Grandparents

Bring on the French toast! Though this particular bread lends itself beautifully for French toast, this time what makes the dish special is Giada De Laurentiis’ wonderfully decadent bourbon maple syrup, which you make like this: Place 1 cup pure maple syrup and a peeled and sliced 2-inch piece fresh ginger in a pan. Bring to a boil, and then reduce to low and let simmer for 10 minutes. Remove the ginger with a slotted spoon, and stir in 2 Tablespoons of bourbon.

My maternal grandparents were farmers and as such deeply tied to the land. They relied on this land for their livelihood, but even after they retired, an obsession with the soil and the land remained until they died. They could never understand, for instance, why I wanted to leave Sweden for the States.

“They don’t have Swedish potatoes there!” they said. Aghast.

I don’t think they were very suited for each other. My grandfather, Erik, was a jovial fellow, outgoing and social. My grandmother Nancy, my mormor whom I’ve written about here and here, was brooding and quiet. She was highly intelligent and very industrious. They both were. They worked extremely hard. There seems to have been very little romance and there are no wedding photos. My grandmother already had a child, a daughter (my Aunt Siv) when she married my grandfather. Siv was the product of an ill-fated liaison, and perhaps my grandfather felt sorry for my grandmother and my aunt and stepped in. I don’t know. Nobody knows. It remained a secret. And now they are all gone: Erik, Nancy, even Siv.

Yet, there was a profound connection between my grandparents, of the sort that I suppose you develop nearly by default from living and working with another person for many decades. Once when my grandfather went on a bus trip up north, he sent my grandmother a postcard with no message on it. Only her name and the address. I guess no words were needed.

He called her “Morsan”, which is slang for Mother in Swedish, more slangish than “Mom”, and a word I’d never use for my own mother.

“Hey, Morsan, how about we paint the house?” my grandfather would say importantly.

And my grandmother would say “no”. She said “no” to him almost all the time. But he never went sour or got upset. I never saw my grandfather upset except once, when we were at a cemetery and he found the grave of someone who’d wronged him.

“Now that was a mean bastard!” He said and shook his walking stick at the headstone.

They were both early risers, even after they gave up farming. And by early I mean 5 in the morning. They breakfasted together on boiled eggs, potatoes, and pickled herring. My grandmother made coffee, which they mixed with milk and sugar and poured onto plates, from which they drank.

My father, who came from a slightly more refined background, found my maternal grandparents hopelessly unstylish and homely. He once took it upon himself to introduce my grandfather to the art of fine dining. Together they went to an expensive restaurant in Stockholm where the waiter brought plates of Wiener schnitzel, the most elegant dish on the menu. My grandfather smiled broadly and said:
“Oh, flatfish!”

My grandfather passed away very suddenly from a heart attack in the back seat of a taxi en route to the hospital (with my grandmother in the front seat next to the driver). It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. My grandmother was supposed to go first, she’d been threatening to do so for some time. She’d been worrying over how my grandfather would get along without her.

“What’s Erik going to eat? He can’t even boil an egg.”

Now, he went and died before her.

During his funeral in church, my grandmother bent over his coffin and cried her heart out in an unprecedented show of emotion.

She spent the ten years alone in a small apartment, where she could be seen sitting at the window looking at whoever passed by outside, commenting:
“Is Hulda going into the city today again? She was there just yesterday.”

And then, with a chuckle:
“Look, her skirt hem is up in the back!”