Two old Swedes

My aunt Ruth married Roger Sutherland, son of a Swedish Minnesota farmer, who had a job working for the Feds in the Department of Agriculture.  They had four daughters, blond, athletic, and self-assured.  My friends loved it when my “Swedish cousins” came to visit.  At family get togethers, my father would argue with Roger who had the best aquavit, the Swedes or the Danes.  

The summer I was a sophomore in high school, I spent some of my vacation in Minnesota up at the lake house uncle Roger kept after he and his brother sold the farm.  One morning Roger asked me if I wanted to see a ballgame with “a couple of old Swedes.”  The Twins were playing the Yanks, so I didn’t care how old the guys were.  Roger’s buddy, a guy he had grown up with, stopped by the lake house in a beat up old Ford and we headed down to the Twin Cities.  A couple of miles from the stadium, the car stalled at a busy intersection.  Roger’s buddy, ignoring the rising commotion around us, said we would just have to sit there until the engine cooled down.  Then he had my uncle take a flask out of the glove compartment and they passed it back and forth trading swigs in a storm of furious drivers blaring their horns and flipping us off.  Sinking in the back seat where I was practically cringing with embarrassment, I found myself in an Ingmar Bergman movie where humiliation is the central theme.  Five, maybe ten death defying minutes later, Roger’s old friend cranked the car to life and we chugged our way to the game making it in time.  My two old Swedes got plastered while we watched the Yanks clobber the Twins (Elston Howard hit a grand slam), and the fact that we made it back to the lake alive is just one of those lucky breaks that grace the past like Max von Sydow (a U of Lund grad) out-maneuvering the black-robed figure at every turn.