the first entry ...

dear blog!
this is your first entry.

i am not used to write blogs or diaries and that sort of things. anyway, i´ll give it a try. i think it´s all wam´s fault. i heard the radio show on his diaries with my mother yesterday, and the reason he gave for it "that my family and friends know what i`m doing down here" got stuck in my head. that was the introduction. now the real thing....

in the last weeks i was going thru tons of papers my father had collected in the last 20 (or 30. or 40) years and tried to sort them by some kind of system. in the first week my younger sister joined me. it took me about a day to figure her system, but at the end i realised she actually sorted chronological. i gave up on that after about ten minutes. my first system was according to importance. bills, finances and beaurocratic stuff in one file, less important things in the second, unimportant into the paper bin. i changed that system about three times. now it consists of about 22 to 24 files. files for our father`s hometown, a little village in poland north of poznan called biala. for my father it was of course always behle, as the village was called when it was in germany; insurances, life and health insurance; finances, one for each taxes, bank stuff, pension and rent; liederkranz, the choir he was singing in; his job, my father was working for the german army administration and was before that 12 years soldier. it must have been strange for him that his son was working for peace grous in former yugoslavia. two files of music notes, one from the choir, the other one a collection of songs from and about biala. i forgot to say that we didn´t have much contact from about 1990 to 2000. only in the last couple of years we came closer. i was helping him when he had trouble with his computer and i guess we started to understand each other in a way. after having been in former yugoslavia i had gotten some sort of an idea what life is for a refugee and he probably had finally given up on the idea that i would make a career as a soldier or engineer. you probably can imagine that filing all those papers i am getting now a view from another angle on my fathers life. another source are the stories from relatives and friends. more on that maybe later. i guess i should try to find my bed soon, tommorrow i will try to talk a little about my daily life in schwaben.