In August my high school class
will celebrate our 50th class reunion. I probably won’t be there.
Instead I will be recovering from hip replacement surgery. In a way it is
fitting. For one reason or another I have never been able to go to a reunion. I
wasn’t at my high school graduation either. Instead, I was in Denmark, where I
spent my senior year as an American Field Service exchange student. I didn’t
miss being at my graduation, but I do wish I could have seen my Dad receive my diploma.
I loved being an
exchange student. Missing the normal things American high school seniors do was, in my opinion,
a small price to pay for living my dream of really getting to know a people,
learn their language and customs, and become part of a new family.
Every
exchange student has her own story, and mine certainly was—and is—one of the
best. I quickly fell in love with my host family, who adopted me as one of
their own, sliding me into family activities as if I was
just another cousin from Jutland come to a suburb of Copenhagen to study.
My host sister
Grethe was in the second of a three year pre-university “Gymnasium”
program. I joined her class. On Sundays
she and I often took long walks by the lake near our house. We talked about the
usual things like boys, movies, music, and our dreams for the future. And
we talked about the differences in growing up in a county which valued
self-reliance versus a country where the government supplied health care,
insurance, and other necessities. We laughed about our teachers. I had a bit of
a crush on one of the music teachers, who was still in his twenties, and Grethe
railed against the English teacher because he thought she was picking up too
much of my American accent for a student who was supposed to be learning
British English. When my younger sister
Kirsten and I did the dishes together she’d coach me on my Danish
pronunciation. I even got pretty good at saying rød grød med fløde (stewed strawberries with cream,) the phrase
most Danes think is the hardest for Americans to pronounce.
Because “My Danish
Parents”, who I have always called Mor (Mother) and Far
(Father), spoke no English I learned to speak Danish rather fluently. I can
still handle small talk paa dansk but
my accent is horrible. By the time I
left Denmark I was dreaming in Danish, and when my own parents called to tell
me I’d been accepted into the college program of my choice I could barely
express my glee. What came out was a mix of English and Danish, something that
still occasionally happens.
And
then the day I dreaded finally rolled around. The day I had to leave. It was
overcast and cool, a typical August day for Denmark, a country made up mostly
of islands parked in the North Sea above Germany. My fellow Danish AFS students
and I spent part of the day sliding along Copenhagen’s many canals on a tour
boat while a guide described the sights: the statue of the then
decapitated-by-vandals Little Mermaid (she really is little) who would soon be
getting a new head, the King’s castle, the island home of the Royal Danish
Navy.
From there we
were whisked away to a reception at the home of the U.S. Ambassador to Denmark.
I should have been impressed, but I wasn’t. I had seen these sites, including
the US Embassy, many times. On Wednesday afternoons, when I got out of school
at noon, I’d take the train from our suburb to the station nearest the U.S.
Embassy. There I would borrow library books, then walk to the center of
Copenhagen to board the train home. My
weekly Wednesday walks took me past the headless mermaid, the King’s castle,
and more: the Royal Danish Theater, the Hotel L’Angleterre, which had been Nazi
headquarters during WWII, a corner of Tivoli Gardens, and Strøget, the shopping
district where no cars were allowed. I often stopped at one of the small
bakeries that lined Strøget, sipping coffee and eating real Danish pastries.
On that last day in Denmark I was allowed to
leave my fellow AFS students and return to my Danish family for one final
meal. Grethe and I had already said our
good-byes when she’d left three days earlier to go to a summer camp in England.
After dinner I took one last look around the home that had been mine for a
year, then drove to the train station with Mor, Far and Kirsten. Tears flowed.
When at last I got on the train for Rotterdam, where I would then board a ship
bound for New York City I found a fellow exchange student—he’d been in
Sweden—as bereft as I. We consoled each other during the long train trip. We
loved our own families, but neither of us wanted to go home.
Once
home in Pennsylvania I slid back into the social scene I’d left behind, going
to parties, saying farewell to friends as one by one we went off to college,
got a job, or joined the Army. But I felt a bit like an outsider. They could
laugh about the dances, the proms, the jokes played, the songs sung while I’d
been riding my bike to the Gymnasium. It was a relief when the calendar turned
to September and I began college. The turning of this page meant I was just
another college freshman, learning the ropes.
But
my longing for Denmark remained fierce. There were no computers, no Internet,
no Skype. I could not pick up the phone and simply call Grethe or Kirsten the
way I could call a friend in another town. In 1965 a mere mortal had to make an
appointment with an overseas operator to make a trans-Atlantic phone call. The
Danes must have missed me as much as I missed them, for they came to visit at
Christmas.
For
a while after I left Denmark Grethe, Kirsten, and my best friend Lone and I
wrote each other frequently. But with the passage of time the letters became
fewer and shorter. Yet somehow Grethe and Kirsten and I managed to cobble
together a relationship that remains difficult for me to define to people who
don’t know us. There is no blood or shared DNA between us. And yet we still
consider ourselves more like sisters than best friends.
It
took 10 years for me to get back to Denmark. In the intervening time I’d become
a nurse, spent three years in the Army, including a year in Vietnam, married a
fellow veteran, gone to graduate school, bought a house and planned to start a
family. Grethe and Kirsten had done much the same. By the time I took my
husband Jim to Denmark in the summer of 1975 both Grethe and Kirsten had
finished college, started careers, married, bought houses, and each had a
child. We added some more glue to our
relationship, though we decided it was time to stop confusing people by calling
ourselves sisters.
Since
then I have returned to Denmark many times. At last count it was up around
fifteen. In 1990 I took my mother to see the places I had known so well
twenty-five years earlier. In 2008 our eldest daughter Kirsten married a Dane
in Denmark in a wonderful ceremony that combined the best of Danish and
American wedding traditions. Grethe has been here several times, Kirsten once.
This summer Grethe’s daughter Lise will bring her teenage children for a
visit.
Grethe and I
email each other every day. We talk on the phone once a month or so. We have
already celebrated 50 years of friendship, but will do so again later in the
year. She is one of the rocks in my life. A person who knows me so well she can
tell if I am happy or sad just by my email. She can, and does, chastise me when
she disagrees with me, but she also supports me when she thinks I am right. She listens to me in a way few people do.
Yet
in spite of our frequent contact, or maybe because of it, I think about Denmark
every day. I think about Denmark in little ways, wondering if Grethe’s spinach
is ready to be picked, for example. I think about Denmark in big ways, using my
nursing background to encourage Grethe to see a doctor when I thought she might
have pneumonia in February. I think about Denmark in silly ways, wondering when
the 2015 Georg Jensen Christmas mobile will be available, or if I might find a
much desired Mads Stage print on my next trip, or hoping my bum hip will let me
be able to walk to the new Ship museum near Hamlet’s Castle. For a piece of my heart stayed in Denmark
when I left 50 years ago. And it will always be there.
My husband and I have made a wonderful life
for ourselves and our children in Maine. Our hearts are well and truly here. He
claims the only way he will leave our home of 36 years is feet first. Now, in
tourist season, we repeat something we have done weekly for decades: walk
around the Beach in the evening with nothing more in mind than perhaps a dish
of ice cream. I love living where I do, but on long winter nights, when there
is significantly less daylight in Denmark than in Maine I envision myself in
one of the apartments near Grethe’s, the table set, the candles
lit, enjoying a meal and the company, because no one knows how to make a long
winter evening cozy like the Danes.
I spent my
freshman year of college living at home, but in my mind’s eye I was already
gone. I left my hometown the day I left for Denmark in June 1964. Gradually I
lost contact with all but two friends, Linda and Ellie. Linda lives quite near
to where we grew up, Ellie is in Wyoming. We exchange Christmas cards. Ellie
and I are Facebook friends.
In fact I am
Facebook friends with a lot of people from my high school class. About three
years ago someone started a Facebook group just for our class. One of my close
friends, someone I wanted to stay in touch with but hadn’t, found me through a
google search. She invited me to join the group and I did. Pretty soon I was
reading posts from people I hardly knew or didn’t particularly like in high
school. I wasn’t interested in every post, but it was fascinating to see what we
had—or hadn’t—done with our lives. My first boyfriend owns one of the big ole
Victorian houses on the main street of our town. One of the cute football
players I hardly knew occasionally messages me about silly stuff just because
he can.
One of the most
gratifying things about joining the group was learning how much my classmates
admired my parents, especially my Dad, who frequently fixed friends’ cars long
after I left home, and once built the backstop for the local Little League
team.
Petty differences
are long forgotten. Now we sometimes disagree in discussions about politics and
religion, but are, for the most part, respectful of our differences. We share
pictures of our children and grandchildren. And we ask for—and receive—prayers,
and good wishes, or expressions of sorrow when someone is sick or dies. To me,
the woman who willingly cast herself out of this group of then young people
from Western Pennsylvania in 1964, it is remarkable.
So deciding to
forgo the reunion was not an easy decision, especially when Ellie wrote she
had bought her plane ticket. I came close to rescheduling the hip surgery until
after the reunion, but was dissuaded by a husband who knows me very well, and
has watched me struggle climbing the stairs, getting in and out of cars, or
participating in activities that require a lot of walking or standing. But I
know I will be in good hands when I have that hip replacement: I have an
excellent surgeon, even if he is the same age as Kirsten. And I have an entire
high school class of friends who will be praying for me.
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