Into Trouble, deep.

Into Trouble, deep.

To call our family normal might be far stretch, but we never really considered ourselves really special. There is Tatiana my beautiful, gorgeous wife, a real life super model. There is Vanessa my daughter and Peter my son. There is Barrow our Husky, Scape our goat and Trouble our Siberian tiger. We all live in a beautiful home located above the beaches of Santa Monica in the Hollywood Hills, California. You might have blinked and read the list of family members again, yes there is indeed a Siberian Tiger and it is a real one, but before I tell you about Trouble and how he ended up being a family member I think I tell you how it all began. This story is as much about trouble as it is about my family. Since I am the one telling it I start with me.

-1- ME I wasn’t born in the United States. I came to this world in Germany and during the sixties in a town called Karlsruhe. The big war that ruined Germany, cost the lives of millions and burned the word German as the ultimate evil race in the Universe firmly in the minds of everyone else on this globe. Another war was fought and again with Germany squarely in the center. The Cold War, east versus west. Countless nuclear warheads, bombs and other sinister devices pointed at major population centers of the other side. Germany split into two. East and West Germany and thanks to the immense help from the United States and the Marshall plan, the West prospered like never before in a time called the “Wunderjahre”. Luckily for Germany it was the Marshall Plan and not the Morgentau plan that had been picked as what was to be done with that nation after that great War. My mother a medicine student in a time where female med students were still a rarity, especially in Germany, was recognized by her professors early on to be a great talent and would be a brilliant doctor one day. She was the only female student and much to the dismay of her male colleagues the darling of the teaching body. It was a hard fight she often told to be accepted and to stand up and speak her mind in front of the class and to old Professors who got their education even before the mad man from Austria took over. Some of them still had a firm idea in what was proper and what was not. An American Guest professor saw my mother’s potential and managed to