German Diary

Leveson Inquiry continues ...

2012-01-13T20:31:00.002+01:00

The Leveson Inquiry has reconvened this week following the holiday break.

It is worth a watch to catch Mr. Jay in all his inquisitorial eloquence. Justice Leveson has, for the most part, allowed Mr. Jay to corner and confront the witnesses uninterrupted. Jay, brimming with righteous indignation in the face of Editors from various British papers, was nothing short of brilliant.

Thursday’s grilling of Mr. Peter Hill was particularly acute. When the testimony turned to the McCann case, I actually winced as Mr. Jay plowed through Mr. Hill’s defense of the indefensible.

http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk

The Leveson Inquiry: Highly Relevant Reality TV

2011-12-19T10:50:00.003+01:00

Part One: The players

Great Britain is known for its quality television and the drama currently running in London and presided over by Lord Justice Leveson is TV of the highest order for anyone with an interest in the current state of media in the UK. Public outrage over phone hacking by Murdoch-owned newspaper News of the World brought the inquiry into being but the inquiry is reaching far beyond that one issue, delving deep into the heart of the British press establishment.

The stakes are high – LJL must deliver a report to Parliament in late 2012 detailing what he has learned about the culture, ethics and practices of the Press, to include his examination of its relationship with politicians and the police. Further, his report will make recommendations for a new approach to press regulation, which will likely gut the current Press Complaints Commission. It’s serious, important, timely and juicy viewing and it all unfolds daily via live webcasts.

The cast of characters thus far has been impressive. The celebrities include Hugh Grant, Sienna Miller, J.K. Rowling and Charlotte Church; the victims include the Dowler and McCann families, Max Mosely, Mary-Ellen Field, Chris Jeffries, Margaret Watson and Garry Flitcroft. Private investigator Derek Webb, journalist Nick Davies, scholars, lawyers, newspaper editors and reporters - undercover and otherwise - round out the cast and more are to come.

The lawyers. The attorneys representing the newspapers are there, cast in the role of surrogate villains. Mr. Kaplan (who often looks like a deer caught in the headlights) and Mr. Davies (whose toothy smile is so off-putting one expects LJL to make a ruling from the bench that Mr. Davies may only ask questions sans smile) are the key players for the defense. The lawyer representing many of the victims, Mr. Sherborne, relishes his moments in the glare with a bit too much enthusiasm. He could also use a wardrobe intervention.

The counsel to the Inquiry are as different from one another as night and day. Lead counsel is Mr. Jay – serious, experienced, reserved (most of the time) and able. Mr. Jay often sprawls over his podium, face down in his notes, twisting his neck to one side and raising his head just enough to squeeze out his questions. When he gets wound up, which he does with certain of the witnesses, his questioning is brilliant and piercing and can leave a witness desperate for relief. I wouldn’t want to meet Mr. Jay in the witness box when he was riled. Now and then, however, just when Mr. Jay is closing in for the kill, the witness squirming, counsel for the newspapers poised to raise some sort of objection to prevent an incriminating utterance, LJL will interrupt Mr. Jay with a redundant question or clarification. It is maddening to witness and one can only imagine what Mr. Jay might wish to say were he not constrained by the protocols of the courtroom.

Mr. Barr is a wholesome-looking young attorney, junior to Mr. Jay, but capable of delivering a solid, focused interrogation. He is, however, regrettably burdened with a distracting habit of inserting “uh” between nearly every other word. He appears an able lawyer, but his questioning of the witnesses can be a bit nerve-wracking to watch.

Ms. Patry Hoskins, of “the woman on the left” twitter fame, is the ingénue among the key lawyers. She is a comely young woman with a soft Scottish brogue whose questioning can sometimes sound apologetic. Last week, she faced Derek Webb, a former police officer turned private investigator.

If there ever was a beauty and the beast moment in the Inquiry, this was it. Ms. Patry Hoskins ever so gently lobbed the questions in to the beefy, weathered, former cop who not only answered her but often had to be stopped from going too far and incriminating others. Ms. Patry Hoskins was soft-spoken, hesitant at times, unfailingly polite but devastatingly probative in her interrogation. It was good television.

The man at the center of the action is Lord Justice Leveson. He appears an unassuming man cast in a role at the center of one of the largest public media scandals of our time. He comes across as confident and in control of the proceedings, clear-headed in purpose and just a touch puckish. That’s the quality that makes him an interesting character to observe. Although he often sits with his brow furrowed, contemplating the oral evidence or perusing a text, now and then there is a brightening glint in his eyes as he gently corrects an attorney who has gone off on a tangent or asks a question from the bench of a witness whose testimony seems to him incredulous or surprising. It is that quality of demonstrating genuine curiosity that makes him an endearing character in this drama. He is the Lord Justice and seems to relish his role as such, but he never lords over the proceedings, rather choosing to guide it, nudge it here and there, while keeping its focus clear and its direction steady. The questions he poses from the bench can be a touch discordant with those of his inquiring counsel (as noted above with respect to Mr. Jay) but these interjections are few and the overall impression one takes away is of a judge who is in his element, a man well-suited to the task and enjoying every minute of it.

http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk

At Dusk in a Park nearby

2011-11-27T07:40:00.001+01:00

It was nearly dusk and the dark-suited businessman was busy with a phone call. He was on his way somewhere important it seemed, briefcase swinging from his free hand, the other pressing the phone to his ear. He was walking through a park near the center of town.

HH and a group of friends were playing soccer nearby, shooting wildly at the goal, the improvised boundaries of which were rapidly disappearing in the waning light. Another kick went wide and the ball sailed off through the trees and leaves marking a path that would inevitably intersect with the businessman’s.

He didn’t acknowledge the ball. I didn’t think he even saw it, so wrapped up in his conversation as he was. But as the ball closed in, he turned to face the boys and swung his leg, the side of his foot connecting solidly with the ball and sending it, and with it himself, cleanly back into play.

Setting it right

2011-09-07T05:05:00.000+02:00

It’s an older tale than I can tell

As far back as winter

And knowing it will come

I’ve just spent another day in the sun

Burning my shoulders

And wrecking my hands

That will carry the scars and scales I’ve made today

Through the first winds of late September

It’s a race of faith

But a scanty faith it is

As solid as memory

Taking note

2011-07-05T05:37:00.000+02:00

The changes come less frequently now, settled, more or less, as we are in this place.

The urge to take note of differences between what I had known and what I am seeing for the first time, the observations that sparked me to take to the page a year or two ago or more are less urgent. It is a still remarkable however, and rarely a day goes by when I don’t pause my thoughts to take it in, the little things, the pace of life I have not yet begun to take for granted and may never, given as I am to expecting change.

Yesterday, as I hurried through the morning catching up on errands, there was a short stretch of such recognition. A barrier separates the small paved path in front of our building, a path that runs the length of the park outside our windows. This barrier forces you to alter your course, weave through it, slow down, turn and straighten again before continuing on. And I thought to myself, ‘here I am navigating my wobbly Dutch bike through this ancient German city on a cool summer morning.’ I never would have imagined it as a young man growing up in America.

Not that it’s such a foreign place; Europe isn’t so different from other places I have known. It isn’t China or Borneo or Tierra del Fuego but it is just different enough to strike me now and then with wonder and appreciation.

HH is growing, fast and in every imaginable way. Two shoe sizes since his last pair of trainers, language, emotions and understanding just about keeping pace with his physical changes. He realizes he is a person with roots in two countries, two continents, and two traditions. Soccer and baseball compete with each other for his imagination. He wants to invite Derek Jeter and Bastian Schweinsteiger and to his birthday party. I had told him he could invite anyone he wished but I was a bit surprised when these two names appeared on the list. I tried to break it to him gently that these fellows had pretty demanding schedules and weren’t likely to show up. I think he knew that going in.

Summer is upon us and soon we will be back in the USA for a spell. As much as I love this place, I am looking forward to the sounds and smells (the grill will be the first thing out of the storage shed) of home. Home – but that’s the subject for another day. HH is stirring.

SS 396

2011-06-14T05:21:00.000+02:00

It was only that one night. I don’t remember who else was in the car. I didn’t know the boy who drove but I must have known one of the other boys. I’ve replayed that night so many times that it has taken on a significance far greater than it merits. I was dreaming about it yet again this morning just before I woke.

It was summer, late summer 1968 and the car was a fire engine red Chevy Malibu SS 396. The car rumbled, a low growling vibrating rumble that you felt throughout your body. There was nothing subtle about the car. It was a muscle car, made for acceleration, to impress, intimidate and dominate. I was sixteen.

We drove to the A&W root beer drive-in. The parking lot was where everything happened, the cruise we had come participate in, down and through the rows of parked cars, snaking slowly, rumbling, rumbling, growling at the other cars, watching and being watched.

But we were out of our comfort zone, at least I was. The other teenagers there that night were older, a year or two at that age makes a world of difference. We were riding in the ultimate sex machine but I wouldn’t have known what to do had one of the girls I ogled through the glass actually returned my stare.

It was only that one night. I never rode in that fire engine red Chevy Malibu SS 396 again, not in the flesh at least. But I’ve taken that ride a thousand times in memory, in dreams, in the late, late night just before waking.

Shameless Self Promotion

2011-04-19T21:41:00.003+02:00

Just click on the title above and vote, if you feel inclined.

Thanks,

Richard

April 15 - Pretty in Pink

2011-04-15T12:38:00.002+02:00

April 14

2011-04-15T12:36:00.002+02:00

A Time to Talk

2011-04-15T05:03:00.001+02:00

When a friend calls to me from the road

And slows his horse to a meaning walk,

I don’t stand still and look around

On all the hills I haven’t hoed,

And shout from where I am, What is it?

No, not as there is a time to talk.

I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,

Blade-end up and five feet tall,

And plod: I go up to the stone wall

For a friendly visit.

Robert Frost

April 13

2011-04-13T08:23:00.002+02:00

April 12

2011-04-12T08:30:00.002+02:00

April 11

2011-04-11T08:26:00.001+02:00

April 10

2011-04-10T12:00:00.001+02:00

April 9 - Flower Bed as Dump

2011-04-09T08:29:00.001+02:00

April 8

2011-04-08T12:35:00.001+02:00

April 7

2011-04-07T15:43:00.002+02:00

Spring

2011-04-07T04:49:00.003+02:00

This world’s a very shaky place right now.

Recent events in Japan and New Zealand find those island nations facing devastation and loss beyond comprehension. Africa and the Middle East are boiling with political upheavals on a scale not seen since the last World War and much of the rest of the world is teetering on the brink of economic instability; one small “puff” from another floundering bank or financial institution and the whole house of cards could come tumbling down. Given this disturbing state of affairs, I have taken to getting my hands dirty.

In the relative calm of this German city on the Rhine, spring has begun to show itself in the cracking upheavals of soil long hard-packed by winter. It is a signal to the residents that they can once again venture out into the parks and green spaces belting Cologne. Just yesterday the daffodils opened and one or two early tulips showed their colors. The roses have begun to leaf out and the lilac trees are showing promising buds. All of this renewal in the ground calls to me and my fellow gardeners to take up our trowels and rakes and begin the work of preparing our beds for the coming season.

Along with a group of my neighbors, I tend a public garden located in the heart of the city, an oasis of green in a city known, alas, for its post-war architectural blandness. Many of the public spaces here are desolate expanses of man-made materials. Yes, we have a green belt, the trees of which are the lungs of the city and it is a wonderful thing indeed, but the central city is notable for the near absence of anything green. As a result, our neighborhood park is flush with visitors from all quarters. They come early and stay late, meeting, drinking, playing music, drinking, taking photographs, drinking, eating, and then of course, drinking.

You might say that given all the awful things going on in the world, a less ostrich-like response would be a called for. But I would take issue there. In recent weeks, I made myself a little crazy staying glued to Al Jazeera, checking with the New York Times and generally trying to keep up with events as they unfolded. I still keep informed, but when you think about it, aside from donating money, voting and generally trying to do the right thing, I can have very little impact on the world beyond the immediate community in which I live. And that, making a small difference in the world outside my door, is what community gardening is all about to me.

This morning, after taking His Holiness to school and before beginning my work day, I stopped off in the garden to clean out the bottle caps and beer bottles from last night’s festivities. While there, a mother walked by with her toddler, pointing out the flowers to him as he waddled by the beds probably oblivious to the world beyond the outstretched hand guiding him down the path. They were followed by another neighbor, a retiree who had a small flower bed outside her front door. She was having trouble with a lilac tree that wasn’t doing well and asked if I would transplant it into one of my larger beds. We talked about sun and soil and how it would be best to wait until autumn to move the plant and she told me she hoped she would be around for another autumn, that time was short. Children on their way to school passed by, some taking the time to greet me by name, dog-walkers, early morning strollers, the neighborhood regulars who do not take for granted the importance of this slice of green beauty in the midst of the city. This too has merit, this momentary dose of peace from something so simple yet so profound, the living manifestation of renewal, promise, life.

April 6

2011-04-06T16:21:00.001+02:00

April 5

2011-04-06T16:19:00.001+02:00

April 4

2011-04-06T16:16:00.003+02:00

April 3

2011-04-06T16:14:00.001+02:00

Writing by the light

2011-01-09T06:37:00.002+01:00

Only in the pale light

Writing in the faintest waning light

Ending of a Dream light

Dancing four of four of living light

The end of Santa

2010-12-30T06:08:00.002+01:00

HH knows there is no Santa Claus.

On Christmas morning he was the first one into the living room. He had made us promise the night before that no one would go into the room before him. When he opened the door and saw his new bike, he looked at me and asked if I had bought it. I asked him what he thought and he said, “Papa bought the gifts” and I told him he was right. He didn’t mention it again.

The night before, sitting in the kitchen worrying that he might be disappointed this year because there were not as many gifts under the tree as there were last year, his mother and I talked about the feeling we had that something was a bit off with him, that he wasn’t as excited about the day as we thought he should be, and we concluded that he had learned or suspected that Santa Claus was a story and not a real person. We were right in at least part of our assumption. His mood of the previous day might have been the result of any number of things – but the loss of Santa was likely one of them.

It might not have been a huge blow to him – this knowledge of the reality of Santa – but it was a blow to me. I have been tracking HH’s growth and development in these pages over the years and with each new development I feel the loss of his childhood, his innocence, and with it the loss of something personal. Perhaps it is the realization that with every new evidence of his maturity comes the corresponding and undeniable fact of my own decline, my very real waning. It isn’t a zero-sum game we are playing, we aren’t in competition with each other for anything, but as I look at him, watch him grow, witness the changes that are shaping him, I am forced to notice the waning of my own abilities, my strength, endurance, flexibility… He is a mirror held up to me, this strong young boy who runs and learns and develops new capacities while the only quickening I feel is the rapid onset of withering.

Perhaps it is the season, the end of another year, the fact that I don’t have as much faith in the prospects before me in the coming year as I might have had in previous years. Perhaps the loss of Santa means so much to me because I took so much pleasure in preparing for it, assembling the gifts and wrapping them, watching him as he crept into the living room on Christmas morning and seeing the light in his eyes as he tore the wrapping paper away and gasped at the contents of each new box. The days and weeks leading up to Christmas, the letters to Santa, the excitement of the night before when he could barely get to sleep, these are the things I will miss. Some of that will remain but an element has surely been lost, that mystery of the little man who comes at night and lays gifts beneath the tree, the little man we never see but believe in nonetheless, the elements of fantasy and magic and wonder. I mourn the loss of his innocence and I mourn the loss of my role in sustaining it.

It is one of the gifts of parenthood, this time of year, playing Santa, inhabiting that mythic character for a few days, watching your child revel in it and at the same time realizing how brief a spell it is.

There is so much changed in him. He is seven now and in the second grade. His vocabulary increases daily, his physical strength, his size, and his knowledge of the world – all of it expanding at a rate I can barely keep track of. His personality is also developing, his independence, his will, his temperment. There are elements there that trouble me now and then, his impatience for example, a trait I share with him and in all likelihood have taught him by example. Oh we must proceed with care we fathers. The things we teach our sons by example far exceed anything we might wish them to learn by our words.

I am writing this on the eve of a new year, in a troubled world, a world of uncertainty and war, a world not unlike that faced by my parents when we were young. But it is also a world far safer than that faced by the families that lived in this very house sixty-five years ago as World War Two raged to an end, as allied bombs tore apart the streets and buildings of this neighborhood, as the world crumbled around them as it had for millions of others far less fortunate, their victims in many cases, as it would for millions more in the decades that followed. We have it far better now than they did, far better than many of our fellow creatures do, and for that I am grateful.

So as I write this eulogy of sorts on the loss of Santa, I am chastened by the knowledge that our loss is a minor one, an undetectable flicker in the night, no matter how large it may seem to me here, waiting for my son to wake, on a pre-dawn winter’s morning. That said; I can’t help but wish that Santa had returned just one more time to this place. I don’t expect I will know him again.

December 22, 2010

2010-12-22T04:12:00.000+01:00

I would call her now

And if not now

Then later

This afternoon when it was still

When the chores were done

And we were drinking coffee

In separate rooms

Towns, States, Countries

We always found the time

But this I cannot bridge

This distance

The great unfathomable

That’s what it means

The loss

It’s the talking

On a winter’s afternoon

About life

That has been cut short

Shorter than it might have been

Than I wish it was

And I miss it

And her

And I always will

Until I am no more

The Secret Germans

2010-11-02T20:48:00.001+01:00

A little over four years ago, I moved to Germany. I am a Mayflower American with ancestors stretching back to Plymouth. I never imagined myself as an expat.

That all changed when I married a German and we had a son. We were living in Manhattan at the time, and about one year after the birth of our child my wife expressed her desire to return home. I had lived in Manhattan for most of my adult life and although I had enjoyed most of that time immensely, I could not imagine raising a child there. This feeling was only enhanced by the events of September 11, which my wife and I witnessed from our neighborhood streets in the West Village, and by the ever-sharpening political divide spreading through the country as a result of the Iraq war and the “my way or the highway” rhetoric of our President and his handlers. It was also painfully clear to us that we could never afford to upgrade from our tiny West Village apartment to anything like an apartment big enough to accommodate the three of us. That, and the certain costs of schooling, the politics, and the undeniable lure of Europe, brought us to our decision to leave.

I did not speak a word of German and I had only visited the country briefly during summer holidays. I had no idea what to expect and I was intimidated at the prospect of trying to find work, raise a child and make a home in a country about which I knew relatively little. Like many Americans of my generation, I grew up with the stereotypes of Germans as they were portrayed in films and television shows about World War Two. They seldom smiled, unless enraptured in a state of shadenfreude at the suffering of others, were often blunt to a fault and were terribly fond of ordering others around. The flip-side of these dark generalizations was the kooky-stern obtuseness of Colonel Klink from “Hogan’s Heroes.”

Armed with this vast understanding of my soon-to-be neighbors, I proceeded to stay inside our apartment for long stretches of time, venturing out only for German lessons, which were painfully difficult. I lived in a bubble for nearly two years, blocking out most of the unfamiliar sounds around me, the voices of passersby, fellow passengers on the tram, and anyone who might try to get my attention. I simply pretended I didn’t hear them.

I remember one afternoon in particular. I was sitting in a small café near our apartment, by myself, having a cup of coffee and reading. I was in full bubble mode until I heard the voice of Judy Garland coming from behind the bar. I could almost feel tiny doors inside my head opening as I took in the familiar sounds of my native tongue. It was in that instant that I realized how much I was surely missing of the world around me. These people listened to Judy Garland, I thought to myself, it might just be worth the effort to get to know them.

Hundreds of hours of German lessons later, I was able to carry on brief conversations with some of the vendors at the nearby Farmer’s Market. I may never be able to communicate with many of them, because they speak with heavy regional accents, seasoned with dialect mumbled in terse bursts. To them, I will continue to nod knowingly and point – the last defense of the speechless.

But I have been able to break through with some of the people with whom I regularly come in contact and those relationships have shown me a side of Germany, and the Germans, that I never knew existed. It isn’t a remarkable insight on my part. Speaking the language of the country in which you live is a sine qua non for assimilation – a topic on which the Germans are very keen. But it was a breakthrough for me. The bubble slowly evaporated and there I was, a local - not a foreigner, a neighbor - not a stranger. It was only then, when I began to understand the voices around me, that I started to realize that Germans have a sense of humor, they are warm and generous and yes, friendly.

I’ve come to know my neighbors, my grocer, baker, mail carrier, butcher. I recognize the faces of the taxi drivers who cue up each morning at the end of the block. We say good morning and now and then exchange brief pleasantries across the parking lot. And even the men who sit each day in the park and drink, even these men say hello to me each morning when I walk by to tend the flowers in the beds surrounding our small enclave here in Cologne. The Germans I have come to know in the last four years have been generous of their time and wisdom, have helped me in innumerable ways to navigate through this once strange place I now call home. It is a false stereotype we Americans carry around with us - as many stereotypes often are – of the stern cold German. They may be slow to warm, that I will grant you, but there is a certain wisdom in that. But once they take you in, they take you in fully, warts and all. Were I to leave this place I would miss it, but I have no plans to do so. The Germany that I have come to know is not perfect, it has its problems like any country, but the people are solid – solid and true and warm. A secret worth sharing.

2010-09-20T11:30:00.003+02:00

There isn’t any one thing that stands out from summer; we planted a tree, played baseball, watched the moon rise one late August night through the telescope he got for Christmas last year, spent days swimming or not swimming, but on the lake, digging in the sandy dirt, running, laughing, eating one dollar fudgesicles at 3PM when Ice Cream Pat rang the small bell on the wall of the shack where she sells ice cream and soda and small bags of pretzels and corn chips. But it all adds up, I hope, to something memorable, for him.

Marks on the Cabin Door

2010-09-05T05:25:00.005+02:00

Photo: T. Quick

Marks on the Cabin Door

Summer is winding down; there is that unmistakable chill in the evening air that signals the waiting fall and HH has just celebrated his seventh birthday. Time to take it in, and write it out, my way of absorbing events, the passage of time, processing the important and not so important events in my life and that of those I love.

I am not sure why the end of summer is the point in time I have always felt marked the end of one year and the start of another. Perhaps it’s a carry-over from school days or some vestige of my agrarian roots – the shorter days, the rush to bring in the crops before the frost, lardering in anticipation of the dark winter ahead. Nevertheless, it has always been so for me and in recent years, the celebration of HH’s birthday has only added to the significance of the season.

There is a series of marks, short black dashes, on the doorframe of his bedroom in the Catskill cabin we retreat to each summer, one for each year. We began standing him up against that doorframe when he was two and at the end of every summer, we marked his progress. That mark on the door is a short-hand note, a too-brief but nonetheless telling point, reminding us of summers gone by, of events, firsts, storms – personal and climatic – and how, with each passing year, HH is growing up.

I started this, I don’t know what to call it exactly - blog, diary, journal, at about the same time the first mark was scratched on that door. I am an older father, far older than most men with a seven-year-old son, and the habits of my life have not always been healthy ones. HH has finally arrived at a time in his life when his memory will be capable of storing events away for a lifetime. However, I have no doubt that much, if not most, of our time together will be lost to him. There is only so much a picture can communicate, and so I took up this habit in the hope that he might have something of me, the words behind the pictures of summers passed, and in the process, know the father he will, in all probability, largely forget.

We saw our first Yankee game this year. It was a sweltering July afternoon and the Yankees beat the Angels 10-6. It was my first time in the new Yankee stadium and HH’s first major league baseball game ever. Growing up in Germany, HH had heard a lot about the game of baseball but he had never seen a game. He has been wearing a Yankee cap since he was two and we sing, “Take me out to the Ballgame” but only as a marker to indicate that the aircraft he pilots from the top of his bunk bed has landed in New York. Until this summer, he had no idea what the song was really about. He did recognize the National Anthem and he hummed along with the crowd. When it was over, and everyone sat down, he turned to me and asked when the song for California was going to be played. Before this July afternoon, his experience of sporting events was limited to World Cup Soccer matches where each team’s National Song is played before the match. I explained to him that California and New York were part of the same country, one song, one nation, indivisible, etc …

We had the good fortune of attending the game with my friend Herb. Herb and I worked together for a number of years in the TV business and he is one of the most knowledgeable people I know on the subject of baseball. Herb and I often found ourselves in foreign territory (our common National Anthem notwithstanding) during the World Series. One night during the Boston-New York series, he told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was not to call the police or the front desk or attempt to break down the door, should I hear strange, loud noises or banging on the walls from his room. Herb is a participatory baseball game watcher and the World Series (particularly the heated Boston-New York rivalry) often called for extreme participation.

We ate our way through the New York- California game, popcorn, hot dogs, lemonade and beer, but alas no crackerjacks – and HH was thrilled. The new Yankee stadium is quite an impressive place; huge, loud and commercialized beyond belief. That said; the game was terrific with home runs and great plays and Herb there to give HH and me stats on all the players as well as a measure of historical background on the game. That afternoon, we took the subway back to Brighton Beach where we spent the night with friends. It was our only day in the City this summer but it was a full one. We returned to the mountains the next morning and spent the rest of our summer there.

Part 2 to follow …

Things

2010-08-08T09:00:00.000+02:00

Things
like the soft red twist that came off in my hand when I opened the plastic milk bottle this morning
the empty can of chock full o’ nuts
the song that won’t stop playing in my head because I heard it last week and again twenty years ago
the people and that small cat
the forgotten to be found debris of collected life

the apartment fresh with the smell of thick white paint
and no furniture
it was new and so was I
for as long as it took to dry and fill
with things
the things I touched and used and played with
that small cat chasing that bit of curled red plastic across the kitchen floor

none of it or them or him remains
except in still morning snatches of touch and smell
when it all comes back
for a moment
until I step outside
and look into the three o’clock sky
and pause on a star so brilliant
and forget again

The Game of our Youth

2010-07-04T09:25:00.000+02:00

Tom Findlay lived in the last house on the block. It was 1960. It was budding suburbia, but just, and Tom Findlay had a yard that stretched nearly to the Elementary school we all attended. Nixon was running for President for the first time and we had not yet experienced the Cuban Missile Crisis that would soon rob us of our sense of invincibility and security. (Hiding under your desk in fear of an imminent nuclear attack has that effect.)
I had a little brother and a big brother and we shared a set of heroes. It was a patch of time when the world was ours - clear and comprehensible. Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Ted Williams, Whitey Ford; our heroes were baseball players and every afternoon we gathered in Tom Findlay’s corner lot and played the great American pastime.
My brothers were better at the game than I ever was or ever will be. They were lean, fast and agile. I was a fat kid, so I played right field, that lonely spot in the deep grass that only saw action when a lefty took the plate and then the fear was palpable. I can’t remember now, thank God, how many balls I dropped or never got close enough to fumble in the first place. I eventually found my comfort zone behind the plate and became a catcher, but that is another story.
Baseball is a game that even a fat kid can play. If he can catch, throw or hit a ball reasonably well, he can play. Running fast is important for some positions and has its place in the rarified zones of base-stealing and stretching out a base hit from a single to a double or a double to a triple, but if a fat kid can hit the ball far enough or play a position that doesn’t require a lot of speed in the first place, like catcher, then he can make a contribution to the game, and now and then redeem himself on the field of play.
Flash forward fifty years. I am writing this in Germany the morning after their stunning victory over Argentina in the 2010 World Cup. I am horse from hollering and have a slight headache from one-too-many beers slurped down during the intense heat and excitement that has enveloped the country this weekend.
Baseball, the game of my youth and homeland, is still embraced by its die-hard fans but since the glory days of the post-war, basketball, football, hockey and stock-car racing have stolen much of its thunder and many of its fans. There is no game in America today that unites the nation as baseball did when I was a kid, no game that works the kind of magic that soccer seems to work on the countries of Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. If there ever was a World sport – it is soccer.
Following yesterday’s match, I took a short walk through the neighborhood I now call home. I am married to a German and we are raising our son here. He is now the same age that I was when I played baseball in Tom Findlay’s back yard. He wears the German national team jersey and knows the players names and numbers, and yesterday he proudly wrapped himself in the flag of his mother’s homeland to cheer his team on to victory. And he was not alone. From street to street, corner bar to bakery, in every part of town the people were celebrating the win. Children, adults, retirees, black, white and brown – the streets and parks and sidewalks were filled with people who had spilled out of their homes after the match to join the celebration.
I lived in New York City most of my life and experienced a World Series or two, but I’ve never experienced anything quite like this. It is difficult to imagine how much more excited the fans might become were Germany to win it all.
The game itself has taken me a little time to adjust to; the rules and strategies are foreign to me. I played soccer a handful of times as a boy but it wasn’t the game I grew up with. We didn’t have soccer moms in the late 1950’s. But I have a prediction. If the kids of America embrace this game, if the kids on the street and in the neighborhoods start bouncing that ball off their knees and heads and chests, if the game catches on like baseball did when I was young, then America, and world of soccer, are in for change of monumental proportion.
Soccer moves. It’s fast, tough, and thrilling even without scoring – I know that may be hard to comprehend but it’s true. Imagine hockey without padding and skates, imagine 22 men running full-out for 90 minutes with nothing but shin pads and high socks for protection, executing plays that demonstrate a level of skill, finesse and raw power that rival any sport or art you have ever seen – that’s soccer as it is played during the World Cup.
And all you need is a ball. The kids in our neighborhood play soccer in the small clearing directly in front of the church. The local pastor doesn’t care much for the constant battering the front of the building takes every afternoon after school, but there is little he or anyone else can do about it. The kids roll the balls along with them as they go to school and whenever two or more of them are together, they match up and play. The young men who played last night in front of an audience approaching a billion fans, started playing the game as soon as they could walk. It’s not a rich man’s game and it isn’t that complicated once you learn the basic rules – anyone can play – or just about. One thing you don’t see is many fats kids. Soccer requires running and lots of it.

Last week I watched my son playing on the field behind his school. I was a little early picking him up and boys were playing soccer. He didn’t get his feet on the ball that often but he ran – man did he run. When I asked him later about his day and about the soccer game, he told me he had had a great time. He didn’t score, he’s the youngest kid in his class and with an American father, he didn’t receive the early and constant coaching that most of the boys received growing up, but he loved the running and he’s fast, so once he figures out how the running and kicking together thing works, he’ll probably be pretty good at it. Soccer will be the game of his youth just as baseball was mine.
In two weeks, we will be back in New York and I have promised him a Yankee game. It will be his first and I will be interested to see how he reacts to it. He’s been wearing a Yankee cap since he was two and being the only American kid in his school, he wears his cap as a badge of pride. Being an American is something that sets him apart and he loves America and everything he imagines it represents. But yesterday he was wearing the German flag and it was the sport of soccer that enthralled him. I want him to enjoy the Yankee game but I don’t expect he will ever play it, not like we did when we were kids. I suppose I want him to know the game so that he understands a bit more about his father, and the game I played and loved when I was his age. But if the truth be told, it is the game of his youth that I am learning to embrace. I will never lose my love of baseball, but I expect I may soon love soccer even more.

Herbal Essence

2010-06-09T06:07:00.001+02:00

Clairol Herbal Essence was brand new
when I met her
the girl whose name I don’t recall
whose face I could not place in a line-up
whose lips I can taste to this day
and could distinguish from any other lips
anywhere else on earth
and her hair
long with ringlets wet
smelling of that shampoo

She lived in the mill district
behind the railway station
in a lint-head’s house
falling down, badly heated and affordable
we made love one afternoon in winter
when the warmest place was her hot bath
and stayed in love a week or two
then stopped

I come across a bottle
in a bathroom at a party
in a beach cottage
where one of the single girls
left it for the rest of us
the weekend men
I open it and think of her
this morning in the moment
between turning off the shower
and reaching for the towel
when the scent of soap and water
is fresh and tangy clear
and not unlike her.

Harold Gerow

2010-05-27T04:40:00.001+02:00

When I first met Mr. Gerow he was already in his 70’s, a rail-thin man with a neat white goatee wearing a baseball cap and driving a pick-up truck filled with lawn mowers, blowers, rakes, shovels and weed-whackers. He reminded me of my brother, a man who also works in the heat of the day and carries not a pound of extra flesh. And they both wore a similar smile; I don’t recall ever seeing Mr. Gerow when he wasn’t smiling, at least softly, as he went about his work. He took care of our cabin now and then, mowing and whacking away at the grass and weeds and keeping a watchful eye out in the off-season.

I met him through a neighbor whose yard he had been tending to for a number of years. It gave me a sense of well-being knowing that Mr. Gerow was checking in on the cabin during the long winter months when snow and ice storms came roaring through our neck of the woods, felling the massive oak and beech and pine trees that grow precariously in the rocky soil and dropping them on cabins.

Last week I called him to check in and there was no answer, which was unusual, normally his wife picked up the phone to tell me he was out working – he was always out working. I called again a few days later and the machine picked up again. I learned subsequently that he passed away this winter, a few days after my mother.

I admired his industry, his energy and his spirit and I will miss him. He told me once that he had never left the state of New York, in all his 79 years he stayed close to home, raising his family on the farm where he was brought up. In an age when people have trouble making any sort of commitment, be it to work or to another person, it was a bit of a shock to me to meet a man who had never felt the need to venture beyond the place where he was born. I am glad I had the chance to know Harold Gerow; I don’t expect I’ll meet another like him.

Smile

2010-05-10T09:50:00.001+02:00

Most mornings I wake before sunrise and make a cup of coffee before sitting down here to write out my night, or the day before or the day before that. Sometimes it takes a while to process the events of a day or a week, the cumulative experience of living. It’s the time of day I reserve for sorting out the sometimes unsortable.
Then there comes that time, about 6:05AM to be precise, when I really start my day, when I wander back to the other end of the apartment I share with my son, starting his bath and turning on lights along the way, finding socks, a shirt, and a clean pair of jeans for him to wear to school. When I enter his room he is usually still sound asleep, warm from the night, hair tussled and his small, dirty bear pressed close to his chin. I try to wake him slowly, with a kiss and a rub on the back. Almost without fail he rolls up, checks that his bear is in his hand then reaches out to me to lift him from the his bunk bed and set him on the floor.
He’s a little unsteady at first as he pads down the hall to his bath, pin-balling his way to the bathroom with eyes half-opened, so I usually stay close behind in case he runs into a wall face-first. It’s happened before. He sits in his bath without saying a word while I wash his face then I leave him there while I get his breakfast ready. A few minutes later he’s dressed and sitting at the table, almost ready to talk. It’s usually not until after he’s eaten his pear or banana that he starts talking and even then, he’s not that chatty in the morning. It’s not until we’ve packed his school bag and started on our way to school that he opens up.
“Papa, I need to tell you something.” With those words, he launches on a ramble about whatever is on his mind that morning. Sometimes he wants me to clarify something I mentioned in passing the day before, or he may narrate the plot of the latest video he’s fallen in love with, or describe a new invention he’s been thinking about that will change the world. But every now and then, he’ll say something so out of the blue that it causes me to stop, lean down close to his face and ask him to repeat himself, so that I’m sure I’ve heard him correctly.
Once he told me about a conversation he’d had with his Grandfather, long deceased, about the nature of the planets, another time he told me he was happy I had a normal job now, because I was around in the evening to have dinner with him instead of taking off on long trips away from home. But one morning recently, he told me something I truly didn’t expect. He told me to smile. He looked up at me, stared directly into my eyes and told me to smile. I didn’t realize I wasn’t smiling, I was probably thinking about something else, something from the other side of my life, the side that doesn’t revolve around him and he caught it. I’m sure it wasn’t the first time he’d seen me with something other than a smile on my face but it was the first time he’d decided to do something about it, to confront me.
I conjured up a smile and told him that even when I wasn’t smiling I was smiling inside, at least regarding him. But that wasn’t entirely true and he knew it. He reminded me of a time when I had been angry with him and I acknowledged that, yes, at that time I wasn’t smiling inside or out. Maybe he thought that the scowl or frown or whatever it was I was expressing unconsciously that morning was directed at him, I’m sure he did. But the fact was, I wasn’t upset with him, I was thinking about something else entirely and the mistake I made was forgetting that HH doesn’t miss much and that the way I express my feelings, knowingly or unknowingly, affects him.
It was a humbling experience, that conversation, a reminder of how deeply a child experiences the world and how important it is to pay attention to everything I do and say, even to the way I smile, or fail to smile, on our way to school.

The Pendant

2010-05-01T07:14:00.000+02:00

You’ve never seen and ad on my blog even though I receive about one request a week to post or link or mention some product or service here. I don’t have anything against the practice; I’ve just never had the inclination to try it. Then a few months ago, I received an email from a woman who represented herself as the owner of a small business that made jewelry. She offered to send me a sample of my choice if I agreed to mention the line in a blog post. There was no script or logo placement requirement, nor did she ask that I post only favorable comments, just a straight-forward request to look at the piece and comment. So I looked though her line, placed the order and waited. As promised the piece arrived a few days later and I left the box on my dresser for a long time before I opened it – life was a bit messy at the time and I didn’t get around to it until a few weeks ago.

It was a pendant, a simple topaz colored cut stone with the circumference of a small grape and the thickness of a Hershey Bar that hung from a delicate silver chain. Resting in its box, the pendant appeared unspectacular, but as with anything that is meant to be worn on the body, you never know if it “works” until you put it on.

I gave it to a woman with collarbones to die for and when she draped it around her throat, it was as if the stone became animated by its proximity to her skin. The cut and color of the stone against the shapes and lines and color of her skin had the effect of focusing the attention to her face, it was subtle, just a soft flash of color, a twinkle, but the effect was powerful. The funny thing was that she had recently taken to wearing necklaces again, after a period of abstinence from jewelry of almost every kind. She had recently purchased a number of pieces, and I had been under-whelmed by them. This piece worked and it didn’t cost any more than any of the other pieces she bought. I must say that it might not have the same effect on another neck, against a different set of collarbones or a different shade of skin, but it worked on hers.

This is the website: www.jewelryartdesigns.com.

2010-04-18T20:05:00.001+02:00

A bit of shameless self-promotion ... Hope you don't mind.

My other blog was one of the three most read between January 2009 and now on the Expatica Website, so it is in the top three up for the voting for the top blog post on Expatica competition.

You can view the article inviting readers to vote here: ‘Vote for your favourite Expatica blog post!’

http://www.expatica.com/nl/lifestyle_leisure/blogs_photos/Vote-for-your-favourite-Expatica-blog-post__15769.html?ppager=0

Exiting the subway at 34th street

2010-04-18T05:06:00.000+02:00

That was the last time
I paid attention to the color of my hair
Or worried about the soup
Not if there was soup enough
But from which bowl
Or spice rack riddled kitchen nook
I’d serve it up

Then yesterday
On some midtown street
I lost my way again
And caught myself
Looking for faces
That could not be there
Reflections long since gone

So I imagined one
In an oak-trimmed bar
With rice chex nuts
And sixteen dollar Gins
And for sixteen minutes we pretended
To know each other
Avoiding mirrors

Scarlet Fever

2010-03-11T05:10:00.002+01:00

When HH is sick there is a great deal of second guessing and feeling the forehead and taking temperatures with three different thermometers , two of which read Celsius, which send me running to the internet to see if he’s sick in the European sense of sick. Then there is the sitting at the edge of his bed and watching him part, trying to decide if those bright red cheeks are a sign of something terrible or simply the result of the extra blankets or the fact that I forgot to remove his socks when I put him in bed at 4:00 in the afternoon when he nearly fell asleep on the floor in the hallway after taking off his jacket when we got home from school.
Sitting on the edge of the bed may be the toughest part, particularly if there is a little rattle in his throat that brings out a soft snore and the hair around his face is wet with perspiration from the fever. The temptation is to wake him up to make sure he’s ok or at least not any worse than he was before he fell asleep. I’ve done that, awakened him to make sure he wasn’t delirious, but he usually just tucks his small, smelly bear to his face and falls right back to sleep.
But it’s the middle of the night when all the doubts and fears peak, when he shows up at the side of my bed crying because his cough is so strong he can’t sleep or his ear hurts or he has vomited all over himself. That’s the time when I wish I were back home, back in the place I knew when I was a boy growing up, where I know the routine like the back of my hand. I know the numbers to call and just the right tone of voice to use when speaking with the doctor or the nurse or the intern on-call in the emergency room. It’s times like these when I fell like an alien here, not just a foreigner or an American but an alien, someone who for all the studying and acculturation I’ve gone through still doesn’t and may never know the ropes like a local. And the damned thing about it is that HH is the one who is suffering in the bed next to me, where I’ve settled him down with a dose of children’s ibuprofen and a cool cloth on his forehead.
This week he came down with Scarlet Fever, just hearing the words sent a wave of dread through me. He’s taking his medicine now and I think the worst is over but there will be other nights, I know there will, when the light in my room comes on unexpectedly at 3:00AM and his bright red face stares up at me with that unmistakable “I don’t feel well” look and it all starts over again. Tonight, at least, we will both sleep soundly. I hope.

Light through the window

2010-03-07T07:53:00.002+01:00

It's morning again
and dancing, singing, chirping feet
run through the house
and to my room
and to my bed
to wake me with whispered plea
for a bath
clean clothes
and something warm to eat.

Happy

2010-02-21T07:16:00.000+01:00

Sometimes you hear something that sets you off thinking or reasoning or dreaming of an ordered, peaceful world and the same words heard an hour or a day later seem to signal something else entirely, something more like simple fear.

I heard a new song yesterday about happiness, about making the choice to be happy and yet the song was anything but that –it wasn’t a happy song at all, even though the beat was quick and the „happy“ word was repeated over and over. It was a song about the elusiveness of happiness and the singer’s life-long pursuit of the seemingly unattainable. Yet in the end, it was the song of a searcher, a person who had not and would not give up.

Later that day I heard the word again, this time in near desperation, a plea for happiness spoken by someone a great distance from it. As if searching for safe haven in an angry and impersonal world, the cry for „happy“ wasn’t a dream or wish for anything resembling joy, but more like a prayer for peace, a moment of rest , asylum – anything to stop events from unfolding as they inevitably seemed to be.

I hope they both find what they are searching for – I hope we all do.

This is a quiet house ...

2010-02-05T20:46:00.000+01:00

This is a quiet house tonight
No little boy sleeping
Even then there is a sound
A whispered breath
A turn against the sheet
A rumble rustle twisting in the night
But not this night
No wife in her study tapping
Or dressing
Or undressing
It is unnatural
This peacefulness
This calm that damns the senses
I’d rather the racket
The racket please
Oh bring back the racket
And let me sleep

Haiti

2010-01-15T04:11:00.003+01:00

If you have ever visited Haiti, you might have some idea of the magnitude of the problem the people there are facing today. Even then, the suffering is unimaginable. We can only hope that the world will rally to quickly organize the water, food, shelter and medical assistance that is needed. I worked with one of these organizations in 2003 and spent some time in Haiti. I learned today that their staff survived the earthquake and they are doing what they can to bring relief. This is a small organization that concentrates on delivering medicines and basic survival materials to people and they have been working in Haiti for decades. I've included their contact information below because one often wonders if the donations we make ever reach the people who really need them. This is a good group - they are on the ground and they know what they're doing.

Catholic Medical Mission Board is asking for monetary contributions. Donations can be made by sending checks, payable to CMMB-Haiti, to CMMB, 10 West 17th Street, New York City, New York 10011, or by calling 1 (800) 678-5659. Pledges can also be made via the CMMB Web site, http://www.cmmb.org, or by a direct web link: http://support.cmmb.org/Haiti. Donated medicines and medical supplies are also being accepted by CMMB. To make these donations, contact Kathy Tebbett, at 1 (212) 242-7757.

Checking in ...

2010-01-11T20:28:00.001+01:00

I feel like the young Catholic boy I used to be kneeling in the confessional on a Saturday afternoon: “Father it has been three weeks since my last confession.” But it’s been far longer than that since I’ve posted and I have nothing like a confession to make, except for the fact that I haven’t been writing, not from a lack of something to write about exactly but more from a decision to keep it to myself.

Living in this foreign land has become less foreign, less strange, something akin to routine has crept into my life and HH’s. We wake early, bathe, go to school, do our respective work for the day and meet up again in the late afternoon. There is play and eating together at the kitchen table, brushing of teeth and bedtime stories, something to write about perhaps but the rhythm of it has lulled me into complacency. I’m tired at night by the time I’ve put him to bed, sorted out the wash, and done the dishes. I’m too tired most nights to do much of anything else but crawl into bed with a good book and wait for my eyes to become heavy and finally drift off to sleep.

Something will catch my eye in the coming days, something I haven’t seen before or haven’t looked at closely enough to realize how interesting it really is. There are things I could have written about, difficult things, unsettling things, life-wracking things but I won’t be writing about them here at least not any time soon. For now, I’ll just say hello to those of you who still follow this story of ours and thank you for your time and interest and hope to see you again.

Harvest Holiday

2009-10-23T06:19:00.000+02:00

The autumn school holidays are coming to an end here in Germany. For two weeks in late October, school children throughout the country get a break. Many families take this Indian summer opportunity to get out of the country or into the countryside, little gets done because so many parents take this holiday from work.

HH is in his first year of school and it seemed he had just gotten his new rhythm down, getting up a little after 6AM, bathing, eating breakfast, a little Lego play of course, and then off to school. This break turned things around a bit, even though he spent the first week with his afternoon group taking field trips to the Zoo, visiting a Piano maker, making Pizza and generally having a good time in a semi-organized fashion. We did, however, take the chance to get out of town and went for a visit with Oma in the Eifel region nearby.

The days were bright and cool and the landscape was full with color and bounty. It was harvest time after all, the reason behind this break in the first place. Not that long ago, this time would be used to bring in the crops and the children would be out in the fields alongside their parents, digging in the rich, wet earth for potatoes. I would venture to say that most of the children in HH’s school did not get their hands dirty digging potatoes over the last two weeks. HH, however, did.

We had taken long walks in the forest nearby, looking out over the cliff sides into the sweeping green valleys of the Eifel National Park, gardened with Oma, and generally had a relaxing time in the country. Then on our last afternoon there, one of HH’s older and somewhat distant cousins came by with his son to dig potatoes. It was cold and the earth was damp. The work was done by hand except for the hand-driven plow that lifted the raised rows of earth to expose the treasure of the potatoes that rolled out by the dozens each time it made a pass. HH and I scrambled along behind it, tossing the dirty spuds into a wicker basket that would later be dumped into large burlap sacks. It was truly surprising to see just how many potatoes lay beneath the surface in such a small space.

HH took to it with relish and worked with his older cousin who had to watch his hoe when HH reached into the nearby dirt to pull out an escaping potato. Our “help” probably slowed down the process, but after a few minutes of it we got into a rhythm and made a pretty good crew.

It’s hard work bending and digging and hauling and HH’s mother kept her distance. When she did come out to see us, her cousin came over to her and reminded her of the late October when she was 5 years old and sat in a field nearby wet, cold and crying. She told me about it later, about how this time of year was a hard one and that she and her sister worked in the fields with their parents. There was no child care for the little ones, and they worked or sat in the dirt until it was done.

Our experience was different - exhilarating and novel. But it did offer a small glimpse into the food chain, a chance to see where our food comes from and how much work it can be to get it to the table. It was similar to an experience that I had as a child somewhat older than HH is right now. We too dug potatoes on an autumn day and the memory of it has stayed with me.

When we got ready to return home, Oma brought out a large sack filled with potatoes, small ones the size of a grape. When we were digging that afternoon, I had mentioned to my cousin that these small potatoes would be great to pan cook, whole, with a bit of olive oil and rosemary. He had collected them and when I got home I opened the bag to find hundreds of the tiny things, many of which we had for dinner last night. HH even tried a few.

Later we called Oma to get our cousin’s telephone number to thank him for the gift. When we told her why we were calling him she laughed; these small potatoes, the ones I treasured for cooking, were generally culled from the crop and fed to the pigs. She couldn’t understand why anyone would want to eat them.

But eat them we did and the meal that night was a happy one, something about knowing the food, taking it out of the earth with our own hands, made that dinner special. How far we have come from our agrarian roots, that we now romanticize the digging of potatoes on an autumn afternoon.

Gardening at Night

2009-10-09T06:07:00.001+02:00

The garden is pushing the last, late flower burst of the season into the air. The coming frost will soon send most of them to sleep for the winter and kill the unlucky ones who were never intended as more than summer guests. The garden is an ever-changing work in progress that puts on its greatest show in from April through September.

Now, as the leaves fade and drop, stems wither and colors fade, the gardener dreams of the coming spring and wonders which of them will make it through the winter and of those that survive, which will flourish and grow to their full potential. The gardener sees not only what rests in the bed before him but what might be. One shouldn’t rely on his observations because they are always hopeful, he sees the stub of a rose crushed by summer revelers as the full and robust plant it may yet become. He imagines the lilac in full bloom, tall and rich white in the background, the lavender bushy and deeply scented, a harmonious yet seemingly random collection of living things fed and watered and whispered to, the product of a thousand gentle touchings and encouragements.

That’s your grandfather jumping out of the plane …

2009-09-22T15:47:00.002+02:00

This weekend HH’s grandfather, T. Moffatt Burriss, was honored for his courage during World War II in the capture of the brides in Nijmegen, Holland in the battle known as Operation Market Garden. Beatrix, Queen of The Netherlands, Prince Phillip of Great Britain, US General David Petraeus, the US Ambassador to The Netherlands, the German and Polish Ambassadors and numerous other military and civilian officials gathered to recognize the sacrifices American soldiers made during the liberation of Europe. It was an eventful and memorable weekend and His Holiness was there.
He missed a day of school and would be three days away from his favorite toys, but when promised a hotel room with a television, he was willing to go along. Before we had even left the neighborhood he was asking how long it would take to get there and when we were coming home. I explained to him that we would be going on a long trip, like when we went to America this summer. He got it and really didn’t bother with the question more than once or twice more during the trip. Later that morning, in a cow pasture about 20 minutes outside of Nijmegen, he watched his “Big Pa” parachute out of an airplane four days before his 90th birthday. He hit the ground smiling and we were all relieved. Another veteran jumped with him but his landing was not so smooth. He’s fine, but he had a few cuts and bruises and required a visit to a local hospital.
It was a powerful moment witnessing these two men who in their 20’s had jumped from their planes into a battle where a huge number of them would not survive. The impression I was left with was not just how remarkable their accomplishments are, but how it must feel for them to be in that pasture together, sixty-five years later. Whenever two or more of the veterans were together, one could almost sense the bond between them. Few experiences in life bind men together as do the nearness of death and the loss of friends.
We spent the weekend attending commemorative events and watching parades. But we took a big break in the middle for HH to visit one of the local playgrounds in Nijmegen. I’ve attached a picture because it was probably one of the nicest playgrounds I’ve even seen. We spent a good deal of time there and then took a long hike through the Dutch countryside. It was a full day and we expected HH to go right to bed. And we almost made it until he turned on the TV and caught a German Volksmusik program that he watches when he visits his German Aunt and Uncle. For those of you who have never heard or seen this music (I say seen because the costumes are a major part of the experience) it is very traditional, with accordions and rousing choruses and dirndl skirts for the ladies and lederhosen for the men. It’s beer hall music, German country and western and HH loves it. He was clapping along and laughing – he even knew some of the singers. It is all lip-synched and most of the performers were fortunate that the lighting technician was a forgiving person, but he enjoyed it and we enjoyed him enjoying it.

The big celebration was on Sunday and the entire city of Nijmegen was locked off – no traffic in or out. The Dutch have become very serious about the Queen’s security following a recent incident where a man drove his car into a crowd, killing seven, during an appearance by the Queen earlier this year. We sat in the VIP section behind the Queen and the other dignitaries, but we didn’t see much of the Majesties from our seats. It was nevertheless memorable and I hope HH will in fact remember some of it. Although if I had to guess, I would say the playground and the Hotel TV were probably the things he most enjoyed about the trip.
We made it home to Cologne and are awaiting word that Pig Pa made it home to the US safely as well. He is a remarkable man, not only for what he has done but by what he continues to do each day - engage life. Even while acknowledging the extraordinary events of his past, he was active, jumping out of that airplane at his age – at any age – and when he hit the ground he wasn’t saying how he was happy just to have survived, he was making plans to do it again. That’s a lesson worth remembering.

First Grade

2009-08-17T06:35:00.001+02:00

Tomorrow HH enters the first grade.

Last night he let it out; his energy level over the last few days had built to such a peak that we thought it must be the product of a growth spurt coupled with some hormonal abnormality and topped off by a measure of Jet-Lag. Seems the issue was what he was going to wear to school.

For those of you, like me, who thought that five-year-olds had a limited concentration span and remembered only those things related to chocolate, Lego and Pokémon, not necessarily in that order, we were wrong.

Last year HH was required to endure a number of admissions interviews. We looked at three schools and each of them had its own form of interview/test to determine if the child in question had the goods to make it at the respective school. He did fine, was accepted to all three and in the end chose the school he wanted to attend. During the course of one of these interviews he was shown a picture of the boys’ choir. The boys were dressed in long black robes with white collars as they stood in the choir loft of the Dom Cathedral in Cologne. Last night before falling asleep, HH explained that he was not ready to go to school – it was just too much trouble – and the primary reason was because he did not want to wear one of those black robes to school each day.

I didn’t even remember the robes, or the picture for that matter, but HH had kept that image tucked in the back of his mind for the last eight months. Now, I’m not sure he was really so worried about having the wear the robe to school, or that he had even given it a moment of thought before last night. It is just as likely he was digging deep to find an excuse, any excuse, to delay the start of school, much in the same way that he will come to the table and tell me that he won’t be able to eat the broccoli that’s sitting on his plate because he wasn’t allowed to watch the last installment of Bob the Builder. But it was impressive nonetheless that he conjured up that fleeting image of the boys in black and slipped it into his argument against going to school.

First grade. Now the fun begins; peer pressure, new friends, sports, helping him with his homework (in German no less!) after-school activities, girls, dating, driving! I’m getting ahead of myself, I know, but as I look back on the last few years, the HH years to-date, it seems like not that long ago he was just a toothless bundle in a Baby Bjorn, nodding and cooing as I carried him from place to place. HH is setting off on his own now, a bone-crushing school bag strapped to his back, and I must get used to waiting, waiting until the end of the day to hear the stories he chooses to tell.

Summer Time

2009-08-09T11:56:00.001+02:00

It’s cold and sitting here in the pre-dawn chill; it seems more like autumn than summer. His Holiness crept out of his room a little while ago shivering and crawled into bed with Mama. Much earlier, too early for my own good, I had taken up my place in the tiny living room of our cabin, pecking away at my notes for a meeting I would be having later today to plan a new playground here in Smallwood.
It’s been a cool, rainy summer in the southern Catskills but it has been a great one. In a little over 72 hours we will be making our way back to Cologne where I will once again take up my struggle with the German language and HH will enter the first grade. Where did the time go? It seems like yesterday that we arrived in America and how is it possible that HH is already starting school? Wasn’t I just bundling him into his Baby Bjorn and walking him down to the Union Square Farmer’s Market to sniff the fresh herbs and flowers?
I was sitting by the water with a friend yesterday, a man who has two children about HH’s age, and we were talking about our perception of time, of how it speeds up as we age. As we watched our children digging in the sand, I tried to will the moment to linger. I had charged the battery in the digital camera that morning and had taken shot after shot of the children, realizing the photo ops were dwindling and wanting to save as much of the experience of summer as possible before we returned home. From experience I know these pictures will be viewed over and over again in the coming months, as winter settles in and the dull gray canopy that passes for sky reasserts itself over our lives.
One morning soon, HH will wander into our kitchen in Cologne, sit on my lap and the two of us will look at pictures from this summer. And far sooner than I care to acknowledge, sooner than I can even imagine, I will be sitting in a kitchen somewhere alone, paging through the images of summers passed, times I could not stop or even slow

Breakfast at Blanche’s

2009-07-31T13:35:00.000+02:00

One of our summer rituals is acting out the characters who inhabit the legendary breakfast spot, Blanche’s Diner. HH is the waiter and I am the cook. He takes the orders and serves the plates while I remain in the kitchen cooking. Each morning he constructs a small door between the kitchen and the living room, made from the lids of his two plastic toy tubs to make sure I stay in the kitchen. I’m forbidden to leave.

We have one customer, Mama, who eats alone on the front porch. HH eats his breakfast in the kitchen, crawling up on a stool that is still too high for him to manage comfortably, or safely, but that’s the way he likes it. He doesn’t have too much trouble mounting the stool but getting down from it is precarious and about 50% of the time he ends up on the floor. It doesn’t matter. He just picks himself up and goes about his work. Serving breakfast is serious business for HH and he isn’t going to let a little spill off the stool stop him. HH has a special voice he uses when he adopts the character of the waiter Joe. It’s a very New York sort of accent, classic 1950’s Cab driver style and he insists that I use the same style of speech. It’s tough, street talk with a bit of swagger and attitude, a cartoon version of hash slingers from another era and nothing at all like the real Blanche’s Diner.

Earlier this week we made our annual visit to the shrine of small town truck stop food in this corner of the Catskills. Mama was out of town and the two of us set off early in the morning to pick up grass seed and Pokémon cards – he had his shopping list and I had mine. On the way back we pulled in to Blanche’s and settled in at the counter for breakfast.

The diner has been there for as long as anyone can remember, sitting on the crest of a hill on highway 17B, a few yards down the road from Mongaup Valley in the town of Bethel, NY. Most of the customers are regulars. If you didn’t know it was there you probably would just fly right by it at 55MPH on the two-lane road. I’ve missed it a few times, even when I was actually looking for it. It’s not a silver metal airstream-style diner that catches your eye. There’s no flashing lights or paved parking lot, just a small sign that says “Blanche’s Diner” in front of a modest wooden building.

Blanche’s is a local institution. The county judges used to hold their regular weekly conferences over breakfast at Blanche’s, there is always a police cruiser in the parking lot, and on our most recent visit one of our town council members was rehearsing a speech he was about to give on the new natural gas pipeline. For decades a local radio station would call Blanche each morning to report the weather. Blanche doesn’t do the weather anymore, but she still runs the place. Normally she sits at the counter talking with customers until someone wanders over to the cash register to pay. Then she slowly gets up and takes their money, offering lollipops to the children, always checking with their parents first to make sure it’s ok.

Penny and Bud do most of the heavy lifting. Penny is the perky blonde waitress who never forgets a face and Bud is the cook, cool and steady and determined to give you a side of potatoes with your eggs whether you want them or not. They have both been there for as long as I have known the place, but they haven’t seemed to age. The linoleum that used to be under Bud’s feet is about the only place that looks the worse for wear. Penny knows what most people want before they say a word. “Western, wheat toast, coffee light – right?” She confirms rather than takes orders most of the time. You rarely see a menu at Blanche’s. They exist, but even irregular regulars like me are loath to admit we haven’t committed the offerings to heart.

HH loved every minute of it. We sat on short stools at the end of the long half-circle counter that rings the prep area. From there we could see Bud working the grill and Penny placing orders and picking up food. To our immediate left were a dozen large paper coffee filters filled with fresh ground coffee ready to drop into the steaming BUN. We were sitting on the business end of the counter which was perfect for us because we consider ourselves as part of the team. HH ordered large – a short stack, side of bacon, side of links and milk. He ate it all without lifting his eyes from Penny and Bud for any longer than it took him to spear a piece of pancake.

I don’t claim to know what prompts HH to want to inhabit one character or another or why assuming the roles of waiter and cook thrill him like they do, but I love it all probably as much as he does. My reasons are likely different than his; there’s a dash of nostalgia in it for me, American Diners are one of the things I miss living in Europe, the chatter between the cook and the waiters, the small-talk the customers exchange, all in my native tongue, all familiar and speaking of home.

In a few days we will be returning to Cologne, but I expect we will be taking a little bit of America with us. If you happen to be walking under our kitchen window one morning on the Brüsseler Platz, you might just hear the sound of two street-wise New Yorkers serving up an American breakfast of eggs, bacon and toast, to Mama, our one and only customer. And even if she’d rather be having a brötchen with butter, she’ll eat it with a smile, she’s a regular.

Summer anyone?

2009-07-22T14:50:00.001+02:00

Yesterday it rained. Again. It was cold and windy and I closed all the windows in the cabin to keep the chill out. HH and I spent the day indoors. It is nearing the end of July and we haven’t had one week that has felt like summer, not a stretch of even three days when the temperature reached 80, or the sun stayed out and the ground stayed dry from dawn through dusk. But yesterday was cold, even when compared to the dismal norm we have become accustomed to this summer. So we stayed inside the entire day and indulged ourselves; we binged on the pleasures we most enjoy yet often deny ourselves, or more accurately, that I ration. HH spent most of the day watching cartoons, Abbott and Costello, The Three Stooges, Superman, Spiderman and Sponge Bob while I sat on the porch reading a crime novel, the most recent installment in a marathon of blood and gore and terror that I’ve subjected myself to this summer.

Over the course of the last 8 weeks, I’ve read about 20 books and all of them, with the exception of one David Sedaris collection of essays and a trio of CIA spook thrillers by David Baldacci, have been about murder and mayhem. This reading material feels oddly suited to the seasonal disguise that summer has adopted, pretending to be early spring or fall. The dark, wet days and cold nights have been the perfect environment for immersing myself in this dismal genre.

HH on the other hand has discovered cartoon Superheroes and, with a little coaxing from me, the slapstick comedy of the middle of the last century. He has also learned to manipulate the keyboard of my laptop. He can now turn it on, enter my password, access the Internet and browse the selection of PD cartoons available on Hulu and YouTube. I will have to change the content filter on my browser. There are some strange variations on Batman and Spiderman out there that have nothing to do with the cartoon characters that inspired them and I don’t want HH to find himself sitting in front of a video featuring fetish Spiderperson – where the webs they weave are more akin to Japanese bondage than crime-fighting spider silk.

Yesterday I read and he watched cartoons. We ate chicken nuggets and donut balls. We took a break in the late afternoon to play our favorite game of Mack and Hop Sing, did some drawing and coloring, and took out the trash, but aside from those brief detours into the realm of active, or constructive activity, the majority of the day was devoted to guilty pleasure. And it was good.

The problem is that this summer we have found ourselves all too often banished to the indoors of our tiny cabin in the woods. After a few weeks of this internment, I exhausted my list of constructive play ideas. Call me lazy, call me a bad parent or - in the words of the late Henny Youngman – Just Call Me!

I hope summer returns this week or next week, or in my lifetime. I want to change my reading list and I need some time to make the internet safe for HH before the cold weather and the habits it has spawned set in for good.

When Nature Calls

2009-07-07T12:27:00.000+02:00

It was a normal summer Saturday morning.

HH and Mama were sitting on bar stools at the kitchen counter eating their cantaloupe and I was making cheese eggs and bacon, shuttling back and forth from the stove to their plates. That’s my job; I’m the cook in the family, although HH is my number one helper. At five years old, he has acquired a pretty steady mixing hand and knows just when to lay off the pancake batter, allowing a few soggy flour balls to remain uncrumbled so that the resulting cakes are light and airy. We have a small cabin set in a shady corner of a summer community built in the Catskills in the late 1920’s surrounded by maple and pine and beech trees that have overgrown the area for decades. It’s a bit like living in a forest with neighbors.

On one of my transits across the room, I glanced out the window above the kitchen sink and saw the bear. It was a big bear, not huge, but probably in the 400-pound weight class. It was walking slowly and deliberately across the lawn below the window on its way into the front yard. I picked HH up off his stool and carried him to the “nature window” which is what we call the day bed on the front porch that is ringed by double-hung windows and where we sit on summer afternoons to watch the thunderstorms roll in, or catch a sight of the odd ground hog or bird or chipmunk that might happen into the yard. The bear sighting, however, was in a class all its own.

He crossed the road and sunk back into the thick woods and out of sight. We went out onto the front step to see if we could catch a sight of him or maybe snap a picture but he was gone, or so we thought. A moment later he came back out of the woods, crossed the street in our direction, then headed into our next-door neighbor’s yard finally disappearing into the deep woods behind our house - gone from sight but not from our thoughts.

In the days that have followed, we’ve talked a good deal about the bear, among ourselves and with the neighbors. It seems our bear has been making his way through this area for the last year or so, although this was the first time we had seen him. We live in the county with the highest density of bears in New York State, but for the most part the bear population is concentrated in the less populated portions of the county. Perhaps some new building or road project had disrupted the bear’s usual stomping grounds – I don’t know. I’d seen only one other bear in the five years we’ve been coming up here. It was a small cub we encountered about two miles away. He was crossing the road late one afternoon as HH and I were making our way home from nursery school during the year before we moved to Germany. We had remained in the cabin until late November that year and had had the chance to see summer roll into fall – something rare for summer inhabitants. I’d told HH the story many times during our nightly story hour, but he finally admitted to me recently that he really didn’t remember the event. I hope he is old enough now that the memory of this bear sighting will stay with him.

Yesterday the sun was out, this following weeks of constant rain, and the evening was dry and cool. We had our dinner on the back porch for the first time this summer and it was a real treat. However, there was something different about eating outside last night. I found myself looking over my shoulder now and then, back into the deep woods behind me, and I was listening more intently than usual, but not to the conversation at the table. I was anticipating the cracking of twigs, the swishing of dense ferns as they were displaced by the giant mammal that had visited us just days before. HH is nothing if not perceptive to his father’s moods and he asked me why I was scared of the bear. I wasn’t even aware that I had been signaling my concern but clearly I had. I told him I wasn’t scared of the bear, that the bear was part of nature and that he belonged here, just like the other animals, but now that our bear had shown himself, I had become aware of him. I tried to explain that the bears in our neck of the woods weren’t particularly dangerous bears. Black bears aren’t like grizzlies after all, but that if a bear was hungry or if a mama bear was traveling with her baby, it was better for us humans to keep out of its way. I was lying. I was afraid of the bear, not so much for my own safety as for his. His favorite outdoor activity is to run around the house and surprise me from behind. I guess he figures I’ll forget that I just saw him leave a few moments earlier and that I fully expect him to show up behind me. I still faint surprise and he laughs and sets off again. I just don’t want him to round one of those corners one evening and come face-to-face with a startled mother bear – I haven’t said that to him but I don’t think I have to. He knows what I’m thinking even if I don’t say it aloud.

Last night as I was cleaning up outside I heard the cracking sound I dread most. It wasn’t the sound of an approaching bear. I called into the house for Mama and HH to get out through the front door – to leave the house right away. They hesitated for a moment, Mama coming to the back door to make sure she had heard me right. I waved them away telling them to get out just as a huge dying tree slammed to the ground beside the cabin The sound was so loud and thundering that the neighbors down the road came running out of their house to see what had happened. The tree missed us this time, others have come much closer and one nearly took off the side of the house a few years back.

Living in the woods is a study in paying attention. It’s not that different really from life in the city, you’re just listening for different sounds - a bear padding through the brush, a car rounding a blind corner, a tree falling through the cool, clear air, or a child crying in the night. The difference is that in the city, the sound-scape is dense with the chatter and hum of machines – air conditioners and vehicles, trains and sirens. Here every sound represents a life – an owl, a crow, a lonely coyote howling at the setting sun, a dying tree, and yes, the bear, moving through the woods minding his own business and giving little thought to the humans in the cabin on the corner whose path he has now crossed.

HH and Superman

2009-06-24T13:04:00.001+02:00

A few weeks ago, we went to visit his HH’s Grandmother in South Carolina. The two of us set off on our adventure with his backpack loaded with his special friends, the ones we don’t go anywhere without, while I carried the rest of our gear. No matter that he’s less than a quarter my size and weight, his stuff still occupies 75% of the space in our luggage. I thought when he emerged from toddlerhood that the age-to-baggage ratio might level out a bit but it hasn’t.

I struggled to balance the three bags I was carrying while keeping one hand free to hold his as we made our way through check-in, security and finally to our gate. We arrived early, which was a good thing because somehow our seats had not been assigned together and I was not getting on that plane unless the two of us were sitting side by side. We trudged through Newark airport, my hand sanitizer at the ready, supplemented with regular warnings not to put his fingers in his mouth or nose.

There was a good deal of time to kill so we sat on the floor in front of the window overlooking the tarmac and played an airport version of “Mack and Hop-Sing” our daily ritual starring HH as the all powerful Mack, mayor of our town, police officer, pilot, farmer, train conductor and Viking and me, as Hop-Sing, his black, Mexican brother. He’s never commented on the fact that his character is white and mine in black and I’ve never brought it up. It just happened that way because when we started playing the game, we had one white and one black, plastic Lego man. I’m secretly very happy it turned out that way and I’ve not made a point of noting the difference, that time may come but it hasn’t yet.

Playing on the floor of the Newark airport terminal filled me with parental dread. Our travel kit from Germany included Tamiflu, surgical masks, a stock of hand-sanitizer and anti-bacterial wipes. I admit to being a victim of the Swine Flu scare but I figured it was better to be prepared than sorry. During pauses in our game, HH would wander over to the window and marvel at the heavy equipment, his face pressed against the glass, followed by my constant reminders not to lick it. I was relieved, somewhat, when we finally got on the plane and underway. The flight was good; he slept most of the way waking just in time to relish in the turbulence as we began our decent onto Columbia Metro Airport. HH loves turbulence, while I, on the other hand, was doing my best not to hold his hand too firmly as our plane waddled toward the runway.

We picked up our rental car, made it home, had a quiet meal and went to bed. The next day we visited with family and he turned in later than normal, complaining that my brothers and sister made too much noise at dinner and couldn’t I ask them to keep it down a bit. The next morning he awoke crying with a fever and a headache. I monitored him for 24 hours and when the fever didn’t let up and the headaches continued and the cough developed, I took him to the Doc-in-a-box down the street to be checked. He was diagnosed with Type A influenza. I was told the State Department of Health had requested samples for further testing and that I would be getting a call in 48 hours with the results. I was not to travel outside the country and had to keep him and myself in isolation until we received the test results. My family had to leave the house, my sister had to bring food to us, and HH was not allowed to leave the house. My worst nightmare was coming true and we were far from home, away from our family doctor, away from his mother, and not happy. The only saving grace was the wide-screen TV set in the den. I set HH up on the couch, with a TV tray and a blanket and for the next three days, he watched TV and coughed. I slept in his bed with him, more to comfort me than him although it was at his request that I joined him. There was no way I was going to sleep in another room, not with him in there coughing and sweating. I didn’t sleep much that week but HH had a ball. We don’t have a TV. I expect one day I’ll be forced to buy one but I hate the things and haven’t watched TV regularly for a decade or more. I turned it on in the late morning of September 11, 2001 and pretty much kept it on for a year until it finally got to me, again.

On those rare occasions when he does watch TV, like when he visits his Oma or his Aunt Doris, HH doesn’t usually watch the news. Once while perched in his Oma’s lap he caught a news segment about an airline crash and came downstairs to ask me what happened to all those people in the burning airplane. I reminded his Oma once again why we didn’t have a TV and to please keep the TV on kid’s programming if it had to be on at all. However, during our quarantine in South Carolina that damned TV was a life-saver and when it was finally time to fly home, HH had very mixed feelings. He wanted to go home – he just didn’t want to give up the TV. I had finally reached his Doctor and who told me that as long as HH was taking the Tamiful and his temperature didn’t exceed 101, he could fly, with a mask. So we finally made our way home. HH wasn’t fully recovered and would need to spend another week mending. Knowing he was going to be home, in bed, with little or nothing to do, and with a full-blown TV habit, we resorted to video.

When he first looked at the two-DVD boxed set of Superman (the animated version) he was curious but not elated. He as a Spiderman guy and although he had heard of Superman, he wasn’t a fan. Well, after three days of watching that DVD he was hooked. Mack and Hop-Sing have now been transformed into Clark Kent and Jimmy Olsen. Lois Lane is there, Lex Luthor, Perry White and the entire cast of villains and support personnel from the city of Metropolis. He rediscovered the Superman t-shirt I had picked up for him last fall and rarely takes it off. Superman fascinates him. Two nights ago, on the Summer Solstice, he refused to go to bed until it was completely dark outside. So we sat up in the living room and he talked to me until he began to nod off. He waxed eloquent about the planet Krypton, about Superman’s costume and how he (HH) was going to invent his own version of the Superman outfit so that we could do our grocery and toy shopping without the muss and fuss of driving.

HH is fully recovered no, his Swine Flu results were negative, and although he still has a bit of a cough, he is pretty much back to his old self again. The two of us went fishing for the very first time yesterday. We caught two small fish and released them and life is beginning to resemble something like normalcy. The big difference between now and before our trip to Grandmother’s house is Superman. I don’t know how this will turn out – I never do – but I hope the call of summer, the warm days and the lure of the lake, will take his mind off the DVD player and the new superhero who has taken up residence in the imagination of my son.

In madness and sadness ...

2009-06-20T13:11:00.001+02:00

June 20, 2009

HH administering wedding vows yesterday to two of the Lego characters he calls Sgt. O’Malley and Princess Leah…

“Do you take this woman in madness and sadness until you die?”

Summer things

2009-05-31T12:33:00.000+02:00

The boy has outgrown the old two-wheeler he learned to ride on, legs splay, pumping knees just miss the handlebars wobbling side to side, a wind tossed dingy flying down the street.

He’s wearing his city clothes, long sleeved shirt and intact blue jeans; he may have even combed his hair this morning before he left home. He has the unmistakable look of a new arrival, street shoes at the shore, coins in his pocket bearing the wrong king.

His mother and father are still unpacking the car, storing storm windows, swiping spider webs from the walls but he was three minutes in the stuffy basement and out the door peddling with all his heart, through summers passed to summer come again at last.

About You ...

2009-05-18T22:32:00.003+02:00

I'll be away for a bit and thought it might be about time for you to write a little something here.

From time to time I ask those of you who visit here regularly, or just stumble in on a lark, to tell me about yourself, where you live, what you do and how you happen to be here.

All the best to all of you ...

The Cost of Living

2009-05-08T06:40:00.001+02:00

On the other side of the dream, where you’ve found yourself, you know which of those two cheeses you would rather eat, but you buy the mixed Variety slices because the days of triple-fat, stinky French, are long gone. The smell of real leather upholstery is still ripe in your memory but the sticky plastic of your 97 Toyota is where you sit every other morning when you squeeze out of your alternate-side parking place and slip across the street where your car will stay, free of charge, for another two days. It’s only your time you spend now because that’s the only thing you have to waste. You don’t run the engine any longer than you must because a tank of gas takes a hurting chunk of your unemployment check and you don’t argue with yourself or your wife anymore about how much safer or easier it is to park in the garage, that passed from the realm of the justifiable a week or two after you switched from those slender, subtle Rhone Valley Reds to full-bodied and a bit too sweet wine-in-a-box from Chile.

And that silly old song from Camelot, you can’t get out of your head. You were once King Arthur or so your Guenevere said.

What do the simple folk do
To help them escape when they're blue?
The shepard who is ailing, the milkmaid who is glum
The cobbler who is wailing from nailing his thumb
When they're beset and besieged
The folk not noblessly obliged
However do they manage to shed their weary lot?
Oh, what do simple folk do we do not?

Loney, Dear

2009-05-05T20:33:00.001+02:00

There is a lot of music out in the world people, and I don’t often recommend things here, but take the time and listen to Loney, Dear.

About Dreaming

2009-05-05T06:04:00.001+02:00

A dream of struggle and certain death but at the same time oddly encouraging, even vital, a dream I wanted to remember, something that would make a great television show.

I was thinking this even as I was dreaming it. Or did the thinking part come later as I tried to pull back from waking, as the covers slipped and my feet got cold and the pillow dropped to the floor?

Dreams are often, not always, but often, fragile things, impossible to hold onto. The dreams that become nightmares are the easy ones to recall because they never leave you.

They hold on like a stink.

Toys of War

2009-04-29T06:08:00.000+02:00

Dear Son:

Last night we talked about Vikings and Knights and the end of the world. Good guys, bad guys, and the battles they fight are much in your thoughts these days and therefore in mine as well. I suppose it’s inevitable that you would want to take up your wooden sword and your plastic pistol and act out the battles you have been watching in your Viking cartoons and that you have seen the older boys at kindergarten playing, but some part of me is still surprised. I don’t know if surprised is the right word exactly, disappointed is too harsh, but some hybrid of the two is what I’m feeling. In the back of my mind, I knew it was coming but I thought it might wait another year.

Yesterday when I picked you up from school, the girls were sitting together on one side of the room playing with dolls and the boys were on the other side building forts and Viking ships from Lego blocks. Last year at about this time, I would just as likely find you in the play area with the girls, cooking dinner or playing house, but that doesn’t happen anymore. When I was a little boy I played with toy soldiers and acted out battles just as you are doing today, but as my generation came of age, we staged a sort of revolution, in which the toys of war we outlawed. Many of my contemporaries decided not to allow these toys in their homes and for your first five years, I did the same, politely refusing gifts of that sort when well-meaning aunts, uncles and others offered them.

All the little rules your parents impose, the walls we build around you to protect you from the ugly side of life, the boundaries we set hoping to frame the contours of your choices: What effect do they really have in the end? The influences of the world outside our home are strong – they will not be confined within our walls of will and admonition and with every passing day, you are spending less of your time with us and more of your time with your friends, a division that will only increase as you grown up and away.

We played on the living room floor after dinner last night. You refused to go to bed until we had staged a battle. We had been playing earlier that evening, building ships and fortifying the castle, but you insisted on staging a battle with the bad guys. So I gave you a fifteen-minute reprieve from bedtime, took up my position with the bad guys’ ship and attacked the castle. When it looked like I might get away with the chest of gold you had hidden in one of the turrets you threw a mild fit. I knew you were tired and that it had probably been a mistake to keep on playing at that hour of the day, when disappointment so quickly turns to tears, and I tried to calm you, asking you what was wrong. You said you didn’t like losing. Ultimately, we got going again and you captured my one remaining soldier and threw him in jail. As we were making our way to bed, I reminded you that one doesn’t always win each battle or conflict in which he is engaged, that is was inevitable that there would be failures and that failing was ok if you learned from it. You were not convinced and reiterated that you didn’t like losing.

You asked for a story that night, a “real” story you said, something made up, something imaginary. I struggled with what to say (I couldn’t come up with anything) and mercifully, you asked me to tell you the story of your mother. When the story was over and you started to get a little bleary-eyed, you settled into your pillow and got that look you get sometimes, of a tired, old man trying to make sense of the world for his troubled son. “You know Papa, when I die the world will still be here. The world goes on and on. The buildings will fall down, even the Dom Cathedral will fall one day, but not the world.” And with that, you rolled over and went to sleep.

I love you,
Papa

Hands

2009-04-28T07:16:00.000+02:00

I look at my hands and ask myself, “Am I old yet?” I have been asking myself that question for as long as I can recall. My mother once told me that when I was four years old I asked her if the wrinkles on my belly from my too-tight bathing suit were a sign that I was growing old.
I check the progress of my life against the wrinkles in my hands, the wrinkles I see each time I set myself down to write in the soft light of morning, when I tend to do this scribbling. In that otherwise forgiving light, every scratch and line and pucker of the skin is visible. So it’s little wonder that much of what I write is in the nature of reflection. Perhaps I should try writing in the light of mid-day when the glare washes out the imperfections, smoothes the surface of the skin and gives me back a year or decade or two.
I pay attention to hands, after the eyes they are the thing I look at when I first meet someone. They tell me a lot about the person and they are difficult to disguise with creams or Botox or makeup or any other form of personal hygiene or deception.
A few years back, I worked on a documentary film about transvestites and transsexuals. Over the course of filming, I saw a great many men who had undergone transformations, adjustments in their hormonal balance to better suit their natures. Many of these people were stunning examples of female beauty and I expect they could pass as genetic females in their daily lives. But I always looked at their hands and the hands told me that they had been born with a measure more from the male gene pool than from the other. It’s an unconscious habit now, this snap of my eyes to the hands.
I met a woman recently, I was walking through a park, picking weeds and trash from a flower bed when she approached me and asked if I would sit with her for a spell. She said she had had a rough day and needed a bit of gentle company. She was covered with hat, scarf, heavy coat and boots, but here hands were bare. We didn’t say much, we just sat. She had strong hands and the joints were slightly larger than one might expect from looking in her eyes, she had worked with them and worried with them. I don’t know the nature of her troubles – we didn’t speak of them – nor do I know her name or anything else about her. I got up after about fifteen minutes and made my way home, shaking hands with her before we parted. I might not recognize her should we cross paths again, but I’ll remember her hands.