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 smoke 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 flowed over and everything became a mess.

I stepped onto Danish soil dressed in my grandmother's shirt, as my own was 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 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 that 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 grandparent's 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.

What strikes me is how similar our paths through life have been, with regards 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.