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December 23, 2005
Bappa's eyes
The other night, as my wife and I made the korv, the sausage for our annual Swedish Christmas Eve dinner, someone on the radio asked occasional callers for their Christmas memories. The question brought to mind Evert F. Nordstrom, the grandfather who made the korv with the same recipe many years ago. I called him Bappa.
The memory was not altogether sweet.
It was Christmas 1966, and I was home on leave after Army basic training at Fort Jackson, S.C. As usual, family and friends, including uncles, aunts and cousins from afar, gathered to laugh and talk, to catch up with the family story and to gorge on Bappa and Nana's Swedish meal.
Many years before, I had told Nana a white lie. Not wanting to offend her, I had said how much I liked her pickled herring, called sill, even though, in fact, I could barely get it down without gagging. So, in 1966, as she stood watching, I filled my blue Depression glass plate with chunks of sill. At least it was a small plate.
As far as I could tell, Bappa, called Grandpappy by the cousins from afar, was his gleeful self that night. Although he had retired to Florida, where this particular dinner took place, he was my New Hampshire connection. He was born in Bedford in 1894 in a farmhouse built in 1776. I'm not sure how far he went to school, but he entered the workforce young, possibly because of the early death of his father. His expertise was in refrigeration instruments, including thermometers. He sold them, and he wrote a book about them.
Like many other literate first-generation Americans, Bappa was a student of his country's history and an admirer of Abraham Lincoln. These interests, along with baseball, became our special bond, skipping a generation. He took me to the Polo Grounds in 1954 and Yankee Stadium in 1958, and I still have the brochure, with his handwritten note on it, from his 1942 visit to the Gettysburg battlefield.
Unwittingly, Bappa was also the way I learned the truth - or one truth anyway - about Santa Claus. When I was 7, my mom was in the PTA, and she must have recruited her father as Santa Claus for a visit to my school. I could not mistake his eyes behind the cotton beard. I asked an older boy named Cappy Lingo about this, and he said that of course it had been my grandfather. Cappy grinned and told me there was no Santa Claus.
By Christmas 1966, I was no longer a boy. I was a man, a soldier happy to be done with endless marches in the morning damp and lessons in "the spirit of the bayonet." But I was also happy to be home, in the fold of family. And I woke up the morning after the Swedish feast with a boy's anticipation of Christmas.
But sometime during the night, Bappa had suffered a heart attack and died. He was one day shy of his 72nd birthday. Christmas was also Nana's birthday, magnifying the calamity.
I am the grandfather now. This means that when I think back on that Christmas, I no longer dwell on the shock or the loss or the pall that Bappa's death threw over our holiday. Instead I think of Evert F. Nordstrom alive. I see him as the loving grandfather with the shock of white hair and the broad ruddy face. I consider the kindness with which he touched my life. I think about how he did it and how I might be a good grandfather, imparting something to my grandchildren that their parents cannot.
The other night, as I ground the meat, barley and spices into the pig casings to make the korv, I looked down at my hands and saw Bappa's hands. I smiled as I remembered his laugh, and his singing voice, and his grand appetite for life.
He made a good Santa Claus, too, even though the costume could never disguise those kind eyes of his.
Merry Christmas.
Posted by Mike Pride at December 23, 2005 02:32 PM
Comments
Mike, thanks for this story, and especially the memory of your grandfather's hands.
Did your family celebrate Lucia Day? That's one of my favorite Swedish traditions--I recently posted an English translation of the Lucia Day song in my blog:
http://BetsyDevine.weblogger.com/2005/12/20#a2553
Posted by: Betsy Devine at December 23, 2005 03:27 PM
I'm at work now, in a strange, sprawling city far from home and friends and wooded hillsides and weathered brick downtowns and people tied so closely to their landscape and history; and at a desk that doesn't fit nearly as comfortably as the one I left behind in New Hampshire less than two months ago.
It's coming on 11:55. Five minutes, it'll be Christmas. An hour, I'll be home at last, where my family is sleeping and my oldest, who's 4, is no doubt dreaming about the coming dawn.
And I just read this wonderful piece, Mike, and said aloud, "Merry Christmas."
The perfect present -- and the first this year -- to put me in the spirit.
Thanks, and Merry Christmas. And all the best to the family, and Concord.
Posted by: Grambo at December 25, 2005 01:58 AM