Day 9: Puddles without a Splash

This morning was another test of will. I awoke to the thundering of heavy rain on my window and had to overcome the comfort of my bed and force myself out the door. I took the first step with my umbrella in hand, but immediately turned and set the umbrella back in the house. There are few things as refreshing and liberating as an unshielded walk in the rain. It acts as a baptism of sorts, cleansing us of all the seriousness and stress of adulthood, allowing that inner child societal norms have so suppressed to take over for an instant.

The pouring rain echoed from the rooftops and clanged into the gutters, filling the streets with a hypnotic sound. To add to the effect, the trees danced in the wind illuminated by tiny droplets hanging from each branch reflecting the streetlights. I felt like an unwelcomed guest to some great midnight ball.

Soon I crossed paths with the early morning paper lady, sporting her bright yellow jacket and headlamp, and realized I wasn’t the only one joining in on nature’s frolic. Remembering my own days as a paperboy, I doubted whether she was enjoying the rain as much as I was. What for me was a great blessing must have been to here an even greater burden.

The puddles blanketing the streets continued to tempt me to jump in, to splash around while no one was looking, but my slippers and flannel pajama pants begged me to act my age. Not to mention that by this time I was soaked and starting to get a little cold.

Unfortunately I allowed reason to persuade passion and I passed the puddles without a splash. Oh, how often rationality spoils a good time!

Mormonism 101

Although I've created this blog mainly to highlight my and others' creative work, I post this to make up for all the times I've floundered while explaining my faith to an academic audience. Elder Holland does an excellent job of summarizing the core beliefs of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Day 8: The Flagless Flagpole

As I walked out this morning I inhaled the refreshing, recognizable air of home. There’s something about being home that makes you always long for vacation, but there’s something about vacation that always makes you long for home. By the end of the week in Hamburg, I couldn’t wait to get back home to my own bed and my own messy apartment. This morning's scent of home persuaded me to re-walk a familiar route instead of charting one anew.

This morning was not as silent as usual. Spring weather has reintroduced the medley of avian arias as countless birds flutter about their morning business. Their songs transformed the mysterious darkness, which is also beginning to brighten with each new day, into a more cheery mood.

I passed the familiar cigarette butts, the trusting house with open shudders—each window now has a crack or a hole from some non-neighborly passerby shielded by the other homes' upgraded, roll-down shutters. I continued past the burned out garage. The scent of burning has vanished. The garage now stands as a ruin. I strode down to Main Street, turned left towards the bakery to see the middle-aged woman tirelessly kneading the dough for the neighborhood’s breakfast. Everything was just as I had left it.

One object on my well-trodden trail, however, stood out to me: a flagless flagpole.

It is curious how new experiences make you more aware of things you have otherwise overlooked. It's like learning a new word that you were sure you had never heard before. Once you have learned the word it seems to pop up everywhere. While in Hamburg, I asked my old friend why Germans seldom fly their national flag? Unlike in the United States, in Germany you can search all day to no avail for a business flying the German flag. And it is almost impossible to discover a private residence with such outward patriotism. He told me the answer is simple; before and during WWII, Germans were forced to fly their flag. Germans could be punished for not flying a flag. My friend told me of his grandfather, who did not support the regime and thus did not raise its fabric symbol of servitude. One day a knock came on the door and the police scolded the old man for having a flagless flagpole. My friend’s grandfather simply replied, rather than announcing his death-sentence disdain for their practices, that he did not have the money to purchase a flag. The police disappeared back into their patrol vehicle and returned a moment later with a flag. They attached it to the pole and raised it themselves, announcing “Now you have no excuse!”

As a result of coerced patriotism, this and millions of flagless flagpoles throughout Germany stand as a defiant symbol of their freedom to not fly a flag.

Day 7: Stelle, Germany - A Morning at the Museum

As I mentioned yesterday, last week I inadvertently went without the Internet and without walking. I was visiting an old friend in Stelle, a quaint town just across the Elbe from Hamburg. My friend is a 72-year-old divorced, lonely, extremely German man, whom I hadn’t seen for six years. During the 6½ hour train ride, I just hoped that we would still be the friends we once were. 

When we arrived at his apartment, he showed me to my room, then my wife and daughter to theirs. I asserted that we could all sleep in the same bedroom and wondered where he would sleep in his two-room apartment. He said not to worry about it, which I soon realized meant he was sleeping a few floors down in his neighbor's extra room. Every night he left us alone in his apartment, walked down a few flights of stairs, and appeared the next morning with a bag of fresh breakfast Brötchen. It was quite the accommodation. The only problem was that he never left us the key to his apartment, so we were trapped from 9pm to 9am, hence my inability to walk.

Although I took advantage of sleeping in a little longer than usual, one morning I did wake up early to my daughter’s hungry cries. My wife took over as those cries always demand and I decided to go exploring rather than going back to bed. I know it sounds strange to go exploring through somebody else’s apartment, but his apartment was really more like a museum with a couple of beds and thus invited inspection. In our bedroom the walls were covered with paintings and the bookshelves were lined with aged manuscripts and antique organ music to be played on his old-fashioned pump organ and his custom built pipe organ. He later told me that this organ is his most prized possession.

Though the keys remained motionless, it seemed to accompany my exploration with a distant dirge. 

As I exited the bedroom and entered the living room, I realized why. The walls and floor were decorated with Testamized animals. (After viewing the commercial I posted a couple weeks ago, I think it’s time, in this year of verbification in the sports world—Jimmer and Tebow—to verbify Chuck Testa.) I first saw this fawn packed into the bookshelf.

It’s hard to imagine that it looked so calm while being hunted. And if so, it is hard to imagine the mentality that would pull the trigger. As I turned toward the center of the room, a similar, sickening image caught my attention, two foxes, mother and child.

My friend affectionately calls them Max and Moritz. The bullet wound in the kit’s back was still visible. Directly above the dining table, two owls peered down at me with their hypnotizing eyes, attesting to the violent scenes that have been transformed into decorations.

The owls’ eyes seemed to force mine to the floor where I found a bearskin rug. I crouched down to examine its face.

Its plaintive features made me fear the hunter more than the hunted.

The animals were only one of many displays in my friend’s living room exhibit. The shelves were covered with statues, fine china, mementos from a lifetime of traveling the world, and relics from both World Wars.

The furniture encasing the artifacts was an exhibit in itself.

The walls were covered with art encased in the most decorative frames from artists around the world. His favorite and my wife’s too, was this English painting.

My friend calls her his girlfriend and his only complaint is that she seldom returnes his affection.

As I returned to my room, I ruminated over the tendency of man to prove his mastery over all other forms of life. It must be a distortion of that same tendency that pushes man to prove his mastery over mankind. Perhaps it is my recent transcendentalist readings that persuade me to argue that fulfillment comes through pursuing a mastery of self. A course of self-mastery would also prove effective in curing man’s propensity to collect substitutes rather than substance, to collect Max and Moritzes rather than real friends table, to collect artwork rather than one capable of reciprocal affection. It would do us good to seek self-mastery and substance rather than others and substitutes.

Earworm of the Week: The National - Start a War

After a week of inadvertently going without the internet, I'm back with a smooth tune, and I'm afraid it won't be out of my head anytime soon. I'll be back tomorrow with another walk.

Day 6: Windows and Wars, Sheetrock and Cement

This morning was the first morning I woke up feeling already alive. It usually takes me a block or two to really wake up. Perhaps my body is finally catching on. I walked out the door to a welcoming sight of dew-covered, rather than snow-covered cars. 

Along the sidewalks, I noticed daffodils beginning to shoot up out of the thawing ground. Soon a thousand tiny trumpets will announce the season’s arrival.

Around the first corner, a pile of yellow garbage bags signaled that today is the pick-up day for plastics.

Here in Heidelberg we separate our garbage into paper, plastic, glass, bio, and the rest. It’s quite the process and I often get mixed up, but I agree with the underlying initiative. I often worry, however, about the effectiveness vs. image ratio. Because going green has become such a status maker, such an image maker, I worry that corporations are coming out the greatest beneficiaries.

A sudden iciness came over my bare legs as the morning dew turned into a morning mist. There was no rain, but the air became wet like the rising mist of some distant waterfall.

I noticed a street sign at the next corner that reminded me of a recent vacation to Salzburg.

We were driving circles around the city trying to find our hotel when my Mom pointed to a similar sign and said, “I think we passed this sign already.” We all laughed as I explained that the sign means one-way street.

Down the street to the right, I spotted a house that has been being worked on for months. The renovation has finally become visible, a set of new windows. 

I’m sure, or at least I hope, more renovations took place inside, but the windows themselves must have been quite the project, having had to literally cut the windows out of the cement and then refill the excess void with cement blocks. Germans often criticize American construction for being out of wood and Sheetrock, vulnerable to tornadoes, fires, and floods. It makes perfect sense, coming from a people whose history has been a constant cycle of destruction and reconstruction with each war, to seek security. Coming from a less war-stained background, a part of me still prefers the mobility and re-moldability of wood-framed houses over lock down security. I’m afraid the day may come, at the rate we’re going, that I too will prefer cement. I hope not.

Down the street a few houses from the new windows, a little farmhouse, nestled between cement houses reminded me of how life was before war, before streetcars and stoplights, before roll-down shutters and car alarms, before cement facades hid the classic wood.

Now typing on my laptop, inserting digital images, and posting the outcome for the whole world to see, my sometimes excessive use and enjoyment of modern luxuries contradicts the inner longing for yesteryear this remnant farmhouse awakes. The Art of Walking is reminding me to maintain a balance.

Earworm of the Week

I don't know what it is about Monday mornings, but I almost always wake up with a song in my head. They are always the most unexpected songs: songs I haven't heard for years, songs I wish I had never heard, and some of my all-time favorites. I usually end up singing these songs around the house all week until my wife also begins to unconsciously hum along. This week's was both a song I haven't heard in a while and an all-time favorite. Enjoy!