Humans of Millbury: Dave

I’m retired so I’m ultimately flexible with my days.  You know, I have a few commitments, but not many.  Sometimes I like to just sit and do nothing, and you know, read.  Or watch something on TV or go down to the sportsmans club.

Well, my grandfather was a draft dodger over in Sweden. They had a requirement that everybody had to go into the service and my grandfather didn’t want to do it.  He couldn’t buy a ticket in Sweden so he had to go over to Denmark to buy his ticket to come to the United States.  He told me about that a long time ago.  And then when he got to this country, the weird thing is he immediately went to the west coast, about as far west as he could go, to Oregon.  And he met this woman.  My grandfather was from Torso on the southern Swedish coast.  The woman that he met was from Halivik, which was about ten miles down the beach. They had never met. They met in Oregon, and they got married in Oregon.  

You know, my grandfather, he would watch for me. I’d be out partying with my friends or whatever and I'd come home and next thing you know he’d be at my door.  His bedroom was next to mine.  He’d come in and tell me these stories.  He went out to Oregon to be a salmon fisherman cause he was a fisherman in Sweden. My dad was born in Somerville.  A homebirth.  A couple years after, my grandmother died and my grandfather bought a farm in Sherborn.  

We had a lot of traditions that kind of fell by the wayside.  I miss smorgasbord from when I was a kid, cause you know I grew up in a Swedish household. Smorgasbord is this variety of swedish foods, sil, which is pickled herring, swedish meatballs.

My dad, you know, the thing is my dad had friends and he’d say “Oh Charlie, he’s a character” and that’s the greatest compliment he could bestow on anybody which meant someone who did what they wanted, thought what they wanted and didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought.  But, that was my dad!