MOROCCO: FINAL THOUGHTS

After a Big Trip like this one to Morocco, my husband and I like to sit down together for a final trip evaluation. We did that on the plane on our L-O-N-G flights (stop in Paris, stop in Detroit) home. With almost no editing (except for adding a few pictures), here are my notes.

OBSERVATIONS ABOUT GEOGRAPHY:

* The Atlas Mountains, with their three levels (Anti-Atlas, Middle Atlas, and High Atlas), are a significant barrier and effectively separate the north from the south. Even today, roads seem tenuous--easily washed out by a storm or destroyed by a landslide.

* Road repair, similar to in the U.S., is a constant struggle, especially on the winding mountain roads. It's one of the few places we saw heavy machinery.
* Mountain roads have few safety precautions, such as barriers on the cliff side.
* Morocco has incredible diversity of terrain and climate zones in a relatively small area.

OBSERVATIONS ABOUT TECHNOLOGY:

* In some ways the technology was way behind, although everyone carries a smart phone, there are plenty of cars, and I've never seen so many satellite dishes. Still, it is as if they skipped over many parts of technological development. (No telephone land lines, for example.)

* There is a complete lack of farm machinery. Large areas of land are plowed by donkey and an old-fashioned plow. In fact, donkeys are EVERYWHERE.
* People in the middle of nowhere are walking alongside the road. Where are they going? Where did they come from?

GERMANY: 67th ANNIVERSARY OF THE BOMBING OF PFORZHEIM

Sixty-seven years ago today, the Royal Air Force, as part of the Allied offensive against Germany, bombed my mother's home town of Pforzheim.  Just ten weeks later, Germany surrendered.  My brother has written a tender, insightful post about the bombing here.

In December of 2000, we took our chidren to Europe to pick up Rachael from a study abroad in France.  As part of that trip, we met up with Mom in Germany and spent several days together.  She took us to Pforzheim and showed us all her favorite places: the place where her gymnasium once stood, the bridge where she kissed her boyfriend, her favorite shops and parks. 

She took us to Sophienstrasse 34, where the apartment building her family lived in used to stand.  It is just one block from the Enz River, shown below:

These are the steps that Oma and Uncle Heinz ran down to get to the river, where they huddled in terror during the bombing.  

The memorial marker in the Pforzheim Cemetery lists the date of the attack and the number killed:

The stones that mark the mass graves are each inscribed with about twenty names of those who were known to be killed:

In another portion of the cemetery is the grave of my mother's uncle, Gustav Adolf Schmid, who died in 1962.  Look below Gustav's and Anna's names and you will see the name of their son and my mother's cousin, Karl Schmid, who was killed in action during World War II:

Pforzheim has been beautifully rebuilt, as have so many other European cities, with an eye to recreating and restoring the past:

At the time, all we had was a 35 mm camera, and these seven pictures are all that we have of that day in Pforzheim.  If we could go back, we would take ten or twenty times as many pictures.  We also tried to take notes while Mom was talking, but she kept saying, "No, no!  Don't waste time with that!  I'll write it all down for you later!"

Unfortunately, later never came.

READING

No book about World War II has affected me more than The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I first listened to an excellent Audible.com recording of the book, and have since read the print version. Most of my World War II reading has demonized the Germans, and as the daughter of a German immigrant, I appreciated a story that was sympathetic to the average German citizen (although Liesel Meminger, the main character, is anything but average).

Liesel, a Jewish girl, is the equivalent of a foster child in the home of the Hubermanns, a childless German couple. Her love for them, her friendship with a young Jewish man the Hubermanns hide in their basement, and her friendship with Rudy, the boy next door, are at the heart of the story narrated by a mysterious character who seems to know the past, present, and future of each character.

While this is not a book about Pforzheim, in many ways it is a book about my mother's experiences. The descriptions of the air raids and general life during the war match up poignantly with the stories she shared with us. Liesel is within a year or two of my mother's age during the same time period, and the story takes place in a fictional town outside Munich, a city about 160 miles from where my mother lived. It was a profoundly emotional experience to read Zusak's tender telling of a life not so different from my mother's.

In 2013 The Book Thief was made into an excellent movie of the same name.

D-DAY 2011: MEMORIES OF OUR TRIP TO NORMANDY

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” 

~Henry Miller

In December 2000, our family traveled to France and Germany.  We couldn't pass up the excellent tour guides in each country: Rachael, who was just finishing a semester abroad in Paris, and my mother, who was in Germany for the holidays. (More on our time with Mom in a future post.)

Years ago we started making a list after our family trips that we titled "Things We Want to Remember."  I thought that on this 67th anniversary of D-Day, it would be appropriate to remind my children of a few things that we wrote in our family journal about our visit to Normandy. Here are a few "Things We Want to Remember" from December 22, 2000.


•  The video footage of World War II at the War Memorial in Caen.

•  The stones with peace inscriptions from all countries involved in the war, and the flags of both Allied and Axis powers alike flying together.

•  The statue of the rising spirit of a young man in the plaza at the American Cemetery with a wall of names of those missing in action behind it.

•  The orchard-like rows and rows of white stone crosses and Jewish Stars of David, inscribed with the name, date of death, and home state of the soldier.

•  The inscription on the crosses of unknown  soldiers:

HERE RESTS IN HONORED GLORY

A COMRADE IN ARMS

KNOWN BUT TO GOD

•  The long, sandy, peaceful Omaha Beach where so much death and destruction occurred.  Ponies trotting down the beach pulling surreys.

•  Pointe du Hoc with its deep bomb craters now covered in green grass, its grim bunkers filled with the out-of-place laughter of school groups, and its rolls of barbed wire still standing.

•  The French school group that seemed to be following us around Normandy, the girls who kept trying to talk to an embarrassed Sam, and the one who said in a thick French accent, "Fine! Don't say hi to me then!"

•  The American tank and memorial to Patton in the town square in Avranches.

Dwight D. Eisenhower gave the D-Day order to attack on June 6, 1944.  In part, he said, "I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle.  We will accept nothing less than full victory.  Good luck, and let us all beseech the blessings of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking."

It is easy now for us to look back and call this a glorious moment, and insofar as it brought about the end of the war, it was indeed a great day.  However, I do remember how anti-war my mother was.  She and others who actually experienced the horrors of invasion and bombings and death probably looked back on this day with pain.  Seeing the rows of crosses--each representing someone's son, husband, father, brother, sweetheart, or friend--was a moving experience.  I hope my children will always remember both lessons of our day in Normandy: the courage and sacrifice on one hand, and the tremendous loss and suffering on the other.

CEMETERIES, PART 1

(I thought about saving this post for Halloween, but I decided I'd probably lose interest by then, so here it is now.)

I have a confession to make: Bob and I are obsessed with cemeteries.

Or at least it would seem that way if someone took a cursory look through my photo files.  I'm not sure what is so appealing to me about cemeteries, but I don't think it's a fascination with the macabre.  After all, I was raised with great respect for cemeteries.  My mother took us to the cemetery to visit our dad's grave at least twice a year, and I have good memories of running and playing among the familiar stone markers.  As I grew up, I found the cemetery, with its dedication to memory, to be a peaceful and poignant place. My mother also took my siblings and me to the narrow, quiet lanes of the Payson cemetery to teach us to drive. What's not to love about that, right?

Joseph Anderson, an American clergyman, said, "The Christian cemetery is a memorial and a record. It is not a mere field in which the dead are stowed away unknown; it is a touching and beautiful history, written in family burial plots, in mounded graves, in sculptured and inscribed monuments. It tells the story of the past, not of its institutions, or its wars, or its ideas, but of its individual lives,--of its men and women and children, and of its household. It is silent, but eloquent; it is common, but it is unique. We find no such history elsewhere; there are no records in all the wide world in which we can discover so much that is suggestive, so much that is pathetic and impressive."

Perhaps my current fixation with strangers' graves started in December of 2000 when our family visited Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France.

We had to hunt and hunt to find the grave of the great Polish composer Frederic Chopin, who died in Paris in 1849:

In contrast, we just followed the crowds to the cemetery's most visited grave, that of Jim Morrison of The Doors, who died in Paris in 1971:

Morrison's stone was covered with flowers, and we still laugh about the earnest young man who was staring mournfully at the grave, quietly singing what we assumed was music from The Doors while swaying back and forth. Such homage!

A few years later we had a similar experience at Graceland.  (Well, Rachael and I did.  Bob refused to pay the admission price to take the tour, so Rachael and I went in without him.  It was worth every penny.)  I think Elvis's grave (located not very far from the house, as if the family already had a Graceland museum in mind) was one of the most decorated I have ever seen. He is buried next to his parents and paternal grandmother. Lines of people filed quietly past the markers, some reverentially adding flowers to the piles already there.  You would think this was the final resting spot of a former President of the United States and his family. In fact, with 600,000 visitors a year, Graceland is the second most visited private home in the United States--behind only the White House.

On our recent trip to New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, we enjoyed strolling through several cemeteries that exemplified what Anderson described as "a touching and beautiful history." One of the things I love about the big cities of the Eastern U.S. is the way that history is so nonchalantly interwoven with the present. Cemeteries with three-hundred-year-old graves and hundreds of individual stories are located next to impersonal, towering skyscrapers, as in this cemetery next to Trinity Church in the Wall Street District of Manhattan:

It makes you wonder what these guys will think and say on resurrection morning! ("Hey, Martha! Look at that great and spacious building!")

I loved this cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut, seen through the iron fence surrounding Yale University:

In Boston, the dead lie buried all over the city in churchyards and public parks:

 
This is probably the most famous cemetery in Boston, the Granary Burying Ground, where many of the Founding Fathers were laid to rest (such a lovely euphemism, don't you think?):

Every now and then we stumbled into a name we recognized:

Samuel Adams, a member of the Continental Congress, Governor of Massachusetts, and founder of a ubiquitous ale brand.

Paul Revere, patriot extraordinaire

John Hancock, whose stone was appropriately large among the smaller stones of the cemetery

It was thrilling to see these memorials, some original and some of recent vintage, to the men who shaped our country's history. Compared to Jim Morrison's or Elvis Presley's graves, they were rather plain and unadorned. It seems to me that we should be doing more to honor the sacrifices and phenomenal contributions of these American icons. But then again, they were just colonists, not kings; they were mere citizens, not royalty. For the most part, their graves reflect that.

We visited my FAVORITE cemetery, however, on the last day of our trip.  Come back in a few days to find out where it was.

CHRISTMAS TREE ORNAMENTS: TRAVEL

I've gotten in the habit of picking up new Christmas tree ornaments when we travel. I think it all started with this ornament, sent to us from Hawaii by my mother-in-law a few months after we visited my in-laws there when they were on a two-year assignment for my father-in-law's work:

After we got this ornament, I just couldn't stop myself.  On the domestic front, we have these:

Purchased on a Church History tour in 2003, Palmyra, NY

Valley Forge

Louisiana's Bayou country, 2005

 Andrew even got in on the act WITHOUT my urging.  On his 8th grade trip to Washington, D.C., he came home with this gift for me--a tree ornament:

 

It's been especially fun to purchase international ornaments.  We got most of the ones I include below in the country itself, but a few (the mosque and the Chinese dancers) were purchased at World Market here in Redlands. 

King Henry VIII came from the very first international trip Bob and I took together: 

England, 1999

 We returned to England a few years later:

On that same trip we spent a few wonderful days on the Isle of Man, site of much Cannon family history:

Over Christmas and New Year's 2000-2001 we all traveled to France to pick up Rachael from her study abroad semester in Paris:

On that trip we also met up with my mother in Germany.  One of our favorite stops was the Weihnachtsmarkt in Salzburg, where I bought two long strands of these straw ornaments.  When I brought them home, I cut them apart into forty individual ornaments, and they are now one of the main design items on our tree:

At that same market we purchased these two woodland fairies:

In 2002 we took a winter trip to Italy.  Unfortunately, on the day we were in Pisa, the Tower was closed and we did not get to go inside:

 

In 2007 we traveled to Japan to see our cute new granddaughter Savannah:

 

While there, we took a little side trip to China:

In 2009 we went to Peru with the other partners in Bob's law firm and their wives:

  This past year we went on a cruise that included, among other countries, Turkey:


. . . and Ukraine (where I lost control as far as ornaments go, but they were all so cute):

. . . and Greece

 

I realize that I don't have any ornaments  from our trip to Spain with Andrew in 2006.  We'll have to go back so I can get one.   I'm also hoping for lots more ornaments from other countries in the years to come! Maybe an Egyptian camel, a Polish grandma, an Indian elephant, a Dutch tulip, an African warrior, an Australian kangaroo . . .