Thinks I Love About Denmark

Now isn’t that a title to get people yawning, groaning and yammering about as they anticipate a long list of likes? Never fear that is not the sort of thing I want to write about this morning but rather about the simple picturesque life that was Denmark. My family “over there” tells me that Lille Danmark is gone, what they have now is both richer but also in some ways more depressing and fraught with angst as much of Europe has been over these last 10 years.

But in some ways Denmark will never change because the people have such an ingrained sense of self which has not dissipated in millennia so why should it now?

We love marzipan and consumed tons of it (literally) during the month of December; we love our flag and our proud to know that it is the oldest national flag in the world; we love hygge, jul and hearts. We love our families, our friends and even the tourists. Snaps, herring, ale, bakeries and flowers. Really, we are a simple people with simple desires and that is why we are the happiest people on earth. We don’t want to be millionaires or own 1,000 pairs of shoes; we don’t need Coach purses or Gucci watches. We want a work-life balance that lets us hygge with family and LIVE, LIVE, LIVE until we die.

Here’s a little toast to my home country!  Skol, skipper, smidt flipper!

Celebrating a Beloved Aunt

I spoke a little bit about my Faster Jonna the other day and crediting her with her wonderful sense of “hygge”. For those having lived under a bushel these past few years “hygge” has been celebrated in a number of books and discussions perhaps in a hope to enlighten the world about why Danes are amongst the happiest people in the world. Certainly I have mentioned this feeling of coziness in my blogs before but I’d like to tell you about my darling aunt.

She could make an ordinary day into something special by simply setting a lovely little coffee table, a breakfast treat or a full on supper. First of all she had collected over the years a lot of little treasures, small vases, candlestick holders, crocheted egg warmers (made by my mother) and other little and large decorative things to set on the table. She always set her coffee table with true cup, saucer and sandwich or cake plate. I don’t believe she even owned a mug!

However all of this was merely a setting and to hygge you don’t really need to set a scene but that was Faster Jonna’s charm. The real sense of hygge comes from the down-home hospitality that one can exude without even trying. As I reflect more on my aunt’s charm I also feel very strongly that her sense of joy in life was a contributing factor in making any visit to her home or her table so hyggelig. She was always laughing, opening her arms wide as guests entered her home and one simply felt welcome immediately.

She was such a darling inspiration for me and I miss her very dearly. It was her birthday this week and I have been thinking about one memorable one we celebrated together as we walked along Bispensgade in Aalbørg on Beaujolais Night (her birthday). There were live lights everywhere (torches), wine glasses and open air seating (the first I had ever seen) and simply crowds of people having the best time. We walked arm in arm while Onkle Verner and Axel walked beside us, behind us, in front of us, as we laughed, giggled and just enjoyed ourselves in the simple revelry of the event.

Happy Birthday Faster Jonna!

Rye Bread and Other Things

I wrote about Mom’s rising rye bread yesterday but unfortunately the end result was not so very good!  Mom forgot to tell me she had put the bread in the oven so I never put the oven Timer on and 90 minutes later she had a loaf of brick rather than bread!  I think it has been many years since Mom had a FUBAR moment with her bread! I suggest she should send it out for the magpies to have a go at but she was afraid they would break their beaks!

The cause of her forgetting her bread was that she was knitting like a maniac (more than usual).  She knit 4 headbands by 3:00 and I then said “ok, that’s enough, you need to rest your arms” and suddenly she looked at the clock and ran into the back kitchen. Ouch in more ways than one! Poor Mamma. Fortunately John had bought some Canadian Rye Bread; not at all the same thing but at least she had a backup for her breakfast! With my ileostomy I am recommended to have only white bread which is a real bummer as I have been eating multigrain or whole wheat for decades and going back to white bread is like “sticking your tongue out the window and getting slapped” as Mom says in her Danish idiom! At least when I make it as toast I can spread my avocado, diced tomato and Havarti cheese on it and it tastes of something.

So one must be creative with these little but vital things like BREAD.

In case you are wondering Mom’s rye bread is the dark rye that is very typical of Danish meals, particularly with high rise open faced sandwiches commonly called “smorbrød” but also a breakfast bread when you aren’t spoiling yourself with their morning buns from the bakery. Which reminds me of one memorial morning jaunt to the bakery in Aabybrø; I was typically up early so thought I would surprise Faster Jonna og Axel so I got to the bakery and went berserk, bringing home at least 2 dozen "rundstykker" and pastries, all different sorts because they all looked so good I could not make up my mind! It was a terrific breakfast spread because of course Faster Jonna then had to make it all “hyggelig” and she was the Queen of Hygge – no one, and I mean no one – could hygge like Faster. (Faster is the Danish word for paternal aunt).

And this doesn't even do justice to the bakery I was in!

 

 

 

 

 

 

And now you know a lot (but not everything) about Bread!

Being Danish Canadian

I was brought to Canada when I was 4 years old.  We sailed from Odense, Denmark in 1957 and landed in Halifax from whence we took a train to Toronto.  I can actually remember the train ride and the hotel we stayed in for several weeks while my parents looked for a decent apartment.  As I’ve written before, they had some very rude surprise awaiting them in this country the first of which was finding a decent place to live in Toronto.

Now making that statement I can anticipate born Canadians may ruffle their feathers and make the remark “why didn’t you go back where you came from” to which I want to respond by simply slapping their faces.  Stupid response to a stupid question, I know.  However, as I cannot do that in a virtual environment (and of course I wouldn’t really do that “live”) I will say what I normally say “number one, they couldn’t afford to turn tail and run and number two, they came here to make a better life but the people who invited them here did not live up to their promises”.  

Why am I bringing this up today?  Here’s why, I want to express some gratitude as well as some concern. 

I am very grateful that I live in a safe country like Canada.  I was talking with my mother the other day about how it was when she first came over here and finally she said to me “you know, it was not easy, we had a lot of very hard times.  It was very, very hard.  Dad had a really good (top) job in Odense, we had a beautiful modern apartment, we had access to the best food and because your dad listened to those men from Canada Packers we came over here where he had to start from the ground up.  He was “maester" (equivalent to General Manager) in the most modern meat plant in Denmark to become a butcher again.  It was really hard on him (and on me).”  Mom had never talked like that before and I was deeply impressed with how silent she has been all these years about how tough they had it.  It was a terrible shock to not get the job he had been promised when he made the decision to sell everything and take 3 small children and a wife to a country where he knew absolutely no one.  I cannot imagine what courage it took for them to go and to stay.  When you came to Canada in 1957 you did it on your own, no aid whatsoever.

I’ve asked my dad many times what brought him to Canada and he said that he chose Canada over South Africa, Australia and the United States because it was the safest place, in his opinion, of any country in 1957.  He had lived through World War II in Occupied Denmark and he did not want to see that happen for his children.  When I was in Europe this summer I was very, very uneasy about the news blasting away morning, noon and night.  Since returning home I have slept badly and have a number of nightmares that has me waking up in a sweat.  I listen to the news, to the continued fighting in the Middle East, to the posturing by Russia and the United States, to plane crashes and migration crises.  I am stressed out and do not see a good outcome in the years ahead.  So I thank my parents for being survivors in immigrating to a country where we are relatively safe from harm and I thank Canada for being a safe haven for me and mine.

I was born Danish but I am a Canadian.

Now What's Funny

Just because I’ve been pondering some heavy stuff lately doesn’t mean I haven’t had some laugh out loud moments.  Watching my critters demonstrate for me makes me grin and when they start doing the fandango I have to laugh out loud.  Thumper has started zipping around the house if he thinks he is being given “what for”.  Cherie gives me soulful looks after he’s tracked mud all over the new bedding and then rolls over like a dog to get a pat on the tummy. 

My mother repeats something I did not say and then says “I’ve got to go put my ears on”.  The other day she thought I said I wanted her to make a cow to go around my neck.  One look at her with my eyebrows raised and she got up and hurried to her bedroom to put on her hearing aids.  What I said was I wanted her to make me a collar; we both couldn’t stop laughing when she realized how crazy the “translation” sounded.

The other night we were watching some old family movies and we couldn’t stop laughing at ourselves laughing so hard.  One story in particular still keeps me laughing.  My mother has always been a stickler for good behaviour in stores.  As children we were warned well in advance of entering the story not to “plague” her; in other words, no asking for anything.  We weren’t allowed to touch anything either, only look longingly at the dolls and other toys in the bins or on the shelf.  Flash forward 50 years and there is my mother picking up a ball in Staples.  Just as she goes to test it’s bounce-ability I turn around and see her; my eyes look frantically at the sign but before I can say anything “whack” to the floor goes the hand calculator.  Mom looks up at me with horrified eyes; I spin around and shuffle out of the store holding my legs together, with Mom right behind me.  We stand outside the door and laugh so hard we can barely hold each other up.  Gasping for breath I ask her “why on earth?” and can’t get anything else out.  I start laughing again, Mom is laughing so hard she is crying, I am almost wetting myself.  Every time we looked at each other all the way home we would burst out laughing again.  At last Mom gets out “I thought it was a ball” which sets me off again.  “Why would you do that in an office supply store?  You with your perfect behaviour?”  She manages to get out “It was for Bobby” (her dog).

I tell you, it’s not easy raising a mother.

Snowsuits

Did you have a snowsuit when you were little?  We have some great pictures of us when we were little wearing matching snowsuits.  My sister’s and mine were matching light blue suits and John’s was a darker blue but the same style.  We’d zip those little puppies on and go out not afraid of the cold or snow.  We just had rubber boots for winter boots but we had 3 pairs of socks on to keep our feet warm.

       My father said they were the most expensive snowsuits to be had and for years we thought he just meant we had really nice suits.  However, the truth was that my dad had a brilliant idea of canning and marketing water back in 1958 but my mother insisted that the money should be spent on the children, not a crazy idea.  My father naturally listened to the wiser head of his wife.  So he never got the patent or the idea off the ground until 1980 when his children went into partnership with him.

       Fortunately my father was a sensible man and also one with a great sense of humour, hence the allusion to how expensive our suits were.  Meanwhile we thought we were rich to have such nice suits.  It was one of the few times I felt happy to have something different from the other kids in school.  Most of the time I just wanted to blend in and it would embarrass me to be wearing fashions 2 years ahead of my peers because my grandmother would send us things from Denmark.  When girls had tall boots, Jeanette and I had to wear white rubber ankle boots (and those never did come into fashion over here).  When other girls wore fuzzy knit winter caps, we had ones made of white fur (they were gorgeous, but we didn’t blend).  One year, and I really don’t know what Farmor was thinking, she sent over pinkish grey duffle coats that were 10 sizes too big.  I am not exaggerating.  Here we were, 10 and 11 years old, both of us together didn’t weigh 100 pounds, and these coats were made for women considerably taller and at least a 100 pounds heavier.  Those, thank God, my mother never made us wear.  They were even too big for her!

       Oh yes, and let’s not forget the white and blue satin bloomers – but that’s for another story!

Communication from Canada

When a family immigrates to a different country they will often protect their family back in the home country by only telling the good things about the immigration.  Back in 1957 a person wrote home.  One didn’t call because long distance was exorbitant in cost.  In the very beginning not only didn’t my parents have a telephone but the family back home didn’t have one either.  So my mother would write letters on thin “air mail” paper and use air mail envelopes with the blue and red border.  I don’t know the price of stamps back then but you had to be frugal with how heavy the envelope was.

When my parents finally got a phone, and the family back home got a phone, we would have to make a special appointment with the operator to set up the overseas call.  It was a huge deal.  And then they had to time the call for about 10 minutes and try not to ask stupid questions like “how’s the weather” and “what did you have for dinner”.  It was very stressful and my parents were tense just making the call.  When it was all over they were not much wiser but satisfied that they had heard the voices of their family.

Today my mother has this special 10-10-7-10 number where she can call her sister for 99 cents and talk for 90 minutes.  The rest of us can use Facebook, Skype and otherwise contact the other side of the ocean in a few minutes.  The world has really changed in my own lifetime.  I often wonder what more we will see during our lifetime; inventions move faster than the speed of light.

My Father

One of the things I remember most strongly about my father was his sense of humour.  He could laugh at himself just as easily as over any other hilarious story. 

            When he was a little boy of about 5 or 6 he asked his father if he couldn’t please have an allowance.  Somewhere he had heard about an allowance, perhaps because his older sister was receiving one and he seemed to think it was about time he received some allowance also.  The family was strapped for money but Farfar didn’t want to completely disappoint the boy so he told him that not only could he have an allowance but he had a perfect piggybank for him.  So my father went with him to the room that contained this piggybank.  There on the wall was a metal box with a slot for him to insert his coins.  Perfect.  It was quite some time before my father discovered that the metal box was the place where they would put money into to get the heat for the apartment!

            My father’s sister was seven years old than he and he simply adored her.  The worst thing that could happen to him was to have her become disappointed in him so when he got into trouble he would beg his mother “don’t tell Jonna”.  And my father got into trouble quite often, he simply couldn’t help himself.  He was full of energy and enjoyed playing out of doors.  One time he was playing in Skansebakken Park with a couple of his friends and he discovered a sewer drain that lifted up.  Naturally he climbed down into the sewer and his friends followed him.  They were having a gay old time, and for whatever reason they began digging about as part of their game.  Suddenly they came upon some artifacts which seemed very cool.  He brought them home and his father realized that they were of Viking provenance.  So off they went to the police station where my father told them how he had discovered them.  Then the museum was called and people went down to discover this new find.  But instead of my father being any sort of hero he was in trouble for having trespassed on city property!

            Another time my dad and his friends discovered a pile of those little rings that go on the nuts and bolts (and whose name I cannot recall) and then they discovered what a cool sound these things made when they were twirled on a stick.  And then they sort of hurled off the stick and flew high into the air, quite a distance away.  They heard some noise but it was a considerable time before they realized that when the rings flew away they were actually crashing into windows across the street and breaking the glass.  Once they realized what they had been doing they naturally ran home.  The next day there was an article in the paper about vandals destroying property.  Dad never confessed to having been the culprit!

            It wasn’t that he was bad, he never meant to do things that were wrong but somehow he just did some many different adventures that some of them were bound to get him into trouble.  One of his observations was that whenever the kids got in trouble, or was on the outs with other kids, they would run home to their mothers and the next time you saw them they were outside their home eating a sugar sandwich.  This particular story really resonated with us kids and when we were having a fight with one another (which happened often enough) and one of us would start bawling the rest of us would say “oh go home to mother and get a sugar sandwich”. 

When Steven Harper gets into one of his pouts I feel like telling him the same thing.

What We Are Made of

My parents told us plenty of stories about growing up under the war in Denmark and from adult perspective I certainly feel grateful that we have grown up in Canada where we have been safe from the threat of invasion and war.

            When my father was ten years old he heard the planes flying over Denmark and went home to his parents and said “the Germans are coming”.  (Germany invaded Denmark on April 9, 1940)  His parents didn’t believe him at first but soon enough the country became aware that they were invaded.  The Germans occupied the schools as living quarters so the children did not attend school with any kind of regularity.  Soon enough there was rationing of food, gasoline, leather goods and other things.  My father described how they made shoe soles out of old bicycle tires.  They had liquorice made of liquorice bark or root.  Under this war Danes began eating unsalted butter so that after the war they had become so accustomed to this type of butter that few went back to salted butter.  We always had unsalted butter in our home.

            When my father told the story of the invasion he said “one million Germans occupied Denmark against 9 soldiers at the border”.  That was a bit of an exaggeration.  In the initial action there were approximately 120,000 Germans against 2 divisions of Danish.  The country did not accept the occupation quietly although initial resistance began slowly.  By 1943 there was a large wave of underground resistance and in 1944 there was an actual uprising in Copenhagen.  The Germans had been fairly reasonable with the Danes during the occupation compared with their attitude in other countries but the Danes were quietly furious when the rumour went out that there would be a roundup of Jews.  Under cover of night all but 472 of the 8,000 Jews are spirited across to Sweden or otherwise hidden by the Danes.  Of those, 70 lost their lives in the concentration camps.

            My father told us how even children were recruited to the non-violent resistance movement; they would distribute leaflets and they put sand in gasoline tanks.  At the same time, he described how the Germans could strike fear into people as they stormed up the stairs of apartment buildings in the dead of night.  One never knew when the door would bang open and Gestapo would be in your home.  He described standing in the street and seeing neighbours shot at because more than 2 had congregated on the street after the ban.  He saw his own mother dive into a building to avoid being shot while he dived into another building across the street.

            My family lived in Aalborg close to where the airstrip was and so there would be bombs dropped by the British to try to blockade the German air force.  London wasn’t the only allied city that was being bombed regularly.

            These were some of the stories I grew up on.  War is not something to be taken lightly.  And heroism isn’t the glory that we see in a John Wayne movie.  Heroism is enduring the ignominy of an occupation with quiet, stoic resistance until the tree is bent beyond endurance.

Learning English

My parents had learned some English in school but my mother’s ability was really quite limited.  She could sing songs like “pudda you right hand in, pudda you left hand in, shake it all around”.  In other words, she really couldn’t understand English at all when she landed in the middle of Little Italy.  My father was a bit better and managed very quickly to pick up the lingo.  He would read the newspaper every night and particularly he would read the sports page because at the coffee breaks that is what the guys talked about. 

            One of the neighbours in the apartment that they moved to on Keele Street was kind enough to invite my mother in during the evening to watch a little television which was a real phenomenon for my mother as no one in Denmark, of her acquaintance, had a television set.   One evening when my father came home my mother was quite excited and told him,

            “I have just seen the funniest lady on the television set.”  It turned out it was Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy.  My father was coming home rather late so it was some time before he ever got to see this show but he could tell that my mother was liking it so much that he went out and bought a television set for her.  He justified it by saying she would learn English much quicker by watching it.  This turned out to be true and in particular my mother was very soon parroting the various commercials she saw on television.  Some of the ones she remembered was “W I S K Wisk” which was a dish soap.  She could sing the Mr. Clean jingle “Mr. Clean, Mr. Clean leaves a sheen” although she really had no idea what a sheen was!

            Within a year my mother was speaking English very well and able to ask for anything in the grocery store.  She also started reading paperback novels which were a lot cheaper than books back in Denmark. 

            We children learned English almost without thinking; in fact I don’t remember ever struggling with communication at all.  I was out playing with the other children from the beginning and managed to communicate somehow.  I probably learned through the television also since my parents never spoke English to us.  My parents believed that their strong accents would handicap our pronunciation so we speak Danish at home to this day.  In any event by the time I went to school the following year I was fluent in English.  Interestingly enough I never had a self conscious thought about my parents’ English until I was in grade 4.  That’s when I noticed how long the absence notes of the other children were.  I became embarrassed by my mother’s one liners, written on a tiny slip of paper.  “Susanne was il”  (misspelling intended).  It wasn’t until I was an adult that I wondered what the heck the other parents were writing since the letters were sometimes two pages long.  How much explanation were they giving the teacher about the kid’s illness anyway?

            I’d really like to know!

My Danish Heritage

When I read about Danish authors, artists, philosophers and so on I find that I am sadly ignorant of Danish culture given the strength I have in Canadian, American and even British culture.  I don’t mean that I don’t know the names and I have a superficial understanding of the works but I do not feel that I have a thorough knowledge of say Kaj Munk in the same way that I do of Charles Lindbergh; I am somewhat of an expert on the Brontes while I have a very general knowledge of Karen Blixen (a.k.a. Isak Dinesen).  The reason for this is quite simple, there is a paucity of written information on Danish characters in English.  I read Danish at a grade 2 level so when I tackle my Danish history books I am wrestling with the dictionary until I get frustrated and give up. 

But did you know that during the Impressionist period in France there was a similar abundance of work being done in Denmark?  The group included my favorites Laurits Tuxen, Anna and Michael Ancher and Peder Severin Krøyer. P.S. Krøyer’s famous beach scenes are world reknowned but one I particularly like is Laurits Tuxen’s “Paula og Yvonne” which is an older sister brushing her little sister’s hair.  As a seafaring nations there are a lot of renditions of fishermen and beach scenes that are really wonderful.

Kaj Munk was a playwright and Lutheran pastor who became outspoken in his  resistance to the German occupation of Denmark during WWII and ultimately was murdered by the Nazis in 1944.  In one of his articles he says (and I paraphrase here) that if one continues to pull on a branch eventually the resistance will snap and hit you in the face.  It is such a visual illustration that I use it often as an example of “push back”.  Kaj Munk became a focal point of Danish resistance.

Niels Bohr was a Danish physicist who made fundamental contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922.  Bohr mentored and collaborated with many of the top physicists of the century at his institute in Copenhagen and he was part of a team of physicists working on the Manhattan Project.  Niels Bohr was another strong player in the resistance during WWII who was instrumental in the rescue of the Danish Jews into Sweden.

Both the names Munk and Bohr I learned in my childhood because my parents had lived through the German occupation and had family members involved in the resistance.  It really is a pity that our schools don’t teach enough world history. 

The internet is a great tool to learn more about persons and movements in history.  If we’d only use it more often for learning instead of entertainment!  My little lesson of the day.

Barbie

I was eleven years old when I got my first “Barbie” which was actually a Mitzi doll. Mitzi was a lot prettier than the Barbies of 1964 and equally well made. The Mitzi cost .99 cents and the Barbie was $1.99, a whole dollar difference. With 5 kids (at the time) a dollar made a difference!

I adored my “Barbie” though and after that baby dolls were of no interest to me. In those days you could buy outfits for Barbie and then you would also get a little booklet with all the other outfits you could buy. I don’t think I ever got one outfit that came from Mattel but my girlfriend Susan did and she let me look in one of her booklets. I would pore of them devouring every detail. Oh but I wanted the nurse’s uniform and a particular ball gown so much. I learned to sew my own outfits but as I was a terrible sewer I went in for all the ball gowns as they were easier to make. You didn’t need to make sleeves and the skirts didn’t need to be hemmed if you got a piece of fabric that was an “end” (already bound). I was the genius of shortcuts, let me tell you!

One day my mother heard Susan and I playing at Barbies and we were putting our mink stoles around their shoulders (the mink was a bit of fur I had salvaged from an old slipper of my mother’s) and we were saying “let’s put on our petticoats, it’s so chilly” or something like that. My mother took me aside and told me that petticoats were actually underwear or the slips underneath the dresses. I was shocked and thought she was making it up but I did find out that she was right. I felt so silly calling a mink stole a petticoat but none of my friends knew any different either!

The things we go around assuming!

Farmor and Ghosts

My grandmother was born in 1900 on this date so I thought I would write something about her this morning. She was an interesting combination of common sense, wisdom and superstition. My father got his gift of story telling from her I am sure because she could keep us enthralled with her tales, particularly when they involved ghosts.

I was four years old when we immigrated to Canada but my adoration of Farmor was fueled by her bi-annual parcels. She sent one at Christmas time and another one in late May to coincide with Jeanette’s and my birthdays but of course the boys also got something in that parcel. As we got older and recognized the pattern we would start prowling around the house in search of the parcels since they inevitable had been shipped well in advance of “the date”. We were incorrigible snoopers and in the beginning all we would do was shake, feel and sniff the packages once we had unearthed them. But naturally we got more ingenious (not that there was much genius involved) in unwrapping the gifts and putting them together again. Since she never used scotch tape we simply had to be careful to put the ribbon back the way it was. Often we would chicken out about unwrapping it all the way because (1) my mother had ears like a fox which caused us endless heartattacks while we were being so bad and (2) we really didn’t want to ruin the surprise.

When the longed for visit came I was in grade 4, 9 years old and it was bliss to finally see this woman we had heard so much about. She had a beautiful face and lots of curly grey hair which was cut short. She always wore a pearl necklace and she had several different strings of them. No earrings (remember the story about me getting my pierced ears?). And she wore corsets. My brother Peter, who would have been about 4 when she visited was absolutely fascinated by these corsets. He would help her every morning clip them together. I am really not sure why she wore the corsets because she certainly did not have them on snug the way Scarlett O’Hara had hers tied up. I think it was simply the only way she had to keep her stockings up because I’m pretty sure she was much too round to wear a girdle!

Farmor slept in Jeanette’s bed in our bedroom and Jeanette and I then slept together in my bed (not a big problem as we were as thin as broom sticks). We would beg her to tell us a story and the favorite ones involved ghosts.

When Farmor was a young girl she went to work in an inn. She arrived during the evening and so she did not have an opportunity to speak with her colleagues and was simply shown to her bedroom at the top of the house. She unpacked her few things and then went to bed but it was some time before she fell asleep. Then she was awakened because she could feel her covers being pulled away. She opened her eyes to discover a woman sitting at the side of her bed and slowly pulling the covers away. Farmor pulled the sheets back up to her chin but continued starring at the woman who tried to pull the covers back but Farmor held tight and kept them up. Then the woman disappeared. There was no falling back to sleep after that. Farmor had her eyes wide open the rest of the night. As they became accustomed to the dark she could see pairs of eyes on the wall opposite to her. They were just eyes and they looked like they were a child’s eyes. They were on the walls, the closet, the door. Impossible to run out the door with the eyes right there. It was creepy beyond belief.

“What was it? What was it?” we cried.

“Shhh, let me finish.” She would say in a mysterious whisper.

“Finally morning came and I hurried to dress and go downstairs.”

She approached the boss right away and said she could not sleep in that room. The man looked at her and told her that he would put her in a room with another maid. Later that day she got the true story from the other maid who had been there for many years. There had been a maid working for the inn who lived in that room. One night she gave birth to a baby but being unwed she had strangled it at birth and then hanged herself. Now she haunted the room. Shivers run up our arms!

My grandmother swore to us that this was a true story that really happened to her. She was a very religious woman who would not swear something which wasn’t true. I have therefore always had a very open mind when I have heard other ghost stories!

I will have to scan a photo later!

Life with Father

Some of the stories my dad told on himself are so funny and yet they explain not only his personality but just how close his children have fallen off the old apple tree.

My dad was raised as a city kid so it was quite a treat for him to go out “to the country” which he did occasionally with his father. One time they were visiting a particular farmer friend of his father’s and the farmer said that my father could go and pick as many peas as he liked. My father adored peas and he took the farmer at his word. He picked as many as he liked, which was pretty much all the peas in the garden. My grandfather was happily unaware of the depredation to the garden until they got home and my father proceeded to take peas out of his plus-fours. You know plus-fours? They are those baggy pants that buckle around the calf. They are so baggy that you can apparently put a whole farmer’s field of peas in the legs! My grandfather was so humiliated at having such a greedy son that he was never able to bring himself to go back to visit that farm!

My dad really had what was later described as an excessive personality. He always seemed to do things in a big way. That was just the way he was. As kids we just loved to go to Sunset Villa where we could play in this huge natural park. There was this gigantic tube slide at one end of the park with like 50 steps up the ladder (or so it seemed when we were little). The tube was quite large, a 10 year old kid could stand right up in it so it was massive. Down we would go, twisting in the turns and just telling at the top of our lungs, having a blast. Guess who the biggest kid was who could yell louder than King Kong? Yep, they could hear him all over the 160 acre park when he got up there helping the youngest of the kids go down the slide. My mother, picnicking with her friends at the other end of the park was red with embarrassment because of course all her Danish friends knew who was making all that noise! She would scold him all the way home but he was incorrigible. He’d do the same thing the next time we went there.

Another time I remember very well was not so much fun. I don’t know what my father’s big brain wave was but he heard about this place way up north where he could get some antique telephones. We are talking about the old wooden boxed phones with the little handle that you would wind up and make the call. My father, being the lousy navigator that he was, got lost and it was really dark before we got to this place (it felt like we went right up to Churchill. He bought every single one of those telephones and I believe we had about 36 or so of these phones in the trunk. It was midnight before we got home. And we hauled those phones from one end of the country to the other as he got transferred from Toronto, to Winnipeg, to Montreal, to Winnipeg, to Kitchener and then to Calgary. I believe my brother still has several of them in his basement! One wasn’t good enough for my dad. He had to corner the market.

AS much as he liked to get stuff for himself, he was also very generous with other people. But I will leave those stories for the next installment of Life with Father.

Yes, I’ve purloined the title from Clarence Day! It could be worse, it could be “I Never Sang for my Father.”!

Nautical Heritage

Naturally now that I am breaking my rule (ok, I have broken it for a while) about using art other than my own photos I simply feel I must write on a theme so I can use this picture. Fortunately I have the heritage to be able to talk about sailing.

That is, I can talk about the stories I have bene told by my sailing uncles and my paternal grandfather. My maternal grandfather (Morfar as we call that in Danish) got seasick so he never sailed. It was interesting because he loved ships and was a gifted whittler of ships. I have a couple of his ships framed and hanging in my living room. He was a master machinist who excelled in his craft to the extent that all other machinists would refer really complex work to Morfar. He worked his whole life on the wharfs, building motors and equipment for the great ships that docked in Denmark. During the Nazi occupation of Denmark the Germans learned that Morfar was “the man” and so they wanted his help with some piece of equipment and they came down to the wharf to get him. Well, Morfar wasn’t prepared to assist the Germans. The next thing he knew he had a machine gun pressed to his back and he was marched along to their headquarters (or where it was there problem happened to be). My grandfather said that there was reason in all things and you simply did not argue with a German with a gun!

Morfar knew pretty much all of the ships that docked regularly on the wharf, both at Fredrikshavn and Aalborg. Whenever he took me down there I remember that he would stand and look across the water, shielding his eyes against the glare, then pronounce that was the “skole skibe” (school ship) and to the left of her was The Martina. I was terribly impressed.

My Farfar (my father’s father) was also a machinist but he actually worked on the ships. I suppose he would be called a merchant marine in English terms. He sailed around the world and during WWI he was actually torpedoed twice in one week! His ship was bringing coal back from England to Denmark when a torpedo went right through his cabin, splitting the ship in half. He managed to get into one of the survivor boats and they were headed to Sweden when they were shot down again. They managed to be rescued, were sent to the Danish embassy in Sweden, given a sandwich and sent home. My Farfar was quite a young man at the time but he was thoroughly disgusted with the treatment the survivors received at the hands of their government. They were bringing coal back to warm Denmark and all they got for their trouble was a sandwich! I love that story which was told to me by my own father since Farfar died in 1945 just before the second world war was over.

My own father did not sail though he did not get seasick and he loved ships and boats. When he was a lad of 7 or 8 he kept pestering his father for a little row boat. Farfar kept telling him he was too young but one day he add the proviso that when Dad could swim he could get a boat. At the time, they were on the Aalborg wharf. The next thing Farfar knew Dad had jumped into the Limfjord and begun flailing about and at the same time yelling “I can swim, I can swim.”

That was my dad!

The Birds and The Bees

Some statement on the bus today made me think about this topic though I cannot recall what that was. It just made me smile and remember a story which I’d like to share.

I was raised bilingual which means that at home we spoke Danish and outside we spoke English. My mother is a very conservative, reserved sort of person and in contrast my father was a very ebullient guy. Being Scandinavian the conversation at the dinner table could get risqué, according to Canadian standards, but my father’s rationale (as he told me when I was much older) was that because he knew Mom wouldn’t talk to us girls about sex he felt it was necessary to bring it out into the open. Therefore while he was carving up the chicken on a Sunday afternoon he would mention things like the fact that our mother laid an egg once a month. Imagine the scars I carry to this day over that very visual information! Somewhere along this line of talk the sexual act was brought up, all in Danish, of course. It was fairly blunt and to the point, nothing fancy.

Flash forward from age 7 to age 12 when Jeanette and I are having a talk with our friend Heidi (yes the infamous “do you like Heidi” friend). She is bursting with news. Her mother has just told her about :”the birds and the bees”. Naturally, I had never heard of this saying so when she asked if we knew about the story of the birds and the bees we shook our heads. Then she whispered “it’s about sex”. Well, talk about being disappointed! I had expected something like, oh a jungle adventure or Disney movie or even a Hitchcock horror story.

“We already know about that.” We shrugged, not even being blasé about it as we didn’t think it was anything extraordinary to talk about. This was ordinary Sunday dinner table talk after all.

Heidi wanted to get the upper hand and prove that we weren’t telling the truth. She asked us if we knew what “a boy’s thing is called”. Well, we were stumped. Because we didn’t know the English word for it. To this day I feel that Heidi never believed us when we said we knew all about sex simply because we did not know the word “penis”. Furthermore, we never did hear the story of the birds and the bees.

Years later, when I was in my early thirties, I was having some sort of talk with my dad and it led into the story of Heidi and her whispered confidence about “the birds and the bees”. I asked my dad if he knew what the story of the birds and the bees was. He looked at me blankly.

“Actually, I’m not sure how that story would go.”

I looked at him and burst out laughing and he started to laugh too. To this day, I still don’t know the story of the birds and the bees! Someone will have to explain how Canadian parents tell the story of sex using birds and bees.