Mom still had the non-alcoholic beers I’d left two years ago and surprisingly, they tasted the same. We went to the mall to buy her a pop socket for her phone and I helped clean up her file storage, then diagnosed why she wasn’t getting notifications on WhatsApp. This is what happens when your parents get older, you become tech support. And I expect my kids will do the same for me one day.

The stereo in mom’s car is always on Swabisch Radio 4, and the speakers make a funny clicking sound like a metronome running at double time. It’s agitating and impossible to ignore. But I don’t mention it because either mom doesn’t notice or I’ll bring attention to it and then it will agitate her as it does me. The best thing they played on the radio was Kodachrome by Paul Simon. American music always sounds foreign and out of place to me when I’m abroad. But it made me think back to when Polaroid instant photos first came out in the 70s and how magical it was to see our faces come alive on those small canvases. Then to watch how the color faded over time and how we seemed to disappear, the same process in reverse, entering and exiting our own scenes.

I cooked a Turkish red lentil soup recipe and it was good to be back in mom’s kitchen chopping vegetables, working with the metric system again.

Mom’s Hungarian lodger Laszlo got home around 5:30 every day and popped in to say hello with his black mechanic’s overalls, brought a six-pack of non-alcoholic beer and asked if I minded if he drank a real one. He’ll be 50 in November, never had kids, always wanted to be a writer. Doesn’t speak German, somehow gets by speaking English.

It’s when Laszlo is telling me about his boss at the car repair shop I finally remember the name of the black preacher who used to live down the road, Sheef. Laszlo calls his boss Chef at the garage. The preacher Sheef was married to a Swedish woman and had two little girls around our kids’ age, but there was a scandal after his wife accused Sheef of domestic abuse and he left town disgraced. He always seemed like such a good man and some think she lied about it. Walking by the little chapel and the flat where they lived I can almost picture what he looked like. But like those old picture prints, it’s now gone blank.

The American boogie-woogie blues musician Cadillac Kolstad is gone too, but there are pictures of him plastered all over Facebook mom shows me on her tablet, and Cadillac looks great. He’s the Minnesotan we met that year at the wine festival he played for four nights straight, and we went every night. Cadillac then hung around the village for literally years, got with a local German girl but never had a place of his own, intimated maybe he could stay at mom’s place for a little, but she wisely decided against. Watching him drink and perform on stage was remarkable, a kind of public self-mutilation but exquisite. He was good to begin with but only got better the more he drank.

I don’t really have plans to go anywhere or do anything while I’m here, and I’ve got another week. This trip was just about catching up with my mom since it had been more than a year since I’d seen her and she’d had some health concerns preventing her from visiting us in the States.

We connected her Apple Watch to her health app yesterday and recorded an EKG to see if that would help send notifications about heartbeat irregularities, but all it said was you’ve got A-fib and you should talk to your doctor, the watch can’t tell if you’re going to have a heart attack. We put it away and visited with Laszlo, then watched Slow Horses on Apple TV.

Today Eberhard comes and tonight, I was invited to an old friend Miriam and Uwe’s house for a barbecue where we’ll no doubt talk politics. I’ve been rehearsing what I’ll say and planning for it.

Categories: Memoir, travel, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, travel