We have a green checked rug in our living room. Last summer we picked it up at IKEA, marked down on sale (a sign!), to fill the blank spot on the floor. It's bright and friendly and fits perfectly in the space. But that's not even the best part.

It doubles as a giant game board!

Checkers? Chess? Go? Not today. In honor of the (extremely cheesy) new Liam Neeson movie in American theaters this weekend, we thought we'd give Battleship a try.

I made the aircraft carrier, battleship, submarine, destroyer, and patrol boat out of colored paper. Gray, of course, because battleships are gray. (I would've used my cherry-print or pink paisley paper to add a dash of ironic juxtaposition, but I'd already committed a fairly severe Battleship faux pas by referring to the pieces as "boats" rather than "ships," and was afraid of being hanged from the nearest yardarm.) Because the regular Battleship board is only 10 by 10, and our equally divided giant-board is 15 by 30, I was careful to scale the ships accordingly.

Throughout the country schoolchildren participate in colorful parades, celebrating 17 May 1814, when the Norwegian constitution was signed and Norway was finally declared to be a separate nation. In Oslo, the barnetoget (children's parade) begins down by the water and winds uphill to the Royal Palace. It is the largest parade in the country; about 100 schools participate, and the number of spectators can reach 100,000! At the palace, the royal family stand on the balcony to inspect each school and band as it goes by.

   

King Karl Johan, King of Sweden and Norway at the time the constitution was signed, also inspects the schools as they pass. Norwegians are very patriotic, though not necessarily in the way I was brought up to think of patriotism in the U.S. Love of country simply laces every celebration. It's not strange to have a Norwegian flag displayed at a birthday or anniversary party, and Christmas decorations often include flag ornaments and ribbons. But on Constitution Day, flags run a red, white, and blue river all the way up Karl Johans gate.

This means we get our own flags, too!

Today is 17 May, Norway's Constitution Day, the biggest national celebration of the year. Tomorrow I'll post pictures of the parades, national costumes, the king and queen, and the spectacular weather we enjoyed all day. Tonight, all I have energy for is a simple post about a singular pleasure.

The sun was still high in the sky as we took an after dinner walk down to the fjord. We walked the bike path by the quiet harbor, leaving behind the pump and whine of ten thousand parties vibrating throughout the city center. The water was glass. The green of the spring-plump trees like alien flames against the sky. 

It was good to stretch our legs and find some time away from all the activity. Spectating on days like today is fun, of course. We ogle the colorful bunader, silver jewelry glittering at the waists, the wrists, the throats. We bob along to the bass beat as marching bands pass by playing songs we do not recognize. But under it all, there is a danger for foreigners like us. 

Days like today, we feel freshly outside. Untouched. Unnecessary to this long-standing tradition. This is not our history. And while tourists are able to run back to the familiar confines of their home countries and rejuvenate their own sense of identity and national pride, expats aren't so lucky. This is our home. Even when we have not the language nor the costume nor the roots of everyone else around us. 

About six years ago, Jonathan and I attended a game night organized by our church. It was meant to be a gathering of young married couples, a chance for us to commiserate as we learned to navigate those secret tunnels of early marriage. After a rousing round of Apples to Apples, four or five couples reclined in chairs around a table, still littered with red and green cards, and began chatting about the events of the day. The group was diverse in terms of age, parental status, length of marriage and, as it turned out, political values. 

We knew several of the people in that room, but Elliott* and his wife were new. In their mid-thirties, they were a full decade older than Jonathan and me. She was a teacher, petite and blond. I'd seen her wrangling their two little boys, dressed to match one another, in the halls of our church the Sunday before. That night, she remained quiet, eyes on the collar of her husband's button-up shirt. 

Elliott was small, skinny, and his eyelashes were so fine and white-blond, they were almost invisible. He blinked a lot. I don't remember what he did for a living, only what he said.

"Gays shouldn't be allowed to marry, and they definitely shouldn't be allowed to be parents." 

Elliott spoke with soft authority, nodding, blinking his bald eyelids and scanning the faces in the room. As often happens at church gatherings, he made certain assumptions about our larger group. He thought, Oh, I'm among friends. We read the same Bible. We pray to the same God. We must agree on the core tenants of our religion. I'm in a safe place. No matter what I say, I'll find support here among my people.

But I pushed back.  I knew gay couples who had adopted children and were parenting like pros. I also knew straight, married, Christian couples who had screwed up the parenting gig profoundly. Why shouldn't gays be allowed to parent?

"Homosexuality is a sin," he said, disdainfully. Had he been holding a Bible, he would have thumped me on the nose with it. "It's a depraved lifestyle, and against God's law. And it's no environment for children."

Lord help me, I tried to argue. I was 23-years-old and still believed all people were, deep down, reasonable. Elliott's mind was sealed up like a clamshell. Everyone else in the room was quiet, watchful. And silence, as we all know, is tantamount to support of the loudest party in the room, acquiescence to the belligerence of a bully. 

His chest swelled with pride as he said, "One thing's for sure, I would never let my children play with the children of gays."

I thought I saw his wife twitch, but she said nothing. Neither did I. My mouth was open. I stared at Elliott in his plaid shirt and pleated pants, his graying crew cut, his lashless eyelids. The man was a bigot, and he had total control of his wife (Biblical principle?) and his children (Biblical principle), and because no one was stepping up to stop him, he had control of the room, too. 

It was Jonathan who finally broke the silence.

"And I'd never let my kids play with your kids."

Elliott flinched. Then he took a long sip of his water to cover for it, but his reaction had been obvious. Without meaning to, he'd looked right at my husband, his eyes suddenly weaker and questioning. He'd been hurt. We thanked our hosts and walked out into the warm summer night of our small California town.

President Obama supported same-sex marriage in 1996, opposed same-sex marriage in 2008, and has since "evolved" to become a proponent once again. (And the crowds went wild.)

Columnist Mona Charen penned a response to the President's of-late position on this issue for the National Review Online. I appreciate that she took the time to point out the hypocrisy of the GLBT community in using a different standard for measuring our President's position on their numero uno issue. (Republicans who stand against them have been accused of "hate speech," but Obama stood against them and they merely expressed disappointment.) However, Charen diminished her credibility entirely once she stated her own reasoned opposition to same-sex marriage.

It could be his posture, relaxed but alert; it could be his bicycle. Today it was the pile of roses and flags at his feet and tangled in his handlebars. 

American author Jennifer Egan drew a sellout crowd to Oslo's Litteraturhuset on Wednesday night. Organizers had to set out extra rows of chairs on the floor of the main theater to accommodate Egan's fans. The room was warm, thick with anticipation and the rumble of low voices. My friend, Zoë, and I edged in toward two empty seats.

"Note to self," I whispered to her. "Win a Pulitzer."

And Zoë, who never fails to keep things real, whispered back, "Note to self: Get published first."

I took the last sip of my pinot noir as we settled in. We were only two of what I'm sure were many aspiring authors in the room, including a few of our fellow members from the Oslo International Writers Group. But that night, all of us had come primarily as readers, fans of Egan's work. 

She'd arrived in Oslo to promote and discuss A Visit from the Goon Squad, the novel which earned her the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The book is as impossible to describe succinctly as it is to spoil for those who have not yet read it. Written as a series of nonlinear chapters which each read as a standalone story starring a different protagonist, Goon Squad is a fresh take on the art of the novel, one influenced by both the 19th century serialized fiction of Dickens and the HBO mob hit The Sopranos.  It is organized in two "sides," A and B, like a record or a cassette tape, and every chapter, like a song, is complete in itself, but also builds to create a full album.

As Litteraturhuset's Head of Programming, Silje Riise Naess, said in her introduction, "It's about time Jennifer Egan was published here in Norway!"

Norwegian author Linn Ullmann led the interview, and the first thing she asked Egan about was that crazy title, A Visit from the Goon Squad, which has given Scandinavian publishers a bit of trouble. Norwegian publishers ultimately decided on the title En bølle på døra, which translates to something like A Bully at Your Door.

"I came up with the title years before I started the book," Egan said. "For a long time, whenever I had a new idea, I wondered, Will this book be Goon Squad? And it finally was."

"What exactly is a goon?" Ullman asked. "One of your characters says, Time is a goon. What does he mean?"

"A goon is a comic thing. Not a scary term, a silly term," she said. "It's like a very cartoonish thug. And Time is a goon is a completely made-up saying, but [it means] that time wins. The Grim Reaper, but in a lighter sense."

Everything about Egan was confident. She's been through dozens and dozens of interviews just like this one. I watched her shake back her hair, cut short, silky in the stage lights, the same silver-brown of a Yorkshire terrier's coat. I could picture her, a New York City adoptee (born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco), walking around Brooklyn with her ear-buds in, listening to Elvis Costello. Confident. Creative. Nothing Egan said in her interview was perfunctory or unthinking. Hundreds of people had gathered in Oslo just as similar crowds had in interviews across the U.S., everyone eager to catch a glimpse of the mind that had conceived a book this different, this wacky... a work Time Magazine described as an "expert fillet" of an epic novel.

On a gray Wednesday evening in April, I walked to Oslo's Litteraturhuset under the red blossom of my umbrella. I was on my way to see Australian author Anna Funder talk about her debut novel, All That I Am. Cars splashed murky water from the gutters up onto the sidewalk. I worried that my heart was about to break.

As a hopeful, student author, I've been told a thousand times that good writing is always genuine. That I must write from a place of sincerity and passion. Time and again, my mentors and professors have said to me, Write the story you must. Like any other helpful adage, however, once this truth has been used as a device to stimulate creativity a few dozen times, it loses its shine, its magic, its ability to impel. It becomes personal affirmation. Still true, but benign. 

Then last winter, I heard a teacher say something new. 

Bill Lychack, author of The Architect of Flowers, spoke to my class about what a writer's product is and where it comes from. Snow dusted the bare trees outside our classroom in Cambridge. When it came to his own process, Lychack said, "What I must do is all that concerns me." But then he went on...

She popped up in the middle of my essay on the evolution of Feminism yesterday. Since then I've been wondering which of her characteristics, good and bad, live on in me. Grandma Dot passed away almost three years ago, but I think about her often. On some days, I even see her in the mirror. She's there in my slightly left-upturned mouth. My high, pale forehead.

Dot was an insatiable reader, an archer, a woman with a soft spot for the past (a genealogist). She was quick to talk to strangers, an eloquent listener, and had a charitable heart. I want to claim all of these traits as my own, too. Segregated and recombined. But maybe that's just wishful thinking. Maybe I'm entirely my own woman and there is no one behind me to blame when I fall short.

Either way, Grandma's beauty is the kind I want. She is missed.

You've just landed on Planet Zuto. Thus begins a recent article in The Atlantic titled Why the U.S. Economy Is Biased Against Men. The author, Marty Nemko, plants his readers on this fictitious planet to demonstrate that, given a blind test, the facts of the U.S. marketplace actually add up to a bias against men rather than women. It's fascinating to see someone try and state the position of the other side in the modern realm of gender bias, and Nemko makes many important points: 

Unfortunately, many of the Nemko's objections are still rooted in the classic chauvinism which rightly contributed to the rise of Feminism in the first place: that men are designed to work more, harder, and in higher positions than women, and that women are destined to make the sacrifices required by at least one parent in order to rear children. 

It is as though Nemko has no idea that while Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining and defending equal rights for women, it also seeks gender equality by acknowledging that men are also harmed by sexism and gender roles. 

So we left.

Maybe it was that all of our familiar furniture was already placed in these foreign rooms, or maybe it was that sunlight streamed in through all our garret windows and made the place glow. Whatever the case, our cats had no trouble adjusting to their new surroundings. We unzipped the carriers slowly so that Disney and Crypto could ease their way out into the new space. They still wore their harnesses. Green camo for Disney and pink floral for Crypto. They'd spent the last 24 hours enclosed in the carriers, most of that time on planes between San Francisco and New York, then New York and Oslo. We'd pulled them out a few terrorizing times: going through security at SFO and then again at EWR, for a brief rest period at an airport hotel in Newark, New Jersey, and then finally at OSL where a veterinarian was on hand to examine them and grant our precious cargo official entry into Norway.

 

That was the longest day of our lives. 

Two planes, a train, a taxi. Five giant suitcases, two cat carriers, and two whining cats. Four flights of stairs. 

But as we entered the new flat, at once aware of our solitude and our togetherness, all the stress of the melted away. 

Disney found the circle window in the living room quickly. He hopped up to the sill multiple times that first day to check out the new street so far below him. Birds played in the sky at his eye-level. He purred contentedly. Crypto sprawled on the floor in one of the rectangular patches of yellow sunlight on the wooden floor. She lay there like a swimmer floating in a pool of light.

Jonathan and I stepped out on our patio and walked to the corner of it. I pushed up on the banister and leaned forward, face full into the fresh April air, pointing myself southwest where I could see, half a kilometer away, the water of the Oslofjord. Jonathan stood behind me and placed one hand on each of mine, his chest pressed warmly to my shoulder blades. 

That was exactly one year ago. And since then...