On May, 31st, my oldest daughter Sabine Simone married her Sebastian Andreas Held at Ebersberg City Hall. Or perhaps it was Sebastian who married his (formerly my) Sabine?
Well, whatever, they tied the knot! It was a very beautiful ceremony in the Great Hall of the central building.
And the subsequent wedding party at the Sudelfeld Hotel Tatzelwurm was a wonderful experience for all of us. All over the room, we felt joyful and every table emanated happiness and future-oriented courage.
Being the father of the bride, I was permitted to say a few words …
Here is what I said verbatim – so my words will be preserved for eternity.
It all started like a fairy tale! So here we go…
… Once upon a time …
… in the last millennium, the following scenario took place. Two Dinks (Double income no kids) of Augsburg– Roland und Barbara – had made a comfortable home for themselves at Laim in the west of Munich in a small flat under the roof. That was more than a third of a century ago!
Barbara was in the middle of her career and earned pretty good money. Roland had an interesting job with a “secure employer”. To make up for it, he earned a little less.
The two of them lived happily together. Those were not bad times at all. But something was missing and there came a time when they thought maybe it would make sense, after all, to give up being just a couple.
Consequently, on September, 20th, 1980, a girl was born. It was a well-timed birth without any complications and all of a sudden, there was a beautiful baby. She was called Sabine.
In those days, even “rooming in” was a total novelty. Mother and child were permitted to go home only after having stayed in the hospital for five days. Consequently, I had to wait until September, 26th, 1980 before I could take them home with me. When I drove to the hospital, the car radio was just telling me about the Wiesn suicide attack. Being a “young” father who was just on his way to fetch his first child from the hospital, I found this maniac behaviour extremely upsetting.
But our small bundle of joy soon saw to it that I forgot all about it. In order to have a little more freedom even with the child, we had been moving into a small terraced house before Sabine was born. We had to take up a lot of money to buy the house. In fact, the mortgage, including interest, was as high as my income. But so what? Everything was “easy-going” and the world was just at our feet.
We had a part-time governess who saw to it that everything was neat and nice. “Aunt” Luise confronted us with a few very new rules for the family. Barbara and I were more or less untouched by them, but not Sabine.
Sabine was still the lonely princess, because her brother Maximilian was not going to be born before the end of April, 1982. It was the time of great emotions. Seeing and experiencing how our little Sabine grew up was the most exciting time of my life. Everything changed – values, meaning, goals.
When, every evening, father and daughter went for a stroll on the garage lot behind our small terraced house – we were already living in Ramersdorf – this made my day. The young father made great resolutions in order to meet his responsibility towards Little Sabine.
Later, I learned that you have to count your blessings if you can contribute even to a very small extent to the success of your children’s lives.
Yes, it was a good time with Little Sabine. Everything went straight on. There were few sorrows and lots of joy. Huge catastrophes did not happen and the small catastrophes always quickly turned into good news.
It was a time during which courage and joy really grew. Little Sabine was probably a major factor for our wish to have a few more children later. The first to follow was Maximilian.
After he appeared, the parents sometimes had the impression that Little Sabine now had a living test object. Maximilian gave her the chance to test what was possible. Those tests involving the small brother were sometimes accompanied by bites that were all but tender – which caused rather loud braying. Consequently, the parents had to abruptly end the experiments. Needless to say that Little Sabine subsequently started to bray.
Evil tongues say that Maximilian got toughened up early on by Sabine and thus she is responsible for him learning how to enforce his iron will even against rough odds.…
There is not much worth mentioning to relate about Sabine’s childhood. At school, she was doing well. Most of the teachers liked her, even if at one time she sported green hair. It was generally easy to get along with Sabine. All you had to do was follow her will a little more than your own. But then, it seems to me that this is generally the case with daughters (or maybe women).
Sabine decided herself about her education and career. I was a little surprised when, after she had graduated with good results from high school, she decided to first learn hotel business. After all, I had a vague idea that this kind of career might be a little tough. The rest of her path through life was planned just as autonomously by Sabine. Be it her university studies or her job, at Hapag-Lloyd, on the MS EUROPA or at the discount store: she never cared for other people’s advice.
Sabine made a lot of experiences: the Schwabing hotel world, the University of Regensburg, the Hanseatic Hamburg enterprise, the mundane society of the beautiful and the rich on the MS EUROPA and the strict work style at Aldi.
Sabine visited all continents and oceans, speaks many languages, saw many nice places and is quite familiar with all the wonders of this world. She had a lot of effect on others. But her life was also always rather strenuous and demanding.
So now I wish for you two, dear Sabine and dear Sebastian, that you enter a phase of harmony and content. And may courage and joy be with you at all times.
Because time goes by much too quickly and it is quite possible that the future is a little more “stormy” than the last 50 years were. But in harder times, it is particularly helpful to have a guardian star. To be sure, once in a while, said guardian will have to be “reset to point north” – but on the whole, it gives you stability throughout your life.
So my wish for you two is that you will find your guardian star and that you manage to follow it together!
Something that started as a fairy tale should also remain a beautiful fairy tale. Let the taletellers say many years from now:
And they lived happy ever after!
Or
And unless they died, they live to this day!
Now Sabine’s second name is Held. I wish the two of them all the best for their life together!
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
I almost forgot: the nice pictures of the wedding were, of course, again taken by our friend and photographer Rolo Zollner.
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