Mushroom Cloud Over Frankfurt
My first husband Frank Wolf is German. We were married for 13 years and would return to Germany each summer to visit his family. We got divorced five years ago.
Frank was born in 1958 postwar Germany. He got a degree in psychology at Frankfurt University, then a degree in Boston at Berklee College of Music, and then went to MIT for four years for sound engineering before opening a music studio in Alston, a neighborhood in Boston, and then moving to New York City where we met in 2006.
We got divorced in 2020 and I remarried my teenage sweetheart Peter in 2021.
At first Frank was skeptical of Peter but now Frank is Team Peter all the way. I often call Frank to complain to him about my woes. “Woe is me, I have no Friends,” I tell him. He says “You got a husband (Peter) who’s completely devoted to you and on his knees laying wood floors for you right now and you got me. I answer the phone every time you call. What am I? Chopped liver over here?” he laughs.
Frank’s a Capricorn which he says gives him the discernment of what’s important and when to act and when to let things go.
Last year in June somewhere in the heat of 109 degree days in Tucson, I had a dream that Frank and I were back in Frankfurt visiting his family. We were at Aldi’s buying groceries with his young nephew Mika. We were in the parking lot getting back into our van and I looked to the West and saw the mushroom clouds of nuclear bombs going off.
Frank knew just what to do. He knew which border crossing to drive towards. In the dream our van had robot features, very Mad Max, all white. Frank was counting money trying to figure out how many kilometers it was to Bulgaria where he could bribe someone to cross the border. We had friends in Bulgaria and if we could get there we would be safe.
There were robots scanning our faces in other non-human occupied vehicles and we’d hide our faces behind the sun visors.
In real life in 2016 when Trump was elected President after Putin helped him get elected, Russia turned its nuclear warheads towards Germany within five minutes of Trump being declared the winner.
In real life this spring Frank’s sister Ute back in Germany says their German National Broadcasting System interrupted regularly scheduled television programming to warn German citizenry to prepare for war with Russia, for Russia to invade Germany.
I tell Frank the reason he understands what’s happening today is because he was born into postwar Germany, into the ruins and he knows how to rebuild. They had a deNazification program in Germany. They had to re-program the German psyche to not be Nazis.
In the US we have a Nazification program. Frank watched endless History Channel shows when we lived in New York. The night Trump was elected there were four new Hilter programs glorifying Hitler released instantly.
In Iowa City this summer Peter and I had milkshakes at the historic old Dairy Queen on the Iowa River. They destroyed this cool old metal cedar footbridge bridge and mowed down all the trees along the river bank and destroyed the bike path along the river by the Dairy Queen. They did this because there used to be homeless people who’d hang out by the river in a grove of trees under the railroad bridge there. The stench of a dead animal bowled me over as we walked to our car. “That’s not a dead animal,” Peter explained, “that’s the water in the Iowa River.” The water looks very polluted and Peter sent me an article explaining the Iowa River has toxic levels of nitrates from agricultural run off. Iowa has 3 million people and 93 million fecal equivalents from the hog shit Big Ag hog farms dump in the Iowa River. The article Peter sent me explained the water processing plant in Iowa City cannot get the nitrates out of the water and we’re not supposed to water our lawn because Iowa City is running out of drinking water. Trump dismantled the EPA. The GOP in Iowa’s Supreme Court made it illegal four years ago to test water quality in Iowa’s lakes and rivers as a way of protecting the industries that pollute the water. There are no clean waters left in Iowa.
Peter and I have a baby on the way, due in January with a surrogate in LA. My plan is to get the baby a passport as soon as they’re born and head for Canada. But I’m not sure what’s coming in the next seven months. I keep looking to the horizon, ready to flee. Waiting for that mushroom cloud.