5 June 2002

My parents sometimes make me laugh. They still haven't turned their air conditioning on. I understand their house is twice the size of ours and therefore costs more to cool - but it's June. The high for today is slated to be in the 90s - and this isn't the first warm day we've had lately, either. I think they're waiting for it to get hot and stay hot, as if it were a crime to turn the A/C on and then turn it back off again a week or two later.

Ah, well, I can't complain too much. We went over to their house last night and Mom fed us BLTs. The first BLTs of the summer. Warm bacon and cold lettuce and huge fresh tomatoes... There's nothing like it. Yum.

They gave me some stuff my grandmother had sent for me, including some sheets and a fondue pot (now to find a use for it) and some napkins. Stuff like that.

Among the napkins is one slightly stained, mismatched one. It's one of those napkins where the design is made by just changing the weave of the thread, so you end up with a very elegant design that you have to hold the cloth up to the light and angle it strangely to see. Well, actually, they're all like that, but this one...

I want to know where my grandmother got it. Smack in the middle of the thing is a swastika, and in gothic calligraphy along two edges is, "Der Deutsche Hof" A little web research revealed that "Der Deutsche Hof" ("The German Yard") is a hotel in Germany.

One of the few documents I could find that was in English told me that it was the hotel of choice for at least one Nazi party rally, in 1927. (Another page suggested that it was Hitler's favorite hotel, but that was a site selling WW2 memorobilia, so I'm not sure I want to trust it to be impartial.)

At any rate, I'm curious to know how my grandmother got it, if she even remembers.

--Liz