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Posted on: Nov 22, 2023 at 4:33 AM

Hi Linda! I just found this site! Hope you are doing well! We've lived in San Francisco area for 23 yrs now. Just sent our oldest kid off to college and our youngest is a sophomore in HS. Time flies!

Colonel Ralph Capio is pleased to announce that he has successfully defended his dissertation and has been awarded the Doctor of Law and Policy degree by Northeastern University.

Hope you got my Happy Birthday call message...
Love,
Belden

DIdn't know Melanie.  Never met her.  But now I feel like I know her at least a bit, and I like what I learned.  Very sorry for your loss.  Humanity feels it.

In the 1980s, somebody asked me if I wanted to type a dissertation for an American woman who was living in Heidelberg.  I agreed, and I met Melanie.  After months of work, typing and retyping, the document was finished but the bond between us was strong and clear.

I was raising a critically ill child (he was 2 or 3 when he met Mel, or Dr. Mel as he has always called her), and she lived at the foot of the mountain in Ziegelhausen where we had a flat.  She began teaching at the University of Maryland, where I worked from 1980 to 1999, and we started hanging out.

When I say hanging out, we were running partners, dinner party buddies, movie actors, travel pals, and we rented hundreds of movies to watch at each other’s houses.  We had some arguments, we even broke up for a couple of years, but we were magnets for each other.  At one point, Melanie gave me the name of her therapist and told me to go see him, even though she had a rule not to share her work therapist with anyone…that’s how close we were.  She saved my life with that and gave Adriano a better mother.

Melanisia (my pet name for her), first and foremost, was just plain interesting.  She was funny, smart, and insightful.  And she was a 1000% caretaker.  Her relationship with my son, Adriano, was one of respect and care.  I have photos of Mel and Adriano taken all over Europe: my favorite being of the two of them at the turn out before the San Gottardo Tunnel in Switzerland around 1988.  She is hugging him from behind and they are beaming as if they just discovered gold in them thar hills!  But I actually have photos of her and various friends and family at border crossings, ferry docks, and even airport terminals.  Better than photographs was driving somewhere with her.  On our first visit to Adriano’s granny in Italy she taught us to play a travel game she called Stink Pink, or Stinky Pinky.  I can’t remember anything about the game but we laughed hysterically for miles and miles trying to figure out how to play it.

Once, when we had gone to Taormina she found a giant flower pot that looked exactly like my boyfriend of the time.  We didn’t have a way to purchase and get it back to Heidelberg so she took a photo of it and I still have that photo to laugh about.  She sketched a lot of the places we visited and I have those sketches too.  We laughed our butts off at the chaos at Al Italia Airlines and it took us months to get rid of the $3000 Hertz Italy charges for a 5 day car rental!  She was the absolute best companion one could ask for.

Melanie loved to sing.  We went to churches to hear choirs practice, and she tried to get me to join the choir in the church at the end of her street.  But I wasn’t as good as she was and I was still trying to finish my degree, so I settled for listening to her.  One time we got in a cab to go to dinner before a concert and she knew the driver because she knew his dog!  Dinner was with a bunch of art dealers and university professors, but she knew the cab driver’s dog.  That is eternally Melanie!

Mel was an artist practicing the art of loving people and trying to lift them up.  She loved life and her family and she refused to let the slings and arrows change her except for the better.  Like all of us, she made mistakes.  She tried to fix the hurts and make her mistakes count as opportunities rather than as sins.  She wasn’t capable of behaving badly or hurting even strangers.  At the end of her father’s life, every week she watched the Lawrence Welk show with him over Zoom!  That’s love on a massive scale!

It is so hard to try to sum up a long and beautiful friendship when you are grieving the loss of that person.  But I know that Melanie is always with me and with Adriano and I refuse to see her passing as a loss but as a transition to the future.  I could carry on for another 100 pages and not capture her essence, her intelligence, her heart.  But I know, when I think of her, all of that floods back to me on a wave of memories and mementos.  These are the things that will be in my future and in Adriano’s future as we travel our lives the rest of the way without her.  She can still make me laugh.  She can now make me cry.  Love and friendship endure, as  Melaisia will.

Posted on: May 21, 2023 at 11:50 AM

Hello Robert:

Soon, you will have a birthday anniversary. You only have one birthday. I hope you have a good day. I also hope that you have many more good day anniversaries.

Ciao,
Rog

Hello Chris:
I hope that your B-Day anniversary is a good one. I also hope that you have many more. All is well here in Heideberg. I hope that all is well in the Phlippimes. Gae sends her regards. Give our regards to Loydz. .

Ciao,
Rog

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHERYL!

Posted on: Feb 21, 2023 at 7:20 AM

Hello John:

Another anniversary for you. I hope this is a good one and that you have many more good ones. Live long and prosper.

Ciao,
Rog

The single grearest strength of the Maryland Overseas Program with which I worked for 40 years was always the teaching faculty.  In all the years and the many classes that Bill taught with the European Division, he embodied this great strength.

While Director of the European Division in the 1980s and 1990s, I was quite aware of how fortunate Maryland was---and even more so his students---that Bill was with the program.  But, I began to know him better personally only after I was no longer with Maryland.

Somehow, we learned that we shared the same birthday---and we were pleased annually to exchange e-mail birthday wishes.  With appropriate joking references to growing ever older together.  Then over the last 15 years, whenever visiting Germany, I always looked forward to a lunch meeting in Heidelberg with Bill and a few other former Maryland faculty.  But,...in September 2022, Bill was unable to come to the luncheon.  We were all saddened by his absence.

All the more, am I saddened now.