It seemed in
those days I never lost a moment, I slept a scarce five hours a night, and only
one with a makeup structure of iron cold dead sleep, and that had to settle me
down, like it or not. My last vacation was to Luxembourg, and it had consumed
nearly all my earnings, or savings. I stopped Cody’s reading lesson, I had
given him ten cents for every page he could read without a mistake the past few
months, and jotted down how much I owed him, a sufficient number of dimes had
been accumulated; Shawn never seemed to need assistance with his reading skills.
I had intentions of selling my car, but I had it fixed instead, and wanted to
make one last trip—before being
reassigned to a new military installation in the States—to Garmisch, Germany. And so I put aside my
laundry money and used it for gas of all things, and figured I’d not be any
recluse, although I never was. I found myself a leather bag I had kept for
traveling under my bed, kind of a bag, a suitcase older than Methuselah, and
put one item of clothes in it for each boy and myself.
Garmisch was only a few hundred miles
away, thereabouts, and it was a resort area in the sierras, near Austria, and
so the day was set, the car gassed up, and the twin boys ready, with long
underwear on and me with a dark sweatshirt, a car full of groceries, the
suitcase, and thus, we ended up in the Township of Garmisch, near noon.
After settling our hotel affairs and
having mealtime, we ended up walking the hilly countryside in Garmisch that
afternoon, which was a long weekend, I think the Fourth of July.
There was no snow on the ground, so the
skiing was over for the season, and most of the hotels were half rate, and most
were half empty. Shawn in one hand, Cody with a thump in his mouth, on the
other side of me, we climbed the hillside, when Cody got tired of his thumb,
then it fell back into my hand, Shawn’s never left. The hills were green, and
the path up the hill was of stone, or cement in areas to my recollection, and
alongside the path was a wooden fence.
And Cody and Shawn their mother being of German ancestry, fit right into
the countryside, blond hair, colorful eyes, milky white skin, strong bones.
The meadow glowed; all around the boys
they were luscious in the midst of this enchanting beautiful countryside.
We had stopped along the climb, Cody had
spotted a cow, with a big bell on around its neck, and I think he wanted to
dingdong it. I had little patience with chance things, and Cody ran under the
fence to the cow and Shawn followed him, quicker than a jackrabbit—and it
scared me a bit but I let it be, and Cody jumped back, and Shawn froze in place—the
cow was now huge, not like it was from the distance, and a young boy, above ten
ran up to the boys spoke in German, I could understand some of his words, I
made them out to be, “Don’t fear the cow, he’s friendly, he’s my cow…” thus again,
I left well enough alone lest I doom the
moment of fun running after the boys, and bring more fear into the situation
than need be, and the boy, the German lad, looked at me, and we talked some,
with expressible connotations, more so than pure language of German or English. The
boy kind of bowed and marveled knowing that they, or we were beyond the
deliberate creation of any language, and understood one another. And I
expressed the underlie beauty of the landscape, and the boy smiled and ran off,
and Shawn and Cody, had ever penetrated the German culture, once and for all.
They, the twin boys were only four years
old then, but they knew, kind of knew they could never attain ultimate
knowledge of life at their age, it was all a mystery of beauty, but no less
than life, that beauty and life and their father were all intertwisted, and in
the long range of things, the same non-understandable fabric like the sun
following Cody, that Cody had to take at face value and put aside for another
day, for full understanding.
In fact, it was that evening in the
bar-restaurant, that a fiddler and his son were singing and playing a tune, I
had ordered a beer for me, and some sandwiches for the boys, and a coke, and
they felt so free and connected to having cleared their mind of the day,
serenely joined the fiddle with his son, and danced a tinge to the melody. It
was delightful to see them both, untroubled by real or fancied grievances of
adult life, this evening they had their say, and the last word was theirs.
No: 1065/5-20-2014
