Wednesday, December 17, 2014


  When I was five or six, Lake Bonaparte was just about exactly at the center of the whole round world.
            From the roof of our boathouse, you could clearly see that the  world was flat on top, with a plastic dome  that came down to the horizon all around to keep you from falling off the edge … if you ever went that far. 
   But if you lived near the middle of the world, why would you ever go away?   
         Then one day, my mother told me we were going to move. 
      My Great Grandfather Dr. Drury had our house built when he came to practice medicine in Natural Bridge, and both my mother and my grandmother were born at home there, but for all I knew about such things, the house had simply grown in this place and had itself given birth to us all.     
   The house  is a fairly simple  post-Victorian with the  notable embellishment being the brass statuette of what I have been  told is the muse of poetry. Sixteen or eighteen inches high, on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs  … so when you slid down the bannister you had to jump off quickly  toward the bottom, or come to a tragic end. 
       
     
   When my mother announced that we were going to move from Natural Bridge , I was dumbfounded, bewildered, and flabbergasted.  I asked her just  how we were going to  move  our HOUSE.  
         I understood her to say then that  a big truck would come along with a WIND MACHINE.  And the WIND MACHINE would BLOW  the house up onto the truck.   
       
  When  my mom was in her nineties , I finally brought up the subject of our move.    Mom denied that she ever said that stuff about a WIND MACHINE blowing our house up onto a truck;  and I am sure she didn’t.   It would have been totally out of character for her.   
        The disappointing  actual move was the end of my natural-house theory, and shook my conviction that Lake Bonaparte was the center of a world that is round underneath and flat on top, with a plastic dome that keeps us from going over the edge.   I have gone over the edge more than once .   
  

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Escape from Christmas

 From the time I was seven or eight years old,  I would get sick most every Christmas.  I suppose it started with my  loss of faith in Santa Claus, and my  disappointment  at not getting the big gifts I wanted.   What greedy child would be happy with a Ukulelle when  he  had hoped  for a guitar?   After all, it isn’t like I asked for a pony!
 
   Other than that ukulele, the only Christmas present  I remember right now, was the  miniature “spy” camera   I  got in my stocking when I was fifteen, and never used until I took it along on my junior year abroad in Austria.
 
             For the Christmas/NewYear holiday that year John Irving, Eric Ross, and I had booked a room  in the Post Master’s pension, right at the foot of the ski slopes at Kaprun,  which had very little snow cover at the time.  If any spy photos from that ski trip had survived,  they would have shown broken skis.
 
      Because of the poor snow at Kaprun and just about anywhere in Austria that year …. a year of winter olympics in Salzburg …  we three left Kaprun temporarily, taking the  bus to the train to  a town further up range, where we caught another bus that  took us up  a long steep valley to a  hamlet built around the terminal base for a gondala the size of a railroad car that was used for pulling timber off the slopes of a long draw  that was another twenty   miles up a roadless swath  to a lodge at the foot of Grossglockner, the highest mountain in Austria.    From the lodge, you could walk  up the talus slope and ski back the lodge, or ski the twenty miles down valley under the gondola line.
      There was plenty enough snow under Grossglockner,   but it was so cold up there, that as soon as we could step outside the lodge and put our skis on, we had to take them off and go back in for tea with rum.
  
      The next day we took the gondala ,the bus,   the train , then a bus again, back to our rooms in the post master’s pension at the foot of Kaprun’s milder mountain, where we tried to ski again, despite the nearly naked slopes.
 I hit a fence while  falling in an attempt  to  avoid some bare rock. I broke one ski … which is as effective as breaking both.
  
    We three took a break from trying to ski.    We ate, slept, and drank.  We took steam baths.  When it snowed a little bit, and they didn not plow the streets of Kaprun, we held on to the rear bumpers of unsuspecting cars, and skidded around the streets on or boot heels.
     Alone on foot Christmas eve, I strolled around Kakprun, and stopped to watch a  church service from outside the doors,  which were wide open and imploring.

      Why was I … why AM I … suddenly smelling butterscotch cookies?  Is that priest  fueling the incense burner with butterscotch cookies?  Are butterscotch cookies the communion wafers in this church?

        No, it is just the pungent memory  of Christmas Past:
       The Christmas eve when my Sunday school teacher Mister Hutter  had  invited us kids out  to his farm. It was probably not functioning as a farm then, though I suppose there were chckens, because Mr. Hutter was a poultry science professor, who is remembered for having developed the famous Cornell Barbecue sauce, which is still used by many a fire department at fundraisers.  We were invited to the farm on Christmas Eve  in order to wrap  gifts of toys and food which we would put in baskets that we snuck onto the porches or front steps of the local, rural poor … then running back to the car,  parked just out of sight.
        When we got back to the farm house after a few such raids,  Mrs. Hutter was   baking butterscotch cookies. The smell ot hot sugar hit me with such a Tsunami of nausea that, right there in the kitchen, I lost my cookies before I could even eat them.
    
  
        I don’t know if there were any actual butterscotch cookes anywhere near me that Christmas eve in Kaprun, but with odor ghosts threatening invisibly and Church bells all around  ringing,   I hurried back to the  Postmaster’s pension.   
   It snowed a little more the day after Christmas,`so I rented a pair of skis.
     But  on my  last run … a little too late in the day  to notice some bare granite … I broke another ski.

         So the next day Eric and I  checked out of the pension again, collected the lunch sandwiches  we had already paid for at the hotel,   and headed off hitch-hiking toward the   coast of Italy.
  
     The first day we were passed by  truck after  truck, carrying snow from the peaks to Salzburg for the olympics.
    We got very few rides that first day  and ended up sleeping in a corn crib … which was enough of that sort of thing for Eric.  He turned around and hitched back  to Kaprun the next day.
     I myself detoured to Germany and  look up Peter Kruger,  a German friend at the University in Stutgartt.
        I hitched only so far as the next town  and went the rest of the way to  Stuttgart  by rail arriving late on New Years Eve.
           
                   The university was not in session   and   I couldn’t find Peter Kruger in the phone directory.
     With help  at the railroad station I found a room in a household  a short walk away.
       Outside the pension, a jolly group of roving students saw me with my rucksack and invited me along, but I declined, and checked into the pension about fifteen minutes before  midnight. The Frau put me in my room abruptly, then went back to her family celebration.
  At midnight I watched the fireworks  from my window.
         Next day, I bought a train ticket to Vienna.

                But the train wouldn’t leave for another six hours so I sat down in the station restaurant and ordered a bowl of Liver Dumpling Soup:  a grey broth with a grey, fist-sized  dumpling half sunk in the middle of it … a homely comfort food for which I often stopped in for at the WestBahnhoff station near my room Vienna .  

     The only other person eating there at the time was a kindly smiling older man who asked if I was an American and where my travels were taking me and  if I was a fan of The Reader's Digest.  Learning that I had to wait six hours for my train, he invited me to his apartment for tea and to look at his Reader's Digest collection.
   So O.K.  I was young,  far cuter than I am now,innocently appealing, and ignorant.  
       His room had a cot, a chair, and a hot plate.   He made  tea, and we sat on his cot to read a "most unforgettable character "story… which I don't remember.
          He put his hand on my thigh and I lifted it off. Though his advance was a surprise to me, the scene was not as awkward as it might have been …unless it was more awkward than I remember … but I do remember clearly that my friend said  he guessed it wasn’t his lucky day;  and  I think we even read another unforgetable character  or “life in these United States articles.

       When my train time came near, I left politely and went back to  grey Vienna with its bare streets and liver dumpling soup at the Westbanhoff.
 
       Now, as I recall the year in Austria … I realize that I actually DIDN’T get sick that Christmas.
                 I don’t  want a pony anymore,  I have a guitar, and  too much other stuff , but   I have been ill for the last two Christmases, and I  may be ill again this Christmas too. I’ll stay home, and you can go shopping if you wish to.