Joining the game: Challenge 8 – Folk Lore
My parents have a fairly large set of friends that they’ve kept in touch with since their student days, some even longer, so many, in fact, that even now I have problems remembering who they all are. This impresses me wildly. I’m lucky if I manage to keep in touch with anyone except a chosen few for more than a month after I stop seeing them daily – I’ve forgotten the names of most of the people I worked with a year and a half ago – and I’m of the internet persuasion and have all these social networking tools at my fingertips. It obviously doesn’t help.
Anyway, back to topic: Two of these friends, husband and wife, are both doctors and live on a farm somewhere in Nord-Trøndelag (I forget the details). Quite an impressive place, apparently, but definitely rural. My brother and I are both city/town bred, hardly “big city” in the international sense, but still, urban enough.
When I was 4 or so we went to visit this family. Apparently, the first utterance from my four-year-old self upon embarking from the car was “Where is the playground?”
Twelve years or so later, my brother accompanied my parents on a visit, he would have been nine or thereabouts. The lady of the house gave him a glass of milk from the cows of the farm out of the fridge. His answer, when asked how he liked it, was “Well, it’s kind of strange to think that it comes from the cow.”
My parents would have been mortified if they hadn’t been too busy laughing. What sort of city slickers had they brought into the world?
(In my brother’s defence, he knew better, of course, it just came out the wrong way. I was probably genuinely interested in knowing where the playground was.)
Having written that, I’m no longer sure it counts as family folk lore (though it’s told often enough in my family, I assure you), but at least it’s a good story.
I might try to catch up on some of the earlier challenges, too. The net knows I could use some new content on this so called blog.
