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.