Chapter Four
Meet Lena
Time for some background on my wife. Lena is not a “character.” If you were to say to her friends, “Boy, that Lena sure is a character!” They would squint, look at you as if you had tiny monkeys coming out of your nose, and say, “Who, Lena Macy?” I tested this, and that is precisely what all her friends said, except one who said: “Are those tiny monkeys coming out of your nose?”
Lena is a level-headed, born-and-raised Swede. She was born above the Arctic Circle, in JokkMokk, which is pronounced “Yuck-Muck.” I had her pronounce it carefully for me, because I figured you wouldn’t believe me. Her personality complements my wacky inherited traits, just as her steady chemical engineer income was the perfect counterpoint to my up and down revenue stream.
This is not to say that Lena doesn’t enjoy life. She’s a lot better at that than I am, actually, although you wouldn’t know it by looking at her facial expressions. When she’s at rest, she may be happy on the inside, but if you look at her, you’ll want to put her on suicide watch. She got that from her family. Here’s a 1999 photo of Jenny, Lena’s Mom, Lena, and Lena’s dad having a rollicking good time.
Apparently Lena’s grandfather was, in contrast, a character, and there are many stories to back that up. In Swedish, the term for a grandparent is based on precise lineage. For example, “morfar” (pronounced “moor - far”) translates to “mother father” and means your mother’s father. “Farfar” would be the father of your father. “Morfarsmor” would be your mother’s father’s mother. Get it?
It’s not a bad system, and is shorter than saying, for example, “My great-grandfather on my mother’s side, and her grandfather’s side.” Luckily, nobody cares about ancestry in the USA, so we don’t have to sweat those kinds of details.
Anyway, Lena’s morfar Alex (pronounced “Ah-lex”) was a colorful character. During World War I, when he was in the King’s Technical College in Stockholm, his dorm room had a bed with a big brass knob on it. There was a standing competition to see if anyone could open his jaw wide enough to put his mouth around the knob. No one had ever succeeded until Alex’s red-haired buddy Sven, his jaw loosened by large quantities of alcohol, finally did it.
Unfortunately, it turned out that it’s much harder to get your mouth off of a big brass knob than it is to get it on, and Sven was stuck. Nothing worked, and no amount of grease or prying helped. The knob wouldn’t even slide around in his mouth. Luckily, they discovered that by lifting Sven up, and rotating his body counterclockwise around the post, they could unscrew the knob.
It was now 3 AM, and they set off for the hospital for a knob-ectomy. You’d think that having a big brass knob stuck in your mouth would make you rather subdued, but apparently that was not the case. The group was so rowdy and noisy, in fact, that they were written up for "förargelseväckande beteende" (disorderly conduct). The police report, which is now famous in Lena’s family, included the phrase “Och den vildaste av alla bråkmakare var pojken som hade svalt en trumpet” which translates to “And the rowdiest troublemaker of all was the one who had swallowed a trumpet.”
OK, enough background. From California, well below the Arctic Circle, we were ready to get our show on the road.