The language of the heart

A swan glides silently on the water in the little bay outside my house.  I watch as he slowly approaches the shore near my neighbour's beach and, there she is, his partner, partially concealed by the rushes.  The swans always appear together, a pair.

It's been a long time in since I ate a meal with a man, just the two of us, on a date, or across the breakfast table at home.  I've been single now for over two years.  It's lonely, but it's also healing.  Healing deep wounds of past relationships.  Not just my marriage and the relationship after that.  But further back.  My parent's marriage.  My grandparents and great-grandparents.  Who knows what they said to each other across the dinner table.  Did they even speak?  Maybe they had been raised to eat, but not talk at meal times.  In the case of my paternal grandparents they had been raised with different languages and different cultures, that was also the case with my parents of course.

Yesterday I took myself out for lunch.  I was off work.  Off sick, but not exactly sick.  I had taken what they call a mental health day.  The day before I had tendered my resignation in an email to the two headmasters at my school.  It's funny how the British word Headmaster conjures up a completely different image to that of the American Principal, or the Swedish Rektor.  Language differences are tricky.  I've grown to hate them.  Teaching in a middle school with predominantly Arabic speaking students will do that to you if you don't speak Arabic yourself.  It's a horrible feeling not being able to understand what students are talking about to each other, across the lunch table, across the classroom.  And they are not usually talking, they are usually shrieking, screaming, or shouting.  I'm not really sure why I have put myself through this experience, but I somehow feel a karmic debt has been repaid.  It's over.

I had been promising myself lunch at the local restaurant my father, children and I loved to go to in the summers when we were here.  It's a small, family-owned diner specializing in traditional Swedish Husmanskost.  It was tucked away at the side of a small apartment building behind the main shopping street and square in Söderköping and is aptly named Bakfickan.  For 89 SEK you can enjoy a variety of salads, fresh-baked bread, one of a choice of three or four well-cooked meals and coffee and cookies afterwards.  This is what's known as Dagen's Lunch in Sweden.  By far the best deal when eating out.  The same meal in the evening will cost you twice as much.

Earlier this month Bakfickan relocated to much larger premises by Göta canal which runs through Söderköping linking the east coast of Sweden with the west.  It's a spot that will attract many tourists come summer.  The place was crowded at 12:30 on Friday lunchtime and I felt lucky to find a small table for two next to another one the same size where two ladies were celebrating their birthdays together.  It felt a bit strange to be eating alone and I got some stares from nearby tables.  Swedes tend to stare more than Californians or the English.  But let them.

I was just finishing my salad when a man looking for a place to sit asked if he could share my table.  "Of course," I replied and he sat down.  This was literally the only empty seat in the whole restaurant now.  At first it felt a little strange to sit with a complete stranger but I decided to start a conversation and he reciprocated.

As it turned out we had a lot in common.  His children had attended a Waldorf School in Norrköping that has since closed down, and so had mine, for a short time, in King's Langley, also now sadly defunct.  I am still very interested in the Waldorf pedagogy and another discipline that originated in the work of Rudolf Steiner, anthroposophical medicine.  We both lamented the recent closure of the anthroposophically based hospital in Järna, south of Stockholm.  Another synchronicity was that this man had himself attended the school where I now teach when he was growing up in Norrköping.  The chances of any stranger in Söderköping being interested in Waldorf pedagogy, anthroposophical medicine and also having attended the school I teach in are probably not that high.  Isn't it a wonderfully small world we live in at times?

We don't even know each other's names, but we had a very enjoyable conversation over a delicious lunch.  When he asked if I would like coffee and whether I drank it black or not, very simple, everyday questions, I realized how nice it would be to do this more often.  Not necessarily with him, but with someone.  To be in a pair again, like the swans.  I feel my heart is healing and is ready to communicate with another again in a language that crosses all boundaries of culture, as evidenced by the marriage of my Chinese grandfather and East-End-Irish grandmother.  But theirs is another story...