B ~ Bil = Car

google image

The word for today is “bil” which means car. It's pronounced “beel” as in the slithery creature, preceded by a b. This word is significant, because my maiden name was Bilen. The adding of the “en” at the end or a Swedish word is like the English use of “the” before a word. In other less English teachery-words, our name meant “the car.” Pronouncing our last name was a source of much explanation over the years.  The best we could get Americans to do was "bill + en(d)" as in pretend the second word is end, just don't say the "d".  

Having this last name was not only interesting, but significant because when “The Swede” moved us to the USA, he didn't look for a teaching job. He looked for any job, and after a brief stint in customer service at a bank, got a customer service job at Volvo. From there he climbed the corporate ladder many rungs at a time, and retired as vice president in 1998 at age 57. People always think he had the Volvo job when we moved here, but that's not the case.  

The car in this post card is almost exactly my first car.  I don't have any digital pictures of it, so I grabbed this one from google.  Just erase the groovy racing stripes and there ya' go.  I got it in 1985, with 100k miles on it.  We finally gave it away in 1995 with over 250k, to a friend who needed a car.  By then it had been joined by a yellow version.  We had fruit salad cars.  Mine was blueberry...