Resurrection

I will tell you

What it was like

To rise, like the phoenix

From the ashes of the still-smoldering embers,

Of the house that I was born in.

What I cannot tell you

Is how that house came to be,

That birthed the plagues it did

From one generation to the next.

Only that sorrow was twin to despair

That etched themselves onto the faces of the living.

I moved from that house

To one built in hell.

Walls lined with pain and hate

Of my soul which longed to rise

Above it all and soar

High, like the phoenix.

Almost twenty years have come and gone,

My house is built now

On firmer ground, the walls and rooms

Have known and know love still.

And yet the images of those earlier houses remain,

The memories raw and naked, still etched with pain. 

from 'Parables and Voices'

copyright Paula M. De Angelis

A New York Summer State of Mind

Back to work today after four wonderful weeks of vacation, and it wasn’t as tough as I had expected. But of course that’s because I know that on Friday I will be on vacation again for another week, this time in New York. ‘A New Yorker in Oslo’ will be ‘A New Yorker in New York’ again for a week, visiting friends and family. I look forward to my annual trips to NY each year, and usually plan them for the middle to end of August so that I can experience a bit of the NY summer—hot, humid, and sometimes tough to take. But it’s a real long summer and it’s what I remember from growing up there. Once I land at Newark airport and step outside, it’s like being hit by a blast of hot air. But I like feeling the heat outdoors and then walking into an air-conditioned supermarket or clothing store and nearly freezing, or lying in bed and feeling the air from the ceiling fan at my friend Jean’s house blowing down on me. I like opening the door to a car that has been baking in the heat and having to air out the car to cool it down. I like the smell of sun-baked asphalt and tar—it reminds me of the boardwalk smell at Rye Beach at Playland from our childhood days. I need my dose of warmth but I also like that feeling of needing some relief from the heat. It doesn’t feel like summer if you cannot complain at least once that it’s too hot. My mother would sometimes complain, and then she would bring out watermelon, sherbet, lemonade or her homemade iced tea (nothing beat it) and we would relax and forget about the heat, at least for a while. The heat would often make us seek relief at the beaches. I can still remember long summer days together with Jean at Jones Beach or Sherwood Island when we were younger, working on our tans, listening to the radio and reading our fashion magazines. When it got to be too warm on the beach, we ran into the ocean—the water was warm but still refreshing. When we were children we often made our way to Kingsland Point Park on the Hudson River, or joined neighbors for trips to Lake Welch or Sherwood Island or Rye Beach. Now I often visit Gisele whose apartment terrace overlooks the beach, and we sit out there watching the people on the beach, sipping cold drinks and enjoying good conversation.

Now that I no longer work in NYC and no longer have to use subways or buses to get to work, I enjoy being a tourist and walking around the city in the summertime. I prefer to walk rather than take the subways or buses. The subways in NYC always seemed to smell worse in the summertime than during the rest of the year as I remember. It’s been a few years since I’ve ridden a subway during the summer, so I don’t know if that has changed or not. I do remember a few times being on a subway train where the windows were shut tight and the air conditioning was supposed to be on but it wasn’t, and it didn’t take long for the cars to heat up and tempers to flare. Someone always ended up opening the doors between the cars and standing in them to hold them open. The stream of cool subway tunnel air that flowed through the cars then was like a gift from heaven even though the screeching of the train wheels and the iron smell accompanied it. It was a trying experience to deal with claustrophobic subway cars and buses where the windows were tightly shut. I never managed that too well and would get off (fight my way off) a subway train or bus at the next stop if it was too unbearable. Asking the bus driver to put the air conditioning on always elicited the same response—it was on and please do not open the windows. We opened them anyway if we could, just to get real air. I don’t miss this aspect of NYC summers at all.

Summer storms in Tarrytown where I grew up were always intense but short-lived as I remember, with a lot of lightning and thunder and torrential rains. Sometimes there was flooding. Afterwards the storms had seldom cooled everything down, but they were fascinating and scary to experience, especially at night with all the lightning flashing about. We always took care to get indoors so as not to be struck by lightning. That was always impressed upon us by parents and teachers—how to deal with lightning storms and what to do in different situations. Oslo has not had many intense lightning storms in the twenty years I’ve lived here, but the past few years have seen an increase in their frequency. Experiencing such storms when we have been out on our boat on the Oslo fjord—with torrential rain, strong winds and high waves—is a scary experience and one I prefer to avoid. We have been lucky the two times it has happened—getting back to port or finding shelter just in time before the storm hit. That is the best way to describe it—it just hits and lashes everything in its path.

I am looking forward to my dose of New York summer—the warmth of being together with family and friends, the summer weather--all the experiences that contribute to the making of memories that keep one warm during the winter months.

Norway through the eyes of others

Today is a beautiful sunny day in Oslo, just like yesterday. Real summer days that give you that lazy feeling of summer, those days that are necessary for the heart and mind and soul if one is to survive the long gray winters. This past week Haika was in town—my very good friend from my Memorial Sloan-Kettering days in Manhattan—and we had a wonderful week together. She arrived last Sunday evening and left on Friday morning. Haika came to Oslo from Berlin, and brought the good weather with her. I was afraid she would take it with her when she left, because it rained heavily all day Friday. But thankfully no, the weekend has been beautiful! We managed to see quite a bit of Oslo together this past week, and spent all day Tuesday doing the ‘Norway in a Nutshell’ trip. As Haika would say, it was a fabulous trip, and it was fabulous to see her too after so many years. The last time I saw her was in England during the mid 1990s when her husband was doing a sabbatical at a college right outside of London and I visited them there. Here we are, so many years later. The passage of time—how quickly it happens.

When I look back over my twenty years here, I feel blessed to have opened our house to many different visitors from the USA, family and friends alike: my sister Renata and her husband (several times); my good friends Gisele, Jean, Maria, Jola, and Haika; my cousin Cathy; my friends Lucy, Steve and their son Andrew; and my friend Janet’s niece Sonja. They come from different areas in the USA—upstate NY, metropolitan NY, Long Island, West Virginia, Michigan, Colorado, and California. I have learned a lot along the way. For one thing, I’ve relearned that Norway is expensive when I see it through others’ eyes! I stopped dividing the total kroner amount by 6 (roughly the amount of kroner to one USD) a long time ago. It made grocery shopping a lot easier and helped me hang on to my sanity. Early on, when I was still calculating the cost of things in dollars, it would floor me that I was paying nine dollars (about fifty-four kroner) for a grilled chicken, fifteen dollars (ninety kroner) for a small pizza, not to mention fifteen dollars for a cocktail or ten dollars for a beer. When I wanted a turkey to celebrate Thanksgiving, a frozen one could easily cost sixty to seventy dollars in the supermarket back in the early 1990s. Needless to say, it made a huge dent in our meager scientist budgets at that time. Even though we earn more now, it can still be daunting to take a trip to an upscale supermarket. But ok, I’ve lived here for twenty years now, so I’m used to it. I forget that when friends come here, they go into a mild shock initially before they adjust. My current advice in terms of figuring out a travel budget for Norway is to think about what you might normally spend on such a trip and double the amount, just to be on the safe side.

The ‘Norway in a Nutshell’ trip (http://www.norwaynutshell.com/en/explore-the-fjords/norway-in-a-nutshell/) is expensive but well-worth the money in terms of the scenic views and fjord experience. We boarded the 6:30 am train at the Oslo Central Station that took us to Myrdal, about a five-hour train ride. This is the second time I have done this trip. The first time was when Gisele visited in 1995. We have some pretty funny memories of that train ride. Just about every time she was about to take a picture through the train window of some scenic view, we entered a tunnel. After it happened a few times we were laughing hysterically. It was very funny to watch the same thing happen to Haika and to a group of senior citizens traveling together. The latter were also laughing hysterically for the same reason. God knows if they got any pictures at all. Haika got a few but it wasn’t easy. In the summer of 1995, when Gisele and I reached Myrdal, we stepped off the train into close-to-freezing temperatures, completely underdressed for the weather. It was not cold in Oslo, but it was cold in Myrdal! There were a few people on the train before we got off who commented on our lack of warm clothing—looking back I think they must have thought—typical tourists (or typical New Yorkers?). It reminded me of stories I had heard about my former boss in NY when he was visiting Italy and walked over part of the Alps wearing a thin leather jacket and leather shoes. People remember things like that. So with Haika, I remembered my earlier experience with Gisele and we were prepared, but this time it wasn’t cold at all. Once we got to Myrdal, we took a connecting train to Flåm, which is about an hour’s train ride from Myrdal. This is a beautiful train ride with lovely scenic views on both sides of the train. The only problem is all the tourists rushing from one side of the train to the other to get pictures. Not an easy task. My NY ‘get a seat on the subway’ instinct came to good use—I managed to get us both window seats. Once we reached Flåm, we boarded a boat for our trip along the fjord ending at Gudvangen, which took about two hours. It was not really possible to take a photo that truly captured the beauty of the fjord and of the landscape along it, and the same goes for the scenic views from the bus that took us to Voss where we got the train back to Oslo. Luckily I was not aware beforehand that the bus would be driving down a road (from Stålheim) that barely had space for the bus let alone an oncoming car. If we had backed up at any point I think we would have been in trouble. Add to that thirteen major hairpin curves and you end up thanking God that the bus driver knew what he was doing and had nerves of steel. Every time there was a scenic view people moved from one side of the bus to the other and I thought—no, no, please stay in the middle of the bus so we don’t tip over. But we made it to Voss in one piece and with some lovely photos as our reward.

On the train trip back to Oslo, we met a family from the USA traveling together—an elderly woman of 85 and her four sons with their respective families. The trip was their family visit to Norway to see where the woman’s family came from, as her maiden name was the Norwegian name Hellerud. They were a very interesting family; we spent time talking to her (a former professor of Spanish) and her son who was a craftsman. They were as interested in our lives as we were in hearing about theirs. It struck me that every time I travel by train, I meet some interesting people, and time passes quickly in conversation. That is also one of the things about traveling that I enjoy—the world is still an undiscovered place and the strangers in it can become known if one just listens and takes a chance. Haika commented on another thing that we noticed about a few people who sat on the train with all the wonderful scenery outside and instead played video games or watched a movie on their laptops—what they were missing in terms of new experiences and in terms of opening their eyes and really seeing the land they live in or are visiting as well as the people around them. I am glad that Haika and I had our eyes open for the days we were together. Memories are made of such.

Movie Nights

When we were teenagers, Friday and Saturday nights were often our movie nights. We would make our way to the Music Hall on Main Street in Tarrytown or to the Strand Theater on Beekman Avenue in North Tarrytown (now Sleepy Hollow). Both theaters catered to the horror movie crowd, and there was no dearth of horror films available for our viewing pleasure when we were growing up. The interesting thing was that the Music Hall showed a lot of foreign horror films, something that I have reflected on in later years because it was quite unusual. The films that come to mind are the Italian horror films directed by Dario Argento, with titles like ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’ (from 1970) and ‘Four Flies on Grey Velvet’ (from 1971). They made quite an impression on an impressionable teenager. I was reminded of them recently because I happened to watch another of Argento’s films, ‘Tenebre (Unsane)’ on TV the other night, which was quite violent, and it struck me how violent the murders in the earlier films were, already at that time (the early 1970s), albeit done in typical Argento style. We also watched a lot of the Christopher Lee vampire horror films from the 1970s as well as a number of psychological horror films like ‘A Child’s Play’ (1972) and ‘You’ll Like My Mother’ (1972) with Richard Thomas of later Waltons fame. My sister might say that I dragged her rather unwillingly to some of them, which I probably did. And even though ‘Death Wish’ (from 1974) with Charles Bronson was not a horror film, it should actually be classified as such considering the subject matter. We had to sneak into the Music Hall to see the R-rated Alfred Hitchcock film ‘Frenzy’ (from 1972) since we were still underage. No one stopped us or caught us. There were many other types of films that we went to see besides horror. I remember keeping a list of the movies I had seen starting around the time I was thirteen and since it was not unusual for us to see about four movies a month, by the time I was nineteen I think I had seen several hundred movies. Going to the movies was part of our social life—we met friends and went to the movies, dated and went to the movies, and even now, I still meet friends for an occasional movie night. But I will often go to see a movie alone—I enjoy sitting in the theater with other people and experiencing the movie together.

The Music Hall and Strand theaters eventually closed for business as cinemas and were replaced by more modern multiplex cinemas in Yonkers and Ossining that we made good use of as we moved into our twenties and thirties. The new cinemas sold huge boxes of popcorn and giant-size candy packages, the theaters were huge and the sound systems were loud. We continued to see all kinds of films, from horror to romantic comedies to war films to costume dramas. We liked them all and still do, although our movie nights now are more geared toward romantic comedies rather than horror—we like to laugh and keep it light. Reality is tough enough sometimes and the violence around us is real enough without having to see it brutally re-enacted on screen in living HD color. But every now and then, I still enjoy being scared, even if I have to cover my eyes with my hands during the scary or violent parts. This was definitely the case a few years ago when I went to see ‘The Grudge’ (the American version from 2004) with a friend. Both of us had problems sleeping for a few days afterwards. Other people have seen the film and it did not have the same effect on them—who knows why it bothered us the way it did—but it definitely had something to do with the facial distortions and the sudden appearances of the female ghost and her creepy son who would silently rise up from the floor along the side of the bed.

When I first moved to Oslo, it was still possible to see many films at the older and grander theaters like Gimle and Soria Moria in addition to the cinemas that showed multiple films. Soria Moria is closed now, but Gimle is still in business. Modernized multiplex theaters dominate now. The theaters here have always shown the most popular American films so it has never been a problem to keep up with the new films. They do not dub films here as they do in other European countries except for the young children’s films, and even those are offered in two versions, the dubbed version and the original version.

Scandinavian films tend to be dark, melancholy, and a bit depressing, at least the ones I saw when I first moved to Norway, influenced no doubt by the dark winters, the coldness, grayness and long summer nights. My opinion of Finnish films (at least the ones I saw in the early 1990s) was that they were just plain crazy, with binge drinking, nudity, sex and sometimes violent behavior, and they often lacked a coherent storyline. Danish and Norwegian films from the 1980s and 1990s often dealt with drugs, addiction, prostitution and other depressing themes. Some of them were good, most of them were forgettable. Danish films that I enjoyed were ‘Pelle the Conqueror’ from 1987 and ‘Smilla’s Sense of Snow’ from 1997—both were directed by Bille August. Sweden had the internationally famous film-maker Ingmar Bergman who made such classic films as ‘Fanny and Alexander’, ‘Cries and Whispers’, and ‘Hour of the Wolf’. The late 1990s saw the re-emergence of Norwegian romantic comedies, some of them quite touching and funny; some of the comedies from the 1950s and 1960s were very funny as well. One of the best Norwegian comedy films I have seen is a film called ‘Mannen som ikke kunne le’ (The Man Who Could Not Laugh with Rolf Wesenlund from 1968)—you cannot watch it without thinking of Monty Python—it has that absurd humor that makes it stand out. Many of the recent Norwegian horror films are quite scary—‘Fritt Vilt’ (Cold Prey—a psycho slasher film from 2006) and ‘Død Snø’ (Dead Snow—a film about Nazi zombies from 2009) come to mind. But one of the best Norwegian psychological horror/thriller films is from 1958, called ‘De dødes tjern’ (Lake of the Dead or Lake of the Damned). I saw it on TV when I first moved to Norway and it was a ‘skummel’ (creepy) film about a group of people that spend their holiday at a cabin in the forest that holds many dark secrets, and how they deal with the disappearance of one of them.

As long as movies keep being made, I’ll always find my way to the cinema for my movie nights—American, Italian, Scandinavian, French, British, Spanish and many other international films. I will always prefer the cinema experience to the DVD/TV experience, but I must admit that it is good to have the opportunity to watch films I missed for some reason when they were first released.

From 'Sicko' to Socialized Medicine

I watched Michael Moore’s movie ‘Sicko’ recently on TV. I had not seen it when it was in the theaters. It was an interesting movie to watch—a typical Moore movie with him shuffling about everywhere in pursuit of his targets. In this case he was interested in specific health insurance cases in the USA that had turned into fiascos for the patients involved. Some of the patients were 9/11 volunteers and firemen, and of course that gets to you right away. Here they served their country willingly in a time of need, and the greedy insurance companies deny their claims for treatment. He made a lot of good points in the movie, and showed (as best he could) how healthcare functions in other countries, for example Canada, France, England and Cuba. He did not visit Scandinavia or other countries in southern Europe. It is one of those movies that should be watched and discussed by students in high school and college. I learned quite a bit that I never knew before, for example, that it was Nixon and his cabinet that were interested initially in setting up what eventually became HMOs like Kaiser Permanente in California, medical care for profit. I also was surprised to find out that France had unbelievably good healthcare (and other social) benefits, probably the best in Europe.

I know a number of people in the USA at present who are struggling to make ends meet. Most of them are self-employed and health insurance is not a top priority, even though some of them have health issues like high blood pressure and cardiovascular problems. Some of them have children. One of them claims to have gotten his high blood pressure under control by changing his diet and eating more healthily, and I hope that is the case, because he is not going to the doctor to have his cholesterol levels measured or blood pressure levels checked because visits to the doctor and lab tests cost money. It is possible now to check your own blood pressure at home with a little monitor that is sold (at least here in Norway) in the pharmacies. It costs around 100 dollars and is well-worth the investment; I purchased one several years ago. If it is possible one day to measure my own cholesterol levels by pricking my finger to draw a little blood for a test kit, I’ll do that too. I’ll do anything to keep me out of doctors’ offices. I have finally realized the value of preventive medicine—taking care of oneself, eating a good diet, exercising, and not overdoing stress. The problems arise when genetics kick in—when your family history of cardiovascular disease or glaucoma or diabetes rears its ugly head and demands attention. What do you do then? You cannot ignore the problem, and diet by itself may control but not cure the problem. Then treatment with drugs or surgery may be required at some point. At that point, it might be nice to know that your eventual operation will be covered by your health insurance so that your illness does not bankrupt you. Such considerations are not problematic in Norway generally. For example, if I need an operation, the cost is covered due to socialized medicine. That is a relief. If I visit my doctor for a regular checkup, buy prescription drugs or have some lab testing done, I may have to pay out of my own pocket until I reach the deductible which is set by the government (about 300 to 400 US dollars for 2010). Once I reach the deductible, I get what is called a ‘frikort’ (free card) where the government then pays any future costs for that calendar year. But the prices I have to pay before I reach my deductible are not outrageous, at least not in my opinion. The last time I visited my ‘fastlege’ (primary care physician or regular GP) I paid her about 30 dollars for a 15-20 minute consultation. I don’t know what it costs these days in the USA to visit your regular GP. Dental visits and visits to the optometrist or eye doctor are not covered by socialized medicine generally except in some specific cases. Dental care costs about half of what it costs in the USA but prices are slowly increasing. Eyeglasses and contact lenses cost about the same as what one would pay in the States. A visit to the optometrist who does a routine eye exam costs about 50 dollars. Eyeglasses of course can cost a fortune depending upon whether or not you need special lenses or if you want the latest designer eyeglass frames from Versace.

I have not had much need of the healthcare system in Norway in the twenty years I’ve lived here. The most serious problem I have had was a major slipped disc that almost led to surgery some years ago. Luckily I escaped the operation. But then I saw another side of the public healthcare system, and that was a bit more disconcerting. I had to wait quite a long time to get an appointment to see my regular GP, so that had I waited the time they wanted me to wait, I would have recovered by that time (I had in fact recovered by that time). I was not considered sick enough to be admitted to the emergency room at the local hospital, so I ended up paying a physician who worked in a private healthcare facility (yes, there is private healthcare here too) to see me immediately so that he could schedule the necessary tests to confirm that I had a lower back prolapse and to give me the prescription for pain medication that I needed. The private facilities cost much more money than the public healthcare facilities. The advantage with them is that you can make an appointment to see a specialist without a referral from the primary care physician. That is terrific in my book. It is just irritating to be in pain and to have to see your regular GP first whose only role is to give you permission to see a specialist. My thoughts on this are—if I know I have back pain, then I can call the specialist myself and make an appointment. I don’t need a middle-man or middle-woman. So that is one advantage of private healthcare. The other is that you don’t have to wait very long to see the doctor as you might have to do in the public healthcare system. If you pay an annual membership fee of about 225 dollars, you can get treatment at a private healthcare facility at discounted prices (compared to non-members) and in some cases this is well-worth the money because it saves time and aggravation. But of course critics of the private facilities have a point when they say that these facilities are undermining the public healthcare system. Many of the doctors choose to work in the private rather than the public facilities because they can earn more money. But generally I would say that public healthcare and socialized medicine function fairly well in Norway, despite that it can take a while to see your doctor and/or to get a referral to see a specialist. The major problem at present is that healthcare costs are soaring here just like they are in the USA, and we already pay high enough taxes (25% sales tax; taxes on gasoline and alcohol) to cover the costs of socialized medicine. It will not be possible to offer each patient individualized care without it decimating the public healthcare system. This is the same discussion that is going on in the USA at present, except that it is the health insurance companies who are trying to deny claims and cut costs. Their motive may be profit, whereas here the motive is to prevent costs from spiraling out of control. It is not a problem that has many obvious solutions, because the population is living longer and illnesses such as cancer (with costly treatments and testing) will therefore be more prevalent.

When I worked at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, I had very good medical coverage as I recall. I needed an operation while I worked there and ended up (luckily) paying only a fraction of the total cost. Doctor’s visits were cheap, and prescriptions cost me 5 dollars a month. When my husband and I worked at UCSF in California in 1993, we were part of the Kaiser Permanente system of medical coverage. We have only good things to say about their coverage and we never had a problem with them denying our claims. They also offered very good dental and eye care coverage. But we were not their most frequent users and I have no idea what it would have been like had either of us needed treatment for a chronic illness or the like. That is the key point—that healthcare coverage becomes tricky when the health problems become more complex and difficult. Therefore it does not seem fair to me that if you lucked out by working for a company that gives you great coverage at minimal cost to you, that this will guarantee you treatment while if you are self-employed, you are not guaranteed the same treatment unless you pay through the nose for it. Both parties work hard, work long hours, strive to meet deadlines and goals, and stress is a part of the workdays of both. The health problems that arise for both parties may be exactly the same but the end result in terms of treatment and coverage (or lack of treatment and coverage) may be quite disparate. This is the best argument for general healthcare coverage for all, in my opinion. But general healthcare coverage will not preclude the eventual and necessary discussions that are coming/have arrived for most westernized countries—how to tackle the soaring medical costs in all segments of the population—a major problem for the coming years.

The Meaning of Life

A Facebook friend posted the question—what is the meaning of life—on his wall this past week, wondering about life’s meaning now that he has reached middle-age and started the ‘downhill’ process as he puts it. It was a serious question even though he got some funny non-serious answers as well as a few serious ones. Whether or not one believes in God or in a Universal Spirit, at one point or another in our lives, we are faced with this question--what is the meaning of our unique life on this earth? The question may arise especially during times of personal illness or the illnesses and deaths of loved ones, when the point of life seems futile if death is all that awaits us. We all have or have had days (even weeks) when most of what we do and feel seems so futile and meaningless—jobs that have become routine, daily lives likewise. Life may seem empty of meaning. Even the saints had their struggles with emptiness and feelings of futility so faith in God is no guarantee that life will feel meaningful at all times. It’s a question that cannot really be answered—there is no one right answer that applies to everyone. The only thing we can do is attempt to answer it for ourselves and how we answer it reveals a lot about our personal beliefs and uniqueness. I believe that we were put on this earth to be happy, not in a superficial sense, but in the sense of fulfilling our talents and gifts to the best of our ability, without damaging others or ourselves in the process. The meaning of life may be found in the journey toward that fulfillment. The journey may involve becoming a parent or spouse and focusing on family, or a writer or businessman or teacher or a combination of all those things. And if we manage to live up to our potential then it seems reasonable to me that one might want to help another person or persons along their own paths where needed. For me it is the journey that provides meaning in life because it usually takes a good portion of one’s life to get where one wants to go—to reach one’s goal or goals. So the journey and a lifetime go hand in hand. There has to be a goal, however small, that keeps us going each day-- that gets us out of bed and out the door into the world, happy to be alive, happy to live in the present, happy for another day to make something of ourselves that has little to do with monetary worth. Awareness of our own mortality becomes more pointed as we grow older and helps us live in the present, thankful for the day we have in our hands. For me now it feels like a sense of urgency—not to waste the precious time I have each day.

In this context, it seems a shame to waste too much of a life’s time in front of the TV set. And yet we do at times and that may be the result of an unbalanced daily life. For example, we may work too many long hours at times, become exhausted and not have the energy for much else except to come home, eat a quick dinner and lie on the couch watching TV for the rest of the evening. I’ve done it during different times of my life like so many others. But I find that I cannot watch TV in large doses anymore now that I have reached middle-age. I get restless. The passivity gets to me and makes me frustrated. I want to DO something—be an active participant in my own life. So now I ‘choose' what I want to watch on TV instead of just swapping aimlessly from one channel to the next. It feels better to do it that way—that way I can watch a film (like when I go to the cinema) and still have time to do something else, like write, read, or talk to my spouse or a good friend. Small things, but they give my life meaning. I don’t know if I should be doing more. I didn’t feel as though I could handle more some years ago, but that was because my work was all-consuming. Now it is not as consuming, so now there is more time for other things. New roads have appeared on the horizon, and they are enticing roads because they are unknown and mysterious and may eventually be part of my journey for all I know. But I believe that some of the meaning of life is that what was once mysterious and impenetrable eventually becomes familiar and known to us—revealed to us in stages when we are ready for the revelations.

Norwegian Summer Meals

July is usually vacation month in Norway. Most people take their vacation at that time, traveling to their summer cottages or abroad. Life slows down a lot, Oslo is much quieter and not so crowded with cars and traffic, and all of it is a welcome change from the rest of the year. We are enjoying a “stay-cation” this year, to borrow a word from a young Norwegian woman whom we had the pleasure of conversing with this past Saturday evening at her parent’s summer party. We are not traveling anywhere during the month of July. We are instead enjoying some quiet time at home, sleeping in a bit later, enjoying leisurely breakfasts, shopping, watching Tour de France, biking long trips or biking down to our boat, and taking some boat trips in the nice weather. It’s been a relaxing summer so far. And with free time comes the desire to try out new recipes and to make some traditional Norwegian summer meals. I love buying new cookbooks and this summer has been no exception—I’ve purchased a world recipe book on baking—from dinners to desserts. I have a list of new recipes I want to try. But the two recipes I’m including here are not from this book. The first is fried mackerel, a general meal that most Norwegians prepare at one time or another during the summer months, and the second is cucumber soup (Norwegian-style) from Magnar Kirknes’ Kokkeskolen (Cooking School) section in the VG newspaper from June 2010. Neither of them is very complicated to make and they come out well each time.

I. The first recipe is Fried Mackerel served with cucumber vinegar salad and boiled potatoes

1-2 mackerel fillets per person, cleaned and well-dried
flour, salt, pepper
oil for frying
4-6 oz. sour cream

Coat the mackerel fillets in flour, salt and pepper. Fry the mackerel in oil until golden brown and add 4-6 oz. sour cream just before serving. The cucumber salad is prepared as follows: peel one medium-sized cucumber and slice it into wafer-thin slices with the slicer section of a grater. Place in a small bowl and cover with white vinegar (7% strength), add 1 tsp. sugar and mix. Prepare several hours ahead of time and refrigerate. Serves 3-4 people.



II. The second recipe is Cucumber Soup with Crayfish Tails

1 large cucumber, peeled
½ yellow onion
1 green pepper
1 green chili
1 green apple
1 garlic clove
1 tbs. sherry vinegar
1 bunch dill, chopped (save a little to mix with crayfish tails)
1 bunch parsley, chopped
4 oz. olive oil
2 cups chicken bouillon (should be hot)
5-6 oz. crème fraiche (18%)
7 oz. crayfish tails rolled in chopped dill

Cut the peeled cucumber in half lengthwise and remove the soft centers with a spoon. Chop up the pepper, chili and apple coarsely after removing the seeds from each of them. Chop the onion and garlic also. Place all ingredients in a bowl along with the chopped dill and parsley. Cover with the olive oil, sherry vinegar, and sprinkle with a little salt and pepper. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours. Then place all ingredients in a food processor, add the hot chicken bouillon and process until completely mixed. Add the crème fraiche and mix until the consistency is soup-like. Add a little sugar, salt, and pepper to taste. While the soup is cooling, mix the crayfish tails with finely-chopped dill and divide into about four portions in soup bowls. Pour the cooled cucumber soup over the crayfish tails and add a little crème fraiche (in stripes) to the surface of the soup. Serve with buttered toasted Italian or French bread.

Enjoy!

A Tale of Two Rivers

There are two rivers that have wound their way into my mind and heart over the years---the first is the Hudson River in New York State where I grew up and the other is the Akerselva in Oslo Norway where I live now. Both are beautiful rivers that wind their way through city, town and countryside alike. The Hudson River, over 300 miles long, starts in upstate New York at Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondack Mountains and ends in the Upper New York Bay, which is the New York harbor area between New York City and New Jersey. The river narrows at some points, other times widening so that you could believe it was more like the narrow part of an ocean than a river. The Akerselva river flows through the city of Oslo, having started its journey at Maridalsvannet in the forest area north of Oslo. It empties into the Oslo fjord. Compared to the Hudson River, it is not a long river at all, only about five miles long.

The town I grew up in, Tarrytown, is one of the small towns located on the Hudson River. The Tappan Zee Bridge crosses the river at this point, connecting Tarrytown with Nyack at one of the widest parts of the river. The bridge is a landmark like the George Washington Bridge. On a clear day, you can see the George Washington Bridge and the New York City skyline from the Tappan Zee Bridge. The river has been known to freeze in the wintertime, although it does not do so each year. I can remember my father talking about this happening when he was a child (he grew up in Tarrytown) and how the townspeople could walk all the way across the river to Nyack if they wanted to. I remember when I was around sixteen or seventeen, the river partially froze that winter and I was able to take some really nice pictures of it. It was amazing to see how the ice was pushed up in some places like small icebergs. I don’t remember it freezing much after that. There was always a lot of activity on the river—barges, tugboats, pleasure boats, cruise ferries to Bear Mountain and West Point—all on their way to upstate NY or back to Manhattan. I remember as a child being out in a very small motorboat together with my uncle and my family; it was not a pleasant experience because the boat was too small, we had to sit completely still, and none of us had life vests on even though they were probably there in the boat. Looking back on it, it seems so foolhardy to have done that. Yet knowing my stubborn uncle, he probably insisted to the point where my parents gave in rather unwillingly. It never happened again. During the summertime when we were children, my mother would take us and some friends to Kingsland Point Park on the river, where we would make a day of it swimming, picnicking and lying on the beach to get a tan. It was also interesting to watch the male lifeguards flirt with the teenager girls and I always wondered what became of some of those people. Did those summer flirts lead to romance and a future together? As we and our friends got older, we hung out at Rockwood Hall State Park on the Hudson River, which was the former estate of William Rockefeller given to NY State by the Rockefeller family. Part of the local folklore would have it that it was haunted in places by the spirits of the Indians who used to live there. I can remember being there with my sister and a good friend early one evening, walking around, and suddenly experiencing the feeling that there was something else there with us—an electricity in the air, a feeling, a coldness. We did not hang around there very long after that. It was an odd experience because we all felt it at the same time, and we had not been talking about spirits or any such thing when it happened. In the autumn, if you looked across the river, the Hudson Palisades were always there in the distance. They were not real mountains, rather more like steep cliffs falling down to the water, but in the autumn the leaves on the hundreds of trees on the cliffs would turn beautiful colors, so it was incredible to look across the river and see that foliage. When I come back to NY now, usually during the summer months, I often stay with my friend Jean who lives upstate. For the past four or five years now, we have been attending the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison, which is held on the Boscobel Estate (http://www.boscobel.org/main.html), also overlooking the Hudson River. It is a fantastic experience to sit in the audience tent and watch the actors and actresses run about on the sweeping estate lawns, making their entrances and exits. The plays usually start when it is still light out, but then darkness descends, and the stage lights illuminating the tent come on, giving the place an eerie-like glow that is usually quite in keeping with the tone of the play at that time, whether it be comedy or tragedy. In other towns along the Hudson, such as Irvington, Dobbs Ferry, Hastings, and Riverdale, to name a few, the waterfronts have been developed so that there are now lots of different restaurants and shops to visit. It was not like this when we were children. The waterfronts were often shabby, old, dotted with factories (with many broken windows), garbage areas, small marinas, rundown buildings and weary-looking men hanging about them—in short, they were not very appealing places to walk around in or look at. I remember taking the train from Tarrytown to Manhattan when I went to school there, and it was always interesting and sometimes disconcerting to look out the windows at the life along the river. The town waterfronts look very different now, all changed, and mostly for the better in my opinion. Of course it is now almost impossible to afford an apartment in the newly-built complexes on the river, so this is the flip side of the coin of improvement and development. When I am back in NY, I still enjoy taking the train ride from Manhattan to Tarrytown or Irvington—it is a beautiful ride that always makes me feel like I am coming home. If you want a book that presents the Hudson River in all its glory during all the seasons, I recommend The Hudson River: From the Tear of the Clouds to Manhattan (http://www.amazon.com/Hudson-River-Tear-Clouds-Manhattan/dp/1580931723) by Jake Rajs. Some of his photography is breathtaking.

The Akerselva river is not a long river as I mentioned earlier. Nonetheless, it weaves and winds its way through some lovely scenery and areas of Oslo. It is a people-friendly river, with bicycle and pedestrian paths that allow one to follow it all the way up to Maridalvannet and all the way down to the fjord. If you walk north along the river, you will come to Nydalen, which is a complex of apartment buildings, shops and businesses that blend in nicely with the river and its small waterfalls. I often think how nice it would be to work for one of those companies that have buildings there—one could sit out along the river and eat lunch during the summertime. The Nydalen subway station boasts an escalator ride down to or up from the train platform that will enchant you—the escalator ride, called the Tunnel of Light, envelopes you in a rainbow of colors that change and glide into each other accompanied by a kind of mood music that creates a truly memorable experience (http://performative.wordpress.com/2007/01/21/tunnel-of-light-nydalen-metro-station-oslo/). There are many people picnicking in the parks along the river in the summertime. If you walk south along the river, you will pass some idyllic spots perfect for taking pictures. You will also come upon a part of the river where salmon and trout swim upstream—we have stood from the bridge and watched them flopping about and trying to swim up the waterfalls. We don’t really know how far up the river they actually manage to swim. The city of Oslo has used some money to renovate formerly rundown areas along the river, and these now are populated by restaurants and galleries and coffee shops—again a change for the better in my opinion. I have taken numerous photos of the Akerselva river during all four seasons and I never tire of photographing it. I always seem to find new idyllic areas that I have not photographed before. The Akerselva river has now become a part of my life in much the same way as the Hudson River—captivating me with its beauty, hidden spots, bird life and constancy.

Birdwatching

Sometimes I wake up early, around 5 am or so, and I can hear the seagulls crying in the distance. They are actually not so far away. They live along the Akerselva river, which is the river that divides Oslo east and Oslo west. Our apartment is about a five-minute walk from the river. The gulls did not live along the river earlier, but I think like most creatures, they have discovered that humans leave food about and that is the great magnet that draws them into the city. There is more food about now because there are quite a lot of newly-built apartment complexes along the river. If I close my eyes and listen to the gulls, I could imagine that I was out in a boat on the ocean, listening to them as they fly overhead. It is odd to think that they have invaded the city. I admire them, like I admire most birds. They adapt. They disappear for some years and then return when conditions are more favorable. God knows where they have gone to in the meantime. This year Oslo has seagulls, magpies, doves, pigeons and sparrows in abundance, and they are all flying about, calling to one another and looking for food to feed their families. I love watching and listening to them. Our apartment has small balconies that can be used in the case of fire, but not for much else. However, the birds love sitting there, and if we throw bread crumbs out, they are there within minutes. It has been interesting to watch the pecking order so to speak—the sparrows must wait their turn while the pigeons feast, but when the magpies arrive, the pigeons move down a rung on the ladder. The magpies rule. They are cool birds. We have watched them annoy the local neighborhood cats—pulling on their tails—and the cats take the abuse. It is seldom that we have seen a cat turn and attack a magpie. The magpies strut and hop about, calling to each other. It is interesting to listen to them ‘talk’ to each other. They shriek. The doves also call to each other, but they do not shriek like the magpies. The magpies have nested in the tree outside our bedroom window. If you are a light sleeper, you may find them a bit irritating. I am a light sleeper at times, but I do not find them irritating at all. I am glad for their presence in the city—glad for the presence of all the birds.

The pigeons are the tamest of all the city birds—they will take a piece of bread from your fingers if you offer it, and this seems to characterize them no matter where you are in the world (Trafalgar Square in London comes to mind—although feeding the pigeons there is a part of a bygone era). They are also the birds I think might one day attempt a foray into our living room. Three of them sat on the ledge outside our open living room window tonight and peered in. They are funny to watch in the wintertime—they stand outside the kitchen window ‘waiting’ for food, and a few of them have actually tapped on the glass. It is endearing. This reminds me of the swans and the Canadian geese that swim right up to our boat when we are out on the Oslo fjord in the hope of obtaining some food, which they usually get. Both of these types of birds hiss, and at times the swans have actually ‘bitten’ the boat in an effort to get our attention or to get even more food. Swans are beautiful birds. When we traveled up and down the Telemark Canal some years ago with our boat, there were many swans at nearly all the local wharfs we stopped at. When we vacationed on the island of Strømtangen some years ago, which has an old house connected to a lighthouse, we would awake in the morning to a number of swallows that sat on the edge of our bedroom window. They simply sat there and watched us as we slept. They would also fly about, swooping up and down, almost like bats, but did not fly into the room. They were also pretty amazing birds. We are not very good at identifying all of the different birds around us, so the purchase of a Norwegian bird book is in order. We’ve been talking about it for a while and hopefully we’ll get around to doing so this summer.

On Retiring Early

Vacation time is here. Four blessed weeks of freedom. I filled out an online survey recently that had to do with how people felt about their work, and many of the questions had to do with what one preferred, e.g. a salary increase accompanied by more hours at work, or more free time. I answered-- more free time. Ten years ago I would have answered--salary increase, which is more evidence that I have definitely changed over the years. Free time is worth gold to me now.

I am not the only person who likes free time. Many people I have talked to recently say the same thing. They are tired of working and they love their free time. I listen to what they have to say and I weigh it all against my own feelings. I think what we’re all tired of is the push to produce, compete, produce more and compete more. It never ends, and enough is never enough. And against the backdrop of business corruption, the global financial crisis, layoffs and unemployment, outrageous salaries and retirement benefits for company leaders, and outsourcing of jobs, it seems strange to me that more people don’t want to quit their jobs, just out of pure anger at the unfairness of it all. But I’m guessing that many do and just don’t say it because to say it rubs more salt into the wound. They know they have to work to keep adding to their pensions, and some people have lost their pensions due to the corruption and bad investments that we’ve all read about. This hasn’t happened to me, thank God, because I don’t know what I would do with the amount of anger I would feel if my company had betrayed me like that. I get irritated enough with other types of unfairness at work. I want to take early retirement and I will spend the next ten years of my work life saving as much money as I can, living simply and effectively, and not spending extravagantly. My husband and I have lived like this most of our adult lives already because working as scientists has never been about making a lot of money. We have lived non-extravagantly for many years now. The word ‘budget’ has always been part of our vocabulary and will likely remain so for the rest of our lives.

I was talking to my good friend in NY recently about working and being tired, and was probably complaining a bit, and she just said to me, you want to retire now. It took me all of about two seconds to realize that what she said was true. But of course I cannot retire now. I think it is strange to consider that I want to retire now because I have been a near-workaholic for years. Perhaps that is why I am tired. The long hours have caught up with me. Or perhaps I just need a change--maybe a different type of job would be the answer. It is worth considering. Another good friend said to me that what I feel now has more to do with that I have achieved what I want to achieve in my current profession, that I have reached a plateau and now feel like a drone. Also a very interesting idea to consider and it may be true. What I do know is that retirement for me will be a time of adventure, new challenges and creativity. I have no plans to sit around doing nothing. I want to use my free time well—write (and hopefully publish what I write), read all the books that are on my list, take language courses, travel, do photography, do some consulting work, do volunteer work at my church, and who knows what else. Time will tell. It will be the next phase of life and I think it will be a very interesting phase. I hope so at least.

Train from Michigan

I dreamed then of my father, I was
On the train; outside a yellow moon
Full-light circle against the blue-black sky.
His face came into memory
As I drifted in the sleep of transit,
That is uneasy and unsettled.
We crossed, from Michigan into Ohio,
The train's whistle blowing lonely
As though miles ahead of us--
Yet ever with us through the night.
I thought the thoughts of transit--
My father, dead these three years,
Perhaps traveled this same train
Bound from Michigan to New York.
He knew people in the north of Michigan,
Farmers and ultimately life-long friends.
I see his face, with me always.
My head rests lightly against the train window--
When I awake it is because my head has banged
And fallen against the window, jarring me.

I visit friends, they live in Michigan now
Having moved there from New York; hence my trip's purpose.
I meet new people on the way to visit old friends,
And think about old friendships as I make my way home.
New people I am always letting in; they find me or
We find each other--one in particular spoke of kindred spirits
On our way out to Michigan; his words surprised me.
Do they, these spirits, find each other?
Are we all in search of one?

About trains, I know they draw me so,
Luring me with the call to adventure,
Like a call to arms.
I boarded one, bound for Michigan,
And then one back, to New York.
Time spread out over hours of track--
Moving me, my life, along,
From one point to another.
Spreading me out, thin, fluid,
Over time which is suddenly the merger
Of past, present, future.
Like liquid spreading I see my life
Moving over these tracks, out and beyond,
Expanding to assimilate Michigan
As I have before incorporated other states
And other countries, American and European.
A fear that I can never belong to someone--
How could one keep me from flooding
Past the walls and out into the open spaces?
It is an abstract love of world I feel,
A pull to know what is unknown, but knowable.
To care for it, about it, accept it for itself,
The planet, the globe, its rivers and its land,
The farms and their greenness in the summer--
The land you pass through while travelling on a train.
Small towns and the people in them, suburbs and large cities,
Unknown, but knowable.
I look out, I know this river--
I grew up along it, knowing it stretched
For miles, out of my reach--I see it now
In places I never knew before
And feel the vastness of its beauty.
Back in New York, I grew up here,
But I have grown beyond it.


copyright Paula M. De Angelis 2009
from Parables and Voices

Neighbors

I recently wrote about my old neighborhood in Tarrytown New York and what it was like to grow up there. I often think about all of the interesting elderly people who lived there, most of whom have passed on. Most of them were first-generation Irish immigrants who were hard-working, faithful to the Church, faithful to their spouses, and charitable to their neighbors. I think of Mary, Betty and Harry, Sally and Frank, Rose and Dan, Mike and Philomena and so many others. They did not have top jobs or degrees from the best schools, but they had empathy, kindness, personal ethics and they cared about other people. None of the latter can really be taught in school nor can one get a degree in any of them, at least not a degree that ensures that the recipient will actually be kind or ethical once he or she goes out into the world after college.

Mike passed away recently at the age of 80 after a long battle with cancer. I have kept in touch with his wife Philomena throughout the last ten years because she is the angel who watched out for my mother in her last years--shopped for her, sometimes cleaned her apartment, or carried heavy groceries up the stairs for her if it got to be too much for her. Since I live abroad, it was a godsend to know that she was there for my mother. And when my mother’s daily life got to be too difficult, she called me to let me know that too and that something had to be done. My mother would never have admitted to her children that she needed help or that she couldn’t manage her daily life anymore, she was far too independent for that. Philomena has taken care of a lot of the older people in my old neighborhood. I know that some of them tipped her or gave her what they could afford, but she did not do what she did for the money because she made very little money doing it. She no longer lives in Tarrytown, but I imagine that her new neighbors have gotten to know her in much the same way as I know her--nice, unassuming, kind, helpful and charitable. Her husband Mike, who was a plumber, was much the same way--helpful, always a cheerful hello and a positive word. Both of them always asked about my life and my family’s life; their interest never once struck me as other than genuine and well-intentioned. It was after my mother’s passing that my relationship with Philomena deepened. If she wrote me a letter telling me that she missed my mother, I could write back and tell her the same. It was the way those letters were worded--the tone of them--that told me how much she missed my mother. And when one of the other older women (Mary) that she also looked after passed on, she told me that she missed her too, and I know it prompted her to want to move to be nearer her own children who lived in another state. So she and Mike moved from Tarrytown to Pennsylvania. She would send me Mass cards on the anniversary of my mother’s death, would go back to visit the old neighborhood and visit my parents’ grave when she was back in Tarrytown. She wrote to tell me of all those things. I have saved all of her letters, they mean that much to me. She gave me the gift of an ear to talk about life and death, grief and sorrow, and memories of our earlier life, and so many other things, and I hope that is what I have given her too. This is what I think the world needs more of--the simple gift of true listening--being there for another person in whatever way one can be there for them--in person, talking on the phone, writing letters. It is really the only real gift we can give and in the end the best gift we can give another person.

Independence Day in America

In honor of America’s Independence Day, I am posting the lyrics to the beautiful song ‘America the Beautiful’ as a reminder of all that we have to be thankful for as Americans.


America the Beautiful
Words by Katharine Lee Bates,
Melody by Samuel Ward

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare of freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife.
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for halcyon skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the enameled plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till souls wax fair as earth and air
And music-hearted sea!

O beautiful for pilgrims feet,
Whose stem impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till paths be wrought through
wilds of thought
By pilgrim foot and knee!

O beautiful for glory-tale
Of liberating strife
When once and twice,
for man's avail
Men lavished precious life!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till nobler men keep once again
Thy whiter jubilee!

The Old Neighborhood

I grew up in Tarrytown New York and lived there until I was twenty-three. Our family home was an apartment in a complex on Tappan Landing Road that was built shortly after WWII. My father was born in Tarrytown, and it was here that my parents settled when they married in 1955. After my mother’s death in 2001, it struck me that she had lived in the same neighborhood for over forty years. She knew all her neighbors and they knew her. Of course there were newcomers to the neighborhood, but it was a surprisingly stable community of neighbors who lived there, most of them older people, retired or like my mother, old-timers who had raised their children there and who stayed on as they watched their children grow up and leave.

My parents were on friendly terms with most of their neighbors. They were always willing to stop and chat briefly with the parents of our friends, who attended the same grammar school as we did. In that way, they shared their lives without becoming intimately involved. There were always borders that were not crossed—none of the neighbors as I remember ever invited the others to dinner or in for coffee. Or if it happened, it was very seldom. I do remember that the older women would sometimes sit out in the shade of one of the big trees on the front lawn and talk for a few hours during a summer afternoon, but that was also a seldom occurrence. Nevertheless, they were good to one another and supportive of each other in difficult times—sickness and death. When my father died in 1985, my mother’s neighbors made food for us and I will always remember their kindness. My mother, who loved the winter, was often out early to help the superintendent shovel the walkways and when she was done with that, she would clean off her elderly neighbor’s car. Sometimes she and another neighbor would go shopping together, and she and the same neighbor got their driver’s licenses together shortly after my father’s passing. They would visit sick neighbors in the hospital, and attend wakes and funerals for the same neighbors who passed on after one too many illnesses. They were charitable toward and respectful of one another and that was a valuable lesson in how to live life.

There were a lot of children in our neighborhood when we were growing up, and we hung out together. We played a lot of kickball and dodge ball, and did a lot of roller-skating, hurtling down the parking lot driveway at top speed and smashing into the garage doors at the end of the driveway. It surprises me now, thinking about it, that none of us ever really got injured (or that the garage doors never got damaged). We also hung out at each other’s houses, listening to rock music on WABC or WPLJ and talking. During summer vacation, after dinner, we would walk around the corner to Henrik Lane to hang out with friends who lived there. Sometimes we would walk to WI (Washington Irving junior high school) ball field and sit in the bleachers looking out over the Hudson River, and just talk. It was here that Tarrytowners would gather on July 4th in the evening to watch the fireworks that were sent up from barges on the river. The event was always crowded with people, and an orchestra would play until it got dark enough to send up the fireworks. They were always a spectacular sight and watching them together with family was always a special time. We also spent a good deal of time in the summer at Kingsland Point Park, which was a beach and picnic area on the Hudson River. And if we weren’t doing that, we were hanging around downtown, shopping at the local gift store, bookstore or clothing stores. We were also often at the movies at the Music Hall on Main Street.

I was restless when I was a teenager, as most teenagers are, and looked forward to leaving Tarrytown when I grew up. I wanted to leave because Tarrytown seemed too small to me when I was younger, and that meant lack of privacy. Everyone knew everyone else and everyone else’s business, or so it seemed. It was hard to be anything other than what people perceived you to be or assumed that you were from when you were a child. So if you were the smart one in the family, it felt as though you could not suddenly become an actress after years of talking to the neighbors about the biology courses you were taking. It wasn’t possible to ‘try on new selves’, if that makes any sense, without a whole lot of commenting and tongues wagging. Perhaps it is that way in most small towns. I wanted to immerse myself in the larger world. So I did leave Tarrytown after I finished college, trading it for the Bronx, thereafter New Jersey, Norway, California, and then Norway again. Throughout these moves and changes, my old neighborhood with my mother still living in it remained a point of stability on my mental map. I always knew she was there. The same phone number, the same street address--stability. I could pick up the telephone and dial her number, and she would always be there to answer it. While it seemed as though my life changed from year to year, hers remained fairly much the same. She seemed fine with that, never complaining, enjoying her daily routines of volunteering at the local library, walking to the store to buy groceries, chatting with her neighbors and going to mass. When we talked, she would fill me in on life in the neighborhood—who was doing what, whose daughter or son was getting married, who had become a grandparent, who had bought a house, who had graduated from college---and we would talk about now and the past and how things had changed. Her keeping me up-to-date kept me grounded and connected in a way that I never would have thought possible, and I am grateful for it, even though I didn’t appreciate it as much at the start. Her point of reference was always her children in relationship to the neighborhood families with their children.

That is what I miss, now that my parents and their neighbors are gone—most of them having passed on. The neighborhood as we knew it is gone. As long as our parents lived there, it was still our old neighborhood and we could always ‘go home’. I don’t really know anyone who lives there now. Yet an odd thing has happened, and that is that I now appreciate the smallness of Tarrytown. It is appealing to me now because of its smallness, because it is possible to get to know it due to its smallness. It is not overwhelming. Mostly, it is just a lovely town--a small quaint town on the Hudson River with a wonderful vibrant history, lovely estates, lakes, river parks and nature. I look forward to seeing it each year when I come to NY, because it has become my ‘hometown’ even though my old neighborhood is gone.

Channeling Harry Potter

Universal Studios in Orlando Florida just opened a new attraction for all of us who are Harry Potter fans—The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. The author of the Harry Potter books, JK Rowling, has toured the attraction, as have some of the major actors in the Harry Potter movies, and they were suitably impressed. One of my Facebook friends from high school just got back from visiting Hogwarts with her daughter. They posted a lot of photos and I must say that it looks impressive and just made me want to get on a plane to get there to experience it. I have read all the books and seen the movies and I know how I want it all to look. And it sounds and looks that way from the news and photos http://media.universalorlando.com/harrypotter/news.php and http://www.universalorlando.com/harrypotter/.

Reading the Harry Potter books was a magical experience—I cannot recall being so immersed in a fantasy world as I have been in the world of Hogwarts. I have read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy and they fascinated me, but the world of Harry Potter was far more appealing to me. I shared the experience of each book with several friends here in Norway and with my sister in New York. I remember plowing through either the sixth or the seventh book on a flight to NY one summer—the hours just flew by. My sister has excellent recall for most of what happened in the books; I do not. I remember the general storylines and the characters but am not good with all the story details or the chronology of the stories. But that doesn’t seem to matter somehow, because it is the atmosphere in the books that you remember best and the relationships between the main characters.

My sister and I have met in London England several times during the past ten years. On one of those occasions, she brought with her Harry Potter jellybeans. I think they actually had a different name but I don’t recall it now. What I do remember is sitting in our hotel room tasting the different jellybeans—several of them quite nauseating—perhaps not so surprising since one of them was supposed to taste like vomit. We were like kids daring each other to taste something disgusting. We also took a trip to Cambridge on a train that left from King’s Cross Station in London. It was at King’s Cross Station that we saw the 9 ¾ platform, which is apparently the platform that the train to Hogwarts used. It was cool to see it.

I don’t think we ever really grow so old that we cannot remember what it was like to be a child and how amazing it was to discover a book or books that captured our imagination and heart. I think that experience as a child marks us for life. You remember those books for always. For me, The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland and Treasure Island, among many others, stand out as books that set the stage for a lifelong interest in reading and fantasy literature.