"A little more to the left, please!"

My son prefers oatmeal for breakfast. No matter what I cook up, he is happiest with a bowl of oatmeal topped with his favorite cherry jam. But every so often I think maybe it’s better to not eat oats all the time, and that’s when this recipe comes in handy: Quinoa granola. Above served with Siggi’s Icelandic style yogurt, which reminds of what yogurt tasted like when I grew up.

“A little more to the left, please! No, not that much! Less! A little less… Hmm, and then up a bit. Up, up, up – there you go. Yes, well, no! No, look! Now it’s all crooked!”

Sometimes I think living is like hanging a painting. We try so hard to get it right (whatever that means) we try to step back from it to assess how we’re doing, although you cannot really step back from life to look at life. Anyway, I am obviously still in the game since I’m up and about and writing, but sometimes I can’t help but think “wow, what a terrible let down life can be!”

Yesterday was such a day. It started out all right without any conspicuous issues, but around noon it began to look suspiciously dark, and then at four it took a quick but sure nosedive for the worse. By eight I was already wiped out, sitting in the armchair in my pajama, with a glass of wine surveying the landscape in front of me: Clean laundry (folded) and dirty laundry (in a mess) in piles and toys, books, paper, and crayons sprinkled on top it all.

I suppose as soon as one feels the day is going down the drain, instead of spending energy trying to salvage it, one should really just let it go. Let it go! Down with it already! But I don’t function that way. Though I’m far from being a card-carrying optimist, I do hang on a bit extra thinking things will somehow work out even though the evidence that it will not is staring right at me. I always think I have time to whip up some muffins while I clean the bathroom and tidy up the kitchen and edit some stuff knowing full well there’s only 25 minutes to go. Because a little detail such as the cat puking on the dining table will put a stopper to all of it. And a little thing like cat barf is all that’s needed for me to give up on the whole project and pour myself a glass of wine.

Anyway, today is Friday and I woke up to the begonias looking perky and colorful on my windowsill, where there’s also enough basil to make Insalata Caprese tonight. Let’s remember Lars Gustafsson’s motto: “We never give up. We begin anew.”

Have a wonderful weekend and see you again on Monday.

New York – A Love Song

Extravagant breakfast! Sugary toast with caramelized strawberries and Brie cheese. Recipe here.

I know the exact moment I fell in love with New York City: I was 14 and sat on our couch in Kalmar in Sweden in front of the TV watching a recording of Simon & Garfunkel’s concert in Central Park. While Simon & Garfunkel sang, the camera panned over the New York City skyline and the skies got darker and darker as the evening progressed. Sometimes the camera zoomed in on people in the audience, and they all looked so incredibly happy. People in my own town never seemed that happy. It was always doom and gloom and five feet of snow. And I never heard people sing like Simon & Garfunkel either. I wanted to marry them, either one, and if that wasn’t possible, I wanted to go live where they lived.

So I decided that when I grew up, I was going to live in New York City.

Here’s some of what I’ve gleaned from living in and around New York City:

• New Yorkers never walk, they run.
• New Yorkers wear black, no matter what color Paris dictates.
• Nothing is particularly shocking to New Yorkers.
• New Yorkers are the kindest people. They can afford to, they live in the coolest city on Earth.
• New York is like a non-stop movie, but you never feel you’re an extra; you’re a star like everyone else.
• Even people who don’t know New York can get so worked up and excited about the city that they cry. Literally. I'm not lying, I’ve seen this happen.

There’s urgency about New York. New York is now, is now, is now. It’s never two years from now, or when we’re fifty and have money, or after we get married, or when the kids are in college. New York isn’t safe like that. New York is actually the very opposite of safety. It’s always, always now. And you know, just walking down the street, any street in New York, just about anything can happen. It’s like riding the rollercoaster.

Once, many years ago, some customer gave a waitress a one million dollar tip. This didn’t happen in Kansas City or St Louis, it happened in New York.

Once, when I was selling ice cream opposite Lincoln Center a woman came in and spoke in a strong Russian accent.
"Where are you from?" I asked ever so nicely and handed her a cone with rum raisin.
"Brooklyn," she said.

I know a guy with a Ph.D in mathematics who works extra at Target on the weekends selling cellphones.
"I could make a good living in California," he says. "I'm thinking about moving. It's cheaper. It's real pretty too, y'know?"
And he shows me pictures. He never moved.
"I can't leave New York," he says and shrugs sheepishly.

Once I moved to New York, I stopped traveling. There was no need to travel anymore. As long as I have New York, I need no pristine mountaintops in Austria or coral reefs in the South Pacific. I didn't always think like this. I had an acting teacher who had never been outside of the state of New York, well, maybe he'd been to New Jersey and Connecticut. He used to say:
"I don't need Europe. I can go to the park and watch the squirrels!"
I used to think that was a blasphemous thing to say. Now I understand.

Last year, I thought “Perhaps I am done now?”

New York is dirty and expensive, terribly expensive. Living in or around it comes with a steep price tag, and I have a young child and wouldn’t Sweden be better after all? So off we went.

A couple of months later my son and I walk into a grocery store in a small town in Sweden. And it’s clean and quiet and good and affordable and everything is hermetically sealed. And suddenly there’s music playing in the background. Suddenly we hear this song, this very New York sort of rap song. And we look at each other, my son and I, with the grocery cart in between us. And my son says:
“We cannot stay here, Mamma! We have to go back home.”

So back to New York we travel on the cheapest of tickets with the cheapest of airlines. My husband had just received his Swedish work permit. I had just signed up with an employment office. To hell with all of that. After a yearlong absence, we breathe in the dirt and the dust again and there’s the familiar loudness around Midtown, New York’s hub, when we get out of the cab. The scent from the Halal food carts, and it’s a hot and humid June night and people are smiling. And a thousand bright lights flicker absolutely everywhere. It is so extraordinary! It is so very wonderful! The city that never sleeps, beckoning you to stay up, you too. So that you don’t miss a thing.

It is so nice to be back in New York.

Miss Nadrai’s School of Ballet

This morning’s breakfast: Oatmeal and almond/coconut milk with home-made strawberry jam. The recipe for this jam has been circulating social media and is well worth a try. Put 2 cups of fruit or berries (such as strawberries) with 2 Tablespoons honey (or to taste) and 1 Tablespoon Chia seeds in a blender. If you want the jam a bit chunky you can add some more fruit after you’ve blended this. The Chia seeds will turn the mixture into a gel if you put it into glass containers in the fridge overnight.

When I was four, my mom took me to ballet school. It was run by a Hungarian woman, a former ballerina with the Budapest Ballet, named Eva Nadrai. Miss Nadrai was short and stout and spoke with a heavy accent. She wore a black leotard and black tights, a wide, sweeping skirt, and soft ballet shoes. She had black hair cut into a blunt bob and a round Kalmuck face. Miss Nadrai was stern and we were terrified of her

My first leotard was light pink and had a little transparent skirt attached to it.

I began my ballet training at the same time as I began swimming. But the talent I had for swimming, I lacked for ballet. I amassed a great deal of medals in swimming, but could never force my legs down into a split.

The ballet school, tucked away on a quiet street, consisted of a huge room with a parquet floor and barres nailed to three of the four walls. The fourth wall was completely mirrored. In a corner stood a grand piano, but Miss Nadrai was not above using taped music when she needed it.

Class, which I now suspect was quite Soviet-inspired, slow and rather conventional, began like ballet classes everywhere in the world: at the barre. We learnt the five ballet positions, we pliéd, we relevéd, we developpéd, we learnt how to carry our arms.

“Port de bras,” said Miss Nadrai.

“Port de bras,” we repeated, and formed halos with our arms over our heads.

Like the archetypical ballet mistress she was, Miss Nadrai would walk around the room pushing a lazy leg up further here and adjusting a sagging arm there. She was forever telling us “in with the stomach” (sometimes accompanied by a pat on the belly) and “in with the bottom” (occasionally illustrated with a slight slap on the butt). I never understood how one could hold both in at the same time.

From the barre we moved out into the center of the room. Miss Nadrai took out pieces of silky blue fabric cut into cloudlike shapes, and threw them on the floor. This was my favorite ballet exercise, we called it “jumping over the puddles”, although its real, technical name is grand jeté. I loved the feeling of flying over those puddles to the big music played on the piano. I also loved to do the polka, for which Miss Nadrai divided us into pairs. Class ended, an hour later, with a deep, slow reverence. Reverence to the teacher – Miss Nadrai – and reverence to the art form of ballet. Afterwards my mom picked me up in our old Volvo and drove me back home. While waiting for dinner to be served, I flicked on the TV: Ballet class was followed with half an hour of Betty Boop and BBC’s series about Madame Curie.

I continued taking ballet until I was 12 years old. I liked the smell from the resin box, I liked the height the toe shoes gave me and the intricate pattern of the bourrée and I liked to perform, which we did once a year in the big theater in town, wearing the loveliest of costumes. I also liked to be around the older girls, who sat on benches in the green room doing their homework while waiting for us, the younger girls, to be done. The walls of the green room were decorated with black and white photographs from Miss Nadrai’s illustrious career as a ballerina.

One of my strongest memories from ballet class is of a girl who peed while we were doing exercises at the barre. She was too scared to ask for permission to go use the bathroom, and we watched her pee and watched the puddle form around her feet. A puddle, which she and the rest of us girls carefully sidestepped for the remainder of the class. Not a word was said, the music kept playing. Our pointed feet went this way and that in battement tendus and ronds de jambe but never for a second forgetting that pool of urine.

The Cracks In the Wall

Much of my weekend was - unfashionably – spent in church, since my son celebrated his first communion. At home, I’ve been thinking a lot about Lars Gustafsson, a Swedish author I once interviewed and wrote about, and who means a lot to me. I don’t have his books here, though they are available in English. The book that I read over the weekend is a gift from a very special woman and friend and it is one that I highly recommend to women of all ages. Goddesses Never Age by Christiane Northrup will change the way you look at yourself, I promise! And of course, it’s Monday so here’s a smoothie: Strawberry and coconut milk!

Lars Gustafsson is a Swedish author who lived for many years in Austin, TX. One of his books, The Death of a Beekeeper, is a perennial favorite of mine. In that book, and the   subsequent The Cracks In the Wall, Gustafsson shares a kind of repeated motto, a diapsalmata if you will, which inspired me to write this entry. That motto is: “We never give up. We begin anew.” May you feel that way always, even when times are difficult.

Difficult times have a tendency to bring out creativity like nothing else. Difficult times force us to discover things about ourselves that we didn’t know before, or perhaps didn’t want to know. When that happens, we mustn’t freak out. Something important is in the making.

“We never give up. We begin anew.”

It’s safe to say that the past three years of my life have been pretty hard in comparison to other years, but in comparison to other people’s lives, perhaps not hard at all? It’s important to have things like that in mind.

In a beautiful little book called Den pebrede susen in its original Danish, Suzanne Brøgger writes: “I cry often and on my knees and my forehead is pressed to the ground in gratefulness while empty palms are filled in the wind. It must be that tears cleanse the eyes, because secrets are continuously being revealed: Twelve deer, for instance, who were hidden up until now and who have always lived there right in front of my nose, but who never came out before, they are standing here now, sniffing on the hill that is me while a bud opens into a flower.” This shows that difficult times are necessary in order for us to grow and to be able appreciate what we have hitherto taken for granted (for surely Brøgger saw the deer before, she just failed to take notice of them). And the knowledge that this is so, should make us respect those difficult times in a new way, and to react to them differently. We are not “losers” when we’re walking “through the darkest valley”, maybe that walk alone is a blessing? Only the person who has walked through that valley will truly appreciate the light that follows.

The question is how to balance on the precipice of hope and not fall down into the despair of hopelessness. Because Brøgger’s twelve lucky deer do not always appear right when we want them to, no matter how much we’ve cried and prayed.

“We never give up. We begin anew.”

I think it’s important to keep in mind that the wall of difficulties in front of our eyes is not solid. It has cracks in it, and perhaps it is part of our journey to find those cracks and see the light that lies ahead through them. There’s always a way out for the person who is interested, but that way is not necessarily what we imagine or want for it to be.

Sometimes all that’s needed is a glimmer of hope. The smallest glimmer will do, and we must seize it and let it propel us forward. My son taught me the other day that even crumbs count. This past Saturday, we celebrated his first holy communion. The entire week prior, all the kids rehearsed the ceremony and the readings in church over and over. One day, my son came home and talked very excitedly about the “tabernacle”.

“It is golden and sits up front to the right,” he explained.

“What’s it for?” I asked.

He looked a bit confused, as if he didn’t quite know. Then he lit up and whispered.

“God lives in there!”

“Ooo! That’s a bit spooky!”

“And we got to peek inside.”

“You didn’t!”
“Yes we did!”
“What was inside?”
He paused a little for ultimate effect.

“Crumbs!”

“Crumbs?”
He nodded and smiled.

“Yes, but Mamma, not just any crumbs, those were the crumbs of God!”

You Are the One

Friday's breakfast: Blueberry scones from this recipe. Have a great weekend and see you Monday!

You are the one. There may be others out there, others who are better, brighter, smarter, nicer, kinder, handsomer, successfuller, richer, funnier, softer, harder.

You know what I’m talking about.

But you are the one.

Whatever did I do before I met you? What did I occupy my life with? How boring and empty it must have been. Now, there’s you!

Before I met you my life was calm and easy. You made my life difficult. Sometimes. Most of the time you make my life beautiful. Like a song or a dream. Difficult and beautiful. Just like you. Just like life is supposed to be.

We never said: "Oh, let's buy a house!"

We never said: "Let's settle down."

We walked around the block one New Year's Eve with all our money in our pockets, because that was a lucky thing to do, you said. And I believed that, like I believed all you said.

Sometimes I get angry with you. I knock on the bathroom door and say:
“Are you ever going to come out from there?”

Other times I say:
“What is this thing doing here?”

And pick up a sock, yours, from the coffee table.

You always call for me to explain where some address in Manhattan is. You never google it, you always call me. And I always answer. Even when I’m busy. It makes me feel special, it is a silly thing perhaps, but it makes me feel special. Bet you didn’t know that!

When you say something nice, it means something, and I can go for miles and miles on a nice word from you. I remember the things you say. The words you invent for me. You say “textual fracture” when I make a writing mistake. And you invented “compulsionist”. You said so-and-so is a “compulsionist don’t let him get to you!” So I don’t.

You see, I love that! Few know that about you.

You can point your toes like a real dancer, that’s very impressive and another thing I like about you.

Once, I thought I’d lost you and we were at Times Square, I was with someone I didn’t want to be with, and all of a sudden in the throng of people I saw you. In your big, blue coat, which later I sat with in my lap to sew on a button.

Once, for a short while, I did lose you, and no matter how often I checked the cup with the toothbrushes, yours wasn’t there.

You have tried and liked (or pretended to like) every single cake I’ve ever made. Even the ones that clearly were failures. You always give my cakes thumbs up.

Once we watched four movies in a row in a movie theater on 12^th Street, another time I told you “take the steak tartare! go ahead, take it!” when we were at a restaurant in Nyhavn and you bravely ate the raw meat and onions.

You leave me to sleep uninterrupted on Coney Island while you take our son to buy corn on the cob.

You are the other half of my apple.

You are a clown. You aren’t like all those other people who are so serious all the time and know boring things like how to do taxes and what stocks to buy and stuff like that. You bother about the important things in life: Art and philosophy. Dreams. Religious stuff. Stories. You get excited about the Knights Templar and Richard III buried under a parking lot and if that’s really Noah’s ark up there in the mountains of Turkey. I like that.

When you sleep you look just like our son.

You are the one.

Kieślowski

Hey there busy Thursday! How about an olive-fried egg, spinach in garlic, and a banana/almond smoothie for a late breakfast? Last night’s green goddess salad dressing on the side. For dressing recipe (and you do want to try it, it is so good) look here.

In the spring of 1990, Swedish Television showed ten short films by a then unknown Polish film director by the name of Krzysztof Kieślowski. The films, collectively known as the Decalogue, were shown late in the evenings, and I sat up by myself and watched. Breathless. I had never seen anything like it before. Each film was about an hour long, and took place in a drab, gray area of Warsaw. Actually the movies themselves were sort of gray. Nobody said much. And yet, these films, the characters in each one of them, moved me. To me, each of these ten films was a miracle

The next day I’d rush to my university lecture and very excitedly ask whomever I met:

“Did you see that little Polish film last night? Did you see it?”

Nobody ever had. None of my fellow students, and none of my professors. Soon I didn’t ask anymore. But I continued watching the films. Kieślowski and his Decalogue became a private, haunting love.

One evening shortly afterwards, there was some film award ceremony, also on TV, and I was sort of watching it while simultaneously doing something else. And suddenly I heard the name Kieślowski being called out, so of course I sat down and there he was, this guy who directed those films. I didn’t know what he looked like; I had never seen him before. He was a bit gray, a grayish, tall, thin man with huge glasses. He was presented with an award for his Decalogue films and he said something funny, he said:
“I hope Poland is considered a part of Europe.”
I thought that was a funny thing to say in 1990, only a year after the Berlin wall had fallen and Europe was beginning to open up and there was hope in the air everywhere you looked. It made me very curious of Poland. Kieślowski made me curious of Poland.

In just a few years, Kieślowski became very famous. Not only in Europe, but all over the world.

Life brought me back to the States, and soon I found myself working for a movie star in New York. It was a job I did reluctantly, and my heart was never really in it. Anyway, I traveled with her from one location spot to the next, and suddenly we were in Austin, Texas, and I don’t know how it happened but one day, on the table in the hotel, she’d left a script and on that script there was a name I recognized: Zbigniew Preisner. I recognized that name from the Decalogue movies, because Zbigniew Preisner had composed all the music to them. A wave of nostalgia came over me, a feeling of “I should not be here, I should be there”. A little later, I asked the movie star about the script but she told me she’d forgotten it at the hair salon. And shortly after that, I left her.

When I moved to Poland I could say three words in Polish: “kwiat” (flower), “list” (letter), and “herbata” (tea). Polish is a difficult language to learn, especially for a Swede with the linguistic background I had (English, German, French). But I arrived with an open heart and found a Warsaw not unlike the one I had seen in Kieślowski’s films. It was a beautiful time for Poland, because the country was coming into its own somehow after years of oppression, and things were happening very fast. It was also a beautiful time, I imagine, for Kieślowski, who by then was making movies in France. Great movies. I saw all three of his Three Colors Trilogy (films themed on the ideas of the French Revolution: Liberty, equality, and fraternity) in movie theaters in Poland: Cracow (Blue), Lublin (White), and Warsaw (Red).

I recently watched an interview on YouTube with Kieślowski, in which he says that although censorship was something bad, it made filmmakers in Eastern Europe clever at discovering possibilities that their western colleagues never were forced to discover. Filming, he explained, became a game, a game where you’d have to balance at the edge of what was allowed. I think this may be one of the reasons his movies are so intriguing. Someone, a critic, said Kieślowski made movies about the soul more convincingly than anyone else. I agree with that.

After Kieślowski died (of a heart attack in 1996), my interest in films waned. I rarely go to the movies these days. American films in particular, with their perfect, beautiful, but boring actors and their glazed Disney endings, leave my heart cold. As do most European films. I miss the films of Kieślowski.

A Life Lesson

I made this for my son's school lunch the other day, and it was a success, so I decided to make a replica of it for breakfast: Whole wheat pita bread with shallot and chive Boursin cheese, spinach, avocado, and Chia seeds. And on the side, the first peach of the season.

Ah, the many lessons we learn in life while interacting with one another!

On a recent Saturday morning, my phone rang. It was a phone call I was expecting, and felt slightly apprehensive about. A kid at school, let’s call him Tommy, had been bothering my son for some time. Little things, or so I had assumed. My son didn’t seem overly upset about it so I, not wanting to make a feather out of a hen, downplayed it too. Although I did notify their teacher.

Then one day, when I picked my boy up from school, he was agitated:
The kid, Tommy, had hit him! Fortunately a teacher had seen the incident and asked Tommy to write a note of apology. My son, being my son after all, mislaid the note.

Two days later, another shocker: Tommy had stepped on my son’s glasses, causing the frames that were already kind of worn out, to break.

Needless to say this made me angry. Not so much with Tommy, as with myself for not having realized the severity of the situation earlier, with the teacher for not nipping the silly teasing in the bud, and with my own son, since I suspected he had not properly portrayed the relationship between himself and Tommy.

“Have you ever done or said anything, anything, to him? Have you teased him or hurt him in any way?” I asked angrily.

“No!”

The teacher called Tommy’s mom, who in turn, on that Saturday morning, called me.

A couple of hours later, she and I were sitting at my kitchen table. I was fidgeting. She was composed. My son and I had talked about this visit; we had bought cookies and popsicles to make it a bit smoother for Tommy. We knew what was going to happen, because Tommy’s mom had already decided: Her son Tommy, who is the same age as mine, was to give my son all his savings (a total of $48) as a “lesson”. She said:
“I want this to be difficult for Tommy. I want this to be a lesson. He has to pay for your son’s glasses.”
“I am pretty sure the insurance covers that,” I said.

She shook her head:
“It doesn’t matter, it is a lesson for my son. He must never do this again. If for any reason it should cost more to fix the glasses, let me know and I’ll pay the difference.”

Tommy gave my son an envelope with the money and a formal apology. My son forgave him and they ran off to play in my son’s room.

Two days later, we’re sitting at a Lenscrafters in the city with the broken frames. The lady behind the desk says the insurance does not cover this, so we have to pay $27. My son hears this. I pay for the frames and give my son the rest of the money.

This, I thought, was the end of the story.

Then just last week, I run into the Tommy’s mom at a school event. I walk up to her and say:
“You know, the new frames only cost $27.”
She is visibly upset.

“I know! Your son told Tommy. And Tommy feels it’s unfair. He thinks he should have his change back!”

I look at her in disbelief.

“But I thought you said it was supposed to be a lesson for him? I mean, isn’t that what you said?”

“Yes, well, but I didn’t realize your son would tell mine how much it cost to fix the glasses!”

Afterwards, I walk back home from the school event with my son.

“Remember the money for your glasses?”
“Yes?”

“I’m sorry, but I think we better give it back to Tommy.”

“Why?”
“Tommy’s mom thinks it is more fair that way.”

I put $21 in an envelope and marked it “Tommy”, then I put the envelope in my son’s school folder. My husband came home, and I told him about the whole thing. Then he got upset.

“This is not quite right,” he said. “She offered to pay, you didn’t ask. It was meant to be a lesson for her kid. That was her suggestion. And now she wants the change back?”

I nodded.

After a fairly long discussion, we put all the $48 in the envelope. The next day my son gave it to Tommy who cried out:
“Yippee!”

Swedish Candy

I didn’t know there was a breakfast dish with the beautiful name Idaho Sunrise, but I stumbled upon it and then stumbled upon a variation of it, the result of which you can see above: Hash brown nests filled with eggs, fake bacon (of course you can use real if you, unlike me, eat meat) and eggs. Easy as pie and quite delicious! Serve with avocado.

“Sugar can cure everything”

Sylvia Plath

Ask any Swedish expat what he or she misses most from Sweden, and I guarantee you they’ll say Swedish candy.

There’s just not anything like Swedish candy anywhere else. Swedes know candy and take it seriously. For them (us), candy isn’t just some sugary concoction sold in plastic bags with a funky name on it, candy is a science, dare I say even art?

In Sweden you buy candy in special stores where only candy (and soda and chips) is sold. You buy it by the pound (or kilo, more correctly) and you pick it yourself with plastic tongs into a paper bag. The selection is endless. There’s violet and licorice twirls, strawberry and vanilla-flavored vampire teeth, coca cola snakes as long as your arm, soft, green jelly frogs, sour peach skulls, chewy nougat bites, chocolate-covered banana marshmallows, caramel marshmallows, Turkish-licorice coca cola bottles, peppermint candy… In other words anything your heart desires, the very things sweet dreams are made of.

Imagine my dismay every October when I look into my son’s Halloween basket and find year-old Reese’s peanut butter cups mingled with bland and boring Hershey’s kisses – it’s enough to make me want to cry. If a kid is “lucky” he or she gets candy buttons, which surely must be a joke.

When I first met my husband, I told him about Swedish candy, and he told me about Colombian candy. Then we got our hands on each other’s candy and I can promise you he’s now a convert!

There’s a Swedish candy store in New York, which we sometimes visit. I enter it as I enter church: Solemnly, quietly, and with the deepest sense of gratitude. It’s located in the Village and it’s called Sockerbit, after an iconic Swedish piece of candy that’s been around since, I don’t know, but quite possibly forever. The problem I have with Sockerbit, which in many ways is a little slice of Swedish paradise, is that the candy there is an expensive treat, and besides they don’t always have the things I like. 

Sometimes, I ask my mother to send me some candy and while that’s all good, she doesn’t quite know my taste either. I prefer to pick my own.

Unlike food or wine, which taste better and thus is best enjoyed in the company of others, candy is something for the person who is home alone. Candy is for when you’re reading a good book, for those rainy, thunderous evenings when the rest of the family is magically scattered on activities outside the house. And since it’s sugary, candy is perfect for when you’re studying.

In Sweden, candy used to be a treat given on Saturdays only and was then called “Saturday candy” or “lördagsgodis”. Or you’d get it for when you went to the movies. In fact, Swedes used to buy candy, not pop corn, when going to the movies.

The “tradition” to consume candy on nearly a daily basis began with the opening of the first candy stores, in 1985. Buckets and buckets filled with candy led to Sweden becoming one of the most candy-consuming people in the world. Today, Swedes eat 15 kilos, or 33 pounds, of candy a year, beaten only by the Danes, who eat 36 pounds a year.

That must make for a whole lot of sweet Swedes!

Swedish candy galore in my favorite red candy bowl.

White Chocolate

Blackberry smoothie and one of the strangest novels I’ve ever read: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender about the (sometimes) magical gifts we’re born with.

 Aunt Julia drinks coffee from a demitasse. When it is cold outside, she adjusts her fur collar with a gloved hand. And today is a cold day. Quick steps down the cobblestoned street, but careful so you don’t trip! Fall days are short this far up north, and the light is already fading.

Gilded mirrors and heavy green velvet curtains. At Holmgrens Kafé on Kaggensgatan the girls stand in line and wear starched, white aprons over their black dresses. Now one of them holds up the lid to a glass dome and waits for Aunt Julia to choose a pastry. There, on a doily, is a pretty selection of freshly made ones. The girl then uses silver tongs to transport Aunt Julia’s choice to a white dessert plate. Aunt Julia bends down and flashes a seductive smile to a little boy who is only six years old:

“And what would you like, dear?”

Today is my father’s 81^st birthday, and I am celebrating him by telling you about his grandmother, whom he called “Aunt Julia”. My father was young when Aunt Julia passed away, but he remembers her well. She was a whiff of the finer things in life: French perfume from a cut glass scent bottle, fur coats, cloche hats, lipstick, and – most importantly – “white chocolate”, my father’s favorite. White chocolate meant hot chocolate with a dollop of whipped cream taken with Aunt Julia at Holmgrens, her favorite café.

I’ve heard the tale of Aunt Julia so many times. And I have her photograph right here, in front of me.

She set out in life as a starry-eyed maid whose greatest asset was her petite, dark-haired beauty. No wonder her unmarried boss, the one with the fat wallet and the gold pocket-watch, fell for her! And perhaps she fell for him? Or was she maybe more cynically made and fell for the idea of an elegant, idle life? Either way, Aunt Julia was in for a rude awakening, the lesson of many a young girl: Rich Men Don’t Marry Girls With No Money. At least not then. At least not him.

They had two baby boys, Aunt Julia and her rich boss. Twice did he make her pregnant and twice did she make the long, arduous trip to the capital, where she gave birth and promptly placed her babies in an orphanage on a shabby backstreet.

My paternal grandfather, Harry, was the younger one of those babies. He was auctioned off from that orphanage to the highest bidder, a ruthless man who made my grandfather’s childhood a living hell. There was a long scar at the back of my grandfather’s head from a beating he took as a child, and later on, when he was an adult, he oftentimes woke the entire household by thrashing about and screaming, the result of endless nightmares.

The first baby, my grandfather’s brother Werner, was also auctioned off. The two boys didn’t know of each other’s existence. My grandfather didn’t find out he had a brother until he was a grown man, and by then it was too late: Werner had already immigrated to America. He never knew of my grandfather, never knew he had a family back in Sweden actively searching for him. Werner died in California in 1985.

I guess most of us don’t change. It’s only in the movies that people have those hoped-for epiphanies. Aunt Julia’s rich boss died and though they never married, he willed all his money and belongings to his “faithful servant Julia Larsson”. Aunt Julia took the cash, moved into a modern apartment in the city, and made even more cash by letting rooms to students. It’s at this point she looked up – and found –  her son (my grandfather), and his family and began visiting them and taking my father to her favorite café.

How I wish this story had a happy ending! Or at least a conclusive one.

I have asked my father several times:
“Did Aunt Julia ever apologize for giving up her babies? Did she ever express any regrets?”

But no, she never did. She has been dead for many years now. I don’t know where she is buried, and I don’t think anyone in my family has ever been to put flowers on her grave.

"Aunt Julia" - my father's grandmother.

Mary

Today is the first day of May. Where I grew up that meant a whole lot of demonstrations, since it’s the International Workers’ Day. But May is also the month of Mary. For that reason, I decided to make Madeleines, Proust’s French Madeleines. However, this year I wanted to do something different, so I made Spanish Magdalenas instead. They aren’t shell-shaped like the French cookie, but are baked in muffin trays. They have a subtle lemony taste to them and are, I read, typically eaten for breakfast in Spain, with café con leche. Recipe here. Have a good weekend!

Mary wasn’t around when I grew up. Not that there was much religion at all, but whatever there was – light a candle for Advent, open presents at Christmas, eat eggs for Easter – for sure there was no Mary.

She had been thrown out during the Protestant reformation in Sweden. Perhaps they had meant to keep her, Mary hardly did any harm, but as a female figure she wasn’t deemed necessary to save. I guess.

As an adult, after I converted to Catholicism, I never much cared for Marian devotion. Or rather, I didn’t understand it. I already had a mother; it wasn’t like I needed another. Also, Mary seemed a bit lame.

It was our 5^th grade teacher who took us to visit a Catholic church. We had been reading about Catholicism in school. Sweden is a Lutheran country, and in the small town I lived back then there weren’t many Catholics, so they didn’t exactly have a church, it was more like a big room in a private villa. There were a whole lot of things in there. That’s what I remember. A whole lot of things. Crucifixes in all sizes, paintings depicting dramatic scenes from the Bible and pictures of all kinds of saints, candlesticks, sculptures. And rosaries in silver and gold with colorful gems in them, and a mysterious wooden booth and a mysterious sweet-smelling smoke, but I don’t remember any Marys. Although there must have been at least one.

In school, I always liked when the teacher talked about other religions, and my favorite ones were Hinduism and Catholicism. They were mysterious and different. They had elephant-headed gods and blue gods and Gregorian chants and stigmatas and “signs” flashing across the sky. Spooky, fascinating stuff. The Lutheran church I was used to seemed empty and cold in comparison. 

When I was 13 or so, I discovered Joan of Arc. She was a revelation. I’d never heard of saints like her before, an armor-clad, brave girl with a sword. She was more like a superhero than a saint, and way cooler than Mary.

Mary didn’t come into my life until everything else had been pretty much given up and emptied out. It was a time when all seemed utterly hopeless. I felt very much alone. You know those endless nights that somehow blend into days and you don’t sleep and there are no more tears to cry and you wonder how you’re going to be able to go on? Your head aches from thinking. That’s when Mary came.

I had a friend in this Mary business. She too was lying sleepless at night; she too felt everything was a hopeless mess. So we started talking. We talked and we talked. I don’t know how we came upon Mary, or how she came upon us, but suddenly there she was. And my friend and I got very excited; we could both feel her presence. These are things that you can’t really talk about because they are so remarkable. It’s almost like saying:

“Hey, Jesus is out there walking on the water! I can see him from my bedroom window!”

But we were strangely joined in this, my friend and I.

It was like a game we played. Skype was constantly on, because my friend lived in another country. I would send a message:
“Now!”

And we’d fall to our knees and pray.

She’d send a message:
“Now!”
And we’d fall to our knees and pray.

The Memorare nine times. Always.

Some months later, maybe four, Mary pulled through. I used to go to this tunnel where there was a whole lot of graffiti and the graffiti said: “Love, love, love!” I thought that was a “sign”. Not like those signs flashing boldly across the sky, but nevertheless a sign. From Mary.

My friend was the first to receive a miracle, but only a week or so later, I received mine.

Shortly afterwards a woman in our town told my husband:
“When I see your wife, it’s as if there’s a woman walking next to her. All the time walking next to her. Who is she?”
My husband said he had no idea what she was talking about. It sounded downright crazy.

But later, when he told me about it, he clearly had thought it over, because he said:
“Maybe it’s your dead grandmother walking next to you?”
“Oh, no,” I shrugged. “That’s not my grandmother. That’s Mary.”

Them Carefree Brooklyn Days

The other day I bought canned pumpkin and made pumpkin pancakes with half of it. I knew exactly what to do with the rest of it: Bake my favorite pumpkin muffins that happen to be vegan! You can find the recipe here.

Years ago, I lived in Brooklyn. Actually first, I lived in Manhattan, on Bleecker Street, in a one bedroom apartment, which I shared with a model and a dancer. I cried in the taxi the day I moved from Manhattan. I sat in the backseat with my belongings in a suitcase and two plastic trash bags and cried and cried.

“You all right there, Miss?” asked the cabdriver as we crossed Brooklyn Bridge.

I turned and looked at all Manhattan’s twinkling lights through the window.

“No, I’m not,” I whispered.

A small part of me was dying.

Over the next 13 years, I lived in four different apartments in Brooklyn: Three of them in Greenpoint and one, the last one, in Williamsburg. They all had this in common: Filth, roaches, and mice.

And yet, I fell in love with Brooklyn. I would still take Brooklyn any day over Manhattan. Brooklyn has attitude. Manhattan has only cash. Big cash-fat Manhattan. Unfortunately, friends tell me Brooklyn too is going in that direction.

My husband Fernando sometimes sighs:

“Remember the carefree days in Brooklyn?”

What he means is: Remember when we were young and beautiful and could spend all our money on restaurants, books, movies, and the theater?

Back then Bedford Avenue was lined with no-frills mom-and-pop stores and you got a cup of coffee for 75 cents. There wasn’t a commercial café in sight. I ate my Edith Piaf sandwich in peace in the back garden of the L-Café.

We knew that the best Mexican food, the authentic, real stuff, could be found in the back of a dingy store. Cooked and served by stout Mexican women with hairnets, while Spanish music was playing on the radio. We drank cheap Jarritos soda.

We browsed the shelves with second hand books at Spoonbill & Sugartown where you sometimes had to shoo away one of the two big, fat cats, which sprawled the book tables. I bought Colette’s Retreat From Love for $2.50

Fernando, Friday nights we splurged on fancy dinners at Sea, way before Sarah Jessica Parker and TV got to it.

We took turns reading chapters of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.

One summer day we fell asleep on a blanket in McCarren Park and slept for hours. I got sun burnt, but you got a nice tan.

Saturdays we strolled over Williamsburg Bridge into the city where you bought me my favorite licorice candy on Rivington Street.

I bought a never-once-used Calvin Klein coat at the Salvation Army in the corner of North 7^th and Bedford for $10, because the manager had never heard the name “Calvin Klein” before.

Sometimes we took the less glamorous Driggs Avenue home.

“Man Ray lived here,” I told you. “And Henry Miller.”

And you squeezed my hand.

Brooklyn is where we first became cat owners.

Brooklyn is where we took our infant son (born at Beth Israel Medical Center on 1^st Avenue and 16^th Street in the City). I was terrified you hadn’t fastened the newly purchased infant car seat correctly in the yellow cab. You checked it and checked it and checked it again while I – clumsily – held our 2-day old son, brand new little star in our private universe, in my arms. He wore his bear outfit, his homecoming suit. Over us the November sky arched gray and rainy.

Then carefully, gingerly, the cabdriver took us downtown and home, home to Brooklyn.

Sweet, wonderful Brooklyn.

The Emin

Last year, around Thanksgiving or so, I made these delicious pumpkin-chocolate chip pancakes found here. Today, I bought some canned pumpkin (which is thankfully sold even when it’s not pumpkin season) and made the pancakes again, this time omitting the chocolate chips. I also made the cinnamon syrup. Here’s a recipe for it.

 When I was in college, a friend of mine, Eszter, and I went to a lecture by the Emin Foundation. Eszter, who was Hungarian, was into all esoteric things, and the Emin Foundation was one of those mysterious New Age movements that sprung up everywhere back then. I was sort of clueless but thought “why not?” The flyer promised three free lectures (or maybe they were called lessons, I don’t remember) after which you had to either stop coming or become a paid member.

There were two men heading the Emin Foundation in Lund, Sweden, where I lived then. The leader of the two was a British man named Lance. Lance was tall and slender with a longish face and a light brown beard. I especially remember his hands, which were also long and had monkeylike, sensitive fingers.

The other man was a shorter, dark young man who was always smiling as if he knew something you didn’t. Which I guess he did. His name was Constantine. Both Lance and Constantine wore black pants and full, white, fluid shirts, like the ones Cossack dancers wear. Lance and Constantine weren’t their real names. Once you became a proper member of Emin, you were given (or could pick) a new name.

Only English was spoken.

There was something spooky and forbidding about the whole thing, which I guess is why we were drawn to it. The lecture-lessons were held in a deserted part of the public library, a bit too clinical for mystic stuff to take place, which it nevertheless did. I don’t remember much, but I remember we always sat in a circle. Lance either talked or conducted experiments, while Constantine stood aside smiling. One such experiment was called “the aura”.

Lance showed us photographs of ancient Egyptian art and asked us to look closer at the heads of the people in these pictures. Most of them had some sort headgear, strange structures, or just a huge, red circle on their heads. I hadn’t thought about that before, though obviously I had seen pictures of Egyptian art.

“These are not hats,” Lance explained. “These are auras. The Egyptians could see them clearly, which is why they were manifested in their art. We’ve since lost the ability to clearly see the aura of a person, the way the Egyptians did. Yet, it is still there, and it has many different colors. For instance, what color do you think the aura of an angry person has?”

“Red,” some smarty-pants piped up.

“Exactly,” nodded Lance. “And from there we get the word ‘hatred’, which is a combination of the words ‘hat’ and ‘red’. A red hat, or aura. Hatred.”

Next, he had us all line up in front of an empty wall. And sure enough, as I watched the others parade in front of that wall, I saw a faint sort of light emit from their heads. I suppose “shadow” would be the word. I left that lecture-lesson filled with awe, and proceeded to tell everyone I knew about the root of the word “hatred”.

“I saw it myself,” I whispered, baffled at the non-believers who just shook their heads at my naiveté.

The next time, Lance had an even better trick up his Cossack-sleeve. This time he was going to demonstrate his heat.

“Heat radiates from our bodies,” he explained. “And if you practice, you’ll be able to conduct that heat through various body parts.”

Since we had no clue what he was talking about, Lance asked us to stand up and hold out our palms. Then he went around and above every open palm he held his slender magician fingers. One after the other, everybody quickly withdrew their hands as if they’d been burnt by fire. Some even yelped “Ouch!”

I decided that I wouldn’t fall for this particular trick. I would not withdraw my hand and I would not scream. But when it was my turn and Lance stood in front of me and held his fingers over my palm, I felt a burn as if from a laser beam, and just like the others I pulled back my hand quickly.

I never went back for my third and last free lesson-lecture. I am not sure why. Eszter did though. She became a real member of the Emin. She even got to pick her new name: Spring.

Whales, Fires, Public Restrooms & Other Fears

Quinoa and kale breakfast, topped with a poached egg. This recipe comes from Gwyneth Paltrow’s It’s All Good cookbook, which I rather like. It’s simple and tasty, and perfect for those times when you have leftover quinoa (but good enough to make with fresh quinoa too). You can find the recipe here. Have a good weekend and see you again on Monday!

My son, who is seven-and-a-half, has exhibited a lot of fears lately. He’s afraid of the mother of another kid, because she once screamed out loud, he’s afraid of police officers, he’s afraid of going into the kitchen alone at night.

The other day I asked my husband:
“What’s up with all these fears? I was never afraid as a kid!”

As if my son’s fears surely had been passed down from my husband’s side of the family, not mine. I tend to think of myself as pretty fearless, but a deeper examination of my own childhood and youth, revealed quite a few fears, some of which were almost compulsive in nature and a few of which lasted until I was a grown-up.

Two major fears are connected to this one summer, when I was 8 or 9. First, it was this whale, which had gotten lost and was “stuck” in the shallow strait located between the island of Öland and the town of Kalmar on the mainland, where we lived. Because of this whale, I refused to put my foot in the sea all summer for fear my foot would touch the back of this great big Leviathan. I imagined the feel of it: Slimy, bumpy, and worst of all alive.

That same summer there was a fire in a nearby school. Everyone talked about it and I couldn’t sleep at night, imagining our house, too, might burn down.

“Our house is made of stone,” said my mother. “Stone houses rarely burn.”

Yet in my dreams I saw firefighters and police and a curious crowd of people poking in the remains of our house and our furniture all covered in heaps of black ash. And our bodies, blackened and burnt, found amidst it all.

Traveling alone was another fear. I was terrified of being alone on a train in my younger teens. I was afraid of having to change trains, actually my heart started to race every time the conductor announced that Alvesta Station was next. Alvesta was a busy railway junction, with tracks and platforms forming a difficult, snaky grid. I always knew the platform from which my next train would leave, but one little hick-up, one small delay, could easily change track 3b to track 5a and that would produce an hitherto unknown terror in my heart.

Public restrooms were also extremely scary. It began with the restrooms at school, where the older students held court and terrorized those who were younger. And the public restrooms were even worse! Who knew what one would find in there? I always opened the doors to the stalls very quickly. I imagined half-naked; half-dead bodies slumped in there, in a sea of urine. The stalls back then were always covered in vulgar graffiti and veiled in a nasty stench. I always wondered who in this world could stay in there long enough to write and draw all those things.

I still try to avoid public restrooms. The good thing is, that in New York City there’s a whole bunch of really nice ones: The ones in Bryant Park are the best, followed by the ones in the lobby of the Renaissance hotel at Times Square. Most Barnes and Noble restrooms are OK. I’m not as picky as when I was younger, but if you are in New York and you are picky, there’s a book out there for you.