Bella the Dog and the Ramblin Man

I am Schroeder.

I was walking the dog, Bella, in a very windy sugarbeet field near Aldenhoven, just a short time ago, when I conceived of this blog. I had stopped to smoke my fourth cigarette of the day on the downwind side of a row of trees that separated the sugarbeet field from a potato field, and I had thought, 'What shall I do with myself when I get home?' And so the blog.

I was not only taking Bella for a routine walk, but also training her to heel. Bella, a shiny black Border Collie-like dog, perhaps not quite as clever as a Border Collie, sits and lies down on command. In German, the commands are, 'Sitz!' and 'Platz!', and Bella obeys these commands very well, but she hasn't been a good dog on the leash. She pulls in every direction, and wants to attack every other dog or anything she can't identify in the distance.
The other day, Elke and I were walking Bella, and in the exact place where I was now smoking my fourth cigarette of the day and thinking of this blog, a woman had passed with a chocolate lab with a blue neckerchief on its neck. The dog was very well behaved, but Bella strained and pulled and snarled.
Elke had said something like, 'Guten tag,' to the woman, but the woman responded with many words that I didn't understand. Her words were measured, neither polite nor impolite, like the words of a school teacher. Elke and I walked on a bit before she told me the woman had said that we had to train our dog.
So now I am training Bella so that, in the future, when we pass the woman with the chocolate lab, whatever it is that she says, whether 'Well done,' or, 'It's about time,' I can tell her to shut up.
If she says nothing I can still tell her to shut up, referring to the last time we met.
And if Bella isn't yet trained to heel, and again pulls and snarls, I can still tell her to shut up.
Meanwhile, Bella's training is going well.

I have named my blog, 'Schroeder's Ramblings' because I have done a lot of rambling, in both senses of the word. My original idea was to call it simply, 'Schroeder's Blog', but when I typed in the blog address with the same words as the title, the computer informed me that that address had already been taken. So I came up with the far more clever title, which hasn't been taken.

I chose the 'Awesome' layout for the blog for the sake of irony.

Though the reader may already understand my rambling in one sense of the word, the other may need some explanation.
You see, I've been a 'ramblin' man' for the past two years, though any image the reader may have of me in relation to the song may be misleading. My father was not a gambler down in Georgia, though I understand he'd played a little blackjack once or twice somewhere in Nevada. Nor was he ever involved in gunplay, though he'd taught me how to shoot a .22. No, my father, though born and raised on a farm in North Dakota, had turned out to be a computer engineer for America's space program.
And I was born in a hospital in Santa Monica, California, and not on a Greyhound Bus. I've ridden a few Greyhound buses though, and I can tell you that no one should give birth to a child on one.
Finally, though I have lived in the South, I lived in the suburbs, in Satellite Beach, Florida. We had a swimming pool and a big yard and two cars, neither of them jalopies. 
I have been to both New Orleans and Nashville though. As a child I was in Nashville as a tourist. In my twenties I was there on a road trip, then later I was there as a truck driver, which is more in the spirit of bein a ramblin man. I've only been to New Orleans as a tourist though.  I have never been to the bayou, and I've never met a Delta woman, or never one who identified herself as such.
Nevertheless, I have indeed been a ramblin man of sorts these past two years, trying to make a livin, more or less, and doin the best I can.

In the strictest sense of the word, my ramblin began on November 4th, 2011, when I walked away from our little home in Portugal accompanied by my daughter, Olivia.
In the strictest sense of the word, my ramblin ended about two weeks ago, when I settled down in Aldenhoven, Germany.
In the strictest sense of one sense of the word, that is.
Still ramblin in the other sense of the word.

My ramblin began because I was called to a vocation, to walk for peace to the Middle East, which is not so much like the Allman Brothers' Ramblin Man.
My ramblin has ended because I did the walk, then cycled to Aldenhoven from Italy while on the way to Syria, only to discover that the whole ramblin epic journey had been designed by the Grand Designer to meet Elke, the woman whose home I now live in with three of her six children and Bella, the dog.

And now I think I'll quit ramblin for a spell and have my fifth cigarette of the day.