The Girl from Copenhagen: A Memoir Revisited

By Glenn Peterson

In this book I continue the story of my late mother’s life, tying up some loose ends and filling in inadvertent gaps in the narrative. Memories are fickle and evanescent, often no more substantial than last night’s dream. They cannot be summoned up at will to reveal themselves and often require a period of incubation before to begin to coalesce. As was the case in The Girl From Copenhagen, I have in this sequel used pictures in my mother’s photo albums to rekindle half-forgotten memories. I was surprised when I wrote this book by how many significant events in my mother’s life that I had failed to record. But such is the nature of memory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796066340

Glenn Peterson

Glen Peterson is the author of The Girl From Copenhagen, I was Hitler’s Baker, and the Fluoride Papers.

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 by Glenn Peterson.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2019916667

ISBN:              Hardcover              978-1-7960-6637-1

                        Softcover                978-1-7960-6636-4

                        eBook                     978-1-7960-6634-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Rev. date: 10/18/2019

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter One

Team Mates

Chapter Two

The Calendar

Chapter Three

Coping with Death

Chapter Four

Reminders

Chapter Five

A Word of Advice

Chapter Six

Bodil

Chapter Seven

One Last Horse Ride

Chapter Eight

The Wicker Basket

Chapter Nine

From Ourupgaard to Jersey City

Chapter Ten

Hudson Boulevard

Chapter Eleven

The Cave

Chapter Twelve

Duck!

Chapter Thirteen

Muffins

Chapter Fourteen

The Problem with Television

Chapter Fifteen

The Telling Detail

Chapter Sixteen

A Slide Rule and a Chalkboard

Chapter Seventeen

Huyler Road Revisited

Chapter Eighteen

A Better Time

Chapter Nineteen

Hot Meals in the Woods

Chapter Twenty

Rhus Radicans

Chapter Twenty-One

The Egg Lady

Chapter Twenty-Two

A Brief History of the Earth

Chapter Twenty-Three

Prison Life

Chapter Twenty-Four

Halcyon Days

Chapter Twenty-Five

Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane

Chapter Twenty-Six

Sven

Chapter Twenty-Seven

J’accuse

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Saving

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The Old Man and the Sea

Chapter Thirty

Camelot

Chapter Thirty-One

Letters

Chapter Thirty-Two

Cape May

Chapter Thirty-Three

The Budding Cartoonist

Chapter Thirty-Four

Life in these United States

Chapter Thirty-Five

Missed Opportunities

Chapter Thirty-Six

Getting Along

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Moving On

Chapter Thirty-Eight

I’ll Never Laugh Again

Chapter Thirty-Nine

The Last Supper

Chapter Forty

Things That Are Missing

Chapter Forty-One

Lock the Doors

Chapter Forty-Two

Lawrence Welk

Chapter Forty-Three

Why Did We Plant So Many Trees?

Chapter Forty-Four

Colonoscopy

Chapter Forty-Five

The Answering Machine

Chapter Forty-Six

Borgen

Chapter Forty-Seven

The Beginning of the End

Chapter Forty-Eight

Hello, Ducks

Chapter Forty-Nine

The Hummel Figurine

Chapter Fifty

Memories

Chapter Fifty-One

The Last Telephone Call

Chapter Fifty-Two

Back Trouble

Chapter Fifty-Three

Inge’s 94Th Birthday

Chapter Fifty-Four

Where’s Our Little Dog?

Chapter Fifty-Five

Still Life with Grapes

Chapter Fifty-Six

Sunday Morning Coming Down

Chapter Fifty-Seven

My Mother’s Doctor

Chapter Fifty-Eight

At Loose Ends

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Where’s Bob?

Chapter Sixty

A Partial List of Things that I Miss

Chapter Sixty-One

Regrets

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

––Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

INTRODUCTION

When I was writing The Girl From Copenhagen I would put in as much as eight hours a day. I was working against a deadline. I wanted to send the completed memoir to my mother’s sister, Anna Lise, before she succumbed to old age. And I achieved that goal. Anna Lise received a published copy of the memoir in December 2018, eleven months after my mother died.

Sometimes, after a long writing session, I would suddenly realize how much time had passed, and think for a split-second that I had better go downstairs to see how Mother was doing. But, of course, she was gone. I was alone in a big, empty house. But not a silent house. I always have a radio turned on or a CD playing music that my mother enjoyed: Frank Sinatra, Vera Lynn, Glen Campbell. I’ll put the TV on and tune in to one of the shows my mother used to watch––that way when I come home from shopping I won’t be entering a house that’s as quiet as a tomb.

I intend in this sequel to The Girl From Copenhagen to include memories and impressions that for one reason or another I did not get around to including in the original manuscript. I am surprised with how much new material I have been able to conjure up. While The Girl From Copenhagen was a chronological record of my mother’s life, A Memoir Revisited was composed largely through free association, often moving back and forth in time. As I did in putting together the earlier book, I have made use of our collection of 35 millimeter slides and the photos in my mother’s albums to spur my recollections. The old saw, One picture is worth a thousand words, has turned out to be true. Mother was quite diligent about noting names, dates, and locations on the backs of her photos. So in a sense we were working together on this reconstruction of the past.

Chapter One

TEAM MATES

I must confess that it is somewhat disconcerting for me to see my mother’s photo on the cover of a book. I would rather have my mother sitting across from me at the kitchen table as opposed to seeing the 1945 picture of her that graces the cover of her memoir, which now rests on the side of the kitchen table. I had thought that writing Mother’s memoir would be therapeutic. But it was not. It was like picking at a scab and making the wound bleed again. I was only reminded of how much I had lost. My mother and I were a team, and now I have to face the fact that half of the team is gone. I have, for instance, never been very well-organized, frequently mislaying important papers and forgetting to arrange key appointments. My mother, by contrast, was extremely well-organized. After all, she had been employed a bookkeeper in her native Denmark. Every year in December, she would sit down at the kitchen table and note on the calendars for the new year all the important dates she wanted to remember: birthdays, doctors’ appointments, car insurance, CD renewal dates, and when tax payments were due. Before her memory began to fail, she would remind me when it was time to prepare our estimated Pennsylvania tax payments. In 2018, without my mother to remind me, I failed to make two consecutive quarterly tax payments. I am quite lost without her.

I might have put together a more comprehensive memoir if I had spent another few months on it––as it was, I completed it in just seven months. But I was working against a critical deadline. While I began composing my mother’s memoir, her sister, Anna Lise, turned 94, and she was beginning to experience problems with her memory. I wanted to have my mother’s memoir in Anna Lise’s hands while she was still able to appreciate it. And, indeed, she had it before Christmas 2018.

In this sequel, I will be able to add to the memoir, including material that I had not thought of while I was writing the original book. I failed to mention, for instance, how, after the age of seventy, when my mother began to suffer from high blood pressure, and I would take her pressure every day with an arm cuff, she would murmur, Anna, Anna, in an effort to relax and bring her pressure down. And it usually worked.

Chapter Two

THE CALENDAR

Early in January 2019 I came across a 1974 calendar that I had stowed away in my closet. The days of the old calendar correspond exactly to those in 2019. So I decided to reuse the calendar, as I had done with previous old calendars. (There are regular cycles when calendar dates for different years will correspond––talk about a cheapskate! See my chapter on economy in The Girl From Copenhagen.) On this particular calendar my mother had penned in birthdays, doctor’s appointments, and other important things she had to attend to. She recorded her own birthday with a simple me. The majority of the doctors’ appointments were for my father’s aunt and two uncles, and also for Mary Trainor, a long-term friend of the family, whom the Petersons, Grace and Walter, took into their apartment in Jersey City during the Great Depression. With minimal government assistance programs available in those days, people had no recourse but to help each other get through trying times. And so they did. During these years the Petersons also took in a young boy named Leo. He was related to the Petersons through a cousin, I believe, but I don’t recall what the circumstances were that made it impossible for his parents to take care of him. In any case, Leo went on to distinguish himself by becoming a draft dodger in World War II and was never heard from again. The only remaining trace of him is his name printed in crayon in one of the drawers of Aunt Grace’s Singer sewing machine.

Mary