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October 24, 2008It’s raining in Amsterdamand drizzling in Stockholm,A SPIT-IN-YOUR-FACEmiddling Portland sort of rain. Wet streets and a spray of mist kissing my cheeks. Hotell Norrtull on St. Ericksgatan 119 resembles a fortress and the lobby is a picture of old-style high-ceilinged elegance–red velvet curtains and swags, high-backed burgundy leather chairs and crystal chandeliers–undercut with furniture of Art Deco styling (silver leather lounges?), rough concrete floors and exposed heating ducts during their under-new-management renovation.
Hotell Norrtull and view from Room 309 WHAT AM I ALL THE SUDDEN DOING IN EUROPE?I ask myself in surreal moments of exhaustion, when I’m watching what I’m doing as if it were someone else performing these acts in my place. Just livin’ life, wherever it takes me. For instance, to Philadelphia for my uncle’s funeral, to Sweden for a concert, to New York for a party, to Oaxaca for a writer’s workshop, then back to New York for more partying, back to Philadelphia for the Christmas thing, then onto the Crescent to New Orleans for New Year’s Eve, onto the Sunset Limited to Los Angeles, and the home-stretch, the Coast Starlight back to SF, my home, sweet home. That’s the plan, anyway, best-laid as it is. I DATED A GUY(”Qwerty” of yore) when I first moved here who was planning for a big trip down the Amazon, and beforehand was taking numerous regional jaunts, bike trips, mountain climbs, whatever, and I’d thought, he sure is taking a lot of trips before his trip–but I realized, he was just livin’ life. Life is the trip. What is there to do but travel that winding road? At the Norrtull that night, DISASTER STRIKES.I am exhausted and there is no phone in #309. Instead of a comfortable conversation in the room I have paid for, I have to hit the front desk to call friend John to tell him I’ve arrived. But wait, there’s more. In the course of their renovation, they have not gotten around to internet connections on the third floor. So instead of relaxing and unwinding in bed with my laptop, in the room I have paid for, mind you, I am spending much of this first evening in the chilly lobby working on this column. To top it all off, in my haste to pull the trip together, I spaced out about the European-style electrical plugs. I thought, easy fix, for surely the front desk will have an adapter, but no dice, they are all out, and the receptionist sends me on a wild goose chase to some big box supermarket around the corner because they have electrical items. They do, but no converter. This means that I can’t use the laptop tonight, can’t recharge it tonight, and hence, can’t use it all day the next day in Stockholm. Bummaire, as they say in France. To me it feels like an emergency, but not to the hotel staff. In the morning I’m standing outside the grated front door of the electronics store at two to ten, waiting for them to open. “Good morning, I’m your first customer.” I admit it, I am addicted to my laptop and it feels physically wrenching and just plain wrong to be having a latte in Stockholm without that trusty tool and resource standing close by. For one not particularly fond of coffee, I spent a lot of time writing underscored by the hissing of steamed milk. I OF COURSE WRITEinstead in my “manual” journal, but I had wanted to post a column before too long, for Sweden is a looooong ways away from San Francisco (we flew by Greenland, for God’s sake) and makes for a looooong story. You see it here. Nevertheless, jet lag (and a Xanax), the beer and the cozy down bedding give me a great night’s sleep, and I am wide-eyed at 5:30 a.m. contemplating the oddity of waking up in Sweden. But I won’t be waking up in the Hotell Norrtull again, because a hotel is in the business of serving your needs temporarily, and having to leave my room for phone and internet service and even charging my laptop–three strikes and they’re out. They gave me a bed, but not the experience I wanted. (So there.) I HAVE NEVER,to my shame, visited my great friend John Beck in the twenty-three years he’s lived in various Scandanavian locales, ever since we went to the Bach tricentennial in East Germany in 1985, and let me tell you, just as an András Schiff recital is reason enough to delay a trip to Sweden, a Beck piano recital is reason enough to go there. He’s performing on the 25th and I’m thinking, wouldn’t it be fun to show up for it, to just be in the audience? On a whim I get on the web to check out airfares and next thing I know I’ve booked a flight. Talk about an impulse buy! I decide it’s high time I show my face. There are a bunch of conventions in Stockholm today, and John is unable to book me the room on the island prison hotel I so wanted to experience, but hey baby, I’m in Stockholm and you’re not! Starting my journey the day before at 16th and Mission BART, and after my nine-hour flight from SFO to Amsterdam, another two hours to Stockholm, the train ride from the Arlanda airport to the city, a Metro subway ride and a half-hour of wandering around laden with my bags, searching for the Norrtull, 6,165 miles as the KLM Royal Dutch airplane flies, I am savoring my ice-cold first-ever Swedish beer, a bottle of Ericksberg at 65 sek, Swedish krona, about $8 USD at today’s rate. For a bottle of beer? But I love cold beer after a grueling trip. I would look forward to one while walking from the Delaware River to the Schuylkill, in Philly, but no cold beer ever beat the frosted-glass pilsner at the Acropolis on W. Burnside in Portland. Standing at the bar, confused for a moment about where I am, I almost ask for a Heineken, but hey, Amsterdam is so four hours ago. I LOST THE COLUMNI was writing in my head Sunday night after the András Schiff recital at Davies, which in booking my flight I had delayed my trip to hear (I will miss Joshua Bell, sadly, and donate the ticket, gladly, to a friend’s birthday). Schiff put out five powerhouse Beethoven sonatas, including the best-ever Appassionata and my favorite, the Les Adieux (how apropos), which I have never heard performed live. Great performances stir up great things in me–a hunger to get cracking and put out my best–and as always when there is much else to do, is when I like to sit down to a column. Instead I pack my bags and change the cat litter. As I so often quote Virginia Woolf, it is fatal to not write something at the moment of wanting to write it, and the column that might have been evaporated into the ether. I’m disappointed I didn’t take the chance to write it; more disappointed I’ll never get the chance to read it. At Schiff’s recital the week before, I was in the tier above the stage looking at his back as he played the Waldstein. I had a sudden surreal vision of Beethoven himself sitting at his keyboard just so, knocking the stuff out for the first time, as if he’d taken possession of Schiff. I get an eerie shiver down my spine when I contemplate Beethoven, the flesh-and-blood man walking the streets with such magnificent music storming in his head–the same shiver when I saw a few strands of his hair stuck in his glass frames at the Beethoven Birth House in Bonn, Germany. What is it like to be a titan, I wonder? After all, Schiff was channeling Ludwig and bringing him back to life. What a gift! AND NOW I’M IN STOCKHOLMwriting about it all at the sweet little Kladdkaken Cafe. The proprietor of The Earth Connection, where I succumbed to a bold wooden necklace, had told me how to find the National Museum. I had about four hours to roam around and make my train. I thought for a second and admitted, “Actually, I’d rather shop!” And that I did, that I did. Perhaps Reverend Billy can perform an exorcism at his November 9th Half Moon party boat fun-raising fundraising ride around Manhattan. I’ll be on that boat. Praise-alujah. AH, BREAKFAST IN SWEDEN!The Hotel Opera Grand has laid out a delectable smörgåsbord and I help myself to kaffe with varm mjölk, yogurht with fresh jordgurbsylt and nötter, then a plateful of bröd with ost and leverpastej, melt-in-your mouth senapssill (as good as grandma made), rödbettsallad (not as good as grandma’s), rökt kalkon and skinka, and finish off with scones slathered with smör and apelsinmarmelad. How much you have missed, my friends, if you’ve never had pickled herring for breakfast. In Sweden! All this to fortify me to trod the charming cobblestoned streets of the Haga district of Göteborg (town of the Goths)–where I have come because a friend lived here for a time and raved about it, leaving only when her (gay) boyfriend gave her the word, it ain’t me babe, it ain’t me you’re looking for babe–so while I am in the neighborhood (that being anywhere in Sweden), I check it out. Charming it is; as I enter the region the noise of the city drops away as if someone has swaddled it with cotton balls. But those streets, quaint though they be, are killing my feet. There is not a level step to be taken, ankle twists threaten my every move, at times I appear to be falling off the street itself, and on top of the grueling hours spent yesterday on the demon sister cobblestones of Stockholm’s Old Town, I’m nearly crippled (or “podiacally challenged,” if you will). I literally cannot take another step. I’m telling you, if you cobble, you will hobble! My callouses are burning, and my dog-tired dogs thank me for stopping, not at Cafe 13 14 17 (which I first think is its name, stenciled on the window, until I notice the telephone icon) but at Cafe Grappolino at Skolgaten and Haga Nygata, and I’m going to have to taxi out of here to the train station.
Those killer cobblestones This afternoon I head to my final destination of Delsbo by way of Stockholm, again, Gävle and Ljusdal. Looking forward to seeing John, of course, but first and foremost, to taking my shoes off, second, massaging my feet, and finally, staying in one place for a few days, while I command John to play my every wish on his Bechstein grand. Heaven! PASSING BY MY WINDOW,going both ways, often on each other’s butts, are more bicyclists, blondes and baby carriages than I have ever seen on any given street, perhaps in any given city. I am astonished. Dozens of each have come this way in two hours, like some Twilight Zone where the Stepford wives replicate themselves every two minutes. The women here must all be mothers, grandmothers or mothers-to-be. This is one fertile borg, this Göteborg. Even beats out Noe Valley. But it’s time to pry my hide from this chair. Two charming and helpful gals at the counter draw maps for me to find the tram to Centralstationen. What a restful and restorative choice of coffee house. I can tell my hours in this chair watching the citizens pass by, whereas some details of travel blur together, will remain vivid in my mind as one of the trip’s most pleasurable time-outs.
Anja and Ida of the Cafe Grappolino But before I take off I wander down Haga Nygata and into Haga Trätoffelfabrik o Läderaffär to buy a beautiful embroidered Norwegian sweater-jacket that’s not really even my style, but is so iconicly Nordic that when I wear it will be like wearing my trip. But better than the sweater is the proprietor Barbro, the only woman in Göteborg besides myself who never married and never had children. Way to go, Barbro. She’s in her sixties, seventies? with long gray hair and a leather vest, and doesn’t want me to publish her picture here because she, also like myself, considers herself unphotogenic. I disagree. Into the shop comes Rene, a blonde Norwegian-American, who announces to Barbro, using her hands as punctuation, “I. LOVE. YOUR. SHOP.” She is opening up one of her own in San Diego and wants to showcase Barbro’s things, because every time she comes to Göteborg she manages to stumble into the shop, never even remembering where it is, and loves it, just loves it. She asks for her email address. Barbro doesn’t have one and Rene can scarce believe it. “I don’t have any data,” says Barbro. “Data-free!” I exclaim with glee. “Do you even have a computer?” I ask. No, of course not–she’s data-free! We’re gabbing, gabbing, gabbing about a film called “Cool and Crazy on the Road,” when I realize it’s 15:20 (4:20 p.m.) and my train leaves at 16:12 (5:12 p.m.). Yikes! I just miss two trams to the station and step aboard nanoseconds before the train departs. Long story short, I could have won Olympic gold sprinting for Train 406, all the while banging my bags against my thighs–the train I cannot miss as John will be waiting for me at 23:04 (11:04 p.m.). If I’ve got him out driving until 00:00, I’d better be there! (From now on, I’m calling midnight “the zero hour.”) AND NOW, A FIRSTfor me, [I am] inloggad på SJ Internet ombard! [I can] nu surfa fritt. The cashier in the Bistro is from New York, and walks me through the Swedish instructions. Internet on a train. How swell is that? I revel in that for a few hours, then my connection time and the laptop’s charge and the ride expire virtually simultaneously, and it’s time for the Gävle train, which thank God is on the platform beside us. My seatmate on that train asks me, as I’d asked her, what is my line of work? I describe my wage-earning jobs in architectural firms, but that I had sold a house and later my flat to get out of it. “And now,” said I, “I’m just, uh, tumbling along with the tumbling tumbleweed,” following my bliss. I AM GIVING MYSELFthis for-a-limited-time-only opportunity to do whatever I want to as soon as I want to, because I have never had it before. Enjoy while you can, I say to myself, while I rack up one indulgence after another, even as I plan for my future. LATER,it’s two trains down and one more to go. John and I briefly touched on what to do if I miss connections (”you won’t,” he said deadpan) and I am not on the train or he is not on the platform. We take the positive thinking approach. So the next scheduled ride is in John’s car. If I had a car, which treasonous act I would never perpetrate on our Mother Earth, my bumper sticker would read, “I’d rather be writing.” Every damn thing I see I want to record and comment on, every crust of bark on every birch tree. I wish I had a continuous loop recorder I could talk into as I walk. Come to think of it, maybe I’ll just talk into a mini digital recorder like it’s a cell phone. Certainly someone talking into a gadget will never attract attention. “Ho-kay,” I’m now saying to myself, narrating my arrival on the train, “I make it without incident onto the Ljusdal train. It’s general seating and finally I cop a right-hand window seat, my travel ideal, even in black of night. Another two hours to go. My feet, calves and thighs radiate pain from the abuse they have suffered on the cobblestoned streets and alleys of Stockholm and Göteborg. The rushing around is over for now. Waiting for me are all the comforts of home.” SPEAKING OF COMFORTS OF HOME,most of the passengers have departed, so I grant myself another indulgence: I take off my right shoe to massage my foot, the right being the most troublesome. I see that my toe ring got bent out of shape and is digging into my flesh. Then one toe nail jabbed into its neighboring toe and bloodied them both. O Sweden, thou art pain! My poor sock, my favorite, my Walgreen’s “I Love You Always” sock, is dirty, worn clean through at the toe, exposing my polished black toenails, and bloodied from my walking injuries. It looks like ancient spent gauze that missed the wastebasket and lived behind the toilet for a year, one of those delightful spring cleaning discoveries. Is it time to retire the Valentine socks? If so, I will love them always. It’s a sad occasion, as with Jerry Seinfeld’s indomitable yellow t-shirt “Golden Boy,” which finally saw its last wash. Thank you for your years of service, my socks. Who could have known you’d die in Sweden, still clinging to me in your last moments. And I want you to know, my Seattle Space Needle pair will never fill the sock-shaped void in my heart. I will bury you here in Delsbo, secretly. John won’t know anything about it ’til he reads this. [They find a second life, dragged from under the bed, as chew toys for John’s wonderful dogs, the spirited poodle Doodie and thoughtful Bebban. Bless their hearts. -Ed.]
The guy up ahead of me is resting what must be some kind of mini-massage wand against his temple and elsewhere on his face, but it looks like he’s downloading “data” into his brain. The realization that such concepts may indeed quickly become reality, is alarming to me. We all take it for granted that digitalization could eventually extend into our brains and don’t even flinch. If we can’t do it yet, it’s next on the horizon, I’m sure. Now he’s changing the settings. I’d like to change my brain’s settings. The train attendant comes around with what I can only call a contraption, a green ticket validating and printing do-hickey; it might even have inspired the coinage. I almost say to him, uräsakta, excuse me, do you know the English word “contraption”? Well that thingee there is one if ever I did see one. I almost ask him to pose with it. There is also a shoe-stretching contraption at Barbro’s place. Some things can’t be called anything else.
The shoe-stretching contraption at Barbro’s place WELL THE WONDERFUL REUNIONwith John is minutes away. It’s sad to know someone for so long and not be able to picture him in the chair he’s calling you from. Friends should know each other’s homes. And don’t commit to a long-term relationship before you’ve seen the guy’s house. You can learn loads about who a man is by observing how he lives. I remember a date who once, gesturing to the piles of papers and boxes and miscellaneous clothes and junk littering his place, said, neither proud nor apologetic, “This is my life.” Sad and poignant. I could only feel sorry for him. He also once accused me of having clean, folded towels in the closet, as if it were a character flaw. “All women do.” I sounded the buzzer on that one. Time’s up! Of course my own house is in much the same sorry state! But it’s an element of discord interfering with a basically harmonious space. It’s chaotic for now, but cozily so. Cozy chaos! My world and welcome to it! So far I’m missing my cats and not San Francisco. “You know how it is,” I’d told Barbro, “there’s San Francisco and there’s the rest of the world.” I wish we’d overcome our masturbatory egomania. ”As San Francisco goes, so goes the nation.” Aah, get over yourself! My seatmate on the Ljusdal train said American presidential elections have the over-the-top movie production values of a blockbuster (my words). Swedes just go out and vote for their preferred party and that’s it, it’s over.
How the Swedes see Palin Here, someone says something. Then someone reports that they said it. Then someone comments about it. Then someone satirizes it. Then someone says something about what the other guy said. Someone reports it, someone comments on it, someone makes fun of it. The other guy, once again, has something to say, yada yada yada and on and on. I am embarrassed for my country. The presidential campaigns come off like vaudevillian farce. I think Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC should double-date with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Funny situation for a sit-com. But a presidential election is not, and the level of John McCain’s discourse has been puerile and self-serving. The “fundits,” as I like to call them (you heard it here first), should be in the next president’s cabinet to keep it all real. Yes, I can survive a break from pre-election madness. When someone (yo, Sweetie!) first emailed me this by now famous alarming pic (which she captioned “not for the faint of heart”) of a faltering McCain… I was immediately reminded of this Thurber drawing McCain must have posed for back in the day…
…from “The Pet Department” in The Owl in the Attic. The drawing is captioned, “Q. Sometimes my dog does not seem to know me. I think he must be crazy. He will draw away, or show his fangs, when I approach him.” “A. So would I, and I’m not crazy. If you creep up on your dog the way you indicate in the drawing, I can see his viewpoint….These [behavioral] maladjustments can often be worked out by the use of a little common sense.” But I think Chris Clarke earns the best laugh with his piece “Because someone had to” on coyotl@faultine.org.
Copyright and courtesy of Chris Clarke “Ah, the train is pulling into the station,” I am saying to myself as I gather my belongings, “As it slows, I spot the silhouette of John’s hat flying by as the train moves on. The doors open, I drop my bags, throw myself at him and he lifts me off my feet. Huggage! ‘John!’ I exclaim proudly, ‘I was on the train! I’m in Sweden!’”
The author will have the French hot dog. ------------------------------------------------------------ I'm in John Beck's Sweden
Twenty-three years later is better than never copyright Alexandra Jones 2008 |
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