Tuesday - The Great Divide
Jan. 10th, 2006 01:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninanevermoreToday on the drive into work, I was thinking about facts of life "talk," and how it was handled by my father with each of his children.
My father is American born, but culturally he is Swedish. He is not a product of modern Sweden, but of the Sweden of the late 1800's that his grandparents left before they wound up in Minnesota (a place so heavily populated with other Swedes that they never had to learn English). If you were to put one of those horned Viking helmets atop my father's head, it would not look out of place. With his sturdy build, broad face and white beard, he is a good model for a portrait of an aging Viking warrior.
The Old Warrior does not like wasting words. In fact, he barely likes using them at all. He conserves them the way a miser hoards money. Somewhere in his psyche, words are piled up like the treasures in a pirate's cave, spilling from wooden chests and covering the floor in glittering stacks. My father lives in his thoughts, but he does not voice them. He is an intelligent and thoughtful man who worked as a civil engineer before he retired. Words, to his mind, should be functional rather than fancy.
When it came to important things, he figured a few words could cover as much as a lot of words, but with less effort. With each of my three brothers, he covered sex, love, reproductive health, contraception and relationships in general with these words: "Be careful."
I, however, was his only daughter, and my talk had to be more inclusive. It occurred to him when I was in college that he and I needed to have the talk, and that it might be long overdue. Since there was so much at stake, the speech I got was more than twice as long as the one each of my brothers got.
"I don't approve," he said, "Be careful."
My father is American born, but culturally he is Swedish. He is not a product of modern Sweden, but of the Sweden of the late 1800's that his grandparents left before they wound up in Minnesota (a place so heavily populated with other Swedes that they never had to learn English). If you were to put one of those horned Viking helmets atop my father's head, it would not look out of place. With his sturdy build, broad face and white beard, he is a good model for a portrait of an aging Viking warrior.
The Old Warrior does not like wasting words. In fact, he barely likes using them at all. He conserves them the way a miser hoards money. Somewhere in his psyche, words are piled up like the treasures in a pirate's cave, spilling from wooden chests and covering the floor in glittering stacks. My father lives in his thoughts, but he does not voice them. He is an intelligent and thoughtful man who worked as a civil engineer before he retired. Words, to his mind, should be functional rather than fancy.
When it came to important things, he figured a few words could cover as much as a lot of words, but with less effort. With each of my three brothers, he covered sex, love, reproductive health, contraception and relationships in general with these words: "Be careful."
I, however, was his only daughter, and my talk had to be more inclusive. It occurred to him when I was in college that he and I needed to have the talk, and that it might be long overdue. Since there was so much at stake, the speech I got was more than twice as long as the one each of my brothers got.
"I don't approve," he said, "Be careful."
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Date: 2006-01-10 09:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-10 09:28 pm (UTC)