My Dad

It's been a hard month. Soon after my last post, four weeks after my father's vehicular encounter with a deer, he died. The really excellent medical staff gave him every chance they could, but his body was just too damaged to keep going. We had the memorial service over Labor Day weekend, and I'm staying in the US until the end of September. I will probably reflect more on this experience and my thoughts in the future, but for now I'll just copy in what I wrote about him for his eulogy.

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Dad was a collector. He collected things and he collected ideas and people. Every single thing that he saved was something that he either thought he could repair or something that he could use again in a new way. People he collected because he loved learning their stories and making friends with them. He was a very good listener, willing to explore people's ideas and beliefs when they didn't agree with his own, and also quite interested in sharing his own experiences. In high school a personality test classified him as strongly introverted. The instructor said that very few people ever change their basic personality type, and my father decided that he was going to be one of those rare exceptions. By the time I came along. I knew him as an extrovert. He talked to strangers at restaurants about their cool T-shirts, he made friends with people he sat next to on the airplane and invited them to his home, and was willing to talk to anyone. He joined so many clubs and made sure to learn people's names and learn about their stories and their lives. When I was a kid, I was very shy and a bit embarrassed by how much he talked to strangers. I'm still quite introverted, but now deeply admire his ability to connect with people and make friends with almost anyone.

He was a great father. This is actually an astounding achievement considering how difficult his childhood was. We kids were given Independence within boundaries. We were allowed to have a voice and opinions and my father valued our ideas and knowledge, even as kids. Above all, I always felt loved. I know that later in life he wished he had spent more time with his kids and less time at work, but I always felt like he was connected to us and a loving parent to us.

Everyone will say this, but he really was a mechanical genius. There was no device or motor that he couldn't fix and he was always engineering solutions. He could find a plastic spoon on the ground at the fairground and scrape it on stones to make an impromptu splint or tool. Or he could design and build custom-made parts for furnaces or furniture or anything you could think of. When I bought my first home, he and I spent 2 years building a bathroom where previously had been an attic. I was so proud that we could do that together and that I could learn from him.

In his autobiography, he wrote that legacy wasn't terribly important to him. I assume that was because his actions in the here and now mattered more. But he does leave behind a legacy. With my mother, he built a nuclear family of people who love each other deeply, strong bonds with friends that he has made across the decades, and wonderful memories of dirt bike riding and DIY projects and sharing life together with friends.

I would say that my father was equally proud of two things- his ability to engineer a solution to almost any kind of problems, and the relationships he had with his family and friends. On our weekly phone calls, he would relay to me the status of all of his current projects, and then follow that with interesting conversations that he had with people. It really meant a lot to him when someone appreciated him for his caring interactions with them.

When he retired, he had even more time to devote to relationships. He spent a lot of time on the phone and taking trips around the country to maintain close connections with all of his siblings and as many of his nieces and nephews as he could. To me, he seemed like a loving and interested patriarch of the family. 

I will miss him so much. 

Tragedy

It´s been a month since I posted, and what a month. Three weeks ago, I woke up to a bumch of missed calls and found out that my father had been in a serious motorcycle accident. Let me stress that my father is an excellent motoryclist - he´s very good at defenisve driving and, to my knowledge, had not had an accident in the entire 65 years that he has been riding. But a large deer hurling itself in front of your motorcycle is a disaster, and he ended up with many broken bones and internal injuries. 

I immediately flew home, where I joined my mother and brother spending a lot of time in the ICU. He was slowly improving after a week, so then I flew back to Spain to join my friends in watching the eclipse. However, then things were looking worse, so I immediately flew back. (That trip involved three legs and 32 hours, but it was worth it.) My dad was a healthy and strong person when this happened, but spending three weeks in the ICU, which regular health crises and many, many procedures has made him quite fragile. It´s not clear how this will all play out, but I am confident that he is receiving really excellent care and I am so glad that I do not have a job so that I can spend time with my family now. 

Campeones del mundo

In case you didn't hear, Spain won the World Cup. 

I come from a family that did not watch sports, of any kind. In middle school, my father once turned on the Super Bowl just so we could see what a halftime show was, and that´s all I remember about sports in my childhood. So I've never really watched sports on television nor attended many games in person. But when I came to Spain, I decided I wanted to experience it as part of the culture. I have limited myself to the all-Spain teams, which means I saw a few of the women's World Cup games, men´s Euro Cup games, and now the men's World Cup. And it just so happens that the Spanish teens did very well in all of those competitions.

Starting early on Sunday morning, the day of the World Cup final, you could see people dressed and ready for the party. In Spain, it's typical that the local governments put up large screens in each community so that everybody can watch together outside. That's probably pretty amazing, but the idea of standing outside in the heat for 3 hours sounded rather unpleasant. Instead, a friend invited me to watch with her and her daughter and we had a very civilized dinner while doing so.

Our TV feed was oddly delayed by two seconds, which meant every time Spain did something important, we'd hear a huge roar from outside several seconds before we'd find out why. It was a nail-biting match with almost no scoring, but in the end Spain did it! Afterwards, I soaked in the fireworks and roars of joy from the streets. On my way home, I watched two boys, young teens, sprint down the sidewalk, but then stop to join hands with a random guy on the street and dance around for a minute.

It felt really nice to be part of a nation-wide experience (even though I didn´t end up joining the two-million people who went to watch the victory parade the following day*). I can´t think of something similar in the US. The biggest event on our calendar is the Super Bowl, but people are rooting for different sides. The Olympics are national, but there are so many different competitions, it doesn´t feel like you are participating in the same moment as everyone else around you, feeling the same feelings. Iam glad I got to experience it. 

The metro train that took me home. I even joined in the singing for a few moments.

 *Note that twice as many people showed up for the national fútbol team as the Pope. Their true passions are revealed.

Stolpersteine, aka "Stumbling blocks"

In 1992, the German artist Gunter Demnig started the Stolperstein project, an initiative to commemorate victims of Nazi persecution. Stolperstein means "stumbling block” in German, and it is a 10 cm brass plaque that bears the name, birthdate, and ultimate fate of the person who used to live in that location. They are installed in place of one of the stones that make up the pavement. Although there is a directory to find them, you usually just “stumble” across them in your everyday life. It is a very powerful memorial, and tragically moving when you find 8 or 10 blocks together, commemorating an entire family, most of whom perished. Each Stolperstein is placed at the last location where someone worked or studied. They are registered in a large public database where biographical detail of each person commemorated person can be found.

These also exist in Spain - the ones I have seen were people who fled Franco´s regime to France, then were persecuted when it became occupied. A friend of mine recently spoke at a ceremony in Hamburg to commemorate his father´s memorial- his father was a pacifist who was imprisoned very early in the Nazi era but was able to flee Germany after his release. The picture I have above is not from his family, but from others we saw on our trip this spring.

The project has been opposed by some, who find the idea of stepping on the names of departed people to be disrespectful. Personally, I find it a moving commemoration and a fitting way to remember that the people who died were individual people with lives embedded in their community. I would love to see something like this in the US that would better commemorate the individual lives of enslaved people and how their labor was exploited in so many ways to make the country I grew up in.

Summertime is the time for SMART goals

While I was in Malmö, I decided I needed to achieve some things. Perhaps I was inspired by my cousins making summer buckets lists, perhaps I was just giving structure to two weeks of wide-open time. But I´m actually quite pleased with the not-very-important things that I achieved.

The most important was the garden - my cousins´ house came with a garden, and they are not (to put it mildly) avid gardeners. My advice in the spring was to let things grow and we could just see if there were things worth keeping as they got bigger. When I arrived, I discovered they basically had a meadow of an invasive species called goutweed. There is a long tradition of people from poorer, southern countries coming to richer, northern countries to do the menial labor. Thus, it was most fitting that this Spanish laborer spent two weeks weeding and raking to clear the Swedish garden.

Before: a meadow of invasive species.

After: weeds conquered.

I also managed to eat lots of incredible ice cream flavors: A´s  homemade rhubarb custard, along with mango pistachio and fig. 

One day I ended up in a beautiful city garden and decided I was going to take the best bee photos I could.

Malmo borders the Orsund Strait, but I thought it sounded more romantic to bathe in the Baltic, so we took a bus just far enough south that we were officially at the Baltic Sea.

Malmö - the cool, green city of my dreams

Even with a heat wave and a drought, Sweden´s summer weather is still heaps better than Spain's.

Sweden, land of IKEA and pickled herring. And, more importantly for me, it is the land where my beloved cousins live. Cousins who not only put up with my biannual visits, but provide me with a very comfy guest bedroom and my own coffee pot. (Conveniently, I also really like the whole family.)

This year, they suggested an experiment where I stayed for longer, but my trip would be less of a visit and more as a member of a family. This means we get to spend time together and time apart, plus I got to spend two glorious weeks away from the heat of a Spanish summer.

By all reports, the experiment was a success and we hope to repeat it next summer. The pictures below highlight the family-bonding side of things, but I also took a lot of long, solo bike rides and met locals at meetups.

Midsommer´s Eve is one of the most Swedish of holidays. We danced around the Maypole at an event aimed at kids, so as far as I could tell from the few words I knew and the hand gestures, we sang of barnyard animals and musical instruments.

A requested a belated birthday cake, specifically an almond cake with cherry filling and coconut filling. I did the baking, but L and N did a bang-up job with the decorating. I need to use more gold dust in my baking, that´s one thing I learned from them.

We built and successfully flew a kite, an item on N´s bucket list. 

All those years of studying physics finally paid off!

Reflections on the last year

Since last September, I've been seriously considering whether I want to continue living in Madrid. (Spoiler alert: I haven´t made any decisions.) I´m quite sure I don´t want to live in a city of six million for the rest of my life, but weighing the factors of city size, weather, the prevailing culture, language, along with tax and visa options, is a complicated process. I don´t have any particular deadline, but I feel some impetus to decide within the next year, mainly because I want to start living whatever life I´m choosing sooner rather than later. I do feel like I have been making progress - I have visited possible cities and countries, investigated immigration laws, and started learning a new language. At each point, it´s been pretty clear what are the next two or three steps I need to take, and I´ll just continue until the right decision seems obvious.

In the meantime, I have been reflecting on my three years thus far in Spain. Moving to a new country is hard. I knew that even before I came, and I came prepared to be lonely and bewildered. And I certainly was, although with diminishing frequency as I learned both the language and how Spain works. So although I feel apprehension about possibly starting over in a new country and a new language, I am also appreciative of how easy my life is now. Three years in, it's quite rare that I encounter a new rule / holiday / life admin problem that I don't know how to deal with. With my B2** level in Spanish, I can generally communicate in any situation, even if I still sometimes sound like an idiot. I've made a huge number of friends in my choir, which means I feel like I have a strong support network and ample opportunities for socialization. I don´t know what the future holds, but the present is a pretty good place for me to be.

** That's level 4 of 6 in the Common European Framework for languages, described as, “Can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party.”