Home For A Time

I was shopping in the outdoor Christmas market in Kungsträdgården Park in downtown Stockholm. It opens about four weeks before Christmas and the booths are supposed to carry genuine Swedish hand crafted gifts. But every year, it seems the items are less handcrafted and even less Swedish.

I have a silly notion that because I live in Sweden, the gifts I send to the folks back home should be, you know, Swedish. Something they cannot find in some store called “Northern Lights” in a suburban mall. I hold out until the last minute, hoping against hope that I’ll meet some artist or crafts person that will have a garage full of the gifts I am looking for. Some year it will hit me that I have to buy that stuff in the summer when I am traveling through some area of Sweden where these artists actually practice their craft.

I was under the gun to get something for Mom. After walking up and down the promenade between the booths, trying to decide what to choose, I settled on a linen bag full of silicone that heats up in a microwave or freezes in a freezer. It is used to apply therapy to knees, joints or other hurting parts of your body. My mom has had sore knees for a while. I thought that this bag of silicone, wrapped in a homemade linen sack with runes of the ancient Vikings on the cloth would be a step up from the frozen pea bag she was using. Weighing in at 1.2 kilos, it was about the weight and length of a good-sized Jersey submarine sandwich. Hopefully, it would be less than a small fortune to ship back to the States.

I was leaving the market, with my silicone sack in a plastic bag, shivering a bit against the mid December damp and cold. I needed to go home, wrap the gift, take it to the mailing shop, find an envelope that would work and get it off in the post today. I was trying to decide what bus to take home when coming towards me on the promenade was an older man with a camera around his neck.

The man was a perfect fit for the holiday season with his chubby shape, round face with high cheekbones and round rimless glasses. He had a close-cropped beard that was whiter than gray and it gave him the look of whom else, but Santa Claus. He came up to about my shoulders in height and he had a down jacket that was open in spite of the cold dampness of the day. His stocking cap was centered on his head, and looked like an inverted ice cream cone. Over his shoulder he carried a small canvas sack.

As we approached one another our eyes met and he smiled slightly and approached me. When this normally happens I prepare myself for the next few uncomfortable minutes of conversation. My Swedish is terrible and I have learned to say, in something near Swedish, how sorry I am that my Swedish is horrible and does the other person speak English?

“Ah, English,” said my gnome like stranger, “Where are you from?” After my answer of the United States, our conversation then became a monologue. My now new friend began a crash course history of his working adult life. The man was a professional news photographer and he had visited the United States taking photos at the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid. Upon my answering his question about what part of the United States I came from, he told me about the vacation the news syndicate gave the reporters and photographers in Florida after the Lake Placid assignment.

He then launched into a history of the United States covering the last fifty years. How the only Olympic games to make a profit were in Los Angeles. Surprising me, he then rattled off every assassination attempt on Presidents and other American dignitaries, including the perpetrators. A strange thing for anyone to remember, I thought.

My new friend asked me where I lived and what I did for a living. I responded that I was a freelance writer and lived here in Stockholm. “What have you written?” he asked. I said I had written some articles for magazines and that I had written a book. “What book!” he exclaimed. As the fates would have it, I had a copy of The Swedish Golf Experience in my bag. I had brought it to a meeting I had earlier that day. The book is a collection of essays and photographs of golf courses in Sweden. As a photographer, he admired the photographs and seemed pleased that I had shared it with him.

Regretfully, our meeting had to come to a close. I thanked the man for his time and began my farewell. He asked if he could take a picture of me holding the book? He took the camera off his neck, a film cartridge style with automatic winding that was state of the art twenty some years ago. He snapped a few shots, posing me in exactly the way he wanted. He seemed genuinely pleased to be at work, clicking away. We shook hands, and I wished him a God Jul. He said he had to give me something.

Ignoring my protests about needing anything from him, he reached into his sack and pulled out a small book. The book, "Vinterdag", really no bigger than a pamphlet, was a story by the Swedish artist, Roland Svensson. Svensson is renowned for his drawings of scenes from the Sweden archipelago. My friend excitedly paged through the book, struggling with his English to impart the information contained within. Pulling a pen out of the same bag the book was in; he asked how to spell my name. Realizing that my protests were falling on deaf ears, I patiently gave him the letters. He then inscribed a salutation, "To Jene from ..." and signed with a flourish, "press photographer Hanst Dehlskon." I had never met this man before and now I knew about his past and he knew enough about me to want to take my picture and give me a remembrance. What made this casual meeting in a city park so special?

On the way home, carrying the gift from Hanst, I wondered about him. Was he a gregarious man who walked the city striking up conversations with receptive people? Or, was it the opposite, a lonely old man who just needed to talk with someone? Are there people in this world who need to talk to strangers for, as Springsteen wrote, to receive that human touch?

I really hoped for the former over the latter. I wanted my press photographer to be a gregarious, world traveler who regaled the fortunate ones that he would choose with his tales of adventures with famous people in exotic locations. I imagined Hanst sitting in his living room, surrounded by his kids and grand kids, enjoying the warm glögg and family Julbord. I watched in my mind’s eye as he leafed through photos taken of events he had witnessed and documented with his camera’s eye, remembering the stories behind the events he had photographed.

I don’t want to give the impression that I am telling this story as a life lesson. I don’t expect you to now get some insight into life, and begin to seek out lonely people to strike up conversations on city streets. I rarely do this myself. Herman Hesse has said, “One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.” There was something that made that man’s path cross mine on that December afternoon. I should do that sort of interaction more in my life. Because, as rare as I have those spontaneous conversations, more rarely do I ever regret them.