More than coping in Copenhagen . . .

Many weekends we long to escape the oppressiveness of the city and flee into the countryside. Because we have no car, this is often hard to do. This weekend, however, we did one better. Rather than fleeing into the countryside we fled the country, taking a Friday night flight to Denmark.

Why Denmark? Copenhagen and its near environs have their treasures to be sure. But mostly we wanted to visit our friends, the Sevys. One is tempted to call them “old friends” or “dear friends” or “beloved friends.” But these are all too tame. The Sevys are better than any adjective; we love them better than any adverb.

We landed in Denmark after dark. European planes don’t release you into a walkway directly attached to the airport. Instead, you walk down a make-shift stairway directly onto the tarmac, from which you walk outdoors to the terminal. When we got to the bottom of the stairs and breathed our first breath of Danish air, I wrinkled my nose, contorted my facial features into a ghastly grimace, and asked Lia, “Can you SMELL that?” “Smell what?” Lia asked, playing along perfectly. “Something must be rotten in the state of Denmark,” I responded. Brilliant, no? Joke of the year, certainly, if not of the decade. The laughter of all who overheard me drowned out the roaring of the airplane engines.

Travis, who has been working for the public diplomacy arm of the American embassy in Copenhagen for about seven months, picked us up at the airport a little after 8 p.m. on Friday evening. Lindsay phoned to warn that, in Travis’s absence, the house had been rocked by a tornado—two tornadoes, actually—eighteen-month-old twins called Joel and Leif. Lindsay asked Travis to stall while she did the work of a one-woman FEMA.

Stalling was delightful. Travis took us to the royal palace, where we drove in circles round the royal square, rousing the suspicions of night-watchman who changed positions with orderly steps and defied fashion with colossal black hats. They were reassured, however, when I rolled down my window and began shouting the opening lines from Hamlet. Travis then took us to the restaurant recently rated—to the apoplectic anger of competitors in Paris—the best in the world. We admired it boundlessly from the outside. We then saw the one-time home of Hans Christian Andersen, and visited the world-famous, sea-bound bronze statue of his little mermaid.

When at length we arrived at the Sevys beautiful home, there was not a trace of tornado wreckage. Four Sevy children slept soundly upstairs. Asher and Mayah had begged to be allowed to stay up to greet us, but Travis and Lindsay rightly predicted that, if this happened, none of our combined seven children would have slept all that long night. We feasted on chicken nuggets and frozen burritos—American delicacies long denied us in our Prussian exile—then put the girls to bed. Lia and I and Lindsay and Travis then began the deliciously wonderful work of “catching up.” We got to bed late—by our geriatric standards very late. We fell asleep swiftly, suffused with happiness.

Eli fought a losing battle with her sleeping bag, and awoke often during the night (maybe it was only once or twice, but it seemed like often). At five o’clock she went upstairs (we slept in the basement) to use the bathroom and came back boasting of her bravery. “Julia!!!” she hissed in her sleeping sister’s ear. “I bet you wouldn’t be brave enough to go to the bathroom in the PITCH BLACK!!!” Fortunately Julia didn’t hear this, and I intervened before Eli could repeat her untimely rodomontade. At 6:40 I awoke with the eerie sensation that a pair of small eyes were staring intently, and with discomforting proximity, at my face. I cracked an eyelid. Eli again. “Daddy,” she whispered, “I think it might be 7 o’clock!!!”—the magical time when the girls are allowed to get out of bed. It wasn’t, but I knew the game was up. I took Eli upstairs and we read together on the couch. After about fifteen minutes, the living room door flung open, a small, fiercely athletic male figure appeared and shouted, “Bombs away!!!” When Asher realized, however, the occupants of the couch were strangers, his enthusiasm vanished. But his curiosity didn’t quite. He peered at us cautiously from behind the door. Then he remembered his parents’ promise of visitors. “Oh,” he reflected. “I forgot you were coming.” These were the last words Asher spoke for awhile. Skipping superfluous reintroductions, Eli exploded with a thirty-minute distillation of facts of supreme importance. In the meantime, the two old friends got down to the serious business of playing. Julia and Mayah were comparative slugabeds, not emerging until nearly 7:20. They picked up precisely where they left of four years ago—the very best of friends, united in preexistence, reunited on earth. Just how kindred these little spirits are was revealed Sunday morning by the touching picture of Julia and Mayah, side by side at the kitchen table, each sunken in her own book, oblivious of the breakfast for which they were ostensibly waiting.

After a blessedly leisurely Saturday morning, we left with Travis, Mayah, and Asher for some adventures in the countryside, while Lindsay stood sentinel as Leif and Joel napped. We first visited the estate of an old family of Danish dukes, the last of whom donated the land to the state on the strict condition that pets be everlastingly welcome there, that dogs remain free to roam. The place is known popularly as “the dog park” and we soon learned why. The place was crawling with a host of hounds, some of which—and I say this as an one who nurtures a lifelong enmity against dogs, an enmity sharpened in recent years in regions where dogs so often serve as a substitute for children—were truly beautiful. One group in particular—what do I know of races or breeds?—were sleek and brown, sinuous and bold; shimmering in the wintry sun and roused by a stiff, chill wind. The grounds were everything one imagines that the estate of a European noble family ought to be—wide, open fields; thick, sturdy woods; and an elegant, stately manor. The combination of wind and sun gave the air an invigorating sharpness, and we were filled with life. All five children gathered walking sticks and romped the land over like little lords of vast dominions. The idyll was broken only when Mayah dragged a white tennis shoe through a surprise left behind by an incontinent canine. The park also features a high tower serving no evident purpose, and therefore likely to have been the elevated prison of some bygone Danish Rapunzel.

Our next stop, the Frederiksborg Palace, was even more breathtaking. We had a picnic lunch in the geometric gardens that overlook the water and the castle, before and after which the kids climbed up and rolled down the gardens’ diagonal, grassy walls. Then we toured the Palace itself, which serves now as a nation museum. The highlight, of course, was the Palace chapel, and the highlight of that was King Frederik’s prayer room, still crowned by the twenty-three paintings from the life of Christ that Frederik commissioned from the incomparable Carl Bloch. Travis told us that at a previous visit, they were accosted by a security guard who said: “Let me guess: You’re looking for the Carl Bloch paintings. And let me further guess that you’re from Utah and you’re Mormons?” Asked how he knew, the man answered that the only people who come to the castle with broods of small children are Mormons come from Utah for the sake of Carl Bloch. He also told them that, unlike the general public, Mormons are allowed to use flash photography in the prayer room. Conservatives to the bone, we still turned our flash off. Even without the heavenly gift of seeing the Sevys again, these paintings were worth the trip to Copenhagen.

After visiting the palace the kids were ready to go home and attend to more important matters—dress-up, dancing, and Barbie Mermaidtopia (or some such film with an outlandish, parody-defying title). While they did so, Travis and Lindsay sent Lia and me downtown for a blessed, honest-to-goodness date. We visited, with lamentable rapidity (the museum closes early on Saturdays), the famous Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek museum, where we viewed in whirlwind fashion the statuary of classical antiquity and modern Europe, as well as paintings from Manet, Monet, Van Gogh and Degas. It was all impressive and beautiful—but not so much as my date.

After dinner we put the kids to bed and introduced the Sevys to Time’s Up, for many years now our favorite game. In a spasmodic fit of enthusiastic Girl Power, Lia decreed that we would play boys against girls—excuse me, men against women—rather than as couples. Needless to say, Lia and Lindsay trounced Travis and me. Twice—the second trouncing more merciless than the first. Along the way, we told a thousand stories and shared a thousand laughs. I don’t think any of us had laughed so much or so hard for a long time. And for Lia, who spends her days basking in the radiance of my sparkling wit, that is really saying something. We got to bed even later, and even happier, than the night before.

The real highlight of the trip was just getting to hang out with Travis and Lindsay, watching the girls play with Mayah and Asher, and holding Joel and Leif (Leif especially took a liking to me, surely in the charitable hope of reassuring me that I might succeed yet as the father of a little boy). The cultural and spiritual highlight was visiting the Vor Frue Kirke, which houses Thorvaldsen’s statues of Christ and the twelve apostles. The girls recognized the Christus, of course, from trips to Temple Square and the Washington, D.C. Temple Vistors’ Center. On the way over, I related to the girls President Packer’s immortal story about visiting that cathedral with President Spencer W. Kimball. The chapel is one of the great places of the earth, its statues one of our richest cultural and spiritual treasures—a rare and supernal union of the good, the true, and the beautiful. We were very blessed to get to see it in person.

We were equally blessed to get to see the Sevys, who picked us up at the train station and gave us a ride to their local ward, which meets—poor Sevys!—at 1 p.m. After sacrament meeting and a part of primary (Asher was assigned to give a talk; as it happened, Lindsay gave a talk), Travis gave us a ride back to the train station where we caught a train for the airport, where we caught a plane home. It all ended too swiftly. Our trip home was not without hiccups—the greatest of which involved what airport authorities estimate as a 25-minute walk from the security check to our departure gate, which culminated at the gate with the haunting realization that one of our three suitcases (all carry-ons) had been left—ah, the protective passive voice!—back by the security check. I ran, in a shirt and tie and dress shoes, all that enormous distance to retrieve the bally thing before some officious airline security officer delivered it to the lost-&-found and, in all likelihood, oblivion. My thirty-year-old knees nearly gave way before I reached my goal. But there the suitcase was—standing upright in all its glory—right where it had been when I set it down in order to hoist Katharine onto my shoulders and to relieve her from the burden of the suitcase she had been ineffectually but adorably dragging herself. I grabbed the suitcase and retraced my many, many steps back to the departure gate, where I proudly displayed my boarding pass and bowed before the admiring multitudes who applauded my heroic rescue and return. We made it home in one piece, had a hearty dinner, and went wearily to bed. We already miss the Sevys.

*Pictures of this adventure coming soon (but don’t hold your breath).