Category: Life

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Le Halloween

Halloween is the one day each year when I miss my home in North America more than any other. Halloween in Europe reminds me that I am a stranger in a strange land.

Halloween is about empowerment. Kids are encouraged to be someone else, to ask boldly of strangers. By contrast, two teenagers stood on our doorstep in Belgium some years ago. They were dressed as bedsheet ghosts, the lamest of costumes.  They mumbled “Tricks or Treats”. Clearly novices. I gently pointed out that (a) I had no candy, because (b) it was October 29th so, wrong night, and (c) it was technically the singular, Trick or Treat, no “s”. But they only spoke Flemish. So things sort of broke down at that point. I gave them some apples. We looked awkwardly at one another through the eye-holes in their sheets before they wandered off.

Halloween is about excess: mountains of candy, over the top decorations, sugar-induced meltdowns. These are not only tolerated, but celebrated. Europeans are just hardwired not to go there. Tonight we placed our jack-o-lantern and a bowl of candy at the far end of our long Swiss laneway. Several times this evening I walked out to replenish the bowl. I need not have bothered. Apparently each Swiss child only took one candy each. Only one item from an unsupervised bowl of free candy? Come on! That would NEVER happen at home. Where I come from, this is what happens.

Halloween is about being unselfconscious, both for kids and parents alike. But our Euro-neighbors never let it all hang out. They stand together in svelte black slacks eating canapé and sipping wine while their kids circulate politely around the neighborhood. By contrast, my neighbor in Maryland used to rig a microphone to a speaker hidden in the pumpkin at the end of his driveway. As trick-or-treaters approached his home, to their delight the pumpkin would comment on their wonderful costumes. But in the spirit of unselfconscious excess, this neighbor also hit the booze pretty hard on Halloween. As the night progressed, the talking pumpkin became more belligerent. Alas, no drunken pumpkins in Europe.

Halloween is an intoxicating mix of fun and fear. At the consulate in Switzerland, Marines in camo hide in a darkened hallway that leads to the family Halloween party-room. They step out of the shadows as families pass down the hall. The result is lots of screams and more than one soiled unicorn costume. Take that, Geneva Convention!

I truly love living in Europe. But on Halloween, I miss my home.

 

Bonus – This just in from stateside friends as this blog post went to press: I had to stop tricks or treatsing early this year because I spilled my red wine all over the head and back of my youngest in her stroller. Don’t worry, the Asian costume makers didn’t use cotton, so the polywhateveritwas fabric didn’t absorb the red wine. Add that to the fact that the costume was way too big for her anyways, and that magic means she can wear it again next year! Woot!!! I’m totally winning at this parenting gig, let me tell you!

 

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

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The Goat

The goat was not happy about being tied to the roof rack of our Jeep. But we had no choice. It would be culturally unthinkable for our Ugandan landlord to refuse such a gift from his home village, (see “The Village”).

The poor goat began to kick and bleat as we drove down the dirt track leading away from the village. Each time a hoof thumped down on the Jeep’s roof my wife and I would jump. Our infant daughter would quicken the pace of her thumb sucking and stare upward, wide-eyed. Our landlord carried on as if nothing unusual at all was taking place.

We eventually approached the end of the dirt track. I slowed the Jeep to merge with the paved road. As I did, a cascade of goat urine washed down our front windscreen. If you have spent time around goats you can well imagine the smell. Not good.

We mouth-breathed our way back to town until reached the apartment. The gardener opened the gate. His eyes lit up as he saw the goat: a Ugandan laborer might eat meat once a week, if that.

The gardener, soon joined by the other labourers at the apartment compound, untied the goat and led it away. We knew what was coming next. We bade our landlord good evening, happy to no longer be accomplices in his goat caper.

But we were wrong. An hour later the doorbell rang. We opened the door and there stood our landlord’s housekeeper, Margaret. In her hands was a large shopping bag dripping blood with a hoof protruding from the top. In his generosity, the landlord had kept a quarter of the goat, given us a quarter of the goat, and given the remaining half to the staff. There was no way we could refuse.

Thinking quickly, my wife noted to Margaret that (a) we had no experience in how to carve up goat meat and (b) we did not have a freezer in which to keep it. Margaret kindly offered to butcher our share of the goat for a small fee. The landlord generously cleared some space in his freezer for us.

The next day Margaret brought us a small bag of frozen, cubed goat meat.  We cooked it for dinner. It tasted like the bottom of a shoe. No doubt it was our cooking, but I also suspect this was one tough old goat. It had lived a hard life in the village. After we choked down a few mouthfuls, we gave up.

Each morning for the next week or so, Margaret brought a new delivery to our door. She would then ask how we enjoyed the goat from the previous day. Of course we lied.

In reality, each day I was smuggling frozen goat meat off our compound in my computer bag. I was giving the meat to the laborers on the construction site where we worked. They shared it between them, then carefully wrapped the precious meat in newspaper to take home in the evening for their families.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

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Clark Kent

“Yep, that woman was tied to the bed without a stitch of clothing on. And the feller was unconscious on the floor, dressed up in a Superman suit. Damndest thing.”

Bob made this pronouncement in the lunch room of the university where I had a summer job cutting grass. Bob was my boss and a legend among the summer workers. The other full time employees were rude and insecure. Bob was humble and at peace with himself. The other men were vulgar; Bob was a gentleman. The other men never bothered to know your name; Bob made a point to know everyone.

He was also a legend because of his many quirks. He always clenched a pipe in his teeth, but he never smoked it. He hummed a distinctive three bar tune that he had made up. It went: hiiiiiii, hiiiiiii, hiiiiiiiiiiiiiii… It was in a minor chord and totally infectious. Most of us hummed that tune by summer’s end. And Bob only mowed grass in top gear. As he approached a tree at warp speed, his eyes would widen like headlights. Clamping down on the pipe, he would screech into a corner with the mower, barely avoiding catastrophe.

Bob had simple interests. He had been cutting grass at the university for 40 years. We took him for milkshakes on his birthday and you would have thought he won the lottery. He was devoted to his mother and to his childhood best friend, Nelson, who still lived on his street. He spent his evenings with Nelson on the front porch, eating Hostess cupcakes.

It was precisely from this location one evening that Bob and Nelson heard a woman screaming for help from somewhere on their street. They got up to investigate. When they located the house from which the screams were coming, it was locked. Bob got a ladder and he and Nelson went up through an upstairs window. They entered the bedroom and there was indeed a naked woman tied to a bed and an unconscious man in a superman suit.

Nelson covered the woman with a blanket and went about loosening her bindings. Bob called an ambulance. Apparently, as Clark Kent had leapt from the dresser to rescue Lois Lane he had misjudged the ceiling height and knocked himself out cold.

Bob finished his story. No embellishment. No sense of irony. The entire lunch room sat in silent awe. “Yup” said Bob, “Damndest thing. Well let’s get to ‘er”. He stood up, ground the pipe into his mouth, and headed out to his riding mower humming hiiiiiii, hiiiiiii, hiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

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The Wedding

My most memorable wedding experience (other than my own) included the following epic ingredients: a beautiful lakeside terrace battered by gale force winds; the groom’s hippy friends smoking pre-nuptial weed in the corner;  a cultural disconnect between the bride’s estranged East Indian and Jewish family members; and strafing helicopters.

The Jewish grandmother kicked things off with a rendition of “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof. She was accompanied by an East Indian teenager on electric guitar. But with the wind absolutely ripping off the lake they could not actually hear one another. So she sang mournfully while he played unrelated minor chords, completely out of time with her. They finished the song about 20 seconds apart.

The Jewish family members nodded in cultural solidarity. The East Indian contingent was respectful, but wary. The hippies gazed into space, fully baked and lost in the deep meaning of the song.

Then came the wedding vows. The bride first shared some thoughtful verses, barely audible above the wind. Then the groom produced a piece of paper and read the following:

“Wherever I am, there’s always Pooh,
There’s always Pooh and Me.
Whatever I do, he wants to do,
“Where are you going today?” says Pooh:
“Well, that’s very odd ‘cos I was too.
Let’s go together,” says Pooh, says he.
“Let’s go together,” says Pooh.”

The Jewish contingent sat in shocked disbelief. The baffled East Indians mouthed the words “Pooh?” to one another in a futile attempt to understand what was being said. Several hippies wept, moved by the timeless wisdom of Winnie the Pooh and by the effect of narcotics.

Several helicopters from the nearby festival grounds then began to buzz the terrace like a scene from Apocalypse Now. Chairs were scattered. The wedding officiant had to yell above the roar as they passed overhead. The men holding the corner poles of the Jewish wedding canopy hung on for dear life.  Finally, the rings were exchanged and love won the day.

It was later discovered that the young ring bearer had head lice, which he passed on to the entire wedding party.

This story is dedicated to Glen and Mark, whom we met last week at a lovely family wedding.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

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Uni Year 1: The British Student

Guest Post, written by the site curator, Eloise. 

After Year 1, I am ready to present my findings on the creature that is the first year university student in the UK. Putting this into several categories, I’d like to share the amazing things I have learnt about the people who live in the country of my birth after infiltrating their ranks.

First: Issues of Health

University means moving to a new place, with new people and new DISEASES. The first week of Uni is ‘freshers week’, and is followed by ‘freshers flu’. To some, this is a code for a particularly horrific hangover that hangs over you like a ghost for over 48 hours. Like a mix of jetlag, a migraine and a fever, the stricken students do not attend the first few days of class (which teachers note with amusement). For the rest of us, freshers flu means the flu – but the worst version of it. A slow building disease that you watch take out your house mates one-by-one, awaiting your fate. My neighbour had it a week before me, and I used him to gauge how badly I would be hit. I was optimistic, seeing as he seemed mostly okay.

I was not okay. In a flat of 8 people, 3 of us were coughing so hard we coughed up blood. It was horrific. But did any of us go to hospital? No. We lay around, pitied ourselves and enjoyed the first few weeks of our 6 months of free Amazon Prime TV (free to Uni students, that is). I quickly learnt that the health system in the UK is somewhat broken, and students are also a little too lazy to go and get help – we’d rather google the symptoms, discern we probably aren’t dying, and then lie around and complain for the next 7 weeks. After that, you go home to your family who will once again feed you a balanced diet, and the symptoms finally relent.

 

Second: Drinking Culture

Coming from Switzerland, where 16 year olds are allowed beer, wine and cider, I was already used to alcohol. Or so I thought. British Uni culture is so involved with alcohol that kitchens in student flats boast a ‘chunder chart’ – a wobbly record of who has made themselves sick the most. I was amazed at the superhuman liver of the boy who managed to get over 40 points on this chart in 9 weeks. Similarly, I marvelled at the stupidity of my best friend who thought that downing three bottles of wine within 20 minutes would go well – 20 minutes after that, he saw how wrong he was. But I was amazed at how much people enjoyed drinking with the intention to black out. Having never done this – and intending never to do so as well – it is somewhat amusing to watch, yet also tragic. I do enjoy blasting Taylor Swift’s catchiest songs outside their rooms the morning after though, just so they have the right anthem to begin their miserable, hungover days with.

 

Finally: Cooking

Nothing quite beats the absolute hilarity of trundling down from my third floor room to first floor to find a plastic colander having been melted into a saucepan. The white plastic had created a once-molten-now-solid lump at the bottom of the now ruined pan, whilst weird tendrils of thin, partially melted plastic linked it to the original skeleton of the colander. I was in a catered accommodation block, where we only had to cook for ourselves on weekends. It appeared that even that limited requirement of selfcare had surpassed the abilities of one student. My flatmates weren’t much better. One – studying chemistry – was surprised when he poured water into a hot pan and it evaporated instantly (Repeat: He is studying CHEMISTRY). Another just constantly ordered take away food. I, however, perfected scrambled eggs, scrambled eggs with cheese, omelettes, fried eggs, and various types of pasta. I did make pancakes once, which my flatmates all ate, and then told me that they were the worst things they had ever eaten and never to cook them again. None of us are perfect.

 

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed my first year and couldn’t have wished for a better one. I look forwards to having to cook eggs in more interesting ways next year and avoiding freshers flu as it sweeps through campus and most of all, reading hundreds of books for my course of English Lit. (which I did not mention at all, which sort of shows where priorities are at in first year).

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Belgian Chocolate

I was not thrilled with the prospect of having to dig a hole in my suburban back yard to do my business. But I had no choice.

Earlier that day the septic system in our century-old house in Belgium had backed up, filling our basement with ick. This was the fourth backup in as many months. Something was seriously amiss.

The landlady sent over a crew with a camera. They put the gear down the manhole. They turned it on. With cigarettes dangling from their mouths they uttered a single exclamation: “Catastrophe!” The landlady had a serious problem on her hands.

She sent a crew over to dig up the crumbling septic tank and the broken pipes running to the street. I imagine these materials had been installed in pre-Roman times. There was mostly nothing left to dig up, except for the soiled soil, care of 1,000 flushes directly into our yard. To describe the excavated pile as smelly and gross would be the understatement of the year. It was also a health hazard.

The crew finished for the day. The crew leader then casually mentioned to my wife that they would be back to recommence work…IN ONE MONTH. My wife asked him to repeat himself. She wanted to be sure she understood. Her French is not parfait.

He looked at her quizzically and explained that the official holiday period began the very next day. The company would be closing for one month. The entire Belgian septic industry would be closing for one month.

My wife gently pointed out that there was a mountain of dirt and raw sewage on our front lawn. She asked what happened for all other such septic emergencies during the holiday period. The septic worker puffed sympathetically on his cigarette. He shrugged and said, “meh”. Then he left on holiday.

Which left me that evening wearing my rubber boots, with toilet paper and trowel in hand, trudging towards our back yard in a light Belgian rain to respond to nature’s inconvenient call.

To add insult to injury, we had houseguests. As I dug the hole of shame near the backyard hedge, they looked on from the window and cheered. Then, mercifully for all involved, they closed the blinds.

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Mountain Men

Swiss mountains are unforgettable. So too are the people you meet up there.

Last year my wife and I were hiking a remote trail high in the Alps. We came upon a farmer repairing a stone wall. He was a burly fellow with a mutton chop mustache. He looked like Obelix the cartoon character, or an agrarian version of Lemmy from Motorhead.

As we passed I wished him a “Guten Tag”, this being the German part of the country and greetings an essential part of Swiss culture. He raised his hand in a Roman salute and responded “Salve”. His greeting was Romansh, an ancient derivative of Latin used by only a handful of Swiss, yet still one of their four official languages. It was a moment straight out of another millennium.

I regularly hike up a mountain trail behind our house.  Three hikes out of five I will find a man there, sitting alone on a mountainside bench. He is my age and from the Middle East, either an immigrant or an asylum seeker. He sits and smokes and gazes with sad eyes over the broad Lake Geneva valley. We nod and smile at each other as I pass by, but we have never conversed: he speaks neither English nor French nor German. Still, he has become a fixture on the mountain. I miss seeing him when I find the bench empty.

Just today I was hiking alone in high mountain pastures when a storm boiled in. It began to rain hard as I made for the shelter of a stone cattle barn. I sat there under the eaves as a wicked thunderstorm rolled through. It was glorious.

Then out of nowhere three Swiss farmers appeared. We greeted each other. They began to prepare the barn to milk cattle. One of the farmers wore a baseball hat that featured a Canadian maple leaf and the silhouette of a bull. I pointed to the hat and said, with some pride, “Vive le Canada!” He responded with a smile and perfect English, “Yes! Canada! That’s where I get all my bull semen from”.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

 

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The Motorcycle

I rolled up on my little motorbike behind a dozen Hell’s Angels waiting for a traffic light. This was a moment that could define a lifetime. Or end it.

So I honked my horn. Because that’s what motorcycle guys do when they see one another. And because I was only 17 at the time and had a different understanding of risk and consequence.

I should note that I was on a teeny, weeny motorcycle. It was robin egg blue. The horn sounded like a clown wooga-wooga squeeze horn, but falsetto.

Also, I was dressed like a flower. I was on my way to a Hawaiian party sporting a flowered shirt, flowered shorts, and sandals. I had a bowling ball motorcycle helmet. It was orange with sparkles.

The Hell’s Angels turned in their seats and stared at me. They were enormous. Their Harleys were enormous. Their girlfriend’s, perched on the back of the Harleys, were enormous. They looked like a herd of leather-jacketed bison with Nazi helmets. Time stood still.

Then I waved to them and smiled, because that’s what motorcycle guys do when they see one another. As one they burst out laughing. They motioned for me to ride up among them.

I gunned my little bike and rolled up to take my place among the thundering hogs. Their bikes sounded like the deep rumble of marine engines. Mine sounded like a tiny swarm of bees with asthma.

The light turned green. The Harleys roared away. I tried to follow but could not keep pace. As they disappeared, a few of them pumped their fists in the air. I like to think this was an act of solidarity. I suspect it was an act of good-natured mockery. Regardless: ride on, brothers.

 

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

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The Possum

I would like to thank Eloise, Wordsfortheweary editor, for her guest blog post last week about a Ugandan chicken. Her story was in large part the inspiration for this one, which took place in Canada. Different continents, same absurdity.

It was past midnight, and there was trouble at the henhouse.

The shrieking chickens woke the farmer from a deep winter’s sleep. He threw back the covers. It was bitterly cold, and he usually slept in the nude. He fumbled in the dark for his shotgun. He stepped through the door to the bedroom balcony to get a better view.

But in his bleary state he had neglected one crucial detail: there was no bedroom balcony. It had not yet been built. So instead, he stepped through the door into thin air and plunged two stories into a deep snowdrift. He still clutched the shotgun. He was still nude.

Now very much awake and with a chapped butt, he struggled out of the drift and through the snowy field towards the chaos in the henhouse. He flung open the door. There sat a large possum, contentedly making a meal of one of the hens. The possum was dispatched. With order restored, the farmer walked back through the snowy darkness to the farmhouse.

Which was of course locked. The only thing open was the door up where a bedroom balcony was supposed to be. He stood in the snow calling up to his wife. Nothing. He yelled. Nothing. He went round and knocked on the front door. Still nothing. Then he pounded on the door with all his might.

Finally the farmer’s wife rose from a deep winter’s sleep. She threw back the covers. It was bitterly cold, but she slept in a sensible flannel nightgown. Thankfully, she did not venture through the void to the unbuilt balcony. Instead she trudged downstairs and wearily opened the front door for her shivering husband. He was nude, he was holding a shotgun, and he had some explaining to do.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

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The Dump – 26/03/2018

Each week here in Switzerland, we go down the road to the local Déchetterie (dump) to dispose of our week’s garbage. The “sorting of the garbage” ritual is more than just a weekly chore. It is a window unto the Swiss soul.

To begin, it makes practical Swiss sense to dedicate as little space as possible to landfill in a country with so little arable land. The Swiss can’t just truck their garbage to Michigan, like so many other places do. So instead they enlist their citizenry to gather weekly at each town’s pre-determined site to sort things down to the last wrapper. This level of practicality and precision is very Swiss.

Just how precise? Taxonomically speaking, the family garbage is divided into glass, paper, metal, plastic, compost. This is pretty standard for any progressive city. But in Switzerland there is further subdivision of the garbage right down to sub-species. Plastic is sorted into clear plastic, wrapper plastic, colored bottle plastic, and green plastic. Glass is similarly separated into bins designated by color. Any container with a metal cap must have it removed, with the cap sorted into yet another container. The strict separation of paper products borders on OCD.

For the privilege of doing this hauling and sorting ourselves, citizens in our town pay a 55% municipal tax rate, considered one of the most attractively low in the country. And while it is not strictly mandatory to go to the Déchette, it is nonetheless highly incentivized. The alternative curbside pickup requires the use of garbage bags specially stamped with the name of our town. A roll of 20 stamped garbage bags costs $30. It doesn’t take a math genius to deduce that it is far more affordable to join the Déchetterie ritual.

And the ritual is surprisingly community-building. The Déchetterie is only open for 5 hours a week (2 hours Tuesday afternoon, 3 hours Saturday afternoon), also very Swiss. So there is a very good chance of meeting some or all of our neighbors there. There is a sense of pride is doing our civic duty, and witnessing everyone else doing the same. Friendly greetings are exchanged over armloads of tin cans. Discretion is widely practiced in the face of vast volumes of empty liquor bottles coming from neighbor’s cars. There are understanding nods as each empty bottle is meticulously recycled according to its color.

The town retirees are drawn to the Déchetterie for its social aspects. They mill about as gossips and gatekeepers, helpfully instructing newcomers on the finer points of acid vs. lithium battery separation. And they invariably have bottles of wine on the go, even the paid municipal worker who is theoretically in charge. The other week, with the mountains framing her in the background, we saw a lady in a full fur coat sipping champagne from a fluted glass near the compost bins. To add to the ambience, the local militia unit was taking rifle practice at the range just behind the Déchetterie, their gunfire adding a finishing Swiss touch to this caricaturish Swiss scene.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

[Image Credit to Montreal Gazette]