What's left

Even the dog is still asleep; that's how tired we are. Normally, we share the couch in the morning while the house slowly stirs itself and steps cautiously into the day's routine. But today, with five of us lost to the north and two in still bed, I guess the dog decided to stay put as well, which leaves me alone downstairs, listening to the silent beats of the clock, watching the cool sun slowly gather its wits about it and burn, anticipating the hours that still lie ahead.

Today will be the capstone to a long week of teaching and learning: there are essays to collect and select from, last lessons to teach, a farewell lunch, and, then, just when we will feel it's all over, we'll walk back to our building and begin the scoring (a task that will probably stretch through the weekend but hopefully not into this next week). Right now, it seems as if a mountain of work is rising between me and the deep sleep I'm looking forward to tonight. But I'm hoping that coffee and a few smiles will be enough to propel me over the mountain and into less hectic pastures.

A year away

Germany is on my mind and in my heart this evening as I celebrate the first anniversary of the end of my Great European Adventure. But instead of trying to recreate the experience with fresh words, I think tonight I just want to share a few entries from my travel journal. They're rough, long, sometimes almost too honest; but they have their moments, and they still say what I wanted them to, which is, in the end, what is most important.

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10. Juli 2008
My last evening in Tuebingen did not go quite as planned, but (like so many other things on this trip) was ultimately serendipitous. Several of us had planned the week before to go to Top 10 again one last time. I had bought a shimmering blue haltertop and a string of sparkling white beads. I was prepared to dance.

And then, in the end, only H. came. I had almost given up--had scouted the club three or four times and bought a drink in a desperate attempt to look occupied. I was going to leave when H. walked in. The two of us downed shots of orange-zimt...tequila? (I forget exactly what it was now. I only know that the fresh half-moons of orange sprinkled with cinnamon tasted divine after the sharpness of the alcohol down our throats.) We put our names in for karaoke, although they were never pulled. We danced. At about midnight we walked back to the Neckarbruecke to wait for the bus home. The water below us was calm--glassy beneath the dark sky, reflecting the lamps beside the bus stop and the occasional shadows of people leaning out over the bridge railing.

We met E. and S. on the bus (and sat across from one of my floormates). Walking back from the bus stop at WHO, we yelled up to H.'s window and eventually there was a little group of us huddled downsairs in the Kuckuck. "If I'd known tonight was your last night, I'd have bought your beer," E. said as we headed outside. The six of us climbed to the top of the pyramid and talked--talked while the stars wheeled above us and until I began to remember the packing that still waited for me. I said goodbye and climbed down. In my room, I set my alarm for 3am and collapsed onto my bed. It was already early.

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11. Juli 2008
I was exhausted the next morning, but somehow I managed to stuff the last of my things into my bags, although I had to throw away my towel and washcloth on the way down to the bus stop. My suitcase and backpacks were heavier than I had expected them to be--something I regetted many times over as I hauled them on and off buses and trains, through trainstations, and around airports.

I slept most of the way to Stuttgart, waking only when the conductor gruffly asked for my ticket, the rest of the time clutching my bags close and letting my head droop forward onto my chest.

I had been worrying for weeks about my train connection from Stuttgart to Frankfurt, but in the end it was simple--I found the Lufthansa flight desk, collected my boarding passes, and went to wait for my train.

The cup of fruit that I normally bought at the Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof had never tasted so good as it did that morning: The fresh cubes of crisp melon, the tang of the pineapple, the bright notes of whole strawberries. I had planned to buy coffee with my last Euro, but on my way to the bakery, I stopped at a bookstore and ended up purchasing my own copy of Schlink's Die Heimkehr. It seemed fitting, somehow, that this should be my last purchase in Deutschland: Die Heimkehr. The homecoming.

The Frankfurt Flughafen was enormous. My train took me deep beneath the airport and from there I made my way up and up by a series of escalators and moving walkways. My hands were chafed and sore from dragging my bags behind me and my jacket and scarf were making me uncomfortably warm. Upstairs there were check-in desks for what seemed like every airline in the world. My boarding passes had the wrong check-in desks printed on them and so after trudging past hundreds of counters to one end of the hall, I had to turn around and make my way all the way back.

The Philadelphia flight to Portland was awkward. The man next to me consumed five flasks of vodka over the course of the nine air hours, wandered back and forth between the bathrooms and his seat in bare feet, annd spoke to me in a slurred mixture of Deutsch und Englisch. But even worse than the inebriated companion were the seats and the knotty armrests, and the way my whole body ached no matter which way I turned. I was so exhausted that when my vodka-loving neighbor offered me his shoulder, I shrugged, laid my head down, and fell fast alseep.

Walking down the carpeted halls of PDX, I felt perfectly normal, and when I saw the rest of my family they looked normal too: Warm hugs and affectionate smiles, although wisps of doubt lurked behind their words of welcome, as if they were worried I would have changed beyond recognition. We shared fast food from Wendys and collected my bags--I was happy to hand over the suitcase and backpacks to stronger hands. Then we drove quietly home: home where D. dragged my luggage up one last flight of stairs to my and B.'s room; home where I changed into pajamas and brushed my teeth; and home where I gratefully, sleepily, almost without thinking, fell into bed.

****

Later in July 2008
The hardest thing has been the normalcy of it all--the extraordinary ordinariness of the way my life has resumed where it left off. Maybe part of the strange everydayness is due to the fact that my family already knows so much about my trip; we stayed in good contact: skyping, emailing, IMing, and even, upon occasion, writing. They know my stories, are abreast of my thoughts, have already seen most of the pictures. There's really nothing more to tell.

My friends and acquaintances at church barely stirred when I showed up in the family pew on sunday. A few "welcome backs" and incurious questions were the most I got. At work K. told me, "Well, you still look like Allison." And that was that.

Now, I guess, I'm back. Only I know everything I did and experienced and lived. But I can't expect anyone else to really understand because, after all, no one is ever so interested in our own lives as we are.

From the chapbook

Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, Umberto Eco

I picked this up a few years ago during my first visit to Powells. I was in the first flush of my love affair with philosophy, and I was on a hunt for anything remotely resembling philosophy to add to my collection. I had also just finished The Name of the Rose and was very concerned to finish my conversation with Eco. When I looked up his name that January day, Art and Beauty was what I ended up finding, stashed in the third-level art collection under "medieval." Of course it sat on my shelf for several years (as almost all of my "serious" books do now), but I pulled it out a few weeks ago to try. I read the first few pages before being distracted, then came back to it last night and was completely enthralled. Eco writes sensitively and with scholarly detail (be still my beating heart!) about the medieval aesthetic and what claims moderns do and do not have a right to make about the (much-maligned) scholastic taste in art. I've included a few of my favorite moments from the opening pages of the text. More to follow if Eco does not disappoint (and always assuming that I don't forget).

On the existence of a medieval aesthetic:
p.5 "The view that the Middle Ages were puritanical, in the sense of rejecting the sensuous world, ignores the documentation of the period and shows a basic misunderstanding of the medieval mentality . . . Ascetics, in all ages, are not unaware of the seductiveness of worldly pleasures; if anything, they feel it more keenly than most. The drama of the ascetic discipline lies precisely in a tension between the call of earthbound pleasure and a striving after the supernatural."

On the goal of medieval art and art criticism:
p.15 "Medieval taste, we may conclude, was concerned neither with the autonomy of art nor the autonomy of nature. It involved rather an apprehension of all of the relations, imaginative and supernatural, subsisting between the contemplated object and a cosmos which opened onto the transcendent. It meant discerning in the concrete object an ontological reflection of, and participation in, the being and power of God."

On the use of medieval didacticism in art:
p. 16 "These [moral] views were often abused by being too strenuously pressed. But we should note that they do not represent a myopic and primitive didacticism. The fact was, that the Medievals found it extremely difficult to separate the two realms of value, not because of some defect in their critical sense, but because of the unity of their moral and aesthetic responses to things. Life appeared to them as something wholly integrated."

Almost-leave-taking

We drove down the hill under a brilliant moon, past the dark silhouettes of oaks and pines, into the beginning of the end. I wanted to know about the best and worst of times. The hard moments were easy to describe: saying goodbye again, saying goodbye for real, leaving. But the best memories, we found, were more difficult to articulate. We started and stopped, and finally gave up because, well, "It was all of it," she told me. "It was the people and the university and Oregon itself; it was driving over the border and seeing the welcome sign after a trip away; it was finding the coastal ranges on the horizon; it was coming home."

There wasn't much more to be said because we both knew she was right. The best part of anything is having a home and homecoming. "I know people who've never left," I said. "But I think everyone should have to leave," she responded. Because the thing about homes, we both acknowledged, is that you can't know what they really mean until you've been away or until, suddenly, you have to say goodbye.

Not that that makes the leave-taking any easier. It's still hard to see a world deflating: to watch the people and places and memories shrinking like images on the side of a punctured balloon (or like houses and towns and finally mountains from the window of a jet plane). And it's harder still because you know that after the first weeks, the contact becomes less frequent: the emails and phone calls slow down as you both slide more or less bravely into your own new worlds. Even planned returns and immanent reunions aren't entirely satisfying because, creatures of habit that we are, we're still annoyed that this particular world, this particular home have been disrupted. And we want them back.

Serenade

Surprisingly, the highlight of my weekend wasn't the fireworks or the parade but the Sunday evening when it was all a day away, and the three of us met at the Mexican restaurant for margaritas, iced tea, and dessert. It was a gathering that had been long overdue. We'd tried to make plans early in June, but I didn't call, and then she was gone, and then I left, and then there was a series of over-filled weekends and hectic weekdays, and it simply hadn't happened. But I called her on Friday, "What about this Sunday evening?" I asked. And she said yes.

So we sat in a booth in the back of the restaurant, sipping our bright, tropical drinks and idly talking about nothing and everything, while across the room the tiny band belted out tunes that were alternately sweet and hysterical. They came to our table eventually, two guitars and a string bass, to ask if the senoritas had any requests. She did, of course. And so they stood there and serenaded us, fingers racing across the strings, shuffling closer when the waitress came to clear the booth behind them, their smiles reflecting the delight on our faces.

We stayed until the restaurant closed and until the clouds outside had begun to accumulate ominously across the sun. As we stood by our cars to say goodbye, buffeted by the wind, we predicted storms, and we acknowledged, as we had already, that our date was long overdue, that we should do it again; but wasn't the music beautiful?

Fireworks above the Willamette River

In the evening--
after the parades, and the cupcakes, and the music--
after our shoulders are burnt
and our foreheads are wrinkled from the sun--
we gather at the river.

We perch, like blackbirds on a telephone wire,
strung out
along the concrete slabs of bridges
and the sandy left bank
with our faces tilted up to the cooling air
and the brightening moon.

And then we inhale
the blooms of fiery light
as they burst across black sky,
sift toward the velvet surface of the river,
drown in enigmatic currents.

Our own little world

Ulm, Germany

This year a parade, fireworks, and a barbecue are on the menu, but I woke up today with vivid memories of how it was last year. Last year it was the 4th of July, and it hardly felt like it. I'd been away for over three months, building my new world--my home away from home--and when I exclaimed about the fact that--yes--fireworks are a customary part of the American celebration, I was told, "You've been away too long."

There couldn't have been a "too long," but it was true that I had been too distracted to think much about American holiday traditions. For us, the first week of July was notable not for its celebration of independence but for the fact that it was bringing us to an end; we were beginning to say goodbye.

On the 4th of July, we traveled in waves of two or three or four, by bus or foot, down to the Insel for a party thrown by the Italian (Giovanni; renowned for his mad pizza skills) who lived on 7. Stock. We grilled Wuerst, drank beer, and watched twilight deepen into night over the river. Three of us sat at the very edge of the river shore, the tips of our shoes almost catching the small waves that broke over the pebbles at our feet. As the sky darkened, the lights of the houses opposite us cast pale rectangles and pinpoints of gold across the water. The silhouettes of the trees above us were carved in sharp navy blue into the plastic skin of the river. And a gondola slid past us, the voices of its occupants muffled, paper Chinese lanterns ballooning and glowing softly from its bows.

"Our little world," he said to us, breaking the silence. "Our own little world. I'm going to miss you all."

We had nothing more to add, but simply let the night stretch on. That night, on the banks of the river, we found a hedgehog huddled on the ground beside us and stroked its slender spines before it went scuttling away into the bushes; we brushed brittle leaves ("Mother Nature," we laughed) from our backs; watched stars from the top of Pyramid in the Student Village ("Because we've talked about it for so long and haven't done it yet"); and whiled away the wee hours of the morning from the balcony on 13. Stock. Mostly, though, we said goodbye. Over and over. Not with words, but with the carrying-out of a thousand small rituals and the parading of a multitude of inside jokes that we knew belonged only to our world,

only to this time,

only to now.