Auslanders: Blitzfahrt Amsterdam

Auslanders: Blistzfahrt Amsterdam

The first time I went to Amsterdam, it was with a bunch of teenage girls. Well, maybe not a bunch, but there were definitely at least two of them. And maybe they weren’t exactly teenage girls, but they were teenage girls back when I met them.

Please do not assume that I am a multi-national gentleman of leisure running my newest ladies into the bowels of the Red Light District, because that is simply not the case. I am no pimp, just a simple high school teacher.

There are probably some who find it somewhat disconcerting that a couple of my former students would grow into adulthood only to befriend me and my family, then fly over to Germany to visit us, to sleep in my little German house and eat at my German table and then stroll across the beautiful canals of Amsterdam giggling through the second hand pot smoke at all the real live Amsterdam hookers with me.

Those people would find it all suspicious.

“Why would those girls want to visit you?”

I will admit that I take it as a compliment that two of my former students managed to make it through five years of high school and graduate without a raging desire to seek revenge upon me once they escaped with their diplomas. Maybe I have been doing something right after all.

The two young women in question are NtC and The Uje, and have for years been on again, off again visitors to our home and so it was no surprise that they would end up at our kitchen table during any one of the many planning sessions wherein my good woman and I entered into protracted discussion regarding some aspect of our forthcoming German Adventure.

“You’re so lucky,” said NtC. “I would love to go to Europe.”

Being a man, I just nodded. Yes, of course somebody would wish to go to Europe. Yes, we are so lucky. NtC was correct in her observation. Nest topic…

My wife, however, being a woman, and speaking fluently the female dialect, responded in the correct and perhaps, expected manner, using that same dialect.

“You should come over and visit us.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” said my wife. “It would be fun.”

I should have known what to do. Having lived amongst women for so long, I have acquired a passable understanding of their tongue, although perhaps only just enough to get me in trouble.

At a restaurant, I know that if my wife asks me, “Is that good?” I am supposed to push my plate over towards her and demand (with smiling love) that she try it for herself, rather than tell her it is indeed good and that she should have picked it instead of what she has.

If we are driving a long distance and my wife asks me if I am hungry, and do I want to pull over and get something to eat, I understand that I am not supposed to say “No thanks” and keep driving because I just want to get wherever the hell we are going without biology slowing us down. I am supposed to immediately pull over and find a place for us to have a proper sit-down meal because we aren’t in a hurry and we can always just get a hotel that night.

And when houseguests remark on how they would love to go to Europe we don’t nod and feel privately superior that we have arranged to live there and they haven’t. Instead, we invite them to come over and stay with us.

That is why, not too long after we had settled into normal life at 24 Auf dem Hahn, I got up early one morning, fought two and half hours of stau (crushing Autobahn gridlock) down to Frankfurt, and waited around in the massive Frankfurt airport complex until I saw two familiar and shell-shocked faces bobbing through the crowd.

We drove back to The Deuce chattering like giddy Grade Six girls, and I realized that I was happy to have these girls with me. Seeing my new home through their eyes was more fun than seeing everything through mine all the time. It was like being their teacher all over again, only this time I could say bad words and there was no marking.

After a week of bike rides, city visits and grocery paradise runs to Real, and on the morning of their second last day in Germany, we got up early, slid into their rented BMW (thanks to an incredibly lucky mistake at the airport rental agency), and highballed for Holland.

Driving from the Dusseldorf area to any other area can be distressing. Living in a conurbation of some thirty million people demands that there be a sufficient concentration of highway for all of those people to get where they need to go, all at the same time. This has created what is, even after you figure out where you’re going and what you’re doing, an unimaginable concentration of roads, onramps, offramps, connector thoroughfares, multilane superhighways, and vehicles.

Luckily, I am the kind of resourceful Canadian guy who generally feels like he knows his way around.

Drop me in a new place and I get my bearings very quickly. A few glances at a local map and I’m fully prepared to walk around exactly like I know where I’m going, kind of like a giant wingless pigeon. Maybe I have magnets in my head too. Or maybe I am fooling myself, considering that, for our first few weeks in Germany, I had a hard time figuring which way was North whenever I merged onto the Autobahn.

But I don’t blame myself. I blame the transportation planners, which I suppose means Hitler. He wasn’t much better at planning roads than he was an artist.

If you want to drive to Essen, which is northeast of Meerbusch, you have to leave on a highway that goes south, drive into and partway through Dusseldorf, then turn east, and then drive north. Why? I have no clue. The only thing I can guess is that there is no more room for any more roads that are more direct. They have literally run out of road space. This unnatural experience was repeated driving to Muenster, to Paris, to Venlo in Holland, to almost everywhere that required leaving the house.

“How do these people figure out where they’re going?” I asked my good wife.

She pointed at the cars around us.

“They all use GPS.”

Just to get around in the area where they lived. Probably even to find their way home from work.

“We need to get one, or we are going to go insane and harm ourselves.”

She was right.

It was the best several hundred Euros we spent over there, not counting what we spent on shokolade muesli. And it made driving to Amsterdam with the girls a no brainer. I didn’t have to think about where we were going, where to turn, which lane to be in or any of that. I just had to drive that beautiful piece of German automotive engineering.

Yes. I drove it.

The girls agreed that I should pilot the BMW not only because I was old enough and had my name on the rental agreement, but because it was essential to my mental health. I have no choice but to drive. Once in a while I am forced by heinous circumstances, or possibly rank bullies, to sit in some other section of a motor vehicle where I have no control over my Destiny or the steering wheel and, during those times, I am not fit for human companionship, plus I am car sick.

Thankfully, these young women honoured my needs and allowed me to assume command of a car well beyond my reach, a car the likes of which I would normally not be allowed to touch, let alone drive.

This might explain why, once I pulled out onto the Autobahn, the taunting began in earnest.

“Are you sure you can handle this car?”

“This isn’t your minivan, you know.”

“I thought there was no speed limit on these highways.”

“Doesn’t this car have any higher gears?”

“Are you as old as you drive?”

I shook my head and laughed at them.

“I was immune to peer pressure in Grade Six. Do you honestly think I am going to allow your feeble commentary to goad me into-“

An old lady driving a Smart car blew past us, blaring her horn and shaking her fist.

I stomped the accelerator.

As a rule, my family is a law-abiding group.

In our tribe, we recognize that many of the codes and restrictions under which we live are rooted in logic and self-preservation. Even as a hormone-addled, self-absorbed teenage boy, I wasn’t likely to commit B&Es, shoplift unnecessary luxury items or drive more than 140 kph. I’ve only had five or six or seven or so speeding tickets in my life, and one of them was in Quebec, so that doesn’t count. But here I was on the Autobahn. The Autobahn, and NtC was absolutely correct.

There were no speed limits on this particular stretch of road, no rules or guidelines for careful driving whatsoever, and the pavement was utterly smooth, graded to perfection and maintained in a manner unimaginable anywhere else but for Germany. And I was driving a BMW that purred like a post-coital tigress.

Even my mom would have to agree that I had no other choice.

At 160, there was still no sense of speeding. The car and highway were too well designed. Besides, I was just pacing the regular flow of traffic in the left lane.

At 180, everything started to change. The road before us narrowed in from my peripheral vision, thinning to a blurred strip of dark grey as the speedometer moved towards 190.

The car was still smooth, almost like we weren’t on the road, but floating above it, just a few inches, which gave me the slightest sense of vertigo, like I wasn’t exactly where I was, but a little somewhere else.

It was very quiet in the car as we floated along, and I couldn’t glance over to see if that was due to the girls’ paralyzing fear at our speed or their mute ecstasy at this blatant flouting of North American traffic laws.

I had the distinct sense that, as we edged ever closer to 200, if I looked away from the road, even for a second, something – a moose, a thrown tire, a discarded coffee cup – something would suddenly be there in front of us and the fun would be over in a screaming pinwheel of expensive German engineering and fragile meaty sacks of Canadian touristry.

I eased off the gas, diesel, actually, and watched the speedometer creep down to a more manageable 150. It felt like we were inching our way up to the speaker at a drive-thru, and I could understand why the Germans were so adamant about maintaining their seemingly unhinged highway speed laws. Although it’s dangerous and eerie, and the margin for error is way too small for normal drivers to tolerate, if you were in the habit of driving that fast, going any slower is a total drag. It gives you that same feeling you get driving behind an eighty year old woman coming home from a euchre tournament at the legion with belly full of cherry pie and Earl Grey.

Driving normal speeds after going almost 200 was like putting training wheels back on your bike after you’d learned to ride without them. I felt like I could have driven blindfolded at that speed. I also felt like I would able to stop the car or steer if necessary, so it wasn’t all bad.

We played Ipod Name That Tune for two hours (I won) and suddenly, we were pulling into the Ajax Stadium for a little five Euro Park and Ride.

Just like that, we were in Amsterdam.

Amsterdam is a city that has a lot of connotations, which compels me remind the world that I do not partake of intoxicating substances of any sort.

I do not currently make use of, nor have I ever used, drugs or alcohol of any sort, not counting all the drugs doctors have given me over the years, which would include such highlights as Valium, Percodan, Percocet, Ativan and Adasol-15. These were all prescribed by actual doctors, for legitimate medical reasons, I might add, and as such I didn’t misuse any of them except for that one migraine when I woke up spread all over the macramé mat in front of the sliding glass door at my parents’ house with no memory as to how I got there and a trail of crusted drool on my face.

For me, Amsterdam doesn’t generate any excitement about legal pot, not even in a supposedly chocolate space cake. If I want a brownie, I don’t even want walnut or icing, never mind a few seeds of of skunky old pot. Getting high isn’t what made me want to go.

It was the whores that I was after.

That was a joke.

My first conscious encounter with a real-life hooker took place when I was eighteen and visiting Toronto after a morning tour of York University. It was only my second time in that particular city, which makes it more understandable that, when the impressively full figured woman standing outside the Zanzibar strip bar asked me if I wanted a date, I was almost dumb enough to be flattered. She was at least twice and a half my age, and the idea that an older woman of such bounteous and unusually conspicuous cleavage found me attractive enough to ask me out on a date without even knowing me gave me a great deal of satisfaction.

“Did you hear that?” I asked Marcel. “That woman just asked me out! She doesn’t even know me!”

He probably didn’t believe it had happened until she asked him out too. To my credit, it didn’t hurt my feelings, but that may have been because she made it fairly clear that she perfectly willing to go on a date with both of us at the same time.

It was at that moment that I realized this woman wasn’t attracted to us because of our small town good looks and naturally curly hair (well, mine was naturally curly, Marcel had a perm). Here it was, just past three in the afternoon, and we had met our first lady of the evening!

It was all very exciting, even without actually going on the date.

After that, most of my encounters with prostitutes were much less interesting, and best characterized by an ongoing and rather nagging interaction with the unfortunate, drug ravaged woman working the driest patch of sidewalk in front of the T.D. Green Machine down the street from where I lived at Queen and Manning years later.

She didn’t look as much like the definition of optimism as she did the definition of a crack whore, but I have to give credit where it is due. It didn’t matter how many times I walked past her on my way to the grocery store, she asked me every single time if I wanted a date.

It didn’t matter than I had just told her “no thanks” on my first pass. Five minutes later, when I walked past carrying two armloads of groceries, she asked me again. As she did every single time.

One night after I had quit my job making commercials and didn’t have anything better to do, I passed her seventeen times, walking just past her to the corner and then forty feet back to the book store, and each time, she asked me if I wanted a date. Each time I told her “no thanks.”

Finally, on the last pass, I stopped and asked her why she kept asking in spite of all the evidence supporting my lack of interest. “Didn’t you notice me saying no these last sixteen times?”

She just shrugged. “Maybe you changed your mind.”

The lasting memory of that dentally challenged woman, and the distressing chemically rich urine smell that permeated the air around the Green Machine tainted my view of prostitution. That doesn’t mean that I thought anything was wrong with adult women of sound mind and body choosing to exercise their rights to make money as they see fit, it just meant that it wasn’t right for me. Nobody who gags watching other people chew their fingernails, who can actually taste their fingers from across the room, is going to be able to stomach some kind of intimate tussle behind a dumpster chock full of rotting Chinese food in a back alley on Dundas Street.

But that didn’t stop me from wanting to go to Amsterdam and see what there was to see.

We came out of the subway station onto a busy street along the water, where several canals fed out into the sea. Even though it was Monday morning, the place was packed with tourists, and everybody was funneled up what I assumed was the main street.

I don’t know exactly what I expected, but it just looked like any busy street in an old European city. Cheap Italian restaurants, pubs, Middle-Eastern fast food and T-shirt shops one after another. I didn’t see any hookers standing on the corners, no potheads spilling out into the street smelling like the upholstery in Snoop Dogg’s tour bus.

We followed the flow of people up to a busy square with a statue, some really old buildings, and even fewer hookers.

Where was all the bad stuff?

I slipped into a hotel and rifled through their collection of brochures until I found something with a boobies on the cover. Sure enough, there was a map inside. If we followed the road up another block, curled around to the left and came down into Waterlooplein, we would find a flea market, the Rembrandt House, and there, across the bridge and down the road, was the Sex Museum.

I showed the map to the girls.

“If you were a hooker, wouldn’t you set up near the Sex Museum?”

They agreed.

It didn’t take long to find it.

The Red Light District looks the same as any of the other old parts of this really old city, with tall, slanty medieval buildings tightly packed and sagging over narrow lanes that run alongside the canals.

The sidewalks are tiny, the roads are tiny, the crowds are thick, the canal water is rich with raw sewage, and there are no guard rails or safety measures of any kind preventing you from going over the edge.

I can only assume that, if you did fall into that water, you would have to fling yourself around in mid-air to guarantee that you hit your head on the concrete edge before you hit the water so that you could be unconscious, or better yet, dead before you fell in. I’m not joking about the raw sewage. Toilets have flushed straight into the canals for hundreds of years and there are a lot of people flushing. The water is brown for a reason, and it’s not because the mud is being stirred up.

It wouldn’t have mattered how brown the water was, however, as nobody spends much time looking at it. Yes, the bridges were awesome, the old buildings impressive, the shops bizarre and the coffee shops dank and nasty looking, but all of that is forgotten when you see the little hooker booths.

Once you get into that part of town, I don’t think you’d have noticed flaming dead bodies floating by.

Please don’t assume that I was walking around staring lustfully at semi-nude women for hire like some shaven-headed British soccer hooligan, of which there seemed to be hundreds in the city.

No, my staring was more shocked than lustful.

Now, I am not a prude.

I am not a religious man with some kind of negative attitude towards nudity and human sexuality. I am all for nudity and human sexuality. Remember, I stood with a bus tour of French senior citizens in The Erotic Museum along the Pigalle in Paris and watched a porno movie shot in 1916, and I clapped at the end just like they did.

I am not one of these self-righteous people who feels that prostitution is wrong, assuming that the women involved are taking part in it by their own decision. I don’t think it’s any of my business how some people want to make their money or spend it, as long as everybody’s a consenting adult.

But I have to wonder how it is that a prostitute can expect to make any money in such a competitive market if she looks exactly like former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega with basketball sized breast implants.

I am not exaggerating.

I saw that exact woman, assuming she was a woman.

Not only did she look exactly like Noriega, she was right around his age. And had clearly had the same dermatologist. Or lack thereof.

You have to realize this means that, somewhere in Amsterdam is a little Latin American kid sitting in a park eating a bun, wondering where his grandpa works. Well, I saw that little kid’s grandpa, and the little kid’s grandpa should be ashamed of himself. He should also take that bikini off and go back to being a general, because he can’t possibly be making money as a prostitute.

That is why I was shocked.

Shouldn’t prostitutes be at least a little better looking than that? Think of what they’re doing for a living. Seeing some of these “ladies” of the evening, I will admit that I couldn’t help but feel like, with a little makeup and the right g-string, I would have as good a chance as any to make a few bucks. Honestly, what kind of sick-minded individual wants a hook up with an old lady that looks like the former Panamanian strongman dictator? And pay fifty Euros for it!?

I guess that wasn’t the only thing that shocked me. The sheer number of women is hard to believe. All over this maze of tight little alleys, lanes and side streets, you pass glass door after glass door, each one filled up full with a woman. And if you walk by, you’re usually right there, just inches away from them.

Maybe because they are there every day, the girls in those booths have become immune to that thing people do where they look away from someone when their eyes meet. You know how you’re sitting on the subway looking at people, and then one of those people looks back so you immediately glance in the opposite direction? Well, these women don’t do that. If you glance at them, they stare back at you and smile, and if you don’t look away, they will open the door and call you over. It’s a good thing they don’t have lassoes.

The level of self-confidence they have is amazing, standing there in what amounts to a full length window in bikinis or less, being stared at, laughed at, pointed at, shunned, lusted over, scrutinized, drooled over, and every other response such a display would attract. You want to look, too, because it’s just so weird to see them all placed like gerbils in a pet store, and maybe you could look, but I couldn’t. Not for long. The shiver I got when they looked back at me was too creepy. Meeting their eye was like looking into the ten thousand years stare of a war vet who’s been in The Shit.

Which makes sense.

Think about it. All day these women are literally naked to the world, naked to the filthy, spilled open secret and unsated hungers of nasty, stoned, drunken men and women from all over the world, all living out wildly differing definitions of hygiene.

No wonder so many of them looked rough and hard eyed.

But some didn’t look like that.

Some are attractive, some look like girls you knew from school, some were cute or exotic or smiling.

And one of them looked like she wasn’t even real.

We saw her during one of our constant sweeps through the sector of women stationed opposite the Old Church.

This area was ironic, oxymoronic and morally distressing from the start.

Imagine a large, very old church with a lane going all the way around it.

Now imagine walking around that church counterclockwise.

The first building on your right as you come in from the canal side is a primary school with typical school windows and finger paintings affixed to the glass. We even saw a mother picking up her child there.

The second building, right beside the school, was a porn theatre, festooned out front with enormous posters advertising scenes from the movies. Not dialogue scenes, either. We’re talking scenes from the movies.

Just past the porn theatre, there was General Noriega and much of his senior staff, then a coffee shop, more booths, a lane that lead to a tattoo parlor on the other side of another coffee shop and a gaming hall of some sort, and then more girls. Wandering around on the lane beside the canal was a slitty-eyed entrepreneur singing out “Cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy” in warbling falsetto.

You might think that the mother picking her child up would rush in, grab her daughter, cover the child with a thick hood and run away, but that wasn’t what happened. She walked up, took her daughter’s hand, and wandered off chatting and laughing. Neither of them paid the slightest attention to the posters, the girls or the tourists wandering around goggling at everything.

We were behind that mother and child, but turned off to the right and took a quick left, to move through a very tight alley. As we walked along, trying not to look like we were looking at the girls, I was struck by something in one of the booths.

It looked like a statue, or a life-sized magazine photo, very stylized, perfectly lit and composed.

She was turned the other way, facing the back of the booth. Her hair was swept up into a Japanese kind of bun, with two long black lacquer hair pins holding it together.

Her skin was golden, somewhere between a tan and natural tone.

She had a riding crop in her hand and held it over her shoulder, pointing straight down her spine, like an arrow drawing one’s attention to her bottom, which was hard to believe, and where the last few inches of it rested comfortably between the tops of her buttocks.

It didn’t look like something that could happen in real life.

I am referring to her buttocks.

She was wearing some variation of a one piece bathing suit and a thong, and it revealed what I took to be the miraculous result of a brutal workout schedule. From top to bottom, she looked like she was generated, unnatural.

I stopped still.

“Did you see that?”

The Uje turned back.

“What?”

“Come here.”

NtC stayed where she was.

“What is it?”

I moved three paces back and closer to the full length window.

“That’s real!”

The Uje was shaking her head.

“Oh my God. That’s incredible!”

She was also referring to the girl’s buttocks.

The girl turned to face us.

She had to have been a supermodel.

I stared.

The model didn’t have the Thousand Yard stare. She didn’t look like a lifer on death row. She wasn’t sucking on an unfiltered Gauloise or smacking gum and sneering.

She smiled and crooked a finger at me.

I held my hands up and shook my head.

She made an exaggerated pout and pointed at the door.

I sighed and opened it a crack, leaned in.

“Are you coming in?”

“No. I just wanted to say, whatever you’re doing in the gym, it’s working. You should be proud.”

She smiled sadly.

“I don’t work out.” Not Dutch. She had a slight Parisian accent, spoke perfect English.

“You don’t work out? Liar. ” I angled my head at her abs. “I can see the situps from here.”

She laughed and shrugged, very French.

“It’s all genetics. I’m just lucky. But it doesn’t seem to matter.”

“What do you mean?”

She showed her empty hands.

“Nobody’s visiting.”

Her bottom lip pushed out and she mimed a pout.

“Unless you want to come in…”

It’s a funny thing, prostitution, amazing even.

Men spend so much energy in their lives thinking about women, looking at women, trying to meet women, working up the nerve to talk to women, trying to attract them, impress them, talk them into their cars, into bed, into their lives. And here was this ridiculously attractive young woman in a tiny booth in Amsterdam trying to get a blandly average middle-aged man to have sex with her, and all I had to do was pay.

I smiled.

“That wouldn’t be very nice to my friends, would it?”

She looked past me, at The Uje.

“Your girlfriends?”

“No. My students.”

Her forehead wrinkled up.

“Students?”

“Well, not anymore, but they used to be.”

The hooker made an odd expression.

“What are you doing here with them?”

I smiled.

“That’s funny. I was wondering the exact same thing about you.”

She didn’t say anything and I pulled my head out the door, waved, and walked on.

The Uje was still shaking her head in amazement.

“What is she doing here?”

“Same thing General Noriega’s doing.”

NtC turned to face me.

“What would you do if we weren’t here? Would you go back?”

“Back where? To Germany? Probably.”

“Don’t be stupid. You know what I mean.”

N glanced back behind us.

I laughed.

N was watching my eyes carefully.

“Well?”

“Give me a break. You already know the answer to that or you wouldn’t be here.”

She tried for a second to look serious, failed.

We walked out into the wider street, along the canal, past the hash-eyed guy singing out “ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana”, past the sex shops, and cinemas, the hookers and the tattoo parlors, out onto the main street, looking for a place to get pie.

Auslanders: Stroopwaffel

There is a secret truth known to only a very few elite travelers that one of, if the most, exciting aspects of visiting a new area is to be found in scoping out, locating and wandering the aisles of the native grocery stores.

Who among us hasn’t approached that one supermall in Belgium with goose bumps, knowing full well of the orgy of chocolate filling an entire aisle, most of it cheaper than a grab bag of stale candy corns back at Becker’s.

How about sniffing your way through the dairy coolers in a French superstore?

Exploring the hanging ham racks in Spain’s finer food shops?

Pinching the plump offerings in Italian vegetable markets?

Bathing in the yeasty heat of a German bakery as you finger the warm pretzels you just bought?

Plumbing the briny depths of Sweden’s fish and porn bunkers? Okay, I didn’t go to Sweden, but my wife and daughter did, and although they never said anything about a fish and porn bunker, I am 50-60% sure that they have them. Maybe not together, and maybe not in the same store, but they have them. You know the Swedes.

In Holland, the big excitement for my family was brown sugar.

Brown sugar is not common in Germany. Oh, they have a kind of sugar you can buy, and it’s brown all right, but it’s crystalline and granular, like the snow conditions at a cheap downhill ski resort in March when the snow machines are running full time. We needed the kind of brown sugar that is fine and tiny grained, but clumps together like wet sand. This is the kind of sugar you would need also if you were hoping to enjoy a mess of Chocolate Chip Banana Bran Muffins or Chocolate Chip cookies.

You might also be saddened to learn that Germany is equally deficient in chocolate chips as well, although that is not the same kind of hardship. A highly acceptable response to chocolate chip deficit is to buy one of those dark Euro chocolate bars, chop it up roughly, eat the hunter’s portion, then throw the rest into your batter as if it was a bag of President’s Choice semi-sweet and you’re all set.

But without brown sugar, you might as well not even bother.

The Dutch, however, they understand a Canadian family’s needs.

We learned this on the way home from England.

Passing through a town called Venlo on the Hollish-Germish border, I remember Mark telling me that, under dire circumstances along the lines of a canned pork and bean craving or a deep yearning for prepackaged foods (not popular in The Germ), a trip to Venlo’s mall sized grocery store was much in order.

And having just been in England for two weeks, I had an itch for peanut butter.

If you lived in the greater Dusseldorf area, peanut butter was not easy to get in reasonable quantities.

There was, in the average food shop, a small jar, slightly larger than a urine sample container, although much more appealing.

As you know, the average European considers peanut butter grotesque, a vile epitome of all that is wrong with America, not including the President. Laden with icing sugar, sweeter than I like it, those tiny sample jars were also expensive, and buying it guaranteed a cashier would give you the hairy eyeball.

Would the Dutch, famed for their tolerant society, stock their shelves with the stuff? Would they have it in containers large enough to cover more than one slice of toast per jar?

The answer was yes.

But that was not the most fascinating aspect of our excursion into Venlo’s enormous grocery mall.

It was the candy.

I have put a lot of different things in my mouth.

When I was four, I picked up old cigarette butts that the teenage neighbor kid just dumped out on the freshly oiled gravel of John Street, and then I smoked them. Well, pretended to.

When I was nine, I tried to live off the land like the natives and eat the soft bark inside a birch tree. And the curled up green disk in the bottom of a dandelion puff. And grass. And a lot of not particularly tasty things that grew in and around my yard.

When I was fourteen, I got half of Catherine’s A.B.C. gum (not really caring whether or not it still had any flavor left) at twelve thirty five and chewed it until three o’clock, feeling increasingly a most likely one-sided intimate connection with Catherine with every chew.

When I was twenty one, I ate sea urchin sushi (heinous, don’t even bother).

But I can’t remember putting much of anything in my mouth that was as offensive to the inside of my mouth as the triple extra super salted whatever else they were called drupjes masquerading as candy.

Drupjes (pretend it rhymes with puppies but WAY less cute and not nearly as tasty) are supposed to be a treat. They’re sold everywhere Dutch people could potentially gather, and come in a myriad number of shapes, sizes and formulations. For no reason I can come up with, these drupjes are sold in the candy sections of stores, right beside edible products such as chocolate and gumballs. Most of the drup that I have seen look like the petrified droppings of some small woodland creature. If only they tasted as good.

Do you know that feeling just before you throw up where your mouth is awash in a sudden rush of saliva much more viscous and plentiful than normal? That’s the feeling of having one of these drupjes in your mouth, only you have to imagine a chewing tobacco/anise flavoured salt lick accompaniment to this pre-vomit. You simply can’t spit the triple salted ones out fast enough to mitigate the havoc they are capable of wreaking on the tender interior of the human face.

It’s true that most drupjes aren’t that brutal, they’re just nasty and somewhat nauseating. Some are okay, but nowhere near flavourful, and then there are a bunch more that aren’t really that awful, and they could almost be construed as being vaguely similar to candy, assuming you really, really like black licorice.

We made a wide berth around the drup (I had so utterly frightened the children that they held their noses as we ran past the bulk candies) on our way to the general area of the cookies, where I imagined fingering a huge variety of spekulaas and butter cookies. There on the top shelf was something called stroopwaffel.

I took that name to be a reference to both syrup and waffles. Each cookie was a thin disk of very dense, almost unbearably sweet caramel honeyish syrup that is thick and viscous and locked into a latticework layer of wafers. This thick syrup can be seen semi-hardened on the sides of the cookies in the package, like darkened amber, sweetly free of the petrified husks of prehistoric insects, waiting to be softened with the correct application of heat.

We had to buy them in order to find out.

After loading up our poor little Ford Fiesta with bag after bag of Dutch booty, we screamed back to Meerbusch and lit up the tea pot.

Using her great knowledge of science and vectors and stuff, my wife had correctly calculated that each stroopwaffel was the perfect size to be place across the top of an average sized teacup.

Under the cookie, powerful Bernoulli currents of heated air flow upward where they are trapped under the dense wafers, unable to escape.

The cookie very quickly begins to sag with the weight of the syrup as it liquefies, and if you were an adult, you would immediately lunge at the cookie and find out how fricking delicious are. If you were a child, you would sit and watch as the cookie sags until it falls apart in your tea and becomes a gooey mess.

After you eat a stroopwaffel, there follows a vague feeling of unease.

Is it a sugar mad craving for another cookie, or is it a hot rush of glucose driven nausea?

There is only ever one way to find out.

Luckily, Holland is only forty minutes away.

Auslanders: They Drew First Blood

They drew first blood.

Okay, they didn’t really, but I loved that line from the first Rambo movie.

What they actually did first was visit us.

And when I say “they” I mean just about all of them.

Just before we left Canada my wife told anyone she ran into that they should come over and visit us in Europe. It didn’t matter who they were.

The neighbours.

Kids I taught.

That guy at the grocery store fish counter.

And he hadn’t even asked about what we were doing. All he did was put a pile of sole on the scale and ask “Is that much okay?” and my wife handed him a card with our German address on it.

“We have lots of room!”

I’m sure she was just excited about going, and, like any incredibly socially acute female person, wanted to share that excitement with every single human being she encountered.

Which, to me, seems insane. So it’s a good thing she’s cute. Insane people have a much easier time in life if they are cute. Unless they smell strongly of pee and scream at invisible midgets outside the Eaton’s Centre.

The first visitors that took my wife up on her offer was a family from Hensall. Not just some random family from Hensall, but a family that had a dad who taught at the same school as my wife.

This teaching dad was apparently some kind of supremely organized travel master taking his family on the most scheduled European vacation ever. He was one of those travelers who maps out every possible use of his family’s time in advance, down to the most insignificant minutiae. He was emailing detailed schematics of the hotel rooms they had booked online for us to use if we wanted to visit the same cities, but I didn’t have the same CAD program so I couldn’t use them.

Don’t take this to mean that I am somehow against planned travel, because that is not the case. I am pro-planned travel. In fact, I am married to planned travel. I will freely admit that, just like my wife, I am also the kind of person who knows what order to do the rides in Disney World to avoid the crowds and I am not even a Disney fan. But even I found it hard to accept that this particular guy had a five inch thick binder for his trip that weighed about the same as the Marshall Plan.

But his being organized wasn’t what bothered me about them visiting us. I didn’t have any problem with his minute-by-minute itinerary or his invasion binder. What made me tense was the simple fact that some unknown family would rubbing up against me in our German house after us having only been there for a couple of weeks in total, moving around with their different smells and chewing noises and probably they would say things and I would have to respond correctly to those things they said and there would be interchange and expectation and interaction at a variety of levels.

And the worst part of that was that my wife would know what I was thinking during their stay. She would know that I was having a hard time living with our visitors and that would aggravate an ongoing bone she has to pick with me, assuming bones can ongo.

This is the part where I am misperceived as a solipsistic misanthrope.

For those of you who don’t have immediate access to a good dictionary, let me offer this tidbit from the Random House Unabridged:

sol·ip·sism [sol-ip-siz-uh<!--[if gte vml 1]&gt; &lt;![endif]–><!–[if !vml]–><!–[endif]–>m]

1. Philosophy - the theory that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist.

2. extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one’s feelings, desires, etc.; egoistic self-absorption.

mis·an·thrope [mis-uh<!--[if gte vml 1]&gt; &lt;![endif]–><!–[if !vml]–><!–[endif]–>n-throhp, miz-]

1. “one who hates mankind,” 1563, from Gk. misanthropos “hating mankind,” from misein “to hate” + anthropos “man.” Alternate form misanthropist is attested from 1656.

I don’t think that’s me. Not entirely.

My wife is a human and I don’t hate her. Same with my kids, my family, Japanese waitresses at sushi restaurants and plenty more besides.

And on the other hand, I don’t love myself enough to be solipsistic. Don’t get me wrong, I think I’m alright, but there are a lot of people I like better. Like Damon Lindelhof, executive producer of Lost, for example.

One of the reasons that some people think of me as a misanthrope is that I have a hard time blocking everything out. Literally, I mean everything.

Let’s imagine a true-to-life situation from the 1980s that may illustrate my point. In this situation, I am eating in a group setting, in a residence cafeteria in York University. In that cafeteria, I am sitting with a group of my friends, and these are people with whom I am literally spending almost 100% of my time. We eat together, got to class together, hang out together, work out together, listen to music together, and there’s even a coed communal bathroom, so, you know, we’re in there together too. It would be fair to say that, in this actual scenario I am spending an inordinately intense amount of time with a specific group of people.

During the cafeteria meals in question, I have to bolt my food and maintain as high a level of activity as possible in order to cover up a number of things that are happening around me:

1. John is eating all of his food first, and saving all of his drinks until after the food is all gone. But he’s not doing it naturally. It’s too methodical. You can tell that he would like to have a drink, and certainly a portion of this food is very dry and he can barely choke it down. He’s running out of saliva, and that makes my mouth flood with saliva and yet thirsty at the same time and I have to get a drink. Of course, I have to bring this to his attention and he makes what I take to be spurious claims about the health benefits of this rigid mealtime structure that we argue about for years. “What difference is it to you?” he will say. “What makes you think that your way is better? You’re slopping solids and liquids in there all the same time, and that’s putting extra stress on your digestive system!” Of course, I disagree, and I have to point out to him that the stomach churns all its contents together into one big slurry or goo that is, ironically, called churn (and chyme?). I also point out to him that the chocolate milk on his tray is warming even as we speak, thickening and forming long clotted chains of warming protein structures. It’s turning to chocolate cottage cheese, a warm, viscous carton of pus that makes me nauseous just having it nearby. John responds by letting it sit even longer, then drinking it with relish. Not actual relish as in on his hamburger, but relishing it as he drinks this heinous and lukewarm tub of listeria.

1. Sheldon is eating one group of food at a time from his plate. First he will eat the hamburger, then he will eat the fries, then he will eat the salad then he will eat whatever else he’s picked up. He only moves on to the next group of food when every last scrap of the previous group of food has been consumed. I am outraged. Why must he do this? Why is driven to create such a bland monoculture of taste in his mouth? Why wouldn’t he combine foods into rich, exciting new mixtures? What about a bite of this, a bite of that, then maybe a drink of something else and a quick triumphant look over at John? His fries are getting cold, the grease all over them congealing. And look, now you have those peas on their own. That’s it. Just peas. You’ve got nothing left to look forward to on that plate but the flavour of pea. It’s all work from here on out.

1. Jai is eating a hamburger also, but he eats his concurrent with his fries. This is good. But the sound he makes is not good. Jai is nose breathing while he eats. This is a terrible, terrible thing. Does he have a deviated septum? I can’t say for sure, as I don’t have access to his x-rays, but throughout the entirety of the meal, the whistling constriction of his nasal passage accompanies the moistened clack of his chewing. It sounds like he’s doing it from just inside my ear, sitting beside my eardrum, whistle-chewing, his clogged out nose scraping air as he struggles to take in enough oxygen to live. I experiment with trying to nose breath with so much volume as I eat. It is fruitless. The amount of wrinkling and screwing up of features that I must do to approximate even a fraction of the sound he makes renders me unable to chew, let alone hold food in my mouth without drooling.

1. Peter sits on my left. He is very neat, very clean, mannerly, highly responsive to the world around him. He doesn’t chew with his mouth open, he doesn’t nose breathe or parcel his food out into obsessively maintained borders. But he hovers over his plate like a female vulture with a nest of freshly hatched babies. He curls his left hand around the front of his plate, cranes his head forward over it, and then makes a strange dipping forward motion so that he meets his fork halfway through it’s journey up to where his mouth would be. He ends up making this head bobbing fork interception hundreds of times at every meal, for every bite. It’s like he’s not confident the utensil will make it all the way to his mouth if his mouth is up where it was when he started the eating motion, so he has to come down and take the food in the middle. I take pains to point out that I have my own plate of food. I don’t want his. He is safe. I point at the others around the table. “Nobody wants your stew, Peter. It’s all for you,” but he doesn’t make the connection. In my peripheral vision its all I can see, this swanlike, neck-forward dance between fork hand and head coming out of this hunched, protective posture.

Does Tom click the spoon his teeth when he eats his soup? Does Doug breathe in with every sip he takes of every drink, even if it isn’t hot? Does Steve chew his food WAY more than necessary? Does the girl two tables down have a glob of mayonnaise on the corner of her mouth? Do I? Are my lips overly wet from the lettuce flopping as it went into my mouth? I use a napkin after each bite, breathe quietly, drink carefully, eat proportionate bites from each of the groups of food on my plate, try to look down and ignore the whistling, grinding, slurping cacophony around me. Forks scraping plates, teeth on bones, elbows rubbing across tables, over and over again.

I sit in a riot of the senses, seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, smelling everything, fighting to block it all out and find pleasure in my own food and the company of others, fighting the urge to run screaming from the cafeteria.

I am not crazy.

I am not obsessive, compulsive, neurotic, manic, autistic, schizoid, psychotic or bipolar.

I am just a regular guy except with no filters, no defense against noticing all the everything going on all the time around me all the time, and now, after years of living with my wife and feeling perfectly in step with her life’s motions, sights and sounds, and after having to struggle to come to grips with our children growing their own lives into my senses, there I was in somebody else’s house that had to be my own, in somebody else’s country that had to be my own, with a house full of people that I didn’t know, that had no prior place in my pattern, and I would have them there for lots and lots of days, one after the other.

And that family from Hensall was only the first few drops of a flood of houseguests.

NtC and The Uje, Grandma and Grandpa, the other Grandma and Grandpa, The Hustler and Bride of Hustler, Dr, Jables, my sister’s whole family, T.B.C., my brother, Seteve, it seemed like everybody wanted to come over, sleep in the same building as us and go to the bakery in Lank.

I wish I could tell you that I was miserable when they came. I wish that I could say that I drove to this or that airport gnashing my teeth and then cursing out loud like a madman as I circled endlessly through jam-packed parking garages, desperate for a spot.

But I am not able to say those things. Not without lying, and everyone knows that is something I will not tolerate from myself.

No, I find myself compelled to admit here that I greeted each new visitor with an untroubled heart. Somehow, in spite of all the tooth clicking, nose breathing, new smelling people pressing into the tight confines of my pattern over the course of my German year, I was happy to see them come, as if our new context added some interesting new element to those familiar friends and family members. Or maybe to me.

Yes, I was happy to see them come, happy to share my cheese and chocolate with them, happy to take them to The Gerge, to drag them through Real, happy to drive with them to Paris, to Normandy, to Amsterdam or Belgium or wherever they wanted to go.

And at the end of their week or two or however long they stayed, no matter how sad the kids were to say goodbye to our friends and family to those special people who came to see us and who reminded us all of our lives back home, I was just about as happy to drive them back to the airport and see them go.

Auslanders: Blitzfahrt #3

Switzerland

Switzerland looks like a phoshopped picture of itself.

It looks fake, like you’re looking at a bunch of postcards blown up and stitched together on a really good hi-def monitor, and I guess the Swiss government has decided that is a good thing, because you have to pay thirty Euros just to go into the country and look at it.

I am still offended by that entry fee.

It’s like paying admission for the privilege of going into a store. I’m going to be buying stuff the whole time I’m inside, so why should I have to pay to get in? I’m thinking that the owner should be paying me to enter. I am currently drafting a formal letter of complaint to the Swiss government as we speak, assuming I am speaking.

Of course, I paid the extortionate entry fee anyway. Having driven a traffic grinding ten hours to the border, I was hardly going to turn around and fight my way back home to Strump as a sad form of protest, and there were a lot of cars behind me in the line, so I didn’t have a choice anyway. I had to suck it up and drive on. They did give me a sticker to put on my window, however. It was green.

The main things about Switzerland that the random man on the street knows would be:

Army knives

Chocolate Bars

Mountains

Neutrality

Banks

Cheese

Milk Maids

Yodelling

Movenpick

Pig-headed Refusal to Smarten Up and Adopt the Euro, Which Would Make Everything A Lot Better For Pretty Much Everybody

There are other, much less random men on other, more learned streets who, I am certain, would be able to explain in great detail any number of much less popular and stereotypical things about Switzerland, but unfortunately I didn’t have any experience with those. I had to make do with the well known stuff, although I was the only one yodeling, which was disappointing. Especially to my family, who were stuck in the car with me.  

Our key destination in the country was the touristy town of Interlaken, which would be our overnight stop on the way to Italy. I should add that, if there is a non-touristy town in Switzerland, I was not privy to that town.

We found our Interlaken hotel with little trouble, and were amazed at the incredible view from this patio room on the edge of a cliff. The town is ringed with mountains, and a river of stunning cobalt blue, no doubt rife with deadly industrial runoff of some sort, slices through it. The kids were capering about in amazement at our dumb luck at finding such a room. Which made it all the more disappointing when the owner came back and said that room wasn’t ours. Instead, we would be put up in the attic.

Literally.

We were taken from the good room and given two dingy rooms in the attic. I shouldn’t complain though, because at least we had a couple of windows and access to an old coffee can in the hallway for our biological needs. Okay, I made that part up. There was a toilet, but it was shared between all the attic rooms. Yes, there was one more room up there, but we were told not to open that door and I can only assume that the owner’s inbred step-brother was chained to a radiator in there, which would be one less person using that toilet, if you’re trying to look on the bright side.   

The town of Interlaken itself seems to be some kind of gambling mecca for wealthy Asian tourists, and walking around, it was obvious that we wouldn’t be doing any shopping, not that we had planned on it. There were a lot of high end stores with one word French names, ornate hotels and casinos, typical tourist shops, and a twenty franc note blowing between some unconcerned guy’s legs.

The twenty blew up and stopped right in front of me, daring me to bend down and snap it up.  

I did so with impunity and held it out to show my son.  

“Check it out, buds. Now we can eat supper.”

He was stunned.

“You mean there’s money on the ground here?”

He began to methodically pick through any trash he could find scattered around the parking lot. My daughter, having just come back from the bank machine with my wife, couldn’t figure out what he was doing.

“He’s looking for money because I found twenty francs.” I showed her the bill.

Her eyes lit up. “I’m looking too!”

I shook my head. “I already told him not to bother. It’s pure fluke that I found this twenty. There’s no way it’s going to happen again.”

Being kids, they wouldn’t listen, and I had to drag them away from the parking lot, across the road to one of those tourist shops that sells only Army knives, chocolate bars, cheese and milk maid outfits where my wife was fruitlessly searching for tea towels.

“Come on kids, you’re just going to drive yourselves crazy. There’s no way you’re going to find-“

“Something like this?”

My daughter was giddy, cackling as she held a fifty franc note in her hand.  

If not for my wife, we would all have ended up in the dumpster, rifling through crumpled Toblerone wrappers and putrefied bananas.

Eventually we ended up pooling our found monies and entering the Swissest looking restaurant we could find, lured in by the prospect of rosti.

In terms of calories per franc, the rostis we ordered were unmatched. Imagine that you are in a restaurant where the patrons don’t receive a plate for their food. Instead, the waiter drops the whole sixteen inch frying pan down in front of you, loaded with potatoes, ham, onions, garlic and topped with a melted brick of cheese. It’s enough for the whole family, and you are about to parcel it out as such, but then the waiter brings a similar frying pan for everybody else. And then, because you are a disgusting pig and perhaps owing to a lack of understanding as to which is the good cholesterol and which is the bad, you eat damn near everything in that frying pan.

I dealt out as much punishment unto that rosti pan as I could, sitting there on a patio under a kerosene heater watching the Japanese tourists beside us pull out and display on their table an unending an assortment of electronic devices whilst pretending that the hot runny cheese into which they were mime dipping their bread didn’t gross them out. I wasn’t any more convinced by their performances than the waiter was.

“They always do this,” he muttered as he leaned over to clear our table.

“Who?” I asked.

“Them” he sniffed.

I didn’t tell him that I agreed with them about the fondue cheese. The smell of it hung over the patio like running shoe man feet in a dorm room. We paid up and left before he had a chance to try and make me eat some. Of the cheese, not the man feet. 

After such an extravagant feed, and hoping to fend off late night heart attacks, we undertook a vigorous walk back to our cells in the attic, looking up from the ground only to gawk at people in impossibly expensive clothes getting out of impossibly expensive cars and walking into impossibly expensive hotels.

For all that scrutiny of every scrap of litter, we didn’t find any more money, but I am pretty sure I could have made a lot more than seventy francs if I had been brave enough to knock one of the rich gamblers over their beer sodden heads and take their stuff y main force. My wife said no.

After a night of semi-restful attic sleep, and a few handfuls of dried old bread crusts much enriched in quality by a thick layer of Nutella the next morning (I was not paid any money for this product placement), we packed into the car and headed up the Sussten Pass.

The Sussten Pass is exactly what it sounds like: a dangerous mountain pass blasted out of the rock by some crazed surveyor with too much dynamite and a faulty survival instinct.

My daughter, who has always read in the car and never once complained about getting car sick, looked up from her book after the forty-third hairpin turn and said that she felt gross. 

I suggested that she pull her head out of the book and take a look out the window at the miniature Swiss villages thousands of feet below, just down there where the right lane of the road was washed out and crumbled away.

She chose car sickness.

Eventually, we were up amongst the glaciers, driving around them, dodging yetis, feeling only mildly concerned about being the only car on the road for over an hour and driving past what looked like a remote Antarctic research station behind electric fences topped with concertina wire.

But we needn’t have worried.

Sure, it took us an extra five hours to get to Italy and the precarious driving conditions shaved a couple months of hard use off my daughter’s heart, but it was worth it. I have seldom felt more like Sir Edmund Hillary, albeit in a rented Volkswagon Touran instead of riding herd over a team of trusty Sherpas.

And I bet Sir Edmund never found seventy francs.    

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

Auslanders: Blitzfahrt #2

Italy

On The Beverly Hillbillies, whenever the characters went to a different country, or if someone from that country came to visit the Hillbillies, a particular song would be played that created an instant association with the country in question. This was clearly crucial in the United States, where some 85% of the population still doesn’t have a passport and 100% of the population pronounces Iraq like it was spelled “Eye rack”. In a country where not knowing anything of substance about any other place in the world is celebrated as a character attribute, those handy musical cues to the stereotype of choice is useful.

If you were here right now, perhaps sitting on my knee, I would ask you to get off because it hurts, but then I would hum that stereotypical song for each country and you would easily recognize them all. Such is their power.

Note: don’t let the fact that there are maybe only three episodes of the Hillbillies where those songs are used ruin my point. The same songs would probably get put to good use in Scooby Do, The Facts of Life, and pretty much any other piece of good, warm hearted, lowest common denominator TV enjoyment.

This reference to music is only relevant because when we drove to Italy, I couldn’t stop singing the Italy song and the strange thing is that when I sing the Italian song, I find myself singing the words Hot Tamales over and over again, which you would have to assume would, in terms of content, be more suited to a Mexican Beverly Hillbillies episode. There is no obvious reason why I used those lyrics other than the fact that Hot Tamales fits the syllable count, which now that I think about it, explains a lot about most of the lyrics to songs from the 1980s. Does it have three syllables? Check. Does it rhyme? Check. Does it make sense? Who cares?

Literally from the exact moment we suspected we would be living in Germany, we started planning a trip to Italy and by “we” I mean my wife.

Any time we are thinking about going somewhere with an overnight stay, and sometimes even when we are not, she does that thing where she gets on the Internet for hours, combing exhaustively through all these sites with names like waytooexpensiveholidayrentals.com or luxuryvillasyouwonteverstayin.com, looking for the right combination of price, amenities, location and price.

There is an art to this process, but the art of it pales next to the jawgrinding tedium necessary to perform that art.

First she finds a lot of sites, then she reads all the reviews on other sites, then she cross checks, then she generates a possible list of places, then she tells me all about each one and watches me carefully to gauge my reaction, but I have an unintentional deadpan expression all the time so she can’t read the correct response she deserves after all that work so she starts again and then I say, “what was wrong with that first one?”.

Sometimes we have a talk about how hard this process is, and I completely agree. I would never spend so long as trying to book a place to have fun. I would give up very quickly, thinking “we can have a lot of fun right here in the basement for way less money and effort.”

Eventually, she always finds the right place, however.

She calls and she books the place and I always say that it’s expensive and she always tells me that it isn’t and then I try to believe her but I am secretly nauseous.

Sure enough, this is exactly what happened when she booked our place in Italy.

It was in Umbria, two hours from Firenze, four hours from Roma, and a scant forty minutes from Assisi. I don’t know if this means anything to you, but it should. If you are a good little Christian and you die saving a freshly baptized baby from being eaten by a Satan worshipping heavy metal band, you would be lucky to go to a Heaven as beautiful as this part of Italy.

I had been there before, so I knew that whatever my wife had booked was probably worth it, even if we had to leave our children there as payment. (Note to Children’s Aid: I am kidding. We followed the “pack in, pack out” principle with our children and they are both fine.)

That first time I went to Italy, I was accompanying a group of small town Ontario high school students on one of those rigidly structured school trip tours where you spend exactly twelve days on a bus seeing the most commonly agreed beautiful sights for perhaps one hour at a time, getting just enough of a look to realize that you aren’t ever going to see enough of anything to satisfy.

Chaperoning on one of those trips causes you to spend an inordinate amount of time staring out of a tour bus window at things that you wish you could stop and examine without motion blur. Then when you do finally stop, you have figure out how to have an amazing time at the exact same time that you are trying to stop a group of teenagers from having their own amazing time. Which could involve alcohol, bad decisions and lusty student travelers from foreign schools.

During that first trip, I kept telling myself “I’m going to come back here with my family and eat in that restaurant” or “my kids would love this gelato” or “how do I prevent Darryl from making out with everybody?” It was the kind of thing that you say to yourself idly and wish that it was true without ever believing yourself, but incredibly, this time it actually happened. I did go back to that area and my kids really had that gelato, although I was never able to stop Darryl from making out with anyone.

Umbria is a just a hop, skip and a sixteen hour jump from Dusseldorf.

That sixteen hour jump includes a great deal of time spent examining other vehicles in gridlock on the Autobahn, the ascent and subsequent descent that is Switzerland, a lot of mountain tunnels, and the northern part of Italy, which appeared to need a fresh coat of paint and perhaps a Vatican or something. I’m not trying to hurt Northern Italy’s feelings, but it would have been a lot more convenient for tourism if they’d put the south up close to the border instead. It would save a lot of time.

Moments after rolling off the motorway onto a rough, looping two lane stretch of plain old highway, I came face to face with the reason why so many tourists are afraid to drive in this country, and I mean that literally. Have you ever been able to look deep into the eyes of an oncoming driver? I have, and that is because he passed the car in front of him on a bridge. Right in front of me. Luckily for both his family and mine, I wasn’t trying to find The Appleseed Cast on my Ipod and so I was able to go up on two wheels and drive on the guardrail to give him enough room to hurry through without killing us all. I didn’t have time to be amazed at this insane disregard of safety, however, because there were hundreds of other drivers exactly like that guy all over every road.

Where were the police, you might ask?

Well, the closest we came to the police was in Sorrento as I drove the wrong way down a busy one way street looking for the beach. I wasn’t pulled over or anything, the officer just waved me over, smiled at my wife and told me to turn around and try the other way.

I didn’t realize that simply arriving at our destination without taking physical damage on the roads was a miracle of its own, but once I got a good look at the place we were going to be staying over our two weeks in Italy, it was obvious.

Every morning I woke up to look out my window in complete disbelief.

I remember being a kid and thinking that once I get to Grade 1, then everything will be perfect. It wasn’t.

Then it was all about being in the double digits. If I could just gut it out until there, I’d be right where I want to be. I wasn’t.

The same thing happened for Grade 8, Grade 9, getting a girlfriend, turning sixteen, getting into film school, graduating, getting a job, getting something published, etc, etc, etc.

Nothing is ever as good when you get there as it looked where you were impatiently waiting for it. Nothing.

Except for my wife, and now, Italy.

For only the second time in my life, I was doing something that was not only as good as I could have imagined, it was even better. I couldn’t seem to take the place for granted.

It was like when I had amnesia and kept forgetting what had just happened. Every few minutes I would look around in shock and wonder what was going on and someone would have to explain that I had fallen off my bike and I had amnesia and explain that I should read the paper I was holding that explained everything. I kept looking up at the low mountains around me, the clear sky, the olive trees, the golden fields, the stone houses, then looking over at my wife who was doing the same. Were we going to wake up from this? I hoped not.

And we didn’t.

Our bedroom windows faced the southwest, looking out over an intricate layering of rolling hills and valleys ringed with mountains. It was October, so everything was drenched in amber, glowing and perfectly composed no matter which way I looked.

Our apartment was stone, the front quarter of a very old farmhouse perfumed by fat purple grapes busting out of vines curled all over thick frames shading the patio and main door. Down a few steps there was a pool, set perfectly onto the hill with nothing to break the view.

Every day was sunny and warm, every night very cool and completely dark.

I haven’t mentioned the food.

The woman who owned the holiday farm house was German, obviously, and as such knew exactly where the best place was for everything.

“For pizza, you must go to Franco’s. It’s just down the road.”

Of course, that being our first night, we were ready to drive down the road. And down the road and down the road some more. There was no Franco’s. There was a Café Americain, So and So’s Pizza, Somebody’s Trattoria, Some Other Italian Guy’s Everything Else, but no Franco’s. We went up and down the highway a couple times and couldn’t see it.

“Let’s just go the closest place!” the kids whined.

“But we want the good stuff.”

“This is Italy. It’s all going to be good.”

My wife was on their side. Actually, my wife is usually on anyone’s side when they suggest we eat sooner rather than later. Me? I am much more discriminating. Which is very different from simply being picky.

Through sheer laziness combined with the process of elimination, we ended up just going to the restaurant closest to our place in the hills, the Café Americain.

It didn’t look very promising.

The parking lot was completely full (good sign), but there were a lot of rowdy local dudes hanging around out front smoking and making stereotypically broad hand gestures (bad sign, in no small part because my wife is blonde…), there were plastic beads in the doorway (I really don’t know if that’s a good sign or not, unless you’re going to get your palm read) and there was a hungry cluster of loud patrons waiting to get in and watching a soccer match on an impossibly loud, ancient TV (leaning towards good).

It was hard to believe that a highway pub exactly resembling the kind of roadhouse that would serve greasy chicken wings and forty nine cent draft to meth tweaking bike gangs back home served food that made you want to group hug the waitress and sing opera.

I had to stop myself from turning to people at other tables and shouting, “Holy shit! Can you believe this food? Why isn’t anybody else weeping?”

They weren’t weeping because they were locals. They ate in this place every night. You would too, if you lived in the area. You would be having pizza every day, just like my kids. You would be ordering veal scallopini with black truffles and gnocchi with a pomodor sauce that should have been in the dictionary under “delicious”, stewed wild boar shanks and porcini mushrooms, ten layer lasagna that cut itself when you held your fork over it and enough chocolate gelato to choke a polar bear.

I’m crying now trying to imagine how bad life must have been for some people to leave this country and go anywhere else. Can you envision the brutal forms of misery that Italian immigrants must have left behind in order to bring themselves to stomach sailing away from restaurants like that to come to a country where donuts count as a food group?

I can’t.

The closest town to us was called Gualdo Tadino.

It was a working town, with nothing big enough to pull a tour bus off the highway but I had to go there every day to work, plugging my laptop into a drop at a computer store carved into a medieval building that opened out onto to an ancient town square.

The shop didn’t open until four o’clock, and I would go early and sit on a bench in the square and feel like I might shiver with amazement. It was like I was living in a 1970s Chef Boyardee ad.

The streets were barely wide enough for a single vehicle, winding through town with no discernible plan or structure. Ancient widows in black kerchiefs stumped along with bags of perfect vegetables. Leathery faced men in Chico Marx hats sat in the sun, eternally arguing, stopping only to stare at every woman that walked by.

The sun angled down into the square and lit up the dusty old bricks, casting everything with into amber. The sounds were different, the light was different, I was different. I didn’t care if the computer shop never opened, didn’t care if I never left the bench again. In the wildest leap of my most insane exaggeration I couldn’t have imagined that I would be parked on a step in a place like this, in a moment of perfect peace, eating pizza that tasted better than dreaming about it and only cost one Euro a slice.

When you grow up in a place like Clinton, you can only read about this kind of thing. Actually, if you grow up in Clinton, there is a pretty good chance that you won’t read about this kind of thing. Or maybe any other kind of thing, either.

But I had grown up in Clinton and even that couldn’t stop me from walking through Roma and Pompei in the microwave heat.

It didn’t slow me down as we fought insane traffic all the way to Firenze or Perugia or Genova.

And it didn’t make me embarrassed when people stopped me in the street and asked for directions in Italian, assuming I was one of the locals.

Because, for two weeks, I was one of the locals and I never wanted to leave home.

Auslanders: Blitzfahrt

I am not going to be drawn into some kind of a pissing match between Germany and Italy.

Or Germany and France.

Or Germany and Holland or Belgium or any other country.

First of all, Germany doesn’t need my help. They can piss just fine on their own. Plus, they have established a fairly impressive track record for defending themselves as it is. Assuming the best defense is a good offense.

Second, I don’t want to bust up the good thing the Europeans have going over there, what with being the world’s economic powerhouse and all that. They should stay together. For the children.

But I have to admit that one of the best things about living in Germany has nothing to do with Germany and everything to do with all those other countries you can drive to in a day or less.

In my homeland, it is not uncommon to run into somebody who has had, for whatever reason, cause to drive to Thunder Bay. During that conversation, you will learn that it takes eighteen hours to drive there from Toronto. That’s longer than it took for the Nazis to roll through the Low Countries, and they stopped for a meal. And Thunder Bay is still in Ontario. If you thought it would be fun to drive from one end to the other, you had better take a week or so off from work.  

Canada is so huge, so enormous and gigantic, that we who live there can’t even begin to understand it. If every man, woman and child in Canada were to spread out so that they were touching hands with at least two other people, all together we wouldn’t fill Prince Edward Island. And if you don’t believe me, go ahead and set it up. You’ll see.

We were in Europe for about a week until we decided to take the place for a test drive, just to compare.

England was our destination.

Now, for purposes of comparison, if you want to go to England from my hometown, you have to drop a few hundreds of dollars for airline tickets, go to the airport, sit there for a few hours, maybe buy a seven dollar sandwich, cram yourself on the plane and try to make yourself unconscious for eight hours or so. And when you finally do get to England, it will have taken so long you won’t even care anymore so you’ll just turn around and go home.

If you want to get to England from Dusseldorf, it is a much different process. You get in the car and drive forty odd minutes to Holland. Those minutes are odd because you are passing towns with names like Dong and Titz.

Once in Holland, you turn towards Belgium and then in an hour or two you are through Holland and Belgium both and you’re in France.

Three and some hours later, you’re in Calais and if you can afford the Chunnel, it’s only another thirty minutes and you’re driving in England, almost as enthusiastic about being there are you were when you left. Maybe more so if you stop at Tesco’s and buy a packet of crisps.  I recommend Chicken Tikka.

My kids couldn’t believe that they had burned through so many countries so quickly. They’d had barely enough time to complain about anything.

“It’s like driving through Clinton!” they said. “Blink, and you miss Belgium.”

I was more excited that they were, however, because I knew that driving to England was only the beginning.

We were going to be here for a year with a car of our own, a wallet full of credit cards, and just enough information to get us into trouble, one country at a time.

 

Auslanders: You Don’t Do That Here.

You Don’t Do That Here

Once my son started sleepwalking, it was obvious that he was unraveling.

He would walk from his bedroom down through the main floor to the basement and come up behind me while I was writing, mumbling about trying to find something or get away from somebody. It was very disturbing to see him so agitated and struggling to speak. Clearly, he wasn’t awake, and nothing I said or did could make an impact on whatever was tormenting him in his dream, even if I was able to make anything out from his feverish rambling.

And he was sick all the time.

My son is razor-thin, packing barely enough meat on his bones to get him from one meal to the next without passing out. When he is running around playing soccer or swinging a ninja sword, he looks like a poster of childhood fitness, but when he is sick, his size and fair colouring make him look almost transparent. You can see all his veins and tendons straining as breathes, every bone jutting out like it might pop through his skin.

First he would get a high fever, then the hallucinations and more sleepwalking. After a few days of this, he would break out in a dry, wracking cough that hurt just to hear it.

He wouldn’t want to eat or drink and being as he spends every day on the thin edge of subsistence, this is a problem.

If I was the kind of man who believed in such things, I would probably assume that his constant sickness was a response to school. It was so difficult and draining on his resources that he didn’t have anything left to fight off these new German bugs. The rest of us didn’t get these fevers or come up with a bad cough. It was always him.

My wife would take him to the doctor, each time trying to find out if there was something he should have been taking to break out of the cycle, and each time the doctor would say it was just a virus and there was nothing we could do.

During the times when he wasn’t sick, we noticed that his behavior had begun to change.

Since the day he was born, he had been a happy and loving little critter. Cuddly, affectionate, tuned into the emotions of others, we used to worry that he was too gentle for this world. Secretly, I dreaded what I knew was ahead for a boy like that. If he grew up anything like I did, real life would pound him, tear away that unquestioning warmth until he callused over and forgot what he used to be.

Whenever there was family friction, he would cry until it was over, and once he was old enough to run away on his own, he would find a place to sit and read something as hard as he could to pretend nothing bad was happening.

So the fighting came as a big surprise.

The first time I saw scratches on his face, he shrugged off my raised eyebrow, and I could see that he wasn’t going to tell me what happened on his own.

“Did you fall into something?”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t remember?”

“I don’t think so.”

I nodded. A good dad would be patient and give his child room to talk when he was ready, let the child explain what happened on his own terms.

I am not a good dad.

“Okay, this time tell me the truth.”

He sighed. “It was the boy beside me.”

His translator.

This was the boy the Principal told us would be our son’s helper, in lieu of the boy we had already enlisted before we arrived. This was the boy she said would be better for our son’s needs.

“What happened?”

My son never looked up from his Archie comic.

“He wanted to be my partner in Sport, and I already paired up with somebody else.”

“And then what?”

He pointed at his face.

“He scratched me.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

Every parent will confront this quandary at some point, and how you deal with it says a great deal about your moral fiber, your love for your fellow man, and about your commitment to turning the other cheek.

I bent down close to his ear, in case my wife was close enough to hear.

“Next time, hit him.”

My son turned to face me, Archie forgotten.

“Hard.”

He furrowed his brow.

“Really?”

“Yeah. With your elbow. And if you can catch him around his eye, it’ll split right open.”

For a moment there, it seemed like he was going to run away from me and never look back, but then he got a faraway look in his eye.

“Okay.”

I am not a violent person.

Normally, I am against fighting, unless it’s sanctioned by the Nevada State Athletic Commission, but it was time to take drastic measures. My son would have to learn to be a fighter. He needed to fight off the bullies, the viruses, his fears, his nightmares, and the sadness that seemed to have taken him over since that first day of school.

Every day he woke up and got ready for school as though he was on death row, and when it was time for him to leave, he needed me to walk over to the gate with him. As we walked, we talked about home, World of Warcraft and anything else that I thought would distract him from his misery, but it always ended up the same: the two of us standing at the main gate, him looking panicky, explaining to me exactly how many classes he had and exactly what time he would be home, and me reassuring him that I would be there all morning. Him not wanting me to leave, waiting for me to force him to go into the yard and enter the school.

I would walk back home, and then, a short time later, the phone would ring and it would be my son.

He would have conjured up some important reason why he had to call.

“I just wanted to tell you that I was having four classes today.”

Or, “I just wanted to remind you about the test on Friday.”

Or, more often,

“I don’t feel good.”

Every day we told him that he didn’t have to call, that we would never leave him alone, that he would be fine and he only had a couple more hours of school and he could gut it out, and every time he sighed and said “okay” in a lost little voice and we hung up feeling our like the meanest parents alive.

We couldn’t move him to a different class.

We couldn’t make any headway with the obstinate principal.

We couldn’t afford to send him to the English school in Dusseldorf.

We couldn’t go to school with him and give him the support he needed.

What else could we do?

I taught him how to fight.

I showed him the flying knee, the Thai clinch, the rear naked choke, the arm bar, the side choke, the side kick, the foot stomp, jabs, roundhouses, combinations, blocks, dirty boxing, ground and pound, everything that I knew from a forty-odd years of martial arts and hand to hand combat.

Had I myself actually been trained in any of these martial arts, it would have been even better.

The fighting style that my son learned was that same fighting style that many children have learned over the last several decades. You could call it “Watch Fu”.

When I was a kid, I used to get my friends to shoot arrows at me so I could catch them out of the air.

I used to try and break boards with my forehead.

I used to make shuriken out of sheet metal, swords out of plowshares, nunchaka out of broken broom handles, naginata out of hoes.

I kicked, punched, tiger-styled, dragon-styled and ninjitsued my way through the backyard and out into the streets of Clinton with the complete confidence of a boy who had seen every Bruce Lee movie, every Kung Fu episode and every chop socky after school action movie that Channel Seven had shown.

Although I didn’t actually know any martial arts, I had seen them all, and I figured I had more than enough information to turn my son into a living weapon.

And the thing is, it worked.

We thought that maybe if we invited the entire family of this translating boy over to our house, we could all feel some special good feelings together and be friends, and then the translating boy would stop trying to claw my son’s eyes out with his filthy talons.

Of course, his parents were very nice.

We had a lovely meal and sat around the table chatting about the same things we always chatted about with English speaking Germans – “How do you like it over here?” by which they mean to say “German is better than Canada. Discuss.”

The two boys were downstairs playing foosball, the clanking and knocking of the ball almost loud enough to be heard over the unholy shrieking of a child in agony.

The adults all stopped talking at once.

I leaped up and ran down the stairs in time to hear a door slam.

My son had barricaded himself in the guest room.

His translator was curled up on the ground in the fetal position, gasping for enough air to scream again.

I pushed the door open into what was clearly a pile of pillows and a seven year old body jammed up against them.

“Hey, what the heck is going on?”

My son’s face was screwed up as though he was the one in pain.

“He’s crazy! Get him out of here!”

I don’t know what the other boy’s mom was learning from her howling son, but I believed mine when he told me what happened.

They were playing foosball and my boy scored a goal and the translator said it didn’t count. Neither did the next three goals. Apparently, none of the goals would count unless they were scored by the translator. My son realized there was no point in playing under this rule structure and quit. Cue the claws.

The translator moved in with his talons up and my son decided that he wasn’t going to take any more of this, so he dodged to the left and ran his knee straight into the translator’s stomach. Upon which he went down choking out the ungodly shrieking we heard.

“I hate him! He always freaks out and attacks me and now I’m the one in trouble!”

I bent down low to my son’s ear.

“You’re not in trouble. I think you did the right thing, and I don’t blame you. You defended yourself.”

Some of the tension eased out of his face.

I was so tired of seeing him fighting tears, tired of watching my son struggle to find his way over here, and almost anything that he did to take a stand against the pressures he felt was a step forward.

I grabbed his hand and shook it.

“Good flying knee.”

He smiled faintly as I stood up and went out to see what the translator’s mother had to say.

It wasn’t very helpful.

“It’s okay. Boys are always fighting.”

She said it with a blithe grin, shaking her head as she went back upstairs, where she promptly repeated it for my wife, who couldn’t have done a better job hiding her surprise.

After they went home, my wife got the same story from my son, nodding as he recounted his well delivered knee to the guts.

“Good,” she said. “He had it coming.

That moment of triumph didn’t last very long.

More and more fevers, more hallucinations, more fights at school, more random tears, more unwarranted panic attacks and more freaky sleepwalking. My little guy was sinking as we got closer to Christmas and my wife and I wondered if he was going to make it even that far.

“I can’t just sit back and watch my son fall apart like this.”

She also couldn’t sleep at night, or relax, or shake off the stress of trying to help him cope.

“Why don’t we pull him out of school?”

I said aloud, but she had been thinking it all along.

When we first planned to come to Germany, we threw around the idea of home-schooling both kids. I can’t imagine anybody else doing as good a job as my wife could, and we wouldn’t have to worry about the kids having a hard time sliding back in to the Ontario curriculum when we got back home.

Ultimately, we decided that it was too great an opportunity for them to try something new and we canned the home school idea, although we did bring a few key textbooks just in case.

It wasn’t an easy decision for her, but I thought it was a no-brainer. They hadn’t dealt with him correctly right out of the gate, by my estimation, and in spite of all the unbelievably positive comments given at the parent-teacher conference in the fall, I wasn’t so sure he was learning much at all.

He was used to being a very good student, and all of that confidence he had at home was coming into play here. He was also that kid who had to know what was going on in his environment. What time is recess? What period comes next? What exactly are we doing in Math today? What about tomorrow?

In the German school, he didn’t have anything of that context. In his own words, “I don’t know what’s going on!” He spent every minute of every school day with a heightened sense of anxiety, always reacting to surprises, always playing catch up, never feeling part of the flow of the classroom.

And he wasn’t learning German like we thought he would.

It was certainly our fault.

We read with him, my wife translated and worked on the language to a degree that I could never have done, tried to set him up with play dates with German kids as much as possible, but he just wasn’t having it.

“We tried, and it didn’t work. The experiment is over. Pull him out and let’s try to make him happy again.”

On the last day of school before the Christmas holiday, my wife sent a note with my son, and he took it in to the teacher.

It had been written with the help of a German friend who gave us some ideas for how to phrase it correctly, and, as far as I was concerned, it was a lot nicer that it had to be. There was no reference to the school’s screw-ups, no acrimonious assault on the classic German focus on the maintenance of the system and the rules rather than on the needs of the child, and no clear sense of our inner rage. Instead, my wife explained that we were both teachers, that we had received the correct books and curriculum documents from our local board of education, that we had the permission of the local school principal, a school board superintendant.

“Let me write a note,” I suggested.

“No.”

My wife was handling it alone.

When my son got home from school on that last day, he looked like he’d just been released from jail.

“I’m done!”

We celebrated with a vigorous round of WoW, two men together against a world of monsters. It was incredibly symbolic, I might add.

“So what did your teacher say when she saw the note?”

My son didn’t turn around to talk to answer.

“She told me to take it to the Principal.”

“Oh? And what did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything.”

I didn’t think much more of this. What was she going to do? Tell us that we couldn’t take our own child out of school?

That would be why we were surprised when we received an incredibly German letter from their equivalent of the local board of education that informed us that we would have our child back in school as soon as the holidays were over or else I would be arrested.

I cannot imagine any other language able to so perfectly capture the intent of such a letter as German.

Harsh consonants breaking up long, angry words.

Capital letters shouting out from the middle of sentences.

Umlauts turning friendly O’s, A’s and U’s into heavy metal weapons.

The essence of heartless bureaucracy in squared off black font, carved out of card stock office white, impersonal, uninterested in logic, emotion or human nature.

As I held that letter I felt the truth in all the years of cruel, faceless Teutonic rigidity that have become such a stereotype in North American media.

Once we translated it, my wife and I looked at each other in amazement.

“What can we do?”

Well, I can tell you not to bother calling the Canadian embassy. They will tell you that every child must go to school in Germany. They will tell you that home schooling it illegal. They will tell you that even if you were travelling around the world, teaching your own children as you went, that for the duration of that time that you were in Germany, your children would be legally required to attend school.

Once you hear this, of course you spend some time doing a little research on the Net.

After a very few moments, my wife found news articles about recent cases where German fathers were arrested for home schooling them for religious reasons. The latest example took place in Austria within the last year. Reading this was pretty surprising, but nothing compared to what we found towards the end of the article.

The reason why German children are not allowed to opt out of assigned courses or school activities, and the reason why families are not legally able to home school their own children is because Adolph Hitler outlawed it in 1938.

That’s right. My son, a seven year old visiting Canadian citizen living in Germany in 2006, would be forced to go back to school after the Christmas holiday instead of being home schooled by his mother and father, who are both teachers, because of Hitler.

So, if I had walked into the school and asked why my son couldn’t follow the Canadian curriculum under our tutelage, the principal would have had to say, “Because Hitler said.”

I suppose at that point, I could have asked, “What about the other stuff Hitler said? Do you still keep all those wacky laws on the books?” and then, had she been a thoughtful person, would then have realized that this situation is insane and we would have been back home with the Canadian Math book open and a son who could sleep through the night without hallucinating.

But I didn’t do that.

As I walked my son back to school on that first day after the break, I thought about many things.

Germany is a great country, with much that we can learn in North America. They have incredible recycling programs, a more environmentally conscious approach at every level of society, very high standards for manufacturing, food production and safety.

Their cars are awesome, their bread astounding, and their bike paths unparalleled.

But their education system sucks.

Hard.

We were walking to a school nestled into a system run by a government and philosophy of education that has demonstrably not changed since the Nazis marched people out of their homes because of their religious beliefs.

Nothing I said would make any impact on a principal working in that system. If they hadn’t changed since 1938 for anyone else, they wouldn’t change now. Not for me and not for my son.

There was no sense fighting a battle I couldn’t win. It would only make everything more stressful.

Instead of dropping my boy off and heading home, I walked into the school with him.

I walked up the stairs and down the hall to his class room.

I knocked on the door, and his teacher came out.

She didn’t look surprised. There was no sign of gloating, no smug sense of satisfaction over seeing us back in the building. She didn’t have any need of it. She had known all along that we would be back here in January. Either that, or I would go to jail.

She didn’t speak enough English for me to say anything useful, so I just told him yet again that everything would be fine, that we didn’t care if he wasn’t the best in his class, that he just had to do what he could and not worry about the rest.

He walked into the room, and the kids started buzzing with excitement.

Before he sat down, my son glanced back at me and nodded. I could hear him thinking, I’ll be okay, you can go now.

I walked down the stairs, straight to the Principal’s office. Her secretary spoke English very well. I didn’t knock.

As soon as she saw me, the secretary got up and went for the Principal without saying a word.

I told her why I wanted to pull him out of school, how his behavior had changed, how he was so often sick and had become fearful and sad. I didn’t blame her in any way, no matter how much I felt I should have, nor did I vent my rage at having spent months like this.

The last thing I said was something like, “I know you want to do what’s best for my son, and that’s great, but you need to remember how hard it is for him to feel comfortable in a school where he’s always struggling. He struggles with the boy beside him, struggles to figure out what’s happening next, struggles to do the simplest assigned work, and struggles to feel like he belongs. When everything you do is a struggle, after a while you have to wonder if it’s worth doing.”

Her answer?

“It doesn’t matter. You don’t have any choice.”

Before I had a chance to respond, she took me around the school on a spontaneous tour of the facilities, revealing a suddenly comprehensive command of the English language.

“You know what would make things easier for your son?” she said, as we paused in the lunch room.

“Not being forced to come to school by an evil dictator who died over sixty years ago?” I suggested.

“No,” she shook her head, revealing a classic German response to bitter sarcasm, ”but perhaps if he stayed in the afternoons and took part in our full day programs he would make more friends and improve his German. That would make school more fun.”

I nodded. “So you think if he spent more time in school, his intense anxieties about being that school would ease off?”

She nodded.

“We’ll think about that,” I said.

We didn’t.

What we did instead was watch as our son did it all on his own.

He must have decided that, since he had no choice in the matter, he might as well find a way to cope.

He got a new friend (one that didn’t try to bite and scratch him).

He played soccer at recess.

He ran away from the girls who had crushes on him.

And he had fun.

Towards the end of the year, he came home from school and I asked the same question I asked every day when he walked in.

“How’d it go today?”

This time he didn’t go straight for his Archie comics. He stood in front of me with a smug little grin.

“Pretty good,” he said. “I came in third in reading.”

“What?”

“I got voted the third best for reading a story out loud.”

“Nice. Who voted for you?”

He shrugged.”I guess the rest of my class.”

“Awesome.”

That was all he gave me.

When I told my wife, I said I figured it was the pity vote. They probably felt sorry for the poor little Auslander whose parents had tried to pull him out of school and then brought him back with their tails between their legs.

“It was a nice gesture,” I figured. “But a little insulting, if you think about it.”

Then we got a note from the school. There was to be a special assembly and parents were invited to attend. My wife would normally go to such a thing, but she was going to be in Paris. I would have to go on my own.

I walked over late in my workout clothes, still sweaty from riding to Krefeld and then home with a backpack full of groceries, and wandered into the school just in time to find out that my son was being called up to the front to receive an award.

I don’t know what the Principal said, but it was a fairly long speech, and when she was done, the applause was enormous. Some of the other parents there (all mothers, of course) looked over at me with baffled expressions as the kids hooted and cheered.

My son shook the Principal’s hand and walked back to sit with his friends.

The assembly was over.

As I turned to leave, a mother of one of the boys on my son’s soccer team approached me.

“That’s amazing!” she said.

“It is?”

“Yes of course! The students work all year to prepare themselves for that public reading test. It’s incredible that your son came in third out of all the Grade Two students. You should be very proud.”

“All of Grade Two?”

“Yes! It’s very prestigious. He had to read for a group of teachers from several classes.”

I accepted a few more congratulations and walked over to my son, who waited to hand me a gift certificate the principal had given him.

“Did you know that was a competition against the whole school?”

He shrugged. “I guess.”

“Did you understand the stuff you were reading?”

He shook his head. “Nope.”

I took the gift certificate, and watched as he ran back to his friends. His new seatmate wrapped an arm around him, pulled him in tight and led him off into a cluster of boys waiting to congratulate him.

And girls. Lots of girls.

I watched him as he stood in the middle of them all, a huge smile on his face, his cheeks taut and dimpled as he laughed and jabbered in German.

He didn’t notice me leave.

Auslanders: Cherokee Driver

I couldn’t believe how well my daughter was taking to living in The Germ.

She had made friends with the locals, was quickly learning to sprech the Deutsch, and had avoided the kind of drama that would normally keep my wife up at night grinding her teeth in maternal middle-of-the-night stew sessions.

And so you can imagine my shock when my daughter came into the house one day after school in a sobbing panic.

Admittedly, my first thought was girl trouble, and I don’t mean menstrual cramps.

I am referring to that particular kind of girl trouble that people like me (male kinds of people) simply don’t understand.

It is obvious to anyone who has lived in a coed society that girls live in a different universe than boys. They are not even remotely the same type of creature.

Girls appear to be a sensually enhanced refinement of the species, designed to hear sounds males can’t hear, detect minute variations in social structures that males can’t even see to begin with. They exist in a plane of time and space that males will never be able to experience or understand.

For which we are grateful.

We are not forced to grow up learning how to pick a path through intricate social complexities. There are no complexities in the male world. Everything is obvious. If Male A doesn’t like you and causes you problems, it is either because

a) he is a dick or

b) you are a dick.

There is not much room for subtlety here. Either you will fight Male A in the Octagon after which you will be best friends, or you will just get a better car than he has and all will be well.

The irony that we use a slang term for the male sex organ to describe someone who behaves in an obnoxious way is not lost on me, I might add.

Girls don’t have the luxury of such simple recourse.

They grow up forming tight, ever-shifting social cliques under the cruel dictatorship of a Queen Bee.

This Queen Bee character usually has nothing more to distinguish her from her clique mates than a better push-up bra or a thicker coating of lip gloss, but for whatever reason, this Queen Bee is in charge and she sets the rules under which the clique will be forced to operate.

These rules appear to revolve mostly around which boys are cute, which clothes are ugly, and which other girls they hate and torment. I will admit that I am not 100% certain that this is the true extent of the Queen Bee’s mandate, I am only describing how it appears to the outsider.

Whereas boys are like the Marines, brutally direct, all about saber rattling threat postures and superior firepower, girls are like the CIA. They rely on espionage, counter-intelligence and psychological warfare. Seeding disinformation, mounting covert propaganda campaigns and manipulation of public opinion are their weapons of choice. Who is a slut? Who is stuck up? Who smiled at Caitlin’s boyfriend in C Hall? Theirs is a much more insidious battleground.

All these things ran through my mind as my daughter struggled to explain what was wrong, but I didn’t really expect that kind of crap to affect her so deeply. She’s way too stubborn to cry over Grade Five politics. She’s more likely to laugh at them, which caused me to jump to a new area of concern.

“What happened? Are you hurt?”

I couldn’t see any blood.

She took a deep breath.

“There was a truck and I was on my bike and-“

“Truck” and “bike” are two words that should not be together in the same sentence except under the most specific of circumstances. My blood pressure redlined.

You see, I had been hit by a truck when I was on my bike when I was a kid.

The truck driver was going west on Highway 8 in a rusted out, beat up, Sanford and Son looking pickup heading out of town. I was at the corner, waiting to cross.

His right turn indicator was on, and I figured he was going to turn, so I went out onto the road just as he accelerated.

I don’t remember actually getting hit, but I do remember being wedged under his front bumper.

He jumped out of his truck as I scrambled out from under my mangled bike.

I don’t remember feeling any pain at all, just a shaky rush of adrenaline that had me panting, and a dizzy feeling that might have been a result of hitting my head on the hood before I went down, or could have been fear.

He leaped around to the front and watched me get to my feet with his eyes wide, like I had just come back from the dead.

I blinked at him a second, trying to see through the blurriness, then stared down at my bike.

It was the best bike in town, and now it was wrecked, the frame twisted and bent.

“Aw man, my bike…”

“It was your fault!”

I turned to face him.

“You rode right out in front of me! It was your own fault.”

What?

I shook my head, sparking off a whirling swish pan of truck, driver and trees.

“No, wait. You had your blinker on. I thought you were going to turn at the corner.”

He shook his head. “No I didn’t. And look, you scratched up my truck.”

I glanced at his bumper. It was warped and bowed and scraped all to hell. If hitting me had done that, I must have had superpowers.

He looked around carefully, then back at me.

“You better not tell anybody about this. You’ll get into big trouble.”

A pang of concern shot through my chest. Trouble? I don’t want tro- Wait a minute.

“You hit me! You had your blinker on and then you didn’t turn. It wasn’t my fault.”

He got closer to me.

“You want me to call the police?”

I should have said, “Yes! Of course I want you to call the police! And then I want them to arrest you and charge you with the willful running into of kids on their bike.” Then the police would make him replace my bike and pay for me to go to nuclear physics school when I was older, and upon graduation I would test the first bomb I would make on him.

But I didn’t say that.

What I said was, “No.”

Maybe it was a side effect of banging my poor, underdeveloped little brain into his hood ornament, or maybe it was that pervasive and ingrained 1970s fear of the cops, but I didn’t want the police to come. I was worried that they would believe the adult, not the kid, and I would end up in reform school after my parents had to pay a fine and fix the damage to this guy’s truck. Maybe that’s what happens when you grow up reading about Steven Truscott.

“What’s your name?” he said.

I pulled my warped bike out from under the truck and went over to the sidewalk. I didn’t answer him.

“That’s what I thought,” he almost sneered, then grunted back into his truck and pulled up to where I stood, pointed at me out his window.

“You say anything and you’ll be the one in trouble. I mean it.”

Then he drove west, his indicator still blinking a right turn he wasn’t going to make.

I never even looked at his license plate.

“Did you get hit by a truck?”

My daughter shook her head and sobbed out the whole story.

As far as I could tell, and it is hard to tell very far when you are trying to interpret English that is shot through with heaving breaths and shuddering, my daughter was riding with her friends on the bike path that leads to her school.

An uncharacteristically large vehicle (by European standards), which I learned shortly was a Jeep Cherokee approached the small group of girls where the path narrowed under some trees.

The woman driving the truck stopped, waiting for my daughter and her friends to move, then as they went over to the side, lunged forward.

My daughter was frightened and jerked over further to the side of the path, the tire went into a muddy rut, and she fell back out into the road just as the truck was beside her and went down right beside the front tire.

My daughter was terrified, confused and did what any smart kid in a complete panic might do.

She got the hell out of there.

We live only two blocks from the school, so no sooner had my daughter told me basically what happened than my wife was answering the door because the driver of the Jeep was there. She must have been terrified. If I watched a kid fall down at my front tire, I’d be sick.

I didn’t hear their conversation, but my wife came back to speak to my daughter.

“She said you scratched the truck.”

My daughter nodded, teared up anew.

“I fell against the side and my handlebar scraped against it.”

I jumped in.

“Think what could have happened if your bike hadn’t hit the side of the truck. You could have gone down under the tire. You might have gotten hurt. Don’t you worry about scratching her truck. She shouldn’t have been driving there in the first place.”

I didn’t say that if I had been there I would have kept on scratching my handlebar all the way down to the back end and around the other side. I would have carved out a scarlet letter in that Cherokee so deep you could see through to the other side. This woman had been driving on a bike path access lane outside of a school. She had been in a hurry and was taking an illegal short cut after picking her own kids up, and she was impatient and pissed off that my daughter and her friends were piddling along on their bikes in front of her, clogging up her road. So she hit the gas and lunged forward a bit and scared them and my kid fell down.

Then, this woman jumped out of her truck and put it all together into a neat package by shouting in German, “Look!” and pointed at the scratch.

Was she worried that she had run into a kid?

Did she ask if that kid was okay once figured out nobody was injured?

Did she apologize for being such a dick?

No, no and no.

She was angry and pointed at the front quarter panel of her monstrous black Jeep Cherokee that had no business being on a bike path, no business being in Europe and no business being manufactured in the first place. All she cared about was the finish on her truck, as opposed to the potential damage done to the eleven year old girl laying on the ground beside it.

That was why my daughter had taken off.

Maybe she was worried that this crazed woman would jump up into the cab and finish the job.

Grinding my jawbones, I went back to my marking for the next hour or so, realizing that there was no use being angry and I should just be thankful that nobody had gotten hurt.

Then the doorbell rang.

And there she was, standing at the door. The driver herself.

The Cherokee was parked on the road in front of my house, gleaming in the sun.

It was, of course, spotless. As giant, black and perfectly maintained a piece of North American made conspicuous consumption as you could hope to find in Germany.

The driver was holding a sheet of paper and smiling.

Smiling!

“Hello, I just need your signature on this,” she said.

“On what?”

She held it out to me.

“It’s a statement that you will pay for the damages to my vehicle.”

Sn-ap.

“Excuse me?”

She was still smiling.

“It’s just a statement that says you will pay for the repair of the scratch on my vehicle.”

I nodded slowly.

“So, you ran into my daughter in your truck and now you want me to pay for the ensuing damage.”

She nodded, then caught herself.

“Oh, I didn’t run into your daughter. She was on the road-“

“Do you mean the bike path?”

Pause.

“She was on the road, and they were riding their bikes in a line across the road-“

“It’s not a road. It’s a bike path. In front of a school. There’s a sign that says you can’t drive there.”

“But she was not driving safely.”

I have, in the past, made reference to the tendency for some Germans to come across as somewhat arrogant in their certainty. Maybe it’s because I am a Canadian and we are trained to be self-effacing and it makes the Germans seem so much more cocksure than they really are, but in this particular situation, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“She wasn’t driving! She was riding her bike. On a bike path. You were the one who was driving. “

“But-“

“But it’s okay to run into children on bikes if you’re in a hurry and take an illegal shortcut?”

“No…”

“Of course it’s not. I can’t believe that would come here with this paper and expect me to sign it. You ran my daughter off the path and she slipped and it’s just damn lucky for all of us that she didn’t fall the other way and land under your front tire! You know, I assumed when I saw you here that you would be begging to apologize.”

“Yes, we’re all very lucky that nobody was hurt. That’s the main-”

“No. The main thing is that I’m not signing that paper and I am not paying for any damage to your truck.”

“But it’s your daughter’s fault and if your child breaks something or damages something then the parents are resp-“

“I’m not responsible for you running into a child on a bike and I’m not paying for anything.”

She threatened to call a lawyer and I laughed.

“Why don’t you start by calling the police? I’m sure they’d love to talk to you about all of this.”

She went on a while longer, more out of standard German pigheadedness than logic. There was no way I was going to pay, and there wasn’t anything she was going to say to change that, but she refused to use her brain.

My wife was worried.

“You shouldn’t have been so harsh. We’re visitors to this country.”

I didn’t agree.

“I should have been harsher. She was an idiot and she almost ran over your daughter.”

For the next few months, my wife was on tenterhooks, wondering if a team of GSG-9 police were waiting for the right moment to storm the house and take me by main force, but it didn’t happen.

“That woman knows she was in the wrong,” I said. “You don’t have to worry about her. Even if she does come back with a lawyer, we wouldn’t lose.”

“But we don’t know the laws here. Remember, you got pulled over on a bike path for listening to an Ipod.”

It seemed impossible to me that an adult able to hold down a job and feed him or herself with a spoon without putting an eye out could, in good conscience, take a case like this to a lawyer, but then on the first Friday in January, there she was at our door again.

This time she had her husband. Maybe she was worried that I would be the one holding a spoon.

Her husband was one of those guys you just know works in The Douche at an office, probably in banking or insurance. He was wearing a suit coat with jeans and had a scarf artfully folded around his neck.

“What do you want?” I said.

I was completely soaked with sweat in shorts and a t-shirt after riding the exercise bike. And I had been watching the Ultimate Fighting Championships. There couldn’t have been a worse time for them to show up proffering new pieces of paper claiming my culpability for fixing the paint on their damn Cherokee.

“Hello. We have here a bill for the repairs to our vehicle, and…“

I didn’t hear the rest.

I had just watched two men fighting hand to hand in the Octagon, fists and feet, grappling and clinching, knees and elbows, chokeholds and arm bars, that most primal struggle of male dominance through muscle and will channeled into athletic competition.

I had ridden hard with it for an hour, my heart rate high, my adrenaline up, my blood screaming through my arteries, buzzing with oxygen and man hormones.

Now I stood panting at the door, looking at a scarf tied German office boy poised smugly at my door with a body shop bill clutched between his pink little fingers, spa-beveled nails gleaming.

He wanted me to take this bill and pay it in full.

He wanted me to admit that my daughter had been in the wrong, that she had been the cause of his problem and not the blithely arrogant, overly entitled Cherokee driving high maintenance trophy wife beside him.

She smiled at me like we shared some cute little secret.

He smiled at me like we both knew that this was the way it had to be, a mess caused by women and cleaned up by men working together under awkward circumstances.

And I wanted to smash his trendy rimmed glasses into his face.

“Are you kidding me?”

As soon as I opened my mouth, my rage shifted from physical to verbal, as it had to do.

I am not a big man, and I am not a fighter.

Nobody will ever fear my knees or elbows, and I don’t know much about chokeholds.

But I know how to talk.

I know how to bend words into weapons and spit them out with accuracy.

They didn’t stay long.

As they retreated to their car, the office boy warned me that he would be calling his lawyer.

“Don’t come back without him,” I said.

Then I pissed all over my moral high ground.

I had taken the high road, as I always try to do.

I didn’t curse at them, I didn’t shout or lose my cool.

Bitter humour and sarcasm? Check.

Cold logic and scathing description? Check.

Complex language and big words to confuse non-English speakers? Check.

F words and mindless increasing of volume? Never.

But without thinking, as they walked across the road, not even looking at me, I couldn’t stop myself from descending into immaturity.

“Have a nice day!” I smiled, and gave them The Finger.

I know. It’s pointless.

It’s just a finger.

When somebody else shoots me The Finger, I laugh.

“Boy, you really hurt my feelings when you gave me that Finger just there.” And then I give them a big smile and wave.

The only meaning in that Finger is the meaning we invest in it, and my investment is usually very low. I just don’t care about such a meaningless, puerile expression of contempt.

But standing on my step that morning, in a foreign country where a number of things hadn’t been working in our favour, after we had gone through some trouble in school, after a busy holiday with so many guests in one house, after being away from home for months and looking at months more to go, I suddenly felt like Johnny Cash at San Quentin, and in that moment couldn’t find a better way of showing it.

I shot my Finger up at the sky, at those upper class, Cherokee driving pricks, at the school, at the crazy rules that ran this country, at everything around me that was different and troublesome and kept my wife up at night.

It didn’t do a damn thing, obviously, other than give me the satisfaction of knowing that I am as capable of being an ass as anybody else.

I went back into the house and told my wife what happened and then it was her turn to snap.

Those same pressures acting on me were on her too, probably even more so, and she didn’t have any Germans to vent at. Even if she did, she would never have taken it out on them.

We are not the same, my wife and I, aside from the blonde-black, blue-brown, female-male, good-evil thing.

If I have a bad day, or suffer from some kind of unfocused anger, I never take it out on her. Ever. On a fundamental level, I guess I feel like if I do that, she will pack up and walk out. Maybe there is some good evidence there for a psychoanalyst to come up with a theory that my self-loathing is such that I assume that nobody could love me unconditionally and therefore I am always trying to earn it.

She, however, doesn’t have anything like that holding her back. She knows deep in her core that I love her unconditionally and if she wanted, she could hit me with a nail studded bat and I would keep coming back for more and as a result is far more likely to be concerned about always being kind to people she doesn’t know.

Unlike me at the door of our house moments earlier.

After I told her what I had said to the German hit and run family, and how I had waved goodbye so economically using only one finger, she lost it.

I don’t blame her because we had clearly hit The Wall.

Some people who immerse themselves into a foreign culture hit it at three months, others at six, and some don’t feel it until they come home, but eventually, almost everybody in that situation is going to run into that wall at some point.

Everything that you do in your plain old life is layered with intricacies and folds of unknown expectation and confusion. You spend a disproportionate amount of your thinking time struggling to find the right way to do things that, back home, don’t require any thinking at all. And after doing this every day for so many weeks and months, all those irritations and differences crystallize and you hit that Wall head on.

My wife hit right there in the kitchen.

“Who are you?”

I knew what she meant.

Why was I giving somebody the finger?

Why was I being so openly aggressive?

Why wasn’t I making a joke out of the whole thing and bleeding off tension with sarcasm?

Why wasn’t I making her feel better about any of this?

What had living here done to me?

I thought about her question a moment.

“Let’s get the hell out of here.”

My wife just looked at me.

Did I really want to leave?

At that moment, you bet I did. I would have cut and run in a heartbeat. At that moment I hated living there. I hated the problems and petty cultural bullshit that got tangled up in so much of what we did. Flying home to simple, normal life would have been a huge relief.

All my life, I have been a fast quitter. When the going got tough, I got out. I dropped out of races, events, social groups, clubs, plays, teams, squads, classes and jobs. I never once had any problem just dropping the reins mid-ride and walking away from anything.

Except for my wife.

If she had wavered, if she had nodded at me and said “you’re right, let’s do it,” I would have had us packed and on the plane in less than twenty four hours, no regrets.

But she didn’t.

“I guess you can go home if you want to.”

I read her face.

“What about you?”

She shook her head.

“I’ll manage.”

“You don’t want to leave?”

“No, I don’t.”

We were on a knife’s edge at that moment, stretched just past the breaking point, thin on patience and loaded down with more pressure than we could handle at that moment.

On top of everything else that had been going on, we had just been threatened with legal action for something we couldn’t believe was our fault, and had no idea what would happen to us in the German legal system. Was it illegal for a child on a bike to be hit by a truck on a bike path? Was it possible that we were somehow in the wrong? Were we actually going to be sued? Did we need a lawyer? How much would that cost? Would I freak out and be tasered to death in the courthouse?

If I was a different kind of man, the kind that had an ego to protect, the kind who needed to feel like he was the head of the house, if I was that guy with face to save and insecurities to hide, I would probably have cracked right there, stomped up the stairs, packed my bags and called my woman’s bluff.

But I am not that guy.

Before she told me she was staying, I was ready to go, ready to burn down whatever we’d built up in the last six months and roll on out of this backward-ass country, but once my wife said she wasn’t leaving, that was all I needed to hear.

I walked right through The Wall like it wasn’t even there.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have behaved that way. It was immature. I’ll call them tomorrow and apologize. I don’t really want to leave.”

It wasn’t a lie. I meant every word.

I called that miserable, insufferable Cherokee driving woman the next day and told her I was sorry for being rude.

“I don’t agree with anything you say about this incident, but that is no reason for me to behave irrationally, and I want you to know that I regret it. I am sorry.”

She spent several minutes pointing out a number of things that were wrong with me, along with my daughter’s bicycle riding skills and I listened to her self-righteous ranting without argument.

Because it didn’t matter anymore.

None of it did.

I was still lucky enough to wake up every morning beside the only woman I ever want to wake up beside, with the same two mostly happy, mostly healthy kids we started off with, and it didn’t really matter where we were.

Everything else was gravy.

First Rhymes With Worst

I thought that the worst part of my son’s first day was what happened when he left through the wrong door and couldn’t find me and freaked out thinking we had abandoned him, but I was wrong.

He had already been having a worst day.

When my wife and I dropped him off with his new friend, we assumed that everything would work according to the basic structure we had been planning well before we left Canada.

We were told that he would be in class with his new friend.

His new friend would be able to translate for him.

His new friend would introduce him to all the new structures and rules and challenges he would be facing, introduce him to other kids and, in general, be his hold card for worming his way into his new world.

He would become the coolest kid in the school and everybody would hold him up on their shoulders and parade through town.

None of those things happened. Not even the first part.

My son and his friend walked into the class and sat down, the teacher smiled and greeted everyone warmly, and then she stopped mid-warmth.

The way my son described it, the teacher actually got angry, and at first I didn’t believe him, but now, I am certain that he wasn’t exaggerating.

She pointed at him and barked off a thick wad of German.

He didn’t know what to say, and his new friend just shrugged, then leaned over and whispered.

“She says you don’t belong here. You have to leave.”

I don’t really know the specifics of exactly how it happened, or who said what, but my son described it like this:

The teacher got angry, checked her list, then walked out of the room.

She came back with the principal and pointed at him.

Then they asked him in German who he was.

His friend tried to answer, then stopped.

My son gave his name.

The principal told him in broken English that he wasn’t supposed to be there. He wasn’t on the list.

He wasn’t supposed to be in this school.  

My son was taken out of the classroom and put in the office where he was told that his parents should have signed him up for this school because you can’t just walk in and sit in any class you want. Why didn’t they have any information about this?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that is the kind of question the Principal of an elementary school should be asking of an eight year old.

Do you remember being eight? I do, and I remember that eight year olds do things just because they are told to do them. They don’t tune in to the details and rationale, or find out all about the paperwork involved. They’re just kids and you might think that people who work in a school would know that.

So why didn’t they just call us?

We might have been in a better position to point out that we had indeed sent all the paperwork, all the report cards, gotten permission, made contact, set everything up. We could have talked to them as equals, maybe even without being terrified and confused and eight years old.

After a time, I suppose somebody figured out that maybe my son a) didn’t speak German and b) wouldn’t have been able to answer their questions even if he did, and so they sent him off to a different Grade 2 class and told he had to stay there.

He would not be in with his new friend.

At this point, he was very upset and I don’t blame him.

Now he was in a new class in a new school where he ad just been told at some length that he wasn’t supposed to be attending, he had no translator to help him, no new friend to make him feel welcome, no clue as to why they weren’t expecting him after we had already told him they were, and he was for some reason convinced that he had just been put back into a lower grade because, “they think I’m stupid because I can’t speak German.”

He told me that he sat in his new class all morning feeling stupid and scared and wishing he could run away, which is what he did the second he was dismissed, and that’s why I didn’t see him.

Once I teased this story out of him, my wife got home.

Now the stakes were raised.

Mommy doesn’t like to see her babies cry.

She rounded on me.

How could the principal have told him that he wasn’t supposed to be there?

I didn’t know.

We had sent everything in at her request months ago. His placement had already been arranged. Why didn’t she have all that information?

I didn’t know.

What was happening here? What was wrong with these people?

I didn’t know.

I told my wife that I would go over and talk to the principal immediately.

“No! You can’t go. I’ll do it. I’ll get him moved back into the right class and he’ll be fine.”

I knew why she wouldn’t let me go. It’s because I am a monster.

My wife has this theory that I don’t care about other human beings.

She thinks that I have all of my feelings tied up with the people I am already close to, and I don’t have anything left over for anybody else.

As a result of this missing gene for empathic human understanding, she figures that, instead of going into the school and entering into a mutually respectful dialogue with the principal about my son’s future, I will go in hard through the window with flashbang grenades and clear the office on full auto.

She’s wrong, of course. I don’t have any flashbang grenades.

She’s dead right about the feelings part, however.

I very much wanted to go over and talk to the Principal. I was eager to burn that bridge and dance naked in the ashes.  

We didn’t have to put our son in a German school. We chose to put him there. For his benefit. And if it wasn’t to his benefit, then we could pull him right back out. It wouldn’t hurt my feelings to go with our original plan and home school him for the year. He couldn’t find a better teacher than my wife no matter where else he went.

If he was going to be treated like an unwelcome Auslander on Day 1, then I was all in favour of not sending him back to take anymore of the same crap on Day 2. And I thought it would be nice to go over and share some of the special feelings I had around these issues with the Principal. Which I would have done, had I been allowed.

I was not allowed.

So, while my good woman went over to the school in full Grizzly Bear Mama mode, I worked on trying to make my son feel better about his miserable morning by playing World of Warcraft with him. There is nothing more therapeutic for a sad little boy than fighting computer generated pigs with a magical dagger.

When my wife came home I ran upstairs for the good news.

“Did you make her cry?”

My wife didn’t look very triumphant.

“No.”

“What happened?”   

“She won’t move him.”

“So let’s pull him out! The hell with these people!”

“I don’t want to pull him out. I want him to learn German. That’s why we’re here.”

I thought that we were here for fun and good times, but I didn’t say that. It wouldn’t help. Something I have learned in my life is not to argue with my wife. Not much, anyway. It is way smarter for a man to give in on any issue rather than argue with the woman he sleeps with.

“Okay, so what did the principal say?”

“She said she knows what’s best for our son.”

Now that’s confidence.

She had only just met our son a few hours earlier, had hardly spoken to him, and once she did, couldn’t understand anything he was saying, and already she knew what was best for him.

And there we have the German education system in a nutshell.

The Principal pointed out that there was a boy in my son’s new class who had lived in America and therefore spoke excellent English. He would be able to translate, and being as he lived nearby, would also be able to walk my son to school.

“It is much better this way,” she said.

But why?

Why would it be better to move him rather than just let him be in the class with the kid he already knows? Why not just let him go ahead and do what he was already expecting to do?

I can tell you why: because that would mean that she had been wrong.

It turns out that there are a few Germans living over here in Germany who simply are not wrong. About anything.

It is astonishing but it is true. And I know it is true because I have been told this by one of those very Germans. Actually, I was told a lot of things by one of those very Germans. Lucky for me, not only is that kind of German always right, but is also in possession of vast amounts of knowledge that everybody else needs to know.

I have made a small list of some of that valuable information.

Belgians are the worst drivers in the world.

German bread is the best in the world.

Turkish people don’t properly prepare their children for school.

German cakes are the best in the world, and Heinemann’s has the best cakes in Germany.

The Italians are the worst drivers in the world.

Everybody knows the Germans work the hardest. That doesn’t include the former East Germans. Those people don’t do anything.

Spanish people are the worst drivers in the world.

German people are the best at looking after their skin.

Nederlanders are the worst drivers in the world.

There was a lot more.

The ratio of Time Spent to Valuable Knowledge Gained was incredible. I could make the most amazing graph if only I hadn’t disabled that feature in this program. The willingness of these people to inform a clueless Canadian visitor about the best way to do everything was something that I will treasure for the rest of my life.

Once you understand this particular kind of German, you realize that it doesn’t matter how much logic you use and it doesn’t matter how right you are if it contradicts what they already know.

We would have to give in.

My son would go into the new class and we would shut up and let the Principal run her school the way she saw fit.

This didn’t sit well with my son. I kept reassuring him that he had already had the worst day of school here, and every other day would get better and better until he felt like he belonged.

“By Christmas,” I said, “you’ll be able to understand the language, you’ll have new friends, and it will feel normal to live here.”

He looked at me like he felt sorry for me, like I had no idea what was going on.

“No I won’t.”

When I dropped him off out at the playground on that second day, he was pale, and while I promised that we would play WoW again when he got back home, and told him about the greatlunch we would have ready, his eyes reddened and he shook his head.

“I can’t do it!”

“You have to. Just keep going for awhile, and if it really doesn’t work, we’ll pull you out. But for the next few weeks, you have to try.”

He blinked away his tears, wiped his face, then turned and walked into the playground.

His head was pointed at his feet and he hunched his shoulders against the weight of his schuleransen as he walked into a screaming mass of complete strangers.

It made me feel sick.

When I was his age, I wouldn’t have been able to walk into that school yard. I would have collapsed under the pressure.

The thing I kept telling myself was, at least he’ll be in with a boy who speaks English. He’ll make a new friend and everything will be fine.

And then we met him…

A Memory of the Day We Left

“Aren’t you scared?”

It should give a man a strange feeling to pop over to the neighbour’s house for a tasty lunch of barbequed ribs on a hot summer day, wave goodbye, walk out of his backyard, get into a van and drive to the airport to fly away to another country for a year.

But in my case it was strange because I didn’t really have any feelings at all.

For weeks, people had been asking me questions like, “Are you getting ready to go?” or “Getting geared up?” or “Are you suffering stress-related diarrhea from moving to a foreign country where you will be socially isolated by language, culture and your lack of appreciation for beer?”

In each case I know that the questioner was not only poking me in my cage to see if I would drop into a fetal ball on the floor of Zehr’s and soil myself in terror, but they were also revealing to me their own fears.

It was obvious that those asking me if I was scared were themselves thinking, “I sure as hell would be,” and a number of those people admitted that they would never do it.

They’re right to feel that way, of course. It is bug nut crazy to up and leave like we were doing and I probably should have been on the floor there in the produce section, weeping in a puddle of my own urine.

But I wasn’t. All I was doing was buying bananas.

Don’t think I wasn’t filled with dread, but also don’t think that I was filled with dread specifically because we were moving away.

I am always filled with dread.

I am filled with dread from the moment I get up in the morning until I fall asleep at night.

I am filled with dread right now.

 

In my normal life, I don’t experience a very broad range of emotions. At most, in an average day I have about three feelings, counting fear. If hungry counts as a feeling, then I have four.

I think living with a constant background hum of fear and dread is pretty normal.

It’s not crippling, and it’s completely undeserved because my life is better than so many others’, but there it is nonetheless.

In fact, it’s there because I need it.

So do you.

Dread is the only sane response to a scary reality. If we didn’t have dread, we would all have been eaten by lions on the savannahs of Africa however many million years ago.

Dread keeps you alive.

You probably have it all the time yourself, and you may not really notice it until one of those odd stray moments where you have a sudden sense of weightlessness, a disorienting internal twitter from the lifting of that constant press of fear.

I get those moments as well, and instead of soaking it up for as long as I can, I cut it short with a pang of new concern. “What am I supposed to be worried about again?” And then I actually run through a bunch of problems; generate a list of my own petty torments to end my fleeting sense of inner peace and go back to worrying about having to go to a party in a week, or my next prostate exam or any one of a million stupid things that might be going on in a middle-aged life.

Moving to Germany is just putting another stone on the beach. Who’s even going to notice?

Every night before we left I fell asleep the same as always, slept until I was too sore to stay in bed, got up, ate food, worked out and did whatever I was told to do.

Just like a robot.

Just like any other day.

Just like everybody else.

Get up. Go to work. Have lunch. Come home. Make supper. Do dishes. Work out. Do homework. Indulge in leisure of choice. Go to sleep. Get up. Go to work…

Rinse and repeat.

All I had to do was add a couple more layers into the routine to get ready to move.

Pack up, clean up, roll out.

Wait a minute.

I’ve been lying.

I did have a new fear, something that made me scared about leaving.

Hugging.

Have you ever noticed that some people actively want to hug other people?

I’m not kidding. I’ve seen it firsthand.

There is a certain segment of the population that seems to enjoy grabbing onto other people, and pressing up against them and gripping them right in there.

It’s bizarre.

Do you, like me, wonder if any of those hugging people have ever noticed that some of the people they are hugging are fighting the urge to recoil and run away?

When I was a kid, I had this idea that all people should be colour coded.

All those who like to hug and be hugged, patted, ruffled, tousled, cuddled or coddled, they can all be a bright colour, like a flower, which would attract attention and pollination and all that.

Those of us who don’t enjoy hugging all the time can be a dark colour, like dirt.

Note: I am not a complete monster.

I am not totally against all types of hugging.

I believe that there are two kinds of body contact that should be allowed.

One is parent to baby.

Part of this is because babies can’t walk, and if you didn’t pick them up, they would just lay there and scream. And if you picked them up by the arm or leg, well, that doesn’t look good. You have to pick them up in a certain way and it’s basically a hug and there’s nothing you can do about it. Plus they’re so cuddly and soft and warm and cute and don’t they smell nice? Most of the time.

However, I believe that once that child gets to a certain age, then you have to stop picking them up and giving them free rides. Once they can walk, talk, and maybe shave, well then they have to move on to the next kind of body contact. With somebody else. It’s time for your little baby to fly out and get a nest of his or her own.

That second kind of body contact is the good stuff, what you were saving yourself for as you were growing up. As soon as you can find some acceptably attractive person who doesn’t attempt to flee when you grab onto them, do it. Grab on and don’t let go, even after they give in and marry you.

That’s what I did, and now I have two kids. See? It works.

But in spite of what I consider to be good policy, other people don’t agree. And when they see other people going away for long periods of time, they start warming up their biceps for some intense, protracted torso on torso action.

Maybe I was flattering myself, but I was concerned that some people would try to pack 365 days worth of hugs into what could be interpreted as an orgy of goodbye hugging.

That alone was enough to make me not want to go.

I can deal with being away from my friends and family, my house, my job, my town, my gym, the band room, the cats and a decent desktop computer for a year.

I can deal with unending months of cultural and social isolation.

I have no problems with constantly being the conspicuous outsider, the strange one, the odd man out in an odd new place.

I am fine with putting my wife and kids through a brutal regimen of international travel that would crush a weaker family.

I can handle the uncertainty, the unexpected, the incomprehensible and the unknown.

It’s the hugging that keeps me up at night, staring into the darkness, wondering if we could get away without anybody finding out.

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