Mostly About Birthdays

A few Sundays ago Lia turned twenty-nine. We celebrated by spending the week leading up to her birthday in Munich. Early Monday morning we rented a car, piled in, and set forth southward on the Autobahn. Along the way we stopped in Bayreuth, the adopted home of Richard Wagner, where we visited the musician’s former home and current grave, as well as the old Baroque opera house that drew him there, and the newer, larger theater he had built to stage his endless epics.

In Munich we stayed at the apartment of Andrew, Lori, and Holly Davis, who hosted us for a couple days before leaving on a vacation of their own to Italy. On Tuesday we toured downtown Munich, fending off vendors at the traditional market, now an overpriced tourist trap; touring an old cathedral, and stopping at eleven a.m. to witness the daily Glockenspiel at the old town hall. In the afternoon Andrew and I took Julia, Eli, and Holly to the English Gardens—Munich’s answer to Central Park or the Tiergarten.

Wednesday morning the Davises took a plane to Italy and Lia a train to Regensburg, where she researched her family history at a major Catholic archive. Regensburg is a very old, very Catholic city (the current pope was formerly a cardinal there). Its cathedral is one of the most spectacular in Germany—surpassed, if at all, only by its counterpart in Cologne. Near the cathedral is a bridge dating back to Roman times. Lia’s visit, repeated on Thursday, was a solid triumph; she found seven full families and extended her line, for the first time, back into the 1700s.

In the meantime I took the girls south toward the Austrian border. We saw the Alps, which on this limpid day were breathtaking, and visited the seven-hundred-year-old mountain cloister in Etal. We then drove West to Neuschwanstein, the unfinished masterpiece of mad King Ludwig, adapted and immortalized by Walt Disney. At the end of all this, I bought each girl an ice cream, and they competed to see who could decorate her face with the finest ice cream moustache. Katharine won roundly, looking in the end like a seventeenth-century Spanish don. Having seen the Alps in person, the girls begged to return to the Davises to see them on film. I relented, and the ladies watched The Sound of Music for the second time in as many days.

On Thursday we drove up to Regensburg with Lia, where she again researched and we played tourists. The city proved less than car friendly, however, and the girls touristic stamina soon waned, so after meeting up with Lia for lunch, we returned to Munich while Lia stayed to finish the job.

On Friday we did our best to clean the apartment the Davises had so graciously loaned us, then visited the Nymphenburg Palace in Munich before visiting the Sneddon family, who hosted Lia, her sister Jini, and the girls during the last Regensburg family history adventure in 2009, and who now hosted us for dinner. When last the girls were at the Sneddons’, Eli persecuted their dog mercilessly; we were a bit anxious to wager a second visit, but Eli’s offences were apparently forgotten. We had a delicious meal of home-made hamburgers and french-fries, and the girls ran rumpus with the Sneddon children. Saturday we drove back to Berlin, pausing along the way in one of Lia’s ancestral towns.

On Sunday at church Lia was bombarded with birthday greetings from her many admirers in the ward. Two of them, sisters, had separately made her cakes. The older of the sisters gave Lia a birthday hug and explained that she had baked a cake, but that she would give it to her after the meeting, since it would be awkward and embarrassing for Lia to walk around carrying a cake. Moments later, the younger sister accosted Lia and placed her own cake enthusiastically in Lia’s unsuspecting hands. How awkward, thought Lia, and how embarrassing. Actually, she only felt very loved, as she well deserves to feel. Lia’s major birthday present from us was her trip to Munich and two days in Regensburg, but we also took her to the mall after family home evening on Monday and let her pick out a new purse. Like Kirk Cheney’s birthday gift of a mountain bike to Gretchen earlier in the month, this gift was self-serving. Lia’s old purse—strange shades of blue and emblazoned with a cartoon figure on a skateboard—embarrassed us all.

Eli’s sixth birthday followed Lia’s twenty-ninth by only twelve days. In between we celebrated general conference. On Saturday evening, we went to the stake center in Tiergarten for a live transmission of what in Salt Lake was the Saturday morning session of conference. After some technical difficulties—fatal for the German transmission, only temporary for the English—we watched a wonderful session with a roomful of missionaries. We were astonished at how well the girls listened. Julia even took some notes and Eli scrupulously colored the ties of the First Presidency and Twelve in her general conference handbook.

Sunday was a different, but still wonderful experience. Thanks to an ill-timed half marathon, we watched the sessions on Sunday (really priesthood, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday morning, in that order) in Lankwitz. The Clarks, a family in our ward from South Africa who live around the corner from the Lankwitz chapel, invited us over for lunch, and later dessert, in between sessions. Later in the week Sister Vivien Clark found a tiny chocolate handprint—Katharine’s—on a white cupboard in the bathroom, which she couldn’t bring herself to remove. The girls tried hard to listen—at some points they tried harder than at others—but by the end of the last session it was rough going. Eli kept to her seat only with difficulty, and Katharine danced brazenly in the back of the gym. But we made it to the end, and were very proud of our persevering little ladies.

Actually we weren’t to the end yet. It was after 8:30 when we left the chapel for our trip home. As we walked up the ramp to the S-Bahn station we saw our train rolling in by the platforms. Instantaneously, we determined to dash for it. We caught the train but lost a shoe. Julia had decided earlier in the day, in the name of elegance, to wear a pair of sparkling pink shoes that no longer fit her. Cinderella like, she lost one of them during our mad scramble for the train. Some young women from the Tiergarten ward found the shoe and tried to return it to us, but by the time they reached our car and hit the shoe against our window, the doors were shut, and the train began to pull away. Katharine was already weeping out of sheer exhaustion; Eli, in line to inherit that particular pair of shoes, now wept out of unalloyed sorrow. We had on our hands two damsels in deep distress. They wept and refused to be comforted. Actually, Eli eventually soothed herself by looking out the window with a tragic expression, and Katharine calmed down slowly as I asked inane questions about the costumery of her favorite princesses.

But our troubles were not over. At Yorckstraβe—one stop away from home—we had to switch from the S-Bahn to the U-Bahn without the assistance of an escalator or elevator. This required us to descend a host of stairs from the S-Bahn down to the street, then another host from the street down to the subway. Katharine was in a stroller and Julia had only one shoe. Lia pushed Katharine on the flat surfaces while I carried Julia. At the stairs, I carried Katharine down in her stroller, then ran back up to fetch Julia. In the end Julia hopped down the stairs, one foot on each stair and one hand on the railing. Not a few onlookers mistook us for a traveling circus. That we were in our Sunday best made it all the more exciting. We finally made it home after 9 p.m., filled in spirit and weary to the bone. We were not overwhelmed with amusement to learn, later in the week, that there is a bus that runs from the Lankwitz S-Bahn stop directly to the U-Bahn station nearest our apartment.

In any case, we had little time to laugh at ourselves: Eli’s birthday was swift approaching. Asked what she wanted to do for her birthday, Eli answered that she wanted to visit Schloss Charlottenburg. Asked what kind of cake she wanted, Eli answered that she wanted a cake shaped like Schloss Charlottenburg. Eli’s birthday fell on Friday—it was her “magic birthday,” she explained, since she turned six on the sixth. Lia spent all of Thursday making the requested cake. My contribution was to draw up the architectural blueprint and conduct the prerequisite geometric computations. And I stayed up past midnight helping Lia decorate. The end product was a masterpiece, from which we learned two important lessons: the first was how to make a cake that looks like Schloss Charlottenburg; the second was never to ask a six-year-old what kind of cake she wants.

Eli awoke on Friday and stepped into a world of balloons and cake, hugs and applause. It was her birthday and she was its star. We met up with our friends, Olaf and Antje Wenke, in front of the palace a little before eleven and got in line to take the tour. The inside of the castle, which was built between 1698 and 1701, is sufficiently impressive, but the birthday girl was less than delighted with her tour. She quickly became bored with all the old portraits and tired with all the walking. She wanted out but she needed an excuse. She found one in the quality of the air. “The oxygen is horrible,” she groused. “Doesn’t anyone care that I’m having to breathe this terrible oxygen?!?! Doesn’t anyone care that the birthday girl is practically suffocating?!?!?!” We are happy to report that we eventually got safely out of that horrid castle and into the pure air of an early-April early afternoon.

As we were hurrying to get out of the prison palace, Katharine and I reached the bottom of a long and magnificent staircase. To my dismay, Katharine completely lost focus on our resolve to exit the castle post haste—clearly she didn’t care what kind of air the birthday girl was breathing—and plopped down on the bottom step. “Come on, Katharine,” I coaxed and cajoled, “we’ve got to get out of here.” But Katharine was unmovable. When she did start to move, it was in the wrong direction. She scooted on her backside from the bottom stair to the second. I was nearly apoplectic. “Katharine,” I cried, “what are you doing?!? Come on!!!” Then, as she moved backward from the second step to the third, she began to sing. “The sun has gone to bed,” she warbled, “and so must I.” Then, imitating every gesture of The Sound of Music’s theretofore inimitable Gretl, she yawned ostentatiously, and lay down to sleep in the middle of the stairwell.

Once outside everything went smoothly. We toured the palace gardens and found two swans on the lake. We also discovered that the swans were nesting, and even got to see the eggs. Olaf and Antje gave Eli a big chocolate rabbit, which she immediately broke into small pieces for distribution among the company. There is nothing like fresh air and chocolate to purge lungs fouled by impure oxygen.

When we got home from the palace, Eli blew out her candles and opened her presents—a magnifying glass, a big book of flowers, the DVD of Mulan, and a coupon for three movies more. It was, Eli burbled at bedtime, the best day of her long life.