VATTER
On Saturday Elke and Heinrich were invited to a 90th birthday party of an old friend and I stayed in Winsen. It was probably my one chance on this trip to have breakfast in Vatter a chain of bakery/restaurants across Germany, but a place so cozy and beautiful with racks of bread behind the counter and round tables for people who wanted to sit for awhile that it feels like a local village restaurant. As at other German bakeries, every morning, starting at 6 a.m. there is line of people coming to get fresh break and crusty brotchen for breakfast that is eaten at home with cheese and cold cuts.
But I was there for a hot breakfast of two fried eggs, a brotchen, butter and jam, fried bacon along with orange juice and coffee. I sat for a long time luxuriating in a room full of old friends meeting to sit and talk to each other. Then I walked home, stopping at a store with a Lotto sign out front, playing the same family birthday numbers that brought me, five numbers right, $3000, fifty years ago as I was passing through Winsen on my first trip back to India, enough money to buy us a one year old tan Volkswagen bug with a sun roof, yet the same birthday numbers have, since then, cost me quite a bit as I’ve never even again gotten even 3 right. But this seems like an auspicious time to win again so I signed up for twice a week drawings with great anticipation.
The rest of the day I spend connecting to home over the Internet as I have been trying to make my house available to buyers. It is surreal to be in both Germany and Marshall at the same time after a lifetime in which they were so distant.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 