I had a virtual reality way before the internet. It was my reality and it certainly was virtual. As a child my best friend was Jesus. But Jesus wasn’t just a kid called Jesus. What I experienced can best be described as a virtual or spiritual experience. As a child I would talk to Jesus. Often. When I was three we visited my grandparents in Oslo and I would talk to him before I went to sleep. Later that summer when we went to Switzerland I carried on talking to Jesus and I wondered, “Are there several Jesuses? One here and one in Oslo? Or maybe he walks in heaven from Oslo to here?” The spiritual reality of Jesus was with me wherever I was and has stayed with me all my life.
I have a distinct timeline of my life starting when I was born. I’m not sure how or when I started visualizing it but it is more or less the same as the way I visualize when I count. There are lots of fascinating visuals along the timeline that can be seen from different angles but the actual timeline itself starts like a tube that opens at 12 o’clock – my birth canal?! The timeline follows clockwise round to 7 when it does a straight line up till 11, then does a diagonal two-step from 11-12. From there it goes straight up to 18 when it curves up and left to 20 with a side-step to 21 before circling down and left to 25 and up to 30. At that point my timeline goes into several 270-degree curves. It does a 270 degree curve from 30 and up to the left to 40. When it hits 50 a new 270 degree curve heads upwards to 60, and then starts a new trajectory straight up to 70. From there it curves down to the left, following a new 270 curve to 80, another to 90 and on till it reaches 100. After that the whole cycle repeats itself though starting to the right of center around one on a clock-face and no tube! Who knows how far I’ll get along that line!
My timeline gives me a quick review of my life. Nothing spectacular, it just is. During the first part of my life the path is simpler and narrower, growing in depth through experience and happenings until I was introduced to the internet in the mid 1990’s. Until then my timeline it simply contained my lifes’ happenings or memories, places, family and friends. But by the mid-nineties it gained a sort of aura of happenings and information that are not restricted to my personal timeline – but they have influenced it. Until then all that I knew was lodged in my mind and based on knowledge that I had gained through my teachers, my work books, library and reference books. But from then on it grew with my awareness of where I could access relevant information at any given moment as it does for us all. A portable computer brought this new world into our home and my virtual world took off. It brought new and old contacts, colleagues and friends into a virtual reality. I went from learning by going to classes, reading books and articles – to getting a grip on a new virtual reality which was so vast it was impossible to conceive, but so much fun to discover. I say this because I don’t think anyone born after that has any conception of the enormity of this difference.
In the autumn of 1993 computers were introduced in Swedish schools followed in 1998 by the home-PC-reform. The idea was that everyone who had a job would be able to use their work computers at home, tax-free. It was in the early 1990’s that Sweden’s virtual reality exploded when over a million Swedes got access to their first computers. Swedish families were provided with a subsidy to get a mobile phone and later a family computer and this is no doubt why Sweden became computerized so fast. This coincided with our move to Falun and paid jobs. I started work as a copywriter and with my English/American/Norwegian/Swedish background I had a hidden talent for proof reading my Swedish/American health writer boss. He had a very large portable computer that he sent home with me and I proceeded to do the final proof reading of a book that he was writing. The portable computer was huge by today’s standards, more like a portable typewriter. At that time computers didn’t have an internet connection. Everything I proofread was saved a large floppy disks that were sent to the printer!
In the mid-ninteties we finally got connected to the internet and our perception and view of the world gradually changed from then on. It grew and spread and merged. I started to be able to look for information on the internet and entered a new world. New words took over. A mouse was no longer an animal with a tail. For those of us who were in our thirties and forties the internet presented a very steep learning curve – gradually made easier once we were able to ‘google’ things! A huge difference from that of our own children whose virtual world exploded in their teens. To say nothing of our grandchildren who can’t even conceive of life without a cell phone in their hands. Can they even perceive their own thoughts without them being affected by those of friends, peers or influencers? And yet they have influences that are vast compared to those of my childhood! Are they too vast? Were mine too enclosed? Probably.
Our grandkids wondered recently how we were able to function without cell phones! This reminded me of some extreme situations when a cell phone would have been a godsend to have. And other times when they made the world of a difference in difficult situations.
When I was 18 I was invited to join a group of people travelling with a play in India. This was a group of idealistic like-minded people who looked out for each other. Cell phones were unheard of and I often stayed with people who didn’t know what a permanent phone was either. I seldom had the contact details of the people I was working with. One night I was billeted with an Indian friend in a home in Pune. Next day we were supposed to move to another house and as we walked, bag in hand, through Pune’s numerous streets and roundabouts, one street looked just like another. I asked my friend if she knew the address of where we were going but she had no idea and nor did I. We prayed out loud as we walked that we would somehow be led to the right place. A few minutes later an Indian lady who was walking down the same street, tapped my friend’s shoulder and asked her if we didn’t belong to the theatre group visiting Pune? She asked he if we know where to go? She was our angel that day. She was a cleaner at the home where the group was based and she took us there!
Once we got there I was to share a bedroom with another Indian friend. At that time you couldn’t drink tap water without it being boiled and cooled so our bedroom was provided with 2 little carafes of ’clean’ water on the dressing table. The 2 carafes each had a glass placed upside-down on them to keep the water clean. A few nights later the glasses started rattling wildly in the middle of the night. The dogs in the area started barking and I thought the fan was falling out of the roof, as it actually had done on the first day we arrived in India! We fell asleep again and next morning everything seemed the same as usual. We learnt later that there had been a massive earthquake at a large dam not far away. Back in England my parents also heard about it – but it took 4 weeks before they got my next letter and knew for sure that I was safe. An unthinkable wait today but they assumed that no news was good news, at least for our family.
Not long after this I took part in a conference in Panchgani and afterwards I helped to produce a magazine report that I was to take to Mumbai to get printed. I took the bus to Pune and got on the train to Mumbai looking forward to being picked up by friends at the Mumbai train station a few hours later. But not long after the train started it came to an abrupt stop. As I looked out to see the cause of the stop I saw half a body and all the intestines of a man – right outside my window. We sat there for 4 hours till the body was finally taken away and the train could leave. I arrived in Mumbai at midnight, tired, hungry and pretty shaken up – but none of my friends were there to meet me. They of course had no idea of why I hadn’t arrived when they went to pick me up as the station didn’t have any information about why the train hadn’t come or when it would eventually arrive. I found one single public phone at the station. It had a huge book of Mumbai phone numbers and I looked up the surnames of my friends in the book but all the R’s, L’s and M’s had been torn out of the phone book – so I had no idea how to call my friends the Reynolds, Lalas or Mayors. I don’t remember how it all worked out, but I do remember that I never travelled anywhere again without writing down the phone numbers and addresses of those I was going to visit!
The stories continue to pop up in my mind, but maybe the most interesting challenges came as a family as our children were growing up. We ate at 6 pm every evening and the easiest way to know that everyone would be home then was to have supper ready! But if there was an earlier appointment for dancing, riding, hockey or if one of the children was late – there were the usual 3 or 4 friends where we were pretty sure we could find them. This got more complicated as they got older and even more so when we moved to Falun where it took a while to get to know their classmates parents. Up till then our son was called Truls, his first given name. One day we called round to the list of class parents looking for Truls and got the response, “We don’t have a Truls here but we have a Joffe!” Unknown to us he had changed the order of his names from Truls Joffe to Joffe Truls and from then on his name was Joffe!
The food supplement company we worked for had their suppliers in North America. When Kjersti was 15 and Joffe 13 we visited San Francisco. Kjersti wanted to go down to the wharf and see the sealions and all the other attractions. Joffe wanted to go skateboarding, so we left Joffe off at Fulton Street on the north side Golden Gate Park and told him we’d see him at that corner at 3 pm. We went off with Kjersti and had a great time at Fishermans wharf and came back as planned at 3 pm. But there was no Joffe. We waited and waited and got more and more worried. But then we heard a familiar sound far away in the distance, vrrroom, vrrroom, vrrroom which got louder and louder as the speck on the horizon got bigger and bigger and finally a sweaty Joffe skated in to view! He was drenched in sweat and we were all incredibly relieved to see each other again. Golden Gate park south side looks much the same as the north side and Joffe was waiting on the south side. We had said we would stay there till he came and not move, so his only hope of finding us was to skate the length of the park. Poor guy was terrified that he would never see us again. We headed for Muir Woods and the ocean and time together again. On the way we passed a little shop selling skateboards and surfing boards run by Kevin Champion. A serendipitous stop as Kjersti was longing to surf and got lots of tips of where to go and how to go about getting a board as we carried on down the coast. For Joffe this was the beginning of his business collaboration with Kevin that lasted for years. Joffe marketed Kevin’s PoorBoy brand in Sweden during his high school years and worked for him several summers. Pretty amazing – though had we known what goes on in and around Golden Gate Park we would never have left Joffe there alone in the first place. His guardian angels worked overtime as usual!
Mobile phones were big and clumsy to begin with. But when GSM, the Global System for Mobile communication introduced mobile phones with SIM-cards, the phones became smaller, could send messages and were generally more usable. Cashcards were introduced in 1996 in Sweden and the mobile boom took off. We got a family cell phone through the business we worked at around 1996. We started to get used to online communication, but it was usually one-way and far from consistent as we only had one mobile phone in the family for the first few years.
The evening of Kjersti’s high school graduation we knew she would be out way past midnight. We on the other hand were going to Stockholm next day and we wanted to be sure that she was able to get home before we left. She didn’t have her own cell phone and at 2 am I got in the car and drove downtown in the hopes of finding her. I drove up Svärdsjögatan in the early morning light but the street was completely empty. No cars, no buses and no people. But suddenly I caught a glimpse of one girl in a cream coloured long dress walking down the street with her shoes in her hand and I was able to pick up our very tired but happy daughter and take her home!
By now the family was getting used to trans-atlantic air travel. We travelled to America on business most years, bringing our children with us. Liquid containers weren’t restricted to 100 ml then and as Joffe and Kjersti didn’t like airplane food we often brought fruit yoghurt with us on trips. When Joffe was 17 and visiting LA with a girlfriend he gave us a reversed charge call. Joffe said how yoghurt was expensive and he needed some cash and then as he quickly put down the public phone he said, “I’ve got to run – here comes a junkie!” We had no way of calling him back! Later we got an email through his friend Kevin where Joffe said, “Please can you send me some dough! With love from your one and only son!”
After she finished high school Kjersti was accepted to study physical theatre at Dell’Arte college of Physical Theatre in Blue Lake, California. They had some days off over Christmas and she and a friend went to stay with friends of friends in LA. One night I was woken up with a reversed charge call to our home number. Kjersti was out on the street as a guy had crept into her bed against her wishes and she wanted our help to get her out of there. I called a friend who lived north of LA and asked for her help. This angel dropped everything and immediately left to pick Kjersti up in LA. One of those situations when we would have given everything to have a direct connection ourselves and to be there for Kjersti.
In his late teens and twenties, Joffe focused on making money so that he could take a month or two off to surf or snowboard and one winter he and friends took off for Bali. They are all tall goodlooking Scandinavians who stand out in a crowd. Balinese are generally short. One evening when they were eating out, a Balinese prince, who was notoriously jealous about his wife, picked a fight with Joffe and his friends. The prince grabbed a bottle, broke it and proceeded to stab at Joffe who was sitting, stabbing him from behind in his back and on his head. The police were called (this was apparently not the first time the Prince had stirred up trouble) and Joffe and his friend were taken to the police station – despite Joffe’s protests that he wanted to be taken to the hospital. He called us from the police station. His gurney lay next to that of a dead man. The sheet he himself lay on was multicoloured – very dirty with signs of previous injuries. They finally got Joffe to the hospital where he was X-rayed and stitched up. He was released with a huge white bandage turbaned on this head. A perfect target for the uptight prince so we called UD, Sweden’s foreign department to get him sent home on an earlier flight than planned but as the medical service was very good in Bali, UD opted to have him rest there in a hotel and come home as planned 10 days later. Whenever he had to go out he took of the turban target!
In 2004 Joffe and some friends went to Thailand around Christmas. One of his friends was buying and bringing snus that would last them for the whole visit. As luck would have it he stayed with friends before leaving for the airport and when he locked the door and dropped the apartment key into their letterbox he saw the packet of snus lying on the floor – inside the door. No way of accessing it. They must have got that friend to send the package to Thailand because on Christmas Day they went to a town on the east coast to pick it up.
Meanwhile we were celebrating Chistmas with my mother in Falun. I went into the living room to chat with her on the morning of the 26th December, and she told me that she had just heard on the news that there had been a huge tsunami in the Indian Ocean affecting Thailand. Time stood still as we took in what that could mean for Joffe who was supposed to be at the same spot as the tsunami hit Thailand. Or so we thought. 5 minutes later my cellphone rang and it was Joffe to ask for help to transfer money. He obviously had no idea of what was going on on the west coast! We breathed a sigh of relief and it was years before we knew the real story behind why they had been on the east coast that memorable day when 230 000 people died in the tusunami, amongst them our accountant, several of his family and 550 other swedes. To speak nothing of all those that were injured. But, thankfully and amazingly, not Joffe or his friends.
Another memorable event was when our first granddaughter was born. Once again a night time call, this time from Judson in Boulder, Colorado, to say that Kjersti had been in labor 4 days and now needed to get to hospital for a caesarian. They had been planning a home birth and had put all their money into the cost of home birth and were unable to cover the cost of hospital care. My response was you have to do what you have to do and I got on the first plane to Colorado. Arlanda was in the midst of a severe snow storm but they successfully cleared the runway 5 snowtrucks at a time. Not so in Frankfurt where they had 3 tiny snowtrucks for the whole airport. I saw how all the bags were piled inside the entrance in a huge mountain and realised that I probably wouldn’t find mine when I arrived in Denver! I had a vague idea which hospital they would go to but at that time our cell phone coverage didn’t include the US. So I took the shuttle from the airport to the hospital that they thought they would be at, asked for Kjersti Webb and was shown to the room where Kjersti and Judson were just getting to know Zuni, their new little daughter who had a great pair of lungs! What a trip! As soon as I heard how much it cost to breathe the air at the hospital, I suggested we take off to their home, which we did and Kjersti and Zuni continued to be cared for by the doula and us all.
Getting to know grandchildren at a distance can be a challenge but Skype was created, by 2 young swedes, just in time for our family’s births deaths and marriages! We used it right from the start so my parents could take part at the reception when Kjersti married Judson. We were able to take part in the moments when our American grandchildren sat up, learnt to crawl, walk and talk bridging the gap from Sweden to Colorado and making it easy to be close even though miles apart. When we arrived to visit it was as though we had never been apart! We even used skype at my mothers funeral so that her sisters in Norway could take part, all dressed up in their funeral clothes!
Being able to keep in touch with friends and family around the world is amazing.
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