Light on a Living Room Wall

Before I knew Europe as geography, I knew it as light on a living room wall.

My father had a slide projector—I can still hear, or think I can hear, the dry mechanical click of the carousel advancing, the brief dark pause, then the next image flaring into place. Other nights the projector was different—an 8mm reel threading through its sprockets, short silent films in color, a few minutes each before the leader whipped out and flapped in the light. Sometimes it was just our family gathered in the evening. Sometimes extended family came, or friends, and the event took on the air of a small performance.

Lights off.

Voices settling.

The projector humming warm.

And my father narrating another world.

There were castles rising from mist, plazas and cathedrals, mountain roads, old streets whose names I struggled to pronounce. Normandy. Mont-Saint-Michel, which he would help me say slowly, syllable by syllable, as if giving me a spell. Liechtenstein, which fascinated me because he explained it was an entire country, absurdly small, tucked inside mountains. There were places tied to our own ancestry in Bohemia, and castles there that fed something already stirring in me.

He had gone to France, Germany, Liechtenstein, and many other places I could barely hold in imagination.

To a child on a farm, these images were not travel slides.

They were portals.

And there was always, according to the family joke, a pretty woman near my father in half the photographs.

This became ritual too.

The adults would tease him mercilessly.

There she is again.

Another one.

Your father sure made friends in Europe.

Even my mother joined in.

There was laughter every time, a running comedy threaded through cathedrals and castles.

As a child, I only partly understood the joke, but I loved the atmosphere of it—the way the slides carried not just faraway grandeur but family playfulness.

Even memory, in our house, came with heckling.

There was one story told alongside the slides that always seemed to glow darker around the edges.

He had intended to go to the Munich Olympics in 1972.

But the terrorist attack changed those plans.

There were no slides of that.

An absence in the carousel.

The trip not taken.

For some reason that moved me even as a child—that history could intrude on an itinerary, that there were images which might have existed but never would.

The missing slide became part of the story too.

And outside the slide nights, Europe spilled into ordinary life.

At the dinner table he would sometimes teach us bits of French or German, not systematically, just tossed into conversation like sparks. He would sing fragments of French songs, only a chorus line or two, often from Edith Piaf. I was probably the only child in my school who knew her name.

That felt like a secret distinction.

And there was pain au chocolat.

He made them for my lunch sometimes, which struck me as wildly sophisticated though, if I’m honest, my chief loyalty was to the chocolate.

Even these small things carried the same enchantment as the slides.

Europe appeared not as abstraction but as crumbs on wax paper, as a song half-whistled, as a father correcting your pronunciation of Normandie.

Those talks were formative.

Most of them happened when I was in second through sixth grade, those age-rings when the world is still being assembled.

And my father was quietly enlarging mine.

He was not a man who lectured much or imposed grand philosophies.

But through slides and side comments and stories, he gave me something harder to name:

wanderlust.

A sense that the world was older, stranger, layered with castles and revolutions and languages and ancestral traces waiting beyond Wisconsin.

I knew, even then, I wanted to make similar journeys.

Part of me hoped I would make them with him.

That part never came to pass.

I traveled to Europe later, but he never returned.

There is some ache in that.

Yet maybe what mattered is that he had already taken me there in another way.

Through projection.

Through story.

Through inherited longing.

This belonged to the hidden self I kept discovering in glimpses—the chess-club president, the language student, the traveler, the man whose practical farm life held unsuspected interior continents.

His history often felt hidden to me, perhaps because of trauma, perhaps because quietness was simply his nature. A father dead early, houses lost to fire, a sister gone too young—there were depths he did not narrate.

But the slides narrated something.

They were evidence.

Proof he had once moved through old worlds I only dreamed about.

And the most moving part now is that the slides still exist.

Somewhere in boxes.

Small transparencies waiting for light.

Undigitized.

Dormant.

They are not relics but sleeping lanterns.

I want to see them again.

Not only for the castles or the teased-about women in every frame.

But to hear, through them, my father once more saying Mont-Saint-Michel into the dark.

And perhaps this is what inheritance sometimes is:

not land,

not objects,

but someone handing you a far-off place in childhood and making you believe you might someday walk there.