Wasn’t forecast to rain but it did and I got caught in it. Sunrise, if you want to call it that, was an hour away still. The cocks still knew the time and croaked as I walked by. Odd to catch a tendril of cannabis in the dark in the rain, by the river. Under the power lines the sound like static in the soft rain, I started to imagine myself back home and to yearn for it, for my morning walks with my stick. The rows of apple trees in the orchard extended on forever, mini versions of the tall power line structures up above, triangular at the top and perched like sentinels. The crops were all tilled and bare looking. The corn husks the color of parchment.

I walked to the outskirts of the adjacent town like I did in the winter when I was last here and then I turned around. All the towns looked the same, though mom’s was the best, it had real character. They had a tourist business they cultivated, albeit fragile but still hanging on. Tourists came from other parts of Germany, mainly by bike when it was nice. You didn’t hear other languages spoken, only Deutsch. They stood in the narrow streets in awkward clumps gesturing with their cameras and gazing about like they were lost, most of them north of 70. And there was a travel agency on the corner still with glossy photos of all the places you could go. Who hires travel agents anymore?

When I’m back home in the entryway mom’s Hungarian lodger Laszlo’s just gone for work and his cologne still hangs in the air. His surname is beneath mom’s on the mailbox but I will never be able to remember or pronounce it. I invited him to come down for dinner with us Saturday when Miriam and Uwe come by. (He was in his boxers playing rap music on his laptop.)

The fungus on my scalp started the last time I was here in January. It began at the nape of my neck and crept up the scalp then around the edges of my eyes. The dermatologist diagnosed three varieties of dermatitis, a subcutaneous deep tissue irritation (they call it cradle cap in babies), said it was just a normal fungus we all have growing on our skin except some people lose the ability to fight it over time for reasons unknown or maybe catastrophic, like a problem with the brain or immune system. I was still using the medicinal foam and shampoo and thankfully we’d ruled out catastrophe. But I wondered if it was something environmental that triggered it, that last stay here over the winter. I thought about it in the bathroom and it made my scalp itchy.

Frank’s was hands down the best and most expensive restaurant in town and I liked saving it for last. On Friday we’d go back to the Rat for “Fish Friday,” a tradition dating back to when people didn’t eat meat on Fridays for religious reasons; I guess fish didn’t qualify as meat.

Frank was Bavarian, brother to the German woman Tonya who married the French guy Claude who now owned a lot of the good real estate in town. They’d squeezed out the nice Turkish family restaurant when they put in Frank’s, and also the nice German guy Charlie’s wine and bookshop, now relinquished to an upstairs corner spot and much smaller space.

Frank was mad fussy about food and vintage sports cars, large in stature and well polished, possibly gay but closeted. (Vacationed in Mallorca, always alone.) He now had a big, muscular dog the color of good chocolate who was so well behaved the dog just lay in the restaurant entrance hardly bothering to move. Everything was perfect at Frank’s.

But Frank was also the one who nearly worked his cooking staff to death according to mom’s friend Guido, also Bavarian, childhood friend to Frank, who’s also responsible for the cat my mom now owns, who’s urinated on my things more than once. She doesn’t care for me and boy the feeling is mutual.

Guido moved to Norway after quitting Frank’s but has kept in touch with my mom for like 15 years now, sending her audio files of his guitar playing on WhatsApp that sound just like John Fahey or early Jimmy Page. But Guido’s been into drugs and had other problems mom thinks, and one time said something like “maybe you and I could die together” while hugging her, so they’ve kind of fallen out of touch since then (though he still sends her music).

There are many more I could list: Sonja and Thomas, the neighbors behind mom’s crumbling barn I’ll meet for tea at 9, then Christoph, a town elder of sorts I’ll see at 10, and finally Stefan Hirt who’s coming tonight. Stefan is a scholar in American literature and wrote his thesis on David Foster Wallace, so we’ll have plenty to talk about. He also likes American music, specifically folk and what you’d call Americana, and his thesis on DFW is written in English, establishing connections to Sartre and Kierkegaard, a big-time thinker with zero pretense. He showed us around Berlin when he was living there but moved out when they had kids on account of the drugs.

Lily’s on an overnight bus now to Amsterdam and I just transferred more money into her account (for “food and museums,” she said). I’m just glad she’s there with two decent-sounding guys from New York who both have steady girlfriends. Life is funny. In 45 minutes it won’t be light, but light enough for me to walk. Part of you starts to fade into the place you’re headed to next. Like airline travel there are weight limits to how much we can carry in this life.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Travelogues

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, prose, travel