Post by Grubb.
Two great-greats on my mother’s side immigrated to America from Denmark in the late 1840s. So here I am in the old city section of Copenhagen and maybe it’s my uneven footing on the cobblestone streets, like Proust tripping over loose paving in the Guermantes courtyard, but I begin to feel swayed by the 19th century. Did any of my ancestors wander up one of these streets? Did they stop and chat with the perambulating Kierkegaard? “Ya, ya Soren! I finished your ‘The Sickness unto Death’ last week and I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since.” Of all my ancestors, which one talked to Kierkegaard? “Ya, Olaf, you know I always say, ‘There is no thought so burdensome that you can’t out walk it.’” Did I have a great-great grandfather named Olaf, or whose brother was named Olaf? “Ay, ay, Soren, after reading your book I’ll have to walk to the next boat sailing to America in order for me to get any decent rest.”
And did he? Did Olaf sail? Or was he just kidding around with his old buddy Kierkegaard? Maybe it was Olaf’s cousin who sailed and Olaf stayed behind, and maybe Olaf’s last name wasn’t “Boie” like my mother’s, but, but, I stop to avoid a small crowd spellbound by a 17th century round brick tower, and I gaze up at this landmark destination for tourists wondering at the ungovernable kids at the top, whether they’re about to jettison a scoop of ice cream over the railing, and it comes to me: Oesterplunk. Some tangled strand of my scrambled DNA is faintly, almost invisibly associated with Olaf Oesterplunk.
That’s why, a few blocks later, I feel so at home in the park I’m crossing, the big park adjacent to the King’s Gardens fronting the Rosenberg Castle. This is just the sort of wide open easy stroll that Olaf would hang out in waiting to exchange apercus with Soren. He would have joined his buddy in supplying wry commentary on the red brick repository of royal bric-a-brac separated from the park by a shallow, algae-clogged moat.
Inside the Rosenberg Castle it doesn’t take a remnant of Olaf’s alcohol soddened blood to remind me how dreary Ella and I usually find the cramped, dimly lighted rooms that make up the historical splendor of a royal confine.
Completely unsubstantiated story, probably false, that said, I read once that Kierkegaard was such a downer that hardly any babies in Denmark were named Søren for many years.