Salzburg. City of Salt. That early claim to fame. The famous salt mines that seasoned Europe.

And three universities! I’ve always said every town should have a college. But three? Go, Salzburg!

If you love Mozart, you have to go to Salzburg.

If you love Austria, if you love Vienna, if you love music festivals, if you love The Sound of Music, you have to go to Salzburg.

We do and we did.

I tend to be overwhelmed by the amazing and enchanting places I’ve visited. Salzburg takes a special pride of place, and it’s not just because of Mozart.

As usual, things blur in my memory. It’s the intensity of the moment which keeps me from taking notes or emphasizing chronology or details. But the memories are a string of pearls.

The Tourist Bureau arranged a place to stay, but the details elude me. I just seem to remember Shirley and I walking each morning along the Salzach River into the city. We passed through an invisible permeable barrier into a city of enchantment where everywhere the streets followed Mozart’s steps and we saw immediately why he chose to be born there, and he grew up where he could run around and unleash his enthusiasm, learn music, practice it, perform it, and then unleash himself upon the world.

And we were there, in his home town, running around from place to place eagerly questing his city.

We loved everything. We loved the Mirabell Gardens. How nice to be able to build a special Residenz for your woman, with adjacent gardens she could walk through and tend the flowers. We especially liked the roses growing along the side where they might be overlooked by those, like tourists, who just walk by passing through.

We were not just tourists, and we went off the beaten path, approached the side and smelled the roses.

I was proud that, though on a smaller scale, I had given my woman a Residenz, a garden to walk, flowers to tend, and fruit ripening on trees.

We understood Europe, because our own lives matched in parallel, and Europe took us in because, wherever we went, we belonged.

We saw the way the cameras had led the movies, the tourists following The Sound of Music Trail as they rushed past. We took our own sweet time, sat in the beer garden where Benedictine monks stood by the falling fountain of endless beer, placing empty mugs under the flow, filling, replacing, an endless rhythm passing the frothy mugs to us in line as the beer kept falling and I thought, with my California mind, “That’s wasting a lot of beer.”

The monks were in service to the falling fountain of beer and understood their place in the world. We took our mugs to the garden and sat, and I enjoyed the best beer of my life. It was as if I had been waiting all those long years to come to the artesian source of beer in its essence. I understood why monks would give themselves up to religion in the service of the miracle of true beer, and I took the miracle in, and the mystical afternoon was beyond the limits of mere earthly time.

We met another young couple in the beer garden. Americans, even less tourist than we were. They heard us talk and sat at our table. Introductions. We discovered they were staying in Salzburg, the woman’s mother was a resident and lived there. The woman was a musician and was giving a lecture recital the next day at Mozart’s Geburtshaus, now a museum, and they invited us to attend. They also invited us to dinner. We all liked each other as fellow non-tourists, and we happily said yes.

We had immediately entered the circle of inner Salzburg. But first, on the way to dinner, a stop by her mother’s apartment. The mother was a charming woman, pleased that her children had found Americans who were real people. I wanted to stay longer in her lovely apartment, then off to the local restaurant and a very satisfying dinner, happy to let them pay, where we kept talking and getting to know each other as you do when you find friends who have so much in common.

The next day at the appointed hour, we went to Mozart’s Geburtshaus. There were locals hovering below as if waiting for visitors so they could point and say, “This is where.”

Inside, we climbed the stairs little Mozart used to run up and down, saw the room where he slept, the room where he wrote his music, the keyboard he played upon.

Our new friend was there and we were given preference in the small crowd seated for her performance. She was an accomplished musician and drew Mozart out of the original keyboard.

I felt the impulse to sing with her, Mozart, Pappageno and Figaro, the things I knew and loved and had sung before. And Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Richard Strauss, all of whom I was sure she knew and which I had loved and sung back home and in Canada. But I was shy, as I always am, and didn’t intrude.

We had made new friends, but we had an itinerary, and were like ships passing in the night. I wish we had kept in touch. We would have continued as friends.

When you’re open to friendship, you find friends everywhere, even half way around the world. The world is full of friends waiting for you to find them.

The beautiful streets and plazas of Salzburg beg for exploration. We had our guidebook, and went to the famous Salzburger Marionettentheater to see the adorable little puppet marionettes who gave us an enchanting Magic Flute with a recorded background in a performance we had back home on our vast shelves in the Mozart section of our remarkable record collection.

We liked the great square and the fountain before the Archbishop’s Palace, which was open as a museum. There I was again, pinching pennies, and I let Shirley go inside, because she wanted to see everything, and, impecunious me, I sat outside and waited by the fountain so she could come out and tell me what it was like inside. She said, “Very nice.”

Mozart was in the air everywhere. We went by the site for the Salzburg Festival, nothing scheduled that day, so money saved. I thought again of how I would never forgive Mozart for dying so early. He was so young and quick and eager and melody flowed out of him so endlessly, and Beethoven recognized that and was probably jealous. I wrote a poem, “Ludwig on Wolfgang,” that I hope to see published someday.

Mozart couldn’t stop the flow of his music, almost from another larger world, and he kept learning and inventing and creating the new and the next, and his last symphonies showed he had reached the dimension Beethoven struggled with to break through into overwhelming, and Mozart was just there, poised, and, had he lived, he would have taken music centuries into the future, and it’s the world’s loss, mine personally, and that’s why I’ll never forgive him for dying so early too young.

And then there was the Heilbrun Palace and the Trick Fountains where you stepped on the stepping stones that triggered the fountains but you were prepared because the sign said, “Warning: you may get wet.”

Shirley and I were very aware of Hohensalzburg, the medieval fortress on the mountain top looking over and guarding the city. We saw a notice for an evening concert there, and we bought tickets to kill two birds with one stone, a concert and a chance to go up and see the castle.

As evening fell, we joined the crowd like pilgrims walking up the steps, climbing to the medieval castle with a concert hall from which we could look out through the dark and see the lights of the city below, as chamber music drew us through the osmosis of air.

It was another magical night, and we climbed back down among the departing faithful all of us transformed.

Have I mentioned that Salzburg was a magical city?

We checked our money and our calendar and decided to sign up for The Sound of Music Tour. We can play tourist with the best of them.

Our group was led through some places we had seen before. Like the Mirabell Gardens. Our tour guide reminded us how in the movie The Sound of Music, Maria led the Von Trapp children up the steps as they sang higher and higher, “Doe, a deer…”

It was, after all, a movie tour.

And the tour guide, a young man, personable, enthusiastic, gave a running commentary and included something about himself. He had studied law, was a lawyer, but chose to live and practice in Salzburg, rather than the Big City like Vienna. Salzburg was just the right size for him, big enough to have everything he wanted, small enough so he could get everywhere. He had escaped the big city rush and pressure, was happy to live in the comfort of the day-to-day real world.

As a resident of Altadena, a kind of suburb of Pasadena, a city of comparable size to Salzburg, I felt a kindred spirit, decided ours were Sister Cities with a special bond.

We were on a tour bus, and we drove around to the Von Trapp mansion everyone recognized from the movie. We were tourists from around the world, but the movie was world-wide, everybody had seen it, and could sing along with the songs, which they did on the bus.

The tour guide took a perverse pleasure in shattering illusions and revealing the secret truth to tourists. “See that gazebo there? Where they sing, “I am sixteen, going on seventeen…?” That’s not original to the property. They had to truck it in.”

“See that ‘lake’ where the boat tips and the children fall out and almost drown? It’s a shallow pond only three feet deep. No danger of drowning…”

“See that mountain? Remember how at the end of the movie the camera shows the family climbing over to safety in Switzerland? We’re going up over it in the bus. It leads right down into Germany and Hitler’s Berchtesgaden and Hitler’s mountain resort.”

He took renewed pleasure in deflating tourists with behind-the-scenes truth, and we chuckled with him and liked him all the more.

The bus took us up the mountain, and we paused at the top for a lunch break at a café with a view. It was hot, summer, and I was thirsty. Thus occurred my legendary incident still repeated decades later.

I drank from the fountain and splashed water on my face. Then I straightened up and noticed the posted sign, “Kein Trinkwasser.” Immediate trepidation.

We drove down the other side of the mountain, past the side road entrance to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest where he and Eva Braun could look down on the world.

Then we went further down into Berchtesgaden and emerged in the middle of a Hunter’s Festival. The streets were filled with men in lederhosen, wearing feathered hats and hunting jackets, rifles in hand or over their shoulder. Our Viennese friend Bimba, whom we met on the plane home, looked at our photos and said, “Yes, they’re good little Nazis.”

That night, back in Salzburg, my eyes were inflamed, my head in pain, my bowels restless and loose, expelling the memory of what I had done to them by splashing and drinking the “Kein Trinkwasser.” They were flushing my transgressions.

Shirley went to the pharmacy and they gave her the European magic which cures everything in a day or two.

They couldn’t believe it had happened in Germany. “The Germans are always so careful…” “There was a sign…”

She asked, “How much does it cost?” They said, “No charge. Universal medicine. This is Europe.”

I cried aloud, “Why, O why can’t we, who proclaim ourselves the leaders in everything, why can’t we follow the lead, democratize medicine for everybody…?” I stopped myself, because I knew the answer. But then I asked the unanswered question, “What are we going to do about it?”

So I got well, and we were ready for our next country.

Our stops in Europe were jewels on a necklace.

Our days in Salzburg were a string of pearls.