Reading is a waste of time
Sleeping late should be a crime
Feeling’s not the thing for me
I like my stoic misery
My favorite food is smelly fish
Meatballs are a spicy dish
Darn’s the strongest curse I know
Keep your motor, I’d rather row
Now you should know all you need
It should be clear that I’m a Swede
I am a half Swedish by blood, but fully Swedish-American by cultural immersion. I grew up in Cannon Falls, a small Minnesota farming community — the same community in which my grandparents settled from Sweden a little over a century ago. This means a number of things relevant to my upbringing. First, it means that I grew up related to half the town, making it a whole lot harder to get into trouble – and a whole lot harder when I did get into trouble. Second, with lots of Swedish relatives in a Scandinavian town, I grew up steeped in Swedish cultural traditions. This, in turn, has a wide range of implications.
I was raised the son of older parents. My dad was fifty-eight when I was born, my mom, forty-four. On my father’s side, I have cousins old enough to be my grandparents. So, not only did I grow up around a bunch of Swedes, I grew up around a bunch of old Swedes; the kind of folks for whom English was not their first language, and for whom the American Dream had meaning on a number of levels now somewhat lost to us.
It’s taken me most of my fifty-plus years to understand fully the nature of a Scandinavian upbringing, particularly for a male growing up the son of a person who, in effect, was a first-generation American Swede. As near as I can tell, Swedes somehow possess, either by training or genetics, a unique combination of guilt, shame, pride, and stoicism that gives rise to some improbably bizarre behavior. Not only do we not ask for help, we’re shamed and guilt-ridden if we can’t go out of our way to help others. Somehow, we’re imbued with the notion that we’re responsible for all bad things but are not to take credit for any of the good things. And God forbid somebody does something to stand out.
So here’s an example of what it means to be a Swedish male: My dad was a great believer in the maxim, “Why pay somebody to do a job that you can do half as good in twice the time?” The problem with this philosophy in practice was that, as I indicated above, my dad was fifty-eight years old when I was born. In addition, he had some mysterious heart ailment that routinely led to near-death experiences (it’s a good thing that our neighbors knew CPR) and sent him in and out of hospitals on a regular basis. So, “do-it-yourself” for my dad meant supervising his young son (me) in a summer’s worth of projects. One summer, when I was no more than twelve – I swear – Dad decided that he would re-shingle the garage roof and re-paint the trim on the house. Did I mention before that my dad was not physically able to do this work? Also, he was afraid of heights. To be honest, I wasn’t particularly keen on heights to begin with either, but nobody asked.
The garage roof was an ambitious task. The roof was covered with ancient, grubby, moldy cedar shingles that first had to be removed before new shingles could be placed. This level of wanton destruction was exactly the type of activity that appeals to a twelve-year-old boy — for about the first hour. Then it seems like real work. Believe me, it was real work. I would climb up onto the roof, hammer, prybar, and shovel in hand, while my dad would hold the ladder until I was “safely” on the roof and then take his place in the captain’s chair – which was more of a lawn chair really – in the middle of the yard, well out of shingle range.
Throughout the course of this project, my neighborhood friends who, for some odd reason, did not have their own shingling projects to attend to, routinely would wander by to visit with me/mock me. I had Sawyer-esque notions of convincing them that the project was fun and that they should join me. This may work in Twain’s Hannibal, but, although it was unlikely that any of my Cannon Falls friends had, in fact, read Tom Sawyer, they were naturally smarter than Tom’s fictional friends. The closest they came to helping was to climb to the top of the ladder and point out nails that I had failed to remove. After days which seemed like weeks, we (using the term generously) had managed to remove all of the old cedar and were able to survey what turned out to be a significantly rotted garage roof underneath. Not to worry, my dad could fix that. He simply had me tear out the worst of the rotted boards and replace them with whatever scrap boards we had laying around the garage. Not exactly the building code solution, but one that was perfectly consistent with Swedish construction methods.
In putting the new shingles on, my father’s principle role was to let me know, usually at the end of any given row, whether the shingles had been placed straight. I think normally the protocol is to make that evaluation before an entire row has to be ripped up and redone. But that, I’m sure, would eliminate some of the richness of the experience.
While the garage roof project was an ambitious undertaking, it was, relatively speaking, a reasonably safe endeavor. The house trim, on the other hand, was both ambitious and dangerous. Ambitious because it involved moving the lawn chair to various sides of the house as the project progressed, and dangerous because of the not quite long enough extension ladder my father had managed to borrow. Let me just say that you haven’t lived until you’ve had the opportunity to stand at the very top rung of an extension ladder two-and-a-half stories off the ground and reach above and behind you to paint the trim on the highest peaks of the house.
While my dad was more physically capable of performing modest indoor projects, it would be fair to say that he was not a craftsman. His idea of repairing a leaking pipe was to place beneath it a pan large enough to allow the dripping water to evaporate faster than it was being added to the pan. This is not to suggest that all Swedes are somehow incapable of basic home repair, or can’t be excellent craftspeople. My point only is that to my dad, it didn’t matter. You only asked for help as you were going underwater for the third and final time.
Another result of growing up Swedish was that I had to endure lutefisk.
For the unenlightened (or uninitiated), lutefisk is cod gone wrong. Very wrong. Here’s the process, as I understand it: Perfectly fine, albeit fishy, codfish is stored in barrels and left to rot. Legend has it that while stored, canines, and perhaps humans having consumed too much aquavit, would claim those barrels as part of their territory in the usual urinary manner. Once appropriately fermented, the fish was then soaked in lye to undo the effects of the prior treatment. Finally, the fish was dried in blocks to preserve it through the interminable Swedish winter.
To serve the delicacy, one first had to soak the blocks to remove the lye and “reconstitute” the fish. Then the fish was “cooked” and served. This left the discriminating diner with a pile of goo the consistency of mucus and with a smell somewhere between rotting fish and armpits.
I’m convinced that one of the main reasons my forebears leftSwedenwas to get away from lutefisk. It’s quite possible the entire country had a stench that could no longer be removed. Either that, or my forebears were a whole lot less bright than I’d like to think. This may also be true, in light of the fact that the majority of them settled in the north central plains, where the weather generally sucks. In any event, once here, these arguably intelligent folks apparently developed a longing for the homeland. Rather than build a tradition around fruit soup, a somewhat vile, yet mostly harmless concoction, or lefse, a potato flatbread resembling a tortilla that’s tremendous if accompanied with enough butter and brown sugar, they chose lutefisk. Maybe it was simply to remind themselves of just how bad things were back in Sweden.
Regardless, after years of inbreeding among this motley group, the consumption of lutefisk had evolved into a Christmastime tradition to which people of Scandinavian heritage looked fondly. My family was no different.
Again, I had the benefit of growing up with older parents. This meant that at family events, I mostly gathered with people a full generation more senior than me. In addition to cousins old enough to be my grandparents, my aunts and uncles were mostly white-haired senior citizens driven slightly crazy by years of lutefisk consumption. Our lutefisk gatherings first occurred at family homes, either at my Aunt Mabel’s or ours. I never made the connection before, but my mom was an expert wallpaperer and was frequently working on projects at Mabel’s or our house. The reason now seems obvious: The toxic emissions from the fish were taking off the wallpaper as fast as my mom or Mabel could put it back up. I don’t remember much about the early gatherings except that there would always be a raging debate as to whether lutefisk was better with white sauce (the Swedish way) or butter (the manner favored by the Norwegians who had somehow strayed into the family). Even at an early age this struck me as similar to debating whether it’s better to puke in the upstairs or the downstairs toilet.
In later years, once we had sufficiently devalued the resale price of our homes, the annual Swedish get-together was moved to a local supper club that, believe it or not, offered a lutefisk buffet (under the circumstances, perhaps a better word is “smorgasbord,” but they didn’t use that). It’s not coincidental that this restaurant has struggled over the last several years and is now permanently closed.
I was very much in favor of the move to the restaurant, because the buffet had other, non-lutefisk items, including Swedish meatballs, Swedish sausage, and that old Scandinavian standby, barbecued ribs. This buffet now posed a real test of one’s Swedish heritage. One could take the coward’s path and avoid the fish, which I gratefully did and willingly endured the rebukes of my elders.
Over the years the restaurant event became huge. Although it would ebb and flow a bit, many years the event would draw in excess of fifty hungry Swedes, and for a period in the late 1970s, my father and all five of his sisters (that’s right, five Swedish sisters) made it to the event with much of their extended families. We’re talking lots of old Swedes here, many of whom were my cousins, consuming lots of rotten fish.
As the years went on, each annual event became an opportunity to mark any passages that occurred over the previous year. My father died in the early 1980s at the age of seventy-seven. Four of his sisters, two of whom were older than him, outlived him by many years. Three of them lived into their nineties with his last remaining sister dying only recently. Nevertheless, each year, it seemed with increasing frequency that someone was no longer at the event, or if at the event, was there in body but not in mind (maybe it was the fish).
“What of my mom?” you may ask. Interestingly, she didn’t have a drop of Swedish blood, but she willingly married into a Swedish family in the heart of Scandinavian Minnesota. She learned to cook the fish, claimed to like it, and became, for all practical purposes, an honorary Swede.
As my life got busy and I was increasingly preoccupied with my own family and career, my attendance at these events became more sporadic. More recently, however, I had tried to attend with some regularity, mostly out of a sense of duty to my mother, who had moved to be nearer to my wife and me, and had no other means of getting to this event. The last official lutefisk dinner we both attended was in the fall of 1999, when my kids and I went with Grandma.
I should note here that it’s particularly torturous for me to do any events like this without my wife. She has the rare skill of being able to instantly engage people in conversation, appearing quite at ease and making others feel equally at ease. I have no such skill. So I considered myself extremely fortunate in 1999, wifeless as I was for that event, to be seated at what I called the matriarchs’ table with the three oldest women in the room: my mom, who was just about to turn eighty, my aunt Elaine, who was in her late eighties, and my aunt Mabel, who was in her late nineties. I didn’t have to make conversation, I just had to listen.
I also did a lot of thinking. I wondered what it must be like to be Mabel, pushing a hundred, approaching the end of the twentieth century, the daughter of Swedish immigrants, presiding over an event steeped in Swedish heritage, with a room full of people who helped populate the New World. In that room were farmers, laborers, corporate executives, lawyers, housewives, secretaries. The ages ranged from Mabel, at almost a hundred, to an infant not yet a half-year old. There were still many people consuming the smelly fish, but there were also an increasing number of folks, like me and my above-average children, who opted for the safer course of meatballs and ribs. You could feel the pride Mabel was experiencing in having accomplished something truly significant. There must be a deep, almost biological, satisfaction in witnessing a group of fifty plus people who share a common heritage.
For the matriarchs, the “lutefisk” became a defining event. The term even took on a new meaning, referring not the fish itself, but the event. Thus, every Christmas card from my aunts would say, depending on the year, “Good to see you at lutefisk” or “Missed you at lutefisk.”
That was to be Mabel’s last lutefisk. She died in early 2000, still somewhat shy of a hundred years on the planet. As it turns out, it was my mom’s last lutefisk as well, as I had some schedule conflict or another that prevented us from getting to the 2000 event and she died in early 2001. For a while the restaurant was closed and the event took a decidedly non-Swedish turn, with us gathering at a buffet restaurant in the Twin Cities. We didn’t meet in Cannon Falls and we no longer ate the fish. Now that the last of the original generation is gone, we have seen the last of these gatherings.
It’s not exactly a profound revelation to acknowledge that the gathering wasn’t about the fish at all. What is it about these bonds that are so strong even through the stinkiness? If you think only about the fish, it defies reason, but if you think about Mabel, it doesn’t. Her pride at the table was a recognition of the gathering as something bigger, that we are all tied to something larger and something significant. We belong, even if it is to a club that people are not exactly dying to join. We all have our stinky fish traditions and we all have our share of oddball relatives who claim the fish is good and argue whether it’s better with white sauce or butter. The snot-like fish symbolizes the sense of belonging, as do the family characteristics that we share. I admit that once or twice over the years I’ve reflected on this as I’ve grabbed a lawn chair and a cold beverage and watched my son mow the lawn.
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