Monthly Archives: April 2013

When I hit 101

Crazy ideas

I had a crazy idea today, an idea about writing a novel. You might say: “This is not that crazy. Almost everyone wants to write a novel!” Right! But what is it that makes a person to want to write a novel? I guess there might be plenty possibilities for this. In my case it’s mostly curiosity how a bigger piece of fiction is created and comes to life.

My thought today was crazy because I want to bind the posts in my blog into a novel. And the number 100 seems to be so attractive. So I thought: “What if I bind my first 100 blogs into a novel?” Of course, the first post introducing the blog could be omitted. But then, as for other posts, I could use parts of it in this crazy novel of mine. And then I remembered a sweet family story about the number 101.

One of my grand-parents-in-law lived until 97. He was very optimistic about age and his goal was to live until 101, a year longer than what was according to him the goal of the old pope John-Paul II. My grandpa-in-law Max was a quirky little man with an incredible history of the Second World War and hard life behind him but an absolutely childish pleasure in enjoying life at whatever age.

So, when I hit my 101,- and before you ask, I mean posts in this blog, not years; I don’t want to make you wait so long -, I will start thinking of a plot and characters and I will use for this something from each of my very first 101 posts in this blog.

This idea is so exciting and so crazy that it makes me wish to play a trick on myself and create all kinds of funny, strange, melancholic, inspiring, nonsense, nutty, hilarious, outrageous posts and whatever comes to my mind. I don’t exclude writing a “sane” novel in between.

But this 101 idea is just so crazily great! You and I might forget about it when the 101st post is there in the world. But I am sure that this “lamp” will light up at some point of time and make you and me laugh out loud and swear (me, about having such an idea in the first place!) and smile and be happy about the ways the human mind takes us.

Special gifts

Memories

I don’t remember my father’s voice anymore. Sometimes, I remember the words he told or might have told me. But the voice is gone. It was thirty years ago that I last heard his voice. Also the look of him is gone from my memory. I know how he looked like and his pictures scattered in my apartment and hidden in my wallet remind me of the very handsome man he used to be. But these pictures are static and two-dimensional. Sometimes, after waking up I know I saw him and maybe even talked to him in my dreams but I don’t remember anymore when I am awake. Other time, taking a tram in my home city I thought I caught his sight walking down the street, but I didn’t need to jump out of the tram to follow him, since I knew that he was somewhere unreachable to the living.

Once, when I was visiting in Lyon with my professor and fellow assistants from the University I worked at that time, some of us went to a brasserie for breakfast. And then I heard it. I heard my father’s voice coming from a man standing about five meters in front of me. He was standing with his back to me, being almost of my stature and even seeming to be a couple of centimeters smaller than me now, as I know my father was. This man was chatting merrily in French with his friends or colleagues, just as my father often did when I, aged from six to nine years, was with him and my mother in Algeria. These were the truest and sharpest memories saved somewhere very, very deep, that this complete stranger unbeknownst to him dug out and presented to me. For a moment, I was tempted by my curiosity to walk and look into that man’s face. But I decided against it. You are right to assume that I didn’t want the disappointment of this man not being my father to spoil that magic moment of hearing his voice.

I still don’t remember his voice and neither his looks when I try to recall them. When they come, then they come unexpectedly and they are given to me by the living. It is as if my father is pouring magical rain drops of his looks and sounds on various people. And these drops glitter in the sun of his love to me and my love to him making me recognize these little drops of his being.

And now there is a very special person in my life who brings me three-dimensional memories of my father that no pictures, I have, have ever captured. These visual memories are so true and so vivid and they fill me with endless love and happiness of being my father’s daughter.

This special person giving me such enormous gifts of memories of my father is my son. And when I think that I passed this to my son, I realize that through all my life I bear the gifts from my parents, from my father, both in my looks and in my soul.

Special help

Memories

I remember a rainy day in Annaba, when my father picked me up from school and protected me from rain with his big military rain cloak. It had no sleeves, only openings for hands and my little seven-year-old face fitted one of them perfectly.

I worried about a bad school grade I got that day. I was afraid that my mom would be angry with me about that. My dad never was, and therefore he was the first to know about my failures. He actually never saw them as failures but as achievements, since my regret wouldn’t let me stay where I was but would push me forward. And he was always sure that I could achieve more if I only wanted it. And he trusted in this wish of mine. But as in any family, there had to be a policeman to declare the rules and indicate the limits. In our family it was a “policewoman” to do this job, my mom: a very kind “guard of family law and order”, but from my seven-year-old point of view, also a very strict one.

So, on that day I was contemplating to hide that bad grade from my mom, since in that term it was not final anyway.

But my father gently insisted that I tell her the truth. “You are right to think that your Mama will be disappointed”, he said, “but when she finds out you lied, and you know that she is very good at that,” he smiled, “then she will be really angry”. After a short silence interrupted only by sound of rain and our feet stamping onto the wet pavement, he added: “Tell her the truth. I’ll help you”. And he did, in a very special, for me unexpected way.

As my mom’s disappointment lingered a bit longer than I would think I could suffer before bursting into tears, which was actually less than thirty seconds after I told her the truth, my Papa sent me to my room and set up to talk to my mom. While going sadly to my room I suddenly heard my mother giggling and I turned to see why. My father held her in his arms and teased her with kisses. Although being a bit jealous and being too little to grasp and understand the situation, I realized that my father made all of us three happy with just one small but sweet gesture.

Matti

Portraits

A 100% fictional portrait (‘painted’ by a 100% fictional character)

Written and published on an older blog in March, 2013

My name is Jacques. I was born in Helsinki and I am a suomi. Well, maybe not by my first name. If you wonder about it, you will probably come to the solution at the second thought. Yes, my mother was French. I don’t know what she thought about when she insisted giving me a name, which is pronounced by many of my fellow suomi men and women as “jakku “, meaning, yes, correct, a jacket or a coat. Well, you might say there is nothing to it, but at some point at school I started thinking that something was odd when in I wasn’t greeted by a “Hey, ‘jacket’, where’s your jacket?”, “Oh, our ‘coat’ has a new jacket!” etc.

My mother’s name was Isabelle. My father, Matti, is suomi and up to this day he didn’t marry again after Isabelle left. We never say she passed away. We always say that she left us when I was ten. And when we see a shocked face, my father and I say in one voice: “To a better place”. It is hilarious to see what happens to a person who hears us saying this for the first time. The face shows often an interesting mixture of awkwardness at the misunderstanding, relief that there was no cruelty involved from a mother, apology for being so impolite and guilty of thinking such a thing of a most probably loving mother, and sadness for a father and son left without indulging love of a woman and a mother.

My father was always a rebel. Isabelle looked and was nothing like an ideal suomi girl. She was too fashionable, too spoiled and too fragile. The latter made her ‘fade’ and die too fast like a tropical flower brought to Alaska and forgotten outside.

But Matti is definitely suomi, with his quirky, dry sense of humor – it was his idea to say that his wife left him, – and with him being absolutely reliable. He never missed a single game of my ice-hockey team, even if it was a mere training and wasn’t an actual game. Our neighbors thought for a long time that I was playing for at least five teams in parallel, by having so many games a week. Matti sat with me through all of the life or leg saving treatments in the ER, where I happened to be a frequent guest, partly because I mimicked fearlessness of my father and was therefore very ‘headless’, as Matti likes calling me, and partly because I inherited the gentle health from my mother. At least my bones have done just that.

This strange mixture makes Matti and me different, also in the way we relate to speech and feelings. My father, as a man, and more so as a suomi man, has a big difficulty to talk not only about feelings, but to say more than three sentences in half or often also for the whole hour. I am in contrast a river of words, especially, when I talk about feelings. Even suomi girls grow tired of me quite fast.

But there is no other man, who could listen to me as Matti does. Maybe this is due to his quiet nature, but rather it is his endless love to his loved ones and especially to his boy that makes him the first person I reach out to in the saddest and also in the happiest moments. And my guess is that my glamorous, fashionable mother fell for exactly these qualities of his as much as she fell for his glittering blue eyes.

A thing about toothpaste

A mother's diary

Niklas is here 2,5 years old.

–        February/March, 2013 –

This morning Niklas has expressed a wish to brush his teeth while I was brushing mine. In order to do so, he brought his little stool into our narrow bathroom, put it in front of the sink and stepped resolutely onto it. I spread his light blue, glittery and translucent toothpaste on his sophisticated junior toothbrush.

After handing Niklas his tooth-brushing tool, I did the same with mine. Because of my fruit intolerance, I use a toothpaste free of sorbitol and other with “-tol” ending ingredients. At least two of those I tried so far have a strange pinkish color of teeth-ridge, including the one I use today.

When Niklas saw my toothpaste, his face changed from smiling one to one full with disgust and he proclaimed: “Den kan ikke smage godt!” which translated from Danish means: “That cannot taste good!” All I could do is agree with him.