Happy birthday

My son is 15 years old today.

I still remember, of course, the day he was born. I carried him out of the room and over where he got cleaned up a bit, and looking into his face I felt, down to my toes, he looked just like me. I never did any real investigating of how that feeling comes about. It can't be very rational, because I just don't look much like a baby. The features I saw in his face were mine, not my father's or my brother's. I think I mentally compared him to old pictures of myself and that's hard to link to any biologically motivated illusion. Mirrors and photographs are just too recent to have had any impact on evolution.

We named him Axel, which turned out to be a quite popular name in his generation. No surprise, though it really was hard to realize these things could apply to us. "Axel" after relatives and perhaps a bit after Axel Oxenstierna. (Not after A. Rose, who can't even spell his name.)

Fifteen years later he still looks a lot like me, but recently my greatest revelation has been not how much of my boy he is but how different from me he is. He's a whole other person, and in most ways, better than I am.

We've done a lot, especially the last 5 years. Music festivals and concerts, movies and books. I think it began about when he started playing online games and learned English and surfing the net. He was 6 or 7 then.

He speaks English more or less fluently and writes it better. He's better at my best school subject than I ever was. He reads books almost exclusively in English and he likes to switch off the subtitles on movies.

Movies have become his greatest interest and he dives into it like nothing else in life. By now he has long passed me. He has seen more films by more great directors than I have. Only one book on his birthday wishlist this year, and it turns out it's a novel that Herzog is filming - Axel wants to read it before seeing the film. Herzog is his favorite director, for reasons I cannot understand. The sentiment is sincere, I think perhaps more so than I ever was about movies or any other culture thing. I was sort of looking forward to get to watch a few action movies while he was a teenager but Axel prefers Almodovar over Hollywood.

I compare his interests and thoughts to my own at fifteen and it strikes me, I look like a hillbilly compared to him. It makes me proud and sad at the same time. By the time I was watching real movies, not just the odd Star wars or James Bond - in cinemas only mind you, no internet or dvd back then - I was closer to 18, and my taste was nowhere near the refinement my boy shows. We went to a local movie club last night, and Axel got a membership card - age requirement 15, I just said "he's 15 tomorrow" and that was that - and we saw Hrafninn flýgur (from 1984, "When the raven flies", this could be the only really worthwhile "viking" movie ever made or at least one of very few). It was great and Axel had a great time. I sat there thinking this might be as close as we'll ever get to that idea of seeing a guy movie together just us two. Ok, that wasn't really true, for instance we saw True grit just a week or two back.

Now I'm worrying about letting him get in touch with working life and about student exchange.

At least my daughter will always be my little girl... No?