Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Kaiserslautern

Kaiserslautern

I must look more like a German that a German does. I remember when I first arrived in Kaiserslautern I took a bus ride from one end of town to the other. In WW2 “K-Town” as the Americans called it, had been a major rail center. In the center of the marshalling yard are these huge cement bomb shelters that look like rocket ships. They stick up like spires. I got to go inside one and there was a circular ramp where the people went during an air raid. It started on the ground inside this huge cement edifice and spired upwards to the tip that must have been a hundred feet above the air.

Anyway when I took the bus one day soon after arriving I was sitting a couple rows back when this old lady with a shopping cart got on and started to the back. She had her head down and was shuffling slowly along. As she came past me she looked up and we had eye to eye contact. I like to look at old people and try and wonder what they looked like when they were younger. This old lady must have been stunningly beautiful once because she had soft features and piercing eyes. She looked at me and her eyes got wide as if filled with some sort of recollection. Her jaw dropped open and she stood there stunned blocking the center isle. A woman my age took her by the arm and guided her to a seat. As this woman returned to her seat she said, “You reminded the old woman of someone she once knew.”

I think of that incident all the time….don’t know why really, but it sticks in my mind. Sometimes I dream about it. I see that Old lady walking by and that sudden connection, and the intensity of the look on her face. I wonder what she was thinking about and who that person was I reminded her of. Was it a son, a lover or a husband?

My grandmother was in a nursing home and my mother took me to visit when I was home vacationing with our family. I hadn’t seen her for a while and she had become senile. As we walked into her room she gave me the same sort of look, a mixture of awe and dread. “Oh my Gad!” the cried out…”The old devils back.” I do bear a resemblance to my Grandfather. My grandfather lost his job in the Depression and became a glazier by trade (They put glass windows in Greenhouses.) The family was extremely poor and my mother had a hard young life helping her mother with her brothers and sisters. After a few minutes Granny spoke up again looking at me. “I love kids. We would have had more if you'd been home more often.”

Oh, getting back to the bus ride in Germany. After the old lady incident, the bus stopped in the middle of town. There was some traffic backed up and the light had just changed. We were almost to the stop where I wanted to get off but not quite. The driver refused to open the door because he was not squarely between these two painted white lines next to the stop sign. He waited at least three minutes until the light changed and he could move forward about a foot and get between the lines. I was the only one upset…everyone else saw it as perfectly understandable. It underlined a huge cultural difference between Germans and Americans. If a bus driver in New York had insisted on doing the same thing there would have been a riot.

My wife and I liked Europe, the shops, the Coffee and the hot bread. It was fun to walk through the market on Saturday morning and sit with a croissant and hot cup of “Tar.” It came in a demitasse cup and the spoon would almost stand up in it. There was this guy who was a one person Umpa band. He had a drum on his back and an assortment of instruments he had linked together in a very clever way and he would stop and play. Then there was the lady with the Chimpanzee that walked about like it was a child…that was one ugly kid. Europe was fun and if you have never been you need to go there and see what you’re missing….its quite a hoot. We would walk down cobblestone streets that were older than the United States.