Oberwesel, GERMANY

The weather may have been less than fair here, but it certainly was more than fair in the Lorelei Gorge along the Rhine -- not a cloud in the sky, which was even better than what the weather forecast indicated.  You can guess I was not sorry I pushed myself to get in the car for today's drive.  AW didn't go anywhere so he was invited to join me, and I will always invite him, even knowing that most likely he'll refuse, because of his back and because he does not want to risk infection.  Sometimes, I wonder, but in the end, everything is okay with me.

Wonder of wonders that there was absolutely no traffic jam on the A61, considering that it is not the weekend.  Got to the Rhine in less time than I had gotten used to.  I already passed by Oberwesel in my two previous visits here but had no time to explore it.  What's to see here?  A 'burg', for one thing.  It occupies a prominent position on top of the local mountain and of course I just had to see it.  A good excuse, as if I needed one, was that I had to go to the wc.  What I didn't know was that the castle has been converted into a hotel, and I ended up having a late lunch there as well, but not before going up to the ramparts for magnificent views of the Rhine and the Lorelei Gorge, and playing with the catapult and trying out the crossbow (killed the local duke and duchess, too).  Two extras.  Actually, Oberwesel is most known for its rather thick medieval city walls, parts of which are at least 7 meters thick and still standing today.  This tower is part of that complex.

After Oberwesel, drove further on to Bingen, where I have been, and tried to find the ferry to cross the Rhine so that I could admire the Niederwald Monument, but could not find the parking area I parked in last month.  Ended up back on the A9, so stopped a few times along the way to take shots of the castle hotel in Kaub, across the Rhine, as well as the cutesy fortress tax castle in the middle of the river itself.  What a clever way to waylay ships for money.  It was about 17.30 by the time I began the climb back to the A61.

Music off again on the drive back home, and continued the topic I began dissecting last weekend, but now the approach was hypothetical -- I wondered if I would have managed to please the real set of parents, had I known them.  If I had met the woman I often call Tranquilina (you can blame Gabriel Garcia Marquez for this choice), she and I would have tried to find out what we had in common -- a close to impossible task, but of course it's certain I got some things from her (and from him, too, I suppose).  To shorten the story, that 'old Ellaphant' wasn't allowed to emerge and is practically dead.  My brain has been so thoroughly rewired through the years as a result of the violence earlier on that I can only vaguely guess at the potential that was originally there.  This is the 'hole in the head' I spent time analyzing some months back.  I've tried to fill it up with stuff that I thought should be in it, because I've been made very aware of the fact that it is there, but what I have put in it so far just hasn't worked.  An overwhelming sense of grief took hold of me in the car at one point.  I knew the feeling would pass, but I needed to get it out and verbalize it for purposes of clarity.  AW has been right all along -- this is my upteenth life already.  There is no 'old Ellaphant', nothing to be nostalgic about, because she died before she could live.  Everything I ever imagined she could have been is pure fantasy.  Not that I blame myself.  Everyone wants to come to terms with who they are and how they got to be that way.

The way forward now is to simply enjoy and appreciate my present self and stop trying to look for some 'hidden self' that isn't there.  My life now -- my home, my husband, my hobbies, and the things that are a part of me today -- that is me.  This sounds very matter-of-fact, and how naive or stupid of me not to have seen it before, but this is the effect of the 'hole in the head'.  I'm slow with some things.  I'm not as talented as some have made me believe.  That said, I have managed, somehow, to accomplish some things.  All of that is good enough for me.  In the end, I was right to choose peace above success.  I was most connected with myself, I think, when I made that choice more than 35 years ago.  The simplistic, starry-eyed, adventurous, impetuous, stubborn Ellaphant is, apparently, the real one as well as the only one.