Monday, April 29, 2013

Germany: Returning Home

When we travel it is difficult to know what will stay with us when we come home and pick up the threads of our daily life. Once the photos have been posted (gone are the slide shows in a darkened room over cocktails and cheese balls), we simply move on.  And as you know, not much makes it on to this blog unless I am particularly moved by an experience and it can provide a skewed postmark to what may have been actually much more of a whole cloth journey than it appears (with a thankful nod to our wonderful hosts in Germany, who gave us the trip of a lifetime).  But I don't know how to go about it in any different way and in some ways this  space is all I will have when most memories have vanished.  I need to keep this in mind.

Fact is, I do not have a very good memory for certain details and rely on others for this Herculean accomplishment. Each period in my life has a memory keeper in the form of a friend or a sibling: For example, I have forgotten almost everything that happened when I was in theatre school, that crazy emotionally-charged wild ride through the machinations of our still-immature brains.  Most of it should be buried as it was a constant assault on my ego and not pretty given how fragile I was when I started there. But I do recall certain events, mostly cringe-worthy, as we lived fully vulnerable in the daunting and critical eye of our teachers who were pushing us to dig into our interior worlds and pull out everything usable for the sake of authenticating our performances.  My memory of these times is limited to a collection of snapshots, among them: trying not to giggle as I examined, upside down, the face of my new friend Sally in a classroom exercise.  Doing a sense-memory exercise (God, there were endless versions of these) with blindfolds on and our hands in a variety of food substances which we put in our mouths and savored. Lying on the carpeted floor and breathing with our diaphragms, one of the few things that stayed with me to this day. Singing lessons when I discovered my voice had gone from an alto to a high soprano. Performing Dylan Thomas' poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light...." in a darkened room, listening to others do it better....damnation!  Sitting in the school lounge reading bits of Margaret Atwater's poetry, releasing my feminist wings as delicate as those of a dragonfly because we were already equal were we not?  There was the prickly stiffness of the starched fabric of my costume as Sonya in Uncle Vanya, one of my only good performances near the end of school term.  And boys, of course, especially the one who was way out of my league that I pined after, and the one who became famous, the boyfriend who farted in bed at night and left me thinking that this relationship thing was not what I'd imagined it to be.
   I can conjure up a a good number more of these bits and pieces, but when it comes to specifics, my friend Sally is the one I turn to. She remembers the names of our schoolmates, my boyfriends, the color of the princess phone in our attic kitchen, the people who lived in the flat below us, and the names of our landlords.  My sister Deb does the same for our childhood memories, and it isn't often I take her on when it comes to those facts and figures because I will certainly be wrong in almost every case.

So when I look at the piece I first wrote about Germany and the connection with the past wars which engaged our countries I cannot help but wonder why it was the initial post-card. Why not the breathtaking landscape that we hiked in, the sharpness of the air, clean and unencumbered by city and smog, the winding paths to castles shrouded in mist, the horse-drawn wagon that lumbered up the path, nostrils steaming? In Lake Titisee in the Black Forest where cuckoo clocks are made by hand, I spent an entire morning studying them in all their variations, admiring the extraordinary workmanship of intricately carved wood and the movements of little people chopping wood or dancing, waterfalls with real water, cuckoos that made all manner of entrances and sounds.  The rest of my family, along with a very patient Christine, left me alone to immerse myself for so long even the sales girl gave up.  I finally made a decision, and wondered then where I would put this piece of art, a little kitchy and certainly with more personality than a clock deserved to have, but I didn't care.  I had snapped off the branch of a tree in this forest and I wanted to bring it home.  A cuckoo clock, chiming as it does every hour, making a group of merrymaking dancers swirl to the rhythm of a minute hand, will certainly not let me forget.  I want to put it over the kitchen sink where I will see and hear it every day as it's the second busiest room in the house and certainly the friendliest.

I have my photographs too, and the memory of exploring winding cobblestone streets in three different languages, all within a short distance of our base in Freiburg, with people whose company and conversation I happily soaked in over steaming cups of dark chocolate and shared pastries.  Part of the joy as a traveller is hands-on experiencing things that  are passing through the centuries untethered to us, knowing they will flow on to an infinite future.  I think that's why we travel, to engage on a grander scale and perhaps become larger in the moment because of it.  And on a personal level, the most memorable trips are also about the essence of the more ephemeral aspects of the journey, the things we do not expect, the moments of deep connection that provide a more complete understanding of our human nature, seen through a different lens.  But it does involve other people, and that's a risk.

If we are open to it, sometimes traveling takes us places we cannot foresee.  And sometimes our memories fade until only the essence remains.  I'm going to keep writing until the whole picture is revealed.


Thursday, April 25, 2013

Middle age: The Goat Years




I remember vividly a conversation I had some years ago with a co-worker who had just turned 40.  This woman, a gorgeous, dark-haired femme fatale of Greek or Spanish ancestry, maybe a mixture, told me in no uncertain terms that when a woman hit 40 their body would start to go bad faster than potato salad on a hot day.
     She'd just had her birthday and was now 41 and apparently in that 12 month period between celebrations things had started to go horribly wrong.  Nothing life-threatening, mind you, just the kind of things that one takes for granted: strong bones, low cholesterol, endless energy, stomach of iron, non-wobbly arms, etc.
     Apparently she was grappling with all of the above in one degree or another, which was unfortunate because she was the designated looker in our office, wearing very high heels and tight skirts, glossy hair tumbling down prettily, tossed occasionally as she passed the worker-bees in their cubicles.  I think she had taken for granted her special place on the pyramid of wannabes and it was a shock to realize that she was.....human.
     I nodded sympathetically when she came into my office with her dire warnings about aging.  But what she didn't know was that I was actually a couple of years older than her (not that it was any of her business) and I didn't have any of the aforementioned maladies that had suddenly descended on her.  But then again, I am more of a Pippi Longstocking, than a Kate Middleton and everyone knows (especially Pippi) that red pigtails are the secret to longevity and good health.
    What I wasn't to know at that point was that certain things were beginning to happen as estrogen flees, as it does for all of us now that supplements are strictly forbidden, and over time, oh so slowly, they began to manifest.
     So what am I confessing?
     I have great blood pressure, no cholesterol, heart problems or the like.  So far I have the same energy my much younger friends have who, like me, have hoisted babies, run after toddlers, and now must have the brain superpower to solve our elementary school children's advanced algebra problems and outwit them in every-increasing games of 'but why?"
    When I began this blog eight years ago I was, like actress Nia Vardolos of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the mother of an adopted child and an Instant Parent (the title of Nia's new book).  And for a while there I was floundering, alone without much help and parents who were far away both geographically and from the memory of other grandchildren who were already growing up into scientists and engineers.  Being an older mother did give me new lease on life and may have staved off some of the reckoning that comes with... well...getting older.
    However, I have discovered some weird things that make me believe the human organism is very odd indeed.  Take facial hair.  My mother has always had peach fuzz, and like mine, is delicate, very blond, and almost invisible except if you put me under a strong light and stare.  But at some point my mother's peach fuzz started to mix genders and went from quaintly feminine to alarmingly and pointedly masculine.  The field was invaded by some random DNA from a Victorian uncle with stiff whiskers and bushy eyebrows. Some of the blighters are long enough to point out the directions on a compass.  And quite effectively too.
     My mother has macular degeneration, which she has successfully staved off for more than a decade to lead a fairly normal life, but she cannot read anymore and she certainly can't see the whiskers either.  It's kind of a yin/yang thing because what she doesn't notice, she doesn't care about.  But even with good eyesight they're trickly little devils, like weeds they find innocuous places to crop up and can be hard to detect.
    Which brings me to my face and the peach fuzz I inherited, along with a host of very good genes from both sides.  Although I have no idea what happened to the skirted beauty who once flowed through our office as if on a chariot of good luck and hope she has found balance, I do know that she was right about one or two things.  Or six or seven.  I now find myself regularly feeling my face like a hairsuit man who needs to shave before dinner, rubbing my hand along the contour of my chin feeling for the stubble that yes, inevitably comes back every week.  My mother warned me never to pluck because she said they would come back stronger than ever.  Oh, the things my mother warned me about that I completely ignored!  Aside from bushier and bushier eyebrows which I trim with the precision of a Japanese bonsai fanatic, I now sport a billygoat chinny-chin-chin and naught can be done about it.
    I suppose I could spend a pot of money and have the offenders electrolyzed permanently but then what fun would that be?  I've come to like them.  Maybe I'll give them names.  They do remind me that I've been damn lucky to have had not much else to complain about in what is becoming an increasingly longer life.
    My father has always said I'm a glass half-full kind of person.  Let's just hope I never have to put my teeth in it.


Monday, April 15, 2013

The Kite Runner at last

Trying to get back to a normal sleep routine after a topsy-turvy travel schedule from half-way around the world is a mixed blessing.  A couple of nights there was a tangled bundle of arms and legs stuffed like a tortilla between the two of us as our daughter's internal clock tricked her around 2 a.m. and she wasn't about to hang around in bed all by herself. Climbing over me and shooing away the dog sandwiched in the trough seemed like the next best thing to not missing school.
   I might have woken up on and off myself a few nights in a row but I did catch up on movies - some very good ones that I'd somehow missed. For this clandestine activity, a subscription to Amazon Prime and an iPad by the bed is very helpful, along with a pair of earbuds, a couple of times covered by a sheet like a kid with a flashlight and a really good book.

I love to go to films on my own and I see almost every good one that comes out but surprisingly I missed The Kite Runner and this one I watched in the early morning hours of the weekend. Embarrassingly tardy since I've worked on two fundraisers for the novel's author, Khaled Hosseini, who has a foundation that provides shelters for families and educational opportunities for girls in his native Afghanistan.  I got involved because Hosseini is the cousin of a friend, the amazing Maral who owns a unique clothing boutique in our small downtown shopping district.  Maral has an ongoing and ever-changing collection of couture, runway one-offs, and other exquisite pieces which she mixes with finds, small design labels, chunky Afghan jewelry and one treasure after another.  The fundraisers I've helped her with are fashion shows featuring items from her collection and she manages to make the women (mostly customers) of every size and shape look beautiful, fabulous, and very sexy.  Who wouldn't want to wear clothes like that?

Maral was very excited that Hosseini was to be the beneficiary of her show and auction, and he sent along signed copies of The Kite Runner, and one of A Thousand Splendid Suns to auction off.  The novels had been recommended to me many times but during periods when I was writing myself and was avoiding reading someone else's good work.  I think I thumbed through a copy at a bookstore and had a general idea what it was about but the film was so visceral and stunning I felt like a complete fool for having waited so long.
    The experience left me with an overwhelming desire to see Maral.  I knew her father had passed away when we were gone,  but it wasn't just that.  I'd been skirting around the edges of her culture, brought in as an observer, but only to the immigrant she had become, straddling worlds, one very far away.

The store was quiet when I arrived, and Maral wasn't there.  A friend, also Afghani, was minding it for her.  I browsed through the racks and somehow the subject of Hosseini's book came up.  She smiled and told me that her story was not so different. When the moujadin were fighting the Russians, she had three small children under five years old, and a comfortable life in an upscale neighborhood of Kabul.  Life before the Russians is remembered in many fictional works by Afgani authors, none more poignantly than in The Kite Runner.  Everyone with enough money to find a way out fled during this time, and that included Maral, her family, and her friend, who as she stood there, calmly recounted her exodus.  
    They left everything in their house.  Furniture, artwork, dishes, photographs, toys, clothing, everything.  Forever. She had one small bag, two children in hand, and a baby on her hip.  When they neared the Pakistan border, she told me, they ordered everyone out of the car.
"They told us it was too dangerous because the Russians would bomb any vehicles near the border," she told me. "So I had to walk for two hours carrying my baby."  She was smiling as she told me this, but I knew that the distance from the memory was hard-won. "You know, in Kabul in those days, before the Taliban, we wore Western clothes, like this," she indicated her skirt and blouse.  "And we had to put on a burka when we fled, it was so dark and difficult to see, I kept tripping on it."

As a fellow immigrant I do understand something of a sense of loss when it comes to being separated from your primal roots and I asked her if she ever wanted to go back, even for a visit.  He people, after all went back thousands of years there.
"No," she answered firmly.  "I am afraid, and it is not like it was when we lived there. The people are different."
A pre-war scene from The Kite Runner came back to me - the vibrant, noisy markets, busy daily life, children running through the streets with their colorful kites, hundreds of them dipping and diving in the sky. Then the images after the Russians and the Taliban had swept through, the litter, broken buildings, fearful shadows, skies empty of the now-forbidden kites.

"But what about your children?" I asked Maral's friend.
"They grew up here," was her simple answer. "They are happy and I am happy.  I have my mother and father, aunts, uncles, cousins. Everyone I love is here."
    Her daughter, she told me, married a Japanese/American man, and another child married a German. It was clear the family with an ancient familial legacy had truly embraced the new way of things and it had changed their future forever.

American troops may be muddying the political and social situation in Afghanistan but families like hers are here to stay and the connection, at least for the foreseeable future, is gone. And by a trick of fate and the growing personal connection to Maral's world, mine, it appears, is just beginning.

For more information on Khaled Hosseini's work in Afghanistan:
http://www.khaledhosseinifoundation.org/about-ourwork.htm

For more information and great photographs for Maral Designs:
http://www.yelp.com/biz/maral-designs-san-pedro


Monday, April 08, 2013

Germany: Living with history

Like my father once confessed to me, I am not a traveller who likes to spend too much time in museums  or great landmarks.  My photographs, posted daily on Facebook are more impressions of these icons, given equal value with a vibrant purple houndstooth tulip potted on a doorstep, interesting shutters and gates, or a 19th Century cast-iron post box with a white dove in relief holding a long-awaited letter.

Who doesn't like getting a letter in these days of emails and tweets?

I was also chided by friends that we barely appeared in these photos, another weakness of mine - I am behind a fourth wall of sorts, the invisible observer, coming and leaving with barely a trace save for the images I capture.  In the foggy cold, hidden behind scarves and woolen hats, we may not have left much of an impression anyway, and that's the way I like it.  I'd rather live somewhere than visit, but often don't have the luxury of the time necessary to come in from behind the wall that separates tourists from reality.

Our trip to the Black Forest region of Germany came in the late, record-breaking cold of March, a foggy, grey, wintry landscape that slid even into April, with bedraggled but persistent shoots of spring bulbs forcing their way through snow just as we were decidedly undaunted by the lack of accommodating weather.  It hardly mattered because this journey was more about the connection we made to one family in the Medieval town of Freiburg than any great structure, no matter how many hundreds of toiling years it may have taken to present itself to us.  A family that came into our lives serendipitiously and created the impetus for the spring voyage to their homeland.  To Deutchland, the Fatherland.  The images and memories of war were never far from any of our thoughts and they flowed in and out of the conversations during long nights fueled by schnapps and mutual trust.

I am a postwar baby, distant enough from the two 20th Century world wars to not feel connected to them as a witness, but as I grew up and began the inevitable questioning nature of my life as a writer I began to get images and impressions from aunts, uncles and fathers who began, not unlike the spring bulbs too early in the season, to force their way out from under the wintry silence to talk about those years.  I learned that my father had never seen action - by quirk of fate he was too thin (and had grown three inches right before he became eligible to join) to be accepted into the Royal Canadian Air Force.  Although the intervention of his father, a paymaster in the army, provided him with a last-minute chance to switch from his army regiment as they readied to ship to England, he declined.  He had already bonded with his buddies and this probably saved his life.  Instead he was stationed in England where he worked as a military hospital orderly.  Seeing the gut-wrenching violence inflicted by conflict in the wounded that came in waves for treatment was enough, but not enough to give him the kind of post-traumatic stress that eventually felled his older brother as he struggled with alcohol addiction for the rest of his life.  He told me not too long ago that he opted to train for the Pacific front after Germany was defeated.  Most others were too wearied and scarred from years of fighting and were content to wait until they were de-mobbed, but my father left England almost immediately and was set to travel to a U.S. Army base (Canadians were not in the Pacific conflict).  But the war ended there too before he could make his way down.

I did grow up with a continual moving image of the stories of war. From Hogan's Heroes, to The Great Escape, King Rat, Bridge on the River Kwaii, Kelly's Heroes, later overlaid with black-and-white images of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belson, revived every time I came to know a child of one of the survivors.  I met many sons and daughters of parents who had immigrated to Canada after the war and these were men and women with scars so deep they cut into the lives of the children who were born to them decades afterwards.

Coming to Germany brought with it so many images and stereotypes, it was difficult to find a blank space with which to begin. Our hosts in Freiburg were the first Germans we truly spent time with, and their warm and generous welcome contrasted vividly with the occasional chilly glances from some of the older generation toward our multi-national family as we passed them in our travels (a new experience for us as Angelenos).  Difficulty accepting anything 'different' is a human quality and I remember feeling the same way in rural Kansas when we visited my in-laws and I'm sure it would be a very different story in multi-national cities like Berlin. These strangers who passed us were only a small part of our experience very different than the many kind and helpful innkeepers, shopkeepers and guides we met along the way. When people asked us later if we found the national character to be distant, we could only really speak with any depth to our welcoming hosts, as they were the heart and soul of our visit there, the fabric of lasting memory.   In this regard we were so lucky: Our families were destined to meet  because we'd hosted their daughter, Christine, an exchange student the previous year and her grasp of English was so good that we spent many long hours talking over the dinner table.  It formed a lasting bond that motivated us to visit her in her home town of Freiburg.

Almost at once our newly formed group fell into an easy comradarie, and we found them to be  extraordinarily forward-thinking, generous, and candidly introspective as we compared our cultural differences.  But what struck me was how seamlessly the subject of the WWII came into conversation, a subject I never would have dared broach on my own.  The first time was when we were poring over a map of the city to map out our way to various points of interest when Seigfried, who was a child during the war, pointed out that most of the buildings had been rebuilt after the area was nearly decimated in a bombing raid by the RCAF.  Siegfried was born during the war years but had children later in life.  His son, just eighteen, looked a bit askance when his father brought it up, but we took it in stride.  What was there to say?  We were simply glad that he, and the beautiful historical buildings painstakingly reconstructed to their original grandeur, had survived somehow.

References continued to pepper our evening conversations, sometimes to the relationship between Germany and the U.S., still resonating with the gratitude felt by most due to the sense of forgiveness by the Allies after the war and the desire to get the country back on its feet, in stark contrast to the policies of the Soviet Union who wanted a weak post-war neighbor to assimilate into its empire.  I would hear these references and then at night in our hotel go online and educate myself - The Berlin Airlift to a starving a city trapped inside Soviet East Germany, the building and separation of the Wall, the terror of East Berliners escaping the checkpoints, a fractured nation trying to put itself back together.

There were other conversations that touched on Germany's cultural personality, disciplined, industrious, and a hearty disposition.  A constellation of traits that at the best of times brings it prosperity (as it does today as the strongest member of the EU), and then, as can happen with a healthy tree that grows unabated until it begins to dominate everything around it and block out the sun, was what Siegfried referred to as the fear by outsiders that Germans would become 'too strong'.  Our world history is made from the fabric of conflict - thousands of years of history between nations and tribes large and small, a century encompassing two major wars; so many millions dead, so many scars, and questions as to the mystery of  our human inability to temper and control the forces that can begin so productively.


But it was the last meal we had together, Easter lunch, where the worlds came together in ways that were so unexpected.  Siegfried's younger wife, Angela, a beautifully voluptuous doppleganger for my sister Peg, had invited her mother, sister, and brother-in-law to the feast and we sat at a long table laden with traditional holiday food prepared for us.  Not everyone spoke English at this meal and there was a lively interchange of both languages, translated and commented on, and it was nearing the end of the meal when Christine was scrolling through photos on her iPad and found several of her mother and father's ancestors.  These old photographs inevitably led to stories of the young men pictured who had been in the wars, and Siegfried then left for a moment and came back with a packet of letters tied in a string.  He explained they were from his relative who had been in the Russian Front in the latter part of the last war.  Written on onion skin, the envelopes bearing the familiar stamp of Hitler's Wehrmacht (Military), and written in orderly script with a fountain pen, Christine opened one and read the account of misery from a young soldier who would soon die, a lonely boy who despaired of ever seeing his family again, who railed against the empty promises of his superiors who told him they would soon be home - "they have said this for years", he wrote.  He seemed to have no answer for his purpose in a cold and desolate land where he was stranded, and there would never been a definitive one for the Germans who would inherit and grapple with his failure.

I happened to have on my iPhone, photographs of a diary that my aunt had given me last year to copy - a small pocket-size red-leather daily calendar carried by my grandfather during the first war, written in cramped pencil as he laboriously recorded the battles raging around him as he hunkered down in his trench, the accounts ending only when he was shot in the leg and removed to a hospital where he wrote pages and pages with the refrain - "today it is very bad, the pain is very bad."  Although he almost died from his wounds, an infection that was controlled by a miracle in pre-antibiotic days, he survived to go home though his brother, Townley, the handsome, cocky, and brave younger brother, did not. Townley was one of Lord Strathcona's Horse, a famous armored mounted unit that ended a centuries-old tradition with one last charge at Moreuil Wood in March, 1918.  Despite his assurances in a letter home that he felt invincible, he wasn't.

Siegfried then told me his father had also been in the Somme - and imagining as we had to, the men opposite each other in this desolate place, we sat in silence at the table considering the testament in these documents, an extraordinary connection of the pain and suffering brought on by war, the prices paid, the loss of innocence and purpose.

So many images of Germany remain, many of them magical, as we toured a wintry landscape filled with picture-book villages, and the cobbled streets of towns rich with history.  Some of them were unbidden, as the many times I would stare out into the forests and wonder if I had to flee would it be dark and silent enough to shield me.  I couldn't help it. I want to know my own true nature, what would I have done faced with surviving against such odds. My history is not yet written, not all of it, and these exercises are not limited to the Black Forest or the formidable winter Alps separating death from freedom.  We live in an uncertain world and madness bubbles up and reminds us that we are all called to be watchful.  Here, in the land of war and peace, we were by the grace of this family, linked to the history of a place still so fresh in the souls of all its inhabitants, whether they spoke to us of it or not.  We were so fortunate to be entrusted with the bridge where we could meet and feel out this connection.

This memory remains above all.