My grandfather was Swedish. He was born in a country house called Siggeboda in Örebro county and educated as an engineer. After emigrating to the States he spoke very good English, with a strong Swedish accent that he may have cultivated for its exotic appeal.

I never heard him speak in his native tongue, even around his Swedish sisters (my great-aunts) or his equally Swedish mother-and sisters -in-law from his first, tragically short-lived marriage. Except, as I now recall, for one word, the only word.

My grandfather came to New York from Sweden in the first decade of the 20th century. His sisters had already emigrated and found work. He also found employment as engineer/inventor at Otis Elevator, brought his mother Carolina to New York, married a Swedish American girl, had a child.

His young wife died of typhoid soon after and his mother died of cancer. His sisters said he was devastated and never quite the same man after. But he worked on, re-married an American girl, who helped him raise his infant daughter. They produced one child, my father.

My grandfather was pretty taciturn, not given to gushes of affection or outbursts of sentiment, but he was very kind and indulgent to my cousins and me. He taught us to eat sill, the Swedish marinated herring, on hard Rye toast. He showed us how to make little Swedish pancakes, and how to eat a lobster properly. He taught us to fish, I mean really fish– casting with a spinning rod and playing a big bass or pike until we could net it and haul it into the boat.

Our fishing expeditions with grandfather took us to Charleston Lake in Ontario, where the family had a fishing shack; electricity, no running water, stinky outhouse in the back yard. I was about ten when I first went there, and I never had so much fun in my life. We would head out to fish in the morning, clean, grill and eat the fish on a different island every day, then go swimming or hiking around the island, then head for home in the afternoon if we didn’t feel like fishing any more. In the long summer evenings, we ran wild with the local kids.

One day my cousins and I were diving off an island rock after lunch (who waits an hour? not us) and I caught my toe in a crevice, fell bellyflop into the water, leaving my toenail behind. I surfaced screaming and thrashing and bleeding. My grandfather fished me out of the lake, put me, still howling, into the boat with my cousins and headed for the dock, full throttle. He carried me to the telephone in the Charleston Hotel, found out the address of the nearest medical office, and drove me there.

The doctor was a kindly old man, who was so deft and gentle as he cleaned and dressed my gory toe that it didn’t hurt a bit. His office was really old fashioned looking, with big glass bottles and antique medical instruments in cabinets and on the walls. My grandfather looked around at them, and began to talk. He said this office reminded him of his childhood in Sweden. There was an old country doctor in his town who knew how to do everything for people. He went to that doctor when he was a boy, and was never afraid, because the doctor was gentle as a woman, but strong enough to set bones, pull teeth or turn around a baby that wanted to be born backward.

My grandfather never talked about the old country, but now the words came tumbling out of him faster and faster, telling me about Sweden as he looked at the bottles and remembered his old life. Those doctors, he said, were called something.

“Shee Rooric,” He said. Or something like that. I knew he was speaking a word in Swedish, and the sound of that word was too strange for my ears to really hear. But I remembered it, because he said it over and over on the drive home, and his face was lit up with love and remembering. He never talked like that to me again.

Shee Rooric. Or something like that. The kindly country doctor.

When I went to Sweden this year to meet my long-separated second and third cousins, I downloaded Google Translate in case they had forgotten their high school English. With this app we could have easy conversations just by pressing the button. They were wonderful to me, their English was excellent, they fed me like a Christmas goose, and we gossiped endlessly about our relatives. We talked about my grandfather. I said I had never heard him speak of his childhood and youth in Örebro. Nor say anything in Swedish.

But when I got home from this blissful family reunion, I remembered the day of the torn-off toenail and the old doctor, and my grandfather’s sudden transportation to another time and country. And the only word. And there was my Translate App still on my phone, just waiting to help me out.

I typed in “doctor.” Translate typed in “Läkare.” No.

Then I typed “general practitioner.” “Allmänläkare.” No.

Then I tried the old-fashioned term “surgeon.”

There it was. “KIRURG.” The beloved word. The word that had swept my grandfather home to Örebro in a flood of memory.

 

I had discovered during my adventures in Sweden that my grandfather had had a rocky start in life. He must have been sickly; he was baptized David Karl Larsson, not in the Lindesberg Church by a priest, but at home, by his father Vilhelm. Parish records called this “Nöddöpt,” an emergency baptism. I cannot ever know the true story, but I think perhaps his wondrous KIRURG may have been a frequent visitor to Siggeboda- or that my infant grandfather may have been taken to see the KIRURG in his office with the shining glass bottles and strange metal tools.

The KIRURG’s kind face, the deft and gentle touch and comforting voice may have warmed the child’s heart and healed him as much as any medicine could have in those primitive days, over 130 years ago.

This is the story I have made up about my grandfather, a tale which provides me with a reason for his explosion of passionate feeling, talking to his grandchild in a village in Canada about a long-ago country doctor he had loved.

 

You may have noticed that the word Kirurg derives from the French chirurgien, and perhaps the British term for doctor’s office, a surgery. However, to my ten-year-old as well as my seventy-four-year-old self, it is a Swedish word through and through.