FROM ROME WITH LOVE

   I suppose I imagined Rome. But I didn't imagine this. Nor could I have. Mostly it's the size and ubiquity of all things Roman: ruins, walls, fountains of every shape for every use, colors, parks, churches, piazzas and pizzerias, pines and palms and bougainvillea, myths and motos, shrines and their saints. Even St. Peter's dome and the meandering Tiber seem always to be not that far away.  Everything is much bigger AND more beautiful--more OMG--than could have been captured in all those photos I saw before encountering the reality that is Rome. Those popes and emperors really knew how to show the little man and little woman just how small he/she really was. And in the presence of these monuments to God and to the men who believed they were God, they still have this effect.

  
   Photos just don't make it, not that it's kept me from trying for an approximation of that OMG moment. But mostly I'm trying to focus my shots on the little things. Like gelato. Did you know that there's a time of day for gelato? And also for espresso, and for pizza, and for buying stuff in stores (not between 13:00 and 16:00). And somehow something called gelato doesn't seem too terribly bad for the arteries and the waistline. Not if you call it gelato. Ice cream?. . Now that's another story and a continent away. 

Two scoops, 2 euros.

   
   Perhaps not surprisingly, the beauty and the grand scale (and probably the gelato) seem to have a good effect on people, or at least on the tourists who've come here during this not-so-hot-and-humid, not-quite-so-crowded season. It occurred to me--maybe on Monday while waiting in line at the Coliseum or on Thursday when we contemplated the long security line at St. Peter's Basilica--that I'm actually enjoying being part of these masses of people, hearing all these different languages, seeing all the faces full of anticipation, curious to see all these awe-inspiring achievements of humanity. Waiting in line to feel small. It seems to put people in a good mood. Thoughtful. Happy. Smiling. Putting our lives in perspective. Taking the long view.

Along with these folks. . .

. . .Jim as tourist on Spanish Steps.

     

Anita and Frauke

  For my generation at least, history inhabits and haunts every corner of Germany. So many places we visited--Potsdam, Wannsee, Dresden, Nuernberg, Berlin, The Wall and Checkpoint Charlie--are fixed in our collective memory as That Time of world war, horror, starvation, extermination, and finally liberation and the Iron Curtain (what an image that is!).

  That Time I was born into, when My People were at war with My People.

   A time, as Jim likes to remind me, as far removed from our children's experience as WWI was from us at their age.

   As the daughter of German immigrant families, I have been reluctant to consider certain questions from this close up. Were my cousins, those whose grandparents did not emigrate to America, whose fathers and brothers were drafted into the German rather than the U.S. army, whose mothers tilled the land while their husbands and sons were off being wounded, dying--were these German-speaking cousins my enemy? Did they know about the camps? Did they point guns at the fathers of my friends?  Was something in me tainted by association? Did I have a special responsibility to make sure this never happened again?

  These were some of the questions I hoped to exam during the two weeks I drove and walked and listened and talked and ate and drank late into the night over glasses of good German wine with my lovely, kind and generous cousin Frauke Rademacher-Heidemann. Frauke was also born into war, two years before me, 1939. She also grew up asking questions, determined to do what she could with her life to bring peace and understanding among the world's peoples.

   Frauke showed me not only all these places in Germany familiar to you, but also places you've probably never heard of, familiar to Frauke and me because we share an ancestor, our great-grandfather Garrelt Antons Fecht.  

   We visited family in Wiesens and Aurich in Ostfriesland--farm villages too unimportant to be fixed in imaginations much beyond our own, a region so far north and west toward Holland that it claims its own language, Fresen. Together we recalled names--Anna and Anton, Jacob and Jans.  And especially my father's name Fecht--rare in both our countries, yet appearing over and over in the little cemetery surrounding the church (c.1500) where our great grandfather is buried.

   And we shared stories about what life was like here and there--as children, as young adults and now as older women--looking back  at Germany and the lives of two of her descendants. Two weeks to change that impersonal label "second cousin" into something more like "sister."