Speaking of… ●4

… needles!

Some time in the mid-thirties, my grandmother accidently sat on a needle that broke. They tried to find the broken tip of the needle, but was never able to find it. I bet it must have hurt quite a lot at the time, but after a while, the needle was forgotten.

Thirteen years later, my mother, age 4 developed a swelling on her upper right arm. She was taken to the hospital to have the arm examined by a doctor. Inside the swelling, there was the broken needle.

How the needle magically wandered from my grandmothers tush, through the womb and to the tiny baby that was to grow up to be my mother without causing any serious injuries, I don’t know. Every time I tell this story, people refuse to believe me… but then all I can say is: Hey, I only know what my mother told me!

———
Additional facts as by November 4:

Correction:

Mother age 1,5 not 4 (I mixed the stories up : 4 was when she almost drowned…)
Now not only Mothers Word as proof - also Dagens Nyheter (one of Sweden’s biggest and oldest newspapers) swears by it! (Because everything that you can read in a paper is a well known truth!)

Translation (excuse my Swenglish…):

Needle wandered from mother’s leg to baby’s arm
From Dagens Nyheters (Daily News) correspondent
Eksjö, Wednesday

A unique case of “needle wandering” through the body has become known in Eksjö. A tip of a sewing needle that 13 years ago got stuck in the thigh of an Eksjö lady has now emerged through the upper arm – not her’s, but her baby girl’s.
In it’s time, attempts were made at Eksjö hospital to have the needle removed. The doctors did get hold of it, but it slipped away and disappeared. Recently, the woman’s 1,5 year old daughter got a black mark on her arm, and during examinations, to general astonishment, the needle that 13 years earlier disappeared in the mother’s body were retrieved.
The doctors don’t see it as impossible that it actually is the same needle. The only explanation is believed to be that the needle got into the girl’s body through the placenta.

Speaking of … ☼3

… when it might have been better not to ask:

A friend and I were walking along a busy city street having one of those conversations where you can only shout small stuff at each other because the noise is such that you can never really be sure of what you’re saying. I was telling this friend how I’d patched D’s jeans last night.

He looked at me and said, ‘What did you just say?’

I said, ‘I said I patched D’s jeans last night.’

‘Oh’ he said, ‘I thought you said you patched D’s dreams last night.’

Just keep mumbling is what I should have done. Then, my friend would have stopped, looked at me and just said really quietly, 'Wow!' I would have taken it in my stride, kept walking and mumbling and let the city noise of cars, and construction, and people shopping their guts out make the conversation all the more interesting.

Speaking of… ●2

…. surreal:

This morning, just a short while after I read your down jacket story, I was biking to the train station to get to work. I was in “no-mood-land”, not happy nor sad. Suddenly, on the side of the bike lane, I see the back of a woman, wearing a large monitor on her shoulders. I mentally rub my eyes and drop my jaw, but this is not a hallucination, she’s there.

I tilt towards happy.

While i ride pass her, I curse my self for not just stopping to take her picture. My first guess (having worked at an art academy…) is that this has to be a performance of some kind. Maybe she’s trying to state that we’re all just locked in our computorized workspaces, or what? I was smiling towards all the people I met, heading the opposite direction, thinking oh my are you gonna be surpriced in 5 seconds…

I got on the train and to work, still a bit bummed that I couldn’t show anyone what lovely morning curiosity I had seen. Going out for lunch in the town I work, I stumbled on her male counterpart… I knew what I had to do, so walked up to him and asked if I could take his picture. The monitor head nodded carefully and slowly. After taking the picture I asked what the purpose was. He mumbled something inaudiable and gave me a card.
To my big disapointment, it was an advertising drive for this recruitment company. Very clever, but I would have liked it way more if it was art…

speaking of which ☼1

Last week for the first time in a long time, I turned on the radio and lay down on the floor to do a few exercises for my back. On the radio a man was trying to describe a jacket he found really special. I always listen closely when people describe objects that mean something to them because they tease out such unexpected detail that the object soon becomes a collection of bits of unbelievable beauty that makes it impossible to picture it whole, even if it’s put right in front of you.

Anyway, he looked for the words but couldn’t find the right ones, he paused and searched, and it was the care with which he paused and searched that I came to understand how exquisite this jacket must have been because in the end the only word he found was ‘beautiful.’ It was down-filled he said, like a ski-jacket.

He knew it was down-filled because when he helped the woman who was wearing the jacket who had fallen into a fire, he remembered how everything seemed surreal as the white feathers floated above the dark pit.