Meet the Danes

By Mark Perrino

Meet the Danes is a rollicking satire of 1980s American pop culture disastrously transplanted into the unsuspecting nation of Denmark … and Hans Christian Andersen's fairy-tale land will never be the same.
 

When newlywed but jobless academic Norman McKay follows his wife, Kirsten, back to her homeland, he struggles to fit in—until by chance he gets recruited to help launch Denmark's first commercial television network, DK2. With programming fueled by Norman's twisted take on American viewing habits, DK2 sparks a culture war that quickly spirals out of control, sowing confusion, political controversy, violent resistance, and murder. Norman's increasingly desperate attempts to salvage DK2 and prove his goodwill only end up sabotaging his marriage, incurring a centerfold's wrath, and provoking U.S. military aggression against its puny NATO ally.
 

Can Norman pull the plug before it's too late? Television overtakes reality and reality imitates television as the world's oldest kingdom careens into surrealistic turmoil.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mariendal Press
• Release date: Mar 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9788797274613

Mark Perrino

Mark Perrino was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in several American cities, finishing high school in Schenectady, New York. After attending four colleges and working various mundane jobs, including a stint playing cards in Las Vegas, he took a doctorate at Columbia University and completed the literary study "The Poetics of Mockery." In 1988, he wrote "Meet the Danes," a whimsical satire based on an imaginary emigration to his wife’s homeland. Six years later, they did move to Denmark, and the memoir "It doesn’t matter, you’ll be okay" tells the heart-rending story of what really happened. He has taught at Manhattan College and worked in corporate communications in New York and Copenhagen. He has an adult son and now lives in Frederiksberg, Denmark, with the psychotherapist Pia Friis. You can follow him at "The Happiest People" blog.

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Mark Perrino was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in various regions of the United States before graduating from high school in Schenectady, New York. He attended the State University of New York at Albany and Columbia University. He has taught at Manhattan College and worked in corporate communications in New York and Copenhagen, where he has lived since 1994. Meet the Danes is his first novel.

ALSO BY MARK PERRINO

The Poetics of Mockery

Meet the Danes

A Novel

Mark Perrino

Mariendal Press

MARIENDAL PRESS

Copyright © Mark Perrino 2020

Mark Perrino has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this novel.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by other means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author, except as expressly permitted by law.

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, organizations, and incidents portrayed in it are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, localities, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First published by Mariendal Press in 2020.

ISBN 978-87-972746-2-0 (paperback)

ISBN 978-87-972746-1-3 (eBook)

Cover design by Kiryl Lysenka.

Mariendal Press

Mariendalsvej 26

DK-2000 Frederiksberg

For Karin

There was once an evil demon, one of the worst of all—the Devil himself! One day he was in a really good mood because he had invented a mirror that made everything good and beautiful that was reflected in it shrink almost to nothing, while things that were no good and looked horrible were clear to see and appeared even worse than they were. . . . All the pupils at his school for demons—for he ran a school for demons—told everyone that a miracle had happened: Now, they said, you could finally see what the world and people really looked like.

— H.C. Andersen, The Snow Queen

1

The squalid little dragon withered like a slashed tire on Saint George’s lance as the philosopher-knight’s horse reared and tossed his noble mane. Norman gazed at the tall window blazing forth unseasonably in the Scandinavian autumn: tinted shards diagramming an idea, from the hand of an anonymous artisan who verily dreamed his work would outlast wars, heresies, and occupations. He drank in the silence of the chapel, the shuffling feet and respectful whispers, the sparrows’ muffled twitter outside, savoring a respite from words he couldn’t understand. This shrine is a thousand years old. What mutant hybrid did they really worship then, as the dragon squirmed toward extinction? The whitewashed walls, shorn of their pre-Reformation ornament, exuded a humble prayer for the goodwill and common sense that in more recent decades had made this land a safe harbor in a rapacious world. In muted tones the congregation, a forthright, congenial lot with fine chiseled features, praised the beauty of the babies in the front pews. They came here to honor not Christ so much as history, their heritage, not its particulars but just the fact of their endurance.

Norman couldn’t recall when he’d last been in church, forgetting for a moment his own wedding, when he hadn’t this calm vantage. Not so distant really, at least in time. It was after all what had brought him to Copenhagen and now to a tranquil village green in central Jutland, the last capital of Viking Denmark, to witness the baptism of another immigrant from the New World, his adoptive nephew. Copenhagen’s modest charm paled against the magnificence of the larger European capitals, but he’d fallen for a woman in a graduate seminar in New York who spoke with a rare freedom and ease and the slightest trace of a foreign accent. They’d tried to leave each other more than once, but it was no use—they were yoked by a bond as fatal as the one between the medieval horseman and monster aloft. So he’d followed her back to a quaint country for elderly tourists, a model of cleanliness, courtesy, universal health insurance, and brain-numbing sanity.

"Han vandt en halv gris i Bingo sidste vinter," Hanne, Kirsten’s mother, leaned across Norman to whisper to her daughter, nodding at the minister with a wry smile of sneaking admiration.

What? Norman asked Kirsten, still groggy from her brother’s hospitality last night.

"Vinde, vandt—‘win,’ that’s basic, said Kirsten. The minister, he won a side of pig on TV Bingo."

He knew the word. The difficulty was their impenetrable pronunciation, slurring whole sentences together with their oversupply of low vowels.

Didn’t you say many young clergymen were diehard socialists?

Yeah. Morten can’t stand his ideas but he had to have this chapel. Bourgeois nostalgia. Oh look, here comes another one!

Norman thought he heard envy in her voice. The last baby but Mikkel, borne by its proud mother, found a seat in front after the minister’s decorous chuck under the chin. The babies’ relatives nearly outnumbered the small congregation now. Pernille’s brother’s family, sitting across the row before them, had come from southern Jutland, and her sister’s, from Copenhagen. Beaming at his charges over a wide bright ruff, the minister glanced at the door, then at his watch. The ancient doors slowly parted, upon the back of the light blue suit of a man who seemed to be holding his head. No, it was Morten with his new camcorder on his shoulder, backing up in a crouch, propping one door open with his free hand. Then Pernille appeared with Mikkel in her arms, trying to look dignified but grimacing a bit as she felt Pina poking his nose past her knee to sniff the nave and nudged him back. Everyone swiveled around with hushed gasps and giggles. The lean, erect minister walked briskly but without panic down the aisle. Pernille tried to warn Morten but he was bent on capturing the celebrated Teleus Videreus (1399-1491) relief over the arch.

The minister tapped Morten’s shoulder, muttering forcefully that Morten must know there was no videotaping inside the chapel. Or so it seemed to Norman, who had to infer speech from posture and gestures. Morten’s head bobbed up over the camera with a surprised smile and ducked down again as he backed away, delighted the pastor had consented to a close-up. Don’t worry, he wouldn’t tape the ceremony, but he needed the entrance. Was it religious to let the milestones of Mikkel’s young life drop into oblivion?

Hanne raised a hand to her face to cover an incredulous frown. Kirsten leapt up and rushed back to shower her brother with the strongest oaths suitable within these walls, adding perhaps a sneer of reproach for Pernille for kicking her dog. Others had risen behind the minister, who implored Morten politely to turn off the camera but hesitated to lay a hand on it or block the lens or hide his face in his ruff like things he’d seen arrested rapists and hitmen do on American video. They weren’t superstitious like that here. It wasn’t as though Morten were stealing something hallowed from this shrine by subjecting a pale copy to hoarse guffaws over stumbles and miscues in smoky, beery parlors. There were already slides of the chapel as well as the nearby runic stones and burial mounds on sale across the road at King Bluetooth’s Tavern. But the other families are ready to begin, and we also hold services on Sundays, that’s what the congregation is waiting for, insisted the minister, unable to control his sarcasm, the downfall of many an aspiring saint.

"Ja ja," Morten blustered. Yeah, yeah, just one shot of the altar . . . and a few of the guests.

But the guests and parishioners had now crowded around him, gesturing toward the door and declaring that the joke was over, growing more vehement as Pina began barking at the commotion. Morten had to lift the camera overhead to get a view of the altar, and in the jostling he stepped on an open hymnal that had fallen from someone’s lap. His legs went out from under him, and since this pioneer of Nordic home video wouldn’t unhand his pricey yuppie appliance to break his fall, Oomf! he plopped down onto his ass. His viewfinder became a kaleidoscope of waving arms and flashing teeth, until, when he came to a rest on the bricks, all that remained in it was the traditional model ship suspended from the ceiling, while the greatest spectacle of the scene, the cameraman himself, survived only in the indignant memory of the congregants.

Where was I, thought Norman. Yes, beneath their hardy pragmatism and the warm embrace of the welfare state lurk uncrushable vestiges of pagan magic. Dragons don’t die so easily. They’ll take a dive in princes’ murals, but their scales will flash again. Since it was his first kid, maybe Morten hadn’t trodden sacred ground lately either, or maybe he felt his church taxes entitled him to this stage.

It took a few moments to recover the proper mood. People hoped the sooner things got underway, the faster Morten and his banana-peel shuffle would be forgotten.

Can you believe he did that! said Kirsten. He must be out of his mind.

I told you we shouldn’t have brought Pina, said Norman. He always has to hog the camera.

Yeah right, it’s his fault, she smirked, settling back into the pew wondering how many of the attendees saw her family as a laughingstock. He couldn’t stay at Morten’s by himself. He’s afraid of Viggo.

After the invocation the principals stepped up to the font, joined by the godparents, including Kirsten and Pernille’s brother, Niels-Erik. Norman was to have stood there beside her in an improbable pledge to guide the child’s Christian upbringing, but they’d since learned that only citizens were eligible. Chubby little Mikkel, the senior baby at six months, twisting and kicking during his predecessor’s dousing, was also the pawn of red tape. Since the papers validating his new name hadn’t returned from the sticky cogs of this miniature country’s formidable bureaucracy, he was being welcomed into Danish society as Alejandro Salazar Gonzales. Having wrested from Pernille the honor of presenting the foundling to be anointed, Morten assumed a pious mien, though when he caught people’s eyes they had to stifle a snicker. No one could doubt that Mikkel’s parents loved him madly, in proportion to the trouble it cost to obtain him—the interviews, investigations, the hefty price tag, the long wait, and two trips to Mexico City before they got their hands on a baby who was healthy enough to leave the hospital. Denmark for some reason had great need of orphans. In a few years she’d imported a whole generation of Korea-children. Parents with nothing in common but the same nationality of baby, now world citizens, got together to talk about what a full night’s sleep used to feel like and to compare videotapes.

Norman supposed the minister was giving those babies an ecclesiastical version of the spiel in a brochure he’d read on the plane: "A land where fairy tales come true. Carefree Denmark. Friendly and cheerful. Safe and manageable. Small and clean. The world’s oldest kingdom invites you to forget your troubles and discover a place where the art of living has been perfected. The key word in Denmark is hyggelig, which means cozy or homey. From charming towns with ancient squares to Hamlet’s Kronborg Castle overlooking Sweden, at country inns and the enchanted plazas of Tivoli Gardens, Europe’s oldest amusement park—all across the islands where the noble Vikings proudly sailed—the Danes know how to make visitors feel cozy. Step back into a happier time, into the world of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales where, for the young at heart, your dreams really do come true."

Norman had translated the Tourist Board English to "Don’t worry about rag-headed terrorists on our airplanes. We’re so humble and obliging no one would think of disturbing us. Observe our tame Iranians living on welfare and riding the bicycles our gracious queen gave the refugees so they could see the country. Imagine that in America—Nancy would give every Hispanic in New York a bike so they’d get run over."

"The state gave them bicycles, not the queen," said Kirsten, impatient with Norman’s derisive style of acculturation. That was when he’d still been ignorant enough, if not young enough at heart, to possess a cartoon dream of the country to tease her with. Since landing, though, he’d stopped doubting the need for the fairy-tale package. Touching as Mikkel’s induction was, it also reminded him that he was on strange terrain where he couldn’t speak the language or find a job, that soon they had to leave their sublet in Copenhagen, and that his darling wife had just become enchanted with a country house they couldn’t afford.

Kirsten positively glowed at Mikkel. She’d looked enchanted holding him and playing with him last night when they arrived in Carlsborg. She’d always said she’d never raise kids in America, and they hadn’t wanted to enlarge their nuclear pack anyway while their careers were unsettled. But now that she’d come home to roost, maybe that was behind her sudden craving for a house, if not behind their momentous crossing itself. Norman couldn’t tell one baby from another and sometimes thought their first year was a messy corporeal trial that women performed to make both husband and child impossibly indebted to them. Kirsten was in a nostalgic trance, as if she, the repentant deserter, were being rechristened and welcomed back to her childhood world herself. Beside Pernille and Morten, Norman saw Kirsten Hjemming as if for the first time in her true element, in a family portrait, the classic cheekbones and other sharp features of her sunny face softened to a slight vagueness in ritualistic reverence. The frank blue eyes, and the full lips that had encouraged American men more strongly than she realized, now promised those gathered here an attentive sister, daughter, and aunt. The lean yet shapely figure that strode through New York with a sanguine independence, the dirty-blonde mop of curly hair that accented her impulsiveness, she bore with a quiet grace. Even the tension in her chin, the only hint that her effusive charm had a harsh recoil, had relaxed. That is, until her eyes met Norman’s scrutiny with a puzzled glimmer. He was now the oddball in that reverent assembly, she seemed to be thinking, indifferent to both ritual and family, abstracted in belittling bemusement, the one with the guidebook protruding from his jacket who had consented to trade her exile for his own.

The parents and babies left just after the ceremony, but the rest of them had to pay for the show by singing hymns, Kirsten with a patriotic fervor and Norman with a wavering hum, and listening to the sermon. For him, it might have been an introduction to Buddhist instead of Lutheran doctrine, except for what he could absorb from the earnest emphasis of the minister’s tone. He ought to grapple with that yodeling gurgle and glean its hoary wisdom. What was the minister saying now: These are hard times we live in. The land is caught in the niggardly grip of the potato cure. Cunning corporate raiders are poised at the southern border to pounce at the fatal stroke of 1992 when Europe unionizes. We must maintain hope and courage. Sometimes, despite all you’ve worked for, you must take heart and start over again. But with our fundamental decency and generosity, we must not flinch from the task of sheltering the wretched of the earth and their abandoned offspring. Remember that the potato holidays are also upon us, a time for families to gather together and reaffirm the legacy that has sustained us. . . .

Potatoes everywhere you turn. Kids got a vacation from school although few still joined the harvest. Norman remembered hearing of the potato cure from Kirsten’s calls home. "What is it, a folk remedy? I thought your mother worked in the psychiatric ward."

No, it was the government’s new austerity program, like a potato diet after a bad crop year, a blunt instrument of fiscal rehabilitation that incidentally crashed property prices. In an hour he’d be partaking of that indispensable vegetable at one of their famous family dinners and repeating his most fluent line: Goddag. Jeg taler ikke dansk. Taler De engelsk? Good day. I do not speak Danish. Do you speak English?

Only six weeks ago he’d had little inkling of this fate. He and Kirsten were living in Washington Heights, a Manhattan neighborhood that had seen better days, eking out an existence as adjunct lecturers at colleges around the City. Both were overdue doctoral candidates at a fine university. Norman’s thesis had stalled during a nagging bout of insomnia, and afterward, he decided to write a novel instead. They applied for some full-time positions, but the only offers they got were short appointments in the hurricane belt. Kirsten had come to visit New York twelve years earlier and stayed to attend college and graduate school, which had never ended but just left her suspended in an indefinite internship. She felt more and more adrift in America and depressed by their neighborhood, with the crack trade encroaching from one direction and raucous Caribbean rhythms from the other. Marriage stirred a desire for better living conditions and stable careers. It had been a few years since Kirsten’s father, Ernst, had passed, and she thought Hanne was becoming sad and lonely. She applied for work in Denmark in the spring and to her surprise was offered a job teaching American Studies, although it wasn’t even her field, at a small school outside Copenhagen. It was a folk high school, that distinctive Danish institution founded around 1850 by the theologian and hymn composer N.F.S. Grundtvig to give the adult peasantry a chance for an informal higher education and personal development. Now people used it as a sort of sabbatical from everyday life to brush up on a subject, cultivate arts and crafts, or discuss philosophy.

The school year began early so she lost no time in packing to hear Norman’s reservations. With so few colleges in the tiny country, what was he supposed to do if he couldn’t get work teaching? He’d find something, Kirsten told him. Denmark would be good for him. It would bring him down to earth. Maybe he thought it was a cultural backwater, but he was cynical and actually very naïve about people and the real world. It was because he was so aloof, always cloistered at his desk with his books, that he found it easy to scoff at normal middle-class customs. He was in an abstracted daze except when he latched onto farfetched projects with fanatical energy. Denmark was truly civilized. Its modest natural scenery was unpolluted. There wasn’t a nuclear reactor in the whole archipelago. Kirsten remembered her idealistic hippie-pinko teenage years fondly and thought of the place as one of the last holdouts in the West against neoconservatism, a functioning social democracy where people still took pride in public service. If the notorious taxes were too steep, how could it have one of the highest standards of living in the world?

Although Norman protested as a matter of form, he was ready for a change too. He had had some trouble over curricular policy at his last position. He’d finally finished the book, more memoir than fiction, about his coming of age at the blackjack tables in Las Vegas, a work of searching angst that left publishers cold. So he rationalized that if the election campaign was an index of the American mood, it wasn’t a bad time to leave. Though Dukakis led the polls on novelty appeal, those crucial Reagan Democrats didn’t seem to mind that Bush lacked his mentor’s personal appeal and knack for lying innocently. Since the nation’s paper prosperity camouflaged its humanitarian deficit, it looked like four more years of deregulated toxins, junk-bond takeovers, ghetto gang wars, homeless people sleeping beneath skyscrapers sold to the Japanese, and the liberal arts reduced to literacy training. Norman was curious about living in Europe. He had an idea for a book about a precarious romance between two East Village artists working as office temps and fighting gentrification that he thought living abroad might give him some perspective on. If he couldn’t teach at a Danish university, he’d try gymnasium, the college-prep high schools. He hoped he wouldn’t have to take some other kind of work. He’d go at least for Kirsten’s sake. She’d become disillusioned with life in New York and couldn’t apply herself to her work. She was susceptible to sudden enthusiasms and disappointments in her social life. Going home might steady her and let her find some direction.

Norman had been to Denmark once, two years before. He had been charmed by its traditionalism and impressed by its rational social planning, so different from his own rootless, temporizing existence. But now, even though he knew he must put aside the tourist’s detachment and superficial curiosity, he clung to them as a hedge against the difficulties he met. The few openings at universities were for jobs that began the next fall, and unemployment was rising. He had begun a Danish course alongside Iranians and other displaced persons from third-world battlefields, but progress was slow. Though the language wasn’t bad on paper, he still confused the inflections, the letters pronounced like other ones, the three new vowels, and that elusive hiccup, the glottal stop. By now he could usually make his basic needs understood by salesclerks and bartenders, but he couldn’t begin to decipher ordinary conversation. He lost the thread at the first unfamiliar note. Since most people under the age of fifty gladly and proudly spoke English, it was easy to put off the full immersion. Kirsten had been content to let him get his bearings and peruse his alternatives at first, that is, until the fatal day she saw the house for sale in the town where she taught. Norman had begun to doubt his assimilation and was glad they’d kept their New York apartment with a sublet. The loyalty test came sooner than expected. The renowned easy pace of Danish life had turned into a deadline for him to produce some income.

Oh, is it over? he said when Kirsten nudged him in the pew and stood up.

Outside, with his eyes glued to the door, Pina lay next to the oldest monument in Denmark, a two-meter stone erected by King Gorm den Gamle (Gorm the Old) around the year 950. He dashed up to Kirsten, who was explaining her brother’s devotion to Mikkel to the minister, and hugged her leg.

No you don’t, said Kirsten, pushing him down, not on my woolen dress.

Pina stood panting happily and scanning the herd emerging from church. He wasn’t trained, but he was quick and alert. He looked people in the eye, as though, like Norman, he wished he could understand them. He had a disarming appearance that never failed to charm fellow pedestrians, this medium-sized border collie or Australian shepherd. His shaggy back and flanks were black, and above the white underside was a tan edge that ran down his legs. All three colors met in his face: brown patches curved under his eyes, and the white ran from his chest up one side of his nose into a crooked heart on his head. His bushy tail, with a white spot on the end, waved like the flag of a proud explorer. No parent could dote on a human baby more than Kirsten did on him. Though he always ran free, he never strayed far.

Niels-Erik’s little daughter Anni kneeled down to hug the pretty bow-wow around the neck while he squirmed to get loose. What’s her name? she asked.

Norman told her and stammered that it resembled—he couldn’t find the word—it sounded like a girl’s name, but he was really a boy dog. The puzzled urchin looked back and forth between man and beast weighing their relative rarity. Norman tugged at Kirsten’s sleeve for help.

Yes, unusual markings, the minister noted, and asked what breed he was, too polite to suggest he was mixed. Peanut, that’s American, isn’t it?

"Pina," said Kirsten, and from the word spansk Norman knew she was rendering the provenance of the name. Actually it had been Peanut, but she thought the Dominican super at their apartment building who had kept him locked in the basement was saying Pina—Pee-nuh! It sounded Spanish. She didn’t find out he’d meant Peanut until weeks afterward, and by then it was too late.

He has many the name, right, Pino? Norman added in Danish.

The minister replied to Kirsten, and Norman felt somewhat overshadowed by his pet. But he didn’t really mind. If he believed at all in fairy-tale magic, it was because of this hypersensitive mutt with the power to make grouches smile. Owing either to his miserable puppyhood or Kirsten’s lack of discipline, he carried an inquiring light in his eyes that seemed almost human. Plus parts cat and rabbit, no wonder he was touched.

"What’s your name?" Anni now asked Norman. He replied with one of his best lines, but his accent didn’t fool her. He didn’t sound like a nordmand (a Norwegian), so what did he mean he’s called normen (the norm)?

He meant that his parents made a big mistake when he got baptized, said Kirsten.

Anni’s brother, a skinny, excitable boy of about twelve, sized Norman up and asked her if she couldn’t hear that he was American. Norman asked the boy if he learned English in school.

Oh yes. Listen. He screwed up a sneer and spit out a roundhouse drawl: Sue Ellen, yew ain’t nuttin’ butta tramp an’ a lush!

Kirsten was the only one who didn’t get it, and the minister explained the provenance of the sentiments to her. A good way to learn a language, he added with a smile.

Norman might have asked the guy whether he’d butchered the half-pig for the freezer himself, had he not noticed that Pina was pissing on the Viking monument! Taking the opportunity for some sanitary concern to excuse himself from this linguistic audition, he went over and looked at the tourist sign to find out what the inscription said: Gorm, King, made this monument to his wife, Thyra, the pride of Denmark. That was all of it. Conjugal devotion, period. J.R. Ewing could teach Old Gorm a thing or two about heathen sacrifices. The other, more elaborate stone, left by Gorm’s son Harald Bluetooth, bragged about his Christianization of the entire North. Baedeker noted that the original stones had stood by the burial mounds beyond the cemetery, and the Romanesque frescoes over the choir were questionable restorations made in this century. Well, Gorm wasn’t the Oldest anyway, just the first to recognize the medium of the future in rock ’n’ runes.

Norman picked their way through the cobblestone streets of Jelling in their rental car, past eighteenth-century row houses with colorful, ornamented doors hard upon the curb, until they hit the open country. Traffic on the back highway was light, mainly bicycles and mopeds. The landscape was a pastoral postcard, a rich green flecked with violet heather surrounding stretches of brown and yellow fields. Farmers were burning off the harvest stubble and smoke drifted across the road. Cows and sheep stood placidly beneath slowly churning windmills. They passed farmhouses built around courtyards and small churches perched on rolling hills. Kirsten and Hanne were commenting on the scenery. Kirsten had grown up in Duereden, a picturesque port on the island of Funen, and was still a small-town girl at heart. As a child she’d spent weeks with her grandparents on the farm where Hanne had grown up. Hanne had taken a couple of English courses in recent years, but since her facility was still as basic as Norman’s Danish, their communications entailed much pointing.

Isn’t it beautiful? said Kirsten. This is just like the Sunday drives my father used to take us on. We looked at all the farmhouses and discussed the layout of the landscape and the additions. We walked on the beach or through a manor, stopped somewhere for coffee, and then went home to a light supper—all the leisurely little conventions people enjoy so much here.

Yeah, it should be no surprise that globalization is passing them by, said Norman.

That’s the best part of it. Sometimes I still can’t believe we’re really here, for good.

We might have come a couple of years ago if you’d married me sooner.

"Me! I