Flying into a Triceratops (or, "Nothing´s Gone Wrong Yet")

I don´t know how many people ended up hearing these stories, but I was hit by a car when I was in Paris a little over a year ago, and six months back someone slashed open my handbag on a Metro in Mexico City. I bring it up now because neither of these things discouraged me from traveling and now I´m on my second day in Berlin and wondering why nothing exactly has gone wrong yet.

Paris was a pioneer in Europe´s urban biking phenomenon -- or maybe they weren´t, I don´t really know, but at any rate Paris was the first place I rented a bike for next to nothing. You do need a credit card that they can take €300 from if you fail to reappear with their bike, but apart from that you can tear around the city for €1-7 a day, and return the bike almost anywhere. I had just left the Louvre on mine, and if I remember right I´d come to one of a million side streets off Rue de Rivoli and failed to predict where the hypothetical on-coming traffic (which ended up as real on-coming traffic, which is why there´s a story here) would stop. It did not turn out to be where an American understands the pedestrian cross walk to be located even when it´s not drawn onto the road between the corners. A SmartCar barreled right through to where the driver could see cars (that was his concern, see) were or might be coming. But he knocked me off my bike in the process. In Paris, buildings come right up to the corners of the sidewalks, so neither of us stood a chance. I was fine; a little achy, but none the worse for wear. I ditched the bike off the Champs Elysees and wandered into a theatre to watch the new Indiana Jones movie (it was out at the time) in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe. Equilibrium slowly restored.

Before I went to Mexico City, I read a lot of the tourist rag, and as a result fully anticipated being robbed at least once. I just wore a leather jacket every day with inside pockets barely big enough for my camera and cash. Not a big deal. I also carried around the handbag I made on the looms at Holden the June that Soul Purpose toured there. It served to carry a journal, a book of Garcia Marquez´short stories, a first aid kit and some ball point pens and granola bars -- and also to keep pickpockets from wondering where else my cash might be. It got promptly slashed on a subway car, my first full day in the city. I felt it happen, pulled my bag away, nothing was taken. Relief and equilibrium flowed in when I found the first aid kit still there in particular, since that´s where I keep the sewing kit and the resolution to the only thing that actually went wrong that trip.

Now I´ve just spent two days in Switzerland, trying to figure out why the McDonald´s advertisements had the outline of a triceratops in french fries or sesame seeds, before I realized it was a rendering of the Swiss borders. With at least three official languages and way-too-clean streets, the country´s like Canada but with a German dismissiveness of America that rivals and compounds the French. I went to the giant toy store off the Banhofstrasse, toured the churches where the Limmatt meets Lake Zurich -- including the Großmünster -- and not a single altar. The chancels sported large and central baptismal fonts (although it took a few for me to figure that out, since they were hiding under huge sprays of flowers (cut for Sunday, brownish now)), and often an ornate lectern or table with an open Bible under pope-mobile plexiglass. Crow´s nest style pulpits. But no altars. When Luther chalked "est" out on the table at Marburg and said a lot was going to ride on how each of them understood that word -- he was right.

A night train took me north to Berlin, and I´m on my second day there. Hiding in a Dunkin´Donuts from the rain at the moment, but nobody´s perfect. Yesterday was the big day of the rent-a-bike, all-Cold War, all-nerd, all-day tour: past Communist monuments and Check Point Charlie and the double rows of cobblestones that mark the old site of the wall down certain streets today. Fat Tire Bike Tours. It´s the way to go, kids.

The only slight oops so far was booking a hostel right over an "Erotik Museum". But the location´s still a good one: I´m right across the road from the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, which is where I spent my morning. Bombed out in World War II and left pretty much as is, in testimony to the horrors of war. The bells are ringing right now, and will be for the next five minutes if my German was worth anything against that sign, as a call to remembrance and reconciliation. (They´ve got a Nagelkreuz, a cross of nails from coventry.) All that´s left of the bombed out church is now a little memorial hall; they talked about restoring it and raising the ruins around it to look, well, like the church always used to look. But that plan got ditched, even though Jacobi (the church´s pastor through the Second World War, and the guy that basically started the emergency German clergy alliance against the German Christianity the Nazis were bringing in with them) was the one behind it. Instead they raised a church next to the ruins that´s like a net of cinderblocks, with tens of thousands of deep blue stained glass panes filling in the gaps all over it, roof to floor. It´s a round nave, with a surprisingly contemporary feel, in contrast to the vaulted arches of the ruins just beyond it.

Rain´s cleared. Good; I have a bit more exploring to do. This time tomorrow, I´ll be in Denmark.

Like Every Other Trip to Valpo

Because in a lot of ways, it was the same. And in some important ways it was different. The Union is up and open and functioning. Heard more good things about this Heckler person I haven´t met yet. And it´s not often asked of me to see a closed casket and understand, "That´s my friend." For example.

But then, on the other hand, I spent a lot of time in the Chapel doing what may have appeared, to the outside observer, as work. Spent an evening at PassTimes. Rode the South Shore Line three times, once to see Isaac´s latest show at Lookingglass, "The Arabian Nights". Ran into friends at random places -- Target (buying socks) or a walk down Lincolnway and up Indiana Avenue. Church at Immanuel, same lovely liturgy, and LBW´s still in the pew racks. Stopped by Ron Rittgers´office eight times when he wasn´t there, but other than that saw and caught up with plenty of former professors. Was asked about future plans a dozen times and gave the same vague reply. But that happens everywhere, not just Valpo.

Last Matins (Somewhat accurate transcript)

Good morning. Um. So I'm Katie, and I've been at Holden for the last ten and a half months -- working as the school's student aide, as worship assistant, and as a cook -- and I leave soon. For, I don't know how long. And I can't tell you how that feels because I've kind of refused to slow down and think about it. I guess I suspect I'll be sad. But there's plenty to do, to keep my mind off things, what with preparing for a move, and wrapping up the work I've done here. I've filled my head, too, with the adventures that are coming next: visiting with family and friends, travel, another move, starting at Divinity School in the fall. I'll turn my own mourning into dancing, thank you.

I'm really smart. But I don't always think things through all the way, so I did something antithetical to this whole enterprise of not thinking about leaving Holden, and not being sad about it. I signed up for Matins, and gave myself the perfect opportunity to think about just how much this place and people have meant to me. But I've figured out how I'm going to do it -- I'm going to read you something from my journal. It doesn't actually take place here; I wrote this while I was sojourning outside the village. But, this is also how I feel about my sojourn here. So.

(Names changed to protect the innocent.)

30 April 2009

So aside from the time I met a Tibetan Buddhist monk at the Seattle Amtrak station, I usually get put next to crazies and lawyers and other undesirables when I travel, and as a rule I think people who talk about meeting people on trains and having "conversations" are fools or liars or just inexperienced. Last evening looked like it might live up to expectations. Hank and Edna are sweet enough, the ride to Seattle and dinner at "Rusty's" passed smoothly -- then they called ahead to make sure I could stay with them at Edna's sister's, and caught on speaker-phone a surly sounding woman with a cancer-stricken cat and an overpronounced sense of that great Kierkegaardian virtue of "infinite resignation." Well, she uttered into Edna's (and my) hearing, it sounds like you've already promised her a bed, so I don't see there's anything else to say.

I had half a mind to beg Hank and Edna to drop me at Sea-Tac after all, where I could sleep sitting up or not at all but at least I wouldn't be in anybody's way, or jockeying with their sick cat for attention.

But then we arrived, and it turns out: you can catch remarkably kind and open and generous people at tremendously unfortunate moods. Expectations can be upset, and narratives rewritten at a stroke. We got out of the truck and immediately toured the yard and ten years' worth of incredible gardening skill, flowers of all kinds and lavender plants and lemon grass stepping all over one another, crowding to the surface. Once inside, I was shown my bed and Susan Boyle's performance on YouTube, and at the dining room table hot breakfast tea and eight kinds of half-finished chip, cracker and crisp bag, and cheese, and paprika-spiced hummus. And we talked and joked about Holden, about teaching, about Florida -- where Edna and her sister and I all grew up. What they call conversation, I guess. Although "conversation," when I hear about it secondhand, always seems a more civilized practice. We moved from observing that the Hank prefers his blue suspenders and come to think of it, blue everything, to Edna suddenly rounding on him with the accusative, "Ya crunchy-eating Yankee."

Substantial to this accusation was the Yankee propensity for salad, as opposed to vegetables steamed or boiled away into a state of semi-permanent flop. I presume. We proceeded to a rousing comparison of Florida's coastal cities and interior, where Hank and Edna have seen washing machines out in the middle of a yard, but running, with the help of a garden hose and an extension cord.

There's nothing quite like people around a dining room table, ill-disposed to rush off and get work done, or to have time to accomplish whatever million things they've set for themselves.

No, nothing quite like it. At all.

For the moments of indecorum, for the first impressions that were absolutely wrong, and the ones that were pretty scarily accurate, thank you. And for the cracks in your clay jars, the thorns in your sides that keep you irritated at yourselves and your neighbors, seething over your oatmeal, wondering how I can talk about this place like the last ten and a half months have been nothing but sunshine when you can't even make it through the morning:

For these things, too, Christ has died.
To raise you to new life, in a new moment, Christ is risen.
To reunite us all someday, Christ will come again.

I'll see you.