1972

One evening in Europe I was sitting on an upturned bucket in the basement of a rental house in Tubingen, Germany. My friends had left the house and I was alone. I walked down the stairs to the dark and strange basement, saw a bucket against a wall picked it up and carried it to the middle of the floor. I placed it upside down and sat on it. I felt afraid. I wrapped my arms around myself and began rocking forward and back quietly sobbing. I was in love with travel, intoxicated by the new isolation and diminishment of my normal identity. The basement was like a womb of rebirth for me. I was letting go of my childhood mythic self as I sat rocking and crying in the dark dank basement. Sobbing and rocking with my arms cradled around me in an upright semi-fetal position wondering what was happening. How could I be joyous and afraid at the same time? Three years before I had been in Vietnam, now I was in the middle of Germany, where another war thirty years earlier had been fought. I was a boy shedding my boyhood skin of play and imagination. I was alone in someone's basement afraid and happy.