July 23 - Se Alltid Lyst På Livet

In my College Success class, my students just finished a journal entry writing about a time they experienced negative emotions followed by a time they experienced positive emotions, and then reflect on how they felt when writing about them. Most of them talked about how they were able to relive the emotions they felt at the time while writing about them, and that has been so true throughout this year of daily writing. It has also been one of the main reasons I slow down on a few postings and don't get too personal - but today I can't help it. July 23rd has always been my grandma's birthday, and it is hard not to spend some time remembering her today. She was farmor, my father's mother, married to farfar, my father's father (there's a shocker...!)

I came into her life the year she turned 60. It's funny when you start thinking about it this way - she was always in my life, but she lived almost 60 years without me around. I've always wondered what she was like growing up and in her youth - as well as in her adult life - and while I have heard stories (most of them, I am sure, had been sanitized over the years), those are still 60 years that I never will know first-hand.

But I do know who she was to me. I know who she was for me. I remember waking up at her place, on farfar's side of the bed (he was relegated to a sleeper sofa when my sister and I spent the night), turning on the light and compulsively itching what looked like small mosquito bites in the middle of winter. She told me to turn out the light and go back to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I was still itching, and the red dots had multiplied. And there was fever. Chicken pox. Which led to massive nurturing. She was really good at that.

I remember sitting at her kitchen table, eating spiralloff (white bread baked in a tubular bread pan rather than the rectangular ones we often think of) with sliced bananas, looking out over one of the main roads going in to town, often looking at trikken (the street car in Trondheim) coming in to it's final destination. Actually, the streetcar was the reason my grandparents lived where they lived. My grandfather had been one of the people instrumental in building the apartment building they lived in for the conductors and drivers of the streetcar. The garage was next door, and my dad still gets visibly shaken when talking about the great fire of the streetcar garage in 1956, when he was only 6 years old.

I could go on and on. But the main thing I do think about when I think about farmor is the constant that started way back in elementary school and kept going all the way until I moved to the states, and that was playing cards, especially Canasta. I am not sure how old I was when I learned to play this fascinating card game, but I remember playing it every Wednesday from I was in third grade, I believe, and all throughout high school. When I was in third grade, my Wednesday schedule was short, so I would get on the bus right outside my school and take it all the way to my grandparents' apartment building (we actually had different schedules for each day, very different from the American school system - and we started going to school 15 hours a week in first grade and gradually increasing the number spent in school, which I believe really worked to our advantage). There was food and chocolate and other goodies - let's just say that I was well taken care of - and then there was Canasta. In the beginning, both farmor and farfar would play, but eventually it was just farmor and I most days.

As I got older, I got better at the game - but farmor had a harder time remembering the cards, so I would beat her quite often. Beat her badly. And she wasn't the most gracious of losers all the time. you could read her frustrations from miles away. So just to make sure she would stay interested, I started making "mistakes" as well. I started letting her win - but not so often that she would get too suspicious. I will say that I know she caught on to it from time to time, but most of the time we were both too happy to simply be playing to care about the winning and losing aspect (don't get me wrong, I get competitive playing cards and board games, and I think I am the same way farmor was - I think my displeasure of not doing well is very obvious with me as well).

She lived for a little over five years after I moved to the states. She got a chance to meet my oldest daughter, Emma, twice, and I know how much that meant to her. Farmor and I got incredibly close - although we had our issues as well - and I believe that is because we had our weekly card game. Closing my eyes, I can smell her place, smell the food on the stove, and hear her voice. And I miss her. A lot. Being here when she died and not being able to go to her funeral/memorial service was really difficult - but then again I have a hard time with funerals, so maybe that was a blessing in disguise. I wrote a few words for her, but I still wish I could have been there in person regardless.

Picking a song for her isn't easy, as her musical tastes predates mine quite a bit - she liked a lot of songs that for me always seemed old fashioned. But she also liked Lillebjørn Nilsen, so I picked one of his songs today - a song called Se Alltid Lyst På Livet (Always Look At The Bright Side of Life - and no, not the Monty Python song). It's a great song about remaining positive even when life turns itself against you...