Confronting Power and Chaos: The Uncharted Kaleidoscope of My Life

By Christine Skarbek

“That one event, that one ten-minute car ride, radically bowled over my life’s kaleidoscope.”

What’s in a name?

Her trailblazer of a distant cousin forged a solitary, singular path during and after WWII. Unassuming and somewhat clueless, Christine eventually finds she has to do pretty much the same. A teen fully expecting her Midwestern life would be drab and ho-hum, she meets in Germany an elderly man who offered her a ride – and insight into a legacy she was going to rely on throughout her entire life.

Marrying the wrong guy, divorced, isolated, and responsible for four chronically ill children, she charged forward, brooking no fools to get her children the healthcare and education they richly deserved, even if that meant blackmailing the governor of Iowa. She took on the powers that be (including spooks invading her home for six months), while always striving for the career she pined for.

Throughout all the decades of financial and personal setbacks and the chaos that swirled around her, Christine’s legacy constantly beckoned her: to be worthy of that distant cousin, WWII’s most decorated courier, and of a timeless love story she witnessed.

Christine’s life journey, including her 12 years in Poland (her other homeland), is a stirring testament to determination, imagination, and the power of perseverance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Aug 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886936865

Christine Skarbek

With an MA in journalism from the University of Iowa, Christine Skarbek has worked as a foreign student exchange coordinator, written op-eds for several newspapers—including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—and co-authored three screenplays. Besides continuing her public relations promotion of D.W. Rettinger’s novels, she has had articles published in online journals. The most recently published are: https://www.whlreview.com/no-16.2/essay/ChristineSkarbek.pdf https://macromic.org/2021/03/26/a-journey-into-self-or-what-auschwitz-can-do-to-the-soul-by-christine-skarbek/ https://voxpopulisphere.com/2019/11/28/christine-skarbek-a-personal-pantheon-of-phenomenal-fellows/ https://voxpopulisphere.com/2021/07/20/christine-skarbek-konstancin/?fbclid=IwAR1vqgYuGqjrqjiyYUTDIy6aNdUmCAQ7zri3npZqhEwK9DzwIhPOGwA4yNg She’s currently enjoying her semi-retirement in Silver Spring, MD.

Book preview

Introduction

For the seventh time in less than four years, I stood before a Ukrainian border guard. This one was gray and tired, looking almost as haggard to the bone as I was. He inspected my passport photo and compared it to my now-emaciated face.

Having seen that expression so many times before, I was weary of this rigmarole, the red tape, the necessity of doing this every ninety days.

What are you looking at? I wanted to grouse. Can’t you believe it’s me? Don’t you know I’m an American Mata Hari and will be meeting my FSB counterpart in a few minutes? He has irrefutable proof Ukraine hasn’t dismantled all of its nuclear arsenal and I’m going to sneak it out of your miserable little country. In less than an hour, I’ll be back here and you won’t even think to look for the microchip in my bra.

I refrained. Dozens of Ukrainians behind me shuffled their feet, watching the drizzly daylight fade away. With the proceeds of their contraband vodka and cigarettes, they wanted to return to their homes and supper.

It’s really me, I smiled at the guard.

He held my future in his hands. What would I do if he refused me entry into his country? I had no backup plan. How many more times was I going to have to do this?

The train connections were dicey at best. Several times, I’ve had to spend an expensive night in Krakow because my Warsaw-to-Krakow train hadn’t arrived in time for the next leg of my journey. This time, instead of the poky, oil-burning bus, I hired a taxi to drive me from Przemyśl to the border. I had desperately begged the cab driver in faulty Polish to wait for me while I trekked back and forth so he could get me back for the return train. Would I get back to town in time?

It was all a pathetic situation in a godforsaken place. At that moment, I hated Poland, Ukraine, not to mention my entire life. What horrendous blunders had I committed to be here in the middle of a wet twilight, a beggar at the mercy of some poor, vapid guard bribed by Ukrainian and Polish smugglers at Europe’s very extremity, at the border of the country in a nagging war with Russia?

Though I had been here before, I was even more afraid to return because of that war. Had not the Russians and/or their Ukrainian proxies shot down a jetliner back in July? So, what the hell I was doing?

Th-thunk! My thoughts were interrupted by the thwap of the metal stamp against the page of my passport. The document held scores of stamps from over the last four years. How many more would there be before I found my place in life? I was definitely way too old for all of this.

The guard’s expression confirmed my thoughts. For a brief moment, I detected a blink of compassion in his eyes. Did he understand what I was going through? Two humans lost in the middle of nowhere.

There was a thick gold wedding band on his finger. He certainly had a family and would see them after his shift: a wife and two, maybe three, grown children. Where was my family?

The guard handed back my passport. With a mere four hours to spare before my ninety days were up, I was out of the EU.

I flashed him a grateful smile and trundled my suitcase behind me into the desolate border town. An underfed stray dog meandered down the soggy street as a rooster and two woebegone hens pecked in a grassless yard. A few locals sauntered into what was a seedy stand-in for a bar.

I then noticed the bent-over form of what appeared to be the witch out of Hansel and Gretel. The old woman suffered from osteoporosis and would never stand up straight again. Yet, she lugged an oversized carpetbag that bulged in every direction and now groaned trying to carry it up a short flight of cement steps.

I went up to her and smiled, gently reaching for the carpetbag. Here, let me, I offered.

The wheezing woman toothlessly grinned at me and shifted the weight into my hands. I knew the livelihood of the people here was bootlegged cigarettes and liquor. Whatever was in this sack was as heavy as gold bullion or lead, however.

I was certainly grateful the steps weren’t as many as there could have been and the Ukrainian was just as happy not to have had to struggle with them and her load. At the top of the stairs, we exchanged genuine smiles. The wizened woman clasped both of my hands in thanks.

Then, I trudged the three-quarters of a mile back across the border and confronted another set of guards with unasked questions on their faces.

Yes, you’re right to wonder, I mused. I wonder myself. What the hell is an American woman over sixty doing here?

Less than a half hour later, I climbed out of the taxi and slumped down onto a cold metal seat at the train station. What kind of crazy has my entire life been?

What follows is a journalist’s account. Because I’m a short-circuited but dyed-in-the-wool reporter, what other choice do I have?

1. The Mountaintop View

The most important luggage in life is a happy heart.

~unknown

Don’t tell me how educated you are; tell me how much you traveled.

~Muhammad

A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.

~Moslih Eddin Saadi

People don’t take trips. Trips take people.

~John Steinbeck

To travel is to take a journey into yourself.

~Danny Kaye

Life has always whirled and eddied around me: I was just the spectator, not the prime moving force. I never have been. A middle child of nine, I watched my parents’ methods of pragmatic, remote childrearing in a gray, middle-class Illinois town set in an ocean of corn and soybeans. My entire childhood, my kaleidoscope was cemented in place.

Nothing really ever happened in my bit of the world with one season rolling inexorably into another. Summer meant gardening and games. Planting, weeding, harvesting, and canning tomatoes were all the intimate contact I had with my parents. But, the tomboy in me always found time for the outdoors playing baseball and basketball with neighborhood boys. Girl stuff: dolls, dress-up, make-up, and boy-talk, all of that kind of thing held no interest for me whatsoever. When I couldn’t find enough fellows to set up a team, I’d emulate Jo March from Little Women, creating plays in our garage for my buddies and siblings to star in for the neighborhood families.

Winter was full of endlessly shoveling snow in the bitter wind and hours huddling indoors with my four brothers and four sisters over board games, art projects, and homework in front of the TV.

The first time I can remember the eleven of us eating out at a sit-down restaurant with white tablecloths and going to a movie in an honest-to-goodness movie theatre (not a drive-in) as a family was in 1966. While on our Minnesota camping trip, our campground and tents were inundated in a ceaseless, torrential downpour. So my parents were forced to invent a plan B, even if it meant knocking their budget off-kilter.

The memorable movie was The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming—utterly hilarious. But the critical thing about the movie as far as I was concerned was that it presented our worst nightmare of an enemy in a human light. They weren’t the monsters we were led to believe as we cowered under our school desks during our duck-and-cover drills—the Russians were just like us, complete with personalities, very human ones. What an eye-popping notion! There was a world out there waiting to be explored and my appetite was officially whetted.

I should have guessed years earlier I’d yearn to become a journalist when we all piled into our cranky station wagon to gawk at the Christmas lights around town one December night. Only, I wasn’t as impressed with them as I was with the curtains behind which families of all sorts played, ate, and lived.

What went on in there? I wondered what they all were doing. Were they happy? Happier than our family? What did they all talk about? What was important to them? Were they like me at all? (It turned out that nagging set of questions would end up defining me all the rest of my life.)

Entering high school, I suddenly felt the urge to learn. History and languages came alive for me. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend time than with a book. Once, as an eighth-grader, I was reading on the crowded school bus home.

Obnoxious, overweight Kenny was teasing one of the younger kids across the aisle from me. My girlfriend Katie said, Chris, get him to stop.

I didn’t know why Katie didn’t step in herself and was annoyed she was distracting me from my novel. But Katie was right: Kenny had no right bullying anyone, let alone frail Jeff.

I looked disdainfully straight at Kenny. He couldn’t avoid my stare.

Why should I bother, when he’s not even worth the effort? I retorted to Katie, loud enough for Kenny to hear over the rest of the bus pandemonium.

He swallowed hard and slunk off to another seat. Both of us girls were impressed by the impact of my words. As a matter of fact, I had never realized before how words could influence the outcome of a situation. There was actual power in words. That, too, was a revelation.

Because of the size of our family, vacations were strictly budgeted. Consequently, camping trips were the order of the day and I always wrote the travelogues. I was into reading Erma Bombeck’s newspaper columns and inserted her style of humor into my daily journals. The family reeled in delight as I read them at the evening campfire, while everyone roasted marshmallows and munched on S’mores.

Words in books lured me from the Illinois humdrum and opened new worlds to me. I was tired of the same worn-out dreariness of Midwestern life and longed to see and experience anything different. Craving knowledge, I was about to unstick my kaleidoscope and rock the steady family boat.

When I announced I intended to spend my junior year in college abroad, in Switzerland, my parents were appalled.

Why would you want to go to Europe? my father Herb complained. Nothing good has ever come from there!

I was genuinely shocked. Why, Dad, your father came from there!

There was no greater person in the world in my eyes than Roman, my grandfather. A self-employed furniture maker, he passed away suddenly at his workbench, just four years earlier when I was fourteen. He ran his own shop with a couple of apprentice employees.

Popsie, as everyone called him, was a rock with an amazing twinkle in his eyes. He always found time for me and the other grandchildren. He got his pet squirrel to eat out of his palm, performed sleight-of-hand magic tricks, and told stories about our famous and fabulous Polish predecessors.

I’ve told you how Boleslaw I Chrobry honored our ancestor by awarding him the name, Skarbek, over a thousand years ago, haven’t I? he asked.

Yes, Grandpa, we’d answer in unison.

Do you know why?

Because, when he was the Polish emissary to the German court, he dared to say to the emperor, ‘Let gold go to gold. We Poles will take the iron,’ I replied.

Correct. And what does Skarbek mean?

‘Little treasure’ because of our gold Habdank ring with its bit of iron embedded in it.

Right again. It’s the oldest Polish family name. And remember Frederick Chopin was named after your many-times-great-uncle Frederick who was his godfather. He introduced the youngster to the Polish court.

Grandma Skarbek may have ruled the house, but Popsie’s realm was his magical basement. Scantily clad cowgirls twirling lassos and Hawaiian hula dancers adorned the sides of his pool table. His mountain of gramophone 78 rpms was piled high in the corner, offering every sort of music. The Chicago home so close to Wrigley Field was full of enchantment that I and my siblings got to enjoy only a few precious weeks a year.

Popsie’s greatest feat of magic was having a bona fide Chicago fire truck show up for my younger brother Tim’s summer birthday celebration in 1960. All the never-seen neighbors came out of their houses to watch the commotion of all of us Skarbek cousins piling onto the truck. With its bell clanging and siren blaring, the crimson chariot drove us off in splendor to an amusement park. What a red-letter day!

However, the fairy tale screeched to a halt whenever Grandma began yelling at Popsie in Polish. Shrugging it off, Roman always took her kvetching in stride. No one ever witnessed a word voiced in rebuttal. But when he died at such a young age of a heart attack, I decided it had to be Grandma’s yelling that did it. The woman never seemed to have a nice word for anyone and blamed Popsie for everything. And it was all in Polish that I didn’t understand.

No one, even my father who grew up speaking Polish in his Addison Street neighborhood, spoke it in my hometown Galesburg. Back in the 1950s and 60s, English was the American banner in those anti-Communist times. So, the only Polish word uttered in our home was kielbasa.

My dad, Herb, graduated from high school the spring after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Like everyone else in his class, he went to go off to war. The fact that he was so young never occurred to me until a half-century later when a Polish friend actually explained my father’s age to his son in my presence! Up till then, for me my father was always 35 or 40! My dad having a childhood seemed completely out of the question.

His younger sisters told me many years later how Popsie fought his only son’s decision to enlist, the only time they nearly came to blows. Had Popsie told my father what he was now telling me?

Nothing good ever came from there. The words rang like a refrain from some terrible dirge.

In any event, Herb didn’t go to the European theatre but became a Navy Hellcat pilot on the Pacific aircraft carrier, the USS Cabot. At the tender age of 18, he was shooting down Japanese pilots, other teenagers whose faces he never saw. He never told any of his children about his wartime experiences. Somehow, that just wasn’t done.

The father-daughter rift about going abroad was not an out-and-out fight. Dad allowed me the freedom to choose, and choose I did.

In the dimly lit living room, after putting the younger children to bed, Herb and Bernice wanted to know what their daughter planned to do with a French major. The only thing you can do with it is teach, you know. Are you going to be a teacher? Mom asked.

The question hit me like the proverbial bolt out of the blue. Why would I want to do anything with French, other than learn about a different way of life? The thought of putting it to use to earn an income with it knocked me for a loop.

Would I actually have to earn money with my college degree? Whatever for?

Life wasn’t about making money! It was about discovery and about sharing those discoveries with folks who wanted to know. Life was full of insights: what made people tick, influences from within and without that led to their actions or manner of thought. Why would anyone want money?

The movies I watched, the books I read, and the teachers I knew never discussed money. The concept of money—the earning, spending, and saving of it—was utterly alien to me. Carpe diem was the Latin phrase I lived by, not carpe pecuniam.

Certainly, the WWII Polish Resistance phenom whose name I shared never did anything for money! Krystyna Skarbek Granville saved thousands of men’s lives on both the Western and Eastern fronts without firing a shot or wielding a thermometer. She was never paid for it. Oh, they gave her medals but she died in a seedy London hotel without a tuppence to her name. A loony Irishman stabbed her in the heart that June night in 1952 for having spurned him, not over money!

And why would I want to be a teacher, of all things? If I were teaching, how could I continue learning? It was the quest that mattered. I knew I didn’t know. Why become complacent, pretending I did know in front of a class of indifferent, dull, or rowdy children? I was hungry, but not for money and not for security. The thought of settling into a forty-year career, doing the same mundane things day in, day out made me cringe. That was death.

I could… go into the foreign service, I suggested.

Chris, you’re not a diplomat, Herb said drily. Remember that letter you wrote my company president, complaining that our three-week vacation was scrapped? It nearly cost me my job!

Fidgeting in my chair, I vividly remembered writing that letter when I was fifteen on behalf of my crushed younger brothers and sisters. They had been champing at the bit, planning our trip around Lake Michigan for months. They came to me and begged I do something. Thus the letter: the only thing I regretted was misspelling the CEO’s last name. I vowed I’d never misspell anyone’s name from then on.

Heaven help this country if you ever work for the State Department! Mom agreed.

Well, okay, then maybe I could be a foreign correspondent.

My parents exchanged perplexed frowns. Mom dismissively shook her head and, resuming sewing buttons on my brother’s shirt, muttered, A man’s job.

My dad was exasperated. We live in Illinois, Chris. Quebec’s the closest French-speaking portion of the globe and that’s thousands of miles away. Be practical! There are exactly two careers for women with college degrees: teaching and nursing. You don’t like nursing. What’s left?

You’re right. I can’t be a nurse like Mom was. But I can’t teach—I hate kids! They’re six ways to dumb. Dad, I’ll be alright. I don’t know how but I’ll manage.

My mom snorted above her needle and thread. By taking courses that won’t get you a job.

I always had admired my no-nonsense mom and her weathered hands… those always busy, doing-the-job-required hands that held our flu-fevered foreheads when we vomited.

I sighed. This was becoming the longest conversation I had ever had with either of my parents. I wasn’t sure I liked the attention and was pretty sure it wasn’t going well.

Chris, please. You know I never got a college degree, Dad started again. But I was lucky. I didn’t die or was injured in the war and the US economy was in full production mode when I got out of the Navy. We’re trying to get the rest of you kids through college. Can you appreciate that? You can’t go to college just to go to college.

Maybe I’ll be lucky, like you.

You can’t count on that, unless you’re looking for a MRS degree. I told your older sisters…

Precisely, I interrupted. I don’t see Caroline or Vi taking education courses.

And they’re making a mistake! Why follow in their footsteps?

Caroline with her sociology major from what was considered, at best, a finishing school wasn’t the best argument I could offer. For all intents and purposes, my oldest sister was looking for that elusive Mrs. degree, dating everything that had male parts. And Violet’s studying Latin and ancient Greek made even less sense.

This ‘women’s lib—free love’ thing is a bunch of bunk! Dad continued.

At least, I’m learning a living language, Dad. One with a rich, vibrant history. If you only knew…

Knew what? That de Gaulle and his snooty Frenchmen can’t win a war? In, of all places, Algeria? We’re not even talking about how we had to rescue them against Hitler! And look what they left us with in Vietnam!

I rolled my eyes and took a deep breath. I knew better than to go down this treacherous road with my father.

Every evening, he’d fume and rant at the TV during CBS newscast coverage of the Vietnam War, Jane Fonda, and the war protests. I was inclined to sympathize with my generation’s views. Since the preceding summer’s Democratic Convention in Chicago, the Generation Gap was a reality in this home but it was best to keep my powder dry. That is, unless I wanted to be thrown out into the street.

My scholarships, on-campus jobs and loans pay for nearly all my tuition, and room and board, Dad. I should get to say what I learn and what I do with it. I’m not that big a financial burden on you and I can look out for myself.

Okay. If that’s the way you want it, go.

Hey, you know I love and appreciate you both but this is something I gotta do.

If that’s what you want.

Matter closed. There’d be no more discussion. I’d rather know they’d be pleased with my achievements but I could tell I hadn’t relieved their qualms.

You’ve got a train to catch tomorrow, don’t you? Go to bed, Dad ordered.

I wanted to hug him but knew that wasn’t permitted.

He wasn’t a bad father. From what I could tell, he was the typical American dad, stereotyped by Robert Young of Father Knows Best, Timmy’s father on Lassie, and Herbert Anderson on Dennis the Menace: a sort of absentee God-figure who seemed to provide for their families in some nebulous way, while dispensing occasional droplets of wisdom.

But there were chinks in the armor. I learned of them when I was eleven.

On a family camping trip, I was put in charge of watching my baby brother, Dwayne, as he sat in the infant car seat in the van and the rest of the family was pitching camp. Distracted by a bird chattering in an aspen, I turned away for all of maybe ten seconds and, lo and behold, Dwayne catapulted himself headfirst out of the seat and out the open van door. Maybe he thought he could fly or something… I don’t know.

I stood over his writhing body, completely at a loss. I hadn’t a clue as to what to do.

Not so my father. Herb rushed up and, instead of checking to see if Dwayne had broken his neck, clocked me on the jaw.

Wow! I thought as I picked myself up off the dirt. When someone does that, you really do see stars, just like in the cartoons!

At that instant, a light went on in my head: my dad was frightened. My dad—the man who shot down Japanese war planes and could create marvelous things as a refrigeration engineer (and furniture-maker in his free time)—knew fear. The man who had a practical solution for every problem could be afraid! How was this possible?

My absolution was instantaneous. Herb never beat his children in anger and, as far as I ever knew, I was the only child of the nine of us he ever punched. I understood exactly why he clobbered me and he didn’t need to ask for forgiveness, as our Catholic Church demanded in the confessional. I absolved him of the act because his fear had overwhelmed him.

Fear could make people as pragmatic and down-to-earth as my father do irrational things. It was yet another discovery for me.

Recollecting that incident, I studied him for a moment, got up and leaned over to give him a peck on the forehead. Goodnight, then. I’ll make you proud.

You already make us proud. But the weariness in his voice wasn’t reassuring, stimulating confidence or effusing enthusiasm. His rejoinder was merely matter-of-fact, noncommittal and not at all wholehearted.

His own father’s premature death had hit my dad hard and he began to sense his own mortality. It was as if he was always staring death in the face. The bravado of the teenaged fighter pilot had disappeared ages ago.

Every night, he fretted and muttered under his breath in front of the TV, a drink in one hand, peanut jar in the other. One drink followed another. This had been going on for years. It was evident to everyone in the house he had lost his way. What I didn’t know was there were other nagging demons pursuing him.

Upstairs in the bathroom brushing my teeth, I inspected myself in the mirror: straight, dirty dishwater blonde hair, full lips, and bulbous nose. For its size, one would think it’d perform its function of smelling. But it didn’t. I had never detected the odor of anything my entire life: not bacon or coffee, not dog poop, dead skunk or flowers.

When we all had visited Yellowstone National Park, I leaned over the bubbling Sulfur Caldron, turned around and asked my family, So, what’s the big deal? Our family doctor determined I had a residual sense of smell, meaning I could taste, but barely.

I hated that nose and considered my blue eyes my best feature. I was somewhat jealous of Violet’s Irish dimples but the stunning azure of my own eyes made up for that deficit, I figured. I stared deep within them. You’re so outta here! I crowed, trying to contain myself.

My kaleidoscope was beginning to spin.

***

It was a fairly foregone conclusion I’d be accepted into Rosary-in-Fribourg’s program. After all, I was Sister George Lennon’s secretary. The elderly Dominican was the retiring French Department chair and took me under her wing.

Flattered by her mentorship, I admired Sister’s jolly mannerisms both in and out of classroom. The petite nun reminded me of some twinkly fairy godmother. The general atmosphere always improved when Sister George was in a room and seemed to sparkle with her fairy dust well after she had left it. Her smile was simply radiant. As far as I could tell, Sister G. L., as her students dubbed her, was the first living, breathing saint I had met, except perhaps my grandfather.

Sister thrived on everything French. She’d often digress from her lectures on Anouilh, Baudelaire or Zola to involve the class in a discussion of Daumier’s Man of la Mancha prints or the fine art of baguette- and brioche-making.

The prevailing theory among the French majors was Sister G. L. had been an undergrad in one of the first classes to go Fribourg, Switzerland, when Rosary College began the program in the ’20s, making it the oldest study abroad program in the United States. For nearly fifty years, some twenty to forty lucky women boarded a transatlantic ocean liner out of New York to spend a month in Paris with French families. They then regrouped to go onto to the foothill town on the French-German speaking border between Genève and Switzerland’s capital, Berne, to live in the college’s onion-turreted mansion and attend university courses nearby.

We also hypothesized that Sister G. L. would be the woman in charge of the next year’s program because of her recent release as department chair. This wasn’t to be. Instead, mousy Sister Mary Magdalene got the assignment. Before we debarked in le Havre, we coeds were mocking her trilling refrains of "Attention! Attention, tout le monde! and Si vous pouvez imaginer!" behind her back. The poor woman seemed to be perpetually afraid of us, her charges.

But with someone like Phoebe McKenzie around, was this any surprise? I considered myself a tomboy but without the lack of reserve that Phoebe showed. She would stride confidently into a room and, apropos of nothing at all, yell, I-I-I-I LOVE IT! in two distinct descending notes. Built like a locomotive, the dark-haired minx simply took on all comers. There wasn’t anything you couldn’t dare her to do.

Accompanied by a local white wine, raclette is a Swiss dish of broiled cheese, served with strips of dried beef, pickled baby onions and cornichons (tiny gherkins). Usually, restaurants broiled the round of cheese right in front of their clientele and scrape it onto the diner’s plate. Three to five servings was the typical bill-of-fare per person.

Not so with Phoebe on the scene. She bet four guys from the Providence College program to see who could down the most. Phoebe left them all in the dust—twenty-three platefuls, while the best the runner-up could do was fifteen. The restaurant owner had never seen anything like it. No one in all of Fribourg had ever seen anything like it.

She could out-talk, out-prank and out-laugh everybody. After the New Year, she’d sneak guys into the villa for a panty raid, giving Sister M. M. an apoplectic fit that nearly resulted in a stroke.

Like everyone else, I was mesmerized by Phoebe. She’d always challenged me with impossibilities. For example, I had never skied but she’d have none of that.

A group of university guys and us gals found the nearest slope and a student chalet to stay in. With everyone in the mood for a grand weekend, an introductory mixer was lined up for first evening in the ground floor lounge. At first, it was pretty sedate but the records became more up-tempo and I was enjoying my wine too much.

The throbbing beat of Light My Fire made me brighten up. I started singing along, Come on, baby. Light my fire. Try to set the night on fire.

I turned to Phoebe. I wanna dance.

Yeah, but where? The spitfire motioned to the tiny, overcrowded dance floor.

I had neither a partner nor room to dance. In my tipsy state, I could do without the first but not the latter.

I can fix that!

I climbed onto one of the twelve-foot-long tables where couples sat with their drinks, and started really grooving. The music and I were in total sync. I had gone onto a different plane in more ways than one. All the guys’ jaws were on the floor. Who was this creature? Who had plunked this mini-skirted go-go dancer into the youth chalet?

Phoebe stood by with an enormous grin on her face. I-I-I-I LOVE IT!

When the music ended, everyone broke out in spontaneous, wild applause, complete with whistles and catcalls. I must have turned shades of crimson and scarlet. They were applauding me! How amazing! I thrust out my jaw and took a sweeping bow.

Now get yourself off this stage, I chastised myself. Uneasy with the clamorous limelight, I clambered down off the table and wanted to slink away.

But a bevy of boys blocked my exit. The tallest, handsomest of the lot elbowed his way to the front. Will you dance with me? he asked in broken Germanic English. A waltz started up.

I looked up at him over the rims of my granny glasses and bit my lower lip. I took a deep breath. Sure, I muttered.

He grabbed me by the waist and swept me into the center of the minuscule dance floor, just like Rhett