How I Got To Where I’m At

My parents met while both were students in the Biology Department at the University of Lund. Lund is a university town in the southern province of Scania, or Skåne (pronounced scawn’uh).

I was born at 4 o’clock in the morning on November 6, 1940. World War II was in full swing, and blackouts were in effect every night, even if Sweden was, officially, a neutral country.

Most of my summers were spent at my grand-father’s summer house on the Baltic. My aunt still lived at home, my grandmother was long since gone. There was a housekeeper-nanny, Musse, who took care of all of us, and stayed there until my grandfather passed away in the mid 1950s.

My parents both got their doctorates in science at Lund, just before the war was over. As soon as peace had been declared, in 1945, and it was safe to travel, my father, an Icelander, was ordered to return to Iceland to work at the university.

My mother and I followed a few months later. She was very pregnant by then with my sister, Loa, who was born in January of 1946, while we lived in a tiny house with my Icelandic grandparents and other family members.

When I was about 9 or so, my father received an offer to teach in Johannesburg, South Africa. We were almost ready to leave when riots broke out, so my father declined the position. Shortly after, he received an offer to teach botany, and do research at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg, Canada. My mother was also hired as his assistant.

In about 1956 we moved to Montreal, Canada, where both parents were hired as professors, my dad a full professor, my mother as an associate. I learned to speak French there, but the local French, Québecois. And I picked up Italian from friends as well.

After I finished high school my parents sent me to a school in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, to learn "proper" French. in the French part of Switzerland. Then I went on to Italy for a few months, to learn "proper" Italian in Florence. by staying with friends of my parents.

After I returned to Montreal and while I was at McGill, I met, and fell in love with, a Greek student who also worked and partly owned a small sandwich shop just close to the university. We had planned to marry, but both parents had hissy fits over that. He was sent to Greece; I was sent to my uncle in California, just north of San Francisco. We each met someone else. Well, I did. He married the woman his family had picked out. Both marriages ended up in divorce. He had one daughter, I had two. My older daughter is called Lisa. He named his daughter Lisa too. Neither of us knew of this until much later.

A few months later, I returned to Montreal to get my visa to move to the United States, and stayed there for almost a year longer before I got the visa and moved back to California where we were married a year later.

Two daughters, and 24 years later, I was divorced and living on my own, and wanting very much to move back to the East Coast. I visited several times while on vacation, and eventually settled on Charlotte, North Carolina as my destination.

I lived in Charlotte for almost 13 years before I moved back to be closer to family and grandkids. My mother and sister were both gone. My dad had passed on soon after I moved to Charlotte, a victim of Parkinson’s syndrome.
And that, my friends, is how I got to where I’m at, in Campbell, California, a small city nestled in the spidery arms of a much larger San José.