Comcast changed its name to Xfinity (why?) a long time ago, but I still think of them as Comcast. Or more often, “Fucking Comcast.” For purposes of this narrative the company shall remain Comcast. Expletives may or may not be deleted.

Several months ago Comcast began pushing a new and faster modem that would enhance our Internet experience a hundred fold (not exactly their words.) And entirely free! I showed Gwen, who knows something about just about everything my third notification for this miracle modem and asked her what she thought.

“Is there anything wrong with the modem you use now?” she asked.

“No, it works just fine.”

“Well, then.”

“Maybe I’ll just have one sent to me—since they’re free—but I don’t have to use it.”

“Well don’t try to fix what’s not broken,” she said, although significantly she did not wash her hands. She still has to live across the street from me.

The modem arrived. I put it in a closet and there it sat for weeks.  Then my computer started behaving erratically. In an effort to act like I understood computers, I made several of what have since become known as “unauthorized visits to the control panel.”  Predictably, things got worse.

Gwen gave me the better part of two afternoons trying to figure out what was going on, even though her expertise is with Macs. (And by the way, I get tired of Mac owners who say, “I don’t ever have problems with my Mac.” But I get even more tired of hearing, “Oh I let my husband handle all that.” Gwen, for the record, doesn’t say either.) She took my PC back and forth from my house to her house trying to ascertain if my problem was with the computer or with the network. Results inconclusive. But Gwen said “Oh for Pete’s sake” several times which is tantamount to anyone else saying, “FUCK it!” and kicking the dog so I thanked her for all her help, support and time and released her.

My former neighbor, David who used to work at Microsoft came over and fiddled for an afternoon with the computer. He left it installing the 135 updates it had somehow overlooked although events were to show that I had scrubbed away those updates by running a registry cleaner too often and at the wrong times for the wrong reasons. This is something I am able to do without even going into the control panel.

Meantime, my friend Mike, computer geekus and husband of Susan, the wittiest woman I know and my copy editor, said he would be happy to install the new modem for me. At the weekend after my lovely four days on Whidbey amongst deer, birdsong and people who live off the grid in a yurt, Susan and Mike came over. As it happened, it was that first awful weekend when it was in the high nineties and garden tomatoes turned red overnight. Susan brought a bag of mint leaves and we made mojitos and sat in front of the fan while Mike installed the modem.

Comcast says “all you have to do is plug it in,” but I don’t know of a single case where it was that easy. On this hot afternoon it took several hours and five phone calls. At some point during each phone call Mike made a speech to the cretin on the other end: “I am using a cell phone since the phone service is dis-connected and when you put me on hold, I am forced to pay for extra minutes.”

“Is he upset?” I asked Susan.

“No,” she said. “He does that all the time. He loves it.”

It was a hot, miserable day but there’s a glow of mojitos (I had four) around my memory of it. Gwen came over before we ran out of rum and I thought how nice it was to be among friends and to have Susan take over the making of the mojitos. I drank and smiled at my friends.

After the new and improved modem was installed, I could no longer stream movies. I could only send emails when I caught the server in a good mood. I lost my connection over and over. “Connection has timed out” and “Server not found–” I saw those screens a lot.

I called Comcast. I am always sorry when I do this. So, I think, are the customer service people who have to talk to me. This call began as usual by my asking the person on the other end of the call to please speak more slowly. That was the end of civility on my end. She led me around my computer trying this and that and as her accent thickened and her wpm increased, my frustration rose until every other thing she said to me was “Ma’am, please stop crying. I am trying to help you.”

Finally she passed me on to someone in Nebraska who spoke slowly. He hacked into my computer and ran circles around me while I fanned myself, blew my nose and calmed down. Finally he said that there was something wrong with the modem. He gave me a reference number and told me to swap out the current piece of crap at the Comcast store.  I said I wanted my bill to reflect that I’d been a week without the internet service I was paying for. He said he’d make a note.

There were email consults amongst Gwen, David, Mike and now Joan, my friend with the theological chops who is also a computer geekess. I took the computer to Joan’s house so she could see what might be going on apart from the modem situation. She had bronchitis and her asthma had kicked up and she was having trouble breathing but she took in my computer. So she’s also a saint. She noodled around while I sat quietly. (Gwen has taught me to do this.)

Finally she looked up. “Have you done something with the security?”

“A little,” I said. “The customer service with the piercing voice made me do it and I was crying so hard we didn’t finish.”

Joan kept my computer for three days. I had visiting rights so I could look at my email. Meantime I ordered the new modem and scheduled someone to come out and install it. Comcast service people were —not surprisingly—backed up nearly two weeks.

“You’re going to adjust my bill for the three weeks I won’t have had internet service, aren’t you?”

It took them five minutes to decide they would “make a note of it.”

Finally I went Zen. I get impatient with people who can’t let their cell phone take a message but I am just as obsessive with email and it was humbling to find this out. As soon as I came to grips with the knowledge that I am not so important that I have to answer emails within a minute of their arriving I became a calmer (and better) person. I learned that among my friends and acquaintances are people who look at their email once a day. That’s it.  I didn’t think it could be done.

On the other hand I am from a generation that not only didn’t grow up with answering machines, our phones were on a party line with neighbors. Not only did we not have to respond to every ring, not every call was even for us. It is possible to live at one’s own convenience, not to say one’s ability to cope. I started walking every day. I dug out the Brahms Intermezzo I have been working on for 100 years and started every day with it. I read for longer periods of time. I was in the garden more, I puttered around the house more, I sang more. I wasn’t as tired at the end of the day.

I was teaching my watercolor class the day the new modem was to be installed. We were painting under the lilacs when two trucks arrived.

“Wow, they’ve sent two of them,” I commented.

“For their own protection,” said Kay, my student and smart-ass friend.

They stayed an hour, installed a new modem, spliced something and messed around with The Signal. When they left I was no better off than when they came. I still couldn’t stream, still couldn’t do email. Joan decided the problem had always been the signal. She made an appointment with Comcast for three days hence and told me she would be there for it. Joan was by now not just breathing more easily, she was breathing on and polishing her sainthood.

My Comcast bill arrived. It was a bill for a full month’s service plus the service call to install the second modem. I called billing and explained as calmly as I could that I expected the bill to reflect the fact that I hadn’t had internet service from June 27 to July 14.

“That’s no problem, ma’am,” said a reasonable voice.

Her reasonableness sounded like complacency and it set me off.

“Yes, it is a problem,” I said. “This is the third time I have called about my bill. Either I’m not being listened to or I’m being ignored.”

She spent ten minutes researching my account. She told me that she had put through a credit and it would show up on my next bill.

Here’s where we are as of this writing. I have not gotten that adjusted bill yet. I string a 25 foot ethernet cord across my living room when I want to stream a movie. Joan and Gwen–independently of each other (as far as I know)– both commented that I did not have a personality compatible with computers. The next call I make to an IP is going to be to Century Link. And that yurt is looking really good right now.

It’s been a month of extremes, starting with a long quiet June weekend on Whidbey Island.  I stayed at Windhorse, a Buddhist retreat center at the end of a long road and situated in the middle of the woods. Perched on a hillside are three well-appointed little meditation cabins and the Buddha House, a large apartment with the meditation hall as its upstairs. At the bottom of the hill is the home of my friends who own the center, and who happened to not be there during my visit.

I have stayed in the Buddha House at Windhorse several times . I don’t go to meditate; I go to write. This time I also took my paints. I packed a lawn chair because there’s no really comfortable place to be out of doors. This is a meditation center, after all, not a resort.

Windhorse is somewhat of a deer sanctuary. It’s a safe place for man and beast. I feel it the minute I turn off the highway. On this trip I did a little writing and painting but I was completely distracted by some tiny twin fawns only slightly larger than my cats. Under the strict supervision of their mother, I never saw enough of them. In any case, for four days I lived in that lawn chair, bathed in bird song, watching the rabbits and growing used to the habits of the deer.

One deer came every night to rest in the cool dirt just down the hill from one of the meditation cabins. Others grazed at certain times of the morning and afternoon outside the door of the Buddha House. They were so beautiful and graceful as they reached through and ate the leaves of the trees that are fenced off. I learned to peek around the door and move slowly before I came out of the house because the deer were often very close.

Every day I walked across to the next property to see the goats. I would stand at the edge of the fence and wait. First the big white dog would come over to let me pet him through the fence. Then the nannies and billies and their collection of kids trotted over, their funny little faces bright with curiosity. We’d all stand and stare at each other in silent communion.

Except for the animals, I was alone on the grounds of the retreat center. In an emergency I had been advised I could go down the hill, find the key to my friends’ house in the generator shack, let myself into their house and call the neighbor with the goats. Also I could address any questions to the mysterious couple who have lived off the grid, deep in the woods in a yurt for the past 30 years if I happened to see them. I did meet them both one day and to my surprise, they seemed like anyone I might meet anywhere on the island. I had rather expected mountain man and Annie Oakley.

There were no emergencies. Once before when I was alone at Windhorse and got a bit nervous, I imagined I was an S.O.E. agent hiding from the Nazis in a safe house and this was utterly calming. After all the World War II reading I’ve been doing, I rather hoped I’d get to take this imaginative flight again, but I felt completely safe.

Not just physically safe. On my last evening I made my visit to the goats. By then I had lost my curiosity value and they hardly looked up. All the rabbits I encountered froze when they saw me and bounded away as soon as they felt they could. The deer, while fairly comfortable with humans in the big bowl of the retreat center, weren’t going to let me pet them. They edged away when I got too close. All these animals going away from me, leaving me.

Next thing I was sobbing for Freud, my cat who died in my arms several months ago. Great, gulping sobs like I hadn’t cried in ages for anything. It can be frightening crying alone like that but I felt like the big bowl was holding me. I had brought my writing and my painting to Windhorse but when I finished crying, I knew that I had done what I came to do.

I came back to Seattle the next day. After a few days of civilization and technology, that yurt idea was starting to look very good. Stay tuned.

This post might also be entitled “The Life of an Alfred Piano Course, Lesson Book One,” something only a piano teacher can fully appreciate.  This particular copy has sat on my piano rack off and on for 15 years, thanks to the Seattle Mennonite Church, which has supplied me with a stream of students over the years.

In the beginning it was Rachel’s book. Rachel now goes to work in a three piece suit, but when she was in grade school she took piano lessons from me.  She practiced her assigned pieces all week and when she felt she had learned them, she wrote on each page, week after week: “got down.”  Her circular cursive documented that she had nailed down “Lavender’s Blue,” “Classic Dance,” “On with the Show,” and nearly every other song in her first year lesson book.

Fifteen years later, Rachel’s mother referred me to another family who attends the Mennonite church.  Lacie arrived for her piano lessons with Rachel’s music books under her arm.  Lacie is a walking question mark in striped tights and purple sweaters.  “What if?” she always wants to know.

What if I get home and forget how to do this?

What if this page accidentally falls out of the book?

What if Rachel didn’t have a pencil and forgot to write ‘got down’ one time but she got it down anyway?

Lacie and I had been working together for nearly a year when her cousin Addie began lessons.  When Lacie finished book one, it was passed on to Addie.  By now each page was annotated with two dates, two sets of stickers, “got down,” and the name Lacie.  I began adding a third date and the name Addie.

That was okay at first but after a while Addie objected to Lacie’s name being there.  I didn’t ask why, it was enough to just keep Addie focused on what we were doing.  I thought for a minute.

“Okay, Addie, watch this,” I said.

I extended the long line of the “L” of Lacie and added another joined at the top to create a lopsided A.  I put lines on the right side of the “a” and the “c” to create two “ds.”  Addie appeared.

Addie shrieked!

“Do it again.”

It was kind of fun. I did it again.

“Let me do it,” Addie said.

I watched Addie turn Lacie into Addie.  We both shrieked.

“It’s the magic name,” I said.

Now we do it every week—several times—and Addie never tires of it.  I never tire of it either.  And we still shriek. Every. Single. Time.

On these warm summer nights I sit outside right before bed and do a crossword puzzle.  I have never been much of a crossword puzzler.  I am learning to do them now because I am tired of my friend Nancy beating me at Lexulous by hundreds of points and I think this might help.  I consider myself a beginner just like Rachel, Lacie and Addie.  When I finish a puzzle without having to look up any words in the solutions, I write on the puzzle “got down.”  And smile to myself.

My first thought here is do I want to write about this?  Do I need to make my weird private habits public?  People who have read my memoir will say that page is already torn.

Two weeks I lost my Freudy, a cat I had wrapped my heart around.  He started to fail and within 24 hours had died in my arms.  The initial shock lasted that first day.  The second day was harder as the feelings started to thaw.  By the third day I began on what were to be pounds of M&Ms, a product I don’t even like ever since I got acclimated to 72% cacao.

But M&Ms have traditionally been comfort and stress food.  Cheap, sweet chocolate with an extra therapeutic advantage: I get the peanut M&Ms, and since I don’t like peanuts, I suck off the layers of candy coat, then the chocolate.  Then I spit out the peanuts to be collected in a pile and distributed to the squirrels to keep them out of my fruit trees.  Those of you who are orally oriented will appreciate the aggression of sucking off the chocolate and spitting out the peanut.  The rest of you won’t get it.

The week after Freud’s death, I went through pounds and pounds of peanut M&Ms.  When I got to feeling thoroughly sick of them (and of myself) I continued through another few bags and finally ground to a stop.  For a day or two I ate an exemplary diet while the waves of grief crashed around me.  When I couldn’t endure the feelings any longer I went back to a comfort/stress food that predated the M&Ms.

Chocolate Poo.  That’s what I called it in college. I grew up in a family that didn’t buy things like candy or cookies.  We didn’t buy anything that could be made (more cheaply) at home.  Pretty much all junk food that came out in the 60s: Fritos, Oreos, Lucky Charms cereal et al were dismissed by my mother with the joy-quelling words, “We don’t need that.”   So when I went to college I was still oriented towards making, not purchasing.

Chocolate Poo is essentially chocolate butter cream frosting.  Ingredients are chocolate, powdered sugar, butter, milk, pinch of salt and splash of vanilla.   When I make it for a cake I call it frosting.  When I make it for comfort food, it’s Chocolate Poo.

When the M&Ms palled, I remembered my atavistic comfort food, Chocolate Poo.  I had some incredibly healthy, organic baking chocolate in the house, some salt and the vanilla.  I had to get the powdered sugar, butter and milk.  I creamed the butter, added the powdered sugar, chocolate, vanilla and salt, and then slowly dribbled in the milk until I had the primo comfort consistency.  I carefully cleaned off the blade of the food processor and licked my finger.  It didn’t taste quite right.  A quarter of a cup later, I decided the incredibly healthy, organic chocolate ruined it. I threw out the Poo.

The next day I bought some Nestles’ semi-sweet chocolate chips, thinking they would elevate the flavor to comfort level.  They didn’t.  Maybe it had been Hershey chocolate I used at school (and the next several decades.)  The day after Nestles’ I bought a can of Hershey baking chocolate and more powdered sugar.  By then I felt like everyone in the city of Seattle knew what I was doing.

The last batch of Chocolate Poo still wasn’t quite right but was close enough. And there were still chocolate chips left, which are a kind of auxiliary comfort food that my therapist once memorably referred to as “little nipples.”

I’ve cried through all these iterations of Chocolate Poo because chocolate really isn’t strong enough to suppress the feelings invoked by knowing that my little guy is gone and he isn’t coming back and I am very, very sad.  Comfort food is a futile attempt to get some relief from all the sadness but I keep trying.

Cheetos used to be quite satisfying. I wonder if they are hard to make.

Grief.  It’s a place I visit.  I’ve been there so many times it feels like a familiar cabin in the woods, a place where my heart hurts and I cry without warning.  A film runs over and over, playing out a story.  Occasionally my mind refuses the story and tries to make it not have happened.  I’m in the cabin now.

Freud, my funny, happy, golden cat; my little waif who lived 11 years longer than expected, died last night.  Freud was a seven weeks old stray who came to live with me 12 years ago.  At three months he almost died from a blocked urethra and I learned that I could spend $3000 on a cat.

He gave me 12 years of joy.  He was one of the smartest and most loving cats I’ve owned. He never lost his purr and he never acquired an adult voice.  He miaowed like a kitten except when he wanted something to eat.  Then he said “Mrkgnao” like Leopold Bloom’s cat in Ulysses.

Friday afternoon he was favoring his left hind leg, then that seemed to go away.  Saturday he stopped eating and by Sunday was feeling punk enough that I took him to the vet at noon.  She couldn’t find anything obviously wrong but gave him an anti-biotic shot and prescribed an appetite stimulant.

By Sunday night he could barely walk and was drooling something foul smelling.  Periodically he squirmed and cried with a heartbreaking sound.  I held him all evening, and then settled him next to me when I went to bed.  During the night he wailed and his body seized up.  For half an hour he gasped every few minutes.  I drifted off to sleep and when I awoke he had died in my arms.

I was in shock.  Who should I call?  Should I call anyone?  Should I have some tea?  Should I leave the body on the bed? Should I put him on the floor where Artemis and Winston could say goodbye?  What should I wear?  Should I get dressed now?  Should, should, should.  It wasn’t possible to think of what I wanted because what I wanted was not possible.

I laid him on the floor with a blanket around him so that just his little orange colored ears and his nose were visible.  I lit candles around him to make a little goodbye altar.  Artemis and Winston came, looked and backed away.

Years ago I had another very smart and funny cat named Eugene.  I was living in Bothell on the edge of a greenbelt.  Eugene pestered me one midnight to let him go outside.  He was so insistent that later in the grief cabin I comforted myself with the notion that he was keeping an appointment with death because a coyote got him five minutes after he left the house.  Eugene must have walked right up to him, right on time.  I heard the thrashing around in the bushes and spent the night disbelieving what I knew had happened.

My wonderful Aunt Frances died later that same year.  I imagined her death to consist of walking across a bridge and there on the other side, waiting for her, was Eugene.  She picked him up and cuddled him just like she had done for a photo I took of the two of them.

Today when I couldn’t will Freudy to not have died, I saw Eugene and Frances coming across the bridge to meet him.  A big black tomcat, my aunt with the long skinny legs, and my orange tabby, Freud who never stops purring.

Christmas, 2011

Sniffing the spring

Traudl Junge was 13 years old when Hitler came to power. Having never known her father, her childhood was dominated by her tyrannical grandfather. Traudl describes herself as late in developing and raised to be subservient.  The Hitler Youth movement was her final preparation for adult life.

“I was a thoughtless young girl,” Traudl said when she was 81 years old. “I didn’t pay attention” (to what was happening in Germany.)

In 1942 she made her way to Berlin where she more or less fell into the role of one of Hitler’s secretaries. Her first impression of Hitler—outside the public events where he was roaring and gesticulating—was of “a kindly old gentleman speaking in a low voice and giving us a friendly smile.” He had a protective, paternal air towards Traudl who had always longed for a father.

For the next three years, Traudl lived with another young woman in their own apartment within the bunker, first at the Wolf’s Lair in Prussia and then under the Chancellery in Berlin.

In 2001, the year before she died, Traudl gave an interview.  She had spoken briefly for several documentaries made over the years but this particular interview was several years in the making.

“Hitler was considered a great man,” she said. “I was shielded from the megalomaniac projects and barbaric measures.  I thought I was in the center of information.  In fact I was in a blind spot.”

Blind Spot is the English title for Im toten Winkel, the documentary of Traudl’s interview.  She is a beautiful woman with wisdom and sadness etched into her face.  Every so often she takes a drag on a cigarette and blows it out of the side of her mouth, making her look very briefly like a street tough.  That is the only comic relief in an utterly mesmerizing film.

In the film she takes us through life in the bunkers, talks about Eva Braun, describes the death of the Goebbels’ children, the taking down of Hitler’s last will and testament, and finally the end of the war. After Hitler’s suicide “we were all like puppets when the man who pulled the strings had let go.”

“This” –referring to the Third Reich—“can really only happen when a tyrannical system is so well established that it can dominate the entire fabric of society.  And the Germans are good at organizing.”

In the bunkers, Traudl had been not only isolated from the world, she had been isolated from the war itself.  She spent about a year in a Russian and then an American camp.  She was “de-nazified”—whatever that meant– classified as a “young follower” and released.  Even in the wreckage of Germany she was amazed at the spirit of freedom she encountered.  The Americans especially were friendly and helpful.  The world wasn’t anything like what Hitler had warned it would be if Germany was to lose the war.

“I suddenly realized that none of it was true.”

That was the beginning.  She was still years away from connecting herself to the horrors of the war.  She felt no guilt because she hadn’t known what was happening.  But she took early retirement from her editing and writing work because of depression.

One day she came across the Sophie Scholl memorial in Munich.  Sophie Scholl was a 22 year old woman executed for speaking out against the Nazis.  Traudl realized that Sophie was executed the same year and at the same age that Traudl began working for Hitler.

“At that moment I sensed that it is no excuse to be young.”

It was at this point in the film—both times that I watched it—I had to pause and burst into tears.  Youth really is an excuse in many ways.  Children who grow up damaged and neglected will continue to be vulnerable to predators.   This will never change.

Young people will continue to die for their beliefs.  We can’t have it any other way.  Young people are the carriers of idealism and many will die for what they believe.  Either idealism dies or the world dies.

Traudl spent her 50 years after the war slowly awakening. She didn’t try to excise the young woman who had loved Hitler.  Instead she stayed connected to herself while she developed into her own maturity. In the last months of her life, she said, “I think I am starting to forgive myself.”

In a piece of atonement, whether it was conscious or not, the young girl who lived in a blind spot during the war spent her retirement reading to people who were blind.

Agnès Humbert was in her forties, a respected art historian and a well-off divorced mother of two grown sons when the Nazis walked into Paris. Her memoir Notre Guerre was published in France in 1946, caused a stir and then went out of print.  It was first published in English translation in 2008 under the title Résistance.

The book is in three sections.  The first is a diary of events as they happened in which Agnès recounts the development of the very first resistance cell.  Somehow this manuscript survived the war. The second section was recollected after the war and deals with her experience in prison and work camps.  It makes for very heavy reading.  The final part is again a diary of events as they happened just after the liberation of the town and the prison where Agnès ended up.

Agnès is funny, sarcastic, unflinching, and gutsy—all qualities I especially admire. Here she is in her first “interview” with the Gestapo:

“I was made to stand in the middle of the space as the Germans circled around me, looking me up and down with jerky staccato movements, screaming like lunatics all the while.  .  . the din was indescribable.  This idiotic scene, presumably intended to impress me, merely reminded me of all that was most surreal in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.  I asked a typist if she would be good enough to translate what the gentlemen were shouting at me, as if they were questions I should be happy to answer them.”

During one “interview,” Agnès sees herself in a mirror and comments that she doesn’t look at all bad after a month in prison.  “The exasperated captain orders the typist to inform me that I am not there for my amusement.  I reply that I have already worked this out for myself.”

And again: “I learn that I am not allowed any ‘privileges’ I am to be subject to a ‘regime of extreme harshness.’  Before he shuts the cell door he repeats, ‘No more privileges’ in what is evidently his most imposing and fearsome voice.  ‘Oh that’s such a shame,’ I quip, ‘especially since you took me to the pictures last week.’  He looks deeply affronted.  Really, these people have no sense of humor.”

Elsewhere Agnès comments that she could get away with this attitude at the beginning of the occupation.  Later on such a response would have brought on ice baths and torture.

I’ll skip over the years in the work camps; they were almost unbearable reading.  The time after the liberation was probably the most fascinating part of the memoir for me, I suppose because in my imagination everything comes to a halt after I see the American jeeps coming through the flower-strewn streets of villages. Then there’s nothing until I first travelled in Europe in the 1970s.

Agnès was in prison in the village of Wanfried when the liberators came through.  She and her friend Madeleine make the acquaintance of the young American left in charge who is in over his head and has the humility to know it.  Agnès dubs him St. George and the three of them set to work sorting through the chaos of the village.

Everyone—former prisoners and townspeople– needs food, most need medical attention, looting needs to be clamped down on, angry former POWs need to be pacified.  There is nearby gunfire because the liberation happened village by village.  Nazis are re-grouping in the surrounding forests.

A riot begins to brew outside a bakery.  The baker is refusing to sell bread to certain of the German refugees.

“Climbing up some low steps, I address the crowd of mutinous housewives.  How I long to hear someone, just one voice, asking what earthly business it is of mine; but these people are supine, they accept anything, whatever you tell them, just as long as you say it loudly enough.”

Agnès and Madeleine set up a soup kitchen and hospital for the unending caravans of refugees and displaced people and set German women to run it “confident that they are making a splendid job of it.”

Still it took the French women to get it set up and organized. Agnès and Madeleine tried to find out why the Germans had done so little themselves.  After much evasions and inconclusiveness, someone told them, “All our charitable work was National Socialist charitable work so we couldn’t carry on with it.”

Agnès lets loose: “Not a single one of these wretched halfwits had the gumption to help the refugees because for them charity came under the heading of Nazism; not one of the poor fools had the sense to replace the swastika with the Red Cross!  No, they all said they had to wait to be given the order.  .  .they had to wait for French women to tell them not to leave their fellow Germans to die from exhaustion and starvation by the side of the road.”

While I recognize Agnès’ exasperation and no doubt fury at the apparent helplessness of the Germans especially in the crisis of those weeks and months, this is the way traumatized people behave.  As much as I love to hate the Nazis, all Germans were not Nazis and they were a traumatized people. It brings me back full circle to what Traudl Junge says:

“This can really only happen when a tyrannical system is so well established that it can dominate the entire fabric of society.”

Traudl Junge, March 16, 1920—February 10, 2002.

Agnès Humbert, October 12, 1894—September 19, 1963

Two remarkable women.

There’s almost nothing I like better than sleuthing out a new song.  This week, as it continues to be World War II at my house, the latter interest has intersected with the former.  Just as one gets used to seeing the same news footage of D-Day, of the Zyklon-B can, and of the liberation of Paris, one hears the same music in sound tracks: “In the Mood,” “Run Rabbit Run,” and “The White Cliffs of Dover.”

As I branched out from British to German centric books and films, new songs begin to recur. One was stirring, unusual, and quite beautiful.  Another was jolly and joyful. My familiarity with German music begins and ends with Lieder and Bach.  If I wasn’t such a snob I would probably have already known both songs. My German wasn’t up to figuring out any lyrics and I don’t have a Shazam app (or a phone, for that matter) so that wasn’t going to help.  But that would have been too easy.  I like the thrill of the hunt.

I noticed that soldiers were mostly singing the first song.  I remembered it as the song German POWs sang at the beginning of the Foyle’s War episode called “Broken Souls.” On You Tube I started through playlists of German war songs and soldier marching songs. Click, no. Click, no. Click, damn commercial. Click, no.  Finally one of the clicks paid off and I heard my tune.  It was called the “Horst Wessel Song.”

I entered the titles on Wikipedia and got a page in German.  The Bing translation was barely more illuminating than the German language page but I did glean that it had something to do with the Nazis.  Digging deeper I learned that this beautiful melody, originally from World War I, that lends itself to sumptuous harmonies, had been outfitted with really ugly words by a fellow named Horst Wessel in 1933.  It became the official Nazi anthem.

The text and the melody are apparently illegal in Germany.  I don’t know how that works out in practice.  Anyone can listen to it on You Tube.  The tenor line is to die for.  It’s rather nice for me that the language doesn’t interfere with my appreciation of the music.  A lot of us feel that way about the Latin mass and the 16^th and 17^th century Italian art songs, the staple of classical singing students.

The other song also came up on “Broken Souls. ”  Johann, the German POW, sings it to the little boy on the farm where he works.  And the crowd in the Dresden café that is bombed at the beginning of the episode “The Hide” sing it.  It sounds like a folk song and that’s all I could gather about it.

I heard it here and there for months.  “There’s that song again,” I’d think.

I don’t get all my World War II information from Foyle’s War.  The soundtrack of the gruesome The Life and Time of Klaus Barbie, is ironically dominated by a children’s choir who sing the song.  This was too easy.  In the credits was the list of songs the choir had sung.  I wrote them all down and sussed out that the song I wanted was called “Muss Ich Denn.”  The tune was borrowed for the Elvis Presley song “Wooden Heart.”

I started through my books of folk songs and found “Muss I Denn” in an old tattered copy of a community song book published by the Inter-Collegiate Outing Association in 1948.  You know—back when people sang together.  The words are all in German so it was back to the internet to find some English lyrics.  The OK Chorale is going to be doing this one sometime soon and you can’t imagine how they squawk when I ask them to sing in a foreign language.

The tenors in The OK Chorale—well, one tenor; you know who you are– are always asking me for better parts but I think we’ll skip the official Nazi anthem

I’ve been having World War II at my house for the last several months: the war as seen through the eyes of the French Resistance. I’ve read so many biographies of spies that I am beginning to get them all mixed up. One book I am not likely to ever forget, however, is called Between Silk and Cyanide, written by the English cryptographer Leo Marks. Twenty-two years old when he joined the “war effort,” He had me with his first page:

“In January, 1942 I was escorted to the war by my parents in case I couldn’t find it or met with an accident on the way. . .Mother’s farewell to her only child was the public’s first glimpse of open-heart surgery.”

Leo Marks’ father owned Marks and Co., the bookshop made famous by Helene Hanff in 84, Charing Cross Road. That story took place later, in 1949, but Marks and Co was already a well-known antiquarian book shop in London. Sigmund Freud, “the great decoder of unconscious signals,” patronized it in the last year of his life after his escape from Nazi occupied Vienna. He sat in a comfortable chair and the staff brought him books for his research for Moses and Monotheism.

The book shop was where Leo Marks was first introduced to coding. Precocious as a child, he figured out the (secret) pricing code booksellers used. When the war began he was accepted at the school for cryptographers:

“I’d written to the War Office, the Foreign Office, and the Admiralty, enclosing specimens of my home-made codes with a curriculum vitae based loosely on fact, but no more loosely than their formal replies stating that my letters were receiving attention.”

In fact he was the enfant terrible of S.O.E.—Special Operations Executive, the secret organization created by Churchill to employ sabotage and subversion in Nazi-controlled Europe. He was a cryptographer whom Bletchley Park had overlooked because his first teachers had no imagination and didn’t recognize genius when they encountered it. Bletchley Park was itching to get him but S.O.E. wanted to keep him and Leo preferred its rogue atmosphere.

His interview with S.O.E took place in “a large private house which tried to ramble but hadn’t the vitality.” He was given a message in code and told to break it. He worked at it all day while his interviewers shook their heads. The FANYs could have broken the code in 20 minutes. When he finally handed in his de-coded message, he was told to leave the code with it.

“‘What code, sir?’

‘The code you broke it with.’

‘You didn’t give me one, sir.’

‘What the hell are you talking about? How did you decode that message if I didn’t give you one?’

‘You told me to break it, sir.’

‘You mean you broke it without a code?’

I had always understood that was what breaking a code meant, but this was no time for semantics.”

He was in.

As I read about all the inter-departmental squabbling in secret intelligence I wondered how short the war might have been had they all actually got along and communicated with each other. MI-6 thought S.O.E. was a bunch of amateurs who disrupted their quiet intelligence gathering operations so they withheld transport and information from them. De Gaulle, in London through much of the war, wouldn’t share information with S.O.E. and insisted on having a secret French code that only his organization, the Free French, had access to. Leo quietly figured out what this code was and helped himself to all their information before they got it themselves. He is quite funny about pretending to not know about The Secret French Code. It’s a theme that runs through the entire book.

Leo Marks briefed most of the secret agents whose biographies I had already read but his name doesn’t start coming up in books published before the mid-1990s. I suspect that records that weren’t destroyed outright were not de-classified until fifty years after the end of the war, which would be 1995. Between Silk and Cyanide was published in 1998.

Cyanide in the title refers to the cyanide pill that agents were given when they were dropped into occupied countries. The pill was an alternative to being tortured by the Gestapo. Some took that alternative, some didn’t. Some refused to carry the pill at all.

Silk is a little harder to explain. Once an agent was in enemy territory, all communications had to be enciphered and then put into Morse code to be transmitted. The secret agents created codes out of poems that were easy for them to remember –famous quotations or lines from Shakespeare or Tennyson–so they wouldn’t carry evidence of their codes on them. The trouble with this system was that the Germans knew English literature, too, and they had genius cryptographers as well.

Leo first weaned the agents off famous quotations and had their codes created from original verse. He kept a “ditty box” of verses he himself wrote. His most famous verse, used by Violette Szabo who was executed at Ravensbruck, was actually written for his first girlfriend who was killed in the war.

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours.

The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have,
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause;

For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.

But finally after much nuisance, red tape, and offering people valuable books from his father’s shop, Leo managed to push through a system whereby a hundred one-time codes (or ‘worked-out keys,’ WOKs)were printed on silk. Once a line of code had been used in a message to London, the agents cut it off the piece of silk and burned it. The silks were adopted late in the war.

This is a bloody brilliant book. It reads like a detective thriller interspersed with tutorials in coding, which are fascinating in this age of the computer. The human mind is really the first computer and the unconscious is “the greatest of all code rooms.”

Here are some bits that I especially enjoyed:

* It was there on the blackboard, glaring at him. He hadn’t bothered to ask what ‘worked–out keys’ were. He probably thought they were iron-based laxatives. . . I shoved a sample of a WOK at him like a door-to-door salesman and showed him how to use it. . . His expression conveyed to me what he was considering using it for. Even his blackheads seemed to underline in porous italics his silent rejection of everything I’d said.

* He had a particular flair for masonic books and was honorary advisor to the Grand Lodge library, yet he wasn’t Freemason because Catholics were forbidden to join secret societies other than their own.

* Tiltman’s eyes became sheets of calculus at the mention of indecipherables. (Tiltman was head of Bletchley Park)

* Since agents often hid their WT sets in lavatory cisterns, he’d devised a lavatory chain which could act as an aerial. He also had a stock of lethal toilet paper which he hadn’t yet issued because he couldn’t be sure it would be used by the right behinds.

*He was short enough to make me feel average with a moustache which was as clipped as his delivery and eyes which didn’t mirror his soul or any such trivia. . .He had eyes which could lance an abscess, a court-martial of a mouth, and an expression that warned me he had found his next victim. (Description of Colin Gubbins, head of S.O.E.)

* We both stood up. In his case, it showed.

* Aggression was their common denominator and each of them had as much in his make-up as a saint’s unconscious.

* He said something in French which I took to be thanks, shook my hand and de Gaulled out of my office.

* The facts emerged slowly, like soldiers from a brothel.

* Alors, messieurs. . .the message sur the blackboard are from one of your agents. Je suggest that we attackez votre code together.”

* That put the chat among the pigeons.

* A dark-haired slip of mischief rose from behind a desk. (Description of Noot Inayat Khan)

I have a seven year old piano student—Alex– who is obsessed with leprechauns. This year she is excited by them. Last year, when she was afraid of them, she asked me if I had ever seen a leprechaun.

“Oh yes,” I said. “There was one in the house yesterday morning.”

Her eyes bulged. “What did he look like?”

“Well. . . I didn’t actually see him whole,” I said. “I just saw his foot go around the corner as he slipped out of the room.” (I find this an always useful way of prevaricating about elves, pixies, angels, Santa Claus—everything I believe in as metaphor.)

I was starting to wax eloquent about the little green foot when I realized she was scared. I reassured her there were no leprechauns currently in the house. How did I know? It was March 18. They were gone til next year. What did they do in the house? As far as I could tell they just slipped around corners. They weren’t to be frightened of.

This year, Alex was chattering about leprechauns when she came for her March 10th lesson. Those of you who think in numbers will immediately pick up that her next lesson would fall on St Patrick’s Day. She instructed me to leave a green potato (that didn’t sound good) for them and see if they left a few bits of it.

She also told me that if I had a drop of Irish blood in me, I would be transported to–

“Where do they come from?”

“Ireland.”

–transported to Ireland at one minute after midnight on St Patrick’s Day, would spend the night there but would wake up in my own bed with green in my hair.

“Maybe I’ll see you there,” I said.

This morning I dutifully—dutifully—soaked a piece of potato in green food coloring and put it in the corner of the room where Alex had told me to put it the week before. (She’s a bossy little girl.) I picked some grass and strew it around the room in corners where a leprechaun might have some interest—inside the door where he might reconnoiter, near the cat food where he might be curious. I left green jelly beans in odd places.

My students began arriving. Alex was the last in the afternoon. I have to admit I was a little excited myself. She presented herself inside the door with her two stuffed animals: Husky and Ribbon. After they had been suitably greeted, she did a quick inspection and found the green potato.

“I noticed it earlier,” I said airily.

“OK, here’s what we’re going to do,” she informed me. “We’ll do this stuff”—she waved at her piano books—“as fast as we can. Then we need to do a thorough inspection of your house, especially the toilet and the sink.”

She focused on the music like she never had before. Her triplets jerked back and forth. I suggested that while she played them she say to herself, “Leprechaun, leprechaun.”

“Shh!” she said. “You’re not supposed to say it outloud.”

On a pretext of checking on the cats, I sprinkled some green sugar in the toilet and in the kitchen sink, which already had some dirt from when I rinsed some oxalis roots earlier in the day. The green and the dirt were quite impressive.

We got through the actual piano portion of her piano lesson. Then we went on the Giant Wee Leprechaun Home Tour.

“Wow,” I said when Alex lifted the lid on the toilet and we stared down at the green water. “That wasn’t here earlier.”

“Look at that!” I said when we got to the kitchen sink. “They tracked in dirt!”

The oxalis was soaking in glass of water. “Yikes!” I said. “That wasn’t here before either.”

“OK, now you’re scaring me,” Alex said. “Let me see your eyes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Take off your glasses.”

She stared into my eyes. “You’ve got leprechaun blood in you,” she announced.

“How can you tell? Is there green in my eyes?”

“No, it’s that green under your eyes.”

That’s being 60 and not having gotten enough sleep last night, but I don’t mind having an imaginative little girl in my life who thinks I’m part leprechaun.

As she was leaving Alex said, “Now if you find any more leprechaun evidence, call me at home. Call me as soon as you find it.”

“Will do.”

Off she ran to her grandmother’s car. I vacuumed up the grass. I’ll leave the green potato crumbs just a bit longer. I really would like to see a little green foot slipping around a corner.

I lost a day and half of my life to Customer Service last week. Its reverberations are no longer keeping me awake at night but I still shudder during the day when I pass the oven.

It began when I called Seattle Public Utilities to make a payment arrangement. I’ve been doing this for years. The bill comes. I call them. I pay half by debit card over the phone and the next month I pay the other half on-line. It usually goes smoothly.

But last week the very polite and accommodating agent accidentally charged my debit card twice and over-drew my account. My first call to them the next morning snagged me someone who sounded flustered and who after putting me on hold a few times to “check something,” finally cut me off. I called back and put myself through the menus a second time. The next agent had the soft voice of a 16 year old.

“Well, you know,” she said sweetly. “If you leave it as it is, your balance is only $4.38.”

“Do you understand the point of a payment arrangement?” I asked. “If I had the money now, I would pay the whole bill now.”

“I’ll be happy to request a refund for you,” she said.

I don’t fault Seattle Public Utilities for politeness. And they are usually efficient. Just have to say that

“How long before it goes through?” I asked

She had to check.

“Two or three days,” she said.

“Well, that’s not acceptable,” I said. “You’ve overdrawn my account. It’s the end of the month. I can’t wait two or three days.”

“Is there anything else you have to say?”

This is the same cold line Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle uses on a Nazi spy in an episode of Foyles’ War called “Plan of Attack.” It did not help my state of mind.

I asked to speak to a supervisor. Sometimes when in the middle of customer service hell, I forget this is possible. With menus I forget that doing nothing is the fastest way to talk to an actual human being.

The supervisor handled the whole thing admirably and the refund showed up the next day. I was not nearly as calm as this writing suggests but I am saving myself for writing about the real explosion, which came the next day.

It involves a company that I will call Scorches—and some of you will figure it out—until I am certain they have got me out of their system. I needed my oven looked at. The fan was behaving oddly and making scary noises that I didn’t like to hear when I was roasting something at 475 degrees.

The agent who scheduled my call spoke 80 miles an hour, in a thick accent, and from the other side of the world. Her name was Judy. Uh-huh.

I wanted to know the cost of the call. She couldn’t tell me. That depended on what needed to be done. Only it took her 3500 words to tell me this.

“What if he just comes over here and wipes his feet on the door mat?” I asked.

“$117.”

Ok, good. I’d only been on the phone ten minutes. We were making progress.

“But,” she said. “If you buy” –wait for it—“Our Warranty. . .”

God help me, I know better than to fall for this, but I did, possibly because it was the end of the month and I’d just had this contretemps with Seattle City Utilities. No, scratch that. I have no excuse.

The Warranty, as outlined by Judy with her mouth full of something and at 80 miles an hour, seemed to promise that for $40 a month, all parts and repairs would be covered and I could cancel the contract after three months. That suggested that the serviceperson could do more than wipe his feet on the doormat and in the end it would only cost me $3 more than the price of one service call.

I asked her to repeat her information more slowly. I rephrased my questions to make sure I understood. Then I gave her my debit card info.

I awoke the next morning with the niggling feeling that I should have had the day before. I called Scorches customer service department, got a different agent with just as thick an accent from a different hemisphere of the world, but talking only 50 mph. Name of Janet.

“I just want to make sure that I understand this,” I said. “I bought a warranty, which I can cancel after three months that will pay for any parts and repairs of the service I have scheduled for today. Is that correct?”

It was.

The repair person who showed up that afternoon looked like it was his first day back on the job after recovering from a nervous breakdown. He was so timid that I had duck my ear next to his mouth to hear anything he said.

He fiddled around with the oven light, which was faulty, but not why I scheduled the appointment, and purported to clean the fan. He then told me it should all be okay now and he needed to collect the $60 deductible.

“No,” I said. “I bought the warranty and was told it would cover this visit. No one said anything to me about a deductible.” I breathed hard through my nose.

He fiddled on his computer and said that there was a $60 deductible for the first service call of the warranty.

I was starting to snort and had to sit down to keep from pawing the ground.

“I’m not paying anything,” I said.

I flashed back to when the IRS used to tell us—utterly without shame– that we were responsible for inaccurate information given to us by their customer service agents. And a health insurance agent for Double Cross –some of you will figure it out–refused to honor inaccurate information that I based a $2000 decision on. I remember screaming at a Double Cross agent that if they were a legitimate business they’d be bankrupt in a month. But I was young and idealistic back then and the agent probably was, too.

My nervous repair person called Customer Service and got another accent at 150 mph. If I was snorting and pawing the ground, the bull on the other end of the line was already charging. His verbiage hit me with the force of a whole herd. I stood up and started pacing.

“Wait. . . Stop. . . NO! I was told. . . Just a minute. . .”

On and on he went. I once dumped an entire dinner table into the lap of a boyfriend who wouldn’t shut up. (See 99 Girdles on the Wall pgs 73-77.)

“SHUT UP!!!” I hollered into the phone. My feet almost came off the floor. Sounds continued to crackle out of the phone. I put it down.

The repairman heard me across the street in his truck and looked like he wanted to drive off immediately but I had his phone. He crept back into the house and said, “We can just cancel this visit.”

“Fine.” I gave him back his phone.

By then it was 2:00 on a Friday afternoon. I spent the next four hours on hold, punching in menu options or waiting to be called back. Saturday morning I was on hold for 45 minutes before finally learning that the warranty office was closed until Monday. I had a reasonably nice weekend before resuming the fight on Monday morning.

I made my way through the menus to the warranty office and asked to speak to a supervisor. The agent wanted more information in order to better serve me. Uh-huh. I told her I wanted to cancel the warranty I had just bought.

“Oh, I can help you with that!” she said brightly.

She asked me a bunch of questions about my service call. She said she could cancel the warranty but she had to get her supervisor, which was where I had come in half an hour before. Her supervisor was on another line but while we were waiting she wanted to make sure I understood what this warranty could do for me.

“I don’t care what it can do for me,” I said. “Your agents lied to me in order to sell it to me and I want to cancel it.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

I got the whole bucket of crapola one last time from the supervisor. “I’m not sure you understand how useful this warranty is,” she began.

The only thing I understood was that they all thought I was stupid. Reading over this post it occurs to me that the idea has some credence.

“Your dis-respect of me in trying to sell me something I have told you repeatedly that I don’t want is not helping you or your company’s reputation,” I said.

“I’m sorry you feel that way. I can definitely cancel this for you. . . there. Do you want the cancellation number?” She spat out the question.

I watched my account until the refund posted. I had managed to get through all the phone calls without giving Scorches my e-mail address but now things are coming from them in snail mail.

And the racket the oven fan is making? I’ll live with it. I’m sorry I feel this way.