Our

daughter's significant other, Rainer, keeps us informed

about what Mary's doing, how she is, the weather, the

music scene.

Thanks to

him, we have a pretty good idea what her life is like in

Germany. The postal services of both countries are so

slow that by the time a regular letter gets an answer,

we've forgotten the question. The telephone is too

expensive to use except for emergencies. Besides, the

six-hour time difference, their erratic work schedules,

and my preference for off-peak rates rule out phoning for

routine exchanges.

So for

years we mostly faxed, although I had to take care that

it wasn't so late they would be asleep. A single typed

page goes to Germany for about $1.29 after 5 p.m. and

weekends - not too bad. But at this end, my computer

is the fax machine. With only one phone line, I'd turn

off the phone ringer and leave WinFax on "Receive

fax" two nights a week.

Communication

has picked up considerably since Rainer got e-mail and

they've moved into the age of cybercommunication. Sort

of. Mary spends most of her time in Koln since taking her

new job there, although she still thinks of their

apartment in Gelsenkirchen as "home." When

she's "home," she writes me herself; when she's

in Koln, it's more complicated.

I write to

her by e-mailing Rainer, who then relays the message to

her by phone or fax. In reply, she calls him or faxes him

a note, and he scans it into his computer and e-mails the

image to me. Rainer's Internet provider is called

Freenet.de, which implies that it is a free service like

freeWWWeb here. The big difference, however, is that in

Germany there's a charge for every phone call.

Local calls

are cheaper than distant ones, true, but the system is

certainly a disincentive to long hours of surfing.

Rainer

thinks of us as family, and often writes us cheery,

chatty letters himself. Even after years of acquaintance,

German adults hesitate to use first names, but Rainer has

adopted Mary's looser American ways. His letters

invariably begin, "Hello Sallie! Hello David!"

They make me think of that silly "camp" song:

"Hello Mudda! Hello Faddah!"

His English

is excellent, although he sometimes apologizes:

"Sorry I am not a native speaker." He always

closes, "Lots of love to you and David," and

adds a P.S., "Hope to see you in Gelsenkirchen

soon."

He wrote

about Mary's moving day. Because he had a performance in

Gelsenkirchen he couldn't miss - he's an oboist and

English horn player in the orchestra there - he

rented a truck, conscripted a timpanist, and moved her

stuff downstairs the evening before. The apartment in

Gelsenkirchen is on the fifth floor. With no elevator.

"The

trip to Cologne was very short. Mary, Nico and I started

at 9.30 a.m. and we reached her [new] apartment at 10.30.

It took us 30 minutes to bring all her things up to her

rooms on the second floor. "There is a larger

kitchen (larger than ours), a bathroom (a third the size

of the bathroom here in GE [a converted bedroom] and a

living room which is a little bit larger than our music

room. She'll buy a loft bed to have more possibilities in

this double-used room. Then we went to a breakfast

restaurant and had a nice second breakfast.

"They

have a really good local coffee brand which made a

delicious milkcoffee. After our return to GE I took the

truck back to the rental station and I rode on my bike

back home."

He

described the planned loft bed as tall enough for him, at

six feet, to stand under. "Mary's loft bed is

handcrafted by a local joiner and we hope that she gets

her mattress pretty soon. We too think that a loft bed is

a good idea and we'll put a Schrank [wardrobe] and her

desk under it."

For Mary's

birthday, they "went to a nice restaurant, The

Whistle Stop Cafe, the name of the restaurant in the

movie `Fried Green Tomatoes.' Had a delicious meal. Great

food."

Rainer's

stories seem to revolve around eating. He mentioned that

at the time we were boating in Alabama, they were

"in Alabama too, but our Alabama was a nice little

restaurant in Cologne with good food and cool drinks...

"Yesterday

your gift for Mary's birthday was in the postbox. I was

on the way to Cologne anyway so I brought her the present

[a Marilyn vos Savant memory-exercise book]. "I met

her after her rehearsal in the evening and we went to a

Mexican place for dinner. She liked your present very

much and started to read in the book instantly. We loved

the Dave Barry clips, especially the majonaise

story."

I sent him

a postcard of the Chattanooga Choo-Choo - his hobby

is railroad photography. "Thank you for the postcard

from Chattanooga. It's a great train and I have the music

of Glen Miller in my ears.

"We

opened the new opera season on Sunday. It was a (too)

long show (almost four hours), but all the artists,

including the orchestra, had been invited by the

Forderverein [a sort of theater Booster Club] to the

foyer and we had free food and drinks. A nice gesture, I

think.

"Many

people asked for Mary and I had to explain a lot what she

is doing now." '

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