Christmas with Grandma & Grandpa

Three of our four grandkids who live nearby came over to help decorate the tree a couple of days before Christmas.  They are all sweet beyond measure.  I say that knowing all grandparents think the same of their grandchildren.  I also often hear friends who are grandparents say, "I love having the kids come to visit, but it's great to send 'em home at the end of the day."  I'm sure that luxury inflates our impression of their sweetness.

When the grandkids arrive, they run up to the door shouting our names, arms open.  We wrap them in a bear hug and then they tear into the house, shedding jackets, boots and hats the second they set foot inside.  They run like a SWAT team from station to station, scanning to be sure all of the kid accessories are in their customary locations:  books in the baskets under the window seat, blocks and puzzles in the kitchen hutch, step stool in place at the bathroom sink.  They are also on the lookout for anything new and exciting:  a plate of cookies, wrapped packages, shopping bags that just might contain something interesting.

Our grandson likes to make sure restricted items are where they belong:  the hand-carved Austrian creche with his favorite cow and donkey figures atop the living room bookcase, great grandma's ceramic rabbit nestled at the back of an open shelf in the dining room buffet.  He checks on his favorite dinosaur books--the encyclopedic volume meant for much older kids that he pores over every visit, his favorite listening book, Tadpole Rex, and his newest,  a personally signed copy of Uncover T Rex (my wife works with the author).  His older sister, the kindergartner. wants to know if we can play her favorite make-believe games, "Little Mouse" and "Doctor."  She always arrives rarin' to help with cooking or crafts, or to head to neighborhood playgrounds or outside to build a snowman.   Younger sister brings grandma and grandpa up-to-date on whatever she has been doing in a language she invented for the purpose.

We marvel at their energy and how they can concentrate for longer than we expect on building block castles or drawing or running at top speed around the playground (or our small Victorian house).  We marvel at them, and they marvel at everything else.  When they go along to walk our dog (an adventure we describe as "Around the Block in 80 Days"),  every ten feet there's some new wonder.  "Hey, Grandpa, look.  Ants!"  "Grandma, look, dandelions!"  "Hey, there's birds on that roof."  They give us new eyes to see what's amazing in the ordinary.

Our experience is that kids--just like adults--thrive on a certain amount of routine.  We're not talking boot camp, just enough of the expected, so that they know they are somewhere familiar and safe.  Then they can be relaxed enough to notice and absorb what's novel.   And they thrive on responsibility--jobs that they can handle or can learn to handle, given their age.  We learned all this (eventually) as parents and now it's great fun to see how it helps our grandkids thrive.

We have also learned to anticipate some of the potential mishaps that upset children (and their grandparents) and make adjustments before they escalate into a fuss.  Don't want your favorite mixing bowl broken?  Pull out the aluminum one when the kids come over.  Tired of vacuuming cracker crumbs from between the couch cushions?  Make it a rule to eat only at the dining table.  Afraid you won't be able to erase their crayon art off the living room wall?  Invest an extra buck in washable markers and keep the arts and crafts alive.

For Christmas tree decoration, this translates to grandpa setting up the half-off bargain artificial tree (with its pre-strung lights and decorative berries) before the kids arrive and grandma picking the ornaments that either won't break or can be sacrificed at the altar of learning.  Which is what we do every year now.  So each kid gets an ornament to attach to the tree, which they do, finding the perfect spot within reach.  After which each squeals in delight, "Hey, grandma (or grandpa), come look."  Repeat twenty-five times, with grandpa hoisting kids to hang ornaments in the higher branches, until--voila!  An entirely kid-decorated Christmas tree.  And a grandfather with a backache, worth every hoist.

Of course, the number of ornaments on the lower half of the tree outnumbers those in the top half.  And a few ornaments get bent or chipped.  And a couple of favorites have to be taken down and admired several times before finding their way back onto the tree.  But, in the end, we accomplish something together and stand back to admire our tree with satisfaction, knowing we all have a role to play in bringing Christmas to life.

Chicken Feet

The World Trade Organization (WTO) has been called upon to settle a dispute between U. S. exporters and China.  The crux of the dispute involves chicken feet.

I always assumed (correctly it turns out) that chicken feet and other undesirable parts of animals ended up in pet food.  Sure enough, U. S. pet food companies mix a few feet in with the "beak and fin" that make their way into Fido's food bowl.   But, the reason they end up there, along with the "lips and assholes" (as my son so eloquently describes the contents of pet food), is that there is absolutely no other market for them in the U. S.  Be honest.  When is the last time you ordered chicken feet at your favorite dining establishment?

Not so in China, where every part of every edible animal and plant is fair game for the comestible market.  It turns out, in fact, that chicken claws (as they are called in China) are something of a delicacy, most desired for their crunchy texture when deep-fried.  So, the American poultry processing industry, never one to pass up an economic opportunity, has been exporting chicken claws to China by the bucket load.  Since they are essentially a give-away at home, finding a market that pays even a small amount for them has stimulated an incredible volume of trade--over 300 thousand tons to date.

Now China is crying fowl (sorry for the pun).  Even though American chicken claws are of superior quality--cleaner and more robust than locally produced or imported claws from other suppliers--Chinese chicken ranchers are upset because they cannot compete with what they see as "subsidized" products from U.S. competitors.  They complain that chicken farmers in American use grain that is cheaper because of government subsidies to grow healthier chickens that have bigger feet.  And then these high quality feet find their way to Chinese markets at lower prices, thus sabotaging local producers who are losing market share because they have been used to demanding higher prices for their inferior product.

I have some personal experience with the Chinese propensity to eat anything and everything that can be harvested from fish or fowl or farm.  In 1988, my wife and I traveled to China with a group of engineering students from the university where she teaches.  At that time, the country was still in the throes of recovery from the Cultural Revolution and other of Chairman Mao's social and economic experiments.  Bicycles were the main mode of transportation.  Beijing had one western restaurant, a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet close to Tianmen Square (only breasts, thighs, and drumsticks).  The food we ate during our 30 days in country was entirely local.

The first formal meal we were served, my wife and I and another professor sat with the local functionaries at a round table, gamely trying each of the dishes that were placed on the lazy susan.  When the duck tongue soup course arrived early on, it was accompanied by a plate with the head of the duck neatly bisected exposing the brains.  After some awkward hesitation and much jabbering amongst our hosts, who seemed all to be looking to us to make the first move, we discovered through the translator that duck brains are reserved for the highest ranking person at the table.  Local protocol designated us, as honored guests, most deserving of the delicacy.

Having resolved before the trip to try every food offered to us, I was willing to snap up a little brain with my chopsticks, but on this occasion I deferred to our professor friend, who was a longtime China hand, to accept the honor.  He was still jet-lagged, as we all were, and no doubt had some experiences with Chinese food that screamed caution, and he very politely insisted that our hosts dig in.  Which they did, with a gustatory zeal I would witness often in the coming weeks--entirely justifiable in a country that had been subject to frequent food shortages a decade ago.  What the incident foreshadowed was a trip full of highly unusual (for us) cuisine.

Eating local foods reveals a lot about, and sometimes more than, a person needs to know about a culture.  I had studied modern Chinese history for a year before embarking on our 1988 trip, and I knew something of the famines that plagued the countryside during the warlord period and under Maoist rule.  Peasants resorted to eating tree bark to survive.   These stretches of deprivation were nothing new.  Chinese history chronicles one period of starvation after another.

No wonder, then, the willingness to put unusual foodstuffs on the menu.  But, to the credit of Chinese chefs, even the most bizarre foods are seasoned and sauteed and served with style, if you have the stomach for them.  Among the delicacies that I tasted on our trip:

• Roasted baby birds.  Beaks and legs (but no feathers, thankfully) included.  These, I discovered, are eaten with chopsticks, feet first, saving the crunchiest and tastiest parts (the head and beak) for last.
• Turtle soup.  This dish is common around the world, but I am guessing that only in China are the head and tail of the turtle thrown into the mix.  As the elder statesmen at most of the meals we ate, I had the honor of serving food to others.  When I dipped a ladle into the turtle soup we ate in Changsha, it came up with a soggy turtle head staring blankly back at me.  Not appetizing.  
• Various boiled or baked fish, served whole and unscaled.  The most unsettling feature of these dishes is the eye of the fish staring at the diners.  Fish eyes, it turns out, are the most desirable part of the creature.  Despite a willingness to try everything, I never ate a fish eye.  I did, however, munch on cheek steaks, the meaty flesh under the fish's gill cover.  Tender and tasty.
• Stinky tofu.  This was Mao's favorite dish.  I believe we also had this in Changsha, his birthplace.  The smell preceded the tofu.  The waiter set a plate of blackened, putrified bean curd on the lazy susan and everyone at the table nearly fainted from the odor, something akin to sweat-soaked socks and the smell you remember when they removed your arm cast after six weeks without a shower.  Turns out, the tofu is injected with a bacteria to cause spoilage and discoloration.  And you still don't understand why Chinese  menus feature chicken feet?

Another memorable Chinese meal I recall was served, quite unexpectedly, in Poland.  During my college semester in Europe in the 1960's, our class traveled to Warsaw and Krakow on a field trip.  A group of us went out one night to a Chinese restaurant at the urging of one of our classmates, who was from Taiwan.  When the chef discovered that a Mandarin speaker was among his clients, he came out to talk.  After a few minutes of animated reminiscing, my classmate told us that the chef would prepare a 10-course meal for us at a bargain price (about $3/person, as I recall).  

The food was amazing, definitely one of the most interesting meals I had in Europe during my six months there.  It was also weird.  One course was sea cucumbers, which I still recall as having the taste and texture of a bleached inner tube.  

In the end, we all value the familiar.  When our China group finally emerged in Hong Kong from 30 days on the mainland, we headed to . . . Pizza Hut.  We were dying for a cheesy treat and all of us overate that first night out of the Middle Kingdom.  Many Chinese are lactose intolerant and so cheese is not a part of their diet.  But, the place was packed with locals, mostly young people in their 20's and 30's by the look of them.  They were not there to eat pizza.  Instead they were in competition to see who could load up the most at the salad bar, everyone mounding an impressive dome of veggies and garnishes on the single-serving plates the restaurant allowed--lettuce, olives, bean sprouts, beets, garbanzos, onions, cherry tomatoes, peppers, seeds, hard-boiled eggs, and dressings.  But no chicken claws.

I am wondering, at this minute, whether cross-cultural delights are now featured in the dozens of western fast food outlets that have invaded the mainland since my most recent visit to China in 2003.   If so, they are no doubt toned down, the way kung pao chicken has been manipulated to suit American tastes.  But wouldn't it be another measure of how adaptable we are as a species if I returned to Beijing, headed to a branch of Burger King, and actually said "yes" to the attendant's request:

"Would you like chicken claws with your burger?"

Handel's Messiah

I can belt out the hallelujah chorus from the Messiah like anyone else, but I admit to never having heard the entire piece performed live.  That's no longer true.  We attended a performance this past week at The Kennedy Center featuring a small section of the National Symphony Orchestra and the University of Maryland Concert Choir, conducted by Matthew Halls.

Flanked by an array of potted red and white poinsettias, the choir radiated energy during the uptempo choral sections.  The Messiah is a celebratory composition, despite some somber parts, and the chorus gets most of the upbeat sections.  So it came as no surprise to see on occasion the college-aged singers in the chorus swaying back and forth like they were in a gospel choir.

I'm no music critic, so I'll pass on assessing the work of the soloists, all of whom had beautiful voices, some projecting better than others.  But I have to say something about one of them-- the countertenor.  When I saw countertenor in the program notes, I really had no idea what that person (male or female?) would sound like.   I figured it must be in a musical range slightly above or below a tenor voice.  So, when the young American countertenor, Jay Carter--a stocky blond fellow with male pattern baldness-- stepped forward to sing his first recitative (There were shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night . . .), I thought Frankie Valli had put on a tux and made a guest appearance.

You know the falsetto of the lead singer the Four Seasons?  That's what I'm talking about, only a voice more formal and classically trained, and you would be hearing Jay Carter, the countertenor.  In fact, his singing was the purest and most moving of the evening, full of the trills and arpeggios familiar to listeners of the Messiah, sung so clearly and with such evident emotion in places that the hairs on the back of my neck stood out.   It's easy to understand why the castrati were so popular in Italy, a fame earned by the elimination of their testicles, but certainly worth it for the listeners.

One other surprise of the evening for me was the size of the orchestra.  I counted 11 violins, 4 violas, 2 each cello, bass, and oboe; a timpani, harpsichord, and organ; and 3 trumpets.  When I've seen the Messiah done on televised performances or listened to the music--and I admit to paying most attention during the famous louder parts--my impression is of a titanic accompanying orchestra.  And that is sometimes the case.  But, I discovered from the program notes and a little post-concert research that Handel had an even smaller orchestra than I heard last Thursday.  The heart of the music was meant to reside in the voices and not the instrumental accompaniment, although both are important.

The other lingering impression from the performance also came from the program notes.  Just as in music and sports and politics today, the best performers do not always lead the most virtuous lives.  And the London choirs of Handel's day were evidently full of randy debauchers, who were free to belt out secular music but were seen as inappropriate participants in sacred works.  When apprised of a proposed performance of the Messiah at Covent Garden in 1743, Edmund Gibson, the Bishop of London, objected to hearing the words of the New Testament sung by "actors and actresses of loose morals and dubious sexual habits," in the words of Robbins Landon.  So it took the promise to share proceeds from the concert with the foundling hospital and a charity for "deserted young children" and the additional measure of renaming the piece "A New Sacred Oratorio" to even get the Messiah staged.

That tradition of performing the Messiah to benefit a worthy cause continues to this day.  A canned food drive was associated with the Kennedy Center concert we attended.  A local church is staging Messiah to raise funds to repair their pipe organ, which suffered damage in this summer's DC area earthquake.  One would be hard pressed to find a major city anywhere in the world that does not offer at least one performance of Handel's Messiah during the Christmas holidays.  The music and lyrics and performance have taken on the weight of a holiday tradition.  In that vein, we,  like George II, stood during the hallelujah chorus, buoyed by participation in hearing (and secretly singing along to) sacred music brought to life by flawed mortals.  Another miracle of the season.

Holidays (continued)

Following the dishes, we assembled every Christmas Eve in the living room and took turns reading the Christmas story, the version in Matthew.  This was followed by a round of hymns and other holiday songs, that my mom or I would accompany on the piano--Away in a Manger, Silent Night, O' Little Town of Bethlehem, Angels We Have Heard on High, O' Holy Night, Adeste Fidelus, We Three Kings of Orient Are (...always smoke a White Owl cigar...), and the secular chestnuts like Silver Bells, Frosty the Snowman,  Rudoph the Red-nosed Reindeer, White Christmas.

And then . . . there was the annual photo session.  My brother and I in front of the tree.  My parents in the front of the tree.  My brother and Queenie the dog in front of the tree.  Queenie in front of the tree with her present, which got unwrapped first so she'd have something to keep her busy.  Most of these were taken with a box camera.  When we finally got one of the fancier cameras, another of those "time-saving" gadgets of the day, all of us could pose in front of the tree, which some years took upwards of 20 minutes while my dad figured out how to work the timer.

Finally, the big moment would arrive.  I have since been to homes where present opening takes on the frenzy of buzzards tearing into a fresh kill on the Serengeti.  Paper and ribbons flying, tugged at like entrails.  No sooner one package opened than everyone tears into their next.  Not so in our Lutheran home.

First, mom kept a list of every present--giver, receiver, contents, special notes ("Also sent card with $5").  My brother and I were assigned to pick out and distribute, round by round, one present at a time for each family member.  Then my brother would open his, ooh and aah a bit, and head back for the tree to start gathering gifts for the next round.  I would be next, more oohing and aahing, then my mother, and finally my dad.  Very systematic.

Nor were things torn into.  My dad would get out his pocket knife--my brother and I added ours when we were old enough--and we all carefully cut through the scotch tape so that the wrapping paper could be refolded and saved for next year.  Ditto the bows and sometimes the ribbons.  My mom liked also to save the gift tags.  I recall opening presents on Christmas Eve when I was in college that had the same paper, bow, and gift tag that had covered a box of Avon Eau d' PineSol cologne I unwrapped in junior high.

Gifts for my parents ran out long before my brother and I finished opening our presents.  So we would continue until the living room was filled with piles of booty and stacks of recycled wrapping and bows. Each of us, seated on the chesterfield or piano bench or carpeted floor, my dad in his overstuffed chair, continued to go through our own mound of underwear and socks and games and books and personal care products and something special for that year.  Queenie slobbered on the carpet, intent on her Christmas bone.  I picture myself lifting up a book, reading a few pages, then setting it aside in a new pile, before picking up the next item, until I had gone through everything two or three times.

Our gift opening now with children and grandchildren has some of the same rhythm.  We have our own family rituals for the holidays.  For many years as our children were growing up, that included Christmas Eve mass before opening presents.  Gift opening still features grandpa (me) with his pocket knife and a baggie for debris, helping everyone unwrap things with enough care that some of the paper finds its way into seasonal storage to make an encore appearance.   We gather as a family for the same breakfast every Christmas morning--coffee and sticky buns and grapefruit.  And Christmas meal, like Thanksgiving and Easter and birthdays, sticks to the same menu year after year.

Our kids grumbled when we made them march through our family's Christmas rituals.  And the grandkids twitch and whine a little when told they need to wait until we're done with the dishes before we can open presents.  But they all comply, and in the complying learn something about patience and ritual and gratitude and stewardship and family.  What more could you ask of the holidays?

Holidays at Our House

Growing up, we were lucky enough to have a Christmas tree buried under presents every year.  A mound of wrapped gifts would miraculously come out of hiding when we put up the tree, usually a week or so before Christmas day.

Of course, they weren't really hidden.  My brother and I had pawed over every one and administered the shake test long before their public debut.  I recall us sneaking into the guest bedroom (one favorite hiding place), picking up wrapped goodies one by one, and shaking them like maracas. My brother had the habit of shaking first by his right ear, and then switching over to shake by his left ear, and kind of dancing around as he did, as if he were accompanying a Jose Feliciano Christmas album.

No matter your age, I'm certain you remember those gifts that seemed to appear under the tree, year after year, like celestial clockwork.  Our recurring presents were probably, now that I think on it, a result of a personality disorder that I inherited from my mother:  the inability to say no to door-to-door salesmen.  In her case, she always invited in the Avon and the Fuller Brush sales people.  (I buy cookies from kids fund-raising for pee wee football, candles from disadvantaged youth paying their way to summer camp, miracle cleaning products from the guy who appears on our doorstep every spring, and cookbooks from Seventh Day Adventists.)

So every Christmas we could count on

• Soap on a rope.  The soap itself had an abrasive odor, a cross between Irish Spring and kerosene.  Since it hung under the shower when not it use, it quickly eroded in the waterfall and was cracked and peeled after the first use.  But, it was within easy reach and a reminder to wash your armpits when bathing--a necessity for stinky boys.
• Cologne/after shave in a collector's bottle.  I may be foggy on this, but I think we started getting a container in the shape of a VW beetle or Model T or formula one race car about the time each of us started growing pimples and whiskers.  Avon could have renamed their colognes Eau d' PineSol.  Even applied sparingly, they felt like an industrial strength degreaser--probably not a bad deal in retrospect for teenage pores.
• Various scrub and polishing brushes.  These I recall as eminently practical.  Wooden handled with natural bristles, the small versions worked like miniature blackboard erasers with teeth.  That was the case whether used for shining shoes or scrubbing dirty fingers.  I also liked the way they wore down in the middle, sort of like the smooth indentations in stone monastery steps trod for centuries by pious monks.  To this day I feel virtuous scrubbing my hands with a natural bristle brush.  

There were other predictable gifts as well--underwear, socks, flannel shirts, a book or two, some kind of game the whole family could play.  But, no matter, like all kids my brother and I always looked forward to unwrapping presents and we always faced the torturous identical routine before the gift baring began.

Christmas Eve started with a family dinner, just the four of us.  My mother was a cook from the German school and believed every meal needed meat, potatoes, a vegetable, jello salad, bread, butter, and dessert.  Since my father was a laborer, he came home hungry every day and expected a square meal on the table by 5:30.  Although I don't remember my dad or mom eating in a hurry, my brother and I would have pulled in platefuls of mashed potatoes and gravy--and whatever main or sides accompanied them--with a straw, if allowed.  We couldn't seem to eat fast enough.  Leftovers happened, but usually mom would say, "Why doesn't somebody eat the rest of that," and we would.  Despite some tight times, we never went hungry and probably overate, especially at suppertime.  

But Christmas Eve was different--not the overeating, but the pace.  I can hear my mother say, but only on Christmas Eve, "Let's slow down and enjoy this meal."  Maybe she read in Ladies Home Journal or Reader's Digest about taking family time to appreciate the holidays.  For pre-teen/early teenaged boys, delayed gratification was not high on the list of Christmas virtues.  So, after a slower-than-usual family feast of turkey (my dad's favorite) and mashed potatoes, a condiment plate of celery and carrot sticks and black olives, green bean casserole, red hot jello salad, dinner rolls and apple pie, the boys had to do the dishes.

This was a chore we had some experience with.  Every night after dinner my mother would wash and my brother or I would alternate drying the dishes.  I think every night we also heard the same line:  "A good dish dryer wipes off what the washer misses."  On occasion, one of us would be asked to take a turn washing.

My brother hated washing dishes.  But, like everything else he did, he took the humorous route to resistance.  He would squirt what amounted to a dixie cup full of dishwashing liquid into the sink and the suds would rise into an Everest of bubbles, sometimes so high they would spill over onto the linoleum floor.  Then he would stand at the sink and play with the bubbles.  Look, a goatee.  Or he'd fill his hands with bubbles and squeeze them out.  Look, a volcano.  Or when we were older, Hey, look bro, a pimple.  This would go on for 15 or 20 minutes, with not a dish being washed, and finally my mother would step in and do them for him.  

The rub on Christmas Eve was that we had to do the dishes ourselves, just the two of us, a semi-penitential chore to cleanse the final black marks from our record, so when Santa checked his list a second time we would still be on it.  The sink and counter would be piled high with pots and pans and serving dishes, in addition to the usual cups, plates, and silverware.  I recall a couple of Christmas Eve's when we flipped a coin to see who would wash or dry.  If my brother washed, we were doomed to wait on his goatees and exploding pimples before a pot made it into and out of the suds.  Those years my mom would step in to wash the pots and pans and just leave the eating utensils for my brother, but he could still dilly dally by carving up the dishwater with a ten-minute battle of knives and forks before anything touched a dishrag.

(More to come . . .)

Foreign Tongues (continued)

On the flight to Austria, I kept hearing my classmates talking about "Veen," a word that had failed to make its way into my limited German vocabulary.  This despite the fact I had squeaked through a couple semesters of German.  The embarrassing reality was that I hadn't bothered to find out much about the country where I would be studying the next six months--not even how the natives pronounced the name of its capital city.

The whole of my preparation--two college semesters of German--was pathetic for a couple of reasons:  I hardly ever attended class and I never once visited the campus language lab to work on my accent, which sounded like something uttered by the love child of Dolly Parton and Konrad Adenauer.  The barely passing mark I eked out first semester was a gift from the fraulein who taught the class.  Second semester I attended more often, but quickly fell into my high school habits:  study enough to appear knowledgeable and perform decently on the tests, never bother to really understand much of anything, and above all, empty the brain at the end of each test to make room for whatever came next.

A large part of my limited motivation was the convoluted nature of German itself.  Even Mark Twain wrestled with the language and described the German sentence as something like a long walk through a dark wood with a verb at the end.*  But, no matter, I would have been equally noncommittal about learning French or Spanish or Hindi. 

I signed up for German to make my mother happy.  I'm pretty sure she was hoping I would help to translate the intermittent letters she received from a distant cousin in the Black Forest.  My mom's grandparents were both born in the old country and, according to her, they and her parents spoke German when they didn't want the kids to understand what was being discussed.  This gave me the impression that knowing a foreign language was like belonging to a club, where only members knew the secret handshake.  

This impression was reinforced the summer of my senior year in high school.  I worked as a farm hand for the wealthy bachelor son of a German family that attended our church.  Hank, the bachelor, was nice enough, but basically saw me as a draught horse--available for any dull and nasty job that needed doing.  His mother had a similar opinion of the help and would on occasion stop by the ranch and recruit me to dig in her flower garden or carry items into the house.  One such time while I was doing her bidding, Hank rode up in his pick-up and asked what was going on.  I had been pulled away from painting an endless white picket fence that surrounded the property, something he wanted done quickly so I could be reassigned to other chores.  Hank and his mother began to argue in German, hurling what sounded to me like half-choked threats at each other, glancing now and then in my direction as if I were a potted plant and the disagreement concerned whether I should be placed in the sun or shade.

I listened in total incomprehension.  Then it happened.  In a pique of exasperation, Hank (who had heard German as a child and so could speak enough to be able to argue with his mother) raised his voice to say, "Er ist mein mann."  Even his slobbering weimaraner, Waldo, a dog whose brain was the size of a split pea, could have translated that.  I recall thinking at that moment, gee, maybe it was possible, for me personally, to understand a foreign language.  The idea of knowing one didn't seem so far-fetched.  But, that realization was not accompanied by anything resembling resolve to actually buckle down and study the language of my great grandparents.

Which was a shame, because, in truth, I found the sound of German interesting.  For example, it had a lilting gravity when put to music.  Mom often played our piano and sang along to "Du, du, liegst mir im herzen."  My brother and I knew the song and loved the guttural lyric, "machst mir viel schmertzen."  For us schmertzen came to mean something like, "This whack in the head is gonna schmertz."  The "Ja, ja, ja, ja" of the chorus sounded like a drinking tune, although I knew from my mom that the song was about love.  To this day, when I hear the German word for love--liebe--I picture buxom frauleins with steins of beer in each hand, approaching for a hug.

And so, I arrived in Austria armed with a few pronouns, nouns and verbs that I re-assembled randomly for communication purposes, which I rarely did because people had the rude habit of responding in a language I couldn't understand.  When I did attempt a German phrase or two, it was often just a mash of mispronounced words, always with the wrong article or tense or declension.  In fact, as soon as I spoke, the conversation was likely to come to an abrupt halt, assuming I hadn't accidentally said something insulting or obscene.  Because I knew so little, what I was doomed to discover is that a little learning is a terrible thing.

This was apparent within a day or two of our settling into the seedy but regal hotel in the Alps outside of Vienna that housed our foreign campus.  On the second or third day after arriving, I went for a walk in the village with my bunkmates and a couple of girls in the group.  One of my roommates, Chuck, spoke German fairly well.  He informed me that Austrians greeted each other with the phrase, Grusse Gott, which roughly translates as "God's greetings."  So the first rosy-cheeked weenie-dog-walking lady I passed, I nodded and blurted out, "Gross goat."  The look on her face, something between a disapproving smile and a scowl, withered me. I felt stupid and--before I had time to rationalize my mistake away--offensive.

Thankfully, by the end of the day I had picked up useful phrases for ordering a beer, asking the location of the toilet, and wishing folks a fond farewell.  I also learned that a big smile and elaborate hand gestures could communicate well enough to satisfy basic needs--ordering food, asking directions, begging pardon, pleading ignorance.

The number of those useful phrases would increase over the coming months, although I never spoke more than a few words unless lubricated by several litres of the Pabst Blue Ribbon of Austria--Gooser beer--at which time I was still likely to offend whatever German-speaking citizen I chanced to engage in conversation.  And as a result, I was not able to benefit from communicating at length with people who stubbornly persisted in speaking their own language and not mine.  I did benefit, however, from stumbling around in European culture for half a year--through exposure to art and music and architecture; and through friendly (and on occasion not-so-friendly) dealings with shopkeepers and waiters and public employees.  

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*"An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech -- not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary -- six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam -- that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each inclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which reinclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it -- after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb -- merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out -- the writer shovels in "haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein," or words to that effect, and the monument is finished."  From Appendix D, A Tramp Abroad (1880) by Mark Twain.  

Foreign Tongues

I was 18 years old the first time I awoke among native speakers of a foreign language.  The TWA airplane I was on had stopped for an early morning refueling at de Gualle Airport in Paris.  The plane was packed with college kids like me.  We were on our way to a village outside of Vienna, Austria, to spend a semester at an overseas campus of the university I attended.

We had touched down just before dawn.  A portable stairway was wheeled up to the plane and a cleaning crew came aboard to carry off garbage and tidy the bathrooms.  The cold morning air trailed in behind them, waking those of us who sat near the doorway, including me.  I unscrewed myself from the tortured posture of airline sleep to peer out at the wet tarmac, damp with fog.  The conversation among the uniformed workers had the smooth sexy rhythm of a Maurice Chevalier soft shoe number.  Of course, I didn't understand a word.  But, the fog, and the picture in my groggy travel-weary mind of the airport scene in Casablanca, and the coverall clad workmen with their nasal laughs and easy banter made me take notice--for the first time in my life--of what I might be in for, venturing outside the safety of the familiar.

The other thought I should have entertained--but did not--is how poorly I had prepared myself to take advantage of the opportunity I had been given; to do much more than peer, slack-jawed, at the interesting strangers I would meet, the art and culture and history I would encounter.   As a result of the choices I had made in my life up to that point, my adolescent frame of reference was what could be politely described as "limited," and my inclination at the time was to push out of my mind or make jokes about things unfamiliar or discomfiting.

I'd like to blame someone or something for my lack of interest in refined subjects and international affairs--my parents, my lower middle class circumstances, Joseph McCarthy--but the fact of the matter is, it was my own damn fault.

I had not paid attention to the opportunities I had been given.  True, up until that moment, the only foreign soil I had touched was some gritty pavement in Tijuana, and that had been under strict parental supervision and limited to a 30-minute border crossing during a family trip to Disneyland in 1957, just so we could say we had been to Mexico.  But, my parents had sacrificed to make months of payments on sets of both the Encyclopedia Britannica and World Book, and I might have followed up that visit with by reading an entry or two about Mexican culture.  I chose instead to lay awake nights dreaming of pitching a no-hitter in the World Series.

Years of Lutheran Sunday School exposed me to bible stories oozing with history and lessons on social justice (and injustice).  I chose to view the characters of the bible as mythically remote, actors in a time and place that no longer existed.   My mom served as Den Mother in Cub Scouts and my dad assisted at Boy Scout events, both supporting my expedition towards Eagle Scout.  Merit badges for Art, Architecture, and Music were there for the taking, but I chose Fingerprinting, because I could earn the badge from the local sheriff, whose collection of pickled fingers in evidence jars stimulated my ghoulish imagination.

My loving parents provided all the food and fishing and car trips to Nebraska and trailer camping in the summer that a lad could long for.  They instilled a strong sense of right and wrong and personal responsibility.  From them I learned that if you want something done right, you do it yourself.  Mine was was the upbringing of a good worker bee, which is a noble thing on which to hang an identity.

But it was not an identity that valued points of view or experiences which might upset their staunch Protestant determinism.  For my mother, topics beyond the weather and gardening and pinochle were taboo.  Politics?  Confusing and mostly irrelevant.  The affairs of others?  Impolite topics for public conversation.  Feelings?  Never shared, always contained.  Friends outside the church or our white bread neighborhood?  None, although there were many within the safe circle of the like-minded.

My dad's gaze was set, from the age of 14, on earning an honest living and not squandering what chances he might be given, like his father had done.  He always worked two or three jobs to keep the family finances afloat.  If it was practical and useful and didn't harm anyone, he was all for it.  As a tradesman, he was bent on getting the job done.  And if you worked hard and believed in the same things he did, you earned his respect.

My parents tithed out of a sense of thanksgiving, not obligation, and volunteered often at church and in the community.  But in the end, theirs was a mixed legacy--of generosity and love, of insularity and uneasiness with people and places beyond their ken.

What I responded with was rebellion.  When it blossomed in my late adolescence, it was petty and too often hurtful--growing my hair long, smoking cigarettes and dope, questioning organized religion, and refusing to do the "ordinary" thing, being different for difference's sake.  One of the cruelest examples of that impulse was my refusal to take photographs of any of the sights I saw during my six months in Europe, except for a roll of film exposed on a jarringly dissonant, languid late-summer afternoon at Auschwitz.  Instead, I brought home a collection of toilet paper I had cadged from public bathrooms around the continent--hardly the kind of memorabilia you shared with family or friends eager to know about a grand adventure they would never experience except vicariously.

The sad fact is that I should have known better, but I was immature and my parents were themselves unprepared to know what I could learn from foreign travel.  Give them credit, though.  At some level they must have understood, when they wrote the tuition and travel checks that paid for my half year in Europe, that I would benefit from a semester abroad.  And I did, despite my immaturity and ignorance and stubborn refusal to learn at least one European language.

(More to come . . .)