One step at a time

Dear Mago,
Until recently I used to climb up onto a chair whenever I needed to change a light bulb, wash a window, or get something into or out of an upper cupboard in my kitchen. The climb never seemed as perilous as the descent. Like a cat I’ve always been quick to claw up, and slow to crawl down. Insight into the value of investing in a sturdy step stool came with a thunk and a thud some years ago as I jumped to the ground from the lowest branch of an apple tree. It felt as though I had suddenly pitched a tent on the jutting shafts of my brittle shoulder bones.

A step stool came in handy again today when I had to adjust my kitchen clock to daylight savings time. We lost an hour last night. And to think that just last evening, I was walking toward a setting sun over Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, along the lakes where allied powers (Churchill, Stalin, and Truman) met in 1945 for the last time, to outline the terms of surrender for Japan. And today is the 50th anniversary of the signing of a ”bundle of blank pages” that established the European Economic Community. And then there are the letters from Captain Buddy in Kitigate that I have yet to climb up and bring down. When is history in the making, whose history?

I enjoyed the huge sculptures in the little gallery on August Strasse in Berlin the most. I liked the semblance of reinforced concrete, bedsprings and bunkers of papier-maché. The Rip van Winkle of an artist sat in the back room beside a heavy stack of old newspapers and a washtub: “I love crumpling up all this bad news and burying it with my shovel under water.”

Fortunately, H’s sister reminded us to reset our clocks. Otherwise I probably would have missed my flight home from Berlin this afternoon…packed with half- baked sourdough bread and vegetable bouillon. Someone once told me that Ruth Berlau, Brecht’s lover, kept a hollow plaster bust of him in a hatbox. She used to get up on a step stool and take down the hatbox whenever she wanted to talk to him. The beauty of art. Take it easy, one step at a time. I may be running an hour late this evening, but I’m still nine hours ahead of San Francisco. Next week I will fly to San Francisco to visit mother Anne.

Your devoted granddaughter
ps. Do you think granddaughter and "forever young" are synonomous? Was heisst "tachales?