I have dragged Cheryl into a brave new world. She was tired and a bit cranky when she told me, "You'd better leave me alone." last night. She lay fully clothed in our new bedroom. I lay beside her and was just a bit nervous as she started to wake. "Good morning." I say in the sweetest voice I can muster. She looks around the room, looks at me and then goes back to sleep. I get up quietly and go into our very small kitchen. I start to heat up some water. I don't drink coffee, but Cheryl does. I have instant but seeing the look on her face this morning after looking at our new home I wish I had picked up some real coffee, some really strong coffee.

Cher is awake I can hear her in the bedroom but she is not coming out and I am not going in. I put some instant coffee into a cup and add boiling water. I hope that the smell of coffee will tempt her out of the bedroom. It doesn't. I add some more instant coffee to the cup and even spoon a small amount onto the hot burner, hoping that the aroma will call to her soul. I can hear her getting dressed. She comes out of the bedroom into the dinning room looks at the pure black liquid that is suppose to be coffee and walks past it into the living room. She looks around walks back into the dining room and then back into the living room and finally into our very small and overly aromatic kitchen. She does the whole routine a couple of more times and then finally says to me, "I give up. Where is the bathroom?" "Down the hall" I reply innocently.

I walk down in front of her and open the door to our bathroom. She is standing in our doorway looking at me like I must be out of my mind. I stand there holding the door and pointing inside with my other hand. She realizes that I am not kidding and marches down the hallway. She slams the door shut behind her and I stand outside the door saying, "We don't share it. It is our bathroom; it is just down the hall. She tells me through the door, "Go away."

I retreat to the dining room. I don't have to work today since it is New Years day, but I kind of wish I did have to go in. She is taking a really long time in the bathroom. I think about going down to see if she is alright but I decide against it. I pour out her ridiculously strong and now ice cold coffee, it stains the sink. I refill her cup and pour myself a cup of tea and I add a shot of whiskey. I think about adding a shot to her coffee but decide that getting her drunk will not improve my situation.

I finish my tea and throw away another cup of cold coffee I had poured for her. I don't bother to refill it this time but I do shoot back a couple of more whiskeys while I wait to see if my wife will ever come back. I don't dare turn on the stereo so I just sit in our dinning room and wait. I finally hear the front door and my very depressed wife come in and sits down across from me. It looks like she might have been crying. She says to me, I couldn't get any hot water. I tell her that the tank over the sink takes just a few seconds to warm up, but that it will only just fill the sink. She doesn't seem too happy with this news but says, "In the bathroom. I couldn't get the hot water to work in the bathroom. I know I shouldn't tell her but she is going to find out sooner or later, "The hot water heater in the bathroom is a wood burning hot water heater." She looks at me like I am out of my mind and says, "I don't get it."

I explain that the water heater is heated by building a fire. You start it with kindling and then you put larger and larger pieces of wood into the fire box below the water tank. It takes about an hour and a half to get the fire going and for the water to heat up. The tub is deceptively large since the water heater will only fill it about three inches with hot water and since it is January the rest of the water will be really cold. I offer to start the fire for her and before she can refuse I go down the hall to build a fire. I spend more time doing it then I needed but I wanted to give her some time to calm down.

I fill the tub with all of the hot water just about three inches of water. I put in more wood to see if I can heat up another tank of water but I have already been gone for about an hour and forty five minutes so once the fire is burning away I go back into the apartment. I tell Cheryl that the bath is almost ready although the bathroom is a bit smoky. She asks me why the apartment is so cold. I look over at the heater and discover that it is out of fuel. I pull out a gas can of diesel, refill the tank and then start to drop matches into the heater. The heater starts to warm the room, which now smells like a truck stop from the diesel fumes.

I show her around the apartment. The bedroom has a nice double bed with a couple of large feather ticks on it. There isn't a closet but we have a nice wooden Schrank to hang our clothes in. The Dinning room has a dining room table that will comfortable seat four and in a pinch might be able to seat five, but I doubt it. The living room has two couches which fold down into two twin beds. It also has the only heater in the apartment. On top of the heater is a large metal cooking pot. I keep the pot full of water to keep moisture in the room. I also put cans of spaghetti and soup in the pot so if I want something to eat I only have to pull out a can and open it. It seems very convenient to me but doesn't seem to impress Cheryl all that much.

The kitchen must have been a hallway in the past since it is so narrow that two people can not pass each other. One person has to backup into the living room or go out into the hallway. The stove is really a two burner cook top with solid metal burners, one large one and one small one. The oven is narrow and a bit on the small side. I once cooked a small duck in it and had to split it in half and lay one piece on top of the other to fit it in the oven. The refrigerator is also a bit small; in fact we were looking at minivans a couple of years after leaving Germany and the ones in the vans were almost twice as large. In 1980 most of the Germans we knew shopped everyday. Our refrigerator would hold a six pack of coke, a small carton of milk, some luncheon meat and two beers if you laid them on their sides. The freezer section could hold one ice cube tray. We did have a very nice stereo.

Cheryl decided to take a bath and change. The water was now six inches deep but was only lukewarm. She didn't complain she dressed sat down beside me. She said, "Honey this is not very nice apartment. Are all the apartments in Germany like this?" I told her that the on base housing was newer but too American. Too American didn't seem like that big of a problem to her right now. I told her there was also some other apartments on the other side of town but they were also too American.

She placed her finger over my lips and told me, "Shush, I'll take a look at them tomorrow while you are at work." I asked her, "Are you sure? This place might grow on you." She just says, "Shush" again, like she was talking to a senile old man. It was close to lunch time, and she didn't want to eat a can of Spaghetti-O's, so we decided to go out for a walk. Most of the places were closed for New Years so we walked over to the base. It was about a four mile walk but it was through some very pretty German countryside.

We got a hamburger and a coke and then I showed her around the very small base. We had three major units based here; the Infantry unit I was assigned to, a tank battalion, and an aviation company. We also had MP's, a clinic, school, church, PX, Class VI store, commissary, and a movie theater. The movie theater played two movies a night and they changed at least one of them every night. This means that the movies were pretty bad. It would be like going to your local video store today and just pulling a movie off the shelf at random, but it was cheap, 50 cents a ticket.

We walked the long way home, through the older part of Bad Windsheim. It is an especially pretty place, the Christmas decorations were still up and the people were friendly. The streets were cobblestone and the homes were the traditional wooden beamed construction that you see on Christmas cards. The photo at the top of the page was taken from the end of our street. Cheryl had seen the Army Base in Illesheim but she had started to fall in love with Bad Windsheim. She may not have liked the apartment but she loved the town. We stopped off at a small Gasthaus to have dinner. We order a wonderful dinner, which after having a hamburger and coke on base tasted even more amazing. The people welcomed us as if we had lived in their town all of our lives and helped us make sense of the menu.

We got back to the apartment to find the landlady waiting for us. She had baked us a strawberry, banana cake. She handed it to Cheryl and as we started to walk up the stairs she stopped us and invited us into her kitchen. It was warm and smelled of fresh baked bread. She sat us down at the table and cut three pieces of cake. She spoke almost no English and we spoke a lot less German. We sat around and talked for hours. She showed us around her house and Cheryl's eyes light up when she saw a baby Grand piano. Oma, the name our landlady had us call her. It means Grandmother and she certainly could have been my Grandmother, Oma saw the light in Cheryl's eyes and asked if she would like to play. Cheryl at first refused but was coxed into it by us. She sat down at the piano and began to play. Oma pour me some coffee which I don't drink but that night I did. I watched my wife play the piano and I watched Oma watch her. I knew I was home. I knew that Cheryl would look around at the same places that I looked at, but she would always have this piano and Oma somewhere in the back of her mind.

We would work around the hot water heater, the diesel heater, the small kitchen, the drafty bedroom and the creaky wooden floors. In fact we would come to love the hot water heater, the diesel heater, the small kitchen, the drafty bedroom and the creaky wooden floors but not as much as we came to love Oma.

She taught Cheryl German, how to cook, and when I spent months away in the field they would share supper together. Cheryl went home for Christmas one year and I was adopted by Oma. I would come by for dinner. Since we couldn't fit ice cream in our freezer we kept it down in Oma's kitchen. I also started to show up with a bottle of scotch since it was tax free for me and very expensive on the local German economy. Oma could really drink scotch. I pour us each a glass and took a sip of mine then saw her slam hers back. She told me, "It cuts the grease." We eat together every night while Cheryl is gone, and a couple of shots of scotch followed every meal.

Cheryl returned after Christmas and I ended up going to the field. Oma and Cheryl started to have dinner together again. The first night Oma asked if Cheryl had any scotch, but since Cheryl's German still wasn't very strong and Oma couldn't get it across in English they finished dinner with ice cream instead of scotch. Cheryl explained it to me later asking if I understood what Oma wanted. I pulled a bottle of scotch out of the cabinet and said, "I think so." I took Cheryl down stairs and presented a new bottle of scotch to Oma. I asked her if she could keep this down in her apartment for when Cheryl and she ate together. Oma smiled at me and we shared a glass to our "Improved communication."

We lived in Germany for about three years sometimes sleeping in the living room because the heat wouldn't make it all the way to the bedroom. I once overfilled the diesel heater and had it howling like a jet straining for take off. The chimney glowed bright red and I had to stand over it with a fire extinguisher. We bought a Christmas tree each year on Christmas Eve and put real candles on it. The fire department would put us in jail for a stunt like that today. I once also got the bright idea to use JP4 (Helicopter Jet fuel) to start the fire in the water heater. It was the third time that I had to anxiously stand by with a fire extinguisher. Oma heard the water heater boiling away and the sound that jet fuel makes as it burns in the fire box of a forty year old water heater, she later told Cheryl that whenever we wanted to take a bath to just tell her and she would heat up the water for us.

When we lived in England, almost twenty years later, we decided to drive over with the kids and spend Christmas in Germany.  Travel Log Germany    Germany always seems more German around Christmas time.  Candles on the tree, hand blown Christmas ornaments, and Christmas dinner followed by a couple of glasses of scotch slammed back in honor of Oma. 

  Part I: Stationed in Germany

  Part II: Picking up Cheryl from Frankfort

  Part III: Apartment in Germany (This page)