Arren

My confirmation gift was a trip with my grandparents to visit my uncle Arren abroad, flying to Copenhagen on a plane filled with smoke from desperate nicotine addicts that still enjoyed the luxury of lighting up as soon as the light on the 'No Smoking' sign went dark. Everybody smoked.

3 hours inside a metal tube, inhaling various types of toxic fumes from different brands of cigarettes, cigars, or pipes. It's hard to imagine that today as acceptable for anyone.

Inevitably, I became violently airsick at the end of that journey, my first international air trip, punctuated by vomiting uncontrollably into a small paper bag that quickly filled over, and everything became a mess.

I stepped onto Danish soil dressed in my grandmother's shirt and my underwear, as my own clothes were reeking.

For some reason, I kept with me the memory from that day of one of the other passengers glancing sideways at my misery. He wasn't yet well known in Iceland at the time, but he would later become a famous, celebrated news anchor at the only public TV station licensed to operate there. This was then followed by a long career in politics as a left-wing parliamentarian, using his celebrity status as the jumping point.

Every time I watched the news over the next few years, I was, for some reason, reminded of this incident and his sideways glance. Perhaps I was puzzled by an expression I hadn't recognized; was it compassion or disgust?

Copenhagen in the early 80's was a relaxed place, and the reality that bad things can happen to good people hadn't been discovered yet. I was even allowed to take the bus to Tivoli all by myself after going there accompanied by my grandparents once. The freedom of those solo journeys was intoxicating; even bus trips were unfamiliar territory to me, but I was a fast learner and managed well, complemented by my adequate control of the Danish language that I had learned from the Donald Duck subscriptions that my grandparents had generously supplied me with over the last few years.

We stayed there for close to a week, with my grandmother's older sister, who had a small apartment there. It was a World Cup year, and I was able to watch a few games on TV when the adults weren't using it.

My uncle and his sister were both studying on the Danish mainland; the trip over there was only a couple of hours by car.

Following in their father's footsteps, both he and his brother had become electricians, but to my grandparents' delight, Arren then also educated himself further and later graduated from a Scandinavian university as an electrical engineer.
My aunt studied mathematics and computer programming and would later become the dean of one of the Icelandic universities.

My uncle was a giant of a man, with a thick mane of blonde, curly hair and a warm smile. The curly hair would later gradually recede in the latter part of his 20's, as he had apparently inherited my grandfather's baldness genes. Thankfully, those genes don't seem to be a part of our common heritage.

He did inherit my grandfather's kindness, and I hope I share that inheritance.

Arren almost died in a snowstorm, at the darkest peak of one winter. He and his friends were driving his brand-new Bronco jeep along the snowed-out, treacherous mountain road connecting the fjord to the rest of the world. At some point, he lost control of the car, and it ended up stuck in a ditch by the side of the road.  They had ignored warnings that the road was impassable and dangerous, as young men with big jeeps frequently do, and the raging snowstorm meant that no immediate help would be forthcoming.

Today, they would just call for help using their mobile phones and at least let someone know they were in trouble. Back then, they had no way of signalling they were in distress and were on their own.

The only thing that saved them from freezing to death that day was breaking into a small summer cottage that some stubborn lady everyone knew had propped up there in the middle of nowhere, stubbornly refusing to accept the futility of such a thing.

I was too young to become aware of this when it was happening. I only remember the incident because my grandfather and Arren took me along after he got back safely, when they went back there to board up the broken windows in the cottage to minimize the damage to it.

What I remember the most about that trip is the bitter cold that day, the snowstorm had abated, and the roads had been cleared of most of the snow it had piled up, but to me it seemed that there were mountains of snow on either side of it. It was like driving through a white tunnel for periods.

Arren was like an older brother to me, as I grew up partly with his parents, except he wasn't my brother, and we both knew it without talking about it. It still felt good to have someone to look up to, someone to talk to.

What strikes me today is how similar our paths through life have been, with regard to life and our choices of partners.

We are both loyal and selfless to the point where it starts being unhealthy. 

We've both made choices to distance ourselves from family members for extended periods of time to avoid conflict.

We've also been able to eventually find partners that deserve our loyalty and respect, even if it took us a few failed attempts to learn the difference between co-dependence and independence.

He has been a solid point in the sea of chaos that has been my family for the last three generations. 

I don't know if he knows how much it meant to me as a child to have him there, but I try to tell him as much whenever we meet.

When my mother and brothers passed, my uncle was always there, and it has meant everything to me.

I hope I can be there for him when he needs it the most; he deserves my loyalty and respect.

Orren

Orren was usually a quiet man who didn't drink or do drugs, play politics or engage in arguments. As one of the few farmers who abstained from alcohol, he was frequently called upon to police local balls where spirits flowed freely and violence was the rule rather than the exception.

His two passions were Chess and Football, in the isolation of the rural north he would often wind down a busy day of farming by sitting at his desk and puzzling to overcome chess riddles in a chess magazine he subscribed to.

He'd grown up on the farm with his grandparents, as they took him in after his mother disappeared from the picture when he was very young. My mother and he met in a chance encounter at the hospital where she was working as a nurse, he had been admitted with an inflamed appendix that needed an emergency operation and she a young divorcee with two young children in tow.

He was the son of a neighboring farmer and German girl that had arrived as a refugee in Iceland shortly after the second world war ended. He never talked about her, nor did anyone else in the family.

Something must have happened at any rate, as he was raised by his paternal grandparents that lived on a neighboring farm. To me, they looked like a pixie had married a troll; she was frail and small while he was stocky and built like an ox and only lacked the fangs to fit the label the imagination of a child had applied to him.

Where I grew up in the fishing village further north, there was a strange lady that all the children knew about but none of us knew her name. The reason we were aware of her at all was that it was a game to us to sneak up to her door, knock on it and shout profanities about her dubious German heritage and alleged political opinions and then sprint away to the nearest hiding place somewhere close by and watch her come out fuming and shouting something we couldn't comprehend.

I don't think I ever participated directly on those occasions, but as a young kid it gives you a sense of belonging to be a part of a collective that is doing something together as a group - even if only a handful of the members is taking active actions.

At the time I didn't understand how unfair or cruel this must have felt to her, we were just playing a childish game and our reward from it was the rush of fear combined with the excitement of getting away with something forbidden, as we were able to provoke a response from her without suffering any repercussions.

It was only later that I started thinking that maybe this was his mother that had lived there, to a child every adult is either old or ancient and in my memories she was ancient, as would his mother likely have been by then.

Perhaps she was one of the survivors of one of the worst atrocities at the end of the war, when an overloaded passenger ship containing 15 thousand German refugees was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine in the middle of winter as they fled westwards. 

Only a handful of souls survived the sinking, the icy embrace of the Baltic sea in January will take even the strongest and the refugees on the ship were mostly women, children and the elderly fleeing the wrath of the Soviets who were expected to show no mercy to their invaders after four years of bloody war.

War never changes and neither do refugees, only the names and nationality of the people suffering change.

What effect this would have had on Orren's childhood, I can only imagine, growing up as a child in a foreign country with a German parent. People from the losing side of any war of aggression are rarely popular at the end of it, and children will take what signs they pick up from their parents and exaggerate them into a microcosm of emotions and violence.

It would be easy to just label him a bad person based on his actions as an adult towards the vulnerable children who were ultimately in his power after we arrived at the farm - but life is an infinite shade of grey rather than being the simple difference between black and white that we prefer it to be.

I can imagine him as a young, frightened boy being singled out for his heritage, beaten or called names no child should ever be called, or worse.

Sympathy for the devil or empathy for the evildoer, I believe we all start out with good intentions and evil is what happens when we get lost along the way to grandmas house when there isn't a woodsman to come to the rescue.

Imagining his childhood and what it must have been like, I can sympathize with him, feel empathy to a degree and come close to forgiving or at least letting go of the hatred I felt for so long.

Whether my brother and sister would have agreed with that, I cannot say.