Oma's Bunker

My grandmother told us a story recently, and while I wasn't smart enough to turn on the voice recorder on my phone, I do want to write it down while it's still fresh in my mind. Some of the details might be misremembered by my grandmother, myself, or both, and some details have been filled in by a bit conjecture, but it is a true story. It is the story of the bunker.

Oma's Bunker

The Itjeshorst family lived on a small family farm outside of Dinslaken, Germany. They lived just next door to the Reinersmann's. These two families comprise my father's half of my family tree: my grandmother was born an Itjeshorst, my grandfather a Reinersmann.

During World War II, Allied pilots would occasionally drop their bombs on small farms outside of major cities, not because the farms were strategic targets of course, but because the extra weight of the bombs wouldn't allow them to reach their home bases. As one former pilot once told my father (not knowing that he had lived on such a farm), they would sometimes take target practice on the small farmhouses. While this practice was rare enough not to be a constant threat, such bombings did sometimes occur on a daily basis on the Itjeshorst and Reinersmann farms. Hence the need for the bunker.

It was a great undertaking. The walls were thick concrete (“Like that!” she says, holding her hands about a foot apart.) and the bunker itself was entirely underground, accessed by a hatch door. Oma remembers her father saying that while it might not have survived a direct hit by a large bomb, its structure was not disturbed by the smaller ones that fell around it.

While the size of the bunker is a matter of great internal debate to my grandmother (the memory is, after all, 66 years old), it was large enough to hold all that sought it. The entire neighborhood would come to the bunker when the air raid sirens sounded, just as they had all come to help in its construction. Oma jokes that if the bunker had collapsed, “the entire neighborhood would have gone down with it!” It was so large that it was even able to hold a British officer.

Captain Blackstock was an officer in the British armed forces, and a friend of Oma's father. She tells the story of a time when her father went to meet Captain Blackstock at his office (presumably in Dinslaken) for a hunting trip. My great-grandfather showed up to the office wearing his simple farmer's clothing, and received a rude and abrupt greeting from the British officer that answered the door, who was quite confused (and presumably embarrassed) by Captain Blackstock's warm “Itjeshorst!” a few moments later.

(This story was mirrored decades later when my father, Richard, wearing his electrician's work clothes, popped in on Mr. Smith of Smith-Barney, with whom he had been close as a child. The secretarial staff had a similar attitude, and similar surprising revelation, when Mr. Smith embraced my father.)

To preempt the question: no, I do not know what a British officer was doing in Western Germany in the early 1940s. I do know that he was warmly welcomed into the neighborhood bunker during air raids, and that my grandmother grew up with a picture of Captain Blackstock in the window above their kitchen sink, and probably heard his stories a hundred times in the years following the war. Captain Blackstock's story reminds me of the stupidity of war, and the greater power of human connection.

The last time Oma saw it, the bunker was about half full of water, an almost forgotten relic of an awful time. She and her second husband, Russ, went to see it during their trip to Germany in the early 1980s. The house is gone, sold to the city when the families emigrated to the United States, but that bunker will likely be there for a long, long time. For me, so will the memory of Oma telling its story.

EDIT: I'm told by my Aunt Eva that Captain Blackstock was there after the war, which makes far more sense. Since my family left Germany in 1954, this would have happened sometime between '45 and then.

The Tale of the AC Compressor

I achieved a great personal victory today.

Though I had a lot of help, it still felt like such a victory because it was something I'd never considered myself capable of, and I like surprising myself.  So here's the story.

I drive what I still think of as my dad's 1997 Lincoln Mark VIII, a car I've come to love over the two years I've been driving it.  My dad had had it for quite a while, putting tens of thousands of miles on it, though it was I who pushed it over the 200,000 mile mark.  Mary Todd (Lincoln, get it?) now has just under 216,000 miles, and her engine is running just great.  However...

Lots of other things aren't. The Lincoln was ahead of its time in terms of accessories, with things like an air ride suspension system, onboard computer display, and other fancy - and relatively fragile - luxuries. So over the years, it's needed a lot of work. Just in the two years I've had it, my dad and I replaced a good amount of the air ride suspension system, the upper control arms on both sides, all 4 rotors, one caliper, and there's more that I can't remember. Before I had it, he and we had replaced or repaired so many parts and systems that the file that contains all the paperwork is about 4" thick.

But now, I was faced with the most serious thing I'd ever had to do to the Lincoln, and my dad isn't with us anymore. This is a (functional) AC compressor, and it is connected via the serpentine belt to just about every other motor and compressor in the vehicle. The compressor on the Lincoln was shot, not spinning freely, and screwing up the rest of the components on the belt, even threatening to shred the belt itself.  Dad's Lincoln was very, very sick.

At a local dealer where I received the above diagnosis, I was faced with a $1052 estimate.  Shit.  The Lincoln is barely worth $2000 in its current condition, and I just plain ol' don't have a thousand bucks to spend right now.  I could have spent the money on Wednesday, but eating lunch on Thursday would have been tricky.

Luckily for me, my dad had purchased the service manual for the Lincoln. This isn't the manual that comes with the car, but a digital copy of what the actual Ford mechanics use when servicing the vehicle. It's awesome. These 14 steps are the instructions for the removal of the AC Compressor. Holy shit. After initially rejecting the idea, I got good boosts of confidence from my step-mom, Loretta, and her brother Peter, and decided to do the work myself.

I got a compressor from a junkyard, and with the help of my buddy Chris, replaced the compressor in about 10 hours of work over two days. There were, as you saw, a lot of steps, hardly any of which were straightforward or easy.  Like I told Chris, "If I ever meet the guy that designed this engine, I'm gonna shake his hand, and then punch him in the face."  There was a lot of swearing and smashing of knuckles, but we got the job done.

Here are some pictures of the work. Regarding the "F*@# These Things" picture, these are the instructions for separating them - that was not fun, and my back still hurts. Also, I got very, very dirty during all this. This is me after washing my hands a bit.

After spending two hours replacing all the crap we'd pulled out, I started up the engine successfully and just started laughing wildly, giddy with excitement and a profound sense of accomplishment. I really wish Dad could have seen me do this. He would have been so proud of me at that moment. He also would have found the image of me giggling at myself in the car pretty funny.

So what's the end of the story? The Lincoln is once again running smoothly, though it needs an A/C recharge. Also, I think I'm now officially a "car guy," though I really have no idea what I'm doing. Thanks for the service manual, Dad.

My Dad

This is the eulogy I gave for my dad at his memorial just under three months ago. I've been wanting to put it up here for a while, and for some reason today seemed like a good day to do it. It's here in its entirety.


I want to start off with a funny story of my dad’s, because he had a thousand of them.  He couldn’t let any gathering of people pass by without a Rich Reinersmann story, and this one should be no different.  As my friend John once said, “My favorite stories from your dad are when he’s being a hilarious ass,” so I’ll tell you one of those.


He was a construction manager for Toys ‘R’ Us at the time, and was working on the lighting.  The ceilings are really high, so he and his partner were up on scissor-lifts.  The other electrician was a big beefy guy, who later played pro football if I remember right, but he really didn’t like what they were working on that day – he was terrified of it in fact.


They had to make a ton of connections in the lights, and that meant they had two choices.  They could either cut the power, go up the lifts, make a connection, go down the lifts, turn on the power to test the connection, turn off the power, go up the lift, yada yada yada. Orrrr…


They could make the connections live – with power still running through the lines.  This part is what the other guy didn’t like (and here, by the way, is where my dad would have been able to tell you the guy’s full name, address, and what kind of car he drove).  As the lines came into contact, they went POP! POP! POP! a couple times, but it was totally safe as long as you weren’t touching them.  Still, and quite understandingly, the guy was nervous about it.


So as the guy is making his first connection, very nervously and slowly, my dad readies a big wrench, and just as the wires make their first POP!, he slams the wrench down on the deck of the guy’s scissor lift.  The guy screams at the top of his lungs, drops both wires, and throws his own wrench clear across the store.  Luckily, it didn’t go near anybody, but no so luckily for Dad, the big beefy linebacker guy was pissed.  My dad was apparently a faster runner, though, so the story ends well.


But what I really came up here to say was this.  By society’s standards, my father was not a great man: he didn’t cure any diseases, stop any wars, or solve any of the world’s problems.  But he raised and loved four kids, was a great teacher, and had a network of close friends and relatives who loved him.  So to me, and to those many lives he touched, my dad was a good man – a great man.


It says a lot about him that his ex-step-son TJ was at his wedding, visited him in the hospital, and was expecting my dad to be at his own wedding next year.  Our mom and my dad haven’t been married since 1996, but if you asked him, my dad would always answer that he had four kids, always counting TJ as one of his own (sometimes even counting Casady as number five).  His kids were so important to him, and it pains me to think of the years I missed out on being mad at him.


When my parents divorced, the kids gravitated toward our mom.  And for a while, seeing only one side of the situation (and being kind of an angsty teenager), I hated my dad.  I am so thankful that I got over those feelings and got to really know him as an adult – I’ll cherish these last seven or so years I spent with him especially closely.  He of course wasn’t always perfect with us – he was human – but he helped raise us, and he loved us.  He was a great man.


I can’t speak to the kind of teacher he was at the IEC apprenticeship program.  I can say that he loved doing it so much, and he did it really well – his Teacher of the Year awards and the continuing relationships with some of his students speak well to that.  I can tell you that god-knows-how-many scraps of paper, the walls of every project I helped him on, and every wall of our garage growing up were covered with diagrams and equations – the world was his impromptu blackboard, and he loved using it to teach. He was a great teacher, and a great man.


What I think speaks best about his character is this room full of people right here today, and I don’t just mean the number.  It’s the depth of his relationships that I’m talking about.  Everybody has a lot of acquaintances, but my dad had so many friends.  I want to thank you all for coming today, and to let you know – if you didn’t already – that he loved you just as much as you love him.  He was a great man.


I know I’m preaching to the choir here, and I don’t want to pretend that he was a saint or anything, but he showed me that there is real honor and pride to be had in being a Working Class Hero.  That what you do for a living isn’t nearly as important as how you do it, and that your career isn’t nearly as important as your friends and family.  He defined himself as a father, a husband, a brother, and a son, but most importantly as a friend – a real friend – to a great many people.  And that’s how I’ll always remember my dad – as my friend.

These Are the Dreams I Had Last Night

They are not happy dreams.

I was in charge of watching over Dad’s casket for the night following his death. His funeral would be in the morning.  But the casket wasn't like other caskets, because he was (or was to be?) cremated.  Instead of what you’d normally expect, it was like a shitty electric guitar case, though larger: rectangular, with a textured hard plastic body that was painted a faded light green.  It was roughly the proper length, roughly six-and-a-half feet long, and close to the proper width, maybe 30 inches across, but it was only a few inches thick.  The case was on a bed, on the left side (if you were lying in the bed).  The bed and the room are unfamiliar to me. I was standing next to the bed on that same side, and pacing down its length.

When I got to the end to turn around, the case was gone, and Dad was there in his hospital gown, though not weak and thin like he was at the end.  He was pale, though not deathly so.  He was annoyed at one of the IV tubes, and was reaching around over the top of the bed, which was now tilted up at the head like a hospital bed.  I became upset, because I knew I had to tell him that it didn’t matter: he was already dead.  I moved to help him untangle the tubes and that’s when the dream ended.

The next dream took place a little while after his death – maybe present day.  I was in the driveway of an unfamiliar house, and I was leaving.  I was sad, though not about leaving.  I get the impression I had been visiting its residents for the first time after Dad died, not unlike the recent trip down South that Liesel and I took to see Tante Emmy and Oma.

So I was getting ready to leave the house in an unfamiliar car, when for some reason I became aware (perhaps I just skipped the expository part of the dream; perhaps I just can’t remember) that I could instead take a very fancy black sports car instead.  I decided to do so, and started to take my stuff – an overnight bag – out of the unfamiliar car.

When I got to the sports car, I noticed that the very large spoiler on the back was in fact two separate ones, and now red.  It was more like a wing than a spoiler – raised up rather than flush to the trunk lid – but there was no center.  It wasn’t missing, but intentional.  Then I noticed that each piece was broken in the same way.  The material was like a thick, very hard foam-core that had cracks in several places going front-to-back, getting progressively worse as they went toward the center of the car.  The spoiler(s) would clearly fly off if I tried to drive it.  I had the thought that I was lucky that it hadn't flown off on the drive here, and I didn’t notice that I had already identified the other car as mine.  

The sports car was parked next to yet another car, which I knew belonged to a man that either lived or was just staying at this house.  He was also an electrician, or I think just a hobbyist, and I went inside the garage to ask him if he could help clean some of Dad’s electrical stuff out of the house.

Here’s where the dream became strange, and really sad, though briefly nice.

Once I went into the garage to find the guy, the garage became more like the kitchen I have now, and the man was suddenly Dad.  I immediately started crying and we started hugging.  We were holding each other super tight and I had my hands on both his shoulder blades, which I could feel distinctly, as I could when he seriously began losing weight – like around Christmas 2010.  I’m not sure if I could feel him losing more weight as I held him, but I know that I was aware of his thinness, relative to how he was in his prime.  Still crying, I said, “I miss you so much, Dad.”  To which he replied, “I know you do.  It’s okay.”

That’s when I woke up, still crying.  About an hour later, I called my therapist to make the first appointment of the new round of sessions.

The Terrifying Incident of the Bike Ride in the Nighttime

I was super busy with school and work, and then super busy with relaxing myself into a Reddit-fueled stupor.  It had totally skipped my mind that I even had a blog, let alone that one is supposed to write in these things.  So, in order to distract myself from stressful things of the moment, I'd like to tell you about The Very Scary Bike Ride Through Kankan.

In order to properly tell you of this ride through Kankan, I should first say something of Kankan itself.  It is the third largest city in Guinea, with between 140,000 and 207,000 people, depending who you ask (Peace Corps and Wikipedia, respectively).  The de facto capital of the Haute Guineé region, it is a major hub in Eastern Guinea, and indeed the broader region.  Here's a picture from Google Earth:

Click for larger version.

However (and this is usually the surprising bit), there is no electrical generation in Kankan beyond individual gasoline generators, nor is there any running water.  While no one visiting Guinea or any other developing country is expecting a Four Seasons (although you'd be surprised some places), it is a little surprising to find such a large, culturally relevant city bereft of even the most basic infrastructure.  I can't say for certain - the internet is, not surprisingly, just as bereft of information about the third largest city in a country no one's ever heard of ("New Guinea? Guiana? Ghana?") - but here's what I heard while I was over there.

Lansana Conté was the "president" of Guinea from 1984 until his death in December of 2008.  During that time, he...well, wasn't very nice, to sum up (badly)?  He did lots of mean things to lots of good people.  The bit that's relevant is that, due to some sort of disagreement with the governor of the Kankan prefecture, he shut down and destroyed Kankan's hydro-electric power generation along the Niger.  So the short answer is that Conté was a bit of a dick, and that's the main reason that Kankan has no power.

So let me set up this ride for you.  I was at my house not far from the city center, and was biking to the Peace Corps Volunteer House on the outskirts of Kankan, where a goodly number of PCVs had gathered. Each region of Guinea had a volunteer house, and I was lucky enough to be placed in the same city as the one in my area.  This meant that I would have had a constant stream of potential buddies to hang out with. Here is the route I took - click the caption to blow it up to a readable size.

Click for larger version.

The trip was just over two miles, but that wasn't part of the problem.  With the amount of biking we'd been doing, I was actually in great shape (for me), and was quite comfortable riding long distances (again, for me). In fact, when I traced the route in Google Earth, I was really surprised at how short it was (until I remembered the time I walked it carrying a suitcase). No, the real problems were: the roads, the people, the darkness, and quite unexpectedly, the light.

THE ROADS in Guinea are...how to put this delicately...shitty.  Not great.  I very distinctly recall a particular pothole on the road to Moribaya that we drove into and out of.  Though there was nothing like that in Kankan, the roads are definitely better suited to walking than any sort of wheeled transport.  Biking is no problem - you just have to watch where you're going and make sure not to run into any of

THE PEOPLE, who expect you to know what the hell you're doing.  As I said, I was quite comfortable on my bike, but I've only ever been called coordinated sarcastically.  There were a lot of people on the roads, which have, obviously, no explicit nor implicit divisions between pedestrian, bike, and vehicle areas. So it's important to watch out for people, which is made particularly difficult due to

THE DARKNESS.  It is dark.  It is really goddamn dark.  It's so dark that you can't see the hand in front of your face sometimes.  There are a number of little lights by the side of the road wherever people are selling things or gathering to hang out, but generally speaking, it's friggin' dark.  Luckily, I brought

THE LIGHT with me.  Specifically, every one of us (as far as I know) brought a headlamp with us.  They're terribly useful things in general, and particularly so for two specific uses: poopin' and bikin'.  It is pretty frikkin' hard to hold a flashlight and do either of those activities (or both for that matter, but I don't know that anyone tried that).  "But Dave," you may ask, "why would the light be a problem for your no-good-very-bad bike ride?"  I'll tell you, and thanks for your question.  The headlight is placed on the forehead, which, because of the normally super-helpful spread of the beam, puts a nice glare right across the front of my glasses, making it just about impossible to see.

So I spent the right going extremely slowly, barely able to see through the glare of my light into the darkness, trying not to hit anyone or fall off my bike.  So I went those 2 or so miles very slowly, and quite scared of, ya know, dying - or worse, looking silly on my bike.  Once I got onto the newer road, it wasn't too much of a problem, though then I had the added difficulty with the sparse traffic.

Long story short (too late), I made it to the Volunteer house, where I vowed to never ever do that again.