50/50

Houses in Southern California are built to withstand earthquakes, for obvious reason. One strategy is to make the house very strong, with reinforced walls and windows and doors. Another strategy is to make the house very flexible, so that when an earthquake hits, it shifts with the ground beneath it. At least that is what the real estate agent told my father when he and my mom bought the house we all grew up in down here in Mission Viejo, to explain why all the windows rattle everytime a door is closed anywhere in the house. Such housing construction would obviously not work out in Iceland very well, one storm would blow it down.   

After 2 months away from my son, my mommy instincts are perhaps a bit off. Yesterday, without thinking, I started singing this song for him. He loved it and has been trying to imitate saying "fire" and "liar" with this wacky accent since then. Of course, it would have been even worse in Iceland, where no one has heard of either Elmer Fudd, Robin Williams, or Bruce Springsteen. 

A few days ago I took a drive through Los Angeles. Between the smog, the fires, the lack of water, the sandy soil and the immense number of people living here, I feel fairly confident declaring this a much riskier place to live than a rocky, windy, cold island in the middle of the North Atlantic. 

It never rains in California, especially not in Southern California. So seeing actual rainbows is just about impossible. But my parents live in a town called Rainbow, named after all the colorful flowers that are grown here for nurseries nation wide. In other words, the town looks like a rainbow when viewed from an airplane. This is the reverse of rainbows in Iceland, which of course are only seen from the ground when looking into the air. The question is, where is the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow?

Last night, a cold snap settled in over Berkeley, and this morning I noticed that all the leaves had fallen off the maple trees. Just like that, all at once, winter has arrived in California. Now it is 60 degrees instead of 80.

This morning I spent some time in my son's preschool classroom. On the way in Dave said, "Next they'll expect Big Foot to show up. They think you are an urban legend." After being there a few minutes, the teacher said, "Palmer's mommy is here from Iceland" and then glanced at a globe, asked if I could show them where that was. Both of the teachers were surprised when I pointed to a tiny island way up in the North Atlantic, as if confirming the existence of a fictive land. I was more surprised by the fact that when I asked the kids who had been on an airplane, they all raised their hands. Three year olds get around these days, both in California and in Iceland, I guess.

The Icelandic birki is one of my favorite trees, it has a lovely fragrance, small, dark, filigreed leaves, and bark that changes color and texture, from a smooth red to a bumpy brown. Now that I'm back in California, I am turning my attention to the eucalyptus trees.  Like the birki trees, they have a strong fragrance and interesting bark that peels off in great layers, though the leaves are larger and smoother. They are, however, a non-native species, and are in fact too tall and thin for the California soil and for the strong winds here. Branches routinely fall off, and whole trees fall down on top of houses during stormy weather. The unobtrusive birki trees, hanging close to the ground, rarely get uprooted. Something to be said for things that grow slowly and cautiously.  

When I was growing up, I used to spend my summers in Iceland while all my friends spent their summers at the beach in Southern California. So I am pretty used to the phenomena wherein I am 5 shades whiter than everyone else in California. And yet still today, wearing a short skirt, I found myself self-conscious about it.

The day before I left Iceland, a friend of mine was telling me how happy she was I was going home to see my son. She said even though she understood that my career was important, children are the only thing in life that really matter. Looking at my son this morning, the wisdom of this seems clear. Children are a simple affirmation of hope and love in life.

This morning I went to turn on CNN, to catch up on the U.S. news. What to my wondering eyes should appear but "Governor" Sarah Palin. She seems to keep sticking around, even though her ticket lost the election. I found this a bit surprising, this lack of any sort of awareness on her part that she doesn't have the national spotlight anymore.

Icelandair has made some cut backs on their services, especially in the barest bones economy class, where one has to pay for one's snacks. So I already felt like some short cuts were being taken. Then I got on Jet Blue today; of course there is no food service, but their short cut went one step beyond: no inflight magazine either. They just expect Americans to sit happily in front of the built in television sets. Why should one need to eat or read when TV is in the offering? Of course, the ultimate short cut was getting to put on a pair of shorts this afternoon!

When I was in elementary school and junior high, I always took a seat in the first row, nearest the teacher. But sometimes the teacher would send me to the back of the class room, for talking too much to my classmates. This is when I began to realize I may be just a bit too verbally expressive for my own good. The funny thing is that whenever I am here in Iceland, I basically feel like I´ve been moved to the back of the classroom, since I speak MUCH less here than I do at home. My thoughts get ahead of my ability to express them in Icelandic, so I just stop. I have to say I think this is a good thing for me, since it has really helped me improve my listening skills. But the last time I went back to the States, all these pent up ideas and words came flooding out of me; I simply could not help myself, I spoke to just about every person I saw at the airport. Poor shoe shine guy, he really got an earfull. I am expecting just about the same thing to happen today and tomorrow, as I arrive St...

I've gotten my routine of what to do to get this apartment ready for my departure down to a science. Plus it makes life so much easier having two wardrobes, one in California and one here in Iceland; I basically don't even have to pack. It also helps that one wears completely different clothes in California than in Iceland. 

I hereby confirm that it feels just as good to hunt down an obscure reference in old Icelandic books as it did to hunt down odd archaeological facts at the Smithsonian. One of 6 projects is officially done!

A few months ago, some of us foreigners up here in Iceland were debating why Icelanders are so snobby about their language. I was sticking up for Iceland's deep love of the language and used as an example how familiar everyone is, no matter how educated, with a large body of Icelandic poetry. That knowing Icelandic is not just knowing the grammar, but also knowing all the poetic ways in which the language can stretch to accommodate new meaning. This is not the case in the United States; there are a few Robert Frost poems I suppose most of us learn, but mostly the teaching of poetry in the United States is limited to teaching Haiku. All of us have to compose Haiku at some point during school, since it is a relatively rule bound and short poetic form. But it can be quite beautiful. This morning I read a slightly unorthodoxed Haiku poem from my brother, and have decided that the U.S. school system really knows what it is doing. The poem was perfect.

Well, I just got off the phone with my aunt, we had a long conversation about the man haunting the house in California where I grew up. She's seen him, I've seen him, my grandfather spoke about him.  Funny thing is, on the very rare occasions I ever mentioned this to anyone in California, it was quickly dismissed. I am not sure now if I'm exactly comforted by my aunt's easy going assumption that this was normal, but at least it makes me feel part of the family. 

One thing that is remarkable about California is that just about everyone there comes from somewhere else. I knew very few kids whose family had been in California more than two generations, and almost all my friends have moved out of the town where we all grew up. Just now I was reading Íslenzkar Æviskrár , which describes in brief the lives of important Icelanders living between 1500 and 1900, or thereabouts. Everyone I've read about was on the move constantly, going to Denmark, to Rome, living in this farm and then that, heading off to Stockholm, then moving around from this farm to that again back in Iceland. I guess that is why I feel somewhat at home here, this tendency towards outward movement instead of inward stillness sits better with me. Even if it is the same tendency that caused the collapse of the banking system.    

Many of my friends in the United States read the satirical "newspaper" The Onion. I've never gotten in the habit of it, but sometimes my friends post links to good articles, and they are always a crack up. Iceland of course has four national newspapers and several underground papers focusing on the music scene and campus events. Icelanders also blog a lot. But something like the Onion is missing here, an irreverent, intelligent, funny, topical, critical without being condescending, stimulating newspaper. It would be nice if an Icelandic newspaper like that made its appearance.

This article  on the front page of the New York times has gotten everyone here in Iceland talking. And it has gotten me realizing how strange it is that I am not one of the foreigners planning on abandoning Iceland. It never occurred to me to do so. But it does make a bit more sense to me why people have started suddenly to ask me if I am definitely coming back in January, after going home for the holidays.  

My mom told me the other day that the U.S. press is characterizing the collapse of the Icelandic banking system as "the canary in the coal mine." I mentioned this to my Icelandic relatives the other day, and they were confused. I had to explain that a canary in a cage was lowered into the mining shaft before the miners, and only if it kept singing would the men go down. I suppose the canary also stayed with the men all day long, chirping and singing as long as everything was fine, but quickly dying if the air turned poor. The metaphor does not work in a country that does not have a deep history of mining, no memories of mine shafts that can fill with carbon gas before the workers even realize it. For me growing up, mining was a meaningful symbol of California's first settlement, of the potential riches of the soil, of a hard way of life we were overcoming. (One folksong I learned in elementary school about miners dying enmasse "In the town of Springfield, Nova Scotia...