Into the good room

The pub evening as a bath in the past: Follow ten of our Advent stories.

For so many years we were in the “room” almost every day. Someone asked: “Should we have another round in the room?” Everyone nodded, everything okay. Briefly in the “room”, that was actually never wrong. Even my mother spent her youth in the “room”. Her generation, she says, drank coffee and did homework there after school; and because times change, we were mostly there in the evening. A little longer on the weekend, better not so long during the week, otherwise not only the bike ride home was torture, but also the next day of school. You always met someone if you only had one more round …

Someone who knew the bizarre, silliest stories or who knew who with whom and who no longer. There was always someone with whom we could share worries, talk about dreams or forge creative master plans that could hardly be implemented. Sometimes we just sat there and looked around. That was like our living room. In a rustic half-timbered house in a small town, always new photos or paintings on the wall, relaxed music from all decades, solid red wine from the region. For years I was in the “room” almost every day. And now – times are changing – only one day a year.

Like so many, I live hundreds of kilometers away from the “room”. But on December 23rd or 25th, we’re going there. And every time it is as if no time has passed. Everyone is there: Weizen-Nobbi stands on the stairs between the ground floor and the smoking area on the upper floor. He always stands there every evening and keeps an overview – always one hand on the wheat glass. Emil is there too, sitting at the head of the large table in the smoking area with a small notepad in front of him. And – like back then – he occasionally shows a drawing. Or read a poem he just wrote. Like back then: funny moments, thoughtful moments.

If you come into the “parlor” today, it’s like taking a bath in the crackling foam of the past, immersing yourself in a time that you don’t think of on 364 days a year. Of course, the very closest friends of young people are there. Or those with whom you keep in rather loose contact over the year: “We have to see each other again” – “Definitely!” And then we’ll see each other in the “room”. Former classmates: inside, acquaintances from clubs, people from the former neighborhood, friends of friends, past childhood loved ones or people you simply know from the “room”. So much has changed, but everything is still the same between us – well, almost everything.

Sometimes the experiences one has had over the year are similar. So many stories and faces, all of them almost forgotten, and it’s so nice to hear and see them again. We are delighted that Daniel Depp has fought for a new identity in another city and proudly talks about his job in an Asian metropolis and his bike tour through the Balkans. And we are a little gleeful that the one with the nasty sayings and the casual nickname has probably not gotten much further with his style than to be a potential successor for wheat Nobbi.

When I go to the “parlor” at Christmas, everything is like it used to be for an evening: the wine is fine, the ride home by bike is torture Furniture that didn’t exist before.

What didn’t exist in the past: an empty room. If you go to the “Stube” in the evening on December 23 or 25, it is usually jam-packed. Last year nobody was there because of Corona – and this year too it looks bad. Briefly, the news caused a stir that the “room” would close. She probably doesn’t, luckily. And a year goes by quickly.

Note: To protect Weizen-Nobbi, Emil and Daniel Depp, who have different names, the pub was also renamed.