Old Home Week: Meeting My Roommate from Wiesbaden in Baltimore

Tomorrow I am driving to Baltimore to meet my roommate at Lindsay Air Station, Wiesbaden, West Germany in 1978.  Then he was Sr. Airman Cliff Almes.  He left the military in 1979 and become a brother at a Franciscan Monastery in Darmstadt, Land of Kanaan.

We have not seen each other since 2000, though we have talked every month or two since we were roommates in late 1978.  On that Army and Air Force Base, Air Force had to slum with Army depending on availability of rooms.

I wrote about Cliff, now Bruder Timotheus, three years ago, with pictures.

All of my kids have heard the story about me eating with the novices and taking a big piece of meat, finding out too late it was LIVER!!  No one wastes food in a monastery, so I was the entertainment for Cliff and the other novices at that meal as they watched me cover the liver with vegetables and eat it.

YUCK!

Looking forward to a great reunion.

Marking the 14th Anniversary of 9-11

The 9-11 Memorial today on the campus of Franklin and Marshall College: 2,936 flags in the center of the campus to honor the victims.

Today at 8:45 a.m. I was walking into Russian class, just at the moment 14 years ago when America was attacked by terrorists.  When I left the class I looked north and saw the quad filled with flags:  2,936 flags, one for each victim of the attack.  

As memorials go, I far prefer these to the endless pictures and videos of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center.  The flags honor the victims.  The burning towers glorify in a perverse way the attack and cowards who kill innocent victims.  

Another way of marking the day is to tell the stories of those who stepped up to defend America after the attack.  My favorite story is part of this New York Times article.  It is about my former commander Joel Allmandinger and what he did in the wake of the attack on America.  They are all good stories.  

Writing About the Army, and Writing on Paper with a Pen

My first real writing job was in the Army.  I started writing on yellow pads with blue felt-tip pens.  But working for an Army newspaper meant I had to graduate from pen and paper to the typewriter.  The first typewriter I used for writing was gray, to match the gray Army furniture in the office.  That furniture blended well with the beige walls in the stone headquarters building of 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, Wiesbaden Air Base, West Germany.  

Now I am taking a Creative Writing course at Franklin and Marshall College.  Part of the course is writing in class.  I have white paper and a ballpoint pen and am back to writing with my left hand on paper.  Weird.  I have not written on paper, except to take notes, since the 80s.  Writing is something you do on a computer--as I am doing right now.  

But I like the feeling of writing on paper.  We have to turn in our work in Microsoft Word, so it also means that anything I write on paper will have to be re-typed on a computer.  I began my writing life with multiple drafts.  Now I will be back to multiple drafts.  

Of course, for this blog, I will continue to write what I am thinking as I think it, hit publish and move on.