Stories – Page 2 – The Berrys

Uncle Buddy

This was contributed by Chip to Amiglia:

Uncle Buddy was one of my favorite relatives. I knew him by the name `Buddy’ since forever; I didn’t find out that his given name was `Fred’ until he married Bruna. I can still recall being mildly shocked to hear her use his real name. Being all of 10 years old back then, it had not dawned on me that `Buddy’ was only a nickname, like `Chip’. We had that in common, although I didn’t know it at the time.

My mother once said he was the kindest person she had ever known, and I do believe that was his most essential quality, the one that defines him. My mother once recounted how she and my father had been stranded at the airport in the wee hours, and he had come some thirty or forty miles to pick them up. He was the sort of man who would do such things for people. Most of us would have relegated them to a taxi.

My earliest memories of him are in Chicago, when I was about four. This must have been in 1950 or 1951. My dad must have been doing his residency at the Chicago Eye and Ear Institute. I suppose he and my mother had some weekend plans, because Tim and I spent the weekend with Buddy. He was still married to his first wife, someone named Betty, a nice, but very pale and shy woman with slightly protruding teeth – about as different from Bruna as it is possible to imagine. Uncle Buddy must not have had the slightest idea what to do with two small boys aged 3 and 4, but he did his best – that kindness again. We went to a museum and took a speedboat ride on Lake Michigan, which was a lot of fun.

What he was doing in Chicago then I don’t know. Years later, when I was in the middle school years and an absolutely terrible student, my mother used to tell me about his experience as a cautionary tale. According to her, he had enrolled with his G.I. Bill money in a program at the University of Chicago that would have brought him a master’s degree in only four years. As I was told – repeatedly – he had done superbly in the physical science part of the course, but had for whatever reason refused to satisfy the breadth requirements of the curriculum, leaving himself without a degree when the funds were gone. As a result (according to her, lecturing to me), he was continually frustrated by the lack of a credential, and has to settle for chemical engineering jobs that he was vastly overqualified for. How much of this is true I don’t know. My mother was making a point, not doing history.

On one of the rare occasions when my grandmother Edith acknowledged that anything had gone wrong in any part of her world, she mentioned that he had come back from the war in a low state and had married his high school girlfriend much too quickly. My mother once said (not lecturing this time) that when he lived in Chicago he used to spend a lot of time in black bars, listening to the jazz and making conversation. She was commenting about his musical tastes, but I wonder if it didn’t reflect some depression of his own. At any rate, he was extremely easy to talk to and made all sorts of friends and acquaintances in those hangouts.

I have a few other scraps and patches of memories back then – a really glorious family picnic, Fourth of July or some such, with my Great-Aunt Anna and some cousins from Pittsburgh that I have never seen since, with Buddy in charge of the grill and having a great time. This was the first time I ever saw steak broiled. He also did sleight-of-hand, pulling coins out of ear or nose, which delighted me. But my next tangible memory is from the 1956 time frame. It was the first time I met Bruna.

Not to make too big a deal about it, but this memory is vivid because Bruna was the first truly beautiful woman I had met in real life, i.e., in the flesh and not in the movies, picture or some such. (My mother was beautiful, too, I suppose, but a ten year old son doesn’t think like that.) She glowed with health and vitality, so much so that the impression is still with me. Though she was obviously someone who in the language of the `90’s could be characterized as a trophy bride, my recollection was that he wasn’t at all proprietary, but low key and natural. (Bruna would know for sure, but I suspect that this was one of the attractive aspects about him.) He spoke to her in Italian, which he’d learned by ear. Just what he was doing in Italy I don’t know – some job with an oil company, I think – Bruna would know.

Between that date and the move to Danville in 1967, I don’t recall too much. These were the years of the lectures, when I also got from my mother what family history I know. She said very little about her childhood before the divorce, which must have happened about 1933. She did tell one very sad story about Buddy, which involved a neighbor boy accidentally shooting himself. She ran to get his parents, partly because it was necessary, partly to distance herself from the scene. But Buddy never left him as he lay dying.

She also had happier stories. After the divorce. The family moved frequently to different places around Pittsburgh. One county was fairly rural, and Bujddy went out for track. He did quite well, in the 100 and 200 yard dashes, and was written up in the paper as `Fleet-Foot Freddy’. This was all well and good, but later they moved to a more urban school, with some good black runners, and he was no longer the best.

She also mentioned some things about IQ tests that were interesting. She did quite well on them – but no matter how well she did, he did one or two points better. They were nearly always one and two in the class. This is somewhat sad, because neither one of them were particularly good students. (She was in the lecture mode then, pointing out that high IQ scores don’t insure success. Amen.) She also said he was quite popular with girls, and reasonably successful. He had a habit, before he walked into some teen-age hangout, of rubbing his hands together and saying, loud enough for my mother to hear, `Now, what looks interesting ?’

Uncle Buddy developed his interest in swing music shortly before the war, and with it an interest in radio. He and my Uncle Dick used to sit with earphones on, attempting to bring in distant radio stations.

My mother told me a few things about his military service, but I suspect he said a lot more directly, so I’ll pass on that. One anecdote of interest is that my grandfather Frederick Wurtembaugh evidently published a pome about him in the Pittsburgh paper for which he worked. Because Uncle Buddy was then going by the name O’Neill and Wurtenbach is a German surname, military intelligence had to check the matter out.

The most important interaction I had with my Uncle Buddy occurred in 1967. He and Bruna relocated from Southern California to Danville. While they were househunting, they stayed in the Eastbrook house. My family had gone on vacation. I didn’t join them, because of a summer job I had. Tim was off in Europe on a Notre Dame foreign study program. One weekend in August, I played in a chess tournament on a Saturday, then became sicker and sicker on Sunday. I had severe pain on the right side of my abdomen. Uncle Buddy became more and more concerned. Finally, he suggested the possibility of appendicitis. I knew what that was, but hadn’t the slightest idea that the pain indicated that. I phoned a doctor my family knew well, who arranged for hospitalization and the works. Buddy drove me there. It turned out my appendix was badly inflamed and had to come out then and there. It would be melodramatic to credit my uncle with saving my life, but he certainly helped. He also visited me in the hospital several times the following week, which is the sort of favor no one ever forgets.

We saw much more of each other after the move to Danville, though not nearly so much as we should after my mother’s death. The old story – no one realizes that the time is going until it is all gone. Uncle Buddy was a man of wide and varied interests, and always fun to talk to. The most striking thing was that he was always shy, almost grateful, for the attention. I developed my own interest in probability (in which he was an expert), though not nearly as knowledgeable as he, and I loved to talk to him about that.

Are You Going to Your Ami?

When Cristin was just learning to talk, Tim was going to business trips in Miami very frequently. We were all backpacking in Yosemite, and we were reaching the end of the trip, walking the long downhill after the falls.

We were all tired, but Cristin started to worry about post backpacking life. She heard Mom and Dad talking about Miami again…

She said “Dad, please don’t go to your Ami.”

Cristin applied logic to language from an early age. For example, she referred to place and position as “bebove” and “below.”

Update: November 2007. Sabrina called, Timmy had just asked her about her trip to “your Ami,” which in this case is a trip coming in January.

Christopher’s First Soccer

I went over to Laura’s house today to pick them up and take Christopher to his soccer “practice,” a combination of babysitting and tutoring and friendly happy activity, with Christopher and three three-year-old girls and a very nice “coach” named Amy. He kicked the ball sometimes, and paid attention sometimes, and generally acted like a three-year-old kid.

It was fun. We went to Jerry’s for a hot dog afterwards.

Mom’s Garden

June 23, 2007

Note to Vange:

I’m very sorry I haven’t been more supportive and appreciative through the years. There’s no denying to anybody that our garden is your achievement, yours alone, and wow, what a beautiful garden it is. I know I don’t do any part of it, but I do really enjoy it, I am so glad it is our house, and I’m grateful to you and proud of you for how beautiful it has become.

I do remember how far it’s come too. When we arrived here in 1992, there was a scruff patch of lawn in the front, the stone wall divider was there, the hedges — hooray — were there and the apple trees that were beautiful for years but eventually caused you so much trouble. Other than that, weeds.

Chad Greenberg’s year with us was a good start. The fence in the back was vital. The extra walkway, the new paving in the back, around the side, the lights in the garden. So many years ago, but that was a big step up.

Little by little, you did it. The gardener who cared about weed much more than weeds, the parade of gardeners who didn’t cut it, getting the dirt, getting the plants. There were all those days trolling the nurseries. The days with Kyle King, and Jane whatever-her-name was, and Marcelino and Juan.

There was also the occasional fight with the neighbor below us. And the moles. Remember the summers that Megan and I spent half a day here and there trying to persuade the moles to leave? The struggles to water in the summer and the disappointments when sprinklers failed in 2003, we came back from vacation and trees had tied. The struggle with the city to protect the back hedge.

Remember also when Megan was in third grade and one of her friends’ parents came to the door, and, presumably just to be nice, and asked Megan how her family kept the lawn so nice. “A man comes who does it,” Megan answered.

Two nights ago I got home around dusk, and it was just plain amazing. What a spectacle. I got my camera and took some of the pictures here. But they were a reminder that, beautiful as the garden is, it is best with the people.

How about those beautiful garden moments, like Sabrina’s wedding and the brunch the next day, or the three Lauras’ birthday in 2000. The summer afternoons we’d spend with the deck and the barbecue. The first summer when the garden was full of yellow jackets. Megan’s birthday party on the deck. Megan and Beba in the garden on a hot summer day. Remember when Paul used to play with the slider with Megan. Remember the “mensa” story? The days Sabrina and Noah and their friends played badminton, and, more recently, Megan’s friends from Stanford when they came? How about when we filled up the wading pool on a particularly hot summer day, filling it first with water and then with baby grandsons.

Nowadays I remember the garden every day, I never take the walk down from the back where I park down the walkway to the house without breathing in the garden. I love it in when it’s warm and rich and full of color, the bright greens and Spring or summer flowers against the dark blue sky, but I also love it when it’s cold and rainy and gray, still a richness and a reminder of home as home.

And there was also the beginning, when the back yard was nothing much more than dirt divided into two levels. The stone wall was there when we got here, and the back hedge and some apple trees that are gone now, but not much else.

Back to Palo Alto

The movers left the small, dirty house full of boxes. It was a warm summer afternoon, September 8, 1982. I felt like magic happiness, one of the best days of my life, like I did as a kid on Christmas morning, like I did the first day of living in Innsbruck, like I did when we moved out of Mexico City to California. Everything was good.

We were back in Palo Alto, living at 1599 Mariposa. We wouldn’t have to drive back to Suisse Drive in San Jose ever again. [Ed note: 25 years later, we never did, never have.] As the movers drove off I stood on the front porch and looked up the street to where I could see a patch of Stanford Campus across El Camino. Palo Alto Highschool was just 200 years to my right. We were finally back.

it had been about 15 months since we left Escondido Village, on campus at Stanford, for Mexico City. At last we were back again, just half a mile from the townhouse at 100C in Escondido Village, but this time with a permanent job, and buying (although with one of the most aggressive equity sharing deals you’ll ever hear about) a house. Although there was a lot of work to do (moving, cleaning) we could also just walk out of our front door and take a walk through Palo Alto and Stanford.

The kids felt it too, as much as Vange and I did. We’d made it back. They had the same sense of relief, the end to exile. Cristin of course was still just a baby, six months old, Laura had just turned 10, Sabrina was about to turn 9 and Paul was about to turn 7. The older three were about to enter Walter Hayes Elementary School, which would be their fourth school in 15 months. They were all looking forward to it, I think, or maybe I was just projecting my feelings.

We were all looking forward to just living here, taking walks, normal life, with the feeling that we’d get back to that feeling of Escondido Village, when things were all good.

The move to Mariposa was one of my finer moments. We’d given up living in Palo Alto before buying the house in San Jose — big mistake, that — but we kept driving back for shopping, visiting my parents, whatever excuse. Drives back to Palo Alto were like drives back to paradise from exile. But it took us almost an hour to go each way in the ancient yellow VW bus we called our car. And we always had to go back. I felt like a hero because by late Spring I decided we were going to live in Palo Alto, not San Jose, and I would just plain find a way. And I did. We had seen the Mariposa house on one of our brief breaks from exile. It looked like it had to be cheap, it was older, aged wooden sideboard, and it was smaller — only 1250 square feet, 3 bedrooms and 1 bathroom, and it was right up against the commuter train tracks in the back. It was listed by Tony Domenico.

Tony said he could get us into that house. He never wavered. We had no equity and significant debt, and no down payment. But I had a good salary and with my Stanford MBA degree and all, I was marketable for one of Tony’s equity share deals. And that’s what we did: we bought the house for $190K including a $50K down payment and an amazingly expensive mortgage (1982 was a year of historic high interest rates, so our mortgage was a fixed rate 18%. The equity share deal meant that a couple of Stanford professors named Dutton put in all but $8K of the down payment, we paid the mortgage, and after four years we had to either buy them out for a profit or sell the house to pay them off. The whole assumed equity appreciation, and it worked out for us and them. We were able to move back to Palo Alto.

So the next few days took a lot of work, but the world had changed. The worst of the work was when we discovered that the built-in breakfast nook had mouse grand central station built into it as well, but we moved in.

Be Sad

When Cristin was little Vange threatened her over I don’t remember what:

“I’m going to be really sad or really mad if …” and, like I said, I don’t remember what “if” was involved. It doesn’t change the story.

“Be sad,” Cristin answered.

Who’s That and What Are They Doing to Him?

In late Spring of 1981 we spent a weekend at my parents’ condominium in Carmel in the less spectacular hill section of the 17-mile drive.

We arrived at the Carmel Mission about five minutes after 5 pm. It was supposed to close. Vange was disappointed because she wanted to visit the church to pray, something she used to do every so often, especially on trips.

Right when we were at the door a nice priest arrived from the inside, intending to close up the shop. Vange turned on the charm. We were very Catholic, we really wanted to see the church, it was important to us, “Please Father,” she said, and she turned on both the charm and the accent and of course there we were looking like a young mother and young father with three kids.

He was charmed. “Sure,” he said, “in fact, I’ll show you the mission myself.” He was obviously happy with this turn of events.

His happiness lasted only a couple of minutes. As he walked us down the center aisle, in the middle of the main church, Paul looked up at the huge crucifixion statue silhouetted by stained glass windows in the background.

His mouth was wide open. “Who is that?” He asked, in his loud, throaty, five-year-old voice. “Why are they doing that to him?”

The priest lost his enthusiasm in that minute.

Moonlight on Granite

High mountain near midnight bright moonlight outside the tent

and cold, and almost barefoot, but I was out there and I stopped,

suddenly, stopped,

cold, and looked at the landscape.

Moonlight on granite.

The granite held it all steady and solid:

mountain lake and the lakeside meadow, the peak above it,

and the rockstrewn snowpatched cliffs between.

But the moonlight made it magic — crystal, sparkled, rock-flecked magic.

The rock, like solid time, relentless …

draped in a silver moonlight as equally unreal as rock is real. my people asleep in the tent in the meadow.

The slopes, the pass, the peak, everything there rested on granite.

Think about solid rock, miles deep, mountains made of it, that’s the granite.

Travel Summer of 2003

June 5, 2003. Cristin and I flew together to London, starting with a 6 a.m. flight to Denver, then a couple of hours in the Denver airport, then to Chicago, then to London. Cristin is 21 now, with a gorgeous face dominated by a huge smile and brilliant eyes. She is painfully unsure of herself, being with her makes me want to alternately hug her and lecture her. She tries so hard to be adult that she comes off sometimes as more childish, and sometimes as a bit brusque, but there is always the spark of brilliant little girl in her. It seems like a magic struggling to become itself, rather than something that already is.

Friday morning arrival, taxi to the hotel, room was ready, we took a taxi towards Picadilly. Traffic got bad so we got out of the taxi early, walked for a while, and found a breakfast place – horrible breakfast. We were both very tired, and perhaps more than a little bit irritable. We walked through Soho, bought an orange juice, both of us determined to stay awake until after dinner time. We walked through the theater district, Cristin took some pictures of “look left” signs and such. We walked on, past Trafalgar Square – with a brief look at the National Gallery – then 10 Downing, Scotland Yard, and a bridge over the Thames. Pictures were controversial, Cristin objected routinely. We saw Westminster, but with difficulty, because of that all-encompassing tiredness of the first day across the Atlantic. We asked a guard outside Westminister for help finding a restaurant, so we ended up at a small quasi-Italian place that was slow, not very good, and slow. It started to rain. We took a taxi back to the hotel. We rested for a while, tried to take a walk, and finally it was late enough for dinner in the room, and then, at last, sleep. Cristin fell asleep quickly, like at 6:30, right after our room-service dinner; I read Atonement for a couple hours, then fell asleep.

Saturday started out bright and optimistic. Taking Sabrina’s advice, we took off walking for the Notting Hill Saturday market, which turned out to be Portabello Street. Cristin was delightfully happy with that because she remembered that street from a song in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. We had fun, looking at the stalls in the market. Then we went back over to Soho, purchased tickets for Chicago – the best we could get for that night – had lunch in Wagamama, walked around some more, all the way to Buckingham Palace, then retreated to the hotel. We went to dinner at La Trouvaille, which was well recommended but didn’t work for us, then walked to the theater. When we found our seats, we’d been taken, we had the highest possible, farthest away from the stage, hottest and most claustrophobic seats in the theater. Disaster! We walked out, down the incredibly long and twisting stairs out of there, but, almost out, we tried a desperation move at the box office. Could there be any no-shows, decent seats perhaps? And there were, hooray, some decent seats much closer to the stage, where there was air as well on a hot June evening. The show was very good, Cristin said better than the movie, which made me very happy to hear. We walked half the way back to the hotel, then took a taxi. It was a good day.

Sunday was a hard day, the harder side of traveling. Perhaps the jet lag hit us, or it might have been the rain. We started out alright with a taxi to the British museum, but the museum was hard (stolen treasures, Greek and Roman, we tried to follow the written tour) and except for a nice lunch it was mainly a reminder of fatigue. Then we ventured through the subway to the City, which was deserted, and it started to rain again. We tried St. Paul’s as well, but it was closed, so we gave up and went back to the hotel. For dinner we went out to Yo Sushi, which was hard to find, but at least, finally, successful. After dinner we called home, argued with home about shoes, and felt generally miserable. I was nervous about getting the train to Slough the next day, and worried about my seminars. Cristin fell asleep, and I worried for a while, then did the same.

On Monday I managed the train to Slough without problems, and gave my train-the-trainer seminar for Progress Software. It went well, I was told, but slowly, ponderously, without the excitement I liked. We had some failed attempts at cellphone connections during break, then connected at lunch, so I knew she was okay. When I got back to the hotel, Cristin was a bit down. We went to Ask, an Italian chain Saby had recommended, for dinner. Cristin and I tried to keep our spirits up, she had managed her day very well, and was generally upbeat, good to be with, but it had been hard on her to be alone, I could tell. She had taken the tour at Westminster. She said my cellphone calls had embarrassed her with the tourguide and others on the tour, because she couldn’t figure out how to turn the phone off. We both laughed at that.

Tuesday the train was much easier, no tension, and the scheduling worked. The seminar was particularly hard, participants slow to join in, somehow skeptical. It was a long day for me. Cristin, on the other hand, had a very good day visiting the Tower of London, with another tour, and St. Paul’s Cathedral. We had a nice dinner at Wagamama.

Wednesday finished up the seminar, and I got back to the hotel by 1:30. The pending trip to Stockholm made me very nervous, we had to get to the Stansted airport for a 6:30 flight on Ryan Air, a discount airline that went to an airport 60 miles from Stockholm. We had a quick lunch at Yo Sushi in Paddington, then, at my insistence, took a taxi to Stansted instead of going to the train station and taking the train. That was a disaster! The taxi took almost two hours and more than 100 pounds, and we felt late. No time to eat or stop really before finding our plane, getting to the gate, then waiting in lines with no reserved seats. It was a crowded unpleasant plane trip – we did manage opposite aisles – with nothing to eat but very dumb sandwiches. We arrived at Vasteras airport close to 10 pm, the airport was small and short on bathrooms (lines), the taxis to the city were going to cost another $200, and with some tension we took a bus into the city. The bus turned out to be fine, the drive in gave us a time to notice the open flat wooded landscape and the very late daylight (it never really got dark, just dusk) and we finally arrived, near midnight, to a very pleasant hotel. The Hotel Hilton Slussen felt good, we were glad to be there.

Thursday the seminar went well. My clients made some suggestions at breakfast that got things going right, and it turned out to be the best I’ve had in this series. I went up to the room to talk to Cristin during lunch, and she went out in the afternoon with some local people who were friends of a friend from Whitman. After the seminar was done she called, decided to come back, the friends of friends were too young for her and she was disappointed. She didn’t want to go out for dinner. I could tell she was down but I wanted her to go out with me, I hadn’t been out of the hotel, but she was really disappointed and wouldn’t go. We had room service and then I took a one-hour walk through Stockholm’s old town. Then we slept. I should say that I wish I’d done better for Cristin that evening, because I love her and I could tell the day had gone wrong for her, but my insisting that we go out for dinner didn’t work for either one of us. One evening not done well, that one. Cristin was sad, and that made me sad.

The next day finished the seminar week, an excellent final half day, and by the time I was done I was on cellphone communication with Cristin and Vange and Megan, who had arrived that morning. They were of course extremely tired, we walked through a shopping center, had some lunch, tried to get Megan some shoes that worked for her, and eventually went back to the hotel. Cristin and I went out to a restaurant at Old Town for dinner together, and Vange and Megan had room service and slept. Cristin and I had a nice dinner, in a cellar restaurant, and made each other feel good. It was Friday night, so we had been in Europe a week.

On Saturday we had a nice breakfast and then walked to the docks in front of the Grand Hotel, where we took a 2-hour boat tour of Stockholm. It was beautiful, and we had a good time. We then took a ferry over to the park island, saw the Vasta museum (a ship built in 1630, an amazing museum) where we had a nice lunch. Then we wandered through a very large outdoor park, and it got rainy and cold, we finally found a frustrating dinner on the side of the Opera building, in a small crowded table, with food not very good, but very expensive. We walked back at the end of the day, tired but happy, through Old Town Stockholm.

Sunday we took our waiter (very personable man at breakfast, named Tony) advice and took the one-hour ferry to Vaxholm, a town in the Stockholm Archipelago of 14,000 islands. The ferry itself was fun, stopping several times in different small places, and we played cards. Megan and Cristin both play cards with their friends, so we played card games I didn’t know, fun games that were familiar to both of them (rich man poor man, BS, some others). When we arrived we found ourselves in a beautiful small town. We walked around, took pictures, and had tea in a quaint teahouse. Then we had lunch at the Vaxholm hotel, a lunch that turned out to be one of the best meals of the trip, delicious shrimps in lime sauce and salmon, good salads, and even the club sandwiches were excellent. As we took the ferry back, a pretty young Swedish girl talked to us for what seemed like several minutes, but must have really been before we communicated that we weren’t understanding anything. She was wearing a very funny colorful hat, and high pants, and a bright vest. She then found somebody who spoke English, and we found out she was going to be married in a couple of weeks and wanted “words of wisdom” written in a notebook she carried. We all contributed, then enjoyed the ferry, playing cards and watching the view. Afterwards we failed to reach the city hall in time to see it – where the Nobel prize is held, and walked around some before having a nice dinner in a floating restaurant near our hotel. Here again, we had a very good meal, outside, watching the water and the view.

On Monday we packed and got ourselves to the train station for a 12-something train to Copenhagen. There was some tension getting things sorted out in the train, but that worked out very nicely. We played more cards, watched the landscape, and before we knew it we were crossing a huge bridge to Copenhagen in Denmark.

The arrival in Denmark was daunting. By following the wrong people, we got out of the train ramp into a street instead of the actual station. We had to orient ourselves to find the station, then change money – nervous over the very visible warnings about pickpockets – and then find a taxi to our hotel. The rooms turned out to be small, too close to the street, and dark. We tried to change rooms, then tried to change hotels, but to no avail. We were stuck in 71 Nyhavn hotel. We had reserved with Expedia and they were prepaid. Vie tried to help via cellphone, and Sabrina looked up the Internet description and said “are you sure you’re in the right hotel?” Finally Cristin said “how spoiled are we?” and we changed our mood and went out to eat in a restaurant along the Nyhavn waterfront, which was just a block from the hotel. We ate outside in a very crowded restaurant, Australians behind us, people sharing our table smoking, and cold; but it was a nice view, and decent food, and we made the best of it. The people who shared our table struck up a conversation, which included recommendations on what to do in Copenhagen. The rooms seemed better when we got back, and the beds were very nice.

The next morning, Tuesday, we were offered better rooms and they were bigger but smelled of smoking, so we decided to make due. We took a very nice boat tour of Copenhagen, then walked the main shopping street, failed to find a lunch place we had hoped for, and ate at the National Museum instead. The museum had interesting exhibits of old Viking warfare and daily life in Copenhagen. Then we walked to Tivoli, which we found crowded and hot and disappointing, although we had a nice dinner outside in one of the Tivoli restaurants. We watched an acrobatics show, then walked back to our hotel.

Wednesday, following the advice of our friends from Monday night’s dinner, we took a train to Hillerød, a small town about 45 minutes from the center of the city, dominated by the Fredericksborg castle. We walked through the town, had lunch, visited the castle, and took the train back. We had dinner again in one of the outside restaurants on the waterfront near our hotel.

Thursday we checked out of the hotel and took the train to Aarken, an art museum in the seashore in a suburb. We had a nice lunch there, but found little of interest in the museum, and took the train back. There was an awkward period of time between then and needing to go to the train station, we walked through Rosenborg and Marienborg castles, but Cristin and Megan were disappointed that we didn’t have time to climb the steeple of a church that looks over the city from the Christianshaven district. It was 5 pm when we arrived back at the hotel to take a taxi to the train station.

Finding the right train was daunting again, so we tried to get something to eat but didn’t really, just some dull pizza. We caught the 5:47 pm train to Hamburg to discover there was no dining car. However, within a couple hours the train went into a huge ferry, to cross the Baltic Sea to Germany, which ended up to be an exciting and adventurous 45 minutes that included a quick dinner. After that we played cards and passed the time easily until we arrived at Hamburg, and we then managed the switch to the sleeper train to Heidelberg, which left the Hamburg station at 10:42 p.m.

The sleeper train worked. Cristin and I had one compartment, Vange and Megan the other. Each compartment was big enough for two bunk beds, our luggage, and a small sink and mirror. I slept, fitfully perhaps, but I slept, as the train rocked back and forth through Germany.

We woke up to a meager breakfast of rolls and coffee, served by a porter, as the train approached Heidelberg. We were due in Heidelberg at 7:19 and, to my frustration, we dawdled with breakfast in bed clothes until the train was actually in Heidelberg. I tried to get the three of them to pack up and get ready, but they had their breakfasts and didn’t see the need. In literally two minutes after arriving in Heidelberg, the train was moving again and we were still on it.

The porter enjoyed our misfortune, grinning, as the train started moving again. I pointed out that we wanted to get off in Heidelberg, and he answered “Yes, I thought you wanted out in Heidelberg,” making no move to do anything but enjoy our predicament. Eventually we understood that we had missed our stop and we would continue to the next station, which was to be at 7:52. We were all nervously packed up and ready to jump off the train by 7:40, but the train was apparently late (the grinning porter said “construction”) and we didn’t actually get off until 8:10. We found ourselves in a small station that seemed to be outside of whatever town it was near. Fortunately I managed my German and we caught a bullet train back to Heidelberg (it turned out to be the best train we were in), so it took only 20 minutes or so to make up the ground that took an hour to travel. We got to Heidelberg at 9:16 Friday morning.

Heidelberg was the first of several very nice hotels reserved for us by Steven Hurley, of www.travelswithfriends.com. It was very well located in the old town of Heidelberg, KultursBrauerie, and we had two very nice rooms. The hotel itself is a brewery restaurant, with a very nice garden. Our rooms were noisy because they looked over the garden; but they were also very nice rooms.

We had to wait for the rooms, but we had a nice breakfast while we waited and we were happy with the rooms when they were ready. We packed up our dirty clothes, a whole car full, and took a taxi to a Laundromat.

That night we discovered the noisy rooms, but we had a dinner in the garden. The waitress was asked to explain one dish, and instead of saying simply “sausage,” which would have been sufficient.

Next day we met Isabel for a walking tour of Heidelberg. Dinner again at the same place, garden underneath the hotel, hot, shade trees, beautiful.

Sunday I picked up the rental car, a VW Passat station wagon, diesel, big enough, five speeds, and things went well. All on schedule. The highway worked, Megan sat in front. We tried to use the GPS and a map to find our way, but we failed, and we had to ask several times. We stopped in a gas station in a village, very suburban and new, for detailed directions. When we finally found the right autobahn things worked well.

She wondered while we were driving about why cars got hot, and why the ozone layer caused global warming, what caused the greenhouse effect. I wasn’t have to give her a good answer. She missed David, she said, because he could have explained it to her. She was very sweet about it; an interesting adjective, but the correct one. I could feel her love, she wasn’t disappointed with me, just wished she’d had David at that moment.

At one point traffic stopped, for a long time, maybe 20 minutes, then started for half a mile or so, then stopped for another 20 minutes. We were caught in the sun on the autobahn, not knowing what was going on. It was awkward. Finally traffic started moving again, but we never knew what had happened.

As we neared Rothenburg, we passed a terrible car accident, a reminder about realities of auto travel, and then traffic jammed up. It turned out to be construction, but it seemed bumper to bumper for miles.

When we finally got to Rothenburg, we stopped first at a parking lot outside the city walls. As we drove in, the driver of another car, containing a family, looking German, handed me a slip of paper. It was a paid parking slip, to be put on the dashboard, for another three hours. Thank you. We walked through the gates into the town, for a bit, but then realized we could take the car in, and we did. We drove through the very narrow streets of Rotherburg, having to ask for directions once, until we found Das Burg Hotel.

What a beautiful hotel. It was built into the city wall of Rotherburg, so that the rooms looked outside the wall over a valley falling down to a river far below, then rising over forested hills. At the bottom, along the river, we could see a rural road and some settlement, a few houses and a tiny village. It was hot, the birds were all over, and the valley was peaceful. Immediately below us, about 200 feet, was a walkway along the wall. People walking the outside of the wall stopped to take pictures of our hotel.

We went back into the town, a jewel of a medieval city with narrow cobblestone streets and buildings hundreds of years old. We looked for and found a well-publicized local museum dedicated to medieval crime and punishment, which ended up being in effect a museum of torture. It was unnerving. Vange and I were both uncomfortable with it.

Rothenburg is special to me because of this and previous visits. It was the third time I’ve been there. The first time, in 1967, Jim O’Connell and I took a break from youth hostels and rented a room in a nice small hotel there, as part of a hitchhiking trip down the “romantic road.” I think Dave Edmonds and Steve Tapscott were with us then too, but I’m afraid (gulp – there it is again) I don’t remember. The second time, in 1997, I was driving with Paul to Florence, after having visited Nils Bugge in his home in Denmark.

We had trouble finding a good place to eat. We ended up in a garden restaurant recommended by the hotel, having sausages, near the second church in the town. I wanted to relive good sausages with good mustard, but although the garden was nice and the service good, and the company wonderful, the food wasn’t. The mustard came in plastic envelopes.

After the meal we rested for a while in the beautiful hotel, then went out to join the Night Watchman tour (nachtwocke?) . He was a tall, thin man in a very dark medieval costume. He walked around town explaining the sites and history, punctuating his talks with humor. It was very good, very entertaining, very interesting. He explained how Rothenburg had survived because of its amazing physical location, surrounded on three sides by cliffs, and was preserved in part by centuries of poverty. He also explained interesting details such as the importance of salt, the lifts on the houses, the need to store grain in case of siege. Rothenburg survived the hundred years war by giving up when it was attacked. It was once one of the largest, most important cities in Germany.

The next morning we woke up, had a nice breakfast, and took off again in the car, this time to Fussen. We had about two hours of autobahn, speeding along talking and waiting to get somewhere, and then the autobahn ended, so we drove towards high beautiful craggy mountains, through villages, on a two-lane road. We stopped for lunch in a very small village along the road, where we found a small delicatessen that served nice sandwiches. It was very hot again, so we sat outside where we watched an amazingly small hummingbird that turned out to be a moth (we learned later).

We found Fussen, asked again twice in the village, ended up at Neuschwanstein, the most spectacular castle of Mad King Ludwig II. The castle is very much a tourist trap, feels like it, and acts like it, but it is also that beautiful. It was a hot clear blue summer day. We took the horse carriage up to the castle. We had been assigned a time, (4:55) so we had to wait, but in due time we passed into the castle for the tour of Mad Ludwig’s construction, which was never really lived in. The mountains around it are also beautiful, granite, rising straight up. After the tour inside the castle, we walked up to a bridge over a waterfall, and that was beautiful too. The mountains of Austria are granite, like the Sierra Nevada, but they rise more steeply up from the valleys. After visiting the bridge over the waterfall, we took a bus down from below the bridge, it careened very fast down the road.

It was after five when we got back to the very hot car and found our way to the Gasthof Zum Schlussen in an Austrian village nearby. Beautiful hotel, with amazing views of a flat valley surrounded by towering mountains. It was very much like a farmhouse, with lots of yard, a barn with horses, and unfortunately lots of flies. We had a nice dinner, although halfway through it we fled from the flies outside to the flies inside. We took a walk after dinner and discovered the local fire brigade practicing.

The next day we lost our way to Salzburg, ended up in a village asking again, and the tourist information person there, a woman in her forties, changed our plans in a delightful way. We had been told that crossing the mountains to Innsbruck was a five-hour ordeal, but she assured us it would take only 90 minutes, and was in fact the quickest way to Salzburg. Another person, American, who happened to be in the information booth heard us and assured us that she had just come that way, it was as the person described it. So instead of the originally planned route we crossed over the Brenner Pass to Innsbruck. I was disappointed with Innsbruck myself, it is very much built over, and although the main old town that I remembered was still there, it was very hard to park in an offputting underground tomb, and it was hard to find a place to have lunch. Vange and the girls found it a dull city-like town, surrounded by beautiful mountains, but much less interesting than where we had been.

I didn’t try to visit specific memories in Innsbruck, aside from the Weisser Kruez, under which we took a picture with me and Megan. That one block of old town (altstadt) was familiar. We drove by the university. However, unlike my visit with Paul in 1997, in this case we didn’t have time (Paul and I stayed overnight) so I didn’t really visit where I live or where I used to walk frequently. The memories were uncomfortably unrefreshed.

It bothers me a great deal that I can no longer construct things as they were, I cannot bring back details. This is terrifying. For years I satisfied myself with the idea that time was a process of constructing detailed memories, and that I would have them always. That doesn’t seem to be true, I am losing them.

We drove on to Salzburg, arriving at Freilassung where we dropped off the car, just across the border from Salzburg, from where we took a taxi to our hotel, the Blaue Ganz, which was another beautiful hotel very well located in the old town of Salzburg. We struggled with dinner that night – the hotel person recommended Herzchen or something like that, said “little heart,” but we looked for a “little hut” instead and ended up in a very formal, very expensive, very empty restaurant that we didn’t like. We walked around some more, but it was hard, and we gave up and went back to the hotel fairly early.

I was excited to be in Salzburg. Unlike the disappointment of Innsbruck, it was as beautiful as I’d promised, much the same size as Heidelberg but clearly prettier. I felt unsatisfied with my failure to touch memories, but happy with the town. I saw the bridge on which Paul and I took pictures in 1997.

The next morning, Wednesday, the guide was not able to change her time so we had until 2 pm. Megan agreed to take a walk with me and we talked through some of my Salzburg memories, crossed the bridge to the park on the other side known as a palace related to Mozart (what is it’s name?). Megan indulged me, but of course, as so often these days, we were between us quiet, and I hoped she was happy. She seems loving when she’s quiet, not disappointed, but it worries me that these times pass by without animation. I worry about what I am to my children, who I am, someone loved of course, and appreciated, but not fun, not animated. These worries are there.

We had a nice lunch in Nord, a seafood-oriented fresh food place that we liked very much. Megan had found it.

The guided tour paled by comparison to the one we had in Heidelberg. Her name was Liselotte, about the same age, but she failed to make Salzburg as fun as Heidelberg, which disappointed me. She was all facts and history but it was too dry. I wonder still if Vange and Cristin and Megan didn’t pretend to be enjoying it for me, because of my history with Salzburg, but after three hours we were all glad it had ended.

We had trouble with meals again. We ended up with a Sushi snack in the late afternoon, but we were uncomfortable with it. The baby store closed while we were eating. Time passed, it rained a bit, and we had dinner at the Hertzchen place we had not found the day before. That night we followed fireworks to the center of town, after dinner, and discovered that Salzburg was hosting an international corporate-oriented sports festival. Groups of different nationalities filled the town, mostly the bars. The Italians grouped together in their red warm-ups and sang, challenging groups of Spaniards, who ignored the challenge.

Thursday morning we slept late, had lunch I don’t remember where, had trouble filling the time. In the afternoon I ended up walking along to check my memory for the beer garden we used to go to in Salzburg, along the walk to town, and I couldn’t find it. It was not as I remembered, or it had been changed. There was a Gosser Bier brewery building like an old mansion, built around a patio, that might have been it, but I was not sure. We had dinner at the Stieglhaus, another name I remembered, under the castle a good ways up the hill, with beautiful views, but not great food.

Trouble with meals never included breakfast. We had excellent breakfasts in every place, from Stockholm to including Copenhagen, Heidelberg, Rothenburg, Fussen, Salzburg, and Munich. Always in the hotel, always well served, often fun. By the time we reached Salzburg my German was working enough to manage a lot of the logistics of breakfast, explaining the need for eggs (eier) and tee mit milch, etc.

Friday we took the train to Munich about midday. It was a two-hour train ride, we were hungry and there was poor meal service (very dry very rye sandwiches with cheese) but we played cards and enjoyed a lot of it. Both Cristin and Megan enjoyed cards, particularly Megan, who was usually the instigator.

When we arrived we discovered a very big city, lots of traffic, but a beautiful hotel. It was trying to rain again, although hot, but we managed to see the five o’clock glockenspiel at the main Rathous, and we split up as Megan and Vange looked at stores, and Cristin and I explored restaurants. We met back in the room and walked to dinner – as most of Germany and Austria, not very good – and then we were caught in the rain on the way back.

June 27. Cristin and I share the twin bed room in the last hotel, the Torbräu. She had been off with Vange and Megan, doing shower-related things, Vange nursed her sunburn, while I flipped channels unsuccessfully, started reading. After Cristin came in we both read for a while, then turned off the light. Cristin wanted to talk. She was very nervous about going to Ireland the next day, and we talked about that. I was very reassuring. She told me some things that made me very happy, that I should always remember, about me as a father, how she wanted to have my qualities. “I want to be like you,” she said. “Mom says you’re the glue that keeps us all together.” Maybe she was just saying it, but it made me feel good.

The trip back was a long taxi ride, tension in the airport as we got everything arranged – Cristin’s arrangements involved some awkward waiting, but we were early. We walked to the Hotel Kempinski to make a reservation for Cristin for a month later, and eventually we had to go to our gate and we left Cristin with hugs and kisses.

Those partings are so hard. I worry so much about them when I leave them, waving goodbye in an airport. We left Cristin in a very busy underground area in Munich full of stores and people, at a point in which we had to go to one terminal and she had to go to another. How much it hurts me to do that. She had a flight to Cork changing planes and flights in Heathrow, and we had a short flight to Frankfurt and then the long nonstop to Portland.

Frankfurt was very hard because of the security checks and built-in short time, but we made it, and Portland was annoying that they hadn’t checked our bags right in Munich, but we made that too.

I am filling in the last portion of this in August, on a plane from Sao Paulo to Mexico, so very amazed at the awesome power of time. Cristin sits next to me watching a movie, having spent the month at Cork, and flown back, and then gone to Miami, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, and we will soon be in Mexico City.

On Thursday June 5, as we sat together in a very hot waiting area for a flight that was late leaving Chicago for London, I reminded Cristin how quickly time goes. “Before you know it we’ll be in London, and before you know it you’ll be in Cork, and then coming back again.” It seemed so long at the time, as it always done, but now I’m done with two thirds of this trip to Latin America, and that seemed like it would never be done. How quickly it all goes by.

Log Lake

That was 34 years ago, in 1966. I was 18 years old. As I write this, 34 years later, the memory of Log Lake is immediately fresh.

We reached Log Lake in the afternoon, after a long day’s hike, down from the camp to the creek, then up the moutains on the other side, winding up a steep trail through rocks. It owned its own small valley, invisible from anywhere but the high peaks above it. There was a meadow on the west side, a few trees, good sleeping spots, and good rocks and old logs for cooking and eating. On the east side the rocks rose through boulders and snow patches, very little green, up to peaks above it. We arrived in the afternoon, cooked dinner and slep, and the next morning I woke up before anybody else, shortly after the sun hit my sleeping bag, and jumped into the lake. I had braced myself for an icy, painfully cold mountain lake, like an electric shock that takes your breath away. Instead, it’s temperature was so much better than icy that the memory was engraved, and lasts. It wasn’t warm by any means, but it was no colder than the brisk temperature you’d expect from a country club swimming pool in August.

The moment was so right I would have had to search, like an intellectual exercise, for something wrong with it. Years later, I’m guessing that the only thing I would have come up with was that my summer at Unalayee was going to end.

I was at that point about six weeks into an eight-week stint as a counselor at Camp Unalayee, a non-denominational coed summer camp located high in the Trinity Alps, on a meadow next to a Mosquito Lake. I loved the mountains, like the kids, liked the other counselors, liked the management, and generally just enjoyed the hell out of who I was, where I was, and what I was doing. When I looked ahead, it was back home with my parents and siblings in Los Altos for a couple of weeks, and then off to in love with the mountains, and spending a whole summer up in , There was nothing, but absolutely nothing, wrong with life at that moment, and everything right.

I’ve always assumed that Log Lake was that much warmer than normal because it was small, shallow, and surrounded by rocks. It must have been warming up during the days. I don’t know that, and it doesn’t make sense that it had snow patches just a few hundred yards above it; but they were small patches, probably not draining all the way down to the lake in August.

This particular memory is akin to paradise. Log Lake is a beautiful alpine lake, with the complete ingredients of the perfect Sierra Club calendar photo: the peaks above it, the granite sculptured by glaciers, the small snow patches, the meadow just below itnot a particularly well-known landmark, I’ve never seen a picture of it published anywhere, never even heard of it since. specimen of Trinity Alps alpine landscape,

I crawled out of the bag.

from the other side rise steeply out of the creek’s valley into a deep valley with Tangle Blue Creek running down its bottom. We could only see the steep drop of the Beyond the valley, the moutain rose up other side rose up I couldn’t see it at the bottom Beyond the valley, the mountains rose again up to sharp gray peaks, gray and black, brightened by the morning sun on glistening granite, and, in their shadows, sparkling white small patches of snow. To the left of the truck, a steep slope rose up in the same sparse, granite landscape, broken by trees. This was in the Trinity Alps, in Northern California, in 1966.

In the back of the truck, I held on to the staked sides as the truck reeled back and forth. Across the valley, nestled deep in the sides of the peaks across the valley was a lake I’d been to, Log Lake just a few days earlier, on an overnight I clung to the back, reeling as the truck jerked back and forth. , happy, tired, lost in my own thoughts. Across the valley, nestled amoung the peaks, was an invisible lake, I was one of maybe a dozen people holding onto the wooden staked sides of the truck”Tim, you’ve got a beard,”

A couple dozen people hung on in back, most of them clinging to the high fence-like sides of the truckIn the back of the truck, a couple dozen people hu, . The pwoplwback of the truck held

through the Late August, 1966

On the truck on the way back, it was bouncing, dirt road, a couple dozen young conselors in the back of the kind of flatbed truck, wood stake fence up the sides, that you’d expect to see carrying a load of hay, vegetables, or pigs. It jerked back and forth, reeling from one side to the other, with each rock or hole in the dirt track it followed through the Trinity Alps.

Patty, one of the older counselors — she was at least 22 —