Thursday

7 December 2017

— I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve. — Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

Good Morning All,

One of my former students and long since friend came down on the train from Copenhagen for lunch yesterday, and a loverly time was had by both us! 

She lives in the U.S., but comes over once or twice a year to visit family and friends. She’s now in her forties somewhere,  but remains absolutely as young, exuberant, and volatile as she was back in those halcyon days when the school was housed in the old building next to the Catholic church on Gammelkongvej (Old King’s Road) in Copenhagen.

We sat in the leather easy-chairs that face the south windows, the better to enjoy the lit-up magnolia, the back and forth of the cats, the sparrows disguising themselves as blown leaves in the breeze, and the leaves disguising themselves as sparrows in the same breeze.

Some beer was consumed. Tuborg Christmas Brew. Millicent (name changed to protect the guilty) has—and has always had—an astonishing capacity. I rarely touch the stuff myself. I made some lunch of tomato soup, tuna/cheese melt, and some crab salad. She had brought the perfect bottle of wine, a South African chardonnay, to go with it.

We talked as fast as we could for four hours before I had to take her back to Ringsted Station so she could meet up with her mother in town for a concert.

It is a curious thing to shoot the breezes with a former student who is now older than was I when I taught her. Time kept flip flopping. Much of our talk was, not surprisingly, about the old school. She told me how much it had meant to her she could waltz into Britta’s office or mine any time she wanted to present us semi-hysterically with the latest crisis in her life.

I reminded her that she is in one of my most exclusive clubs, being among my ten most talented writers not to have published anything. I intimated she’d been allowing her talent to terrify her for years. I was going to point out that one day she will have to lift pen and confront her talent head on, but I did not quite get to it before she had launched into a funny middle-school reminiscence.

We talked Trump some, and I expressed my condolences. She’s a member of an activist group that alerts people when a postcard needs to be sent to a state or federal representative on some topic or another. She was happy to report it was working well; people actually sent the postcards.

As pleasant as the afternoon was, as kindred as Millicent and I are, as much as we laughed, our time was enhanced by the simple truth I was talking to someone who knew Britta well, who loved her, and was grateful for her help along the way. I shall not say it made Britta seem more there with us, because it didn’t, not exactly. But somehow, it made it seem as though the remembered Britta in her head and the remembered Britta in my head could somehow join together and be part of the dialogue.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. Two Holly snaps: