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Paris My Heart (2017) • On Saint Ronan Street (1976)
Two Novels, Same Story, 40 Years and Two Cities Far Apart.
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3. Next: Interludes 1976-2016
While in my 70th year in 2019 (Blade Runner Year), I don't know when my grand ETS will be (hopefully a long way off, because I'm having a good time here). In a sense of finding completion, I've been tying up as many loose ends as possible from my early career including teenage novelist and poet, and young G.I. in Europe with a taste for beer, a modest but keen eye for the many glorious young women, a love of traveling all over Europe including Paris in my old orange VW van, and yet those gnawing memories as well.
I was stationed in a small West German city (Kaiserslautern). I wasn't entirely a stranger, since I was born in Nürnberg, FRG after World War Two as a U.S. citizen. I am one of well over a million children born to U.S. military, diplomatic, and other U.S. Government service members. My father was a senior NCO in the U.S. Army, part of the Allied Occupation. My mother was a Luxembourg citizen working as a secretary for the U.S. Army in Frankfurt after the war, which is how my parents met and I came along in 1949. My parents separated for some years, and I lived with my mother and my grandparents just outside Luxembourg City. So my first language in life was Luxembourgeois, followed by German and French which every Luxembourg child has to learn starting first grade.
My class actually received Marshall Plan donations from U.S. taxpayers in the form of daily warm milk and vitamins. I especially loved the warm chocolate milk, which was once a week; the rest was more blah white milk. We got it in warmed little glass bottles. Later in life, I have acquired Luxembourg citizenship through a special law of repatriation (because my grandfather was a Luxembourg citizen effective 1 Jan 1900). That makes me a citizen of the European Union as well, which seems like a nice thing. While I was stationed in West Germany, during my first of two enlistments, I was homesick but I also had a wonderful time in many ways. My buddies and I could hop a train on Friday evening and be in Paris four hours later, or I could drive my orange VW bus to Brussels or Heidelberg or Switzerland (to name just a few glorious destinations) in a few hours.
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