To walk in their boots

I inherited Mom’s after ski boots when she died. They’re great Romika boots with a solid tread and they fit me perfectly – once I wiggle my foot into them.

On the night of January 4th around 11:30, Tom asked me if I wanted to take Shasta for a walk with him. It was icy outside and I had just finished working so I was tired. “Sure,” I said, “But only up the hill and back.”

I grabbed Mom’s boots and started to pull them on but decided it was too much work and I threw on my imitation UGGs with the worn-down, barely-still-wavy tread instead.

An hour later Tom snapped a photo of those imitation UGGs – in the emergency room.

A package arrived from Kristin’s sister this morning. At Kristin's memorial, her sister Casey told me that Kristin willed some beautiful pieces of clothing to me and my daughters. She was a classy, elegant dresser and I knew that there’d be some beautiful garments in the box – and there were.

But this is what's given me chills all day:

The first thing I saw when I opened the box was a brand new pair of (real) UGGs.

With tread.

Casey and Kristin had bought them for the winter that Kristin barely lived through and she never had a chance to wear them. Although they're a size bigger than Kristin normally wears, they fit me (both feet!) absolutely perfectly.

I wish I believed in all the “speaking from beyond the grave stuff,” because if I did I’d say that Mom and Kristin, who loved each other (and me) dearly, are both being characteristically protective of me.

I kind of like that; it makes me feel warm – and, yes, gives me chills – all over.

Der Struwwelpeter made personal

I grew up a first generation American of German parents.  This meant that the bedtime stories read to me were decidedly German.

And I’m not talking about Grimm’s fairy tales.

If you think Grimm’s fairy tales are violent and disturbing, you’ll be shocked at the bedtime stories my brothers and I listened to – and, oddly enough, loved!

This is Der Stuwwelpeter (or, as I pronounced it, “Shtroo-bel-payter”). 

According to Wikipedia, “Der Struwwelpeter (1845) is a popular German children's book by Heinrich Hoffmann. It’s comprised of ten illustrated and rhymed stories about children. Each has a clear moral that demonstrates the disastrous consequences of misbehavior in an exaggerated way.”

I found this book at the Bavarian Meat Market at Pike Place Market.  I was shocked to see it there and enthusiastically explained to the store keeper that I’d grown up hearing the oh-so-violent stories in it.  That launched me into a rhyme that my parents recited to us while bouncing us on their knee:

“Hoppe, hoppe Reiter,
Wenn er fällt, dann schreit er.
Fällt er in den Graben,
fressen ihn die Raben.
Fällt er in den Sumpf -
macht der Reiter PLUMPS!”

…which means something like:

“Chop-chop rider,
when he falls, he is screaming.
When he falls into the ditch
the ravens eat him.
When he falls into the swamp,
the rider makes plop.”

Incredibly, the storekeeper joined in and we sang together!  I’ve never known anyone who knows that rhyme except my brothers, cousins and me!  As we recited it together I got a huge lump in my throat!  (Then we ordered semmel rolls and gelbwurst, gobbled them up, and left!)

But I digress.

Der Stuwwelpeter had a story for each of my three brothers and me.  Aren’t we lucky!

My oldest brother’s story is Die Geschichte von Hans Guck-in-die-Luft  or The Story of Johnny Head-in-Air.  Poor Johnny drowns because he’s a day-dreamer.

Lesson to Michael?  Do not daydream!  Hilarious, considering that Michael became a film producer, among the daydreamiest of professions!

Stephan’s story was Die Geschichte vom Suppen-Kaspar (The Story of Kaspar who did not have any Soup). Kaspar, a healthy, strong boy, declares that he will no longer eat his soup.  Over the next five days he wastes away and dies. 

Stephan is still as skinny as a rail!

And then there’s Christopher’s story.  Oh, my poor baby brother, Christopher!  He sucked his thumb.  His story – poor child – was Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher  or The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb in which a tailor cuts of the thumbs of a little boy who shares my brother’s habit.

Curiously, Chris is about as normal as they come.  Phew!

My story?  Well, my story was really the only story that featured a girl (because not only were the stories violent, they were apparently chauvinistic), Die gar traurige Geschichte mit dem Feuerzeug or The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches.  In this delightful (cough) story, a girl burns to death because she played with matches.

 

So the message for me is… um – that it’s a good thing that I’m not smokin’ hot?  That I can’t die because my kitties would miss me?  Hell, I have no idea, but my memories are definitely filled with both fear and curiosity.

In our next Violent German Stories post, we’ll explore Max und Moritz… or why bread with lots of fiber isn’t always a great thing.

Marco Mania!

I’ve been away for almost a week.  I think this is my longest blogging absence in over three years!

Last week was incredibly busy with a few major deadlines and deliverables for some Microsoft clients. I could have probably finished a bit sooner and a bit smoother if only Marco, our amazing Senior Project Manager, technical writer,  and brilliant jack-of-all-trades in our Mumbai, India office had just stayed put and continued to work with me each evening.  But nooooo – he had to go traveling… to Seattle!

I have worked with Marco almost daily (and nightly, due to the time difference) for the past 18 months.  In that time I have come to respect him, revere him, and admire him – for both his technical and professional acumen and for his personal warmth and generosity of spirit.  When he announced that he’d be beginning his vacation in Seattle so he could finally meet our staff, I jumped on the opportunity to host him at our house.

On Friday morning, Marco joined us at the office for a busy and delightful day of working together.  As soon as he fired up his computer, he IM’d me as he’d done a million times before – but this one was different.

I immediately grabbed my camera and snapped a photo of my old friend and my new office mate:

Then Rebekah arrived, squealed with delight upon seeing Marco in person for the first time, and it was a free for all!

Oh wait – it looks like I was the one who’s squealing.  Whatevvvver.

After a full day of very productive work , we partied a bit at the CEO’s house.  Nora, Rebekah’s adorable daughter, gave the evening rave reviews.

In addition to being a technical whiz (check out his blog, Technology at Work (and Play) here), Marco is an avid photographer… so early on Saturday morning he, Kat and I went on a photojournalistic journey to the beautiful Snoqualmie Falls.  Marco shared all kinds of photography advice and secrets with Kat; I just loved watching the two of them together!

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The town of Snoqualmie is where old trains to go to die – but Marco and Kat came alive there and snapped away!  Rather than post photos I took there, I’ll steal some of theirs from theirs. Only the best for you!

Kat’s…

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And Marco’s.

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No fair comparing!  Photography is such a subjective art.  They both have such an eye for this stuff. I’m insanely jealous!

After a yummy salmon barbeque at our house…

…we headed to the beer and wine bar recently opened by an ex-co-worker.  Of course we had to take a group photo:

Yo!  Morgan!  Pay attention!

It was a late night, but we all got up early the next day to show Marco our fair Emerald City.  First stop – Seattle Center, from both sea(ish) level and 500-some feet up.

(Lake Union)

Then we  took the monorail to Westlake Center and (get THIS!) walked to and around Pike Place Market (at least a half mile, all told)! Yes, my ankle was absolutely killing me by the time we got back to the car, but I DID IT! 

Oh, and I snapped a few photos in between winces.

 

Every time I see our harbor, I think “project manager!  Why?  Here’s why!

Of course, we had to bring Marco to the best vantage point to see our fair city and snap a few touristy shots from Kerry Park on Queen Anne.

A few more touristy sights, like our own fuzzy statue of Lenin, straight from the old Soviet Union…

and our own troll…

and our own seaplane…

…and we headed home to the incredible flavor of the Tandori chicken that Marco had put together in the morning and that had marinated all day.  DELISH! 

See those beautiful placemats and napkins?  Marco’s sweet wife picked those out for us!  I LOVE them!  They also brought lots of Indian spices and mixes with them, so we’ll be having delicious Indian food for months to come… but it won’t compare to a meal actually shared with Marco, in person!

At 4 AM, Marco’s shuttle came to take him away from us.  As he drove off, Tom and I both remarked simultaneously that we feel like we’ve been family friends forever and that we already wish he’d come back!  Soon, perhaps – and hopefully next time with his wife (and maybe a kidlet or two?)!

When we got back into the house we found this next to the (perfectly made) bed in the guest room:

No Marco – thank YOU!  You are so kind and loving and generous of spirit and I feel truly blessed to be able to call you my FRIEND as well as my co-worker!  We miss you already!

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9

Guess what time and date it is right…

NOW?!

It’s 12:34:56 on 7/8/9!

A step in the right direction

Warning: this photo might be completely yawn-inducing for you.

But to me it’s ground-breaking!

Er, perhaps that’s not the best choice of words, considering that the break (or rather, all three of them) was done exactly here on the ground on which I’m standing in the photo.

On January 4th of this year (yes, SEVEN months ago!) I slipped on the ice that lined these steps under the now-blooming lavender. I broke all three ankle bones, tore all ligaments around them, and knocked my tibia and fibula off the foundation of my foot, much like an earthquake might knock a house completely off its foundation.

It’s been a long recovery, but today marked a milestone. See those shoes? They’re pre-injury shoes – on BOTH feet! For the first time since I got hurt, the swelling in my left foot was minimal enough (thanks to a new prescription for mega-doses of Naproxen) that I could slip into both these shoes!

So while you might not want to be in my shoes these days, I’m absolutely thrilled to be in them!

Valkyrie: If Only

I saw Valkyrie last night and again today when Peter and Aleks watched it. 

The IF ONLY aspect of the whole thing has been haunting me and I finally realized why (other than the obvious).  Two of my grandparents, my father’s father and my mother’s mother, were killed by bombs in Germany, both toward the end of World War II – my grandfather in March, 1945 and my grandmother in April, 1945.

(In fact, this is a commemorative plaque in my mother’s hometown of Traunstein, in memory of its citizens who were killed in the war.  My grandmother is Mathilde Reiss.)

Had Stauffenberg and his team been successful, there’s a chance that I would have known my maternal grandmother my paternal grandfather.

I called my dad when I realized that I might have known my grandparents, had the attempts on Hitler’s life succeeded, and he told me two additional interesting stories.

My father’s father (pictured below), a prominent banker in his hometown of Chemnitz, was a Jewish man married to a non-Jewish woman.  The Nazis didn’t really know what to do with these so-called “privileged mixed marriages” and so, in many cases the Jews in those marriages were not treated as were other German Jews and, although life was certainly made difficult for them (my grandfather was told he could no longer work at the bank and my father and his siblings were forced to withdraw from school), they were often spared transport to concentration camps. 

My father told me that in his research (he’s planning to write a book about mixed marriages in World War II Germany) he discovered that in April of 1945 fifty-three Jews were taken from Chemnitz to Theriesienstadt, a German concentration camp. As my grandmother had already died of a brain tumor in 1944, she was no longer around to “protect” my grandfather.  So they mystery is why wasn’t he taken?  Why was my grandfather, a German Jew, NEVER taken by the Nazis?  It’s a mystery that remains unsolved today!

The irony there is that had he been taken, he would likely have lived, as all 53 of those people were liberated from the camp and  survived the war.

Interesting story number two:

My Uncle Rainer, my father’s older brother, had a scar on his left arm until he died in 1995.  Today my dad told me how that scar got there.  On July 20, 1944, the day of Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt on Hitler’s life, Rainer was with his girlfriend Renate (future mother to my cousin) in a crowded Munich restaurant.  When the news broke that an attempt had been made on Hilter’s life, Renate was so excited that she began to scream out in glee but stopped herself – on Rainer’s arm!  To stifle her exuberance, she bit him so hard that she drew blood!

How many more stories are there that need to be told?  My dad has done his best to tell us about his experiences as a “mischling” in World War II Germany (even writing a book that I wish he’d publish!), but how many more stories – like the one about Uncle Rainer’s scar that my father was reminded of only when I suggested he see Valkyrie – remain untold? 

Bloom where you are (not?) planted

So two days ago our backyard slope looked like this:

Yesterday I spent a few iPod-enhanced hours weeding it.  Afterwards, it looked like this:

Notice that I decided to leave the tall grassy “volunteer” that grew right next to the wall.

I had no idea what this plant was or why it was growing there (we certainly didn’t plant it!), but it just seemed like something that should stay.  It wasn’t prettier than all the other weeds and it didn’t scream out  “don’t pick me,” but for some reason I decided not to yank it.

This morning, less than 24 hours after I finished weeding, this is what I found:

It’s beautiful!

I mean, seriously gorgeous!

Somewhere in this little, tiny tidbit of a story, all my religious/spiritual/philosophical beliefs are encapsulated.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll sit next to this little flower and have a cup of tea.

Christopher Cross-roads

Is there a song that instantly catapults you back to a poignant time in your life?

For me, that song is Christopher Cross’ Sailing.

The year was 1980. I was 23. In April of that year I had traveled to Germany alone for a few months. The plan had been for Tom and I to go together after three years of an on-again, off-again relationship (my schemey plot to nab him once and for all), but he couldn’t afford the trip and I ended up going alone.

Eight weeks into that trip the most unexpected thing happened: I fell madly in love at first sight when the best friend of the son of a childhood friend of my mom’s (!) walked into the room.

I had arrived in Nurnberg the day before and had reached the point in my trip where I was looking more forward to going home than to the next destination on the itinerary that my mother had enthusiastically organized for me. As I lay awake late at night on my first night with the Horvath family (a family who not-so-coincidentally had a boy exactly my age… my mom’s own schemey maneuver), I wrote Tom a long love letter, telling him how much I was looking forward to seeing him in just a few weeks. I was much more demonstrative and verbally expressive than Tom and I remember thinking, as I signed the letter “I love you,” that here I was yet again spilling my heart, hoping he’d “come around” and spill his just a little bit.

The next morning I walked to the corner mailbox and mailed the letter. A few minutes after I arrived back at the Horvath’s house, the doorbell rang. Stephan, the young man my mom was so eager for me to meet, answered the door. Standing there was his best friend and classmate, Thomas. He had dropped by to pick up a homework assignment.

Cliché as it sounds, fireworks ignited the minute I saw Thomas -- and they exploded when he spoke his first words, probably something along the lines of “Do you have tonight’s homework assignment?” (In German of course.)

Let me just say right here that everyone should experience love at first sight at some point in their lifetime.

While the sudden lightning storm lit up my life like the most brilliant fireworks imaginable, I was numbly aware that it could jolt Tom and burn him badly if I were to heed it. But I also knew that I had no chance BUT to heed it, that it was an absolute inevitability. I can’t ask anyone – even (and perhaps especially) Tom -- to understand that, even now almost 30 years later, but that’s how it was. Pure and simple.

I won’t write about what happened over the next few days or months because I wrote about it here. But I will say that when I hear Christopher Cross’ Sailing it reminds me instantly of those fourteen months and “sailing away,” first from what I knew to be my own life and love, and then from what I had discovered to be my new life and my new love.

“It's not far to never never land
No reason to pretend
And if the wind is right you can find the joy
Of innocence again
Oh, the canvas can do miracles
Just you wait and see
You'll be with me”

Two weeks after meeting Thomas and completely rearranging my trip so as to spend the rest of it with him, I flew back to California alone and immediately called Tom, shaking, to tell him that I’d fallen in love and it was over, I’m so sorry…

(If there had been e-mail or IM then, would I have told Tom right away? I’d like to think so… but truth be told, I just don’t know. Nothing that happened during those weeks conformed to the normal guidelines of my life, and I felt dreadfully – and delightfully -- out of control.)

I won’t write about the last half of 1980 and most of 1981, when Thomas and I carried on a long-distance relationship, sprinkled with a few sporadic visits together. During that year Tom had spilled his heart many, many times just as I’d so hoped he would before my life had suddenly changed within moments of mailing the love letter to him – the letter which, oh god, he’d probably received while I was in Florence, the most romantic city in the world, with my new love. (Yes, I feel guilty about that even to this day.)

Tom was utterly shocked at the news I’d returned with. How could I? (Really, how could I?) He was angry, but more than that, he was deeply hurt. I’d betrayed him. Hadn’t I just told him that I loved him? (I had.) Hadn’t I told him how much I was looking forward to coming home to him? (I had.) Hadn’t I just spilled my heart? (I had.)

Suddenly, when my own heart was no longer available to him, Tom spilled his heart to me, professing his love to me and asking me to come back to him. At first, Tom called me incessantly and even made a few unannounced trips from Los Angeles to Stanford, where I was in graduate school, in an effort to win me back, but by the following summer when I was back in Santa Barbara working as a camp counselor at the University of California’s Family Vacation Center, I’d heard from him less and less frequently.

One day in August 1981, fourteen months after Thomas walked into a room in Nurnberg and turned my life upside down, Tom called and asked if he could come see me in Santa Barbara the next day. Of course, I answered, surprised at my own enthusiasm.

Christopher Cross was playing on the turntable when the knock came at the door.

“Well, it's not far back to sanity
At least it's not for me
And when the wind is right you can sail away
Find serenity
Oh, the canvas can do miracles
Just you wait and see
Then you'll believe me”

Tom looked happy and healthy, very different from the broken man I’d last seen a few months previous on one of his impromptu overnight visits to the Bay Area . He’d obviously recovered from his broken heart. He gave me a long, tight hug that told me that he was genuinely happy to see me but not needy of me – and definitely no longer broken. It was good to see him like this. The fact that he looked incredibly sexy, in his light blue Polo shirt and tanned, smooth skin wasn’t lost on me.

In fact, I suddenly couldn’t think of anything else.

‘Crap. Not good,’ I thought. ‘Not good at ALL.’

As Christopher Cross played in the background, Tom told me about his new corporate job at Northrop. ‘He’s getting ready to settle down,’ I found myself thinking, then shunning the thought and wondering why I’d even allowed it to enter my consciousness.

What is going ON? Stop this!

Tom then challenged me to a game of backgammon on the beach, just a few hundred yards from the dorm room that I’d called my home for the past five summers. I lifted the needle from the record player, cutting off Christopher Cross mid-sentence, and heading with Tom to the beach…

...and to my life as I now know it, almost thirty happy years later.

So Christopher Cross' Sailing reminds me of love and youth. It reminds me of exhilarating joy and excruciating pain. It signifies a crossroads in my life and, quite simply, my life's destiny.

"Oh, the canvas can do miracles..."

(Yes, Thomas -- who, coincidentally, has become a passionate and avid sailor -- remains a dear friend and I’ve seen him a few times since 1981 – a testament to Tom’s love and trust.)