I wish that I had paid more attention when my mother told me stories from her childhood in Denmark. She had related such glimpses of her life on numerous occasions over the years. Sometimes the specifics would vary. Mother would amplify a detail or two that she had previously omitted. But in the main her remembrances were all familiar to me. I would listen politely, but rarely prodded her to fill in any gap in her narrative. I fancied myself…..
I very much doubt that I would have written I Was Hitler’s Baker if it had not been for the stories my parents told me of their experiences during World War II. I can remember studying the second world war in the eighth grade. Sitzkrieg. Blitzkrieg. The Normandy invasion. But these lessons were dull and dusty. My parents’ accounts, however, made the war come alive for me. In 1940 my mother and her family were witnesses to the German invasion…..
I am not a person who likes to go to doctors. I have not seen a dentist in over 40 years. And never having been sick before, nor having any health concerns, I did not have a doctor of my own to go to after a recent hospitalization. So I made an appointment to see my mother’s longtime doctor. It felt strange paying a visit to my mother’s doctor after her death. In the past, Mother would climb up onto…..
Due to recent health issues and a stay in the hospital, I have not been up to posting new blog entries. But now I am feeling better. So here goes. I’m convinced that television divides people from each other. I can recall several instances when Mother and I were watching a show on TV. I would begin to talk, only to have my mother hush me up. “I’m trying to listen to this,” she would say. Carrying on a conversation…..
People have vastly different ways of coping with the loss of a loved one. My grandfather, Robert W. Peterson, began discarding his wife’s clothes even as she lay on her hospital bed, dying a slow and painful death from pancreatic cancer. This was in 1969. He seemed determined to erase every reminder of his wife of nearly fifty years from the house. Her shoes, boots, gloves, handbag, aprons, hairbrush and comb, a spare pair of eyeglasses––all of these had to…..
May 13,2019 Easter Sunday was a bad day for me this year. Perhaps you’ve heard the Kris Kristofferson song Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, or Johnny Cash’s rendition of the same song. Well for me it was not just Sunday morning coming down, but Easter Sunday morning coming down. Every year during April my mother and I would go over to the local Home Depot and pick ou1 a selection of spring flowers, which I would transplant into our own containers…..
Early in January of this year, I came across a 1974 calendar that I had stowed away in my closet. The days correspond exactly to those in 2019. So I decided to reuse the calendar, as I have done with previous old calendars. (Talk about a cheapskate! See my chapter on economy in The Girl From Copenhagen.) On this particular calendar, my mother had noted birthdays, doctors’ appointments, dates when taxes were due, and other salient things she had to…..
Sunday, March 24, 2019 First of all, I have to confess that it is somewhat disconcerting for me to see my mother’s photo on the cover of a book. I had thought that writing Mother’s memoir would be therapeutic. But it was not. I was only reminded of how much I had lost. My mother and I were a team, and now half of the team was gone. I have, for instance, never been very well-organized. My mother, by contrast,…..
Welcome. My name is Glenn Peterson, author of The Girl from Copenhagen and I Was Hitler’s Baker. I’m so happy to have you as a visitor to my blog about my new book. This project is very special to me, and I hope to share some of that excitement with you here. I’ll be using this blog to interact with you about The Girl from Copenhagen and I Was Hitler’s Baker, expanding on some of the topics in it and…..
