Letter from the Vineyard

Alvin Berkun was, for many years, a member of the Board of NICC, the parent organization of Odyssey, which was, for many years, my client.  We met at various functions; I didn’t know him well.  He seemed an amiable chap, a rabbi from some congregation somewhere with some kind of reputation which had put him on the Board.

What I did not know, until Saturday, was that Alvin had retired as the Rabbi of the synagogue in Pittsburgh that was the target of a horrific shooting.

His wife was not feeling well Saturday morning, so Alvin did not attend services, opting to stay home with her.  So, he was not with the congregation when a man charged in with AR-15 style gun and killed 11 of Alvin’s former congregants.  Allegedly, the shooter is man named Robert Bowers, who allegedly told police, as he was carried out on a stretcher, wounded, after wounding four policemen, that he wanted all Jews dead.

We all sometimes play the game of six degrees of separation; we are only six degrees away from anyone.  In this case, I am only one degrees away from the people who died.  They were Alvin’s people and I know Alvin, not well but enough he knows who I am.

It follows upon a man who allegedly sent pipe bombs to Trump critics and follows a man who allegedly killed two black people because they were black.

The word “allegedly” is used because they have not been convicted so there is a presumption of innocence though it seems hard for me, not a news person, to think it was more than “allegedly” when someone is carried out on a stretcher after a gun fight at the location, calling out for the death of Jews.

But I will say “allegedly.”

This is the message I sent Alvin:  There are no words to describe what I feel and what I would like to say to you.  Just know that you and all your congregation are in my thoughts and in my prayers.  At this moment, I am traveling in Europe.  At my next stop, I will continue a tradition I started when I was a young Catholic — to light a candle for things I want to hold up to God.

I will hold Alvin and his congregation up to God in the Abbey just outside my hotel door.

But the thought plagues me as to what I might do in the real world to stop this violence; it is good to hold up the dead and wounded to God, but I am a human being living in the world in which this is happening and I want to know what action I can take to help stop this madness?

The NY Times posted horrific photos showing the results of the famine that is happening in Yemen as MBS, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, pursues his war there, a proxy fight with Iran, and I recoiled from the truth of man’s inhumanity to man and wanted to know what action could be taken to stop this madness.

The ones most affected are children, twisted by extreme famine into horrors of humanity while in Pittsburgh, another human created another horror and what can I/we do to stop this madness against humanity?

Yes, I have voted.  But what more?

Tell me. Please.

            Since arriving in Germany, clouds have hovered over the country every place I have been, Cologne, then Heidelberg and now in Wiesbaden, where I have stopped for a few days as my friends Pierre and Lionel are also here.

My spirits are feeling just a little grey, also.  Nothing is wrong I can articulate; I just have a bit of “the old ennui.”  The world has felt out of focus.

Pierre and I wandered over to SAM, the City Museum of Wiesbaden, which chronicles the history of the town of Wiesbaden and there was also an exhibit about Topf and Sons, the company that made both the crematoriums and ventilation systems for Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps.

There were copies of letters, detailing orders and specifications and warranties and repairs, all normal sounding correspondence for items that were anything but normal.  Each letter closed with, “Heil Hitler!”

There was something very sobering about seeing that correspondence, bringing history into focus in a way that was horrifying.  Men with typewriters did these awful things, organizing the death of millions, at the manufacturer and at the user.  Millions in Reich Marks worth of business in killing and getting rid of Jews, gypsies, gays, “traitors.”

As I moved from placard to placard, my phone went off with news bursts from the BBC, CNN, and NYT announcing that “suspicious” packages had been delivered to Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, not long after a bomb was found in the mailbox of George Soros, billionaire supporter of liberal causes.  Robert De Niro and Joe Biden have been added to the list of bomb receivers as have Maxine Waters as well as John Brennan, former Obama Administration member and now a correspondent with CNN, which is where he received his and CNN had to evacuate its NY HQ.

One of the other news reports I read yesterday was about a white widow with bi-racial children who received a disgusting Facebook message from a young white man in another state she didn’t know, wishing her children dead.  She called the police in her state and his.  He was intercepted by authorities with two hundred rounds of ammunition and plans to shoot up a couple of schools.

Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist [a nephew of Adnan Khashoggi, the notorious arms dealer and second cousin to Dodi Fayed, who died with Princess Diana], was gruesomely murdered in the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul, and his death has set off a Middle Eastern diplomatic crisis that is much larger than I am sure the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince anticipated.

The Saudi story of Khashoggi’s death changes every other day.

MBS, as Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman is known, made a point of shaking Jamal Khashoggi’s son’s hand while offering condolences at his “Davos in the Desert Conference.”  Young Khashoggi was pained to do so.  MBS is widely thought to be the man who ordered his father’s death.  But what was he to do?

Looking at those letters, all with their “Heil Hitlers!” made me remember we all need to remember we all have a part to play in history, even a little bit of one, and I did my little bit yesterday, filling out my absentee ballot, giving it to Pierre, who will mail it on his return to America, before the deadline, as I will be on the high seas on election day.

Go, be part of history.  Vote!

And that might help shake off any of “the old ennui” you might be feeling and bring the world into a bit of focus.

            Friday, I woke, had coffee, and strolled to the Cathedral in Cologne, a beautiful building, much devasted in WWII by bombing, twinned now with Coventry, in England, where that Cathedral suffered from German bombs.  Seventy-three years since war’s end, scaffolding still climbs the exterior of the building and work continues on the edifice.  Inside, it was dark and chill, with light bounding through windows, though the light seemed contained, taunting but failing to bring brilliance to the interior.

At noon, there was a worship service, possibly Mass, though there seemed no Eucharist; I stayed for it after lighting candles, a habit I have had since my Catholic childhood, for things for which I am thankful or for which I am hopeful.  When the service was finished, the Nave was re-opened, and I stared long at the reliquary for the Magi, their relics a gift to the Cathedral from the Holy Roman Emperor, Friedrich I, Barbarossa, as a thank you for support in the siege of Milan.

The Three Kings fascinated me as a child, perhaps because I was cast as one in a Christmas pageant.  “We Three Kings of Orient Are…”

Once reaching cognizance, I never thought of them as real historical characters; they were part of the Jesus myth and here I was, facing a golden object that contained their relics, an object that suggested a medieval artist’s take on the Ark of the Covenant.

Next to the Cathedral is the Roman Museum, a reminder that Cologne began as a Roman fortress city, defending the western boundary of the Empire.

It was somewhere near here that Gaius Julius Caesar, named for his ancestor, Julius Caesar, got the nickname “Caligula,” because as a little boy he was dressed in a soldier’s outfit, including little boots, the Latin word for which came the nickname.

He became the Emperor Caligula and, after suffering some illness early in his reign, seemed to have become quite mad, obsessed with the testing the limits of being Emperor.   Three short years later, the Senate and the Praetorian Guard ended his reign, killing him, so legend goes, with the same number of knife strokes given his ancestor Julius.

Here, you will find one of the world’s most impressive collections of extant glass from the Roman Era.

In another collection, there are the adornments of Roman women, hairpins, jewelry, mirrors.  Somewhere in time, a woman used those hairpins to hold up her hair, the mirror to put on make-up, slipped on a carefully crafted necklace, adorned her wrists with the carefully tooled silver bracelets and went out, to a dinner, to the games?  Did she laugh while reclining on a dinner couch?  Scream with pleasure in the amphitheater as some gladiator met his fate?

Some time, there was a woman who used those things, who lived and whose name we will not ever know but some whisper of her remains in the things she used and wore.   We remember Caligula and not the woman who lived her ordinary life, her whisper unknowingly transported through time.

It is that whisper that haunts me as I move through museums like this one.

An uncovered mosaic graced the courtyard of a Roman villa.  People walked there, on their way, hither and yon; perhaps back and forth through the night, comforting a crying baby or on the way to a meeting with the Provincial Governor.  Living feet walked those mosaics, laid then for the living, not thinking two millennia hence, the mosaic would be looked over by humans, an undreamed of number of generations later.

It is the whispers of the real people, reverberating in time, that makes such a place almost holy, a sanctuary for the ordinary made extraordinary by time.

Robert Surcouf, French Corsair

There is both an aloneness and a sense of exhilaration that comes from traveling alone.  Before I left, I was asked how I could do it? Travel alone?  Mon dieu!

My life has been spent traveling alone from one place to another.  When I was in college, I travelled alone from one place to another to see people. Then, in business, you are thrust into travel to accomplish something.  One has no choice if you are going to do/keep your job. So, I have become familiar with traveling alone.

This is a trip I wanted to make and to do it, I would have to do it on my own.  And here I am.

In Paris, I saw friends; we had dinner twice.

Pierre Alain, a friend of my friend Mary Ann Zimmer, and I had dinner after that and that was the last conversation I had with anyone for several days.

I am my own companion.

My conversations have been limited to people at train stations, those from whom I order food, taxi drivers who are grateful I am carrying a translation app, hotel attendants…

You get the picture.  And I am sure there are people for whom this would be frightening.  It is for me somethings though apps like Google Translate and iTranslate have made it so much easier.

At my hotel in St. Malo, there was a birthday party and people sang “Happy Birthday;” and even if you don’t know the language, it translates.

On the way from a stroll back to my hotel, a woman had a lover’s quarrel on the phone and, that, too, translates.

As I walked through St. Malo, I passed a school and heard the young squeals of a new generation discovering life’s pleasures and it was reassuring.  For a moment, I stood outside and reveled in their joy.

In the harbor, boats rock, and the town is preparing for the Route du Rhum, a race that happens every four years between St. Malo and Guadeloupe.  It is the race’s fortieth year and everywhere you see preparations.  When the race begins, a week or two from now, I will be gone, off to some other place and will watch the results because, having been here, I feel connected.

Before I left, I had a conversation with my good friend of long standing, Larry Divney, and we parsed the difference between aloneness and loneliness.  I am alone, and I am not lonely, blessed with knowing there are lots of people who care.  They are with me even if not physically and, in that confidence, I can wander the world.

Two days ago, I booked myself on a tour that took me to Pont du Hoc, the American Cemetery and Omaha Beach.  Because I was in a group, it was a very different emotional experience than Verdun, where I was alone.  The group buffered the pain all of us were feeling, I think.

It was all Americans with one Danish couple.

The tour was led by Mike, who sounded all too British and turned out to be Dutch who had lived in England for a long time, lured to France to work three years ago with a start-up, Bayeux Multi-Media Tours, the company I booked.  The drive to Pont du Hoc was illustrated by a video shown on a flat screen above Mike, as he drove.  When it wasn’t on, he filled the silence with stories.

There were two high school best friends who every five years or so, created a trip just for themselves.  One is a College Dean, the other works in construction.  They live in different parts of America.  One couple was from Albuquerque and another from Philadelphia.  A young woman was from San Francisco, on a side trip before meeting friends in Rennes and then heading on to St. Malo.   We chatted about that.  Riding shotgun so he could charge his phone was Phil, from Chicago.  There were a few others.

We hear about Omaha Beach and know of the American Cemetery but I had never heard of Pont du Hoc, or if I had, had forgotten – which is a shame because this is where it really began, the first place the Allies began to claw back Europe from the Germans.

The Allies thought there were big guns, capable of firing three miles, captured from the French at Pont du Hoc. The Germans moved them away into a field, disguised them and replaced them with their own guns while leaving wooden decoys to confuse the Allies.  The Brits or Americans would bomb Pont du Hoc and never seemed to hit the guns so on D-Day, a group of Rangers were assigned to take out the guns at Pont du Hoc.  Of the 750 Rangers dispatched, only 225 ever reached Pont Du Hoc.

Under the command of Lt. Colonel James Earl Rugger, those 225 men took Pont du Hoc, secured it and took command of the road, cutting the Germans off.  For forty-eight hours, they held their own and when reinforcements arrived, only 90 were still capable of holding a gun.

In the bunkers the Germans built, I stood looking out the slits and wondered how terrified I would be if I had been a young German soldier waiting for the invasion they knew would be coming.

The Desert Fox, Rommel designed the defenses and would have been commanding the Germans if Hitler hadn’t ordered him to commit suicide because he was suspected of being part of the plot to kill Hitler.

At Pont du Hoc, I stood, alone, looking down at the cliffs the Rangers climbed and nearly doubled over in tears and wonder at the courage of those men.

We arrived at the American Cemetery just as they were lowering the flag.  Taps played, guns were fired as I stared across close to ten thousand graves.  Looking down upon the water, seagulls called, and the waves sounded.  Had it been that serene in the days before D-Day?

The landing at Omaha Beach appeared catastrophic.  As evacuation was being ordered, and a brash American battleship commander ignored the order, plowed his ship forward, turned on a dime, it seemed, and began to barrage the defenders with broadsides.  Four more ships followed, and the tide began to turn.

As I stood on the beach, a young man filled an empty Perrier bottle with sand.  Had his grandfather fought there?  He wandered off, his bottled sand in his knapsack.  Phil from Chicago fought back tears.

Staring out at the water, I felt enormous aloneness and a sense I was standing in history, even as a little girl ran down the beach, her arms flung wide, her blonde air streaming in the wind.

As it happens when traveling, conversations happen.

One of my favorite memories of my first trip to Europe, lo these many years ago, was eating by myself in a restaurant – London, I think, when the people next to me, also young though older than my college self, struck up a conversation with me.  They were from somewhere in America; I have never seen them again and I can still hear her laugh.

Other trips have brought other, similar memories.

My first night in Bayeux the young man who organized dinner seating in the restaurant at my hotel, cleverly sat me at a table adjacent to another man dining alone.  We started a conversation; his name is Eric, from Detroit, a lawyer in Grosse Pointe, actually, also traveling alone on a food odyssey before going to Wiesbaden to visit his cousins there.  His mother had been a German war bride, who, from what Eric says, is still annoyed at the Allies for their bombing.  His reminder that the Germans started the war has limited effect on her views, it seems.

In the bar the last night, I fearlessly struck up a conversation with some Brits, who were working their way back to England from a party in Burgundy.  Eric came in, joined us, and then Eric and I wandered off to one of the few restaurants open on a Monday.  He ate lightly as he had recreated a lunch that a writer had written about when he arrived as the town was liberated from the Germans.  A huge crab, frites, salad vert.  It sounded marvelous.

The Chicken Fricassee tickled my palate and was worth it, accompanied by a little muscadet and made a delightful dinner for me.  As I left the restaurant, I stopped and wished well to a couple from Philadelphia who had been on the Omaha Beach tour with me earlier.

Another set of Brits had arrived at the hotel bar when we returned and long conversations began and then I surrendered to my need to sleep, excused myself and went to bed.

As it happens, Eric will be in Wiesbaden when I am there; we have exchanged emails and he has offered to show me the town where he has spent goodly chunks of his life.

Outside the enormous windows of the train, the French countryside slips by, an ancient stone bridge connecting two parts of a village.  It is gray, with hopes the rain will relent by tomorrow – though it has mostly just drizzled when I have been outside.

Dawn was slow coming this morning and, for a moment, thought my phone was lying to me about the time.  Eventually, as I went down to settle my bill, light began to break across the square outside the hotel.  There, I waited for the taxi which took me to the train station.

It was only fifteen minutes to Pon de Bertagne, a ninety-minute wait for the train to Bayeux and two hours to reach there – a total of six stops between.

Fall is beginning to touch the trees, though that touch is surprising light.

I have now been in France for 11 days – Paris, Verdun, Metz, St. Malo and now Bayeux.  It has never been in my nature [ask my family] to hurry and I am not, hurrying thither and you to see this and that.

At one moment in St. Malo, I thought:  a tourist seeks, a traveler finds.  There is nothing I am seeking, and I am in hope of finding what it is I want to do when I return.  In each Cathedral I light a candle, asking for what good it is, I might still do in the remaining time.  Some kind of wind seems to be at my back.  I am hoping I will know when it blows me to where I belong.

October 10^thwas NATIONAL BRING YOUR TEDDY BEAR TO WORK/SCHOOL DAY.  Yes, really.

If I were in doubt that I was going blog about my Verdun misadventure, that fact alone told me I must.

For those who know me well, it’s no secret I fight, all too frequently it seems, that thing Winston Churchill called “the black dog.” And in the spring of 2009, that old black dog and I were wrestling like there was no tomorrow. Confessing my struggle to a friend when on business in California, she sent me a teddy bear that had once belonged to her brother.  It is known as BearBear.

And he has been a constant in my life.

He’s a well-traveled bear – Costa Rica, most major American cities, the Caribbean, Italy, India, Martha’s Vineyard and, of course, he’s with me now.

Certainly, I know this opens me to a number of raised eyebrows and the confirmation of what many have suspected about my being eccentric.  However, I am told on good authority [I asked Google] that approximately 25% of men travel with their teddy bears. [Who knew?]

When I was a child, I don’t remember having a teddy bear or a binkie.  Maybe, that’s why he means so much to me now. He’s more worn now than he was – all that traveling will do it to you, you know. Just look at me.

If you read my last post, that important thing I left behind in Verdun?

BearBear.  I was sure I had double checked the room before I left and was sure I had BearBear in his place in my knapsack but, as I was on the bus to Metz from Verdun, I reached into my knapsack for something and realized there was no BearBear.

Terror struck my heart and my first impulse was to begin screaming for the bus to stop and turn around.  Calming myself, I did my best to be rational.

I remembered that reception at the hotel I had left was closed between 11 and 5 [I have no idea why].  Going on to Metz, I checked into my hotel, and waited eagerly for 5 and a chance to phone.

What if BearBear had run off to join les mousquetaires Francais de nounours? Or even worse, a thought I would not even entertain:  he had run off to join la Legion Etrangere des ours en peluche?

Patiently, I waited. 5 came and I phoned the number I found on the internet for the hotel, but the call would not go through.

“Your subscription does not support the call.”  Phoning AT&T, they assured me all was fine.  Calling the central hotel chain office in Paris, I kept repeating, “I’ve left something very valuable in Verdun,” in my best broken French.  The kind man connected me to Verdun and it seemed they had BearBear; however, I was not positive as my French, c’est horrible! And somewhere in the conversation I also had to convince him I was not trying to book a room for the following night [a good thing as they were sold out].

Unsure if they really had BearBear, I went out, asked a taxi driver to take me to a good restaurant [options limited on a Monday evening when most things are closed], ended going to the Bistro in the Citadel Hotel where I had an excellent meal of salmon rillettes, cod with lentils, followed by a cheese course, combined with a crisp demi-bouteille of Macon Villages.  When all else fails, good food and wine.

The only way to make it to the hotel when reception was open was to get up and take a 7:05 bus back to Verdun, which I did, getting up at four, wondering, praying, after not really sleeping anyway.

Reaching the hotel at 8:50 in the morning, I used iTranslate to ask the man at the counter if he had my teddy bear?  He brightened and raced to the baggage room and returned with a plush rabbit.

“Non! Non!”  My anguish was unmistakable.  He checked le placard de linge.  No BearBear. My distress was obvious.

Thankfully, he gathered all the staff, including the lovely young lady who had checked me in two days before.  They all awaited eagerly for the outcome of the adventure.

The housekeeper looked at me, smiling shyly, and went back into the linen closet, returned with BearBear and handed him to me.

My joy elicited laughs; they applauded, I nearly wept.  The woman who cleaned my room had, from what I could tell of what they said, recognized his bear magnificence and put him in a special spot, awaiting me.

My relief knew no bounds, my thanks unbridled.

Reunited, we have resumed our tour of Europe.

[Please blame any bad translations from English to French on my apps!]

Looking at the town from the walls surrounding it.

Robert Surcoff, the famous Corsair/pirate.

Sailboats at rest…

Cafes lining a street…

The square in front of the Hotel France et Chateaubriand.

Jacques Cartier, who sailed from St. Malo to discover and found Quebec.

Outside, heavy fog curls around our train as I speed on the TGV back to Paris, arriving at Paris Est. I have two hours to make my way to Paris Montparnasse to board another TGV to St. Malo, close to the border of Normandy and Brittany and I will stay there for a few days, four or five.  St. Malo has been on a list of places to see since I read, “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr, a best seller from two years ago, when I first worked in the bookstore.  If you have not read this World War II story, I recommend it.  It is one of those great reads, remaining with you long after the covers have been closed for the last time.

In Verdun, I spent two days at the Verdun War Memorial and at the Ossuary, the resting place of the bones of 100,000 men, who died in that battle, gathered together in one huge Art Deco building designed in the 1930’s.

It was not my intention to spend two days there.  And it was meant to be.  The first, and only day, I was going to be in Verdun, I spent so much time at the War Memorial I could not get to the Ossuary.  Regretfully, I left the next morning, only to discover I had left something very valuable behind.

So, I returned to retrieve it and took the time to go to the Ossuary, for which I am forever grateful.

The War Memorial lays out the life of horrors the men of Verdun, on both sides, endured.  It demonstrated how they attempted to maintain humanity in inhuman conditions.  They were known as “men of mud” because that is what they lived in, unremitting mud, day in and day out, for months on end, a battle that went on for more than 300 days.  300,000 soldiers, on both sides, died; another 700,000 were wounded, in a battle that decided nothing.  Officially France won the day, and, at the end of the day, it did nothing to move the fate of the war one way or another.  It destroyed Verdun, obliterated Fleury, left widows and sweethearts with dead lovers, mothers and fathers without children, children without fathers.

One letter read something like this: Mother, how could you let me be born into a world that might let me die like this?

It was found on his body later in the day that he had written those words.

Every week, Charles Grauss carved a toy for his daughter, Ghislaine.  They are part of a beautiful collection at the museum.  He did not live to return to see Ghislaine appreciate his gifts; he never saw his daughter after he left for Verdun.

The Ossuary is a silent temple to the dead, silence that seems to pulsate.  To step outside and look across the fields where the armies fought, and hundreds of thousands died, is to, today, to see one of the most beautiful vistas on the planet, a valley, green and verdant, marked with rows upon rows of white crosses, stretching from one side to the other, marking the graves of men who could be identified.  Trees and grass have returned to a land some thought would be forever war destroyed.

The long upper hall of the Ossuary is bathed in a red orange glow from panes of colored glass; the light evokes both the blood shed on the fields below and the hope of heaven that must have been in the minds of men as they clawed through the mud of earth.

Catholics from France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and the United States all collected money to build a chapel on the second level.  Above the altar is a statue of Christ after being lifted down from the cross, agony ended by death.  It seemed a fitting statue for this somber place where agony often ended only in death.

After the Ossuary was open, both Germans and French stood in front of it in 1936, vowing to never let this happen again.

In 1984, the French President Mitterrand and the German Chancellor Kohl came together there.  Mitterrand had been captured by the Germans at Verdun in WWII.  Kohl’s father had fought in the hills during WWI.

They held hands a long time, a gesture of solidarity of what both sides had lost at Verdun, the best of a generation, a world that would never be the same, the seeds of an Allied victory having sowed the field that would become the next war.

Two men, at the beginning of the European experiment, acknowledging the hard road from Verdun in 1916 to that moment in 1984, hands clasped fiercely, the European experiment just beginning.