Pillars of the Community

This morning I walked my parents down to the tram stop to wave them off after they came to visit me in Gothenburg for a long weekend. We saunaed twice, at the frihamn municipal bastu on the river and at a friend's house. We hiked, picked mushrooms, played cards, fixed up the flat, cooked meals and socialised with my housemates and friends.

My parents are a constant tornado of energy, rarely sitting still for five minutes. They're doing the dishes, making tea, repotting plants, varnishing a table. Back home in Suffolk they are drivers of socialisation, one of my abiding childhood memories was looking forward to the dinner parties our parents would host, and the chocolate mousse we would get as a treat. Every Thursday friends would come over to play folk music. Sundays in winter were for work parties in Reydon wood as part of the firewood co-operative my parents were a driving force in. I have many happy memories of running around the woods with other children of the coppicers, piling brush on the bonfire. The smell of smoke and damp barber jackets. Coffee from a flask that always tasted more of flask than coffee. Dense home-baked flapjack and biscuits.

Growing up I thought this was normal. Baseline. It took me until my late 20s to really appreciate how exceptional my parents are. Most people are not so lucky to come from such a social and open home. I don't think I'll ever measure up to their community contributions and driving energy. But I feel very fortunate to have them in my life.

Recently I've been plodding through Robert Putman's Bowling Alone, about the decline and fall of community engagement across almost all spheres of american life. In the early chapters he talks about how a small core of driven people, often of my parent's demographic (educated, liberal, middle-class & aged) are responsible for organising a huge proportion of organised and casual social contact. The people who chair organisations, set meeting agendas, host dinner parties, write letters, talk to the new neighbours. We depend on these pillars. I have been trying, less than consciously, since I moved to Sweden to be one of these pillars. To bring people together, contribute to the social fabric of a city, to give more than I take. I host dinners, open my home to friends and strangers, volunteer at food saving and a bike repair co-op and even joined the board of my apartment block. It's exhausting at times to be honest. I do not have that seemingly infinite well of energy that powers my parents from tennis game to concert. But I do believe, earnestly, in the social good of it, and will continue to try.