The festive atmosphere as the Wall came down in 1989 (image courtesy of Wikipedia)
Thirty-five years ago today, I stood in my apartment in Seattle and watched images like this on my TV with tears in my eyes. I’d been in East Berlin just weeks before and seen new friends there shy away from Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing point to the West, while I passed through freely. My tears were tears of joy for them.
My forthcoming novel, The Last Grand Tour (publication date: January 28, 2025), takes place in Germany and nearby countries in the years right after the Wall fell, when there was hope and even belief everywhere that freedom would always eventually triumph over tyranny.
1989 was an extraordinary year, and that day, November 9, when the Wall came down, was the most extraordinary of all.
In the fall of 1986, my buddy Steve Smith and I spent two weeks in St. Petersburg (then called Leningrad) and Moscow with a student exchange group. Mikhail Gorbachev, who would eventually dismantle the Soviet Union, had been in power only a year, but the students we met were already testing the possibilities for more freedom.
Because Gorbachev’s reign was so new, conditions throughout the country remained the way they’d been for decades. One of my first realizations upon seeing the relative poverty and the poor conditions in which people lived was that the US government had been overselling the Soviet threat for years. This feeling was enhanced by how generous (though reticent) the people we met were.
That’s me in the blue coat–and is that a KBG agent taking my picture?
Among the things I remember most clearly were the lines everywhere for basic goods, the empty grocery stores, and the restaurant where I tried to order off a menu full of items, only to be told again and again that they didn’t have my choice. Finally, I asked what they did have and the waiter pointed to two or three things.
A line of women hoping to buy…what?
I shot only slides in those days, and I took these iPhone stills with the slides set on top of a light table, so they aren’t as clear as they might be–but you get the picture, so to speak.
The other day I found my passport from the late ’80s and early ’90s, with all of the stamps from Western and Eastern Europe in it, and thought it might be a good subject for my first video.
In 1986 alone, I traveled to Finland, the Soviet Union, Ukraine, East Germany, and most of the countries of Western Europe, including Spain and Portugal, which were new members of the European Union.
In 1989, I started leading annual tours to Greece and Turkey, and in 1993, just four years after the Berlin Wall fell, I led my first tour into Eastern Europe: Austria, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. My little tour company, Halcyon Tours, was one of the first to take Americans into what had only recently been Soviet-dominated countries.
I’ll post more about those old tour days in the coming weeks, as we move toward the January 28, 2025, launch of my novel, The Last Grand Tour. (For a synopsis of the book and pre-ordering information, click on the title.)
For now, here’s my first video. I’d love it if you’d let me know what you think of it.
When I was a kid, you could send in bubblegum wrappers and get prizes. I found this envelope that held one of them in an old box yesterday. (Notice the cost for mailing a package then: six cents.)
It may have held the tiny transistor radio I took to my grade school to listen to the baseball playoffs while in class. My teacher never noticed the wire going up to my ear.
That had to be about this time of year. The team I was cheering for was the Cincinnati Reds, one of whose stars, Pete Rose, died a couple of days ago. The other stars were Joe Morgan and Johnny Bench.
The Reds lost the World Series to the Oakland A’s in seven games that year.
The other day, Sylvia brought out photo albums from our tour guiding days in the 1990s. The shots here are from one of the trips I led through Greece and Turkey when I had my own company, Halcyon Tours.
My tours were focused on small groups, learning about the local culture, and staying in local-style places where my clients could get to know the people of an area. Of course, there were plenty of opportunities for wine-drinking on rooftops in places like Oia on Santorini too!
Back then, Oia was still somewhat unvisited. Many of the buildings hadn’t been rebuilt after the massive (7.5 magnitude) earthquake that hit the island in 1956.
In high season now, as many as 17,000 cruise ship tourists disembark on the island EACH DAY, with most of them crowding into the small town of Oia at sunset time.
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To be immersed in the kind of adventure it was possible to have in Europe before the awful crush of cruise-ship mass tourism, check out my forthcoming novel, The Last Grand Tour, available for pre-order now. (It will be published on January 28, 2025.)
Here’s a synopsis:
American tour guide Joe Newhouse wants nothing more than to reach Venice. Since moving to Munich after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he’s watched his business fail, his wife leave him, and his love for Europe diminish. Now he faces one last ten-day tour with a surly group that doesn’t want to be there. As he leads them through the mythic lands of Europe’s Romantic past, he grows increasingly disturbed by their stories of earlier lives, puzzled by their desire to be with a man who doesn’t arrive, and entangled in an illicit affair that promises to either save him or plunge his tour-and his life-into madness.
Soaked in the Romantic atmosphere and dark deeds of old Europe-as well as the freedoms and hopes of a new era-The Last Grand Tour takes us on a perilous journey through Hitler’s Berchtesgaden, Mozart’s Salzburg, and Mad King Ludwig’s Bavarian fantasyland before reaching its stunning climax in the murky waters of Venice. Along the way, it explores the often-shifting lines between fidelity and freedom, illusion and reality, regret and desire.
Note: I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, where your purchases support local bookstores. If you buy a book through a click on this website, I’ll earn a small commission that helps defray the costs of maintaining this website.
This fledgling eagle turned up at the top of our bank last Sunday. It gave out a pitiful cry every few seconds and we worried that it was injured. When it moved, it seemed to have a hurt foot, and it didn’t fly.
For the first three days, it stayed mostly in the same place, but a couple of times it hopped up onto the woodpile just 20 feet from where I was writing. Its cry was usually intermittent, but sometimes it became continuous. We worried it would starve to death.
It took a couple of days for a wildlife rescue person to come out. When she did, she told us adult eagles might be feeding the fledgling when we weren’t looking. In any case, she couldn’t capture it (using a sheet and gloves) as long as it was so close to the edge. So we waited, that sad cry becoming the backdrop to our lives.
Two days ago, while I was watching it through the window, it flew several feet down the bank. Then it relocated to a stump at the top of a steep cliff above the water. While it was there, I saw an adult eagle perch nearby and lean down, seeming to talk to it. Other eagles flew by the next morning.
This morning (Thursday), I can still hear its cry, but it’s far down the bank, out of sight. When I walked over to see if I could locate it, I found it in “conversation” with this adult eagle perched high in a tree above it.
It is beyond our ability to monitor it now. And I feel fairly sure it will be okay. All that’s left of where it was near our place is this bit of down and this feather. But I think I’ll remember that sad cry for a long time.
Update: After two days of not seeing (but still hearing) the fledgling eagle, we located it 40 feet up this tree. So a) it can fly, at least a bit, and b) it can perch. Adult eagles have come by regularly. It’s going to be fine.
The title of this post is a quote from an autistic artist named William Scott, who was featured in a PBS Newshour segment on an exhibition of art by disabled artists at SF MOMA.
I think he is exactly right.
The world we see in the news–of conflict, violence, hatred, accusations, recriminations, and revenge–is not genuine. Artists offer us visions of a world that is more real because it reflects the desires, values, and aspirations of our better selves.
“The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I don’t know if I’m alone in seeing beauty in these dying hostas beside such vivid ivy. All I know is the older I get, the more beauty I see at times and in places I don’t expect it.
The other night my wife and I re-watched “Ruby in Paradise,” the 1993 Victor Nunez film starring a 25-year-old Ashley Judd. We didn’t remember anything about the movie except that we’d like it the first time. And we liked it just as much this time.
What struck me most about the story of a naive woman who leaves her backwoods Tennessee home to make a new life on the Florida shore is how much the writer and director trust the characters and situation to develop and carry the story’s conflict and emotional weight.
There’s one incident of sexual harassment and Judd’s Ruby has consensual sex, but otherwise the movie is refreshingly free of the violence that substitutes for conflict, gratuitous sex that takes the place of emotional content, and addiction that stands in for personal peril in movie after movie, TV show after TV show, and even book after book today.
The movie is also free of the shallow values and empty ambitions of so much “entertainment” today, in which glitz and power seem to be the only things anyone desires anymore.
As a result, the viewer is able to invest emotionally in the hardships and triumphs of a young woman with modest ambitions trying to become her own woman in a world where that isn’t easy.
