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?

I dreamt about

I had a dream this weekend, about me and me son. We were out driving, I don't know where we were going, it didn't seem like we quite knew. I think we were someplace near home, it was all open and flat landscapes, just like central Uppland. After a while we came to a place. Somewhere that tries to be some place, it had a parking lot and some houses. The parking lot was sort of big, in several sections but not in that industrial way like outside a big well planned shopping mall but like near some ancient attraction where the parking spaces are just sprawled about all around in little pieces. People were walking everywhere, it must have been a pretty popular place. Some houses where nearby, several of them pretty big though we were in the countryside. Two cars were just ahead of us and they were revving and playing, going much too fast, there were people everywhere. It was summer or late spring.

Strangely, it didn't turn into a nightmare where I hit the gas to get away from the kids driving too fast.

One of the cars, I think it was a small BMW estate, had pulled ahead, then turned around and came back full throttle. I could imagine him showing off to the rest of us and he wasn't looking at what he should have been looking at. People were milling about. Some young men were loitering and not paying attention to the cars, too cool to care. One of them was just standing in the street and that BMW just ran head on into him. It was a nasty accident though not spectacular. Just real. Except I knew I was dreaming, just waiting for it to turn nightmare-nasty.

In my dream I thought huh? Am I not supposed to wake up now? But it wasn't a real nightmare.

I pulled my car over diagonally behind the run-over kid. The BMW sped away and went off. I hit the warning blinkers and fumbled for my phone, stepping out.

Nobody else was moving. Nobody was doing anything. The driver was gone. The kid's friends melted away into the scenery and nobody else was stepping forward. Frantic, I found myself trying to do the right things, calling for an ambulance and doing what I could for the kid.

My son was awkwardly moving around and I tried to tell him how to act.

In that instant I understood that this wasn't a nightmare about something I did or had to do but a nightmare about my son.

And then I woke myself.

Later the next day, I went to get some movies at the library. I found two movies I knew my son wanted - The drunken angel and A streetcar named Desire, the old one with Brando and Leigh. Yep, that's his taste. But best of all, I found Cyrano, and Axel sounded like he'd really like watching it. For some reason, library movies are in much worse shape than rentals. I don't quite understand why, people must be less careful with them maybe because they're free. Maybe these movies just see more traffic.

After dinner we popped Cyrano into the player and started watching. Cyrano is such a delightful movie. Axel just discovered knowing languages is fun and though he doesn't know any French he does know a bit of Spanish and I'm trying to encourage pretending you know languages just so you can pick up a smattering of it.

"Holy crap he's speaking in verse all the time!"

Delightful. Of course, just then the movie just... ceased. Popped out the disc and sure enough upon inspection it's clear this disc isn't playable. It's so scratched it's a miracle we could even watch the first ten minutes.

We are not to be deterred however, it's Saturday and we're set for a movie. Next we try Streetcar. Inspecting that disc would have been cheating so we didn't and the first ten or fifteen are just fine. We sit there adapting to new manners, new language, another way to condense drama.

Of course, that one didn't work either.

Now we're laughing at the hopelessness of it all. I say we'll check the online rental. We're talking about other times when movies haven't worked for us and we're agreeing that this is worse than all of them, even worse than when Queen of the damned failed in the last ten minutes.

We find 8 1/2 in the rental menu, but there's an Almodovar as well, and Axel really likes those, partly because it's Spanish. So we choose that one - All about my mother. I hadn't seen it, don't know what it's about.

Turns out it's about a kid being killed in a car accident. Freaky, with the dream the night before. Then the film changes. This film turns around so many times, you never really settle into the story. The kid's mother is into theater and one play is in focus for most of the movie. At first we don't notice what play it is.

After a few minutes more Axel suddenly exclaims, holy crap, it's Streetcar.

And it is. It's Blanche and Stella and Stanley. I just sit there taking in this weird situation and it's like the whole dream the night before and the whole evening, everything has just been leading up to this story about Spanish prostitutes.

Nothing else of consequence happens this evening but I will never forget the BMW and Streetcar named Desire. I'm not the one to believe in hidden life messages in dreams but sometimes it's hard to stop your mind from wandering.

Now I just have to figure out what that dream meant.