Home Economics

I was listening to SWR2 on a Sunday morning recently and was delighted to discover that their subject was one that the media often ignores but which i adore: sewing. It is one outcome of the economic crisis: consumers are tired of same old same old Kleenex clothes that are disposed of after a couple of washings.  In the U.K. sales of sewing machine are up. In Germany homesewing courses are booked solid and at the ethnic markets in Berlin people are snapping up fabrics for 50 cents a meter.

My mother would smile. No, laugh. Even when she travels, she is never without needle and thread. She spent the month of March in Victoria, British Columbia and before she left she told me that she had packed a large board to use as a work surface for her quilting projects (“I just lay it on the luggage rack.”)  My mother was always economical. She made diapers for her many babies from the cotton sacks in which 50 pound bags of flour were delivered. We wore “Pure Canadian Wheat”  on our bottoms. She also made most of our outer clothing as well. Some of the best items that I remember were the birdcage bathing suit that she made for me and the “paper” dresses that she made for my younger sister and me. Not Kleenex dresses, these were made from a brightly printed papery cotton. We didn’t go to pre-school or kindergarten or daycare – we were homeschooled in making dolls clothes.  

Mom sewed on a heavy, but rather dainty black Singer sewing machine that she got when she married in 1945. My sisters and I all learned to sew by hand, and then on this machine. I had it with me at university in Montréal, by which time Mom had bought a new one for herself. I sewed long, narrow, six panel skirts from a Vogue pattern, one in black velvet with pin prick dots, godets flaring at the hem. Or another in fine Italian wool with kick pleats. My favorite fabric store was a tiny boutique called Au Long Metrage in Outremont. But sometimes my girlfriend Robin, another sewing fanatic, and I would enter the bargain basement of Fabricland in search of two-for-one offers on patterns.

My sister and I spent entire summers competing for the use of the Singer, she whipping up Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, or stuffed toys. She once even cut up a vintage beaver skin coat to make a jacket. We made pinafore tops, wrap skirts, and apron dresses. It was the 70’s. The nearest fabric store was in the next village, 11 miles away. Sometimes we biked the distance just to buy fabric for new skirts or dresses with our babysitting money.

When my sisters and I graduated from university, we each received not a car or a trip to Europe, but a sewing machine. Actually, not quite. I got a loan to travel to China where a teaching job awaited me. I bought my first sewing machine there, a treadle machine. That was all that Beijing’s finest markets had in the late 1980’s. I laid out and cut my Chinese silks on the long tables in the reading room of the university library after hours. And when we came to Germany, I got the machine I have now – a Pfaff brand. It was important to me then that my new machine have a buttonhole function. Until then, I had been making them by hand.

When it came time to learn German, I found easy ways – by reading sewing instructions. But that is a topic for the next post!

Find Your Strengths

Finally. I have finally found the explanation for why I am incurably messy. It’s not genetic. It’s just because neatness, or Ordentlichkeit, is not one of my strengths. Makes me a bad match for a place like Deutschland then, where Ordnung muss sein, where the street is swept every Saturday, but never on Sundays or holidays. Where rules reign. In fact it might expain why I continue to be an observer, and not a fully fledged, card-carrying member of the society. I am just not ordnungsliebend. I discovered this Makel, this fleck on my character by doing a study of my strengths and talents. Focus, discipline – these are missing from my Strengths Finder results. And these traits would help a messy person.

Instead my strengths say a lot about why I love to read, write, talk, socialize etc. So here they are, my personal results of the Strengths Finder 2.0 survey, sponsored with thanks by SAP, the outcome of an online questionnaire that asks things like do you prefer to spend time with children or adults?:

• Ideation
• Input
• Activator
• Command
• Woo

My colleagues responded with mirth to the last one. Woo. What is that? The book by the same name as the survey and companion guide to the online test tells us that Woo stands for Winning Others Over. The meaning of the other themes is only really explained by the accompanying text. So buy the book, by #1 New York Times bestselling author Tom Rath and discover your own strengths. I recommend it. It will give you a lift. Our entire team at SAP received copies of the book and did the test. It caused a ripple of excitement in the heady stress of our daily tasks. The idea is not to focus on what you can’t do, but what you do well. And then to team up with people who have complementary skills. Luckily there are two project managers on the team who have Focus and Discipline who have always provided structure to my Ideation and Input. I did find however, that many of my German colleagues found the test a load of crock. Nothing wissenschaftlich about it. In fact, the online reviews at Amazon’s German site give the book’s English version five stars, but only three and a half to the German version. This tells you more about the people reviewing than the book itself.

Lessons in Leadership vs. Lessons in Losership

On the last day of school before the summer break my son celebrated by inviting his best friend to a backyard bonfire in which they reduced their notebooks from fourth grade to a pile of grey ash. After months of teeth gnashing, headaches, stomach aches, and hours spent procrastinating on homework, my son had finally completed perhaps the most difficult and important year in the German education system. Emotionally trying for parents, teachers, and pupils alike, the fourth grade is when ten year olds are stamped and streamed for their further education. My son made the grade and was promoted to Gymnasium. His first day in his new upper school is tomorrow. “Don’t even talk about it!” he says.

I wish he had had a teacher like Mrs Murphy, who taught my friend Nina’s boy in Toronto. I have never met Mrs Murphy, but she sounds like a teacher whose mission it is to motivate children, and make their learning experience a positive one. According to Nina, Mrs Murphy gives the children “leadership opportunities” and encourages them to act like leaders. Instead of telling them who the boss is and what the rules are, she gives them responsibility and ownership for their actions. (Sounds like a good corporate program for employees :-) ). She never got mad, but was “disappointed.” And since she took the children on outings and did African drumming sessions with them, it meant something when their teacher was disappointed. As Nina says, “She believed in them.” And they respected her for it.

Nina’s child, previously sick with chronic belly aches, blossomed in Mrs Murphy’s class. “He jumped out of bed every morning like a little squirrel,” Nina says. Mrs Murphy’s approach may sound touchy-feeling, but the point is, she motivated the children. And if there is one thing my son’s fourth grade teacher did right, it was to demotivate the children. She was stingy with praise. She gave homework every day so that the kids often spent at least one if not two hours at repetitive exercises. I appreciate that it is not easy to manage a group of 28 children, but yelling at them if they don’t listen or don’t pay attention can’t be the answer. And it wasn’t, because every day, the children talked and didn’t pay attention, and every day she yelled at them. Rather than promoting leadership, she promoted losership.

A good teacher can contribute so much to shaping a young person’s personality and future. I remember my favorite teachers so well – they were the ones who believed in me. They recognized talent and interests, and drew them out. I hope my son finds a teacher who believes in his brains and recognizes that he wants more than to memorize Latin vocabulary and chemical formulas; a teacher who instills passion, ambition, and independent thinking. But I am afraid that in the German system, most teachers want to plow through the curriculum and have little time to devote to the individuals in their classrooms.

Sketches of Spain

Today I went back to work after three weeks of paid vacation. I can’t complain. I have worked at companies where employees were grudgingly assented two weeks off per year. I get 32 days paid vacation at SAP. It is one of the perks of living in Germany. But. On my last day at work I left the office at 7:00 PM after an 11 hour day, thinking how wrong it felt. At home I dropped my laptop in a corner and didn’t touch in again until this morning when my inbox groaned open to reveal 750 waiting mails, spam and all. I am not bragging. Many other colleagues go on vacation with their Blackberrys and feel obliged to continue to be on call. Colleagues in other geographies.

Instead, my husband and I packed up the Volvo with essential kit for us (including a novel of 1,300 pages for him), loaded up the kids and their even weightier kit and drove across France to northern Spain. Where I was promptly rewarded for the stress of the previous weeks with a raging fever that put me to bed for days. But I wasn’t complaining. I had seen the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. In all its glory. A thing of true beauty:

 

I had two wonderful – shorter – novels waiting for me (Arthur and George, by Julian Barnes and The Sea, by John Banville) and nothing to do but enjoy the foreignness of Spain. At least once a year I need to get out of Germany. I need to experience a different culture for a longer period of time. Actually my job has taken me on some wonderful trips in the past years – to India and China. Although they are work-related, I still enjoy the people, the food, the sounds, the sites, the shopping. In Spain, it was no different. We were lucky to have a friend, Maria Eugenia, in Cantabria who was our translator, guide, and hostess for two weeks. Maru, as she is known, teaches Greek and Latin in the local school, and directs theatre on her summer vacations. Maru is an intellectual Lolita, who can talk Aristoteles and Lorca, who wears a tiny string bikini at the beach and had a considerable collection of low cut t-shirts that showed her best feature to full advantage. She recommended the following novelists to me, none of which I have ever read: Anita Nair, Rosina Lippi, Natalie Ginzburg, and José Saramago.

My boys were delighted to find a surf school at the beach at St. Vincente de la Barquera. Run by a university educated and multilingual German surfer dude, the school is located directly at the beach, which in turn is located in a national park. No highrise condominiums here. Just VW buses with German licence plates camping illegally in the meagre parking zone. Surfnsoul was lots of fun – highly recommended. My boys will return in glory sometime to ride the waves. The blistering hot beaches are not my scene however. I was the one hovering under a beach umbrella, wearing a hat the size of a wagonwheel and wearing a longsleeve shirt. I can just feel my skin frying like bacon in a pan if I stay too long in the sun. Not so obviously the five topless lovelies stretched out in their full glory at the beach. Not a book or newspaper in sight, these ladies were at the beach for the hard work of turning even nuttier brown. Occasionally one of them would reapply some tanning oil, but they did not talk, swim, eat or even drink. Now they look fantastic. In twenty years?

Pillow Talk

The first two words of German I learned are telling. Either about the person I am, or the person who taught me the language. Or both. Those words were “schön” (beautiful) and “lustig” (funny). We were living in China at that time. My husband – and teacher – was a lecturer of German to students at the Foreign Languages Institute in Beijing. I remember visiting an art exhibition in Beijing with them, and stopping before every painting, I would utter either “schön” or “lustig.” The weird thing was, it worked. No one was the wiser.

Actually I brought two other words to the relationship, but neither was very helpful in communicating on a daily basis. One I had learned as a teenager from the TV series “Hogan’s Heroes”. “Blitzkrieg” was not a word that made small talk with Germans easy. My other word – “Oberschenkel” (thigh) might have gotten me further – faster-, but instead my husband and I started small.

He taught me all the parts of the body, one by one, and I repeated them one by one: Augen (eyes ), Nase (nose ), Mund (mouth ), Schulter (shoulders) and so on, down the line. When people ask how I learned German, I tell them “pillow talk”.

Call of the Wild

I have been gathering evidence in my own unscientific and amateurish way that the Germans have a spiritual attachment to their forests, and I believe I have a strong and emotional case for this claim. Yesterday morning I met my girlfriends for our Sunday morning power walk in our local mini forest.  Martina, at the head of the group, greeted the forest with a loud “Hello trees, here we come!” By the time we were on the home stretch an hour later, Doris and Heidi were in a deep discussion about the scents of different trees. “Warm pines,” smiled Heidi with a look of deep satisfaction on her face, ”in southern France.” Doris, who was brought up in the Black Forest, claimed that it has a deep, dark scent, worthy of its name. 

On the weekend, in the company of two of our best and oldest friends, I asked how many poems they could think of off the top of their heads with “der Wald” as a theme. They immediately mentioned Eichendorff and Goethe. And the first time I visited Germany, my hosts took me for a walk in the woods, which was criss-crossed with neat paths. In Canada my husband was always befuddled by the forests. Because there are no foot paths, no signposts. There is a reason we refer to it as “the bush”. Unless they are national or provincial parks, the Canadian forests are wild and forbidding for people on foot who are not equipped to fight mosquitos, underbrush, bears and poison ivy. Not that the German forests are tame, but they are civilized, welcoming, signposted, and open to the public.