Every Day Who Writes the Book

So begins the life of a leech! As of last week, I'm homeless and jobless. I stole away into James and Lucy's house, and everyone's acting normal, so I'll just hope it stays that way until I can steal away into a plane back to the U.S. next week.

I'm not a total leech. I cooked them falafel for lunch, a good warm-weather meal for an almost warm day on the balcony. I spent most of the afternoon trimming their hedges. James claims I turned their lawn into an "English Garden", which he said fit the weather. It's been rainy and cool again, lately. Once he and I were done, he drove the tractor around and we threw clippings into the back. Right around that time the sun finally came out and flooded the fields with something other than water for a change. Cleared of obstacles and tricky turns, he surrendered the driver's seat to me. I hopped us into gear, as was tradition, and we chugged our happy way across the field to dump our leavings into a corner we don't have to look at. I turned, I reversed, I pulled levers with my elbow, and I lurched us forward back into the future before turning back toward the shed. Here came the hard part. I pulled us in, getting nervous as we crossed the threshold and the walls and ceilings closed in around us. I let off the clutch, put on the breaks, and, as was also tradition, we were only halfway in. Determined to get it right, I gave it one more try, this time hopping so high that James and I almost had to duck our heads under the ceiling. We made it out alive, and so did the tractor and shed.

I know it sounds like I'm pretty bad with a tractor, and I am, but I've improved. James just loves regaling others with the story of the concrete wall's oh so sure triumph over tractor last fall, as I confused brake with gas with clutch with hand. The only thing more triumphant than the wall was James' laugh, nearly falling out of his seat next to me onto the hay and manure below.

My days and afternoons in the fields around his house are the closest I've ever been to farm or ranch life. I drove around chickens on the side of the rode, I watched cows gather at the feed, I caught the glimmer of horse hide and fly wings in the light of a low sun, and I got used to the potent smell of manure. I felled dead
trees with a chainsaw (don't worry, we said goodbye. James has named each of them), dragged them out from the stream, cut them up for firewood, and later put their predecessors in the basement oven to heat James and Lucy's house during the winter. (You'll notice my handiwork on the left. This picture isn't from that day, but you can get an idea of the fields I drove the tractor over).

Someone else's daily life sometimes seems like a magical wonderland to me. Over the Easter break, I went to the Hesse Haus at Lake Constance with Hubertus. At one point, the owner of the house, Eva, asked me to go on one of her tours of the house with her and close doors and keep an eye on people. As I tagged along for free on her often-given "Arts and Crafts Movement" tour, I couldn't help but fail at my job. She seamlessly wove the history of an the architectural movement, the cultural lifestyle, and the personal of life of Mia Hesse (and thereby Hermann Hesse) that had built and defined the house into a story only a fool could forget, and she even managed to juxtapose all of that constantly to the preceding era and trace its tracks into modern day culture. I couldn't believe it. Someone made me care about architecture. And this was an almost "daily" activity for her.

The normal, every-year traditions that so many took for granted often literally called me out of my apartment. Every now and then I heard trumpets in the street only to find out that yet another tradition was being announced to the town. During Carnival in February, or Fasching as they call it the southern German-speaking region, just such trumpets were sounded. I grabbed my jacket and rushed through the courtyard out onto the main street to figure out what was going on. It was the Umzug through the city, the parade. Float after float passed by. One had skiers skiing down a small hill, off a ramp, and making some "fantastic" landing six feet below. Hunters "shot"  at and chased a guy running around "bushes" below a hunter's stand. Two groups of four traded turns "cross-country skiing" behind constantly moving targets, getting on their bellies, and shooting at the targets, then falling to the rear and sipping on their beer to keep off the cold and fatigue. Everything - the hunter's stand, the ski jump, the target shooting - everything was constantly moving past me in typical parade fashion.

Three months later, I was invited to help with the Maibaumaufstellen with the Faulesaupartie. I'll let the pictures tell you about it. It took about 2.5 hours to push the giant tree up without getting anyone killed or breaking the tree. Just scroll down until you see pictures of people pushing a tree. I'm the jerk dressed like a hipster.
http://www.faulesaupartie.at/fotos/
If you want to read about the tradition, check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maypole
Afterward we just sat at tables, ate Bratwurst with Sauerkraut, drank beer, and talked. Technically, we were supposed to be watching the tree to make sure nobody came in the middle of the night to cut it down (also a part of the tradition), but we didn't.

My daily life would be just as magical to anybody else. I woke up every day in mountain heaven, ate better bread than you've ever had (unless you live in Ischl), and I rarely taught more than four hours in the school in one day. Over the period of a few months, I translated the tourism website for the region I live in (they don't have it up yet), as well as the Hermann-Hesse-Haus (that I mentioned earlier) website into English: http://www.hermann-hesse-house.org/ 
I tutored two girls almost every week, and an older couple as well, all of which became good friends. The older couple, Wolfgang and Evelyn, welcomed me to their house with pastries, coffee, juice and wine every time I came. Just about every Thursday evening I met with students to speak for an hour in English. Once warm weather came around I started riding with the Faulesaupartie almost every Wednesday (the same link I gave from their site above has pictures of our other adventures). They even threw me a going-away...get-together, where they gave me this!!!

It's the mountain biking "uniform" that they often wear when we ride together. It's supposed to look like Lederhosen. I FINALLY BELONGS SOMEWHERE.

 One sunny day I sat next to the river Traun, and two boys aged about six and ten walked to the right side of my bench to the trash can. The elder brother dropped his empty cup in, and the little brother handed his older brother his cup to toss in, too. The brother took it with the one hand that wasn't wrapped in a cast, shook it, turned to his little brother, tilted and cocked his head, and raised his knowing, scolding eyebrow to his little brother. The little brother hung his head and took the cup back, and they went on. A ten-year-old scolding his little brother for not finishing his drink: golden. On a rainy day, a former opera singer, carrying a seashell and coral reef from his wife's hair shop, got right up in Jennifer's face and sang the opening line of some famous Italian opera. I had a twenty-minute conversation with an amnesiac who told how the glaciers formed the mountains, and when I saw him a few more times in the following months I always had the sneaking suspicion that he recognized me. When I heard there was flooding in Ischl a couple of weeks ago, I took a walk next to the river Ischl. Where the two town rivers joined I watched the wild current as it threatened destruction to everything around it. One concrete wall stood not a foot above the hurrying current as its only barrier, and right on the other side I could see a man at the water's level in his house calmly hanging his clothes on his clothes-line.

I so often become blind to the charms and tragedies of each day. You'd think that just because there's so many of them (for some of us) that the days are all the same, or at least as good as. "Every-day life": what a misleading phrase. As if all of these days could be grouped together under "every" and tied together with a hyphen. Yet every now and then, day breaks differently and then it all doesn't seem so "every." Every day has its mean and sweet irony, its stupid joke, its green hello, its long-drawn shadow. Be it here in Austria, there in Germany, or over there in the States, they all have that every day with all those every people, and it's all very every, but not really.

(p.s. in case you didn't get the title reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfFunjzyIsE )

What a pig weather for a tourist

Ugh, I'm in the middle of saying goodbye to my apartment. These are my last days in my domicile of solitude. Tomorrow I pack and clean. The day after I leave. In a time of my life where friends have been few in the place I lived, this place has become a friend. I trust its walls and sounds. It was one of the first places whose acoustics seemed to welcome my guitar and voice. Some days I rose, stretched, and sang my morning song before the sun. Without any flatmates I felt the freedom to turn up my music at 6:30 in the morning, to camp out in my living room for an entire evening with no distractions, to hog the entire kitchen, spreading my tools and ingredients as far as the eye could see in joyous inefficiency. I cleaned when I felt unkempt, and I built a sty when tired, and nobody had to wade through the disaster but me. When lazy, I faced the jury of silence, brutal and relentless in its countless accusatory voices. Nobody was there to distract me from my failure or weakness. I had to get to know myself, especially the parts I didn't like; the parts I'd ignored. I created every day from scratch, often listing off the possibilities, the promise, the potential in my head. "Okay Dan. What can you do, today? Hm... well the necessary things first: take out the trash, recycle, do the wash. Okay, now what? I could climb a mountain, read a book and drink a beer...", and very rarely did I pull it all off. Solitude and silence: These were often my most intimate of friends. They lulled me to sleep, kept me up at night, haunted me with their honesty, freed and imprisoned me.

I wasn't always alone. I've had a lot of visitors in the last couple of months. I spent months nagging friends to come and visit, only to be successful in rapid-fire succession in the final stretch. My mother was the first, and then came Tanja. Man, she was unlucky. The day before she got here Spring had sung quite the anthem, then Ischl welcomed her with fog and clouds for the entire weekend she was here. The day after she left, the sun dispersed the clouds to spite her. Not long after, my friends Basti and Hubertus came for a weekend. They also caught the alpine curse of whimsical weather. Julia was the first to see this paradise in all its glory. Every day the sun shone, and every evening it rained or hailed. Last Sunday, my first American friend came to visit: Jennfier! She came to school with me, endured my half-educated tours of the town and sleep-deprived moodiness, and attempted to say every German word or expression I taught her. She caught the worst weather of all. Every day, except for one, it was cold and rainy. We did have one glorious, warm and sunny day. I took her up a mountain, showed her a waterfall, and we ended it on the third floor balcony of James' house to watch the sunset.

I know that means little to you, but you see, that was my view of it. Maybe the most wonderful part of having visitors is that they have different views. How quickly we grow accustomed! How easily we grow spoiled. I remember standing surprised behind Tanja as she took in a hillside in the park next to the Kaiservilla. I'd never been there before, so it was actually new for me, too. She took pictures and stood drinking it in for minutes, and I watched her and the landscape, liking the hillside and her appreciation of it. It didn't mean as much to me as it did to her, but it sure was nice to feel her appreciate it so much. Feeling like I was missing something she could see, I looked closer and felt I came to see it, too.

A couple of weeks later, I brought Hubertus and Basti together with my other good friends James and Lucy. The delight of seeing best friends from completely different worlds and times of my life connect so well is hard to explain. It's so tempting, when a good friend to visits, to keep them all to yourself. Living apart is stupid enough without having to share them with other people, but there's something great about throwing your friendship into new situations. You get to see your good friend be the person they've always been, but you also get to see something new happen between them and those they encounter. It's like throwing two of your favorite spices together to find that they taste great together. Something wonderful happened between between me and each of those persons when we built a friendship, and it seemed nothing short of magic that the same wonder happened between each of them.

I had a favorite bench in Eichstaett when I lived there. Often, in the wintry days I spent there, I'd hear a knock upon my door. Julia would open it to assert something like, "I think we need some vitamin D," so we'd meander through streets and conversations until we reached our favorite bench. The winds and the cold did not matter. It was the sun we were after. So we parked ourselves there, sometimes in silence and sometimes deciding the fate of the world, and all the while we let the valley, trees, churches and bridges climb up to us. So when Julia came to visit me in Ischl two years later, the highest priority was showing her the new bench I've found here. Though it had not been our bench as the one in Eichstaett had been, it quickly became that. We looked on the landscape I'd meditated on a hundred times and did the same we'd always done. "You know?" She said, "that mountain over there kind of looks like a mans face." What?" I asked. I looked and looked, and finally I saw it. It was my favorite mountain from that view. I'd often admired it from that spot, but I'd never seen the face. All of a sudden, the entire landscape changed for me. I could no longer see it all as I had before, and I was so glad for that. Now, every time I go there I see the slumbering giant and his bent nose, rock-jaw, and the valley of his flowing, green mane.

For all the complaining I did while Jennifer was here, you'd have expected complaints to change the weather. Spoiler alert: they didn't. I almost felt responsible for the clouds and their cold, and I lamented the paradise lost behind their grey. Yet every time I complained. "I thought it was beautiful," she'd remind me. Aw man, what I jerk I am! The sun doesn't shine and I talk like there's no beauty left in the world.

I've been a visitor here in Ischl for eight months now. Have I? I don't know. I posed these questions to my students a few times: "What is a tourist? What is a good tourist? Do you like tourists?" Is a visitor the same as a tourist? Someone once told me, very matter-of-factly, that a tourist is someone who has been in a place for less than one year. I remember resenting her for saying that, because she was telling me that months into my stay in Eichstaett, and I already felt myself more at home there than I had in any other town I'd ever lived in. I knew people there whose only friends were other exchange students, who traveled almost every weekend, and who barely spoke the local language. No, time is not the deciding factor here. All that matters is how much we try to connect in the time we are given. A tourist eats the traditional food, buys the traditional clothing (buying the tradition), and learns the few words that seem necessary or entertaining in the local language all without trying to figure out what it's all about. A tourist is someone who's only interested in skimming the surface.

This week, Ischl held their annual "Weindorf" (translated: "Wine village") in one part of downtown. Wine makers from all over Austria come to Ischl and let people try their different wines. I brought Jennifer, and we met up with James and other friends. As we sat at a long table, eating something like Funnel cake and drinking delicious wine, everyone complained about the poor weather that was ruining the entire event. I had been teaching Jennifer some of the basics: numbers, Auf Wiedersehen, ciao, etc. I started telling her how to say things in dialect, and then our friends told me to teach her to say, "What terrible weather!" in dialect. So I said to her, "So. a. Sau. Weder" (direct translation: what a pig weather). I worked on it with her for a few minutes, explaining each syllable and helping her pronounce it. When I looked up, I saw not only everyone at our table watching and listening, but also people from many of the surrounding booths. They were all about as tickled as could be, saying "An American teaching an American how to speak in dialect!" They were so delighted to hear foreigners trying to speak like them. I'm sure I wasn't pronouncing everything perfectly, and Jennnifer was having to fight her way through every syllable, but that didn't matter to them. They were all just so pleased that we were trying to speak like they do.

Living alone for almost a year was one of the most valuable experiences I've ever had, but I'll be glad once I'm rid of it. Like I've said before, sharing is so much better...objectively. You can cook all the amazing meals you want for yourself, but nothing can change the fact that you're sitting alone. So, I invite my friends to visit. Through their presence, I remember what I've forgotten. I remember who I was when I met them and lived with them, and I remember the beauty of the place I call home as they experience it for the first time. I see the mixture of colors, the blending of tastes, as the best of my worlds collide. I celebrate how the old friends can bring newness to a new place gone old, or how new places bring newness to old relationships. I remember that what I have is beautiful, be it bathed in sunlight or draped in grey. Then I realize that I'm a visitor as my friends were to me, and that I always will be somewhere, and all that matters is how hard I try to connect well, connect right, wherever I am.