Some buildings are good friends. Over the years, my family has visited Mittenwald, a quintessential Alpine village in Germany on the Austrian border. For a generation, we’ve walked past this enduring structure in a quiet neighborhood. One still evening, it rested, unhurried in a certain light before sunset, content to offer a convenient, and nearly extinct, means to buy some smokes. My 10 year-old photo assistant daughter and I spent some time greeting and admiring it. We didn’t notice at the time but there is an unexplained apparition in the window. Two years later, we returned to Mittenwald and on our first walk, sadly realized that the building’s exterior had been updated, renovated … modernized. The Zigaretten machine was gone forever.