Sensommer

It’s late August as I pull this post together. 

The summer weather that had eluded us on our vacation finally caught up to us just as the girls went back to school earlier this month; we then simmered through a two-week heatwave before regressing back to the mean this weekend: cool, gray, and rainy.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: we’re starting back in late July.  Summertime, and the livin’ was still (relatively) easy.  (And cloudy and cool.)

The priest Johannes, whom we’ve known a few years not through church but as a fellow handball parent, explained during the Baptism that Trine had asked during one of their interviews conversation whether she would “be dunked, or what?”  We all laughed, but he said it had been a good question: he lifted the polished tray off the font.

Oh, wait: the font had a polished tray atop it:

The font is itself a hollow vessel, and in the old days it would be full of water and they’d plunge little babies right into it.  Immerse them.  This, Johannes noted, fell out of fashion pretty quickly in the unheated church (by pretty quickly I inferred him to mean a few hundred years), and so the polished trays were introduced and dunking was dropped in favor of sprinkling.

I thought that was interesting.

It wasn’t a large congregation, but Maddie and Mormor and I were there.

I myself was not baptized and don’t imagine I ever will be, at least not as long as I live here–the status quo confers upon me the advantage of being “Nagan the Pagan of Copenhagen,” and that’s not something I’m willing to surrender.  

But I admire and respect Trine’s commitment immensely.  It was a touching ceremony.

Our vacation ended before the girls were back at school, so there were some visits with Mormor and Jørgen that last week of their summer vacations–including a day of “art school” with Jørgen for each of them.

(That wasn’t art school: that’s just Maddie and Jørgen down by a canal.)

I can’t count how many times Didi and I came across deer on our walks down by the lake.  

As I’ve already said, the weather finally got summery the weekend before the girls resumed school, but that wasn’t the only major change.  That same weekend, it was announced that face masks would henceforth be mandatory on public transportation during rush hour, starting the very Monday that would also be Maddie’s first day of sixth grade.  So this year’s “first day of school” picture is a little different:

Psych!  That’s all true, but face masks are still strictly optional here at home.

So Maddie was back in school that Monday, and was happy for it.  Molli wouldn’t have her first day at Birkerød Gymnasium until Wednesday, but none of us had ever even seen the place so we took a quick drive out to give it a once-over that Tuesday afternoon.

It’s a beautiful school.

(“Bacteria and unhealthy chemicals and radioactive materials are worked with here.  One may therefore NOT EAT in this room.”  Several rooms in the science wing had this sign on them.  I had to wonder if the warnings were real, or just a way to keep kids from getting crumbs all over the science labs.)

The auditorium we saw was spectacular, and very modern: those little white squares you see in the risers are power outlets.  (And frankly, the school was so ultramodern I was surprised they didn’t also have USB ports.)

Here’s what those bleachers are facing (note the piano for a sense of scale):

Better angle:

Trine was ready to enroll.

And topping it off, as we pulled out to head home we noticed that just 100 meters away from the school was Molli’s favorite restaurant.  (You can just make it out through the trees.)

Courtesy of one of her friends, here’s Molli’s “first day of gymnasium” picture:

There was a little drama surrounding Molli’s start at Birkerød: it’s an ungodly long commute on public transportation (relative to the relatively short distance) and the first day was a disaster of poor planning by the school.  Molli hated it with all her heart Wednesday night.

Thursday night she called us from a party with all her new friends to tell us how much she loved it.

That same night Maddie floated home from handball practice on cloud nine:

It’s hard to read at this scale, thanks to the yellow lettering, but it says “Årets Spiller 2019/20,” which means “Player of the year.”  It was a well-earned honor.

But it was a short-lived stint on cloud nine, because the very next morning Trine took her to the doctor for a look at the finger she’d injured a few weeks earlier at handball camp.  The finger didn’t seem to be healing right so we wanted it checked.  And a good thing: the doctor said this needs x-rays, the x-ray tech said a surgeon should look at this, and the surgeon said, “See you Monday, kid.”

We’ll get to Monday momentarily. 

Meanwhile, here’s what a morning bike ride into work can look like.

So yes, I still love the bike.  I’ve already logged my first thousand miles (over 1500 km), and it won’t be the last thousand of the year.

Every two months for years and years we’ve had lunch with our friends Søren and Bodil and their three kids (Holger, Dagmar, and Harald), but we have almost no pictures of those lunches.  Very few, anyway.  So Trine snapped a couple at our most recent lunch.  (Molli was at work; Bodil and Dagmar were down working on the summer house they’re building with her sister’s family down south.)

Bad dog.

Ah!  We’ve caught up to Monday, the 17th of August, so it’s time for Maddie’s surgery.

Such a trouper!

Such a recovery!

It’s a week later as I write this: she had the cast removed today, and just has a special splint on.  She’ll have that for three weeks, then two weeks of an even lighter kind of splint with the pins out, then two weeks of gentle recovery.  So we’re at least seven weeks from handball, which is not great, but this is obviously not going to be a normal season, so it isn’t quite as horrible as it might otherwise be. 

Back in November of 2019 we booked a trip to Sarajevo for my birthday weekend to visit our old friend Chris Peditto.  He was my classmate at Carnegie in Pittsburgh from 1983 to 1984, a co-founder of igLoo in Chicago in 1985, a roommate and neighbor in L.A. from 1988 to 1992, and a close friend to Trine and me in New York from 1998 to 2003.  So of course we’d both end up living in Europe at the same time, but we hadn’t managed a visit and Trine and I decided my 2020 birthday would be as good a time as any.

The virus forced us to postpone our March visit.  We rescheduled for June, because of course things would be back to normal by then.

In June we just canceled the damn tickets without rescheduling: we’d wait out the pandemic, we decided, and then book a fresh flight once things opened up again.  Maybe in time for Trine’s birthday.

Last week he sent a note: he’d changed plans and would be moving back to the states in early September, any chance we could make it down before then?

No chance.

So we got together the way everyone else does these days:

And that was our long awaited trip to Sarajevo.

Sigh.

The next morning I had to do some shopping at LIDL and was fortunate enough to get the best checkout girl of all time!

It seems kind of unreal to me.

This past weekend of August 22-23 was Cousin Trine’s birthday party.  (“Cousin Trine” sounds stupid, but I don’t know what else to call her without causing confusion.)

Trine, Fabricio, and Matteo have a dog, now–a nine month old puppy, Stella, who loved me at first, then got terrified of my camera (the Olympus).  She went whimpering away from me, tail between her legs, whenever she spotted me.  It took me an hour of obsequious groveling to get back into her good graces.

It was a lovely afternoon–a nice party, delicious food, good company, good weather, and lots of fun.  Most of the faces should be familiar (Fabricio’s family won’t be, but I don’t remember all their names so can’t provide much exposition anyway).  I’ll let most of the pics speak for themselves.

Ah!  The game!  This was Cousin Trine’s party game, and it was a good one.  She split the guests into two teams.  She hung up numbered papers on a line, as you can see, usually about five to seven of them.  A team would pick one of the numbers, and it would be unfolded to reveal a word.  The five to seven words were lines from a song–not necessarily the first line or the chorus, but a line.  The goal was to name the song to which the lyric belonged.  (There were other game elements I’m glossing over in the interests of time, and of maintaining your interest, but you’ve got the gist of it now.)  A very fun party game.  I recommend it, although personally I think I’d do better with English-language songs.

That is, I believe, Fabricio’s niece, whose name I cannot recall.  She was adorable.

The game you saw Per and Josephine playing a couple of pictures ago caught her attention.

“I can play that,” she announced in Danish.  “I can play it well.”

We encouraged her to show us.

Yeah, she walked up to it, squinted her eyes, then draped one of the ball-and-string sets right over one of the bars.  I don’t know what we’d been expecting, but it wasn’t that.

She played it well indeed.

(I think Mormor was successfully “naming that tune.”)

(But not the one in the photo below.)

Another of Fabricio’s nieces, reminding me that our kids actually aren’t sloppy eaters any more.  (Reminding me, in fact, that I’ve forgotten what sloppy eating actually looks like: ADORABLE.)

It’s not a great photo: I’m only keeping it in here because it freaked me out a little how much he looked like Jamie Bland did, way back when.  

# # #

It’s been a busy and eventful month, but not in the photogenic kind of way.

Fall really seems to be rushing at us now.  In fact, “Danish fall” begins on the first of September, which is no longer even a week away.  The days are already shortening: this week I actually had to start turning on lights when I got up at five.  I’ve probably only got another week or two before I’m cycling at least part of the way to work in the dark.

It doesn’t look like we’ll be going anywhere for autumn vacation this year, so the next traveling vacation on our radar is now the February trip to Florida–let’s all cross our fingers that it can happen!