Siebo Friesenborg & Isabel Knuth-Winterfeldt

Siebo Friesenborg

          For a while, when I was at the U of D, I hung out in the evenings in a lounge at the Student Center where people either read or played cards. I learned to play whist and cribbage. I no longer remember how to play whist, but I still played cribbage until recently with my kids. For a while in my early sixties I was seeing a woman with whom I was badly mismatched, but who was keen on cribbage.

          One of the students with whom I played cards fairly often at the Student Center was an guy who was two or three years older than I was named Siebo Friesenborg.

          Siebo was particularly fond of cribbage. While playing he would sometimes tell about how “the old Swedes down by the docks” would spend their days playing cribbage, and chant, “fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and a pair is six,” in a sing-song Swedish accent.

          Siebo had a girlfriend who went to a college in the midwest. Her name was Heather Hope Hornstein. Once he let me listen on another phone when he called her person-to-person, collect, from Siebo Friesenborg to Heather Hope Hornstein, just to hear the operators struggle with the names. It was a hoot.

          A few years later I related this story to my then-girlfriend in another city and she said, “Heather Hornstein! I know her! We went to high school together. We were kinda friends.”

Isabel Knuth-Winterfeldt

          When my stepfather Howard sent my brother and me on a vacation to the Caribbean in December 1963, we spent about five days on St Croix in the Virgin Islands and about the same amount of time in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

          On St Croix there is (or, at least was) a Christmas tradition called ‘stomping’, which involved drunken night-time dancing parades with steel bands through the streets of Christiansted. A couple of nights after arriving there I was standing at the corner watching one of the parades go by when I decided to join in. Everyone seemed to be drinking unwise amounts of raw local rum, and I joined in on that, too. I remember at one point someone taking up a collection to buy more. A fifth (757 ml) of the stuff cost something like 60¢. Someone had a bunch of little, one-ounce paper cups — the kind that dentists used to provide to rinse out with. I remember someone pouring too much rum into my cup (Now, how did that happen?), and the stuff that splashed onto my hand evaporated instantly into the humid tropical evening, cooling my flesh.

          And someone who, I supposed, wanted to concentrate primarily on drinking put his steel drum around my neck, and I hammered away at it, making who knows what sounds. Then I gave the drum to someone else, and I found myself dancing alongside two burly, middle-aged Cruzan men who had a short, round-faced blonde girl with acne about my age dancing between them, one arm over each of their shoulders, all three facing forward. And then, some time later, the four of us staggered into a narrow, crowded bar.

          The girl was a Dane named Isabel Knuth-Winterfeldt. Her father, Count Knuth-Winterfeldt, was the Danish ambassador to the US, and the two Cruzans were bodyguards from the St Croix police. One was especially convivial, and made me feel as if I belonged there. Isabel and I became pretty good friends, in a boozy, non-romantic sort of way. We exchanged mailing addresses and kept in touch.

          The following school year, when I transferred to college in DC, I looked Isabel up at the embassy. We started hanging out together from time to time there. I have a particularly fond memory of us raiding the embassy kitchen together the afternoon before some big diplomatic do. Isabel was surprised that I called the smoked salmon ‘lox’, which I thought was a Yiddish word and she thought was a Danish word. She said, real surprise if not remonstrance in her voice,” Americans always call it salmon!” Great food. Great beer (Tuborg and Carlsberg). Fine company.

She was learning to play the accordion, which I thought was a weird thing to be learning to play in rock-and-roll 1964. Nobody played accordion on the Beatles’ albums.

          I also went to one young-people’s party at the embassy. Linda Johnson, the President’s daughter, was there. She and Isabel were clearly old friends. Isabel helped me feel comfortable in the company of the clearly privileged. I definitely drank too much, but then, so did just about everyone else. I made a fool of myself belching and then discoursing on the difference between the taste of Danish and American beers the second time around, but Isabel didn’t care. She thought it was funny. I got a ride back to my dormitory with a new friend I never saw again, a guy named Andreas who was in the family of somebody at, I think, the Greek embassy. Andreas had a flashy, expensive car with DPL (diplomatic) licence plates, which meant that he couldn’t be arrested. Thoroughly drunk, he drove fast and recklessly, but somehow we didn’t crash and die. I counted myself lucky to get back to my university dormitory in one piece.

          By the next summer, though, Isabel’s dad got transferred to the embassy in Paris, and she started going to an agriculture school in Denmark so that she could manage the family spread outside Fachse, where they brewed a beer called Fachse Towers, or so she told me, and we lost touch. After Isabel moved back to Europe, none of the DPL people I knew knew me any more.

          Isabel and I met again on facebook. She was by then a kontessa herself and a grandmother several times over. She ran a riding academy called Finca Krimalina, in the mountains of Andalusia in southern Spain. In her photos she seemed to have a life enriched by several dogs as well as by horses with girls riding them. A healthy, outdoorsy way of life.

          We somehow picked up on our old simpático, despite our radically different lives, and exchanged information and jokes regularly and comfortably. I was about to send her some smart-arse comment as a greeting for her sixty-sixth birthday when one of her daughters posted the news on her page that her mother Isabel had died the night before. She gave no reason for the cause of death, requesting only that nobody send flowers, as they’d wilt on impact with the hot Andalusian summer air, and that people instead make donations to a refuge for injured wildlife in Kenya, a nonprofit of which Isabel was particularly fond.

          At least the dateline had saved me the fuckup of sending my planned cheeky birthday greetings.

          Her family, I suppose it was them, has removed all images of her from the internet, although such images were plentiful when she was alive.