The Max Planck institute, where my father worked, was up the hill a little ways out of town. A collection of buildings in a wooded area surrounding a stone courtyard. At least that's what I remember.
I remember being pushed in a kinderwagen though the courtyard. It was a two-seater. Not side by side like you see these days, but one in front and another behind. I was in the front and fell out and cut up my knee. It wasn't a bad cut, but it was bloody.
My father performed research on birds and lizards. I am told the birds were starlings, but I remember them as crows, as big as ravens. He let me hold one once, while he drew a blood sample. They were kept in a dusty, open room below the roof of one of the buildings. I liked the lizards better. There were green anoles, and desert iguanas. All of them in a bathtub with heat lamps shining down. The desert iguanas were vegetarians.
The was a grocery store in town, run by a man names Herr Pein. Or Pine maybe. It wasn't that big but it seemed to have just about anything that anyone would need. Herr Pein was maybe racist, or didn't like americans, or something like that. He gave me an icecream cone once though, so I thought he was alright.
12 years ago
