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The year of 1998 was full of happenings - the biggest one was the unexpected appearance of Anne-Cécile one day in Paris.... In February Barbara flew to Atlanta, picked up Jenny and together they flew to Hamburg to Klaus' birthday.

Some time in the Spring Dieter and Evelyn attended a conference in Seattle.

Anneliese spontaneously flew to Seattle and took this rare, distressing photo of the two. This is the only photo I have of the two. Dieter has never shared photos. Our knowledge of his miserable condition, came solely from the occasional visitors in Berlin. I resolved that this had to change, and since then we have seen them more often, but every time I have been reluctant to take pictures of him in his wheelchair pushed by his half-blind wife. But I learned that he keeps himself alive with gallows-humor, a special kind of Gross' sarcasm and long-lasting scientific fights with his colleagues in astrophysical thermodynamics. He is not complaining of his condition.

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Our newly established connections with Irmgard Hammer persuaded her to visit us for several weeks. She loved to travel and despite her 81 years was very mobile. This visit - here Barbara had taken her to the new Getty Museum - was to be her last to Los Angeles.

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Cornelius had finally broken with Carolyn. He has never seen Carolyn again, which makes us, who see her often, sad. In May he visited us with Veznya Dapic a Croatian friend of Johannes' from their New Haven days. Veznya was charming and down to earth, but quite obviously would not be his wife. We were in the dark about his liaisons, and Barbara fiercely protected his privacy from my prying. In June Barbara and I spent a week with him in his new place in New York. We and Barbara and he saw many museums. It was a good time for the three of us.

And then in September Jenny visited him in New York and had a grand time with her uncle.

His apartment house had the customary fire escape, which one could reach through the kitchen window.

Cornelius and Jenny in the subway station next to his place.

Oct 4 - Nov 27 Rolf and Barbara in Paris :

It had been Barbara's wish to see Paris again after two decades. We had found a small hotel. It was dark, and it rained most of the time, besides I had a swollen Achilles tendon, which made walking painful. Nevertheless we visited all possible museums and some places like the Bois du Bologne, I had not been to since 1954. .

Pei's Pyramid over the new entrance of the Louvre. After exploring all possibilities to get into the Louvre without standing in line for hours we spent a whole day there and only saw a small part of it.

A sunny day exploring the Bois du Bologne.

On another morning we went to the Pierre LaChaise cemetery. I slept half an hour on the grave stone of Modigliani and his hapless wife Hebuterne. - Afterwards, on our way with the cog-railway to Montmartre, my heart suddenly missed three beats in a row, and I passed out for 20 seconds. Barbara was scared and took me by taxi to the nearest emergency hospital. They were very thorough there, took a cardiogram and a blood test, but eventually found nothing intrinsically wrong and let me go. A few weeks later at Kaiser in LA - after more unsuccessful tests - a nurse prescribed atenolol, which has kept my heart from stuttering ever since.

Susanne has a friend in Paris, Christine Pompanon and her children and second husband Thierry Giavitto. Christine had been an exchange student in LA together with Heike. We visited them in a suburb of Paris, a most enjoyable day.

And then Peter appeared at our hotel! I don't remember where he had been in Europe, but here he was. We climbed the roof of the Institute de la Monde Arabe from where one has a magnificent view of the islands in the Seine. - Actually, Anne-Cecile first took us there on one of our tours of town with her.

Well, one day the telephone rang at our hotel. A female voice, in English with a strong French accent, wanted to bring us greetings from Cornelius. I was on the phone. Raising my brows I whispered to Barbara, that it must be Cornelius new girlfriend. Barbara was annoyed. The voice introduced herself as Anne-Cécile from Paris and offered to take us on a walk in the old part of town. An hour later, I was waiting for her in the lobby, walked in a petite, dark-haired, very excited, cheerful woman of about 30. We set out. Barbara was trailing us while Anne-Cecile told me that she intended to marry Cornelius. I laughed and told her, that if she could teach him how to love her, this was all-right with me and entirely between the two of them.... She took us to the Roman amphitheater and the Monde Arabe. Afterwards we had coffee at the Mosque. It was despite all our excitement a very relaxed afternoon. We liked each other immediately. We saw her two more times, one evening she took us to a kind of play. I don't remember what it was about. - I was most impressed by Anne-Cécile's courage to explore her future parents-in-law. What a pluck! A month after our meeting she left Paris and a life-time professorial position at the University and moved in with Cornelius....

Meanwhile we went to Chartres with Peter, where I had never been before. Peter in front of the cathedral.

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And then Cornelius appeared from nowhere! You see that Anne-Cécile wears a wedding band on her left hand! Thinking that Cornelius had given it to her, I had asked her. "No," she said nonchalantly, "I am married. Two years. The marriage is dead, and I am applying for a divorce. There will be no difficulties." Cornelius had flown in to be at her side, when she filed the divorce papers. And here the two sat in our lobby!

It was raining. We went to a bistro across the street and just looked at them. She would be his supreme challenge for the rest of their lives. She wanted to marry him. He would learn. A good match. And so it has turned out....

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During our absence Marc and Monique and Marc's parents lived part-time in our house. We had left them the key with neighbors. Marc picked us up at the airport, and we spent 10 days with the four of them. We became especially fond of Edith, Marc's mother

Edith and Louis at a dinner party for them,

To which we had invited Carolyn and Okke van Oudgaarden, a pilot and Carolyn's new boyfriend. He was Dutch but had grown up on the Italian part of the Côte d'Azure. A nice man we all became fond of in the three years they were together.

In November a large exhibition of paintings by Laura Hernández, a Zapotec from Oaxaca, Mexico, took place at MoLAA in Long Beach. Laura's paintings, impressed me for their wild, dreamlike content.

I went back a second time and took a whole film of photographs of her very large canvasses and especially of her 3-meter-high "Olmec" piñata heads. .

Later I also dragged Marc there on a third visit. The photographs were misplaced until 2006, when Barbara found them again. Curious of what had become of Laura I searched for her for several weeks. There was nothing on her in the internet until Inez Baker, a Dutch friend, found a poem to Laura by an admirer, Walter van Lotringen, in the Dutch internet! Through Walter's woman friend, Tineke Pothumus (!), I finally got Laura's e-mail address. From this contact a close friendship has developed with Laura Hernández.

During the weeks before Christmas many friends stayed with us: Peter Steeger from Tokyo came and took me and Sherwin Amimoto on flights to Las Vegas and Mammoth. Robert Forrest and Lorrain Ruston came, and Julia Kempe with her latest hyperintelligent, shifty boyfriend Juri, a physicist at CALTECH.

Finally on December 21 Cornelius arrived for Christmas and a few days later Anne-Cécile!

Dinner with Cornelius, AC, Sherwin, and who took the picture, Anneliese? AC's most skeptical look..

Over New Year Cornelius and AC went to Baja Calfornia. She loved this kind of extreme trip - and Cornelius loved to take her around.