(Re) Stomping around Stuttgart

I fell in love with Europe when I moved to Stuttgart as a young Army wife. A year to the day of my sailing for Europe my mother had forbidden me to visit my then boy friend's parents in Attleboro because "it was too far away from Reading" less than 50 miles from my home and here I was, about to live one my dreams -- not only visit Europe but to live there some 3,000 miles away. One of my first sights --when I arrived after a harrowing trip where I told a French man he didn't speak French but I did and discovering the 24 hour clock just in time to not miss my train and refusing to get off and have dinner with a French soldier -- was the Mercedes Benz medal on top of the bahnhof and that would become my beacon as I prowled around the city. When our tour ended I feared I would never again be able to escape Reading, never again see Stuttgart, never again come to Europe. I've been back to the city several times, but this weekend was a corny stroll down memory lane. My feet knew exactly where to go: the schloss garten (where Bill and Susie and I watched a goose chase a woman who wasn't feeding him fast enough), the new schloss, the old schloss (where my daughter at nine was bored almost to tears as a guard proud of his heritgage wanted to show her every toy in the place).

I ran into my first Christmas Market shortly after arriving those many years ago, a few stands, not unlike this one in the platz in front of the department store Breuningers. The market has been not doubled, not quadrupled, but increased ten fold. Back then I could not have afforded even a one mark ornament, for we often ran out of money long before we ran out of month. In fact that first Christmas we had to decorate with silver safety pins and red plastic hair curlers made into a makeshift tree.

My favourite display was the model village set up with trains, not just the ICE but smaller trains constantly running. The restaurant in the building behind has gone out of business. When I was there with Susie and Bill, Susie and I were in the ladies' room and one of the waiters came in and sprayed us with perfume. The Mad Perfumer, we called him, but he was gone when my daughter and I ate their a year later. What pleased me all weekend I was able to communicate in my German, much diminished from when I lived there and from university when I wrote a paper for a directed study in German comparing the German and English Faust plays.

My feet took me automatically to the apartment building where we lived (middle windows, second floor--European). How young I was still believing that I could make the marriage work, that we would fight for what each other wanted, that love could carry us through. As I sat on the stairs opposite, I wondered what other lives have been lived in those rooms. Did their marriages work out? Of course, no one who lived there is still there. I could almost visualize my German Shepherd Kimm, bounding out the door and our little Spitfire parked out front. I wondered if they now had central heating instead of this wierd oil stove in the living room.

Every one of my generation remembers where they were when they heard that Kennedy was shot. I was surprised in this time of mobile phones to see the phone booths, although modernized still there. I had gone there to call my husband who had all night duty. The purchase of the Spitfire negated any chance of a telephone too. Maybe not the wisest decision we made, but certainly one of the fun ones. My husband told me that Kennedy was dead. It wasn't until a week later at the Jayhawk movie theatre on base that we saw the extended films of the funeral, although our neighbour Günther, did invite us in to watch the television news. I still remember the candle light parade up the mountain, and how many people, knowing we were American stopped us to tell us how sorry they were.

Coming back to the States and despite terrible homesickness for Europe I finished my degree, went on to have my daughter, get a divorce, developed a career, and only many years later was I able to live out my dream of being a full-time writer and journalist living in Europe. Those years before I moved over here were neither wasted nor empty. They were good years, they were all part of the quilt that makes up my life to use a Mary Catherine Bateson analogy from Composing a Life. Every now and then it is good to look at one of the patches and remember the cloth it came from, which is what I did as I stomped around Stuttgart.