An American in Berlin
24 April, 2017

April, April, der macht was er will.  This is a little saying that they have here in Berlin.  It means, basically, April does whatever the fuck it wants.  The beginning of the month was lovely and warm and all Spring-like.  But the last couple of weeks have been cold and windy and generally rubbishy.  The sun sets much later, and during the day, if you manage to find a spot of direct light, it’s actually quite nice.  But cross the street, or step into a shadow, and you start to shiver.  Well, friends, I’ve had enough.  I’m ready for Spring.  So come on already!

Anyway, I’m settling back into life here.  Things with the roommates are good.  We’ve had two “family dinners” since I’ve been back.  And it’s a good vibe here, when we see each other.  Although during the week, we don’t see each other all that much.  I’m out at work during the day and napping when I get home.  They’re usually in their room by the time I’m ready for dinner.  So, for me at least, it’s a very nice blend of time together and time to myself.

For years, he wrote, changing gears, I’ve dreamed of having my own little herb garden.  What could be better than picking my own fresh basil or dill or whatever?  So last weekend, I went to Hellweg, which is the German version of Home Depot ((Or, “Home Shithole,” as my old electrician-boss Gerry used to call it.)) and I bought a bunch of seed packs, two window boxes and some dirt.  Only thing was, I don’t know the first thing about gardening.

Fortunately, Lucie and Marco are big fans, and I guess Marco has sort of grown up around this stuff.  So they helped me get started, teaching me how to plant the seeds and so on.  They even gave me some soil, as apparently I’d bought soil for flowers, which I guess you shouldn’t grow things you want to eat in; I’ll have to get more.  They also gave me some extra flower pots to get started with.

I don’t know how well this is going to work out, if at all.  On the one hand, my balcony is South-facing, so it gets plenty of light.  On the other hand, there’s no shade, so maybe it gets too much light?  We’ll see.  But I’ve got cherry tomatoes, basil, parsley, dill, coriander, peppermint and rosemary.  I dream about coming home in the summer, walking out to the balcony, plucking a fresh tomato and wrapping a fresh basil leaf around it.  Or cucumbers with fresh dill.  Or cooking with fresh parsley.  Or making fresh mint tea.  Or getting some fresh coriander into my beef stock for homemade Pho.  All that, and also just looking out the window and seeing green; living things that I planted.  So either that, or it’ll all burn to death in the sun.  Like I said, we’ll see.

Zibs, Jan and I finally booked our little roadtrip.  We’re going for a three-day weekend, along with some Norwegian friend of theirs from college, up to a little vacation house on the Ostsee, which in English is the Baltic.  This will be the second weekend in May.  Hopefully it will have warmed up by then.  Anyway, the house – which we booked through Airbnb – seems to be right on the water.  So I’m thinking it will be quite nice.

Then, the next weekend, Joschka and I are planning to drive down to Bavaria to visit our friends from the metal festivals.  Another festival mate, from Joschka’s hometown, will be meeting us there too apparently.  I’m definitely looking forward to this.  I’ve never been to Bavaria, and I’ve never seen this crew outside of the festival.  The kids – and they are kids; they’re all in their early 20’s – are just all around good people, to say nothing of fun.

But in addition to the kids, I’m also looking forward to seeing the dad of one of the girls.  He also comes to all the festivals.  I guess he’s probably around 50 or so.  But at the last festival, we bonded over our love of old school classic rock and metal, which the young’uns don’t seem to be into so much.  He’s probably the only guy I know who’s into Gary Moore, for example.

So that will be two trips in two weekends.  And after that, I think I’ll just stay home for a bit and not spend money.

I’m settling into my new work schedule too.  Now it’s three days a week at the heretofore “Friday school,” which I guess I’ll just call my “main school” going forward.  At the moment, I’ve got beginners on Tuesdays and the advanced on Thursday/Friday.  The beginners are absolutely sweet and motivated and hardworking.  But two or three of them barely speak any English at all, so in that sense it’s quite challenging.  And then there’s another guy in the class who, while not quite ready to move up to the intermediate group, is nevertheless well ahead of the others.  The upshot being that you’ve got to find different work for him.  Meaning, basically, that you’re teaching two classes at once.  I enjoy working with them, but it ain’t easy.

Having the advanced group two days in a row, though, is pretty great.  It means I get to connect my lessons; use Friday to build on what we did Thursday.  I think – or at least I hope – I’ll be able to get a lot more out of them this way.  And of course, the material is just more interesting.  This week, for example, I did Shakespeare Sonnet 116 with them. ((…Love is not love / which alters when it alteration finds…))  The language is tough, but I walk them through it.  The real point, though, is to get some conversation going.

Basically, the poem is about “true love.”  But from there, everybody has their own ideas and opinions and they’re usually pretty good about expressing them.  Some people think it’s beautiful, others find it naïve.  Some think it’s a worthy goal, others find it constraining.  But they talk, is the point.  And there are some pretty smart people in that room, which makes it a lot of fun.

Not to say there aren’t smart people in the beginner group.  There certainly are.  But they don’t have the tools to handle that kind of discussion yet.  It will be cool, though, to do this with them, when, several months from now, they find their way into the advanced class.

Anne, my French tandem partner/stranger-in-a-strange land friend, is back in Berlin.  So Friday, she invited me to this little theatre piece she was working.  It’s a French company, in Berlin.  So the show was in French with German supertitles.  The show itself was very cool.  It was a one-woman spiel, in which she played the characters of several social workers ((Or possibly just one social worker.)) who work with refugees.  The actress was very good indeed, and the text itself was both touching and terribly relevant.  Though in the case of the text, I couldn’t feel the full force of it.

Despite the fact that the actress spoke her lines quite clearly, I was really up against the limits of my French.  And so, while I could follow the story and generally knew what was going on, I wasn’t getting the nuance.  The supertitles weren’t much help either.  See, to watch something in German or French with English subtitles is one thing; that’s no problem.  But to try and grab the German supertitles at the same time as the French sound, well, 1) I’m too slow and 2) it’s an extra step, because I’m filtering it through English either coming or going.  Going direct between two foreign languages – both of which I’m functional in, but neither of which I’m fluent in – that’s hard work.

So hard was it, in fact, that I found myself either listening to the French or reading the German.  Not, as I’d hoped, filling in the French gaps with German when I needed it.  Because once I switched my attention to the second language, the first had moved on sufficiently that I could no longer catch up.  So I needed to wait for a pause before I could switch back.  But even with all this, it was a pretty cool experience; and not anything I’d ever tried before.  And I was fairly pleased with myself to have been able to keep up as well as I did.  It just wasn’t easy.

After the show, Anne asked me if I cried; I guess a number of people did.  But I didn’t.  It was all I could do to simply understand.  Interacting with the show on an emotional level was beyond me.  Which is instructive too.  It’s something to keep in mind when I put 16^th century English poetry in front of my students.  Granted, we have the freedom to stop and discuss and explain.  But on some level, there’s going to be a wall there.  In that sense, I’m all the more impressed with what they’re able to give me.

So I mostly hung out with Anne after the show, and we mostly spoke German.  Ostensibly, we were also hanging out with her colleagues – the writer, admin people from the theatre, etc.  But since they’re all French, and were speaking French, I couldn’t really participate.  Listening to one actress in a quiet theatre is one thing.  Keeping up with a conversation in a noisy bar, that’s a horse of a different color.

Anne’s boyfriend was also there.  He’s a lovely chap; a sound engineer by trade, and often not in Berlin.  I’d only met him once before.  He hardly speaks any English and his German is pretty rudimentary.  So one-on-one, we were mostly doing French, with a smattering of the other two.  But he’s sweet as can be, and – thank the gods – speaks quite slowly.  So with him, I could manage.  In the end though, it was just great to catch up with Anne.  I probably hadn’t seen her in at least six weeks.

Around midnight, everybody started going their separate ways.  My way led me to Joschka’s, as the theatre was literally a three-minute walk from his apartment.  I hadn’t seen him in at least six weeks either, but for the one time at Vinny’s while I was home.  I’d say it was classic times, but we didn’t really drink much.  We had a couple of very nice beers, but no cocktails or scotch.  On the other hand, we made dinner (or breakfast) around two or three in the morning, and that’s not not classic.  I think I must have got home around six.

Saturday night, we – Joschka and I – went to go see this Austrian metal band, Harakiri for the Sky.  He’s a big fan.  I thought they were alright.  They’re very “soundscape-y.”  What I mean, I think, is that their music, while melodic, kind of drones on.  It’s very nice and atmospheric when you’re listening at home, but I think it’s not so great for a live show.  They weren’t bad, mind you.  Just not very exciting, to my mind.  Also, I found the bass player kind of disappointing.  He was clearly extremely talented, wielding a six-string axe.  But there was a lot of open space in the music where he really could have added something special; and he never seemed to.

Taken altogether, though, I went to the theatre on Friday and a metal show on Saturday.  I spent time with two of my Berlin besties whom I hadn’t seen in quite a while.  It was a pretty good weekend, any way you cut it.

The difficulty now is finding time to work on all my “projects.”  I’ve put off getting back to Greek long enough.  For a while, I’ve been debating with myself what text I should read.  Thucydides is wonderfully relevant – to say nothing of being the best prose in any language ever – but also quite difficult.  Herodotus is a wonderful story teller, and quite readable, but also quite long.  So I’ve decided I’m going to do Aristotle’s Poetics.  It’s not that long, and his style is pretty clean.  I think that’ll be a good way back in.  I’m off Mondays, so I’ll start that tomorrow.

Then there’s my “Federalist project.”  I wrote about this in my New Year’s Resolution post, but in short, the plan is to read each Federalist essay and write a short post reacting to it.  I’ll give a full explanation as an opening post.  The difficulty lies in the fact that this becomes my third on-going writing project.  The first, obviously, is this blogue.  The second is another silly fairy tale I’m working on.  So when I sit down in front of the computer, which do I write for?  I do want to get that under way though.  Hopefully this week or next.

And of course, there’s the Hebrew.  After I finished the course book, I bought a new workbook by the same authors.  If the course book is designed as a first-year Hebrew course, then this new workbook is designed as a second year text.  It’s got about thirty or so biblical passages of varying length.  But they’re all unabridged, real-deal readings.  So I’m working on that as well.

And, frustratingly, it’s giving me second thoughts about my original goal of keeping up with the weekly parsha readings starting with the new year in September.  I don’t mean that the language is so difficult that it’s beyond me.  It’s not.  But it is difficult, and it’s slow going.  So on the one hand, I’ve no doubt that I have the skills to read The Five Books.  On the other hand, I’m far less certain that I have the skills to read so much so fast.  It’s a question of pace.  But that’s still four-plus months away.  I’ll reassess again when I finish this workbook.  I’m still going to try, but I may have to modify my goal a bit.  We’ll see.

Last weekend, I tried my hand at an Eisbein, which is a sort of German ham hock.  It’s a part of the pig’s leg, with a giant bone in the middle of some rather tough meat.  Traditionally, it’s roasted and served with Rotkohl (red cabbage) and kraut and maybe potatoes.  However, I did it as a braise with leeks and pears.  The meat itself was pretty fucking fantastic, if I do say so myself.  The difficulty, for me, lies in the skin.  We don’t usually buy pork products with the skin attached.  After all, pork skin is quite think and quite chewy.  If you roast it right, you can get it to crisp up pretty nice; which, I guess, is why they do it that way.  But I chose the braise, because it seemed to me that this would be the best way to get the meat tender.

But what to do about the skin?  The first problem is, we have an electric oven.  In other words, no broiler, no direct flame.  If I had a gas oven, I’d have just finished it underneath broiler and that should have crisped up the skin just fine.  So I experimented.  After about four hours, I removed half the skin.  Removing the cover, I put the rest of it back in under high heat for 15-20 minutes.  That didn’t do much of anything, and that part of the skin remained rather chewy and flavorless.

But for the skin I removed, I cut it into little squares and fried it up in olive oil.  First of all, man did that shit pop and dance around in the pan!  That’s what aprons are for, my friends.  Also, I don’t have an apron.  However, the end product was pretty fantastic.  It was crispy and crunchy and full of flavor.  I guess it’s a take on pork rinds? ((But not the gross shit they sell in plastic bags at the supermarket as junk food.))  I dunno.  I was inspired to try it from something I saw in Anthony Borudain’s No Reservations.  I don’t think that’s exactly what he did, but it gave me the idea, anyway.  In the end, I was damned pleased with that, and it’s just what I’m going to do the next time.

The only other thing, then, that still requires some experimentation is the braise itself.  The idea behind the leeks and pears is that pork has an inherent sweetness, and I thought they would pear pair well together.  And they still might.  But I found them to be somewhat bitter.  So maybe I need to put them in closer to the end?  Or maybe just do it with something else entirely?  I dunno.  Like I said, I still need to experiment there.

But that’s enough of that.  To the extent that anybody actually reads this thing, I don’t think people are coming here for my rambling thoughts on cooking.  In fact, I think that’s enough for this post in general.  I keep wanting to put down my thoughts about this whole East Berlin/East Germany thing.  But it’s a lot to go into now.  And also, it’s not that late, so I’m thinking I may take another crack at that silly fairy tale or even get started on this whole “Federalist Project.”  So until next time…

זיי געסונט

An American in Berlin
19 April, 2017
A Berliner in New York, Part III

Right, so Part The third of my time in New York; and hopefully Part the Last as well.  After lunch with Uncle Art, we dropped him back off at the factory/office.  It’s always great to see that guy.  That said, it’s also a touch bittersweet.  You see him slowing down, you know he’s 90.  God willing, he’ll be around for a long time yet.  But you don’t take these visits for granted.  It was important to me to see him while I was in, so I’m glad I got the chance.

He asked me at one point during the visit if I’m living in “East Germany.”  And I honestly wasn’t sure if he just meant the east of the country or the DDR.  My impression was that he meant the latter.  So I started to say that it’s all just one Germany now.  But than I realized that if he was going to ask about what life is like in Berlin (and East Berlin, at that), I’d soon find myself saying something like, “Well, things are pretty different in the East, actually.”  Which they are.  In the end, though, the conversation didn’t go much further than asking about my job and if I was happy there/here.

Anyway, as I said, it was great to see him.  After we dropped him off, we drove down to Jersey to visit Aunt Cookie, my mom’s sister.  As it happens, I’m probably closer with her than any of my other aunts and uncles.  This despite the fact that she doesn’t travel anymore with the result that I only see her maybe two or three times a year.

But when I was living in the city, I’d usually call her about once a month or so.  I was in the habit of calling during my walks home from work, which as a general rule was a great time to catch up with people.  Anyway, I’d ring her up and our chats would usually last the whole of my walk, which is to say about an hour.  So that was a lovely thing.

Anyway, we drove down – me and the ‘rents – for a visit; this was the Tuesday before I flew back to Germany.  We had a very nice time.  Just the usual catching up and joking around.  She’s always excited to have company, so she tends to fuss over me/us rather a bit.  I’m not generally one to be fussed over, but that’s her way and you’ve got to let her have it.  And anyway, she puts up with my surly, sarcastic, deadpan ass, so I’m certainly not going to throw stones from my glass house.

Also, she’s great about respecting my boundaries.  What I mean is, she’ll ask me any question on any subject, but if she senses that I don’t want to talk about something, she’ll dead it, no questions asked.  So that’s something I definitely appreciate.  Add to that the fact that I can speak pretty candidly with her and never have to worry about offending her.  She’s good people.  And as I said, it was a very lovely – if short – visit.

After that, my next stop was Queens, to have dinner with Flare ((Her name is Jen.  In high school, we called her Jen-a-Flare (instead of Jennifer).  Anyway, Flare stuck and that’s all I ever call her.)) and Garth.  Shout-out to my dad for driving me to Astoria on their way home.  Anyway, Flare is another one of these people I’ve known since High School; though we didn’t go to the same HS.  She’s another one who fits the “friends as much as family” schema.  Indeed, the family thing goes a bit further with her.  See, I’ve spent every Christmas with her and her fam from 2010 to 2015.  And this past Christmas, they Skyped me in.  That’s a pretty special thing for me.  I mean, they don’t treat me as a guest, they treat me like part of the family.  And this past year, her mom, her uncle, her cousins, they all got on the Skype and said some variation of, “It’s weird that you’re not here; you’re a part of our Christmas.”  That’s pretty fucking special.  And for a Yid, it beats the hell out of Chinese food and a movie, don’t it?

When I got there, Garth hadn’t come home from work yet, so we had some nice one-on-one time to catch up.  But it was a little different than the usual catch-ups.  By which I mean, we’ve had a lot of the same experiences.  She did a year in Spain, so she’s a) got the living in Europe thing and b) the learning a foreign language in a foreign country thing.  She’s an art teacher now and has done ESL teaching in the past.  So while there was of course just regular catching up, we also did a lot comparing notes, which was really cool; and not something I was really able to do with anyone else.

For dinner, we ordered in Chinese.  Halal Chinese.  Which, I mean, I fucking love New York.  That was my first reaction, right?  Like, where else in the world do you get halal Chinese food?  My second reaction was, “Well, fuck, that defeats the purpose of getting wanton soup.” ((#nopork))  Garth Vader ((Garth Vader is not a Dave nickname; that’s a real nickname.)) picked up the food on his way home, so we all ate together which was great.

Garth is lovely, gregarious, nerdy, jock-y, funny and wicked smaht.  He also works for the city DEP ((Department of Environmental Protection.)) doing waste-water treatment.  Which is fascinating.  He’s another one I just ask questions to and listen to the answers.  I learned a lot about how the city functions, but a part of the city that we a) never see and b) take for granted anyway.  It’s downright fascinating.

Well, it was a late night for both of them and you could tell they were both pretty tired by the end of it.  So I didn’t stay too late, and caught a reasonable train back to the Island.  But it was wonderful to see them.  Two of the sweetest people I know.  And I’ll tell you something else, they’re too of the best huggers.  Seriously.

Wednesday I was supposed to have lunch with Heather (Keith’s wife) and the girls, by which I mean her two daughters and also Mike & Jen’s daughter, whom she had for the day.  But in the event, Jen was able to come along as well.  And then Murp surprised me by showing up too.  We went to the Inn Between, which is the definition of classic with that crew.  I normally get the wings there, because they make the best fucking wings.  But I didn’t want to eat that the day before I was flying, so I opted for the chicken Caesar salad, which is also top fucking notch.

This was perfectly lovely.  Though, as you can imagine, with three little girls at the table, it wasn’t necessarily easy to carry on an in-depth conversation.  But it didn’t matter.  It was just nice to have a little extra time with those clowns.  And little Kelsey is just starting to become an actual talking person, so it was definitely fun to chat with her a bit too.

Dinner was at a pre-grand opening for a new Shake Shack on Long Island.  Jo recently landed a big-deal job with the company, so she got us all invited to this thing, which was otherwise closed to the public.  And yet, it was so fucking crowded!  I have to admit, at first, I was like, fuck this, I don’t want to stand on a line for fast food.  But the line moved pretty quickly, and it turned out to be pretty damned good.  I mean, it’s Shake Shack after all.  Also, it was nice to have the whole fam together for one last dinner before I split.

Afterwards, Justin came back to the house for a final few rounds of NHL; in which I totally thrashed him, btw.  So that was great.  For me.  Which is what matters, right?  No, but seriously, the game itself is only half the fun.  The other half is just the sheer ridiculous of acting like idiots, yelling like crazy people and the general comedy that ensues from all that.  But also I won.  So, you know.  Party all around, points all around. ((#ifyouwannabemyturgeon))

And that was my last night home.  Next day, my ‘rents drove me to the airport.  My flight was delayed over an hour, so they hung out with me for a while before I finally went through security.  The goodbyes are always tough, no question.

But also, it felt a bit weird to be going back.  Even with that crazy busy schedule, there were still people I didn’t get to see.  In fact, after I published the first part of this post, I got an email from Amber being all, “Don’t come to New York and not see me.”  Which, she’s absolutely right, and I immediately felt guilty.  I also wanted to visit my old Jewish special-needs school, to see some of my old colleagues and students.  I didn’t get to do that either.

So I left feeling like I didn’t have enough time, not seeing everybody I wanted to see.  I also left feeling not at all rested.  I mean, I basically spent the entire two weeks either drunk, hung over or sleeping.  I really could have used a third week.  But I also couldn’t have afforded a third week.  So that was tough.

Add to that, it was a bit surreal leaving.  By the end, I wasn’t sure if “home” referred to Berlin or New York.  It was surreal leaving Berlin to go back to the states, and now it was surreal in the other direction.

Back in Berlin, I got through immigration with zero difficulty.  Which is how it should be, but I didn’t know for sure.  I was definitely playing out worst-case scenarios in my head with regard to my visa.  But in the end, there were no problems.  Well, other than the flight being delayed and it taking forever to collect my bags.

Amongst which was was a duffel bag filled with about 20 kilos of books; mostly Greek stuff.  I mean, I’ve got a proper book shelf here, and it was distressingly empty.  Also, how could I get back to work on Greek if all my books were across the Ocean?   So now I’ve got my books here, and that is glorious.  Also, my bookshelf looks amazing.  But lugging that bag home was no fun.  It was worth it, but it was no fun.

After dropping my stuff off, I went back out and grabbed a Döner for lunch.  And since that is pretty much the most Berlin thing I could do upon my return, I mark that as the official end of my visit home and my official return to Germany.  And with that, I’ll also end the official recording of my vacation.

זיי געסונט

An American in Berlin
17 April, 2017
A Berliner in New York, Part II

Diving straight in and picking up where I left off in my last post, I had just parted ways with Shuman – this is Wednesday – after bialys at Kossar’s.  Not long after, I was supposed to meet up with Codog for more noodle soup on Bayard street (still Chinatown).  But first I had to sneak in a quick beer with my friend Rachel, who was good enough to go out of her way to meet me in the neighborhood.

Rachel is part of the NYU extended “Greek” family, so to speak.  I’d see the rest of the gang Friday night for Dale’s birthday.  But Rachel couldn’t make that shindig, so it was now or never.  For years, we’d spoken together of our mutual love of pickles.  Yet, somehow, in all the years of my living around the corner from The Pickle Guys (and possibly Guss’ Pickles; was Guss’ still on the LES when we first moved in, or when did they pack up and head for Brooklyn?  The LES used to be pickle city, but now all that’s left are The Pickle Guys.  Also, why am I writing this in an extended parenthetical and not a footnote?), in all those years, I say, Rachel and I had somehow never gotten ((I literally just had a conversation with one of my colleagues about whether the past participle of “get” is “got” or “gotten.”  Technically, both are valid.  We think.  Anyway, I insisted I was pretty sure I only ever use “got.”  And now here I am writing “gotten.”  So much for that.)) together for pickles.

So now we decided that’s exactly what we must do.  Only TPG would be closed by the time she could get down there.  So I ran in to their new shop, which is directly across Essex from the old shop.  And you know what?  That was fucking weird.  I mean, I’d been going to TPG for years.  Like, my thing was, anytime I went anywhere, that’s what I would bring: pickles.  Except on Pesach.  Then I’d bring a jar of their absolutely lethal, sinus-destroying, god-manifested-in-horesradish horseradish. ((Btw, I have not able to find actual raw horseradish root in this city.  Which is frustrating.  Because like literally everything is better with horseradish.  Dad knows what I’m talking about.))  But seriously, I used to bring pickles even all the way up to Maine; on the bus, no less.  I’d pop in and buy a single pickle while I was walking around or buy whole quarts for the house.  I was there all the damn time, is my point.  And while I’ve been away, they move into new, fancier digs across the street.  Like I said, it was fucking weird.

Anyway, I bought a pair of new pickles, a pair of sours & finally a pair of spicy pickles.  Got in just in time too, right before they closed.  A few minutes later, Rachel shows up and we head around the corner to some rando bar for a beer.  Now mind you, Rachel is tired from a long day at work while I’m already half-in-the-bag ((“Half-in-the-bag” definitely doesn’t get used nearly enough.)) from an afternoon of day-drinking with Shuman.  So I felt a bit bad about that; but good ol’ Rach didn’t seem to mind.

Right, so we sit down with our beers and I pull out the bag of magic pickles.  At which point, Rachel confesses something to me that I was not expecting.  Turns out, for all her love pickles, she (inexplicably) doesn’t like new pickles.  Takes all kinds, I suppose.  But that’s OK, I’ll eat them later.  It certainly didn’t stop us from enjoying the hell out of those sours and spicies.  Man, I forgot how much I love pickles.  Which is weird, right?  I mean, pickles are supposed to be a big deal in Germany.  And they are, insofar as they’re everywhere.  But they’re all kinda sweet and dill-y.  I haven’t had a good sour pickle over here; not yet anyway.  So between the bialy and the sour pickle, that was some classic LES Jewish cuisine right there.

Anyway, me and Rach did the ol’ fast version of the catch-up.  It was great, if all too short.  Still, it was really nice to see her.  And I have to say, it meant a lot to me that she would go out of her way like that, knowing we’d have to rush through a single beer and speed-eat those pickles.  Seriously, I was touched.

But it was over almost as soon as it had started.  I was already late for noodles with Codog.  So I stumbled up and over to Bayard, where I found another one of these guys who’s been around for more than half my life already.  There was a time, back in high school, where Jared and I would be over at Codog’s, playing Super Bases Loaded II every single weekend in his basement.  On Sunday afternoons, we would get a tray of 50 buffalo wings and devour them while watching the Yankee game.  Those were the good times, man, I tellya.

So I meet Codog at the noodle ship.  And right after I show up, in walks his fiancée, Arlene.  Which was great, because I adore her; but I didn’t know she was coming.  So that was a lovely surprise.  Anyway, we all ate noodles.  And it was great.  How could it not be?  After that, we headed back to their place, where I was crashing for the night.  This was my only other crash of the vacation.  And for good reason.

During my first stint living back on the Island, while I was still working in the city, I was crashing at their place once a week, basically every week, for I don’t even remember how many months.  It was like a second home, and I needed it.  More than that, they were great to me.  First of all, there are no easier people to get along with.  Second, they always had a home-cooked dinner for me; always had something to drink.  The couch was comfortable.  And they both leave for work mad early; they were both gone by the time I’d wake up, which meant zero-stress mornings.  And instead of the hour-long train ride from hell, it was a twenty-minute subway ride from their place to the office.

So beyond just wanting to spend time with two of my favorite people, there was a bit of nostalgia to crashing at their place again.  We hung out, caught up, cracked all sorts of inappropriate jokes and generally just had a classic good time.  After they went to bed, I watched some cooking channel TV, which was my old routine, before finally passing out.  I didn’t see them in the morning.

Which was probably for the best, because I felt awful.  Seriously, I was not in good shape.  But I had to get it together, because I was scheduled to have lunch with my mom and my old boss.  This too was pretty classic.  I’ve had a lot of great bosses over the years, but MZ might well be my favorite.  So many laughs.  And if I was having a day, I’d just walk into his office and launch into some or other rant.  Which he always seemed to appreciate.  And the jokes were gloriously inappropriate.  Those too were the good times.  All to say, I was glad I got to have lunch with him.  Even if I was hung-over and feeling shite.

After lunch, I went over to that godforsaken shithole of a train station on 34^th & 7^th, only to find I’d just missed the train by like four minutes.  And the next one wasn’t for another 90.  Which sucks under ideal circumstances.  And these circumstances were definitely not ideal.  So that was quite possibly my least favorite 90 minutes of my time home.  I don’t remember the rest of that day, but I’m sure I did fuck-all, beyond climbing into bed.

Speaking of Penn Station, when I got in on Tuesday, it was rush hour.  So I had to wade through that hot mess of The Public.  Which normally I would have hated.  But it was the first New York rush hour I’d seen in at least nine months.  And actually, strangely, it was quite refreshing.  Remember what I said about the diversity at JFK?  Well, it was that all over again.  But also, just sooo many people.  I mean, when you’ve done rush hour in the Big Apple, rush hour in Berlin is, I dunno, quaint.  Cute, even.

Friday night was Dale’s birthday party.  This was at Swift’s, on E. 4^th, as usual.  I walked down from Penn, because honestly, I desperately needed to walk the streets of Gotham once more.  I took Broadway all the way down to 4^th and then headed over.  It was a bit surreal, knowing I don’t live there anymore.  But it was also comfortable.  Like a pair of old slippers, or some other equally shitty clichéd simile.  Maybe better, it was also a bit Good Night Moon-y.  Like, good night Herald Square, good night Union Square; Good night Flatiron Building, good night Madison Square, good night NYU; good night My Old Liquor Store on 8^th Street. ((Did that work?))

So look, Swift’s is not my favorite bar.  I’m still salty over the fact that they charged me for a fucking seltzer at 3:30am at one of Dale’s previous birthdays.  I know that sounds petty.  But, come on, it’s fucking seltzer.  It’s the non-alcoholic aqua vitae, the water of life.  You don’t charge for that.  Especially at that hour.  Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’m going to regret committing this paragraph to the internets.  Like, I’m going to apply for a job one day, and the asshole interviewing me is gonna be all, “Well, your CV is impressive, but we’ve read the entirety of your blog[ue], ((He won’t spell it right; even if he’s only speaking it.)) and while that Star Wars spoof was mildly entertaining, we’re just not prepared to hire somebody who can’t let go of getting charged for a seltzer fifteen years ago.  But, you know, good luck.”  Then they’ll go and hire somebody whose sext pictures they’ve all seen.  What a world.

Where the hell was I?  Oh yeah, Dale’s birthday.  This was great.  The whole rest of the extended NYU fam was there.  Fredo, Lesley, Katy and Ang, who did the hard work of coming all the way down from CT.  I know I wasn’t the only reason she made the trip, but as with Rachel, it meant a lot to me.  I also know it was a pain in the ass for her to get there after working all day in the Nutmeg state; so it was kind of extra special, if you know what I mean.

For the most part, there’s not too much worth reporting as far as the party goes.  It was just great to see everybody and to catch up and hang out like old times.  What’s funny though, is that somewhere along the line, we realized that this September will mark ten years that we’ve known each other.  Dale, Katy, Fredo and I met in Greek 101, way back in the Fall of aught-seven.  I can’t believe it’s been ten years.  Neither could they.

Funny side-story with Fredo.  First of all, her name isn’t Fredo.  It’s Miranda.  But I’ve only ever called her Fredo.  She has kinda red hair, so right from the get, I was calling her “Red.”  But then she said her hair wasn’t really red.  Which meant it was faux-red.  Faux-red –> Fred –> Fredo.  Nobody else calls her that.  But I do, and she answers to it.  So it’s stuck.  Anyway, she says to me at the party, “You know Dave, when we first met, you told me I would reach ‘peak hotness’ at 27.  Well, guess what.  I’m 27.”  OK, so first of all, who says that?  Well, I do, apparently.  “And you look great!” I said.  And she did.  She’s a very pretty girl.  “Yeah,” she said, “but ‘peak hotness’ means it goes downhill from here.”  At which point, I kinda looked uncomfortably at my shoes and said something along the lines of, “Well, to be honest, at the time, I didn’t think we’d still be friends ten years later, so I wasn’t really planning on dealing with the consequences of that prediction.”  She just laughed.  It was all in good fun, anyway.

But it does get at something, that to me anyway, is quite nice really.  See, when I went back to school – when I met this lot – I was already 26.  But Fredo was a freshman.  Dale and Katy were juniors I think.  The whole bunch of them were in that stage where you’re just beginning to transition from awkward teenager into real person.  Lesley and Dale are both tall and skinny.  Back then though, they were all gangly limbs and bones.  (I dread to think how people would describe 19-year-old Dave; yeesh).  But they’ve really grown into themselves.  Lesley is positively elegant and Dale, it must be said, with his impeccable taste in dress, cuts a rather dashing figure.

What I’m trying to say – and almost certainly making a mess of – is that they were basically children when I met them.  And now they’re proper grown fucking humans, living proper fucking adult lives.  Ang lives in an actual house with her boyfriend.  Katy is married.  Dale is moving to Austin (heartbreaking; as if I was still in New York to feel the pain of it).  Lesley, Rachel and Fredo are all living with or soon to be living with their boyfriends; having actual careers and whatnot.

All my other friends, we’re roughly the same age.  We’ve grown up together.  But this lot, over the last ten years, I’ve watched them grow up; kind of like an older brother, though I’m sure none of them would ever describe me that way.  I adore them all, and I’m genuinely proud of them.  And I occasionally take the time to reflect on how special it is that they’re still a part of my life.  It very easily could have gone a different way.

If there was one downside to the evening, it’s that I didn’t get very much one-on-one time with Dale.  That, of course, was a function of his being the man of honor and having to spend time with they myriad folk there to celebrate his birthday.  But we did get to catch up a bit.  Also, he brought me back of book of Icelandic mythology from Iceland.  In Icelandic, mind you.  The book is gorgeous, though I can’t do a thing with it.  Yet.  Obviously I’ll have to learn Old Norse at some point.  Still, I can’t believe he’s moving to Texas.  Him and his girl have an artisanal craft something-something business.  They make cool stuff.  I’ll even plug their website, which is not a thing I’m in the habit of doing.  http://www.fesswavy.com/  Anyway, he’ll be fine.  Dale is one of the most effortlessly brilliant people I’ve ever met, and he’s good at literally everything he puts his hand too.  Anyway, either he’ll find a way to visit me in Berlin or I’ll find a way to visit him in Austin.  Or both.

Saturday was Niki’s wedding.  This, btw, was the reason I came home when I did.  No way was I missing that.  Aaand…then I missed it.  Not the whole thing.  Just the actual marriage part.  See, we left the house a half hour ahead of schedule.  Then we hit the worst ever traffic.  And got there after the ceremony.  Dave was not pleased.  Niki was very understanding.  And Harry was lovelily, ((Because “lovely” is an adjective; so I guess “lovelily” would be the adverb?)) “Aww, now worries mayte, wee’re jist glad ye could mayke it,” in his darling Ozzie accent.

Anyway, the wedding was great.  Very small affair; less than 30 people, I think.  They had it in the garden of this cute little Italian joint in Carol Gardens.  Vinny was my date.  No, seriously.  Due to some last minute cancellations, Niki asked me if I wanted to bring a plus-one.  Vinny was the obvious choice.  After all, they already knew each other.  They’re both part of what I call the “official Duffs crew.”  Loosely defined, the official Duffs crew is Vinny, Joschka and me; the Finns, Lus, Niki and somehow also Dutch Eddie. ((So-called because he’s actually from the Netherlands.  Lovely guy, that Eddie.))  So it felt completely appropriate to drag Vinny along.  And honestly, if he wasn’t able to come, I wouldn’t have brought anybody else.

Oh, I should clarify.  When I say “we left,” I mean me and parents, as they were also invited.  Niki worked at my old job with me and mom and then took over most of my work after I left.  Her and my mom got pretty close, so that’s how my ‘rents got invited to this shindig.

Meanwhile, Vinny got there on schedule.  So by the time I show up, he’s already chatting away with a couple of Australians.  I mean, that’s Vinny.  He’ll make friends with a lawn gnome if you put a beer in his hand.  Him and Codog, the two friendliest sons of bitches I’ve ever met.  Seriously though, it was great to have him there.

And of course it was great to see Niki.  Much like Dale’s birthday, with her being the guest of honor, I didn’t get as much time with her as I would have liked.  But honestly, I was just glad to be there.  My last two years in the city, I was probably tighter with her than anybody.  I lived with Jared, of course.  But we weren’t going out together much by then.  He was busy with school, and anyway, leaving the house at midnight and coming home at 530 after WoHop just isn’t his scene.

So Niki was my comrade in arms when it came to partying.  Duffs, RockaRolla, noodles in Williamsburgh or WoHop.  To say nothing of all the Archer Nights.  My last 18 months in the city, I don’t know what I would have done without her.  So if there’s anybody I’m going to fly 4000k miles for their wedding, it’s that kid.  And now she’s in Australia.  And I’m in Berlin.  Those Duffs days won’t come again.  Getting hammered and watching Always Sunny over Skype just won’t be the same.

You know who I fucking hate?  Holden fucking Caulfield.  Catcher in the Rye is shit, I’ll say it.  Fucking Holden Caulfield, what an unhappy sonofabitch.  But I’ll be damned if sometimes I don’t want to take those good times – the best times – and lock them up in a glass case and keep them forever.  Except, you know what?  Fuck you, Holden Caulfield.  We’re gonna make new good times.  And when we do, we’ll raise a toast to Dutch Eddie, and Duffs and RockaRolla and the good old days.  That’ll be the first drink.  After that, let the [new] good times roll, bitches!

Sunday was another busy day.  First up, brunch at Keith and Heather’s.  And it’s back to that family vibe.  The whole gang was there, and this time all the wives and kids, too.  Keith made omelets and pancakes.  Jared & Josh brought bagels from H&H.  Rob & Meg brought desert.  Nothing special to report here.  Just classic good times.  Lots of laughs.  By which I mean, we all just make fun of each other.  I played some video games with Kelsey, Keith’s daughter.  Because sometimes you just need a break from grownups, right?

But I did have one weird moment to myself in all of this.  At one point, I’m looking around the table, looking at all these people who are as much family as they are friends.  And I’m thinking, I dunno how to put it.  I’m thinking, on the one hand, I’ve made some pretty amazing friends in Berlin.  Zibs and Jan, with whom I’m planning a roadtrip.  Annett and Jan, who’ve done so much to help me get settled here.  Anne, my stranger-in-a-strange-land tandem partner.  Joschka, who with Vinny, we’re like the three metal musketeers.  So I’m doing pretty good in Berlin.  Better than pretty good, in fact.  I mean, if my friends here were my only friends, I’d be pretty damn lucky.

Anyway, I’m looking around the room at these people, these mutherfuckers I’ve grown up with, these bastards for whom I’ve been not just at, but in, their weddings.  Their kids, who call me “Uncle Dave.”  And I’m thinking, what the fuck is wrong with me that I would ever leave these people?  How unsatisfying was I finding my life that I could just turn around and say, “peace out, bitches”?

And then it passed.  Because the truth is, I was finding my life unsatisfying.  And you don’t live your life for your friends, even if they are fucking family.  You live it for yourself.  Certainly they all do.  Which isn’t to say they’ve all found what they’re looking for.  But I think, by and large, they’ve at least all found what they need.  And that’s something I don’t have back home.  Not yet, anyway.  That’s why I left.  But it’s not easy to leave those fuckers.  I love them.  Even when I don’t like them – which happens; even when I don’t like them, I still love them.  The bastards.

Sunday night, my parents took us – me, Justin & Jo – out for a fancy steak dinner at Bryant & Cooper’s; Long Island’s answer to Peter Luger’s. ((Well, technically LI’s answer to Luger’s is Luger’s…in Great Neck.  So better to say, maybe, the authentic Long Island answer to Luger’s.))  And once again, here’s people going out of their way to do something special for me while I’m in.  And yeah, this is special.  Because it ain’t cheap.  And gods, do I love steak.

I’ve really changed my diet in the last 4-5 years.  Much less meat, a lot more veg.  By and large, I eat healthier.  Which is fine, whatever.  It also means that when you do go for a proper steak, it’s that much more special.  And man, this is proper steak.  There’s really nothing better.  Essentially, it’s more or less the same as Luger’s.  Incredible beef.  Lots of butter.  Hash browns, creamed spinach, tomatoes & onions.  This is how kings eat, I’m sure of it.  I want to say we had a lovely time.  I want to say it was great to be with the family.  And it was.  Obviously.  But this was about the steak.  And it was glorious.

Monday was dinner at Vinny’s.  More great food.  We’re talking meatballs, his mom’s dried tomatoes, pasta with his mom’s sauce.  We’re talking sausage from Arthur Ave in the Bronx and excellent cheese.  We’re talking wine and good beer.  Look, the man is a natural cook.  So when he invites you to dinner, you go.  Joschka and Cindy were there too; the only time I got to see them in the city.

Back in Berlin, there was big talk of taking them to Joe’s Shanghai and Duffs and WoHop.  It didn’t work out.  I had a choice.  Meet them in the city or meet them at Vinny’s.  But that’s no choice at all.  If Vinny is cooking, you go to Vinny’s.  It was cool to see them in New York though; and good to have Vinny, Joschka and me together in the same room.  Classic City, population: 3.

Cindy has enough English to get by in this setting, but she’s not fluent.  So one-on-one, we were speaking German.  Which was great, until she says to me, “Dave, what’s happened to your German?”  I dunno, two weeks in New York has set me back.  But you can still understand me, at least, right?  To which she replies, “Eh.”  Ouch.  Still though, that was a good night.

Tuesday was family day, this time for my mom’s side.  We met my great uncle for lunch.  He’s 90, I wanna say.  And he’s slowing down, there’s no denying it.  But he’s still got his sense of humor.  And he’s still full of great stories.  I mean, they’re the same stories.  Me and my dad were making bets in the car as to which ones he’d tell.  We were both right.

One of my favorites involves a rich oil-man relative.  I’m going to give an abridged “telephone” version here.  By which I mean, I’m sure I’m screwing up details in the re-telling.  But the essential core is roughly intact.  And the punchline is accurate.  Anyway, it goes something like this.

“My father’s brother was a bit of a trouble maker. ((My great uncle, like I said, is around 90.  So if we’re talking his uncle, this is early 1900’s.))  One day, he gets in a fight with an Irishman. ((I swear, he used the word “Irishman” in at least one telling of this story; though not this particular time.))  And he killed him.  So he ran away. ((I don’t know if he actually killed the guy.  But he definitely ran away.  So it seems plausible.))  Anyway, he goes down to South Carolina. ((Or some other southern state.))  And he gets into business selling goods ((Clothes, maybe.)) to people moving West.  Well, eventually he moves out to Oklahoma ((Or some other flyover state.)) and somebody gives him some business advice.  [Making a long story short], they cheat some Indians out of their land. ((I mean, seriously?))  And that land turns out to have oil under it.  And [making a long story short again] he gets crazy rich off this.”

That’s incredible.  Literally, it strains credulity.  But also, what an amazing story.  So I ask, knowing full well the answer, “Wait, Uncle Art, are you saying we have a millionaire in our family?!  Why don’t we talk to these people?!”  To which he replies, “My mother ((Or whoever.)) said we don’t need anything to do with him.”  Here it comes.  “Because he doesn’t keep kosher.”

Whaaat?!  Right, so I have no idea how much of that story is true.  But even leaving room for embellishment, there’s enough there that just, wow.  Also, in trying write that down, I realize I simply need to record him telling it.  Because I’m too fuzzy on too many of the details.  But still.  A fight with an Irishman?  Cheating Indians out of their land?  Oil Money?  And we don’t talk to them…because they don’t keep kosher?!

But he’s full of great stories.  “The atomic bomb saved my life,” is a classic.  He was earmarked for the invasion of Japan, before the bomb.  “I should have married this one girl, but she was fat.”  That’s another classic.  And the best insult in his book is describing someone as being “of the shtetl.”  Which you either get or you don’t, but I ain’t gonna explain it here.

What’s hard to wrap your mind around, though, is that you’re getting a distorted version of these stories many many years after the fact.  What’s objectively true, is that this was a 5’4” Jewish kid from the Bronx who joined the army during WWII and carried the BAR, the biggest, heaviest gun they had.  This is a guy who built and maintained a successful business.  A guy who took care of his developmentally disabled sister.  A guy who regularly goes to Shul…and then calls himself a “fraud” because he’s “not really that religious”…and then reads Hebrew out of the Hagaddah at Passover like a boss.  Whatever else he may be, he’s a fucking treasure.

Right, so this has gone rather a bit longer than I’d anticipated.  So Imma stop here for tonight and I guess I’ll wrap it all up in the next post.  Until then…

זיי געסונט

Post Scriptum: I always close my posts with that little bit of Yiddish: זיי געסונט – ‘be well’, or ‘be healthy.’  Anyway, I once asked Uncle Art if they spoke Yiddish in his house growing up.  After all, his family came out of Eastern Europe, where they would absolutely have spoken mama loshen.  His answer was very interesting.

“My father could speak Yiddish,” he said.  I can hear his voice.  In my last post, I wrote about that Marky Ramone “Queens” accent.  Art has an oldschool New York accent.  I guess it’s Bronx; though not anything that would be called a Bronx accent in my generation.  It’s a wonderful accent though.  Nobody sounds like that anymore.  It’s a time machine.

Anyway: “My father could speak Yiddish.  And if he went into a store or something, and somebody spoke Yiddish to him, he would answer in Yiddish.  But my father really only spoke English.  And the reason was, ‘I’m an American,’ he would say.  ‘I speak English.’”

I catch all kinds of feels from that.  On the one hand, I’m proud of that.  You come to America with goal of making a better life for yourself and your family.  And Step One of getting ahead is simply to speak English.  That’s the Jewish-American ethos, right there.  First Generation: Work hard & speak English.  Second Generation: College.  Third Generation: “Oy, my son the doctuh!”

Look, clearly there’s a lot that went into making me who I am.  And I don’t want to put too much on the back of a man I never met.  But it was the same in my father’s family too.  Bubby spoke Yiddish.  But ask her where her accent came from and the answer was “Florida.”  Press her harder, and the most you’d get was “Brooklyn.”  Anyway, by the time I came along, there as never any question as to whether I was going to college.  And I think that goes back to that generation.  We speak English, our children get better jobs than we have, and our grandkids go to college.

On the other hand, there’s always this background noise of, “we left for a reason.”  Right?  The Old World was not a nice place for Jews.  And Yiddish is the Old World.  So how much of it is assimilation, and how much of it is rejecting the past?  So I get the whole, “I’m an American, I speak English thing.”  But four generations later, I’ve been deprived of something.

It occurs to me that Vinny can go back to Calabria and speak his family’s ancient dialect with distant cousins.  But for us, there’s nowhere to go back to.  The people that stayed were destroyed.  And the people that left, weather by assimilation or rejection or neglect, well, they let the language die.  The culture lingers.  Mel Brooks, as a Native American, speaks Yiddish in Blazing Saddles.  The sense of humor is shot through our culture.  But the language is mostly gone.  And there’s no “old country” to go back to.

But who the hell wants to end on a downer like that.  Here’s a fascinating thing.  Bits and pieces of Yiddish have made their way into modern German.  My Berlin friends use words and idioms that come straight of Yiddish.  And that’s pretty fucking cool.  But I’ll save that for another post.  Until then, I say again:

זיי געסונט

An American in Berlin
12 April, 2017
A Berliner in New York

The subtitle is a bit misleading.  To paraphrase JFK, Ich bin kein Berliner.  I’m not a Berliner.  That is not a statement of protest.  It’s not a complaint.  Nor is it a wistful regret.  It’s just a fact.  I’m not a Berliner.  And that’s fine.  It doesn’t mean, by the way, that I don’t love it here.  It doesn’t mean I regret coming here or that I wish I’d chosen somewhere else.  It simply means what it means.  I’m not a Berliner.  Thing is, I had to go home to learn this.

I’m a New Yorker.  Bottom line.  That’s not a knock on Berlin, or anywhere else for that matter.  It’s not a brag either.  It’s just a statement of fact.  My name is Dave.  I’m about 5’6”.  I’m a New Yorker.  None of those declarations is any more or less true than another.  Just the facts, ma’am.  But like I said, I needed to go home to (re)learn it.

I recently spent last two weeks on Long Island and in the City, visiting family and friends. ((Chiasmatically – the family is on the Island, the friends are in the City.))  Now, to be clear, Long Island can go screw.  Sure, my family is there, and some of my best friends too; to say nothing of many memories.  But that place is the pits.

Now the City, that’s where I belong.  Not now, no.  I needed to get out of there, and I’m glad as hell I did.  When I left, I was often saying that the City didn’t speak to me anymore.  Well, having been back, what can I say?  It’s not singing to me.  But we’re back on speaking terms.

Before I left, I could think of little more than food.  Chinese food.  Pizza.  Mexican food.  Jewish food.  And not in generalities either.  Chinese food meant Wo Hop, but it also meant Joe’s Shanghai (Soup Dumplings!) and my old corner spot.  Jewish food meant pastrami on rye, but also pickles and matzah ball soup; um, and bagels.  Yeah, OK, Mexican meant tacos and pizza is, well, pizza.  But the point is, from my Berlin hideaway, New York meant food.

Then I got back.  And all I had to do was stand in the passport line at our glorious shithole of an airport, JFK.  And all of a sudden, New York meant “attitude.”  It meant diversity – beautiful, gorgeous, annoying, frustrating, wonderful diversity.

Lemme tackle diversity first.  See, I always have a hard time explaining this to Berliners.  They feel – and rightly so, to a certain extent – that their city is very “mulit-culti,” multicultural, and that’s the word they use in German.  They see their city as a major European capital filled with people from all over the world.  And as I said, that’s true, to an extent.

But when people say this to me, I always have an answer for them.  But I think it’s not a very good answer, because when I give it, they always look at me kinda funny.  See, what I say is – though I never know quite how to express it, in English or German is – I say, “Guys, you don’t even know.  This city is so fucking white.”

And again, I don’t mean that to be insulting.  I’m not trying to take the place down a peg, or anything like that.  It’s just that, well, everybody kinda looks the same here.  And yes, I’m generalizing.  There’s a sizable Turkish population, after all.  But this is Northern Europe.  And so, even when people are coming from Poland and Russia, for example, everybody kinda sorta looks alike.

Anyway, I’ve yet to find the person in this town who doesn’t look at me funny when I say my spiel about Berlin being “white.”  So I was sorta wondering what kind of reaction that would get at home.  How would it play in the Big Apple?  Well, as it turned out, people understood me instantly.  I was met with knowing nods, and comments along the lines of, “Well, yeah, man, no place else really looks like here.”

My buddy Shuman put it in more logical terms though.  He said, and I paraphrase here, “Look man, I was in Italy.  And at first, I had the same reaction you did.  And then I realized, Oh yeah, it’s Italy.  Everybody is just Italian here.”  Oh yeah, it’s Germany.  Everybody is just German here.  It was only then that I realized to what extent I’ve taken this whole “melting pot” thing for granted my whole life.  I guess I’d just assumed all big cities look like New York.  And so, while I never meant anything böse (mean) with my line about Berlin being white, I’m realizing now that it’s a bit of prejudice I’m going to have to unlearn.

And yet, one can have a preference without being prejudiced, right?  I can prefer the complex plurality of New York to the comparative homogeneity of Berlin without being judgey or superior about it, can’t I?  I certainly hope so, anyway.

Oh, but I was talking about the diversity at JFK.  So I get into the Citizen/Resident passport line at Immigration, and it was a sight for sore eyes.  In that one line was every color imaginable, a dozen languages, religious garb of every stripe and what I can only assume was the full spectrum of sexuality.  It was beautiful.  I also think I saw more diversity standing in that one line for 45 minutes than I’ve seen in nine months over here.  That.  That is my city.

I also mentioned the attitude.  So there I am, standing at the tail end of this long-ass Immigration line.  And this dude walks up to me.  “Hey man, is this the line for US citizens?” he asks.  “Yes,” I tell him, “I’m afraid so.”  To which he replies, “Fuuuuck.”  Ah yes, I thought.  I am indeed home.

This trip home for me was basically about three things.  Seeing my family.  Seeing my friends.  And eating.  Well, also drinking.  But, I mean, that’s a constant.  So what about all that, anyway?  Family first, right?

Apart from two nights crashing in the city with Jared and Josh and then Codog & Arlene, I stayed with my parents on the Island.  I can’t say I was particularly happy to be in the ‘burbs.  And I can’t say it was convenient, when most of the people I wanted to see were in the city.  But there’s no denying it was great to be back with the fam.  And it was nice to be back in the closest thing I have to my own home Stateside.  I mean, when you add it all up, I probably lived there for about 18 months, maybe a bit more.

Naturally, one of the highlights of being at my ‘rents house was that I got to cook dinner for them a couple of times.  Look, when you’re in your mid-thirties, you just don’t want to be living with your folks.  No matter how much you love them, no matter how good a relationship you have with them, it’s just not where you’re supposed to be in your life.  And I do love my parents.  We do have a good relationship.  Not that we don’t break on each other sometimes.

Anyway, when I was living there, one of my favorite things was cooking family dinner.  I mean, everything about it comes up Dave.  They usually foot the shopping bill.  They do the dishes.  And they generally like what I cook.  Plus I drink a goodly amount, which has the effect of putting me in a good and talkative mood. ((Whereas, at home at least, I am normally hardly talkative and often grumpy.))  So that’s the time I most enjoy hanging out with the parental units.  And this trip home was no exception.

Also, one night I made a Guiness-braised corned-beef brisket.  Personally, I think I overdid it on the spices; especially the cloves.  And I maybe thought it was too salty.  But the meat was tender as all get-out.  And my old dad insists it’s the best thing I’ve ever made.  I don’t think I agree, but it’s nice when your dish goes over well all the same.

The one downside was, I didn’t get to see my brother nearly enough.  And that was just a function of shitty timing.  Being a music teacher, he was working late almost every night with concerts and rehearsals.  But it was classic good times when we did get some time together.  And I kicked his ass at NHL94, which was mission critical.  I mean, if I’d lost, it could have rendered the entire trip home a failure.  That’s a lot of pressure.  But I came through. ((#BRIANMULLEN))

Right.  So your family is your family.  You basically know what to expect.  And you’ve only got one family.  Well, one blood-family, anyway.  What I mean is, it’s not a thing you’re going to replicate or recreate abroad.  Your family is your family.  But your friends, that’s where things get interesting.

What’s amazing to me, is just how much friend-love I’ve got back home.  So many people went out of their way to see me, to make time for me, to do something special for me.  It was incredible.  I’ve done a pretty damn fine job, I have to admit, of filling my life up with some pretty wonderful peeps.  And these people genuinely love me; as I love them.  But it’s the kind of thing you can take for granted when they’re (or you’re) just around all the time.

And you know what?  Maybe I shouldn’t be making too much of a distinction between friends and family here.  It’s more like there’s the blood-family and the choice-family.  So many of these clowns have been around for well over half my life already.  What do you call that, if not family?

At this point, I’m going to try and do a brief run-down of my schedule over those two weeks; without hopefully getting too bogged down in the details.  And if that seems a bit self-indulgent, well it might be.  But as much as anything, it’s so I can have some kind of record of those times; before I forget.  And also, it’s my blogue.  So deal.  No, but seriously, this actually goes on like a (very) long diary entry, so do feel free to just skip it…

Right, so I came in on a Thursday.  I went for dinner with my parents to the diner, which is about as classic as it gets.  Natch, I got a burger deluxe and a Corona.  Comfort food, comfort company.  It was exactly what I wanted.

Friday night was dinner at Amanda’s.  The whole gang was there, though not all the wives.  Keith was already in the city for work, so the only people coming from the Island were me and Murph; Murph, who was good enough to drive me since we all knew I’d be hittin’ the sauce.  Let me tell you, I enjoyed the shit out of that car ride.

Murphy is an interesting cat.  In a group setting, he’s exceedingly quiet.  I mean, he’s good for about one absolutely brilliant one-liner/zinger per night.  But generally speaking, he’s a man of few words.  In a group setting.  One-on-one, it’s a different story.  And I love chatting with Murph, one-to-one.  See, he’s a mechanical engineer.  So to me, his work is fascinating.  I’ll never be my dad when it comes to cars, or mechanical things in general.  But I certainly learned a lot from the old man, not least of which is a simple appreciation for the mechanical and scientific world.

So when I get together with Murph, we talk about cars, we talk about engineering, we talk about science.  To put it simply, we talk about man things.  I love it.  We talk, but mostly he teaches me.  Remember when, in a previous post, I spoke about the conversations I’d have with my former roommate Christian, about economics?  The idea was – and is – if I’m lucky enough to be able to chat with someone who has expertise in a field, I want to learn everything I can from them.  It’s the same with the Murph.  He’s so fucking knowledgeable.  So I just ask questions and let him go.  And I appreciate the hell out of it.

And I think – I hope – he appreciates it too.  I could be wrong, but I don’t think any of the rest of the gang have much interest in this direction.  None of the other guys are into cars, or machines, or airplanes or whatever.  And so, while I’m clearly no engineer, I can at least keep up.  I think, or I like to think, he enjoys talking with me about this stuff too.  Anyway, that was the car ride to Amanda’s, and it was a joy.

Then there was the dinner itself.  Amanda made ribs, which were uh-mazing.  And then all the guys were there.  Jared, Rob, Keith, Lermo, Murph.  The Original Six.  You know – and I’m just thinking about this now for the first time – in the past, it was always hard to get all six together.  There was always somebody who had something.  Yet, this trip home, we got the whole gang together not once, but twice.  That’s pretty special.  Josh and Monica were there too, and man do I love those two.  Josh, of course, is Jared’s boyfriend.  And MoMo is Amanda’s bestie. ((Or do we spell it “best”?))  Of the wives, though, only Kira was there; and she’s fantastic.  But the Carroll girls were absent, as was Rob’s wife Meg, who I’d yet to meet.  Needless to say it was a great time.

Me and Murph were the last to leave.  I’m sure he didn’t want to stay as late as we did, but bless him, he let me have all the time I could have with my friends before we finally called it a night.  We had another long chat on the way home, this time about him trying to decide if he should go back to school.  It was either a really good conversation, or it was me drunkenly rambling and him politely “Yes, Dave”-ing me the whole time.  I suppose I’ll never know.

Saturday night we went to visit my dad’s family at what used to be Mike and Mag’s place in BK, but which, sadly, is now just Mag’s place.  It was the first time I’d seen everybody since Mike died.  It was bittersweet.  But, tbh, it was mostly just sweet.  There’s so much love there.

I spent most of the night chatting with my cousin Jay.  Another interesting cat.  It’s weird.  I can’t say that we’re close.  We never get together outside of family gatherings, even though there’s really no good reason for this.  But we have the same damned sense of humor.  We see each other maybe three or four times a year.  But when we do, we’re finishing each other’s jokes, and it’s just effortless.  I laugh as hard with him as I do with my best friends.

My plan was to drink only wine, and not to get too wasted.  But towards the end of the evening, Mag – Jay’s stepmom, for the record – plunked a bottle of “vodka” ((“Vodker” is the sort of thing I’d maybe have looked down on in the past.  But after nine months of German accented English, this brand of Brooklynese was like an oasis in the desert.  I mean, when my cousin Melissa addressed my cousin Cedar as, “Hey yo, Ceduh!”, it was music.)) and two shot glasses down between me and Jay.  And then the wheels came off.  By which I mean, we went down the Jew-joke rabbit hole. ((Incidentally, I just taught my advanced class the “down the rabbit hole” idiom.  Because we were going down all sorts of grammatical and linguistic rabbit holes.  Then, one of my students thought I said rabbit hall (#accents).  To which I explained, the rabbit hall was simply the rabbit’s home at the end of the rabbit hole.))  Which, let’s be honest, is pretty par for the course with us.  We mixed in plenty of Russian and Yiddish accents, which are always fun.  But sometime around the fourth shot of “vodka,” ((And this on the heels of an entire bottle of wine, mind you.)) we got into the German accents and the Holocaust jokes.  And, regrettably, I think I went a bit overboard.

It was only then, though, that I realized how much I’ve been suppressing this stuff over here.  I mean, yeah, I do Jew jokes.  But there’s a limit to how far I’m willing to push those in this country.  And so, stuff was coming out of me that even I was like, “duuude.”  But I’d had nine months of pent-up Holocaust jokes that needed to get out.  Not my finest showing, to be sure.  But if you can’t fuck up in front of your own family, where can you?

Sunday, Vinny drove down from Mt. Vernon to spend the afternoon.  I met Vin sometime around 2009, just because we kept bumping into each other at metal shows.  At first, we traded numbers only to say “Hey, bro, you going to the so-&-so show?”  It was probably another year or so before we started actually hanging out.  So compared to the lads from high school, he’s relatively new in my life.  And yet, that mutherfucker is like a godsdamned brother to me.  Anyway, Sunday, he came down to the Island.

I drove him up to Huntington so we could have lunch at Little Vincent’s, my favorite fucking pizza place on God’s green earth already.  It’s important to remember here that Vinny is not only Italian, but first generation American.  I mean, his mom makes her own tomato sauce from scratch.  And by “from scratch,” I mean she picks the godsdamned tomatoes herself.  So when I say the dude has high standards when it comes to Italian fare, I’m not exaggerating.

All this to say, he gave his seal of approval to LV’s.  Which fucking matters, alright?  Because if had said to me, “You know what, paisan?  It’s fine.  But honestly, it’s not really any different than the shit you can get anywhere.”  If he had said that, I would have felt shame.  But what he actually said was, “You know what, paisan?  This is actually pretty fucking good.  Honestly, the best part is the crust.  It’s nice and thin, and it has great texture.”  Which is true, btw.  But it matters to me that he thought so.  He didn’t say anything about the sauce though.  He didn’t have to.  We’ve both had his mom’s sauce.

That night, after he left, I knocked together a stir fry for my parents.  That was the first family dinner we had that I cooked.  We were all pretty happy with it.  Also happy with, was I, was the bottle of Dewar’s that was somehow in the house.  Not the white label shit, that’s fit for naught but scotch-&-soda.  This was the next level up.  I wasn’t expecting much, but it was actually pretty solid.  So I drank a bunch of scotch and hung out with the ‘rents, and although I don’t remember what we talked about, it was a good time.

Monday was a recovery day.  Tuesday’s plan called for me to have dinner at Jared & Josh’s and then to crash there.  But first, I had a Taco-Tuesday lunch date with my dad in Levittown.  This was a habit we’d got into while I was living at home, since, as a museum manager, he works weekends but not Tuesdays.  So he actually texted me before I flew back, asking if I wanted to do Taco Tuesday when I got in.  Which was funny, because I was about to text him the same thing.

It was pretty classic.  By which I mean, we ate tacos and bitched about politics, which is what we always used to do.  Also, amongst the tacos I ordered, one was lengua, tongue.  At which point, he tells the story (again) about how he can’t eat tongue.  Because when he was a kid, Bubbi (or possibly his mother?) had a pot on the stove, and when he opened it up, all he saw this giant cow’s tongue just boiling away.  And while my taco just looked like chunks of beef, there in that pot, he saw a complete actual tongue.  And that sufficiently grossed him out to the point that he had no interest in a lengua taco. ((Interesting follow up.  Back in Berlin, I was in the supermarket the other day, where I was perusing the butcher’s section.  And there, in the back of the showcase, was a whole, complete, giant cow’s tongue.  And it looked like a fucking tongue.  And you know what?  Yeah, that’s gross.))

Anyway, we ate delicious tacos and bitched about politics.  Which is a thing, apparently, that they just do now.  Bitching about politics, I mean.  And by “they,” I mean my parents.  I swear to God, every morning I woke up to the sound of them yelling at each other.  Not fighting.  Not even disagreeing.  Just yelling.  About Trump.  It would go something like this.  Mom: “Can you believe what this asshole is saying now?!”  Dad: “Can you not?!  He’s a fucking asshole!”  Whereupon would I roll over and cover my head with my pillow all the while wondering what kind of masochist you have to be to watch the news in the morning anymore.

So much for lunch.  I asked Jared what I should bring to dinner.  He said bourbon.  I brought rye.  Because #davestheworst.  Whatever.  It was great.  First of all, better than anyone I know, Jared knows how to roast a fucking chicken.  It was moist and it was tender and it was delicious.  “How much butter did you use,” I asked.  “A lot,” he said.  I suppose the expected question is something along the lines of “What’s your secret?”  But when you live with someone for ten years, you know the secret is fucking butter.  So the question is simply, “How much?”

So look, I’ve talked about this before.  I lived with Jared for ten years.  That sonofabitch is my best friend on planet earth.  But now he’s with Josh.  And I just adore that fucker.  I mean, he really is one of my favorite people of all the people.  And they’re great together.  If it was anybody else, I’m sure I’d be feeling all, “Can we get some classic Dave-&-Jared time?”  And indeed, Josh will sometimes be all, “I’m gonna go to bed and let you guys catch up.”  But I’m like, “Uh-uh, honey, you ain’t goin’ nowhere.”  There’s a reason they’re one of only two people I crashed with while I was in.

Added bonus, they also invited Hot Michelle to dinner.  Hot Michelle is a lot of things.  She’s Italian.  She’s smart.  She has yuuuge tracks of land.  But more than any of that, she not only puts up with my bullshit, but indeed seems to find my peculiar brand of flirtation (?) amusing.  She sees through the shtick.  And she plays along.  So I adore Hot Michelle.  She’s a colleague of Josh’s, btw, which is how she fits into the schema.  Anyway, a night with Jared and Josh and Hot Michelle (and rye) is a good godsdamned night.

Added bonus, they are all social workers.  So, inevitably, at some point they get down to talking shop.  Some of it is gossip, and for this, I kind of tune out.  But some of it is the actual science of social work and psychology.  And, just as with Murph and Christian, my brain gets turned on.  I listen, and I ask questions, and I listen some more.  And I learn what I can.  What I’ve learned is, you’re never too drunk to learn.  Now, remembering what you’ve learned the next day, that’s something else…

Wednesday was a hard day’s drinking.  But first, noodle soup.  I met my buddy Shuman at Pho Grand for the bowl I’d been dreaming of for months.  Eye of round, brisket, tendon, tripe.  God, I missed this stuff.  Say what you will about Chinatown.  It’s gross.  It’s smells bad in the summer.  People spit on the sidewalk.  But man, I love eating there.

So I meet Shuman at Pho Grand.  Shuman.  One of the few good things to come out of my St. Lawrence experience.  The only guy I’ve ever met who can credibly claim to be a bigger AC/DC fan than me.  In fact, that’s how I met him.  He’s this giant of a man, over 6’ tall; football player.  And he walks up to me one day, in college, out of nowhere.  I’d never seen him before.  And he’s towering over me.  “Hey, you like AC/DC, right?”  Not as random as it seems.  I stood out in college, with my long hair and denim jacket with a giant accadacca patch on the back.  “Hey, you like AC/DC, right?” he says.  And I look up at this man-monster.  “Umm, yes, sir, an’ it please you.”

See, he’d bought an original Back in Black tour shirt on eBay.  Only it was a size Small.  Poor guy couldn’t even try it on, let alone actually wear it.  So he wanted to sell it to me.  Obviously I bought it.  I still have it.  So that’s how we met.  We’re never not emailing each other about our favorite band.  But we’re also both huge Yankee fans.  And students of history.  And Jews with a sense of humor.  We get on well, is the point.

So after that glorious noodle soup, we head around the corner to 169, one of the last true LES dive bars.  Beer & a shot for three bucks.  And we spend a few hours drinking cans of Genny and shots of well whiskey, all the while cracking jokes, talking about AC/DC, and trading off Yiddish and German accents, making fun of everything that rightfully (or wrongfully) deserves to have the piss taken out of it.

Talking about accents, here’s a funny thing.  We’re both New Yorkers.  He was born – and grew up – in, I want to say, Washington Heights.  I’m from BK, grew up on the Island.  German accents, Yiddish accents, Russian accents, no problem.  Then we get to talking about Marky Ramone and how he as the quintessential Queens accent, and how it doesn’t really exist anymore.  And we try it, but neither of us can nail it.

But that’s one of things I love about Shuman.  He’s got this bone-deep appreciation and affection for old New York, for the city as it was when we were kids, but in which we didn’t quite grow up either.  I mean, we’re talking about the three shifts of alcoholics ((Go to Rudy’s at 8am and you find three kinds: 1) Actual nothing-to-live-for alcoholics; 2) Tourists; 3) People coming off the night shift.)) at Rudy’s (free hot dogs!) and dive bars that don’t exist anymore and a Queens accent that’s on its last legs.

And, not for nothing, a Queens mutherfucking accent.  Not Brooklyn.  Not Manhattan.  Not Staten Island or the Bronx.  Queens.  I’m over here in Berlin talking in broad generalities to my students about some kind of “New Yawk” accent, whatever that means. ((Cawfee?  Wawtuh?  Manha’’an?))  Because when you’re in exile, you paint in broad strokes, and everything is rose-colored.

But when you’re back in it, it’s different.  All the Hollywood shit falls away.  I remember reading once that Mel Blanc described his Bugs Bunny voice as being a cross between a Brooklyn accent and a Bronx accent.  Think about that.  To him, these were two completely different and unique ways of speaking that he chose to blend together for a cartoon wiseass of a fucking rabbit.  So yes, debating the finer points of Marky Ramone’s diction absolutely counts as a highlight of my trip home.

Anyway, somewhere around 5pm, we reached peak tipsiness.  You know, when you tiptoe right up to the line of being actually drunk, look over the abyss, take a step back and realize there’s only one thing to do.  Now, that one thing can be lots of things.  It just depends on where you are.  If you’re in Texas, maybe that one thing is to go and eat BBQ.  If you’re in Philly (gods help you), the one thing, I guess, is to go for a cheesesteak. ((Gross.))  But when you’re on East Broadway, where it meets Canal, and it’s 5pm on a weekday, you have one choice.

And that, my friends, is why we stumbled into Kossar’s, there to eat bialys.  And so we ordered two bialys.  And we ate the bialys.  And they were good.  Man, they were good.  I really did love living in that neighborhood.  But that’s where me and Shuman parted ways.

And yet, my day had only just begun.  But seeing as how it’s only Wednesday in this story, and there’s so much more to tell, I think I’ll stop here and finish the tale in my next posting.  Until then…

זיי געסונט

An American in Berlin
11 April, 2017

Well, here I am, back in Berlin.  After an all-too-short two weeks Stateside, it’s back to work.  I’m officially on my new schedule at the so called “Friday School.”  Only that moniker no longer fits, as they’ve got me working Tuesdays and Thursdays now as well.  Which is quite a nice situation to be in, tbh.  First of all, I just straight-up enjoy working there.  The people are cool – my colleagues as well as the students; and the atmosphere is very relaxed.  Also, it guarantees my rent/insurance/metrocard money.  So it’s nice to not have to worry about that, month-to-monthly.

At the time of writing, I’ve just got home from drinks and dinner with Jan & Zibs.  We were ostensibly meeting to discuss plans for a roadtrip next month. ((More on that in a future post, when the plans are more solid.))  We met around 7pm at this Persian joint on the other end of town, ((Also known as their end of town.)) near Hohenzollernplatz.  If I’ve learned one thing about these two, it’s this: When your stated plan is to meet for “dinner and a few drinks,” you’d do well to just leave the rest of your night open.

Yes, we met at 7.  And yes, we ate dinner and had a few drinks.  We also shared two shisha pipes and drank a few pots of tea.  And all of a sudden – well, six hours later, anyway – they’re kicking us out of the restaurant.  Something about the staff wanting to go home. ((#lame))  And yes, we did rough out a plan for the roadtrip.  We also hatched a scheme to buy a vineyard in one of those southern European countries with a shitty economy; possibly Portugal.

I mean, come on.  That would be the life, wouldn’t it?  Owning a vineyard in Portugal?  Sure, we’d have to come up with the money.  “And that’s just for the land,” protested Jan.  “What about business expenses?”  To which I replied, quite logically, I think, “Business expenses, shmizness expenses.”  At that point, we agreed to defer further planning until after the roadtrip.

So on Monday, I had my last lesson with my up-til-Monday one-to-one student at the other school.  Although I had prepared some materials for the lesson, she herself had come prepared with a practice TOEIC exam which she wanted to do.  The funny thing was, she didn’t want me in the room when she took the test; she just wanted me to go over the answers with her after.  The test, mind you, takes something like 90 minutes.

All this to say, I left her alone for like an hour and a half.  Which is highly irregular, btw.  But that’s what she wanted, and the customer is always right, right?  And well, also no.  Because she made plenty of mistakes on the test.  So in that sense, the customer was clearly not always right.  But you give the customer what they want, is the point.  So I split.

I brought soup for lunch that day.  Which may seem irrelevant, but I’m going somewhere with this.  In the cupboard that morning, I found an appropriate Tupperware-thingy for the soup; roughly the shape of a large takeout wanton soup container, but a touch smaller; an inane detail which will also be eventually relevant.  Anyway, I throw my bag over my shoulder, grab the soup container (along with my chopsticks, because noodle soup) and head to school.  And I’m carrying the soup awkwardly in my hand, because I’m afraid it might open up in my bag.  Just so you have the picture.

After all, I wasn’t planning on getting kicked out of my classroom.  I wasn’t planning on carrying this soup container around central Berlin.  But kicked out I was.  Which is how I found myself carrying around this awkwardly sized-&-shaped Tupperware to a park bench near the Mohrenstraße U-Bahn station.  It was there that I had my lunch, happily eating noodle soup with chopsticks like a fucking civilized human being already. ((One tries not to be a snob.  But then one sees Berliners eating Chinese food with forks and all one’s good intentions go for naught.))

So now I’ve eaten lunch, but I’ve still got an hour to kill.  And this awkward empty Tupperware ((Autocorrect keeps capitalizing “Tupperware.”  But it wasn’t a Tupperware brand container.  I’m using the name as a generic adjective.  Which makes me feel like it shouldn’t be capitalized.  And also I have this problem where I can’t turn off being an English teacher.)) to carry around.  What to do?  Well, given my location, I decided to go for a bit of historical sight-seeing.  My plan was to walk around to the site of the old (new) Reichskanzlei (Reich’s Chancellery); then from there, around back to the parking lot where the Führerbunker used to be and then finally to the Holocaust memorial, which stands across the street and one block up.

First of all, I’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t win with this shit.  What I mean is, as a student of history, I do think it’s a bit of a shame that the Chancellery and the bunker were completely demolished with nary a sign that they ever even existed.  On the other hand, good fucking riddance.  But on yet another hand, I’m also completely creeped out by the Nazi buildings that still exist, all the more so given that they’re actually in use.  Göring’s Air Ministry building is now the Finance Ministry.  How the hell does one actually go to their ho-fucking-hum job in a place like that?  Last year, I saw AC/DC at the Olympiastadion, which was really cool until you remember the damn thing was built for the express purpose of showcasing Aryan superiority.  So it’s a loss when the buildings are destroyed, and it’s disturbing when they still stand.  That’s what I mean by you can’t win with this shit.

Anyway, on the site of the Chancellery, they’ve built an apartment complex.  Oh, and also a little elementary school. ((Or possibly a kindergarten.  A school for small children, is the fucking point already.))  I mean, that’s just creepy.  It’s creepy, right?  Like, how do you live on that ground, knowing what was there?  The parking lot around back is where the exit for the bunker was.  And all that’s there about it is one little sign.  And even that was only put up sometime in the early 2000’s.

Still, I felt it was important to at least visit the site.  And since I was in the neighborhood with an hour to kill, it seemed like as good a time as any.  Only, like I said, I’m carrying this annoying and awkward Tupperware under my arm.  Well, as I’m walking from the parking lot/bunker site to the Holocaust memorial, I decide to try and jam it into my coat pocket.  It didn’t really fit well, but it seemed good enough.

Right, so I get to the memorial and promptly sit myself down on one of the stones.  Whereupon did I dig out my phone and open up the Wikipedia pages for the Neureichskanzlei and the Führerbunker.  And I read for a bit, until I decide it’s time to head back.  But as I stand up, I notice the lack of a large, awkward bulge in my coat pocket.  Fuck.  My Tupperware – my roommate’s Tupperware, to be precise – must have fallen out as I was walking.  So I prepare myself to go and retrace my steps to find it.

It was then that I saw the bright yellow plastic cap lying in the street; in the street just between the Holocaust memorial and the bunker parking lot.  I approach it with quick steps, hoping to recover the goods before it was too late.  But it was too late.  A car had run over it, shattering it to pieces and launching the yellow cap to its landing spot about five feet away.  And if I’d had any hope of at least recovering the chopsticks, I was disabused of it by the black tire tracks across them.  Fuck again.

And look, yeah, it was dumb to try and jamb the thing into my coat pocket when it clearly didn’t fit.  But it also easily could have fallen out on the sidewalk where I simply could have just picked it up again.  It even could have fallen out in the street and rolled to the curb.  But no.  Having a mind like The One Ring, it jumped out of my jacket smack in the middle of the road, where it waited to be found by a Gollum-car.  Only the Gollum-car didn’t save the precious, it destroyed it.  What were the odds of this?  There was only conclusion to draw: Even after all these years, this place was haunted.

But there was something else in this episode, too.  Something uglier.  See, I stood over the remains of this Tupperware, there in the middle of the road.  And I looked at it.  Only I knew what it was.  Only I knew who it belonged to.  And I wondered if I should try to clean it up, try to pick up the pieces.  Or should I just keep walking and pretend I didn’t know anything about it?  I mean, that would be easier.  And in the end, that’s exactly what I did.  I just walked away from it, acted like it had nothing to do with me.  I have to tell you, to have that thought process, in that place, even over something so small, so insignificant, it gave me a chill.  I hurried the hell away from that place.  It’s a bad place.

It’s a bad place.  You’d think I could find a better word.  But what are words to a place like that?  And people fucking live there.  I couldn’t.

Changing gears, thankfully, I finally finished my Hebrew course book last week.  I started in November of 2015.  So that’s 17 months of hard work and study.  But I did it.  I do feel like it’s rather a bit of an accomplishment.  That said, I’ve still got the last chapter of the accompanying workbook to polish off.  This consists of parsing 160-odd verbs ((Look, if God is such a big deal, you’d think he could have devised a slightly less horrifically opaque morphology for his chosen people’s verbal system.  #justsaying)) and an extended passage from Genesis about Joseph’s dreams. ((Update: I drafted this post on Saturday (well, like Sunday morning, after I got home from dinner w/ Z&J).  Anyway, I gutted out this last bit of the workbook Sunday afternoon/night, finishing up around 3am.  So I’m officially finished! #yay))  But that’s just putting a bow on things.  The point is, I’ve successfully taught myself to read biblical Hebrew.

Which is not the same thing as saying I’m good at it, mind you.  That will come with time and further study.  But I have the tools now.  I know what I’m looking at.  Which is crazy, when you think about it.  I went to Hebrew school.  I was Bar Mitzvahed. ((Zibs asked me if I had a Bar Mitzvah.  No, I told her.  But I was Bar Mitzvahed.  Yeah, we’re an odd folk.))  And in all that, they never teach how you to read the language.  Oh sure, they teach you how to phonetically read the words on the page.  But to read the language?  Nah.  So I did it myself.  Twenty-three years later, but I did it myself.

So I take a moment to pat myself on the back a little bit.  Because ten years ago, I decided I wanted to learn how to read Greek.  And you better believe I needed to go to school for that.  Ain’t no way I was teaching myself Greek; which even now is the hardest of all the languages I’ve yet dealt with.  But in the course of going down that road, I taught myself French and German and now Hebrew.  And I don’t mind saying I feel pretty good about that.

The funny thing is, I don’t actually think I’m particularly good with languages.  I mean, I know I’m not.  And the reason I know I’m not is because I’ve met people who actually are.  In grad school, I met people who would sight-read Plato and translate it into not just serviceable but actually very good English, on the fly.  I’ve never been able to do that; still can’t.

But once you learn a second language, it gets easier.  You start to see how things work.  So for me, I think, it’s more about experience.  And genuine interest.  The latter is probably more important.  What I mean is, this shit never gets boring for me.  I enjoy spending my nights working on Hebrew, reading Homer.  I love reading Jules Verne on the subway.  I love chatting – well, trying to chat – in German with my friends here.  My point is, I have to work hard at it.  It doesn’t come easy to me.  But I enjoy the work.

Sometimes I think about the funny turns my life has taken.  Because it seems to me that so many of the important things in my life right now have hinged upon chance and random events.  Let’s look at just two examples.  The first is the simple fact that I’m teaching English in Berlin.  The other is this whole Hebrew thing.

So let’s dial up the Way-Back Machine to winter, 2012.  The only reason I decided to learn French was because I needed to pass a reading comp in a modern language for my Master’s.  I could have done Italian (I still want to learn Italian) or German (too hard) or French.  And I chose French, for literally no other reason than it looks most like Latin on the page.  I figured it would be the easiest.

Remember before when I said you have to enjoy the work?  Well, very quickly, I found a way into French.  And that was hockey.  Once I had the basics down, I just started devouring French Canadian hockey coverage.  It gave me a reason to want to work on French every day.  But I digress.  The point is, I passed my reading comp.  And by that time, I was now firmly interested in the language itself; which I was not when I started.

Sometime after the test, I said something about wanting to continue with it to Jared and he suggested finding a conversation partner.  So I googled it up and found this website, conversationexchange.com.  This is the beginning of 2013 now.  But I needed to put this off for a few weeks, because I had jury duty.  So it wasn’t until February of that year that I finally reached out to try and find a French conversation partner.

That’s how I met Charlotte, who was in New York at the time on a three-month study-vacation; to learn English.  Obviously we hit it off.  And as I’ve written before, she’s the one who gave me the confidence – and the kick in the ass – I needed to move home for a year, to save money, to finally do my CELTA and ultimately go teach English abroad.

But think about that.  I started my Greek pre-req’s in 2007; started my Master’s in 2009.  But I only finished my degree in 2013.  That’s four years; longer than normal.  But I was working at the same time, which is why it took as long as it did.  If I finished in 2012, let’s say, I would have found a different conversation partner.  If I didn’t have jury duty, if I reached out for a partner in January instead of February, maybe we never meet.

I’m not trying to take anything away from myself here.  I’m the one who did the hard work of the CELTA.  I’m the one who came here on a one-way ticket, with no job offers, and made it work.  But of all those things, maybe the hardest was making the decision to go live on Long Island with my parents for year, to save money for this adventure.  That’s not an idea I would have countenanced on my own.  But she showed me by her own example that it was OK to do this, that I should do this.  And if the timing had been just a little bit different, maybe none of that happens.  Maybe I’m still lost in New York, trying to figure out what to do with myself.

So much for Charlotte.  But why Germany specifically?  Now that’s down to Joschka.  Another random and chance encounter.  Vinny met Joschka first, at a concert.  And the reason he met him was because Joschka was wearing a Wacken T-shirt.  Wacken, of course, is the Mecca of metal festivals; something that all American metal fans know about and dream of one day going to.

So Vinny sees this kid wearing a Wacken T-shirt and does the only thing Vinny can do in that situation.  He yells out, “WACKEN!!!”  They get to talking, and in the end, they agree to go together to another metal show, a few weeks later.  At that time, I had no idea about Joschka.  I just knew I was meeting Vinny at the concert.  So I get there, and there’s Vinny, hanging out with this baby German kid.  Seriously, I think he was like 22 at the time; this is 2012.

Anyway, we all have a great time at the show, which was on Long Island.  Vinny was driving back upstate, so that left me and Joschka to take the train together back to the city.  We chatted the whole way, hitting it off instantly.  And in the course of this, I said, “Hey, you should teach me German.”  Which was a weird thing for me to say, as up to that point, I’d had literally interest in learning German.  Mostly because all the PhD students had scared me off it, with horror stories about how hard it was.

But I like languages, and here’s this new friend who speaks one I don’t know.  “Hey, you should teach me German,” I said.  To which he replied, “Sure, OK.”  Wait, seriously?  “Yeah, why not?”  I went out and bought a book the next day.  And lo-&-behold, I loved it.  I mean, I instantly saw why all the best Greek scholars were Germans.  The languages work fundamentally the same way, though German is a far sight less complicated.  But this language had everything I loved about Greek in a way that French, a child of Latin – which I hate – certainly didn’t.

It also had the added bonus of feeling good in my mouth.  Look, I love French, I really do.  There’s loads of literature in French that I adore.  The language sounds beautiful.  It looks good on the page.  I find it to be elegant in the way it organizes itself and expresses its thoughts; not something I’d say about German, btw. ((Efficient.  Precise.  Clever, even.  But not elegant.))  But I also find it very difficult to speak.  Or more accurately, very difficult to pronounce.  When I try to speak French, my tongue feels like its wearing its shoe on the wrong foot, if that makes any sense.

Not so with German.  I don’t mean that it’s easy, per se.  And I obviously have an accent; nobody’s going to confuse me for a native speaker.  And there are certainly words that give me a hard time. ((For whatever reason, I seem to trip over Brötchen – a little roll of bread.  Fortunately, in Berlin, you can say Schrippe instead.))  But by and large, German feels pretty comfortable with regard to pronunciation.  I’ve often wondered if this owes in any part to the bits and pieces of Yiddish that were in the background of my childhood.  Indeed, I was surprised to learn how many German words I already knew, just because they’re the same in mama loshen.

I’m going off track here.  The point is, at some point, it came time to make a decision as to where I wanted to go abroad and teach English.  The only thing I knew was, I wanted to go somewhere where I was interested in learning the language and indeed had already started learning the language.  And that meant either France or Germany.  With that, I also knew I wanted to be in a big city.  So that meant either Paris or Berlin.  Then I looked at what it cost to live in Paris and what it cost to live in Berlin. ((More accurately, I looked at what it cost to do the CELTA in Paris and in Berlin.  But this, of course, was a reflection on the cost of living.))  In the end, there really wasn’t a choice at all.

But think about that.  If Joschka wears any other shirt to that concert, Vinny probably doesn’t meet him.  If Vinny doesn’t meet him, I don’t meet him.  If I don’t meet him, I’m probably still walking around with no interest in German.  And If I’m walking around with no interest in German, I certainly don’t move to Berlin to teach English.  So maybe I’m trying to hack it in Paris, or even Rome.  And I’m sure my life would great in either case.  But it wouldn’t be this life.

And what about Hebrew?  A few years ago, I had about as much interest in learning Hebrew as I did in learning German.  But I came back from Germany, after doing my CELTA, in August of 2015, and I needed a job.  And there’s Keith, telling me about an open position at the school where he’s the principal.  Believe me when I tell you that working as a paraprofessional at a special needs school was never ever on my radar.  This was not a job I ever would have applied for on my own.

But there’s Keith, whom I’ve known since High School, telling me I should go for it.  Well, I needed a job, so I went for it.  And they hired me.  And it was a Jewish school, this little school for special needs kids.  At that time, the extent of my connection with Judaism was going to the family Seder once a year and maybe lighting the candles at Chanukah.  And I was plenty fine with that.

Anyway, there I am at this Jewish school, and there’s Hebrew being thrown around left and right and I’m starting to feel like it’s kind of ridiculous that I’m so ignorant of this language.  So I start thinking that if there was ever a time for me to tackle loshen koidesh, the holy tongue, it was now, when I’m around it all day, and not for nothing, surrounded by a bunch of learned rabbis.  So again, I went out and bought a book.  Seventeen months later, here I am.

But think about that.  If I had a job waiting for me, I don’t go to that school.  If Keith isn’t the principal there, I don’t end up there.  And he’s not the principal there anymore, I should add.  He left to go back to public school.  So that was a pretty small window, actually.  The point is, that job kind of fell in my lap.  I wasn’t looking for it.  And without it, I never go down this road of learning Hebrew.

Anyway, I think about all this sometimes.  Because I didn’t plan any of it.  It all just sort of happened to me.  And in between, how many trips have Charlotte and I taken together?  How many German metal festivals have I gone to with Joschka?  So here I am.  Here I am teaching English abroad, in Berlin, and studying Hebrew in my spare time.  And why?  Because I took my sweet time finishing my Master’s?  Because of a T-shirt?  Because I was friends with the principal?  It’s funny how things work out.

זיי געסונט