Literary Mining

I stumbled upon Wendell Berry earlier this summer, more specifically, his sixth novel, Jayber Crow. Berry’s novels are set in the fictitious Kentucky farm town of Port William, a locale and peoples so vividly imagined by Berry, the flyleaf includes a detailed map of the region. 

Like his characters, Berry’s roots are deep in the good earth and, as one critic noted, his novels unfold at the pace of depression era rural life. Some might consider that pace ponderous. Others, including me, would describe it as meditative, a reflection, perhaps, of Berry’s equally deep roots in the environmental community.

Bereft of contrived drama, his novels are the trill of cicadas as an unrelenting mid-day heat rustles through the quarter-sections of tobacco; his novels are the bone-numbing chill of early-morning floorboards as winter howls across unobstructed acreage.         

After Jayber Crow, the life and times of Port William’s barber, I moved onto Nathan Coulter, Berry’s first novel (more novella than novel), the early years through coming-of-age of the main character, the younger of two brothers.

The next Berry novel I happened upon – and who knows why the right book appears when the reader is ready – was the oh so evocatively entitled Our Souls at Night, which, in fact, wasn’t by Berry at all, but by Kent Haruf. 

Completed just before his death in 2014 and published posthumously in 2015, the novel and Haruf rose to some prominence in 2017 when Jane Fonda and Robert Redford reunited in the movie of the same name. True to the novel, the movie plot has its flaws – why would a mature woman, so strong and independent in spirit that she would propose sharing the late-night loneliness of her bed with a virtual stranger so suddenly and easily acquiesce to the neurotic angst of her adult son? – but Haruf’s writing is nonetheless remarkable.

As with Berry, Haruf imagined in detail the fictitious town of Holt, Colorado, the setting for all six of his novels, based, apparently on Yuma, Colorado, one of Haruf’s earlier places of residence. And, as with Berry, townspeople can appear across multiple Haruf novels, but never is the integrity of the individual novel’s narrative perspective compromised.       

What Berry is to dustbowl era rural life, Haruf is to small-town America, circa 1960-70’s. One senses social tensions and change simmering just beneath the surface, but as with Berry, Haruf’s narrative voice is principally that of a detached journalist, reporting dispassionately from the bleachers in a style that is strikingly sparse.   

At his best, there are few extraneous words in Haruf’s six novels. He reports no more than the reader needs to know. One quickly adjusts to his forgoing of the clutter of quotation marks – a style that wonderfully supports the dryness of his narrative tone and masterfully focuses the reader’s attention on the essence of the dialogue rather than the structure upon which it hangs.   

I can find no formal acknowledgement of Berry as a primary influence of Haruf, but the similarities are striking. Regardless, thanks to the two, 2019 has been a rich year for reading. But every avid reader knows the joy of striking a new vein of good reading inevitable leads to the disappointment of tapping it out. I’m now back to exploratory mining.             

Recycling a Friendship

By the time I returned to the curb last evening with the green bin, someone was rifling the blue bin. He thanked me for not chasing him away and I thanked him for sparing the bin its refundable empties. At what would have been a natural end of the conversation, he said, “Your name’s David, isn’t it?”

It was over 20 years ago, the first Christmas I took my flugelhorn downtown to busk, I took up position under the canopy of the old Zellers store. As politely as I could, I asked the hot dog vendor who had that concession if he’d mind turning off his radio. “Depends,” he said, “let me hear you play first.”

That season and for the seasons that came before Zellers shut down, Ken and I would chat between our respective deliveries of hot dogs and Christmas carols. I’d look for him when he relocated his cart further downtown, around city hall, to exchange hellos and a quick chat. I haven’t seen a hot dog cart over the last few years without wondering what became of him.

At what would have been a natural end of last evening’s conversation, we spoke for another hour.

My sense of what it means to be a man is tied directly to my father

My sense of what it means to be a man is tied directly to my father
David Morris
Kingston Whig-Standard
16 Jun 2012

It felt odd in mid-May to turn the same age – to the day – that my father was when he dropped dead. It felt even odder the next day to realize that I will now grow evermore older that the “old man.”

I was 23 when he keeled over, unceremoniously and unquestionably dispatched. His parting parental lesson was life’s toughest: how to go through the motions without drowning in the gaping hole that’s appeared in the universe.

Youth is second only to sex on the list of things we don’t associate with our parents. Despite that, I had no trouble grasping, rationally, that 53 is too young an age at which to die. Surpassing his longevity, while continuing to wrestle with what I want to be when I grow up, drives the point home, freshly and viscerally.

In the lead-up to this Father’s Day, I’ve been pondering the curious, if not surrealistic, circumstance of my being my father’s age and my boys, at 25 and 23, being essentially the age I was when he died.

I’m too much of a fatalist to lose sleep dwelling on the odds of history repeating itself, but this faux time warp has me contemplating the relationship of fathers and sons and, more particularly, how we men inherit and bequeath our sense of what it is to be a male.

My father once suggested that, by the time a child reaches puberty, parents have imparted all that will be imparted. If this is true, and I suspect it is, at least partially, then he had taught me all he could long before he died. This would seem to be borne out by my siblings who have been known to comment, usually impatiently, “You’re just like Dad.”

I’m not sure it’s what they intend, but “just like Dad” calls to mind a remarkably self-reliant, consummate jack-of-all-trades.

Over time, without a mortgage, he and my mother stick-built the rambling, two-storey house in which I grew up near Chelsea, Quebec, filling it with five children as they went.

Per the times, he was the family’s sole bread-winner. We never thought of ourselves as poor, there was just never any money. And so, what he didn’t know how to do for himself, he figured out – always masterfully.

When the transmission went on the family car, for instance, he carefully dismantled it, covering the basement floor with rows of impeccably sequenced parts. As he anticipated, he found a stripped gear, which he was able to replace for a couple of dollars, and the reassembled transmission was put back into service.

He worked as a copy editor at The Ottawa Citizen throughout his abbreviated adult life, coming entirely into his element in his last two years as a researcher and writer for the paper’s consumer help column. As his obituary in that column noted, he could speak planetary gears with mechanics as comfortably as he could speak law with lawyers.

At a more profound level, “just like Dad” calls to mind one of the most unflinchingly principled men I’ve known. For a taste: when my oldest sister started elementary school in the early 1960’s in pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec, my father succeeded in having unqualified teachers removed from the classroom – nuns.

Directed at my brother and me, he told parables from his childhood. The most oft-repeated recounted the day he waited for my Uncle Howard to finish cutting the lawn before smugly asking my grandfather for a quarter for the movies. Sensing a flaw in his son’s character, my grandfather gave him the quarter, but not until he had pushed the hand-mower back across every last inch of the freshly-cut lawn.

The point of the story, as I’ve come to realize, wasn’t about money or work ethic, but about the value of a man’s character and integrity.

“You’ll be punished if you do something wrong,” he would admonish my brother and me, “but not nearly as much as if you lie about it.” Nothing more clearly signalled our jig being up than his dismissing us to “go outside, get your stories straight, and we’ll start again.”

I’ve been catching myself staring into the bathroom mirror these last few weeks, searching for signs of the face that I haven’t seen in 30 years.

Is the greying around the fringe the way I remember it? The receding hair line? The laugh lines in the corners of the eyes?

Without question, my sense of what it means to be a man is tied directly to my father and, by extension, to his father. To this juncture, so has my sense of what it means to be a father. But from here on, my boys and I are in uncharted waters.

Au revoir à Avignon

It was perhaps fortunate that we were numb from the seven-hour bus ride from Barcelona to Avignon – a ride that had stretched to eight and a half hours (see my earlier posting: “Life from both sides now”). Beyond the shift in language, it felt as though we had left the known world behind.

Old town, Avignon, the "City of Popes," is one of the few French cities whose ramparts remain fully intact.

It was cool – almost cold – as we made our way through the dark, empty lanes of the walled city. The relentless mistral (you remember: the wind that drove Juliette Binoche’s character to restlessness, if not distraction, in “Chocolat”) had a nagging wintery tinge to it. And after the genteel beauty of Spain, there was nothing to greet the eye but the oppressive, uniform drabness of unfinished stone and concrete.

But, we had committed ourselves.

And so we did our usual bit of settling in, which is to say, we weathered the now-familiar new-to-town blindness.

We first noticed this phenomenon in Munich. One of our earliest impressions of the city was that it was impossible to find a meat shop or grocery store that sold basics like chicken, the protein staple of our diet.

About three weeks in, I was back downtown one afternoon, again wandering Marienplatz and Viktualienmarkt. As if they had suddenly appeared, I counted nine little meat shops all lined up in a row, along a stretch of sidewalk we had covered numerous times.

Within minutes, I had also “discovered” a terrific fishmonger, another couple of butcher shops, and a half-dozen gorgeous fruit and vegetable stands, all of which we are looking forward to revisiting when we return to Munich later this week.

The same sort of thing happened in Avignon, but we now anticipate it.

We spent our first afternoon scouring the old town for a basic grocery store, settling finally for essentials at a shop clearly priced for the tourist trade. A week later, we could only laugh at the number of grocers that had unveiled themselves. We settled on Casino, just outside the ramparts, for our main shopping, and the much smaller Carrefour City, a few minutes from home, for the too-lazy-to-walk stuff.

On our second afternoon, a Sunday, we visited Pont St-Bénézet, the “Pont d’Avignon” of nursery rhyme fame in France and Canada, according to our audioguide. Bracing against the blasts of wind roaring down the Rhône valley, we didn’t doubt the pont’s one-time reputation for travellers being blown off of it. Another aspect of the bridge’s reputation was captured in what was apparently a popular 16^th century saying in France: one couldn’t cross the bridge without encountering “two monks, two donkeys and two whores.”

Marian, sur le Pont d'Avignon. Elle y danse, elle y danse. According to our audioguide, a popular expression in the 16th century, prior to the bridge losing 18 of its 22 arches, was that one could not cross le Pont St-Bénézet (the actual name of the bridge) without encountering at least "two monks, two donkeys, and two whores."

The following day, the mistral subsided and spring came to Avignon.

Approximately 12,000 of Avignon’s population of 95,000 live within the ramparts of the ancient city. That includes an envigourating base of young people that attend l’Université d’Avignon, also housed within the walls. Just as at home, as day-time temperatures crept up into the low- to mid-20s, the human race again blossomed.

On our penultimate weekend, we took advantage of beautiful Saturday afternoon weather to wander Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, the neighbourhood at the other end of the Pont d’Avignon, before it lost 18 of its original 22 arches.

Printemps des Familles was in progress, an event that reminded us of the Teddy Bear Picnic at home, with various kids’ activities taking place in the neighbourhood’s many small courtyards and squares. We looked in on the circus training activity and we were immediately welcomed by the youngish woman running the event to try our feet on the tight-wire.

Marian tries her feet on the tight-wire during Printemps des Familles in the Villeneuve lez Avignon neighbourhood.

It was one of those fleeting-but-beautiful, multi-lingual encounters that makes me love travelling. She most certainly helped shape our impression of France and I expect we shaped hers – for better or worse – of Canada.

On our final weekend, a similar family festival was taking place at Place des Carmes, in our own neighbourbood. Along with kids’ games, face-painting and the like, a steady stream of magicians, musicians, and jugglers were delighting the crowd. And they really were delighting the crowd.

Intent on getting our travel logistics nailed down, we only barely slowed down as we passed through the square on our way to the train station – twice. But when we did, the young women selling home-baked brownies (in French, they’re called “brownies”) seemed to delight in asking us about Canada, our stay in Avignon, and, in general, making us feel welcomed.

Place des Carmes, our nearest neighbourhood square, played host to a Saturday morning market, as well as special events.

And just as at home in warm weather, it was becoming increasingly difficult to travel our established routes without seeing familiar faces.

There was the book-store shopkeeper who, twice in our first few days, so obligingly gave us directions in slowed-down, dumbed-down, tourist-friendly French.  There was the young woman from the conservatory of music – with her distinctive purple, hard-shelled cello case – who once directed us to a the local music store. There were the cashiers at Casino and Carrefour City who, clearly having us pegged for tourists, seemed to use it as an excuse to be extra friendly.

A week or so before we left, I mustered the courage to move beyond “Bonjour. No, no sac, merci,” and ask the perpetually on-duty Carrefour City cashier “Comment ça va?” She replied by asking, in French, if we were having a good vacation. That led to another of those fleeting-but-beautiful exchanges.

Late in the afternoon of our last full day in town, we walked back to Carrefour City and, as we hoped, she was again on duty. We had nothing to buy, but queued at her cash to give her a Kingston lapel pin as a token of our thanks for her thoughtfulness. In the midst of the rush-hour line-up, she gave each of us a huge hug, accompanied by the rosiest of all possible blushes.

With confidence, because we now know about these things (see my “Learning to French Kiss” blog), we bade farewell on our last evening to Emmanuelle, our lovely hostess, and her two boys, and, as we set out the next morning for the train station, to Marie, her equally lovely mother-in-law, and our neighbour over the last few weeks. Our final stop was at our local charcuterie, with a Kingston pin and a goodbye for the young butcher / proprietor.

Every morning, the grape vine suspended crisscross over our front terrace had more assuredly regained its ability to shade the mid-day sun.

Like its people, the foliage of Avignon had also blossomed. Seemingly overnight, the plane trees transformed from amputated- to majestic-looking. Every morning, the grape vine suspended crisscross over our front terrace had more assuredly regained its ability to shade the mid-day sun. And, to our fond, departing eyes, the greenery added a particular dash of beauty to the rich, varied tones of unfinished stone and concrete.

Learning to French kiss

Joni Mitchell was right: in France, they kiss on main street. And on secondary streets, and in plazas, and on sidewalks. And always thrice.

But they’re not actual kisses.

It’s a cheek-to-cheek brush, first with the left, then the right, then back to the left, a kissing sound made at each turn by both parties to the act.

Beginning with the right cheeks appears to be acceptable, if the angle of the heads so dictate, but leading with the left is the decided norm.

This ritual is striking on two counts, both cultural.

First, evidently there is greater emphasis here than at home on more formally greeting each other. Whereas we might plunk ourselves down at a table-load of friends with a non-specific ‘hi’ and wave of the hand, here, each person is greeting individually.

The kiss then, is an elaborate-looking and certainly time-consuming protocol, and yet there’s something lovely and right about the time taken to fully acknowledge each other.

Secondly, use of the kiss is gender-neutral. Even among males, including teenage males and middle-aged trades guys, it seems to enjoy equal, if not greater, use than say, a hand-shake. With our cultural heritage (baggage?), it’s striking to see males display either a comfort with such intimacy, or the ability to be physically close without seeing it as an act of intimacy.

Unfortunately, the local culture is having a chilling effect on our 30-year marriage. In bed last night, I asked Marian if she wanted to French kiss. She promptly turned the other cheek.

Life, from both sides now

Our knickers were firmly knotted when we were finally allowed to board Linebus’s Barcelona to Avignon highway coach.

We bought our tickets two days in advance, but even then the 9:00 a.m. bus was sold-out. The 1:30 run was our only option. Friday, travel day, feeling obliged to vacate our hostel at something close to a respectful check-out time, we sauntered into the bus station with an hour and a half to spare. And we were fine with that.

Travel and civic emergencies share, I think, a unique ability to bring out the best and worst in human behaviour. Our hostel in downtown Barcelona was, in many ways, terrific, but over the week we saw a preponderance of the self-centred behaviour that makes me wonder why more people don’t stay home and indulge themselves with comparative ease.

Insomnia had me up before 5:30 that morning – a welcomed opportunity for a coffee and email catch-up in the joyful, dead-quiet solitude of the common lounge. Within minutes, my tranquility was shattered by one of the numerous louts with whom we were sharing space – this one male.

Pre-dawn, it seems, is a terrific time for one of those cell phone conversations, the volume of which challenges the need for the electronic device. To my horror, his full-volume wandering of the halls landed him by my side. Oddly – and loudly – he began pestering me for the loan of my cell phone, ‘coz “my friends need a favour.” My adamant “No” was in no way influenced by my not having a phone to lend him.

Minutes later he was back, his cell phone scratching out a crappy tune at full volume, a joint hanging out of the corner of his mouth. His loud pestering was now for a light. He seemed certain that I had one but was unwilling to share.

To digress: the building’s copious, multi-language signs on the matter – one of which was hanging on the wall immediately above me – began with a prominent announcement at the front door: “Smoking is not permitted anywhere in this building.”

Evidently he found a light and, immediately upon reducing the communal air quality to rock-concert-of-my-youth level, he went back to bed. It was now 5:53 a.m.

We were peopled-out.

We knew the bus terminal had a coffee shop. We had books. Showing up with time to spare would let us hole-up in a quiet corner, far from the madding crowd. Even better, as we’d discover, the coffee shop’s outdoor terrace would let us take the needed break while soaking up yet another glorious day.

And that’s exactly what we did. But first, we checked in at the Linebus ticket window to confirm our departure gate. The same ticket agent who had sold us our tickets – in triplicate, with perforations between each – was again on duty.

“¿Avignon: via once?” I asked. Gate 11?

I like that in Spanish I am a man of few words – the strong, silent type. It’s something I’ve never succeeded in pulling off in my native language. In fact, I once had a work colleague, apropos to seemingly nothing, muttered, “’Effing extroverts: ya’ gotta hear every last thing on their minds.” Our being alone at the time severely limited my interpretative options.

“Si, si,” said the ticket lady with studied indifference, Gate 11.

We enjoyed our coffees and hiatus from the species, made final runs to the WC, and were at our gate with 15 minutes left to spare. On occasions such as this, when seating is not assigned, I take charge of stowing our packsacks below, while Marian queues to board and grab two seats.

When the bus pulled into the gate at 1:20, we were comfortably at the head of both the boarding and cargo-stowing queues. At 1:25, we were informed that we could not board without first returning to the ticket window – with that same ticket agent who had sold us our in-triplicate tickets and, more-recently, had confirmed our departure gate – and collect our boarding passes.

In fact, it took two frantic runs passed her window for us to be properly redirected to yet another window, at which we were permitted to trade two parts of our in-triplicate tickets for a dirty, dog-eared, once-laminated, tarot-sized card bearing the authoritative inscription “11.”

For over ten years now, Marian’s working life has been consumed with matters of design and how humans relate to it. At one point in an earlier life, my employer was paid a pretty good rental fee for its claim that I was a senior systems analyst. Our focus, then, even as we frantically raced back to Gate 11 – where we were now welcomed to board – was on an informal, yet vigourous, critique of Linebus’s operating processes vis-a-vis minimally-functioning human intelligence.

Have I mention we were peopled-out?

The bus had arrived with passengers on board from earlier stops, so, in fairness, I can’t honestly say the SNAFU made the difference, but adjacent aisles seats was as close as we were going to get to “together.” We grabbed the first available pair: third row. And as soon as we were seated, I did something I seldom do: I pulled out my iPod, jammed the earbuds into my head tightly enough to eliminate the merest peep of intrusion from without, and cranked on my stuck-in-the-‘70s tunes at don’t-even-think-about-talking-to-me volume.

She packed my bags last night pre-flight,
Zero hour nine a.m.

We were on the road.

With the world safely at bay, I took selective note of my surroundings. I felt a pang of guilt for not so much as nodding at the older woman in the window seat beside whom I had plunked myself down. I’d feel even guiltier a few hours later when she insisted on swapping seats so Marian and I could sit together.

I had a kitty-corner view of the younger guy in the row ahead of me, on the opposite side of the aisle. Almost as quickly as I donned my iPOD, he fired-up his iPAD, which he propped upright on his fold-down table. Idly watching him position it made me aware that there was a woman seated beside him. I could only just see the black hair covering the top of her head over the back of her seat.

At first, he was doing nothing on the computer but swiping quickly through full-screen photos, all, shots of a young father cuddling his four- or five-year-old son.

It’s not time to make a change,
Just relax, take it easy

I couldn’t see enough of him to be certain, but I assumed he was the father in the photos. The shots weren’t posed or impersonal enough to be professionally taken, but they were professional quality. That none of them included a mom led me to the mental leap that the woman beside him – his wife, the boy’s mother – was the accomplished photographer.

I looked away for a moment. When I looked back, he had a video running, and for the next 20 minutes, I shamelessly invaded his family’s privacy.

It’s the same good-looking little boy as in the photos. He’s dressed in a light, sky-blue T-shirt and beige shorts. He’s stretched-out on his back on a soft, rose-coloured mat on the floor. I can see now that the maturity of his face doesn’t match the size of his body. He’s very small for his age.

A woman in her mid-thirties is sitting on the mat with him. Her blond hair tells me she’s not his mother. There’s something I find instantly likeable about her. She’s relaxed looking, dressed in loose-fitting, soft-pastel coloured slacks and a short-sleeved top, but more to the point, she looks like someone who’s entirely comfortable in her own skin. She has the boy all but in her lap. One of her legs is tucked back under her, the left side of his torso nestled up against her shin. Her other leg is outstretched, his tiny legs draped over her upper thigh.

She takes the boy’s left wrist and begins to work pressure down his arm, like someone milking the last of the toothpaste from the tube. As she does, his legs never stop moving. I assume, at first, that this is the listless kinaesthetics of a little kid trying to relieve boredom, but it quickly becomes obvious there’s a spasmodic quality to his movements. At times, he’s virtually flailing. It’s then that I notice the bulk of a diaper under his shorts.

Love will abide,
Take things in stride

After his left arm, she does his right, then, in turn, his legs. She moves on to his face, working from his forehead, down to his cheekbones, to his chin. Rolling him gently onto his belly, she hikes-up his T-shirt so she can work from his lower back up to his shoulders. The massage complete, she repositions herself on all fours above him. One at a time, she ever so deliberately cycles his limbs through the motions they would take if he crawled – if he could crawl.

They are mesmerizingly beautiful together.

Their skin colours are night and day, which, set against the pastel colours of their clothing and the floor mat renders visual poetry. Like the still photos, this is far too intimate to have been professionally shot, and yet the videographer’s skill is such that I have no sense of there being a camera between them and me.

They, too, give no indication of being conscious of the camera. Instead, they remain breathtakingly “present” to each other, as if spellbound, as if time has simply stopped.

You can see in his eyes that he clearly adores her. Even with his body in constant, uncontrolled motion, you can see in his eyes that he has surrendered himself to her. He winces but doesn’t turn away as she applies pressure down his forehead and cheekbones. And when she’s done, he’s again beaming at her.

She is a clinician, after all. Her casual clothing, I realize, are paediatric scrubs. Her trained hands, I’m certain, are capable of doing their job with little conscious thought. And yet, it’s the unconscious things I see her hands doing that prevent professionalism from coming between them.

When her hand rests fleetingly on the back of his, her fingers gently tease his. When her hand rests on the back of his head, her index finger gently twirls a lock of his hair. And when she ends the uncomfortable facial massage, it’s with a gentle sweep of her fingers down his cheek.

She reads his little body as if it were her own. As he twists and turns, she eases – never corrects –  his unnatural positioning with a fluidity and gentleness that I can feel as I watch. And even with my stuck-in-the-‘70s tunes cranked in my head, I can hear her voice gently caressing him throughout.

Shower the people you love with love,
Show them the way that you feel

The video ends.

A short while later, we crossed the border into France. The border police were waiting for us and for the opportunity to carefully examine the passports of a couple of our fellow passengers. That added a half-hour to our seven and a half hour trip.

A short while later, a fellow-passenger realized he had missed his stop at Perpignan. We pulled over, waiting to connect with another Linebus that could carry him back to his rightful destination. That added three-quarters of an hour to our eight-hour trip.

During the second delay, there was a shuffling in the row ahead of us. A little boy appeared – transferred from mom’s lap, where he had been hidden from our view, to dad’s.

There, he sat for the duration, dad’s arms gently containing the arbitrary firing of his muscles, dad’s hand guiding his hand to within striking distance of the iPad touchscreen. He seemed to enjoy the challenge of the software games  designed to promote course motor skills in months-old babies.

And when, from time to time, his arbitrarily-firing muscles caused him to look our way, he’d flash us that same gorgeous smile I had seen in the photos and video.

I kept the earbuds firmly in place until Avignon, needing every available minute of solitude.

I gotta take a little time,
A little time to think things over

Really, how is it we’re not overwhelmed by our sheer, dumb luck?

de Burgh de Bunked in Seville

“There’s a Spanish train that runs between Guadalquivir and old Seville….”

That was Chris de Burgh’s introduction to North American audiences, spoken, not sung, in 1975.

Even when the droning dirge “Lady in Red” made me long to see de Burgh tied to a RENFE rail, I continued to love the romantic allusions conjured by “Guadalquivir” and “Old Seville.”

We took a full three days to explore Old Seville on this trip, and it didn’t disappoint. Our pension was in the old quarter, a stone’s throw from the cathedral and an easy walk to virtually all of Seville’s many charms.

Minus the water and pervasive dog droppings, Seville’s old town is reminiscent of Venice, with its confusing maze of narrow, interconnecting lanes. Pedestrians are principally relived of the nuisance of automobile traffic, however, frequent shoulder checks are prudent for approaching bicycles, scooters, and the electric light-rail that purrs through the main square.

I almost immediately added Seville to Prague at the top of my list of favourite cities. Architecturally, they’re quite different, but each in their own way are stunningly gorgeous and without a hint of the plastic artificiality that adorns some pretty cities. Instead, like Prague, one senses in Seville the vitality, almost an earthiness, of a lived-in city that doesn’t so much celebrate its centuries’ of culture as breaths it.

Guadalquivir, as I discovered, is not a an ancient Spanish town, but the river that runs through the heart of Seville, about a half-dozen train car lengths from Old Seville.

But as for de Burgh’s reference to Guadalquivir, I have to say I was a little disappointed – romantically. Guadalquivir is not, after all, an ancient Spanish town, it is, in fact, the river that runs through the heart of Seville.

More to the point, any train running between it and Old Seville would stretch, oh, maybe a half-dozen train car lengths. Hardly enough time for the lord and the devil to roll craps for the souls of the dead or even, as the tale concludes, settle down to an older gentlemen’s game of chess.

At the risk, then, of sounding jaded, I find myself now doubting that a spaceman really came flying, that there’s truly a cold north wind called “La Bise,” and that Patricia lasciviously licked her lips on route to my late-teen fantasies.

The most powerful foreign-language phrase and other linguistic musings

A popular book on the business shelves a few years ago was Dave Logan and Steve Zaffron’s “The Three Laws of Performance.”

The first law is that the world “occurs” to us based on the “future story” we’re constantly telling ourselves – a restatement of the truism that the world we expect to find upon leaving home in the morning tends to be the one that’s indeed waiting.

The third rule is that we can change the future story by using future-based language. They offer the example of Benjamin Franklin coining the term “America” for what was then little more than 13 warring colonies (this may be where Sun Media’s bright-lights came up with “ethical oil” as a substitute for “environmentally catastrophic tar sand.”)

But it’s Logan and Zaffron’s second rule that fascinates me. It says that how the world occurs to us is largely based in language.

They quote a passage from the writing of Helen Keller, who, blind and deaf from the age of 18 months, spent six years of her life without language. She comments that she lived during this period from a level of survival instinct and her only memories are tactual in nature. Without language, she had no ability to otherwise store memories.

I’m finding again on this trip that the pleasure I get in travel is rooted in language.

When we arrived in Albufeira, Portugal toward the end of January, we did as we always do – as I suspect a lot of Canadians do – when initially faced with a foreign language: we resort reflexively to French, our least foreign of foreign languages. I can’t stress just how reflexive this is: I do the deer-in-the-headlights thing and French dribbles out my mouth even though I am not conscious of speaking.

Albufeira’s old town is quite picturesque, but the town offers few opportunities to practice Portuguese.

This, fortunately, has a bit of a first-date characteristic to it. I get over the jitters and re-learned to relax, listen with intensified concentration, and work that mental muscle that connects what I have to communicate with the limited vocabulary at my disposal – that same mental muscle that so quickly re-atrophies when deprived of all but its native tongue.

On paper, at least, Portuguese and Spanish are remarkably similar. In fact, clearly-enunciating natives can carry on a reasonable conversation with each other.

And while I wouldn’t suggest we have anything in the way of facility with the language, our eight months in Mexico and Central America left us somewhat functional in Spanish. When required, we were able to transfer this functionality to Portuguese with heavy reliance on obrigado (thank you), copious “ssh” sounds inserted in each phrase, and, in a real pinch, straight Spanish enunciated to the best of our abilities.

But the unfortunate truth is, around our home-base in Albufeira, we were almost never required to speak Portuguese.

Two hours by air and less than €100 from Gatwick, Albufeira is to British retirees what Florida is to Canadian snowbirds, particularly to Brits of more advanced years.

The attraction is understandable: membership in a perennial ex-pat community, a moderate climate (particularly this year), inexpensive living, “happy hours” running from 9:30 a.m. until closing, and no need – or apparent inclination – to speak anything but English.

English is so pervasive, in fact, that I had a sense local shop staff preferred we speak it, rather than trying their patience – and opportunity to practice a profitable second language – with our hackneyed Portuguese.

It truly was the antithesis of the severe culture shock I underwent in our first month in Munich. In a first outing to our local vegetable stand, I readily demonstrated that I couldn’t count, couldn’t name a single piece of produce in his store, was woefully ignorant of the protocol in vegetable buying (the shopkeeper, not the buyer, selects from the displayed veggies!), and I couldn’t denominate the currency clutched in my hand.

“I’m much smarter in English,” I assured him, as charmingly as I could muster. Of course, I could only do so in English, which had no discernible impact on his “You’re a complete moron” glare.

Fortunately, in the second week of our four-week stay in Portugal, we rented a car and travelled the Algarve coast, east to the Spanish border, west to Cabo de São Vicente – once considered the end of the world, and north into the majestic hills and ancient Roman towns that cap the region. In our third week, we visited Lisbon, an ancient and modern cosmopolitan city in which we encountered some English, but it was sparse.

Curiously, I find my sense of connection to these places is proportional to our reliance on our rudimentary Portuguese while we were there. Paradoxically, the more reliant – the more fully engaged we were in the use of language – the more I felt connected.

From Albufeira, we traded Portugal for Spain. Almost instantly, Seville joined Prague at the top of my list of favourite cities. Each exudes its own intoxicating air of old-world-meets-new vitality and richness.

Spain has had a coming-home sort of feel to it. Within hours of our arrival to the city, Seville joined Prague at the top of my favourites cities.

From Seville, we bused south to Algeciras, a not-overly-attractive port city, but within local bus service – and inescapable sight – of Gibraltar, rising across the bay as improbably as Uluru rises from the Aussie Outback.

Algeciras and its neighbouring towns also enjoy a great deal of traffic as a result of the commuter-length ferry services running from their docks to Africa – readily visible on the southern horizon.

From Algeciras, we caught a Sunday afternoon RENFE train to Granada for a three-day tour of the city, including, of course, a visit to Alhambra – its beauty immeasurably amplified by the background snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains. As I write this, our ALSA bus ride to Madrid has put the mountains behind us, and those plains of “My Fair Lady” fame stretch to the horizon on both sides of us.

From a language perspective, Spain continues to feels like a homecoming. For starters, my ear loves the sound of Spanish. How could a language that is so inherently musical not be classified as a “romance” language?

I’m also conscious that Spanish is now rivalling French as my least foreign of foreign languages. With increasing frequency, when I ask a question in Spanish, the verbosity of of the response suggests the responder actually believed I could speak the language.

But I think there’s something more at play – a subtle sort of equilibrium. We’re not entirely helpless in a Spanish environment, but without question, we remain vulnerable. And that vulnerability keeps us in that state of openness – emptiness – that allows the traveller to connect with people and possibilities that, at home, would more likely slip by unnoticed.

Our Saturday evening in Algeciras was a case in point.

We had spent the day in a grueling six-hour hike of Gibraltar. The most striking of the rock’s many striking features is that there is no top-down or bottom-up approach to visiting its attractions. Whether the next attraction is above or below you, you’ll inevitably hike steep, ear-popping paths up and down to get there.

A view from atop Gibraltar – and, yes, we hiked-up from sea level! An airport runway can be seen on the left of the photo. This crosses the only street leading to and from Gibraltar, so pedestrians and vehicular traffic must yield to arriving and departing aircraft.

It was a remarkable and exhausting day. Blessed by the gods, we limped into the bus terminal on the Gibraltar end with the sun setting and only five minutes to wait for the next 40-minute bus ride back to Algeciras. Proof, that our decision to defer a well-earned pint until closer to home was the right one.

And while the bus dropped us virtually at the door of our pension, we ignore our sore and now-tightened muscles to do the 15-minute hike back along the waterfront to Plaza Alta, Algeciras’s el centro.

It was Carnival weekend downtown. We had taken in the Friday night parade and dance in the main public square. It became immediately evident that Saturday’s festivities had started much earlier in the day – likely with the start of siesta at 2:00. There seemed to be no escaping the noisy, drunken crowds on the streets and in the otherwise alluring bars.

In desperation, we hiked up one more street, and there, off a tiny public square, we found Mesón Las Duelas a pub just big enough for a bar and three small tables. Best of all, with the exception of an older gentleman patron and two older female servers, it was empty. And quiet.

Before our happily-ordered mugs of beer arrived, we determined the food menu consisted entirely of tapas, several of them on display in a glass case atop the bar.

Tapas, if you don’t know, is a Spanish style of serving food. Essentially, they’re appetizer-sized portions of main dishes, attractively presented on saucer-sized plates, generally with some form of bread or cracker on the side. As with East Indian meals, it’s a terrific way to sample a wide variety of foods and flavours. Marian and I find six or seven shared selections leaves the two of us comfortably full.

If there’s a down-side to tapas – and I strain to find one, it’s a foreigner’s difficulty in understanding the typically long menu list of sometimes subtle variations on a theme. It’s not as straight-forward as the chicken dish versus the lamb dish versus the salmon dish, etc.

Seeing me eyeing the displayed tapas, the older gentleman, obviously a friend of the owners’, launched into a description of each, mostly in Spanish, but with just enough English thrown in to leave me entirely confused. His enthusiasm engaged the full staff, which I would come to realize were the mom-and-pop owners and, I suspect, one of there sisters hired as a waitress. The conversation quickly escalated well over my head.

I developed a theory a few years ago that I’ve seen proven so often that I now consider it a law – certainly as much of a law as those fronted by Logan and Zaffron. Simply put: the most powerful phrase in any foreign language, and, therefore, the first phrase one should learned, is some variation on: I’m sorry, but I only speak a little _______ (insert name of language here).

Beginning with an apology signals that you’re not a smart-assed tourist who knows full-well that “they” really do understand English, so long as it’s spoken s-l-o-w-l-y and LOUDLY. Having invested the effort required to apologize in the receiver’s native tongue signals the sincerity of your acknowledged of your shortcomings.

Forewarned that extraordinary decoding will be required, this phrase almost always causes a noticeable shift in the receiver’s body language as he or she adopts an active listening stance. Just as often, I get a sense that they make a conscious effort to slow-down and dumb-down their end of the conversation for my benefit.

As Saturday evening’s tapas discussion hit the linguistic stratosphere, I pulled out the phrase. In Spanish – faultlessly delivered, I’d like to think, I apologized for speaking solo un poquito de español and for understanding tapas nada.

Having thus surrendered, we were immediately welcomed as friends.

It took no time to determine – in Spanish – that we’d have six dishes, four meat and two fish selections. With that, we were dismissed to sip our beers while our hosts determined our menu.

Carnival celebrations in Algeciras, Portugal are probably entirely responsible for a meal – and a connection – that will be a highlight of this trip.

Suffice to say, it was a foodie experience to die for – and we’re nothing close to foodies. And when we had finished our main course dishes, we asked la Senora if los postres were on the menu.

She dashed off to the kitchen, returning with two serving platters, one bearing a chocolate offering, the other a fruit custard. Her face brightened when we switched our initial order of two chocolates to one of each. This, after all, was about sampling. No sooner had we started into our desserts when she returned with two complimentary tumblers of brandy, topped with whipped cream and a dash of cinnamon.

Being vulnerable foreigners, our bill could have been just about anything our hosts decided to charge. Instead, it was decidedly less than we expected. With our payment, we offered the Kingston lapel pins that we always carry with us. “Ah, Canada,” one of them commented, before I had a chance to identifying our home and native land.

It was evidently important that we given a wallet-sized calendar in return. Our token gift exchange was topped off with kisses, handshakes, and warm good-byes. Without question, it’s a connection – no matter how brief – that will stand as one of the highlights of this three-month adventure.

This trip is reconfirming my sense that Logan and Zaffron have it right: how the world occurs to us is largely based in language. It’s also making me see that how we occur to the world is also largely based in language.

Venice, Vienna and Prague: January 30 – February 15, 2009

(Written on February 23, 2009, after a series of weekend trips from our homebase in Munich.)

Marian and I are fundamentally different sorts of travelers. She suffers from Plaque Plague, a chronic inability to bypass anything remotely brass-looking without stopping for a read, even when said artifact is in a language she doesn’t read. I, on the other hand, prefer to explore new lands from an outdoor café or public square, coffee in hand, developing a voyeuristic sense of the passing native population.

Despite 28 years of marriage, we seemed to arrive at an easy compromise on our weekend jaunts. First of all, of course, you can’t do justice to world-class cities like Berlin, Vienna, Venice, Prague in a weekend. Second, there are only so many hours of the weekend that you can spend inside yet another fourteen-dozen historic churches, particularly when we’ve made it impossible to not use St. Peter’s Basilica as the benchmark. Third, ditto for museums and galleries. Fourth – and here’s my side of the compromise, ditto for the inside of cafés.

So, our compromise is to work with a list of the top-ten or twelve things to see, stay outside where the locals are, and walk. A lot.

We’ve walked in the brilliant sunshine of late spring-like weather. We’ve walked through bone-chilling damp and cold. We’ve walked through miserable, wet and sloppy snow. A lot.

We haven’t done justice to the world-class cities we’ve seen, but in as much as one can do so in something less than 48 hours, we’ve given it our best shot.   

After spending two weeks in Italy at Christmas, there was a minor sense of home-coming as we headed to Venice the last weekend of January. The Trenitalia train wound its way from Munich down through Innsbruck and the Austrian Alps, allowing us to marvel from only a slightly different vantage point the engineering feat we drove at Christmas.

The Trenitalia train ride through the Austrian Alps gave us a different perspective on the engineering feat we drove at Christmas.

Roberto Benigni – clearly on uppers – had been hired to do the afternoon’s announcements. In a setting that felt a little bit like something out of “A Room With a View,” Marian and I shared our six-seater berth with an older woman and a very reserved, if not timid, young couple (they whispered across the berth to each other). Long before Roberto had finished his first announcement – delivered in an over-the-top exuberant Italian, ratcheted up a number of notches on the over-the-top exuberant Italian scale – even the young couple was laughing out loud.

Just when it couldn’t get any funnier – in a laughing with him sort of way – he then repeated the announcement in a no-less-exuberant German. You have to realize that at no time in history did anyone intend German to be a language of exuberance. His exuberance waned not the least in the English rendering, unfortunately for Marian and me, the message got entirely in the way of the medium. We spent the balance of the trip looking forward to his performances.

I don’t want to overstate it, but Venice is as close to a disappointment as we’ve experienced. Cool weather on Friday evening gave way on Saturday to the chilling dampness that only an island can deliver. That gave way on Sunday to wet snow. While it wasn’t a disaster, our accommodation was our first and only experience so far with something less than truth in web advertising.  

Having said that, Venice rightfully belongs on a must-see list for its remarkable architecture and the watery context in which it sits. The age of the structures and their dubious underpinnings dish up a remarkable array of leans, twists and compression that left me thinking that if one structure collapsed (as some have in the past), the whole thing would come down like falling dominos. But then: some of the buildings have been around for a thousand years. 

However fading the "Glamour Queen," Venice remains a must-see destination.

We saw under a half-dozen buildings that weren’t missing large sections of parging, exposing the underlying red brick construction. In many instances, chunks of bricks were also missing. Graffiti is rampant, as are dog-droppings. There is a pong to the smaller canals that eliminates any question as to the final disposition of sewage, but raises a big bunch of questions about the source of the water coming out of the tap.

Venice is described in various tourism publications as a “fading glamour queen.” That fairly describes, I think, the almost palatable sense one has of its rapid decline, despite its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

The highlight of the visit for us both was stopping mid-Saturday afternoon at a traditional Venetian wine bar for a warming glass of red and a selection of the imaginative and tasty canapés for which the Venetian bars are noted. Hanging on the wall was a newspaper photo from the early ‘90s showing the walkway outside of the bar – sitting that afternoon about three feet above water level – under waist-deep floodwaters. It gave us an even deeper sense of the improbability of the place.

In sharp contrast to Venice, Vienna, the following weekend, turned out to be the prettiest city I think I’ve ever seen. As a bonus and in tribute to off-season travel, we had a low-cost hotel suite that was gorgeous. The weather on Friday afternoon and Saturday was positively spring-like. In addition to walking many miles of streets, we took a long walk along the Danube River, an even longer one along the Danube Canal, and took a ride on the city’s 200-foot Ferris wheel that dates to the early 1800s (cabins rather than chairs) for a bird’s-eye view of the city.

In sharp contrast to Venice, Vienna, may be the prettiest city I’ve seen.

I once heard a town planner who’d studied the characteristics of great town squares compare such places to livingrooms. There are real or implied enclosing walls, lots of places to sit, lots to look at, and a minimum of heavy activity (e.g. we don’t typically play football in a livingroom). That’s all of Vienna.

The city gives the immediate impression of being clean and elegant. The buildings are universally pale – white, off-white, sandstone – and are no more than five or six stories high, so they give a sense of enclosing without overwhelming. Virtually every façade offers a feast of imaginative and whimsical architectural touches – asymmetrical balconies, turrets, and porticos, the former two often supported on the shoulders of cherubs, angels, mythological and/or whimsical figures. Modern architecture, where one sees it, is no less imaginative. There are few straight lines to bore the eye.

We woke to rain on Sunday and that became a good excuse to visit the Monet to Picasso exhibit in the Albertina Gallery, housed in a portion of the former royal palace. The featured exhibit was great and a Gerhard Richter Retrospective was icing on the cake. Neither of us knew much of Richter; he’s a remarkably prolific artist in more media and styles than should be humanly possible – everything from impressionism to hyper-realism.

Vienna and Prague are terrific cities to see back-to-back. The architecture is very similar, but whereas Vienna breathes refinement, Prague gives the sense of that more varied, untraditional, esoteric, perhaps earthy blend of arts and culture to which we attach the term “Bohemian.” Prague, as we discovered, is the largest city in the Bohemia region of the Czech Republic.

Like Vienna, Prague is a pretty city, but there is an intriguing earthiness to it.

We had lined up a beautiful apartment in the Old Town of Prague. From there, we walked. A lot.

In brilliant sunshine but cold temperatures, we headed out early Saturday morning, crossing the Charles Bridge into Mala Strana, the minor quarter and, the oldest part of the city (yes, older than Old Town). We spent most of the morning and early afternoon wandering Prague Castle and the quarter, before heading back to wander the Old Town in the afternoon. We had most of the day Sunday, so again used our time to see the Old Town and to take a long walk along the Vltava River that runs through Prague.

Apart from the gorgeous architecture, stand-outs of the Prague trip in my mind include Svatováclavské náměstí, St. Wenceslas Square, where every major political step in the Czech Republic’s history first found its voice (usually somewhere in the order of 250,000 voices).

I was surprisingly thrilled to see places where Beethoven and Mozart worked and/or performed their works (In Vienna we saw similar indicators of where Bach and Strauss worked). Saturday, we stumbled across a small folk festival that may have been related to the start of Carnival. It was terrific to hear a trio play what I assume was traditional Czech music. We also tasted traditional flat bread toasted over an open flame.

Svatováclavské náměstí, St. Wenceslas Square, where every major political step in the Czech Republic’s history first found its voice.

Without taking anything away from the city itself, the truth is that the highlight of the Prague trip for me was the people we met along the way.

On the Friday train ride, we wiled away a number of hours with Michael and Catherine Tierney, originally from Washington, D.C., and their wonderfully precocious eight year-old son, Aiden, sitting a couple of berths away from us. Michael was a NASA earth-sciences engineer, but took up a job as an intellectual property attorney with a Munich firm last August. Catherine’s father was in the diplomatic core, so she travelled much of her younger life and had lived in Prague for a few years in her adolescence. For her, the weekend was to be a trip down memory lane. 

Catherine had that look in her eye of a parent carrying the load of a “wonderfully precocious” child. In a variation of what Marian used to do with our boys and their friends, Catherine assigns Aiden “tasks” to occupy his brain…and relieve hers! She sent him off, for instance, to determine which of the train car’s berths had the fewest occupants. Counting books in a bookstore is apparently always good for a few minutes rest.

We ran into the couple again in Mala Strana Saturday morning. Aiden was looking very much like a young man who would have preferred to be pursing his passion – soccer. In one of those been-there-done-that gestures to fellow parents, Marian asked Aiden to count the number of lions he saw in the statues that line the Charles Bridge. I asked him to check the statues for St. Propeller Head, the patron saint of computer programmers (photo attached).  

We asked Aiden to watch for St. Propeller Head along the Charles Bridge. The statue is, in fact, of St. Anthony of Padua, by Jan Oldřich Mayer, dating from 1707.

Late Friday afternoon, we had about a 20 minute wait for the rental manager to show-up with the key to our rented apartment. It was cold and the building’s unilingual Czech superintendent somewhat reluctantly invited us to wait in her miniscule office (room for one person to sit). We had compiled a list of essential Czech phrases off the web. Marian asked about the pronunciation of one phrase and that touched-off a wonderful lesson in the Czech language and the dos and don’ts of visiting “Praha,” all conducted with a great deal of laughter.

Viktor, the retirement-age rental manager, showed up and took us up to the apartment. While registering, we asked where he learned to speak English. What followed was an amazing story.

Growing up under the thumb of the Stalinists, he secretly listened to Radio Free Luxemburg to learn English. University friends were killed in “Prague Spring” uprisings of 1968 that prompted the Soviet invasion in August of that year. Viktor told his father he had to leave before he did something rash. His father said, “we’re coming, too.”

The family escaped to Vienna, but, he said, the communists had a long reach. The family moved on to Switzerland and Viktor settled into the telecommunications industry. In one of those freakish coincidences of the universe, he eventually moved to Munich and lived a few blocks from our flat Wald Trudering. He is back in Prague now, running the rental business with his wife and son, and ruing the lingering social apathy/inertia inflicted by the Soviets.

On Saturday, we stopped for mid-day coffee at the Starbucks in Mala Strana. We ended up at the opposite ends of two two-seater couches from an older French-speaking woman and a woman about our age. The younger woman disappeared for a few minutes and we took our French out for a ride, asking the mother where she was from. Algiers originally, it turns out, currently living in Paris, and with a son living in Quebec City who she visits regularly. Marie, her daughter, returned to the table and we had a great yatter. What was so remarkable for Marian and me was that listening to the two women speak French was almost like listening to English. After months of German, Italian and a dash of Czech, it was like music to Canadian ears!

A Weekend in Berlin

(Written on January 29, 2009, after a weekend trip to Berlin, January 21 – 23, 2009. We were living in Munich at the time.)

Last weekend, we caught the Deutsche Bahn high-speed rail service for the 500 kilometer hike north to Berlin. As on a plane, the train’s speed is periodically displayed. Marian marveled at the lack of seatbelts. It took us a second to recognize that, aboard a train travelling 228 km/hour, a fast stop was just about the last thing we might experience.

Berlin reflects its history. Quartered post-WWII and halved in 1961, the two Berlins grew independently for almost thirty years before being rejoined with the fall of the wall in 1989. It’s a massive city, encompassing the erstwhile eastern and western city centres. We chose a centrally located hotel, ironically the “Best Western,” which put us in walking distance of the city’s historic attractions.

In contrast to Munich, Berlin architecture is predominantly modern, a tribute to the accuracy of allied war-time bombers. A notable exception, Gedächtniskirche, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, sits a few blocks from our hotel and was the first stop on our walking tour.

Built in the 1890s, a relative newbie by European standards, the church was all but destroyed in a 1943 bombing raid. Post-war, the temptation to raze the site to make way for traffic was resisted. Instead, the towering ruin was stabilized and “book-ended” by a modern, free-standing chapel on one side and a stand-alone bell tower on the other. Sitting on a median in the middle of two very busy downtown streets, the once-great skirche is now maintained as a highly visible memorial  to the destruction of war.

Gedächtniskirche, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church stands as a memorial to the destruction of war.

We moved on to Siegessäule, Berlin’s famous Victory Column, serving as a roundabout at the convergence of five major roadways in the beautiful Tiergarten Park. Proving that there’s merit in the sometimes glacial pace of government action, the monument was designed in 1864 to celebrate the victory of Prussia in the Danish-Prusssian War, but, by its inauguration in 1873, it also bore the celebratory burdens of victory in the Austro- and Franco-Prussian wars.

We climbed to the top of the column and after catching our breath – and admiring the ability of the young guys ahead of us to do the same with a cigarette – we took in the somewhat drizzly and misty bird’s-eye view of the city. Looking a few kilometers due east up Strasse Des 17, Juni, named in remembrance of the violently quashed 1953 workers’ uprising against the Stalinist East German government, we could see Brandenburger Tor, the Brandenburg Gate.

With the Berlin Walled all but flush against its eastern side, the Tor was the very symbol of the Cold War. Crossing through it onto the historic Pariser Platz – for a time a military zone but now re-established as a beautiful public meeting space – the first thing we saw was a Starbucks, and, right next to it, Museum The Kennedys. So moved were we by the history-come-alive, we stood between the two loudly declaring “Ich bin ein Tim Horton’s Berliner!”

Over a couple of lattes, we noticed that the only visible vestige of the paucity we associate with the Soviet rule of East Berlin were the large gas mains that inexplicably sweep up out of the ground like enormous exposed veins, circle about overhead, cross the street, run down the block, make a few connections, and disappear back into the ground. Those, and hucksters offering rides in the questionable remains of “classic” East German Trabants, the car, it is said, that gave communism a bad name.

A short distance from the Gate, we stopped at Gendarmen­markt  to visit the private museum in the domed French (Huguenot) Chuch. The displays were in German and French, but Marian was satisfied to spot a reference to Rachelle, France, ancestral home on her mother’s side.

Opernplatz, for which we have developed a certain regard from our Pimsleur German lessons (“See Hans run. See Gretel run. See Hans and Gretel run to Opernplatz.” You get the idea.) has been renamed Bebelplatz, in an effort to live down the square’s reputation as the main fire pit in the Hitler youth book burning spree of May 1933.

A work crew was putting the final touches on a temporary building erected on the square that will house this week’s Berlin Fashion Week. In its foyer, we found the book-burning memorial. A section of plate-glass embedded in the surface of the square allows you to look down into a sealed subterranean room. The room is bare, but lined with empty book shelves – enough shelf space to accommodate the estimated 25,000 books that were burned.

As we neared “Checkpoint Charlie,” possibly the highest-profile Cold War access point to the American sector of the city, we hit the start of what turned out to be four city blocks of museum-like wallboard displays running along the sidewalk and detailing the history of the wall.

A wall is a wall is a wall, or so we thought. Neither of us was prepared for the horror documented in the display.

As you may know – but we didn’t – the east/west barrier was thrown up early one August morning in 1961. Berliners awoke to find themselves separated from families, friends, neighbours and neighbourhoods by army and citizen militia units. And while the initial “line in the sand” was somewhat porous, work began that dawn on construction of the wall “system” that would snake its way along a 150 kilometre path through the city. That system included inner and outer walls separated by the Todesstreifen, or “death zone,” so-named for the guards’ standing orders to shoot-to-kill.

We watched helicopter video footage of a trip along the perimeter, captured from western air space. It confirmed my sense that, from conception through execution, the wall was so over-the-top, Monty Pythonesque, outrageously absurd, that it’d be hilarious, if it weren’t for its inherent horror. If fact, I think it’s the absurdity that makes it particularly horrific.

In many instances, buildings were annexed to form part of the barrier, their windows and doors bricked in to prevent passage through. In some instances, historic residential buildings were forcefully emptied and then dynamited to further secure the perimeter. Western subway routes that passed under the eastern sector rolled past “ghost” subway stations, inhabited only by armed guards who ensured the train didn’t stop.

It’s difficult to believe that this year – November 9th to be exact – will mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall. While Cold War relations were warming, there is some poetic justice in the absurdity that’s credited for its final demise. On that particular morning, erroneous news reports announced that a change in regulations would permit East Berlins to cross over to the west and return. By that evening, the crossing points were overrun to such an extent, they became meaningless. Not missing the significance of it all, people were out the next morning with hammers and chisels demolishing the abomination.

Clearly, the relationship of Berlins to the wall has evolved over the interim years. It’s easy to understand the first instinct to erase all traces of it as quickly as possible. This was fostered by a government-backed buy-a-piece-of-the-wall campaign. More recently, there’s been recognition of the importance of preserving its history.

Where possible, a double row of cobblestone is being laid to mark the path of the wall. A memorial has been constructed at the longest remaining stretch of the wall – about a half-block long. Polished steel walls have been construct perpendicularly, book-ending the inner and outer walls and sealing off the death zone in between. In the reflected surfaces of the steel, one sees the wall continuing on in both directions. An observation deck on the opposite side of the street provides a view of the memorial and the neighbouring Church of the Reconciliation.

Where possible, a double row of cobblestone is being laid to mark the path of the wall. In this picture, the actual cobblestone leads into a musuem-board display of the memorial pathway's construction.

We ended our day at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial. This is an extraordinary site that covers a large city block in the heart of the city, and defies description. It consists of 2,711 blocks, looking like large grave markers. From the street, the blocks look roughly the same height, but as you wander through the memorial, you realize that the perfect grid of pathways between the blocks descends, and that some of the blocks are 10’ = 12’ in height. In the aerial photo on the web, you also noticed the tops of the block undulate like a flag in the breeze (http://www.flatrock.org.nz/topics/history/assets/berlin_holocaust_memorial_4.jpg).

The Berlin Holocaust Memorial is an extraordinary site that covers a large city block, and consists of 2,711 blocks,

A staircase in the middle of the blocks takes you down to subterranean memorial centre. The history of the Holocaust is presented in graphic detail. You’re then led into the “Room of Dimensions.” Illuminated rectangles on the floor (recalling the rectangular blocks above) present brief excerpts of 15 personal accounts of the Holocaust, each panel containing a copy of the original source document and then a translation in German and English.

One of the panels contains a seven year-old boy’s goodbye, written from the concentration camp in which he and his mother are being held, to his father, being held in another concentration camp. With resignation, the boy expresses his sadness that he and his mother will soon be killed – as they were – and he will not see his father again.

In the “Room of Names,” the names and short biographies of Jews murdered or presumed murdered in the Holocaust are projected on the empty walls and read aloud, one at a time. It’s estimated that to run this cycle for each victim takes six years, seven months, and 27 days.

I came away from the weekend feeling as I did after our visit to Dachau, perhaps better able to get my head around the evil that was perpetuated here – the Holocaust and the Wall – than I am the notion of a society allowing it to happen. There’s an old axiom that says evil walks in the door when good people do nothing. There’s an Ethiopian proverb that says evil enters like a needle and spreads like an oak tree.

There’s a clear and disturbing link between what we’ve seen here and the American population’s enthusiastic rallying behind a president as he flouted civil liberties, human rights, and international conventions and treaties in the name of protecting the motherland. I see exactly the same link in the Canadian population’s silence as our values around citizenship and children rot with Omar Kahdr in a universally condemned concentration camp.

Who says it can’t happen here?