Swedish Inventions

One of the delights of living in Cincinnati is the Scandinavian Society. This group is over 50 years old, although we only discovered it about five years ago, shortly before we moved completely from Spain to this city. Our first event was its annual Lucia Fest, but we really became involved when we were invited to join the Scribblers, a writing group that meets once a month. I also joined the Readers, which also meet once a month. These two groups, in which we write personal stories and share them by reading with our compatriots, and read and discuss books by Scandinavian authors, have not only brought me into contact with people of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Icelandic heritage, but have also enabled me to get to know and become good friends with some of them.

Somewhat less intimate than the monthly specialty meetings are the full-society bimonthly gathering for dinner, each one supporting a theme: one of the featured Nordic countries. Last night we were honoring and enjoying the heritage of Sweden. Swedish meatballs, and more importantly, baked salmon, were added to the usual delicious buffer fare at the Manor House restaurant. The program part of the evening featured a short history of ten Swedish inventions. The items enumerated crossed several fields but most had something to do with technology; they included some digital medical techniques, the three-cornered automobile seat belt, and the crescent wrench. Personally I did not even know what a crescent wrench was, though when I saw a picture I recognized it as one my father had many years ago.


Not mentioned specifically in conjunction with the Swedish inventions, but surely one of the great ones, is the name Ikea, which has been developing products and an innovative marketing concept for nearly 70 years, and that now is known worldwide. We, for example, have furnished homes from Ikea stores in four countries and stayed in airbnb vacation  places furnished "in Ikea" in at least two more. Ikea was a sponsor of the Swedish dinner last night and contributed a large gift basket with wares from its Ikea Foods department to a raffle for the benefit of the Society.

And Johannes won the raffle! It could not have come to a more deserving and appreciative recipient. We happen to live only 10-12 minutes from the Ikea in West Chester, and whenever I have a luncheon meeting, Johannes goes to Ikea to eat salmon. Both of us stop by every two or three weeks to stock up on their excellent rye bread mix and herring for our Saturday-night smørrebrød, or just to take a lengthy stroll through the furniture and furnishings display areas to see what's new. The gift basket had no herring or bread mix in it, but was filled with cookies, chocolates, tea, coffee, jams, and knackebrød, as well as a mug and cutting board and a couple bags--Ikea's sturdy bags always come in handy for gathering smaller bags and moving items. We keep several in our cars.

Now we look forward to exploring even more Ikea goodies in the weeks to come. I think it's time for tea and cookies.

Releasing the Old, Intending Something New

At the Unitarian Universalist service in Santa Fe this morning, the last Sunday in 2018, the Rev. Gail Lindsay Marriner lead congregants and guests in a change-of-year exercise inspired by her interpretation of the book The Everything Seed, by Carol Martignacco. She spoke of constant change and development in the cosmos, in the world, in society, and in humans.

As part of change and development, we were urged to contemplate and choose a behavior, a pattern, a situation, an action, or an attitude from this concluding year that we are ready to give up. By relinquishing one thing, we can then release energy to choose a new intent for the coming year.

We each wrote on tissue-thin pieces of paper the things we want to release, and we wrote on sturdier slips of paper the things to intend to do. Then we walked outside and burned the flimsy papers, releasing the old behaviors to the wind. And we pocketed the strips of sturdy paper to use as bookmarks or tuck into a wallet or notebook, that we may come upon them in the new year and check to see how we are doing.

Snowy Santa Fe

This Sunday I am not in Cincinnati, but in Santa Fe, New Mexico, about 7200 feet above sea level. We flew from Cincinnati to Albuquerque yesterday, starting the day at 2:30 in the morning to get to CVG for a 5:30 flight to Dallas and then on to Albuquerque. We were lucky with the weather if not the early-morning schedule. I had read in the Santa Fe newspaper that they had gotten 3 1/2 inches of snow on Wednesday and that they were due for an additional 5 inches on Friday. They got it, and there were no arriving flights on Friday.

When we arrived at 10:30 in the morning Saturday and picked up our rental car, we upgraded to a more weather-worthy SUV with all-wheel drive from our usual basic compact. At first we were not sure that we had made a good choice, as I-25 in Albuquerque had perfectly dry pavement. But north of the city there were patches of snow on the pavement, and 20 or so temporarily abandoned cars along the interstate from the blizzard the day before. Still it was not as bad as some of the driving I had to do years ago between New Hampshire and Connecticut, but that may also be because a glorious sun was shining and the tall mountains were covered with a white dusting.

The streets in Santa Fe seem not to have been cleared completely, and the sidewalks hardly at all. Presumably Santa Fe subscribes to the snow removal theory that someone told me Cambridge, Massachusetts did years ago: God put it there and God will take it away. God hasn’t completed the job yet, but there are lots of visitors in Santa Fe, this last weekend of the year, and they have tramped the streets to view the art galleries and clothing shops and partake of the tempting restaurants, so much of the snow is beaten down. I have my least fashionable, warmest boots with me, and they are keeping me warm and dry, and also upright.

We’ve already done some good viewing and good eating, though the only non-edible I have purchased so far is a Desigual blouse in the Dallas airport (Terminal A, near Gate 16, and I must remember to plan future DFW trips accordingly). We have four more days in Santa Fe before a leisurely drive back to Albuquerque, we are perfectly situated in the heart of the city, at Otra Vez en Santa Fe, which is a fine locale for mi primera vez en Santa Fe.

Sundays in Cincinnati Redux

This Christmas season has sent me back, back in my mind to Christmases past, and then back in fact (to check the facts) to earlier posts in this blog and even to its predecessor, Sundays in Spain. It has been a year and a half since I last posted. Circumstances have changed. First I noticed that I was just too busy to post about my new life in Cincinnati. Then, my new life gradually became less new. For many months it seemed that the need to write was not high enough to take the time. I had also found a specific activity that occupied most of my Sunday afternoons, so the habitual occasion was disrupted. Posts were few and far between, and then they ceased altogether. Some of my family and friends asked about Sundays in Cincinnati, and then they stopped asking.

Today, after re-reading some of my thoughts from years past so as to ascertain dates, and after realizing that my mind was not going to get any better about remembering events, I thought I might reengage and write again, if only for myself. My original reasons for writing were to write "for the discipline of writing, to concentrate on something positive and/or thoughtful, and to keep friends and family up to date with what is happening in my outer and inner lives."

Obviously I have fallen down on the discipline. I wish I could say that I was writing in other venues, but other than a monthly essay for the Scandinavian Scribblers group, I have not done that consistently either. Keeping family up to date on my life is no longer a reason to write a blog--I am in daily touch with my close family by email, and in face-to-face contact with them in our monthly "Sisters Brunches." I have many Cincinnati friends whom I also see face-to-face monthly or weekly and by email and phone (a communication tool that was missing from my life for the dozen years I lived in Spain), so keeping these friends up to date on my life is not a reason to write. Indeed, I run the risk of too much revelation of personal matters if I write about some events and my thoughts about them. But it is becoming evident that--in spite of Facebook--I am falling behind in keeping in touch with friends afar, in Europe, especially, but also friends elsewhere in the U.S. This is a very good reason for writing again.

Sadly one of my faithful former readers is no longer living. Her sudden death has been a shock to me this year, and a very sobering experience. She was a writer friend, too, and I can't help but think that if I write now,  I am also writing to her. Totally ridiculous, but you might want to take a look at the book Often I Am Happy (Tit er jeg glad) by Jens Christian Grøndahl, and you will perhaps see that I am not alone.

The other big reason to write again is "to concentrate on something positive and/or thoughtful." Now more than ever, I need to concentrate on something positive. The nightly news report is heartbreaking, and I have reached an age where loss is more prevalent than expanded possibilities. Still, there is continued life, and as a new friend reminds--and demonstrates--frequently, "Attitude is everything." Attitude and reflection, and then, writing. I will try.

Girlfriends

Sixteen women friends with whom I graduated from Sidney (Ohio) High School in 1965 assembled at the Inn at Cedar Falls this week to celebrate the year of our 70th birthdays and our friendship. You may think that these were my closest friends in high school, but that is not necessarily the case.  They were all classmates, but in a class of about 300. Some of them I had gone to junior high school with, but there were two junior highs in town then, and most had attended the other one. None of these girls were in my elementary school, but some of them had known each other since elementary days. I knew several by virtue of going to the same church back then. And a couple I knew not at all, because they had moved into the school for only the last two years, and our paths had simply not crossed in the course of daily classes or extracurricular activities. I have no clear idea of how I came to be invited to the first meeting of this group, ten years ago in Naples, Florida. A matter of serendipity and knowing some of the right people, I guess. I am glad I went to that first meeting, and though I have missed a couple group events since then, I am glad I went back to this second big celebration.

We had reserved ten of the cottages at the Inn at Cedar Falls, adjacent to Hocking Hills State Park in south central Ohio near the town of Logan. The first surprise was that the cottages were so far away from each other and the lodge where we were to eat and gather--and that the quarter-mile terrain over which we travelled from cottage to gathering point was so hilly! Clearly we had remembered growing up in flatland Ohio. Even the hardiest among us was grateful for the assistance of cars and drivers that could make the trek, especially during the once-only light rain and the three evenings when we all returned after dark. Many of us, however, appreciated the lush greenery and solitude in the early morning, when we could take a cup of coffee onto our balconies and watch the sun rise, or at least listen to the wind before the joint activities of the day commenced.

With seventeen of us, a lot of time each day was spent in discussing who was driving whom where and when...but the discussions were all in good humor and achieved the result of caring for everyone's wishes. Groups left for hikes to Ash Cave, Old Man's Cave, and Cedar Falls. Also shopping at gift and craft places in the area. Some of us explored the little town of Logan, with its restaurants and unique shops. All these excursions gave us time to walk and talk in small groups or one-on-one. We ate as a large group in the Cedar Falls lodge two nights, and had a special prix fixe six-course dinner all together at Glenlaurel the middle night. We had a late afternoon bourbon tasting and book discussion, which lead us into such deep and moving discussion that our hosts had to come fetch us for out 7:30 dinner reservation.

I renewed friendships on this excursion but I also made news friends. We have all reached an age when we have accomplished a lot of different things, made different choices, weathered different crises, and enjoyed different blessings. But we all come from a certain place at a certain time, and it is interesting to see how that common rooting has served us in the years we have spent apart. Gone is any touch of envy or competition or insecurity, I think. What has grown is respect, support, and appreciation for the people we have become as we have each moved through life.

We told stories, we laughed, we sighed, and occasionally we cried through three days together, but it is noteworthy that in spite of personal challenges, we are all upbeat at this stage of our lives. My words cannot explain or describe the feeling of camaraderie we have developed. Thursday morning we met for breakfast and laughed again and hugged, and started planning for our next get-together. There is no doubt that it will happen.

Roskilde 6 in Cincinnati

On Saturday this week I listened to Kristiane Strætkvern, conservator of the Danish National Museum, telling the story of how a Viking ship was unearthed in Roskilde fjord, Denmark, in 1996 and twenty years later made its way to Ohio to be a major focal point of the recent exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum Center.

In 1996-1997 the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde was expanding. During the renovation process the remains of nine Viking ships were unearthed. Through investigation over several years, the ships were determined to have been constructed during the period 1009-1032 AD. Roskilde 6 was the sixth one to be unearthed; restoration of this long ship started in 2009. With a series of excellent and detailed slides, Kristiane explained the process of conserving the waterlogged remains of the ship, using polyethylene glycol (PEG) to remove the excess water and then freeze drying—it took 3 ½ years to complete the freeze drying!

When the restoration began in 2009 it was not envisioned that the ship would be exhibited outside Denmark, but by 2013, it was decided that exhibition would start first in Copenhagen but then go on to London and then Berlin. This complicated the conservation process tremendously—in addition to planning for assembling the ship, plans had to be made for dissembling it, packing it, and transporting it. Denmark, unlike some other countries, does excavation and reconstruction piece-by-piece, rather than assembling the object as a whole in one piece. The careful marking of each piece was crucial in moving the exhibit from place to place. All three exhibits were successful, gathering nearly 200,000 visitors in each of the three museums.

In 2016, through cooperation with a museum exhibition company, the Roskilde 6 ship was matched with the Cincinnati Museum Center, and now the exhibit had to be transported out of Europe for the first time. It came from Copenhagen to New York by ship; from there parts were re-packed and sent by air, while other parts came by truck. Kristiane came to Cincinnati to direct the assembly of Roskilde 6, and she returned for its disassembly, which is scheduled to take ten days. (A YouTube video shows its assembly in Cincinnati https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFMB-IBFOk8&feature=youtu.be.) Roskilde 6 is “almost certainly” going to Minneapolis after its Cincinnati run, and it is hoped that it will find a temporary exhibition spot on the west coast and on the east coast before making its way back to Denmark, where it will become part of the permanent collection of the National Museum of Denmark.

At 122 feet, Roskilde 6 is the longest Viking ship yet discovered, and required 100 men as crew. It was definitely used as a warship and was built after 1025, probably in Oslo and shows signs of being repaired at a later date, also in Norway, before finding its nearly 1,000-year resting place in Roskilde fjord. It was operational at a time when King Knud of Denmark was fighting against King Olav of Norway, but it is not known who commissioned its construction.

More links:

Roskilde 6, from the Viking History Museum in Roskilde

http://www.vikingeskibsmuseet.dk/en/professions/education/viking-knowledge/the-longships/findings-of-longships-from-the-viking-age/roskilde-6/

Longest known Viking ship goes on display at British Museum http://www.historyextra.com/news/longest-known-viking-ship-Roskilde-6-goes-display-exhibition-british-museum

Rebirth of the Viking warship that may have helped Canute conquer the seas

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/dec/27/viking-ship-roskilde-british-museum

It is still somewhat amazing to me that the first appearance of this restored ship outside of Europe would be in Cincinnati. We went to the exhibit with friends last month and I was amazed at the information in the entire exhibit--the Viking ship was only a part of the excellent content. It closed today, and although the exhibit was excellent, there was virtually no representation of this curation online or in book form, and that is a terrible loss.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Andersen!

Today is the birthday of Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), the creator and teller of "fairy tales," as the poor translation of the Danish "eventyrer" characterizes his "stories told for children." In fact, Andersen also wrote in the form of novels, theater pieces, poetry, and travel journals in addition to the output of 156 (or 212, depending on how you count them) stories that made him famous.  The travel pieces are probably the most surprising, but Andersen was a great traveler in the 19th century, going by coach or steam railway far from his native Denmark, throughout Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, Spain, and beyond--even to England to pay an infamous visit to Charles Dickens and his family (he overstayed his welcome). Perhaps Andersen was wary of leaving England. He was fearful of ocean travel, a fact which prevented him from ever coming to the United States, even though he was invited and carried on a long correspondence with Horace Scudder, his American editor, and was glad to have some of the later eventyrer published in Boston before they were published in Denmark.

At rejse er at leve, Hans Christian Andersen famously remarked: "To travel is to live. " Andersen traveled for months on end, and often enough that for several years he had no permanent residence--he simply traveled or lived in a hotel in Copenhagen. You can still see his room upstairs between the Hotel d'Angleterre and Magasin du Nord in Kongens Nytorv, King's New Square, in Copenhagen, or at least you could as recently as 2005, when the city celebrated the bicentennial of his birth.

I've been traveling in the past weeks, but unlike Andersen, I stayed in my own country this time. It is delightful to discover something new, that you have never seen before, in your own country. In this case it was even more pleasant because I discovered it in Florida, a state that I have visited several times, but mostly Orlando and Kissimmee, where my parents and an aunt lived for many years.

This trip took us to Fort Lauderdale to make use of a four-night stay in a private home that I had "won" as part of a benefit auction last year. Our host warned us against coming during March and April, as that is spring break time, and the place is overrun with tourists, he said. But that is when there was time available on our schedules, so that is when we went. Somehow I never "did" spring break during my youth. I never had the money for an extended trip, and I was lucky to get home from college at spring break instead of staying in the dorm alone for a week. During my freshman year I remember a dorm neighbor bringing a souvenir back from her spring break to my roommate and me--a fork she had "forgotten to return" to her vacation hotel, the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. We added it to our "kitchen utensils" centered around the popcorn popper--that was what we cooked in illegally in dorm rooms in those days.

Since we were going to spend four days in south Florida and this was my first pleasure trip there (I had been to Miami Beach only once before, for a conference at the convention center) we decided to go the extra mile, so to speak, and we spent three nights in Key West. A shuttle picked us up in the Ft. Lauderdale airport at 2:30 in the afternoon and drove us south and west on US 1, and by 7:00 we were on what I thought was the westernmost Key of the Florida Keys. I learned later that Key West is not the westernmost Key and that the name "Key West" was an anglicization of Cayo Hueso, island of the bones, because it was used as a commercial graveyard for prehistoric peoples, and bones were found by the first Europeans to explore the island. We explored Key West mostly by the hop-on, hop-off bus, and saw several of the sites along the route, but we didn't push ourselves too much. It was a relaxing few days, with good eating, gallery visits, some walking, and wandering among interesting architecture and gardens.

The Key shuttle appeared again to take us back to Ft. Lauderdale, and we passed along US 1 again, this time facing the hurricane evacuation signs, and then were escorted to a delightful Spanish-style villa within walking distance of the Atlantic Ocean in Lauderdale. This house reminded us very much of our home in Spain, but its completely surrounding garden was more lush, and our time there was as at an oasis. We took a boat trip along the New River and saw lavish homes, and walked to the beach and a mall (imagine being able to walk to an Apple store!), and bought good fish and prepared it ourselves in the well-equipped and comfortable kitchen. This was a delightful period of reading, eating well, and living in beautiful and peaceful surroundings. It was definitely more relaxing than most of our vacations--we moved at a sedate pace.

Mr. Andersen would have approved, I think.