a little something from my bulletin board to help keep me where the light is…

I suppose it goes without saying that moving to another culture is sometimes hard. There are a lot of exciting new things, to be sure. But there are sadnesses too, and mine tend to gang up on me around midnight. (Nasty little buggers.)

There’s been a kind of low-grade depression riding around on my breastbone these past few weeks. It seems to be always waiting for me—there, on the other side of the threshold, like the Wolf waiting until my Grandmother is weak enough to devour. I’ve been holding the sadness at bay fairly well, but when my hormone stew starts boiling, or if something goes awry – say, your semi-truck sized shipping container full of all your earthly goods arrives with a hole in the roof and two weeks of rainfall in the bottom –well, let’s just say things get a little shaky.

One of the things that is bothering me the most is that even here, in a country where I know virtually no-one and have no outside obligations, I am still fighting like mad to put pen to page. First I lost a week to migraines, then the children were out of school for Easter vacation, then there was a week spent getting ready to move, and another actually moving, then half a week waiting for the children to switch schools (again). Today I marched them into the local school, and when the teacher said this was just a meeting and not their first day, I had to insist that the schoolmistress had told me otherwise until the girls were given desks and workbooks, and I was able to escape to my desk for two quick hours before school was out again.

I feel so frustrated by the limitedness of my ‘success’ as a writer. At least as a pastor, at least at the church, there were concrete things to do, things that seemed to matter, something to show for my time. This accomplishing of things is much unlike writing, where a thousand days of pen-to-page may yield only a $50 paycheck and a stack of rejection letters. Still, I know in the core that there is no going back. I must write, compulsively and widely, even if the right combination of reader, market, and printing press never yields a dollar.

“This is the year for publishing, I think.” I wrote that in my journal a week or two ago. If a real live publishing house picks me up, so be it. But if not, there will still be books of mine on the market, even if the market is just the print-on-demand of self-publishing and a link to LuLu. Right after I made that decision, my soulsister told me she had launched this, and the self-publishing world transformed. Through Jen’s lens, sisters doing it for themselves was a not a second-class compromise, but a tool for artistic empowerment.

We may never make money, the soulsisters of the world and I, but we will put pen to page goddammit–we will testify.

I’m padding around in my mukluks and French apron, wiping off the Danish-modern dinette set and generally feeling pretty at home. (Of course, this after I’d once again sobbed my heart out over leaving one of our own behind.)

In spite of the propensity to break out into occasional tears, we are actually happy to have arrived here six hours ago with eight duffle bags, two children, and one silly dog in tow. We are here for at least three years, surrounding ourselves with words we do not know, cobblestone streets which insist on tying themselves in un-navigable knots, and not a small amount of pickled fish.

Oh, and pastries. Don’t forget the pastries.

Paul has a new job at Microsoft in Vaedbeck, just north of the city. All the fun ex-pats work there and his boss Clara is carefully headhunting more. We will be surrounded by intelligence, wit, and people with a variety of lovely accents—basically graduate school revisited. (Oh, how we keep trying to grasp at our youth!) We have a few days to muck about together, and then Paul takes the train to work, where he will eat warm bread and Danish butter everyday at staff breakfast. I believe there is something called “Cake Thursday” as well, so obviously it’s a very hard life. Meanwhile the girls and I will figure out the multiple train systems on our own and complete our most important tour of Danish bakeries. (Vil du ha caffe, ou vil du ha tae?)
We came to this country to live deliberately: to shop less, to own less, to leave a smaller footprint. We want to stop being unilingual. (Q: What do you call someone who only speaks one language? A: An American) We want to give our children a global perspective—even if it is all still Western—and to let our own adult selves be shaped by things we do not know.

Well, that, and the six weeks of vacation.

While we are here we will live in an urban flat that costs roughly the equivalent our six bedrooms Seattle mortgage. With this price, we secure a third room–for writing, and hosting, and maybe, someday, even for our lost boy. So if you have a yearning for pickled herring, windmills, and baked goods involving almond paste– you should come see us. After all, this is a nation where people believe in spreading chocolate on their morning toasts and drinking beer by noon. No wonder it’s considered “the happiest place on earth.” Go on…buy your ticket. We’ll be waiting.

Catie’s final chalk message on our front porch.

A month ago, Lynette accused us of “slipping away under the cover of night.” She was right, that was what we were planning on—in part because we don’t like big to-do’s, and a goodbye party where all our various worlds collide seemd overwhelming. And frankly, I just don’t like goodbyes. Lynette, however, is ridiculously rich in practical wisdom, so instead of moving in the cover of darkness, we planned a series of small goodbyes–dinners, coffees, and cocktails (especially cocktails.)—and these allowed us to say our thank yous and farewells.

All of this has left me quite tear-sodden. At one point, Katie K, my favorite neighbor, found me crying in the driveway. Why? Because I had to say goodbye to Sean—the cashier at my local grocery store. I know. It seems silly, but this is how we live. I seek out Sean’s line at the grocery store every week. Over time we’ve bemoaned the agony of first-time home buying (a condo purchased with his partner); made plans for a language learning CD (“Chinese the Gay Way”); and celebrated his one year sobriety anniversary. This is how we’ve built our life here in Seattle—by bonding with the grocery clerk, making friends with the neighbor, taking in stray boys and stray dogs. So when it comes to leaving, there is reall stuff, real people to leave—and that is far more difficult than selling a car or packing up a living room.

So I cry–because I won’t be able to sip chai with Jen, or have knit-and-tonic nights with Katie. I cry because I’ll no longer share a big old house with a gaggle of roommates. I cry because I’m ill at ease leaving our newly-legally-adult/quasi-grownup, ( I know Josh and Tonya will have his back, but come on–how’s a boy supposed to survive without unlimited internet and a fridge full of dairy products? ) I cry because I’m ripping my children out of their darling local elementary school, and prying them out of the arms of their sibling best-friends, Noah and Claire, and schlepping them a world away from Rosie, who Eden met the day before kindergarten and they are friends still yet. Not to mention what I’m doing my parents, who retired a year ago planning on full-time grandparent duty and are now wondering what they will do with all that time on their hands.

Then again, children adapt, and friendships survive long distance, and teenagers, well, they get “left” all the time at colleges and boarding schools and…I don’t know, boot camp? (Oh lord, don’t let him sign up for boot camp!) These are not reasons not to go. Ahead of us lies a wonderful adventure. If only I could stop blowing my nose and live into it!

In the midst of all the goodbye’s came many lovely gifts. The Uber-Family took photos of the four kids one day and presented us with an album the next. Rosie’s family threw a goodbye party for all the schoolyard chums. My folks dedicated many hours of grandchild tending while we sorted and packed. And Lynette helped her sweet Pascal make us bookmarks that say, “I will hold your place for you!” (This being exactly the kind of sentiment you would expect from a family who’s liscense plates read YOU MATTER and CONNECT.)
All of these gift are so tender and meaningful. They made us realize that, people like us—and that as much as we are connected to them, they are bonded to us. I really can’t explain how meaningful that is. Everytime I think about it, I’m back to the cry.

Just before we left, Katie read me a poem. It is one her father knows by heart, and she says the last stanza reminds her of our home. I think her reading this to me, after our storytelling-hours, is one of the nicest thing anyone has ever offered me. In reading me this poem, Katie proclaimed that the life Paul and I had hoped for had actually come true. So, when I cry a little too much, I read this poem. It gives me hope that we can again find our way to that magic place.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

A Prayer for My Daughter
William Butler Yeats

Want to read more about the beginning of our immigrant journey? Start here, then move on to this and this
.

Today the grey arrived at Copenhagen, like a shade snapped down over a window. It brought this prose/poem with it.

__________________________________________________________

This is a place for melancholy songs

The sea stretches
long and grey and even
the seabirds alone on their rocks,
each an island unto themselves.

I feel I am trying
to memorize the landscape,
embed it rebar-deep within the ground of my knowing
until it feels familiar, like home
or at least,
until it makes firm the quicksand of foreign soil
so my children won’t feel the shifting
so they can land firm off the horse.

At home, our wisteria is two years young.
She stretches her thin tips
to finger the bare edges of her over-long trellis.

Here, the wisteria is old
like wisdom, she climbs easily up
two, three, four stories
protecting those who dwell inside
from the wearing winds of age
and change

Only one house stands out
amongst the others,
not for its beauty but
but for its size,
its inappropriate smoothness,
the monstrous heave of its bulk.

Echoing its neighbors, yet
the unbroken stucco,
the brazen two car garage
the freestanding ball hoop lying tipped behind the automatic gate
screams of young money.

The Land Rover drives by,
far to wide for these cobbled streets,
enters the third door I had not seen
which opens by unseen hand
with a whir and a click.
This, too much of the future
on a shore inhabited for five thousand years.

Immigrant Diaries is a new category at Magpie Girl. Here you will find our adventures in Denmark. We move to Copenhagen with the New Year.

In thinking about our move I found myself saying “But we won’t be immigrants there, not really.” Then I was struck by the implicit racism in my own thinking – I had only been categorizing people of colors as ‘immigrants.’ Everyone else had some sort of special ‘I belong’ status in my mind. But we will, in fact, be seen as immigrants in our new home, our whiteness for the first time not granting us the immediate status of belonging. I’m curious as to what that will be like, so here I will record that story.
___________________________________________________________________________

On the quest to have one’s own identity while still pursuing cultural harmony:

I could tell right away they were not Danes. Most obvious, of course, was that they had dark skin – a rarity in this platinum blonde nation. She was ‘eating American,’ that is, picking up pieces of her too-chewy cinnamon bun with her fingers. He was pouring ketchup on his eggs. Neither had rye bread, cold sausage, or cheese on their plates. When they spoke British accents emerged, confirming my suspicions.

This is how people see me here. Small tell-tale habits give away my otherness, even when my mouth stays silent. I will never truly fit in.

And why should that be my goal? True, I want to shed my ‘ugly American-ness,’ but I still want to celebrate my unique otherness—as should we all.

Being here has made me aware of how much time I do spend trying to fit in. I’d like to think it is because I want to avoid giving offense. But the truth is I do it at home too, so I know it is not really about deferring to an unknown culture.

This morning I queued to the right on the stairs, ate my pastry with a fork, thought about growing my hair out long – maybe even ceasing to dye it red. Then I realized; I was in immediate danger of losing myself to a false image. I made a conscious decision to be gleeful, but polite, about not fitting in.

“Please don’t let me be ordinary,” my mother used to sing to me from The Fantasticks. It is true that from a young age I have never wanted to be ordinary, have never felt like one of the group. My intutive pull has always been towards the other, the fringe, the outsider.

Still, I’ve always wanted my uniqueness to be from clever choice, not from alien necessity. Here, where one of the national values is “equality through conformity,” I am nervous of being “the immigrant”—of sticking out due to my ignorance of the social norms—this social awkwardness feeling very different from my state-side approach of making a conscious choice to subvert the commercial monotony of the crowd. I don’t want to be different here out of mere social awkwardness. But then again, even moving here will be from choice, from some vaguely daring internal sense of adventure. So I guess on days when my ego needs the tiniest bit of a boost, I can chalked my cultural awkwardness up to cunning personal choice. When I need a shot in the arm to get out and get past all of the unknowns, I can look at my choice to dwell abroad, to be the cultural other, and say like Peter Pan, “Oh, for the cleverness of me.”