Dinner last night was below what I consider acceptable standards from a cook: The lamb chops were overcooked, the risotto was flavorless with too little parmesan cheese in it, the focaccia was pale and the figs were a bit mealy. I guess I need to brush up on my culinary skills. Of course no one complained, but I was a bit disappointed, especially considering the guests.



It was a dinner for the parents of A., the former model and aspiring producer.



"I've only been in New York once," said A.'s mother toward the end of the evening. "We were there for two hours, so we got in a cab and we just thought of a street and then said 'take us to Fifth Avenue.' But the cabdriver said 'where on Fifth Avenue?' and so we thought some and then said 'Bloomingdales!' But the cabdriver said 'which one on Fifth Avenue?' and we said 'any one!'" and she laughed.



"So he drove us to Bloomingdales and we got out and went in the big set of doors. There we had to go up a wide set of steps and at the top we stopped in our tracks and just stood there with dropped jaws in front of the ladies selling cosmetics. 'Can I help you?' someone asked. We just stood and pointed at the Dior perfume counter and the huge photo that was the first thing you saw when you came into the store. 'That's my daughter!' I said."



That is indeed your daughter, I thought. As beautiful as she is clever and kind, but no matter how big the photo, she is never bigger than life.



The Swedish word the day is syfte. It means purpose.



- by Francis S.

We rode to the wedding in Dalarna with the heiress. Her Norwegian boyfriend drove the car. The heiress, who happened to be the sister of the groom and a person we had never met before, has that dark-blonde vulnerability frequently mistaken for brittleness in heiresses. There is nothing light about her, save for her lithe frame and pure skin: She is a person to be taken seriously and very much of her class. But she was very attentive, and I found her tremendously engaging and took a great liking to her.



"You're doing fine," she told me, laughing as I danced with her cheek to cheek, me all bumbling and stiff and square and not remembering a single second of the dancing classes I had to take when I was thirteen.



I never managed to dance with the bride's sister, who was just as lithe and blonde and vulnerable, but melancholy and impatient and tender, her English spoken with a pleasing vague Irish burr learned from the estranged father of her 7-year-old son. The night before the wedding, she had been so petulant and worried whether her tightly wound and pinned hair would be sufficiently curly the next day, demanding attention as if she were a bit jealous of the bride, even if it weren't the case. But at the reception itself, as we drank rum and galliano with lime, I saw that she was in a kind of heaven, a respite from whatever she didn't like about the rest of her life, and she just about purred as if she were a cat.



As for the bride herself, her hair bedecked with tiny roses and cascading down her bare back, she was in her element, all charm and coyness and ravishing beauty, pulling at her train as if she wore one every day of her life.



Me, I felt a bit out of place among all the football players and financiers, seated several chairs away from the husband, who was flirting madly with the heiress as only a homosexualist can. The whole thing wasn't terribly ostentatious by American standards, aside from the setting (Dalhalla) and the details (a fleet of fabulous old cars hauling us from hotel to church to reception, elegantly printed invitations and programs and menus that all resembled top-notch advertising, a 2:30 a.m. fireworks display that would rival the fourth of July displays of my childhood.)



But for Sweden, it was about as far as one can go without breaking the boundaries of good taste. A great success by all accounts.



I'm still recovering.



The Swedish word of the day is seg. It means weary.



- by Francis S.

Tomorrow we're off to another wedding, this one in the heart of the country, the veritable Ur-Sweden known as Dalarna. The dales of Sweden, all little wooden houses painted red with white trim, miniature farms with only one cow, one pig and a chicken or two. And on Saturday afternoon, a bunch of guys in tuxedos - smoking they call them here in Sweden - and girls in designer gowns.



Me, I hate tuxedos. I used to have to wear one when I was a waiter on Capitol Hill. It brings back memories of smarmy brown-nosing congressional aides who took pleasure in pushing waiters around to curry favor with their bosses: "Make sure the congressman's bread is hot enough to melt the butter." There was a particular congressman from Tennessee, Rep. Boner (his actual name)...



The Swedish word for the day is val. It means election.



- by Francis S.

Francis found a certain charm in Edu's half-belief in something most Americans would call magic, superstition, the powers of a curandera. Americans were fond of believing in things, but they were at heart a nation of rationalists who discounted the non-scientific. They pursued any number of fads, but such fads were invariably backed up by what they thought of as science, albeit all too often a spurious science. Americans felt they understood certain inexplicables, and ignored the rest. UFOs with an aura of science they believed in, ghosts they didn't. And so Francis was enchanted when Edu told him, after the floor in the dining room had been cleaned with ammonia, "I shouldn't have cleaned the floor, I felt a bad spirit there, in the corner. Something bad happened there, I know," and then he washed it with vinegar, which his grandmother had taught him would exorcise ghosts. Francis didn't not believe such things, it was just outside of his experience, and contributed to his feeling that Spaniards - or more accurately Argentinians - were curiously sophisticated and childlike at the same time. He wanted desperately to believe in ghosts, but he had been too mired in America for it to really work. Ghosts only lived outside the United States, he knew they would disappear once he got back home.



from a Barcelona diary, 1998



The Swedish word for the day is trolleri. It means magic.



- by Francis S.

Swedes are great world travelers. It is in fact dangerous to say nasty things in Swedish to your husband about the American tourists sitting at the table next to you in a sleazy bar in Krabi, Thailand, because the chances are all too high that the table on your other side, the table you haven't been paying any attention to, is occupied by Swedes.



(The above is not a true story. But it could be, it could be!)



Which means that if I compare myself to Swedes, I am unduly proud of my own world travelling.



That would be 22 countries (excluding airport layovers) - Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Panama, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Thailand and of course, the U.S.



Plus I can't forget, for all of us Americans, 38 of the 50 states of the U.S. - Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.



The Swedish phrase for the day is var har ni rest? Which would mean where have you travelled?



- by Francis S.

If I were someone who likes to jump on the, uh, meme bandwagon, I could write 100 things about myself. Or I could write four truths and one lie.



Instead, just because I think he's a superb diarist, I am going to be a Peter copycat and write nine things that aren't true about me, along with one that is. Meaning you have to guess which one is the truth. So here you go:



1. Although I've tried, I've never managed to finish the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And I seem to about the only person who thought the movie was considerably less than wonderful.



2. I don't like calf's liver with bacon and onions, and I don't like liver paté, but strangely enough I don't mind chicken livers. Fried in enough butter, that is.



3. I saw the Ramones play at the University of Illinois in 1980. It hurt my ears.



4. I don't own a television. It corrupts your mind and makes you fat.



5. Despite being terribly scared of heights, I like carnival rides that go fiercely around and around, making me dizzy.



6. If I could change one thing about my physical self, it would be to not have grey hair. But wait - what am I saying. I could dye it, couldn't I? The idea of dyeing it sounds just too fussy to me.



7. Although I had both my ears pierced, I let the holes close up when I moved to Sweden. I don't look good in earrings.



8. My first car was a white 1975 Chevy Nova hatchback that had been my mother's car. I gave it to my younger brother a year later because it was a piece of shit.



9. Although I lived in Washington, D.C. for 15 years, I never once went into the Capitol building. Shame, shame, shame.



10. When I was five, we moved to New Jersey and although it was the end of June, the first thing I did was run and look up the chimney of our new house and ask my mother "Do you think Santa Claus can fit down there?"



So, which will it be? Don't be shy.



The Swedish word for the day is val. It means choice. And whale. Your, uh, choice.



- by Francis S.

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.