I'm in a very weird mood tonight...relationships

Being chased by ghosts of the past. You'd think it would be something like Dickens, and it even isn't December, hey...

Thinking about women... and why they do what they do. Yeah, that's a new one, right?

I didn't get the message, somewhere along the line. Except that they were awesome... in a good way, somehow, but I didn't ever understand it.

We're going back generations, here, so just click off, it wouldn't be interesting, it's just a bit of history.

I have known two women in my life... who were sort of brave. And married men who were gay in the Thirties and Forties to keep them out of trouble, but they loved them. And I always thought, 'WHOA! How could you DO that?'

Yes, it was the Nazi regime, and they did something daring... but they never dissolved their relationships afterward. That was the amazing part.

Of the two... Margarete was incomprehensible to me. Lovely, always laughing, cooking up a storm to keep 'her' guy, who was alway running around hanging out in WC's, and had the audacity to brag about his 'latest' conquest in front of her... And she would LAUGH.

I was stymied. I didn't understand anything they would do. It was 'refreshing', in that they were honest... but made me uncomfortable... Andreas had this eyebrow thing. He could lift just one and look like the devil... He was thin as a rail, and she was apple-cheeked, round. Because she ate what he didn't.

They were always at our house for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter.... Andreas was Peter's boss in a book store when he was young, and they were in their Seventies. And we had a hell of a lot of fun.

Our first Christmas in the house... well we didn't have much in the way of furniture, and Peter was OH, CHRISTMAS TREE... (Right) So I got a HUGE one. Like it went to the ceiling, which was three meters high. And it was easy enough to get IN... but taking it down, I was near hysterics trying to get the fucking thing OUT.

Peter called Andreas, who lived across the park from us, and he was gleeful and arch, and funny, and he DID get it out of the window. And he never let me live it down, but it was funny, and we bonded over that.

Andreas fell some years ago trying to get on a tram in late December. It wasn't the fall. He had picked something up in WWII that messed him up so badly, it came to the fore, and he died. Margarete died six months later.

So that is one side of the coin. They caused me much wonderment, and were loving and lovely.

The other side wasn't so positive. 'Jane'. I've never talked about her. She was amazing and funny, and very odd. She married a man who was a math teacher. And had to bail him out under the Nazi regime when he got caught in flagranti in Trieste. Trolling for young boys. So she saved him... but she wreaked revenge on him for the rest of his pitiful life. I was witness to how she treated him, and it wasn't good. He begging her in the lobby for some money to get a hot dog, and she throwing 20 Schillings on the floor, and screaming at him.

And him leaving brokenly.

So yeah, I don't understand women at all...

It's interesting... one who rescues a man and goes on keeping him and oh yes, they had to have daughter to 'prove' he wasn't 'twisted'. She's sorta weird, but what would you expect, hey. A crack shot on shooting ranges. I don't wanna know who she is imagining when she sees a target..

And the other, who goes on an emotional rampage... and then leaves everything she has to a gay man. And never had a child.

I don't know.... tonight is sorta weird, and thoughts of my past are sort of haunting me.