1918 – 2011

I remember the first time I said a full sentence to her in the language she could understand.

Ich lade Euch herzlich ein, inviting my mother-in-law and wife to lunch, rolling my tongue seven times in my mouth to make sure I got it right the first time.

It was summer, 1997 and we’d just moved to Germany, still waiting for the shipping container to pass the Suez Canal.

Oma went on a lot of our trips back then.  She’d take care of the little red-haired girl while we went off to the sand dunes, or cook up for breakfast when we were still flaked out from overnight duty.

She had a long life.

Born when the First World War was still in its dying months, she became a young wife in the middle of the next, marrying a soldier on home from leave who left for the Russian campaign a week later.

Pushed out of her home in the East by the threat of advancing Russian forces, she carried her first daughter in the middle of winter over streams and borders to arrive in the west and give birth in the dying days of World War II nine months later.

Her soldier husband had no idea of her ordeal, nor did she of what had happened to him.  Nursing a baby girl to her first steps unable to know whether her love still saw the sunrise, flung between the limits of hope and despair without a word one way or another.

Until one day nearly a year-and-a-half later she opened an envelope from the Red Cross, knowing it was either from or about him, afraid to discover what was inside before reading in scratchy script:

My dear wife and daughter,

I now have the great pleasure to give you a sign of life.  I can tell you that I am doing well and am still healthy, and hope you are too.  I wish you all the best and send my most heartfelt greetings.  Yours ever,

It took still another year and a half for him to finally return from a prisoner of war camp on the Caspian Sea near Baku, in present-day Azerbaijan.  She said he’d become a brute in his years of fighting and imprisonment, couldn’t remember at first how to conduct himself in company or at table.

If, from then on, she led a quiet life in the countryside as a wife and mother, it must have been to make up for the way it began.

Her second daughter, my wife, came along a few years later.  At the time they were living with two other families in a house you’d swear wouldn’t fit a childless couple.  But her husband was a carpenter and builder, and they moved 51 years ago into the new house she lived until suffering a stroke and, two days later, passing away the day before Christmas.

Still on my way by train, I was told to take a taxi at the station and go straight to the hospital because there was no time for them to leave her bedside.

Arriving at the hospital I walked up the stairs to the first floor and opened the door to room 201.  She lay peacefully, a red rose placed below her folded hands.  The whole family was there.   I said little, but did what I could to console them one by one.

In this way it was a Christmas like no other for us.  The funeral was held on my wife’s birthday, Christmas dinner – for the first time, just the three of us – on New Year’s Eve.

It’s a time for looking back and looking ahead.

I was chatting the other day with an old friend from Montreal.  She said we’re all at that age when our parents are getting old and dying.

She said: I don’t want to get old.

Nor do I, I said.  But I don’t much like the alternative, either.

Weekend massacre leaves thousands of wasps dead, cherry trees plundered

Thousands of wasps were too stupid to find the exit over the weekend, dying a horrible death by drowning in a trap filled with a mixture of warm water and honey. The wasps entered the trap carefully placed over the entrance to a nest they had built in the garden of Oma’s place out in farming country near Osnabrück, Germany.

“It was a wasp massacre,” said police spokesman Igott Heimweh, “but just looking at them, you just have to shake your head, cuz damn, they’re dumb.  I mean, they flew into the hole at the bottom, OK?  But then they didn’t turn around and fly out.  And once they hit that water, game over. They just flailed around a bit, then drowned.”

The bodies started to pile up almost immediately after the bell-shaped jar filled with sweet, alluring liquid was placed over the nest.  By next morning it was so full of dead or dying insects, it had to be emptied.

“‘Absolutely disgusting,’” one child with red hair was overheard to say as the dead insects were poured out.  “Iggit-iggit.”

The jar is a clever way to kill wasps without using the traditional Canadian methods of bombarding them with chemical insecticide sprays or smashing the nest open with a hockey stick to stomp on the enraged insects with lumberjack boots.

In a related weekend incident, a marauding band of cycling summertime fruitarians plundered Oma’s two nearby cherry trees.  The mostly immobile nonagenarian could merely sit back and watch as the intruders placed an extendable ladder to their upper reaches to gain access to the ripest fruit clustered on the heavily laden branches.

After stuffing as many of the dark, juicy orbs into their mouths as they could in a 48-hour period, the bandits filled their packs and set off on the train again north for an evening of cooking them up with a mixture of sugar and pectin.  Ten jars of the darkest, richest, most delicious cherry jam you will never, ever find on German store shelves are now safely stored in the basement of an undisclosed Hamburg location, to be consumed sometime over the next few months.

Definitions of stress

1. Driving along at normal speed along a two-lane highway with your 90-year-old mother-in-law bundled up in the passenger seat on the way home to Hamburg in the late afternoon when you see a small car pulling out to pass a semi-trailer coming against you and think well since I’ve got the lights on he’ll see me and pull back in behind the truck but then you realise the jerk is actually going to try to pass the semi-trailer with his gutless wonder and just when you think the two of you are going to smash into each other head-on any second you hit the binders and veer off to roll through the rough grass shoulder leaning on the horn and screaming FUCK! WHAT AN IDIOT! as he’s still only half-way past the semi which has also pulled over as far as he can without landing in the ditch and you’re wishing you’d had the presence of mind to get the guy’s license number but of course all you can think of at a time like that is trying to stay on the road to make sure the both of you don’t get killed.

2. The body’s reaction to the mind’s desire to choke the living shit out of some driver who really deserves it.

This site may harm your computer

Waiting for a flight at Hamburg airport early last week I sat down at an internet terminal and was about to drop a coin in before the nice man sitting next to me said, “take mine, I have to go and there are about 25 minutes left on it.”

I thanked him warmly and sat down in his place, immediately typing lettershometoyou into Google to see if I could find Adsense ads on my blog. You’ve probably heard that they’re out there, lurking on every wordpress.com blog. It’s the price you pay for free hosting, and no amount of whining is going to get wordpress to take them off short of your paying them to do so.

Problem is, if you’re logged in to wordpress.com you never get to see them.

So every once in a while I slip into the skin of Joe Regular Blog Lurker to try to find out how Google is making an even greater mess of my blog. Do they stick ads for jock itch powder next to posts about my mother-in-law? Blurbs for psychiatrists next to write-ups about psychos? Tart up my skiing posts with pitches for helmets and handbaskets and other crap I have no use for?

The list of hits Google chucked up had me scrambling for my camera. Not for what they said, but for the public terminal’s net-nanny warning label:

At first I thought they were referring to my blog. After all, even if there are no trojans waiting to ambush the unsuspecting visitor, there is a ton of stuff here people might find harmful. Fake news, accounts of deception and outright lies, denunciations of crap, transcripts of discussions with an underage female child concerning condoms, naked girls in newspapers, death and more death. I don’t know why I haven’t already been hauled before a judge as a menace to society.

Then I realised the warning was all about WordPress.com. How could it not be? The link is to wordpress, not lettershometoyou, which only appears in the description.

Maybe it was just a forewarning, because a few days later I and millions of other unsuspecting WordPress.com bloggers logged on to find our blogging universe turned inside out without so much as a ‘”hey guys, guess what? Big changes coming up tomorrow at 4pm Pacific Daylight Saving Time.”

Did someone at WP central hit publish instead of save by mistake before turning out the lights for the weekend?

I’m sure after a few months this will all die down and we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about, but in the meantime wordpress.com probably is harmful to your computer. Judging by the number of pissed-off entries on the forums, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a youtube video posted of someone throwing a laptop out the window frisbee-style in frustration. I don’t care what it looks like, merely uploading an image, for example, has become a mind-numbing chore, a multi-stepped process where once a couple of clicks sufficed.

This in an upgrade? Sure the savvy bloggers using wp.org had a go at it for a while, but given the huge drop in skill level between those bloggers and duffers like me using wp.com, didn’t they think to test it on a few hundred of us wp.com users who’d never seen it before? They could have run a little sneak-preview contest, choosing a hundred or so bloggers to run it through it paces for a month just to iron the kinks out.

Hell, maybe they did test it out on no-brain bloggers like me, I don’t know, but the way it was released reminds me of the time I bought a new desktop from Dell a few years back. The monitor was a new flat-screen model from the Korean firm LG, back when flat screen meant the surface was flat. The rest looked like an old-style monitor.

Anyway, the first one they sent didn’t work, so I sent it back.

The second one arrived three days later. It didn’t work properly either, so I sent it back, too.

The third one arrived a few days after that, and it didn’t work either.

So I phoned up Dell to complain – not for the first time – and asked them why they couldn’t ship me a monitor that worked. Their response? We can’t test the monitors as they come in, we just ship them along.

Fair enough, I said, but can’t they at least have someone switch it on at the factory? Twist a knob? Tweak a button?

Nööö, too expensive. It’s cheaper to ship them halfway around the world and have the consumer do the testing.

Happy blogging.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

So close, so far apart

My daughter and her Oma spend a lot of quiet time together. I love it that they get along so well and always seem to have something to talk about, even during those times when there’s not much to say or left to do but play checkers for awhile.

But as much as I love to stop and look at the two of them in their calm togetherness, I can’t help thinking that by the very nature of our family, one part of her childhood will always be hopelessly one-sided.

Her German Oma lives only a couple of hours down the Autobahn and comes to visit us regularly, but her Canadian grandmother lives nine time zones and a long, expensive flight away. My mother is turning 85, still fit and active, still drives a car, goes out with friends and takes short trips, but understandably no longer feels up to the exhausting flight to Europe from the west coast of Canada all by herself. She’s made the trek three times in the 10 years we’ve been living in Hamburg, and we’ve flown there four, but now it’s all up to us.

I’d like to be able to offer my daughter what I feel is the best for her, and that includes regular contact with her grandmother. But by the very nature of having a family where grandparents live on opposite sides of the world, on this I fear we are always going to come up short. In contrast to the close, comfortable relationship she has with her Oma, her contact with her Grandma will always be like getting to know one another all over again. She’ll still be the red-haired girl, but each time she’ll have grown and changed into a new version of herself. Depending on mood, the effects of jet lag and any other combination of factors, there’s no guarantee the two of them will ever be able to settle into each other’s company, and after our time’s up and it’s time to go, that’ll be it until the next time.

We’re headed to Canada this year, not just because we want to, but because it really has been too long since she last saw her grandmother. It’s going to be a great trip: a week in Canada, then a wander down the coast of Oregon and California to Los Angeles. There we will stay with a friend of ours, before flying home from LA.

I really don’t know when the next time will be. And in the back of my mind, I’m always wondering: is this time going to be the last?

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Taking for granted what can’t be replaced

Dear all,

I was clicking through a long list of expatriates in Germany the other day and came across a post that touched me deeply.

My mother-in-law had been visiting for a couple of weeks and I must admit we were all getting a bit frazzled with the extra workload someone pushing 90 can bring on. Quite frankly, we were looking forward to her being picked up soon by a relative and brought back home to the countryside. Besides, the inadvertent wheelchair acrobatics were getting to be a little more excitement than I could handle.

Most of the time I am interested in what she has to say, so much so that not too long ago I sat with her with my camcorder rolling and interviewed her, getting her to talk about her family, what it was like growing up, how she was forced to flee her home with a toddler in tow to go live like a refugee, the penury of the war and the years right after, the rebuilding of their lives. I thought that one day, we all might want to have these stories to look back on.

But as with many older people, they get to recounting the same things over and over, and I must admit I have tuned her out a few times over the years.

If you haven’t stumbled upon it already, go and read the post I found.

Update: that blog has been taken down.

I wanted to leave her a comment, but under the circumstances I guess she doesn’t much feel like blogging, because the comment are closed.

So this is my comment to you, island girl:

Your father-in-law sounds like a man whose heart was always in the right place, right to the very end: with the woman he so obviously adored, with the family he cherished. Your writing this has made me think hard about my own family and how we sometimes take for granted what can’t be replaced. Herzliches Beileid.

all for now,

Ian