First One Today

Today marks a year since the death of my grandpa, Ed the Red Svendsen. It's still really hard to believe he's not around; for him dying at 89 seems like a shockingly young age. It seems like he should be at my parents house or the beach, eating chips and rotel and drinking beer. That really doesn't describe him well, since he was a man who worked out at the gym every morning and took on healthy eating with an engineer's precision. I should have celebrated his life today by cooking something Norwegian or painting a watercolor barn, but instead we went to Ikea and ate meatballs and lingonberries. It was a shortcut to cooking something Norwegian, although I know that it's probably not okay that I was associating with the Swedes.

It's sad that Rush won't get to know him personally, but he'll get to know him through other things. I already toast him with "First One Today" and he took his first visit to the Norwegian Christmas Bazaar last November. Aunt Casey is carrying on the tradition of making julekake, Norwegian Christmas bread, and maybe one day I'll use the Scandinavian cookbook that my grandpa gave me to make lefse, a flat potato bread similar (vaguely similar, just for description purposes) to a tortilla, but served with butter and sugar. Hopefully one day we'll have enough family together in one room to divide up his watercolor paintings so that Rush can see the amazing artist that he was.

We miss you Ed. I can just hear his response to me calling him Ed: Hey, watch your language. We miss you Grandpa.