A reunion 41 years in the making

There's a story in Father Knows Nothing about my childhood trip to Austria. When I was 10 or 11, my parents put my sister Cindy and I on an airplane and sent us to a farm in Austria to spend the summer there. It was a pretty traumatic experience for me--but it made for a good story. The part of the story I didn't tell was that after we spent the month in Austria, two of the Austrian girls (about the same age as us) spent a month with us in Chicago.

Well this past Friday I was surprised to receive an e-mail from one of those Austrian girls. She was going to be in Chicago with her husband, and wanted to meet. I don't know why I was really nervous about this meeting (probably because my German has gotten a little rusty), but we scheduled the meeting at my mother's house--the same house she stayed in 41 years ago.

It turned out to be a lovely afternoon visit. This is a photo below. My sister and I are on the outside, and Ulli and her husband Richard are in the middle. I gave her a copy of Father Knows Nothing, which contains that story. I feel a little guilty that I laid it on a little thick in that story. Please note that some (but not much) dramatic license was taken in the writing of it. :)



Here's Cindy and I in Austria in the summer of 1974...