The end of a long, hot November day, after wandering the streets of downtown Munich. Of all the places to stop and rest, Eleanor (an American with a Finnish boyfriend), Bjorn (a Swede with a Japanese wife) and I chose an American cafe, the San Francisco Coffee House, to grab a late evening drink. Eleanor trotted off to the toilet, and Bjorn stopped in the doorway to look at the crowd so I stood in line with the other tourists, looking up at the menu on the back wall, noticing that all of the ice-based drinks were marked out. Yes, it was still warm and muggy but here there were no cold ice-cold drinks to cool folks down.
I sighed.
“So what are you thinking about?” Bjorn asked as he stepped up beside me.
“What am I sinking about?” I thought and laughed. I remembered a video Eleanor had played for us on her computer. In the video, an older man in a uniform pointed out a stack of electronic wireless communication equipment in a small room to a younger man in uniform.
The older man left the room.
Then a desperate voice called out, “Mayday! Mayday!”
The young man reached down and pressed a button on a microphone. “Hello? This iz the Gherman Coazt Guard. May I help you?”
“Yes! Yes! We are sinking!” the voice responded.
The young man looked up for a second or two and then spoke into the mike, “What are you zinking about?”
I looked up at the menu. “Well, that vanilla cream cake sounds appetizing.”
Her face shiny and her pulled-back blonde hair stringy with sweat, a young woman behind the counter said, “I’m sorry. We are out of the cake. Can I get you something else, instead?”
I looked down into the glass display case to see some old sandwiches and brownies that had obviously been made fresh first thing that morning but suffered the heat like everyone else. I looked along the counter past the display case and saw that water bottles were stacked up in a cooler. “Yes! I’ll take three of those,” I said enthusiastically, pointing to the bottles.
The woman wiped her forearm across her brow and nodded. “Good idea,” she replied with a smile. “What else?”
“Yes, a white chocolate latte…”
“Make that two,” Bjorn added.
“Okay. What else?”
I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said as I reached into my pocket and pulled out a 20 Euro bill.
“Want me to help pay for this?” Bjorn asked.
I shook my head.
“What about Eleanor’s water?”
“She can owe me.”
I handed the note to the woman and lightly brushed her fingers. We both looked at each other, noticing the shock. I saw immediately that her face was gorgeous behind my wildest dreams. She looked at me and batted her eyes, almost in slow motion. She opened the cash register and counted out my change. She dropped a coin on the floor to pick it up. My heart skipped a beat when I saw a tail sticking out behind her. She put the change back in the drawer, pulled out my 20 Euro note and handed it back to me. "Courtesy of Brian," she said in a soft, sensual voice.
As I got change, Eleanor returned. “Can you believe it? My cell phone number has been turned off by Vodafone.”
“What?”
“Yeah, isn’t that crazy. I’ve just spent the last few minutes not going to the bathroom but trying to resolve the issue, instead.”
“On a Saturday night?” I asked, handing Eleanor a bottle of water. “That’s what you get for talking on the phone so much!”
“Yeah, like I said, crazy. What do I owe you?” she asked.
“You can just owe me.” I opened the bottle of water and gulped down the cool liquid.
“Sure. No problem. Is that it?” she asked, as she started to turn around.
“No, I also ordered a couple of lattes.”
“Did you get one for me? Oh, in the meantime, they gave me an alternate number if you need to reach me.”
Bjorn leaned forward. “I’ll get a latte for you, if you want.”
Eleanor looked at Bjorn. “So neither one of you got me a latte? I see how it goes.” Eleanor smirked. “Anyway, I’ll let you know when the other number is back up.”
I took another long swig from the water bottle. “So how does the alternate number work?”
“I think it’s some form of voicemail. The voicemail box is free.”
“Hmm…interesting. Do they have pay phones here?”
“Oh, I’ll just use my personal cell phone to dial in.”
“You mean it was your work cell phone that went out? Who cares? It’s Saturday night. Who’s going to call it, anyway?”
“Well, I thought you might have it mem…”
“You know, this water’s filling me up. I think I’ll go to the bathroom. Hey, where’s Bjorn?”
“I think he already went.”
“Well, okay. Here’s the ticket for the lattes. I’ll let you have mine if you’ll pick them up.”
“Sounds like a plan to me.”
I stepped into the bathroom, passing Bjorn as he was going out. “Crowded in there?”
“Yep.”
I stepped into line behind a couple of guys dressed in yellow and blue at the last urinal, wondering if my bladder would hold. I then realized the stall door was open so I walked in and lifted the seat to take a pee.
One of the guys in the bathroom sang in a German accent, “Sweden sank like a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine. Sweden sank…” His voice was soon drowned out by laughter.
I laughed so hard I misaimed and briefly peed on the floor before correcting myself. I was glad to see the Germans and the Swedish were having fun with each other, despite the Germans defeating the Swedish two to nothing in the World Cup match earlier that year.
I strolled back into the main area and looked around. Through the back window, I noticed an arm waving at me and saw that Bjorn and Eleanor had found a table outside the back of the coffee house. I walked out, hearing and then seeing the large water fountain in the middle of a square. Several tables were perched around the perimeter of the square, some belonging to the coffee house and some to other establishments.
“Hey, great spot!”
“We thought so. Here’s your latte.”
“I said you could have it.”
“Bjorn got me one, too.”
“Cool,” I replied, plopping down into a chair. “This is great.”
“Absolutely. I’ll tell you what, though, I’m sick of this…I’m still getting the runaround and the phone is only one of a long, long list of items. Ah well. I’m building character…”
“Whoa! Where did that come from?”
“I don’t know. It’s just that…well…never mind. So, David, how are you? I’ve been thinking about you the last couple of days as I know how hard it is to lose a loved one.”
“I…it’s…”
“It’s no easy road, dealing with the grief. As I’m sure you’ve heard or know, it’s time, and sometimes a lot of it. I hope you and your wife can lean on the memories of good and precious times with her brother as you slowly continue life with him gone. You’ll need to take care of yourself…and her.”
“Yeah, David. If there’s anything we can do.”
“Well, you guys have been great today. I’ve gone long periods without thinking about it. Thanks for your concern…I really appreciate it. I feel guilty as hell right now, being here, but Karen insisted that I come. I’m doing what I can for her. As you say, it takes time to heal. Karen is also providing emotional support for her sister in-law. Her sister in-law is just beginning to realize that she’s got some financial burdens to shoulder now that the sole breadwinner is dead and there’s a kid in college. It’s not going to be easy for her at all.”
“Wow, I didn’t know that your brother had…”
“Brother in-law,” Eleanor interjected.
“Yes, that’s what I meant. I didn’t know he had children.”
“He’s got two. His oldest graduated from college last month with a degree in computer engineering.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“Yes, we’re very happy that his father got to attend the graduation ceremonies. He also got to know that his son had just accepted a fulltime job.”
“How many did you say he has?”
“Oh, just the two. Hey, do you guys wanna eat the chocolate we bought earlier?”
“I thought you were saving it for your office mates back home.”
“I was,” I said, looking into the bag as I dug around. “I think I’ll open this one. Dolci Pensieri. Isn’t that a grand name?”
“You’re going to open that one?”
“Why not? It’s obvious to me now that I’m not going to live forever.”
Eleanor gave me a sympathetic smile.
I sipped my latte and noticed something in the shadows. “Did you see that?” I asked.
“What?”
“Did you just see a mouse run by the side of the wall there?”
Eleanor and Bjorn looked over to where I was pointing.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Well that proves it then!”
“Proves what?”
“I’ve lost my mind and haven’t gotten it back. You know, I literally lost my mind during the time of my brother in-law’s funeral services – I went temporarily insane, so to speak, having to deal with strangers and all their emotional outbursts for personal loss of their friend or coworker or fellow church member, et cetera, knowing how much more they were connected to my brother in-law than I and I had no corresponding words of encouragement to offer them while I was standing there scared to death, so to speak.” I shook my head, thinking that I saw the mouse again. “It’s amazing how fragile I am right now, how mortal this makes me feel, seeing that death could be tomorrow and not 30 or 40 years from now.” I broke off a piece of chocolate and nibbled at it. “I can’t control what others think of me so I won’t concern myself with what people would say at my funeral but I sure would like to say I’ve accomplished all my dreams before I died.”
Eleanor nodded. “Who wouldn’t?”
“Sure, I’d like to say I owned a Ferrari, the last materialistic goal of mine. Bjorn, Eleanor knows that I’ve had three of them. My first two materialistic goals were having been skydiving and living in a foreign country.”
Bjorn looked puzzled. “I thought you were still trying to move to Ireland?” Eleanor tapped Bjorn’s leg with her foot.
I continued. “Okay, so I’m cheating a little. For now, I count staying in Ireland and Germany for a few weeks on business as accomplishing that goal.”
Bjorn nodded. “Sounds okay,” he said to me.
“I’m still a long way away from completing the only thing important to me – writing my life’s stories. Guess I better sit down at the keyboard and start typing, huh?”
“You do like to write…”
“Of course, I know we all die with our last thoughts unspoken but I’d like to get most of the rest of my story ideas down on paper before I die. I don’t need to be a published writer in a commercial sense but I would like to leave my stories to my friends and family so I can serve as an example to others. There! I saw it again.”
“I think I did, too.”
“Where?” Bjorn asked. “Oh wait, there it is.”
They watched as the mouse timidly hopped from a smaller planter and scampered into a small crack of a granite block at the base of the building beside them.
“So, David,” Eleanor asked, “you said you would cheat on your dreams?”
“At this point, yeah, I would.”
“Well, I know that you’ve just had a rough time with the death of your wife’s brother…”
“Yes?”
“But you shouldn’t sacrifice your integrity.”
“Integrity?”
“Yes.”
“What’s integrity got to do with it?”
“Everything. I mean, look at our society today. There are magazines that display…I mean these magazines. Well, Bjorn, you know what I’m talking about.”
Bjorn arched his eyebrows, as if he’d just woken up. “Did you say something?”
“Tell David what we saw last weekend.”
“Oh yeah. We walked into a store where there was a mother and her children standing at the counter and…”
“And clearly you could see magazines on display that had naked people on the cover. And not just naked but obviously advertising sex.”
I nodded my head, trying to make a connection. “And this is tied to integrity, how?”
“Well, in a society like this, how can we control what we teach our children? I mean a mother should have a right to take her kids out shopping with her and to not have her children exposed to that sort of thing.”
“So you mean that the mother should be teaching the children that those magazines are unacceptable?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t agree,” Bjorn said.
Eleanor snapped her head around. “What?”
“I mean, what’s the matter with the magazines? You never said.”
“Well, it objectifies women.”
“But there were also magazines with men on the cover.”
“And I guess it objectifies men, too. But you must admit there are a lot more of those magazines with women on the front than men.”
I scratched my head. “So what would this woman be teaching her kids?”
“Well, that a young man and a young woman should not have to feel pressured to have sex, despite the societal cues for them to.”
Bjorn looked from Eleanor to me. “But sex is natural.”
“No doubt about it,” I said.
“That’s what I mean, David. You’re willing to compromise your dreams. So naturally, someone like you would be willing to compromise a woman’s future dreams in order for you to have sex before she’s ready.”
“Huh?”
Yes. It’s a matter of integrity.”
“How old are you?”
“How old do you think I am?”
“It’s a trap, David.”
“I can see that. Hmm…so how old are you? Well, if I use Bjorn as a comparison. How old are you, Bjorn?”
“Twenty-eight.”
I looked at Bjorn’s smooth, light-colored face. “Well, as a Swedish engineer, you probably don’t get out much.”
“Good guess.”
“And I know that Eleanor is an outdoors person who likes to climb mountains…” I leaned over to get a closer look at Eleanor’s face. I noticed a sprinkling of freckles I hadn’t seen before. Small hairline wrinkles popped out from the corner of her eyes when she suddenly smiled at me. “Okay, based solely on the comparison to Bjorn’s face, I’d say you’re thirty-two.”
“Pretty close. I’m thirty-one.”
“Eleanor, I appreciate your candor, and respect your perspective on the concept of integrity. You certainly make me realize how much I have changed through the years, going from an Eagle Boy Scout to who I am today. I hope that thirteen years from now you can have the same conversation when you are forty-four and the person beside you is thirty-one – I believe that you will be able to look back over the last thirteen years and smile with joy and feel no regret. I have not been so lucky – although I do not regret my choices (since regret implies the ability to go back and change), I do realize that some of the choices in my life were not the best ones I could have made at the time. It reminds me of a story my cousin sent me in an email. It’s one of those Christian feel-good allegories that I don’t always forward on but it definitely applies here.
“Years ago, a farmer owned land along the Atlantic seacoast. He constantly advertised for hired hands. Most people were reluctant to work on farms along the Atlantic. They dreaded the awful storms that raged across the Atlantic, wreaking havoc on the buildings and crops.
“As the farmer interviewed applicants for the job, he received a steady stream of refusals. Finally, a short, thin man, well past middle-age, approached the farmer. ‘Are you a good farm hand?’ the farmer asked him.
“‘Well, I can sleep when the wind blows,’ answered the little man.
“Although puzzled by this answer, the farmer, desperate for help, hired him. The little man worked well around the farm, busy from dawn to dusk, and the farmer felt satisfied with the man's work.
“Then one night the wind howled loudly in from offshore. Jumping out of bed, the farmer grabbed a lantern and rushed next door to the hired hand's sleeping quarters. He shook the little man and yelled, ‘Get up! A storm is coming! Tie things down before they blow away!’
“The little man rolled over in bed and said firmly, ‘No sir. I told you, I can sleep when the wind blows.’
“Enraged by the response, the farmer was tempted to fire him on the spot. Instead, he hurried outside to prepare for the storm. To his amazement, he discovered that all of the haystacks had been covered with tarpaulins. The cows were in the barn, the chickens were in the coops, and the doors were barred. The shutters were tightly secured. Everything was tied down.
“Nothing could blow away. The farmer then understood what his hired hand meant, so he returned to his bed to also sleep while the wind blew. The hired hand in the story was able to sleep because he had secured the farm against the storm.
“Eleanor, I believe you're prepared, spiritually, mentally, and physically, so you have nothing to fear. I bet you sleep when the wind blows through your life.”
“That’s nice of you to say, David. Thanks for the story, and for the extra time you spent in Munich today. I think Bjorn would agree it’s been a pleasure exploring ‘my’ city with someone whose eyes are wide open to the possibility of all that it can be, and not entirely jaded with the American culture from which we come.” Bjorn nodded. “As I have spent time in the last few weeks wandering through Munich and other cities of Europe (most recently Montpellier, France), I often think that ‘people are people everywhere’, which is an oversimplified way of saying that there is so much to be learned and gained by putting ourselves out upon the edge of our comfort zone, and exploring the potential for beauty and growth beyond our small experiences.”
Bjorn laughed. “I’m sorry but I’m definitely out of my comfort zone. You guys are on a roll. It’s obvious you are both Americans. In Europe, we do not place as much importance on sex or religion, which is what this seems to be what you are talking about.”
I turned from Eleanor. “You’re right, Bjorn. We definitely treat sex as a taboo subject.”
“But it’s not the case with drugs. You seemed to have experimented with drugs and it is okay with you. Here, drugs are against the law.”
“You’re right, in some ways. But it’s Eleanor who puts sex in the same category as your drugs. I cannot say the same for myself. I guess I am ‘experienced,’ if you know what I mean. Sorry, Eleanor, but it’s true, but only before I got married.”
Eleanor gave me a nonchalant look. “That’s okay because that is what our lives are, an accumulation of our experiences, coupled with or perhaps more accurately guided by the choices we make as we go from one experience to the other. Humankind…wait, did I just say that?”
“What?”
“I almost said ‘mankind’ but opted for the more PC version…though I don’t know why that matters so much? If words are metaphors for thoughts and things, where does the significance between word choice of things ideological lie…except in individual opinion? And if to me, Mankind equals Humankind, to whom am I making concessions by saying one rather than the other? But I digress…”
“The political correctness is an American thing that’s being forced on the rest of us,” Bjorn muttered.
“Anyway, we are not perfect, so each of us makes mistakes along the way…choices that we would make differently were we to go back and live our lives again. The choices we have made were of importance in their time, but as time moves on, what is more important is what we do with the knowledge gained by those choices, good or bad. If we could travel backwards, would we say something else, do something different, reach out a hand here and avoid a bad situation there? Would we give more of ourselves to others, or to ourselves? Would we spend more time working on things to benefit others at work or in our personal lives, and where do the two blur? I mean, is hard work in the office necessarily entirely separate from time spent with loved ones if there is a way in which one benefits from the other? Does time spent alone pursuing our personal goals and desires necessarily detract or detrimentally affect those we care about?
“I can’t claim to be wise, nor free of mistakes, nor entirely kind and understanding, open-minded, happy…wouldn’t that be nice?”
I snickered. “Happy?”
“Exactly. Often I feel the opposite and have to turn away from the world at large and back into myself to re-evaluate what is important, and to clear my mind to learn again – which is another reason to spend time in the mountains! I find I learn the most not from what I have done well, but from what I have not. It is the burning memory of my mistakes that inspires me to be better next time, though I must say it doesn’t always work out so well! So…sometimes the best we can do is do the best we can do…which is to say we get one life to live and we might as well go full gusto and let the mistakes come as they may.”
“And don’t forget my brother in-law. He did not have a full life.”
“What do you mean?”
“He lived to fifty-one.”
“So? Didn’t he live life the way he wanted to?”
“Yes.”
“Then isn’t that a full life? I mean, he didn’t hold back, did he?”
“Apparently not.”
Bjorn sighed.
Eleanor looked over at Bjorn. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s been a long week. I’m tired.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I guess I’m a little tired, too. Plus I have to get up in the morning.”
They sat in silence for a minute. I reached down, grabbed my bag of chocolate and stood up.
Eleanor leaned forward. “One last thing before we leave.” She looked up at me, making sure she had eye contact with me. “I’ve been sitting here thinking. Your comments on your thoughts of what your brother-in-law’s death meant in your life and what you’d want to accomplish before your time is up has made me think that the question ‘what do you want to do before you die’ or ‘what would you do if you only had a few months to live’ are the hardest to answer, because what do we want to stand for in the end? I guess that if we make a difference in our small circle of family and friends – if they can remember us with a smile, if only for our quirks, and if we are at peace with God in the end, then that is enough.”
“Perhaps you’re right.”
Bjorn pushed his chair back and stood up. “I’ll even agree to most of that. Oh, look! There’s the mouse.”
We all turned to see the mouse race across the square and jump onto the lip of the water fountain. It sniffed the air and then appeared to dive into the water.
Bjorn shook his head. “I hope he’s just going for a swim. Surely, our conversation wasn’t that depressing!”
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