It hasn't rained in Stockholm for weeks and weeks. Lovely, if freakish weather. Me, I don't mind snow or sub-zero nights or humid days or merciless sun; but rain, no matter how necessary it is, I have never liked.



But Swedes are used to rain; they don't mind it a bit. And obviously they miss it when it fails to appear.



So, when the skies over the Birds' Island clouded over yesterday afternoon, and drops were unleashed followed quickly by a torrent, A. the former model and aspiring producer and her step-daughter O. ran out in the rain, holding hands and dancing on the rocks round about their summer house, soaked to the skin.



When the husband and I got back to the city, however, it was obvious that no rain had fallen to wash away the uncharacteristic stickiness of the streets of Stockholm. One can hardly believe that by rights it should be autumn in Sweden by now.



The Swedish word for the day is vädret. It means the weather.



- by Francis S.

The phone rang. It was M., the t.v. producer, calling from the street.



"Hallo," he said in the cartoon voice he always uses when he calls me on the phone. It's you, I said. I asked him if he was close, if he'd like to come up.



"Sure," he said.



Three minutes later, the bell rang.



We sprawled out on the sofas in the living room, me on one and him on the other. I yammered away about my job and soon the husband was calling from his meeting, giving M. instructions over the phone to order chicken butter massala from Indira, (the McDonald's of Farmer Street, or at least that's how I think of it, only the food is much better) and he would pick it up on his way home, to open a bottle of wine to let it breathe, to set the table.



"Uh-huh," M. said. "Uh-huh, uh-huh."



He got off the phone.



"So this is what it's like, huh, " he said, laughing. "Does he talk to you like that all the time? You guys sound so, so married. He makes me laugh. He sounds so much like, like a husband."



Well, yes. He is a husband. My husband.



The chicken butter massala was delicious.



The Swedish phrase for the day is smaklig måltid. Waiters always say it when they serve your food - it means something like enjoy your meal.



- by Francis S.

I never managed to say how absolutely remarkable it is that a woman, seven-months pregnant and herself a priest of the Church of Sweden, can be married to her boyfriend by another priest - who happens to be a lesbian - in the Church of Sweden, with no one batting an eye. People would be absolutely apoplectic in America over such a scene. It's exactly this kind of thing that makes Sweden a most remarkable country.



And I did get to meet Jonas Gardell, author of one of the four books in Swedish I have read. I gushed, fanlike, in my American way. He, a bit elfin and blinking madly like a rabbit, said "I thought you were Anders' brother."



Oh, no, I said, I'm much too old to be Anders' brother.



"One is never too old to be Anders' brother," he cackled.



And that was witty repartee.



The Swedish word for the day is snack. It means small talk.



- by Francis S.

In the east of Stockholm lies a green island, Djurgården, the site of the grand residences of ambassadors, a zoo and an amusement park. Next to the amusement park stands a quaint little white church that began life as a schoolhouse in 1820.



On Sunday, the policeman and the priest were married in the quaint little white church on Djurgården. Wrapped in grey silk and with purple sweet william in her hair, looking a bit shaky and serious and lovely and very much seven-months pregnant, the priest stood in front of the altar with the policeman. So tall and blond and handsome, the policeman barely got his vows out, his voice cracking and hardly under control. An accordian played a bit mournfully, and a clarinet joined, and then a woman sang, not quite sweetly but deeply and pleasingly, of halves becoming wholes and of love. Everyone watched and listened in the swelter of an unseasonably warm Sunday in August, and the women cried.



Me, I cried too. How awful it is to get so sentimental as I grow old.



Then, the psalms sung and the gospel read, we followed the bride and groom out of the church and posed for pictures on the stairs outside, and finally wended our way in twos and threes to the heart of the island to eat dinner in a garden, Rosendals trädgård.



In the midst of bowery green allees and beds of sunflowers and cosmos, we sat in a glass house, eating endive and wax beans and potatoes dredged in rosemary, all from the garden. We laughed and were entranced by the brides' sisters, and listened to speeches and sang songs and toasted the bride and groom with glass after glass of red wine.



In between the toasts and the speeches, the charming woman to my right told me she was a singer. But wasn't it awfully difficult making a living as a musician, I asked.



"Yes, I suppose it is. I guess we're just lucky, my boyfriend and I," she said. And as we continued to talk and she revealed bits and pieces of her life, it dawned on me that there I was again, talking to some nominally famous Swedish person whom I'd never heard of before and hoping that I hadn't made a fool of myself, that this particular famous person was finding me naively amusing and not an ignorant American oaf.



After she offered me a cigarillo, and after someone put on a recording of "Pomp and Circumstance" while we stood on our chairs throwing streamers and honking on noisemakers and singing at the top of our lungs from pieces of paper with crazy words of praise and humiliation to the bride and groom, the singer told me I had such a nice voice, that I should be in a choir.



What could I do but blush?



In the end, the husband and I ran to catch the midnight ferry back to Södermalm and our apartment on the Farmer Street. The ferry keeper waved us on board, telling us we could pay another day, and as the boat chugged over the smooth black waters of the Baltic under a moon newly snipped after a day or two of being full, the husband and I told each other we would never live anywhere else on this fair earth.



The Swedish word for the day is välsignad. It means blessed.



- by Francis S.

My earliest memory that I know is my memory and not merely something manufactured from photographs or stories recounted by my sister or my parents, is a dream.



I was sleeping feverishly - I'm quite sure I was sick at the time - and I dreamt I was outside playing in a sandbox under a tree (I loved that sandbox; I used to eat the sand I remember, or rather I might be remembering it or I might just be remembering the many times my parents have said that I liked to eat it).



Suddenly, the tree wasn't a tree, but a big green leafy dragon. I ran inside, successfully eluding the monster and went up with my brother to our bedroom in the attic of the little box of a house we lived in then. Suddenly, everything was covered in purple spots, including my white pajamas, and there were jolly and benign little cackling witches everywhere. And instead of a light switch, there was a black telephone mounted on the wall. Which I deemed a huge luxury, being that in 1965, nearly everyone had only one phone, including us.



What is your earliest memory?



The Swedish word for the day is pojke. It means boy.



- by Francis S.

When we stepped into the movie theater, instead of sitting in the seats designated on our tickets, we sat close to the seats designated on our tickets. There were only three other people in the theater, so what difference could it make?



Soon enough, there were 10 more people, and then fifteen. And of course the girl in the ticket booth had chosen to cram everyone into three rows. Before we knew it, around us hovered a group of twenty-somethings all confused and knocking into each other's knees. An angry Danish boy glared at us, and my friend Å. had to explain in a guilty voice and a heavy Jönköping accent that, in fact, we weren't in the proper seats. The Dane grumbled a bit, and Å. grumbled a bit, but eventually everyone managed to settle down a bit indignantly in their wrong seats, and the movie began.



The idea of having reserved seats at a movie theater is a bit odd for us Americans. I suppose we don't have reserved seats because it's undemocratic or something. And we certainly don't have different prices for different seats, depending on where one is seated. Something that is not done in Sweden either, although it makes sense to me.



But why on earth did the girl in the ticket booth have to put everyone all up in each other's personal space like that?



"They only have to clean up three rows that way," Å. said.



So I was so tempted to leave my empty popcorn box and paper cup on the floor in front of my seat. But I was brainwashed by the pre-movie clip of the movie usher in full movie-usher regalia with a big old white guy over his knees, spanking him for not cleaning up after himself in the theater. I cleaned up after myself.



I am, indeed, such a good Swede.



The Swedish phrase for the day is personutveckling. It means personal development.



- by Francis S.

The future wears clothes made of tight-fitting and synthetic materials, right? At least it usually looks that way in movies. Strangely enough, as far as I can tell, the future will look like what it looked like thirty years previously. That is if history is any judge. It scares me a little, makes me laugh a little, that all the clothes that everyone wore in 1971 when I was ten - hip-hugging bell-bottomed trousers, marimekko dresses in loud prints, bluejean skirts and peasant blouses with shag haircuts - are in fashion again. And have been for the last couple of years, in fact. I remember well how ridiculous we found those clothes by the time I graduated from high school in 1979.



Are we condemned to repeat the past out of nostalgia, or lack of imagination? What goes around, comes around - but is it a curse, or just the natural order of things?



Unfortunately, clothes, unlike whores and buildings, do not become respectable with age, they just go out of fashion. Fast, but not forever.



The Swedish word for the day is kläder. It means clothes.



- by Francis S.