in that large worship space, and those who were there ignored me completely. Nobody seemed to care who I was or why I was there. And there didn’t seem to be any real joy. That’s one thing that makes my church at home such a great place to be: everyone seems happy to be there, happy to be part of this imperfect and unlikely family, happy to be singing and thinking and praying and caring about each other.

The next church visit I made was to the Finnish Orthodox church. (I’m not going to lie: the scene from ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ when Golda goes to ‘the enemy’ to find out news about her third daughter was running through my mind.) Here there was a lot of what I was missing from home: the joyfulness, the community, the loving greetings. And one person smiled at me. But all the kissing of icons, the lighting of candles, the constant crossing and genuflecting, the incense, and the very patriarchal feel of the place made me realize that I would always be a foreigner in a worship setting like that.

Finally, last Sunday I went to the large Lutheran church downtown. (According to the woman in the office, I am not supposed to go there because it is not my local church. But I took a chance.) Here, finally, I felt some glimmerings of ‘home’. I was greeted right at the door, I followed the service easily because the preacher spoke very, very slowly, and the liturgy followed the same order as at home. Oddly enough, all of the celebrants were women. The interior was so appealing – the vault was painted with patterns from local trees (sprigs of pine and birch, for example). And several women had, like me, arrived by bike and carried their helmets in, stowed their gear in the coatroom, and strolled into the sanctuary in pants.

Well, this was a long post, and I congratulate you for getting all the way here. I have lots more to say about religion, and losing it, but I will save it for another day. 

Settling in

It’s been almost two months since I moved to Finland. You can tell I’m not quite settled in, because those words “moved to Finland” still give me a little electric shock of – what? Horror? Surprise? Delight? I think it feels mostly naughty. Not ‘oh you horrible person’ naughty; more ‘wow, did you actually do something for yourself for once?’-naughty. Friends tease me about my ‘Lutheran’ sense of duty and how it sometimes goes overboard. I can see now that sticking with a part-time job where I was working full-time hours was, despite all the joys of teaching high-school students (and I mean that with utmost sincerity) and of working with kind, generous and funny colleagues, not the best idea in terms of my financial well-being. And, in the US, that also meant not good for my health. I would have ended up with no pension, no health care and probably nowhere to live. Add to that the fact that I was usually working in the evening as well – sometimes until midnight or 1 a.m. – and getting little exercise – and I suppose I was heading for something I’d rather not consider just now.

So I revel in my naughtiness. It’s a naughtiness that makes me cheerful. And sometimes I even start laughing while riding around on my bike because it feels so good. I suppose a few years from now Joensuuvians (how’s that for a word?) will talk about that crazy English professor who rides around on her bike, cackling. Maybe by then I’ll really be settled.

What does ‘settling in’ look like? It means I have a routine down for loading my bag and bike in the morning, and for packing up to go home around 4 each day. It means I have enough dishes and furniture to make things cozy in my strangely empty apartment – things I have enjoyed seeking out on a Facebook fleamarket site and in local Good-Will type shops. (And today I even found a chair next to the dumpster, which I quickly laid claim to. Now I can have three people over for dinner.) In fact, tomorrow I am getting a red velvet sofa for my bedroom. That room is the emptiest because it’s big and only has a bed and night table in it. A red sofa might be just the place to recline and read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Finnish.

Settling in may mean that my Finnish is getting better. Today I met two separate people and wrote to a third about items I had bought. All these transactions took place in Finnish, and none of these people let on that they thought/knew/suspected I was a foreigner. I don’t shrink from my e-mails anymore, and for the first time today, I left the house without my dictionary. I’m thinking that ‘click’ of feeling comfortable in a foreign language may happen sooner rather than later.

It means I have a pretty good idea of what to buy in the grocery store when I walk in rather than strolling the aisles reading every label. Though today I found the largest grocery store yet – where they actually had kale! – so I spent some time enjoying the large selection. It must have felt this way to East-Bloc citizens coming to the US for the first time and seeing no empty shelves anywhere, and I surprised myself feeling almost giddy at the capitalistic joy of long rows of shiny consumer goods.

Settling in also means that all my classes have started. It’s a full load, but having no more than 18 students in any one class means that the grading is minimal and manageable, and co-teaching three of them means that the classes have basically been prepared for me. My MA-level course called ‘Translation Project 1’ is fun because I managed to get the students a real commission. I get to talk to them about the translator life for an hour each week, and mentor their teams for the second. Teaching something you love has to be one of the greatest privileges on earth.

And finally, settling in means I have some friends. I can count on Stuart the Canadian to want to go to lunch at about the same time I do. Emma the Swede lives in the apartment building next door, so I’ve gone there for tea. Greg the Australian has kindly driven me and various pieces of furniture to my apartment, and Cathy the American (of course she had to be a Cathy) has taken me out for Chinese food. Michael the Liverpudlian/German and I organized a successful student pub night, ostensibly for practicing English, that had a great turnout. And Nina in Helsinki has not only been the biggest fan of this blog (and has even said I should turn it into a book!) – she is one of the most amazing hosts I’ve ever had the privilege of staying with. She makes it look effortless as she whips up delicious meals and desserts, picks me up and drops me off or arranges for someone else to do it, offers a bed and sauna and her fun company – all while being a mom and wife and avid Bruce Springsteen fan and working full-time. It’s great that she’s in Helsinki, because I’ll probably be flying out of there quite a bit – but I wish she lived closer.

No, not finally after all. I have to say something about the weather, because settling in means that the year is progressing. You can feel it very strongly and see harbingers of it everywhere. The outdoor tables and chairs have been removed at most restaurants and pubs. Cars and bikes have their lights on in the morning when I go in to work now at 8 a.m. The wind was stronger today than I’ve noticed before, and yellow leaves were whirling all over the place. The earth is turning. We’re settling towards darkness.