Germans get a head start celebrating Mardi Gras ("Karneval"). The "crazy days" start on November 11th, officially at 11:11 a.m. When I went to the Frankfurt airport a few days later for my Thanksgiving trip to Mobile, some must have thought that I was a Mardi Gras enthusiast!

When my able assistant Jesmina attended a conference in Cincinnati a few years ago, she had a chance to visit some friends who live in Sugarcreek, Ohio, in the northeast part of the state. From there she brought me back an unusual present. It was a hat with a working clock, complete with a couple of small pictures of trains and the words "Time for trains". I don’t know how she got the hat back to Germany without wrecking it – she says she had it in her suitcase, and it wasn’t packed in a box, either. At any rate, the clock really works and keeps pretty good time. But it isn’t the kind of thing a normal person would wear, so I put it on the top shelf of a bookcase in my office in Bonn, where it kept good time until the battery ran out.

I decided that my grandson Sean would really like the hat and put it to better use than I do. Sean is a bit of a train enthusiast. So I told Jesmina that her noble gift was being passed on to my grandson. The only question was how I would get the hat over to the USA. Since I travel light on my trips back and forth between Germany and Alabama, what better way to go than to wear the hat? When I checked in for my flight in Frankfurt, I noticed that the Delta agent had an unusual look on his face. Then I got to security. Since 9/11 there are two security checks for flights to the USA. At the first checkpoint the security agents wondered where I had gotten the hat, seeming a bit suprised that I might have purchased the hat in Germany. I reassured them that the hat was from the USA, thereby preserving Germany’s reputation as a manufacturer of high-quality industrial products. Then at the second checkpoint the agents did not want to believe that the clock actually worked. After all, there wasn’t any battery in it for the trip. I reassured them that it did, and one of them said, "Well, if I wore this on the job, everyone would always know what time it is!" Another security agent asked me if the clock had an alarm so I could wear it in bed. It doesn’t. He got a good chuckle out of that. Well, after a long day and more stares, the hat made it safely to Mobile. I sure hope that Sean likes it!