I’ll Be Standin’ on the Corner, Aqqusinersuaq and Vine

Mrs. Mendelsohn and I visit America's 51st state

Some married couples renew their vows every 10 years. Thinking we would probably be inundated with dual-zone air fryers and state-of-the-art food processors, Mrs. Mendelsohn (she prefers the legal spelling) and I have taken to renewing our vows every couple of months in some picturesque foreign location — Alaska, let’s say, or Malta, or, last week, Greenland, our interest in which was piqued by Donald G. Trump’s having reportedly signed an executive order to annex it his first day in the Offal Office.

Atuqtuaq and Nukappiak. Photo by Mrs. Mendelsohn (she prefers the legal spelling).

Rather than in the bustling (almost 20,000 inhabitants!) capital city of Nuuk (as in every nook and cranny), we got ourselves a comfy AirBnB in Qinngorput, a suburb whose name I found irresistible, and took the bus into town, on whose main street, Aqqusinersuaq, we encountered a trio of University of Greenland dropouts — Atuqtuaq, Lars, and Nukappiak — with whom we began conversing after the boldest (Nukappiak, I think) asked pointedly if we wanted to…buy anything. My impression was that he was referring to narcotics, but all Mrs. Mendelsohn and I were in the market for was a fridge magnet for her remarkable collection.

Once having ascertained that we wanted no drugs, the three young locals enjoyed a moment’s retaliatory sullenness, until my asking if we could buy them lunch made them more affable. Atuqtauq suggested the student-affordable Café & Grønlandske Specialiteter, but I found irresistible the idea of eating Mexican food in Greenland, so it was to Casa Tekkeitsertok that we headed even though Nuuk in January is even colder than southwest London.

My stegt flæsk med persillesovs — “If they didn’t have at least one Danish favorite on the menu, they’d go out of business in a month,” explained Lars — was delicious, but Mrs. Mendelsohn found her vegan burrito strangely fishy, and ate only one bite of it before rushing outside to attend to an urgent personal necessity. In her absence, I and our three new friends discussed Donald Trump Jr’s visit in the wake of Papa’s announcement of his intention to either buy or seize Greenland.

“What an utter dick,” Atuqtauq marveled, eagerly reaching for Mrs. Mendelsohn’s abandoned burrito, the bitten-off tip of which he demurely avoided. “He and his bodyguards, wanting to trade us their MAGA caps for some nose candy!”

“As though anybody’s called it ‘nose candy’ since around 1978,” Nukappiak scoffed, even though I estimated his own birthdate at around 2005.

Lars pretended his iPhone had rung, held it to his ear, and — over-egging the custard, gilding the lily, trying to build a second story on a small joke that barely merited a single story — said, “This is who? 1978? And you want your slang term for cocaine back?” His two companions looked at each other and shook their heads. Mrs. Mendelsohn hasn’t so much as tittered at around 30 percent of my own attempts at humor over the past few years, and my heart ached for him.

“There are 34.9 million people in the USA,” I said, trying to take the heat off poor Lars. “Don Jr is the thirty-four point nine millionth of them I’d send to a country I hoped to buy or seize.”

Atuqtauq smirked obligingly, Nukappiak frowned in confusion, and Mrs. Mendelsohn, newly returned from returning her bite of burrito to nature, kicked me under the table. Lars, staring glumly at what the restaurant thought of as a chile relleno, seemed not to understand I’d been trying to take the heat off him.

He saved some face by pointing out that the MAGA-capped locals with whom Don Jr had been photographed dining the day before at Hotel Hans Egede were homeless folk who’d traded their participation for a hot mid-day meal. It is unknown if Don Jr’s bodyguards demanded return of the caps after dessert.

In the evening, relieved to hear that Don Jr and his entourage had long since fucked off back to the USA, we headed for the island’s most celebrated nitespot, Murphy’s Diskotek, in the suburb of Ilulissat, where we danced the nite away to “YMCA” and Nazareth’s throat-shredding, harmony-free version of the Everlys’ “Love Hurts”, Nazareth, as this went to press, having been the only semi-major rock group ever to have performed on the island. We were grateful not to have heard “Hotel California”, as we had every 30 seconds when we renewed our vows in Hua Hin, Thailand, in 2004.