from the mouths of babes

Working at a Montessori kindergarten, I write down LOTS of observations. I record trends that are troubling (like a certain child's sudden pliability and tendency to do whatever another child suggests) or spates of bullying and what-not. We also have language booklets. We record full sentences or sentence fragments that the children accomplish in one of the three foreign languages. I, however, like to record some sentences in the children's mother tongues, as well. A rant of one of our students that is quite clearly the parroting of a parent ("weisch, Ich will nüüt zu der neue Schule geh, ich ha'zu viel zu tun, und s'wäre noch eiz umfahrt.": "'ya know, I don't even wanna go to the new school, I've got so much to do and it'll only be another detour to take."), or something so damn cute I don't wanna forget it ("America is like cookies, it's the best, but you can't have it every day.")
My colleague and I have argued about which things the children have come up with themselves. The only ones we can agree on are when the children are role-playing and imitating the teachers. This is never a proud moment for us. I cringe when one of the girls announces that she is Jessy. "Alright. That's enough!" "I don't like that kinda talk" "Calm down!" They are pitch-perfect and simplify my role in their lives to an embarassing degree.

Ivo came hiking yesterday with the kids, and I found myself parroting my parent. "We're almost there! Just a little further!" That is parroting a parent. We had he best time. I was a little cheerleader when those with shorter legs complained. Ivo was a pedestrian rickshaw when he heard their complaining. He came up with the "let's throw stones in the river!" idea when one of our more frequent criers fell down and got a boo-boo. He spoke in everyone's own language, which raised the question "Why do you speak Italian?" in Italian from Arianna, our Italian students.

Arianna's rather forthright blathering in English and German is often quite priceless. A few examples:
"A man came to visit. He doesn't have pretty teeth like ours."
"When you go to Rome you can eat anything you want and sleep all morning." (This in response to our asking for advice for our trip to Rome this weekend.)
"St. Nicholas is old and ugly and smells and I don't like him. I think he eats children."
"Ich liebe Ivo, ganz einfach."

This is interesting, as St. Nicholas, this year, was played by Ivo. She doesn't know this. Her mother tried to explain that her opinion of St. Nick may be because she has a beard phobia. This, Arianna has not parotted.
In her ever-honest way, Arianna's new found love, Ivo was honored in her art work today. She wanted to make a thank you card for Ivo and drew big hearts and "Ivo" and "love" all over the place.

Feelin' pretty good about my man. Because, let's face it, I do say "Alright! That's enough!" quite a lot.

bros

Above the door to my toilet hangs a sign:
"Ivo Gets More Ass Than Toilet Paper"
A testament to bros.
The other sign that was traded for this one on the evening of Ivo's bachelor party is less useful in the home. "Pleitch mich. Ich brüch's hart"

At Upenn, I gave an assignment to help warn students of the siren song of projected statistics. Anthropologist must not make the mistakes of sociologists. We know that one needs time and patience to truly understand human behavior and that a certain behavior can not be called "norm" without both time and patience. The students understood my point quite quickly. I asked them to write their findings for a normal year in a place that they had only visited once, for a short time. A student who had recently and unexpectedly transferred from Toulane University, wrote about his findings in Philadelphia. "Typical Philadelphians spend evenings sleeping in doorways". His classmate, who'd only been at Toulane two days before being transferred due to Katrina used a typical Statistical formula to declare that Louisianna's Gulf Coast region received an average annual rainfall of 37 feet.


If I were to use projecting statistics after tonight, I would question the theory that "bros come before hos". I would note bros hanging one another from trees in superman costumes, bros dressing up another of their bros in pink tu-tus and blond wigs, while wearing t-shirts saying "RIP Lukas".
While siting for a long while at a tram connection, one bro was holding his bro's hood as the latter vomited. I can only assume the former bro was going the extra measure, eating a bratwurst. This seemed, to me, to say "Don't worry bro, I don't mind. In fact, I mind so little I still have an appetite. I have so much appetite in fact, that I can eat while you yak."
So, which is the control group? Which is the exception? Are bros uncommonly cruel or super there for each other?
The two solid conclusions I can find at least, are that a lot of weddings are happening this month in Zürich and this leads to conclusion 2 being that this results in insanely heavy drinking.

by a nose

I often joke that Ivo as the sense of smell of a pregnant woman. Last fall he came home with a story of olfactory dejavu which is typical of him. Someone at the university had attempted to mask some heavy drinking with peppermint's and the au de alcoholism had tapped into an old association from years past.

I heard somewhere that smell is the sense most closely linked to memory. I wish I had understood that earlier in life. I wish that I had a way of bottling those smells which most comforted me as a child. On second thought, I seem to remember my favorite smells, as a child, being gasoline and fresh cigarette smoke. As it is, I delight in finding an old familiar smell and procuring it somehow. Like when my sister kissed me the first day I tried using Pond's face cream and she was struck with a memory of our dead grandmother. This same grandmother is evoked, for me, when I smell that kind of Listerine that is yellow and burns worse than bourbon.

I wish I knew the name of my father's old cologne. I don't know if he only wore it at work or not, but I remember him smelling of it strongly in his dress whites. I have a memory of meeting him at the airport, his clothes miraculously still appeared fresh-pressed. He grinned and from beyond the airport arrivals barrier, stretched his arms out and wiggled his fingers. When he'd passed the small gates and placed his large bag on the floor, I'd taken his big white navy hat with it's black patent-leather brim and gold band. I drank in his smell.

Years later, after doing some obligatory service time with the navy, though he'd moved on to another career, I was staying with his wife and small son. We didn't meet him at the airport. Nevertheless, as he came in, he had the same arrival smile sans far away stretched out arms. I smelled his cologne and in a Pavlovian way, awaited his hat on my now larger head. The cologne deceived me, however and the hat tipped and wobbled over the fat cheeks of my half-brother who took it and ran away clumsily.

Years later, I was invited for a weekend with my father and a woman he was seeing, to Cape Cod. I was older and living with a boyfriend. My father was separated and no longer had a navy hat to give. I drank a glass of wine and felt very old and very strange. I was an adult child, a new role with my father. I felt confident, but something else was different, which made me uneasy. I couldn't name this change, nor could I adjust to it's newness. On our second night, all of us freshly showered and preparing for dinner, my father emerged from the bathroom.
"Your cologne!!!" I nearly shouted.
"Do you like it?" asked the woman he was seeing. She smiled brightly. "I bought it for him."
"very clever." I thought. Is there any better was to eliminate any immediate remembrance
of a life before you, than to eliminate the smell of that life?

I don't often wear perfume nowadays. After quitting smoking, I was less self-conscious of my smell. The smell of smokers in trams give me no pining or reminiscence of my old life as a smoker. For that matter, the smell of folks in Zürich trams in general is something to which I've become accustomsed. I like the smell of Zürich and hope that someday it will smell like home.


People ask if I get homesick and I list small things that I miss before concluding that, no, I am not. That's not to say never. When I smell someone grilling and think on my Philly neighbors and their competing marinades for baby back ribs. When I smell the Swiss version of Mexican restaurants. The worst, however, is when I've been swimming in the Zürich lake. A navy kid from the Ocean State, I take my freshly-dried hair before my face and smell - - nothing. That is when I miss "home".

morning cat

I don't like to chat in the morning. I find the question "how did you sleep" immeasurably offensive. I have a routine of meditation stretching and coffee drinking which I must follow before introducing myself slowly to the world. Not so, for my husband.
There was a time when I believed that intruders were in our home, or that my husband was cultivating some gam radio hobby only in the early hours of the morning. I later realized my husband's voice, in all it's conversational tones, was being addressed to our Cat, Deliah. To hear him properly may give one a migraine. At least at those times when he appears to be trying to reason with her. He'll even ask her what it is that he has done, pressing more times than is polite for someone with the understanding that she can and will not be answering back. Sometimes, I begin to feel a bit guilty about this. The pleading anthropomorphising seems to be really saying "Where is my proper consersation partner? Wher is she? Come here?"
This said I was astonished to hear that he had pushed our cat's nose into her urine when it lay outside the box. I was surprised because he normally seems so keen on talking it out with the poor cat (in the background I mock his ideas of feline dicipline). She'll be batting pens, notes and computers off of his computer or any surface that may support them and Ivo will say in a playful tone "Deliah! Mach das bitte nüüt." Seeming to plead with this animal, who I always thought must understand only English.
The real proböem with the nose-to-urine shove was the location. The cat had trotted into the shower (located conveniently next to her litter box) and, instead of drinking from the tap or puddles as per usual, took a piss. For my liking, an easily washable surface like a tub is much better than, say, a carpet or the corner of a closet. I mean, I get the message of "hey! don't pee outside the box" and all, but this was no such commentary. This was Deliah's favorite gossip-partner, the man who sings songs about breakfast time and explains in three paragraphs why we don't play with pens, grabbing the creature and directing her head.
Ivo seemed annoyed by my lack of outrage that the cat had "made" in the shower. Between bites of cereal I asked "had you just peed in the shower?"

am I a slouch?

I always thought that I was no slouch. That I was aware and empathetic. Not so, I have come to discover. I read my paper and hear my podcasts and consider myself informed. I know what the gas prices are in middle America and what the milk costs in New York and DC. I know that the nations of the world met over pasta with cream of pumpkin and shrimps. Yet, things still don't touch me in the same way as when it's more obvious.
Naple's trash slash mafia issues recently came to the fore-front of my social-life. At a family-function, my brother-in-law's girlfriend wasn't there because she was working with German trash-removers to figure out how they could get involved there.
Disgustingly more personalized was the petrol-strikes in Europe. I bike, I buy local and heat is included here, so I am not too often aware of gas problems here. Like most other nations, Swiss government taxes upwards of the equivalent of 5 dollars American, to every gallon of gas. (Of course, we buy it by the liter, here, though.) I knew that trucks were blocking ports and highways on the continent, but I wasn't directly effected until my morning grapefruit. I like a grapefruit. I enjoy a grapefruit. I buy grapefruits from either Italy or Spain. Israeli grapefruits don't interest me. Nor so those from South Africa. The world is suffering for hunger and I realize that when I refuse a grapefruit from another continent, my morning is not empty. I was, however keenly aware of the petrol-problems of Europe the other day when I read the produce sign "Grapefruit U.S.A" USA?! This is not my Switzerland! What the hell are they doing shipping grapefruits from the states?
Every morning that I am without a grapefruit I feel like a small and selfish woman. I miss that grapefruit, I do. What the hell? I drink my coffee and eat an apple and think "you lucky bastard. You comfortable weich Ei."
I want to do something. What should I do? How should I mobilize? How do I help. I've never felt more guilty, than I do without my sour puss.

Euro cup

Today I went for a lovely little walk around a lovely little lake in a lovely little nearby outskirt of Zürich. I went to the train station to do some food shopping and realized that, thanks to the Euro-Cup and our plethora of visitors, the small supermarket on the way home is open on Sundays this month.
Last night we needed to get to the Kulturmart really early in order to get places for the free public-viewing. As I was walking to the Theater, I realised that the people that I was seeing through restaurant and bar windows were probably settled where they would remain for the first Swiss games. Anyone strolling in the street was pretty much guaranteed not to be watching the game that night, unless it was in the comfort of their own home.
This afternoon, I was walking in my neighborhood and saw, and heard, that most Swiss sports fans were yet again cloistered away. This time it was far earlier and this time it had nothing to do with the ill-fated Frei or his teammates. The shouts issuing from my neighbors windows were too early to have anything to do with the soccer match tonight in Austria. It was Roger Federer's loss in the French Open that left these typically nature-loving natives indoors this afternoon.
Will sporting events this summer lead to ill health in Switzerland?
Stay tuned to find out.

ja! kinder und kultur

Today, while running errands, stymied by Bodum's rennovation and, in general slowed by tourists, I noticed that throughout the city were pockets of teens and young ones, playing music.
It is not as if music is never played in the streets of Zürich. Indeed, visiting fans of the Euro will be greeted by busking accordian and guitar players (though, if these musicians are in the "Fan Zone" their earnings will probably only be spendable on Coke and Carlsburg products) What surprised me was how many they were and how young they were. Finally, I stopped to get a closer look. A young group were just beginning a beautiful piece, all of them playing violin, in various levels of ability. They each had a sign on their music stand that said "JA!"
At first I thought that these sweet young musicians were just positive people. It was actually in that exact square when my path crossed the laughing day parade a few weeks ago. (I believe that I have already blogged about this unsettling group that march through the city forcing themselves to laugh the whole way.) A moment later my question was answered as two women approached me with clipboards and pamphlets and information on how I can vote in order to help these children recieve more funding for music instruction in their schools.
I shall now admit a guilty secret. Typically, when I am approached by anyone in the street with a clipboard and pamphlets I respond in my best Southern American accent "Ah'm sorry. Ah'm not from around here." his time, however, I took the information and thanked them for their efforts. The rest of my boring Saturday tasks had a lovely soundtrack and I was pleased.
Later, when speaking to my mother and describing it, I said "They were playing to stop the government taking away funding for music programs." I then needed to correct myself. That wasn't right. Their music stands had told us to vote "ja" on the proposition, afterall. I realized that in my american mind, I had instantly and automatically rebuilt the situation to fit what is now normal in the states. This idea of the arts as being irrelevant, when funding is concerned.