from Crazy Were We in the Head

Great-grandma was a true Reisender, which, we were regularly reminded, is the German word for traveler. In her lifetime she’d covered half the world, from Prussia to Russia to the heart of Asia to Kansas and finally on to Idaho. She’d been born in old Prussia back in the middle of the nineteenth century and her family had moved to Russia when she was a young girl. Before coming to America she’d been married to Great- grandpa in a Muslim mosque out in the wilds of Central Asia, which is a story in itself.At the time I didn’t know the details; in fact, the whole thing was a big secret. Grandpa told us kids we were too young to understand, so after we looked up “Muslim” and “mosques” and “Central Asia” in the encyclopedia Karen and I came up with our own theories. I dreamed up the idea that Central Asia was the ancient version of the Wild West and that Great-grandpa had borrowed a horse or two that didn’t belong to him and when this was discovered he and Great-grandma decided Russia wasn’t the best place to raise a family after all and became outlaws. Karen had it figured that Central Asia was the ancient version of Reno; it was where you went to get married if you jumped the gun and this happened to be reported to the preacher. But our theories were just guesses. And they didn’t account for that mosque.