Reading-spots, part 9

 

This month, I have been living in Odense for a work-related assignment, which has given me a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with one of my most beloved city, and to revisit places which were immensely important to me in the course of my five very formative years in Denmark. By my own admission, I am a ridiculously nostalgic individual, and I treasure those things that enable me to relive periods of great joy or comfort. When done right, this kind of nostalgia-seeking enterprise is phenomenally rewarding, and can serve as a balm for the soul. 

One goal for my current quest to reconnect with positive aspects of my Danish past was to visit the bakery where I used to buy my daily bread. When I lived here, this bakery - Folkebo's bageri - was only a couple of hundred meters from my doorstep. This time, however, it was slightly more cumbersome as I live close to the train station and my daily commute goes in a parallel direction, making it difficult to combine duty and pleasure as part of one and the same trip. Luckily, one Sunday morning I decided to have a typical Danish breakfast in my old haunt. 

The bakery was largely the same as when I used to live here, except that they had reduced the number of tables in favour of another glass case for baked goods. Luckily, I found a chair and spent an hour enjoying some of the favourite flavours of my Danish past. As I was sitting here, I was brought back to one particular period that has been seared into my memory like few other bakery-related episodes in my life. It was early in 2019, the beginning of what was to be my last term in Denmark. I was in a rather rough shape, being unemployed and having no immediate prospects. For some reason I no longer recall, I began to wake up unreasonably early in the dark of one January week, and I got into the habit of stopping by the bakery for a cup of tea, something to eat, and a bit of time for reading before cycling on to the university campus, where the kindness of my friends and colleagues allowed me to pass my time as part of my old scholarly community. It was a week of glorious mornings, where the wider troubles of this stage in my life were pushed away, and I found a pocket of calm while reading at a table in the bakery's café as the world was becoming lighter outside. Eventually, I began to wake up later in the day again and the routine stopped, but the memory of that week became a treasured gem.  

My current lot is fortunately happier than it was during this particular episode, and my life has accumulated a lot of different experiences since then. I am in many ways a different man than I was then, but this joyous hour on a Sunday morning in October also served as a reminder that I am not that far removed from the person I once was - at least in some respects.