Missy Diggs

Halftime

You know how they say no two children ever grow up in exactly the same family? I think it also is true that no two teenagers ever go to exactly the same high school. And that goes a long way toward explaining how it is that my sister is currently traveling from Seattle, Washington to Small Town, Texas to attend her twenty year high school reunion while I am lounging around Austin in my pajamas, safe in the knowledge that my high school reunion committee doesn’t have my contact information, and would find a way to “misplace” it if they did. (Just like they did with all my Homecoming Queen votes back in the fall of 1987. Oh, yeah, little Miss Class President, I knew about that!)

Now, my sister is feeling a bit nervous about going to this reunion, as any normal person would, and she is wondering what she was thinking when she agreed to go.  She has been living in a beautiful blue island of liberalism and secular tolerance for quite a few years now, and it is safe to say that many of her former classmates are still swimming in the red red waters of their Bible belted hometown. But the reunion committee is headed by two of her best friends, by which I mean not just her best friends from high school but still her best friends now, because my sister is a loyal and friendly person who gets along with others and knows how to have a good time. I’ve made her promise to report anything crazy or scary that happens, but I’m pretty sure she’s going to have fun.

Now, I suppose it’s technically possible that I would find a way to have fun if I were to attend one of my high school reunions too (assuming I could find out when and where it was happening, that is). After all, I’m a woman who tried to make chemotherapy fun. And while I would definitely choose going back to high school over going through cancer treatment again (wait, is that right? hmmm, tough one. hopefully hypothetical), High School Reunion falls somewhere under Root Canal on my list of things I would like to do over my summer vacation. This is, of course, at least partly because my sister and I did not go to the same high school. Even though we did. oh, you know what I mean.

I started high school in the suburban Midwestern town where I grew up. It was a big school, academically competitive, crowded. I knew a bunch of the kids in my classes from junior high, but most of the kids I had gone to elementary school with had dispersed into different groups, and I only saw them in the band room or the cafeteria. Which was fine, cause I hadn’t really gotten through that whole 6th Grade Girls Are Mean thing very gracefully and I was grateful for a chance to reinvent myself and make a new start. And I was working on that, and it was hard (as it often seems to be) and then my family moved to Texas. And I thought, as have many before me, well, why not? If I’m going to recreate myself it might as well be in Texas.

Even though we had lived quite happily for many years on a dead-end street within easy walking distance of the library, the town hall, the elementary school, and the Tastee-Freeze, my parents decided to use the move to Texas to pursue some of their dreams as well, and this included Living Out in the Country and Having Land. At this time, in Texas, those things were very possible but did not usually come attached to what most people would call Good Schools. The first place my parents wanted to buy was basically a ranch on a lake and it sounded perfect until they decided to call the local school and make sure we girls would be able to go to school there and still get into college. The conversation went something like this:

My mother: So, my daughter is a freshman but she is taking Honors Geometry. Would she be able to do this at your school?

School representative: We have geometry.

My mother: Oh, okay. Good. Well, my daughter is taking French I and hopes to be able to take four years of French. Does your school offer that? (I know, French! What was I thinking? ah, les folies de la jeunesse!)

School representative: We-ell. Now, we did have a Spanish teacher, at one time. But she died.

So my parents let go of their lakefront dream and bought House2, which was still a respectable distance from town and still on a sizable piece of land. And which was on the bus route for the schools in the biggest town in the county, which also happened to be the only town that had a high school big enough to have both a Varsity and a Junior Varsity football team. Which, and let’s be honest, was basically the whole reason they had a high school at all.

But they did have a French teacher and a Spanish teacher (though we later discovered that these were actually the same person, a native Spanish speaker who really, really liked French food) and they later added a teacher of German, which is what my sister took when she got to high school. And that turned out to be a good choice, because when the Spanish/French teacher died the school got a new Spanish teacher but not a French teacher and there I was with only two years of language on my transcript and no desire, as a junior, to start over in Spanish with a bunch of freshmen.

Who were not at all like the freshmen I had gone to school with in the Midwest. No way. Those kids, maybe because it was a much more urban setting, knew how to fly under the radar. They played it cool and kept things quiet. They caused trouble, for sure: we had gangs, and teen pregnancies, and a “game” played in the hallways called Open Chest that actually sent several kids to the emergency room. These Texas kids, though, were a whole other deal. They were rowdy. They would get up and wander around during class, try on each others’ hats, throw things out the windows to their friends in the quad. In geometry we had an ancient teacher who every Friday would write out a quiz on an a transparency and leave it up on the overhead projector for the first part of class. Every other Friday this kid named Trey (half the boys were named Trey) would walk into class, pick up the spray bottle kept on the stand under the projector, and spray water right onto the quiz. The teacher would rise up out of her chair, flapping her arms in fury, and Trey would escape her grasp and run out into the hall laughing.

He was in my Trig class the next year, though, so I’m pretty sure he passed Geometry. Everyone passed Trig cause it was taught by one of the football coaches, though not the same one who taught World History. Football players passed everything.

If I could have attended high school in Texas as an anthropologist of some sort and not as an aching, lonely, bored, irritated teenage girl, things probably would have gone a bit better for me (though I’m still not too sure I’d be invited to the reunions!). However, I was wandering the halls looking for connection and meaning and damn if those things weren’t hard to find. When I was a junior the high school moved into a brand new building (we had been going to the same school that most of my classmates’ parents had gone to, and I think it was haunted by small town kids from an earlier, less college-bound, time), and my sister started school as a freshman. By then I had more or less branded myself as a Loner and an Outcast, though I still had some friends in less windy corners. Being an honors student helped. So did being in band.

My sister was in band, too, and she and I looked so completely different from each other and had such a common last name that no one ever suspected we were related. This was how it happened that when some older girls took her under their wing and told her what she needed to know about high school, they actually pointed me out and said, “See that girl over there? Stay away from her. She’s weird.” And my sister, bless her heart, said, “Oh, yeah, her. SHE’S MY SISTER!”

After which nobody really fucked with her, either. Though when the time came for the big “voted most likely” weird ceremony my senior year, my sister was nominated “Most Popular Girl” in her class. Another reason why I suspect she is going to have a pretty good time at her reunion this weekend. (I was nominated “Most Scholarly” but I didn’t win. Maybe if they had called the category “Most Eager to Get the Hell out of Here so she Can go to College and Have Some Fun” I would have had a better chance.)

It used to drive me crazy when grown-ups would go out of their way to tell me that my high school years were supposed to be the best years of my life. Literally, crazy. More sensitive but still grown up people would acknowledge that I would probably do better at college, especially outside the Bible belt. That did turn out to be the case, and I have been to several college reunions already (SO MUCH FUN) and you better believe I keep my contact info updated with the college alumni office, even though they mostly use it to ask me for money and not to invite me to parties. But I’m a grown-up myself now, and I can have my own parties pretty much any time I want to, which is why, as I always suspected they would be, these years right now are the best of my life so far, and I have every reason to expect that they are going to keep on getting better and better.

However, if they ever want to offer up a recount of those Homecoming Queen votes, I would still like my chance to ride around the football field in a golf cart wearing a tiara. And I probably wouldn’t even insist on wearing the outfit I had picked out for the event: my mom’s prom dress, torn longjohns, and green hightops. Though it might be fun to get a tattoo of a girl dressed like that to commemorate the event as one of the best days of my life.

Thanks for use of the photo, originally uploaded to Flickr by Mad African!: (Broken Sword and protected under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.

Outdoor Academy of Sweden – Ice Hotel

I used to be the kind of person (if this is a kind of person) who didn’t really think much about Sweden.

That, however, was a long time ago.

I started to think seriously about Sweden the same day I tried sushi for the first time, when I was in college. The way it came about was this: I danced (and flirted) with a very charming young man at a waltz party. Then I asked this young man out on a date, after which he revealed that he was gay, but also that he wanted to go out with me anyway, but not on a date. Up to this point, there is nothing Swedish (or, actually, unusual, at least for me) about this story.  Because I had a car, I picked the guy up at his apartment (he lived alone, off-campus, which was one of the things that would have made him such an awesome boyfriend) and he gave me a little gift that he had made for me. It was like a card, sort of, in that it was made of cardstock and there was an outside part that had my name written on it in fancy letters filled in with colored pencil. The inside part, when slipped out, turned out to be Sweden. By which I mean, he had drawn a picture of Sweden on a piece of cardstock, and colored it in, and cut it out, and written the word “Sweden” on it. It was actually quite lovely, though really very puzzling. When I expressed surprise at being given the country of Sweden, he seemed puzzled that I would  be surprised and explained simply that I seemed like a Sweden sort of person to him. Then we went to dinner, and he tricked me into eating raw fish, which I was sure I would not like at all but which of course turned out to be one of the loveliest and most wonderful things you can eat.

Time passed and we were friends for a while and then he graduated and I took a year off, and I lost touch with him and with many other Scorpio boys both gay and straight. But I never stopped eating sushi. And because he was so right about me and sushi, I had to wonder whether he also knew something about me and Sweden.

But I was busy trying to be an adult and start a career and find love and all that stuff, so I didn’t think about Sweden too much or too often.

Until my parents moved to Ireland. They were going to be there for two years, and they were going to pay for a trip for me to come visit them and do some traveling and exploring around those parts. See, I had never been overseas but my sister had been to England on a college trip. And in our family, fairness is important and it means that no kid gets something that the other kid doesn’t, and so they owed me. I didn’t go visit them the first year they were there, because I was so busy with the career-starting and the love-finding and also the giant-puppy-training, which was not even part of the original plan. And then my dad’s company closed their Dublin office and my parents got sent home a year early and they still owed me a trip but they weren’t in Ireland for me to visit anymore.

So then I realized that I could go anywhere I wanted. And, for reasons that I can’t remember now, because this was a long time ago, I decided that I wanted to go to London. And also I wanted to go to the Ice Hotel.

The Ice Hotel is a hotel made entirely out of ice. It’s in Sweden, and it’s only in the winter. In the spring it melts and then in the winter they build it again. To get there, you take the train to Kiruna, which is north of the Arctic Circle, and then you travel by dog sled 15 km or so to the hotel.  When you get there, you get to drink hot lemonade or other drinks that you order at a bar made entirely out of ice, and you get to sit on chairs made of ice and sleep wrapped in furs on a bed made of ice.

If reading the last paragraph did not make you want to go to the Ice Hotel yourself, I don’t know what to say. I spent a lot of time reading about the Ice Hotel and thinking about the Ice Hotel and talking about the Ice Hotel. Ice Hotel Ice Hotel Ice Hotel.

Strangely, I couldn’t really find anybody who wanted to go to the Ice Hotel with me. So I decided to go on my own.

I was planning this trip in the summer, in Austin, and it is hot here in the summer, and that may be part of the reason why the Ice Hotel appealed to me so much. Also, I was born on the summer solstice, but I have always been a night owl, and so the idea of spending long hours of darkness in northern Sweden on the winter solstice had a definite appeal for me. Also, it was 1999 and the last full moon of the millennium was going to be on December 21, my half-birthday and the winter solstice. How could I resist? I booked my reservation at the Ice Hotel seven months in advance. For the rest of the trip, I decided to fly to London, spend a week hanging about there, then fly to Stockholm, spend a night, and take the train up to Kiruna the next day. It is a 12-hour train ride from Stockholm to Kiruna; the train leaves in the evening and arrives in Kiruna in the morning, although morning is a funny thing to think about in a place where the sun won’t even come up.

It was a perfect plan, and when the time came I embarked on my trip with a little bit of fear and a whole lot of enthusiasm. I had a great time in London, staying in the Holland Park youth hostel, singing Christmas carols at St. Martin in the Fields and then enjoying mulled wine and mince pies in the cafe located in the crypt. I bought a pair of Doc Martens in the shop at Covent Garden and then gave myself terrible blisters wearing my new boots and walking all over the city. Up and down the steps of the underground stations, in and out of parks and shops and museums and churches. I had no schedule and no commitments and so I just did what I wanted all day every day. It was lovely. I went to the movies and to the observatory at Greenwich, I searched out the street with all the Indian restaurants and spent long cozy hours reading in pubs. Looking back now, after six and half years of motherhood, I can’t even imagine having that much freedom and independence.

And then I flew to Stockholm. I had prepared myself for this part of the trip by taking a Swedish class at UT Informal Classes. The class was taught by a very cute and idiosyncratic young American woman who had been an exchange student in Sweden in high school and was currently the only PhD student in the Swedish program at UT. She told us that Swedes have a very high opinion of their own country and that they will often say that “Sweden is just like America, only better.” She explained that Swedes are more physical and less verbal than Americans; so, for example, if a Swedish person finds that your cart is in their way at the grocery store, they will not say, “Ahem, ahem, excuse me,” like we might. They will not even step over, move your cart out of the way, and then push their own cart through. Oh, no. They will take their cart and they will RAM your cart with it. They mean no offense. They are simply being Swedish.

Also, in Sweden, it is very important to be self-sufficient. Therefore, it is considered quite rude and insulting to offer help to people. For example, if you see a young mother with three small children, a dog, a stroller, and four grocery bags struggling to get on the bus, you might think it would be polite and friendly to offer her a hand. In Texas, you would be right. In Sweden, you would be oh so very wrong. Way out of line. Astonishingly rude.

Also, in Sweden they have vowels that we don’t have. I learned how to pronounce most of them, and I learned how to say please, and thank you, and a few other things like that. And I learned that in Sweden high school is conducted in English so in most cases I would not be called upon to use any Swedish at all, which was good, because Swedish is hard and that class was short.

When I got to Sweden I learned a few other things. For example, if you are allergic to the species of juniper that we here in Texas call cedar, you probably should not go to Sweden in the winter time. Cedar Fever hit me as soon as I got off the plane, though it was so bad and so unexpected that it took me a few days to figure out what it was. Also, it is not so easy to get a train ticket from Stockholm to Kiruna the week before Christmas. I never expected that there would be so many people traveling north of the Arctic Circle at that time of year! But when I went to the train station, all the trains were full. The girl at the ticket counter explained that she could sell me a ticket, but I would have to stand (all night!) and there would be nowhere to put my backpack, so I would have to hold it in my arms (all night!). I stood there, shocked, blinking my red allergic eyes and wiping my runny nose, and I stared at her for so long that she finally said, in her crisp clear English, “I don’t know what you want to do.” I wanted to go to the Ice Hotel, is what I wanted to do, so I left the train station and went back to my youth hostel, which was in an old prison and where I slept in one of the cells, and I called the airline to see if I could fly to Kiruna instead. And they said they would sell me a ticket, but it would cost more than my whole trip, which I simply could not afford.

And so I did not go to the Ice Hotel.

And I spent a couple of days crying in my prison cell and trying to figure out what to do and when the desk clerk told me that I had to leave the hostel because they were closing for the season I gave up. I came home early, and instead of celebrating the solstice at the Ice Hotel and spending a gloriously independent Christmas all by myself in Stockholm I spent the next few days curled up on my parents’ couch and playing with my giant puppy, who was very glad to see me, in a way that no Swedish person had been.

And I have never been back to Sweden. Though I have been to IKEA many times, and with much better results.

And now I have a Swedish car, who is a big white Volvo station wagon, and who is named Vendela, which means “wanderer” or “Vandal” or something like that. It’s a Swedish name. And my family is very very safe inside this wonderful car, and we drive her to the chiropractor and all around town, and when the Vivid Girl and I go wandering through parking lots looking for our lovely car we call out, “oh Ven-DEH-la!” until we find her, and this makes us happy.

And once again it is summer in Austin, which is hot, and which means that the Vivid Girl is not in school and instead has wanted to spend all her time with me and I was going crazy because she was even following me into the bathroom and she would follow me when I took two steps into the laundry room to toss a towel into the basket and she would get in between me and the fridge when I opened the freezer to get out some ice and then finally I found something that would keep her busy for a few minutes at a time so I could catch my breath and gather my thoughts: the Swedish Chef, on youtube.

And tonight I finally got a chance to write because when I came home from my new book group the Vivid Girl was already asleep, even though we are so very close to the longest day of the year. And the book that got me out of the house tonight? The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which is, of course, Swedish.

Sweden. There’s something about it. I’m just not sure what it is.

Tack så mycket for use of the photo from flickr, originally uploaded by VisitSweden and protected under a creative commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license.