Broadway Boogie Woogie

Oatmeal cooked with dates and served with fresh strawberries and raspberries in a bowl full of almond milk is clearly needed this particularly snowy and cold Friday morning.

One Sunday a month I brave the elements – whether the cold of February or the sweltering heat of July – and work my way down Broadway on foot. All the way from 125^th Street to 14^th and Union Square. It’s become my one-woman adventure. Exciting yet relaxing, it cleans the head and afterwards everything is right with the world again. It goes without saying that the mind tends to wander. Last Sunday, I thought of my grandmother, my Mormor.

“She says she likes New York because there you get to meet all-sorts,” said Mormor to a friend on the phone. The worry in her voice palpable. I had taken a break from my globetrotting life to come and live a year with Mormor in a small town in Sweden. A year that wasn’t easy on either one of us. I had to keep my books in shoeboxes under the bed, because Mormor’s bookshelf was reserved for assorted wedding photographs and porcelain figurines. Sitting by the kitchen window with her white hair in curlers, Mormor asked me when I was going to come back home “for real”. She had a deep mistrust in the world outside her little Swedish town.

We had spent the morning starching and ironing bed linen. Earlier still we had baked, cooked, and pickled. Now, we were waiting for the cleaning lady. In preparation for her visit, we had scrubbed the little apartment, because Mormor was too embarrassed to let the cleaning lady see it less than spic-and-span. And nobody but Mormor was allowed to dust the sepia portraits of dour-looking relatives with long-forgotten names. So she and the cleaning lady usually had coffee together, while I retreated into my corner with a book.

It takes time to get the footing down. By the time I pass Columbia University, my feet are singing, and when I reach Lincoln Center my whole body is one with the city: The smell, the rhythm, the people. One with the grime and one with the beauty of it. Sometimes I stop by the Ansonia for an espresso, but oftentimes not. I’m a shooting arrow and nothing must stop me. When a man tries asking for directions outside a bodega on 36^th Street, I shake my head: “Sorry, gotta go.”

At Midsummer, Mormor and I pick flowers, which we put under our pillows in the hopes of dreaming of our future spouses, as is the tradition. We sit up quietly watching the never-setting Swedish summer sun change from bright yellow to faint spun gold, while the heirloom clocks take turns pounding out the hours.

In the morning we drink coffee.

“Whom did you dream about?”
“Olle in Götene. You?”
“The bus driver!”

Mormor laughs until she has tears in her eyes.

So I thought of Mormor – now long gone – on my Sunday walk. How could I ever have explained to her that it would be impossible for me to come back “for real” after having walked down Broadway like this?  Mormor would not have understood. This huge city is a place she would never have dared to enter; her world was small and much more practical. Mormor told me you always have to bake first thing in the morning. She instilled in both her daughters the virtue of getting up and going very early in the morning. A gem of wisdom my mother later passed down to me. In her older years, Mormor didn’t do much after noon, but before noon she was in constant motion. Her hands were worn from hard physical work. When I really got to know her, she was already an old woman, without doubt the most intelligent one in our family. “She has a good head for studying,” people said. But there was no money and her life was spent on the farm.

For many years I ran hither and thither in a time that was neither fish nor fowl. During those days, my Mormor’s lovingly passed-down trinkets usually sat, wrapped-up and neglected, in some corner. Now they are at home with me in New York. So in a way Mormor is here too. In New York. On Broadway. Where miracles take place.

Have a safe weekend and see you again on Monday.

My Mormor Nancy (with glasses) standing between her mother (my great grandmother Ellen) and her husband, my Morfar Erik. Mormor is holding my aunt Siv's hand, and my mother, Ingegerd, is the smaller girl with the finger in her mouth. Photo taken in Sweden in the early 1940's.