But Denmark Is My Home

But Denmark Is My Home

An expatriate American seems to have found what  he was looking for on the other side of the Atlantic.

 By Fradley Garner

BACK IN JULY 1960, I RESIGNED IN GOOD STANDING as a public relations manager of Pfizer, in midtown Manhattan, and gave up my cozy pad and motor scooter in downtown Greenwich Village to move to Denmark. I was 34 and newly married. My dream was to open a jazz club in Copenhagen where I could sit in on bass. If that didn't work out, I planned to become a freelance writer and foreign correspondent for medical and science news publications and other media back home.

 I had met Bodil Hansen, a children's nurse, the year before in Copenhagen, and we were married in New York in March 1960. We were happy in our one-and-a-half room Cornelia Street apartment with the two-wheeler parked outside and Zampieri's bakery down the street. Washington Square with live music and the chess tables was a five-minute walk away. Good friends lived in the Village. We ate out a lot, sipped and talked in Caffe Reggio, went to off-Broadway plays. Life was better than ever with a mate to share it with. Still and all, I kept the promise I made myself the year before—to move to Denmark and start a new life.

 Okay, you say, but if you're happy, why on earth leave a secure job with a top (today the world's biggest) pharmaceutical firm to scuffle for a living in a foreign country? For several reasons. First, I wanted to do something else for a living than grind out press releases about company products, ghost speeches for the brass, organize meetings for the medical and pharmaceutical professions, get product and company stories into the media—the stock in trade of a publicist. I was lucky to land that job. In four years I'd worked my way up from copywriter to divisional PR manager

Fradley, Luke, Nicholas and Glen in front of the Vedbæk house in the 1970s.

I'd done postgraduate studies in cultural anthropology; Danish culture as well as women had attracted me on my first visit, when I decided to live here. I wanted to learn Bodil's language and culture from the inside. Here again for keeps, I still couldn't understand a word people around me were saying. An Asian-American visitor I met said it sounded like Chinese! Garrison Keillor calls it "speaking with a hair in the throat." The Prairie Home Companion host married a Dane, lived here for half a year, and still gets around in Danish when he visits.

 I enrolled at Berlitz school and took language lessons for a couple of months while Bo'dil closed out our apartment in New York and sailed home.Soon I could say more than tak and svigermor (thanks — mother-in-law), but so many city Danes spoke English well, and when they caught your accent they'd switch. Today I can fool Danes into thinking I'm one of them for three sentences

A gathering of the clan on Fradley's 77th birthday in 2003. At the left are Hanne, her son Morten with his wife Grith and their three children. Behind and to the right are Fradley's three sons (Luke, Glen and Nicholas) and their wives and children. Former wife Bodil is the blonde in the second row)

At least they go on speaking Danish. Come to think of it, some insulated foreigners could live here forever without learning dansk. In recent years, the "corporate language" of many international Danish companies has been English. That may cover reports, the intraweb and e-mails, meeting minutes, even social events (Friday beer!). Before 2000 at Novo Nordisk it was British English. Today it's U.S. English. Either way it doesn't augur well for the native tongue or culture.

       He thought I was crazy to quit my job and stay here. For sure, doubts were setting in.

 Waiting for Bodil to join me, I stayed with a couple I'd met under the "Meet the Danes" tourist home-visit program. Finn was a freelance dance band drummer, Willi a Village-style bohemian from Norway. He thought I was crazy to quit my job and stay here. For sure, doubts were setting in, but I kept moving ahead. Thank goodness I did wake up from the nightclub dream. Jazzhus Montmartre, Denmark's leading venue, had closed its doors in 1960. An itinerant American trombonist I ran into invited me to invest $1,000, half of what I had in the bank, to partner with him and a Dane and reopen the club. I had zilch experience in this branch. The trombonist turned out to be a hustler with a drug monkey. The Dane quickly took over his share and went on to manage Montmartre through its golden years, 1960 through the mid-1970s.

 Finn and Willi knew a lawyer who put me in touch with an architect who lived in a five-duplex-apartment converted carriage house up the shore road in the old coastal village of Vedbæk. One apartment was vacant, and I got it. Immortellevej (Everlasting Flower Street) was a privatvej, the richest street in Denmark. For 18 years Bodil and I were the poor on the street. Around the corner she found part-time night work at a bornehjem, a community-run orphanage for babies and young children. Without her income, we could not have made it.

 WHEN WE STARTED HAVING SONS IN 1964, neighbors would pass down their kids' outgrown clothing. Suburban and even some country Danes still live behind hedgerows and tend to withdraw when strangers move in too close. I remember my perceptive mother surveying the airport terminal on arrival and declaring, "They have a contact problem here!" Half a century later, young people have loosened way up, addressing everybody, including their doctors and teachers, with the informal du (you)—even calling them by first name. I see many more hugs and kisses on meeting and parting. Some say the traditionally formal Swedes started this trend.

 But for the Greenwich Village emigrant used to close-range conversation and touching, the early years of social adjustment in a cool culture were stressful. More subtly traumatic was the instant switch in dependency roles. In New York I showed my wife around, took her shopping, bought her gifts. I went to work in the morning for eight hours. I was the dominant male. Over here, I plunged into a dependent role. Bodil felt it and finally began to protest. How many times did I hear that question, "Why do I always have to be the strong one?" And misinterpret it. I thought she meant,physically strong. Bodil was raised on a small farm where she helped her parents and brother and sister in the fields. They used to laugh at her when she told them she would never be a farmwife.

I came to appreciate Denmark's national health system, and wrote about it

After our firstborn, Luke, arrived, I really came to appreciate Denmark's national health care system, and I wrote articles about it. Yes, the world's oldest kingdom now is the highest-taxed country of all, higher than Norway, Sweden and Finland. But residents do get prenatal-to-postdeath care. A visiting nurse came to the door days after Luke was born to examine and weigh him in a big diaper, and there were regular follow-up visits. We wheeled him down the shore road to Dr. Schlegel for checkups, and our doctor made house calls as part of his daily routine. Today, few primary care doctors do this. But all rely on electronic medical records, and nearly all use computers to issue prescriptions and make notes on patient visits that other health professionals can access. Just about all medical communications between practitioners, specialists and hospitals are electronic, according to a recent Commonwealth Fund profile of the Danish system.

 Health care, like police and fire protection, is "free" (tax-supported) for all who live here. So is emergency medical care for foreign visitors. If you're over 18, you have to find a private dentist. A network of private hospitals and fast-access clinics has sprung up for people who can afford it; public and private institutions seem to work in harmony. Adults living in Denmark and possessions get a health insurance card from their municipality; we choose our doctors and can change them. Examinations and treatment in and out of the hospital are covered. The card bears the owner's CPR number (birth date plus four digits), address, and serves as proof of identity—also at public librarie's, motor vehicle and other agencies. Even hearing aids are subsidized; I'm trying out a pair as I write this. It makes sense.

 WHEN I MOVED TO DENMARK I BROUGHT ALONG MY violin and the string bass my dad gave me after I got home from Korea and out of the U. S. Army, in 1946. At St. Lawrence University I'd formed The Laurentian big band. To help fill a social void over here—Bodil and I had few mutual friends and didn't go out that much—I joined the rhythm section of an amateur big band in nearby Niva. Our leader, John Tchicai, is a Danish-Congolese who would soon become a world-class, avant-garde tenor saxophonist and composer. John and I started a trio with Edwin Kammerer, from Bavaria, local music teacher and classical composer on piano. He was also married to a Dane. When a new shopping center opened in the local town of Hørsholm, the John Tchicai Trio gave our debut concert. Mostly we played privately, for fun. John's now based in southern France and

often on tour. We've stayed fast friends over the decades.

Fradley after running the 13,3-kilometer Erimitage Race, claimed to be the world's first
time-controlled "folk race", also open to kids and seniors

One May evening in the early 1970s, out on the shore road near our house, Luke and Glen and I watched a trickle of lightly dressed runners emerge from the darkness and pause at a lantern-lit tent for a cup of water or tea. That's when the running bug bit me. I started distance training—a lonely sport—and eventually finished four of these annual 100-kilometer (62-mile), grueling overnight runs. In fall 1972 I entered my first of 35 years in Eremitageløbet. That 13.3-kilometer "E-Race" in the Deer Park may be the world's oldest (since 1969) time-controlled "folkrace," says Peter Schnohr, my cardiologist and father of the event. Nowadays, runners fly in from many countries to join the throng of 19,000 starters.

 In spring 1995 I suffered a stroke, but recovered in time for the E-Race in October and the New York City Marathon a month later. Reader's Digest international editions assigned a feature, and I did spin-off articles for SAS's in-flight magazine Scanorama and the medical press. What a surprise to be named Årets E-løber—E-Runner of the Year—the first and until now only foreigner to win that honor. A trip for two to La Santa Sport in the Canary Islands, with pocket money and a new training outfit were part of the package. There had been some steady income when Ecology Today and then Environment magazine took me on as international editor and columnist. Years later, Scanorama hired me to host its monthly "Welcome to Denmark" column for two years. The maiden entry was titled "Dig All That Jazz." About the third incarnation of Jazzhus Montmartre!

The foreign ministry hired me and an American freelancer friend, the late Jim Kenner, to translate dozens of text panels, write the printed matter and narrate videos for the biggest traveling exhibition ever mounted by the Danish government: Greenland: Arctic Denmark. It opened in New York and was remounted in Washington, D.C. and Seattle.

 On this project I flew to Greenland and learned about the "Norse Colony" on the world's biggest island. Imagine, in the mid-1500s, two settlements of Norsemen who had lived on Greenland's greener southwest coast for 500 years, suddenly disappeared. Like that. One dead man was found lying face down, his hat still on, a dull, bent knife clutched in his fist. There are theories—Eskimo attacks, disease, etc.—but nobody knows for certain what happened to those transplanted Europeans.

 Later, Reader' Digest international editions sent me to Station Nord in northeastern Greenland, to cover Denmark's Dogsled Patrol Sirius. Nord, a scientific and military base 574 miles from the geographic North Pole, is the northernmost permanent settlement on the planet. Great fun there boarding a sled alone, without reins, and turning to ice when the dogs suddenly took off into the mist. And to see the article in some languages so foreign I couldn't read my byline.

 I went over to playing classical music and started bass lessons in 1985 with a Norwegian-American teacher, Tina Austad. A quarter century later I'm still playing Bach and etudes with the same teacher. Several advanced amateur symphonies have invited me into their bass sections. Carl Nielsen is Denmark's leading composer and a challenging one, but the greatest thrill was playing in an all-Gershwin program in Tivoli Concert Hall. To a full house. I rehearse every winter with the local Gladsaxe-Haydn Orkester for an all-Papa Haydn concert in the municipal Town Hall.

My bass is a reddish beauty built in Romania in 1999. There's just one problem: It's putting on weight. Every year it gets harder to schlep around.

MY MARRIAGE WAS HEADED SOUTH BY THE EARLY 1970's. THE worse things got, the more I ran—you just can't come home sweaty after an hour–plus on the road feeling depressed. Back in 1961 ourneighbors in the "carriage house" had invited us and another couple for din­ner. Both were dentists. Hanne Ingerslev was a fellow-redhead and there was chemistry. In 1966, after they came home from the Eastman Dental Center in Rochester, New York, we were invited with them again for dinner. Hanne was very pregnant. The attraction was stronger. By 1978 her marriage was cracking. Our hostess-friend suggested I ask Hanne out. The second time I asked, she said yes. (To go to a concert.)After her divorce and just before mine, I moved into Hanne's roomy suburban Charlottenlund villa with her and her 12-year-old Morten. My youngest, Nicholas, was about his age. Then I moved my office into the base­ment. We've shared life, and many mutual interests, for 30 years. Hanne put down her drill to become an artist, writer and photographer. We speak mostly Danish together. Both of us do what it takes to keep the flame burning.And a bonus most un-American: Hanne and Bodil quickly became friends, calling each other about our boys and for practical advice, and coming to birthday parties and other family events. It was everyone's loss when cancer claimed Bodil this May. Both women are there in the line-up for a combined family photo at my 75th birthday party. You're looking at the main reason for staying in the land where we all live. I still fly over the pond to "my town" for recharges, but Denmark is my home.

Fradley Garner, a three-time contributor to Scandinavian Review, is international editor of Jersey Jazz, monthly journal of the New jersey Jazz Society, and columnist for the online webzine AllAboutJazz.com. He translated the 1934-1969 Harlem (New York) jazz memoir of Danish Baron Timme Rosenkrantz.