Big day deadlines

Oh how I wish I was there today! One more big day in Seattle coming up! One more important deadline to reach and keep. Over the years there are some big occasions in Seattle that I missed out on. The implosion of the Kingdome (the late baseball and football stadium) in 2000, yeah, that’s a big one. The demolition of the southern part of the Alaskan Way Viaduct 2011. Sounds like it’s a lot of going down in Seattle. Yes, but things are coming up too! I missed the opening of the Seattle Central Library 2004. But I was actually there for the opening of the new opera house, the McCaw Hall in 2003!

And I watched Bill Gates mythical building site for a lot of years in the mid nineties while driving east on the 520 Bridge crossing Lake Washington – there is a deadline that was postponed so many times that we stopped waiting for his new super digital home to ever get done. And yes, I missed the Light Rail finally starting to run after a century of discussions in 2009. On the other hand, I was in Seattle when Botniabanan, the new and very much looked forward too coastal railway in northern Sweden made its maiden voyage 2010.

Anyway, today it was. The Next 50’ World’s Fair Celebration Opening Day! While the space shuttles are now definitely retired and Space Age has come to an end, Seattle’s former future fair grounds are moving forward. The Jetson rocket Space Needle from 1962 isn’t a rusty and worn down embarrassing relic, but a still star-reaching object with its roof this week freshly painted in a “galaxy gold” retro color. And I can tell from the forecast that it is going to be a beautiful day; 67°F (19,5° C) and sun! What a party Seattle, what a party!

And you know what. I am not even gonna try to give Umeå any exclamation marks today. Today I am going to be exclusively biased when it comes to my two cities. Because… it’s snowing. Yes, your heard me right. It’s April 21 and it’s been snowing all day. Don’t laugh, because I am not. I am giggling though at the rumor telling the roof of the Space Needle only got half painted for the Opening Day. Isn’t that funny? No matter what the deadline is: a story, a party, a home, a building, there is always something that’s only half done when the big day comes!

Fair grounds

Umeå mid January 2014. I wonder what it will be like. Only days before the grand opening of Umeå being the European Capital of Culture for that year.  Will those new buildings all be done? The redesigns of squares and parks completed? All the projects in place? It’s not even two years until we are there and most things are still up in the air. Will they have a smooth landing?

50 years ago Seattle was ready for take off. Century 21 Exposition – the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair was just days away from opening. What was it like? The intentions were bold and brave. A city at the far west that created a fair of, for and about the future. A transformative event that captured the imagination of the world and introduced Seattle as a global city. Wow. And an architecture that embodied that spirit, reaching for the stars! Yes, this was the era of optimism, of space age, of a handsome young media president.

The civic leaders of Seattle at that time had a vision that wouldn’t take no for an answer. Their dual purpose was to celebrate their city while stimulating its growth, and to create the enduring legacy of a permanent civic center, the Seattle Center. It’s amazing how well they succeeded. Being that bold and brave doesn’t necessary mean that the ideas will work. Not at that specific time and certainly not 50 years later. But they did, and they still do!

Knowing what Umeå is going through now, the city rapidly changing to be dressed up for 2014 and the emotional and practical turmoil the residents of Umeå are facing, I can imagine Seattle World’s Fair stirred up quite some feelings. 13 square blocks were going to be transformed for the site and more then 200 houses were demolished and passed into the past to make room for the future. Eddie Carlson, chairman for the Washington World’s Fair Commission conceived the vision of the Space Needle after dining atop of the television tower in Stuttgart, Germany.  People’s homes replaced by a Jetson rocket weren’t everybody’s cup of tea, so to speak. Therefore, how fortunate it is that those purposes from the civic leaders at that time came true. Seattle Center became and is the much loved and treasured center point of the city that they envisioned. 12 million people visit the Center every year, and 2012 the vision is The Next 50, once again looking into the future.

So, April 15 1962. The opening is six days away, April 21. What was it like? The monorail, the train into the future was already up and running. Were the arcs at the United States Science Pavilion (now Pacific Science Center) already striving white towards the sky, or was somebody balancing paint cans on that delicate design? Did the elevators in the Space Needle test run and how about the restaurant on top of it, did it already revolve? And I can only imagine the nerve wrecking assignment making the sound technique work for the opening ceremony. President John F Kennedy holding the opening speech from Florida. His voice heard by 12 000 people seated in the Center stadium and on the fairgrounds. It was an optimistic president talking about cooperation and radio waves, space age and peace.

-       May we open not only a great World’s fair, may we open an era of peace and understanding among all mankind. Let the fair begin!

Seattle Center is a place for everyone. The water of the International Fountain invites young and old, black and white, Americans and foreigners. The festivals gather the world in arts and food. It’s peaceful lying on the lawn watching the Needle and the arcs aiming for the sky. It’s a place for understanding among mankind. And I am hoping that The European Capital of Culture 2014 will create that kind of space and spirit in Umeå too. I am hoping for  a smooth landing and fair grounds.

Easter Day considerations

-       Are you sure this is what you want to do on Easter Saturday? The question came from my dear neighbor and relative Bertil, 91 years young. Yes, I am very sure, positive, I responded.

Bertil is my mother’s cousin and he lives down across the field from me, I can see his house from my kitchen window. It is yellow, with a beautiful bakers cottage, barn and well on the front yard, everything very well kept. This is the original family homestead, where my grandfather and Bertil’s father were born. Summertime we can take a short walk across the field to say hi to each other. But not now.

One foot. That’s how much snow we had that day a week ago. It was 14°F at my early Monday morning take off, and Trouble 2 had to come shovel me out from my snowed in fortress for my full day of fun at the hospital. Appropriate; that’s what my cancer winter was like, cold and snowy. Extremely cold and snowy.

Being back in all those waiting rooms is a trip back and down. This is what it was like. That fear. Breasts. Those nice nurses seeing things with their cameras that are hidden from me. Lungs. A couple of more pictures, we didn’t quite catch everything. Skeleton. Half an hour while the camera is working it’s way through my body. Half asleep to the sound of the nurses’ everyday small talk about this and that while I am screened hunting for death.

And then waiting for my oncologist. That waiting room. Wigs and naked heads. I used to be one of them. I was one of them. I had a great wig! I had never looked so good before, never gotten so many compliments in my life! And my naked scull was soft and even, I looked pretty cool, like one of those brave models. Only without eyebrows and lashes. And here I am today, preparing for the message if I am going to keep my hair this time, or if I am going to be one of them again. The wigs and the naked heads.

The walk through that waiting room after meeting with my oncologist is a weird thing. I was spared. Breasts, lungs, skeleton, all cleared! No cancer anywhere, everything clean and clear. I was spared. This time I was spared. I can go home. I am passing the door to the room where patients are lying on beds, sitting in chairs, fluids running into their bodies chasing for cancer cells, attacking tumors. I know that one of them is the wife to an old friend of mine, I met them in the cafeteria between the lungs and the skeleton. They are in there together. They are in this together. And I can go home. This time I was spared.

It’s white and bright and clean outside this Easter, from all that snow that fell a week ago. And it’s white and bright and clean inside me. I got a second chance. Again. My dear neighbor Bertil, 91, and I had a nice meal together in my warm and cozy kitchen on Easter Saturday. He told me stories about my grandparents who built my house and cooked the food in this very kitchen when Bertil was a little boy, his uncle and aunt. And we traveled the family tree together back to 1735, to Olof Olofsson who was a farmer here in the village and from whom Bertil and I descend. That’s the past that I am carrying within me. But what’s the future? I have been spared, and every time it happens I feel resurrected. Something that comes with relief, happiness, gratitude, strength and a great deal of pressure and responsibility. Some things to consider on an Easter Day.

Balancing an after life

 It’s snowing in Umeå today. April’s fool, it feels like. A tight, wet, sharp snow cutting into my face on my morning Nordic Walking-walk. The weather is appropriate for my assignment today though.

Three years ago at this time I was in the middle of chemotherapy. Pretty much exactly two years ago I was cleared from a terrifying scare; no, the dark spot that covered my right hip ball wasn’t a malignant metastases after all, only some degeneration. March 30 2010 my after life started, I got my self one more birthday and a second chance to live.

Tomorrow is my yearly check up. A full day of x-ray hopping fun at the University hospital. I feel like preparing for a long-trip divided into all these stops on a tight schedule. Yeah, the take off is even an early morning one, those I really do hate.

Three years ago. I’m reading my journal 4/1/09: “On the 7^th day from my 2^nd chemo treatment. Feeling sick. A soar throat and mouth, nausea, pain in my chest and body. Constipated. All I want to eat is salt.” A couple of days earlier I had received an email from my friend Elizabeth in Seattle: “Trouble 2 is sent from heaven. He took care of house, dog and daughter while we were in the hospital”.

The situation was bizarre. I was fighting the aftermaths of a tumor in my breast and hers was on a tonsil. I was three months in to my cancer journey when Elizabeth’s was discovered. My youngest son, Trouble 2 and his girlfriend, was only two weeks from leaving Umeå to spend spring in Seattle, staying with Elizabeth and her family. And so he did. With three months experience from a cancer sick mother, he moved in with another one for three months, this time one of his Seattle moms.

Elizabeth and I first met summer -95 when my family rented a house across the street from her family in Madrona. I had two young sons, she two young daughters. We became close friends and our lives have since then been interlaced. We have been dressed up in Las Vegas and dressed down in a cabin on the Olympic Peninsula. Her family has spent Midsummer in my little Swedish village, and we became ferry commuters when they lived over at Bainbridge Island. Our children went to school together, and all four of them are now in the start of creating their grown up lives. Over the years we have shared happiness and fear, hope and powerlessness, tears and laughter. And then cancer.

Today we share the experience of being survivors. Last September when I was flat down with my back out in Seattle, I woke up one morning with a bruise on my hand. Realizing that it was the second time in just a couple of weeks I got really scared. There is no fear like the cancer fear. There is nothing like it. Cancer is not negotiable. And if your old cancer shows up again, it will kill you. It’s as simple as that.

Well, that evening Elizabeth came over to my place. She sat on my bed and I showed her my bruise and she said: “You know, I get bruised so much easier than I used to.” And we talked about our poor scarred bodies and ate the comforting Swimming Rama she brought, knowing that what we share is something very special, and no one outside can never ever understand what it is like. Being a survivor. Been given a second chance, although always dreading that next check up. Balancing life and death.

It keeps snowing. Half a foot now.

A child in Space

I wonder what it was like. Seattle today, 50 years ago. That thing up in the air making its first trip March 24 1962. A futuristic train soaring way up, on a concrete foundation. People on the ground, dressed up in spring coats and hats. Watching, stretched necks, big eyes. The nation’s first full scale monorail system, The Seattle Center Monorail!

It must have been absolutely spectacular!! The world moving in to Space Age, and Seattle taking the lead! Still today, 50 years later, the Monorail feels like an ahead of its time transportation on its safe, solid and eternal route between Seattle Center and Downtown Westlake Center. Adding the element of the ride passing inside the Frank Gehry-designed Experience Music Project Museum in the year of 2000 makes the space dreams still alive.

Personally, I love it! I love the idea of it, I love the sound of it, I love the convenience of it, and I love all the beautiful pictures it makes! From every angle: combined with the Space Needle, the greenery, the arches of the Science center, the EMP Museum, the mountains and the downtown high rises.

My first ride with the Monorail was pretty much exactly 19 years ago. I arrived in Seattle the first time March 23 1993, and the 25th we hopped on the bus in Kirkland where we had landed, and paid our first visit to the heart of Seattle. One little son held tight in each hand in this unfamiliar and quite intimidating new place. Trouble & Trouble 4 and 6 years old in brightly striped handmade Swedish pants, trusting their parents knowing the world. Well, the parents needed hands to hold too, and they grabbed Annie and Harold’s who became Trouble & Trouble’s American grandparents and our benefactors and Seattle guides: “You got to ride the Monorail, the boys will love it!” And so we did. And of course they loved it! The note in my journal that day says: “We went with the railway above the ground”. It was my second day in Seattle and I hadn’t quite caught the name yet. For a grown up there is something very special experiencing the world through a child’s open, innocent and unprejudiced eyes, and reading my journal I feel like I was a child myself that day.

And, I’m thinking, maybe that was what this day was like 50 years ago today. Seattle watching the city’s entrance in Space Age 1962. Like a child.

Making a safe ride

March, I love it! In Seattle cherry blossom is sprinkling the city with pink clouds. In Umeå the 1,5 foot of heavy snow is finally sliding from the roofs, collapsing from trees in loud splashes. The landscape has been frozen since Christmas, it was a very white and serious winter, and now it’s loosing its grip. The cramp is releasing, we can breath again!

When I was a little girl riding my bike wasn’t allowed until the streets were dry, no melting water anywhere. Bikes were a summer tool for fun and transportation. Oh, what a wait. At this latitude mostly until May.

Umeå is a big biking town, the Beijing of Scandinavia. During spring, summer and fall, the residents of Umeå move in fast wheeling crowds across the vast and mostly flat city. Twenty years ago we allowed the bike its winter break when the first snow fell in November, stored in garage or basements until streets were dry and safe again. Those were the days. Today those poor things are equipped with winter tires having to carry us around in feet of hardly passable white stuff. And this time of year as the winter road melts during the day and then freezes again during night, we slide around on black ice, and yes, the ER is full of broken wrists and ankles.

The typical bicycle rider in Umeå on a regular day is transporting him/herself on a regular bike in regular clothes, briefcase or groceries in a bicycle basket in front of the handle bar or in the back. Kind of very casual, straight up sitting, mostly without helmet, the bike like a comfortable extension of the body.

The bike rider in Seattle on the other hand, well that’s a completely different ball game, as my 80 + friend Helen would have expressed it. Here is a person lying over the racing bike, calves pumping in slim biking clothes, water bottle attached to bicycle frame, streamlined helmet matching the slim outfit. Riding the bike in Seattle is serious business, an aggressive art. And it has to; Seattleites are competing with cars on regular streets with highly aggressive traffic. And yes, the ERs are highly frequented by cyclists.

Both cities are working on being more bicycle-friendly and safe though. Every neighborhood in Umeå built from the 60ies and forward is equipped with bicycle lanes separated from the streets. You can actually move across town without having to interfere with cars. Seattle is planning on “urban greenways”, designated streets often parallel to arterials but much quieter — that offer everyone from cyclists to pedestrians and people in wheelchairs safer ways to get around without having to drive. But Seattle is a big city and this is a big undertaking. In Umeå, we just have to wait until May for the bike lanes to be dry and comfortable. In Seattle it will take years to create a safe bicycle environment. But it’s worth waiting for. Until then, have a safe ride!

A fat hallelujah

I don’t know, but it actually sounds better in Swedish, Fettisdag, which is the same expression as Fat Tuesday, maybe because putting fat and Tuesday together creates a new word, also pronounced a bit different. Of course Mardi Gras has a whole different and more exotic ring to it, although it’s still means exactly the same thing. And it comes with traditions.

February in Sweden is way too cold for parades, and we aren’t much of a parading people anyway. Seattle did some of that in the late 70ies, but it ran amok and was first banned for a while, then too controlled and boring and therefore abandoned. Today though, Fat Tuesday in Seattle is a family-friendly face painting event, and lots of great music at the clubs down in Pioneer Square.

So, what do the non-parading Swedes do on Fat Tuesday? Well, we are performing a different and very well behaved kind of parade. All over the country people are lining up in pastry shops hoping for one of those seductively tasty buns impossible to eat without dipping your nose in that wonderful whipped cream. Or of course, you make them yourself, out of your grandmother’s recipe. In both cases, the first semla of the year is a  hallelujah moment. Those buns have a name: semla. In plural: semlor. The word probably comes from the German Semmel, rooted from Latin semila, which means light flour.

I grew up in a bakery. Yes I did. My father was a pastry chef. Yes he was. And yes, it was nothing but wonderful. And of course my father and his colleague’s semlor were the best. My childhood Februaries were a heavenly mix of snow, sun and dad's semlor. A semla is a round bun made from light wheat, spiced with cardamom. The bun is cut in half, so the upper part makes a top. In between there is this filling of whipped cream mixed with almond paste. Yes, hallelujah. And on top of the top part of the bun, a bit of icing sugar. Hallelujah. And there is no way you can eat this thing without getting white tasty stuff all over your face and hands. Triple hallelujah.

So, as my father is no more around and he never taught me how to make semlor (that’s another story) the Fat Tuesday that just passed I simply had to buy these desirable items that is something in between a pastry and a light wheat bread. At 4.30 pm the bakeries and coffee shops can be all out of semlor, big notes on the door and disappointed people walking away, dropping their heads to the chest in a big saddened sigh; day ruined! But I was lucky this year, a few of them still on the shelf. And I learned that only in this bakery 6000 semlor were produced during Fat Tuesday! There are six-seven bakeries in the Umeå area, assume they all made about 6000 semlor each, it adds up to around 40 000! Which actually isn’t that many, considering a desiring population of 115 000 people. So, do 75 000 of us make our own semlor the way our grandmas did? I need to do some research on that part until next year. And more important, I need to find out my father’s recipe. And make myself a February hallelujah moment.