Bluebirdy

We have shared out like thieves the amazing treasure of nights and days.

- Jorge Luis Borges

August 10th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

feels like reckless driving when we’re talking
it’s fun while it lasts, and it’s faster than walking
but no one’s going to sympathize when we crash
they’ll say “you hit what you head for, you get what you ask”
and we’ll say we didn’t know, no we didn’t even try
one minute there was road beneath us, and the next just sky

- Ani DiFranco, Falling is Like This

July 28th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Let me tell you something. Something besides the fact that I haven’t posted a real entry for months. Something I want to say to you but I can’t, because it’s like trying to hold back a sneeze, or worse, a deep down belly laugh that threatens to come out my nose in an obscene exhaled snort, in the middle of a quiet library where everyone is concentrating very hard on their important books and papers and are waiting, just absolutely waiting for me to make a squeak of delight that they can oppress with their disapproving stares.

I’m shoulders shaking like I’m crying but I’m not, hand over my mouth, glee in the corners of my eyes but I can’t let any of it out, and it’s giving me a pain in my abdomen that I haven’t had in years. The strangest sensation to rage against is the sensation that I shouldn’t enjoy this, that I shouldn’t be laughing here, that it’s not right. But something about this scenario makes my stomach hurt more, wrinkles my upper lip, bares my teeth in some kind of forbidden joy I can’t or won’t admit to, especially not to you.

It’s novel really, this thrill I get. Everyone always reminds me about the future, the plans, the situation, the morality, and the many reasons I shouldn’t let anyone know I want to laugh. I’ve spent so much time trying to hold it in these past few weeks that I forgot that a laugh is just joy trying to get out. I’m falling now, and it’s going to get out one of these days, and I hope you’re ready for it when I burst.

July 21st, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Moreover, a clandestine life shared with a man who was never completely hers, and in which they often knew the sudden explosion of happiness, did not seem to her a condition to be despised. On the contrary: life had shown her that perhaps it was exemplary.

- Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

July 12th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

It was not your fault; I do not blame you. Please forgive me for running away, and remember me with love as I remember you and our golden age.

- Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

May 19th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Her correspondence had been like the pumping of a heart into a severed artery, wild and incessant at first, then slowing with a kind of muscular reluctance to a stream that became a trickle and finally ceased; the heart had stopped.

- Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

May 19th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

I’m in Egypt for the next two weeks on vacation. Adventure recanting upon my return to Zurich. See ya.

March 28th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

So my first season playing Swiss ice hockey has come to an end and I understand my mentioning of this in Bluebirdy is greatly overdue. I realize also that I never write about hockey much even though it’s my second largest endeavor behind my horse-related obsessions, and I’m always surprised to discover that some people don’t even know I skate. They just know me as that “crazy horse riding chick who also owns some weird pet bird that eats human food.” This is mostly accurate, so I won’t deny it. I also like chickens, which is another massively misunderstood fact about me that I’ll save for another day.

Hockey is actually the one constant in my life that’s nearly always there even when I’m not riding horses or feeding my pet bird Google dinner leftovers. Unlike the horse activities which are fickle and subject to fluctuations in fortune, time, location, and interpersonal relationships, hockey happens almost anytime, anywhere, as long as I’m of sane enough mind to show up and skate (and believe me, your craziest instances in life are usually when you play the best hockey).

There are two things that make hockey grand and have managed to keep me playing even when I moved to the other side of the world. First, all your shit fits in one big wheelie bag that you can take anywhere with you. Second, there’s usually a minimum of fourteen other people expecting your lazy butt to show up at practice, or at the very least, the game, so it’s hard to stay home without repurcussions. Of course, then there’s the small detail that every time I feel like not going to hockey, I go and have a great time. Like I said, trivialities.

I’m in my seventh year of hockey, which is hard to believe, because that’s pretty much the number of years I’ve been out of graduate school in snowy Pennsylvania, where I picked up this nasty little game. I’m starting to think that I was actually predestined to grow up somewhere where there’s snow and ice, and that my birth in Palo Alto, California was a cosmic mistake. I never seem to feel more at home than I do when I’m residing somewhere it’s snowing like the Dickens, I’ve tricked someone else into digging my car out of the pile-up for me (Huckleberry Finn style), or I’m blazing a Jess-shaped path down the obliterated winter sidewalk. As such, it seemed only natural that I’d continue my hockey explorations after moving to Switzerland.

There was only one catch - people play hockey in Swiss German here. This is only a half-catch in that the hard part was figuring out how to get into a league in Zurich, not necessarily how to play hockey. As it turns out, the Google Zurich office is literally down the street from the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) headquarters which handles all things European hockey-wise, despite what the name may suggest. In July of last year this geographical coincidence finally paid off when I was randomly invited by a Googler to attend a BBQ at the IIHF’s posh little establishment on Brandschenkestrasse. Not only did I meet all kinds of people who don’t play hockey at all, but I met the IIHF president and got a tour of the castle that is essentially the office where they do hockey-related paperwork. Who knew. On top of this I met an emotionally disturbed goalie (a redundant description, if you will) who bragged that she only played for men’s teams now because female hockey players are too catty-drama. “And who might I contact if I’m interested in engaging in such catty-drama here in Zurich?” I asked her.

That’s the second time I received contact information that I already had, when earlier in the year a particularly chatty Swiss lad at the Kreisbüro called up the IIHF for me and wrote down the same contact person. I’d spoken to this woman before, but alas, my hockey equipment took so long to arrive from the U.S. last year that by the time I had it, summer was in full swing and the season had ended. It was the end of September when I finally made it to my first practice, which I found out later was more a try-out to see if I could actually stand up on the ice. Frankly, I’m surprised I could, as by that time I hadn’t skated in eight months. What I didn’t know is that, after jumping off a plane from Malaysia half a day earlier, I’d shown up in Zurich at the A league practice, skating alongside some women who, for all intents and purposes, were being paid to play.

This small misunderstanding on my part made my utter exhaustion and infuriating incoordination at the fifteen minute mark into practice that much more embarrassing, as I had no idea I was skating with at least two women who played division I college hockey in Boston and Canada. “Man, I am seriously out of shape,” I said off-handedly to one of the players after practice, as I was riding home in her little car filled with miniature stuffed animals dangling from the ceiling. “What makes you say that?” she asked in her softly accented English. She whipped around a narrow, winding road on the way back into the city and the animals and I all leaned to the right, pressing on the side of the car to keep from falling out. “Uh,” I replied, scooting my ass back into the seat, “I could barely keep up with those girls tonight.”

She glanced at me with a somewhat unbelieving expression and then looked back to the road, suddenly veering left through a roundabout. I gripped the side of the seat. “Those girls,” she said, “play on our national team. There were only three women out there who are part of our regional league that you’ll be playing on with me.”

So ok, sometimes I have unrealistic expectations of myself. At least I can say that sometimes it’s not always my fault either. The truth is, I was out of shape - eight months of chocolate and cheese wasn’t doing me any favors, and the level of play was just enough to make me work harder than I ever had to in the U.S., and sometimes I just could not for the life of me figure out what our coach was saying, but overall I kept up respectably for someone who happened to grow up in the non-hockey-playing-burbs of the bay area.

When you first start any sport, everything’s imbued with a little bit of wonder - from the equipment to the rules to the teams to the rituals and the superstitions. After a while though, it all becomes rote, and you go through the motions methodically, only pausing to think here and there about strategies and to make instant decisions. There’s an element of familiarity that I love about this and that makes playing a sport in another country just like running into an old friend at a cafe in a new town. You may be in a strange land but this person, this person you know. After an entire season here in Zurich, I still get asked by people how I can possibly play ice hockey here if I can’t understand the coach or other players.

Well, there’s two issues I have with that statement. The first is that when people speak standard German, I can usually figure out what’s going on. It’s the Swiss German that throws me off. I may not have met many true-to-life Swiss people while working in the Google office, but there are plenty of them when you go out into the big, wide world that is Switzerland with your glorious attempts to integrate. I still remember the first time I thought I was actually understanding what was going on, as dictated by a coach, only to get stuck when he said “weese und rot.” “What and red?” I asked the Swiss-American girl who often translates for me. I knew he was talking about jerseys but I didn’t catch that first part. “White and red,” she said. “Oohhhh!” I exclaimed, “WEISS und rot.” She looked at me distastefully. “Yeah Jess, that’s how we say ‘white’ in Swiss.”

The second issue I have with the aforementioned statement is that hockey, like many sports (except for horse polo) is filled with set plays and standard drills and exercises. I had the good fortune of being introduced to hockey in a town where the game is well respected (Pittsburgh, PA). As such, I had all kinds of great coaching and clinics at my disposal, where I was properly taught rules, positioning, strategy, as well as a ton of warmup and practice drills with cute names like “horseshoe” and “breakout.” These all exist in Switzerland as well. The challenge is figuring out what they’re called here, and what tiny variation has been inserted to throw me off just a little bit. For example, the women always do the horseshoe drill as the last warmup exercise before a game starts. They of course don’t call it that, but by simply watching how we lined up I immediately knew we were going to do the horseshoe drill without having to say a word. They vary this drill by sometimes having a defenseman skate out along with a forward, and sometimes there are two forwards and one defense. They call this variation “Zwei Eis,” and I’ve come to understand the translation for that as “two on one horseshoe drill.” Of course no one would ever understand my translation - it’s just my personal Jess translation for the purposes of this blog entry and my head when I’m actually at practice.

Harder than practice is being in the locker room with the women, where everyone is speaking in Swiss slang and cracking inside jokes and otherwise speaking a mile a minute on topics I probably wouldn’t get in the first place. My Swiss-American friend, who I’ll call Rosetta for her enduring willingness and unending patience in translating the hard stuff for me all this season, occasionally fills me in on the jokes or if not, tells me that at least I haven’t missed anything important. It was Rosetta who told me that in German, “laufen” means “run,” but in Swiss German it means “walk,” and when referring to ice hockey exclusively it means “skate.” You won’t get that from the software program of the same name, I can guarantee you that.

Remember that sense of wonder I talked about earlier? You might think you never get that back once you’ve been playing a sport for a while, but you can. Just try playing it in another country. All of the rinks we play at  in Zurich and the surrounding area are outdoors. Occasionally we play inside if the weather is horrendous, but sun, snow, or rain, we’re usually outside. It can be a drag when it’s raining but when it snows it’s magical, and there’s something about playing outdoors that I know I’ll miss terribly when I leave Zurich. It reminds me a little of learning to skate outdoors in Pittsburgh at the rink in the park, seeing your breath and the city lights rising up from between the rivers below.

At practice we often have orange cones and small golf cart tires laid on their sides, both used to mark parts of the ice as a skate-around, passing point, temporary goal, and so forth. I’ve seen these used before and am pretty familiar with them. What I wasn’t ready for were the miniature nets we’d use to play 4 on 4 or the short side of the ice. These are goal nets, perhaps about 1′ high by 2′ wide (rough guess) that I assume Frodo Baggins would use if he and the hobbit gang decided to pick up ice hockey. Obviously the idea here is to make it harder to score when you don’t have a goalie. Sometimes the coaches turn the regulation-sized nets back to back and make us play that way, forcing the goalies to look all the way around to defend their goal. The best, however, has to be the long, yellow, triangular padded blocks that the coaches use to mark off sections of the ice. These look just like, well, just like giant Toblerone, and that’s what the players call them too. As Rosetta said when explaining a drill to me once, “So you skate around the Toblerone and then you come back to the center…”

The day I finally received my jersey and socks for my first Swiss game, a guy helping with the game preparations pointed to my helmet in the locker room and asked if it was mine, then asked if he could take it. While I wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it, I happily decided that it was something official and proceeded to let him run off with it. Five minutes later he returned with my helmet covered in stick-on advertising. “What the-” I mumbled when he plopped it into my hand. I had just become a skating billboard. In fact, our jerseys and socks are covered with sponsor logos as well. In Europe it’s considered perfectly acceptable to sell out your team and cover their equipment in advertising. You’ll even see it on TV if you watch the professionals play over here. It’s not something we do in the U.S., strangely enough, even though we plaster advertising all over everything else.

Our games our filled with rituals, some of which are mysterious and some of which have, if not sensible, then at least believable back stories. Before games we do a warmup which consists of running around the block and some random running and jumping exercises in a circle, and then we do this mysterious drill in which we all link arms in a circle and start jogging (or rather sprinting) in place as fast as we can. The instructions are usually dictated by our assistant captain, and for the longest time I could not figure out what was going on. She told us to go left, go right, jump, double-jump, and sometimes we’d all come up and pretend we were taking photos with a camera then continue running. After this happened three or four times, Rosetta finally said to me, “It’s a horse race. Get it?” It’s amazing what I’ve learned playing hockey out here.

In the locker room the women blast hip hop and rock and pop on a boombox they bring in just for games, and we can partake of the tool chest that also shows up at games that’s full of free tape (every kind: grip, friction, sock) and anything you could need should your equipment suddenly fall apart. Once fully dressed and out of the locker room, our team captain has us chant something strange in Finnish. Half the team doesn’t even know what this is, but I understand it has something to do with the fact that some of the team members went to a hockey camp in Finland last summer and learned some dirty Finnish words which they’ve kindly integrated into our pre-game rituals. We then have to perform the standard version of a hockey high five (bumping fists inside your glove) with the captain and coach as we pass out of the locker room and onto the ice. Out on the ice, our warmups always consist of a passing drill on the short side where you do “anything” when you get the puck, such as turning sharply, skating backwards, going down on one knee, etc., before passing it to the next person. We finish with horseshoe variations and then everyone lines up on the blue line. At this point, the captain skates down in front of the blue line, touching her stick to everyone else’s stick as she does so, and then everyone raises their sticks to salute the opposing team, who all do the same. We then turn around and head for our goal, where we get in a circle, listen to some captainish words of wisdom, repeat our Finnish foul language shout, then skate in a line to high five everyone on the team. Everyone then either goes to the bench or gets into position at the center face-off circle as planned. Now, you might think I’m joking about this ritual, but it literally happens the same way every single time.

In between periods, the guy who stuck the stickers all over my helmet serves us sweet tea and sliced fruit, biscuits, and chocolate. If princess hockey ever existed anywhere in the world, this is it and I’ve hit the jackpot. Usually during this time our coach yells at us in Swiss German and I can hardly understand most of it, so I take to enjoying my tea and biscuits and the occasional kiwi fruit with a side of clementines. A long time ago when I was skating in Pittsburgh, I had seen a t-shirt for sale at an ice rink that said, “Hockey Princess” on it with a drawing of a bejeweled crown underneath. When I mentioned this one day to Superstar, he said that he had seen it too, and that he’d thought more than once about buying it for me. He’ll never know it now, but had he bought it for me it’d still be applicable. I love me some between period hors d’oeuvres service.

Away games are no less ridiculous. The A league apparently has their own branded coach, one of those enormous busses with the reclining seats and curtains and DVD system. We get to use this coach to travel to away games, I guess on account of being the “same” team even if we’re the C league version of that team. For late games, we bring this gigantic box that our coach calls the “Kochkiste,” that actually plugs into the wall after unloading from the bus. My German friends find this hilarious as “Kochkiste” apparently translates to “cooking box.” While this humor is way over my head, all I know is that the Kochkiste contains just-from-the-oven hot pasta and sauce, ready for us when the game’s over and we’re out of the showers. I’m also loving me some Kochkiste right about now.

The games themselves are what I’m used to, although the periods are a standard 20 minutes which is crazy long for people who play hockey twice a week, and the clock counts up instead of down (this confused me greatly the first time I watched a game here). Halfway through third period (at the 10 minute mark) the buzzer sounds and the teams change sides, which is a little peculiar. All the penalties called are the same, although some of the teams play quite rough, Canadian or tournament style hockey, and they’re not always called on these things. At my very first game two chicks got into a fight and I had to retract my statement that women never fight during hockey games. Granted, our coach and team were laughing during this fight, but maybe it’s because it was more of an afterthought fight than a real fight. From what I’ve been told, “real fights” are discouraged with a 500 franc fine. There’s very few people worth punching out if it’s gonna cost 500 francs, I have to admit.

The other big difference? The season ends in the spring. That’s right, and I’ve already had someone ask me what my summer sport is going to be which gave me a little bit of panic. Am I supposed to already have that lined up? I haven’t even packed my hockey bag away downstairs yet, but, mountain biking anyone?

March 23rd, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Before I begin and before you develop even more preconceived notions about the subject of this entry, I’ll admit that I don’t really know a thing about “Karma” as defined by those who might be considered experts in the matter. All I know is that there’s definitely a “what comes around goes around” method to the universe, and for lack of a better description I’m going to call it Karma. It’s that unearthly intangible somewhere between Skywalker’s Force and Neo’s Matrix, the thing that supplies us with sometimes opportune and sometimes unexpected poetic justice, retribution, and just deserves. It’s the thing you’ve been waiting for as well as the thing you dread, the miracle and the disaster, and at the heart of it all is that undefinable space between, where you’re not sure if you’re being rewarded or punished, but you know damn well there’s no way you’re being ignored.

The problem with the space between is that unlike the good or the bad, you can never be entirely certain what it is you did to bring on this wave of ambiguous fortune. Just like a huge credit card bill, at some point you can’t tell whether you’re paying for Saturday night’s dinner or that sofa you bought last year. When it comes down to it, you’re just paying. Something like this happened to me over the course of the last two months, although it’s not actually what spurred me to write this entry. Around November of last year I decided, quite suddenly (as all my decisions go) to request an extension to my work assignment and stay in Zurich for another year. My manager verbally approved it, at which point I procrastinated until the week before Christmas to submit my official paperwork for formal approval. To make this short, my procrastination caused some bells to go off and my extension approval was subsequently delayed for two months during which time I languished in the purgatory of not knowing whether I was coming or going, quitting or staying. While the delay wasn’t all my fault, going into the details is irrelevant to this discussion and will only encourage me to start anew my blame distributions, so I’m not going to do that. Instead I’ll just say that I was convinced I was somehow being punished for misdeeds in my past, though I could never be sure what they were. About two weeks ago, the great karmic wheel or whatever it is reversed with a squealing of rubber and not only did my assignment extension suddenly go through, but I found and was offered a new apartment in Zurich after only three days of searching. (If I haven’t before mentioned the Zurich apartment fiasco, remind me and I’ll write another entry on it, as it certainly deserves its own.)

With my wheel of fortune (minus Vanna White) rolling along smoothly now, I was feeling like I’d somehow gotten it together, made amends, taped the wings back on the fly, done whatever was necessary to make those fickle karmic deities happy. This morning I set off on my long train ride to Friedrichshafen, Germany, where I was due to catch a flight home to the U.S. for Frigg’s wedding. I had decided to fly out of Friedrichshafen as a cheaper although less convenient alternative to leaving from Zurich. Somehow, after nearly two hours of perfect train changes and nothing particularly interesting, I managed to miss the stop for the airport. No problem, I reasoned, I had padded my trip a bit and decided to simply get off at the next stop and take the next train going in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, I had efficiently boarded an interregional express train that only makes about three stops between this tiny German airport at the edge of Switzerland and, well, the other side of Germany. I’m not sure if I was halfway to Munich before the train actually stopped. It doesn’t really matter because it’s more like the weather report - they can say it’s 50˚F out but if it feels like 32˚F to me then does it really matter? I was halfway to Munich, or I might as well have been halfway to Munich because either way I was now doomed to miss my flight.

When I got off the train in what was effectively the middle of nowhere Germany, I did feel that old, familiar panic rising up from my gut towards my throat. Interestingly, this panic has nothing to do with the possibility of being stuck in the middle of nowhere, or being stuck where no one could speak English, or being stuck in say, Rome at 3 a.m. after the airport shuttle never arrived to pick me up at my hotel and no public transit was running and there wasn’t a taxi in sight and my flight was leaving in two hours, which actually happened and also did not cause me to panic. The panic was more this fear that I was going to freak out.

For years now, I’ve suffered from this partial but debilitating inability to control basic emotions. Now you might think, but Jess, you seem perfectly fine when you talk to me! Yes, this is probably because I was perfectly fine the last time I spoke to you. This isn’t a constant, unpredictable berserking and raging. It’s more of an overreaction to seemingly mundane setbacks in life, like getting a parking ticket or missing a flight or even screwing up a pass at hockey. Instead of blowing it off, I seemed destined to always take it to heart, bursting into a heaving, sobbing mess or alternatively, stomping and cursing and fuming. And yes, since I freak out about such trivial things you can imagine how I react when something devastating actually occurs, or a series of these smaller things multiply to become one devastating thing.

After discovering that the next train in the other direction wouldn’t get me to the airport in time to make my flight, I spent twenty minutes in the middle of nowhere debating whether I should attempt to find a taxi or take the next train back to the airport to plead my case to the gate agent. Muddled, frantic, and dragging my huge suitcase all around through the snow, I stopped for a minute. Ok, I reasoned, perhaps this bad karma was because of something I did. Or maybe it’s really good karma in disguise. Or maybe it’s a test to see if I deserve better karma. As I stood there with the snow blizzarding all around me, turning my hair to frizz and soaking my luggage, I recognized that I wasn’t actually freaking out. I didn’t even feel a freak out coming on. I actually cynically wondered how long it would last. I calmly dragged my bag back up the steps of the train station and over to the platform where I caught a train back to the airport I’d missed the first time.

Ever skeptical of my ability to manage a situation without making it worse, I stood behind two other people at the Lufthansa ticketing counter, waiting for that intimate hysteria that’s accompanied me into every critical situation since I was a kid to step up and ring the doorbell to my serenity. The customers in front of me walked away and I strode up to the counter with a closed smile, the corner of my mouth twitching downward ever so slightly. l explained the situation. The gate agent told me what Lufthansa had told me over the phone - that my ticket was completely restricted and that I couldn’t even pay a change fee, that there were no more flights out of Friedrichshafen that day that would get me to Frankfurt in time to catch any of the San Francisco flights, and that if I wanted to buy a new ticket to fly out tomorrow it was going to cost €1400+ (on top of the non-refundable $800 I’d already spent on the ticket I wouldn’t be able to use). This is pretty much always the point where if I haven’t freaked out yet, I go absolutely postal. Most people don’t respond very well to this, especially airport personnel, who are not only used to this sort of behavior but no doubt trained in how to deal with it. And usually, they’re trained simply to tell you to go to hell because they aren’t paid enough to listen to someone else’s psychological shortcomings.

I stood calmly and smilingly, and asked what other options might be available. Interestingly, I think that when the gate agent noticed I hadn’t yet flipped after seeing the new price, she decided to search further for me. After nearly twenty minutes, she had printed out three possible new itineraries for me, although none of them could get me into Frankfurt today, and all of them still cost in the €1400 range. My options were staying overnight in Frankfurt or taking the train all the way back home to Zurich only to do it all over again in the morning. She suggested I take the itineraries, look them over, and “think about them” and then come back to the desk when I’d decided to purchase one. It was an odd suggestion, so of course I tried it, and sat for a while staring at all the different ways I would never make it home today and still have to pay nearly $1800 more. Ah damn you Karma, I thought, I did something bad. But what? I sat there for about another fifteen minutes, staring at the deluge of white drowning the airport parking lot.

I was still procrastinating on my decision when the very serious German woman who had printed the itineraries earlier came running around the corner, apparently looking for me. She gave me some instruction in German, then corrected herself and told me to wait for her in English. She then dashed away and came back a minute later, and told me she could put me on almost my original itinerary (except that I’d still have to fly out tomorrow morning since today’s flights were long gone) and I’d only have to pay a €250 change fee. “Oh my gosh, are you kidding?” I looked at her, astonished. “I spoke to the supervisor and told him that due to heavy snow you should be able to change this flight for only the change fee.” An honest to God “Dankeschön” has never fallen so freely from my lips. Who says Germans can’t be sweethearts when they want to? More shocking even than that was the eerie composure I had maintained so easily through the ordeal.

Now, you’d think it had ended there and happily ever after, but if that was all I don’t think I’d really have a case for writing about any of it. After all, who hasn’t experienced some sort of airport mishap, whether self-inflicted or through divine interruption? Or even an airport mishap that spontaneously (or not so spontaneously) resolves itself eventually? I’m actually writing this while sitting in a little square room of a little B&B run by little old German ladies who have little idea what I’m saying whenever I open my mouth. I’m staying here until my flight leaves tomorrow at 6:25 a.m., and the only way I even have a ride back to the airport is that I was able to use my horribly broken German to ask the cab driver to come back for me at 5 a.m. People in little towns in Germany feel sorry for people who speak terrible German, as I found out. So sorry that you have to feel more than a tad embarrassed for yourself and for them as well. I can’t be sure if it was my €1 tip or my pathetic plight (or both) that inspired my cab driver to carry my heavy ass suitcase up three flights of stairs, but he did. He then explained to the old lady running the B&B that I spoke “a little” German and that I was from California. To my wonderment, I understood their entire conversation. To my frustration, I couldn’t figure out how to contribute to that conversation.

My inability to form a complete sentence was irritating at best, but my surprise at mostly understanding what was going on around me overwhelmed my initial vexation. When I asked where I could get something to eat, the two gray-haired ladies bickered on about it between themselves, discussing what places were and weren’t open and which places were only open for coffee and tea. I watched and listened to them, fascinated, as if observing a thrilling tennis match. Finally, after calling a number of places, they realized that none were close enough for me to walk to. You know you’re in the middle of nowhere Germany when you need a car to get somewhere. At this point, I started to lose the gist of the conversation. One of the women put her coat on and picked up her car keys and motioned to me, then told me she was going to take me to a restaurant in her car. Did I mention that I used “Dankeschön” a lot today?

“I have a big auto,” she said in German as she giggled and gestured to her Smartcar. That’s it, that’s joke number three in German that I actually understood and laughed at (although to tell the truth, we laughed at the Swiss guy who told us we weren’t allowed to laugh at the yodeling CDs he was selling, and I’m not really sure he meant that as a joke, so maybe the count is only two). I’ve never been in a Smartcar. They’re amazingly roomy inside, but built like toys - plasticky and unpredictable.

The woman took me on a winding route down the slushy back streets to a restaurant that turned out to be very “geschlossen,” then tried to back out of the deeply bedded parking lot. Her Smartcar started to spin its front tires when she put it in reverse, and I thought for sure I had gotten an old lady and her car stuck in the snow because I wanted a sandwich. The day couldn’t have become more bewildering or absurd. I made a motion that I was going to get out and push the front of the car while she gassed it, but as I reached for the door handle she put her hand on mine and then pointed in a “stay” sort of gesture, the way you’d tell a toddler not to move because you said so. “Uh,” I mumbled, then sat back. I’d almost gotten my sedan stuck in the snow in exactly the same way when I lived in Pennsylvania, and I thought for sure there was no way this old lady knew how to rock herself out of this. All I can say is, don’t underestimate old German women who have been driving in the snow for years. She put the car back in drive and gunned it forward, plowing deeper into the snow drift. I raised my eyebrows but didn’t yet grab for the door handle. She then unceremoniously put the car in reverse after getting stuck in neutral twice, and lead-footed the accelerator while the little car whined in agony and then suddenly and unexpectedly popped out of the rut. Yeah I did. I had to clap. She smiled triumphantly as she turned back onto the main road, once in a while saying, “Oooo” when the car fishtailed.

I recall FlyBoy once saying to me, “I can’t believe the situations you get yourself into.” I suppose it’s telling that his remark came to mind again as I rode in an old lady’s Smartcar in the middle of snowy nowhere Germany. I just wanted to get to California, but karma makes you pay your due, as it were, and maybe it even helps you learn a little something about yourself in the process, my new, rational, sensible self. I still couldn’t believe my emotional heroics. In fact, I feel like I can’t even qualify them as heroics, because the whole thing was so easy. Emotional heroics are where you dig your nails into your forearm to prevent yourself from crying, or grit your teeth so hard they might crack to keep from saying something nasty. You just can’t physically (or mentally) keep something like that going. Having it come naturally to me is something I’ve vividly imagined for ages but could never, prior to this event, make reality. If I was forced to acknowledge any hint of regret at all about this extraordinary awareness, it’s that I wasn’t able to come by it sooner. Exemplary self-control is useful for a lot more than just airline employee charity.

We did eventually find a sandwich shop, in case you were wondering. The best part is that the old lady made me out to be an American Oliver Twist, this poor girl from California who doesn’t speak German and just wants something to eat. This is amazing actually, since I understood everything she was telling the woman behind the deli counter, and she didn’t once tell the woman that I was penniless yet the deli woman still gave me the sandwich for free. To my surprise, the old woman then bid me auf wiedersehen and took off in her Smartcar right after explaining to me that it was less than a 1 km walk back to the B&B. I wanted to scream, “No, take me with you, I’ll only be a minute!” but that was a little too complex for my limited vocabulary, so instead I just waved goodbye, wondering how I wouldn’t be soaked through by the time I got back to the B&B, if I managed to find my way back.

I decided to sit down, eat my sandwich, and ponder it a bit like I did earlier when faced with the prospect of bad and then worse. After ten minutes or so of deliberations, I watched as the deli woman came out from behind the counter and tried to explain to me in the kind of German you use when you’re talking to retarded people and Americans that she was off at 2 p.m. and would drive me back to the B&B if I wanted. How does that go again? Oh baby, dankeschön…

I guess maybe you’re wondering wtf this all has to do with karma. Or maybe you’re just wondering wtf in general. I kind of am too, since I’m still sitting here in this B&B wondering if something good happened, something bad happened, or both. On the one hand, I missed my flight for a pretty dumb reason, and I was literally almost at the airport. I had to pay a change fee. I had to get a hotel. I’m late getting home. On the other hand, I only had to pay a change fee. I had two German women who don’t even know me drive me around town and give me free food. I serendipitously realized that I understand a lot of German when German and not Swiss people are speaking it. I managed to finally write a new blog entry. Most of all, I’m conscious of the fact that somewhere along the line, apparently while I wasn’t even paying attention, insanity stopped coming ’round this place. There’s something about that feeling that points to some pretty good karma.

February 18th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment