Sommartid

“They must be keeping you in the deep freeze over there in Sweden. You still look just the way you did many summers ago.”
My Uncle Pollard (spoken at a family reunion in a redwood forest in the Santa Cruz mountains )

“Would he feel any cleaner in the snows of Sweden, reading at a distance about his people and their latest pranks?”
JM Coetzee (Summertime)

Ever since I first arrived in Sweden in the early 1970s I have always listened to a popular Swedish radio program called Sommar. These days the tag melody ‘Sommar sommar sommar’ is enough to put me into my laidback reception mode, prepared to reflect anew on the preludes to someone else’s achievement, ill-fated deeds or terms for life. Every afternoon, over a period of some 60 summer days, a series of more or less well-known personalities in Sweden are given the opportunity to host his or her own 90 minute public radio program. Air time consists of fragments of a personal monologue, broken up, tempered and joined by tracks of music.

The invitation to host the program is considered an honor, an opportunity for a seasonal crop of personalities to step out into the limelight and tell us some things we do not know, about themselves. The assumption is that those who are to host the program offer personal perspectives on life, anecdotes and reflections that will be of interest to a broad Swedish public. Many listeners believe that the honor should be a confirmation, not only of some pinnacle of achievement, but also of virtue. The latter is controversial.

Agenbite of inwit.

This summer I listened to the voice of Annika Östberg, a Swedish convict condemned to a sentence of 25 years to a lifetime, as an accomplice to two murders in California. After having served 28 years in San Quentin California State Prison, she had recently been deported to Sweden to serve the remainder of her “time”. Needlesstosay, I was curious, in much the same way as I am often curious about the lives of other Swedes who emigrated from Sweden to the San Francisco Bay Area, just before or around the same time that I immigrated to Sweden.

The thought occured to me that Annika Östberg may well have been one of the many young “street people” that I encountered in 1967 during the Summer of Love in San Francisco – a girl I saw propped up against the wall of Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley on my way to school, or a waif that asked me for spare change in the Haight -Ashbury, on a visit to my maternal grandparents. Perhaps she was that forsaken woman who caught my eye one day in Golden Gate Park, the summer before I turned away, helpless as she, to understand why. Life is not just.

I was curious to hear the voice of a woman for whom an idealized childhood suddenly came to a brutal end, despite the surrounding fragrance of the Bay Laurel and Eucalyptus. I wanted to hear the voice of a woman who for all those years - that happened to coincide with my years in Sweden - had been imprisoned behind walls that block out a magnificent view of the Richmond San Rafael Bridge and the surrounding bay. A picture postcard, without a message or an addressee and thus no chance of reprieval? I sensed that her grip on the concept of “home” was as firm as her grip on the bars of her cell. Highway to Hell (AC/DC) and Seismic Rumbles (Country Joe and the Fish) have never made so much sense, before. Was it pathetic of me to imagine that we had anything in common, that we had simply exchanged places, tit for tat? Or that we had been playing a game of musical chairs that caught us both off guard? Whose release party was I supposed to be celebrating? For what melody?

I was definitely on guard as I listened to "her" program. She must be reading, but who authored the script, I wondered? Who could have chosen a more nostalgic voice for a Swedophile: Jussi Björling, Nämner du Sverige [Mentioning Sweden]? Was it true that her grandmother’s favorite tune was En gang seglar jag i hamn [One day I’ll sail into the harbor] by Alice Babs? Swedish words seemed to flow naturally from her lips. So how had she managed to maintain her mother tongue, though she hadn’t been in the country for decades, since she was 10 years old? Like her producer, she seemed focused on this task, I thought. Over the years she has kept in touch, with plenty of support from the Swedish media, without Internet or a cell phone... Curious.