Call Me Inappropriate

It's our last night in Oxford, and I am hopelessly behind in blogging about this trip, or even trying to make any sense of it. For me, travel is a little like putting your head into a blender, shaking up all the usual routines and perspectives, adding exhaustion and novelty, and hoping some worthwhile mix of insight and inspiration will emerge. It's particularly confusing when I visit my daughter, because I haven't quite figured out my role with her. She looks familiar, but she is so fully absorbed into this other life, so utterly not "my" daughter, that I find myself becoming even more awkward and annoying than usual

."I'm sorry," I tell her, "It's just that you grew up so suddenly."

"No," she says, "I've been growing up for about ten years."

On various occasions she has alerted me to the fact that I behave in embarrassing ways. I am loud, for example, and my sense of humor is not appropriate. Overall, I have been getting very low marks for appropriateness. It's apparently not my strong suit.

But there's a lot of pressure to make everything be wonderful when you've come all this way to see your only child. I guess maybe that pressure backfires.

"You talk to me in the same voice you used when I was five years old," she says.

"But this is my voice! Am I supposed to change my voice?"

"Maybe. And stop staring at me. It's weird."

"I can't help it. You're so beautiful and grown-up and amazing."

"See? That's exactly what I mean."

So I am navigating through these waters, feeling far more fragile than my apparently brash, wince-provoking exterior suggests, but I don't want to add self-pity to the already daunting roster of my unappealing behaviors. I accept my fate: I have become one of those mortifying women-of-a-certain age, and all around me folks are probably rolling their eyes. Oh, well.

We've had some good times together, too...country walks, a day in London, errands in town. Picnic lunches. Laughter. I will write about some of our sojourns in England a little later.But first, I want to backtrack and talk a little about Berlin, where Monte and I spent about a week. It is a place I never imagined I would go to, or even cared to go to, but it was fascinating. One of my best friends, Cornelia, lives there for part of every year. She was a great companion and translator, and it was amazing to see her in this context. We talked a lot about the painful history of the place, impossible to ignore.

Even the apartment where we stayed had one of those small brass markers embedded in the sidewalk out front with the name of a Jewish woman (Irma Lowenstamm) who used to live there, the date of her birth (1896) and when she was taken away to be murdered (January 19, 1942).

We went to places of sorrow...the old Jewish cemetery, for example, and the new Holocaust memorial, 2,711 unmarked stone slabs of various sizes on 205,000 square feet of uneven, undulating ground, reminiscent of a cemetery or a labyrinth, poignant and overwhelming in its anonymity and scale. It is disconcerting, mournful, moving. Unfortunately, we were distracted by children jumping from stone to stone, running around noisily, and playing hide and seek. I guess I can understand the temptation to a child who doesn't know the meaning, but shouldn't parents teach kids to be quiet and respectful in some places? Maybe it 's the school teacher in me, but if I knew German, I might have said something to them, gently...something about appropriateness. (Would that have been appropriate?)

But our wanderings in Berlin were not all somber. We enjoyed seeing the modern architecture and vitality of the Potsdamer Platz quarter, and the stretch of The Wall covered in murals - the East Side Gallery, a symbol of oppression that has been transformed into an expression of freedom. We had a long, lazy lunch with Cornelia in a sidewalk cafe, bought straw hats at a flea market, and witnessed the joys of a city park on the first summer-like day.

One night Monte and I got to talking to a local couple who happened to be sitting next to us in a restaurant (in English, of course...I am constantly embarrassed when I travel about my American monolingualism) and they invited us to come to their house a few days later for "kaffee und kuchen". They were so hospitable and interesting! The woman, Daniela, was a journalist, and Roland did something having to do with public relations for health care for the elderly...they had a beautiful home with very shiny wood floors, and shelves and shelves of books. I urged them, when we said our good-byes, to come visit us in California, and they said, well, it's a very long trip, and we don't really have a reason to go there, so we probably never will.

Cornelia laughed when I told her this; she said it's a very German kind of frankness. They don't as readily entertain those vague and grandiose invitations for visits that are unlikely to materialize. And they don't assume we are going to be lifelong friends because we had coffee and cake with them.

But I say you never know.And now we are back in England, talking about which bus we should take to the airport tomorrow, and what time Miranda has to leave for work, and all the awful details of good-bye. When I get back home, I'll add more pictures and I'll write about some of our adventures here in England.

Right now, I am feeling sort of shaky and sad, and I am going to give my daughter a hug and tell her I love her...probably in the same voice I used when she was five years old.

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