Moments - Welcome to the Heart of Europe
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Clinking glasses at a local wine festival
Restoring a faded family photograph
Moments that count
A moment is an incredibly brief period of time. It happens instantly in a blink and is over in no time. A good friend of mine often used the Austrian slang expression “Na, Moment!” which stands for “Just a moment.” To me, it is an invitation to pause for a short time, to symbolically clink glasses on achievements to date and take a good look around before I proceed further.
An uncle of mine took us to the main street of my hometown. The dust cover of a construction set showed a picture of the historic house when my great-grandfather had had a clothes shop there, a “Kleiderhaus.” That lyrics of a Springsteen song came to mind: “He’d tousle my hair and say: Son take a good look around, this is your hometown...” It is important not to forget your roots, where you came from, wherever you may be now.
“Then something happened again,” with Wolf Haas. The last grand-aunt had passed away, like her brother and two of her sisters in the three previous years. “As if they had agreed upon it,” someone said at the funeral. As Christians we hope for them to be reunited in afterlife, just as they quietly assemble around their parents in the photograph from a time around World War II.
One day, I began to fix the faded family picture by removing the crack that had covered half of my grandfather’s face. While modern technology may help us to pep up an old picture and make it look fresh and almost as new, it cannot help us with one thing: Bringing those back we have loved and lost.