Avoiding an international incident

Laura, you know that wonderful gift you and Pete gave us last summer after the harvest from your back yard?  The little gem in the plastic bag, beautifully rolled and ready to be inhaled?  And we lost it for a few months, and then found it again?  Well, we apparently lost it yet again, and it showed up here in my toilet bag protecting a small spray bottle of hair product.

It's a good reflection of how frantically I was packing that night before we left: I remember finding the bottle and thinking it was leaky, so it needed a bag.  Found the bag in the Baggie drawer, put the bottle in and packed it, all without noticing there was a very respectable sized joint in the bag as well. Then the bag went through security, into the hold of the plane, through customs and on to Crailsheim all without discovery.  So what the hell do I do with it now, apart from the obvious?

First we thought we would share it with the mayor and First Lady of Worthington, but when push came to lighting up, they backed out.  We had dinner last night with the daughter of good friends of Mom and Dad, along with her 11 year old son, and while she was very convincing about his exposure to the seamier sides of life (he knocked back the Riesling like a seasoned pro), I decided that having corrupted my own daughter at a tender age by promoting her bar tending skills I would avoid adding to the apparently headlong descent of this charming child.  This leaves Peter's good friends Brad and Peggy, who we will visit in Särbrucken this weekend.  But though Peter and Brad went to Burning Man together a few years ago and cannabis was in abundance, Brad refused to partake.  And since my asthma precludes my inhaling anything, this leaves Peter and Peggy.  I will take pictures, I promise.

Meanwhile, we board the train for Stuttgart tomorrow morning, and the goodbyes have been long and difficult.  The generations who experienced the establishment and flourishing of this partnership are aging - and many have already passed of course - and the baton has largely been handed off to younger generations.  The partnership committee here is headed by a woman who was an exchange student in Worthington in the 80s.  The boys who pushed Grandma Tedo's wheelchairs during her later visits to Crailsheim to mark earlier anniversaries are now grown with families of their own.  One of these, Axel Huss, is an architect here now and held the formal opening of his new commercial building on the former McKee Barracks grounds yesterday morning.  He'd grown up around the GIs who lived and worked on those grounds until the barracks closed and the land was sold back to the city in 1994, and in his speech  before the  unveiling if the memorial and the ribbon cutting he spoke of his response the day they announced his highschool would hold the competition for choosing the exchange student that year.  His hand shot up immediately, and his teacher asked him whether he didn't want to ask his parents if it was alright for him to enter the competition. No, no, said Axel. There is no question.  I'm going.

He did, and came home inspired by the shopping malls in America.  He was going to be an architect. And he was going to buy the land at the McKee Barracks, and he was going to build a way to memorialize the Crailsheim Worthington partnership.  So yesterday he had Mom unveil the memorial with him, and cut the ribbon of his new building with him.  And when we got inside, we found an entire lobby wall covered with historic photos of the partnership, starting with Mom as a 12 year old girl with her young parents.   Tedo and Charlie reading stacks of thank you letters from Crailsheim with her.  Mom showing her friends post from her pen pal Kerttu.  Tedo arriving in Crailsheim for her first visit in 1957, her arms full of flowers and my grandfather coming along behind her.  I'd never seen many of them, and was completely overwhelmed by the sight of these dear people in their younger selves.  Old women patted my back and tch'd and agreed it must be very emotional for me, being here for the first time and seeing the work of my ouma.  Which of course restarted the waterworks, and the sputtering laughter, and the forceful feeling that history is made around and because of each of us, not just politicians and activists.