September, 2004 - Nr. 9
I can hardly wait to come home for Thanksgiving. Right now I have enough of dirty trains and sandwiches to last me for a while. I miss your great cooking. And even though I am not a turkey fan, Mom, can you make one this year? With stuffing and all the trimmings like cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes and red cabbage with apples, dumplings… I can taste it now!
I have been running after some open business deals and do not understand why folks cannot make up their mind. In Germany it is the worst. By the time someone decides something the situation on the other end is so drastically changed that a whole new deal has to be brokered!
Why is it that folks cannot make up their mind? Have they made too many bad decisions that they cannot or do not dare to calculate a risk any more? Or is it this whole "Beamtentum-Denken"?
Security, security, security… that is what all people seemingly want. Don’t they know that if that is what you want then you should not play at all? Then you are admitting that you cannot make anything happen anymore, that all the games have been played and lost and what is has to be preserved forever. Yet nothing lasts forever. Everything needs to be renewed or newly created again and again.
Ah well, I am sure I will have grey hair before my time. That is why I need to come and gas up on goodies only you can provide.
And by the way, if you send me one more teddy bear, I have to have a serious word with you! Admit it! It was you that sent all those identical bears to my various temporary homes!? By now I am the laughing stock of my buddies…I need something in writing from you, because the occasional girl does not believe when I tell them that you did it. Women think that it is leftover from a past love interest. This is not very confidence inspiring, you know!?
Mom, have you read that the Pope spoke out against same sex marriages to our Canadian Ambassador? When I read what he was supposed to have said I kept hearing what you always said. It was nearly identical. Yet you also said that the church should stay out of the nations bedrooms as much as governments should stay out of church business.
The history of the past seems to support that as a sane notion.
Never mind, that. Much more important things are happening in the world. By now you already know about the fire in Weimar! How terrible! Imagine, all that knowledge down the tubes…I hope the many firefighters saved enough to reconstruct some of it.
When the great library in Alexandrian burned to the ground the wisdom of the entire empire was lost… and speeded up its demise. Was it not only a little while ago that archeologists found parts of it under the sea?
I get goose bumps just thinking about all those books burning.
And that reminds me: you had threatened to put all my books into storage. Have you done it already? If not please keep all my history and art books in the house. I do not want to miss them. And the entertaining stuff, like suspense novels and so on, Mom, give them away, please.
Got to run and catch yet another, no doubt, dirty train…it’s not like it used to be any more…
Until soon
Your son Martin
