I'm Going to Germany

I’m going to Germany.

For many years I would not have considered going. My position was that if I had to go to Germany I would walk down the street carefully and only if heavily armed, because I think they are trying to kill me.

People would ask, “Why do you think they are trying to kill you?” and I would usually respond, “What makes you think they are not? They never stopped the killing until someone forced them”. See “The Holocaust”, supra. No German cars either. Even when Detroit put a gun to my head with crap vehicles and said “Buy foreign” it was Japanese cars for 25 years. Even when Eddie Carson at the gas station disapproved, “Those yellow bastards killed my brother”.

But in more recent years I’m getting soft. I’ve decided there should be a statute of limitations on grudges, and I have established it at 20 years. 20 years is enough to property nurture, feed, feed on and ultimately get rid of a grudge. Time to move on. I no longer bear grudges against the people who wouldn’t hire me in the 70s, the girls, who, well, anyway,…and I’m OK with Harvard which rejected me 3 times. There are some continuing annoyances which get refreshed from time to time, Jimmy Carter and Al Sharpton come to mind, and I am unsure yet whether only their infractions within the last 20 years are worthy of grudgedom. Even if I were to make a special exception for the Germans certainly 50 years would have been enough.

We are going on a Main-Danube cruise which starts in Nuremberg and ends in Budapest via Vienna and several cities in southern Germany. We have tacked on a couple of days in Prague, undecided as yet whether to go to Terezin. Thereisenstadt. The Daughter thinks I will react poorly, and #2 son was there in the spring and did not enjoy seeing people with his name on the wall. The cruise looked good, my bride and I could agree on it, and I am reluctant to trip on my own feet to keep the grudge alive. The statute of limitations for grudges is a good thing.

What Not to Think About

We have taken to watching “What Not To Wear” on Friday nights, another reason for Contraria to be anonymous. Each week Stacy and Clinton find some woman of slovenly dress with some more or less offbeat justification for slovenly. A few days in New York later, with a $5000 credit card spent under the tutelage of Stacy and Clinton, with a new hairstyle and make-up the formerly dowdy, hippie, or teenybopper as the case may be emerges as a sophisticate. New wardrobe, new personality, new outlook. Fashion alchemy. Fashion therapy. Fashion as religion, a 60 minute salvation.

My own fashion is not so much “what not to wear” as “what not to think about”. Seven or eight years ago I stopped wearing a suit to the office. Now there’s a family of dress pants from Land’s End and a gaggle of dress shirts with little polo guys. My little polo guy period. A couple of Brooks shirts have sneaked in, perhaps foretelling the end of the little polo guy. The thing is, it’s good enough, and I don’t have to think about it.

I believe there is a huge premium on things we don’t have to think about, in addition to what to wear, or what not to wear. There are two routes to my office, and more or less every day for the last 25 years I have gone one way and come back the other. If ever there was a reason I have forgotten it. I don’t go out on Friday nights, except for baseball games or nuclear war. I go to the gym on Wednesday and Sunday. Many are the things which do not absorb thought.

Now comes the problem of the shaving cream. For an unknown period, and that phrase in my experience usually means 15-20 years, I have used Crabtree & Evelyn Almond shaving cream with a little brush. Brushes come and go, and every couple of years I have to go get another little jar. Who knows how long it lasts, but this year, “It was discontinued last year” came in a particularly unsympathetic tenor. Those words moved the shaving cream from the What Not to Think About column to the Problem column. Who needs shaving cream in the Problem column when it clearly belongs under What Not to Think About? Should I go to EBay and find the discontinued model or just pick out something else? I have picked out something else which is currently a small daily annoyance, but I believe it will recede in time to What Not to Think About, until one day I hear again, “It was discontinued last year”.