The blurry-train-in-motion motif has been relied upon time and again on our trips to Europe; my only excuse might be that with the novelty of train travel, I desperately want to exemplify not only our reliance on it but also the delight we gain from it. So, while I’m aware of the redundancy, I search for a scene that will capture a moment of my 2nd favorite form of travel (first would be bike riding), and hope for the best. A simpler explanation would be that all of this content is nothing more than breadcrumbs, left for future Caroline and me to trace our movements across time and relive things that I’ve given weight to and believed important. This theory is likely full of holes because, in my experience, people, once they reach the age of approximately 75 years, begin losing the nostalgia of looking back upon their lives. Not that they don’t treasure the past, but they no longer need markers as the most important events are compiled in their heads, and their sense of focus seems to point inwards. This has me thinking about how outside stimulus grows dull in their view, and that the gaze outward fades, leading to the question: Is this part of the process of moving closer to death?

There are different vibes to be found among people, something I would have thought to be too full of “New Age” distinctions at other times of my life, but it’s possible I’m starting to understand this phenomenon better as I grow older. Thirty-five years ago, after meeting Caroline, my poor self-esteem left me feeling hostile about meeting her mother, father, and godmother, Helga Hennemann. You see, my mother-in-law was a doctor, my father-in-law was a judge on Germany’s Federal Court of Justice, and my godmother-in-law (if such a designation exists) was an upper-level executive with Hoechst A.G., the world’s largest chemical manufacturer. As a high-school dropout with the anger of inferiority raging in my attitude (relics of my punk past), I couldn’t understand why these people of high distinction cared a lick about meeting me. My thought at the time was that they were all suspicious of the “cowboy idiot” hoodwinking Caroline. What I didn’t understand and couldn’t see in myself was that they were likely gravitating towards this person who could have reminded them of their own youthful curiosity and how awkward they might have been at an earlier age.

For more than 25 years, I’ve worked hard to avoid people who I believed were only being polite towards Caroline by insisting I accompany her on visits. They know how passionate I am about politics, social issues, education, acculturation, love, exploration, and the constant pursuit of things that fuel our curiosity. Sadly, this wasn’t something they could voice when they were in their mid-50s, nor could I question it as I was only then starting to close out my 20s, but now they are willing to share those earlier impressions or engage me in conversations that focus on those strengths. Today, I’m honored by the respect they had then and still have to this day. If anything, I’ll probably grow older with the regret that I couldn’t see them as anything other than antagonists until they were well into their 80s. What a shame it is to be myopic, even somewhat blinded, by our insecurities until it’s almost too late to repair what could have been much more satisfying relationships.

There were the clues right there, just as I found on my mother-in-law’s bookshelf back in 2021, with Hanns’ bookshelf some years ago, when I learned he had an affection for the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, Theodor Adorno, Umberto Eco, and others. On Helga’s bookshelf, there are a few books she decided to keep after moving into the assisted living facility where she currently resides. There is Stefan Zweig, the neo-romantic, Henry Miller, who was provocative and a bit transgressive, a title from Walter Benjamin, and there is Charles Baudelaire and his Les Fleurs du mal, in English The Flowers of Evil, and for the first time I’ve learned the German title, Die Blumen des Bösen. Standing out as a glaring connection between Helga and me, Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, the precursor to one of the dozen most influential books on my intellectual development, Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. From Helga’s bookshelf, I hope to learn something more from her perspective as I order the books, The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure, by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Stefan Zweig’s Decisive Moments in History: Twelve Historical Miniatures.

About our visit today: a walk on the property, through the forest, lunch in their guest dining room, and coffee in Helga’s small flat covers our time in Kronberg. The conversation moved in and out of German and English, discussing travel along with everything and nothing. Even at 85 years old and having suffered a stroke, Helga is still the dynamo who wants to do it all and remains an inspiration to Caroline of what it means to be a strong, independent woman.

From a bus in Kronberg, to a train into Frankfurt, and on foot across Römer, we utilize our limited time to connect as frequently as possible to the people important to us. First, a stop to photograph iconic sites we’ve seen a thousand times before.

And then it was on to Jutta for some mom time between mother and daughter, with a bit of son-in-law thrown in for laughs. For a couple of hours, down in the lobby of Lebenshaus, we chatted with Jutta, told her of our visit with Helga, how we’d see Hanns the next day, and of our upcoming trip to France. After bringing her upstairs to join the others for dinner, Caroline and I took the opportunity to grab a bite to eat, too.

Rather unexpectedly, we were able to skirt across town towards Bornheim for a trip to Döneria, after I had been fairly certain we’d not be able to carve time out during this trip to visit the home of my current favorite Döner Kebab. But here it is, glorious and perfect, the greatest combination of everything that makes for an awesome Döner. While Caroline didn’t order her own, claiming she wasn’t all that hungry, she certainly enjoyed every bite I shared with her. Following this gastronomic miracle, we dragged ourselves back to Heddernheim to finish the night with Klaus and Stephanie, another full day without a moment wasted.

Hot update coming in: Here I was, starting to review my notes about our drive to France and identifying the images I would share. It was then that I saw a stray note that was meant for this day, and what a monumental event that was, almost neglected on these pages. You see, when we arrived back at House Engelhardt after dinner at Döneria, we found Klaus was away for judo practice, and before anything else was able to transpire, I turned into the kitchen following Caroline. What I’d missed was that as she went to the other chair to take off her shoes, she’d dropped her bag in my chair. I transitioned into a sitting position without a clue that it wasn’t to last but the briefest of milliseconds. Unfortunately for me, a knitting needle in the bag was strategically sitting upright so that my left butt cheek received a skewering, which in my mind’s eye, or ass, felt like it went for bone. I can’t say I actually sat down but sprang up like Jack leaping from his box, only there wasn’t any cutesy song accompanying my plaintive cry. I was seriously punctured, requiring a very physical pull at the needle to remove it from my rear end. Hurting more from the effect on my leg muscle, it took a good long while before I was able to calm down to try and find the humor in the situation. Writing this update on June 9th, it’s almost four weeks later, and while there has never been a sign of infection, the muscle descending behind my knee is still feeling the remnants of pain.

If you knew the German tradition of eating Brötchen in the morning for breakfast, you’d understand how exquisite it is to find this selection of “small breads” made fresh daily. Café Dillenburg offers a variety of carrot, potato, spelt, whole grain, various seeds, and other concoctions of Brötchen that make life worth celebrating. Some people will go to Paris and share a photo in front of the Eiffel Tower or head to Rome to capture the majesty of the Vatican, but here on our third day in Germany, we honor the mighty Brötchen, the king of breads. As I go to this length to crown what is obviously our favorite breakfast anywhere, do not confuse the lowly Kaiserbrötchen. While its name translates to “Emperor Small Bread,” this plain white relic of the past might have been great in its day, but with the advent of a broad diversity of recipes now used for making Brötchen, the old-fashioned Kaiserbrötchen should be retired. Two years ago, with some trepidation about whether our scheme would work, we left Germany with an assortment of Brötchen, hoping we could freeze them before they turned into hockey pucks. It worked so well, except for some freezer burn flavors when we thawed the last bag, that we’ve decided to double the number we’ll stuff into our bags while also adding a couple of whole loaves of our favorite bread and then once home, vacuum packing them to protect them better; so when we pop open the last bag, maybe for Christmas, we’ll be dropping into the delight of what might be the greatest product to emerge from Germany. Yep, we are that passionate about German rolls.

There is something else that I might be more passionate about, which is also from Germany, it is the person that Caroline is. From her beautiful eyes, delicate touch, sweet smile, soft skin, wicked intelligence, occasional wit, subtle sense of humor, nerdy inquisitiveness, rare combativeness (even though I insist it is too frequent, or is there all the time if my argument requires hyperbole), and ten thousand other qualities, maybe more, that endear her to me. When I smile at this photo, I see the same woman on a train looking at me with loving eyes, starting about 35 years, 10 months, 3 weeks, and 4 days ago. I suppose if I had one wish about this three-and-a-half-decade-long relationship, it would be that everything and every moment would have been perfect without the flaws that arrive with disagreement and emotional outbursts that veer into anger, because when I swoon in Caroline’s love, I know how fortunate my life has been to be sharing so many crazy experiences we’ve been gifted with.

While we’ve only been in Germany a mere 48 hours, our paths are already diverging. While Caroline will remain in Frankfurt, my trek out of the city is taking me to Gelnhausen.

This relatively tiny, nearly 1,000-year-old town sits about an hour away from Frankfurt on what is popularly known as the German Fairy Tale Route. If that sounds intriguing to you, look it up, as it has something to do with the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Believe it or not, Germany is about more than Oktoberfest, raves, wine, Mercedes, and deep thinkers with bushy eyebrows. I’m here to meet with an old friend I’ve not seen face to face in almost exactly 30 years. A strange thing happened back then in the mid-1990s: our friend Olaf had moved to England, though somewhere back in those foggy memories, he also lived a while in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Helsinki, Finland.

Meanwhile, Uwe (Atom Heart/Atom™) Schmidt sought refuge in Santiago, Chile, and Michael Geesman first escaped to Berlin before finally landing in Bülow, Germany. Funny enough, less than 20 miles (30km) away, I’d spent some time in nearby Schwerin about six months after the fall of the Berlin Wall at a tech conference introducing East Germans to Western computer tech. The deal is, Schwerin and Bülow are well off the beaten path, and while Caroline and I had made it to Lübeck, Lüneburg, and Binz on the German island of Rügen, places surrounding the Bülow area, we were far enough away that our travel schedules wouldn’t allow for the carving out of an extra eight hours to visit Michael in his remote outpost.

Today, that equation finally changed as Michael took the time to drive the 325 miles (520km) south to Gelnhausen, where his parents live, so the two of us could meet again. While Michael was willing to come to Frankfurt, I understand enough about where he’s been living for decades now to know that driving into a city such as Frankfurt would be a stressful exercise, so I told him that I’d take the train to meet him in the town he’d grown up in. No coffee shop, no bar, nobody’s home, he picked me up at the train station, and we drove up a mountain to a forest trail above town for a walk in the woods.

Rarely, over the past 30 years, have Michael and I not been in contact. Skype has allowed us to be relatively consistent in chatting with one another, and then there were the care packages from Bülow, where Michael has sent Caroline and me 3D printed cat-butt cookie molds, a giant plastic frog that wears a crown, greeting us every day we do dishes or make a meal, and a few other trinkets. But here we are today, decades later, and finally closing the gap between voices that never aged and the reality that faces have certainly changed.

Back in Frankfurt, Caroline is again spending part of one of her days of vacation meeting with Claudia, who has traveled south from the Köln (Cologne) area so the two could meet. While these two gifted and ambitious women met, I had to excuse myself due to my meeting with Michael Geesman. To Claudia, whom I am fully aware enjoys meeting with me too, my apologies that I couldn’t dip in, but after you traveling twice to Frankfurt, I hope (no promises) that Caroline and I will make the effort the next time we are in Europe to pass through North Rhine-Westphalia to visit with you and Jo (sounds like Joe to my English readers and is typically short for Joachim). As for how the day passed for Caroline and Claudia, that will be up to my wife to share details of, if she decides to do so.

While the name of Gelnhausen sounded familiar, it wasn’t until Michael and I got to the old town center that I realized that I’d been here before. Returning to the States, I took the time to look up those details. Back on June 1, 2021, I first visited this place, though it could be possible that I passed through prior to meeting Caroline, too, but this was when I first wrote of Gelnhausen. As a matter of fact, I’d already prepped these photos before looking for the previous reference, and so only now am I seeing my overlap of photos I’ve shared between postings.

This one image, an overview I often aim for, is the nearly identical photo I shot four years ago, though the older one is lit better. But I’m not here to contrast then and now.

The image of me I never imagined, sporting a rotundness I seem to easily ignore, unless confronted with a perspective I choose to pretend doesn’t exist.

More important than sightseeing, Michael and I are strolling through the world he grew up in and are simply using the environment as a backdrop to chat.

Moving along, we connected the dots from our shared past, starting in or around 1987, possibly as far back as 1986, as we had a mutual friend with Uwe Hamm-Fürhölter, and with Michael remaining in Germany after Caroline and I left, he’s been meticulous in keeping up with the direction and outcomes about many of the people we’d both known, or known of.

Just as I’ve turned to the headspace I can occupy while writing, Michael has embraced the world he finds while kayaking out on rivers and lakes.

What we didn’t stumble into was where common ground currently exists between our perspectives, likely because covering such a large delta of some 30 years was monumental. So many years ago, it was computer graphics, techno music, and video/film making that connected us; today, it is the ephemeral aesthetics of the world of nature.

When passing through an environment, there are often difficulties in choosing a singular sight to define the vibe of what is being seen. Capturing the big picture is not always easy, so maybe grabbing a fragment will suffice. Upon getting home, there’s the wish, frequently accompanied by regret that I didn’t try harder, that something I shot will have enough character to exemplify a hint of what I feel I was witnessing. Once I believe I have a little something that meets that criteria, I reluctantly offer it here, though I have knowledge of its weakness. Then, time will pass, and soon, a year will have gone by. Looking at the post from that distance, I am then able to understand why an image resonated with me. More importantly, the rarity of the experience strikes hard, and I bask, incredulous, in the awareness that I’ve been one of those rare humans who were able to explore a wider swath of our world.

Maybe I should have asked Michael how he sees this passageway between houses? How many countless times has he descended the stairs on sunny, rainy, or icy days, or walked in the other direction? Does he care about the appearance of things, or does it fatigue his eye in much the same way that cinderblocks and asphalt numb our senses in Phoenix, Arizona?

Agreeing that I’d enjoy a coffee, Michael suggested we visit his boyhood home, where his mother could make us something to drink, and on the way, we’d stop at a bakery to pick up cake for us and his family. While I have a vague memory that I’d met Michael’s brother, does he have more than one? I’d never met his parents. I can’t say they gave Zwei Scheisses that I was visiting, not that I was expecting fanfare, just a modicum of slight interest. Writing this, I feel like a needy child, likely a reflection of how we put on such airs in America as though a minor celebrity were entering someone’s home. Here in Germany, the pragmatism of “I don’t know you, I needn’t acknowledge your existence,” is just the way it is. Oh well, nice view from the Geesman balcony, where cheesecake and coffee were had.

Frau Schnecke macht durch Die Hecke – Mrs. Snail goes through the hedge. The German works better as snail and hedge rhyme, but it’s also ambiguous, as it could also imply that Mrs. Snail pees in the bush. The other snail statement translates to: The snail is in no hurry, why? Because. Sketches from the mind of Michael Geesman. With this, it was time for me to return to Frankfurt for a dinner date with Klaus and Stephanie, to meet up with Caroline again, but fortune was not on my side. The trains at the Gelnhausen Bahnhof were not running due to a fire near the tracks somewhere else, and after three cancellations, I opted for a taxi.

Since I was paying the $100 fare anyway, I invited a young coder, working on an artificial intelligence project for a large bank, to join me for the ride to Frankfurt so he could continue to a city in the north where he works when not doing his job remotely. Not only did I learn about how AI is quietly being implemented without great fanfare, but also without the dystopian hysteria that is the otherside of the story in the U.S. Then he shared how AI has made a huge impact on his brother’s career as a molecular biologist following Google’s open-sourcing its DeepMind project and how through the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute over 200 million predicted protein structures, almost all known such structures, were shared through the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database. Learning about this work, it was well worth the cost of the taxi and the knowledge this young man dropped on me.

While old farts (curmudgeons) rail against “globalization” I’ll celebrate the diversity of everything it has brought us. From the Sichuan duck tongue dish we shared years ago in Los Angeles, our recent taste of Berlin-style döner kebab in Phoenix, to enjoying Tapas from Spain here in Frankfurt. This traditional Spanish drinking food has become popular nearly everywhere, just as we’ve been witnessing taco shops opening across Europe. Electric bikes and cars are proliferating around the world; AI is taking hold everywhere, and renewable energy is expanding globally to fuel a cleaner environment. From my perspective, aside from the idiocy of bickering, dogmatic politicians pandering to intransigent grumpy old people, the future looks amazing.

Following our nice dinner at Ginkgo Restaurant in Bornheim, we walked over to the new location of Eis Christina. On the way, we passed a school where there must have been 50 to 75 handmade banners encouraging students destined for university to do well on their Abitur, or final exams, before moving on to university. While the U.S. flirts with debasing basic education and turning it into a fool’s game on a state-by-state basis of ridiculousness, the “Old World” has established the European Qualifications Framework (EQF) to allow EU citizens mobility between countries based on a common system. I can only hope that rational minds continue to have a voice in front of the nearly 750 million people of the European Union and that those promoting fear and isolation stop making headway into national dialogues.

I’d like to blame the following on jetlag, but the truth might be darker, that being that I’m growing older. But here I was, it’s midday, and I have no interest in taking notes about our travels, nor was I inclined to snap photos. Lethargy was my middle name. Without journal entries, many of the details of our travels would be lost, and that might be okay, possibly, for the family moments, because the truth is, maybe such encounters have largely been written about previously.  On the other hand, I wasn’t just an observer in these moments but also participated, which could be another good excuse for the lack of notes.

We have gathered in celebration of Katharina’s birthday. Aside from the gifts, we celebrated with Klaus’ homemade green sauce with boiled eggs and potatoes, the most traditional preparation of this Frankfurt staple. As you might have gleaned from the first photo, a strawberry tort was the stand-in for the birthday cake.

After spending all morning and afternoon with the Engelhardts, Caroline and I made our way across town for a late-day appointment we’d scheduled with some good friends.

Kaiserstraße in front of the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (Main Train Station) was quite the seedy place decades ago. Today, it’s pleasantly cleaned up. There are still pockets of sketchy types who are milling here and there, but what big city doesn’t suffer such indignities? A notorious red light district once existed mostly to the left side of Kaiserstraße, while every flavor of addict and thug clogged the spaces between, but that was then, and now, after years of gentrification, you may never guess the darker past that was thriving here back in the mid-1980s when I arrived ready to party.

No visit to Frankfurt would be complete without touching base with the person who holds the distinction of being the longest-standing friend I’ve had in life, besides Caroline. This is Olaf Finkbeiner, one of the most curious, ambitious people I’ve known, also one of the humblest.

We met up in the garden for a barbecue and, sadly, not for weed, seeing that only on the rarest of occasions might I imbibe. This bud is a sample of what he’s been cultivating in a modified fridge that will also be the focus of the book he’s currently authoring. Not seeing each other but every other year leaves a lot of ground to cover, and while I’d love to share an entire day with Olaf and his family, we have to make the difficult decision to keep our time with friends brief, hoping they’ll be around for many more years, while we split our time between family pressing into their 90s, our need for novelty found in vacation to new locales, and meeting with those who affirm we are not lost in a world of idiots.

While Olaf and I catch up, Sylvia and Caroline do the same. Before we know it, hours have passed, and it being Sunday, work schedules for those not on vacation demand that evening encounters do not stretch into the wee hours of the morning. Already at this time, I can’t believe that we landed in Germany just the day before. Please keep in mind that the details, or general lack of them, are caused by the delay in recording anything meaningful as we moved through the fog of exhaustion combined with overstimulation brought on by teleporting ourselves from the Arizona desert to a European capital. This situation was being exacerbated by the intense anticipation of what was to come on Thursday after we were scheduled to leave Germany, while remaining in Europe.