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. (more…)

Being home alone the past few days, I’ve had this wonderful feeling of lightness as though nothing in the universe could be wrong or out of place. There is ‘wrong,’ I know, but it seems to have no importance. Things are also out of place. I can’t find my sun glasses again. The ‘good,’ on the otherhand, means something. What—I do not know. It feels like I’ve never had a tooth-ache in my whole life or anything else that went wrong. Blissful ignorance, you might say. That or maybe I don’t really exist in the normal sense. I have no special goal in life, nor can I perceive a purpose other than for the amusement of anyone who knows me. No, I haven’t been drinking, it was just a good day and I hope you had a good one too! Anyhow, I wish you all many good days and good nights. love…

Hope, New Mexico: In the early 1980s, I saw a black and white version of the above photo over the bar of a pension on the outskirts of Biarritz, France on the Golfe de Gascogne. I blurted, “That looks like Hope, New Mexico!” The bartender smiled and said in only slightly accented English: “Yes I lived there for almost twenty years.”

Now Hope, NM is and always has been a small community on Highway 82 about 20 miles west of Artesia, which is on the Pecos River. Traditionally Hope has been a ranching area, think John Chisum whose ranch was to the North, now there are signs of oil drilling nearby. The story is that Hope got its name from two cowboys and a coin-toss. One of them said, “I hope you lose.” Anyhow the chances of running into someone in France who has lived in Hope are minute and the bartender, who was also the owner of the pension, had worked there as a sheepherder. He was a Basque, by the way.

I had met a second person from Hope, NM several years earlier in Sachsenhausen, Germany. Her name was Roberta and she was studying to become a pharmacist at the Frankfurt University. She was born in Hope and probably still has relatives there. I should have played the lottery after meeting the second Hopeian, because I was turning the laws of probability upside down.