JULY 2, SUNDAY

HERMANN WAYD

Today I attended a funeral in Baltimore, I think, although I am not sure since I saw it on You Tube. The funeral was for a man whom I never met but had heard about. His name was Hermann Wayd. I watched because he was the brother of Gerlinde Boright, wife of John Boright, whose family is very good friends with the family of Todd Mahy, Susie’s husband. I have gotten to know the Borights through the every other year week long Christmas gathering of the Mahy clan at Rehoboth Beach. We will meet again this Christmas. When I was taking students to India over 30 years Sara Mahy, Todd’s sister went with me one time to Sri Lanka and later Todd went with me to India. This last year when traveling by Amtrak for the month of July I had dinner with Sara in Washington and spend the 4th of July with Lisa Mahy and her family in Bellingham. On this last trip to Europe in March we stayed with Mary Mahy in Geneva. Another connection with Gerlinde Boright is that she grew up in Austria and my wife Kathe grew up in Germany, both immigrants to America and able to compare their American experience in German. The year before Kathe got sick and died we drove with Susie up to New England and spent a week in the cottage the Borights built in rural Vermont close to where John Boright grew up. John Boright spoke at the service.

So this is my loose connection to Hermann Wayd whose journey through life I learned about at the service. So my response is as an outsider trying to puzzle his way through the service that I just experienced. It is my second celebration of life memorial service in the last month. The first was for Liza Burke who suddenly died at 21, as full of life and promise and vitality as it is possible to be. Hermann Wayd died at 83 and his photographs, that were shown during the service, show, and the stories about him told during the service showed, a man who was vitally alive throughout his life. He actually seemed to lead several lives. He grew up in Eisenherz, Austria. His father was a pastry cook and Hermann became a master baker in Austria, then Switzerland, then London and finally opened a number of backeries and restaurants here in the USA. He first had an American wife and then a Jamaican wife. He seemed to celebrate life, not only through his baking but by training other bakers and, of all things, teaching surfing. He played the accordion and harmonica and the drums. He had an infectious smile and in every photograph was actively hugging someone or teaching someone or laughing with someone and thoroughly enjoying himself.

He was at home in Austria, the United States and Jamaica. His service was in a fundamentalist Christian church with pastors from a number of countries. The songs were the fundamentalist Christian songs of my missionary childhood in India and the structure of the service I am sure far, far away from churches in Eisenerz. One man sang beautifully, another man (not a poet) wrote a rhymed elegy, Hermann’s family told stories, his Jamaican wife thanked us for coming. It was an immigrant church service with immigrants from all over the world.

What struck me about the service was how the celebration of Hermann’s life had brought together so may cross-cultural ways of living and worshipping. It brought for me the Austrian experience of Hermann and Gerlinde and all of the Mahy children’s childhood in Vienna, high church and evangelical church, Black and White, my wife Kathe’s German experience and shift to this country along with so many people who were there, it seemed to me to be the richness of the immigrant experience in the United States. I am grateful for the experience of Hermann’s life and all that he made me think about.