Why German Teachers of English Need to Get It Together

My eighth-grader came home from school with a question: "Mom, the teacher asked what the name of a large green space in New York City is, and guess what one girl said?"
"What?"
"She said The Grand Canyon--but that's not the best part!"
"What's the best part?"
"Tell me the five boroughs of New York."
I told him.
"New Jersey isn't one of them, right?"
"GOD, no!"
But you know what? His teacher told his class--this is, you understand, a Gymnasium class, and a good Gymnasium, too--that New Jersey, snobbishly disregarded by Manhattan and even by Staten Island since time immemorial--that New Jersey really is one of the five boroughs.  She seems to have forgotten all about Queens, since the entire eighth grade class is probably now studying for a test in which they'll list the five boroughs of New York City as:

Manhattan
The Bronx
Brooklyn
Staten Island
New Jersey

Once upon a time when I was young, the New York designer Donna Karan's DKNY T-shirts were so hot that The New Yorker ran a cartoon: instead of a svelte, sexy model, a lumpy, schlumpy, overweight matron in unattractive glasses and a do-rag galumphed along in a DKNJ T-shirt.  The caption? Donna Karan's nightmare.

New Jersey never was, and never will be, a part of paradise. Thus spake the New Yorker who had a commute from the Upper West Side to the industrial armpit of NJ for years, enduring a job that amounted to indentured servitude.

Meanwhile, folks, that large green space in the middle of Manhattan is still Central Park. The Grand Canyon isn't even green, my son pointed out . . .  and he's been there.  Smell the coffee, English teachers. And drink it. That English tea just isn't strong enough. Neither is that English accent.

How the Critical Mom Found the Lost Report Cards

Yes, they went missing. On the first day of school, our sixth-grader and her eighth-grade brother asked me to hand 'em over and I said, "Sure!" and opened the drawer in which they are kept--along with school photos and stuff that seems to jump in there by itself.
They weren't there.
"Mommy, I need them TODAY! The teacher said we had to have them TODAY. The signed report cards MUST be handed in ON THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL!"
Yes, I know. But doesn't the school keep copies? Apparently not. This is Deutschland, and nobody, apart from an air-headed American mom, would ever lose something so important as a report card. I can just see the German mommies shaking their heads and boasting about how many windows they washed that morning, knowingly nodding in my direction . . . because guess how many times I've washed our windows in the nine years we've been living in this house?
 If you guessed "less than ten," you're generous.
So, the report cards were supposed to be exactly where I'd put them . . . and I really do know where they are: I have downstairs drawers, for the report cards plus school photos and another upstairs drawer for the big stuff: the social security cards, the American certificates of birth abroad, my will, a treasury bond given to one child by a godmother, a bank account given to another by his godmother, the yellow health examination booklets, even my old blue "Mutterpasses."
So did the report cards get sloppily dumped in the play area? What I remembered was each child waving his or her report card around last July, insisting that, "It's my report card, Mom, and so I'm going to keep it in my room."
So I said no, we always keep them in these drawers, so hand 'em over. Very unwillingly, they did so. Then I saw the report cards again on top of the sofa . . . or did I? This was the stuff of wakeful ruminations and nightmares the last few nights. 
Then came the gaslighting:
 "But I do remember you all saying you wanted to keep them in your own rooms."
"You dreamed that, Mommy! Remember, I gave them to you!" 
I envied that look of sanctimoniousness on my daughter's face. I know how it is to want to be right.

I really did remember putting the report cards in the special drawer and then noticing that they were parked precariously on the back of the sofa, from whence they might easily have fallen to our anything-but-tidy floor.
 "Did we put them back in the drawer after you had them out here on the sofa?"
"I gave them to you, Mommy."
"I didn't even get to see them," said my husband, with a sigh. 
Oh, the guilt.
The night before last I woke from nightmares in which our house was being burgled by a band of child thieves from the next town . . . I couldn't sleep; it was raining buckets and thunder slammed through the air. I went up to my study to read the NY Times online. Then I remembered a Laura Ingalls Wilder story: Wilder and her husband were about to purchase a log cabin with their cherished hundred dollar bill, which had participated in their nomadic travels in a carefully-guarded wooden lap desk. Their daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, remembered that they opened the desk and found that the bill was not there. They took every sheet of writing paper out of the desk and shook it; they took each letter out of its envelope, unfolded it, looked into the empty envelope. They turned the desk upside down and shook it, the felt covered inside lids flapping . . .Finally my mother said, "Well." She meant: No use crying over spilled milk. What can't be cured must be endured.
Blaming the folks with whom they were traveling was "Not to be thought of," said the in-my-best-dress-and-hat-and-gloves Wilder. She sat and removed her gloves and got back in her work clothes. They weren't going to get that cabin.  
But Wilder did not give up. She kept searching that desk.
So I kept searching those drawers. I took everything out. I put the report cards in the notebooks we'd long ago purchased. So now all the old report cards are organized. But where were the ones that needed to be signed?
Another sleepless night. 
Then I remembered the end of Wilder's story: she kept looking in that old desk until she discovered that the hundred dollar bill had slipped into a crack, and remained hidden.
I thought of the space between the desk drawer and the back of the cabinet. I thought of how the kids--and even me, sometimes--open the drawer, toss the report card in, and close it, without first pushing the contents down.
I opened one drawer, and reached into the space between the end of the drawer and the inside of the cabinet. Nothing happened until I wiggled my fingers and the drawer at the same time--then, hallelujah! Down fell some slightly accordion-pleated report cards, ready to be signed.
My kids stopped complaining.
My husband was pleased.
Only I was overjoyed--because then I knew that after all I was sane, that age had not so destroyed my memory that I'd forgotten where I put those report cards. I just knew I'd put them where I thought I'd put them. And I had! It's a happy day in a middle-aged lady's life when something like that happens.

The Cosby Women and The Critical Mom

I always thought Cosby was corny, but I ought to have remembered that sentimentality, says Oscar Wilde, is the bank holiday of cynicism. Cosby's very successful stand-up comedy routines have been dubbed "observational humor," so I'd like to observe where the man is in the humor and I find banality--not a drop of wit. Is that a clue? Are there clues? He plays on our sentimentality. What a cute kid! What a face! Oh, that face.
If it looks too good to be true, you're safer assuming that it can't be true.
When I listen to Cosby's women, I think: there, but for the grace of sheer dumb luck, go I. How often did I listen to fools who, fortunately for me, turned out to be harmless, or to be weak enough for me to push them away? Too often, before I reached the age of reason, and because my mother told me absolutely nothing. It's not really her fault: she knew nothing.
So a friend and I sat around the dining room table with my eleven-year-old daughter, who is beautiful, and a copy of the New York magazine issue featuring the Cosby women, and an old CD of Cosby's I Started Out As Child. On that album, his is the face of a goofy cherub. We told my daughter that after Cosby drugged and used one young woman, and she awoke not knowing why she was in bed with him, groggy, and begged for help, asking, "How can I get home?" he said, "Call a taxi."
We said, if your hunches tell you something's off, pay attention--even if the place looks good. We said, always open your own drink, and if someone you don't know hands you a drink, leave it on the counter. We said, if you leave your drink on the counter and come back, or someone "freshens" it for you, just go get a different drink that you open yourself.  
And I said, "But there aren't that many men who are this bad," and I hope that's true, too.

The Critical Mom Does the Acropolis

We’re on the favorite ship of all German vacationers: “Mein Schiff 3,” or “My Ship 3.” We've already done “Mein Schiff 1,” on a trip to Norway, and we never met “Mein Schiff 2,” but we’d love to make its acquaintance sometime. 
I’ve just returned from dinner overlooking the Aegean Sea, very green at the moment, but rather turquoise at other times, and an amazingly rapid sunset, Helios dropping like a great orange lollipop behind some hills that may, if I understood our guide correctly, have been dedicated to Poseidon.We came into the port of Piraeus around four-thirty in the morning: I heard the familiar grinding of gears as the ship turns around, and then as it backed out to make room for some lesser cruise line.First, we enjoyed a detour involving the Greek Parliamentary Palace (the first king of Greece being, apparently, Bavarian) and the changing of the guard, which involves soldiers in the Greek version of Tracht doing stuff that looks like a cross between trucking and goose-stepping. They come out in these red clogs with hobnails on the bottom and black pom-poms on the top. Oh, but that is only the beginning of their fashion statement. There’s the hats: red, with long horsetails of black tassel. The beige tunics and the beige tights. And the rifles, complete with bayonets, design c. 1914. I had my picture taken with one of them, folks. Their job is to stare straight ahead, whether goose-stepping (and then executing a movement reminiscent of a passé in ballet, followed by a shuffle from tap). Then one hand stick the rifle way up in the air, accent on the bayonet, while the other extends beyond the soldier. The effect is very Walk Like an Egyptian and I rather liked it. I can do those steps for you anytime.
Then we hit fifth century Athens, complete with Acropolis, on a sunny day, temperatures in the neighborhood of 100ºF., no humidity. It was breezy, if you’d count the exhalations of Hephaestus (which were, I presume, the source of our weather).  The Parthenon, offset by skies bluer than anywhere in the world, except perhaps Vermont in the summer months, dazzled us, and sculpted columns of graceful women holding up one of the outbuildings did indeed, as our guide suggested, turn ones thoughts to Angelina Jolie. The gritty dust blew off hats, but it was worth it to me to stand where the goddess of wisdom got worshiped, through three re-buildings of her temple after earthquakes and Persians destroyed it.On our way to lunch, through neighborhoods graced with olive, lime, and lemon trees, we passed a number of restaurants and shops, whose owners, clearly more than eager to sell after the exit of Grexit, called to us. One young woman trying to lure us into her restaurant called “Where are you from?” and when one among us finally answered, “Deutschland,” she replied, “Oh, no need to be afraid!”But we didn’t stop there . . . after our 280 steps in the direction of the Acropolis, we climbed quite a few more, landing in an ivy-covered enclosure where, finally, we ate--and drank.

Moving the Unmoving Mom

Who is ninety-four. She was scheduled to move into assisted living around the beginning of July. Then July 16--the anniversary of the successful testing of the atom bomb in 1945. Attempts to move her, however, remain unsuccessful. Her boxes are in her hallway and she says everything is "Fine!"
My stepsister and her friends are wondering What To Do. Gee, I'd love to help, but we're going on a cruise. But I've read my Atul Gawande and I think I'll leave her to her own devices. Yes, I'd be relieved if I knew she were in her own room at the assisted living facility where, should she ever actually descend upon them, they will require assistance to keep up with her. Yes, I'd prefer that she not continue in her increasingly dusty, dirty apartment, more prone with each passing moment to fall again and break her hip, or not hear the cars on the busy avenue nearby. But if she just hates the idea of doing what she regards as going gently into that good night, who am I to argue with her? She's as sane as she always was--not very, but she retains every last marble. I knew an old woman whose niece forced her into a nursing home for all the same reasons that I'd like to scoop up my mother the way I can still scoop up my daughter and just carry her, kicking and screaming (unfair comparison: my golden child does neither) and deposit her on her brand-new bed in her brand-new gilded cage. If she hated her life from that moment on--as did my elderly friend with the well-meaning niece--wouldn't it be better to let her do things her own way, including half starving, living in what's becoming a slum, and getting run over? Here's my favorite song at the moment: 

The Critical Mom Critiques

Or she tries. I write something approaching a pep talk on the papers I grade, while spotlighting errors. Today, a student settled combatively in my visitor's chair--lower lip extended--and insisted, "Yes, I did!" when I pointed out that she had not, in fact, stated that Teyve's thinking was in line with "the American dream." She might instead have remarked, I said, that when he asks God for more money and cows, he is hoping to get these things, and that this hope bears some relationship to what nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms experienced when they ended up on American shores, pursuing American dreams.
Hmmmf, my student said. 
I advised her to read. Did she read a newspaper? How about Die Zeit? 
No, she read WAZ, (Westdeutsch Allgemeine Zeitung or West German General Newspaper), the local rag (the American equivalent would be the New York Daily News sprinkled with a little National Enquirer.) I told her to keep the WAZ to line her cat box but not to read it. She probably told the dean on me.
I am holding in my hands a term paper in which Ayesha, AKA "She Who Must Be Obeyed," the drop-dead (literally: basilisk-eyed) beauty of Rider Haggard's novel is described as adorable. The student who wrote it mentions Haggard's inner struggle to form a firm view on womanhood.
I wish I were making this stuff up. This person is going to be a teacher some day.  So is the graduate student who--during the exam I was giving this morning--suddenly lifted her book up off the table.
"Hey!" I said.
"Oh, I just forgot the title," said she.
"You can't look at the book!" I yelled.
The barn door was open, the horses galloping away, but she did not look at the book again.
Meanwhile, another student has produced a last-minute essay on education in a famous American novel. Here's a sample:

In contrast to [name redacted] and [name redacted's] idea of education, [name redacted] teaches his children to be observant of their environment by telling his children about the world outside which are mentioned in songs he sings and encourages them to explore their surroundings. We will see this later. Both teaching methods, if you want to call them that, create an interaction between acquiring and learning. 

Oh.

My dream is to teach a year-long course in which students learn to enjoy writing. In my course, students will write from the heart. They will know what it is to have an opinion, and they will have opinions by the dozens. They will never write "all in all." They will read essays and I will teach in such a way that they look forward to reading them. By the end of the term, they will toss their cell phones over their shoulders and head to the library to get dusty among the tomes. Aw, heck, they can go to Barnes & Noble, too. 

 

The Neighborhood Mom& Pop

I am a big fan of hole in the wall restaurants--anything that's the opposite of McDonald's. What we have in our neighborhood, a place that roasts chickens on rotating spits and provides hunks of ground meat on rolls to kids, takes me back to my childhood, which was so long ago that there weren't any chains except for Howard Johnsons. You didn't have to ask for a key to the bathroom at the gas station back then, and you didn't have to pay, or go through a turnstile, or collect little tickets that saved you fifty cents on your purchase. Each little roadside restaurant--there were such things-- had its own style, and if you never ate at a place called Mother's you did okay. 

Zum ______________ reminds me of those places. The clock says Kein Bier Vor Vier (No Beer Before Four) and all the numerals on the clock face are 4. Hee-hee. Delightful. The harried woman behind the counter wants to get everything right, and if you ask for a frickadelle she makes sure it's warm or cold, just as you wish. Do you have your drink? Is everything all right? Chicken? The chicken is tender--moreso than any chicken I have ever cooked or tasted. The fries--if you like fries, and I don't--are crisp, and offered with mayonnaise, ketchup, or tarter sauce. The patrons gaze off into the distance--or off into the year 1967--and remain happy. Especially when they are looking at that clock. The one that tells the time, German style. 
I'd pay a considerable amount for that clock. The only clock I ever enjoyed more, my husband's earthquake clock, in which all numerals have fallen, or are in the process of gracefully doing so, to the bottom of the clock face, sits dustily in our cellar, having not quite made it through the last California earthquake. But as long as there's beer, there's life . . . and one that Germans love.  That's what keeps folks going to this, our favorite little place.

The Fourth of July and the Independent Piggie: How to Bring Home Your Guinea Pigs When They Have Escaped From Their Outdoor Cage

Here's what not to do:  Run around the garden with the whining desperation of Clytemnestra moaning their names. Then, when you've calmed down, crouch in the bushes and make guinea-pig noises, like your husband is doing two bushes over. Don't bother getting out the flashlight and flicking it around under the clubhouse, beneath which you hope they've tucked themselves: this probably makes them feel like the character in a detective drama with the light trained in his eyes and the question, "Where were you on the night of July 4th?" ringing in his ears.

Don't go to bed desperate assuming they've been consumed by foxes, dogs, cats, or squirrels. Assume they can deal with the moles who have taken over the garden, including parts of their acreage in their little outdoor cage, by themselves.

How did they get out of their cage? Or were they dragged? There's a cat who sniffs around occasionally--I throw empty shampoo bottles at him from the upstairs bathroom and he glares, but runs. 

Oh, the cage isn't on level ground. There's one corner with just enough space for an enterprising young guinea pig to squeeze out, and that's what she did, taking the older, more sedate one, with her.  And now where are they?

Go to bed. Have bad dreams.

Wake at 1:00.  It is raining.  Go down to the garden again and look under the slide, where you've looked ten other times.

At 5:00, wake and Google escaped guinea pigs.

Since you don't have a hav-a-hart cage, take all their little houses, the ones from the indoor cage, the ones from the outdoor cage, the ones sitting on the woodpile.  Place them around the bushes under which you hope the girls crawled.  Place carrots or alfalfa hay  at the entrances or inside.  Look around.  Go back to bed.

At 10:00 a.m., wake from stupified nightmares to the sound of driving rain and thunder.  Go downstairs with umbrella, decide to check the houses.  Nothing in the first, the one you put under the slide, the place they loved to hide the other time they got away.  But that time you were right there.

Check box two.  Astonished to see two perfectly dry guinea pigs huddled together, scream.  When you scream, the fast one shoots out into the bushes. She's now drenched.  Put house back down on other, slower, startled piggie and talk to them:  "Oh, thank goodness you're here.  Oh, Ginny.  Oh, Lily, please come back, Lily, please do come back. Lily gives you a look.  Sorry, Lily, my bad. The rain, the cage, whatever you say. Come back, little Lily.  So she races into the house. This time, you don't scream.  You put down your umbrella, you lift the box and scoop them both up, you bring them inside and wrap them in a dry towel.  They have declared their independence and now they are back home, eating carrots and cuddling.

Frosting at Midnight

Baking cupcakes to take to school for birthdays is ordinarily quite enjoyable, but I hadn't been able to get around to it until after ten, so by the time all 36 cupcakes were cooling their heels, it was close to midnight, and I started mixing my standard goo for the top of the muffins--powdered sugar, melted butter, cream, dash of vanilla . . . all of which is great for the sated taste buds of American kids, and common to American cupcake recipes--in fact, to cupcake recipes in the English-speaking world. But these German kids take their cake medium-sweet. The afternoon custom of "coffee and cake" here means a round hunk of supermarket sponge-cake, not particularly sweet, topped by raspberries, strawberries, peaches or canned pineapple suspended in a not-too-sweet gelatin known as Tortenguss. This translates approximately as "fruit tart glaze," but it's not what you'd think of as a glaze, going by my got-enough-sugar-to-give-you-diabetes Fanny Farmer cookbook recipe for strawberry tart. I guess if you're eating "cake" as they call it here every day, you can't take the buttery, creamy, calorie-crammed stuff that Americans reserve for birthdays and special occasions, unless you live in the deep South.
The short version of this tale is that after I stayed up past midnight making sure each cupcake was cool enough to frost, frosted it, and tucked them all in portable carrying dishes, I was chagrined to hear, "Mommy, they're too sweet!" For more than around a fourth of my daughter's fifth-grade class, those cupcakes were too sweet.
But not for glazed-eyed me, licking that spoon to stay awake.

The Critical Mom Writes

And nobody reads. But that's okay. I'm learning my trade here, and from time to time surprising events teach me what grabs readers. When I wrote a post about Chelsea Manning and titled it "The Unmanning of Bradley," I reached many a poor soul who was looking for something considerably more titillating. I was merely reflecting on Manning's poor timing, in my view. When Bradley announced that he was really Chelsea, she was heading to prison, where bad guys are sure to give her a tough time indeed. I hope Chelsea is protected, and I hope somebody's getting her the hormones she needs to remain herself.
Meanwhile, I've reached a milestone: I'm actually getting paid for a personal essay. An entire forty bucks. Ten more than Judas made, is what I'm thinking. I want everyone in the world except for my mom and my kids to read that essay. My kids can read it when they're old enough to understand that Mom is also human--make that forty: a nice round number (and ten more than those thirty pieces of silver that keep coming to mind: I hope the kids don't feel betrayed by Mom's confession, which is not about them, but about Mom when she was younger than they are now.)
Forty dollars would just about replace the forty euros I got fined for forgetting that the month of June had begun: here in Germany, you buy your tram card every month, and you have a grace period until the third of the month. But I'd spent the preceding two days in dress rehearsals and performances, tap dancing. There's nothing lovelier than being onstage except, perhaps, being backstage. I love peeking in from the wings and seeing my very pretty daughter's profile as a lilac fairy; the contrast of the extraordinarily hideous Carabosse waving her arms around plus the glimpse of the audience's rapt faces was lovely. It would be so much fun to go out onstage and be evil! I wish I could play Carabosse, or a vampire, or anything flagrantly outrageous. When you're onstage the lights are so blinding that you don't see the audience or anything else--you're just trying to keep your eyes open while you dance. I love standing in the hallway and jumping back so the young ballet danseur, having completed his tours jetés, can vault offstage, grab his bottle of water, glug it, and vault back on. Plus the opening bars of Cinderella keep marching through my head.
But the lady who checked my May ticket was, naturally, not interested in all these explanations that came to mind . . . . I burbled away showing all my previous receipts for monthly tickets: I do regularly buy my ticket. But oh, they looked in their computer and found that I had actually failed to buy my ticket on time One Other Time, eight months ago. Who gets off on finger-wagging? People who don't get to go onstage or write personal essays, that's who. Or, as the lady said to me while taking my information (and even my kids have the sense to invent phony names and addresses when they are caught!): "You have your work, and I have mine."
You'd think somebody who likes being onstage and writing would have the presence of mind to say her name was, say, Miranda Schulz or Emma Stein. But no, I blurted mine right out.
And paid the dang forty euros.
But when my essay is published---I still can't believe that it will be--I'll post a link to the magazine and let readers guess which writer might be, in another guise, The Critical Mom.

The Mom With The Serious Hobby

This mom makes everybody breakfast, cooks lunches and dinners, finds missing shirts and sports shoes (except when she doesn't) and cleans the guinea pig cage. What happens when she's gone for a day or two in dress rehearsals for a tap performance--while locating daughter's ballet tights and supervising daughter's ballet jitters for her performance?
What happens is that the middle kid gets the worst deal.  The oldest yells a lot and mostly manages to take care of meals by having them outside, with pals. But the middle kid says he knows how to cook fish sticks, and you don't want to aggravate him by telling him yet again to pre-heat the oven, but you do call home and listen to his bored voice saying, "I know, Mom! You don't have to call again at dinner time."
So you don't.  
And here's what happens: "Well, I ate the fish sticks, Mom, but they were really cold."
"But--"
"Well, Mom! I put them in the oven just like you said for twelve minutes."
"Did you pre-heat the oven?"
"Oops."

After disposing of the semi-frozen remains of the half-eaten fish sticks, I hoped that since his tummy feels okay today he won't develop hepatitis or tapeworm tomorrow.

That evening, I planned food for the next day with him (frozen pizza! Safer!) and put out an envelope of fifty-five euros to pay his piano teacher the next day--when I also wouldn't be there.

Guess what got lost.  

Moms, remind your thirteen-year-olds who have just shot up five inches in the last month, started to get gravelly voices and sprout a pimple or two to carry valuable items in bags. It never goes without saying that small envelopes of money tucked into music folders might fall out, especially if you are running with your folder under your elbow because it started to rain and since Mom isn't there yelling at you, you're wearing a T-shirt, no sweatshirt, and no jacket.

I lost money the same way as he did when I was his age. And my mother forgot to tell me, too. Well, we all know about her. But really, I should have done better.

The Death of Harry: Not a Widow's Lament

This morning, as I was peeling cucumbers to go with the children's sandwiches, I didn't hear the usual anticipatory squeaking from our guinea pigs, who have always been remarkably attuned to the soft whoosh of the fridge door opening, the rustle of plastic wrap, and the sound of any vegetable being sliced. Alas, Harry, our fat, enthusiastic father-of-thirty-six, was lying on his side as if he didn't know what hit him. I'm no vet, but I think he must have been sinking his teeth into a cucumber peel one minute and having a massive heart attack the next. Although I knew right away, I couldn't help thinking that all it would take to have him up and squeaking was a slice of apple nearby, and I put one down near him. Nothing. His wife, Ginny, had retreated to the top floor of our piggy housing development, and did not return to the lower levels until my husband had removed Harry's body.
We buried him in the garden this evening, his winding sheet a clean old dishtowel, his coffin a cardboard Ikea desk lamp box--exactly the right size. A few days ago he was chasing his wife, enjoying connubial relations with her (not bad for a guy of, approximately, 90) and even stealing food from her.
So we had a proper service with an Ave Maria, a few memories from the kids of interesting adventures with Harry (watching him stand on his hind legs when our eldest played the clarinet, clawing his way up mom's pants leg). And a doxology. And now may he rest in peace! We brought Ginny, his wife of some eight years, out for the ceremony, but she seemed not very impressed, and was glad to be back in her home eating a carrot.

I'll leave the last words to Robert Lowell:

WORDS FOR MUFFIN, A GUINEA-PIG

'Of late they leave the light on in my entry
so I won't scare, though I never scare in the dark;
I bless this arrow that flies from wall to window...
five years and a nightlight given me to breathe—
Heidegger said spare time is ecstasy...
I am not scared, although my life was short;
my sickly breathing sounded like dry leather.
Mrs. Muffin! It clicks. I had my day.
You'll paint me like Cromwell with all my warts:
small mop with a tumor and eyes too popped for thought.
I was a rhinoceros when jumped by my sons.
I ate and bred, and then I only ate,
my life zenithed in the Lyndon Johnson 'sixties...
this short pound God threw on the scales, found wanting.'

The Student from Wartornia and the Critical Mom

It's the fifth week of classes and my office hours are over for the day--I'm heading for the gym.  I've got my key in my hand and my athletic bag over my shoulder.  A student with a worried--no, desperate--face appears, and do I have a minute?
Yes.
Could she possibly enter my Edwidge Danticat class now?  I know I was supposed to register before, she says, in heavily accented English.  But--I didn't.  I have a visa problem.  I do not want to go back to--
I'll call it Wartornia. You see the country on YouTube, you read about in the New York Times.  She's far from being the only refugee, but some of my other refugees are only fleeing the impossibly expensive American University system, or they're from third world countries they were lucky enough to have removed themselves from before Ebola loomed.  She's the first I've seen who doesn't want to get returned to a place where soldiers with guns could shoot her dead the minute she's back there--or she won't be able to find food.  She is so distraught that I know she'll be  a terrible student because she cannot concentrate on anything other than how she can manage to stay here, where she is safe, and, once that is established, how she can help her family.  The contents of my course, which concerns a  traumatized island nation that is always in the middle of an earthquake, a war, or political uprisings, and which is anything but kind to its women, are not likely to soothe her. I wonder if she can stand to read material that must be so close to home. But I am the one she thinks will let her into the course so late in the semester that we are about to have midterms. If she shows up, I think it will help her to stick to the regularity of classes, readings, papers. If she doesn't, at least I'm not the one who turned her down when she asked to get into my class.

P.S.  Several months later .  .  . she never showed up again, of course, and I was afraid she'd been shipped off. But I spotted her in a local, never mind which one, store. She looked fine. I'm glad she's okay.

Wildlife and The Critical Mom

While coyotes are trotting through Riverside Park, moles and other critters are making themselves at home in my part of Germany.  I looked out at the racks of clean laundry I'd just hung out to dry on our patio and observed a red squirrel on top, stuffing an article of clothing into his mouth.  
"Get out!" I screamed, startling my husband, who thought I was talking to him.  The rodent ran. There was the time I opened the patio to air out the living room--something I've been doing for years with no ill effects--and during the nanosecond when my back was turned, a critter (species unknown, but I suspect a cat) left its calling card under the dining room table.
 Spiders--big ones--sometimes big hairy ones--find their way into our living room, and children ask me to get the plastic cup quick, Mommy, and take them awaaaaay, and of course I do.  Then there's the bird's nest in our newspaper holder, and now, on the edge of our mailbox, a scene straight out of the final chapter in Charlotte's Web:  a family of tiny spiders, each the size of the head of a pin, seems to have descended on its northwest corner.  Thinking of the three little spiders who befriend Wilbur at the very end, I can't bring myself to smoosh them.  Besides, they eat mosquitoes.  If I let them have the edge of the mailbox, maybe they'll tackle the spider problem. 

The Critical Mom and the Aged P

 I wish taking care of my Aged P were as easy and pleasant as Dickens makes it sound in Great Expectations.  The father of John Wemmick, a bill collector, the old man sits by the fire in the castle home with which his son has furnished him, enjoying the small drawbridge, flag post, and the daily firing of the cannon, an event that always nearly blows the old man out of his chair.
Dickens' Aged P is easy to get along with.  His son Wemmick says to Pip, the main character, "Nod away at him Mr Pip; that's what he likes. Nod away at him, if you please, like winking!"  The old man is happy, and it is soothing to spend time with him. 
 My 93-year-old mother--with whom it is never soothing to spend time--lives alone in her own place, does her own shopping (in the fridge sit open cans of green beans topped by Mom's Au Bon Pain breakfast corn muffin, from which she's taken a bite or two, and which she's decided to "save.") Also two meals worth of leftover Chinese food and the many cans of Vanilla Ensure I sent her via Amazon.  
"You could let the social workers do the laundry," I say with the most casual tones I can summon, as I strip the bed I slept on the night before.
She bristles.  "I'm not helpless!"
Dust coats bookcases, surfaces.  The kitchen is not one I'd be happy cooking in without a morning's work with Clorox. The elegant wrought-iron cage elevator door--as well as the front door to her non-doorman building--are heavy for me, but she scowls when I open them for her. 
"Don't hurt yourself!" she growls.
When I let her struggle with the front door, as she wishes, she mutters, "Guess I'll have to get stronger."  She broke her hip some months ago, and still favors one side, going up the steps by placing her right foot on the step, leaning heavily on the bannister, and hauling herself up.  By the time she gets home, she's ready for a nap, and so am I, but we don't take naps.  We walk to the bookstore and she buys me four books, one for me and several for my children.  The glare she bestows on me when I mention the assisted living facility in which even she admitted enjoying "my three squares," when she was recovering from her broken hip, is potent.  
"I don't want to be around all those old people!" she tells me.  When I write to the social workers who look in on her, they are legally required--or feel morally obligated--or both--to inform her that "your daughter is worried about you."  This nets me an enraged look and a not inconsiderable concern about my inheritance.  She promised to wear a device  on her wrist that would let her push a button and call for help if she happened to fall again and be unable to reach her phone.  The time she fell and broke her hip, she tripped over her phone cord, "So it was right there!" she said brightly.  "They came in four minutes."  I've reminded her about getting that device ("Yes I know! Glare, glare) as have her social workers, but Mom has yet to acquire one. 
"You could get those three squares without the assisted living place," I say.
"How?" She looks interested.  I have hopes.
"Meals on wheels! They deliver three square meals a day."
She shakes her head.  "Oh, I don't eat that much."
Like most modern children of Aged Ps, I live in another city--in fact I live in another country.  I patch together a group of friends and neighbors to look in on her, but these young people, all of whom love and admire her, are always off living their own lives.  One got a job in another city, and one went home to Japan to visit her own Aged P.
"We had such fun times together, the three of us," Mom laments.
I waved goodbye through the back of my taxi.  She's determined to live to 120.  Knowing her, she will.

"It's Spring," and the Critical Mom

---and the bird is on the wing.  Went right past me, a gray blur smaller than a pigeon but disconcertingly close as I exited my front door.  
"Whoa!" Two of my kids and I were rushing to catch the tram, they to go to school and I to teach an early morning class, and I wondered why a little gray bird would dive bomb my navel.   It left no calling cards, but the incident thrust me into an unpleasant recollection of a time when I'd been waiting for a train in Paddington Station, London, and a pigeon had dropped a load right on my head.  You should have seen the way five or six genteel British ladies whipped out hankies and Kleenexes and dabbed ineffectively at my head.  I'd been on my way to the British library to do some research, and my first stop there was the ladies room, where I washed my hair in their institutional hand soap, before leaving to take my coat to a dry cleaners.  
Our little gray bird turned out to be living inside our newspaper mailbox, which was fortunately free of newspapers.  By the time it rushed at me, the bird had already built a nest of brown leaves, and laid a bunch of eggs.  So we are all waiting to see them hatch, and hope that they'll dine on the wasps and hornets who like to set up housekeeping under our eaves about this time of year.

The "Microsoft" Guy and the Critical Mom

It happens all too often--at least once a week.  The phone rings, a heavily-Indian accented voice says my name, and announces that he's calling from the London office of "Microsoft computers," only sometimes he pronounces it "Mick-rosoft."  There's a problem with my computer, he tries to tell me, a virus . . . .or even, "We are receiving signals from your computer!"   . . .  But nothing I say seems to dissuade the gentleman. 
"How's the weather in Mumbai?" I asked last time.
"I do not know what you are speaking, Ma'am!"  
He did a good job of sounding indignant.
"I am calling you from Lon-don!  I am an engineer with Microsoft computers!"
"If you're an engineer with Microsoft computers, I'm the Queen of England," I said, and slammed down the phone.
A good friend took one of these callers seriously when he told her that her computer was infecting other computers.  She gave him a lot of information and nearly ruined her computer, which needed hours of service. 
"Mom," said the sixteen-year-old, who knows everything, "You're doing it wrong."  He instructed me to tell the next Microsoft impersonator that my computer was fine, but that I would like to help him with his computer.  That I had experienced vibes strongly intimating a problem with his computer, and that I would do everything in my power to help him dispel the virus that was damaging his computer.
But this ingenious idea didn't work either.  The wilder my soliloquy ("Ah, but I've had visions!  Visions of a virus swirling through your computer!  Let me help you dear sir!") the more insistently he declaimed that he was "a Microsoft engineer, Ma'am, and your computer . . . . "
Having run out of energy, I inquired once more about the weather in Mumbai, and hung up.  
"Well, Mom, they're just poor people in India or Pakistan trying to make enough to live," intoned the sixteen-year-old, making me feel almost that I should let the callers make more money by talking to me longer.  My husband says I should try asking what time it is in London the next time our persistent imposter calls, or whether the snowstorm inconvenienced him.  But I don't think that'll stop him.  Snopes.com has reported on this, but there's a sucker born every minute, and I must have done something--visited some website or something--to get the attention I'm getting from these folks.
And I don't even own a Microsoft computer.  I'm typing this on my Mac. 

Mass Murder and the Critical Mom

A few days before Andreas Lubitz deliberately reprogrammed Germanwings Flight 9525 in order to lower the plane's altitude from 38,000 feet to 100 feet, ignoring the pleas of Captain Patrick Sonderheimer, a group from my children's school took the same flight--possibly with the same pilots.  German children often go on exchange programs, and my older son has been on several trips to China with international groups of students.   The children on the Germanwings flight lived in a small village slightly north of Düsseldorf, a city to which I frequently go, half an hour from our local Hauptbahnhof.  The sister of a colleague was booked on the fatal flight, but changed her plans at the last minute. A friend who works for Lufthansa loaded the plane with meals, glasses, cutlery.
When we first heard the terrible news, when speculations about the age of the aircraft and the dangers of birds or foreign objects being sucked into the plane dominated the news, I felt that this crash couldn't have been caused by mechanical failure, since most crashes happen during take-off and landing, even those that have occurred with pilots impaired by alcohol or severe psychological problems.  It is still very hard to imagine someone studying the Airbus system carefully enough to set the plane's course in such a way that the system could not override the pilot's intentions.   It is hard to imagine a man wanting to die by sending a plane into slow descent so that it crashes into an alp, killing babies, schoolchildren, opera singers, vacationers.  Even if we try to get into the mind of Andreas Lubitz--another colleague suggests that he wants people to be thinking and talking about him right now--it is difficult to imagine any result other than the kind of feelings experienced by the actor Ralph Fiennes when he prepared for the role of the sadistic nazi, Amon Goeth.  In a February, 1994 New York Times interview in which he reflected that "Evil may well be nearer the surface than we like to admit," Fiennes confessed, 

"It's not a rational thing, but it's an instinctive thing," he explained. "If you are playing a role, you are immersing yourself in thinking about that character -- how he moves, how he thinks. In the end he becomes an extension of your own self. You like him."

When the Times reporter asked Fiennes whether there was "an emotional residue from the experience of playing a character he nonetheless views as obscene and sick," Fiennes answered, "I think there was a price to pay for this one. When you're investigating behavior that is that negative so intensely for three months, then you feel sort of peculiar because you might have at moments enjoyed it and at the same time you feel slightly soiled by it. It just throws up all kinds of question marks -- about acting, about human behavior, about how all of that is probably a lot closer to the surface than we like to think."  For the chilling scene in which Goeth shoots at random, and for kicks, at concentration camp inmates, Fiennes combined memories of "that boyish thrill with an air rifle when you aim at cans on a wall . . . satisfaction when you hit a target--it gives you a kick" with "a desperate and psychotic personality with an unnatural void at the core."  This "desperate and psychotic void" reminds me of St. Augustine's definition of evil as "the absence of good."  In a way, it is what an actor must do--destroy the good parts of him or herself in order to let in--temporarily--the mind of, say, Hannibal Lecter.  The necessary process of actors--or writers--erasing their own personalities in order to inhabit the role of characters they play or create must be accompanied by some form of identification, and identification with another person is normally sympathetic.  The cost of even beginning to understand a mind like that of Andreas Lubitz is this kind of imaginative sympathy:  What if it thrilled me to known that I was going to die in a few minutes, and what if the screams of my passengers were music to my ears?  What if the sound of Andreas Lubitz's breathing was heavy breathing, evidence that he was sexually excited by the knowledge that he would die and kill many innocent people?  What if--alternatively--he had forgotten all about the passengers, lost as he was in the feeling of relief that his life would end?  What if nothing meant anything to him--either his own life or that of the passengers and the captain?  What if he felt things were so awful that he just could not even wait until he got home to kill himself?  If we could imagine feeling any of this, would we be closer to understanding or preventing tragedies like that of Flight 9525?  Or can we only thank our lucky stars that people like Andreas Lubitz are relatively few in this world? 

The Partially Eclipsed Critical Mom

I was expecting the sky to be dark, dark, dark amidst the blaze of 9:30 a.m. but when it was still a regular old cloudy-wintry sky by 10:00, I harrumphed around my office, walked down the hall to ask my colleagues if they had a better view out their window, but no one did.  Meanwhile, hysteria reigned--"You're not allowed to look when you're outside, Mommy," said the ten-year-old, who had almost convinced herself that she had to make her way to the tram stop with her eyes shut.  We were able to convince her that this would prove far more dangerous than staring directly at the sun.  But a friend in a neighboring city told me that the blinds were drawn in every window and that guards were posted at the doors to make sure no child emerged during any recess period.  Parents and pupils alike got hysterical. At my child's school no blinds were drawn, everyone was allowed out during the 9:30 recess, but for some inexplicable reason everyone had to stay in during the afternoon recess, that is, when the show was over.  And there hadn't even been a show in our part of Germany.  Oh, but eclipses can be so thrilling!  When I was in second grade we had a total eclipse and one girl in my class, instead of staring through the pinhole at the piece of white paper, looked right at the sun.  Her mother rushed her off to the ophthalmologist and the everyone wrung their hands.  P.S. She now has the same kind of vision I have--meaning that she, too, wears non-prescription reading glasses.  To find real romance in an eclipse, you'll have to turn to novels.  Wikipedia has an entry on solar eclipses in fiction.  The plot, for example, of King Solomon's Mines takes a nifty twist when the Englishmen just happen to have an almanac, and tell the African natives that they will put out the sun and not give it back UNLESS!!!! So that's how they get to go to the diamond mines, saving a damsel in distress along the way, but getting rich, I'll just spoil the plot for you, doesn't do any of them any good.  But who knows how many real life plots turned on eclipses before we had those almanacs?  Even so, nobody seems any less hysterical than they were before the advent of what is ambitiously and optimistically termed "modern science." 

Magic in the Moonlight and the Young Girl

In Magic in the Moonlight, Woody Allen is at his subtle best--bittersweet, romantic, filled with unfulfillable longing that is then fulfilled at the last moment, I won't tell you exactly how.  But I saw as I watched--admiring the music, the costumes, the wind-blown pastoral scenes, the elegant Firth and the wide-eyed Stone--a strong indictment of himself as a pedophile.  The girlishly slim Stone, made to look considerably younger than her twenty-six years, falls in love with the fatherly, distinguished fifty-four year old Colin Firth.  She's made to look flat-chested, 1920s-style; he's pedantic and repressed, but hoping to be rescued.  It's Lolita-ish, and he's looking for the kind of salvation Oscar Wilde depicts in The Canterville Ghost, in which a spirit is doomed, like Hamlet's father, to pace around like the Wandering Jew or the Flying Dutchman or any number of guilty types until, in this case, a "golden girl" makes a mysterious sacrifice, freeing the ghost from Purgatory.  That does seem to be the sort of tale we're getting here from Allen.  A sensible man, lonely in life but successful as a magician, investigates a supposed case of spiritualism, and teeters on the brink of religious belief, actually sitting down to pray when his beloved aunt is being operated on after a car accident.  In the middle of his effort to pray he has an epiphany--that religion is nonsense, and that somehow that spiritualist--remember, she's the Emma Stone character--is fooling him.  And he figures out how she's doing it, and whom to blame, and then he feels much better, only needing the Emma Stone character--with her air of the twelve-year-old, right down to eating three course meals chased by muffins--to scoop him up and love him.  Fade out.  Everyone who didn't believe Dylan Farrow ought to perceive the confession in this film.  Woody Allen is our modern day Lewis Carroll, and like Carroll, he's apparently gotten away with it.