rief Historical Interlude: What We Talk About When We Talk About Finns
Both my father's parents came from Finland. That makes me half-Finnish.
"Okay," people say. "Tell me when you're through." (Ha!)
The other half is Irish. That's the part of me that laughs loudly and falls off bar stools and drapes my arms around strangers and breaks into song, like tonight, for instance, when I sang "My Way" with an Italian guy in the dairy section of Star Market because it was on the grocery store radio. My mother likes to think it's the Irish part of me that tells stories - Joyce was Irish, and Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett, and that most modern of 18th-century wits, Johnathan Swift -- but I don't know if things work like that. Suppose I started on the dole and lost two front teeth, would that be my Irish side too? In the end, all inheritance is guesswork; it's just easier to guess what's Irish since we know how the Irish behave.
But what the hell is a Finn?
Back in the Eighties, when Christine Lahti was nominated for an Oscar for a supporting role in the film "Swing Shift," my Dad was fond of saying, "You know, Christine Lahti is Finnish." But she seemed to be the only one. No one we knew came from Finland. No one had ever heard of our last name. We knew of no Finnish food, no popular Finnish dance or custom, no famous Finns save one. We put all our eggs in one basket: Christine Lahti or bust!
But her star faded, and I grew up knowing next to nothing about Finland. Part of it was embarrassment: I wanted a cool heritage - the Italians with their lasagna and crazy hand-waving, the neat and ordered Germans, the English with all their famous musicians and bad teeth. Oh to be Jewish - the jokes and the bagels!
"What's your heritage?" friends' mothers sometimes asked.
"Irish," I said. But it told an incomplete story; back then, I was shy. I feared strangers, sat perfectly well on barstools, and sang only to the walls of my bedroom.
"And Hepola. What is that? African?"
"It might be," I said. "We're not sure."
A few years ago, I caught a story on 20/20 about Finland. It was about the dance that was, at that time, sweeping the nation: the tango. Strange for any Scandanavian country, but even stranger for Finland. As the commentator explained, the Finnish are chronically shy. To illustrate, the camera homed in on an older Finnish couple tangoing, all painful white rhythm, looking everywhere but in each others' eyes.
"It's difficult to express emotion in our culture," explained a Finnish man. "It's not rare for a man and a wife to live their whole lives without saying they love each other. If a woman were to ask, 'Do you love me?' a man might be like [shrugs], 'Why do you think I married you?'"
The story listed a few other classic Finnish traits - alcoholism, depression (nice) - and praised the country's role as leaders in the world of telecommunications. Nokia is Finnish. My mother is fond of pointing out the irony in this, the way a noncommunicative culture is helping revolutionize communication. But I think I understand. Of course they want cell phones and email. That way they don't have to look in each others' eyes.

Scene 4: Driving to Hancock, the Most Finnish City in America. June 17.
My father drives our rented Plymouth on the tree-lined, two-lane highways that lead to Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I turn down the talk radio we have been listening to all morning.
"Did your mother speak Finnish?" I ask.
"Oh sure."
"She did?" I know this, but I like to hear it again.
"My father spoke Finnish too."
"Did they speak Finnish to each other?"
"Oh sure. But they didn't like us to hear them." My father laughs with a memory. "You know, my mother used to call oatmeal boodewah."
"Boodewah?"
"The Finnish word. I think it's boodewah*. Anyway, once, when I was in first grade, the teacher asked me to stand up and say the name of a breakfast food. So I said 'Boodewah,' and she said, 'Sit down, that's not a breakfast food."
Sometimes, when I am driving by myself, this memory will make me laugh. Just the word alone: Boodewah. Say it: Boodewah. I turn the talk radio back up and prop my feet on the dash. My father and I could listen to this stuff all day.

*(Knowing my father's predilection for misremembering words, we could have bet this would not be the literal Finnish translation for oatmeal. A few days later, in a Finnish store, a native speaker will pronounce the word more look "boor-rah," but no matter. Boodewah stays, my apology to the Finns.)

To be continued in something like three days (after Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, where I'm staying at a hostel) ...

written in Boston, Massachusetts