Rie

Rie. My, oh, my. Community High School in Arbor — where I taught from 1974 to 1976 — didn't have homerooms. Instead, we had what we called "forums" — each student had to be registered for one, and each teacher was required to lead one. Bottom line was that they were a clearinghouse for the sort of schoolwide information a normal school would have passed on in homeroom — but we were not a normal school, and we didn't have homerooms. In principle, the forums were themed, and mine revolved around eating. We had potluck suppers, we went out to restaurants — we ate.

My first year, there were two foreign-exchange students at CHS — Rafael from Venezuela and Rie from Denmark — and I asked to have them both assigned to my forum. Nice kids, both of them. Rie, I thought, was awfully attractive, and she had in fact already graduated from high school in Denmark, but I think repeating 12th grade was the price she had to pay to get the exchange experience, which she wanted. God knows why. Anyway, if I hadn't been a teacher at her school, I might have asked her out — but she was, so I couldn't. I had a lot to do with her, though, and I guess she must have liked and/or trusted me, because I remember late one night her showing up at my door. She was drunk, or stoned, or both, and couldn't go back to her host family in that condition, so she'd come to me. And I, contrary to my usual form, was smart enough to realize that I couldn't put her up for the night, so, if memory serves, I gave her coffee and called her host parents and they came and got her.

Well, the next year, I quit my job and went to Europe and met Lydia, and in December of 1976, after our six-month motorcycle trip through Italy and Greece, I decided to take a look at Scandinavia before heading back to the States. I got in touch with Rie, and she invited me to stay at her place, and I wound up spending two weeks with her, mostly in Copenhagen. We also took a cool couple-day excursion up to Oslo (where we saw the Viking ships and the Vigelund sculpture garden and the Munch Museum) and an overnight jaunt to Malmö (where I was strip-searched by a friendly Swedish border guard, and it turned out afterwards that Rie, who'd been waved right through, was carrying hash inside some sort of necklace she was wearing).

Somewhere along the line, we slept together, I think twice. I remember it being very gentle and sweet. And then I went back down to Amsterdam, and Lydia and I went to Florida and later New Orleans together, and I never saw Rie again. I'd love to know what happened to her. She was a nice girl.

In my scrapbooks, there's this picture (taken against the Windsor, Ontario, skyline, with two other members of our Forum cropped out) and a shot of Rie holding a frozen fish in a Danish supermarket.

(December 19, 1993)