It sounded like a piece of theater improv. And the performer was directly in front of me. I was sitting in the tram, enjoying the street views from my window seat. The man was standing in the connecting section, leaning on a pole and looking straight at me. He was old. Hold on, maybe he was my age or even a bit older.
To resume: He was an old white guy wearing a backpack, sounding cankerous and entitled. He had something to say and I wasn’t thinking he was part of a pickpocket gang. But you never know.
“Let it ring,” he said, “I have plenty of time.” I could hear the sound of a telephone ringing. It sounded like it was coming from the direction of his packback. And it sounded like an alarm more than a ring tone.
He repeated variations on this type of information, complaining that all people did these days was to look at their phones, and he presumed that folk were examining unadulterated bullshit projected through their screens. I mean, it is more than possible. His voice was loud and had that upper-middle-aged man whine in it. I hate that whine. Whenever I hear it I really have to resist the urge to get all hyped up in my operatic-soprano-doesn’t-take-shit mode (a past life) and flatten the issue into a fine pulverized clump of powder left on the curb for the street cleaning crew. “You did really well,” my lawyer had said after the divorce was finalized.
The tram was full of people and a lot of them were looking at their phones. He had targeted his “primal-audience.” His phone started ringing a second time. He loudly announced more information about his perceived state of the woes of the world. By the third time his phone began to ring, I had already stood up and was ready to exit the tram. He was now in a frenzy. “God damn it! It’s too late!” And he sounded hysterical, yelling words into the phone about an essential drop off or meeting or appointment that was going wrong because he was late or nearly there or maybe couldn’t make it.
I thought about his routine, his morality play, his whatever it was that he was trying to achieve by this schtik. “He’s a decade too late,” I thought. I am not all that wild about all new technological innovations and applications. “Another app?” I think whenever it appears that to take a train, buy a sweater, or pump up my bike tires requires an app.
But I was coming home after a medical visit. Ten years ago I had an operation. Times were different then. The finer details of what exactly was going to happen were all rather murky to me and the information that had been relayed to me was both necessary and limited. The operation was elective, and yet necessary, and I didn’t feel then that I needed to have a lot of insight into my dossier. But this time round, I was sent an email which indicated that I could find all the information on the hospital app. I wasn’t going to quibble about this proposal.
After downloading the app, I saw I could put myself on a waiting list for a test that I was already scheduled for and the wait had been more than six weeks. Should have downloaded this app sooner, I thought. That morning I had checked myself in via the barcode on my phone, a half an hour early, and wandered upstairs to the lobby of the section where I was due to appear only to find a person heading straight towards me. “Ms. Abbott?” he asked and ushered me into his office.
I can’t complain about the app. It tells me exactly what to expect for my appointments and how to prepare. I can also see all the medical results of tests, including those from ten years ago related to the elective operation. I have read the most recent results of my blood tests. It was frightening at first because I have no idea what it all means and I don’t want to jump to any conclusions. But I decided that it was best to take my time and examine the information because then at least I have a basic grasp of what the medical staff is aware of as they process the state of my health.
“What if,” I mused, slowly walking home from the tram stop, “the improv performer had been a healthy twenty-year-old?” Because given the age of the geezer, it could be that somewhere not too far into the future that upper-middle-aged man might just find himself checking into the hospital with his personal barcode after spending an hour or two on his phone, examining the results of his medical tests and wondering about his fate. Maybe then he might come to better appreciate playing Pingo-Pongo with Murphy the Happy Penguin app to distract himself at times.
A friend of mine related to me that her father had asked her this particular question during a visit to see him. This was about ten years ago. And recently her ninety year old father, a former scientist and teacher at MIT, died.
“No,” my friend had replied to his question.
So before her father passed to the great beyond, she spent ten years with him, hanging out, working on a book of his memories, marathon watching educational videos, enjoying a meal together, etc.
Imagine.
I am working on a book with my father, except that he’s been dead these past six years and I have a truck load of unfinished business with him. It’s complicated.
Keith wrote a memoir of his friend, Richard Brautigan. My friends who read the memoir of the poet and author often remarked afterwards that they had no real idea who my father was from the memoir itself and I can see their point. Keith himself doesn’t come through as a personality that much in his memoir of Richard Brautigan. The question is, should he have? He obviously didn’t feel comfortable putting more of himself in the memoir of his friend.
This weekend I came to the end of Downstream from Troutfishing in America. I had been typing my father’s book into my laptop, paragraph by paragraph, slowly examining what I remember and what I don’t recall. Of my two parents, my father was the one that was in charge of me during my grade school years. Instead of going to elementary school, I occasionally spent my days hanging out with Keith and Richard between the years 1973 – 1975.
The episode in the memoir in which I swept up Richard’s loose change from the floor of his San Francisco apartment is one of my least beloved memories of those times. Yet in the book, it is asserted that this was the ultimate memory of my childhood. What I do cherish is having seen the camaraderie and friendship of the two men. I never understood, when Richard died in 1984, why I didn’t go to the wake or the “celebration of life.”
The discovery of Richard’s body, weeks after his death, was deeply painful and I remember Keith vividly in the days and weeks afterwards. At the end of the memoir, it is clear that he suffered grief of the loss of a friend and the erasure of the shared memories of their youthful past, the days in the late 60’s wandering around San Francisco together, like when a partner dies.
The memoir was first published in 1989 and republished in 2009. I think that it’s had its run as what it was and now I decided to put my father in the memoir. I am not writing it. I am simply inserting my father’s words about himself. He talks about his family, his work and his life in his own way through poems and stories. But the catch is, whatever materials I am inserting are only to reveal Keith’s attitude about his friendship with the complicated and gifted writer and how they made the friendship work. Or, in the end, the torment of trying to be Richard’s friend.
Of course, I have lots of questions. They may never be answered.
Regarding Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, my father mentions thanks to his friend (and Richard’s friend) Michael Sowl for providing him with the letters that he sent to Michael during the years 1976 – 1977. Of the archival material that Reg sent me, those years are missing. In other words, the materials my father used to write the memoir, his own notebooks and journals and letters to Michael, are gone. I believe that someone has these materials and perhaps the letters from Michael to my father. These letters are also missing from the archives in Bellingham.
One letter escaped the fate of the others, as my father returned his own letter to Michael later in 2009 and therefore I can read it.
The letter is undated but was written in the mid 1970’s:
I was out farting around with Richard before that this week. We went to Bolinas on errands, etc….I met Gino Clays too and went to a party at Bolinas on Thursday. A great party, it was at a C&W singer’s house, Rosalie Sorrel and all these musicians came, and we all got swiftly spaced & sang and danced & etc. Out in the country, steel guitars & weird songs…Gino’s a great guy.
Of course the kids are all wandering around with names like Anemone, Shoshone, Eagle Craig, Scree….Oh yeah, I got my new series of poems, too….GREAT DRUNKEN SENTENCES:
You can’t
not fall down
in poetry & that’s why
I like it
For reference:
Just to end on a positive vibe, and view the shared experiences between my father and Richard Brautigan, here is a short clip about the Diggers in which a glimpse of Richard can be seen in a film from the late 60’s, radiant and lending a helping hand, and my father examining a box labeled Lucky Lettuce as he removes it from the bed of a truck.
“Everglades?” I thought. “Everglades National Park?” I had once driven across Highway 41 in Florida and I don’t recall seeing many residential areas. Could there be any stategic bookclub placement businesses being run from out there in the swamp?
“So whatever,” I mused in my late night revery before going to bed, “this is (a pointed text written with winsome flattery and competent editorial English) equals a load of whatever the universe can now manifest. I.e. an educational moment to definitely pass up and pass on.”
But still, undeniably, a beautiful vision sent from AI for a great title: Idle Opportunities.
I was inspecting the google analytics page listing the cities where people are interacting with Routine Apparitions. Roswell. That must be the UFO connection.
And how have I gotten to Roswell? Here’s the trail, interview style, for fun:
What am I doing with my days?
I am looking for my father’s missing archival materials.
What did my mother do with them before she died? And who was involved in the disappearance of the materials? Why weren’t they sent to the archives in Bellingham?
Fact: they are not there.
And how did this come to pass?
Well, first I have to consider the stories my mother told about my father. A load of bad ones, that’s for sure. In her narrative, I got flame torched too. Victims of her supreme victimhood.
So, who believed her smear campaign?
Her cronies, her nutty (three cans short of a sixpack type people as my father would say) friends who were spiteful and ridiculous and thinking they were well-intentioned
What did the smear campaign accomplish?
No one would talk to me directly.
What did I do?
I got a little difficult.
Was this a self fulfilling prophecy of the smear campaign?
Not really. Some prices were paid and not particularly by me.
What more can I do, concerning the missing materials, now that I have exhausted most viable legal avenues?
Well, what are my choices? Tell a mommy dearest craptastic narcissistic tale of all the shtick my mother pulled? Definitely not interested in that salacious and dead end.
Other option: Go straight to fiction.
Right then: enter “deranged daughter” project, a fictional novel in blog form on blogspot.
What should I call it?
Routine Apparitions, the title of a poetry compilation my father started
Also quasi Hamlet quote. Really only half a quote, but I imagine my father thought it a sufficient pairing of two words to seem like a quote from Shakespeare
What’s it about?
The ghost of Keith Kumasen Abbott, in zen monk form, roams Longmont Colorado looking for his missing materials.
What is involved?
Possible odds and ends of things that might have or could have actually taken place, only those who know will know…Scout’s honor…..but then it also uses my father’s surrealistic novel Rhino Ritz and as well as other ideas.
Like?
Keith often put his friends in his novels.
Anything else?
Well….Keith’s friend Tim Hildebrand sent me photos of my father as well as other materials and he included his novel Rotwang which has a trio of aliens all called John in it.
Why are aliens named John appealing for Routine Apparitions?
Most likely the person(s) who have the missing materials believe(s) in all sorts of incredulous but potential and unfounded ideas based on mundane misunderstandings.
Hence Roswell.
Yes, hence Roswell.
Am I ever going to finish this fictional novel in blog form?
Possibly. I am busy reading Gertrude Stein in my spare moments.
Why Gertrude Stein?
Just to understand what has to be explained.
Right.
Yes, right.
When do I think this fictional novel in blog form will end?
Well, that’s the beauty of it – it doesn’t have to end.
Anything can happen?
Anything can happen.
How will it end?
Anything can happen.
Okay, so on a serious note and despite this comedic interview of myself by myself, to be clear, I haven’t been alone.
As I mentioned, Tim Hildebrand assisted with materials.
I contacted one of my father’s former students. V.S. kindly sent me what she could find.
My father’s high school sweetheart C.A. also sent me materials.
P.S. sent me materials.
Most amazingly W.L. sent me Keith’s correspondence to Michael Sowl.
A department head at Naropa investigated the archives.
E.V. has checked with Keith’s various other friends about potential copies of his plays (no result) but has come up with a number of good ideas.
K.R. of Beat Scene Magazine has been supportive.
Other friends of my father have been supportive.
In short, people have been kind and understanding.
Because they loved my father.
So what else can I do (away from the blather of Routine Apparitions and chasing down my mother’s delusional deity crazed friends whom she herself abused and exploited)?
I’ve been working on a different project. I feel strongly that my father, while not ever seriously recognized as an author, had things to say as a man of his times. Using this concept, I am putting together an overview of his life, using his own materials published and unpublished that are available to me. I am not narrating this project, but constructing it. For instance, using his voice:
My main wish for my father was that his archival material would be kept in Bellingham WA. But since the unpublished works and materials are not there, I will attempt to reconstruct what I can, the witty, the exasperated, the hopeful Keith Kumasen Abbott.
Debunking my mother’s false identities since her death has taken years. Of course, she wove her disingenuous narratives for decades and targeted different communities with her various falsehoods. Every once in a while I come across an item and I think, “Let me address this, set the record straight.” It’s not only me, other family members have also been involved in this matter.
Unlike the first American professor I had written to about this exact same matter last year, the second American professor wrote a very considerate reply to my request that my mother’s interview should be disregarded for academic use. I nearly felt compelled to write this man back and, in gratitude, send him a photocopy of a letter. Then I decided that there was no reason to reveal the detailed contents of that private family letter in conjection to my mother’s lies. I haven’t gotten back to him. I am not sure any further interaction is necessary.
The letter is remarkable. My great-great grandmother wrote to her son sometime between the years 1917 and 1919. She was feeling poorly and was worried about his inheritance. Did he plan on returning to Hillesøy? Juliana suggested that Harald come back home and bring his new wife.
The family still has Juliana’s letter and it is equally remarkable that it survived.
Harald did return to Northern Norway, once only and long after his mother’s death. He kept the letter and his wife kept the letter after his own death and my grandparents kept the letter and then it was given to my aunt who in turn gave it to me. It is a special letter of love and concern from a mother to a son who lived far away. A son who would not return to live on the Artic island where he was born. A son who expressed regret about immigrating to the United States and missed his family.
Navigating between my mother’s pathological lying and the repercussions thereof has been challenging, But, despite the obstacles, I am happy to report that there has been contact (with varying degrees of success) between people, institutions and cultures when it comes to my family’s Nordic roots and Harald’s own heritage. In a manner, this matter has come to, shall we say, a “full circle”. Unlike my mother’s claim of being Jewish and the failure of the Jewish community that she joined to actually show any courage whatsoever to face family members and have a discussion face to face, my mother’s assertion that Harald was raised within a Sami family and Sami community has been “fairly” addressed with dialogue, including encounters in person in Norway and the United States.
My Dearest Own Harald, Juliana’s letter along with other mementos and correspondence from Harald and Tressa Hansen’s lifetime.
I have to admit that I am becoming a bit of a fan of the Austro-Hungarian empire. And I am not talking politics. Having paid much less attention to this particular historical region of Europe than others, I realized the inevitable fairly early on while in Prague. I’d have to review history to understand the buildings and their historical context for this trip.
***
During one of my last days in Prague I had a mind to visit the Museum of Decorative Arts. The main displays weren’t quite what I was hoping to see. The interior of the building, though, looked like a mix between a festive birthday cake and a fantasy set for a First Communion celebration and it was around then that I started really warming to my subject of late 19th century Austro-Hungarian Empire buildings. You might as well go with the flow.
I had already attended a concert across the street at the Rudolfinum. It had been a spectacular experience. The acoustics were some of the best I have ever heard in my life. Kudos to the architect on that one. My advice would be that if you are ever in Prague, buy a ticket to hear a concert at the Rudolfinum which is, you guessed it, a highly exuberant building. I had to admire all the marble. The pillars are actual marble and not the wooden trompe d’oeil pillars of Northern Europe.
As I made my way down the “secession style” (again, quasi gothic and quasi Roman antiquity themes) staircase at the Decorative Arts Museum, I ducked into the last exhibition room where a selection of works by the Czech photographer Fred Kramer was displayed. Kramer had been a young man when WWII broke out. He was deported from his home in 1942 to what would become a sequence of stays in different concentration camps. He returned to Prague, weighing thirty eight kilos, and started working in commercial art.
The jump in material from the four small black and white photographs of men working in construction, taken in the mid 1930’s, and the presentation of drinking “goblets” from the late 1940’s was stark. The drinking glasses were the type and quality that would have been priced as a post war luxury that most “everyone” could afford. The photo was shot in black and white. The photo only presented the set of drinking glasses. I felt tears spring to my eyes.
Allow me to stop here and make it clear that I fully comprehend that a person who witnessed the murders of innocent people, been a target himself and returned “home” to a location lacking many family members, friends and neighbours is largely beyond my scope of experience. This unfortunate experience is, unhappily, still happening to many people world wide.
When someone tries to kill you, your psyche changes. It’s unavoidable. Looking at Fred Kramer’s photos I felt the penny drop. The abstraction of the object that was being promoted was remarkable. In most photos the object was not being actively used. It was presented because it existed and the presence of a person (usually a woman) was “almost” there. In most cases no background context to the person or the object in the photo was given.
These past four years I have struggled to accept that I will never be the same person. I often wondered if I would feel okay again, whether that hollow feeling of shock and horror would recede. Around May this year, I finally felt my energy return, that drive and stamina that I have depended on all my life to survive. The energy came back, but I don’t feel the same. And I have started to assess this turn of events and, in my case, it could be taken as a positive.
Looking back, there were many activities going on in my childhood home that were definitely not okay and I navigated them as best as possible throughout my life. Moving to Europe is the only reason why I am still alive. The signs that evil was always present, manipulating to be near to me or to “get a handle” on me, and this toxic energy was unceasingly active are obvious to me now. I can’t be that person that I used to be anymore because in retrospect I didn’t fully grasp the patterns of deceptive and insidious toxicity I was living with until, well, until when?
I thought four years ago when the abuser died that it was over. It wasn’t. The abuser continued to abuse by proxy, enlisting complete strangers to do her bidding and to make sure that I, as the daughter, would feel one hundred percent worthless. If she had to die because she was suffering terminal cancer, then everyone else also had to die. And she initiated this plan in 2015 with the recurrence of her cancer diagnosis. My father, entering a slow and steady decline in health, died suddenly in 2019. The abuser spent time and money to carefully carry her plans out. She was charming and clever. And very dangerous.
However, in my case, the suicide bomber plan of my abuser did not succeed. I was too far removed and, additionally, I vigorously fought these strangers back. I reached out, requested contact through mediators and then, having gotten no reply, I attacked and counter attacked and attacked again. These people (some would label them “flying monkeys”) thought that there would be no repercussions to actions that they most probably would never have applied to their own family members because at my mother’s death there was not a single family member present. They were very wrong.
“Why are you doing this?” my therapist asked me.
“Because otherwise I will pay the price later on. It could take ten years off my life.”
Or more.
With perplexity, I sense my brain has now shifted or “rotated” in a way that I can finally freely enjoy concepts that I earlier found challenging. Quite simply: because there are very few reasons left why not to enjoy them. What I used to be wary of because any known attachment and interest made me vulnerable, is no longer problematic. Even the safety labels, what is allowed and not allowed, that I often linked to material objects are gone.
Objects are just objects, and can be valuable or totally insignificant. They might serve a purpose. They can exist independent of humans. In many cases, these objects “out live” humans. Aside from material objects, humans can engage in all sorts of activities that rejoice and truly celebrate other humans. Or not. At the same time that the dissolving of past anxieties is taking place within me, I am aware that somewhere in that collection of listeners in the audience in the Rudolfinum, is a person who may be possibly engaging in murder. And I might even pass them in the foyer, I might even smile vaguely at them, I might exchange words with them, unaware of their dark thoughts. It’s not a pleasant realization and it’s reality. Whatever innocence floated me through all those past years is one hundred percent gone.
***
Standing in the National Gallery in Budapest, I examined the posters hanging on the walls in the temporary exhibition. The posters were Art Nouveau or Art Deco and designed to advertise products. I noted that for many of the posters, the faces were more of an impression than a detailed composition. I discovered that I very much enjoyed that aspect.
After the rise of social media platforms, back in the early 2000’s, I decided to try to find an image of an old flame. I didn’t possess a photo of him. I searched his name, a fairly common name, and examined the photos I found. For the life of me, I couldn’t recognize him in any of the people in the photos. It was quite confusing. I would stare at someone’s photo and try to see if I could discern any features that I might recall. I finally gave up.
Diagnosed with autism, I was later educated to understand that I don’t recall faces well. At times when I meet with friends or family, I am rather astonished when seeing their faces. I think, “I don’t remember her nose being like that, was it always like that?” I now understand that I will never recall the face of my old flame. It’s a bit bittersweet.
***
I noted a few tourists dodging around the floor plan at the National Gallery, trying to find the Monet. The Monet was not entirely superb, what was incredible was the collection of the 20th century Hungarian artists. But those visitors would not appreciate what they did not recognize.
Recently a friend of mine, who is a therapist, deliberately mentioned to me that survivors of narcissists typically believe that they might be autistic. It was a gentle challenge at the end of an evening. Inwardly I sighed. Yes, trauma and autism are very intertwined. However, the experts at the Dutch center for autism evaluation were pretty thorough with their assessment of me. I can confirm that I hit the jackpot.
***
Only a few more days in Budapest. I better get cracking and see the train stations, visit that wonder of an Art Deco church on Sunday (never mind that I won’t understand the Hungarian service), attend Un Ballo in Maschera at the opera (not so much interested in hearing another production of Un Ballo in Maschera but I defintely do want to see the theater and who knows? I might be pleasantly surprised like I was at La Traviata in Prague in the State Theater), and did I really want to visit the Gellert Spa? Yes and no, I want to see the building and the only way to do this is to literally take the plunge. I might enjoy the spa. It depends. Will it be noisy like the one in Aachen? I hope not. One thing is for certain, I am meeting up with my American cousins who are on a Rick Steves trip to take a guided tour of the Liszt Academy and share dinner together. It’s my social event of the week and I am looking forward to reconnecting with them.
On a final note, of the two cities, Prague and Budapest, I must admit I have been more impressed with Budapest. It has that urban grit going on that appeals to me. I would gladly spend another week here.
My piece on my father’s missing manuscripts and notebooks was published in Beat Scene. Thank you Kevin Ring for highlighting this matter and supporting Mordecai of Monterey! Maybe some of Mordecai’s melanoia (the feeling that good things are going to happen) will grace us all!
Although I didn’t get to visit Aachen in 1984, I definitely wanted to see Aachen. Having read up on Charlemagne during my high school’s medieval history class I well understood the core concepts: throne, crowning, important location.
Instead of Aachen in 1984, I was placed as a summer exchange student in a small town in Westfalia. It was a beautiful town with gabled houses and a medieval ruin. I took walks, but as I was socially not very outgoing, you might say I didn’t “react” well to being in a small town. I started to watch Herz zu Herz (Hart to Hart dubbed in German which is the only way to watch Hart to Hart and in addition I recommend a minimal grasp of German to make the experience much more interesting and, indeed, almost fascinating). Thus, I sat mesmerized in front of the white television set in my host family’s living room.
Reviewing this time in my life, I get that this was probably very strange behaviour for a teenager and, from the looks of it, I was certainly not “actively integrating”. So I learned to knit and inevitably I began to enjoy Herz zu Herz while knitting. I was and am not talented at handcrafts but, in my mind, I was now “integrating” and had solved the “active integration” issues. My host mother taught me to knit.
She was a kind woman. In fact, the whole family was kind. The problem was that I came from a dysfunctional family and I was, in a very non savvy way, looking for a new family. Of course, now I understand that I am autistic (late diagnosis) and I can see where my habitual manner and way of viewing issues was compounding the problems. In short, I was harmless but odd, sitting on the couch knitting and watching American shows on German television. Just like the other people living under the same roof. But somehow, the plan was not working and I felt that I still wasn’t “fitting in”.
Researching for my trip to Aachen I read online that “Aachen is best for one day”. This was utter rubbish advice. Aachen can be done in one day, if you don’t know much about history and don’t care to learn more. I booked four nights in the city center. I started out by rising at 6 am on the first morning and attending the 7 am mass at the cathedral. First impression: a handful of nuns and not the hoards of tourists talking loudly and trying to burn the place down by lighting too many candles. By the end of the first day, I felt that I had scratched the surface and, seeing the door to St. Foillan standing open, I stepped inside. I had read online that the church was not of great interest.
Yet it was of great interest. When I first came to Germany, the country I visited was West Germany and the Second World War had ended less than forty years previously. The transition from a vanquished nation into a successful and booming economy was at its apex. Although I am astounded at the city center of Aachen and how much of the city has either survived or been reconstructed, I am also well aware that most of the destruction and damage by the bombings is permanent. Only half of St. Foillan’s pillars survived the war. The other row of pillars was replaced.
Sitting in the church, it smelled to me of 1984. To be sure, the church was rebuilt and modernized in the late fifties. But in 1984 the aura of the renewing, revamping, and forging an alternate world identity was very palpable. I sense that this post war concept is now fading. It’s a pity that the tourist industry dismisses St. Foillan as “not interesting”.
On day two in Aachen I decided to walk further out of the center and found myself on the main (post WWII) shopping street. The kind of shopping street I enjoyed in 1984 and its type is still present despite the post pandemic woes. In 1984 I could buy cheap leather shoes that came from Hungary. I still look for them even though there’s not a leather shoe to be found in the discount stores. Only plastic sneakers. So I walked down Aachen’s high street thinking about buying pink and white leather kitten heels, like I once did in 1984 for less than twenty D-Mark. Humoring myself and tapping into a little whimsical daydreaming, I nearly transported myself back in time.
Returning to 2025 and having bought a “six for fourteen” museum card, I naturally decided to attempt to see at least half of the six of the museums for my fourteen euros within a few hours of purchase. And planned the remaining half for the next day. After the Charlemagne Center and the Couven Museum, I entered the Suermondt-Ludwig museum. I had zero expectations. The place was huge, full of actual works of art and greatly devoid of visitors which astonished me. After the past years battling my way through any museum now overrun by well intentioned and bored tourists, the experience was, once again, like stepping back into 1984.
Side note: Even the drunks, falling into the bushes, are “merely” tanked up on alcohol in Aachen. How old fashioned is that?
Somewhere while on the regional train from Cologne to Aachen, I began to get the feeling of commuting to a lost empire or trespassing into an armpit-like corner of the world. Either. Or. But no matter what, Aachen is a fascinating place to spend a few days in, on and off the beaten track. Will I make it to the Lindt factory? Probably not. But I did see Margaret of York’s coronet at the Treasury and admired a 1950’s cocktail pricker set at the Oxfam store.
I recall the coolness the moment I stepped into the hall, and I remember the odor of wood polish. It was July and I was seventeen.
I might have looked like I had a lot going on, but I didn’t. Coming from the north by car, I was deposited into the care of my father’s German translator by my American Field Service host and hostess who didn’t quite know what to do with me.
Tecklenburg had been a strain. It was a small and cosy town on a hill with a medieval ruin in Westfalia. A theater had been set up between the walls of the former castle. Along with the members of my host family, I stood on stage in the rain dressed in a Hungarian costume and sang the choir’s soprano line in the summer season’s production. A syrupy operetta entitled “Der Zigeunerbaron” topped the bill.
In Munich, I discovered that my father’s German translator and his wife were people I could easily relate to and they didn’t expect me to act like a teenager. I wasn’t interested in teenager things. I wanted to pound city pavement and stare at the kind of architectural wonders that are not found in California.
So instead of watching episodes of Hertz zu Hertz in German on a hill in Westfalia, I stood observing the shadows falling around the beam of light that hazily pieced through the windows of the old apartment building on Daiserstrasse. The lightness and darkness and browns and greys shifting softly and silently over the staircase at the back of the wide hallway. It was summer and it was hot and the staircase was polished and cool.
Just once I would love to stand there again.
“I’ve got an appointment,” Ilse said to me. She doesn’t live in Munich anymore. They moved to a university town outside the city and their building’s hallway smells satisfactorily of wood polish. Whenever I enter, I always take a moment to inhale deeply and relax.
Ilse explained she had decided to get her teeth straightened. I got her point, but I thought with regret that had she had her teeth straightened when I first met her, I would never have thought of her as uniquely European. Then again, she’s nearly eighty and she wants her teeth to look better assembled. She feels it’s about time. It’s quite understandable.
Spring is advancing and summer is coming, and the landlord’s tidy garden surrounding my father’s translator’s flat has turned a hearty and lush green. And I love the summer time in southern Germany. I love it when it gets warm, the birds sing and I listen to Bavarians speak about bike tours and the weather. It’s always a vacation, a real vacation.
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Dreaming of an Impossible Strawberry in Germany
Ruminating that I’ll have to fix that when I woke up that small unripe strawberry its twisted white-ish bottom quite incorrect that that then whoosh out of my reach
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I Thought of An Ex-Friend While in Freising DE
a bloody pinkish red concentrated vitamin juice travel sized bottles in bottom bin - nearly lying on the floor - the overflowing drugstore has everything
last time, that was the last time I was collecting unique items as advent calendar gifts like, much appreciated, my friend in America had previously sent me
then, well back then you know it was the time of corona so when the empty plane landed in Seattle I proudly presented - all wrapped up - the vitamin concentrate, and of course twenty-two other small Bavarian treasures plus a first edition 1930-something novel a female French author to be sure hardbound and last minute addition to be sure
my friend tucked the Advent bag away, turning to the closet nearest her, saving it for the coming yuletide - her dog nipped at me -
I thought I was doing okay definitely not well off - basically......you might say....comfortable - I fancied maybe a handbag such as my friend kept on her kitchen counter only days later to learn a price tag for thousands of dollars hung on it, even when second hand and it was second hand
what was it again? her dog nipped at me reminds me now: the small candle both donation and token for a prayer sourced at a Baroque church in Passau I thought my ex-friend would particularly enjoy being Catholic and all
Some days I imagine my ex-friend on a loop chucking the whole bag of Advent items into a box of old clothes, driving it out of her driveway in the trunk of her white BMW and handing it over to the folks at the Salvation Army or the Goodwill she didn’t need me like I needed her
we don’t talk anymore from social media postings I see she still has her dog
Cleaning up my social media this week, I came across the name of a French baritone in my list of friends.
Jacques Calatayud was a devoted friend to Suzanne Sarroca (and her former student) and he had died. And so had she. They died within a year of each other. I had no idea.
In 2015 I met up with both of them for dinner in Paris. Sarroca was already quite in advanced age, still living in her apartment on the rue Notre Dame de Lorette, and Jacques was attentive to her needs. He screened the diva’s socializing activities and facilitated the meeting with Sarroca. I remember him as a very gentle and kind person.
“You are lucky,” Sarroca said to me over dinner, “you can do other things than just sing.” Her words were kind, but she knew me well and recognized that I did indeed have other occupations than singing that I genuinely liked.
Jacques was her prize student. “Il tourne,” she said proudly. Meaning that he had solidified a career in the opera world. He routinely sang secondary roles on major European stages, and occasionally primary roles.
I remembered the conversations that I took part in and witnessed while I studied in Paris with two celebrated sopranos, Suzanne Sarroca and Mady Mesplé. Years later I wrote the conversations down, verbatim. They are part of a bygone era, yet in a way the social mannerisms revealed in those conversations are still valid in the operatic world today.
Other than the diva’s names inIdle Opportunities, nothing else changed about the ladies. Not their words or their attitudes or their homes….but written from, of course, my then perspective as a twenty something year old.
Side note: Sarroca’s beloved dog Polka was renamed Mazurka.
Although I remember both Sarroca and Mesplé as fierce, loving and regal in their own ways, primarily I was Sarroca’s student. I am grateful to have experienced Paris with her as my main teacher and guide.
Suzanne Sarroca (left) as Octavian in RosenKavalier
