Reducing the Easter Bunny

Punny Pixels, hiphopping, Peter cottontail and the Easter bunny funny kept me company today.
I learned that according to the Easter myth, the hare was once a bird who, when Orion sent a sudden cold spell that froze his wings, was saved by the benevolence of the goddess Oster who transformed him into a hare. The vigilance and speed of the hare have hence come to immortalize the need to flee from sin and temptation, and become a reminder of the fleeting passage of life.
On nights like these, when the sky is clear, you can see him still - the Hare - at the feet of Orion. In the firmament he sits between the lines to the butcher, who keeps his sword in his belt until time immemorial, because the hare has been sentenced to save his skin by revealing his true origins in the eggs he brings every Easter. Ironically, to lay an egg in informal American English means “to fail to make people enjoy or be interested in something.”
While only the hare is at home among the thorns of the briar patch, this particular hare risks scathing, skinning (tarring and feathering too) because he is not truly at home in the briar patch (ref. Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus tales).

“Watch the birdie, smile and prepare to have your picture taken.”
“Maria Magdalena, could you please move in, a bit closer to Judas, I want to immortalize all of my disciples at the table tonight. Watch the birdie.” Click.
“ Yes, that was it, a great constellation. We are all gathered here to re-member...can't remember.”

“Before the cock crows you will have denied me …”
"But Rabbi..." was like the hare in all but sin.
Zoom in. “Quick, lay an egg!”
Now here comes Peter cottontail, hopping down the bunny trail.
Hippity, hoppity, Easter’s on her way.
And the cock crowed and the hen laid another egg.
And suddenly the whole story was reduced to a few golden, grey, green and brown pixels.
Zoom out. Hip hop.

My first seamstress*

As the oldest in a family of five children, Mother Anne apparently learned early to assume her place as the competent and graceful, always on-top-of-it-all woman. She was a conversationalist, a given ”bell of the ball”, the gracious ”hostess with the mostest”. She often outdid herself and others. She was “always in charge”, as a friend of mine has recently said of her. In fact, she was “in charge” until the very end of her life.

As a young mother, she was a master of crafts. I didn’t think that any of the kids on our block in Wellesley, Massachussetts, had the hand-knitted sweaters, the handmade costumes for Halloween, the dresses, that we had. She was the one who taught my sister and I how to knit and gave us an appreciation for all sorts of handicrafts. She gave us beautiful linens, cutlery, high quality cooking utensils... long before the yuppy was ever invented. Her high school graduation present to both of her daughters was a Singer sewing machine. (That we both became amateur singers is another story.) Mother Anne wanted to equip us for life, for the kind of life she and many of her peers had enjoyed as a wife and mother.

But she wasn’t just the typical mother of her generation. As a child, I also remember her sitting at the typewriter, writing letters to a friend in some other country, or a column for a local newspaper. As I grew older I could also picture her behind the easel, painting a classical still life, struggling to capture the frost on a decanter or the reflections on a river. It’s in the same spirit that I can see her practicing calligraphy or shifting the budding branches in some Japanese minimal flower arrangement.

”Your mom has style before others", a friend would say. Her dinner parties were planned with meticulous attention to details, especially when it came to setting the table: starched linens, imaginative flower arrangements, tapered candles, and well-prepared and aesthetically served food. Mother Anne was also an excellent cook. I remember her practicing Japanese cooking on us (classes taught by Benedictine nuns in Tokyo!) when we still preferred hamburgers. Nonetheless we were proud of her ambition. It wasn’t just something she did for the big dinner parties that were a part of her obligation, but every day. I remember often coming home from school hungry and smelling something on the go. I could always look forward to sitting down to one of her well-prepared meals, served every evening at 6 p.m. sharp.

While mother Anne might ”hang out” in shorts and sneakers around the house she would never leave home, never be seen out, without being impeccably dressed, elegantly coifed and made up, with the accessories and jewelry to match. Even when she was out in front of her house washing her car in later years she’d be dressed to kill for the occasion. Egg yolk yellow tights and a blue silk scarf wrapped around her hip, sunglasses and a brimmed cap to match.

Mother Anne was also proud of her heritage as an ”original” San Franciscan (she left San Francisco with father Kreigh during the war and didn’t return until just before he died in the 60s.) She grew up steeped in medical lore as her father was a pharmacist and all of her paternal uncles were physicians. Her paternal grandfather was a physician (Hund) who immigrated from Germany, and set up practice in Marin County (His property is now Marin County College). Her maternal grandparents (Pollard) were wealthy merchants and shippers, primarily of redwood. While her own family lived comfortably during her early years in Saint Francis Wood in San Francisco, they virtually lost everything in the stock market crash in 1929. The death of her sister Carolyn during the polio epidemic of the early 30s, coupled with her mother’s chronic illness then, were other blows to the family in the 30s.

She met father Kreigh in 1934 (at the SF Yacht club on a blind date), and they were married in 1938. Mother Anne told us that she ”grew up” with father Kreigh, that he taught her about the world, about life and love. Life with father Kreigh apparently brought her out and away from the tragedies of her own family...first to South Carolina, then back to San Franicsco during the war, to Japan just after the war, to Boston, to Louisiana, Kansas, back to Japan again, and then Utah.

When I asked mother Anne only a few years ago what she thought were characteristics of her that I had inherited she said: ”I loved your father.” At first I wasn’t really sure what she meant, and wondered if she was trying to avoid my question, but when I thought about it later it seemed clear to me that her love for father Kreigh was…from the very start… the truest story of her life, and it was to that love that I owed my very existence. The last night I saw her she said ”Your father would have been so proud of you.” That was the ultimate expression of love from mom. In answer to my question she then added with some afterthought ”assertiveness and independence". She was indeed assertive, and independent. We could have talks like that over the phone between Sweden and the US. Often comforting and wise.

My last few weeks with mother Anne in April last year had many sweet moments, like when we had taken farewell of one another as I was returning to Sweden the next morning, and had said: ”I have to go now mom” she responded: ” we all have to go soon, dear.” Just a few hours before her death she said to my older brother: ”Can I let go of you now?” While his answer was No, that he’d be back tomorrow”, she remained assertive and independent to the very end. She didn’t want us to tell her what to do or when to go. When her time had come she went.

Her daughter,
Sue Anne

ps. Mother Anne also loved words and sunshine. A voracious reader, she was always a mistress of the word, i.e. ”perspicacious” was one of her favorites. She loved to sit and read in the sunshine, later in the sunlight of her bedroom or sitting room. Yet I’ll always remember her buried in some other world (even have painted her as such), hovering over a book in her lap, in the shade of a wide brimmed straw hat.

*My eulogy to mother Anne, Saint Agnes Church, San Francisco, June 29, 2007

Contemplating an empty plate

This evening I had hoped to listen to Merete Mazzarella, a Swedish journalist, essaist and author, speak at Finlandsinstitutet in Stockholm about her two most recent books: När vi spelade Afrikas stjärna and Fredricka Charlotta född Tengström. While I arrived in good time for the talk, I was turned away together with 20 to 30 other disappointed listeners because the lecture hall for some 200 persons was already full, despite the fact that we had arrived in good time before the posted "meeting time".
In my frustration, several thoughts went through my mind: relax, go home and take it easy; you've already corresponded with Merete M by mail about these books, so you've satiated at least some of your curiosity; how different this situation is from the times I''ve found myself sitting with a dozen or so other diehards at the foot of a Nobel laureate in the Black Oak Bookstore in north Berkeley and been given so much to think about; Jante Law: what is the difference between the intellectual climate of Sweden/Finland/Scandinavia and the USA? I think I am starved here in Sweden and returned home, wherever that may be, this evening to contemplate my empty plate....and write on.
I find solace in knowing that tomorrow evening, I will break bread and eat fish with one of my favorite friends.

Cultural clash

This morning I experienced an amusing culture clash.
We were four colleagues who had arrived simultaneously at the front door of our offices. The senior board member (a Swede) among us was quickest to pull out his magnetic entry card and hold the door open for the rest of us. All of a sudden my younger Chinese colleague backed into me, whereupon I nearly overturned the poor young Swedish colleague behind me. Instinctively grabbing a hold of my younger Chinese colleague for balance, I (typical American?) proceeded to push her in front of me through the door, ahead of our junior Swede.
My young Chinese colleague was of course flustered because she had not been the first to open the door for her senior colleagues, and in her failure to follow Asian protocol she at least wanted to be the last of us three remaining to enter. We all know that some (especially older) Swedes are chivalrous and that most Americans are pushy, right? Once we had all managed to enter the reception without setting off the alarm, we could laugh over a quick cultural debrief. Needlesstosay, I am privileged to work where the ceiling is high and a ubiquitous sense of humor prevails.

The primary election

My absentee vote is still waiting to be counted. I am glad I've had some choice, to bite or not to bite into the big juicy apple in the hands of Billary and Obama. "Some of the best choices we make are the ones we make when we don't have much choice," said Josephine M.

Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday is the beginning the fast, the day of the liturgical year that is to remind us of our own mortality. I watch the priest as he presses his thumb into the bowl of ashes and then hear him say “Dust thou art to dust returneth” or “Return to the Word” as ashes fall before my eyes, like my funeral veil. At once I am shielded from having to show my face, and allowed to wear my grief with grace. I can see that now. My entry on Ash Wednesday last year mentions my plans to return soon to mother Anne’s bedside before her hour of death.

This day also reminds me of the significance of setting limits, of willingly abstaining from things I think I cannot do without. We succumb to temptation so much more easily when and where barriers are invisible. This day reminds me of the unseen black veil and unheard water falling, before the opening behind which I stand.

…All this and more
remains
 to be seen
in the sound 
of silence
at all the checkpoints

between the pauses 

between the Acts
before passing
all old stations
of the Ubahn.

Listen carefully
nowhere any longer
wall or ashes falling
before our eyes

to let me see
what remains
for who am I
otherwise?

Berlin, February 1993

A subway encounter in 1990

I have a note in my diary from 1990 that I ran into one of the architects of the Kaknästorn in the Stockholm subway on 31 January. The note doesn’t indicate where we entered the train or who was on the train first. I can only see that we were both on our way to work in the Old Town, and that while we acknowledged one another, I was apparently the first to open a conversation by saying 'hello'. The note adds that the architect was unable to place me immediately, likewise that he seemed relieved when he was able to make a connection to my face, and pose a perfect “cocktail party” question:

“Have you seen the Börjeson girls lately?” The architect had re-membered that I was a friend of the daughters of one of his oldest childhood friends from Örebro, Börje Börjeson, whose oldest daughter, Tina, had bought the little red house next door to mine. Tina had grown up on a nearby broiler chicken farm, and the little red cabin was where her father had once lodged several illegal immigrants to work the farm. She later encouraged me - whom she had met through mutual friends a few years earlier – to purchase the adjacent property when it too was up for sale the next year. Though the miner's residence I bought was much larger, it didn't have the same emotional ties to Tina as the little red house, to where she and her sister had often gone to escape from farm chores and isolation, and where there were several young available foreign men. It didn’t occur to me then that suggesting that I purchase the old miner's residence might be a dubious exercise of the popular Swedish expression “territorial control”*, nor that it could well become the scene of a modern drama.

“Yes, as a matter of fact I have,” I answered the architect, adding “You know that Tina is married to my youngest brother.” I could see how the architect tensed, the way his face flushed as though I had suddenly offered him a piece of a totally different puzzle than the one he was working on.

“No, no she’s not,” he said impulsively, adding: “She married a rich American and moved to the United States.” I don’t think it was just his negation of my statement - and the obvious conviction with which he asserted that Tina had not married my brother - that was so absurd. There was something vulgar and impersonal about the way he pronounced the cliché “rich American” that caused me to react the way I did.

“No, no, she hasn’t, she’s married to my younger brother,” I said, instinctively defending myself from the source of his information as well as from his preferential right to interpret it, and hopefully protecting the integrity of my “poor little brother” at the same time. Who had told the architect about the marriage? Why did that messenger choose to identify the marriage with something like his Jaguar, a vehicle which he had chosen to hide in the woods because it spoiled the view of his own country house. What was it that the messenger had wanted, and had not wanted, the architect to see? Clearly embarrassed and flustered by the situation, the architect seemed relieved that the train was just approaching the Old Town.

“Yaha, well, I’m getting off here, goodbye for now.”

“Yes, well, I’m getting off here too,” I said, continuing to shuffle to the right of the architect as he stepped out of the subway car. I was curious and sensed that I had nothing to lose by pursuing the topic, despite whatever discomfort it may be causing. It seemed to be a perfect opportunity to consume our anxiety by disclosing the hypocrisy. We walked silently side by side until we were out of the station, when he motioned to the right.

“Well, I’m off here…”

“Yes, me too” I interrupted, continuing to keep pace alongside of him on the narrow cobblestoned street, “I have an appointment with a graphic designer on Ferkens Gränd.” I knew that the architect had an office next door to where I was going because I had seen his name many times before on the building. Thus, I could politely prepare him either for a few more minutes of conversation, or the chance to take a detour. He seemed to succumb, however reluctantly, to my company.

“Yes, they were married several years ago, and have a young son now.” I think that both the architect and I sensed the need to begin from the beginning, with the innocence of a child.

To be continued...


* Max Weber’s definition of state, which has long been appropriated by the Swedish foreign ministry (though applicable only to strong states): “unchallenged control of the territory within the defined boundaries under its control, monopolization of the legitimate use of force within the borders of the state, and the reliance upon impersonal rules in the governance of its citizens and subjects” (SIDA 2533n)