Two Mugs and Their Stories

It was a Sunday afternoon, sometime in July or August, two years ago. I was hanging around in the Old Town of Alexandria, as I was doing on any given Sunday. I was on King Street, having nothing particular in mind. Weather was fine, I was feeling a bit tired, which was normal: I had come to the town using the trail on the border of Potomac; eight miles, starting from Rosslyn, around three hours.

I passed by a small antiquities store and I decided to have a look inside. It was such a tinny space that two persons had no room to walk shoulder to shoulder. There was a lady in front, who was advancing slowly, imposing the same rhythm to me. There was a moment of confusion when she reached the end of the store and turned back, but we managed somehow to avoid any collision. A story that I had heard in the city of Riga, in Latvia, came to my mind. There is a very short street there, perhaps only twenty or thirty feet, and very narrow, it seems the narrowest street in Europe, and as the story goes two ladies happened once to be each one at the other end of the street, and ready to pass. Each lady was inviting the other to pass the first, and no one wanted to be less polite than the other. A gentleman who was passing by told the ladies that there was only one way to solve the dilemma: the younger one should pass first and thus she would let the other lady to be the more polite. As you can imagine none of them wanted to appear as the oldest, so both passed in the same time.

I had the chance to visit Riga in the eighties and I saw the street: it was really very short and very narrow. By that time it had a nickname, given by students, Punk Street.

As I remembered Punk Street and its stories I suddenly noticed in the store a mug that looked funny. Its ambition was to be an antique, actually it faked. It was made in Germany somehow nowadays, with a serial number on its bottom, but I was cool with that, I wasn't that kind of pretentious.

The mug had a metallic lid and it was of course enameled: the scenery was showing two middle aged gentlemen looking kind of Tirolean hunters, sitting at a table in some country pub. Each hunter had in front a mug full of bear (possibly enameled with the same scenery). One of them was trying (unsuccessfully it seems) to hug the waitress. What else to expect from a middle aged Tirolean hunter?

And the inscription on the mug: Hoch edles Naß aus kühlem Faß, High Precious Wet from a Cool Barrel; it looked great.

Another memory came to my mind, this time of a veritable antique, another mug, that I had had in my house in Bucharest. That mug was really an artwork, with a green enamel, showing some sailors sited at a table, each one with his own story. I was a kid by that time, enamored by books with polar expeditions, and for me the heroes carved on the mug were Norwegian sailors, ready to go on Fram to the Arctic regions, together with Nansen and Johansen, and his captain Otto Sverdrup... or maybe a bit later, with the expedition of Amundsen? And so each sailor from the mug had a name, given by me: Larsen, and Olaf, and Gunnar ...

Warmed by these distant memories, I decided to buy the mug in the store, to pack it and send to Bucharest: I was preparing my future remembrances.

Well, now I have both mugs. The one that I bought in Alexandria, Northern Virginia arrived safely in Bucharest, where I found also the old one.



(Alexandria)