NOVEMBER 8, MONDAY

CELLE MEMORIES

Yesterday Susie and I went to the bus stop by the church in Winsen and paid 3.60 euros apiece to ride to Celle. Celle is a beautiful old German town where almost all the stores and houses in the center of town, clustered around the huge white Schloss (castle),

in a park, surrounded by a moat, are Fachwerk cross timbered buildings with even modern buildings built to that style.

The first Hanoverian king of England and Hannover, George the I, married Sophia Dorothea, of Celle. She was the mother of George II with Americans remembering George III who refused to let the American colonies go. It was a loveless marriage, George I, a knucklehead according to his mother, took up with a mistress, and when Sophia, herself fell in love with a nobleman, he was murdered and she was locked up for 30 years in the Lüneburger water castle of Aiden on the bank of the Aller river. But because of this connection to the kings of England, Celle was unbombed by the British during the Second World War even as Hannover was destroyed. So it remains a beautiful, medieval town.

But yesterday, a gloomy, cloudy day, the delight that I have always felt when walking through Celle was muted because this was my first visit back since Volker, Kathe’s brother, whose town this was, died. Dettmer Mueller is a large elegant department store close to the white Schloss where Sophia Dorothea lived as a girl. For most of his life Volker was responsible for the window displays at Dettmer Mueller and for presenting the store in the best way, a very important job, as important as decorating the Fifth Avenue windows of Lord and Taylor in New York. After retiring he went along on boat trips on the owner’s yacht to Denmark and they had wild adventures with each other. My son Tom and his family spent a wonderful ten days in Celle with Volker hosting us ten or so years ago. And I and Susie have walked the streets with Kathe looking in on elegant store after elegant store. Susie showed me some of Kathe’s favorite shops yesterday.

And Susie and I had potato pancakes with applesauce in Kaffee Kiess, an elegant coffee shop, where Kathe’s father would read the paper when he came to town years ago and where we brought Tom, Kathy, Caroline and Hannah on their first morning in Germany for an elegant breakfast. Not far away is the apartment built by a famous Bauhaus architect that Volker filled with beautiful objects.

So the town is beautiful but haunted. I know that I am not the first person haunted by the loss of a person or persons they love. We all are, or will be. The fully alive present slips away into the past and then we are haunted by it. It is the price of love, the price of delight, the more intense the present, the more it will haunt us as it slips farther and farther away.

And so that is what I felt yesterday. Volker won’t surprise us with breakfast brotchen in the morning, Kathe won’t find a pair of expensive travel slacks she can’t live without, Hannah and Caroline won’t come wheeling around the corner on their rented bikes. Susie and I enjoyed our potato pancakes with applesauce but they didn’t taste the same.

So the real issue now is not wallowing in the past or even letting go of the past, because we can’t. The question is how to transition to being warmed by the past, to being enlivened by memory rather than saddened by it. The issue for me and for Susie is how to feel delighted by the energetic presence of Kathe, here and everywhere, by Volker’s exuberance, by my grandchildren’s laughter as I feel their presence in the present. The question is how to shift from being haunted to being filled with the warmth and delight of good, good memories.