Coming Back

It was a very special Christmas that year so long ago.  As a young man my family traveled to Europe in the winter.  There is something different about Europe in the winter.  It is a combination of many things.  The cold harkens back to my childhood Christmas’ spent in Alaska.  There is purity in the air.  The kind of Christmas that American’s imagine but left long ago.  One where commercialism and gifts are secondary.  Where cold weather is a sign for people to huddle together in conversation relishing a hot cup of mulled wine or coco.  The steam of their cups collides with frigid air as it drifts upwards into the night.  The smells of hot sausages  wafting through markets and ginger bread baking in ovens behind frosty shop windows.  Small market stalls and street side stores sell hand made goods that are as far from plastic packaged merchandise as we are from the round full moon hanging over our heads.  

Some how in this panicked and manic 21st century, Europe has preserved the essence of what the season was supposed to be about.  Its not about stuff and pressure.  It’s simply a time to come together, to cling to each other in the frozen world and most importantly to love those we care for.  

My son Noah, his girlfriend Momay, me and my wife Nikki
Prague, Czech Republic

For Christmas 2018, I chose to return to the warm memories of my childhood spent in this magical land of white.  Dotted with ancient buildings and medieval splendor.  I made the trip with my wife, my son and his Thai girlfriend.  Perhaps as young people their memories of Christmas will be colored with the same stained glassed infused light that my eyes have always remembered.  I can only imagine what my son’s girlfriend Momay must see as she faces a world she has never known.  So different from her Buddhist traditions and chilly Thai mornings when the temperature dips to a frightful 65 degrees (18 Celsius).  

As a college student I returned to Europe in 1987-88 and spent a year in the Central European city of Vienna, Austria.  It was my first Christmas alone.  I was away from my parents and surrounded by a new group of friends.  Fellow students that were my companions as the darkness descended upon Europe and the realization that we were all far from home set in.  Our winter 2018 journey took us through Vienna  and it is now 31 years from when I last walked the cobbled streets surrounded by the Habsburg opulence of a long departed empire.  

I am older now. A man in his 50s. I walked by the door of my old school, the Institute of European Studies, and watched the young students bundled with scarfs laughing and leaving as they vanished into the crowed holiday streets.  As one young student left I seized the chance to grab the open door and poke my head inside.  Another man departed and I mentioned to him that I had been a student at the school 30 years ago.  It seemed to have no effect on him as he shrugged his shoulders and suggested I visit the office.  I think at his age there is no concept of 30 years and the life lived in-between. 

Echoes of the past.  I can see Carey and Irene
walking toward me.  Eric and Dwight are not far
behind.  Dawn and Debbie are flirting with a foreign guy

As I looked at a man through a lighted window working on a computer I remembered how every day the office would post a list of who had received mail.  If your name was highlighted you had a letter.  For me it meant a communication with my parents or a letter from the woman that later would become my wife.  I remembered my friend laughing one day as I opened a package from my mom and found colored bikini underwear.  From the shadows of the darkened street outside I could still see the ornately painted gilded ceilings of the class rooms I once sat in.  Lost in thought I would stare up at the cherubs as a professor would recite the names of kings I cannot recall.  

As my family walked and looked in shops on the glamorous Kartnerstrasse a stones throw from the glorious Saint Stephens Cathedral, I sat on a bench and watched the people pass.  It seemed like just yesterday I felt the warm arms of my friends, Eric, Carey, Dawn, Debbie.  Dwight, Ed, Tom and Ranjit.  Melissa, Monica, Michael, Ben, Cathy, Irene, Ellen, Ivan, Joe, Pat, Victor.  The list goes on and on…

We were so young, so happy as we each explored and came to terms with ourselves and our independence in a new and foreign world.  I miss them.  I miss my dear friend Carey to whom the following 30 years were not nearly as kind.  For Carey I felt a tear slide from the corner of my eye and roll down my cheek.  I fear she is lost forever and the pain of that thought forever leaves a scar on my heart.  I missed my friend Irene who took her own life a short three years later. I could still see her tiny form and smiling Chinese face with a sharp bowl haircut as she laughed at my stupid jokes.

My friends held a reunion in Vienna last year yet sadly I was not able to attend.  I hope they will consider it again at 40 and that health will find me strong enough to lift a stein of beer or a mug of wine and toast them all and to our memories of youth.

Prague

As memories of the past slide further behind us, memories of the present and the future are being created around us.  Our journey took us by train to Prague where I walked the streets of a city much different than the one I last visited.   It was the time of communism and the tourists that now line the streets were no where to be found.  Of course there were not many shops either.  I came with my friend Dwight and stayed at the home of an elderly Czech couple, a connection facilitated by the friend of a friend.  The aged Bruno and Gusta Siba graciously gave Dwight and I a warm place to sleep.  I had little to spend my money on and recalled buying a jar of pickles and a salami, two of the few things you could find in the spartan grocery stores.  The pickles were heavy and from time to time I left them on the street as I looked into windows.  They garnered many unnerved stares from curious passers by as they contemplated why a jar of pickles was abandoned on the street.  

In Prague the snow began to fall and as we walked huddled together and crisscrossed the Vitava river, I thought about my Great Grandfather and Grandmother who spent their honeymoon in Europe near the turn of the last century.  My physician Great Grandfather attended medical lectures in Vienna circa 1902 and purchased gilded china in Dresden, plates that I still have to this day.  Their oceanic crossing and steamer trunks echoed a voyage far more complicated than the one we had made with our plastic suitcases and coach class airplane tickets.  

Time is passing yet so much remains the same.  I needed to close my eyes for only a moment to revive the past in the channels of my mind.  If you removed the shiny cars, bundled tourists and glamorous shops the world had been little altered in 30 years.  Europe is that way.  It really doesn’t change much.  It is not like America where you leave for a three week holiday and when you return a building is gone or a new shopping mall is open.  In Europe time plods on and it seems only to be reshaped by wars and conflict that have mercifully left most of what remained in 1945 alone to the present.  When American film companies need to dramatize turn of the century New York or Chicago they come to Budapest.  There was a time we looked like them yet we surrendered elegance to steel and stained glass windows to walls of mirrored glass.  

Budapest, Hungary

My son and his girlfriend navigated the Prague nightlife much as I once did with my friends in Vienna so many years ago.  In my age it was middle eastern Arabs and Persians attempting to lure our girlfriends away with oil money in overprices discotheques.  In my son’s age it was muscle bound Russian low life attempting to pull away his companion for a sexual rendezvous  and sideline my son in the process.  His slender frame and gentle demure once mirroring my own he worked feverishly to ditch the Russians and rescue his girl a feat I am happy to report ultimately succeeded.  

The individual door 6 person compartments on trains have largely been replaced with airline type seat configurations in carriages.  I remembered how when a train would stop people would attempt to grab a compartment and keep them to themselves.  They would quickly close the curtains and turn out the lights.  Stretched out across three seats they pretended to sleep and hope they would not be disturbed.  I miss them.  There was a kind of Agatha Christie type nature to them as you would find yourself face to face with a stranger for hours.  Conversations would often start as travelers passed the time.  When stations were reached windows would go down and bags would be pushed through them to and from the platforms below.  It was before wheeled luggage and everything was ungainly.  Gone are the border crossings I once knew.  When carriages would stop before crossing barbed wire barriers and somber dead faced guards clutching weapons would move through the carriages pushing up ceiling panels looking for anyone trying to leave the prison of Eastern Europe.  

Gellert Spa, Budapest

It is a better world today but their was a side of me that missed the simplicity of before.  A similar feeling was shared with me by my wife and son’s Thai girlfriend who encountered a heavyset Hungarian man at a spa in Budapest.  My son and I were enjoying the steam room during which time the Hungarian man seized the moment and opportunistically nuzzled up next them.   The man lamented the changed world.  Things were cheaper and easier before he said.  I miss the old days. 

When my son and I returned and noticed the situation in process, I contemplated allowing the encounter to play itself out.  My son being the valiant young man he is, chose to rescue our women from the large Hungarian man’s net.  When my wife conveyed the man’s longing for the past, I reminded my wife that while from todays perspective we might lament the loss of the past, time seems to color over the difficulties and remember only the good.  It is much the same in Russia today where some remember Stalin with fondness forgetting about the millions he murdered and starved to death.  Seven million Ukrainians in a famine he precipitated alone.  A number exceeding the 6 million Jews murdered by Hitler.  In this world it is hard for our minds to grasp such death and misery.  Despite this, the memory of order or structure can be enticing.  For those that were provided for, they lived simple but decent lives.  For the rest they suffered and often died.  For six months in Vienna I lived with an old woman named Eva Sartory who was a refugee from the Soviet 1956 invasion of Hungary.  She was a victim of  repression and denied her aspirations for freedom.  Memories are short and I am sure in the mind of my wife’s Hungarian friend, life in communist days was good when what food you could find was cheap along with rent and admission to public spas.

As our train moved into Poland and came to a stop in Krakow I struggled to remember the train station I once ran through, heavy duffle bags in hand.  I tried to remember the face of my friend Dwight as he watched my train car pull away from the platform headed toward a distant Polish town realizing I was on the wrong train moving into a frozen Polish night.   I tried to imagine him pointing at my rapidly moving carriage and saying to a Polish conductor “Mein Freund (my friend)” as he wondered what would become of me.  

Krakow Glowny how you have changed

That train station is largely gone. Well it is still there, it just serves as a Lego museum these days.  It has been replaced by a modern mall/rail complex that is in itself a monument to a new Poland that stares in stark contrast back at the old one.  We arrived in Krakow in the dead of winter and perhaps the cold and ice acted as a barrier to a warm perception of the medieval city for my traveling companions.  For me it was a kind of frozen homecoming.  I can understand how the frigid weather, ice and snow might tarnish ones attitudes yet for me Krakow represents a kind of European purity.  When I walk its streets I feel as if I am in an old Europe still not discovered by the masses of people.  One that sincerely exists as it always has.  At my wife’s urging we splurged for a carriage ride and as the coach moved through the frozen cobblestone streets around Wawel Castle I felt my mind transported to a different time.   I tried to explain that there is a winter world and a summer world here.  It is a concept I think very difficult for a Thai to imagine.  In their life the world changes very little and such stark contrast seems as if it is far from reality and as distant as the classical world in a painting hanging on a galleries wall.  

We were staying in an odd post war building that had the heaviest door I have ever opened in my life.  I wondered if it had once been a bank or perhaps the door was meant to keep any further invasions of the hun at bay.  Quite possibly it was a cold war era fallout shelter now acting as an apartment building.  The apartment itself was a fusion of Bohemian style, classical elements and industrial fusion.  The kitchen sink mounted on a concrete counter was so tall it made me feel as if I was a Lilliputian living in the home of a giant.   The kitchen table was made from a giant wooden wire spool and a cut round piece of glass.   The bearded owner of the spot named Hubert had the effect of making me feel both young and old at the same time.  I liked him.  He was dry and direct but kind and friendly.  

Krakow, Poland

As I peered out from a window of the apartment my first sight was a darkened street partially illuminated by the glowing sign of a sex shop on the first floor of our building.  Across the street was the bright lights of the mall/station complex and in-between people went about their busy lives.  I felt as if I could be inspired there.  It was simple and rustic yet quiet and thoughtful.  I immediately understood how so many of the great writers originated in Poland and Russia.  There was a quality to the dark and loneliness of winter that inspired me. I wanted to come back.  To just live and walk and write.  To sit on park bench and feel the warmth of summer sun penetrate my skin and watch as the sunlight danced between leaves lightly moving in a summers breeze.  To look out at the frozen world from a cafe as I scribbled my thoughts and munched on a pierogi.      

The owner of our rented apartment Hubert said it best, “everyone should go to a camp once.”  For my family and our Thai guest it was their first time.  For me it would hauntingly be my second.  Of course the camp I speak of is Auschwitz and Birkenau.  Visiting a camp in the wintertime seems like the most appropriate time.  It is bleak and frozen and akin to dipping a single toe into the misery of the people that lived and died there.   Central Europe is a region I love and feel a strange kinship to.  It is also a killing field of humanity or those that had no sense of it.  The bodies are gone yet the emptiness that remains is unquestionably more chilling.  Ghosts whisper in the wind as the frozen windows in the buildings that remain seem to reflect the faces of the desperation and sadness.  I touched the earth knowing it was soaked with blood and tears and felt my breathing stop as I walked among piles of eyeglasses and luggage with names written upon them.  Bags once clutched by those that wore the shoes now deteriorating in piles of forgotten leather.  On that frozen day I felt my stomach quake with uneasiness leaving a sour nature fed by the ugly reality of history.  At times I wanted to vomit yet repressed my un-comfort knowing it was but an insect bite when compared to the suffering that had occurred around me.  

I don’t know how the experience colored my families perceptions of Poland.  For myself it reminded me of the sadness of time cloaked by my contemplative nature.  As a story teller the lives of so many and the evolving history of Poland and it’s Central European neighbors has torn into my heart since before I was a student and will likely remain with me until I die.

The Trabant affectionately known as the Trebie

When our overnight train pulled in to Budapest I thought about the city I had last traveled to as a student with my friends.  We all still have the pictures and the memories of jetting around the city in sputtering East German Trabants.  The age of the Trabant has passed but I can still smell the fumes spewing out of the tailpipes as they clattered down the streets of the aged and at times derelict Hungarian capital.  Budapest is looking strikingly better these days.  The back ally money changers seeking hard currency have been replaced by aggressive border line criminal storefront money changers.  The once thriving industry of meeting travelers at train stations and offering a room in a private apartment for a price has been supplanted by Air B and B.  There is still a general shadiness that looms among the faces of many of the residents.  The disheveled gypsy like appearance of many of those you encounter creates a kind of uneasiness.  It also reminds how many have been left behind in the new society.  

As I reflect on the two weeks spent in Austria, Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary with my family and Thai friend my mind often drifts to the images of white.  Why snowflakes falling in the courtyard of a castle feels more magical than a warm sunny day I cannot say.  Some how the cold seems to freeze the passage of time and absorb my mind.  Perhaps the cold weather creates a kind of unity in focus.  The mind is less distracted and standing huddled together with friends or family outside is welcoming.  As inviting as sipping a hot cup of tea relishing the warmth of a room seems to invite togetherness.  

When I was a young boy I spent my most wonderful Christmas in London with my parents.  It was simplistic and beautiful.  When I was a student I spent the holidays in Europe with friends that touched me and have walked with me through life.  During the winter of 2018 for a brief moment in time I shared it all with my family and hopefully created a memory that will burn brightly in their hearts for the rest of our lives.