Lymph Journal # 31

2/20/2012

The bridge at Bad Säckingen

This is the fourth or fifth day in a row of feeling quite good.  The cycle will begin again two days from now so I’m enjoying it to the full.  It is so novel to be eating like I am.  I feel like a teenage boy in this respect – I have vague memories of what that was like and Carl serves as an everpresent reminder of that time when you could eat like a horse and not gain any weight.  I’m getting my three squares a day and they’re each generous with much snacking (often food that’s “good for you” but sometimes just stuff to add protein and/or pounds) in between.  I’m also feeling good enough to cook – last night’s pork roast – yum!

Today is Rosenmontag – Rose Monday – part of the pre-Lenten season here in Germany.  Janz Team Germany traditionally hosts Kindertag, an outreach to younger children, at BFA which is a convenient locale seeing as school is out for the holiday. This year over 70 volunteers from Janz Team Germany, BFA, local German churches, etc. are helping out and we look forward to hearing good things from it.

I mentioned the Fasching celebrations in a recent post.  On Saturday Diane and I took advantage of a sunny day and my feeling well to goof off for an afternoon.  We ended up driving down (or rather up as in up the Rhine) to Bad Säckingen a town famous for the longest wooden covered bridge spanning the Rhine, a trumpet museum and a Baroque style church which houses the bones of St. Fridolin.  Saint Fridolin was an Irish missionary who, back when centuries were labeled with three digits, traveled to this region to bring the faith to the local Alemmanish peoples.

 St. Fridolin's

The community also has, get this, a Woolworth’s Department Store – go figure!

Bad Säckingen is also a “city” that celebrates Fasching on the Saturday of the weekend so we ended up in the thick of it unintentionally.  The central square was populated by costumed folk both young and old, food vendors and a stage where the raucous discordant Fasching bands played.  We wandered a bit, made our pilgrimage to Woolworths which, incidentally, was not selling either hats or watches – the very two things on our list.  For our RI friends – you know one could find both of these at Benny’s!  (If it’s not at Benny’s, you don’t need it!).  Later we found what we thought would be a somewhat quiet restaurant in a successful search for gulasch (spicy vegetable/beef) soup.  The soup was good, the bread even better but, then , as we approached departure time, in streamed an entire Fasching band.  (Sax, trumpet, drum, clarinet, tuba, a dancing snowman, etc.)  They were actually pretty good and got through three numbers before wearing down the barkeep who sent them a round to slake their thirst and rehydrate their chops.  Living in Germany we run into more festivals than you’d think.

The disappointment of the weekend was the second death of our internet service (grrr!, grrr! More dealing with DTelekom!).  We had scheduled a Skype type chat with our home church so this was a little problem soon solved by going next door to Diane’s office and conducting it from there.  That was fun for both sides of the interchange and certainly a blessing for us.

Today was a beautiful sunny day and Carl was off so this afternoon we decided to let him try out some driving.  This is a little problematic over here where the driving age begins at 18 but if we were back in the States it would be appropriate.  There are quite a few practice strips of pavement running through various fields and vineyards but not a lot of wide-open and empty parking lots.  The Holzen soccer field parking lot is where I always take my English Camp van drivers in training so we started there with the hardest lesson of all – mastering the clutch/accelerator balance in a manual transmission.  I never really forced my girls to learn this largely because we really had only automatics on which to learn.  (Well, there was the non-power-steering , 4WD Toyota that needed a weightlifter to steer in a parking lot but I didn’t push it).  The lad came a long way in a day!

Diane spent most of the day today productively tearing through the pile of work she has before her.  It’s good to see that that aspect of our ministry lives is still growing and prospering.  I did get to talk with a few of my students – some who walked by when Carl was going through his parking lot paces and a few next door at a bonfire behind the dorms.  It is a reminder of how much I miss this bunch of students.  Despite that longing to be involved in their lives through the classroom, God continues to grant such a peace about it.  I continue to be amazed that, at the end of the day, I’m not feeling shortchanged or cheated.  I am “doing” what I should be doing right now, for this season of life and that is OK here at the halfway point of six rounds of treatment.  Pray that such peace would continue to rule.

 Strolling the bridge