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.