Leaving friends always makes me think that this will be the last time I’ll see them. Whether with coffee cups drained with a pal on an afternoon or when visiting friends far away, I get the sense that time is getting short. I may never see them again, whether they live far or near. There’s a sweet melancholy in the thought. We have lived. We are now at ages that do not guarantee another morning. But we have had each other and have been luckier than we know at that.
You have read in previous accounts of our few days in Paris. The city really is all they say it is. Since we had good local guides in Phil and Elizabeth Glynn and the American writer Eddy Harris and his Parisian friend Celine, the visit to the City of Light was much more even than we had always heard about. The food was unparalleled and about the same price as American restaurant food, even cheaper in most instances. Public transportation was second to none in both its expanse and its light touch on the pocket. The city sprang alive early morning with feet on pavement and stayed vibrant long after dark. The atmosphere and the light and the river provided a backdrop to important and heart-moving visits to the see such things as Monet’s Water Lillies at the Musee l’Orangerie, in which I stood and cried with a lot of other people weeping at the sight of one of the most beautiful things on earth.
It was with some regret we left the Glynn’s friendly abode for the train station Gare de l’Est. Boarding the TGV (Train a Grande Vitesse), we were very literally whisked from the heart of the great city into the French countryside. The screen at the end of our coach told us that when the train hit its stride it was moving at over 200 miles per hour. Nary a sway or bump. Clean and comfortable, the train shot us to Luxemburg City, one of my favorite cities in the world, which, disappointingly, I saw very little of in the hurry to get to the train that would take us to Trier.
The train from Paris to Luxemburg and then to Trier took only a little over three hours, putting us at the Trier train station in the early afternoon. My friend Stefan Weinert, one of the loving men who took me into their apartment in the late winter of 1986, met us there. The great thing about Stefan is that he seems to know no strangers and he an Virginia hit if off immediately. He ushered us to a bus, which dropped us off a two-minute walk from his house in Trier/Eitelsbach at the mouth of the lush, grapevine- and tree-covered Ruwer Valley.
We dropped our bags in the room Stefan had made up for us and engaged in a very German sort of thing. Sitting outside with a glass of sprudel or coffee or fruit juice on the veranda, gazing into the garden and up the valley, we sat and caught up a moment because a moment was all it took. Stefan and I reconnected a few years ago and stay in regular contact. It was only a few minutes before we were talking about new subjects interlaced with references to shared and yet-to-be-revealed pasts.
It was a good chat. The sky had clouded and rain pittered on the canvas above. The day was warm. A little arm of the Ruwer, a stream-sized river so important to the winemaking region of the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer, flowed in a gurgle and swish at the edge of the yard bounded by an old warehouse for wine casks on one side and a pasture that flowed up under an orchard and up a hill covered with cultivated wine grapes.
Our days in Paris did not tax us, being as they were wanderings rather than touristy rushes from one famous place to another. Still, being there with Stefan on the patio in the quiet of that sleepy part of town and on a kind of dreary day I love the most gave us pause and whatever stress we felt from the trip from Paris pushed out of our lungs and away into the mist. Nothing was pressing us. We had no appointments. We could do whatever, whenever we felt the impulse.
Margrit, Stefan’s wife and a woman who has seemingly not changed in appearance sine I last saw her in 2000, arrived home, exhausted from her work with refugee woman trying to establish themselves in Germany. The chatter continued until evening fell and it was time to eat. We drove the car through the outlying districts of Trier—warehouses and business parks and wholesale stores, so seemingly miniature compared to their American counterparts—into the city center.
I’d lived here for a year and a half in a formative stage of my life. I knew the city from many hours and days I walked the streets. I can navigate the city almost as well as I can my own Kansas City, Missouri. As we drove, we talked. And as we talked, I saw the city as it was and through the mirror of my past. While I kept up with conversation, I said to myself, “I lived here for a while,” “This was the street I rode my bike on to work,” and “Here is the cemetery I spent a lot of sweetly melancholy hours in.” Memory and immediate perception met in what I can only call my favorite state of mind.
We parked at the Cathedral and made our way through the old city, Stefan and I sharing memories and seeing what the city had made of itself since we had walked these cobbles together. Margrit and Virginia made their own conversations and joined us in chatter. The night was magical.
Trier is an amazing, old and sentimental city, fond of its past and constantly seeking its future. It is, as they say, “on the ass-end of Germany,” a frontier town near the borders of Luxemburg and France. It’s clean, dilapidated in spots, and remaking itself all the time. The buildings do not change but what’s in them and around them does. The ravages of capitalism have not spared Karl Marx’ home town. Chain stores infect the inner districts, pushing out smaller, family- and individual owned shops, while landlord push for the highest profit from their holdings. The result is something of a mishmash between the old, unchanging background and flashy, mass-marketed brands. What was so familiar faded with time and I began to feel my time was nearing an end—more behind me than in front—irrelevance growing at exponential, existential rates. Soon enough, I will join the others in the cemetery I remembered so well on our drive into town.
We ended our walk at a restaurant that has not changed in style, appearance, or way of doing business in some 40 years. The food was good, nothing to write home about but beneficial enough on the heart to remember. We talked of the old days some, our memories harmonizing over the feelings of being young and just starting down paths that would land us in that restaurant at that moment. The gratefulness of friendship abounded and we thought about how different we’d be had we not had the time together in Trier in the mid-1980s There’s no real way of knowing. But we felt a great tug at the heartstrings about being together in that moment. The nature of it, the luck of it.
By the time we made our way back to the car in the hauntingly atmospheric light of that city, we were ready to call it a night. We’d be leaving for another town near Trier the next morning. The knowledge that this friendship would continue mitigated the melancholy of yet another parting. The hugs that night were tight. We’d see each other again, at least on video chats. Who knows how many more trips over the pond we have? Perhaps, none. It didn’t seem to matter, at least in that moment, that this might be the last time we would be able to press hearts together in embrace.
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