“SHIT! Glemt bleier?” (“Shit! Forgot diapers?”) It was meant as a play on the word “skit”, which is pronounced the same but means “dirt” and is used to refer to dirty diapers. The sign then directed in-trouble moms to the Ikea restaurant where free emergency diapers were available.

I had to laugh at the cleverness of it, but the sign left me wondering if an Ikea in the U.S. could get away with something like that. Of course it seems much less “bad” if the “bad” words are in another language. For example, I can say Merde! Mierda! Scheiße! and a whole host of other foreign profanities without even feeling the need to cover my mouth.

On the first day of a university-level writing course I was co-teaching, my colleague asked the students around the table to please introduce themselves.

The first student responded in English: “I’m too f–ked up to answer.”

Laughter erupted around the table. I supposed I blushed. But as the day progressed it turned out he was a good student, slightly shy even. Certainly not a rebel.

Far from telling us “I’ve just done a lot of drugs,” I assume he meant to say something along the lines of, “I’m too tired to answer.”

It occurred to me that while many Norwegians speak English extremely well, the subtleties of appropriateness are more difficult to learn in a foreign language when not living in that particular culture. Who you are speaking with and where matters a great deal.

Take the larger than life poster I saw hanging in the window of Greighallen – the main concert hall in Bergen named after the composer Edward Grieg. Greighallen is the main venue for operas and classical music performances, but also hosts some smaller bands and lesser-known performers. The poster advertised, in 5000-point type, the upcoming appearance of a band called “BJØRN HELLF—K”.

I considered calling Greighallen to tell them the complete inappropriateness of such a poster, glaring out at passersby in central Bergen, but decided against it. Who was I, after all? The language police?

So I puzzled over whether Norwegians simply did not know the weight of these words, or did not care. In a country that sells nuddie mags at child’s-eye level at the grocery store check-out, it’s a bit hard to tell what is offensive.

Then again, I wondered if American films might be to blame. It certainly would appear that we all go around saying, “F—k!” to everyone, everywhere, all the time. The film Casino uses the “F” word 398 times, or once every 2.37 minutes. In films like Scarface and Hoffa you’ll hear the word almost once every minute. Compounded with this is the fact on TV and in films profane words are always translated into less offensive words in the subtitles. (The “F” word is usually translated as “Faen,” which in Norwegian carries the shock value of a word like “hell.”) Still, I’m not sure films and subtitles can be blamed for everything.

About two years ago a new muffin and coffee shop opened in Bergen called “Eat My Muffin.” When I first spotted it I couldn’t even stand there looking at the swirly logo without choking. Someone should tell them! I thought. But they had clearly already spent a good deal of money painting the logo across the glass front, and on napkins, cups and paper take-away bags. What could be said? And maybe they already knew? “Eat My Muffin” has since become so popular that they’ve recently opened a second location.

Local designer Charles Ravndal wrote on his blog: “I think Eat My Muffin is a really catchy name for such an establishment though it sounded somewhat *whispering* dirty too.”

No! I groan. No! No! No! No! No! The name of the shop doesn’t sound “*whispering* dirty,” it sounds gross, completely off-putting in fact. Double entendres are fine for porn shops, but coffee shops full of moms with strollers?

I am hereby begging ESL teachers around the world to please teach some cultural context with language.

And then –

Yesterday my son came home from school, threw his English book down on the table and informed me:

“This book is teaching us to say mean things in English.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“One guy says to another guy, ‘I’m gonna rip your guts out!’ and then the other guy says, ‘Shut up!’”

“Well,” sighed my husband. “You can’t learn the language without learning the culture.”

BIFF:             What’s he say about me?

HAPPY:        I think the fact that you’re not settled, that you’re still kind of up in the air . . . [. . .] But I think if you just got started—I mean—is there any future for you out there?

BIFF:             I tell ya, Hap, I don’t know what the future is. I don’t know—what I’m supposed to want.

HAPPY:         What do you mean?

BIFF:              Well, I spent six or seven years after high school trying to work myself up. Shipping   clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. And it’s a measly manner of  existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off. And always to have to get ahead of the next fella. And still—that’s how you build a future.

_______

“I’m not living the American Dream,” I sighed to two friends over lunch. Like me they had lived in several other countries before turning up in Norway. Unlike me, neither was born in the U.S.

“What?” asked one in astonishment. “Did you think you would be?”

“It’s just that . . . well, you believe that if you do A and B then C will follow.”

“Do you really think so? So how did you think your life would be different?”

“Well, you know, all that American Dream stuff – a big job, a big house, two cars, a two-car garage.” (So far in life I’ve made it to no job, small house, one car and a garage that was built in the 70s for a shoe.)

“Really? So that’s what you’re supposed to have?”

I smiled, but I felt self-conscious. And that’s why it’s called the American Dream, I thought.

A similar conversation with an American friend yielded a more expected response.

“I know!” she complained. “I’m not supposed to be starting a whole new life at 50. I mean, what am I doing?”

“But what is a life?” I asked, in earnest.

She agreed that this was the question. We struggled to define it, and without the progression-towards-success myth of the Protestant work ethic that we’d both been forced to swallow, we were left with nothing.

In 1919 Virgina Woolf wrote: “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

No, life is not a series of gig lamps, symmetrically arranged, but I have depended upon that symmetry to make meaning from my life. I constantly try, infuriatingly, to draw a continuous line that knits together past with present and unfolds into a prophesied future.

I want to think of life as not moving in a straight line, but twisting and stretching like a vine. Sometimes it climbs higher, but sometimes it uses all of its energy to simply stay in the very same place and put down new roots.

I began this blog a year ago to come to terms with living in Norway and with being an immigrant, to try to find roots where it seemed none would grow. One year later I am still identifiable as a “not Norwegian,” and any roots I have put down could easily be kicked free by a hiker’s boot. I still don’t know what the future is, or what it means to build one.

I do have the present, though: a very rich and meaningful present that threatens to dissolve if I don’t savor it.

_______

BIFF:             Are you content, Hap? You’re a success, aren’t you? Are you content?

HAPPY:        Hell, no!

BIFF:             Why? You’re making money, aren’t you?

HAPPY:        All I can do know is wait for the merchandise manager to die. And suppose I get to be merchandise manager? He’s a good friend of mine, and he just built a terrific estate on Long Island. And he lived there about two months and sold it, and now he’s building another one. He can’t enjoy it once it’s finished. And I know that’s just what I’d do. I don’t know what the hell I’m workin’ for. Sometimes I just sit in my apartment—all alone. And I think of the rent I’m paying. And it’s crazy. But then, it’s what I’ve always wanted. My own apartment, a car, plenty of women. And still, goddammit. I’m lonely.

“Paradox and Dream” is the title of an essay written in 1966 by American author and Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. I came across it in Steinbeck’s America and Americans while looking for a particular quote of his about why socialism never caught on it America (“I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.”)

From the very first sentence of this essay I was struck by the pertinence of his descriptions  over 40 years later.

Following is an excerpted version of “Paradox and Dream”:

One of the generalities most often noted about Americans is that we are a restless, a dissatisfied, a searching people. We bridle and buck under failure, and we go mad with dissatisfaction in the face of success. We spend our time searching for security, and hate it when we get it. For the most part we are an intemperate people: we eat too much when we can, drink too much, indulge our senses too much. Even in our so-called virtues we are intemperate: a teetotaler is not content to not drink—he must stop all the drinking in the world; a vegetarian among us would outlaw the eating of meat. We work too hard, and many die under the strain; and then to make up for that we play with violence as suicidal.

The result is that we seem to be in a state of turmoil all the time, both physically and mentally. We are able to believe that our government is weak, stupid, overbearing, dishonest, and inefficient, and at the same time we are deeply convinced that it is the best government in the world, and we would like to impose it upon everyone else. We speak of the American Way of Life as though it involved the ground rules for the governance of heaven. A man hungry and unemployed through his own stupidity and that of others, a man beaten by a brutal policeman, a woman forced into prostitution by her own laziness, high prices, availability, and despair—all bow with reverence toward the American Way of Life, although each one would look puzzled and angry if he were asked to define it. We scramble and scrabble up the stony path toward the pot of gold we have taken to mean security. We trample friends, relatives, and strangers who get in our way of achieving it; and once we get it we shower it on psychoanalysts to try to find out why we are unhappy, and finally—if we have enough of the gold—we contribute it back to the nation in the form of foundations and charities.

[. . .]  

Now there is a set of generalities for you, each one of them canceled out by another generality. Americans seem to live and breathe and function by paradox; but in nothing are we so paradoxical as in our passionate beliefs in our own myths. We truly believe ourselves to be natural-born mechanics and do-it-yourself-ers. We spend our lives in motorcars, yet most of us—a great many of us at least—do not know enough about a car to look in the gas tank when the motor fails. Our lives as we live them would not function without electricity, but it is a rare man or woman who, when the power goes off, knows how to look for a burned-out fuse and replace it. We believe implicitly that we are the heirs of the pioneers; that we have inherited self-sufficiency and the ability to take care of ourselves, particularly in relation to nature. There isn’t a man among us in ten thousand who knows how to butcher a cow or a pig and cut it up for eating, let alone a wild animal. By natural endowment, we are great rifle shots and great hunters—but when hunting season opens there is a slaughter of farm animals and humans by men and women who couldn’t hit a real target if they could see it. Americans treasure the knowledge that they live close to nature, but fewer and fewer farmers feed more and more people; and as soon as we can afford to we eat out of cans, buy frozen TV dinners, and haunt the delicatessens. Affluence means moving to the suburbs, but the American suburbanite sees, if anything, less of the country than the city apartment dweller with his window boxes and his African violets tended under lights. In no country are more seeds and plants and equipment purchased, and less flowers and vegetables raised.

The paradoxes are everywhere: We shout that we are a nation of laws, not men—and then proceed to break every law we can if we can get away with it. We proudly insist that we base our political positions on the issues—and we will vote against a man because of his religion, his name, or the shape of his nose.

[. . .]

We fancy ourselves as hardheaded realists, but we will buy anything we see advertised, particularly on television; and we buy it not with reference to the quality or the value of the product, but directly as a result of the number of times we have heard it mentioned. The most arrant nonsense about a product is never questioned. We are afraid to be awake, afraid to be alone, afraid to be a moment without the noise and confusion we call entertainment. [. . . ]

One of the characteristics most puzzling to a foreign observer is the strong and imperishable dream the American carries. On inspection, it is found that the dream has little to do with reality in American life. Consider the dream of and the hunger for a home. The very word can reduce nearly all of my compatriots to tears. Builders and developers never build houses—they build homes. The dream home is either in a small town or in a suburban area where grass and trees simulate the country. This dream home is a permanent seat, not rented but owned. It is a center where a man and his wife grow graciously old, warmed by the radiance of well-washed children and grandchildren. Many thousands of these homes are built every year; built, planned, advertised, and sold—and yet, the American family rarely stays in one place for more than five years. The home and its equipment are purchased on time and heavily mortgaged. The earning power of the father is almost always overextended, so that after a few years he is not able to keep up the payments on his loans. That is on the losing side. But suppose the earner is successful and his income increases. Right away the house is not big enough, or in the proper neighborhood. Or perhaps suburban life palls, and the family move to the city, where excitement and convenience beckon.

For Americans too the wide and general dream has a name. It is called “the American Way of Life.” No one can define it or point to any one person or group who lives it, but it is very real nevertheless, perhaps more real than that equally remote dream the Russians call Communism. These dreams describe our vague yearnings toward what we wish were and hope we may be: wise, just, compassionate, and noble. The fact that we have this dream at all is perhaps an indication of its possibility.

Wide-armed thanks to Paul Higdon for sharing some of the stunning photos he took on a  recent trip through Arizona. To see more amazing shots like these — from the U.S. and from travels around the world — visit Paul’s Flickr site.

But what about no bad weather, no clothing?

A fellow ex-pat living in Lillehammer (who admits she has “been accused of being special”) recently posted a blog on her new-found hobby: ice bathing. Read that again. Not ice fishing. Ice bathing.

“The current temperatures in Norway are below freezing, and the thought of ice bathing sounds GRUESOME!,” she wrote. I should add that she’s from Florida.

“ICE BATHING increases circulation, REDUCES CELLULITE, and strengthens the immune system.” Which sounds enticing, I admit. But did you know your bare feet can get stuck to the ice when you step out of the water, much like Flick’s tongue to that flagpole in A Christmas Story? And just how do you take off a swimsuit that has frozen to your body?

For all the answers, and incredible pictures of this Norwegian “sport,” visit Goodness and Grit.

(She has begun ice bathing with friends every Thursday morning at 7 a.m. Crazy? Maybe, but I admit I want to try!)

"Goodness and Grit" blogger Kimberly Mengshoel writes: "The animated expression on my face says it all!"

As the clock on the wall ticked on and on into the late evening, I was grateful for the easy conversation with my waiting-room friend, an African-American woman with stomach pains who sat wrapped up in a blanket, wondering if they would ever call her name. She knew they called babies first, then small children, then the very, very old, then anyone bleeding or screaming. It would be a long night.

“You got a long way back ta Norway?”

“Yah. And our flight’s not till 10 p.m. tomorrow,” I complained. “It’s going to be a long night and a long day. And we don’t even have clean underwear!”

“Y’all got four backpacks and a suitcase and you don’t got yourselves no clean unduh-wear?”

She had a point.

“I mean – shoot – them paramedics had ta wheeeeel all tha’ stuff in here. What was you thinkin’?”

She was right, the paramedics unloaded our carry-on bags from the ambulance and wheeled them into the waiting room on a stretcher. I could see why this made an impression.

She started to giggle. “Wha’chew got in them bags anyway?”

“Stuff for the kids!” I cried, trying to defend myself.

“How much stuff them two need?!”

I had to laugh. It was shameful, really.

In between this light-hearted banter I began to notice the crew in the corner of the room. A middle-aged woman, with a face that looked much older, paced the floor and grabbed at the back of her short hair in agitation. She wore a pink sweatshirt with a rabbit on it and loose grey flannel pants dotted with pink hearts that would have passed everywhere else for pyjama bottoms. Every few minutes her deep-voiced smokers’ crackle barked out something to a chubby, blond, three-year-old girl, just to prove she really was keeping an eye on her.

“Adrianna, git yer butt over here.”

“Adrianna, don’chew touch them cray-ons!” (And then to anyone who was listening: “She ain’t allowed crayons. She’ll jus’ eat ’em.”)

Adrianna was not allowed to have the coloring book and crayons that my daughter got.

Instead, Adrianna got Cheetos from a foil bag and wandered around the room looking lost, occasionally smearing her orange fingers across the belly of her shirt. Adrianna looked like she ate a lot of Cheetos.

“C’mon. Show ’em how you dance,” coaxed her grandma, who, to my surprise, was quick to squat and sway her own hips.

“Shake that bootie!” Adrianna looked down at her empty Cheetos bag.

“You don’wanna shake yer bootie? All right, then.”

It became clear that Adrianna’s mother was the teenage woman leaning over her crutches and watching the hockey game in the corner. Some of the orders were barked in her direction (“Kayla! She’s tryin’ ta pull off her pants again! I told you, you gotta tell her!”), but Kayla never turned her head to acknowledge them.

When Adrianna moved over to watch my daughter color, and then to touch her hair, and then to try to grab the book from her, Gramma didn’t pay no mind. It was also fine when I asked her how old she was, called her “sweetie” and untangled her pudgy, orange fingers from my daughter’s hair.

Nor was Gramma looking when Adrianna stuck her tongue out at the black woman next to me. (After all, the Detroit Redwings game was on TV.)

But when my friend softly reprimanded her – “Now that was not nice,” – ol’ Gramma spun around with a face like a mad dog.

“Adrianna! You git over here!” she shrieked. “You keep away from that woman.”

She was one of those people who only pretended to have private conversations, and the entire room witnessed her hoarse harangue: “Kayla, you gotta watch out fer her! Some folks ain’t learned ta min’ their own bizniss. I’m serious, Kayla. You gotta teach her ta watch out fer some folks.”

Some folks. I sat in numb shock, my mind racing. We have not moved on from this. This foul smell of hate? fear? revulsion? Or, even more disturbing: habit. It sits here with us in this room as if it were Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Just 50 years. Not so long ago. Not long enough? And the cycle repeats, right here, right now.

“I am so sorry,” I said to my friend in a powerless attempt to right wrongs. “I see I was mistaken. Not everyone here is kind.”

The woman kept her gaze straight ahead at the wall and said flatly: “I’m fixin’ ta say somethin’ back, but I won’t, seein’ as how your lovely daughtuh is sittin’ right here.”

Announcements from the hockey game continued to fill the room with a low buzz, the entrance doors kept opening and closing, patients were called in, and the rest of us continued to wait in a room where the very air had been divided in two.

I rummaged in my backpack for some of the snacks I had intended to take on the plane and found a bag of Godiva truffles. I offered my friend some.

“Now that’s the fancy chocolate!” She nodded her head in approval and took two. “I prob’ly shoul’nt eat these, but I don’ s’pose it mattuhs what I eat. Nothin’ gonna help this stomach . . . and nothin’ gonna hurt it worse neithuh.”

I had intended the chocolates to break the mood – put a smile on our faces, but my gift felt like a cheap attempt at atonement.

“I got them in my stocking at Christmas,” I told her.

“You got chocolates in your stocking?” I didn’t know what the surprise in her voice meant, and left it at that.

Much later that evening, after my friend had finally heard her named called by the nurse, Gramma shuffled over to me and said – by way of an apology? No, by way of an excuse –  “I jus’ don’t like when people git inta other people’s bizniss.”

“Adrianna stuck her tongue out at that woman and so she told her that wasn’t a nice thing to do,” I said, refusing to make eye contact with her.

“She did? Kayla – you hear that? Adrianna stuck her tongue out at that woman. Huh. I didn’t see that.”

“No, I don’t suppose you did.” I meant it as an insult, but she shuffled back to her side of the waiting room unfazed.

I thought about Adrianna for a long time.

At some point in that evening, in a momentary pause in the hockey game, her young mother noticed her standing there at her side, clinging to her pants.

“You wanna wear yer daddy’s tags now?”

With great care, almost ceremoniously, she lifted the long chain over her head and placed it around her daughter’s neck. Adrianna tugged and twisted the two silver dog tags that had helped somebody identify her daddy, and then put one of them absentmindedly in her mouth.

I didn’t actually know any of their stories. I really didn’t.

Within minutes, no less than four paramedics, one police officer and two Delta Airline representatives showed up at gate A40 to offer their assistance. In a tight circle of concerned discussion, a plan was made: we would be taken by ambulance to the hospital and Delta would both rebook our flights for the next day and make hotel reservations for us.

When we left the hospital at 11 p.m. that night, we were armed with 2 Epi-Pen injections and four prescription allergy medications to ensure that the reaction did not return during the flight. Everything was going to be okay and I felt safe again, but the stress of the holidays, the tragedy of the murder/suicide, the tiresome job of packing, and now this – it was too much. The words “exhausting,” “terrifying,” “overwhelming” didn’t seem adequate for what we felt. But as we stretched our legs under the comfortingly heavy duvets in our luxurious and paid-for room at the Westin, the past melted away to became just a story we could tell with varying degrees of urgency or ease.

But this story is only a segue to other stories I wanted to tell – stories about the America I left behind, stories that remind me of why it was good to leave, but also of everything I miss about that great, mythical nation.

When we arrived at Oakwood Hospital, just a few miles from the airport, my husband followed my son and my daughter and I found seats in the waiting room. It was already past her bedtime and she curled up into the chair, head against my shoulder, while I surveyed the environment and prepared for a long evening.

The waiting room was not itself worthy of attention – a small, colorless space with uncomfortable, low-backed chairs lining the perimeter and a TV drooping forward from its wall screws. The patients filling the room, though, emitted hundreds of stories, at least in my mind. In the first two minutes I had everyone figured out. It was like reading one of those grocery store romance novels where the ending is clear from the front cover.

The patients filled in the details of their own story, too. A man with a mullet hair-cut and heavy metal tee-shirt sat with his legs stretched out into the middle of the room and his head against the wall complaining to anyone who would listen.

“And then they told me if I want to get my gut checked out I had ta come here cuz this is the only goddamn hospital that has the machine for it. So now I gotta wait here for 3 hours.”

Not to be one-upped, a young woman with crutches pointed down to her sloppily bandaged foot and told how this was her second ER visit in two days.

“Yah, well I was here two days ago and they put the cast on wrong. It was hurtin’ me so bad, I couldn’t sleep. So I got me one-a-them rotatin’ saws from the shed and I took it off myself. ’Cept that I forgot about that bandage thing underneath.”

This animated Mullet-hair, who sat up and slapped his thigh. “Hah! Ya, I did that once, too! And then you hear this clrgh-clrgh ….”

“Yah, cuz the wrap is all twisted up in that saw.”

“Sure as hell was.” He couldn’t stop laughing at his memory of the event.

Where else but America, I thought.

“But shi-it, I wanted ta take it off myself so I didn’t have ta come back here again . . .  and whaddya know.”

“You gotta sit here again.”

“I gotta sit on my ass for three more flippin’ hours for their mistake.” To accentuate her anger she slipped into her Angry Black Woman persona: “They bettuh be-ware my bedtime’s at 11. If ain’t no doctor comin’ ta git me by then, they gonna see some drama.”

“Yah she’s real funny,” said the older woman sitting next to her. “Draggin’ me down here with her twice in one week.” She sat hugging her purse as if someone might suddenly punch her in the face and grab it.

The girl rolled her eyeballs and then all was quiet for awhile. It was easy to laugh with them. I felt like I knew them.

We were seated next to an African-American woman wrapped up in an old brown and yellow blanket. It was so old and tattered it seemed more suitable for dogs, or covering old furniture in the attic. “Godda keep dat chill away!” she said, and patted her knees.

The doors next to us opened and shut constantly, letting in the cold winter’s night air. An old man in an wheelchair took so long shuffling in that I wished for the blanket. Next came a mother struggling to pull three tiny children behind her, all in footed pyjamas. An out of breath man ran in so fast that he wasn’t sure what to say when he reached the nurses’ window. His wife was in labor.

When a stunningly made up woman in a red and white power suit and terrifyingly high heels ran in screaming, “Where’s my son?” the woman next to me stood up and waved at her nonchalantly. “Hey, Dee-Dee,” she called out, as though she is always seated just there, and Dee-Dee is always running in. Dee-Dee paid no attention to her.

She sat back down and turned to me and whispered: “Tha’ son uh hers is causin’ her some trouble.”

“You know her?”

“Yah, she was inta some serious trouble befo’, you know. She was a re-e-eal bad girl. And then she found the Lor’ and got her own church an’ all . . . She’s a preachuh.”

She had a way of drawing out her sentences, long and slow, and then finishing them off with a few quick words to signal that there was nothing more to say about it.

“Wow,” I said. Meaning it.

“But that son uh hers. Ummm, lawd. He mighta been the one for tha’ security they jus’ call fo’. He prob’ly got shot again.”

Conversation came easily in this waiting room. I realized how comfortable all of this felt to me. How normal it felt to share personal stories with strangers. I told her our story.

“Poor child,” she said, shaking her head. “But I know. I know wha’ thas like. I’m allergic ta codeine.” She showed me her medical allergy bracelet. “Can’t breathe, can’t do nothin’. Like somebody come wi’ these great big hands ta choke the life outta you. Ooooh.” She shook her head again, making a whistling sound.

I liked this woman, the ease of being seated near her, the sincerity of her compassion.

“Where ya’ll from?”

I considered saying Indiana, because it was easier to explain, but the four backpacks and a carry-on suitcase with wheels piled up around our feet told a different story.

“Norway.”

“Nor what?”

“Norway, the country.”

“You all from the COUNTRY of Norway?” She said country as though there might be another Norway, a town or maybe even a bowling alley by that name.

“Yep,” I said.

“I bet it’s cold up there!”

Everyone says this. Sometimes I explain the Gulf stream, and sometimes I just nod.

“What are the people like? Real different?”

“They don’t talk,” I said, anticipating her surprise. I like generalizing. It makes for an easier story, a more definite picture.

“Watchew mean they don’ talk?”

“Nobody talks to each other. If we were sitting here together in a waiting room in Norway, we wouldn’t be talking to each other.”

“Really? Now why is that?” She turned her neck to face me and knotted her brows. She looked truly interested.

“Because it’s so cold,” I said, and laughed. This is one of my theories, anyway. Cold draws people into themselves. When I lived in Costa Rica people talked so much that I had to pretend I had a headache to have some peace and quiet. If I tried to just “rest,” my host mother would move to the edge of my bed and continue chatting.

“It’s different. I like living there, but I miss America,” I continued. The stress and relief of the last hour made me want to share things. I felt an enormous sense of gratitude for the compassion of the Delta representatives, the kind concern of the paramedics who told our daughter jokes on the way to the hospital, the elderly volunteer who handed us a coloring book and crayons as we entered the ER, and tender-heartedness of the woman that I spoke with now who had been waiting for over two hours with sharp pains in her abdomen that every now and then caused her to double over.

I didn’t know how to express my surprise over witnessing such an outpouring of kindness in a place like Detroit without seeming offensive.*

“Everyone in Detroit has been so kind to us,” I offered as a compliment, wanting to ask her next what she thought of the positive plans for rebuilding Detroit I had read about in the news.

Her quick response startled me: “This ain’t Detroit! This here is Wayne, Michigan. Ain’t nothin’ like Detroit. You lucky they brought you here.”

In an instant her mood had changed. What I said hadn’t offended her, but it was important that I understand the difference.

She sat in silence and I didn’t ask for more information. No matter how bad life had been to these people, it wasn’t anything like Detroit, and they were proud to say they lived in Wayne.

.  .  .  .  .

Part 2 of my reflections on America from an ER waiting room will appear next week.

* Detroit, the great American metropolis that was once the heart of the auto industry, a metonym for progress and new wealth, now looks like the bombed out sections of Baghdad. It has become a giant blemish that everyone tries to pretend isn’t there. Detroit lost much of its population in the past decade when people fled to places with more opportunity. Those who remain are the poor and uneducated. Recent statistics give the illiteracy rate at 41% and the unemployment rate at 30%, although some say the figure is actually closer to 50%. In 2010 Time Magazine published two photo essays on the city of Detroit that capture the demise of this great American metropolis: “Remains of Detroit” and “Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline.” Is it any wonder I repeatedly typed “riot” instead of “roit” for the ending of Detroit when writing this post?

Lee Plaza Hotel - Once one of the most luxurious residential hotels in Detroit, Lee Plaza closed in the 1990s. (Photo by Yves Marchand and Romaine Meffre from Time Magazine: "Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline.")

This time landing in the U.S. seemed no more than stepping into the house of a relative I hadn’t seen for awhile. Someone I’d kept in touch with on Facebook and Skype. Nothing had changed. It was exactly as I had pictured it these past two years. Flat, expansive, tree-less. Every other building flaunting the bright, screaming sign of a chain restaurant. Six-lane highways, semi-trucks and strip malls. Four-car garages and empty yards. Eight cars, shooting exhaust out their backsides, lined up at the drive-thru Starbucks. Nature reduced to county parks and dots of land marked “Available for Development.”

And yet this trip was unique: it was bookended by two gruesome murders that took the breath away from the city and from my family.

Late at night on Thursday, December 22, just 2 1/2 miles away from us as we slept in our comfortable beds, a babysitter murdered nine-year-old Aliahna Lemmon with a brick and then dismembered her and hid her remains. I felt much of our trip was marred by this news – the initial belief in her disappearance, the search parties and “Missing” posters, the candlelight vigils, and the daily unfolding of the details from the TV in the kitchen. The fact that Aliahna was partially blind and deaf made the story even more unstomachable.

On Jan. 2, our last full day in the U.S., when updates were still appearing about Aliahna’s murder, I browsed the headlines on my laptop in the darkness of my bedroom, groggy-eyed and not yet ready to move towards the coffee machine. Something new topped the headlines: Allen County’s first homicide of 2012 had occurred overnight. It didn’t take long, I thought cynically, and shut my laptop.

Upstairs my dad was already awake, sipping his coffee in the early stillness of the half-lit living room.

“Can you believe Allen County already has its first homicide of the year?” I asked, slumping onto the couch.

“Are you kidding me?”

“Yah, just over there, too,” I said, pointing out the window and over the lake. “In Huntertown.” Huntertown is about 8 miles northwest of my parent’s house. A rural area where friends and I used to go driving in the dark to be spooked by the myths of Devil’s Hallow on Cedar Canyon Road.

My dad found the news on his iPod touch. I watched his face fall as he read the report.

“I think I know who that is,” he said, his voice tense with urgency.

This was followed by an “Oh no,” and then a longer, more painful, “Oh no.”

We listened to the video accompanying the story and confirmed the address.

Scott West, the son of a close family friend, had shot and killed his ex-girlfriend. He then drove off, parked his car, and shot himself. While trying to make these facts fit some sort of new reality – Scott was dead, Scott had killed the mother of his two children – I could not push out the fact that he did this at his mother’s home. His ex-girlfriend had moved there for protection from him. His mother and his two children were inside the house when he killed her.

The cloud that dropped over our family that day has not left me. It follows me to the sink when I wash the dishes, stands next to me at the stove, hangs over the mirror while I brush my teeth, it sits with me in bed at night before I sleep.

Scott West: the angry kid from my past who always wore black tee-shirts and who didn’t want to be friends with any of us. Scott West, who pretended not to listen when we spoke to him, who was not afraid to shout curse words at adults, but who still showed up at the church youth group on Sunday nights, if only to tell us that God didn’t exist.

As I sipped my Starbucks in the relaxed luxury of my parents’ suburban house it occurred to me that murder is just the price of doing business in the U.S. Fort Wayne and its 250,000 inhabitants rank as an average city on the national homicide list, but it’s a statistic we can live with, or at least one we don’t care enough about yet. The murders in our community are little more than a marginal nuisance given the fact that life is otherwise so wonderful. Because in this country we can still have whatever we want whenever we want it. So much new and improved, extra special, extra strong, extra rich aromatherapy dish soap, foam-tastic shower cleaner, super-tomatoes, healthier milk. Life, but better.

“Mommy! Did you know that in America they have a soap that kills all bacteria?” my five-year-old reported excitedly one morning, taking a break from the TV. “All the bacteria in the whole world, Mommy!”

Oh, land of opportunity. That, my friends, is what you can’t get in other countries.

So when you don’t get what you want, when your ex-girlfriend locks herself in a bedroom to keep away from you, you shoot her through the door. And then open it and shoot her again. And again. Then you shoot yourself because life hadn’t been what they told you it would be – that job, that house, those two cars. Or a car and a truck. That old American Dream turned out to be just that, didn’t it? A dream. Available to everyone but you.

In the running narrative that never leaves my head these days I ask Scott why he didn’t just kill his two children as well, the children he left with the rings of blood around a body they once called Mommy. They too will grow up not getting what they wanted out of life, angry at the have-nots. Beginning with the parents they have not.

But I can’t blame you, Scott. You never got the help you needed. And I can’t blame the system. That would be too meaningless, too sweeping. And I won’t blame your mother, because she was trapped, just like you.

When we learned the horrible truth about Aliahna’s murder, the details that the Fort Wayne Police refused to give, but which we read on the internet – her head, hands and feet tied up in bags in the freezer, the rest thrown into a dumpster at a gas station – we also learned that Aliahna’s grandfather was a convicted child molester, as were fifteen other men living in the mobile park. All unable to live anywhere else.

And Aliahna’s mother? A single mother of three, with the flu and a high fever, just looking for someone who could watch her kids for awhile so she could get some rest.

So many people trapped in this place we call the Land of the Free.

I couldn’t agree more. Steves “Norway” segment of his “European Christmas” program portrays Christmas in Norway exactly as I have found it to be in Bergen as well: a celebration of tradition, warmth, song, good cheer, and of course, light.

Merry Christmas

and Happy New Year!

God jul og godt nytt år!

In the Norwegian version she is a young woman who wore a wreath of candles in her hair while trying to hide Christians from the evil Roman Emperor Diocletian. Quite simply, she brought light to those in need.

In the Sicilian version, however, she is a young virgin who wanted to devote her life to God and was then tortured mob-style by the Roman authorities after refusing to marry. Her punishment was to burn on a pyre, but when the soldiers tried to lift her she became as heavy as stone. The soldiers then stabbed her in the heart (or throat), but she did not die. Some versions tell that the soldiers gauged her eyes out, others that she tore them out herself (Oh Sicilians and their drama!). Thus, in the Catholic tradition Santa Lucia is also the patron saint of the blind.

During November and December I like to compare myself to the cavefish who live in the dark caves and deep lakes of the southern United States. In these black homes eyes would be useless, and so the cavefish have evolved without eyes; they can only perceive a difference between light and dark. “Pretty soon we’ll be like those cavefish and our eyes will disappear,” I say with conviction to my children, who defy me by rolling theirs.

I think Norwegians have managed to keep their eyes because they are so very, very good at dispelling darkness, as proven by the fact that they consume the largest amount of electricity per capita in Europe. (After seven, half-years in darkness my environmental consciousness has seen fit to pardon this.) The entire city of Bergen lights up on the first Sunday of advent, lighted stars are hung in the windows of each home, and Santa Lucia Day will be celebrated with candles and candles and more candles. Candles in windows, candles on tables, candles on fireplace mantles – enough candles to set the whole country glowing. Enough that I begin to cherish the darkness for making the candles brighter.

And then, on the 22^nd of December, my daughter’s preschool will hold my favorite holiday of the year – Solsnu-fest, the “Sun Turn Party.” We will celebrate the tilting of the earth’s axis back towards the sun, and the turning of our lives once again to light.

To watch a video of the Santa Lucia celebrations, click here. Lyrics to the song follow in Norwegian and English.

Shining Lights

Santa Lucia (norsk):

Svart senker natten seg
i stall og stuer.

Solen har gått sin vei,
skyggene truer.
Inn i vårt mørke hus
stiger med tente lys
Sanc-ta Lu-ci-a, Sancta Luc-cia.

Natten er mørk og stum.
Med ett det suser
i alle tyste rum
som vinger bruser.
Se, på vår terskel står
hvitkledd med lys i hår
Sanc-ta Lu-ci-a, Sancta Luc-cia.

Mørket skal flykte snart
fra jordens daler.
Slik hun et underfullt
ord til oss taler.
Dagen skal atter ny
stige av røde sky -
Sanc-ta Lu-ci-a, Sancta Luc-cia.

Santa Lucia (English):

Black the night sinks
in the stable and living rooms.

The sun has gone away,
shadows looming.
Inside our dark house
rises with lit candles
Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia.

The night is dark and silent.
At once the rush
in all the hushed rooms
like wings roar.
Look at our threshold stands
white dress with light hair
Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia.

The darkness will flee soon
from the earth’s valleys.
So are the wonderful
words she speaks to us.
The day will yet again
rise of the red sky -
Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia.

From our downtown apartment in Toronto, Norway appeared on my computer screen as cherry blossoms draped over a fjord surrounded by snow-covered mountains. I already knew, like most Americans, that Norway meant tall blonds and Olympic skiing, that it was somewhere above Europe, that the capital is Oslo. I suppose I considered myself informed when I learned that Norwegians invented both the modern cheese slicer and the paperclip. (What an industrious nation!) And what other knowledge did I possess before our plane touched down on the only flat strip of land for miles? Everything else I imagined about Norway turned out to be Denmark.

Not once did I consider that we were going to be immigrants. My husband, Aidan, had accepted a three-year research position at the University of Bergen: We were on an adventure; we weren’t going to live in Norway. (I can still hear my mother say reproachfully, “You’ll end up staying there.”)

The job carried the double bonus of suiting Aidan perfectly and relieving us both from debasing, graduate scrap jobs like “English for Engineers.” The plan, if there was one, would be that Aidan would build up a solid list of publications and international connections and move on to accept a permanent position elsewhere (naturally defined as England, Canada, or the U.S.). In the meantime, I could enjoy the fjords, learn some Norwegian, finish writing my dissertation, and take care of our son. In three years we would both be on the job market, boosting our chances of landing that dreamed-of job. Norway was the bridge to take us further.

Is the secret belief of anyone who has moved away from home, “We’ll stay here for a while until . . . (the next opportunity magically appears),” or do some people really plan to uproot themselves and live in a foreign place permanently? Do some people take a job in Baltimore or Delhi or Dubai, knowing full well they will never leave, and begin to dream, even before arriving, of that place as home?

Norway was the next magical opportunity that appeared to us. Norway, Norway, and only Norway, because while Norway was raking in oil profits and boasting a surplus of jobs, the economic crisis forced universities in the U.S. to institute hiring freezes. Those that still advertised jobs were sorry to turn us down, but they had received over 600 applications for their Assistant Professor of English position.

In between hanging our shoulders and considering possible new careers – library science? law school? – and much wifely wailing and panicking on my part, Aidan’s three-year contract in Bergen was extended for a fourth year, and then a fifth year, and then became permanent. Permanent as in never-ending.

But were we not lucky? One of us had a permanent job! I knew that, of course, but this permanent job was not exactly where I’d hoped it would be. Not exactly anywhere I’d ever dreamed of living. It was not in an English-speaking country, not in a country known for its outstanding cuisine, not in a country with a tropical climate, not in a country with particularly friendly natives. So much for choosing your destiny. There was no plan. We just ended up here. A spin of the roulette wheel. Come on, lucky England! Come on, lucky U.S.! . . . and the wheel . . .  is stopping . . . on! . . . Norway!

NORWAY?

My complaints about the lack of variety at the grocery stores in Bergen or the 89 inches of average rainfall each year were met with the ammunition fired at all immigrants at one time or another: “Well, why don’t you just move back?”

Immigrants hate this question. Especially accidental immigrants, because it unhinges us momentarily. Maybe they’re right. What are we doing here? It is also a slap in the face, a refusal to recognize that when you moved away you only left one foot back home – not enough to stand on. And that foot is being slowly dragged along with you to this new place, even as you try to keep it where you thought home was. The expanse between here and there has become too wide, too impossible to straddle. A bridge too far.

“Back” is a sticky, tricky word. Going back is moving in the wrong direction. It is back-wards. It is returning to whatever it was that you moved from. Back is an impossibility. The unthinkable. Your doctor is here and the babysitter you love is here, and you know which grocery store has the cheapest chicken breasts, and you just signed up for the Zumba Fitness class, and you and the other school moms volunteered to sell tacos at Disco Kids, and you’re planning that summer vacation to sunny, tropical Denmark, and despite whatever you want to tell yourself, you live here. And not there.

There is no going back, but there is also no going forward. We are trapped in a never-ending present, no longer allowing ourselves to dream of impossible futures. Where is the perfect place to live? We would find it if everyone we know and love could move here, or we could somehow pack this life up in a suitcase and take it there, or if we could just stop caring so much about this silly little notion of “home.”