It has been a few days since my last entry, due to houseguests and a wedding followed by a family gathering. The guests have since left, and it will be several weeks before the next one arrives. We enjoy the company of our houseguests, but we must recognize that their presence presents an added dimension to our daily routine, which has to be adjusted to suit all concerned.
“Goodbye, Lenin” [2003] is a German flick I enjoyed. I played the DVD on my computer screen rather than on the living room TV, as not everyone likes movies with subtitles. The movie was a lighthearted comedy-drama centered on the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. There are some hilarious moments in it, but I don’t intend to spoil it for you by giving anything away.
My bedside table has a pile of half- and quarter-read books, ranging from one about the liner “Normandie” , perhaps the most beautiful passenger vessel that ever sailed the Atlantic; a treatise on digital video editing, “The Orientalist” by Tom Reiss; and Christopher Hitchens’ “Why Orwell Matters”. I used to be able to read until the wee hours when I was younger. Nowadays, it takes less than a chapter, and sometimes only just a couple of paragraphs, before I fall asleep.
As much as I would have loved to have traveled on the “Normandie” during its heyday in the 1930’s, I would also have traveled on the “Graf Zeppelin” on its round-the-world trip in 1928 .
When I was a kid, one of my favorite toys was a tinplate Zeppelin airship made in Germany. It was silver-colored, had little twirling propellers and a gondola with lithographed passengers and crew at the windows. It was about a foot and a half long and about the diameter of a baseball at its midsection. There were little wheels at the bottom so you could push it along the floor. It may have had a clockwork motor also, but I can’t be sure about that.
That toy Zeppelin would command quite a decent price today among collectors.
