About 87 stories
How my gap year began, 11 years before I was born
Written with the clarity of hindsight, the accuracy of a faded memory and countless creative liberties, 87 Stories tries to explain how my gap year lasted four decades, made me an emigrant, an immigrant and a gave me a life I never dreamed of.
My gap year actually started in 1949. That was 11 years before I was born. Thinking about it now, the fact that 1949 was only 11 years before I was born makes me feel pretty old. Still, 1949 plays an important part in the following stories. If 1949 had gone differently, there might never have been a me, or if there was, I might have been a Norwegian me, with no need for a gap year in Norway. Alternatively, if 1949 had taken a different turn, I might have been the son of a rocket scientist or some other kind of engineer, but I’m not. I’m the son of a Pharmacist that could have been an Engineer and the grandson of a Norwegian that was homesick after the second world war.
My grandfather emigrated to North America along with millions of other Europeans in the early 1900s. In the 1920’s he met and married my grandmother, a widowed woman with a small son and a will to survive that had kept her going since she was born a couple of months premature in 1900. Weighing only a couple of pounds at birth, she was kept warm in a shoe box on the oven door in the old farm kitchen. She survived her birth, her childhood and the passing of her first husband. In 1929, my father was born.
In 1949, my grandfather and my grandmother went to Norway for nine months. He had never been back since he emigrated. Like many countries, Norway had suffered through the Second World War. My grandparents sailed across the sea, taking their car with them, but leaving my father in Canada. That was his choice. They had offered to take him along, but he had been accepted into Engineering school at the prestigious Queen’s University. “I can always travel later”, he said.
My grandparents had a wonderful year in Norway, and even though my grandfather passed on before I was born, in our family there was no shortage of stories about this fairy-tale land of wonder, where trolls lived under bridges but where everyone else was kind, honourable, strong and adventurous.
Things in Kingston weren’t so great for one person in 1949. My father was homesick, but there were no parents at home to go to, no Skype to call them on, and a long winter of studies that ended with him not being invited back for year two. Not because he failed, but because his place had to be given up to make room for returning war vets. Thus, he never learned his father’s mother tongue and only many years later would he be able to visit the land of fjords and fishermen, mountainside farms and goat’s cheese. In the meantime, life, a wife and three boys got in the way and his plans of exploring the globe gave way to tent trips and campgrounds closer to home.
As we grew up, one of the only regrets I ever heard my father mention, was the fateful choice of choosing education at school over the education in life he would have received if he had joined his parents when they embarked on their journey to Norway. We weren’t very old before he started promising that if we saved up, our high school graduation present would be a flight to Norway. My older brother took him up on that promise. He spent a year there in 1975-76, learned the language and has since attended some of his school reunions. He followed a straight and normal line, did what normal people do and did it well. My younger brother borrowed Dad’s super 8 movie camera when he was nine and followed his dreams becoming one of the only people I know that has said “When I grow up, I’m going to do this” and then he grew up and did exactly that. Meanwhile, I was the sort of indifferent, indecisive type, never having a strong dream I felt compelled to follow, but never managing to do what was expected either. Then, on a fateful evening in the fall of 1977, just after my last year of high school had started, I blurted out: “If I’m going to Norway next summer, we better start planning.”
87 Stories is dedicated to my father for inspiring my journey, and to my mother, and brothers, for their continued support and encouragement.
Thanks for reading 87 Stories - Lessons from the University of Life!
I’m Paul, and I like to say that my post-high school gap year in Europe, included a 30-year, basement-to-boardroom career at a company that didn’t want to hire me.
Written with the clarity of hindsight, the accuracy of a faded memory and countless creative liberties, 87 Stories is a journal of how my gap year lasted four decades, made me an emigrant, an immigrant and a gave me a life I never dreamed of.
Stay safe, Always Care
Beautiful.