Al mentioned running into his Army buddy, Floyd, who was stationed in Heidelberg, Germany at the same time he was. Floyd too had married a German girl from Karlsruhe, and they have a young son, Patrizia’s age. I listened with increasing interest and suggested a get together with that family. A few days later, we met Floyd and his very pregnant wife, Karin, and their little son, Floyd, Jr. Prior to our visit, Karin had experimented with hair coloring, but something went wrong; her hair turned out fiery red instead of dark blond. She worried about getting her natural dark brown hair color back, and for now wore a kerchief over her head. We spoke German and reminisced about the entertaining places we frequented in Karlsruhe, her hometown, and I told her of my studying there at the Banking College. My hometown, Bruchsal was just 15 miles up the road from Karlsruhe, but our dialects had some minor differences and we laughed about and had fun with it. I liked her immediately, and that day, we forged a friendship that lasted a lifetime. One evening Al came home with two fellow soldiers in a truck, and they unloaded a big awkward looking metal box. To my surprise, it was an older black and white television, a floor model, as they called it, with huge rabbit ears for an antenna. After setting up the TV in our living room, the screen was rather snowy and they kept adjusting the rabbit ears to get a picture. Gerald, the older of the two looked questionably at his
