robinthefiddler

This time it’s a broken hand and a well sprained ankle (don’t even mention the ribs) from a fall. It must have been the nice round pine cone, because I went over sideways rather than straight forward.

Retail therapy? I didn’t skip the dulcimer festival yesterday, even though I couldn’t play well. I ended up with a new ukulele (tenor) and a large hammered dulcimer from the “swap” table. Some day I will be able to play them.

While I was doing that, Fred was springing a friend of ours out of rehab. Like many of our friends, she is smart enough to think she is always right , and therefore rather hard to really help. (No I will not do anything you suggest).

Well, one month to the day after my appendectomy turns out to be Valentine’s Day. The kids have absolutely vetoed doing anything related to “out to dinner”. “Holiday? And Friday? It will be crazy”. I’m kind of mostly recovered from combination surgery, jet lag and travel crud. I still occasionally get what feels like a stitch in my side (no pun intended). Now it’s time for bigger and better things, which means imaging of my gall bladder (they saw something and would have taken it out at the same time, but I already had an infection) and trying to get the proper paperwork for the travel insurance,

Meanwhile I am also doing minimally skilled nursing care for hubby’s foot wound, acquired in Egypt and ignored until a week or so after we got home,

I desperately need some fun.

I can’t remember him, because I never met him. All I know of him, is the stories my mother and grandmother told. All he ever knew of me were pictures and letters about a preschooler. He would have been born sometime between 1880 and 1885. He fought in the Cavalry in WWI. He married a non-practicing Jewish girl, about 15 years his junior. It didn’t much matter at the time, either the age difference or the nominal religious one. It started mattering in the 1930s. My grandmother saw no problem in converting to Lutheranism, so she did, along with her young daughter, but that didn’t really help. Eventually he sent them to her American relatives in 1937, “for a short visit.” I understand that at some point (a historian might be able to tell me) his marriage was officially dissolved. By the time the war was over, my mother was full grown, mostly American (though it took another 5 years to become a citizen) and neither she nor my grandmother was moving back to Germany. Not sure if he was considered legally married after that. They never did stand face to face again, but he wrote long, precise, letters. I once asked if he ever got in trouble and the answer was “Well, he was a war hero, and he was too old by then to be sent to fight.”. Too old was around 55 years of age.

I, also am a veteran, though times were very peaceful during my service (after Vietnam, and before Dessert Storm). I am older now than he was then, but I do wish I could ask him what things were like, when the Nazis rose to power.