Caves are smart.

When the earth hollows itself out to be a cave, and water seeps through to form stalactites by depositing minerals like limestone that start to hang down from the ceiling, the drop falls off the end like snot dripping from the nose and falls to the ground where the drop gives the last of what it’s got to make a stalagmite which grows up taller as the stalactite grows longer down. If they’ve been at it for a long time, sometimes the dropping top meets the rising bottom, they join, reinforce each other the way people do when they get together, they become a pillar, a column that acts as a support to hold up the roof.

As I said, caves are smart to build their own longevity.

It’s as if they knew we were coming, cavemen to fill them up and give them company. That gives them a reason to exist. And then tourists.

Caves are social beings. They like us to talk to them so they can answer back. They can echo on for a long time to let us know they heard what we said.

As I said, caves are smart, sometimes smarter than some people who don’t make room for anybody and never hear what you say.

When Shirley and I were in Slovenia, the first time, we centered in Ljubljana. Ljubljana is like the center of a wheel, the surrounding territory is a wide circumference, and visits out in all directions are like spokes. You can spoke out by bus.

We took the bus to Postojna.

Postojna is where the big cave is. We wanted to go see it. It’s like Carlsbad Caverns in the U. S.

I had been to Carlsbad Caverns only once in my life, and that was before I was born.

My parents were coming from Buffalo, New York, heading for the west coast.

I think there must have been several reasons.

One was because of the War. The War, World War II, was going on in Europe for two years, and getting ready to start for us to join in.

The War was against Germany and all things German. There were a lot of German Americans on the east coast, because that’s where they landed when they came over.

It didn’t matter if you were second or third generation American. It didn’t matter if you were famous and contributed, like Einstein, in whose case it was even worse because he was concurrently a Jew.

People changed their names to hide being German by heritage. They came from “there,” and people refused to remember that everybody in America came from somewhere else, immigrants, even the natives who walked over the former land bridge all those long years ago.

There was so much anti-German sentiment that in New York they were killing dachshunds on the street because they were German dogs.

Both my parents came from German. On my mother’s side, they refined their spelling to Snyder. My father’s family were more obvious. They were Schlageters. That made them targets. When my father married my mother, she became a Schlageter. That made the Snyders uncomfortable.

My father only made it worse, because when he stopped being a Jesuit, he stopped being a Catholic. That dragged my mother into it, and there must have been shunning. Both sides of the families were Catholic to the core, dyed in the wool, and my father became a black sheep.

Another reason was jobs. It was getting harder and harder for Germans to get jobs, even if they hadn’t been German for generations. My father had been teaching school for a job, and I think it must have become more and more uncomfortable.

This of course is only conjecture, because I wasn’t born yet.

Anyway, they were heading to the west coast, my mother was very pregnant, and they were driving fast so I could be born green in the Golden State which everybody knew was the promised land. They almost dropped me along the way, it was that close.

But it was a long drive, a real trip, and they decided they had just enough time to make a stop so the trip would be like a vacation. My mother thought she could hold it in a little longer, and they stopped at Carlsbad Caverns, which is what you do when you’re on vacation.

I could have been born in Carlsbad Caverns. But I wasn’t. So the family had a brief little vacation outing, just not outing me, and joined a tour group which went inside to see the sights.

By all reports and family accounts partly for my benefit because I missed it, the Caverns were really something. Apparently you walked through the tunnels that were dark except for the lights, and came to a big chamber where the guide told you to be quieter than a whisper because of echoes. So everybody looked up and around and marveled in the silent lighted dark, and then a thin high little voice broke the silence and cried, “I wanna go foo foo.”

The explosion of laughter echoed with that little cry long after, and people walked through the reverberating memory repeated again and again.

It was my little three year older brother Lee Lee, and he made quite a sensation entering onto the world stage. People talk about it to this day. I do.

Echoes can last a long time.

And I wasn’t even there.

So I’ve only been to Carlsbad Caverns once, before I was born.
So I never saw it to this very day.

Then my family drove even faster to California so I could be born at the nearest hospital, which was Hollywood. I insist that had nothing to do with my further growth and development, but I could be wrong. I am able to be wrong about many things, and continue to prove it incessantly.

Anyway, a few weeks after I was born Schlageter, my family looked at me and said, “We’d better change our name.”

So my mother looked through the phone book and picked something that had a ring to it, and I became Gary Campbell Sterling. My father went from Francis Bertrand Schlageter to Frank Weatherby Sterling. My mother made good choices, and here I am today.

Anyway, Postojna, and caves.

We took the bus to Postojna.

Now was my chance to see a cave. It was everything promised, and now I could make real memories and be there to make them. Everything matched my memories of the stories of former caves, matched the many movies with caves which even went down to the center of the earth where other people lived, probably not German, and I could now say “I was actually there.”

What was new to me, I think, was the dripping.

The cave inside was still making itself supported, the stalagmites were still growing taller as the stalactites were dripping even on my head so I could feel part of the process.

And we came to the big vast inner chamber which they said was where they even held concerts. There was room for an orchestra and an audience, and they even mentioned Tito. I held Shirley’s hand tighter. They said the acoustics were unbelievable.

So now I’ve been to a big cave.

I’ve only been to Carlsbad Caverns once, and that was before I was born.