Dear Jeril... Love, Dad. Wayne P. Anderson
went over to the Robinsons. We had expected a Mexican dinner since Mexican cooking is one of her specialties, but we had couscous, a Moroccan dish in a stew with lamb, chicken, turnips, chickpeas and carrots over a cracked wheat. Quite different and quite good.
Tomorrow the movers come to get our hold baggage so we’ll pack today. Your mother will spend from one to ten today at the office. She’s finally gotten back to turning her dissertation into an article for publication. Also there is now confusion about what she will teach next quarter at Ramstein, Germany.
An official called last week and said because of politics her class was canceled. One base close to another could not offer the same course and take students away. Anyway, they may offer her a Theories of Counseling course instead. She will attend my last class session tonight to see how I handle the topic of family therapy.
I am reading Roots, a very good but depressing book. I can’t read it for long periods because I won’t be happy with what happens next. We are watching more TV than we did before since there is more on. As the girls probably told you, we’re into the TV series Centennial now. Weather conditions continue bad here. The whole northern hemisphere seems to really be getting it this year. Hope yours is better by now.
Love, Dad
CHAPTER 4
RAMSTEIN, GERMANY, 1979
Ramstein, Germany, March 1979
Dear Jeril,
Your mother and I are just back from our morning run. She’s up to a mile and half now. It happened rather suddenly. The girls don’t like to go with us, but say they’d ride bikes if we had them. We’ve been looking but have had no luck. I hate to invest in new ones, especially since Rosie’s tastes are so expensive. Stephanie will settle for less.
Both your mother and I are working hard getting ready for our classes. I’m getting more anxious than usual, and for the first time since I can remember, I am having classroom dreams about things going wrong, like students walking out on me. These dreams are usual for high school teachers, but rare for professors.
I also don’t look forward to the hundred-mile drives to some of my classes since the bases are not on the autobahn, but regular two-lane highways. Well, I guess one tough quarter won’t be impossible to take.
The girls are just getting up. Rosie is checking the fresh rolls we bought at the bakery this morning on our run.
Love, Dad
Ramstein, Germany, March 1979
Dear Jeril,
It’s nice to see the sun again. Holland in the winter is a downer. If we hadn’t had a summer there in 1975, we would have quite negative feelings about it and would have seen very few of the sights. Our last weekend there was one of the few times we were able to travel.
We had prepared ourselves for Germany by visiting the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. The pictures and commentary about the brutality of the Germans during the war got me in a proper mood for moving back amongst them. At some level I think I enjoy disliking the Germans. In spite of this I keep working on my German—which comes slowly.
Our last Sunday we went with friends to Uden, Holland, to see how the Dutch go wild and enjoy Carnival. The cities in south Netherlands have a large parade on Sunday followed by three days of much drinking, dancing and loving. We understand it’s even wilder in south Germany. One law we were told about is that if a child is born nine months after Fasching (Carnival) the father may deny paternity and the child can be given up to the state.
We are back living in Rodenbach, a village north of Kaiserslautern. We’ve lived here before in the summer of 1977. It still smells like a farmyard, but the local breads seem even more delicious than we remembered them. The girls have re-connected with some German friends, and we are quickly settling in.
Carla will be teaching a course on Theories of Counseling, and we are both working together preparing our classes. I will be driving a considerable distance of a hundred miles to several of my classes so this will be the most hectic quarter we’ll have in Europe.
We live on a second floor of a two-bedroom apartment, and it is taking some getting used to. The girls are sharing a room for the first time since they were babies. The two halves are quite a contrast. Stephanie’s is a free-form-disorder arrangement, and Rosie’s is a precise placement of everything within a logical system.
Water is heated in the area where you need it, so you must plan baths, dishwashing and laundry ahead of time. Storage space is limited so even before our hold baggage arrives, we are bursting at the seams. The stove heats so slowly that there is some danger eggs will hatch before they cook. But then making adjustments is part of what foreign travel is all about.
Love, Dad
Ramstein, Germany, June 8, 1979
Dear Family,
Yes, the Andersons are alive and well and still living in Germany. How often I write these letters seems to depend on a number of things. One factor seems to be how different I’m finding life. This last quarter was much like my job at Missouri—little travel except to class and mostly working with students and attending committee meetings. All very academic.
Secondly, living abroad is becoming a way of life; everything seems so usual that it hardly seems worth commenting on. It’s as if at times we need to remind ourselves that we are really living in Germany in a village, and that we are foreigners.
On our morning jog Carla and I wend our way over very green gently rolling hills, past fields of fast-growing grain and passive cows chewing their eternal cuds. We see an occasional small deer jumping across a field or perhaps a horseman clopping along the trail. Sometimes a bicyclist passes us. No cars. All very idyllic and just out our back door. For variety we take another direction through a forest. It’s hard to believe that such an industrialized nation has managed to keep nature so close.
Daughter number two, Debra, wrote us a while back and after seven or eight pages of telling us about her physical conditioning for parachute jump school, problems with maintaining the house, etc., drops in a line, “John and I are still going together and are thinking about getting married. So I guess what I need to know is—is September too early, and oh yes, can you live with John as a Son-in-Law?”
I suppose that’s as good a way to get the message as any. My women students that evening informed me that all of their fathers went into a state of shock upon getting the news. Mothers take it much better. For a guy who’s so cynical about marriage in general at least publicly, I do seem to take it very seriously personally. Like my dad, I find myself crying at weddings—those vows seem so full of significance.
We haven’t heard from Debra (twenty-one) since she finished jump school at Ft. Benning, Georgia. We assume she finished although her last letter indicated that a large number of cadets had already dropped from the program because it was so rigorous. (She did get her wings we soon learned.) She’ll be spending the summer at Ft. Riley, Kansas, learning basic infantry techniques.
During the semester on two weekends, Carla and I went to a Virginia Satir workshop on family therapy. She is one of the big names in the field right now. The audience of two hundred included a fair number of Satir worshipers.
Some attendees, who burst into tears if she spoke to them, applauded her every move and sat at her feet in awe during the breaks. I find all this a bit much as do most of the students I work with. Virginia is very gentle with these people and does seem to prefer interacting with the non-worshipers.
Ex-students of mine came down from Holland and up from Italy so we had several stay with us and had some parties for the rest. I suppose it’s this sort of thing that has given us the feeling of being at home here in Europe.
A Special Trip to England
The big travel was to England during our two-week break. I had wanted to see Poland and Czechoslovakia; but after the intense quarter we just had,