Memory and remembrance

Thursday's crossword was a wash. I knew the answer to only one, lousy clue. It was something having to do with Norma Rae the 1979 film starring Sally Field. I can usually be counted on to know a random film factoid. This knowledge made me especially good at answering all the pink cards in Trivial Pursuit. 

My dear friend Mrs. R has been on my mind the past couple of days. She died four years ago this upcoming January. I spoke to her last in December 2014 when I was in the middle of preparing to move back to the states from Zurich. I had rung her again on the 26th hoping to hear how she had spent Christmas and, for the first time in our 17 year friendship, not only did she not pick up, but also her answering machine didn't click on. I eventually got hold of her neighbor, a woman with whom I was friendly, and was told what I had feared: Mrs. R had recently entered into hospice and died. That was very hard to hear, but not entirely unexpected. She'd been unwell for some months. 

The last time I saw my friend, in May 2014, I could see she had greatly slowed down and come to rely ever more on her daughter for help. Still, her mind was fit & her humor intact. 

I was just looking at an old hotmail account and wondering why in the heck I still had it when I got the bright idea to look at all the images sent to said acount. I'm glad that I did because I found this picture---

A chance meeting in DE: Mrs. R and my bar pal from California

On the face of it, the above shot doesn't seem remarkable, but it is. In 2005, I had taken my yearly autumn trip to Stuttgart to visit Mrs. R. She and I were on the DB platform, having just visited a village flower show some 50 km away, when I spied a man I knew from back home. He was a regular at the bar where I worked in Berkeley. What were the odds we'd both be in 'small town' Southwest Germany at the same time? We three wound up taking the train to Stuttgart together, chatting all the way. 

Mrs. R was a teenager when the war started. After allied forces nearly bombed out Stuttgart, she and her 7 younger siblings were sent south to the countryside to sit out the war. Fortunately, as she had said, she and her siblings found themselves in the American sector. The soldiers were friendly and would ply the kids with chocolate. She once told me of how an American soldier took a shine to her three-year-old brother. The soldier expressed a desire to take the brother back to America and adopt him. This was not at all on the cards, but I guess the soldier was fairly adamant. It got to the point where Mrs. R kept her baby brother indoors when that particular soldier would come around. She also told me that the soldiers would often be outside 'playing ball' with tins of food. After one such game, one of the siblings noticed that the tin doubling as a ball had been left behind. He pinched it, bringing it back to the house. I will never forget Mrs. R's face as she described the thrill she and her siblings felt when the tin was opened to reveal chunks of pineapple! None of them had ever eaten anything so exotic. What a treat that pineapple must have been to them. 

The story of how Mrs. R and I met is a bit long and convoluted, so, please, bear with me. Mrs. R was the friend of a friend of an American acquaintance of mine I had made in the exchange program at the University of Tübingen. We bothed lived in the same dormitory and hung out loads together after classes. Unlike the rest of us foreign students, my dorm buddy happened to have a family friend living in the neighboring village of Wurmlingen. The family friend was a very welcoming sort and I usually got to tag along on outings to her place. My dorm mate's Uncle Geoffrey had been stationed in Germany after the war. During his time in Baden-Württemberg, her Uncle Geoff had been quartered by an artist and his wife, a former Red Cross nurse. Their daughter was the woman whom my dorm pal and I visited regularly just down the road from Tübingen. Mrs. R had been a neighbor of the artist and his wife and knew Geoffrey as well.  

During one of our village visits, Mrs. R rang the house and found out that the American soldier's niece was currently studying in Germany. Mrs. R invited us both (I think she was being polite) to Stuttgart for the afternoon. We set a date. On the day in question, my friend flaked out, so I headed to Stuttgart via train on my own. Mrs. R, as she would come to do in the intervening years, met me at the Hauptbahnhof. We took the tram back to her place for a lovely meal and a chat. My German was still fairly rough at that point and Mrs. R was very forgiving. That afternoon marked the beginning of our friendship. 

She and I spoke formally, per Sie, for the first ten years of our relationship until Mrs. R invited me to use 'Du'. We toasted the change in language with a white wine at hers. Even with the switch to 'Du', I felt most comfortable referring to her by surname. 

I remember when the film Das Leben des Anderen came out. It seemed to be a seminal film in German cinema. It was both beautifully shot and acted. She'd seen it as well and was less impressed. The film's protagonist, a Stasi officer, was protrayed as having had a heart of gold, to put it simply. Mrs. R didn't buy it. She told me that there was no way a Stasi officer would have been so empathetic. I think she referred to it as a 'Hollywood film'. She was probably right, to be honest. 

Although her life's trajectory had been knocked about by war--she'd had to quit school & watch after her siblings as a result of the evacuation--she was never bitter. She'd often say: 'What we Germans did...I don't ever dare complain.' The total capitulation and subsequent divvying up of Germany by the allied countries was talked about with a 'we deserved it' matter-of-factness. 

Mrs. R loved Bach and Barbra Streisand. She began learning Italian while in her 50s and regularly took solo trips to Pulgia. Her potato salad was tops as were her Maultaschen. She was a thoughtful person who could also be a bit cheeky. She liked to have a laugh. One of the last meals we had together when she was still ambulatory was at a pizzeria near her flat. We drank loads of red wine, eat pizza margherita and nearly shut the place down we stayed so long. I was lucky to have had her in my life for as long as I did. 

Here's a shot of us from around 2010--