CELLE
We caught a ride with Heinrich and Elke, the friends we had come to visit, to Celle. Heinrich was going to a doctor’s appointment.
The owner of the Hertz shop, Steve, a big man with a big laugh, had us fill out our contract and showed us our car, a sleek new car with a company name we had never heard before. In fact, almost everything about the car we had never heard before. No key, you push a button. No gear knob, just a button to slide. In fact, it only looked like a car with a steering wheel, it was actually the latest model of an oddly programmed computer with wheels. We had no more idea how to drive it than how to drive my laptop. We couldn’t turn the radio off. We couldn’t make the GPS work. We sat in the parking lot a long time, being visited several times by Steve whose directions we couldn’t make work. Finally he drove us around the block and showed Susie what to do (I am not going to touch the thing) which gave us enough confidence to start off. Slowly we warmed up to this computer on wheels. It recognized every change in the speed limit, which seemed to be every 300 yards, and grunted at us if we went slightly over the speed limit or if we went too slow, or it yipped if another car was too close and announced in whatever language we chose—German, French, Italian, English—we chose English, when to turn and which lane to be in and how long before we would reach our destination. We managed to drive to the center of Celle and later back home to Winsen. We had become fond at our little rolling computer.
Celle is another beautiful town. Because it was the home of Sophia, who was mother to the Hannoverian royal line who became, along with Hannover, the kings also of England, the Georges, much resented by the American colonies, Celle, during World War II was not bombed by the British or the Americans so all of the fachwerk houses from the 15 and 16 hundreds remain as they were, with elegant shops on the first floor but otherwise unchanged from hundreds of years ago. Even the streets are the old cobblestones.
Susie and I wound our way through the town to Kaffee Kiess and old fashioned restaurant on the square where my wife, Kathe’s, father used to bring her as a girl from Winsen on market days. We had a ritual meal of potato pancakes and applesauce as we always do and felt Kathe’s presence beside us.
In the late afternoon we returned to Winsen, napped, and then had tea with a number of old ladies at other tables, some playing cards, in Nebenan, the church run cafe beside the church run by volunteers serving tea and homemade cakes with the proceed going to church work.
Finally we went to Rewe, an inexpensive grocery store just down the street from our apartment and bought readymade soup and brotchen and had supper. At ten o’clock, not Marshall time, Winsen time, we were ready for bed.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 