Tuesday

10 October 2017

— the CD hanging in the window breaks the morning light into rainbows on the floor. 

1471: Sten Sture the Elder, the Regent of Sweden, calls on farmers and miners to help him repel an attack by Danish King Christian I.

1631: Saxons take over Prague.

1845: Annapolis, MD: Naval Academy opens with 50 midshipmen students and 7 professors.

1846: Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, discovered.

1903: Emmeline Pankhurst founds Women’s Social and Political Union.

1913: U.S. President Woodrow Wilson triggers explosion of the Gamboa Dam, ending construction on the Panama Canal, which will open the following year.

1928: Chiang Kai-shek becomes Chairman of the Republic of China on Taiwan.

1935: Coup d’état in Greece spells tickets for the Second Hellenic Republic.

1957: Ike apologizes to the finance minister of Ghana, after he is refused service in a Dover, Delaware restaurant.

1964: Opening ceremony of Tokyo Olympics broadcast live be geostationary satellite.

1970: Canada: FLQ (Quebec Liberation Front) kidnaps and assassinates Vice-Premier Pierre Laporte.

1971: London Bridge takes up its new residence in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.

1975: Papua New Guinea joins UN.

1985: U.S. Navy F-14 fighter jets force an Egyptian plane carrying the hijackers of the Achille Lauro cruise ship to land at a NATO base in Sicily, where the hijackers are arrested.

2009: Armenia and Turkey open their borders to each other.

2010: Netherlands Antilles dissolved as a country.

Good Morning All,

Britta’s birthday always began with a big basket of fruit, the more exotic the better: mangos, guavas, passion fruit, loquats, leechies, and whatever else we could find in the grocery stores by way of pears and cherries and apples and tangerines. It is safe to say no type of fruit was ever safe in a room with Britta. I can still see my dad early one morning pointing out the back door of the house in Arlington and observing, “I think it’s safe to say your wife likes fruit.” And there was Britta in the middle of our quince bush, one rock-hard, unripe quince in each hand, going to town. I do not know if you have ever eaten a quince. Even the ripe ones are rock hard. As for taste, think of the tartest lemon you ever tasted and multiple by seven. One bite of quince can suck the sides of your cheeks in so far they will meet together. Didn’t phase Britta in the least. I watched her eat four of them and toss the stems.

And with the fruit basket and breakfast tray (in later years delivered by Johs and Holly, while Britta and I pretended to be asleep in the master bedroom) would come a half dozen American and Danish magazines from Gourmet to Alt for Damerne (Everything for Women) to Bo Bedre (sort of like Better Homes and Gardens.)

Every year, as well, would be another piece or two of Royal Danish china, a plate, a coffee cup, a bowl. We’d like to have made it more, but just a small bowl (18 cm, 7in diameter) went for 500 Dkk ($80.00) new. Still, over the years—visiting secondhand shops--we managed to accumulate enough for a small dinner party.

And books, of course. Lots of books, each and everyone of them inscribed for birthdays and Christmas. I think it’s safe to say that of the 3,000 or so books in the house, at least 500 of them are inscribed. I don’t know how many times over the past year, I’ve taken a book down from one of the basement shelves and there’s a little hello to me from Britta or one of the kids; or me or the kids to Britta.

Here’s what Holly wrote in front of Joy of Cooking, a Christmas gift for Britta in 1999:

Hej Mor, 

Some of my fondest memories of home are of our family in the kitchen coziness of Hultoften 27. You teaching Johs and me how to make homemade citron fromage, Johs impressing us all with his expert egg-white folding, Bheka draining mushrooms, Johs grating cheese and being the main dough roller on our floury pizza adventures. All of us gathered around pots of murky, chemical-stinking egg dye, watching the red, orange, blue, and accident brown oval gems bob to the top. Johs and I pressing raisins into our St. Lucia buns. Three of us in different combinations watching the water, oil, and vinegar fizz in our pan of birthday cock-eyed cake. All of us taking turns to stir the fruitcake batter and enjoying the crunchy sand-under-shoe sound of sugar and egg against the bowl, and the walnuts, too, and little by little the dried fruit. Me occasionally going into dessert high-gear and whipping up an Angel Cake (“Chocolate cake with angels”) and ice cream.

The most common memory, though just as cozy, is of walking through the kitchen on homework nights as well as holidays to ask what’s for dinner and stop to watch you stir the always yummy gravy. (Tak for sumptuous Julemad—[Christmas food.])

On many of these occasions. Joy of Cooking has been open on the counter with its torn pages and stains from whatever ingredients are listed on that page, almost as though it (the book itself) got accidentally thrown into the blender while trying to instruct us on how to make gooseberry surprise.

So, I thought it was time for a new one. I was able to find a mint condition Joy at the Dartmouth bookstore. It doesn’t have to stay that way for long, though. Let’s make Christmas tree cookies! The recipe’s on page 711.

God Jul! 

Knus,

Holly 

As far as … what? No, not all the inscriptions are that long! As it is, I left out a bit, and I wish I could show you the drawings in the margins of hollyberries and leaves, of a Christmas tree, of a Christmas-tree cookie like the ones I used to make with my mother, and a sketch of a long-haird girl standing on a stool to stir something in a bowl. 

The short poem in today’s Day Book started out as an inscription for one of the books I gave Britta in 1999.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. Two snaps of the birthday girl, one with her dog Zulu at Nzongomane; and one over at Edwaleni on our front veranda, fashionably attired in velvet bell bottoms and a classy hat.