DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

As has been documented previously, I don’t speak a lot of German. My trips to the Motherland, by which I mean my wife’s mother’s land, bring long periods of introspection for me. I’ve come to enjoy the solitude; I use the time to reflect on events, organize thoughts, synthesize data, and establish defensible arguments on the superiority of US versus German leisure-shoe design.

I compose many of the stories you’re reading here while pretending to follow dinner conversations.

On this trip, our first visit was to my wife’s closest friend. She’s a healer, which I mention for no reason other than that it affords me the opportunity to link to yet-another journal entry from years ago. She and her husband have two adorable kids, ages 2 and 4, and if you think that staying with the four of them on a day defined by the dark depths of jetlag would be a spectacularly bad idea, it’s only because you haven’t experienced these kids. They’re smart and funny and surprisingly mature for their negligible years.

When we visited two years ago, I was reading a bedtime story to the little girl, then just two years old and scarcely more fluent in Deutsch than I was. I had studied the language for six semesters, and although my vocabulary never grew beyond the inventories of kitchen appliances and sports in the textbooks, I always prided myself on what I thought was a knack for pronunciation. And besides, I remember thinking, she’s only two — and this book only has about seventeen words in it.

After I read the first three pages, the girl hopped out of my lap, took the book and walked from the room. She came back a moment later with a different book for me to read to her. It was written in English.

On this visit, the little boy adopted me immediately. His mother was surprised as this is somewhat unusual for him, but for me this was not completely unexpected. Little kids are often fascinated by me. Of course, this usually takes the form of hiding in their mother’s arms, alternately peeking out and crying until I go away.

But we got along famously. We had a lot in common — vocabulary size, for example. We share a disdain for authority. I’m obviously a lot older, and he’s somewhat more likely to smear Nutella all over his face. Otherwise, we’re right in there together.

I’ve been trying to speak more German on this trip. It has been challenging. By the time I struggle to the end of the sentence, where the verb goes, I’ve forgotten what I was talking about. Fortunately everybody knows what I intended to say, and they all say it in chorus, which is great because I wouldn’t have known the correct form or how to pronounce the word anyway.

I had a proud moment tonight: I ordered my own dinner. I was so nervous about performing in front of the table that I put my elbow down on a bread plate, knocking a butter knife to the floor in the middle of my spiel. I think the clatter and subsequent commotion covered most of the case-markers and genders I was mangling.