snow

People Watching

~ Lee Swanson ~ 2 Comments

Some people do their people watching at the beach, the park or an outdoor café but for me the best spot is still the airport.  Parking costs more but for twenty dollars you can get a solid day’s entertainment.

 I usually position myself outside the baggage claim doorway to see people just after they’ve arrived and stepped out into the fresh air.  People flying out are frenzied, hurried and not nearly as interesting.

The first folks you notice are the ones who fall to their knees and kiss the sidewalk.  They are either natives of San Diego grateful to be home and away from wherever they were, or people who are afraid to fly and just grateful to be anyplace where there is something solid beneath the floor.

The business travelers are the least interesting and only partially because they are in business. They are in too much of a hurry to be bothered by anyone who is less important, and they are convinced that includes everyone. There’s a reason business people have a class all to themselves on airplanes and that custom should be carried out elsewhere as well, without the recliner chairs, special menus and free drinks, but with the exorbitant extra cost. Just cordon them off and make them deal with each other so the rest of us don’t have to.

I like to guess where people are arriving from and over time I’ve gotten to be pretty good at it. The easiest folks to spot are those who come from Minnesota, Wisconsin and other Scandinavian countries. Easiest for me because, whether I want to admit it or not, I was once one of them and I know what to look for.

There is, of course, the very pale skin. A Minnesotan’s blonde hair can bleach two shades just standing at the curb waiting for the rental car shuttle. By the time they get to their hotel they have second degree sunburn and when their week’s vacation is over, if they don’t have skin cancer they just weren’t trying.

As they stand and wait for the shuttle or a cab, you can see the Minnesotans gingerly fingering the zipper of their parkas, wondering if they will be risking frostbite if they open it just a little. After all, back home they wear their parka all year long; their only concession to summer is to replace the hood with a stocking cap. Minnesota has two seasons—nine months of winter and three months of bad sledding.

To be fair, these are generally the Midwesterners making their first trip out of the tundra. Those who have previously been as far south as Chicago or as far west as Omaha have found that temperatures can occasionally be above freezing at some times of the year in other parts of the world.  Those folks arrive shirtless, shoeless and almost pantsless and except for the translucent complexion could easily be mistaken for a typical student in his fifteenth freshman year at San Diego State.  Airport security people love them.  They can just wave them through. The Tourism Board is not as fond of these folks who have read the travel brochures and decided to “go native.”  They typically arrive with a pair of jeans and a twenty dollar bill and over the course of their stay, don’t change either one.

The other oddity one notices if you people-watch astutely and consistently is that Minnesotans don’t travel in December.  As they will tell you repeatedly—should you be unfortunate enough to ask—“it just wouldn’t be Christmas without snow.”

Really?

Anyone who has seen a second grade Sunday School Christmas play knows that those hanging at the manger in Bethlehem were wearing sandals, t-shirts and bathrobes; palm trees (perhaps plastic, but let’s not quibble) adorned the corners of the hay bale constructed crèche and the wise men rolled up atop camels.  Last I knew (and until global warming disproves this) camels don’t do well at the Iditarod. Yes, Virginia, the event that repeatedly spawns the greatest commercial success in world history took place in the desert. If Christ didn’t need snow, neither does anyone else—at Christmas or any other time for that matter.

So I pay the parking attendant and leave after a good day of people watching, content that it was money well-spent and convinced I’m fortunate to consistently be on the outside of the arrival gate at the San Diego airport.

Christmas Traditions

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

There are some Christmas traditions I don’t miss.

4)  Flocked Christmas Trees.         My Dad used to buy Norway pine trees covered with “flocking;” white snow-lik-appearing carcinogenic toxic asbestos laden flakes that were supposed to make the tree look like it had been out in the snow, I guess.  But it had “flock” in places it had never had snow; all over the trunk of the tree and every needle covered top and bottom to about pencil width.  Those pencils from first grade width.

We didn’t put lights on the flocked trees.  We put floodlights on the floor that shone up onto the tree.  And we had colored discs in front of the spotlights that rotated and changed colors.  Red and blue and orange and, curiously enough, green.  Yes, because of the floodlights, one fourth of the time our white tree was green.

3)  Fruitcake. Enough said.

2)  Snow.      OK, not truly a tradition, but if you grow up in Minnesota it’s a fact of life. And I hated it. Every flake, collectively and individually. 

    I’ve included it on this list because of the idiots who complain that “it’s just not Christmas without snow.”  Well, the temperature in Bethlehem on December 25 will range from 45 to 48 so it will be Christmas without snow out there in Christmas-land.  Deal with it.

Snow is worthless.  Nothing that you need to shovel out of the way serves a useful purpose.  It’s wet and cold and horrible.  Animals slow their breathing and heart rate almost to the point where they are dead just to avoid going out in the snow.  There will be those who say snow is “wonderful” because you can go skiing.  The only good thing about snow skiing is the fireplace and the brandy in a warmed snifter when you’re done.

You simply must go skiing?  Buy a boat.  You don’t need to wear nine more layers of clothes and be treated for frostbite.

1)    Lutfisk.  This will take a little explaining. No, this will take a lot of explaining.

Lutfisk is Swedish for “inedible glop.” It’s dried cod, soaked in lye and “seasoned” by any animal that happens by the bricks of fish stacked up on the sidewalk outside the grocery store.  In my hometown we bought our Christmas lutfisk I think somewhere around June and then soaked it in water to leech out the—shall we say “impurities”—so that we might be able to eat it without suffering dysentery and ameobic meningoencephalitis.

Since we were destined to have to have the stuff, we were fortunate to have Swedish neighbors with whom we shared Christmas Eve and who would buy and prepare the glop.  She soaked it in water and changed the water every fifteen minutes.  The leeched water was picked up daily by hazmat workers in orange suits who transported it in lead-lined vehicles to dump sites that would later show up on the EPA superfund cleanup list.

It was also fortunate our neighbors prepared the fish because, if we were going to have to have it, we certainly didn’t want it in the house any longer than possible.  The only thing worse than the lye-infested toxicity of the glop, was the smell.

You might be getting the idea by now that this is nasty shit.

Regardless every December 24, our Swedish neighbors would show up with a stoneware pot of lutfisk.  And every year without fail she would say how good the fish was this year.  It was nice and firm, she would say.

Lutfisk is firm in the way grape jelly is firm.

Come dinner time my father, my brother and our neighbors would scoop this “food” onto their plates and hope it wouldn’t slide off onto the floor.  They were so excited about it.  At least my father and the neighbors were.  Genuinely excited.  My brother I think was just trying to fit in and be “a good Swede.”

I figured there hadn’t been a good Swede since Alfred Nobel and fitting in has never been my strong suit, so Mom would make a steak or pork chops or something for me and her.  Mom was German and while Germans aren’t known for culinary delights either – which you would know if you had ever tried what they jokingly call potato salad – she had the good taste to know that lutfisk is not fit for human consumption.

Truth be told, if you can get by the smell and the consistency, lutfisk by itself doesn’t really have any taste.  Most of that has been leeched out and transported across state lines along with the lye and the rest.  The flavor, such as it is, comes from the half pound of melted butter and two cups of “cream sauce” that every diner has to pour over it to mask its smell and enable them to choke it down while pretending to enjoy it.

So lutfisk is a tradition I don’t miss.  It’s not only a horrible dish; it’s a heart attack on a plate, provided you can keep it from sliming off your plate.