karl_barth's_sister epitome of incomprehensibility Life_is_like_a_dream, if not but. The dream was that I was marrying Karl Barth's sister. She didn't have a name, just like Mozart's_sister (but Nannerl, or Maria Anna, ahem), but I was marrying her in a church with curved pews. She had light brown hair in a bun. I hardly knew her, let alone why I'd gotten to the step of marrying her - it was just something that was happening. Incidentally, Safenwil in Switzerland looks kind of like the Niagara escarpment, just as Burkina Faso resembles Quebec cottage country. Dream What You Know, I guess. At the end of the reception, which was simply held in the field outside the church, my mother had to show up and act aghast: "How could they let you marry another woman? In a church?! It's against God's will!" I argued: Look, I married KARL BARTH'S SISTER - Karl Barth, who was one of the main Protestant theologians of the twentieth century! How much closer to God can I get?? Then she told me to leave. But she wasn't sure whether to banish me from home (hers) or to send me away to Karl Barth's sister's house, where I might get up to all kinds of dirty and unholy things. Wherever I was, I couldn't find my newly-wedded unnamed wife, and it rained in the night. The next day I went to the field where the reception had been held, all ready to suffer in nature-infused melancholy like Goethe's character Werther. But the litter from the reception was still there. In particular, I found dozens of beer and soft drink cans, mainly Pepsi, lying in the swampy grass. Moreover, I had a plastic bag in my hand. So I gritted my teeth and waded in, figuring I could at least redeem them for five cents each at the grocery store. (An old meme feels appropriate here: Still a better love story than Twilight.) 150312 ... e_o_i In real life, Eberhard Busch tells me, he had two sisters: Katharina, who died as a small child, and Gertrud, who married another Karl and lived a long life. 150312 ... coming up next: relating_to_Karl 150312 what's it to you? who go blather from