Grüß Gott
Bavarians greet each other with a cheerful “Grüß Gott!” This is meant as a benediction — it’s an elision of “Grüß dich Gott,” originally “God bless you” — but my tin ear always translates it literally as “Greet God!” This sounds like something the Terminator would say to you down the barrel of a high-tech weapon: “Prepare to greet your God, baby.”
Burqa Bintis
There are many Arab tourists at my hotel. Most of the women are wearing chadors and hajebs (long black robes and headscarves), and a surprisingly large subset are also wearing face veils. This is huge political issue in Europe and also in Muslim countries like Tunisia where the government is trying to suppress fundamentalism. Many governments have banned or are trying to ban head and face coverings, a law I can’t support. Sure, the veil is a symbol of women’s oppression, but so are stiletto heels and push-up bras, and you can just imagine the outrage if Western women were told they couldn’t wear them. I say that women should be free to participate in their own oppression! They just shouldn’t be required to do it.
Anyway, although I can mentally give an “Ente imshe, binte!” (you go, girl) to a young woman in a burqa, I have to admit it’s a huge shock to see a masked, robed figure glide into the room. As I checked into my hotel this morning under a cloud of jet-lag, my first thought was, “Holy cow, who let the Dementors in?”
Penne Pasta
Although I am a fairly adventurous eater, I draw the line at red meat. I can’t stand anything fatty, gamy, or rare. (Husband would say this is the definition of an unadventurous eater, but I’m good with everything but meat.) German meat is even named disgustingly: Rindfleisch, Kotelett, Döner Kebab. (Donor meat? Yeesh.) My two stand-bys when in Germany are Wienerschnitzel (which is at least always cooked through) and pasta. For some reason, every pasta dish in Germany is made with penne. Dear Germany: There are other pastas. Italy is not too far away. Please look into it.
Dirndl Damen
All the department stores are showing dirndl-and-stomacher combinations in their windows. I hope these are costumes for Octoberfest, but the vitrine displays have the look of something that is supposed to be high fashion. If women in your region start showing up at clubs dressed like the St. Pauli Girl, you’ll know where it all started.
Krazy Krauts
It was stunning weather today, so I walked out to the Englischer Garten and walked along the Eisbach (Ice Creek). The water is nearly flush with the bank, and the bank is neatly bordered with pavers, so it looks almost like a man-made canal, but the water flows through at such a fierce speed that it has to be natural. Near one of the bridges, some underwater obstacle creates waves several feet high, and today there were young men surfing on the creek.
Last weekend, Husband and I got a babysitter and went to see a movie. The babysitter is a fairly regular thing, but the movie was momentous. We like to put Minor to bed before we leave for the evening, because we want the babysitter to COME BACK AGAIN, PLEASE, so we rarely get out of the house before 7:00 p.m. All the local movies seem to start at 7:00 or 9:00, making them too early or too late for us. But the local art house has a 7:30 show on Sunday nights, so even though it wasn’t on our top ten list, we went to see Once.
I was not sorry. Once is the story of an Irish musician who meets a Czech musician in Dublin. They collaborate on a few songs, and they may or may not fall in love. The songs are performed, “Dogma”-like, at length, in mostly real time, and only with instruments that are also present on-screen. There is one clever scene with a Discman, another with some music editing software and another scene in a recording studio that give plenty of excuses for more lush orchestration, but the scenes of the hero playing alone on the street, or the lovers playing guitar and piano together in a music store, were my favorites anyway.
The leading man, Glen Hansard of The Frames, an Irish group, is a singer/songwriter who reminds me a bit of Ron Sexmith, Rufus Wainwright, Mike Viola, Elvis Costello in his mellower songs — in short, all my favorites. (He was also in The Commitments.) His voice and Marketa Irglova’s blend together beautifully. So many solo artists take advantage of technology these days to sing their own backup, which I think is a real loss. Harmony sounds so much better with two interesting, complementary voices.
The story was a very simple one, but throughout the movie I kept waiting for the big Hollywood plot twist that would transform it into something formulaic. She goes to the convenience store; surely she’s going to be attacked! He meets her family; OK, here comes the big misunderstanding that could easily be solved with a simple phone conversation! He goes to the airport; this must be the scene where he rushes off the plane and into her arms at the last minute. Over and over, the movie failed to live down to my expectations.
Since the two main characters are impoverished musicians, they live in squalor that brought to mind my Peace Corps days: cooking on a gas ring, washing clothes by hand, etc. I spent an hour being terribly sorry for them, then felt a flash of nostalgia and, well, envy. Those were fun times, even if I slept in a never-washed sleeping bag for three years. And then there was a sudden flare-up of revulsion for our comfortable suburban lifestyle. It was short-lived; I haven’t been prosperous long enough to feel all American Beauty about it. But for the first time I got a little taste of that Cheever-esque upper-middle-class ennui.
Anyway, the soundtrack is fantastic and is under $10 on iTunes. Minor has been falling asleep to it for the last two nights. You won’t regret it.
On Thursday, shortly after two changes of Minor’s bed linens, stuffed animals, and pajamas had gone through the wash (he threw up twice, but kindly waited until we had finished changing everything to let loose the second time), I walked into my bedroom and noticed that the bottom half of MY bed was wet. Soaked through, in fact. I put on my detective hat:
1. Minor had only been home for a few hours at that point. He was no longer sick and it was unlikely he had been unsupervised on our bed.
2. Dog was the more likely culprit, but he had been at day care since the bed was made. Surely our cleaning person wouldn’t have made the bed with wet linens?
3. The ceiling was also perfectly dry, so there was no possibility of a leak from that direction.
Stymied, I summoned Husband, who quickly discovered the source of the problem: the toilet on the third floor had overflowed AND had been running all day, flooding the bathroom to the point where it breached the lip of the bathroom door, soaked the carpet in the next room, and thereby penetrated the ceiling. This was the toilet in the bathroom next to the office where we had been working all day, oblivious to our own mini-Johnstown.
“But how did the water get through to the bedroom without getting the ceiling wet?” I called up to Husband. He flushed the toilet and demonstrated the process: The water actually flowed out through the ceiling fan (which, mercifully, was not on). Bodily fluids had been dripping through the ceiling fan into my bedroom all day undetected. It was the Amityville Freaking Horror right here in Port City.
(What? You didn’t spend your childhood reading completely true accounts of paranormal phenomena? Well, click on that link, then.)
In an unrelated but oddly synchronous event, Aitch turned four last week and we decided it was high time to give up the nightly Pull-Ups. He has been toilet-trained for over a year, and for most of that time he has also been mostly dry at night. But a few months ago he started backsliding. First he started waking up wet. Then he progressed to waking up soaked. In the last few weeks, he’s been rising at 3:00 a.m. like clockwork, getting a clean Pull-Up and pajamas, and then bringing them into our room so he can be changed. It’s time to stop.
So at bedtime we went through the ceremony of throwing away the Pull-Ups, and I explained the whole going-to-the-bathroom-in-the-middle-of-the-night thing. I couldn’t sleep at all that night; I woke up every half-hour or so worrying, was he about to have an accident and wake me up? If he came to wake me up, would he be able to find us in the guest room, where we were staying until our bedroom dried out? What if he wet the bed and had to sleep with us and then wet OUR bed? WHAT IF WE RAN OUT OF DRY BEDS IN ONE SINGLE NIGHT?
Four nights later, he’s wet the bed twice and remained dry twice, after waking us up to take him to the bathroom. As far as I’m concerned his personal stats don’t really matter, because either way I’m waking up every half-hour to worry, getting up in the wee hours to either change him or escort him to the potty, and then lying awake for hours afterward in the guest bedroom with Aitch kicking me.
Last night I had a brainwave. If I’m up anyway, why not work through the night and then spend the day relaxing, when the kids are gone and I can really do it right? And I was fearsomely productive between 1:30 and 6:30. Not only did I accomplish most of my work tasks for the day, but I also made hotel and limo reservations, wrote eight thank-you notes, did the grocery shopping on-line, and — oh, yeah — ordered more vinyl-backed mattress covers. It seemed like a great idea until I crashed hard at 6:30.
I recently finished a pretty good mystery book, Case Histories, in which one of the main characters, a new mother, decides that since she can’t get anything done during the day, she’ll try to wake up earlier than her baby. She begins setting her alarm clock 5 minutes earlier each night. When we last see her, she’s rising at 3 in the morning to clean and bake pies. I don’t think I’ll be spoiling anything for you to say that her husband, through no fault of his own, ends up with an axe in his skull.
This will, I swear, be the last post about my running shoes.
Since the big race, I have tried breaking in my new shoes, but they continue to hurt my left foot. Yesterday, Road Runner e-mailed me to remind me of their Perfect Fit policy, so in a fit of optimism I called them to ask, would they really take back the super expensive slightly worn blue-tongued Gel Kayanos?
They would. How awesome is that? They will take back my stinky, slightly-worn running shoes just because I don’t like them. With customer service like that, I’m supposed to patronize the guy down the street who can’t even be arsed to order shoes in my size?
What’s more, the customer service rep listened to my tale of woe (”They don’t make the Asics 2110s any more!”) and said that she MIGHT have a secret stash of 2110 “Classics” in the back room.
I was very excited.
Unfortunately, she did not have my size. But she did have the men’s shoes, in a comparable size. Would I be willing to give them a try? I could always send them back, just like the last ones.
Sure, why not? And by the way, what colors do they come in?
“Oh, I only have white with blue stripes. Is that okay?”
Last night, Minor woke up wailing about an hour after I put him to bed. I was upstairs catching up on work, and Husband was putting Aitch to bed in the next room. Minor had puked, so we changed and washed him and the sheets, and eventually I rocked him back to sleep while Husband read stories to Aitch in the next room, Dog curled up at the foot of Aitch’s bed.
It was an unusual situation, all of us tucked into that one little corner of the house. The boys have adjoining rooms, so we usually try to stagger their bedtimes so they don’t disturb one another during the crucial falling-to-sleep moments. So I may be forgiven if my brain skipped a beat there in the dark, and I had a moment of panic in which I thought, “If I’m here and Husband and Dog are in the next room, then who’s downstairs with the other baby?”
Oh, right. We don’t have another baby. It really feels like we should, though. Like there is a third kid out there for our family.
Even as I write that, I know that the scenario I described above — the two of us taking turns putting the kids to bed so that one of us can rush back to work — underscores a selfishness that means we are not really good candidates for a third baby. Oh, I know that if a kid showed up on our doorstep we’d adjust; it would be chaos for awhile, but we’d figure it out. But adjusting to the inevitable is different from planning it.
Sometimes I wish that a child would show up on our doorstep. I imagine that one of the boys’ birth mothers will place another child for adoption, and the agency will contact us. That seems kind of mean-spirited, though, wishing another unplanned pregnancy on someone.
Then, on the other hand, I imagine that the agency will call us and say that one of the birth mothers had twins, and then I’m just thrown back into panic mode and grateful that we just have the two.
How do you know when you’re done? I know no one will come forward and say they really wish they hadn’t had that last kid, but does anyone with one or two feel happy about stopping when they did?
Could some marketing genius please invent a toothbrush with a high-tech head but a low-tech, non-ergonomic, straight handle that would fit into one of those 1970’s toothbrush holder wall fixtures, as pictured above? I hate to see them leaning uncomfortably against the tile like a couple of sullen eighth-graders dreading third period. How nice it would be if they could just rest snugly in their holder. We folks who are (however unwillingly) living in the Me Decade will thank you, at least until we get around to renovating the bathroom. (And would you check out that wallpaper? A redo is badly needed.)
By the way, can you guess which toothbrush is mine and which is Husband’s? That’s right: mine is pink, and it’s not just because I’m such a girly girl. I discovered a long time ago that if I chose any other color for my toothbrush, he would forget which color was his and use mine by mistake. Pink evidently screams “lady” to him, though, and he therefore always concludes that his is the other one. I blame the patriarchy.
Husband and I are down to one car, having turned in our leased SUV, and we desperately need another one. We are not too fussy about color, style, features, or even fuel economy, since we mostly drive around town. We can afford something moderately priced. We have an excellent credit rating and the money for a down payment. What would it take to get us to commit to a car TODAY? Not a hell of a lot.
Yet, when we show up at a car dealership, we are greeted with all of the warmth and alacrity usually reserved for Amway representatives or “Watchtower”-toting Jehovah’s Witnesses. Honestly, you’d think WE were trying to sell THEM something.
Yesterday, for example, we decided to check out the only new-car dealership within 20 miles, because that’s the kind of people we are: we’re so lazy we would buy a car just because it’s close. Also, we thought that American carmakers might have an incentive to sell, since they are in such dire financial straits. We arrived at the dealership at about 5:00 p.m. on a rainy Monday afternoon. We were the only customers in the place. The doors were locked, although the dealership was open. We had to get someone to come and let us in.
“We’re interested in the ABC SUV. Could we see what it looks like?”
“I don’t have one in the showroom.”
“Do you have one on the lot?”
He shows us the car on the lot. We see a version with a few more features right next to it. “Could we look at this one?”
“Well, I don’t have the key.”
“You don’t have it with you, or you don’t have it at all?”
“I don’t have it with me.”
“Could you get it so we can see the car?”
“Well, sure, I can get the key for any car on the lot.”
“Could you please get the key for THIS car NOW?”
He ambles away, eventually returns, and shows us the car.
“Can you give us some lease prices?”
“Well, they change every week.”
“Imagine we wanted to lease something today. Could you give us this week’s price?”
“Well, you have to tell me exactly the kind of car you want, the lease terms, and so forth.”
“Fine, let’s say Car X, $Y down, Z months.”
Fifteen minutes later he comes back with a price for Car X, no money down.
“How much would this be with $Y down?”
“Well, I don’t have a calculator. Just divide Y by the number of months of the lease and subtract it from the monthly payment. It’s about that.”
“And how about if we get a longer lease?”
“Well, I’d have to run the numbers again.”
I suppose we are doing it all wrong. I guess we are supposed to hone in on one car, go for a test drive, pick out the interior, color, and special features, haggle over a price, then wait for half an hour while he makes a few calls and locates that exact model in Ypsilanti, which will take 6 weeks for delivery. But, you know, all I want is for someone to hand me a sheet of paper with different lease options for a few comparable models, so I can make a choice, write a check, and drive off with a car.
Tuesday was the day of the Big Race. In the heat of the afternoon, I put on my shiny new shoes, and Dog and I walked over to the registration desk to pick up my number. By the time I got home I was a hot, sweaty, tired wreck, and I also couldn’t deny that my shoes were hurting my feet. I don’t mean they were too tight, or rubbing in the wrong spot, but that they were causing a sharp pain under my left heel and arch. Now, I fear plantar fasciitis more than the Red Manace, halitosis, and Dick Cheney rolled up into one foul-smelling ball, so I reluctantly concluded that I was not going to be able to wear my new shoes for the race, and I prayed that the pain would not persist.
And then, after that, everything that could go right went right. The temperature dropped slightly. The humidity stayed manageable. I was able to drink enough water before the race that I felt hydrated, and yet hit the bathroom at the optimal moment pre-race so I didn’t feel like I needed to pee through the whole thing. My feet did not hurt. My back did not hurt. Nothing chafed, dug, or blistered. I felt a little breathless on Mile 1 and was feeling a little bored and tired on miles 2 - 5, which were on one long, straight road, but after I did the hill at the end of mile 5 and we hit the scenic part of the race, I was really able to relax and enjoy it.
The race, in its 48th year, is a real community event. The route goes right through town — in fact, right in front of my house — and the people who lined the streets to cheer the relatively quick-paced 5K runners and to see the elite cadaverous-looking 10-mile racers were kind enough to hang around to cheer for us, too. I saw so many people I knew. Are you familiar with the extended opening credits of “The Simpsons” where Bart flies through town on his skateboard and passes every major and minor character in the Simpsons canon on the sidewalk? That’s what it was like, for ten whole miles. There was every person I’ve written about in these pages —Jogging Jesus! The fence neighbors! The mayor! The play group! — and many more. There were people with hoses to spray us and people who had set up unofficial water stations and people blaring music and one little urchin who held out a half-eaten popsicle. I wanted to take it, too, because I found I was unable to drink any water from an open cup without choking while traveling at speed, and I was afraid if I slowed to a walk I would never start again.
The funny thing was, since we were so far behind the pack, not only were people cheering us on, but they were cheering us personally. Time after time someone looked directly into my eyes and said, “You can do it! Four miles to go! You’re doing great!” And time after time I felt compelled to say, “Thank you!” because, after all, the person was looking right at me; there was no one else around. It’s not what Joan Benoit would do, but it only seemed polite.
At mile 9 it was getting dark, and I found myself wanting to speed up to finish. A number of the 5K runners were already walking to their cars, and they continued to call encouragement to us. “You can almost smell the hot dogs!” one guy yelled, leaving me to wonder. Was that a euphemism, like “hitting the wall”? “How was the race, Joe?” “Well, Dave, I was great up to mile 9, then I totally smelled the hot dogs.” Then I did start to smell hot dogs, and I envisioned spectators setting up barbecues near the finish line to picnic among the carnage, much like the first Battle of Bull Run. But it was actually the race organizers providing food for the runners. The nausea that accompanied that smell was probably the worst I felt for the whole race, that is until I crossed the finish line and had to bend down to take off my ChampionChip. Hot dogs. Head rush. Whoa.
Checking the race results the next day, I was relieved to see that we were not the very last of the ten-mile racers, but we were last in the Middle-Aged Fat Lady division. I suppose there is a point of pride in running a race as slowly as you could possibly run it without actually walking. The best part, of course, was running through the familiar streets and having people we know hail us like we were real marathoners. What a great memory.
