Comparisons

I’m married to a classic stubborn ol’ Norwegian.  He fits nearly every stereotype that’s out there.  Kory’s peers still in Norway, the friends he left behind when he came to America at age nine, have a completely different mindset than he and his Norwegian immigrant peers in America.  The Norwegians in Norway are much more easy going.

Norway has gone from a third world country fifty years ago, to the country that’s always at the top of the list for most “livable” places.  The discovery of oil in the North Sea has made all the difference, as Norway is now the second largest exporter of oil in the world.  The Norwegians that stayed through the hard times are now reaping massive rewards.

My husband can’t shake his immigrant mentality, so whether he came by his stubbornness through nature or nurture, I can’t say.  His father had nothing when he arrived in America.  He had to save for a year before he could pay for the tickets to bring over his wife and four sons.

Kory spent his American childhood living as if in poverty, while his father was investing every dollar in his construction business, increasing his net worth.  They shopped at thrift stores and often brought back more from the dump than they had taken.  Kory’s father repaired all their shoes as the passed down from one boy to the next. His mother made soap from scratch. They ate soup made from fish heads thrown out by a fisherman uncle or beef bones from a rendering plant where another relative worked. 

Since Kory’s had to earn every dime he ever spent as a kid, and pay for his own clothes in high school, he’s been pinching every penny since.  He knows how much work it takes to earn a dollar and he’s not quick to let them go.  He still wears socks with holes in them long after I insist he throw them out because in his mind, if he gets several more uses out of them before they get tossed, he’s made his money go just that much further.

Kory’s counterparts in Norway now enjoy a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle and would never even consider wearing socks with holes in them.  There’s a good chance they even throw out hole-less socks.  Norwegians take so many perfectly good things to the dump that several dumps have opened second hand stores so their landfills don’t fill up so quickly.  Naturally, it’s mostly just immigrants that shop there. 

Today’s Norwegians are anything but tight fisted.  They have so much of their lives subsidized by their government, that many don’t even have a savings account because any possible emergency they’d have, would be taken care of by their tax dollars at work.  Even, I’m sure, a hole in their sock.