Ten Thousand Swedes Came Through the Weeds...

Do you have a default setting on your books, television, music, food…?  Most of us do.  When wandering through a bookstore my first stop is biography.  My music is Sinatra, food is salty/crunchy, and television is Turner Classic Movies.  I love the old black and white movies.  So, the other day I switched on the television and went straight to TCM for something to watch while folding clothes. 

            I tuned in mid-movie but still knew exactly where I was.  It was the hospital scene in the 1948 movie I Remember Mama.  The curmudgeonly Uncle Chris is trying to relieve the suffering of his grand nephew by singing a Norwegian-American ditty.

            “Ten thousand Swedes Came Through the Weeds…chased by one Norwegian!”

            In a single phrase I was time traveling.  My Dad loved to recite that doggerel.  He would carry on for more than one verse, always ending with the homage to the daring and infinite resourcefulness of my father’s people—that one redoubtable Norwegian.  Both my father’s parents were immigrants.  His mother came from Norway and, as typically happens, she formed the culture in the home.  My father represented the best of that breed.

            Dad was temperate.  He seldom swore and when he did it was directed at an object, not a person.  A tepid “damn” or “hell” was the worst he could conjure up.  Neither did he drink much.  He would accept a bottle of beer from a friend (it would be a violation of some basic code of masculine camaraderie not to) but that one beer would stay in his hand, getting warm and flat, for an entire afternoon picnic.  Whenever he was asked if he needed a drink, he would wave that beer in the air like he had just gotten it and carry on with his story.  And that leads me to my father’s one weakness.

            Dad could tell a story.  He told stories well—expansively—with color and movement.  When my Dad spun a yarn, you were there.  It didn’t matter if it was a story you had heard before, you wanted to hear it again, just for the pure joy of the experience.  If the story (all of which were sworn to be true) was a little different each time, you didn’t doubt the veracity of the tale, you were just glad he could remember it with greater clarity this time. 

            I think his tale-telling, like his temperance, was the result of the good early training you see demonstrated in the movie I Remember Mama, but even more in the book from which it was made.  If you have not read Mamma’s Bank Account by Katherine Forbes, (1943) it is worth the time.  It is not great literature, but it is a gentle account of the lives of Norwegian immigrants in San Francisco in the 1920’s.  While the book is more a series of vignettes than a novel, the stories are sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, but never sugary sweet.  They do present a compelling picture of the problems faced by marginal incomes and limited resources in a day when society and government offered no safety nets. 

            I can sum up Mamma’s Bank Account in the words of Momma as she would put Papa’s weekly pay into small piles of coins on the kitchen table each Friday, each apportioned to a different bill.  As the last coin went to the last bill and she declared there was no reason, this week, to have to go to the bank she would declare, “Is good.” 

            Read about something that affirms the best in us.  It will help you keep the faith.