Category Archives: nils

Time passes by

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There are so many balls that I have figuratively dropped these past several weeks, it’s disgusting. I am trying to make up for it or just get over it with not much success.

Here’s to new beginnings, then. My oldest nephew, Nils, married his fiance, Emily, this past Saturday. (Some photos of the wedding are available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/steve_oberg/sets/72157594287976715/) We drove down from the Chicago area to attend the outdoor wedding held on the bank of a local river in the town where I grew up. It was late afternoon, the sun was shining, and the temperature was nice and warm. It was a great experience and we are thrilled for this new beginning for Nils and Emily. We were able to see many friends and acquaintences whom we haven’t seen for quite a while, so that was an added bonus. Just as happened at my niece, Britta’s, wedding a year and a half ago, I had this sense while watching the whole event unfold that I was a modern day Rip Van Winkle who had just woken up out of some sort of dream to find that the whole world had drastically changed while he was asleep. I found it hard to come to terms with the fact that this person whom I have known since birth is now a married man, and that means that I am no longer as young as I once was. My older brothers and sisters are approaching middle age, and so am I. My mother may someday soon become a great-grandmother.

This sense of unreality was compounded by a chance encounter this weekend. I met a former elementary/junior high/high school classmate who was working at the local gas station and whom I hadn’t seen since graduation more than twenty years ago. My, how time changes people! It took me a few minutes to realize who she was. And she didn’t recognize me at first, either, so I introduced myself. In our brief conversation I learned that she has a daughter who is now a junior in high school; that she had been married to a military guy and had lived in such faraway places as Fairbanks, Alaska, and Washington State. How or why did she end up coming back to her hometown, I wondered? I didn’t have a chance to ask.

Time passes by so quickly. I blink, and my own children are no longer babies or toddlers or a young adult but instead are young boys, a little lady, and a high shool aged young man. More and more, I think God is reminding me of what really matters most: relationships. This was recently made even more obvious to me by the sudden death of Steve Irwin, the “Crocodile Hunter,” in a freak accident. Like millions of other people around the world, I did not know this man personally at all yet I felt a sense of real connection with him and his young family through watching his shows on TV. I am sure that Steve Irwin was no saint yet to me, he was a wildlife hero. I admired him for many reasons but especially for his neverending enthusiasm and zest for life, and his championing of wildlife conservation. I mourn him and I have shed tears for his wife and his two little kids who clearly meant the world to him. Call me crazy or overly sentimental or apply some other negative epithet but yes, I cried when I heard the unbelievable news.

I ask you to take time to assess your own life. What motivates you? Where do you put your energies, your hopes and dreams? I hope your focus is not on materialistic things, ambitions, careers, and honors, which are like fool’s gold. Instead, seek after what is true, what is real, what is relational. Seek, and you will find the One who created relationships and who made you for relationship: God.

Some family photos

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My brother, Dan, digitized many family photos a while ago. I’ve chosen a few to show here.

Below is a photo of all of my family members on the afternoon of our wedding in January 2000, including my six brothers and sisters and almost all of my nieces and nephews and one of my cousins. This is the last photo taken that includes all of my siblings and parents. My sister, Becky, is married and lives in New Zealand, so it is very unusual to have her in a recent family photo. And then my father died almost exactly two years after this photo was taken.

First row from left to right: Dan (brother), Ben (nephew), Keegan (son), Pelle (nephew), and Nils (nephew); Second row: Lars (nephew), my mother with Kerstin (niece) in her lap, my father with Bjorn (nephew) in his lap, and Sam (nephew from New Zealand). Third row: Debbie (sister), Bradley (cousin), Linda (sister-in-law), Jeff (brother), Jocelyn (niece), Tim (brother), Petra (sister-in-law), Kevin (brother), Britta (niece), me, Michele, Becky (sister from New Zealand).

Here is a photo of my mother and father on their wedding day in September 1958:

This photo is of Grandma McCallum, my mother’s mother. I was really close to her and miss her even to this day. This is the last photo taken of her not long before her death in October 1982. The baby in the stroller is Nils, my oldest nephew:

Below is a late photo of Grandpa and Grandma McCallum, the only grandparents I ever knew (my paternal grandparents both died before I was old enough to remember them):

I like this photo of all of us kids (except Donny, my parents’ third child, who died of unknown causes at 18 months of age). Left to right: Dan (#6 and twin to Debbie), Kevin (#1), me (#8) in Kevin’s lap, Tim (#2) with Debbie (#7 and twin to Dan) on his lap, Jeff (#4), and Becky (#5). At this point we still lived in Nebraska:

My Kiwi brother-in-law, Martin (top), along with some friends, pretending to do a Maori war dance called the “haka,” on a beautiful beach on the North Island:

Finally, here I am for my third birthday:

The sound of silence

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The entry title is a nod to the classic Simon and Garfunkel song…and is meant as a lead-in to an explanation of why there haven’t been many entries in this blog of late. Stuff happens. Mostly, I needed a bit of a break from blogging due to preoccupation with other matters. There is always plenty to discuss here, but the motivation isn’t always plentiful!

During the 4th of July weekend, my family and I went to visit with my side of the family in east central Illinois. We had a good time, and it was especially good to spend time with my mother and to see my many nieces and nephews. They have all changed and grown up a lot somehow in the last six months or so, especially one nephew, Ben. I really enjoyed perusing a scrapbook of his recent three-month stay with his cousins in Manitoba, who own a farm and raise pigs and cattle. The scrapbook of photos and a diary of the daily events was put together by his aunt. It was quite well done and gave me a real picture of the fun, but also hard work, that Ben had on his trip. Ben’s dad, my brother, Tim, had just finished laying new hardwood flooring in his house and that was duly admired. Michele wants that kind of flooring in our house, so I asked some questions of Tim as to how to lay hardwood floors. He and Linda chose a nice birch flooring from Bruce Flooring.

Keegan had a lot of fun Sunday night (the 4th), playing with his cousins and lighting off lots of firecrackers. One of the days we were there, we drove through some of my old stomping grounds, the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It has changed a LOT since I was a student there. Of particular interest was the new Siebel Center for Computer Science, which just opened and is likely one of the world’s most technologically advanced buildings. I was pleased to hear that my oldest nephew, Nils, recently began a full-time job as a systems analyst for the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, working on a five-year grant that relates to the Deep Tunnel Project in Chicago.

Another highlight of the trip was going to an incredible bakery in downtown Urbana, called Mirabelle’s. I bought an olive rosemary loaf, as well as a honey walnut loaf, and some raspberry brioches — all very delicious! I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t have their almond horns, which is a kind of pastry that, well, is to die for. Michele’s comment was, “We badly need a nice bakery like this where we live!” To which my response is, Amen.