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stories
the brass tacks of berlin
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Walking in the streets of Berlin I see a large brass tack on the road. I look, trying to decipher the language, the meaning.
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“What’s this?” I ask.
“Hmm. I don’t know.”
To me it looks like the US Geological markers they place at the top of mountains, detailing information about the summit: Name, elevation, co-ordinates etc. We walk farther towards the tangerine glow of a setting sun, in a land once consumed with the eradication of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, disabled people, leftists and others who seemed dispensable. 17 million people lost.
The next day we see the sites of oppression, domination, fascism. Bullet holes patched in Brandeburg Gate, a maze memorial to the 6 million Jews murdered under Hitler’s Nazi regime. My three kids don’t and can’t understand the gravity of such actions. “We came to visit our new baby tousin, Evie, she’s the tusest.” Tilly shouts. The kids bounce from pillar to pillar, as if it’s a game, thinking it will be fun to get lost in the labyrinth. We exit the memorial promptly. I try to convey a synopsis of the war to them, so they recognize the tragedy of loss, and the reverence it deserves, but they can’t understand.
As adults we somberly walk from the pillars, kids fading into the background of our own thoughts on humanity. “Have you seen those brass tacks around the city?” my brother-in-law Daivd asks. “Yes. I asked someone yesterday what they were and we didn’t know.”
“They mark the place where people were taken from, during the war.”
My mind leaps back to my view from the plane as we landed; a landscape, city,
homes, railways, and autobahns. As we flew in, I imagined the people hiding in those very attics, cellars, closets; people being transported on those rail lines, and soldiers following horrific orders.
We continue walking, talking about the horror of humanity; what passes as permissible behavior, what people do to survive, those that don’t survive. I contemplate the way the far right has been gaining power in our own country, giving racist, xenophobic rhetoric a platform and an audience once again. As I feel myself immersed in this country, I wonder how many people’s relatives were participants in the war in our not-so-distant past? How many people gave up their neighbor’s location to save themselves? How many of you still support this notion of Arian right?
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“Did you know that the neo-Nazi’s gained two seats in the last election here in Germany?” David says as we walk farther into the city, from the Holocaust memorial. I can tell he is shaken, his mind elsewhere.
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“No, I hadn’t realized.”
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“If we lived then, they could come and take Adi and the baby away.” The gravity of what weighs on his mind, illuminated now. “Her family doesn’t understand it, why we would want to live a place that did such things,” he says, “but to Adi, she sees how far we have come.”
“Her family history is wild. They weren’t directly affected by the holocaust, because the Nazi’s targeted mainly Ashkenazi Jews.” David says.
“Is that term describe a region of people?” I ask.
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“Yes, Jews from Germany, Poland and Russia. Her family was from Romania and Iraq. After the war the Romanian government sold their Jews to Isreal. Her other grandfather smuggled himself out of Iraq in a burka. They all left their homes as refugees.”
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“Adi hasn’t even been to the Holocaust memorial.” He continues.
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“I don’t think that they would even build it today.”
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“What do you mean?” I ask.
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“It was built in 2008, a time when the government was apologetic to what happened in their history. There are many people who still display guilt over what their country did. But now, with the rise of the Right, more xenophobic and white national ideals are given credibility.”
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We continue walking to the center of Berlin. All new high-rise buildings tower above us, new streets, new sidewalks standing as a modern Germany, without the relics of their disturbing and painful past. The heart of the Third Reich fell and was bombed into smithereens by American and allied bombs, so no old building remains. Holes are not holes for long; filled and rebuilt into luxury condominiums, office towers and a X-fit sky scrapper with fit people entering and exiting back into their Berlinian lives.
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We walk for ages, finally stopping to look at the map of our open top bus tour to find out where they stop. We find the location and head there, everyone is tired. The wind in the city picks up dust and debris and blows it in our faces, across our exposed skin. We find a column near a coffee shop and Shabaun entrance. The wind still swirls around the stone, but the awning provides shade from the relentless heat of the summer. There is a busker playing guitar with a drum machine in the background keeping beat. Tilly wants to throw him money.
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I hand her a couple Euro and she timidly leaves my side. Her two small hands clutching the coins, she turns back, her big blue eyes looking for assurance in her parents. We wave her forward with a smile. She approaches the musician and throws the coins in his guitar case. He smiles at her, and smiles at us, as we watch her run back to the safety of family.
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Our red double decker bus finally arrives, and the seven of us rush to the bus stop from the shady stone we had found refuge. As we board, we grab a pair of cheap headphones and climb to the top. Everyone puts on their sets and listens to the boring music playing as if we were on hold until the bus drives to the next historical site. “Checkpoint Charlie, a critical place after the war.” It continues.
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A missed opportunity on the part of the bus company. The history I learned of Berlin came from one of her own residents, the patriarch of a modern Jewish family residing in the heart of the worlds ability to change, in the hopes that it can continue.
long night to london
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An evening flight to a long night, eyes are heavy and sting from being open. Muscles ache, uncomfortable seats, children cry, not my own. Thankfully our babies are stars in the sky and twinkle even brighter after long nights.
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Johnny’s face is illuminated in blue quickly darting light of the personalized screen on the back the seat. He sits too upright for it to be this late, swiping through a game or movies or cartoons. As we fly through into the next morning. I wonder if he will ever sleep, but the excitement of content at your fingertips keeps his eight-year-old mind engaged, awake.
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Tilly comfortably asleep, spreads out across my lap and the two seats next to me with a seat belt loosely fastened around her blanket. Her eggplant purple Mary Janes sit at my feet. Why don’t they make those in my size? Benji fast asleep next to dad, dad fast asleep next Benji; just Johnny and I awake, like bookends, with an isle and several sleepy seats between us.
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“Johnny” I whisper shout. “Johnny!”
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The roar of the engines mixed with noise canceling headphones, he doesn’t even orient in my direction in the dark. I give up. Asking a little boy to go to bed when you can’t lay down, but you can watch whatever you want, seems like an impossible task.
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I scroll through my own screen wanting to sleep, but too uncomfortable to drift. Pinned between a perfectly comfortable little four years old, and the excess of our own baggage under the seat.
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I watch the map.
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We fly high over Greenland, mostly ice and mountains as far as I can see in the dark. The windows are tinted with a deep blue, giving the illusion of night. Yet as I stare into the horizon, I see a brilliant red orb rise. “Is that the moon?” I look around to the cabin to see if anyone else is witnessing this brilliance. Sleepers all around.
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There’s no way that’s the moon, it’s far too intense. Is it the sun? How could it be the sun? Have we flown into the next day already? Is the cockpit full of bright sunlight? Can the pilots see the expansive peaks and wasteland below us? Volcanoes? Mountaintops? Fjords? Lakes? Glaciers? What is all of that geology?
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I scan the earth in amazement, as the only witness to the landscape bathed in simulated night and red glow of what should be the moon, but is obviously the sun.
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Real night and real sleep never come.
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“Tea or coffee?” I hear, as the window tint simultaneously simulates the rising of the sun, not an illusion of day, but the bright blue sky, intense round orb of sun and sea stretching into the distance. Johnny is awake still, having a glass of orange juice and enjoying his time in coach as if it were first class. Slowly our other two stars wake to brilliance and smile to greet the morning; happily, adapted to their place above the world.
sandbagging
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Nearly every time it rains and the gutters on the street fill with water, I am reminded of a memory of my mother. You see, my mom has always been an advocate for the environment. She was the first person to enforce in my mind the idea of “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.”
When we were young she had a tower of recycle bins in the garage where we would sort our aluminum, tin, plastic, glass and paper. Glass was on the bottom. Obviously. Once they filled up, she would load them in our Subaru and drive them over an hour to the nearest recycle center in Ogden, Utah. Luckily our Granny and Tia lived there too.
So, like many things, my mom utilized everything to the max. Whether it was wearing our hand-me-down clothes until they were in shreds, packing left overs in old margarine containers, or using scrap computer paper cut into quarters and stapled as note pads. We reused. it. up.
One of mom’s biggest conservation efforts is with water. She informed us that it is likely that we will run out of drinkable water long before we run out of food. Only *3% of water on the planet is fresh water and a sizeable portion of that is frozen in the ice caps. We have always been encouraged not to mistake its convenience with its abundance.
One summer water was scarce. We lived in the high alpine desert of southwest Wyoming, so to keep our Kentucky Bluegrass alive we had to water it supplementally. But why waste such a precious resource on mere aesthetics? Especially on the front lawn. Because of its proximity to the road, you can’t even use it that much.
That summer my mom began rain harvesting water, if you can call it that. But in order to harvest any water, it must rain. She bought sand bags and strategically put them in the gutter at the front of our house. Honestly, they were really annoying. The majority of the time it wasn’t even raining. You had to maneuver around them in order to park on the street and for a 16 year old learning to parallel park, it was not fun.
One blessed day, the sandbags became less of a parking hazard and transformed themselves to serve their one true purpose. The Heavens opened up and in traditional western fashion a raucous thunderstorm took over our corner of the world. The skies were dark and ominous and once they opened up the street began to flood.
It was a beautiful thing to watch. As the water rushed down the street, the U-shapes of the sandbags began to form little lakes. The street edge of the lawn was flooding nicely, however the water didn’t extend to the thirst of the middle.
My sister Melanie and I sat on the couch in our living room as it poured outside. Enjoying the beauty of the storm from the comfort of our roof. Our mom must have been busy doing something elsewhere in the house because at a certain point, she ran upstairs to the coat closet to grab her umbrella and ran outside through the garage without saying a word.
Mel and I were a little concerned because her umbrella was older than either of us and barely opened. Umbrella’s don’t stand a chance in Wyoming wind.
Now we were intrigued. We sat up on the couch peering out the front window. Mom goes running out into the yard with her rust colored, broken, short, un-fully opened umbrella in one hand and a half-cut plastic milk jug in the other.
She runs to the pools forming at the edge of the yard and begins furiously scooping half gallons of rainwater and throwing it to the middle of the lawn. Scoop after scoop, chucking water this way and that. We watch in awe. Her cut-off jean shorts and t-shirt beginning to soak through, but that doesn’t stop her. That lawn needs a drink!
As we kneel up on the couch poised at the window, watching this show intently; our neighbor Dale peers out of her garage, daring to walk into the storm of her driveway to get a better look at what’s going on next door. The look of pure bewilderment is still seared in my memory as she shakes her head and walks back inside.
Like most thunderstorms, it didn’t last long, but the memory of my mom’s dedication to conservation, will last forever.
late nights and white powder ain't what it used to be
Life is funny, you know… in a ha-ha sort of way. Sometimes it folds back on you and it makes you wonder what happened to those times?
You know; the “good ole’ ones.”
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Sleep these days is precious. Once my boys go down, they are like little time bombs, ticking through the few quiet hours of the night. Each second that passes is one second closer to when they go off, disrupting any continuous thought or emotion. But in this solace of congregational, congested, face down, snoring; I write about late nights for my own memory of such times; filled with cleavage for aesthetics rather than sustenance.
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A night in the not so distant past, my friend and realistic confidante and I, sat up talking about the joys of child birth. Cal hasn’t had the privilege of tearing your nether regions for the sake of procreation yet; but she seems intrigued. As a nurse, she aids all women, regardless of race, class, creed or national origin, in the art of holding your nipple like a hamburger and keeping wounds sanitary near feces.
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My births have been fairly textbook; natural, full of breathing and primal meditations. However, my hind end had more trouble than I remember reading about in biology. Anal fissures weren’t discussed to me by my teachers or by ANY of my health care providers, but that didn’t stop it from splitting after all of the pushing for life was accomplished.
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Only one honest friend discussed the horrors of the postpartum ordeal. Her sweet and even tempered voice told tales of flesh being torn apart and the searing pain that accompanies urine in a fresh and bloody wound. Due to her honesty, I developed a rigorous consumption of liquids while in the hospital, to 1) stay hydrated and 2) dilute my pee so much that it almost rinsed my gash rather than contaminate it. With the latter being the more important of course.
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So, this brings me to the evening Cal and I sat up chatting in the lamp light, enjoying adult conversations in the stillness of night, as the time bombs slept. It was late, you know, like 11, so we decided to call it. We quietly brushed our teeth in the bathroom and I walked her out to the kitchen so I could drink my nightly warm glass of Miralax as my bedtime ritual. A mitigation effort that is better than the sharp and shooting pain of that evil little fissure.
I can be honest with Cal. After all, she see’s people in all sorts of states. My honesty can potentially help her with her own regularity postpartum and or help her patients to know that even if you don’t take anything more than IB Profin for pain, you can still end up with a rock in your bowels that doesn’t seem like your own body made it; nor has the capacity to expel it.
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As we stand in the kitchen, mixing my warm laxative cocktail, a light knock at the door is heard. I thought my sister, who had been staying the weekend with us, had possibly locked herself out. So, not thinking, Cal and I answer it; Miralax bottle in hand.
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In the light of the porch stands a beautiful, hip young woman; obviously startled more by our presence than we were of hers. She stammers “is this, uh, something something and uh something else?” We laugh and say no, it must not be; and tell her she should try side street behind the house.
She turns off and into the night, quickly departing.
I look at Cal and she looks back at me, both of us smiling. It’s cute that some young thing thought she was going to a college party and found us instead.
Maybe we could have been the party she was hoping for in years past; instead she ended up on a dark porch talking to two women who were unwilling to share their company or their Costco size bottle of hydro-osmotive laxative.
Late nights and white powder ain’t what it used to be.
not just pie and beer
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Growing up Mormon, I have always known that my ancestors came across the plains in covered wagons. It seemed like everyone’s did the way the church talked about it, but since moving beyond religion, I realize that most did not.
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I remember stories about my great great great grandmother burying her baby on the plains. They buried her under the trail where the wagons traveled, to prevent coyotes from getting her. I remember my mom telling us that they watched for hours as the wagons in their party left and rolled over her baby, knowing they would never see her or this place where she was laid to rest again. Trekking towards what you hope is a better life, not knowing what lies ahead, only knowing what you leave behind.
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As a teenager, we did a pioneer trek on the original trail the Saints took to the Salt Lake Valley. It was southwest Wyoming in July, so the weather was variable. My mom had sewn skirts, aprons, pantaloons and bonnets for my sister and I. She dropped us off at the church early one morning knowing full well that she would pick us up, from the same location, healthy and happy, and all the better for having experienced such a venture.
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Upon arriving they divided us into “families” separating us from our real families in order to rely on others from our church. It was nerve racking; I didn’t really know anyone else from my arbitrary family. What I wanted, was to be with my OWN sister and rely on someone that actually meant something to me, but I could see what they were going for and tried to play along.
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We were assigned a 5lb bag of sugar, that was our newborn baby we called “Butch” we swaddled him, double checked our supply list and headed out to the caravans. In this instance, it wasn’t Calistoga wagons, but suburban’s, vans and trailers that transported our handcart company to the trail.
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The rolling horizon was dry and only ragged sagebrush and sparse tufts of prairie grass filled our eyes. Modern conveniences, transportation, protection and heating left us somewhere east of Fort Bridger, Wyoming. Here in the high alpine desert, the trail, over 150 years later, was still etched into the landscape; two tracks, dead from the thousands of wagon wheels that rolled over them.
Our energy was high as we loaded our handcarts, swaddled our sugar sac babies, and set off on the plains. Smiles and laughter was heard as hundreds of excited youth started our pretend journey. I remember thinking that by the time my great great great grandma got here, her spirits wouldn’t have been so high. We had the advantage of knowing there was an end in sight. Our leaders couldn’t let us die out here. We would spend a few nights under the stars and return safely to the arms of our parents and a hot meal, or so we thought.
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A historic journey re-created with hundreds of youths, and a few brave chaperons. Holding hands and hugging baby Butch tight, we sang hymns of resolve. Our bonnets kept the high elevation sun from our eyes, and we walked in the dust of thousands of pioneers.
We were given sweet jerky and hard tack rations. I wanted to trade another family for peppered jerky, because Sweet is the absolute worst; but instead, I ate it, because it’s part of the game.
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I looked to the horizon as our handcarts stretched along the plains, a long line against the sky. We climbed. The sage greens and light browns of the prairie turned gray, as the sky darkened above us. The clouds closed in, intent on making us feel the pain of our ancestors.
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As we ascended the pass, the pressure built; swirling, blackening. The rain came first; like tears of the past, breaking down our hope and resilience as our crisp bonnets melted and our heavy cotton dresses absorbed the sky. Up we continued, the thunder growling and reminding us of mortality and the fact that our re-creation included metal handcarts, as the lost art of Wheelwrights died with the advent of rubber tires.
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The lightning began to crash all around us, especially at the top of the mountain. I looked to the front of the train, now being grateful I was closer to the back.
Over 8000 feet above sea level, first sleet, then snow. Our long dresses froze, and each icy step hit the back of your legs like metal nails in tender flesh. Screams of terror and distress couldn’t be heard. The Wyoming wind howled the cries of the past and we kept going. What else can you do? It’s 1997 and no one has a cell phone.
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That night as we entered camp, exhausted; we were jubilant to be together. Now in the safety of our wagon circles with the warmth of campfire, we could smile and laugh about our harrowing journey. The dresses dried and we slept under the clear and constantly changing western sky.
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Dawn brought a renewed sense of strength and determination. We had our ration of hard tack and jerky and set out. Our sugar sack died on the trail. We had to bury baby Butch without proper shovels and leave him for the ants; because coyotes don’t have much of a sweet tooth.
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At some point, we passed the area where the Saints split from the Oregon trail and headed toward the Salt Lake Valley. I remember the sky and the horizon where the Y juncture was etched in the trail.
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Metal carts, kids, lightning, it was a liability nightmare; but we were able to taste a moment in history. My bonnet never had the same amount of starch, and the dirt from our skirts had to be hosed off, but we made it through. I now appreciate my choice of jerky, religion and trails hiked for fun.
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Happy Pioneer or Pie and Beer Day!
July 24, 2021
