Sunday morning

15 January 2017

— Not frost this morning, but a proper dusting of snow

Good Morning All,

In 1929, Martin Luther King, Jr. was born today in Atlanta, which more than a few friends have told me is the Boston of the south. He and Malcolm X and Mohammad Ali in their different ways played a kind of triumvirate Moses delivering African Americans out of Egypt. Or at least they began it.

It’s a very small detail, but I have always been impressed that he made sure the Jr. was never left off his name. (Little known fact: he had Irish blood in him through his paternal great-grandfather.)

On his seventh birthday down there in Atlanta, my sister-in-law Esther was being born in Denmark in the town of Buddinge in a house her father built. (Hannah, Britta, and Joe were also born there.) I doubt it was a quiet birth! I would not be surprised if she, who become a nurse and midwife, didn’t provide a little instruction during the delivery.

She is eighty today and throwing a party for family and friends from down the years. She, her son Mikey, two friends Jens and Gitte, and I were down at Sorø hall yesterday setting up tables and such. I am much looking forward to it.

In one of today’s photos, the woman staring at the shrouded seven-foot statue (in the Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen) is my friend Trudy, who taught for a semester at Copenhagen International School but now resides in Saskatoon, where the temperature this time of year regularly dips to -24 C. (-11 F. ((And just by way of incidentally, there’s another reason Fahrenheit is to be preferred! It’s not as cold.)))

This picture cracks me up every time I see it. Trudy is a very chop-chop, let’s-get-things-done sort of person. I look at her expression and can almost read her mind. She is thinking: “Okay, for Pete’s sakes, quit the self-pity, get some clothes on, and let’s go weed the tomatoes.”

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bheka