How swift the shift
It's hard to believe that on Feb. 3, it was so warm, Claire was out riding her trike in this interesting outfit (skateboard chick meets quaint, Wellie-wearing gardener):



Just a little over a week later, we're deeply blanketed in nearly 17" of snow.



This is the first really major storm we've had since moving here in Oct. 2000. While not all of the past 5 winters have been totally mild, none brought more than a foot of snow at a time. We're in for some interesting adventures in travel this week, living in a very hilly section of town.

But what a nice day we've had so far. Shoveling, listening to a webcast of church, blueberry pancake lunch, and several rounds of indoor croquet. I bought this set at a flea market for $1 last summer to save for a foul weather week. Today seemed the perfect opportunity to try it out.

Perhaps this afternoon, like last night after dinner, we'll take half-Husky Nicky out to the park to bound through the drifts like a Iditerod champion. And we can have another snowball fight, though I'm most often the target.

Crazy fun
I'll admit it. I generally don't give a hoot about sports, but I just adore the Olympics. Some of my earliest memories are of great Olympics moments, like Dorothy Hamill's and Nadia Comaneci's amazing performances in 1976. I love the weirder sports like cliff diving, equestrian dressage, syncronized swimming, biathalon, luge.

But this year, oh boy, have they got a crazy new sport I can't wait to see--snowboard cross. Four people simultaneously racing down a snowy mountainside, clearing obstacles and doing huge arial jumps. Looks like some truly insane, totally riveting action to me. Whoa dude!

Finally, help for Grace!
My Borders/Amazon order arrived this morning and I'm so excited. One of the things I bought with gift card money was Nancy Kress' Dynamic Characters. I have high hopes it will live up to its rave reviews.

I've been struggling for several months to complete a chapter narrated by Grace, a 40-something mom and ad executive. She's been living in a corner of my brain since 1992, waiting to come to life on the page. Problem is, I still don't quite get her. I write scene after scene, only to come back and have Grace tell me "I wouldn't have done that. No, no, no, no. I feel very differently about my daughter than you think. You haven't really grasped my motives at all."

This is a very different sort of frustration with a fictional character than I've ever experienced. I've read about some exceedingly pigheaded characters who make me want to pull my hair out...and keep reading! Grace, on the other hand, just keeps eluding me. I have trouble really listening to her, letting her voice come through.

At this point, I'm willing to do a bunch of dumb exercises like an undergraduate if that will provide the breakthrough I need. So bring it on, Ms. Kress!

You know you're getting old when...
...some of your favorite childhood treats are now marketed as "retro."

Joel's post about Tastykakes got me thinking about the treats my mom used to pack in my Snoopy lunchbox. For grade four and under, I got homemade cookies most days--ginger crinkles, snickerdoodles, tollhouse, peanut butter with crisscross fork markings. When I turned 10 and mom went back to work, homemade became rarer. Enter treats from the Strohman's bakery outlet and candy bars.

Strohman's made these luscious chocolate-dipped devil's food cakes with a cream filling. They were foil-wrapped and looked like a very thick hockey puck. I've no idea what they're called, but the memory makes me crave one something fierce.

The candy bars I remember most are some of the more unusual ones. First was the Zero bar, a weird all-white gooey thing (white chocolate, caramel, almond nougat, peanuts) that was perhaps too grown-up a flavor combination for my taste. "White chocolate" is something of an oxymoron in my mind, since the stuff doesn't have cocoa in it, only cocoa butter. You might as well call Tone soap chocolate if the only standard is to contain a cocoa plant derivative.

The weirdly named Whatchamacallit bar was another regular lunchbox find. These are sort of a chocolate-dipped peanut butter Rice Krispies treat. With caramel. Not so bad, though peanut butter and caramel are not exactly stellar together. While studying abroad in college, I discovered a British candy in a similar vein called a Lion bar made by Nestle UK. They're much more generous with the chocolate, lighter on the cereal and forgo the peanut butter altogether. Nothing quite like it exists in the US. Besides, American milk chocolate is frankly a little too milky compared to what you find in the UK.

My favorite lunchbox candy was the Zagnut bar. It's similar to the modern Butterfinger, but instead of a chocolate coating, it's coated with toasted coconut. Peanut butter and coconut seem a rather disgusting combination at first blush, but crunchy toasted versions combine surprisingly well.

Thanks to the Internet, I could get an entire box of any of these treats. Or candy cigarettes (to glamorize smoking) or bottle caps (to encourage kids to swallow small metal objects found in the trash). So much for nostalgia.

Cuppa tea
I was surprised to discover in Iza Trapani's book I'm a Little Teapot, the illustration ending the story is of a tea party in which the teapot merely contains hot water. Each individual has a bag in his or her cup. It struck me as strange that someone would use a teapot as a mere kettle. A teapot, after all, is for brewing tea.

My family almost never made tea by the cup, and I don't think it's some Anglophile affectation. Partly, I suspect, my mom preferred the frugality of boiling water just once and popping two bags in a pot that will fill 5 mugs. But mostly the communal pot communicated that tea is a social beverage. You brew a big pot and fill cups around the table. Even today, meals with my family of origin don't feel complete without a shared pot of tea and after-dinner chat. All of my siblings do this when we visit one another, even though all of us have been "out of the nest" for decades.

I suspect the companies that market tea to the US are partly to blame for American's individualistic tea drinking. The bags they make are so darned small compared to what you can buy in the UK. And drinking by the cup uses up bags far more quickly than drinking by the pot. My large Royal Worchester pot holds about 12 cups, to which I add just three tea bags for a very pleasant brew. The proper use of teapots is one custom the Bigelows and Twinings would probably prefer not to catch on here.

Jesus, master of the zombies?
Claire and I have been reading Jesus Begins His Work by Ella Lindvall this week. I regularly check to see how much she comprehends and remembers the stories by asking her to tell me in her own words.

When we got to her version of Jesus raising Jairus' daughter, Claire said: "A little girl was sick and her daddy got Jesus and said, 'Jesus, come help my little girl be well.' So Jesus went but everyone was crying because the little girl died. So Jesus touched the little girl and made her undead."

Perhaps it's a sign I've been playing D&D far too many years, but I wondered whether Simon Peter or James or John had the needed silver weapons to combat the zombie girl.

Thoughts on the "four things"...
The list in my previous post was tougher to compile than I first imagined. I think I got especially hung up on the "four books I could read over and over." Developing criteria for this got me thinking first of "comfort food" books-- the macaroni and cheese of literature, so to speak. I could have as easily listed my favorite Rosamunde Pilcher book, September, or Scarlet Feather by Maeve Binchy. Jan Karon's works fall into the same category in my mind. These books take you away to lovely places. The characters have their foibles, but they change and grow in satisfying ways. But none of these books changed me.

I can, however, think of some books that created a shift in my life--either how I understand the world or how I want to live in it. But these are not necessiarily the kinds of books one can read over and over. You read them, they change you. Were you to approach the text again, you would not experience the same tectonic shift, because you're already different.

So here's a partial list of tectonic shift books that I heartily recommend, and themes they touch on:
Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton (injustice and atonement)
Dead Man Walking, Helen Prejean (justice)
Glittering Images, Susan Howatch (authenticity)
The Heartbreaker, Susan Howatch (redemption)
The High Flyer, Susan Howatch (authenticity)
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (regret)
A Prayer for the City, Buzz Bissinger (hope)
Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Willa Cather (powerlessness)
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte (courage)
Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott (grace)
Witchwood, John Buchan (deceitfulness of sin)

The books I listed as my "four books I could read over and over" fell somewhere in between the "comfort food" and tectonic shift. They encourage me to grow, though in a gentle way.

Tag, I'm It

Four Jobs I Have Had:
Summer camp arts and crafts director
Church janitor
Dispensing optician
Magazine editor

Four Movies I Could Watch Over and Over:
Amadeus
Princess Bride
LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring
Emma (Gwyneth Paltrow version)

Four Books I Could Read Over and Over:
Susan Howatch, The Wonder Worker
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
Jill Briscoe, Running on Empty

Four Places I Have Lived:
Williamsport, PA
Cheltenham Spa, Glouchestershire, UK
Alexandria, VA
East Lansing, MI

Four TV Shows I Watch:
Gilmore Girls
Dr. Phil
Supernanny
The Simpsons

Four Places I Have Been On Vacation:
Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming (childhood)
Dublin, Galway, Cahir and Cashel in Ireland (after study abroad)
Rhossoli Downs, Wales (during break studying abroad)
Montreal and Quebec City, Canada (honeymoon)

Four Websites I Visit Daily:
Me? Get on the Internet DAILY? ROFL! How about sites I visit with some regularity...
Yahoo mail
Google
Merriam-Webster
My blogroll

Four Favorite Foods:
Popcorn
Ice cream, esp. chocolate marshmallow and homemade vanilla
steamed bay scallops
turkey with mashed potatoes and gravy

Four Places I’d Like To Be Right Now:
Having tea with my oldest niece in a charming little English village, Bourton-on-the-Water
Sitting in a sunny balcony overlooking Florence like Lucy in Room with a View
Horseback riding in Hyde Park, London
Taking a writer's retreat at my former pastor's house in Trout Run, PA. The Lycoming Creek dances along just a stone's throw from the kitchen window. Many wise trees grow along its banks.

Four Bloggers I'm Tagging:
Sylvia Duggan
Paul Duggan
Christiana Fitzpatrick
Annie Barlow

Feeding the wolf
I picked up Elizabeth Berg's The Year of Pleasures from the library because it deals with similar situations and themes that I'm writing about in my novel.

I've not seen much evidence that Berg's writing is informed by a particular faith tradition, but she did include an insight about the natural vs. spiritual man that I think resonates in interesting ways with St. Paul.

"There is a story about a Navajo grandfather who once told his grandson, 'Two wolves are inside me. One is the bad wolf, full of greed and laziness, full of anger and jealousy and regret. The other is the good wolf, full of joy and compassion and willingness and great love for the world. All the time, these wolves are fighting inside me.' 'But grandfather,' the boy said, 'Which wolf will win?' The grandfather answered, 'The one I feed.'"

Oso del teddy
Whenever Claire and I work on "school" things--art, music, counting, identifying letters and sounds--she asks if we can do a Spanish project. I'm certain this fascination with Spanish comes from Rosita on Sesame Street. Unfortunately, I know little of the language since I studied German in high school and college. I certainly don't want to discourage her interest due to my lack of expertise, however.

So this weekend, when she asked about a Spanish project, I said, "What words do you want to learn?" I pulled up Alta Vista's trusty Babelfish program and translated a few words to get us started. Spanish for "teddy bear," for example, is oso del teddy.

But this is a kind of dumb and disorganized approach. There has to be some book or video or tape series designed for teaching languages to preschool kids. I could really use some recommendations.

Casting
Over Joel's winter break we have been watching videos galore. Among the lighter fare was Bewitched, based on the TV show that was in syndication all through my childhood. The film is about as deep as the old show ever was. Cute, light fun. I was surprised at how well Nicole Kidman does comedy. And she has a fairly strong resemblance to Elizabeth Montgomery.

The Darrin character, however was badly miscast in my opinion. Will Farrell is great at slapstick, but not comedies of manners. The TV Darrin was always so concerned about others' opinions of his familiy, always a bit nervous and fussy. Darrin just isn't a gallumping slob. I really think Jim Carey would have been a far better actor for the role. He does nervous/neurotic well, and I'm sure he could have nailed those bug-eyed Darrin expressions.

I've heard that some new Pink Panther films are being made. Sadly, more bad casting will likely doom them to flopdom. I enjoy Steve Martin, but he's no Clouseau. I've seen Martin attempt European, and he just seems moronic. I think you need an actual European to really nail the role. What was so hilarious about Sellers was his embodying so many of the British stereotypes of the French. For my money, I'd really like to see Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean, Black Adder) bring Clouseau back to the screen.

Scary parenting
One of my Christmas gifts was the book Mommy Knows Worst: Highlights from the age of bad parenting advice by James Lileks. Lileks is the author of another humor gem, The Gallery of Regretable Food, which highlights the scary foods in vogue in the 1940s and 50s.

A fair amount of the humor relies on Lileks' commentary on the images from advertisements and parenting books, so it's a little hard to blog. But I'll share some of his general observations from the beginning of a chapter that is truly ROFL-worthy.

Here's an example:
"If there's one thing the old books agree upon, it's the importance of leaving young children to bake in the sun, preferably until they have attained the hue of pot roast. It's the most striking example of how things have changed in recent years....Now, of course, parents regard the sun as a giant flaming ball of death, and will not let children stand near the window unless they are covered in gunk whose SP rating is equivalent to roofing tar."

I've only made it through a few chapters so far. It's frankly a rather exhausting book to read. Laughing yourself teary and breathless every few pages makes each chapter quite a work out.

Truth telling
I've learned a valuable lesson in believing one's child, especially when there's no reason for the child to lie. (This story is not for the squeamish.)

A few days ago, I noticed that Claire's cold seemed to be getting better, except her nose. The nasal discharge had thickened and begun to smell bad. She began complaining that her eyebrows hurt. I checked all my medical books, and certain that she had sinusitis, I called for a doctor's appointment. The triage nurse, when she learned that Claire was only 3, asked "are you sure she didn't stick something up her nose?" I assured her, no, surely her nose would hurt if there was something stuck.

So we see the doctor Saturday and when asked about her nose and how it felt, Claire said, "I stuck some tissue up there." The doctor couldn't see anything but mucus, so she figured Claire was just descibing wiping her nose. She wrote a script for antibiotics and sent us home.

Tonight, after Claire had been on antibiotics for over a day, I noticed a marked improvement with one nostril but not the other. But the blocked nostril looked white inside rather than green.

"Did you really put tissue up there?" I asked.

"Yeah Mommy. I had stuffies and I put tissue up there."

"You were trying to clean your nose and the tissue got stuck?"

"Yeah."

Oh Lord. I fetched a pair of tweezers, sterilized them and began a gentle fishing expedition. I pulled out three or four little bits of what looked like facial tissue. Then I got hold of a wad about the size of a shelled pecan. It smelled terrible, but with it gone, the nostril was clear. A quick squirt of Ocean Nasal Spray cleansed her nose more.

Poor kid! If we grownups had only believed her story we could have relieved her pain so much sooner!

Guess I'll be calling the doctor again in the morning. Eight more days of antibiotics to go.

My 2005 lists

It's time I overcame my blog intertia, so here are some of my favorite things from 2005.

Best books read this year
Searching for God Knows What, Donald Miller
Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling

Best videos watched
Wives and Daughters
Itallian for Beginners
Gilmore Girls season 1
Bride and Prejudice
Firefly season 1

Best new discoveries
I still like to write
Netflicks carries TV shows
Franklin's adage about "early to bed, early to rise" is true

Best changes
potty training daughter
keeping homeschool log
writing regularly
delegating library accessioning
rearranging bedroom
carpooling to choir

Best days
Good Friday, singing Mozart's Requiem to SRO audience
August 10, a full day free as a kid at Knoebels Grove amusement park

Goals for 2006
Hold church library book sale
Scrapbook Claire's first 18 months
Write 6 more chapters of novel

Fiction to Cinema
Sadly, I started this post weeks ago, but holiday projects and my 3-year-old keep interrupting.

All year I'd been eagerly anticipating the release of some wonderful stories as films. The results of those efforts were, to my mind, mixed at best. First, the worst adaptation:

Goblet of Fizzle
I'd stayed up till midnight or one for nearly a week before going to see HP and the Goblet of Fire over Thanksgiving break, racing to re-read Rowling's 700+ page tome. I was a-quiver with anticipation, especially since a friend had raved about the film just days before we went.

Sadly, re-reading the book was a very bad move, because I found myself perpetually irritated by the scriptwriter's and director's decisions. I can live with some collapsing of characters to simplify for another medium, but some of the cuts seemed nonsensical to me. The plot was rendered almost unrecognizable. Any tension or subtlety was eliminated with poor pacing and beat-you-over-the-head clues. Rowling's stories stand up quite well as mysteries, with all the requisite red herrings and twisting back stories, if only scriptwriters would let this element shine through.

This film adaptation seemed to be suffering from an identity crisis. It wanted, most of all, to be a teen angst film. While that element is certainly there, it stands to undergird the main theme of the novel--misunderstanding. Misunderstandings abound in the novel: we have false impressions of Moody, Crouch, Bagman, Krum, Fleur Delacour, Cedric Diggory and as usual, Snape. Misuderstandings disrupt relationships between the champions and Harry, Harry and Ron, Ron and Hermione, Hagrid and Madame Maxime. Rita Skeeter exists in the novel to embody the destructive power of misrepresentation and spreading of lies. Without the emergence of this culture of misunderstanding and misinformation, the kinds of evil that abound in Order of the Phoenix would never have gotten off the ground.

In the film, many of these misunderstandings are simply eliminated. We get once more, a gee-whiz-this-is-cool approach (as in the first two films) that looks more at the furniture than the people interacting in a room. Only the third film got at the essence of Rowling's story as a mystery and piece of literature with themeatic elements. I fault the Goblet film most of all for its complete distorion of the core mystery--why is the difficult Triwizard contest so easy for Harry? The film gets it all backwards. In the book, Viktor, Fleur and Cedric are smart, savvy and heroic. Harry simply gets unsolicited help and there's something sinister about this.

My hope is that twenty years from now, a true Potter fan who understands Rowling's themes and vision will remake the films for a new generation. I think contemporary films 1, 2 and 4 are going to hold up about as well as the old BBC versions of Narnia.

And speaking of Narnia...
I was pleasantly surprised by the Narnia film. The film does a good job of contextualizing the children in the 1940s, giving contemporary kids a feel for this historical period and showing the bravery of Brits in WWII. (It also shows that Americans take far too much credit for winning the war, since we sacrificed and suffered far less than Britain.) The interaction among the siblings fleshes them out very well. The girls are far more psychologically interesting than in the book. Overall, I thought the film carried the themes of the book pretty well.

The tension was not quite what it could have been, however. In the book, it builds slowly but steadily. In the film, new scenes are added to build up and release tension in increments, which ends up diffusing the tension overall. I was also disappointed with some of the visual effects. Everything Weta did was magic--the props, some of the creatures and the battle scene. The CG effects were pure Lucas--not quite believably walking on the ground or existing in the same space as the live actors. Sorry George. Weta Digital beats your team hands down.

Overall, it's a worthwhile film, if you're willing to not expect LOTR, but a great kids' film instead.

Holy roller

Claire loves doing somersaults and attempting more difficult feats like cartwheels. She was recently learning some new fun moves--headstands and crab walking. I left the room to put away laundry and returned to find her in a wonky pose, head down, one leg up in the air.

"Look, Mommy, I'm doing monastics!"

Now there's an order I'd like to visit. And you thought monks just prayed.

Happy blogiversary to me!

On this day in 2001 I began my blog odyssey. Sadly, I have mostly blogged about very silly things, not too many poems in progress or other zaniness like my descriptor says. I decided to celebrate by reading over some old entries and remembering fun things (and some sad ones) from the past 4 years.

June 27, 2002
"In college I sang in a rock band, did theatre and created a poetry group called the Janitor Poets (we all had custodial work-study jobs)."

I wonder what ever happened to my fellow janitor poets. Now that i'm home compulsively tidying, I see how cleaning can free your mind for creativity. If you wish to become a true poet, I say take up your mop and shine!

Feb. 6, 2003
"I really love the writing on Gilmore Girls. Two days after seeing the new episode, I still chuckle when I remember some of the lines.
This cracks me up:
Lorelei to Sherry: Just don't look at the baby too closely until they clean it up, or you might think you gave birth to phlegm."

I'm not sure the writing is quite as zippy this season....

Feb. 5, 2003
"I hate how dementia has taken my Dad from me, and that neither Joel nor Claire will ever know my other Dad, the smart, funny, gifted, creative, fix-everything guy."

This saddened me especially last week, when I remembered the anniversary of my father's death on Nov 2, 2003.

April 13, 2003
"The network execs at Fox must be smoking crack. How else can you explain a show like "The Pitts"? Its central comic concept about a family of accident-prone losers is about as funny as a train wreck. I can't say I've managed to sit through an episode yet. I think I'd rather watch a whole season of "Charles in Charge" reruns than one episode of "The Pitts." The ads for the show are so painful the thirty second exposure makes me want to run from the room and call the nearest psychiatric center to schedule electric shock treatment."

That show was on the air for a month, I think! Sense wins again.

Aug 31, 2003
"This evening I returned a video to the video store. As I was leaving, a car full of nuns pulled into the parking lot.

What do you suppose they were going to rent? The Sound of Music? Sister Act? My guess? The Fast and the Furious. :-)"

Dec. 14, 2003
"Listening to the radio during breakfast, we heard a long segment on the capture of Saddam Hussein. At one point in the broadcast, a crowd reacted to the news with clapping and cheering.

In response, our toddler daughter kicked her high chair tray, clapped and said 'woot!'

Or should that be w00t? Only 16 months old, and she's picking up Internet chat slang. Thanks bq."

Feb. 24, 2004
"Boohbah makes Teletubbies look like Shakespeare. I really think you need to be under age 2 or a drug user to fully appreciate it. Almost no talking occurs during the program. For a good portion of the show, a glowing ball with a rainbow trail bounces around while children's voices say "Booh-bah" repeatedly and giggle.

The ball eventually lands and these five freaky creatures come out. They have turtle-like retractable kewpie-doll heads--but no mouth or nose--and bulbous bodies in rainbow shades. These creatures would have been the stuff of nightmares for me as a kid. They never, ever talk. They just roll their eyes from side to side with a clicking sound. Creepy. They do occasionally squeak and sing five-note chords. And they dance a lot. In fact, about all they do is dance. How children are supposed to learn anything from watching these singing rainbow freaks gyrate and sway is a total mystery to me."

Such fun, but that's enough for now....

Time goes
We recently joined Netflix, largely because they offer so many great television series that our local video stores simply don't carry. The past 2 weeks, I've enjoyed watching through episodes of "As Time Goes By" with Judi Dench as Jean and Geoffrey Palmer as Lionel. The humor is largely understated, though occasionally they throw in a very eccentric character or bizarre situation. I love Lionel's 85-year-old father who collects pop culture items like jukeboxes and frequently uses the catch phrase, "Rock on!" :-)

I look forward to catching up on BBC series that only occasionally appear on PBS: Chef!, The Vicar of Dibley, All Creatures Great and Small, Good Neighbors. Of course, we'll probably get some movies too...eventually. Any film suggestions for an Anglophile like me?

Another update
Thanks for your continued prayers for my relative who attempted suicide last month. He was moved from a medical floor to the psych unit a few weeks ago, though he is still on a feeding tube for nutrition. The doctors have changed his medication from antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication to one that stabilizes bipolar disorder. He doesn't have an official bipolar diagnosis, but this medication experiment may prompt one. Some of the literature I've read says antidepressants will make a bipolar patient worse, and he appears to have reacted that way.

The more researchers study bipolar disorder, the more they find a continuum of symptoms, particularly in the manic phase. Not all bipolar patients will behave as if they're "king of the world" while having a manic episode. Some will be agitated, paranoid, unable to sleep or concentrate, or have thoughts swirling like a hamster running on its wheel. The more I read, the more I marvel at the mystery of the human mind.

The best news I've heard yet is that my relative's care team is developing a plan for his release from the hospital that will involve a month of day treatment. Our big fear was that he would be under-treated and sent home too early with no support in place, with disastrous results. The developing plan sounds very promising.

Please continue to pray for his continued progress in therapy and good results with medications. Pray for his wife and daughters to be stengthened and filled with hope.

Delight from Denmark

Last night, Joel and I watched a film called "Italiensk for Begyndere" (Itallian for Beginners). I vaguely remember seeing previews for this at an art house theater back in our pre-kid days. While it was marketed as a comedy for American audiences, the film defies genre classification, as do most films from this studio.

The first character we meet is Andreas, a young pastor sent to temporarily fill the pulpit in a suburban town's Danish national church. The former pastor was removed from his post because he became unhinged after his wife's death and assaulted the organist. Pastor Wredmann continues to lurk around the church, shouting atheistic ideas during services and generally terrorizing the congregation, which has shrunk to a handful of elderly women and the paid staff (verger and two choristers). The verger, a middle-aged woman with a checkered past of drug addiction and robbery, encourages Andreas in his work to revive the ailing church that helped her build a new life.

Andreas stays at a local hotel, where he meets the receptionist, Jorgen and Jorgen's work friends, Finn and Guilia, who work at the restaurant. Jorgen's boss wants him to fire Finn, a handsome but surly fellow who regularly insults customers. Jorgen sees Finn as a lost soul--an orphan with a troubled life--and procrastinates firining his pal. Guilia is young, Italian, and infatuated with Jorgen, though he's too sunk in gloom about his failings with women to notice the woman in front of him.

The film progresses as we see the characters going about everyday tasks. Finn picks up the restaurant's bread order from the bakery, and we meet Olympia, a young woman who's so incredibly clumsy it's funny only once, and thereafter quite poignant. We follow her home to see how she's bullied and cowed by her cranky, bedridden father. Andreas goes for a haircut to Jorgen's hairdresser and we meet Karen, who is also saddled with an abusive, ill parent. In Karen's case, it's a mother who complains of chronic pain and seems to lash out because of it.

Many of the characters converge at a nightschool course on Itallian. When the teacher has a heart attack, the class is in crisis. As they seek a way to continue, the characters' lives become entwined in interesting ways full of love and second chances.

I really loved the non-Hollywood feel of this film. The characters seem so ordinary, doing normal jobs, suffering losses and hardships that are common in life. Strangely, this is what makes them compelling. The drama and tensions are organic, never forced. Only one scene had the potential to be Hollywood-style drama--when Andreas confronts Pastor Wredmann. His confrontation is so peppered with love and grace for his broken predecessor, I know Hollywood would never film such a scene. Why is it in American drama, characters can't resist zinging a few home truths? Both pastors are widowers in this film, but Andreas doesn't even mention that he was able to keep his faith in the very same crisis that shattered Wredmann spiritually. Andreas' faithfulness to his calling as shepherd of the flock is rewarded in satisfying ways.

Even if you resist foreign films, give "Itallian for Beginners" a try. Its quiet charms will surprise you.