Inputs
Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother by Barry Sonnenfeld: My Name is Barbra was too long. Everywhere an Oink, Oink felt like a compilation of retorts that David Mamet thought of too late to make at the appropriate moment. But BS,CYM. Now that’s the stuff. There are dark moments. There are disgusting moments. There is an anecdote about Will Smith and a package of premoistened towelettes. Frequent mentions of his preferred cocktail and level of steak doneness, without which no chronicle of late 20th century show business is complete. Wish I had listened to the audio book.
Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: Is about -is it fair to say dystopia if quite a bit of it is drawn from reality?- a system in which prisoners are offered commutation of their sentences if they survive three years of televised deathmatches. It is disturbing, it is a thrilling ride, you are disturbed that you find it a thrilling ride!
Outputs
As an early fortieth birthday gift, my mom got tickets for me and six-year-old N to Helsinki to visit loved ones for a week. I hadn’t been since 2015 when we surreptitiously scattered Dad’s cremains. Finland in February may not seem like an attractive destination, but the airfares are low, it’s not getting dark at 2 pm anymore, the stores have put out the Easter candy, and the wooly underclothes are on sale so I urge you to consider it. Here are some highlights.
Day 1.
Arrival. Had been very smug about using our shiny red passports but I am hoisted by my own petard when the man checking said passports reasonably assumes I speak Finnish, which I must shamefully admit I do not. “Actually, it is not very hard,” he says, which is a lie. The temperature is about the same as home and I thought we were amply prepared clothingwise. Nope! N slips as soon as he gets out of the car and my mom’s friend (MMF) with whom we are staying sends her husband out to buy us spiked soles we can slip over our boots. These items are only the reason none of my limbs are currently in a cast.
We walk from the house down to the seaside where some hardy ladies are swimming in a hole cut in the ice. In front of a Russian family’s house there’s a metal garbage cart with a Ukrainian flag spray painted on it. MMF says it has already been painted over once and was promptly resprayed. “Russia” is rarely said out loud in public by anyone we are with, instead it is usually “The Neighbor”. A plane passed and her face snaps up to the sky. “Sometimes it is them coming in our space and they’re not supposed to do that, they’re doing all these nasty things.”
For dinner they make lohikeito or salmon soup, a favorite of mine. Trip’s off to a great start already!
Day 2
We’re taking a train six hours north to visit my dad’s family. I have some leftover lohikeito before we head out.
The long distance trains have a special car for kids with stroller parking, potties and bottle warmers in the bathroom, and a play area. After a few hours all the kids drift off to tabletland, but it’s nice that they have space to mill around without getting shushed. I look at the menu in the dining car and-score, lohikeito! Still slaps!
We are picked up by my uncle in Oulu and brought to his house where there are about 30 inches of accumulated snow on the ground. My dad’s mom’s family are extremely devout Laestadian Lutherans who have great hosts of children and don’t watch TV or listen to secular music . I ask my cousin, who was number 9 of 19 children, how laundry worked when she was young. Everyone pretty much kept track of their own stuff except for socks, which were communal. I tell her I had never changed a diaper before N was born and I have a feeling she thinks she must be misunderstanding me because seriously what?
When I said I wanted to see them I was nervous that they would wonder why I was there exactly. I was kind of wondering myself. My father was adopted so I’m not their blood relative, my grandmother (who died before I was born) was always a bit on the outs with her family for discarding some of their beliefs (an aunt tells me about the packs of Kents they found hidden in a bag full of yarn after one of her visits), and my dad and grandparents left Finland when he was six so he probably only saw these people in person half a dozen times after he moved to America. Despite all that they are very welcoming and we are all just kind of tickled to be in each others’ presence. I am presented with a bag of fleece-lined mittens knitted by another aunt, who was chugging away at a sweater the whole evening.
Day 3
We rushed breakfast so I could buy yarn and by the time we get on the train I am very hungry. Maybe I’ll mix it up at dinner, but for now I want a known quantity. Lohikeito it is.
The loop of scenery: Town, lumber yard, cluster of red or yellow houses, someone cross country skiing over a frozen body of water, snow-covered field, birch-spruce forest. When we go back to the restaurant car to get dinner, they are out of the only other gluten-free thing I wanted. Could it really have gone any other way? More lohikeito.
Day 4.
We meet up with K who took care of me when I was a tot and will be forever imprinted in my mind as the most glamorous woman Tiny Anne had ever seen. We don’t eat lohikeito. A win.
MMF’s kids and their families come over in the evening. I learn that in Finland circumcision is not just frowned upon but actually illegal without a pressing medical imperative. MMF’s family are all lowkey judging me for having done it to my kids, but there is a whole story about that I can get into another time. On a completely unrelated note, Finland has a growing population of people from Muslim countries and the nation is, to put it charitably, ambivalent about their presence!
Day 5.
Morning visit to H. Shortly after our departure her band had a gig in the unisex bathroom of the Helsinki Central Library, and missing this event is one of the great regrets of the past decade. Her home is what I tell myself mine would look like if everyone would just put their things away occasionally. Having lived alone in the past I know I am deluding myself.
She apologizes to me because she has made a baked pancake from scratch for N but due to my dietary restrictions she had to offer me something store-bought. Which was very good! But I heard some variation of this sentiment from a few people on this trip and it is something it would never occur to an American host to feel bad about. Finnish people take cake very (appropriately) seriously.
Afternoon visit to AW family. We stop at the supermarket. AAW says “I had to take a picture for your brother” and holds up a large bag of chips labeled “Megapussi,” or “large bag”. Our parents got to know each other because their dad’s aunt and my grandmother were friends when they were both maids in New York in the fifties. When we were young all the kids would be shuttled between New York and Helsinki every summer, them to our house for tennis camp and us to theirs for a few glorious weeks of Nutella and psyching myself up to leap off the dock into the frigid water (not the one in the picture, and even in summer the water was still very cold). Now we all have kids of our own and theirs, aged 6-8, want to go unaccompanied by adults to the park with 6 year old N. In Finland this is totally normal. In Massachusetts it is not. N and I are both discomfited but we get through it.
AAW says that the neighbors have stopped speaking to his Russian-born wife since the news about Bucha. The border is closed now so she doesn’t know when she’ll see her extended family again, she wants to meet them in Turkey but her uncle can’t leave the cows. By the way, did you hear that TFG said Putin can invade any country he wants, and that the Ukraine bills keep stalling in Congress because of nonsense? Every person I’ve encountered here sure did! Everyone I saw told me about low-grade hostilities from The Neighbor that are already happening, or what they’ll have to do if The Neighbor shows up in person, or what happened to grandma the last time(s) The Neighbor showed up in person. Then they asked me to explain why some people in America seem to think what The Neighbor is doing in Ukraine isn’t a big deal, and I couldn’t. Right before we left I got a ballot in the mail for parliamentary elections and I didn’t fill it out because I don’t feel like I understand enough about Finnish politics and won’t have to live with most of the consequences of their electoral outcomes. This trip made clear that I would probably have more of an impact on Finland’s future by voting in the American election than in the Finnish one.
Day 6.
N’s former babysitter V brings us to her house where we are joined by former babysitter E, who is also V’s cousin (not a coincidence as some people have asked, Finland isn’t quite small enough for that). I had been mystified by E’s request for Fruit Roll-Ups which I didn’t recall ever seeing her eat but it turns out it’s for a Tiktok thing.
As with all our babysitters, V and E were quite possibly the people with whom I exchanged more words than anyone else during their respective tenures. Their departures were a huge change to my everyday life so it’s a little startling to be faced with evidence that their time with us was a (hopefully net positive) blip in their normal routines, and that my role of occasional confidant was so reliant on temporary proximity. I have a powerful desire to believe that the people taking care of my kids were providentially engineered to do so. Seeing V and E in their normal environment (on beanbag chairs in the basement surrounded by hockey paraphernalia and V’s dad’s library of death metal CDs) makes it clear that they are instead human beings who were doing a job and, as great as they were at it, have moved on to things they find more fulfilling. It is wonderful to see them, N is beside himself with glee, and what with one thing and another I feel about 234 years old.
Day 7.
Avail self of MMF’s sauna in the morning, bliss. Supermarket (see below). MMF has a thing she keeps on her dashboard with a clockface and hands that you have to adjust to show what time you got to the garage so it is clear if you are overstepping the maximum allowed time for free public parking. The fact that people actually do it is illustrative of Finnish society and its fanatical devotion to FAIRNESS. N watches in wonder as the plane is de-iced. Home.
Condiment Corner
Just a look at the Wall of European Spreads in the supermarket.