the hearing-aid flirt

Got chatted up, at work, by a customer. A guy who had to be pushing 80. Oh well, mustn't be picky. His hearing aid wasn't really working so we conducted our little flirt half-shouting, to the amusement of other customers.

Now I'm gearing up to go play volleyball with the lads. The other two girls who normally play are away, so I will be the only one balancing up all that testosterone-fuelled, here's-for-all-the-frustrations-of-the-week, Friday night male aggression.

the echo song

Can I make an echo here
though this song is much too quiet
Will this sound be travelling on
and make some waves when I am gone?

halloumi and creepy eyes

Leaning across my halloumi salad to whisper to my best friend: "That child is creepy."

The child being a painting on the wall, staring at me with huge, accusing eyes. That's what you get for having lunch in a posh art museum. But the rest of the interior is beautiful and the salad and the company are excellent. After a great cup of coffee, we drift through the souvenir shop and laugh at Andy Warhol-shaped fridge magnets and artificial snowballs that even feel like real snowballs, minus the cold, when you squeeze them. ( Who came up with the idea of fake snowballs, and why, and is this person a millionaire now? )

My friend goes back to her studies and I try to decide how to spend the rest of my day off. The day is typical November: A chilly wind and a grey darkness that hardly qualifies as daylight.

I could go for a run. I could study a foreign language. I could go visit my mother. Or I could wrap myself in a blanket and spend this dismal day on the sofa, watching DVDs.

the table at the heart of creation

A Saturday evening and a Sunday spent having a Numb3rs marathon and eating pizza.

Days are being wasted, but what else is there to do?

Writing is stupid. How can you be so sure, throughout your entire life, that this is what you want to do and are actually able to do, and still have nothing in your heart to express? I have nothing to say. I have nothing I even want to say. Most of the time I just want to withdraw into a corner and leave other people to their boring lives.

Other times, I dream about living in a big house where colourful, opinionated and brilliant people gather in a large kitchen to eat, work, talk, and - above all - be  creative  in every sense of the word. I see a large, wooden table strewn with laptops, coffee mugs, pencils and paint brushes, physics textbooks, maybe a half-empty bottle of wine. I smell cinnamon coffee and a whiff of the wet dog that is nosing around people's feet. I hear voices raised in good-natured arguments on Hegel's philosophy or the benefits of the latest architectural design software, and in the background, Bach or Billy Joel is playing.

In this company, I might find something to express.

the Aberration

I miss you, Dad.

I never really believed that there was anything in the world that the human mind was incapable of dealing with. Until my mind was faced with the task of processing the completely unfathomable, incomprehensible, impossible fact that you were gone.

Not only gone. Dead. One day you were there, smiling at me, ready to give me anything, loving me. The next, the world did no longer contain you. And that was impossible. That night, when I lay awake, I understood the tears and the pain that was ripping me to shreds. But my mind, my logic and intelligence, my readiness to accept and believe in irrefutable facts, failed me for the first time. The fact was there, my mind tried to grapple it but failed - slipped back a few steps - tried again, with the same result. That entire horrible night, not to mention days and weeks and months afterward. My mind was like a faulty recording, skipping back every time it reached that scratch in the disc, that glitch in the software, repeating the same sequence endlessly. Nightmarishly.

You, no longer. You, nowhere.

And faith, which usually steps in, could not help. Faith held me up, cushioned and soothed me with words like "heaven, immortal soul, meet again", but faith is in another dimension. Comfort from others, with words like "you are not alone", was invaluable and absolutely life-saving, but comfort is also there in the other dimension. Reality is here, and reality is harsh and blinding and relentless.

Someone put it beautifully (quote from here): "... she's been in this vague in between lifes world. One life of what you knew is passing away, dying on the winds while the other is opening up and brightening to blind and bleach out your brain. It hurts like stabs in the heart."

Eventually, I must have learned to live with that fact that had blinded and bleached out a part of my brain. My mind is no longer skipping. That scratch or glitch in the weave of the universe is still there, always will be. But I glide past it with a respectful nod, and move on.

Usually. Every now and then my mind stumbles over it from an unexpected angle and falls flat on its face, painfully. And then, again, the shock and horror: You, no longer. You, nowhere.

a boring description of a boring event

An urgent need to de-stress.

My mind suggests a week-long stay on a beach in the Seychelles and then immediately rejects the suggestion for financial reasons.

I walk home from work, exhausted and knowing more work is waiting at home. Decide on a short detour, just a couple of blocks to unwind. A dark November evening.

A stop by an R-kioski (Finland's answer to 7-11) for no other reason than that it looks bright and inviting. I look at the broad selection of magazines, everything from adult magazines and Newsweek to knitting and sailing periodicals, in several different languages. Impressive. I look at the paperback shelves, mostly Fifty Shades of Grey and the latest Finnish whodunits. Not so impressive. I eavesdrop on a conversation between a middle-aged man and the cashier: "The opening hours of Sampo Bank have been reduced again! What's next, all their employees will be let go, won't they?"

I continue my walk through back streets, past the hospital and down the path through the woods down to the beach. It's after dark but the path is well-lit and you can (almost) always feel safe in this town. Plenty of joggers and dog-walkers around. I look at the dark, ice-cold waves washing ashore.

Past a grocery store to pick up apples, eggs, bread, a small bag of crisps. And then home.

And wow, I'm de-stressed.

they don't make grandparents like this anymore

What my grandfather tried to teach me:

How to read the clouds
How to be open-minded, humble, yourself, and loved by everyone
How to play with matches (although not with fire)

How to make coffee
How to tie somebody up so they can't get on their feet
How to comfort the grievers when you're dying

Everybody loved my grandfather. He had a natural, sincere charm, was great at telling funny stories and loved life. He listened with focused interest to what people were saying. Towards the end of his life, he rarely complained even when he was in pain, preferred to make little jokes instead.

I only knew him after he had already retired from his active working life, which had consisted of a little farm with a few fields, a few cows and a plowing horse. My uncle took over the farm and my grandfather and grandmother moved to the little suburb where my family lived, bought a little flat with a little garden in a rowhouse.

I'm sure they missed the village where they had lived their entire life, missed the neighbours they knew so well and the endless fields and the closeness to nature. It must have been an enormous change, having mostly nothing to do after working from dawn to dusk since they were very young. I could tell, by the wistful tone in grandfather's voice when he told the funny little stories about village life or spoke about how he loved the open horizons he saw when standing in the middle of his fields.

But I never saw either grandfather or grandmother bitter or complaining. My grandmother, quieter than he was, focused on feeding and spoiling her grandchildren, on tending to her garden and her handicrafts, and on the English course she took in order to understand the letters she received from relatives in Canada. Grandfather took to exploring his new surroundings, getting to know all the neighbours and helping my father with various carpentry projects. He watched TV documentaries and read biographies as well as tried to think up practical little inventions to solve everyday little problems. He also drew miniature portraits and landscapes (mostly copied from pictures in magazines) on the back of recycled pieces of carton.

They lived simply and sparingly, with a  contentedness  that I have not seen since their generation passed away.

And we, the grandchildren, were always welcomed with open arms. When I was little and my parents were going away for an evening, I took my dog and went to my grandparents, where I played little games with grandfather and was fed sweets by grandmother. When I was in my teens, I used to mow their little lawn, hoover their flat or tune their TV set, and I knew that my reward would be coffee with muffins or cinnamon buns, enjoyed on the patio if the weather was good. When I moved to another city I sent them postcards frequently (often with miniature drawings of my own, to my grandfather's delight), and during my brief weekend visits, my grandmother took great care in packing a goodie bag for my train ride back.

Grandfather was well into his nineties when he died, grandmother a few years younger. My mother took care of them and their household for years when they were too old to look after themselves. But eventually, grandfather spent long periods being in bad shape in hospitals and grandmother needed around-the-clock supervision because of her worsening dementia.

One of the last times I visited my grandfather in hospital, he was dying and barely able to speak or move. I hung back and let my mother do the talking - I felt paralyzed by helplessness and grief and just wanted to run away from that room. Grandfather noticed. He managed to lift a hand to wave me closer, then whispered to me in short breaths - a funny little story again, just to make me laugh. Even on his deathbed, his only thought was to comfort me.

Eventually he died, "being old and full of days". Grandmother, in her quiet way, followed him less than a year later. I still miss them.

granny and the Arabic bottle of life

Last night, in my dreams, I was dying.

It wasn't particularly painful or sad or anything, just a bit of a hassle.Various family members featured vaguely in my dream, coming to offer condolences or talk sense into me. But the main character, making a very surprising appearance, was my grandmother. The more distant one of my grandmothers, the one who died a long time ago and whom I didn't see that often even before then. In my memories she is always sitting on her bed, quiet and gentle of mind, body twisted by arthritis, crocheting doilies until the pain in her joints stopped her. Still, she must have been a strong woman once, the daughter of a farmer and marrying a penniless farmhand even though her father threatened to disinherit her.

My teetotaller granny, who was probably never within a mile of a wine bottle in her life, managed to shock me deeply last night. In my dream she was convinced that she knew a way to save me from death. Somewhere, she had gotten her hands on an  Arabic wine bottle  and if she could just figure out the writing on the label, these words would stop death.

In my mind, as of now, she is Scheherazade.

and so to bed

My immediate plans:

Pull the duvet over my head in my lovely, lovely bed. Feel safe.
Dream of love and new horizons.
Wake up, well-rested. Feel that I'm good enough for this world.
Have a lazy brunch.

in the corridors of life and death

Today I went to the hospital. I don't like the hospital nearly as much as I like the prison.

In fact, seeing it usually makes me shudder. I have never had to be admitted to one, thank God, but disease is right at the top of my fear list.

As I walked toward the entrance this dismally dark November evening, of course I had another horrible, dark November evening in mind: two years ago, when I came to this same hospital to say a final, too-late farewell to my father who had been taken from me without warning. That time, as I waited in the car park for the rest of my family, I was leaning against my car and paralyzed by shock.

But in this hospital, I was also born once. Since then, I have come here on a few occasions, even during the years when I lived far away - to see a newborn nephew, to visit an ailing grandfather, to bring a sick friend to the emergency room one late evening when we had to wait for hours and watched an icehockey game in the waiting room. Once, by a ridiculous coincidence, I had a Valentine's Day date in the dull cafeteria here. Another time I visited a friend who was a patient but also belonged to the hospital staff - he took me on a weird walk through the mysterious basement tunnels.

Today I suddenly remembered these things. I thought I hated this building. But I can't just dismiss something that is a part of my history.

The joy of this particular occasion probably helped. I took the lift to the maternity ward and was met by one of my best friends with a day-old baby in her arms. No matter how cynical and world-weary I am, that sight made me feel that maybe, just maybe, all is well with the world.