The Egg Hats of Berlin

The Egg Hats of Berlin

I realize that most people visit Berlin for the currywurst, or the head of Nefertiti, or Checkpoint Charlie that is no more, or figuring out from which window of the
Hotel Adlon Michael Jackson dangled his young son, or Frederick the Great’s summer cottage at Potsdam, and those are all fine things to travel for. But the Egg Hats of Pension Kettler are also an excellent reason to visit the once-divided city. Let me explain.
Thanks to the diligent research of Anna, extremely stylish art-historian and young mother, Bine and I stayed last week at the Pension Kettler on Bleibstrau Strasse. The price was right and the rooms were straight out of the 1920’s, including the plumbing. Each room is named for an artist, and I thought this was because the named artist had actually once stayed in the room. This misapprehension was the result of my pint-sized German. But so what if Maria Callas never stayed in my room: outside my door there was a handmade diorama featuring the highlights of her career. Across the hall, the Peggy Guggenheim (who likewise never actually stayed there) diorama featured a pair of exotic sunglasses.
Frau Isolde Josipovici, the proprietress of the Pension, is known in certain Berlin circles as the “Fountain Fairy” (die Brunnenfee) on account of her work restoring Berlin’s derelict fountains. She also takes great pride in preparing breakfast and delivering it to your chamber. The only problem is that the esteemed Frau has a bad hip, a very bad hip, and if I understood correctly is awaiting her hip surgery, but meanwhile she limps rather extravagantly, which makes it impossible to carry a tray laden with teapots, coffeepots, cups, saucers, eggcups, honey, cheese, ham and bread. And eggs hats. But this problem was solved when one of us went to the kitchen, midway down the famous 40 meter hallway, and carried the tray back to the Maria Callas zimmer. Followed by the careening Frau Isolde. Once we had deposited the tray, our hands were summarily swatted away - “This, I will do!” – by Frau Isolde who has a very special way of arranging the table. And each morning our boiled eggs (neither soft nor exactly hard) wore a different pair of hats. Though at first I did not realize that there would be new hats each morning, but soon this became clear, and even when I felt that could not stomach another egg, I also could not forego the chance to see which hat would come next.
No, we never exhausted the collection.




If you want to know more about Frau Isolde and Pension Kettler, you can read here from the English version of the website:
She rented an old-Berlin apartment after the career as photo-model and mannequin beginning of the 70er years. In originator-time - and Art-Deco-Stil, she " did her/its/their pension " from it.
Pictures, gifts of friends, hang at the walls of the 40 meters long hall. The widow of a Jewish art-historian and -händlers puts down beauty and individuality against cold uniformity. Her/its/their living room resembles a parlor of the 20er years. No coincidence - meets here regular Berlin artists however. Not art-connoisseur par excellence but as lover of distinctive pieces sees her itself.
Why the commitment for it, that the wells flow? " The beautiful has no unmitelbaren benefit for many people. Exactly therefore, I want to fight for it that gets it remains ". Watches, like in this city " the culture the brook down goes ", that can can her. So, she commits herself also to the conservation of the Berlischen gallery.

Newly discovered factoid

James Bond and I have something in common: our mothers share the same name. Of course his mother tragically died in a 'climbing accident' when James was a boy, and mine is alive and well and still delivering the last word in fenestration, protocol and oriental carpet maintenance.

The storm, past tense

For the first time ever we managed to use every heavy-duty extension cord we have, and we have a lot. More than is normal. Specifically we have 4 orange cords, 1 green cord, 1 purple cord and 3 yellow cords. If strung end to end we might have reached Yonkers, but no, we did not string them end to end because that would have been unsafe, and safety is good. We plugged them into the little generator and that way we could keep the heat lamp on for the new baby chicks.


Thanks to the high winds of Hurricane Sandy, aka Frankenstorm, we lost power Monday night, and thanks to the ministrations of ConEd crews, we regained it early Friday morning. Not so bad when you think about it, in the grand scheme of things, given that for the bulk of history, people lived their whole lives without electricity and most of them never complained. (As I did). They also lived without Gatorade, Girl Scout cookies and Donald Trump.
What we lost: the top half of a very large and old white pine, and on its way down, this white pine crushed the magnolia and the weeping hemlock. Gone. Creating a gap in the arboreal landscape, a space where there used to be foliage. Which I am discovering is very different from a similar space that never was filled with foliage in shades of green. CSB says he will not miss the weeping hemlock, but he is quite sad about the magnolia. I will miss them both.




What I missed: hot water.
What I enjoyed:
Going to bed by candlelight and then reading about Cuba with my headlamp.
Also, dining out on Sandy. The Powered fed the Powerless. Friends who did not lose power* invited us to dinner — and so thanks to the storm our social life improved by a factor of 1000%. The food was universally excellent, and the conversations ranged from South African flora to oysters in New York Harbor to geriatric medicine to Aged P’s to LBJ and the question of politicians and their excessive testosterone.
What I discovered when the lights came back on: that our floors - unvacuumed, unswept and largely unseen for a week - were covered with a fine layer of dog hair.
What else I discovered: the disturbing reality of my slavish devotion to incandescent lights and playing Solitaire on the computer.

* Not unlike the rest of the world, power and power outages in Hastings and New York are unevenly distributed.

Ready for Frankenstorm

Here is SQD’s convenient guide for Frankenstorm* preparation:
• First thing, create a FEMA Halloween costume that includes, but is not limited to: Foul weather gear (Blue, as a color less likely to incite panic: more likely to spread calm mastery of the situation); rubber boots with bees on them; LED headlamp; snorkel; pink onion-peeling goggles which are also very good protection against flying limbs; Strike Anywhere matches in a sealed baggie.

• Then bring inside the OBAMA lawn signs, so they don’t get trashed by the wind and the rain. We are very protective of the OBAMA lawn signs just now as the first one we put out was stolen, and then after we put out another one, some $%&^# had the temerity to place a Romniac sign right in front of it.
• Batten down the chicken coop, nail shut their windows, fill all their food and water dispensers to the brim.
• Run a heavy-duty electrical cord from the baby chicks heat lamps to the generator, at the ready.
• Secure all the beehives, with rocks or concrete blocks or ratchet straps. Stack all the empty supers on the back porch, tie them up and wrap the whole package in plastic.

• Do every possible bit of laundry, and wash all the dishes. Run every possible appliance. Why? Because we can. And who knows what the next days will bring. Make bread in the breadmaker. [Soon I will make waffles in the electric waffle maker and squeeze something with the electric juicer that has not been plugged in for a decade. Then I will find some use for the electric curling iron.]
• Cut all the dahlias in bloom, before they are smashed to smithereens. Ditto the red peppers.
• Go next door and chain-saw the tree that fell directly across the driveway.
• Go down to the waterfront and note that already the Hudson River has flooded the park and is lapping at the base of the restaurant. And we are still hours away from the peak.
• Curl up with a good book. Light a fire with your Strike Anywhere matches. Keep your headlamp handy.


*I did not come up with this name. Thank the media.

How long has it been since I have written about a saint, any saint, in SQD? A very long time, and while there are some of my readers who have perhaps not bemoaned this hiatus, and while perhaps not a single one of you has woken in the middle of the night with a craving for a hagiographic tidbit, I am going to plunge back into the haloed fray.
This has nothing to do with the fact that on Sunday (21st) the Pope will canonize 6, or 7, depending on your source, new saints, thus rendering my compendious Lives of the Saints even more out-of-date than it already is.
It has more to do with the fact that today is the feast of René Goupil, a deaf French Jesuit who came to North America in 1639 to missionize among the Hurons, a group not known for their fondness for missionaries. However, it was the Iroquois, fierce enemies of the Hurons, who killed Goupil. The method was a tomahawk to the head, and on account of that dispatchment, he is the patron saint of anesthesiologists as well as patients who receive anesthesia.
This remarkable – is it literal or magical? – linkage-giving-rise-to-patronage made me want to suggest a patronage group for another of today’s saints: Peter of Alcantara. He was a 16th century Spanish friar and until today’s exciting discovery, I only knew him as a friend and mentor of Teresa of Avila. Early in his monkish career, Peter was put in charge of the refectory at his monastery. After six months of his regime, the other monks finally complained that they had not been given one piece of fruit in all that time. Peter replied that he hadn’t seen any fruit. A fellow monk directed his eyes just slightly upward, and there were grapes and apples and figs hanging in profusion.
Peter’s taste buds had not felt the lack. Monks, as we all know, have a great sense of humor, and once for fun they gave Peter a bowl of water with vinegar and salt and told him it was soup. He never knew the difference.
Based on this story, I am recommending to the Vatican that Peter be made the patron saint of school cafeteria workers who, no doubt, need all the help they can get.
St Frideswide, an 8th century virgin, is the patron saint of Oxford, England, but that is never here nor there. Her story gets interesting about 500 years after her death, when England was in the throes of reformist zeal. For those hundreds of years, Frideswide’s relics had been resting undisturbed in Oxford. Then in 1561 came Calfhill, of whom even the laconic Alban Butler writes: “[he]went to such trouble to desecrate them [Frideswide’s bones] that it would seem he must have been insane with fanaticism.” For the purposes of his nefarious desecration, Calfhill dug up the bones of an apostate nun (She had married a friar) and mixed them up with the bones of the virginal Frideswide, and then reburied the mélange back in the church.
This performance piece was written up in Latin and German, and given the rubric: “Here lies Religion with Superstition.” History does not tell us what Calfhill did with the rest of his life, nor the manner of his death.

Memo for the next debate

The following are subjects that were not addressed in the presidential debate that I would have liked to hear addressed and that, if addressed and discussed - even in the most bellicose manner - would have enabled many more undecided voters to choose their candidate, and additionally would have elevated the risibility factor of the debates several notches:
What does the US government intend to do about the pesticides that are likely responsible for hundreds of millions of honeybee deaths, the neonicotinoids?
What do the candidates suggest we do when our chickens stop laying eggs and just sit around all day eating their fancy organic food and roosting?
What is the candidate’s position on canonization?
Has anyone noticed how the US is plagued with a short and long term memory loss so extreme that an individual thus afflicted would be diagnosed with advanced senile dementia?

If any of my readers has would like to pass these questions on to the moderator of the next debate, please do so with my blessing.

Two good reasons to go to California

1. This cathedral, at the De Young Art Museum, is made entirely from guns and bullets, and comes complete with a tooth and a spinal bone. (These are my pictures - better ones can be found here:






2. Going to the supermarket in Santa Cruz, you are greeted with this sign:



And inside you can buy this honey:


3. Actually it should be three things. This tree at Golden Gate Park. Several other trees at GGP. California is blessed with trees.