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Thursday, April 5, 2012

Traveling around England, Scotland, and Wales with my mom and great-aunt by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Traveling around  England, Scotland, and Wales with my mom and great aunt by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 


The British said “River Thames” and not “Thames River” I noticed as my mother and great-aunt purchased tickets for a boat and bus tour out of London when I was on a trip with them as an elementary student.


We took a taxi to Maidenhead, where we boarded the tour boat.  We stopped first at Stokes Poges and visited a church from Anglo-Saxon times called Saint Gilles that was more than 1,000 years old.  My great-aunt and I smelled the antique roses with many petals, whose perfume seemed all that much stronger in the misty air.


Back on the boat, we passed an English village, which looked mysterious due to the foggy mist.  This village called Bray on Thames harbors Michelin four-starred restaurants, but I was enchanted with Bray, because it looked like the drawings in my fairy tale books.


Finally, we arrived at Windsor Castle.  Windsor Castle was built around 1078 by William the Conqueror as a fortress high on a chalk cliff over the Thames.  As a child, my lasting impression of the place was of the Queen’s Gardens.  After admiring the flowers, we set out for lunch at the Castle Hotel in Windsor.


After lunch, we took the bus to Runnymede where the Magna Carta was signed by King John in 1215 to guarantee the rights and property of barons; American colonists knew of this document and used it as a precedent for the American Constitution. 

 

My maiden name is Ruth Pennington, and three Penningtons signed the Magna Carta.  I was pretty happy to learn this later in life when I thought about running for president one day.


From Runnymede we took the bus to Hampton Court.  The gardens there are fantastic as well, but under no condition was I allowed to go into the maze made up of towering Yew trees.


Earlier in the week, while my mother and great-aunt were watching the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace from the Victoria Monument, I walked across the street and into Saint James Park.  I started counting swans, because the Queen kept track of them. 


When I came back out of the park, the English policemen were on the scene and the whole tour group was rather agitated.  I just laughed at all the commotion and got back on the tour bus for the rest of the London city tour.  I had become a "lost child."


So, my time at Hampton Court was limited to photos in the garden in my double-breasted, blue coat with brass buttons.  My hair was in pony tails, because I had succeeded in taking down the bun my mother had sent me out into the world with earlier in the day.  


I wanted to see a castle a day, but I was quickly realizing that the gardens were the true treasures of the British Isles. 


The journal that my great-aunt and mother kept for me of this trip made me realize that it was my great-aunt, who made me love gardens so well.  


Her handwritten notes about how much she loved English roses are the best souvenir I have of the wonderful trip I took to the British Isles many decades ago.


By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France


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Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Learning about Canada‘s French Culture in Montreal by Ruth Paget

Learning about Canada's French Culture in Montreal by Ruth Paget 


I learned about the vestiges of French exploration and/or colonization from my high my first French teacher in Detroit, Michigan. She was from Guadalupe and ran an efficient classroom.


She told us that French was a language of diplomacy, business, art, cuisine, and fashion to introduce us to the language we would be studying.  


She also gave us expectations for classroom behavior and homework rules.  She emphasized that if we wanted to go on the spring break trip to Montreal that we would have to keep our grades up.  “Up” meant a “B” or better.


I loved traveling and studied hard to make it onto the train to Montreal in the province of Quebec, Canada for a week.  Instead of taking the tunnel under the Detroit River to Canada, my mother drove me to Windsor in Ontario over the Detroit-Canada Bridge, so I could see the Detroit skyline.  


As soon as you enter Canada, the signs are in English and French, signaling a different way of life.


Almost all of the students in my school including me had been to Windsor, Canada.  Windsor offers visitors river front gardens, a great view of Detroit with John Portman’s (b. 1924) Renaissance Center in the middle of the skyline, beautiful restaurants, and crystal and china shops galore along Oulette Street.


Montreal was a cousin to Paris albeit colder, we had learned in our teacher’s orientation session before we set out on the trip.  I thought Montreal must have had massive traffic jams as it is located on an island where the St. Lawrence and Ottowa Rivers meet.  


Our teacher made sure that we could order in a restaurant, buy clothes, purchase movie tickets, and get directions in French before we headed out to Montreal.


Everyone stayed up all night on the train talking with our friends, telling jokes, and playing logic games like 21 Questions and Who am I?


Upon arrival in Montreal, we loaded our suitcases into a tour bus and took an all-day city tour, which required several stops and walks up steep hills.  The hills seemed steeper than they were, because we were tired.


The stop that interested me the most was our visit to St. Joseph’s Oratory.  I had been in Catholic Churches before, but had never seen a pilgrimage site before.  Canes lined the walls along with crutches and wheelchairs left by people, who had been cured by a visit to the Oratory.  


According to the Michelin Guide I read years later, Brother André, born Alfred Bessette (1845 – 1937) created the devotions to Saint Joseph at this church that healed ailing pilgrims.


Some of us lit candles and prayed for loved ones.  


Our next hilly stop was Parc du Mont Royal which was planned by the landscape architect Frederic Law Olmstead (1822 – 1903), who had planned New York’s Central Park.  


We drove through the exclusive Westmount neighborhood to get to the park and took many photographs of the nineteenth century mansions, which reminded us of Detroit’s exclusive neighborhoods of Palmer Woods, Indian Village, and Sherwood Forest.


Later in the week, we took another tour bus out to the Olympic Park built to host the 1976 summer Olympic Games.  These games were fresh in our teen minds in 1979.  I loved the excitement of sports; the skier Franz Klammer was my favorite athlete.


We all complained to our French teacher that she had not arranged for us to go swimming in one of the six pools of the aquatic complex.  I think she might have wanted to throw all of us into a swimming pool after five days in a youth hostel.


The best part of our trip, though, was getting to spend a day in a bilingual high school.  We attended algebra, English, and biology classes.  In English, we read parts in a readers’ theatre of part of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a Grade 13 class; Canadians go to school for thirteen years.  The algebra and biology classes were taught in French.


I could keep up with the algebra class and was happy, because I knew that Canadian schools at the time were among some of the best in the world when using international testing standards.


I also learned from one of the English-speaking teenagers that she liked studying French, because it reinforced her understanding of English grammar.  I was not entirely sure of what she meant until I studied French for another year. 


When and why to use certain verb tenses became very clear to me in English as I studied the same verb tenses in French.


When I diagrammed sentences in English class, I knew exactly what to do with subordinate clauses thanks to studies of French as well.  French was my insider secret to doing well in English class.  That secret was the best souvenir I brought back from Montreal.


By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France


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Friday, March 30, 2012

Attending Tea Parties in the US, the British Isles, and the People's Republic of China with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget


Attending Tea Parties in the US, the British Isles, and the People's Republic of China with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget


“The hors d’oeuvres are for the adults only,” said the English colleague of my mother, whom she had invited with his wife for tea at our house.


I, the eleven-year-old princess, was not going to be denied the liver pâté on crackers that my mother was serving as part of the tea.  I went into my bedroom to execute my plan.


I immediately began making placards to wear over my chest and back.  I wrote out my message, attached the placards with a string, and put them over my head.


I took the American flag out of my mother’s closet and reappeared in the living room.  I circled in front of the coffee table before the English couple with the flag held high and the message “Equal Rights for Kids” emblazoned in red marker on the placards.


“You just have to like some children,” the Englishman said as he was guffawing American-style now.  Victory won, I sat down nicely to enjoy the liver pâté and drink tannin-rich Red Rose™ tea from Canada that we always drank in my childhood home in Detroit, Michigan.  I willingly fought for my tea, because I knew that “biscuits” known as “cookies” in America would soon appear.


Thanks to a trip I took to the British Isles with my mother and great-aunt when I was seven, I already knew what a tea held in store.  On our trip, we visited my grandmother’s English pen pals, who plied us with cucumber, radish, and butter sandwiches served on white bread without crusts.


The sandwiches occupied the bottom tier of a three-tiered tea goodie tray.  The smaller tier in the middle usually held dry yet sweet triangular scone muffins that tasted good once you dunked them in tea.  The very top and smallest tier held dainty desserts and cookies.  As a child, I munched away on cucumber sandwiches just waiting to get to the top tray.


More than the cookies, though, drinking tea even at the young age of eleven, conjured up the magic landscapes I had seen in the British Isles.


I liked standing in the doorways of the stone farmhouses we stayed in overnight and looking out over the misty, emerald fields with stone fences of irregular heights separating them.  I always felt like I was dreaming while I was wide awake while looking at this scenery.  Sipping tea helped me recall that otherworldly feeling.


Tea brought on other feelings in high school when I had the chance to visit the People’s Republic of China in 1979.  At that time, China prided itself as having an “iron rice bowl” or social security blanket for all.  


After reading about the Chinese war for independence, communes, and the Cultural Revolution, I had a rugged view of the Chinese, who wore blue Mao jackets.


How surprised I was to find that communists liked overstuffed furniture covered on the backs with white lace doilies.  No matter where we went – train station reception rooms, hospitals, factories, hotel lobbies – we invariably sat through presentations and question-and-answer sessions in chairs like these with a warm cup of tea beside us.


Chinese tea cups offer countless play opportunities, especially while you are listening to a presentation about how tennis ball production has improved yearly since the 1939 Revolution.


The mug-sized teacups came with a cover.  Every time you would take off the cover, you would get a cloud of jasmine-scented tea that you could waft toward you.  Jasmine tea appeared to be China’s official function tea. 

 

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France


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Thursday, March 29, 2012

Eating Greek Food at Home Parties and Holiday Parties with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget


Eating Greek Food at Home Parties and Holiday Foods with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 


The pungent, cold odor of lemon and oregano rose from the calf skull that I carefully held together with the two sides of my “doggie bag.”  The skull was what was left of my meal of boiled brains in Chicago’s Greek town.


I entered my college dorm at the University of Chicago.  I looked over at my Greek-American roommate, who was peacefully sleeping, and stifled a laugh.  I quietly walked over to her bed and put the skull under her nose, which immediately crinkled.


Her eyes popped open and she let out a shriek.  “I told you I’d bring home some Greek food,” I said as I menaced her with the stinky skull.


My good sport roommate liked my awful sense of humor and invited me to spend weekends with her family in the Chicago suburbs.  I tried some Greek foods in her home that do not show up on restaurant menus like Thanksgiving turkey stuffed with a mixture of ground lamb, pine nuts, raisins, and rice.  


I discovered that the Greeks use lemons almost like salt when I ate roasted chicken with potatoes that were bathed in olive oil and lemon juice.  On hot days, we would sit on the back porch and eat feta cheese along with plump, black Kalamata olives.


Thanks to eating in Detroit’s Greek town as a child, I was already familiar with Greek foods like pastitio, a baked macaroni dish with meat sauce that is lightly flavored with cinnamon.  


During one of my weekend visits, my roommate’s mother had made pastitio and none of the kids except me wanted to eat it.  They wanted American food.  My roommate’s frustrated mother pointed to two rows of cereal boxes on top of the refrigerator and said, “There’s your American food.”


“Why do you have so many cereals,” I wondered out loud.


“Mom’s always stocking up for war,” one of kids said, which made us all laugh.


We were still laughing when my roommate’s mother served us platefuls of horta, a mixture of boiled dandelion greens, chicory, escarole, and/or kale generally.


“Keep laughing,” my roommate’s mother chided us.  “During the War (World War II), all we had to eat was the horta we could find on the mountainsides.”  I doused the greens with olive oil and freshly squeezed lemon juice to take away some of the horta’s bitterness.


Luckily, bitter herbs were only part of the Greek menu in America.  Getting ready to pull an all-nighter of studying to complete term papers or study Japanese characters, I would smile as my roommate’s mother set out a small pyramid of melamakarona cookies for me to nibble on during the night.  These cookies are made with butter and dunked in orange-flavored hot honey and topped off with ground walnuts – very good brain food.


Tables groaning under the weight of melamakarona and other honey-laden desserts like bakalava featured prominently at all the Greek community parties I attended with my roommate’s family.  


These parties included Greek Independence Day celebrations, village dances complete with circle dances, and dances organized under the auspices of the Greek-American youth organizations called the Sons of Pericles and the Maids of Athena.


Celebrating Greek Orthodox Easter, though, with my roommate’s family remains my favorite college memory.  We attended midnight mass and as we left the church lit only by candles we said, “Kristos Anesti (Christ is Risen)” and wished each other “Hronya Pohla (May you have a long life.)”  We repeated these greetings when we arrived at the relative’s house for the midnight meal.


The main dish of this midnight meal is a lemon and scallion flavored soup made with lamb tripe, lungs, heart, and liver.  During the meal, we tapped the ends of our gleaming red eggs against one another’s eggs to see whose would crack.  The person with the last unbroken egg won them all.


The next day, red eggs showed up again peeking out through bread lattice-work in the festive round loaves made by all the ladies for Easter.  While we waited for the spit-roasted lamb to finish cooking in the backyard, we noshed on Greek village salad, heavy with plenty of cucumbers, purple onions, green peppers, anchovies, tomatoes, black olives, and feta cheese.


We used bread as if it were another utensil to soak up the oregano-flavored vinaigrette.


Sitting there balancing plates of this delicious food on my knees as I talked with the Greek cousins and friends, I thought of how I wanted a life like this, too.


By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Trying Russian Cocktail Food in Chicago with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget


Trying Russian Cocktail Food in Chicago with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 


“So tell me what glasnost is before we get there,” I said to my college buddy as we waited to cross one of Chicago’s eight-lane streets on our way to a cocktail party honoring glasnost.


“Don’t you read the newspaper?” my college buddy asked.


“No, I gave it up when the student subscription ran out,” I said as we crossed the street fighting the autumn wind and crowds of people coming from the other side of the street.


“Don’t you watch the news?” my college buddy asked, trying to keep her little red bow from blowing in her face.  I wore a similar bow with my blue suit in an early 1980s attempt to emulate male neckties at IBM.


“I work too late to see the six o’clock news, and I’m in bed before the eleven o’clock news,” I responded in the pre-CNN year of 1987.


“How do you keep on top of things,” my college buddy asked in disbelief.  I had gone to a PR briefing on CNN at J. Walter Thompson, advertising agency in Chicago, but I did not watch it.


I laughed and said, “I eavesdrop on conversations.”


“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard anyone talk about glasnost,” she said.


I pushed my little red bow out of my face that was flapping in the wind and looked over at her.  


“Don’t pick on me,” I said.  “I know glasnost is Russian, but we’re more into things Asian in my unit at the firm.”  We both fit the type of organization types in our blue suits, even though we had said in college we would never wear these in college.


We arrived at the restaurant and immediately headed to the restroom, so we could comb our windblown hair.   “Who’s sponsoring this shindig?” my college buddy asked.


“The invitation said it’s a radio station that has a Russian political commentator.  Maybe they’ll think we’re potential advertisers and ply us with food and drink,” I gleefully thought aloud.


“I love your reasoning,” my college buddy responded.


We left the restroom and walked towards the meeting room.  “You never did tell me what glasnost is.”


“Well, it’s hard to define exactly…” my college buddy started in.


“Oh really.  I thought you would know since you read the paper and watch the news all the time,” I said.


“Don’t push it, Ruth.  I could leave you in the dark about it all evening.”  


“Oh, come on.  I’m trying to educate myself here,” I said.


“Let’s just say glasnost is about promoting political openness,” my college buddy said.


“Is that all!  It sounds like Mao’s “Let 100 Flowers Bloom Campaign” that encouraged dissent, so it was easy to identify critics and jail them later,” I said.


“My, you’ve gotten some mileage out of that degree in Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations,” my college buddy laughed.


"I know.  My relatives asked if I was an expert on Philadelphia, Boston, and Bangor (Maine) when they saw the Far East Languages and Civilizations BA notice I sent out for graduation money," I said.



The radio presenter was giving a presentation when we walked in the conference room.  We headed towards the food and drink and viewed our first Russian zakuski table.  Zakuski in Russian means “little bites” I learned later.


I had eaten Polish food before, so I recognized the pirozhki (Russian ravioli stuffed with beef and onions) and the cabbage leaves (stuffed with ground beef)  On the other side of the table around the outer edge were dishes like beet salad, carrot salad, radishes in sour cream with scallions, and glass dishes of black and orange-colored caviar.


Carafes of plain and flavored vodka sat in the center of the table with shot glasses surrounded by baskets of black rye and white bread.


My college buddy, who was Polish and Lithuanian on one side of her family, knew about vodka.  She poured us some of the innocent looking potato-based fluid.


“You’re supposed to drink it down in one swallow,” she said.  “The fumes are what make you drunk.”


The vodka burned my throat as I contemplated the caviars in their glass bowls on ice. “I’m not bothering with the potato salad,” I said.  “I’m just going to eat the caviar, because it’s the most expensive thing here.”


“Have you ever eaten caviar before?” my college buddy asked.


“No, I wonder what you’re supposed to do with it?” I asked.


“We can just drink a bit until we see what everyone else does,” my college buddy suggested.


After a few more shots of vodka, a few more people did come and eat the caviar, which had its nuances.  The small, black caviar got eaten with white bread.  The orange-hued salmon caviar got eaten with dark rye bread.  


Some people added chopped raw onions and lemon juice to the orange caviar.  I tried both kinds of caviar and liked the salty squirts of liquid they left on the tongue. 


We both continued to generously serve ourselves with regular vodka.  My college buddy finally asked, “Don’t you think it’s time for our dessert vodkas?”  We had a choice of apricot, cherry, and lemon flavored ones to choose from.


We could hardly keep up with the serious drinkers around us, though.  I only discovered the historical saying “Drinking is the Joy of Rus” years later when I worked in a gallery selling Russian icons among other art objects.  


In the tenth century, the Grand Prince Vladimir unified Russia and wanted to confer a religion on his subjects.  He was ready to accept Islam as the state religion until he found out that it forbade alcohol consumption.


I thought it was quite neat that I had been able to attend a glasnost cocktail party without being asked my opinion of glasnost.  Towards the end of the evening, though, one of Chicago’s consul generals (the Greeks do moocher patrol in the Windy City) came up to us and asked if we were journalists, which made us laugh.  


I told him that we had recently graduated from college, and then asked, “Do you think glasnost is going to have a lasting effect on politics in the Soviet Union?”


He gave what I am sure was an intelligent response, but I was having a hard time paying attention.  My college buddy had choked on her vodka, and I was trying not to laugh at her.


By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Learning about Scandinavian Culture in Door County (Wisconsin) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget





Learning about Scandinavian Culture in Door County (Wisconsin) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget


I had the chance to visit Wisconsin’s Door County, located northeast of Milwaukee on a peninsula that juts out into Lake Michigan with my family when I lived in Wisconsin.  Door County is famous for the fall colors of its trees, and since it was September I naturally wanted to visit.


When my daughter would want to join the conversation, I would say, “Tell me when you see cows, too,” so our talk was interspersed with cow sightings along the way.  As for me, I did not want to miss anything related to gastronomy and worried that I would miss the fish boil as we passed all the secondary roads we had to take between Madison and Door County to get there.


We arrived an hour before the fish boil, but that was not much time to get dressed for dinner.  I got my hotel room key and went to my room in the sprawling complex that made up the resort.  I arrived at the room, inserted my key, and broke it in half, leaving a piece in the lock.  My daughter started crying, because we would not be able to get into our room.


I called from a hallway courtesy phone and explained my predicament.  The hotel staff person arrived promptly and told me that I was trying to get into the wrong room.  He took me to the right room without lecturing me.  Time to get to the fish boil was slipping away.


I met my long-suffering car companion downstairs, and we drove to the restaurant where we met our spouses.  The telephone book in our room had a good explanation of this culinary specialty that put all the essentials in a nutshell.  I have paraphrased and supplemented the information as follows:


The Legendary Fish Boil


Scandinavian settlers and lumberjacks in Door County prepared fish steaks with potatoes and onions.  They threw it all in a pot and boiled it over an open fire.  Just before serving the fish boil, you throw gasoline over the fire and let the flames cause some of the stew to boil over .  You eat the fish with plenty of melted butter, a favorite beverage, and cherry pie.  Door County is famous for its cherries. 


The next morning my husband, daughter, and I went to the hotel restaurant for breakfast.  We sat by a window and looked out over the tops of trees that were already turning orange, red, and golden yellows.  I castigated myself for being such a city girl and not knowing the names of the trees.  I could not take my eyes off the scenery.  I felt very fortunate to see this spot and understood why so many people from Chicago came here to escape the big city.


When my daughter and I came back to the room, I made plans to go into Egg Harbor.  Egg Harbor I discovered is trendy with many of shops selling clothing, crafts, and souvenirs.  There was no historical museum in town, or maybe I just could not find it.  I did get a small brochure at the information center that described how the town got its name in 1825 in one sentence, which basically said that there was a fight with eggs between six men on a trading flotilla. 


I was on a quest to buy a guide book about Door County and its history.  I went to a fabulous market on Main Street.  I only had a few minutes to look around, but a few items caught my eye – big city newspapers in the doorway, roasted chicken, anchovy paste, a great selection of wines from Europe and California, freshly baked muffins and breads, and vegetables carefully displayed in woven baskets.  I bought some postcards of Door County for my journal.


After that I went to several trendy shops.  I bought a great, inexpensive book at a store about the wood stave churches of the world.  Most of these churches are found in Norway, and I hoped I would visit them someday.  Until then, I would soak up what I could from the little book.  I walked down to the harbor through Harbor View Park.  The yachts would soon be stored I thought as I felt a slight chill in the autumn air.  We returned to the hotel to discuss lunch plans.


I told my husband how great the market was that I found, and we decided to go buy our lunch there.  We bought a roasted chicken, a pound of pasta salad, a bag of freshly baked wheat rolls, and a dozen apples.  We ordered dishes for our room from housekeeping and had a feast.  My daughter loved the chicken and was delighted to get the big piece of the wishbone when we pulled it.


After lunch my family took naps while I wrote.  When they woke up, we drove to Gill’s Rock.  My daughter played at the rock beach with her dad.  I checked out the tourist spots.  You know you are in tourist territory in Wisconsin when you can buy plaques with Chicago Bears insignia on them less than fifty miles from where the Green Bay Packers rule. 


On our return home, we concentrated on playing “Find the Barn” and “Count the Cows” with my daughter through a forest of blazing fall colors dotted with farms.My husband left before me to go to a meeting and arranged for the spouse of one of his colleagues to drive me and my daughter to Door County.  I chatted about raising children and the fish boil that we were supposed to attend once we arrived. 


By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France


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Learning about Norwegian Culture in Minnesota with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget




Learning about Norwegian Culture in Minnesota with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 


Fall colors convinced me to go along with my husband on a business trip to Minneapolis, Minnesota one weekend when we lived in Wisconsin.


While my husband worked, I drove around Lake Mille Lacs outside Minneapolis and visited all the small towns.  “Lake Mille Lacs” means “Lake One Thousand Lakes” and “Isle” means “Island.” 


The name Lake Mille Lacs refers to all the lakes in Minnesota that were created when the last glaciers retreated.   The license plates all said that there were 10,000 lakes in the state.  The mosquito was jokingly called the state bird on postcards.


A state park dedicated to Father Hennepin further attested to French exploration of this area.  The largest group of Europeans, though, who settled Minnesota are from the Scandinavian countries of Norway and Sweden.  The Objibway are the original inhabitants.


When I arrived in one small town, I immediately saw a little craft store that sold Norwegian items like tablecloths.  I decided to start my souvenir shopping at the hardware store, though, because that was the only place that was open.  I bought some fishing tackle for the fishermen in the family and started to look for some old-fashioned toys for my daughter.


The toys I found for my daughter included dominoes, white chalk, a pick-up sticks game, and a little handheld pinball game.  I loved getting things like this as a child and looked forward to sharing them with my little one.  


I would dole them out in two-week intervals so that each item would get her full attention.  I bought my mother a pretty flowered tablecloth for her kitchen table; small town hardware stores carry just about everything.


The Norwegian crafts store was now open, and I proceeded across the street.  I walked into a party happening at 10:00 am in this crafts store.  About fifteen Norwegian matrons were gathered around a “Congratulations” cake.  The elderly owner of the store was signing copies of her first book, which detailed her romance with the American who had brought her to Minnesota.

She invited me to have some cake and tea and asked where I was from.  I told her about my wanderings that had led me to Wisconsin.  She told me, “You should write a book, too!  Everyone’s life has drama in it.”


“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” I said.

She knew I was buying souvenirs for a child and let me purchase a book for my daughter.  I found a Scandinavian fairy tale called The Tomten and the Fox.  The tomtem looked like a Norwegian leprechaun, but instead of tricking people the tomtem helped them. 

 

In this story, the tomten protected the chickens from a wily fox for a family, who did not realize how hard the tomten worked.


The visit to the Norwegian craft store left me in high spirits.  The scenery was beautiful with the leaves turning golden, red, and brown as I drove back to the hotel.  I did want to write, but mostly I wanted to participate in wonderful moments in life like going to a 10 am book signing for a romance book.


By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France


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