WHERE TO NOW?
Today, to avoid fitting back in I wondered where to go next, escaping before I have even returned. But this isn’t so easy, either. One of the things I realized on this trip to my wife Kathe’s hometown, Winsen, as stimulating and as much fun as it was, is that Winsen and nearby Celle are also haunted. For years every visit to Celle was a visit with Kathe’s brother, Volker, who directed a crew of window decorators at an elegant women’s department store, Detmar Muller. Volker died suddenly twelve years ago but whenever I visit Kaffee Kiess and order potato pancakes with apple sauce or Schweine Schulze with its Eisbein, greasy pig’s leg, I think of him. And of course in visiting Winsen where Kathe grew up and went to school I think of her. When with Elke, her best friend, we tell stories of Kathe. Susie and I made a trip to the beach town of Sylt where Kathe and Elke made a class trip together. In short, Germany is becoming haunted for me of people who are no longer there. And when I thought of other trips I could make such as Landour, India where I went to Woodstock, a boarding school in the lower Himalayas, where I have been many times, I now know no one and all the people I have rich memories of have moved to the ends of the earth or have died. Allahabad where I went in the winter months is also haunted as are many of the places I visited with student groups over the years. Each place has warm memories but is haunted at the same time.
I am no different from anyone else, the older I get the more haunted everywhere I go becomes with memories of friends gone or dead. It is the price of being old. But it also colors where I want to travel to next while I can.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 