Category: Family

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Kassel After



Theater After

Originally uploaded by Dan Brekke

Here’s the same scene taken some time after the bombing. My dad bought three cameras at an Army post exchange–including a Leica and a twin-lens reflex camera–and took many scenes of Kassel in 1946.

At first seeing this picture in a stack of old photos, we supposed that my dad took it. But looking again now, the picture and others that almost exactly reproduce the perspectives seen in a series of prewar postcards seem to have been done commercially. At least that’s my guess, since they appear to printed on postcard stock (though without credits). In short then, the photographer or photographers who documented prewar Kassel returned to the scenes they had shot earlier for the “after” view.

This scene speaks for itself. I’ve put up a (still unorganized) colllection of similar views on Flickr.

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Kassel Before



Theater Before

Originally uploaded by Dan Brekke

Part of a project I’m working on during my family trip. My dad was drafted late in World War II and sent to Germany as part of the occupation army. He was assigned to Kassel, a city on the River Fulda that had a prewar population of about a quarter-million and was the site of an important locomotive works and some other industries. The city was heavily bombed, with the deadliest and most damaging attack coming in the fall of 1943.

This is a “before” view of Kassel’s opera house (officially called the Prussian State Theatre, I think). According to one account, a program was being presented the night of October 22, 1943, when the air raid sirens went off, signaling the start of the 569-plane British fire bombing that devastated the city. (It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it, a nation putting on an opera for the home front while engaged not only in a calamitous war but also in a side project of systematic extermination of millions. All part of maintaining an illusion of normalcy, or humanity, I guess.)

This image is from a postcard that is an obvious duplication of an original by Echte Photography and published by the firm Bruno Hansmann–apparently taken in the mid-1930s.

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Dog Geography

Scout, a.k.a. The Dog, is full of surprises, especially when it comes to what we think of as him memory and awareness of where he is when we’re out on walks.

Since he’s a border collie/retriever mix of some kind, our program has been to walk him three or four times every day. But these are not long walks. Most of his world lies within a radius of about a mile and a half of our house. Still, that’s an area of about seven square miles.

When we bipeds traverse an area that size, we notice and remember remarkable or useful features: Peet’s Coffee, the house with the unusual water fountain in the front yard, the parking lot that offers a shortcut, the beautiful tall Norfolk pine.

The Dog has some of the same thing going on. There are certain places on our walks where he loves and expects to stop: outside the chicken coop in the garden at the local middle school and a certain Monterey pine where squirrels are always eating sunflower seeds after a dish on the ground.

How do we know The Dog remembers these places? He stops when we get to the nearest corner and more or less points in the desired direction. The fact he does this after many repetitions doesn’t surprise me.

But here’s something that does: About a month or six weeks ago, we had Scout out for a walk. We got a corner I don’t remember having walked past with him before. He stopped and stared into the yard of the house at the corner. There were a couple of pet rabbits loose out there, and he was transfixed. In fact, we’d still be out there if we hadn’t compelled him to leave after about 10 minutes.

The next day, we approached the corner from a completely different direction; in fact, no part of the path we took repeated the way we had come the day before. But when we got close to the rabbit house, he headed directly for it. OK, maybe not shocking. Still, I was impressed that he made the connection–maybe he smelled the place–when we were coming from a different direction.

We didn’t return to that block for a couple weeks. When I did, we were taking another route that didn’t come closer than about 100 yards to the rabbit place. But as soon as The Dog got to the closest point, he stopped and looked up the street toward his desired destination. Yesterday, needing to take him on a quick walk and wanting to keep him away from the rabbits, I took yet another route, but had the same result. When we got to within a block of the rabbit house, he stopped and pointed for it.

I’m not sure how he’s doing it. But I think it must be a combination of visual and olfactory recognition (though he knows we’re close even when the rabbits are downwind) and some sort of ability to guess the relationship of one location to his target even if he hasn’t walked the precise path before. In other words, he’s using something more than rote memory.

I’m not suggesting The Dog is capable of planning out his own trip itinerary. But en route he’s got the capability of connecting a remote location with where he happens to be and heading there.

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My Triathlon

Ironmancda062208

As mentioned in a previous installment, I’ve been up in the Pacific Northwest (broadly defined) to see my friend Pete do the Ironman Coeur d’Alene triathlon. Pete started into this swim-bike-run business about six and a half years ago, the year he turned 40. He went into it as a strong cyclist and runner (though not a distance specialist) and a non-swimmer. After a few months, it became apparent to him that a) he found the sport not only challenging but intriguing and fun and b) that it would take far longer than the half year or so he and another turning-40 friend had allotted themselves to adequately prepare for a race that consists of a 2.4-mile open-water swim, 112-mile bike ride, and full-distance marathon (26.2 miles, if you don’t have that distance tattooed on you somewhere). So he shelved the full Ironman plan for the time being and did “half Iron” events where each event is half the total length of the full version. Somewhere along there, he started running marathons, too (last year he qualified for the Boston Marathon, and this year he ran that event). Since the only thing harder than finishing an Ironman is getting into one–each even admits about 2,200 racers, and each seems to be fully subscribed, at 500 bucks or more a head, within hours or days of opening for registration–he signed up for Coeur d’Alene last June. Yesterday was the day.

Short of a disaster–something possible but unlikely such as a bike crash or something like a debilitating injury during the run–I didn’t have any real question that Pete would finish. The question for me was more about what the full day, and especially the long, long concluding run, would take out of him. The one thing I have noticed from seeing shorter triathlons is that many very strong athletes whom I imagine look imperturbably graceful running under normal conditions are reduced to a painful-looking shuffle in the tri marathon. And it’s a shuffle that goes on and on and on.

I saw some of that yesterday. Pete hit the (60-degree F., wetsuits required) water at 7 a.m. with 2,000 other swimmers. The scene was beautiful mayhem. I saw him in the wild scrum in the swim-to-bike transition area, where volunteers helped peel wetsuits off the athletes, and then as he headed out on the bike. I saw him come in and out of town on the two 56-mile cycling laps, and then early on his run. In the long periods between sightings, I was walking back and forth to a Coeur d’Alene cafe and cheering on every triathlete I saw. When I first saw him on the run, I told Pete that he was looking great. He said he felt pretty good. I saw him coming back in from his first of two running laps. He smiled, but said, “The pace has slowed considerably.” He was out long enough on the second lap that I started to wonder if everything was OK. It was–I was simply stuck in spectator time, while he was slowing but moving forward in competitor time. Finally, I spotted him less than a mile from the finish, ran ahead to snap one last picture, and then watched him run the long, downhill and beautifully sunlit finishing stretch down Sherman Avenue to the lakeshore where the whole thing began.

To repeat what I said yesterday to hundreds of people I didn’t know: great job, Pete. (And yeah, he did well: 12:26:07 total time, 73rd of 209 starters in his age group.)

Petecda062208

(Pictures: Top: The field finishes first of two swimming laps. Bottom: Pete, on the second-to-last turn before the finish. Click for larger versions.)

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Graduation Day

Owls061408

We’re in Eugene, Oregon, for the weekend. The big event is our son Thom’s graduation from the journalism and communications school at the University of Oregon (after three years).

We spent a couple hours this morning at the campus’s famous basketball arena, McArthur Court, and watched the new doctorates, masters, and bachelors (of arts) strut their stuff. The speaker was an alum named Dan Wieden, a 1967 graduate of the journalism/communications school. He went on to cofound Wieden+Kennedy, a PR and marketing firm that started out in Portland with a card table, four chairs, a file cabinet, a green lampshade and the stub end of a pencil. Oh, yes, and one client: Nike. Mr. Wieden has done OK for his clients and himself since then, and the firm is now international. He spoke briefly about barely graduating, about dating the professor in the French class he was failing, and about the accelerating pace of change in our world (citing Moore’s Law and Ray Kurzweil’s singularity).

OK. Then the diplomas were handed out. The ethics in journalism professor mangled Thom’s middle name (Cuchulain came out as KOOSH-a-lin), but that was OK. Then we were leaving campus to come back to Thom’s to pack him up and move him to Berkeley.

Thom had something he wanted to show us on the way back to the house. The tree above. More specifically, two residents of the tree that would be nearly invisible to all but the most attentive passers-by: a pair of nesting western screech owls. They’re little things, well camouflaged; they looked like they were asleep, but their heads pivoted to follow our movements. Below is a cropped version of the top photo in which they show up a little better. (Click pictures for larger versions.)

So that’s it. Packing this afternoon. Dinner tonight. Driving home tomorrow. It wasn’t long ago Kate and I were dropping Thom off up here. The three years have gone very fast.

Owls061408A

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Dog Stats

The dog and I took a walk today–2.7692 miles if a map of the route is to be trusted. The dog, who also answers most of the time to the name Scout, has been here just over two years. I’ve been mentally working up a statistical profile of his life since he joined our household. Just a rough idea of the major points:

Walks: Scout is some kind of mix–probably border collie and a bigger dog called a flat-coated retriever. His appearance says so for one thing. And for another, flat-coats are reputed to be calmer than collies, and Scout is generally very calm. Of course, the daily walking regimen has something to do with it. Since we were sure when we found him that we had a dog that needed a lot of exercise on our hands, we’ve made sure he gets out for three or four walks a day, every day. All told, he probably averages a couple hours a day out with us. And if we cover between 2.5 and 3 miles per hour, that means he (and we–though Kate and I generally split the walks) put in 5 or 6 miles a day with the dog. Over two years, 730 days-plus, that comes to somewhere between 3,600 and 4,300 miles.

Food: He gets something like 3/4s of a pound of food a day (mostly dry), not counting stray corn chips from the kitchen floor, sidewalk snacks, and daily lawn grazing (he’s got an amazing nose for food that others no longer have any use for). Over 730 days, we’re talking about 540 pounds of dry food. (You look at his 55-pound body and wonder where it goes. Stay tuned.)

Food–the Sequel: In Berkeley and other places that kid themselves they’re civilized, it’s the law that you have to pick up your dog’s dumps (prized though they may be by discriminating members of the strolling public). The accessory of choice for this chore is the little plastic bags that home-delivery newspapers come in. In some city parks, it’s common to see garbage cans full of tied-off New York Times delivery bags; in some city parks, there are special self-locking receptacles for this kind of refuse (I often think about what a future civilization–the one we imagine pawing through our garbage dumps in 2,000 years–will make of the garbage strata that contains all the nicely wrapped dog crap; I also wonder how long the nicely wrapped crap will maintain its freshness for future garbologists).

OK–all those walks I mentioned above are punctuated by stops. Stops for Scout to inhale the fragrance of his kind and to add his own to the mix; stops for squirrel staredowns; stops for unexplained noises in the bushes; stops to sample discarded school lunches; and stops to crap. No, I don’t weigh the crap. But my impression is that Scout performs this function dependably two or three times a day (never inside, and that’s a fact; the one time he came close, we were staying in a motel; he work me up in the middle of the night to take him outside). Let’s say he goes 2.5 times a day. So over 730 days, that’s … 1,825 responsibly retrieved and wrapped up dog leavings.

And on that note, I’ll also wrap up this tour of the quantitative dog’s life. (Though I wonder if I can figure out how many bales of fur he’s left around the house in the last two years.)

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Boston Again

A friend of mine from high school, Mike Koerber, took up distance running decades ago. He was always a pretty serious athlete, and we spent many, many days playing hockey (he had a pond in front of his house), softball, basketball and football. Last time I saw him was … 1977, I’m guessing. But last fall, I looked his name up in the Chicago Marathon results and saw that, yes, in the midst of a race beset by unseasonably hot temperatures (about 90, in mid-October; it was weather Mrs. O’Leary’s cow would have loved) and some logistical problems (not enough water on the course), there was Michael Koerber, finishing in something like … 3:12, if I remember correctly. I traced his past performanced and found at least one time under 3 hours. I’d guess that that puts him in the 80th to 90th percentile among runners his age (which is also my age, since we were born four days apart). So, Mike not only runs marathons, he’s pretty accomplished.

So, I look him up on the Boston Marathon site, and he’s out there today, too. Here are the early splits for both Pete and Mike (click for larger). Go, you two!

Petemike

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In Boston, Meanwhile …

I’m sitting here gathering my wits for the day (not that there are all that many to gather). In Boston, meanwhile, my friend Pete has just crossed the starting line in that marathon they have there. He’s an amazing athlete, really: In the last six months, he’s done a series of long races getting ready for this day, including a 50-miler. Yeah. Fifty miles. Running (it took something like 9 hours and 50 minutes). In the next couple of months, he’s doing a tough half-Ironman triathlon (Wildflower, here in California, next month) and a full Ironmon (Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in June). And today, he’s there in Boston, running again. Here’s the first split from the online tracker:

Petemarathon

Go, Pete!

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Rewrite: An Editing Tale

It’s like this: a trusted reader went over that bike piece and pointed out a few things about it. I was reluctant to acknowledge the reader’s points, but eventually saw their merit. The new version of the piece has a lot in common with the first, but has jettisoned a lot of what I’ll call random rhapsodizing. I liked the rhapsodizing. I just found it didn’t work the way I thought it did. The rewrite: It’s after the jump.

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Today in History, and Why I Ride

[Reposted, slightly altered, after being killed]

Fifty-five years ago, Mom and Dad were married (I wasn’t far behind). Today, Dad had surgery on his second broken hip in six months (the good news is that he’s doing well and that he doesn’t have another hip to break). Tonight, Mars is in conjunction with the moon. Looking out from our front porch with 10-power binoculars, Mars is just to the left of the moon as it declines in the west, and the moon’s craters are beautifully visible.

But the principal news of this evening: I wrote a little piece on cycling for a friend’s newsletter. Without further ado, here”s the text:

Until Next Time

One year, growing up in the recently paved over prairies and peat bogs south of Chicago, I got a birthday bicycle. Someone may have thought I was too old for training wheels; maybe I was that someone. I learned to ride that bike, a red J.C. Higgins with fenders and big tires, through pure dumb gravity-assisted trial and error. I fell down a lot. After a couple of weeks of coaching and cajoling from my dad and mom and other adults on the block, I had wobbled around and toppled over so many times that both sides of the leather-like seat had been worn down to metal.

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