The Power of Silence

Once every summer, we drive 4 and a half hours north to find silence.  This morning, I woke up to sunshine leaking past the curtains.  I walked down to the dock on Flour Lake.  When I am in the city, this is the place I imagine when instructed to go to a favorite restorative spot in my mind.  This dock, these gently lapping waves, the line of pines reflected in the water, the white, billowing clouds. An eagle circling over the trees to my right. Today, I settled on the dock cross-legged, drank in the beloved view, and closed my eyes. 

At first, I heard nothing.  My city battered ears felt dull and muffled.  I breathed in,  letting the taste of cool water and pine linger in the back of my throat. A spot of sun burning on my left cheek.  Gradually, as my ears settled into the quiet, I began to hear.  A single car passing on the access road a mile away.  Birds chirping. A bluejay’s squawk.  The slight movement of leaves in the breeze.  And then, the mad cackling of a pair of loons, calling to each other, over and over on Hungry Jack Lake - the next lake over in the lacy pattern of scattered water that makes up the Boundary Waters. 

I feel my edges dissolve.  This is it. I am home on this precious planet Earth.

Who's Got Soul?

A few days ago, the afternoon DJ on the Current played an Al Green song.  To my surprise I found myself singing along.  When I  got to my studio I plugged in my iPhone, booted up Pandora and set up 70’s soul as a new station.  All afternoon, I left it on, as I slip cast elements for a new sculpture.  It took a few hours - I go into a creative trance when I work, so I’m not consciously paying attention - before I realized that I knew all of this music.  During the 70’s,  I didn’t think I  listened to it.  Didn’t listen to it consciously at least.  I never bought a single Soul record.  Because in South Carolina, Soul was the music played at high school dances, the background on the radio, drifting across bars in Myrtle Beach, wafting from frat houses on summer afternoons.  It was the music favored by white cheerleaders and crew-cut boys in chinos and alligator shirts, and it was everything I was trying to avoid.  

I listened to Cream and the Stones and later Acid Rock and early Heavy Metal.  I played Led Zeppelin II until I had not only memorized the words to every song,  I could sing them in order.  I banded together with all the long-haired outsiders marooned in Clemson  - a small community even in the early seventies.  We’d wander past the frat houses late on a Saturday night, certain we were superior to those drunken boys risking their lives balancing on window ledges in their liquor haze.  To the strains of the Supremes and the Temptations.  

As I trimmed excess clay, an image from a spend-the-night party circa 1969 popped into my head.  Three of my classmates - well-behaved 15 year-old white girls whose parents had deep roots in the South - sitting on the floor, deep in the night, playing a new record.  Who was it?  Otis Redding? Lou Rawls?  One was holding the album cover - I remember a sexy black man portrayed on a white background -  cradling it in her freckled arms, gushing over the music, the voice, ultimately the man.  The other two looking on enthralled.  

The memory is crisp. I must have retained this image because of my confusion.  The girls were clearly crushing on this man the way I thrilled to the bad boys of Rock. I couldn’t square what I saw with the rules of racial politics I’d pieced together by painstaking observation.  What I saw sensed was lush and sticky, forbidden.    There, in the studio, 45 years later, I got it.  In the South of 1969, no other music could touch the level of danger and rebellion of Soul.

Living My Father's Past

Last Sunday, we picked up my father, loaded up the wheelchair and headed out to Como Park for an outdoor concert. The evening was humid but cooling off slightly and I was thrilled to find the usually packed parking lot offering up a single handicapped spot right near the Pavilion. I pulled out the handicapped sticker issued to me under Dr. Lagalwar’s signature ( he had them issue me one that’s good until 2017 - makes me shudder a little to imagine doing this four years from now),  slipped it on my rear view mirror and, after a bit of maneuvering, we rolled in the direction of the trombones that were already in full swing.  And Swing it was. 

As we settled in, I scanned the audience.  There were a few stray families with toddlers, but mostly I saw a lot of permed white curls.  For most of the audience “Sentimental Journey” was an adolescent memory.  I’ve been to enough of these concerts in the last few years that I was pleased to find Stan Bann’s Big Bone Band unusually skillful.  I relaxed in the summer breeze and found myself thinking about this phenomenon of reliving your parent’s past.  

My father has no tolerance for music that doesn’t meet certain parameters:  it has to be classical ( and then preferably Beethoven or the Romantic Composers) or it has to be pre-50’s Jazz or Swing.  All my life this has been such a definite rule, that I automatically switch my car radio to the Classical Station (or pop in a Louis Armstrong CD) when I’m picking him up at the Assisted Living.  Since I drive him somewhere at least twice a week, this is having an impact on my musical experience. 

When he first moved to Minnesota, we tried taking him to a few plays, but it became clear that his dementia made it hard for him to follow the action.  Music, on the other hand, held his attention.  I’ve gone to a lot of concerts in the past four years that would not have made my high priority list.  Chamber music, piano concertos, swing and jazz - some days I’m grateful for new discoveries, and other days I feel like I’m being abducted into his world.

More complex was the period - mostly over now - when he wanted to relive World War II.  I thought I had dealt with the German past exhaustively when I was in my thirties.  Back then, I plowed through everything in the library pursuing the question that bothered me most:  Was there something inherent in the German character that predisposed us to genocide?  I was relieved to find that the answer seemed to be “no”, although it did seem that Germans were more organized than Turks or Cambodians.  Just how organized, I didn’t realize until my father’s insatiable need to relive the Third Reich led me to find copies of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and some truly horrifying German documentaries that drew on SS documentary photography and even some film.  

Most revealing was the night we watched a movie called After the Fall. It’s fiction, based on memoir, and set in an elite Nazi boarding school similar to the one my father attended.  I switched on the movie for him, and then settled in to file his tax documents.  I soon lost track of my folders.  The brutality of the movie - the discipline imposed in order to make brave Aryan men out of boys - shocked me.  My father stared at the screen, rapt.  The stories my father told of his time at the NAPOLA in Köslin told of friendships with other boys, occasional pranks, a crush on one of the teacher’s daughters.  I leaned toward him during a break in the action and asked: “Was it really this bad?”  He tore his eyes from the screen and nodded toward me. “There were days.”

I had a sudden vision of my father - a sensitive boy who loved to play the piano and caper around the house pretending to be someone else, raised by a father who resisted corporal punishment - hundreds of miles from home exposed to this harsh environment.  A place where feelings were weakness and survival meant acquiring a tough exterior.  No wonder he didn’t take my mother’s and my homesickness seriously.  It was only a feeling.  

Lost Pages: Sundays in Krefeld (late 50's/early 60's)

On Sundays it feels like the whole town’s asleep except for the church bells echoing through the deserted streets.  In the mornings, myfather takes me on an adventure. I love it when we stroll to the freight train terminal. It’s closed like everything else; the cars rest on the tracks, empty, their open doors inviting.  We scramble from car to car, playing hide and seek, imagining journeys hidden between sacks of grain or stacked cabbages.

When we return, the thick smell of gravy warms us.  If our timing is good, my mother has the dumplings steaming in a bowl, and is ladling the gravy into its boat. The dumplings have a distinct smell of their own -  earthy but more subtle than boiled potatoes.  My father and I crunch left-over croutons as we help set the table.  For me, the roast is an afterthought.  I cut up my dumpling, spread the pieces in a thin layer across my plate and drown them in the thick brown sauce.  Whatever vegetable and meat accompany this feast take second place.

Sunday afternoons are for outings or visits with friends.  Whichever we are doing, we have to dress.  My father wears a suit with a white shirt and tie, my mother and I put on our best dresses. If we don’t have an invitation and no one is coming to visit us, we take the street car to the City Park or the Zoo, or all the way out to Ürdingen - the part of town along the Rhine.  There we stroll along the Rhine promenade, past other well-dressed families.   Sometimes we bring stale bread to feed the pigeons.   At five o’clock, when it’s Kaffeklatsch time,  everyone converges on the cafes for their Sunday torte and coffee.

If we are invited for ‘coffee,’ we first have to stop at the railroad station - the only place stores are allowed to open on Sunday - and buy flowers.  Then we take the streetcar to our destination.    The streetcars run less frequently on Sundays, but every one of them is full of people dressed in their best clothes, most of them carrying bouquets.  My favorite family to visit are the Willes.  They live just a few streetcar stops away.  When we ring the bell labeled ‘Wille’ at the front entrance of their apartment building, Onkel Bernhard sticks his head out the window and drops the housekey.  We let ourselves in and climb up the steps.  Just outside the door, my mother unwraps the flowers and hands them to me to present.  Tante Jutta ushers us into the cramped foyer,  and I curtsy and hand the bouquet to her.  She leads us into the living room, where the table is set with a white table cloth, fine china and coffee cups for the grown-ups, juice glasses for their son Rainer and me.  A torte, sometimes buttercream, sometimes glazed fruit,  and a plate of cookies wait in the center.  Rainer enters to greet my parents with a proper handshake and bow.   Tante Jutta disappears to find a vase and to finish making the coffee and whip the cream for the torte, while we settle in at the table.

Onkel Bernhard and Tante Jutta are not really my aunt and uncle.  I called them ‘Tante’ and ‘Onkel’ because that’s how we refer to any adult we know well.  It’s more respectful than calling an adult by a first name, but not as distant as saying ‘Herr’ or ‘Frau’ Wille.  It also allows me to use the informal ‘Du’ instead of the formal ‘Sie.’  Onkel Bernhard is an old friend of my parents.  They’d been at textile school together.  Onkel Bernhard had stayed to graduate and even work in East Germany for a few years before coming West.  My father helped him get a job at Kleinewefers where he works.

Rainer is exactly my age - he was even born on the same day.  Even though he is a boy, I like to play with him.  He has the toys I wish for but don’t get because they are boy toys: an electric train with an elaborate track and a medieval castle with a working drawbridge and armies of little metal knights.  Unlike other boys, he knows to stop tickling and wrestling when I yell “Enough!” Before we could play, we had to sit at the table with the adults, eating cake and drinking apple juice.  Finally, the adults decide we’ve sat still long enough, and give us permission to go. Rainer’s room is tiny, so most of his toys are upstairs, in an attic storage room.  It’s cold up there, and there are no carpets on the painted wood floor.  We wear sweaters and roll around wrestling until we are warm enough to lie down on our stomachs in front of Rainer’s castle, ready to conduct elaborate battles and pretend there are princesses to be rescued. Neither of us ever takes the part of the princess; we collaborate in the rescues.  We stay up there until the chill stiffens our joints.  The adults usually get so involved in their conversation that they don’t call us down until it is time for supper.  We run down the stairs to warm up and are glad for the hot herb tea with our sourdough rye and cold cuts.  The fathers drink beer and after dinner, Onkel Bernhard offers some brandy.  Tante Jutta passes around pieces of chocolate.  My parents consulted their watches to make sure we don’t miss the tram home.  When it is time to leave, I shake everyone’s hand with a  curtsy, though I exaggerate the motion with Rainer. He bows extra deep and pretends to loose his balance, so we crash into each other and upset the umbrella stand.  My father says:” It’s definitely time to go home. You guys are so tired you’re getting slap happy.”

Outside, it is dark  except for the dim light cast by the street lamps.  We are almost late for the tram, so my parents hold my hands and we walk as fast as I can.  My mother’s heels click on the sidewalk. In the Sunday evening quiet, her steps echo off the rows of apartment buildings, counting out a beat for me to follow.  We reach the stop with a minute to spare.  The tram screeches to a stop in front of us.  The inside glows with the warmth of lights reflected in the polished wood seats, most of them empty.  I lean against my father on the way home, insisting, of course, that I am not tired.

Me, in about 1958, dressed in my Sunday finery, out for a walk in the park.

Saying No to My Father

My father sits on the deck, and clears his throat.  His voice is barely audible, his words slurred.  He hasn’t said anything more than yes, no, or ok in weeks, lost in some nonverbal space the doctors call dementia.  I have to move closer.  He starts over.  “I need to make one more trip to Germany, and I want you to be my travel companion.”  My heart clenches.  We had this conversation a year ago.  At the time, Ron said immediately, “Impossible.” 

But I understand that yearning for home.  I researched all possible ways to make the trip, including checking into the logistics of getting handicapped hotel rooms and making an ocean crossing.  I discovered that it would be impossible to get travel health insurance for someone over 85 with a history of heart attacks. He’s prone to losing all sense of time and location, even at the Assisted Living, so I would have to share a room with him.  I wondered if he wanted to go home to die.  If that was it, I wanted it to be possible, but in the end, I was relieved when he stopped asking.

“We could fly to Boston, and stay a few days with your sister to recover, and then fly to Frankfurt. From there we could take the train to Gera.”  He’s thought it all through.  Travel planning was a constant all his life.  Even after he retired from his career in international sales, he lived for the next trip.  When he told me that he was done traveling six years ago, I think he expected he could just lie down and wait for the end. 

I listen to his whole plan.  When he is finished, I try to divert him by asking why he wants to go.
Remind him that he had decided he couldn’t fly to Europe anymore.  He really doesn’t have an answer.  At some point he says, “I don’t want to get sentimental about this.”  He never could talk about feelings. 

Instead, he says he wants to pay his respects to his companion Hannelore’s grave, and that he wants to see his childhood home once more.  I ask him if photographs would help.  If he would like to Skype with his sister.  He nods.  That might help.

Ten minutes later he starts over.  “I need to you to come with me to Germany one more time.”
I try several different approaches, but as the evening advances, and the June Minnesota sun begins its slow descent behind the trees, I realize that nothing short of “no” will work.  

For decades I carried anger against my father for not letting me return to Germany.  The memory of how trapped I felt as an adolescent still makes me choke.  But having to say “no, we cannot make another trip to Germany.  You have to stay here, now”  doesn’t give me the slightest satisfaction.  It only breaks my heart. 

Violence and Nature

A few days ago, I stood, facing the window, doing my morning qi gong.  As my arms flowed into seven steps a gorgeous dragonfly swooped toward me.  I just had time to register the striking black striped wings, when a bird plunged after it, plucked it off the window and dashed it to the concrete patio below.  Then it neatly severed the wings off the stunned body, and flew up, carrying it’s prize away.  So much for the illusion of tranquility in nature.

The following night a line of violent thunderstorms moved swept across Minnesota.  Waves of water crashing into the bedroom window panes woke me out of a groggy sleep at 4 am.  I squeezed my eyes shut.  I was sleep-deprived from a week of waking up early to the voices of my granddaughters - welcome voices, but early nonetheless.  Maybe if I just lay still, nature would subside.  The wind intensified until the house began to shiver.  Huge rumbles of thunder rolled across my head.  I felt like I was lying under a roller coaster.  Then a huge thunk.  The bedroom door opened.  A flash of lightning illuminated Hallie, her arms wrapped around herself, whispering: “A tree just fell over in the front yard.”  I jerked up.  Followed her out into the living room.  More lightning flashes.  The entire front yard a jungle of tree parts.  Huge branches flung from the locust barred the sidewalk, the 45 year-old-ash’s exposed roots made a wall between us the neighbors.  Its trunk blocked the street.  “At least it didn’t fall on the house,” I said.   On the opposite side of the house, the damage looked light. Until I saw the hot tub lid twisted off its metal hinges, peeled back.  I was grateful it hadn’t crashed through the window.  The maple, my favorite of all the trees, stood lopsided, one of its huge arms twisted off. But it stood.  As we circled the house, the storm began to calm, the rain let up. The worst was over.

As I tried to go back to sleep, my thoughts turned toward violence of another kind.  Earlier in the week, I had written an editorial about my father and how he made it through World War II alive.  His survival hinged on intuitive strokes of luck that had always seemed random to me.  A flaw in the structure of his toes caused the Nazi air force to reject him for pilot training ( almost all German pilots died), he narrowly avoided being recruited by the SS, and when his unit lost their first major battle, he survived to be shipped off to the US.  Narrow escapes from the forces of violence.  

I lay in my safe bed, listening to the rumble of thunder recede, the rain subsiding into a gentle wash,  wondering about nature and human nature.

To read the editorial see the link below.

 http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/212556341.html

What was left of the dragon fly

Lost Pages: Hunger

My grandmother never used a potato peeler.  It was too wasteful.  True German housewives used knives to get thinner peels.  I have never known hunger or war, so I work at my kitchen sink, thick chunks of potato peel dropping from my peeler.  In front of me, my window glows with reflected Minnesota snow, and my American husband chops peppers beside me.  In the corner, a huge refrigerator hums, its belly brimming with food.

Still, I see my grandmother’s potato peels spiraling from her knife.  There were transparent, so thin that her potatoes emerged bumpy, eyes intact.  A mountain of potato peels grew from her knife in her lifetime.  Like every other woman in her East German town, she peeled potatoes to boil every day and grated them for dumplings on Sunday.

Before my parents and I left Germany when I was thirteen, I visited her in Gera every year for at least a week.  I remember sitting on a creaky kitchen chair, swinging my legs, as my grandmother unwound potato peels into a chipped enamel bowl cradled in her lap.  It was summer, and it was morning.  The white net curtains brushed against the panes of the open casement window.  Outside, a delivery truck crashed through the potholes in the cobblestones.  A pot of salted water waited on the table.

Her hand released memory as she uncovered pale potato flesh.  She told me how, during the war, her stream of peels grew longer.  More potatoes, less meat.  Then potatoes were rationed: five pounds per person per week in ’42 down to four pounds by ’44.  In ’45, after the war was over, even potatoes were hard to find.  Her knife stopped for weeks.

She fed her three youngest children two slices of bread each day.  She sprinkled the bread with salt and pepper and told them to close their eyes and conjure up the taste of liverwurst.  Sometimes, she could get a few grams of yeast to spread on top.  Once Gina, who was eight, came home bearing a bouillon cube, a gift from her piano teacher who’d had a package from America.  She made soup for five.

My legs hung still.  I strained to imagine years without cake or sausage.  Grandmother turned toward me, peering over the tops of her bifocals, quiet for a moment.

Then she talked about my father.  When he returned in ’46, well-fed and strong, from his US POW camp, he was twenty-two.  She sent him out on his old bicycle - the tires were so worn that he had to patch them every ten kilometers - to Gauern where her cousins had a farm.  He could work at the farm for a day, harvesting hay or digging turnips, eat his fill at their table, and maybe earn a few potatoes to bring home.  When they didn’t have any to spare, he could steal potatoes in the village fields.  Once he got arrested, but another time he escaped with a whole sack.  They feasted then.  Potato soup, potato pancakes for days.

How could my father have stolen?  She shook her head and bent closer to her knife saying: We would do anything for food.  It was a terrible, terrible time.

Exposed! Effects of Publishing Memoir

Ever since Dreaming in German has been available, people come up to me at parties telling me: “I just finished your book, and now I feel like I know everything about you.” I’m never quite sure how to respond.  Usually I mumble something about not having thought that out so well.  They often grin and say, “Yes, it’s weird, because I know you, but you don’t know me so well.”  A side effect of publishing memoir that no one warned me about.  

While I was writing, I did agonize over my Dad’s reaction. Especially early on, when my first drafts were powered by my need to express the anger I still felt at him for seeming impervious ( and oblivious) to my pain.  When I finally finished the manuscript, I’d gained some perspective, but as I handed him a copy to read, I fretted.  I knew I was breaking a family rule. One so basic, no one ever had to say it out loud.  “Do not distress your father.”

I needn’t have worried.  He read the whole thing in a matter of two days on a visit to my house.  I watched out of the corner of my eye, interpreting every facial expression.  He did look tense for a few hours.  When he closed the book his comment was: “Wow, you struggled with this for a long time, but it came out all right in the end.”  Phew. I should have been able to predict that response.  My mother used to say: “Your father only sees what he wants to see.”  After I recovered from the relief, I was miffed.  All my encounters with loss reduced to “it came out all right?” Once again, I’d failed to pierce his defenses. Hmm.  Still, he was proud of me for writing a book.

My other concern was my mother’s family.  Would Tante Isolde ever hear of the book?  My cousins?  Shouldn’t be a problem. I wrote the book in English, was publishing it in the US.  I have hopes of translating it and releasing it in Germany - anybody know a translator? - but that will take time. By the time I finally navigated the self-publishing process, my cousin Matthias’ stepdaughter had come to the US to teach German, and was my facebook friend.  A fact that I didn’t fully register until after I published the book, she ordered a copy and Matthias sent me a picture of himself in front of the Christmas tree, holding it up.  I haven’t heard from him since, but he’s always been sporadic at keeping in touch.  

What surprised me even more than realizing I had exposed my intimate details to acquaintances and strangers,  were the email and facebook messages from fellow displaced Germans.  I never knew I was one among thousands.  There are facebook groups with names like “Germans transplanted to the USA” sharing their nostalgia.  One man whose story roughly parallels my own, suggested I add a recipe feature to my website and sent me some links to his favorite sources for German foods.  I suppose simple demographics could have predicted this development.  What I never would have predicted is how many other people tell me they identify with my displacement.  My dentist said he only moved from small town northern Minnesota to the “Cities” as we call Minneapolis/St. Paul around here. Yet, he said, he understood my impulse to be careful when negotiating the two cultures.  “I always think twice about what I say, because I don’t want to offend someone when I visit home.  I don’t want them to think I’m talking down to them.”

 I guess it proves one of the maxims of memoir writing.  The more specific you are in writing about your own experience, the more people will be able to find echoes in their lives. 

Lost Pages: New York, 1966

At the end of a shortened night the plane began its descent.  Thoughts of the future vanished along with my attempts to appear indifferent as I craned my neck to admire the famous skyline.  New York!  The largest city in the world.  I’d been to famous cities - Vienna, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam - but the very idea of New York carried a charge.  This city was the gateway to America.  Das Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten.  The land of unlimited possibilities. As the plane turned in its approach, skyscrapers swung into view.  I recognized the Empire State Building’s spike and knew that I was looking at the tallest building on earth. We would be staying for four days before flying on to Greenville, South Carolina. I couldn’t wait to explore Manhattan. 

Jet lag knocked me off center. My brain buzzed and my eyes burned. My father insisted that the secret to a quick adjustment was to force yourself to live by the local clock.  As soon as we had stowed our luggage, we stumbled through the city to ward off sleep.  I gaped at the rows of tall buildings lining the streets.   I felt like I’d wandered into a roofless cathedral. My neck stiffened from staring up, up.  When at last my neck tired, I lowered my gaze to encounter Rodin’s ‘Thinker,’ skaters twirling at Rockefeller Center, and, on Fifth Avenue, women in fur coats walking tiny dogs with bows above their eyes.   I’d seen all this before, sometimes in color, sometimes in black and white, on large screens and small.  What Hollywood had failed to convey was the noise and grit, the exhaust fumes and the littered gutters.  I was surprised.  The New York of my imagination was modern and clean, too young to show signs of wear.
Exploring this vertical city was in itself so novel, that I didn’t notice at first that my parents had switched roles.  It was my mother - guidebook in hand - who usually led our sightseeing trips to famous places.  The evening before, she would have read up, so she could point out landmarks and identify architectural detail.  She had dreamed of majoring in art history  - instead of textile chemistry as the East German government eventually decreed - and knew how to tell a Romanesque arch from a Gothic and judge the period of a prehistoric ruin by its columns and capitals.  On our last vacation to the Italian Lake District, she’d told me the Roman poet Catullus’ life story as we visited the remnants of his villa.  I’d gotten so interested, I’d forgotten to keep my embarrassed distance.  But in New York, her architectural references were useless, and besides, my father knew Manhattan.  She left her guidebook in her purse as we followed my father’s confident lead.

When we arrived at our first restaurant for dinner, I peered into the gloomy interior.     I’d never seen such a dimly lit room that wasn’t a theater or a cellar.  

“Why is it so dark?”  I asked my father. 

He shrugged.  “ I don’t know.  A lot of American restaurants are like that.  They seem to think it’s elegant.”

My mother wondered:” How can they see what they’re eating?” and started toward an empty table.

“Stop,” my father hissed. My mother froze.  “You have to wait for the hostess to seat you!”  My mother’s shoulders sagged.

 “Why can’t you pick your own table?” I asked.

“That’s just how it’s done,” my father said.   

 As we waited, I soaked up every strange detail.  There were no tablecloths.  The plates and silverware sat directly on wood grain Formica.  Ruby pressed glass goblets held dark red napkins.  Once at our table, we pulled them out and placed them in our laps, and a waitress filled the goblets with ice cubes and water.  My father had told me that Americans put ice in their drinks, but why were they giving us water?  All my life I’d been told not to drink tap water because I’d get sick.  “Smell it, “ my father whispered” it’s full of chlorine.”  That it was.  It smelled like the Krefeld public swimming pool.  I couldn’t overcome a lifetime of training.  I asked my father to order a Cola for me instead

He also ordered shrimp cocktail, salad, steak and a baked potato.  I was excited about the shrimp.  They were such a special, expensive treat.  When they arrived, I was puzzled.  The shrimp were huge.  I bit into one and felt my taste buds wilt.  Compared to the tiny North Sea shrimp we ate at home, they had no flavor.  My father so clearly enjoyed them that I gave them another chance.  They still tasted bland, but I liked the cocktail sauce.  My father said:” They’re just different.  You’ll like them once you get used to them.”

 Our steaks arrived, each one sizzling on a metal platter.   “One of these is as much meat as I normally buy for all of us for dinner! “ my mother exclaimed, as she picked up her fork and knife.    She wrinkled her forehead.  “ I don’t know if I can eat it all.”  

My father grinned.  He promised me that, since meat was so cheap here, we could have steaks every week.  That sounded great to me.  As I dug in with pleasure, my mother fretted.  If she ate the whole steak, she’d get a stomachache.  My father reassured her that Americans didn’t think anything of leaving some food on their plates.  “ And if they don’t want to waste it, they ask for a ‘doggy bag’ and take the rest home,” he explained.  We were both incredulous.  Take food home from a restaurant?  It sounded unspeakably rude and admirably practical at the same time.  Did they really feed it to the dog?   My father shrugged.  How could anyone know?  I’d been making good progress with my steak, but the foil-wrapped baked potato was another mystery.  My father showed us how to split the potato’s top, squeeze it open and scoop out the insides.  I love sour cream, and quickly realized that I could use the potato to indulge in lots of it by slathering each forkful.  

  After that first meal, I was sold on steak and baked potato.  I added the meal to my list of foreign favorites.  In Italy, I’d fallen in love with the custom of sprinkling grated Parmesan into my soups, and I relished the grilled lamb sausages they served in Yugoslavia, the huge selection of cheeses in Denmark and the potato croquettes sold in the streets in the Netherlands.  It hadn’t penetrated yet that I wouldn’t be going home to restaurants where I could count on the menu to feature Schnitzel and Gulaschsuppe. 

Glimpse of the Future

While I was in Clemson, I made a pilgrimage to see my friend Ellen in Six Mile.  What drove me there was curiosity.  Ellen has just undergone a life transition from successful artist ( her art quilts are in private and corporate collections everywhere) and married woman, to single and learning how to organize and run a non-profit devoted to the intersection or creativity, economy, and sustainability.  You can read more about her organization, the Rensing Center here.  

She has just moved into a new house, designed for one, as green and sustainable as possible.  I love it - every square inch holds beauty.  The dishes are all handmade. Some of the interior walls are recycled roof tin. Every detail is fresh and thoughtful.  Her porch looks out over a cow pasture.  She tells me that nearby Greenville is booming.  Free plays in the park, galleries and restaurants, a thriving farmer’s market.  

We roam the property, meeting the Rensing Center pig,  inspecting the guest houses that will host artists in residence, and finally stopping to see Ellen’s mom at her house. Her depression era survival skills (she is 93), are the inspiration for the center’s mission.  She was also a good friend of my mother’s.  I haven’t heard anyone talk about missing my mom for a while.  It brings her back to me from a fresh angle - I can hear her laugh, catch a glimpse of her dimple.  

I am surprised that Ellen has made a life here.  When she arrived in Clemson, a few years before I left, I couldn’t have imagined it.  She had a degree in costume design from Syracuse University, and had just returned with her husband from two years in Hamburg.  We bonded over Germany,  our love of fabric, and our liberal politics.  Now we talk about marketing, how to make a living selling art, how to navigate our shifts in life direction.  

When I  have to leave, we are not even close to finished with out conversation.  The last thing Ellen says to me as I back out of her driveway is: “Keep asking yourself what you care about. The rest will follow.”  I am grateful for the reminder.  I am asking myself every day.