Little Heart

I think this might be one of my favorite sandwiches ever: Kale (steamed) and sauerkraut on bread spread with on the one side tahini and the other mustard. The recipe is originally from Vegan Vittles by Joanne Stepaniak.

I spent last year in Sweden. I hadn’t lived there in over twenty years, and coming back for as long as a year felt a little strange. So many things looked, felt, and smelled the same, but were in reality different.

Because I look and sound so Swedish, most people got impatient with me when I was confused trying to figure out the cost of things or what some new slang word might mean. I’d forgotten that banks are not open Saturdays over there, and that shops close at 6. But the most serious mistake I made, was that I smiled at people I didn’t know.

You don’t do that in Sweden unless you’re drunk.

This led me to Little Heart. Frankly, I don’t know what to call that, which developed between Little Heart and myself. He was an older man, with a shock of white hair on top of a brown leathery face (the result of too much money spent in tanning salons). Wintertime, he sported an expensively tailored navy topcoat, and in spring he wore boat shoes and flamingo-colored twill pants, like some retired businessman from Connecticut off to the nearest golf course.

I have no idea why I first smiled at Little Heart. It might very well just have been some nervous tic. But as a result, I was stuck with him for the duration of my stay, an entire year. Wherever I went, there he was, smiling, waving, and often with a pressing word or two. When the town celebrated its 400^th birthday and the King came to visit, Little Heart found me in the crowd, put his hand on my arm and whispered:

“I think you’re just like me, you don’t care much for royalty and you don’t like crowds.”

“What?” I said perplexed.

He nodded and gave my arm a squeeze.

“Oh, I know. I know.”

Another time, I was sitting in the basement of the local library, where nobody – and I do mean nobody – ever ventured, preparing for an exam, when I heard the tap-tap-tap of footsteps coming down the stairs.

“Oh no,” I thought to myself. “It cannot be…”

But of course it was. There was Little Heart, smiling from behind a row of empty bookshelves.

“Are you reading?”

I didn’t want to seem impolite, especially since I felt I had started the whole thing (whatever “thing” it was) by smiling at him, but Little Heart began to get on my nerves. 

When I took my son to the eye doctor, who was waiting outside in the blistering cold?

When I recycled my plastic bottles, who was already there, cheerfully lifting a hand in salute?

When I went jogging Saturdays, who did I jog into?

In fact, every time I went to the grocery store – who was there with a pack of unsalted butter?

When I asked others if they knew who he was, they shook their heads. They had no idea. They claimed they’d never even seen him.

“But he’s always out and about!” I said. “How is that possible?”

That’s when it occurred to me, that Little Heart, like the infamous Italian truffle hog, was equipped with a laser-sharp sense of scent that roots out the different, the confused, and the lonely (i.e. societal outsiders), from miles away. While others brushed aside my years in exile, Little Heart sniffed his way to them, identifying them as the very source of my strangeness. Perhaps he was some sort of undercover agent. Perhaps he had me put on some list for my suspicious behavior.

I’ve been back in the States for a while now, but sometimes I wonder if Little Heart has found someone new to investigate.

P.S. Little Heart is just the nickname I gave him. He never properly introduced himself.