Maybe it skips a generation

In my pilgrimage through my childhood city, I walked into the oldest coffee shop in Denmark, La Glace, on Friday afternoon.

This is a place that still serves cakes like they used to be: filled with heavy cream, sugar, eggs, butter, and vanilla. Think heart-attack on a plate, unless you subscribe to the obviously ridiculous notion that Scandinavians somehow genetically have an easier time digesting dairy-fat than folks from other regions. If you look up coronary heart disease in Denmark, you’ll see how erroneous this notion is.

Somehow, as I sat down with the menu filled with childhood favorites, I felt tears well up. This is where you get emotional?, I asked myself, a bit incredulous. A loop of disjointed clips played in the back of my head: special afternoons with friends, post-Christmas-shopping with my father and brother, and, above all, countless times with the one grandmother I had a close relationship with, my father’s mother (farmor, in Danish).

My farmor was a truly exceptional human being and a formative presence in my life. She was from a generation and class where things had to be just so, and she was ruthlessly honest when she did not understand my fashion or other choices. But she was never dismissive or judgmental. Somehow, she communicated to me that my choices were valid, even when she did not agree with them. We were equals, her actions implied, and her empathy and love towards me were all-enveloping and unconditional, also when I walked through difficult times.

It was her I thought of when I ordered the most traditional piece of layer-cake on the menu, and a cup of the place’s signature tea-blend. She would have ordered something with more butter and less cream, and a less aromatic tea. We would have relished those differences together.

I miss her. I sometimes feel her presence. I definitely felt it at La Glace on Friday afternoon.