A tribute to my old friend from Reykjavik

MANY years ago....1958 to be exact...one day in Mrs. Waites’ second grade class, a new kid showed up. Quite frankly, he was not at all like the others kids because he did not speak much English and what he did speak was with a strange and heavy accent. Plus, he had hair almost as white as my grandmother’s hair and his skin was as if it had never seen the sun. He said he was from some place called Iceland. Reykjavik, Iceland to be exact. He could have said he was from Mars and it would not have mattered any much more to me or my friends. Oskar Moller was his name. Oskar and his family had moved to Birmingham, Alabama where his father Dr. Palmi Moller had taken a prestigious position as a chair of the new dental school at The University of Alabama. Oskar and I quickly became friends as did he and all our classmates. He was smart and funny and quick to learn the ways of life of a kid growing up in the deep south of the United States. But, as frequently happens our lives took different paths when I went off to military school and he became very focused on academics and the civil rights movement. I did sort of keep up with him after high school and knew that he studied at the University of New Hampshire and then fulfilled his lifetime dream of becoming a medical doctor. Oscar became a respected Director of Emergency Medical Services in Taos, New Mexico but died unexpectedly in 2012. This week when we arrived in Reykjavik, I just assumed that the phone book would be full of his Moller relatives and I could fill their ears with stories from long ago...but it was not to be. There were just a few Mollers and no one had ever heard of him or his family. After all, it HAD been almost three quarters of a century! Anyway, I’ll still post this tribute to Oskar ... Dr. Oskar Moller ... in hopes that he’ll know that I finally visited his homeland and what a beautiful country he called home.