Part 13: Whale-Fish!
No one game is more under stated than the gentle, relaxing game of Bowls (Boules, Petanque). Forever big in France, I see my old Frieburger (German) friends have all grown into - what I thought was - ostensibly an old man´s pastime, chucking heavy metal (a clue?) balls around in a sand pit or barren patch of dusty ground.
CLONK. CLONK.
At the Freiburg GANTER Pilsner-beer, ´bier garten´, it´s positively a religious ritual.
CLONK. CLONK.
Here, several years ago, these guys would have been paralytically drunk, chasing Hilda, or, hungover, sipping jugs of milk, reading Wittgenstein, at the nearby bar, the WALFISCH (Whale-Fish), which, presently open, lies empty, with ceiling and walls studded with bones, skulls and the like; on the juke-box, the band Motorhead, probably, blasting to the people vacuum.
CLONK. CLONK.
But here, in the GANTER bier garten´s relative tranquility, the fast fading light of a Summer´s eve, gnats dancing under the elms by the banks of the Dreisam river, the lads, playing away, chucking those ball-missiles around, raises my own safety concern level...with every CLONK.
And yet, content with my beer and happy to be among old comrades, I surmise, people get old...or older, activities mellow, new wives, new - lesser intensive - lives. And having children, as some have, are always the great maturer, sometimes destroyer, especially of young provincial men´s lives and dreams.
...Thus I find (CLONK!) a tribe of friends whose raging youth, now ebbed, still clinging to the Pack, the Group. Some are rich, some, not so. Still the most intellectually provocative, are the financially challenged, who still talk well but need to collect our beer garden glasses for the return deposit at the distant garden bar... CLONK!!!
Still, it´s been a brilliant and idyllic German Breisgau Summer´s day, so I bid my ´adieu´s´ till we all meet later at the Heavy Metal bar of old, the Walfisch, and on departing the Bier Garten I - not quite unexpectedly - hear a loud CLONK, a loud piercing SCREAM and hue and cry.
An ambulance, with all it´s bells and whistles blaring, sirens past me before I even get 500 yards!
c. 2010. Freiburg I. Breisgau/ our man in europe/dave delacroix
it's a picture, Del! Happy bowling - jam
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