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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| Bless You, Kalamazoo By Antonio C. Abaya Written July 03, 2006 For the Standard Today, July 04 issue When my article My Aubervillers came out (Nov. 20, 2005), I received a most unexpected reaction, from one Pete Selkowe of Racine, Wisconsin. For those who may have tuned in late, Aubervillers is a banlieu or suburb of Paris, northeast of the City of Lights, near where the racial rioting started and was most severe last October-November, during which some 10,000 cars were torched all over France by rioters, mostly unemployed immigrant youth from North and sub-Saharan Africa. Aubervillers was also where my Vespa motor scooter finally ran out of gas, specifically at the corner of Avenue de la Division Leclerc and Rue de la Republique, and I had no more money to buy another liter, and had only enough coins to make one phone call, to the Philippine Embassy in Paris. The Embassy paid for my cab fare as I had the equivalent of only two US cents left in my pocket by the time I got there, as I recounted in my book Europe by Scooter, published in 1965 and long since out of print. It was the last leg of a six-month odyssey through Europe, during which I logged 18,000 kilometers through 13 countries, all the way to the Arctic Circle in Finland, and up and down the highest pass in the Pyrenees (between France and Spain), and up and down the second highest pass in the Alps (between Italy and Switzerland). That was in 1961, when there were still no tunnels through the Alps. Anyway, I was surprised by the almost instantaneous reaction from Pete, who is a total stranger. I didn�t think he was a Filipino, but I asked him anyway, and I wanted to find out how he got to read My Aubervillers. No, Pete replied, �I�m not Filipino. I found your story from a link through Google. I have Vespa as one of my daily alerts.� Pete explained that he once traveled from London to Athens and back on a Vespa, and that he was raring to go on the road again on another Vespa. So he arranged for Google to feed him articles on Vespas whenever one surfaced in cyberspace anywhere in the (English-speaking) world. The wonders of the Internet! �I doubt your book will be at the Racine Public Library. But there�s an Inter-Library Loan service that finds me stuff from all over. I look forward to it.� I thought that was the end of it. But last April 02 I received another email from Pete, with the subject heading Another fan of yours checks in�. �after doing a Google search to see if you were still alive.� Wrote Pete: �I saw your book (Europe by Scooter) mentioned somewhere last week and I just got it yesterday through inter-library loan service from the Western Michigan University library in Kalamazoo. I have raced through it cover to cover.� Bless you, Kalamazoo, that you still have my book 41 years after it was published! I once drove through your fair city in 1958 or 1959, on my way from Chicago to Detroit. Continued Pete: �I enjoyed it very much, dated as it may be (prices, statistics). I, too, did a Vespa trip around Europe, five years ago: London to Athens and back, also staying at hostels. I had similar experiences. A wonderful trip even for an old man who doesn�t dance.� �I had one adventure you didn�t have: I spent a night in jail.� Pete went on to narrate how he had arrived in Barcelona by ferry from Genoa in a driving rainstorm and couldn�t find any place to stay: the hostel and all hotels were full. Barcelona was hosting a football game with Real Madrid. (I can believe the story that President Arroyo had to wait 30 minutes in Rome last week while Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi watched the Italian team battle Australia for a quarterfinals slot in the World Cup. No affairs of state can possibly be more important than that. Italy won, 1-0, with a penalty kick in the last five seconds. No wonder Prodi could not tear himself away from his TV set, just to receive someone who does not understand or appreciate football enough to come calling during the World Cup.) Pete finally found lodging in the municipal jail of nearby Badalona, where the desk sergeant allowed him to sack out on the floor in an empty office. At 3am, after a shift change, the new desk sergeant woke him up and led him down to the basement jail, where he was given his own cell with a bed and clean sheets! Well, Pete, I almost had a similar experience in Hamburg, as I narrated in my book. I had been staying for a few days in the university town of Goettingen in central Germany, in the family flat of my pen pal Renate, with whom I had been corresponding, in my schoolboy German, during my late teens. (I am 5 feet 10, was 25 years old, sported a near-crew cut then and wore a surplus US Army jacket as windbreaker. When I first rang their doorbell, her mother called her up at work and I overheard her telling Renate - in German, of course - that �there is an American soldier here looking for you.�) With my finances down to a dangerously low level, I left my scooter and luggage with Renate and hitchhiked to Hamburg, some 600 kilometers to the north, where my father had sent me $100 through American Express. But, alas, I neglected to consider that I would be arriving in Hamburg on a Saturday morning. So American Express was closed, the Philippine consulate was closed, and the jugendherberge or youth hostel warden would not let me check in because I didn�t have enough money for a three-day stay, which would have cost the staggering amount of about US $2.25. What to do? I went to the police headquarters at the Rathaus or city hall and explained my situation to the desk sergeant and asked his permission to sleep in the jail over the weekend. But he politely refused. Instead, he gave me the address of the Salvation Army and told me how to get there by tram. As a last resort, I recalled knowing a German girl in my US university. I knew her full name and I knew she was from Hamburg, but I didn�t have her address or phone number. The methodical German police went to work and, after a few calls, located her residence. She not only lent me some money, she also invited me to spend the weekend in her family�s flat. Her mother later told me, in German, that she was frightened when the police called. �This is the police in city hall. Do you have a daughter named Renate?� (All good German girls are named Renate.) She thought her daughter had been in an accident. As it turned out, her father, who also didn�t speak any English, had been to the Philippines, in 1928, on his way to his diplomatic post in Tokyo. He recalled visiting Pagsanjan (my father�s hometown, which Germans pronounce Pagsanyan), by boat (or casco?) from Manila and remarked about the beauty of the landscape. Coming from Scandinavia and heading back to Paris, I passed Hamburg for a second time and was again invited by Renate to stay with them. Apparently someone in their building did not like my presence and decided to play a prank on me: he/she poured what looked like milk into the fuel tank of my Vespa, which I had to push to a service station some two kilometers away. The mechanic on duty drained the fuel tank, dismantled the carburetor and cleaned the engine�.but did not charge me anything � deutsche service, he said - which may have been his way of apologizing for what he may have interpreted, probably correctly, as someone�s racist prank on me. I also ran out of money in Stockholm, but that�s another story. As a postscript to this vignette, let me mention that last week I received an email from a Fil-Am reader, Gus Lucero, of Fullerton, California. �Mr. Abaya, I read your column regularly in the Manila Standard and when I miss it, such as when I am traveling, I go to www.tapatt.org�.Occasionally, you or your readers have mentioned Europe by Scooter. I have been to the public library in Fullerton, and have contacted amazon.com, Borders and Barnes and Noble, but they don�t have it. Please tell me how I can get a copy�.� Gus, the book has been out of print for more than 40 years, so you will not find it in any bookstore anywhere on the planet. But Pete Selkowe (above) has found a way. Go back to the Fullerton public library and ask if they subscribe to the inter-library loan service. Who knows, some college or university library somewhere in California may still have it in its shelves. Worth a try, don�t you think?. Let me know. ***** Reactions to [email protected]. Other articles since 2001 in www.tapatt.org. Current articles also in tonyabaya.multiply.com and tapatt.yahoogroups.com. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |