I played center on a boys football team where the minimum weight to qualify for the team was 70 pounds. On weigh-in night, I weighed about 69 ½ pounds, and had to eat bananas and drink water to finally make weight. The maximum weight for the team was 90 pounds, and several of my teammates on the offensive line spent that evening throwing up in order to make weight.

Being home

   When we’re back home after a trip, Carol and I head off in different directions: she to the laundry room to wash even the clean clothes she’s returned with (“bedbugs like to hitch a ride in suitcases.:”), and I to the couch to unpack from the trip a little differently.

   I first try to get the measure of whether I behaved as a tourist or a traveler. Tourists rush about cramming as much activity as they can into their two-week vacation before rushing back home exhausted, complaining they need a vacation from their vacation. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was “off” about this last trip of ours, until I was able to reconstruct it in touristy terms. We went to Europe in the rush of its tourist season. Every place we went had some sort of a self-imposed deadline, as we were due in Heidelberg for a wedding in the middle of it. There was this drive to see as much as we could, yet not stray too far from a day’s travel from Heidelberg. Time and place did open up after the wedding, but by then the rhythm and pace of the trip seemed to have been set. We rushed home even sooner than we had planned. Carol noted my blogs of the trip lacked the usual purposelessness, with none of the charmingly pointless observations of our two earlier trips together, as well as my previous solo journeys. Not to put too fine a point on it, the trip carried the same unease for me that perplexed Gregor Samsa when he awoke to find himself turned into an insect.

   The Nazis at Auschwitz used the word Stücke or pieces to describe and completely dehumanize their captives. They didn’t start out calling them that. Back in the 1930s in a Nazi propaganda film, immigrants in general were referred to as “parasites…bringing with them crime, corruption and chaos.”

   Also, Auschwitz itself did not start out as a death camp. In the spring of 1940, the Nazi conquerors of Poland needed some place to house their Polish POWs. It chose an abandoned army barracks in the town of Osiewicz, near the Polish/Czech border. Only after iterations as a work camp for Polish political prisoners, then captured Russian soldiers and finally, when penning Europe’s Jews in ghettos proved increasingly costly to maintain, did the Nazis hit upon the idea of “repurposing” Auschwitz for mass extermination. It took a full two years before Auschwitz went from POW camp to death camp. And even then, there was a period when the camp population still waged a daily “battle of starvation, disease and appalling physical abuse,” according to a BBC documentary on the camp.

It is estimated there are 850,000 bicycles in Amsterdam. About 750,000 nearly ran me over during our stay there. By the time we left, the shrill little bell rings from cyclists warning me they were about to lay me out flat had begun to sound like a chronic medical condition. The Dutch are polite enough about not running you over, but to a man and woman, they claim their bike paths prohibitively as their own. The city claims they fish anywhere from 12 -15,000 bikes out of the canals every year, and several times I fought an urge to add to that total – while the bikes were parked or otherwise.