Chapter 22
My mother's side of the family thought they were German.
My grandparents came from Germany and joined a German community in Kansas.
However, when my youngest daughter was growing up, she researched our genealogy
and found we were Swiss. Maybe my grandfather was German. I never heard his
story.
When I learned about
Hitler, I was ashamed of being German. However, when Neil and I drove from
Germany to Switzerland, I found a Pharmacy with Hertenstein on
the window—my grandmother's maiden name.
While Neil and I were
on his business trip in Germany, I suggested we drive into Switzerland, where
blood never reached its shores—no shores; it is landlocked. At the time, I
still thought I was German, and I knew that the Hartenstein’s had left Germany
before the war because Mom was born in Kansas, and her mother, Great-Grandma
Hertenstein, was the first of their children born on American soil. Her mother
was pregnant on the boat. Imagine.
We visited Lucerne,
where we found a drugstore and the name Hertenstein, and where the incredible
Rhine River tumbled voraciously over rocks, creating Der Rhine Fall.
A glorious white swan stood at the cress of a water flow, withstanding the
current. In Lucerne, Neil took his sat-upon glasses into an Optometrist's shop,
where they repaired them for free.
Neil drove until we
reached the end of the road facing the Alps, and coming back at twilight, we
saw a little boy bringing home the cows. The air had that fresh, misty
fragrance that comes after a rain. Droplets sprinkled our windshield, and
through it all, we saw a little boy walking ahead of the cows with the cows
following docilely behind. One of the cows trailed the others, and she was so
pregnant she stopped, breathed a deep sigh, and labored on.
We drove through the
green countryside of Germany, where cows stood on green hillsides and
yellow flowers dotted the green. Beside the roadway, immaculately
manicured farms had their morning feather comforters airing out the windows.
Off in the distance, we spotted a castle.
It was
Neuschwanstein, "New Swan Castle," King Ludwig's castle and the
inspiration for Walt Disney's castle in the Magic Kingdom. We hiked the hill
from the parking lot to the castle while a horse-drawn carriage carried other
tourists. While medieval looking on the outside, that castle has
state-of-the-art appliances from the time it was built.
It had running water
fed from a spring above and flushing toilets. The kitchen had a Leonardo De
Vince-designed device for warming dinner plates. It was constructed from two
pullies, with chain shelves between the two. Plates were loaded onto the
chains, and the pullies pulled the contraption up behind the stove, thus
warming the plates.
King Ludwig adored
Richard Wagner's operas, and many of the walls inside the castle were painted
floor to ceiling with exquisite murals of scenes from Wagner's operas. It is
said that King Ludwig was crazy, but I don't believe it. He loved beauty too
much to kill himself, and then there is a mystery surrounding his downing in
the lake while his psychiatrist lived—and there was money to be made. Dum de
dum dum.
I was up before Neil
one morning. I walked a path until I came to a cemetery awash in May flowers.
Iron fencing enclosed many of the little plots, and there were so many
flowers it was as though I was in a greenhouse. I watched an old man walk shakily
to a faucet, fill a sprinkling can, and carry it to a grave, where he
tenderly sprinkled the flowers.
I developed a bladder
infection while in Stuttgart, and Neil and I went to a hospital. A young man,
an orderly who could speak English, checked me in. I was embarrassed to tell
him my problem. However, he told me his story.
He said he was doing
community service instead of being in the military, for he was a pacifist.
After hearing that we were from Southern California, he told us that once,
while surfing at La Jolla, California (right beside San Diego where we lived), he
was hit in the face with a surfboard. He was taken to the hospital, where the
doctors treated him so kindly that he vowed to treat others the same.
The doctor gave me
medicine and said, "This is Wednesday. We'll bill you."
Imagine.
We were off to
Copenhagen, Denmark (home of Legos), where I took a perfect picture of the
Little Mermaid statue sitting on a rock in the bay. At night, we visited
Tivoli, the exquisite mini Disney-like park under the romantic glow of a
million (?) white lights.
In Amsterdam, we took
a Long Boat through the canals and under the lighted arched bridges, and they
served us so much wine and cheese that I could hardly walk off the boat.
We attended
Holland's Floriade, a flower fair covering acres, where they
asked if you wanted salt or sugar on your popcorn, and we walked around in the
rain.
This morning, Neil
reminded me of the black horse we saw at the Floriade in Holland. I thought
that horse was the most exquisite creature I had ever seen, totally black, head
high, and with "feathers" on his ankles. I asked what sort of horse he
was, and the man nuzzled by the horse said, "Dutch Horse." That
didn't tell me much. I was in Holland, after all, but once back home, I looked
up "Dutch Horse" and found it was a Frisian, a warm blood.
(Frisians were favored by Knights of old for they are heavier than a light
saddle breed, easy to train, and could carry all that armor they stuck on the
rider and his horse. Think of Zorro's horse. We just watched the new Indiana
Jones movie, where I recognized the black horse he rode galloping through the
subway and down steps as a Frisian). The Floriade horse was tied to a long
rope that extended to a canal boat. It was a demonstration to show how horses
were used to pull the boats.
I just now
looked up Frisian and found you can pick one up for $34,900.
That trip gave me a
taste for travel, which I had the privilege of doing more of later.
