Breakfast
We slept late. Something like 10 or 11 hours. Woke up still groggy. Hartmut and Martina have patiently waited to have breakfast. Breakfast is bread, rolls, cheese, meats. Coffee. I'm lactose intolerant. At home I never get to eat cheese. I eat Vegan cheese these days and try to pretend it tastes like cheese. It doesn't really taste like cheese. I miss cheese so much. More than I miss ice cream or sour cream or really any other dairy thing. Also, at home I spoil myself with a cappuccino every morning in which I use oat milk because it foams - one particular kind of oat milk, the only kind that foams. I've been bracing myself for this month to be spent in Germany and France, places where dairy is used a lot, and where I've been fearful they might not have any substitutes for full dairy everything. I've been imagining trying to explain why I can't eat anything.
To my delighted surprise Robert has warned them and Martina has found laktosefrei everything! Laktosefrei 3.8% milk which they foam to a thick froth in their enormous foamer. Laktosefrei cream cheese with herbs de provence. Laktosefrei gouda. Laktosefrei ham salad. Breakfast is the three of them catching up in German, with lots of translation by Hartmut and Robert for me, which I barely hear because I'm quietly squealing the word "laktosefrei" over and over again. As I rub my belly and survey bread crumbs everywhere, I think no amount of walking will keep me from getting fat on this trip as I am reunited with my long lost love, cheese.
Old world
After breakfast we drive to Celle, a town dating back to the Middle Ages, and the site of hundreds of intact half-timbered houses lining cobble stoned streets. While Martina drives, Hartmut asks me how does all this German language sound to my ear. I pause. I want to be honest. A little sing-songy I say, more musical than I expected. But I add maybe that's because there is that up-lilting at the end that happens when one is talking to a foreigner, the implied "Do you understand" question mark. I say also, though, it sounds like chewing on broken glass. I impersonate what that might sound like. They laugh. I want to be more honest. I tell them I didn't grow up hearing German. It's not so common in Southern California. I want to be more honest. My mother was Jewish. Her mother was Polish. Her uncle - my great uncle - was a Holocaust survivor. Others did not survive. I grew up with only one association for the German language.
I've talked about this with Robert. I understand there is more to associate with Germany. But it looms large for me. Germany never topped the list of places I dreamed of visiting. If not for Robert - who speaks the language, who has lived there, who taught German in high school for many years and brought students on month-long visits - I would probably never have come.
Everyone in the car is nodding. They seem to understand. Hartmut begins to speak slowly and thoughtfully about what it is like to have lived his entire life in a country that is reckoning with the most shameful possible past. About his parents' stories. About his own efforts to understand and face this legacy. About memorials and reminders in every city, alongside every church, about Stolperstein (stumbling stones), about genetic memory. About vows to never start a war from this soil again. His voice shakes and his face is quickly covered in tears. I can't do justice to all of his words. Except to say that I am inspired to think that the U.S. could use some reckoning of its own.
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| Robert, Martina, Hartmut posed in front of the fountain in the Französischer Garten on the walk into the old part of Celle. It is a "French Garden" that has been reshaped a few times and looks a bit more like an English garden now. You can't really see in this photo, but there is a sculpture to the right of the fountain that looks like a swimmer floating in an inner tube. |
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| And then we pose too |
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| Look, so old, 1534! |
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| Nestled among the old, something modern |
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| Finally caught a photo of the postal delivery by bicycle. So much bicycling here in Germany, everywhere. More on that later. |
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| Robert among the cobble stone streets. |
, is then calculated by adding up the probabilities to survive to every age. This is the expected number of complete years lived (one may think of it as the number of birthdays they celebrate). 
