My friend Natasha spent 10 hours in the air after two weeks traveling around Germany and surprised me with a visit right after she landed and cleared customs. You might call it killing time to beat Friday rush-hour traffic, but I call it a fine excuse to make time for a friend (we've known each other 23 years, and she's not on Facebook after reading Eggers' "The Circle"). A gift, pure and simple, even finer than my blinged-out souvenir of Berlin. My ears filled with her adventures as we walked (because, yeah, a good idea to move and get some fresh air after sitting for ten hours before a two-hour drive home to Athens--wannabe blot clots and aneurysms, take that!).
Earlier, you name it, I was thinking about everything from my sister, iron pentacarbonyl, the Ancient Order of the Hibernians, to polonium halos, Harry Crews, white supremacists, Robert Burns, paying my bills, why I buy so much lip gloss, and yesterday's new moon, but after Natasha left, all I could think about was Berlin, about someday visiting Germany, and what a bombshell it was to recently discover a German branch on my family tree--hardly a bough, and more a twig, but still! Enter the Lauffers from Baden-Württemberg, near the Schwarzwald. Lutheran Germans that settled in Frederick, Maryland decades before America's birthday (hundreds of thousands of Palatine Germans migrated to America between 1730-1755) and who changed their last name to Runner, the literal English translation of Lauffer. Gottliebs and Georgs, who knew! Does this explain why I took German in high school and college? Why the mountains call to me? And there were the Fortineux's from Otterberg, Germany, (or possibly Lambrecht) that split between Lancaster, PA and Frederick, Maryland when they settled America, changing their name to Fortney. Jean Henry Fortineux, who married Catharine Charity Berger (another sprig of German on the tree with some Schmidts), was actually struck and killed by lightning in 1753 in Maryland (it wouldn't be the last time lightning struck my tree, at least not literally). How strange imagining faint traces of my DNA buried deep in the dirt over in a Lutheran cemetery in Maryland, much less Germany. If I could donate my family to science, I would, so genealogy's the next best thing for now.
Maryland Gazette, July 12, 1753:
"One day last week, a man in Frederick County, about 4 miles from Town, whose name was Henry Footney [sic], having just stept out of his House at the latter end of a Thunder Gust, to a gate at about 3 or 4 Yards Distance from the house, to see if the storm was all over, a Flash of lightening killed him on the spot as he was leaning on the gate. One Child outside the Gate close by him was unhurt one other standing at the Door, and another between him and the House, were both struck down but soon recovered, and the rafters at, one end of the House were split, and some of the Shingles turn'd the thick End upwards. There was no Mark to be discovered about his Body, only his Beard was a little singed; for he had a long beard, being one of the sect call'd Dunkers, who never shave nor clip their beards."
