Margaret Meyer 174 School Street Belmont, Massachusetts 02178 617-868-4666 April 18, 1993 Dear Gertraud, In a note dropped into one of you letters to Jochen you have greeted me as "lady in the background." This is certainly an ap- propriate characterization, and after I have completed this let- ter of introduction I expect to retreat into the background, hop- ing, to remain most of the time in the shadows while you, Bernd and Jochen converse in German. I don't want to interrupt the spontaneous flow of ideas and information except for an occasion- al request for translation or perhaps to echo Mutti's frequent objection: "Jochen, das geht zu weit !" In answer to the obvious question:Why do you not speak Ger- man? I can only say that the reason lies not so much in my lazi- ness as Jochen says but in my anxious, hesitant disposition. For example, I have a driver's license but am too indecisive to be a safe driver. In contrast to your lives, the lives of the Meyer family, Hirsekorn and Strangfeld which have been wrenched by war and catastrophic political changes, my own development has been shel- tered and tranquil. I grew up in settled, normal upperclass cir- cumstances and have suffered only the problems of affluence: too much comfort, too many choices. My father was a doctor of Scotch Canadian descent. In the first world war he was a military "surgeon." My understanding is that he was stationed in England and was responsible for limiting the spread of venereal disease among his soldier-patients. While in military service he contracted tuberculosis and spent the rest of his life dealing with the disease, first as a patient and then as a physician. He was hospitalized in a tuberculosis sanatorium in northern New York state.There he met my mother, who had come to that beautiful area to visit her aunt and cousins. Mother's uncle (by marriage ) was the head physician at that elegant sana- torium. Long before they met, Mother was already captivated by the stories told about this young man: so charming, so witty and intense, so ill. By the time they married my father was well enough to start treating his own patients at Trudeau Sanatorium also in northern New York state. Mother could boil a kettle of water, that was all that she knew about cooking and she did not learn much more about housekeeping for many years. She had grown up in New York City, the eldest of six children, five of them girls. Her father had been born into a farming family, probably -2- in New Jersey. By hard work he climbed up the economic ladder from a menial position as an "office boy" to become a partner in a firm of cotton textile merchants. His own formal education probably ended before he was 14; he sent all of his six children to college and several went on to graduate school. Mother felt inferior to her more energetic sisters and brothers; they went on to various careers; the next became an archaeologist,today still living and active in her profession in Athens; my other living aunt was an editor for Fortune magazine; Mother's only (surviv- ing) brother obtained a professorship at Harvard;another of my aunts had a sultry manner, spoke in deep, throaty tones and was almost as dangerous as she pretended to be: she wrote novels and made several men quite unhappy, but no one could ignore her spell. Another of these independent women studied ancient Latin texts and became a Socialist. She was charmed by a visiting Rus- sian economist (spy?) and emigrated with him to Moscow. She had a hard life and was so indiscreet in her criticisms that it is a wonder that she survived the Stalin regime. After a year or so at Trudeau Sanatorium my parents moved to Philadelphia, where I was born in 1924. I have a sister and two brothers. We all attended Germantown Friends School and my par- ents joined the Germantown Meeting (Quaker) at about the same time that my father became a United States citizen in 1936. He must have lived in this country more than fourteen years before taking these decisive steps. So much of his energy was absorbed by his research, his attempts to find a method of treating and curing pulmonary disease-especially tuberculosis. He always hoped to formulate his methods and to publish papers which might win the recognition that he sought. His method was based on the use of various vaccines to stimulate the disease- resisting re- sponses in the patient's body. Each patient had a somewhat indi- vidualized vaccine regime.The patient's response was monitored partly by observing the skin reaction, partly by X-ray films fo- cussed on the "spot" on the lung. Many of these sequential pic- tures showed dramatically the regression of the diseased area. Many of his patients were "cured", led productive lives. How much of the cure was generated by the vaccine therapy, how much by my father's concentrated, loving care no one could say. He mourned intensely the misery and death of the ones he lost. I was aware of this as a small child watching home movies in which pictures of my sister and me playing in the back yard were inter- spersed with lingering vignettes of frail black babies in cribs at the Philadelphia Children's Hospital. As a child I was unhappy at school, shy, absent from class because of bouts of asthma. During my absences my mother tutored me at home. We put together a lovely little notebook about Greek mythology. We did not do so well with arithmetic as I realized with regret and panic when I taught some fifteen years later an eight and nine year-old group of actors and models. Several of them were quite unruly. One boy expressed his dismay at the inad- equacy of my teaching by hurling himself from his desk to the -3- floor in a mock fainting fit. The rest of the class gave him a standing ovation. I loved to read and was happy outdoors,whether in our own small garden,in the mysterious and wonderful "wild" garden of our neighbor or in the woods and on the lake of our summer retreat in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania. This was a community of simple cabins on the shores of a long irregular man-made lake created by damming a small stream. In the winter ice was cut from the lake and stored in a high barn-like building. The mountains there are very low. My father could happily walk with us on trails which wandered through the hemlock woods with gradual changes in elevation. Despite his di- minished lung capacity he did not become breathless. Papa taught us to sail our small sailboat and to enjoy being on the water whatever the weather offered. A windy day was exciting; an over- turned boat was a nuisance, but one could always swim home. In our canoe we paddled to islands at the head of the lake. Our normally cautious father was so confident of my boating and swim- ming skills that I rarely wore a life preserver even when I was alone for hours on the lake. The cottage which we "rented" was a loan by one of Papa's patients. The family could not afford to pay him for his profes- sional service, nor could they really afford to be away from work for two or three months. My father loved this place.He drove up from the city on weekends. Here, freed from the tensions of his medical practice he could sleep. Mother read aloud to us on rainy afternoons and in the evening in front of the stone fireplace. Our family life in Pocono was also freed from the tensions creat- ed by the fierce and miserable Irish cook-housekeeper who lived with us Germantown for at least ten years. The kitchen was the realm of this pathetic dragon. We were all afraid of offending her. Mother never cooked at home in Germantown so of course none of us learned any domestic skills until we were adults. I have inherited few of my father's good characteristics, certainly not his perseverance and generous loving ways, but I unfortunately carry with me the burden of insomnia. This bad habit developed long before I went a few miles away from home to my college,the same one attended by Mother and three of her sis- ters. There at Bryn Mawr I often became so exhausted that I would have to retreat to Germantown for a few days. For major examina- tions my teachers tried to help me by giving me a bed in the rel- atively quiet infirmary or even in one of their own homes. Noth- ing worked, even sleeping pills. Of course, during my twelve years of teaching in congenial well-ordered schools I continued to turn minor dramas into major problems and to spend sleepless nights in anticipation of a conference with a hostile mother. Pleasant excitements have a similar effect so that a visit with my rarely seen brother is re-played again and again when I should be fast asleep. On our travels I am especially vulnerable. I must tell you this tiresome story so that you will understand -4- that when we arrive in Kierspe I will already be exhausted by preparations for the journey, by a sleepless flight, and then af- ter a night under the roof of new kind friends I may look even worse. It would not be your fault. It is mine. Of course every illness may have some attending benefit, an opportunity not afforded to "normal" individuals. Once after hiking through the New Hampshire woods in early spring we set up our tent on a spongy bed of moss. With an impermeable layer of plastic under us we stayed dry, and all through the moonlit night I listened to a mixed chorus of frogs, bass, baritone, soprano. Jochen and Klemens do not seem to remember jene Verklaerte Nacht. They slept through it. I have also watched the northern lights and the mid-August Perseid showers of meteors. I have watched the sun rise over the ocean off Nantucket Island and heard the early morning songs of the birds. Here in Belmont on two occa- sions I listened to the mockingbird go through his wonderful pro- gram of songs during a midnight performance at the time of the July full moon. At the time of our first trip to Germany I think I heard a nightingale. Have you a nightingale in Kierspe? Your recent letter of April 5 made me search for Jochen's old plant guidebook, "Was blueht denn da" von Alois Kosch. Some of the plants are quite unknown to me, but cornus mas, Kor- nelkirsche, was identified for me years ago when I first noticed it by the French neighbor who had planted it. Now I begin to watch it in early March and am delighted when I see it in bloom as it is now, lighting up an otherwise drab corner. Even on the rainiest day it has its own special radiance. I may have passed it for ten years before I ever saw it. Your Zahnwurz, so full of buds when you wrote your letter, will surely have competed its bloom by the time we arrive five weeks after your letter, but I hope to be shown other plants you love- and, yes, the insects too! My search for the plants and birds you name has led me back to pictures and memories of the plants blooming now in Konnarock: at lower elevations the shadbush and Judas tree, (amelanchier ob- longifolia and cercis canadensis) make pale misty patches of white and pink. On sheltered hillsides I have found trailing ar- butus (epigaea repens) tiny fragrant flowers. The bare branches of the deciduous trees are often decorated by the brilliant col- ors of migratory birds. Because so many of the trees are still bare, one can walk along wooded ridges and see far away in the valley, green trees around small settlements. We had played with the idea of going to Konnarock during the past two weeks, but fi- nally decided that the energies demanded for this long trip (18 hours of driving broken by an overnight stay in a small now- fa- miliar motel) were better spent here. I have spent a few extra hours playing with the children on the back lawns and on our driveway. By pulling an old ladder and some trash cans across the lower driveway we prevent them from rolling down the incline into School Street. Cars, trucks and buses pass the house night and day, at rush hours 50 to 60 vehicles in 10-15 minutes. Almost -5- every evening Klemens comes in to see us after he has helped to put the children to bed. He and Jochen are working on several com- plicated computer projects for use in the kidney dialysis unit that Klemens runs at the New England Medical Center. Jochen is a sort of hidden consultant. Jochen has gone into the office to see a few patients who had special problems. Otherwise we have spent most of the days at home. It is still too snowy to walk on the White Mountains of New Hampshire. One day we drove to our favorite nearby walking place, the bird sanctuary on the beaches of Plum Island, but found that only the dusty road was open, the beach having been "closed" to protect the sandpipers and terns which arrive at this time to start their nesting period. Now we must wait until late Septem- ber or October before we can again walk there. Whenever we are at home the office telephone can be switched so that it rings here in Belmont. Thus we can make appointments, answer questions, re-order medications.. When we are both away, Jochen's answering machine records messages. Because of keeping open so much time during the past two weeks we will be relatively busy until we go to Germany. I expect that there will be several very long days as we attempt to schedule almost everyone who calls. When we return to Boston on June 1, there will only be an interval of three or four days before we start off on our June trip to Konnarock to join Klemens and his family for about ten days. During the next three weeks, while I am scheduling ap- pointments, advising patients that they will be "seen" if they are willing to accept possible waiting time in the office of an hour or more, discussing with many of them restrictions imposed by new insurance plans, sorting out insurance forms and bills and remembering details relevant to individual patients and their ac- counts, Jochen will be examining them, writing prescriptions for glasses, eyedrops, recommending surgery or more frequently per- suading patients that surgery will not improve their "quality of life" as journalists and others have encouraged them to expect. Most of the patients accept the delays, filling the time by read- ing, talking to each other or to me. I cannot really afford the time to converse with patients in this way, but sometimes as I review a day I am satisfied that it was a good use of my time or I remember the conversation which developed between hitherto strangers in our waiting room, which resembles a living room and looks out on busy Massachusetts Avenue so filled with traffic that individuals who do not wish to talk or read can always find entertainment. I have sat in much more uncomfortable waiting rooms, where there is no one to look at except the person who sits right opposite across a narrow space: or one may study the secretary enclosed in a glass box with a small window for pushing through money, credit or insurance cards. In addition to the office work we have various problems and tasks connected with the maintainance of our house. Some of these were postponed by the unusual weather of the spring. Just as patients postponed appointments from March to April and then -6- to May, we had to postpone an appointment for the termite "doc- tor." These wonderful insects continue to nibble at the beams supporting our house. It is no use to try to discourage them with chemicals injected into the soil while the level of ground water is so high that it seeps into special wells in the basement and is then automatically pumped out into the sewers. For about ten years we did not need the pumps, but this spring they have been working at frequent intervals. At the top of the house we have a leaky roof. The young con- tractor who had hoped to come to give us an estimate in March will come this Wednesday. From attic to basement the house is filled with books and papers: these include diaries kept by my greatgrandmother and her sisters and are mainly concerned with which chapters in the Bible they had read that day. The patriarch of that family was a banker in the small town in New Jersey. It is said that when the house was cleared out before its replacement by a housing devel- opment a box was found labeled in the bank director's impressive handwriting:"Useless Papers." I don't know what was inside, but I am sure that there are a good many boxes in my house that should be similarly labeled and then set out on the street with- out any regretful, curious backward glance. The two archivist/historians in my house reject such suggestions. Among these papers is my own collection of useless papers, which in- cludes many of my classroom plan books from twelve years of teaching various subjects to girls as old as 16 or 17 years down to-perhaps I should say up to- the last class that I taught in the spring of 1966, a group of 7 year old children, boys and girls at the Cambridge Friends School. In the fall of that year Jochen left his hospital-based research and practice to open his own office. We no longer needed my salary, he needed a secre- tary/receptionist, a role which I have filled with frequent mis- givings, perhaps even more acute than those which I experienced when struggling with the challenge of teaching fractions to that funny class of little actors in New York almost twenty years ear- lier. Can you read from the tone in which I write the curiosity that still drives me to ask every teacher whom I meet what goes on in his- more often her- classroom? I hope that you and Bernd will tell me something about school in Kierspe: what you do, and in what respect you wish your work might be different. Of course I expect no reply to my inquiries before our meeting. I must also add a question about Sir Bevis of Hampton a cor- ner of English literature unknown to me. Can you show me a text, a fragment is all I need. Chaucer is the earliest English that I read comfortably. And now it is close to midnight. I must in- form you that this is the first text I have entered on the com- puter terminal. Although I have asked the same questions again and again, how to correct this or that, what happened to the rest of the page; although Jochen will make necessary changes in the format and start the printer, I have firmly declined his offers to clean up the style.