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Published: October 5th 2009
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porter hard at work
ah, Holland. free to smoke. free to rearrange airport furniture. …and as we take for granted that the grains of sand pass in a familiar and effortless manner through the hourglass of time …so, too, do we take for granted that our luggage, that
all of our pieces of luggage, pass in a familiar and effortless manner through the heavy, black plastic weather flap onto the conveyor belt.
wearily swaying in baggage claim, this dream was not to be realized in Berlin-Tegel, airport of lost luggage. we were reunited a couple of days later…
and people ask me why I insist on bringing the cats into the cabin?! …and so saturday was another day of reunion: the official German holiday for
reunification.
my participation? going to see two gigantic puppets...
(marionettes - tamed by frenchies:
)
(article here: )
(photos here: )
...the gigunda, creepy puppets began on opposite ends of Berlin’s historic Unter den Linden, only to be joyfully reunited. if only it could be that simple…as my dear West Berliner friend, C., acknowledged the other day - the romantic notions of pre-wall-falling of “we are one” were not as easily manifested as thought…
…so as I indeed was romantically reunited with my luggage, their unpacking brought all this over a dummy?
er, excuse me, puppet. marionette. "wasever". check out urls for more excitement. i was more impressed by the # of people and their excitement...u c here 1/5th of depth of crowd, and it went on for miles, literally. about the reality of what I have done. charms from second grade, winter boots, favorite books, bath pillow, my 110 volt electronics—all of my life’s dearest possessions, uprooted - and now needing to function together with this new city, with my two felines, with the new me. I’ve now stacked my four (almost) empty pieces of luggage as bricks - creating a haphazard shelving system in my very german “altbau”, high-ceilinged, un-closeted subletted flat.
so, parcel by parcel, brick by brick
I build space and time around me. as the germans somehow manage to piece together their past, present and future….
as for the felines…
Mexico (the clever one)…has been doing her own wall investigations…sniffing the courtyard wall as conservateurs niggle over each brick on the roofs of medieval monasteries. by this time, she’s familiar with each whitestone cube, and has found a hole in the wall where she hides.
(something funny about her trying to escape through a Berlin wall. considering she shakes at the sound of the eyor-eyed English sheepdog here, I don’t think she would have made it past the borderguard pooches. she could barely take airport security.)
BaleBale (the sweet one)
making a break 4 it
Mex in her new niche meanwhile is excavating under the bed. she shakes at the wind still.
each day they each venture a bit further (Mexico, into neighbor’s flat, BaleBale with another paw out the door…). and me…each day I try to stack just one more brick onto this close encounters heap of a life: sleep, food (that isn’t take-out), visa application, bicycle, friends, and of course, the neverending jobsearch.
…keeping on this corny theme…bricks of restoration are now popular for east berlin buildings…since last year already, more and more feats of architecture are wrapped like Cristo, having their bullet and bomb destruction smoothed. I hope they leave some…
the most moving reconstruction I’ve been privy to experience, however, was on
Yom Kippur, invited to services by my human donkey, cat porter extraordinaire, Herr E. who accompanied me to Berlin.
I was a tad (ok, enough) nervous about being in a synagogue in Berlin, on a
my favorite bricks
in all of Berlin. [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_Memorial,_Berlin] holy day, with terrorist warnings from the elusive, charlie-brown adult Al-Quaida (enough that the US.gov site actually put out a travel alert not to venture to Germany exactly the day I landed. don’t read it, Mom.)…
well… I chose a synagogue in west berlin…in a slightly uppity neighborhood near the “Savigny Platz” (that should tell you)…
…as with a few other
synagogues here in Berlin, it is found by entering through a courtyard, and for this reason, was greatly spared on Kristallnacht
(in 1938 when synagogue, stores and houses of Jews were stoned and set ablaze…not to mention Jews murdered and sent off to concentration camps)…it did catch fire, and the Berlin fire corps actually came and put it out because they didn’t want it to ruin the adjacent and adjoining non-Jew buildings (rare moment of bad German planning).
so inside this rebuilt synagogue on the night of Yom Kippur, sat tons of rebuilt lives.
…I couldn’t help but eye every single elderly person, wondering what memories they held…and did they hate me for my round face, blond hair and blue eyes?
this synagogue, Pestalozzistrasse, was a meeting place for Jews when they returned to watch where you sit
this sidewalk cafe chair at a busy corner in Berlin is hovering over one way to memorialize the murdered Jews. small plaques set on sidewalks throughout Germany - with name, birthdate, date deported, to which camp. the city immediately after liberation - mostly to find out news of family and community members, to pray, and to rebuild.
and so I dried some tears, imagining this small, precious space for the Jews. and as ever, considered the different ways we memorialize tragedy, and how we address the present. (are there plaques in Rwanda?) I still see the only answer as person by person, brick by brick…to find common ground and build a common future.
I hope to report back soon with some news on how I’ll contribute to this…with some fantastic position with one of the international development organizations here…but if not, I’ll help patch the wall in my courtyard, fill in the babysitting gaps for new moms, make friends with my new language coursemates, and continue to take every step and place every brick, or euro, with consciousness.
and by the way, you’re all invited to lay bricks. wherever you are.
and are all invited to Germany to tour walls of yore, walls of music, fortified walls of synagogues, walls of cyclists, walls of adults in rainbow wool tights and walls of, well, chocolate.
ps and remember that who is that guy?
flanked on my right by my cousin, doing a double shift of airport construction and porter; on my left by, Herr E., endeavoring on cat portering mission other wall I put up some of you? well, not sure how quickly that wall will crumble, what with all the men in birkenstocken mit weissen socken (yes, men in open birks with white socks still do it for me. every time. can’t help it. it’s genetic.)
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