Weekend Crumbs

Short Story On A Lamppost:

I was waiting to cross Torstr. on Saturday when I saw two notices newly taped on the lamppost where I was standing. The upper one said "Apartment Sought!" and showed two female stick figures. (You know, with the triangular dress thing. I guess male stick figures are naked.) One was larger than the other, and had an arrow pointing to it with the number 31. The smaller one had an arrow pointing to it with the number 3 1/2.

Underneath it was another notice which said "Part-Time Father Urgently Seeks Apartment!" This apartment-hunter was 35.

Both notices showed an appalling ignorance of current housing prices in this neighborhood, too. Guess it's been a while since they've been looking.

***

The church down the street from me owns an awful lot of real-estate immediately around it, not only the Konvikt (seminary) which adjoins the house next door, but also a parish-house on Tieckstr. which is tied to the rest of the buildings. This gets rented out to various people (there are AA meetings -- yes, they have AA in Germany -- there, for instance) from time to time, and until yesterday I'd forgotten about one of its more interesting regulars. I was coming back from the store at about 3:30 and saw two very large African women in their finest Dutch Wax finery walking down the street. As I got to the parish house, I heard singing, and remembered that there's some kind of African congregation which meets there on Sunday afternoons and has all-singing services. The first time I encountered them, I stopped under the window to listen for a while, but it became evident that there was more spirit than technique at work there. I guess things were pretty played out yesterday, though, because there were only two voices, and they were pretty hoarse.

Still, that was preferable to what happened last night, as the Konvikt had another of their appalling hootenannies, with gut-string guitars strumming and voices attempting Beatles songs and "Blowing in the Wind." Man, if I play a record that's audible to anyone after 10pm I get the cops called on me. But in yesterday's warm breezy evening, I got to endure this until midnight. Yet another argument for the separation of church and state, if you ask me!