Here is my list of seven things I like about Germany (translated for you):

1. The proximity to France.
2. The proximity to Italy.
3. That chocolate is a food staple.
4. The precision of the language.
5. That my employer gives me a company car and that I now drive a super sexy Audi A5, triggering envious looks from men in my neighbourhood.
6. Müsli and whole grain bread from our local bakery.
7. That the newspapers print long essays and opinion pieces.

And one thing I miss about Canada:

1. Maple syrup in five liter containers.

What do you like about Germany? And what do you miss about your home country?

To do so, I have to go back in time. I grew up in a small town in the Ottawa  Valley, situated about 50 kilometers south of Canada’s capital city. My family was well established in Almonte. My father and his many brothers and sisters were born there in a big square stone house where my grandfather had established his medical practice.

Almonte is blessed with water. A river runs through it and the town features two sets of dramatic falls. It has good feng shui. My father would have referred instead to the genus loci, the spirit of the place.

In the late 1960s and 70s, Almonte started to attract a number of artists, draft dodgers, and people seeking a simple country life. They bought farmhouses, stone mills, one-room schoolhouses, and farm properties. They were wood workers, sculptors, teachers, stained glass artists, bakers, and Buddhists.

One of the people attracted to Almonte was also attracted to me. Or I to him. A carpenter, he bought up a rundown house in town and renovated it room by room by himself. I fondly remember a Valentine’s Day when he and I and many other artists crowded into the home of the couple who were living in the former schoolhouse in the country, for an evening of erotic and love poetry. It was grand. The women dressed up in red and black velvet dresses at a time before secondhand was called vintage, when it was born of necessity rather than coolness. (Jean, our hostess, eventually developed a thriving business in vintage clothing). We took turns reading Leonard Cohen, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, and Walt Whitman. Some guests read their own verse. It was a tradition I have long wanted to revive. Perhaps next year.

What are your favorite love or erotic poems?

*Sylvia Plath, Nick and the Candlestick

Over the years I have collected notes he has written because they were too adorable to throw away. Together, they document his progress in English. You’ll best appreciate the humor if you know a bit of German. The best one, written when he was about six or seven, read:

Is dis jours?

Translation: Is this yours?

In August, he spent ten days with his boy scout troupe in Slovakia. It was his first camping and hiking trip ever. He is not especially fit or especially tough. Before he left, I tucked a note into his provisions, saying how proud we were that he was going on this trip, all by himself, away from the family for the first time ever, on his own, hiking for miles a day, enduring rain and discomfort and generally undergoing untold hardship. In a postcard he sent to us during the trip, he refers to this note in a postscript.

Today weare staiing at a nice river. Yesterday was a star clear night but it raind quiet a bit to. I washed twice already. The water was ice cold thow. Im rasining the toblerone to one piece aday (mostly for the cold evenings). We had some kafda some sort of Slowakian cake. I miss you a lot.

PS: I found your Note (quiet touching).

What I especially appreciate is his direct translation of compound nouns: “Sternklare Himmel” becomes “star clear night.” The “eiskaltes” water in the river is “ice-cold”. He speaks like that too, in not-quite-right-English. You can practically hear him translating as he goes along. You will notice too that punctuation is not his forte. Nor can he get used to the fact that we don’t capitalize our nouns in English (but forgets to capitalize Toblerone). Or that the “w” in English doesn’t make the “v” sound as it does in German.

Are your children bilingual? Can they spell? Tell me. I want to hear your stories too.

We were living in China when we met. Once we went to an art exhibition with my husband’s students, Chinese students who were in Beijing to study German. By that time my vocabulary had doubled and I had another two words to impress my audience with. They were “schön” (beautiful) and “lustig” (funny, amusing). I managed to use one of these words to describe each of the paintings we saw in that exhibition.

In 1988 China’s first Goethe Institute opened on the university campus where we lived. I enrolled immediately in Grundstufe I and excelled at my classes, jumping ahead in our lessons and learning all the answers auswendig, off by heart. My classmates were young Chinese professionals, whose employers, companies like Siemens and BASF, paid for their language training.

By the time we moved to Germany, I thought I was fluent. Until I realized there was a whole local lingo for the variety of breakfast rolls and breads at the local bakery. Until an old woman in our neighborhood looked at me suspiciously after I didn’t understand her, saying “Sie sind nicht ganz deutsch, oder?”

It was at that point that I started to ask all of our friends, many of whom had studied at Oxford and Cambridge, to speak German and German only with me. That year I had to pass the PNDS - Prüfung zum Nachweis der deutschen Sprache, the first  hurdle in the university acceptance process. It was tough. I had no idea how a language could have cases like nominativ, dativ and so on. The spelling was tortuous. My husband insisted then and will insist now that German is spelled exactly as it is spoken. Except they like the letter K so much they even put it in their Kaffee. A linguist tried to teach me when to use the Umlaut by inserting a pencil into his mouth and demonstrating that when a word has an Umlaut, the lips eject the pencil from the mouth. It’s all about the mouth in the end.

I still associate certain words with certain people. For example, our friend Michael N., who used the word “grossartig” (great, brilliant) in combination with a great guffaw; or Udo, who came from southern Germany and used the diminutive “Mädel” for girl, of which he always had several about.

Recently at work I had the opportunity to do a TV interview in German and while watching the replay, thought Scheiße, my mastery of the language had declined. I’ve decided to make more of an effort by reading German literature and not just the gossip and lifestyle magazines; by listening to books on tape rather than just radio; by speaking German to my husband instead of conducting conversations in a mish mash of English and German. Could this be another new beginning?

My lackadaisical efforts at yoga, combined with power walks through the woods with my girlfriends on Sunday mornings had been keeping my weight below a certain number, but I didn’t look good in anything that wasn’t egg-shaped. Speaking of eggs, whenever I baked a pan of double chocolate brownies with walnuts, it was nearly impossible not to help myself. I live in a household with men and boys who want carbs and calories.

On my last birthday I decided to take action and find a personal trainer. I have always hated fitness studios and felt I needed to work with someone who would be more objective than I was, someone who would be tough with me.

I have gained eight kilos since joining SAP.  (I am well within the average – an unoffical source at my company revealed that employees gain a kilo per year, probably thanks to the free lunch, but also the sedentary desk jobs). At one point I was using a new form of contraception and I swear, within seconds of its subcutaneous insertion in my upper arm, I gained five kilos. (My gynecologist warned me I would gain weight, but I thought I was immune to excess pounds). In the end I had it removed because weight gain was just one of the unpleasant side effects it caused. Another was a diminished libido. What is the point of birth control if you don’t put it to the test? But I digress.

Since late July I have been getting my butt whupped by a 23-year-old sports management grad with a black belt in karate. I am old enough to be her mother. In fact, her mother is younger than I am. My PT has been teaching kick boxing at a local gym, but has never worked as a PT before. I simply approached her through a friend, who thought we would be a good fit, and my PT agreed. We set realistic goals when we began our sessions and she sets the agenda. She decided to take an interval train approach to our routine, one that would challenge me and tone the problem zones: upper arms, legs, butt, and of course, the ever thickening middle. We meet early mornings to walk, jog, and do weight bearing and resistance band exercises. I finally know what Jane Fonda meant all those years ago when she talked about “feeling the burn.”

There will be no before and after pictures for this experience. But I can already proudly say that our efforts are paying off!

I would be lying if I said that working with a personal trainer has prevented me from blogging. But it has also been good for the soul and what’s good for the soul is good for a writer.

Should I keep you updated on our progress, faithful readers? Has anyone had good (or bad) experience with a personal trainer?

That doesn’t account for old clothes, which have to be taken to a clothing bin, or to the Red Cross. And it doesn’t account for unwanted furniture or broken lamps, for which you have to book a date with the trash collectors at least two weeks in advance. Wood must be separated from iron or metal, which is collected separately.

This might explain why suckers like us inherit household goods from the previous tenants just about every time we move. So far, the previous tenants have always been older women. Coincidentally, their surnames all begin with the letter S.

The first time was shortly after reunification, when East Germans were moving west in droves, triggering a housing shortage. As a short-term solution, we moved to a furnished apartment, vacated by an old woman who was invited to enter a care facility. Her books were on the shelves, her pots and pans in the kitchen. Some months later Frau Schl. was back among the living and decided she wanted to move home, forcing us once more to up sticks. By this time, I had discovered personal photos between the pages of one thick volume, photos that were taken at a railway station probably sometime in the late 1930′s or early 1940′s. They showed Hitler surrounded by young women with fawning expressions. We didn’t actually inherit anything from Frau Schl., but it felt as if we did, since we lived amidst her green swag and watched her television for several months.

In 1995 we bought a little house Swedish prefab that had been built by two sisters, Evelyn and Gertrude S. After they died, the relatives took the piano and the mint condition Opel, and hired an “Entrümpler” to perform triage on the remaining contents of the house, taking anything that would fetch a few euros at auction (including an ancient set of kitchen scales) and throwing the rest in a dumpster. I took a few things too – a chaise longue, a butler’s table, antique wooden cutlery trays, a collection of jet buttons, and picture frames, most of which I still have.

This year we bought a big, solid, three storey house with good bones and nice features (including a sauna and a fireplace). I liked the vendor right off the bat. Frau Sch., a tall, attractive 70-something widow who drives a BMW Z3, repeated several times how she and her family enjoyed living in the house (“Wir fühlten uns immer hier wohl“). I figured, if it worked for them, it will work for us. We inherited: a Japanese tea set, five rice bowls, four armchairs, a coffee table, a wardrobe, three lamps and many more items too numerous to mention. I must admit, I donated many of the items too numerous to mention to someone who is going to hawk them at a flea market.

I’ve always been a collector and in preparing for this move, thought it would be cute to archive some of the vintage clothes and collectibles that I cannot emotionally part with. But now I am ready to live a pristine, uncluttered Zen-like lifestyle.

So here is what has been keeping me from posting:

1. Moving
2. Working with a personal trainer
3. Work
4. Concern about the focus, or lack thereof, of this blog

I promise to write a post about each of these activities. ASAP.

But it was Rainer Werner Fassbinder and his favorite leading lady Hanna Schygulla who captured my imagination. I am still convinced that it is impossible to understand the post-war German trauma or the German psyche without considering Fassbinder. The Marriage of Maria Braun is still probably my favorite movie. In it, Hanna Schygulla plays a louche lady in wartime Berlin who survives with her dignity intact despite the liaisons she leaves in her wake. We watched her in Lili Marleen, but it was in the role of Maria Braun that her sleepy sexiness, intelligence, and grace shimmered most. My favorite line: “I love my husband, but I’m very fond of Bill.” Now when I watch it in German and hear Schygulla’s warm, earthy voice, I am amazed how harmless the quote sounds.

We watched the movies with English subtitles. None of us spoke a word of German. We read Günter Grass, Thomas Mann, and Hermann Hesse in translation. As far as I remember, none of us had ever even been to Europe. But when I first came to Germany, Fassbinder’s films had so thoroughly informed my perception of the country that I half expected to find a society of gay filmmakers in leathers and nightclub singers in corsets and garters. I was more than a little disappointed to find instead stern housewives in aprons sweeping their stoops. Maybe I was in the wrong city. Maybe I would have found traces of Fassbinder in Munich and Maria Braun in Berlin.

After university I went to China where I met my husband, a German. As university lecturers, we lived on campus in Beijing, and took our meals in the cafeteria. One hot summer day I appeared at lunch with my hair pinned up in a loose bun, wearing a floral skirt and olive silk blouse. Peter said, “You look like a woman from a novel by Fontane.” He pronounced Fontane to rhyme with Montana. Maybe he was thinking of Hanna Schygulla as Effi Briest in the film by Fassbinder. Had I known that particular Fassbinder film at the time, I would have been flattered.

Today I am going to share some of the highlights with you. But before I do, allow me to say that these colleagues worked hard, they worked late, they worked under a lot of pressure. Allow me to add that I am by no means perfect and might, under similar circumstances, have lost my senses and lost the ability to think straight. But I do hope I would never have produced any of the following doozies:

• Jane Doe has decided to leave the company to embark on new personal opportunities with her family. What ever happened to spending more time with one’s family? Since when do we “embark” on “opportunities” with our loved ones?
  

• Following the birth of his first child, Jack Sprat has decided to leave the company for personal reasons. I see, so our gentlemen executives are now having babies.

Among the tips for managers in a communications guide prepared to help them keep their teams updated on internal changes were the following gems of wisdom:

• Having an awareness and respect for the pulse of your employees can help you create the right touch points for achieving a coalition of purpose. What, for Pete’s sake, is a “coalition of purpose”? What has happened to simple language?
  
• By addressing employees in small group settings, you can treat employees as customers. Ewww, they will so appreciate being treated as customers. Perhaps they meant to say that the atmosphere is intimate, personal, and genuine in small group settings and that the employees will be more willing to ask questions in such settings?

This material was not only written by professionals, but presumably approved by higher ranking individuals.  At the risk of sound like a right arrogant prat, this reminds me of the six golden rules of writing that George Orwell introduced in his essay “Politics and the English Language”:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Now Mom is a highly pragmatic person and I think she thought that getting on without her husband would be easier than it has been. So she has come up with a 19-point plan for overcoming grief that she recently published in her church bulletin. She believes this is a helpful plan even for people who are not experiencing grief, which is why I am sharing it here. As someone who is perennially harassed by the clock, I have certainly thought a lot about rule number 12, “Never refuse an invitation.”

1. Do three works of charity every day: (e.g., phone calls, cards, visits, alms to the poor, baking for a friend or neighbour).
2. Ask others about their troubles and trials.
3. Be diligent about your own health. Walk each day, preferably outside for 30 minutes (to get vitamin D).
4. Climb stairs each day to improve endurance and maintain bone mass.
5. Take advantage of the sun: work or relax in a room into which the sun is shining.
6. Share meals with others. Take turns eating together, especially Sunday dinners.
7. Prepare nutritious meals for yourself. Do some preparation for dinner early in the day so you will be more likely to eat properly at night rather than resort to tea and toast.
8. Let restful music soothe you.
9. Vary your routine from what you were used to when your loved one was alive.
10. Spend time on a hobby.
11. Treat yourself once in awhile to a, manicure, pedicure, movie, concert.
12. Never refuse an invitation.
13. Ask others for favours.
14. Plan activities where you will be with other people: join clubs, take a fitness/yoga class, do volunteer work.
15. Have a rest midway through each day.
16. Plan things to which you can look forward (e.g., a trip, visit from family, etc.).
17. Keep you mind sharp by playing bridge, doing crosswords, studying a second language, etc.
18. Make a list of partially completed projects and then start getting them done.
19. SMILE.

My parents at their 60th wedding anniversary.