Week 1, Theme 4

Prompt: Start with a place-name. It may be a place you know, or one you have never visited, like Proust's Parma. In either case, it should be a place-name you find evocative. This assignment is about the power of the name: you are writing about the names as much as, or possible more than, the place. Think about how you encountered the name, and how it became resonant for you. You make make the name prominent in your theme, or barely mention it.

“Unsere Familie kommt aus Baden-Baden. Vergess es nie!”¹

Beverly Bertha Thompson is the type of woman who will never let you forget anything in which she believes. Dress to impress the people around you, not to match them. Always wash your hands after going to the bathroom or touching raw meat. It is not chicken noodle soup but vegetable beef soup, mostly the beef, which will cure a nasty cold. And, above all, we are of good German stock and are bound make Baden-Baden proud. I have always admired my grandmother’s bedrock opinions, but despite her hearty German endorsement I have remained weary of my ancestral Heimstadt. The name of the town rolls off Beverly’s tongue as easily as an admonition for an un-tucked shirt; throughout my youth I had heard it muttered thousands of times in connection with all things holy. But the black-and-white morality taught to young children is limited to a discussion of good and bad – thus by age four the name Baden-Baden was for me, the best efforts of Bev notwithstanding, closely connected to images of strange men offering candy to vulnerable children, pets getting run over by cars, and Republicans. That the town is located on the edge of the ominous-sounding Schwarzwald² did not help. As I learned from my grandmother-mandated Deutsch lessons that the town’s name literally meant “Bath-Bath,” a once-is-too-many word for a dirt-loving rascal like me, my distrust for this suspicious place only deepened. Beverly, always tolerant if not approving of her first grandchild’s whims, has accepted my superstitions toward the town that is for her the wellspring of all things gut but has made me promise one thing: that I visit before I make a final judgment. I have made a promise to myself as well: to stop in Munich to pick up some good beer to calm my nerves before my trip through the Black Forest to the town of strange men and tax-cutters.

¹ “Our family comes from Baden-Baden. Never forget it!”
² Black Forest