By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
Lifestyle Columnist

Our daughter's significant other, Rainer, keeps us informed about what Mary's doing, how she is, the weather, the music scene.

Thanks to him, we have a pretty good idea what her life is like in Germany. The postal services of both countries are so slow that by the time a regular letter gets an answer, we've forgotten the question. The telephone is too expensive to use except for emergencies. Besides, the six-hour time difference, their erratic work schedules, and my preference for off-peak rates rule out phoning for routine exchanges.

So for years we mostly faxed, although I had to take care that it wasn't so late they would be asleep. A single typed page goes to Germany for about $1.29 after 5 p.m. and weekends — not too bad. But at this end, my computer is the fax machine. With only one phone line, I'd turn off the phone ringer and leave WinFax on “Receive fax” two nights a week.

Communication has picked up considerably since Rainer got e-mail and they've moved into the age of cybercommunication. Sort of. Mary spends most of her time in Koln since taking her new job there, although she still thinks of their apartment in Gelsenkirchen as “home.” When she's “home,” she writes me herself; when she's in Koln, it's more complicated.

I write to her by e-mailing Rainer, who then relays the message to her by phone or fax. In reply, she calls him or faxes him a note, and he scans it into his computer and e-mails the image to me. Rainer's Internet provider is called Freenet.de, which implies that it is a free service like freeWWWeb here. The big difference, however, is that in Germany there's a charge for every phone call.

Local calls are cheaper than distant ones, true, but the system is certainly a disincentive to long hours of surfing.

Rainer thinks of us as family, and often writes us cheery, chatty letters himself. Even after years of acquaintance, German adults hesitate to use first names, but Rainer has adopted Mary's looser American ways. His letters invariably begin, “Hello Sallie! Hello David!” They make me think of that silly “camp” song: “Hello Mudda! Hello Faddah!”

His English is excellent, although he sometimes apologizes: “Sorry I am not a native speaker.” He always closes, “Lots of love to you and David,” and adds a P.S., “Hope to see you in Gelsenkirchen soon.”

He wrote about Mary's moving day. Because he had a performance in Gelsenkirchen he couldn't miss — he's an oboist and English horn player in the orchestra there — he rented a truck, conscripted a timpanist, and moved her stuff downstairs the evening before. The apartment in Gelsenkirchen is on the fifth floor. With no elevator.

“The trip to Cologne was very short. Mary, Nico and I started at 9.30 a.m. and we reached her [new] apartment at 10.30. It took us 30 minutes to bring all her things up to her rooms on the second floor. “There is a larger kitchen (larger than ours), a bathroom (a third the size of the bathroom here in GE [a converted bedroom] and a living room which is a little bit larger than our music room. She'll buy a loft bed to have more possibilities in this double-used room. Then we went to a breakfast restaurant and had a nice second breakfast.

“They have a really good local coffee brand which made a delicious milkcoffee. After our return to GE I took the truck back to the rental station and I rode on my bike back home.”

He described the planned loft bed as tall enough for him, at six feet, to stand under. “Mary's loft bed is handcrafted by a local joiner and we hope that she gets her mattress pretty soon. We too think that a loft bed is a good idea and we'll put a Schrank [wardrobe] and her desk under it.”

For Mary's birthday, they “went to a nice restaurant, The Whistle Stop Cafe, the name of the restaurant in the movie `Fried Green Tomatoes.' Had a delicious meal. Great food.”

Rainer's stories seem to revolve around eating. He mentioned that at the time we were boating in Alabama, they were “in Alabama too, but our Alabama was a nice little restaurant in Cologne with good food and cool drinks...

“Yesterday your gift for Mary's birthday was in the postbox. I was on the way to Cologne anyway so I brought her the present [a Marilyn vos Savant memory-exercise book]. “I met her after her rehearsal in the evening and we went to a Mexican place for dinner. She liked your present very much and started to read in the book instantly. We loved the Dave Barry clips, especially the majonaise story.”

I sent him a postcard of the Chattanooga Choo-Choo — his hobby is railroad photography. “Thank you for the postcard from Chattanooga. It's a great train and I have the music of Glen Miller in my ears.

“We opened the new opera season on Sunday. It was a (too) long show (almost four hours), but all the artists, including the orchestra, had been invited by the Forderverein [a sort of theater Booster Club] to the foyer and we had free food and drinks. A nice gesture, I think.

“Many people asked for Mary and I had to explain a lot what she is doing now.”'

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