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

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 …

Summer Time

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

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?

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

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.

Summer things

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.

Summer 2008

This is our fourth summer at Smallwood. The earmarks on HH’s bedroom door show his growth over the years, he’s two heads taller than he was that first summer in 2005, the summer that lasted until late fall, the year we left New York for Europe.

He’s golden brown and strong and talking up a storm and singing, singing day and night. He’s enjoying his summer here. The children he has come to know over the years are all back and every sunny day they play at the lakefront together, building castles in the sand, picking blueberries, exploring the shallow water for crayfish and minnows and frogs, and swimming in the cool mountain lake. Smallwood is the kind of place that people imagine when they conjure childhood. It is unquestionably a place that time has forgotten. The parents may have blackberries tucked in their beach bags, but the scene here is much the same as it has been for the last sixty years. It’s simple and glorious summertime.

Later this morning we will drive down to Manhattan for the day. He has his annual physical with the pediatrician who has been his doctor since he was five minutes old. His doctor in Cologne is fine but nobody knows him as well and for as long as his first doctor and we like to have another set of eyes taking a look once a year, putting things in perspective. Later in the day we will visit the Museum of Natural History. We have been talking about it for some time now, this visit to the great museum that houses the world’s most extensive collection of prehistoric dinosaur bones. I can’t wait to walk into the place with him, there is nothing like this museum in Cologne and if there is one thing I regret about leaving New York it is the chance to stop in at a museum, a world-class museum, without a transatlantic journey. So during our stay each year we take a day or two and visit the City and this year he will have his first real Museum visit. He’s been to Museums before, to galleries and such, he was in the MET when he was a year old, but much of that time in his life is gone to him, his memory just couldn’t hold on to all those first experiences that seemed so important to us at the time. I’ll also take him to Union Square and maybe the Brooklyn Bridge if time permits. The Empire State building is another spot on our wish list but we will have to see how the day goes. We may just bite the bullet and stay late into the day and drive home after dark. We rented a nice little car so we don’t have to worry about breaking down on the road in the middle of the night. Our summer cars, the 88’ Toyota and tha 92’ Honda, are aging rapidly and not really reliable for long trips.



He’s very excited about going to NYC for the day, he is proud to call NYC his home, even if he isn’t quite sure about the difference between New York and Smallwood and America – they seem to be almost interchangeable. I’m proud of him, he’s a wise little boy, and although he can be rough at times, he’s a loving child, kind to others and generous and thoughtful. It is all I can do not to just hold him in my arms and cuddle him all day long.

One of the joys of summer here is something we started doing a year or two ago, during one of the frequent stormy late afternoons. We have a small day bed on the porch, it rests next to the far wall of the porch under two windows and when the thunder and lightning are raging outside, the two of us crawl under a blanket and prop ourselves up on the bed to watch the storm work it’s way through the sky. Even when it’s not storming he will often ask if we can sit up late and watch the stars, I think he just enjoys laying close to Papa talking about the wind and rain and stars. I know I do.

Good time days …

Summer is here, HH is nearly five years old and I am writing this from our cabin in the Catskill Mountains of New York. The days and weeks leading up to our departure from Cologne were filled with anticipation. Each morning recently HH would wake with the same question: “Are we going to Smallwood today Papa?” Finally the big day arrived and he was packed and washed and ready to go long before I was. He was terrific on the flight. The only snag was his jogging in the aisles of the aircraft a few hours into the journey. He was a little stiff and most of the other passengers were sleeping so I didn’t think it would do any harm if he stretched his muscles a bit. So there he was, navigating the narrow aisle, big smile on his face, running back and forth through the cabin careful not to jostle his fellow travelers. But I guess someone complained because the flight attendant came to me and said HH would have to take his seat for the duration of the flight. I thought it was a good idea – I still do – I think we should all get a little exercise during those long transatlantic flights.

Once here HH went through what has become something of a standard routine. He reminds me of a cat who has just arrived in a new home. He goes all through the place checking everything out, sniffing for any change from last year and finally he brings every toy he can find into the living room and creates a mine field of sorts for Papa who must tip-toe around it all on my way from the front porch to the kitchen. Yesterday we started planting the garden. This was a big event and HH brought out all his tools from the basement to get the job done right. There were wagons and bikes and various other toys, the gardening function of which are still a mystery to me. But he was over-the-top excited and kept repeating this one phrase all through the day. “This is a good-time day Papa.” He stands there wearing his Yankees baseball cap, his hip cocked to one side and one hand resting on his waist and announces this or that accomplishment or revelation and at the end of whatever it is he has to say comes his pronouncement, “This is a good-time day.” I haven’t asked him exactly what he means by this because I have a pretty good idea of what he’s thinking. I feel the same way. These are the good-time days – they don’t get much better than this. I can’t imagine anything more rewarding than seeing his smile or hearing him laugh out loud or focus all his considerable energy to some task. He told me yesterday that he wanted to live in the cabin forever. I explained to him that it got very, very cold here in the winter and that there was not much to do out here in the woods when the cold weather set in and all the snowbirds went back home to warmer or more urban locations. He may or may not have accepted my explanation and I expect I’ll hear this request again in the coming days. He loves it here – he can be as loud as he wants, get as dirty as he wants, eat as many bagels and crème cheese as he wants and generally have a great time. What’s not to love?

In a few days the lake will open for the season and HH will meet the other children who summer here, children he has come to know over the last four years, whose pictures he looks at on Papa’s computer during the long, cold, German winter. I wonder how that will play out. More good-time days? I expect so.

Greener Grass

Talk about counting the days down!

There must be a name for the phenomenon, where you begin to dislike the place you’re in because you’re about to be somewhere else. It’s something akin to justifying a failure of loyalty to your mate by nitpicking the small failures of the relationship until you convince yourself you’re doing the right thing by taking up with someone new. Well, maybe not quite that bad.

I like it here in Cologne just fine, even though the locals have been in a particularly rowdy mood of late. The consumption of beer in my flowerbeds has reached an all-time high. It will be a nice change to renew the garden in upstate New York and have only deer and the rascal who lives under the rock at the end of the driveway to contend with. Between them they consume a good deal of flowers but as I tell HH when he suggests we build a fence around the flowerbeds, “They were here before we were.” The same goes for my new neighbors here in Cologne. They have been drinking themselves silly for generations and if they haven’t any particular regard for green things in public spaces, then there isn’t much I can do to change that.

Here's to Summer

Today we return to Germany.

The summer has been delightful. There was a good bit of rain, but the sun was warm enough most of the time and the lake was cool and so were the nights. It was also a wonderful time for HH, who became a bit more comfortable in the water and a lot more comfortable scooting around the lakefront each day, chatting up the locals and playing Junior Lifeguard with his red shorts and small white whistle which he swung around on a short black lanyard, like the real Lifeguards, even standing next to them by the lifeguard stand, mimicking their posture. It was a hoot.
He also fell in love, as much as that is possible for a nearly four year old. We have a neighbor nearby, an eight year old girl, and she became something of an obsession for him this summer. Every morning upon waking he would ask after her and want to run out of the house to play with her. Then he always brought her back to the house and played with her here. It was not a perfect match however and soon she found a friend her own age. One afternoon as the two of them were playing in the yard, this older friend rode up on her bike. The two girls immediately ran off together laughing and HH stood forlorn on the front step and watched them go. She didn’t say goodbye - she just ran away. Eventually he looked over at me with just about the saddest expression he couldn’t suppress and asked me what had happened. A flood of answers rushed to me but I resisted the temptation to rant on the subject of relationships with the opposite sex. When it happened the second time however, he was really perplexed and I leveled with him – in a way. The next time it happened, and it was bound to happen yet again, he was prepared and he just turned around and took my hand and said, “Papa, let’s play.”

Yesterday HH said good bye to the lake and the trees and the little gate by the lake outside of which he left a small, blue, cardboard box each morning, as a signal, so that others could also find the lake and him of course. Today will see the scurry of closing the house and getting ready to go – something we have been working at for the last few days but inevitably has a reality of its own that requires a certain amount of anxiety to fuel. That said; we will make it and we will have time to say goodbye to the cabin and animals and to summer. Tomorrow night we will sleep in our old beds and begin to adjust to life outside of these woods.

I may have been too long among the trees because I can’t say I am completely ready to go. I’m torn between the reality of living in America (and this small cabin) and speaking my native tongue without thinking about it and returning to a world where communication is a struggle at best. VHS here I come.



Language dislocation is one aspect of the equation but the other is the fact that our home in Germany is just that – our home. We live there now and have put down roots. Next week HH will return to kindergarten, reacquire his pre-summer German language skills and take up with his small friends in Cologne while Papa continues his efforts to make himself understood. Real life resumes.

Here’s to Summer 2007 … I hope it was a good one for you.

Summer Passing

Morning feels cooler
as August wanes to the ripening
and the returning to seed
for those whose blossoms passed
before their first summer night

Days grow shorter
Soon it will be then and never now again
Our sun lopes to twilight
Less willfull than in bright summer
When it wanted to stay up all night

Living goes on
Within the swirls of childrens balls and fortresses
And flying and bouncing
And growing too
To winter



August 12, 2007
Copyright German Diary

Movies on a rainy day

July 20, 2007
Smallwood

Yesterday it rained all day and this small cabin can get very small after a few hours of playing airport in the living room. So I packed up HH and we went into town for a movie. Finding a film suitable for a three-year-old is never easy and in this part of the Catskills we would have to drive for nearly an hour to find a multi-plex and even then the majority of the films would be out of reach for HH, who has a strong dislike for bad guys of every shade.

Luckily for us there is a small independent theatre in the next town, with three screens and a pretty good selection. “Ratatouille” was playing, a story of an aspiring chef who happens to be a rat. We arrived early, found a good seat in the center of the room, bought a huge bag of popcorn and settled in. For the first few minutes HH kept spinning around in his seat to point out to me the light that was coming from the small room in the back of the theatre. We had read a story about such a room, a “Curious George” story, where the ever-inquisitive monkey creates mayhem in the projection booth then calms the audience by making finger puppets in front of the projector lamp while the projectionist re-threads the film.

The movie began and HH eventually crawled up into my lap and whispered every now and then that he wanted to go home, but I persuaded him to stick it out and he seemed to enjoy himself. I expect that I get more out of these outings than he does. I don’t remember my first time in a movie theatre, whatever I saw wasn’t memorable. The first film I actually remember seeing was “Midnight Cowboy” when I was 18 and on a first date with a daring red-head. HH may not remember yesterday’s film either, or any of the ones that follow for the next few years. When does memory start to catalogue things for distant recall?

For me the thrill of going to the movies with HH is in answering his many questions; “Why is it dark in here Papa?”, “Is there a man in that room back there?” Yesterday I explained to him that when I was a little boy this was the way people saw movies, that we didn’t have computers or DVD’s and so we went out and sat in the dark in a room filled with strangers, ate popcorn and saw a movie. Movie theatres, like the one we visited yesterday, are disappearing from the landscape, but the experience of sitting in the dark with strangers, laughing out loud or secretly wiping away a tear, are still possible. I hope he remembers a little bit of yesterday, I know I will.

Summer Rain

All day the weather forecasters warned of thunderstorms but the day was clear and warm and HH and I had plenty of time to spend at the small mountain lake just a half mile down the road. He’s not yet much of a swimmer but the day’s heat finally got to him and he agreed to crawl up in my arms and wade out into the cold leaf-brown water. He yelped with delight and maybe a smidgen of fear when his feet got wet, then his legs, but when I tried to go a little deeper he stopped me and said that was just far enough and it was time to go back to shore. I persuaded him to stay a little longer but he was insistent so back we went to the narrow dirt beach. He ran to his towel and wrapped himself shivering as if he had just completed a channel crossing and I suppose for him it was something akin to it, our short venture into the dark, vast water. We stayed a while longer then made our way home in time to see the clouds begin to darken and fulfill the promise of a storm we had been all day awaiting.

Thanks to a dear old friend who spent the previous weekend with us, the impending thunderstorm was a little less frightening than previous storms have been. HH still went about his routine of closing all the windows and doors and gathering up his torn blanket and smelly bear but this time his work was measured and calm. Our friend had told him how much she loved the thunder and lightening, how much she looked forward to the pounding rain and purple light of summer storms. We curled up together on the old day bed in the corner of our small front porch and listened. The storm was a calm one as storms go but the rain was steady and we lay there together listening to it for the longest time, saying very little, simply enjoying the warmth and security of our two bodies spooned together staring out the window. Later that night, as HH had just settled into bed, the power went out. I read him his bedtime story by flashlight and soon his eyes were closed, the gentle rattling of the rain outside his window lulling him to sleep.

I sat alone in our dark cabin for another hour or so waiting for the lights to come back on so that I could turn them all off again before I went to bed, with nothing more to pass my time than my thoughts, mostly thoughts of him and how fast he was growing, how even in the course of one summer day he had changed, spoken a new phrase, declared some new variety of independence with his favorite line, “I can do it myself Papa,” just as I was about to lean down and help him with some routine task which he had now learned to do on his own and didn’t need or want my help with anymore.

The sun is just up and I expect he’ll be waking soon, I wonder what today will bring.

Trees

June 29, 2007


It has been raining for two days, good thing because our well-water was looking a little muddy and I had begun taking “navy” showers and watering the flowers with rinse water from the kitchen sink. HH isn’t a big fan of thunderstorms and neither am I. When the sky darkens and the wind suddenly powers through the cabin, we scurry from room to room closing windows, shutting doors and turning off lights. When everything is secured, he crawls in my lap with his smelly bear and we wait it out in our darkened living room, flashlight at the ready.

I don’t mind thuderstorms in the city, where I’m all wrapped up in steel and concrete, a few safe floors above the spit and gurgle of the street, but out here among the aging maples it’s another thing entirely. Trees fall regularly in this neighborhood. Last year, just a few yards from the cabin, a huge one got a direct lightning hit, exploded, split in half and took out the power lines as it fell in pieces to the ground. I happened to be looking out the kitchen window at the time and saw the whole thing. The live wires crackled and danced on the asphalt until the power company finally arrived and put things right. We were without electricity for about eighteen hours but it wasn’t the power outage that concerned me, it was the trees.

Just yesterday I was sitting on the porch reading a dusty 1955 paperback copy of Francoise Sagan’s "Bonjour Tristesse,” when I heard the sharp and unmistakable crack of a falling tree. The entire process of collapse, from that first crackle to the ending thud of the body on the forest floor, took no more than thirty seconds. From the sound of it the tree fell about two hundred yards from where I was sitting. The more I thought about it the more unnerved I became. I’ve always imagined that if a tree began to fall I would hear it in time to get myself or HH out of the way before it hit the ground, but yesterday’s event made it clear to me that it would be highly unlikely I’d be able to get out of the way in time unless I just happened to be staring up at the tree at the moment it decided to fall, poised to leap out of the way.

Last night another thunderstorm pulled into town, it came on like a migraine, a whisper of unfamiliar cold air and a deepening sky followed by the roar and shake of thunder and lightening as it made its way to a spot directly over the cabin. HH and I huddled together, just short of fear, and waited it out. It wasn’t a long storm, or a deadly one for any of our woody friends, at least not immediately.

The weather is supposed to be cool and dry for the next few days, a good thing for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the reduced likelihood of having a tree fall on us. But the thing about these old trees is; they don’t only fall when it rains. The unmarked accumulation of insults from wind and rain and ice preceed the unforseeable moment, and a perfectly normal tree can pop and fall with no notice whatsoever, not unlike the sudden heart attack that fells an otherwise robust 50 year old on his way home from McDonald’s.

So sit we will, in our shuttered cabin and wait out this summer’s storms, with little more than prayers to keep us safe from the vulnerable giants that surround us, shading us on the hot days of July and August and reminding us how nothing is as permanent as it may appear.