stories

This Summer Vacay Is Totally Not Tubular, Man

As a teen, I used to spend a big part of my summers with my grandparents on the other side of the country, which meant traveling to and from all day by train. That meant I needed something to eat and drink on the train, and since the restaurant car had ridiculously high prices for everything, I always brought my own snacks — typically some candy, a tube of Pringles (Sour Cream and Onion), and soda. My grandparents spent practically all summer at the cabin in the middle of nowhere and only came to “the civilization” twice a week to buy groceries and do laundry. (The cabin had running water, but it came from a well, and during summers, there was always a risk of running out of drinking water, so laundry was done in town.)

One summer, toward the end of my stay, my godfather and his family came from Australia to spend time in Finland. Since the cabin didn’t have the space for everyone, my godfather’s family spent the nights in town, made the roughly fifty-minute drive to the cabin every morning, and drove back in the evening.

A few days before I was going back, I asked when the next grocery trip was so that I could get my snacks for the return trip. My grandmother said that it made no sense for us to go to town for groceries when my godfather was driving back and forth every day, and that he could buy whatever I wanted. That made sense, I guess (to a point).

I was skeptical, but I gave her a detailed shopping list, which included the line “green Pringles tube”. (That’s the exact translation of what I wrote down on the list.)

The day before my return came, and my grandmother handed me a bag with my snacks. I noticed the distinct rustle of a potato chip bag, and I hadn’t asked for one, so I was alarmed. I opened the shopping bag and saw a Red Bag of Not Pringles.

I looked at my grandmother, and she spoke before I could say anything.

Grandmother: “I forgot to hand the list to [Godfather], but I called him and read the list to him, he didn’t know what ‘green [horrifically butchered words for “Pringles” and “tube”]’ meant.”

Yep, she had a habit of mispronouncing all words of foreign origin. Well, words she knew to be of foreign origin, anyway. I was SO confused when I learned to read while they were still living in the town where they raised my dad and his three brothers and noticed the difference between the Swedish place names when written and the way she was pronouncing them. And it was NOT because she didn’t speak Swedish, because she wasn’t pronouncing them like a Finnish-speaker with no knowledge of Swedish pronunciation would, either.

That is why I was skeptical when she suggested I write a shopping list instead of going to get my snacks myself, but I figured everything would be okay since all she had to do was give the list to [Godfather]. Unfortunately, I had forgotten how scatterbrained she was. Being in my mid-teens, I was… “mildly annoyed” — I suspect I am on the autism spectrum, as I definitely do not react well when my detailed plans fall through because of someone else’s mistake, and being a teen at the time didn’t exactly help — but as usual, I calmed down quickly.

The next morning, we got in the car and started the drive to the closest town with a railway station (two hours away). The timing was such that we couldn’t stop along the way to pick up anything, so I wasn’t exactly the happiest camper around, but I wasn’t mad, either.

Well, my grandmother decided that I WAS mad at her because I declined the apple slices she was ALWAYS conjuring out of thin air and trying to stuff down our throats. (She washed and peeled the apples, but she never removed the cores and would not tolerate us leaving ANY part uneaten. She only begrudgingly allowed us to pick out the seeds.) She started crying, which caused my grandfather to get mad at me.

Ahh, fun times.

I bought a TINY (something like 40g or so) can of green Pringles on the train, for the same price as a normal 200g tube, of course, but it was better than nothing. I was not going to open the bag of chips on the train because I HATE the sound of someone digging chips out of a bag in places like movie theaters and on trains.