Titanic Post

7 July 2004:
Yesterday I strolled through Frankfurt and Sachsenhausen letting memories guide me through the streets. Starting in Sachsenhausen, across the Main River from Frankfurt, I walked by Karin’s old apartment building, where memories seemed the strongest. Karin and I had been very close for about four years. I rang her door-bell, but no one answered [we did get a chance to meet several days later.] I went by the old bicycle shop, I forgot its name, where I used to buy tire patches and handlebar tape. The shop was no longer there, a victim of larger, more efficient business practices. At home in New Mexico, I have an old black and white photo I made of the inside of the shop. The owner let me photograph the shop where sales and repairs were all performed in one dark and cluttered small room. I think he still had parts for bikes from the Kaiser Wilhelms era.

Picturesque old Sachsenhausen with all its quaint Äpfelwein locales had gone to seed. The old Irish Pub had burned and no one had wanted to repair it. The Brückewach restaurant (Pinos,) which kept me from starving in the 1970s and early eighties, was no longer there, but it was still an Italian restaurant by another name. The Palm Cafe’, where Marion and I had our wedding breakfast was also still there, but under a different name. Across the street from the Cafe’, was the old Schifferpark where mechanics readied bicycles for the next day’s stage of the 1978 Tour de France.

Over to Frankfurt am Main, I took subway U4 toward Bornheim, exiting at the “Bornheim Mitte” station. Walking up the Berger Strasse I ran into the Bornheimer Markt. Every Saturday and Wednesday food vendors came from all around with fresh produce: vegetables, cheese, bread, eggs (happy eggs,) and even olives from all the Mediterranean countries. I didn’t recognize anybody, but after sixteen years, it’s no wonder. I passed Panchetto’s Ice Cream where I spent many delicious hours over espresso, Gelate, and seditious talk.

Further up the street to number 215 where Marion and I lived before we came back to the US. At street level there was now a pizza place and an internet cafe’. Across the street, where then was a barbeque restaurant owned by an East Indian, I’m not kidding! Now there is a Thai restaurant. Sahib has moved on.

I walked to the Katherinen Krankenhaus, where my daughter Jesse was born and then back to the Güntersberg Park. Maybe it was memory overload or perhaps the memories of my daughter no longer being able to play in the park, because of the fallout from the April 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Walking back through Bornheim to catch the subway, the market place was filled with people scampering like ants with singular purpose in all directions at once.

As fond as the memories were at the time, the contrast to my New Mexican home was a reminder of why I had returned to New Mexico sixteen years earlier.