The Born Again Sweater
Today is Monday April 13 and here I am In Ekanas on the Baltic Sea west of Helsinki (we are located at the blue spot on the map) So much has happened since I left Dublin that I hardly know where to start.
My friend Chris Senn aka Cookie Monster met me at Helsinki airport and together we rode the light rail train into the city. We stayed at a very modern Scandia hotel in the Kampii neighborhood (with the most overwhelmingly generous breakfast buffet I’ve ever been offered - I was so overwhelmed with the abundance of choices I was practically unable to serve myself anything - sorry I didn’t get a photo though it would have taken at least five photos to give any sense at all of the extent of it). As many of you know, Chris is a long ago former client who joined us for Chris’s 80th birthday in Venice in 2011 and took photos of her party there (the photo below shows Sabine and Agnes, the friends Chris is now visiting in Cologne, who have just passed out sparklers to the whole party.)
Chris and I started meeting by zoom just before covid got going because I wanted to interview him - as a blind photographer - for a paper I meant to write for IFPE (international foundation for psychoanalytic education) whose 2020 conference theme was “vision.” Thanks to COVID the conference was cancelled and I never wrote the paper, but Chris and I have been visiting weekly by zoom ever since. Chris has been living in Finland since 2008 and when Chris (“my” Chris, or Chris #1) and I finally made it to Europe I couldn’t resist visiting Chris #2 and seeing his life in Finland in person.
Now, back to Helsinki - and where to start? As you know, I tend to favor solitude and quiet. Chris #2 on the other hand adores human interaction and stimulation, and for me the sheer quantity of interaction and stimulation during this visit has been dizzying. Chris describes himself when photographing as a shark in a feeding frenzy chasing after moments of joyful, beautiful human presence and contact (he mainly photographs dance, theater, and children). Imagine me having a shark in a feeding frenzy as my guide - and you’ve pretty much got the picture.
We started with a visit to a Lutheran “chapel of silence” - a very simple curved wooden exterior and interior. (I know this doesn’t sound like a shark in a feeding frenzy- maybe I am exaggerating just a wee bit?) I have never seen a sacred space so simple. No color, no complex ornamentation. Simple pews, simple altar. As I knelt there, i realized the space conjured a whole different image of God from the cathedrals and chapels I have loved. It almost felt as if this was a God of the quiet, unpretentious workman or craftsman doing simple work with complete concentration and without fanfare. I keep repeating that word “simple.” It is of course a key concept of Quakerism, but this Lutheran chapel gave me a whole new experience of it. Of course Chris
(This is too confusing referring to Chris #1 And Chris #2. I am just going to call him Cookie Monster as do many of the children he photographs) knew the priest Nanna at the chapel, they hugged and discussed her visual challenges (she has had ocular herpes). She asked if I liked the chapel and I effused, then asked if she did. She said she liked it but didn’t love it. She preferred the coldness of old stone churches in Italy with dark corners where one could be alone and light candles. She also didn’t really like being pastor for a tourist destination. (She grew up in the north of Finland so she was used to plenty of cold and dark.)
Nearby the Chapel of Silence we walked over the roof of the Museum of Modern Art which was decorated with curvaceous structures that kids (and old people) love to climb. The slopes and slants and curved made me think of the Orcas skate board park (as well as the dizzying pace of our Helsinki tour). Cookie Monster reminded me that he had helped build the skate board park on Orcas, and that felt very fitting.
Cookie M. wanted to show me the public library but it turned out to have closed early for Good Friday, so we walked around the outside. Fortunately it was open for Holy Saturday and I was glad to save it for another day. It seemed quite enough for now to have come all the way from Dublin and to be lurching down the street beside my blind photographer friend bonking into one another every few steps, to have met Nanna and toured the chapel of silence and climbed the sinuous surfaces above the museum of modern art and walked the perimeter of the strangely curving architecture of the public library.
I was so glad to eat dinner and go to sleep! Then in the morning the breakfast buffet with its excess of everything fit right in with the feeding frenzy tour of Helsinki and off we went to visit the inside of the public library which was an incredible experience of slants and slopes and curves - and a space made for children and families, with food and books and play areas, and sewing machines and printing machines (including 3d and photo quality) and musical instruments and small group spaces and more books … It reminded both of us of the Funhouse on Orcas and we wished Funhouse founder Jim Bredouw could have been there touring with us.
I forgot to mention my first glimpse of Finland - all the snow seen through the airplane window. It looked cold but in fact it has been sunny and beautiful.
I was sitting beside a nun on the airplane and we hadn’t yet spoken but as we looked out the window at the snow below, we began a conversation. She was born in India, she told me, and had just visited her parents there. She now lived in Finland (Cookie tells me he knows of only one Catholic monastery in all of Finland) and was returning on the flight from Ireland after visiting her brothers who now live there.
Also - after Cookie and I left the airport and travelled into Helsinki by light rail - we walked through the Helsinki train station. There is something about train stations that I really ove - and always have to stop and take a photo of.
After we left the spatial-awareness and mind-altering public library, Cookie Monster walked me through the almost entirely glass (and metal) building that houses the Finnish language newspaper.
Despite his feeding frenzy guide style, Cookie Monster wasn’t quite well. He had a nasty cough and when we got to the hotel room he toasted me with cough medicine.
Cookie’s cough sounded a lot like “my” Chris’s cough when we were in Dublin - Chrissy, I would soon learn, tested positive for Covid when she arrived in Cologne, so that her time there has been difficult for her and for our close friends - these are German friends who despite the distance we have managed to see almost every year since Chris and I have been together. Now because of Covid we had missed two years and now because Chris tested positive (and because of their compromised immune systems) they have had to keep a careful distance. Though they still manage to enjoy each other!
So, mid-day Saturday after the huge breakfast, the library, and the newspaper building, we began to consider heading to Cookie’s home in Ekenas. Cookie checked his app to pick up train tickets, only to find that all tickets for all three afternoon trains were completely sold out. This was something Cookie had never seen before and probably had to do with the post-Covid opening (and yes I know very well that we aren’t really post Covid but things are opening up, all the same) combined with Easter weekend. Then we tried to get bus tickets - discovering that there were no ticket booths - one person suggested we try a little variety store called R-kiosks but the man there (clearly uncomfortable with English) told us “No. Downstairs.” Which sent us downstairs to the light rail - at this point my guide was as dizzy as I was, which is to say we had no guide, but were wandering around very confused, until someone at an info booth assured Cookie that all the buses heading west were, like all the trains, completely sold out. Having learned that buses were not an option, we went back to our hotel to check on a taxi and learned that would cost us $200 eu. But The hotel offered us a good deal on a room and we could get tickets for the first train Easter morning (which did feel like a bit of a resurrection) along with a packed breakfast “to go.” We had a nap in our new room and prepared to go out to dinner when Cookie discovered that his sweater was missing. We searched the room thoroughly including looking multiple times in multiple places it could never have gotten, with no luck. He was sure it was too cold for him to have done our morning tour without it - therefore it had to be in the room. But it wasn’t. I raised the possibility he had left it in the previous room (though we had both checked it thoroughly before leaving, not to mention that it was too cold for him to have been outdoors without it) or at breakfast (this had all the same arguments against it plus the fact that he would never take this heavy pullover sweater off except in the room). We started to get like a couple of irritable siblings - oh the joys of travel adventure - but he accepted my “evidence based” suggestion (since it was clearly not in the room even though we both agreed that it had to be there) that he check at the hotel reception desk. The woman at the reception desk said she would have to check with housekeeping, which she could not do until the next morning. So we went out to dinner and to bed with the Great Sweater Mystery unsolved.
But Easter Morning, true to the miraculous nature of the day, as Cookie was picking up our tote bags of breakfast-to-go, the reception lady came over to me with a sweater wrapped in plastic and said “Does this belong to your husband?” So I had a double miracle: the sweater rose from the dead, and I was given a husband (my first ever, though I dreamed about a husband the night before this trip started - so it must have been a prescient dream).
I almost forgot to include our little walk along the waterfront, probably after dinner, when Cookie kept insisting that if he had taken the sweater off (or failed to put it on), he would remember it! So when I found this sign I was very pleased with it.
But wait. I almost forgot the Church of the Rock, another Lutheran church turned tourist destination (only more so) because of its remarkable construction - both dug into a rock cliff and with walls built out of rocks. Here is yet another collage of photos of the inside - I didn’t get any of the outside. By the way, I apologize for all these collages. When I am in sensory overload I find it hard to make choices so the collages próvide a way to share a lot of photos and not have to choose between them.
We went there before all the drama about the full trains and buses and the disappeared sweater.
Then Sunday morning (that would be yesterday, April 12) we arrived in Ekenas by mid morning and went to a room in the Thorstrom family compound (next door to a space in which Chris lived for many years) where I had been invited to stay. I had a chance to meet three generations of this wonderful Swedish Finnish family, to tour a textile and printmaking studio shared by grandmother and granddaughter, to join the family Easter coffee/tea and to fall a little in love with their two dogs and the relationship between the dogs and their humans. The smaller dog (who is 4) was a very snappy sharp-toothed puppy (her main person had to wear rain boots to protect her feet) and a bit of a problem child but settled down and is now well-adjusted and loved. The larger dog, who has only been with them a year or so, was a rescue dog from a shelter in Moscow. they described with much delight her transition from fearing everyone and everything to approaching the world with curiosity.
Wilma, the “big dog” person in the photo and the granddaughter who gave us a tour of her (and her grandmother’s) studio, also invited us to come along to an art show on loving women. All of the art was interesting but what I found real delight in was a home video taken in the early 70s by the artist Tove Jannssen (original author and illustrator of a childrens’ series the Moomim books, very popular with children and adults in Finland, Japan and many other countries. People here seemed very surprised I had not heard of them) and her woman partner. The video was 60 minutes of edited home videos from travel to Japan, Hawaii, Mexico and the US. The playfulness and adventurousness with which they explored, filmed and edited was a joy to witness. I was spellbound, could not tear myself away. I loved their bemused but affectionate view of Americans, especially when Tove spoke of how horrible but also wonderful Las Vegas was - because it was full of people with dreams.
I still haven’t gotten to today’s adventure yet, when I followed Cookie to a photography assignment documenting the early process of stage set design and planning and rehearsals for a musical called “All Shook Up” (using 27 Elvis Presley songs). I am really tired, so I think we will save this for tomorrow.
If you have read all this way, I think you are amazing. I am grateful. I feel much less dizzy and much more centered and grateful for the experiences here. But I fear I may have passed my dizziness onto my readers! Thank you for joining me and helping me see and think about and sort out the experiences and weave them into something that feels satisfying and whole.
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