Wie Gehts meinen Damen und Herren! Live or semiconscious at 0445 here on Falkenstrasse staying with my friends Benno, Dina, Kai und Taylor. The direct opposite time difference is a bit dodgy but I am having a great time. Reconnecting with old friends first met in Hawai'i in 1990. I have not seen them since about 2005 or 2006 when I had gone back to Hawai'i for our friend Colin Denney's wedding. Never heard from Colin again, sadly enough that his is standard operating procedure although he is a fine person. But, I digress.
Memories of growing up in Germany have come flooding back but many are insubstantial and what I call 'eine kleine kind' or 'little kid' memories. This includes the color and taste of liquorish candies, the smells and sights such as a barge on the River Elbe. I grew up in a small village called Florsheim am Main, South of Frankfurt and West of Wiesbaden. Our street was Landstrasse but I do not know the number. I remember seeing and smelling the paper factory. I remember playing with our friends and the local dare was to run down the stairs to the World War II bomb shelter and touch the doors and make it back up.
Just children then, we had no idea of the cataclysm that had shaped the world and so many of the attitudes of a generation. To us it was nothing and it was only later that I learned of the camps, Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and the hundreds of others that existed within the sphere of Nazi influence. We Americans like to deceive ourselves into thinking that it could not happen in America, that surely we are better then the Nazi's. But for me, I have seen too much. My mother took my brother and I to a camp and for years, every once in awhile I would have dreams, sometime nightmares of half imagined Nazi's still alive to terrorize me and the people I loved.
To this day I wonder why my mother took us, yet when asked she has a clear answer. She thought we should know. Indeed, that is a very clear lesson . . . that we must never forget. In the broader sense it applies to all evil that is done in the world. I was not damaged by what I saw but to my dying day it will affect me and i think in no small measure has contributed to my own quest to do some good in the world while I walk among you.
We hope to drive to my old home in a few days. I hope we can meet some old friends, hoist a few beers and maintain some tenuous hold on a distant relationship. I am glad I have come, not only to celebrate the ties that bind but also I think so I can do my own remembering. Not only of my own past but to remember it all, to not forget, to deny the naysayers their insane and ignorant quest to deny us all the privilege of knowing evil and the sacrifice made by so many. After all, I take care of many World War II veterans every week while their numbers grow less each day.
I am having a challenge in connecting to my friend's wireless Vodafone network. My iPhone picks up the network, I type in the passcode yet it cannot lock onto it. In this way I hope to post some fotos and other dispatches from Germany and then Turkey in another week. I bought a local phone yet am also having connection issues. calling the US for about five minutes was eight Euros, one Euro being about 1.25 US at this time.
I am missing my friends at work and send them a shout out. It is good to be in Germany again. I called my brave mother yesterday and she once again said she is doing fine and reassured me that I should be here. Yet still, I long to be by her side, doing my Nurse Manly thing for her out of the gratitude I have for doing her Mothering to me for the last 49 years of my life. When she dies, it will be a loss. Yet as so many friends and coworkers said to me . . . Carpe Diem.
For there is no other time but now.
David
