I did not know a single word of Danish before our trip to Denmark in 1955. I suspect that my mother chose not to teach me the language in my early years because to have the two of us chatting in Danish would have made my father feel left out. We stayed at Lars Buus’ farm, Paarup, on the island of Falster for about two and a half months, which afforded me with ample time to learn Danish. It is…..
Now and then while watching a TV show that is not all that engaging, I will unconsciously begin to twiddle my thumbs, first clockwise then counterclockwise. It’s a habit I picked up from my Danish grandfather who, in idle moments or when he was sitting at the table waiting for a tardy dinner guest to arrive, would begin to slowly twiddle his thumbs. Another habit, however, that I did not acquire from Morfar was smoking. I remember how when he…..
During the writing of I Was Hitler’s Baker I incorporated several episodes that my mother related to me of her childhood in Denmark. She told me how she and her brother and sister had placed coins on a railroad track to have them flattened by a passing train. (What they did with these coins, I do not know.) I used this image to flesh out Adolf Hitler’s childhood, and showed young Adolf placing pfennigs on a railroad track and afterward…..
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…..
