Rememberment

Dad was no longer a member of the Lutheran Church like the rest of our family, but instead had joined the Evangelical Free Church when he became a born-again Christian. He would often take me with him to their meetings, where they had a separate club room for children. The routine there was pretty much always the same - we started by singing some gospels together, then did some coloring and drawing (which I always enjoyed). After that we would have some juice and cookies and then gathered together to hear some bible stories, and then sang one more song together in the end. The church also held summer camps. They had all the usual fare - outdoor and indoor games, sausages over the fire, swimming (which I gave a pass - I was afraid of water and didn't learn how to swim until I was 12 or so) and obviously gospel-singing and Bible-storytelling a plenty. But even with all that, I didn't make a single friend with any of the Free Church children. I would join the group activities when...

Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. The people of long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them. (Ecclesiastes 1: 2-3, 9, 11)   One day you will draw your last breath. You will be one of about 150 000 people to die on that day. Many of them will be old, some young, and about 6500 of them will be newborn babies. Perhaps you will have been fortunate enough so that you at least have people who will miss you when you're gone. This won't be the case for everyone. In fact, dying alone and unnoticed is becoming something of an epidemic . Regardless, unless you are one of the extremely rare individuals who leave a lasting mark on history, in just a few generations the world will have utterly forgotten ...

All in all I was a happy kid.  Sure, the house wasn't much and had some issues. Our water came from our own well and often tasted funny, and our heating boiler used peat pellets for fuel which made the whole place smell a certain way. The house was surrounded by trees so lightning storms were particularly exciting. And sure, every now and then something made me sad for a while (such as losing another pet to the Road of Death, this time our cat) or having to listen to the adults having an argument over something (that something most often being the building project that had emerged on our property - my oldest brother was starting his own furniture workshop).  Overall it wasn't all that bad though. Besides, we soon got a new dog. It also wasn't exactly a rare incident for someone's cat to be carrying kittens, so I got a new one of those as well.  "Welcome to the family, Sir Roadkill the Third". Besides my usual hobbies of drawing and reading, I spent a lot of ti...

My daughter had a biking accident. She fell on a tree stump and ended up with a gaping wound on her knee, so off to the ER it was. The doctor was a bit rough while examining her wound. "That hurts" my daughter said. "Life is pain", the doctor responded. "Wow, that's so profound. How about a punch in the balls so you can feel alive too?" Our good doctor wasn't wrong though - pain is a fundamental part of our lives. None can avoid it, and it comes in all flavors. In fact, it seems that pretty much everything we do is somehow tied to suffering. Our days are a constant struggle to prevent and escape it, and by doing so, we often just end up trading one kind of pain for another - we work in our unfulfilling jobs to avoid financial stress, let social media build up our anxieties in an attempt to escape loneliness and boredom, and hurt ourselves doing sports in the hopes of prolonging our seemingly pointless torment on this Earth. Want to be healthy and t...

I enjoyed the simplicity of life in our new home. Unlike in the apartment, I could go out whenever I wanted. And there was always something exciting to do, whether it was examining the surrounding nature in the summer or building things out of snow during winter. I also quickly made friends with a boy from our neighbour, besides him being a couple of years older than me. Their house was a few hundred meters away from ours and we visited each other by a path through the woods. On weekdays I was brought to an older couple living a bit further down the road. They looked after a couple of other boys as well for me to make friends with. It was a real farmhouse with cows, pigs and chickens and there was never a boring moment. We fed the animals, gathered eggs and though we were told not to, dug tunnels in the piles of hay in the barn. From that activity I once got such an allergic reaction that both my eyes were swollen shut. "I hope you learn your lesson from this" said Mom. I did...

I've had the idea of doing this for many years. Perhaps it's my midlife crisis that finally got me started - I'll be 50 this year and starting a blog seems cheaper than buying a motorcycle.  Not to mention I kinda hate motorcycles. For the most part, I guess I'm doing this just to see if I can. I enjoy writing, and consider it one of the few things I'm somewhat good at. This is also an attempt to do some self-healing, hence "rememberment" - trying to reattach some of my missing pieces by digging into the past. (Cool huh? Honestly, I just like playing with words. Pretty happy with this one!) Seriously though, some of the stuff I'm about to write here will be quite heavy.  I'm going to deal with sensitive topics such as mental issues and religion. You should probably consider yourself warned.  Thanks for joining. Perhaps we will both learn something along the way. I love stories. The ones I've found most captivating span across genres - comedy an...

"I think it's a boy" said the midwife while I was peeing all over her. The year was 1975 and my three brothers were already in their teens. Dad was just about to turn 40 and Mom was 34. Dad was the one who wanted a fourth child. It wasn’t a small thing to ask; they had already tried that once before and it didn’t go well. She was already far along when they found out that something’s seriously off. Terminating the pregnancy was the only option to ensure my mother would live. Mom agreed to give it one more go on a condition - my dad would have to participate in baby care, something he had not really done with my brothers. He made the promise and kept it. I still have a couple of memories from my first few years. Our apartment had two bedrooms. My brothers (and our dog) shared one of them. We often had a bunch of unfamiliar kids in the house, as my mom made some extra money minding other people's children. One of my memories is when such a kid took my favorite book and ...