Berlin -> Krakow

It is as one would imagine it to be: a forested land made gray by winter, then white by snow and now, after a two day thaw – some combination of earthy colors in a Dalmatian-like mosaic. It’s not that in these two days the snow has melted, but it looks hardened and miserable. All that, on display through a window splattered with dirt.

And yet, I can’t take my eyes off of it. Occasionally, we pass a small village, but not very often. Once, a solitary church appeared fleetingly behind the glare from the window.





Another time an abandoned brick factory. Just seconds ago, I saw a small deer with her back to me. Mostly though, it’s pine and birch, growing out of banks of snow.

We are speeding through south eastern Germany, on the way to Krakow in Poland. Though speeding is a relative word. Surely this isn’t the high speed rail of western Europe. But it’s a pleasant, rhythmical movement and though the total trip will last ten hours, I find myself thinking it could go longer and I would not be disappointed. Our train compartment – old fashioned, to be sure – is warm, the window to the world is large.

I note another wee village coming up. The sign tells me it’s Synowa Zarska, Just like that, I know we’re in Poland.



Our second day in Berlin (Saturday) had been far tamer than the first. Europe experienced a partial (and temporary) warming. Two degrees above freezing and continued precipitation meant that there were bouts of rain and gusts of a warmer wind. My daughter needed downtime and I wasn’t in a rush either.

Just after noon, we put aside our various preoccupations and set out for the Alexanderplatz. I think of it as the center of the former East Berlin – the tower defines this part of the city and I remember it vividly from my past visits here.






Now, it is also the place of Berlin’s major Christmas market.

It’s tough to photograph the market. We’re in a crowd of wet, dark winter coats. We put up our umbrella, we take it down. Up, down, raining, not raining. And still it hardly matters: the place is charming and most everyone is in a spirited mood. Aided by spirits.











I’m game. I ask for a hot mulled wine. Ours is special! -- the vendor tells me. We add rum for an extra punch! Oh dear.

There are many, many families here now. Of course. For the merry-go-rounds. For the Santa. For the festiveness of the place, the weather notwithstanding.
























Up one alley, down the next. Like strollers on a warm summer day, but without the warmth or the sunshine.



We spend the late afternoon and evening in our own neighborhood – where Mitte turns into Prenzlauer Berg. And whereas the previous day’s neighborhood walk took place in the former West Berlin, this one’s in the Eastern sector. Not that you could tell. In Poland, the change to a market economy seemed to erase fewer of the distinctly Eastern block retail venues. Even now, as I walk away from the center of Warsaw, I come across shops that may have been there in my childhood – they’re not gaudy, nor pricey. Perhaps the shelves are better stocked, but they’re in their own dated league of another era.  But in (East) Berlin, except in the architecture, I see no signs of that past. In the short time we’ve been here, it looks to me as if the stores, the cafes, the restaurants are all now at the level of the West. Not necessarily posh, but of a certain kind. Not the kind that I have memorized from postwar Poland.











And still, there are the common elements – the familiar forms found, it seems, only in central Europe. Take the small issue of mushrooms. Poland and Germany seem to share a fondness of depicting with great affection the poisonous red mushroom in any number of decorative settings.











And speaking of mushrooms, there is the matter of food. We go for dinner to a café/bar – a place that also serves simple, rib-sticking food – Altes Europa (Old Europe).






We order a potato soup (served with prunes), a mushroom vegetable soup and a plate of meatballs and potatoes. German food, yes, but if you hadn’t told me, I may have guessed Polish. (Though the carafe of delicious Reisling is unmistakably not Polish.)


 



Maybe I’m just getting my mind fixed on the days ahead. Getting ready for the very short, but still significant visit home.




And now it is Sunday afternoon. My daughter’s suitcase caught up with us just hours before we left Berlin and even though we’ve been traveling since Tuesday, in many ways it feels like we’re just starting.  We board the train in Berlin...


 


...and somewhere in that vast forest of birch and pine, we cross a river and with it -- the border between Germany  and Poland. Yes, the villages that appear now are, to me at least, quite obviously Polish.






The train is moving very, very slowly. Stopping at even seemingly empty stations.





And sometimes, for example while sitting at the Wegliniec station (wegel means coal, and we are indeed moving through Silesia – the southwestern coal mining region of Poland), it feels as if we’re really not going to move at all.  A station worker comes up to our car with a big mallet like tool. He tweaks something at the base of our car and steps back. He jots down a word or two, watches...





The train lurches forward.



My daughter is leafing through some Polish writings. Przepraszam, dzisiaj wyjezdzamy... ("I’m sorry, we’re leaving today..."). Vowels! – she asks. Where are the vowels?! What can I say, we’re a generous people, but we’re stingy with the vowels.


It’s dark now. We still have a way to go. We’ve been visited by one German conductor, one Polish one, a vendor with candies (who is indignant that I hadn’t taught my daughter Polish) and now we have yet another conductor checking our tickets.

How late are we? I ask.
Oh, some 35 minutes now.
Is this train typically this late? I ask, because I deliberately avoided the connection through Warsaw where we would have had to make a quick change for the Krakow train. I never felt that Polish trains can be trusted to run on time.
Oh no! Not at all!
And now I feel guilty for my past assumptions...
We’ve pulled in to Krakow many hours behind schedule! Three just last week! This is fantastic!
I no longer feel guilty for harboring those assumptions.

So long as we get in on time for one Krakow supper. Just one.

layers

The wind turns pale faces beet red. If your eyes tear, will they freeze at the corners? The snow is well trampled by now, but it looks like shoveling is not a habit here. Most sidewalks have a decent layer of packed snow. If you’re lucky, there’ll be sand to get you over the bad spots.

We only have two full days in Berlin. And it’s best to front load the sights you would not want to miss. Because what if tomorrow is even harsher?

In the hours of daylight and well into the evening, we walk from one place to the next, stopping to read occasionally, maybe to take a photo, processing it all as best we can.





In most any city, the harsher side of history is well out of view. We’re taught to admire the sublime – the picturesque medieval streets, the grand architecture of the Belle Epoque – on and on. But in Berlin, how can you forget a history that has influenced every piece of stone, every street, every bridge and empty expanse before you?

I say to everyone who asks that you cannot understand Warsaw unless you understand her recent history. And I truly believe that. Every time I shepherd friends who visit, we start the tour with a short movie on the destruction and reconstruction of Warsaw in the previous century. It’s a movie about bravery, resilience, oppression, defiance – and ultimately of a spirit that one can be proud of.

That’s not Berlin’s history. And so you walk past monuments and you reflect about their use, misuse, disuse and except perhaps in your review of the last two decades, it’s all so painful!

Take the Reichstag. The Prussian building, where the Parliament now sits.





Created during the German Empire, destroyed by fire, ignored by Hitler, abandoned by the West, neglected by the East – only now, following reunification, has it been made great again.

A walk through the historic center of city on this bitter cold day is like a walk through a confusion of magnificent monuments and nothingness. Why such vast, empty spaces?





When Warsaw rebuilt herself after a near total destruction, it chose to painstakingly imitate a proud past. When Berlin rose from rubble, it did so with less pride, more politics, inattention to the past and, really, toward any coherent future. They say that if there are hills and inclines in this town, they’re made of war debris, buried underneath where we stand now. Hidden. Best forgotten.

The toll of the twentieth century is hard to stomach in a city that was not made better or finer for it.


And so you look at something like the seventeenth century Brandenburg Gate and you think – oh my, how splendid. Until you think about who passed through its gates and why. And you can’t help but recall all things having to do with military strength and conquest. And how are you supposed to process it? Are you supposed to smile for the camera? Pose, and with a person making a Euro by imitating a German soldier? On this cold day there are several such “soldiers” for you to choose from: from the wars of the past century, from the post war Soviet presence here – pick your poison. In the alternative you can stand next to a bear.





And then you come to the memorial to the Holocaust. A recent addition to the Berlin landscape.





Covered with snow now, looking like tombstones, but beautiful in the most heartbreaking way (you can't tell from where I'm standing, but some are twice the height of you and me) and though we did not intend to pause in museums today, we could not help ourselves now. Silently, through underground rooms of human stories of suffering at the hands of something so evil! There are photos and texts, in German and English and we read them, moving from one to the next: the story of German Jews, then of Polish Jews, and finally all European and Soviet Jews, leading the pack, with Roma, with the disabled, with those who dared challenge or merely just stand in the way, leading on to a certain death.

I know the story. I learned it at a very young age. It ended only eight years before I was born, but honestly, it never really had an ending at all for me, because once you know of it, once you meet the few who managed to survive, with most everyone they cared about lost to them, you don’t see it as ever ending. Not in your generation anyway.





Outside, I watch one, then another high school group. I see them at the Memorial, then at the spot where Hitler’s bunker once stood. But they’re not German kids. The first group is French, the second English. Where are the German kids?

Maybe they come to these markers of history in better weather.


We move now to the last sad chapter of Berlin’s past – the part about the wall. This one is more of a grim tale that ends well. Here, I should feel that surge of hope for a city that went through a lot at the hands of those who cared little about the people who merely wanted to get on with their days.

Again we read – about the quick construction, then reinforcement of a wall that was to keep people in, even as just a short time ago, some people were forced to leave.





But Berlin is all about moving on now. The preserved fragments of the wall are in a square that has perhaps the city’s most brazenly modern and tall structures. Raised over the ground where the Gestapo headquarters once stood. So that you find your self saying – yes, but all that was then, and now the city is something altogether different. The German spirit, whatever that is and however suppressed and repressed it was in the past, now moves forward.





It is so cold outside that perhaps it is not a surprise that most of these monuments have very few visitors. As we continue on our Berlin walk, feeling numbed by the wind, or by the monuments to the past, or both, we look around us to understand, after all is said and done, what has become of the city now.

A Christmas market! Just a few feet from the fragments of a wall, we have before us a cheerful place of holiday color. We join the Berliners (and visitors?) in a warming slug of hot spiced wine and we walk from stall to stall, admiring the sweets and the sausages and the Christmas trinkets.









And now we want more of it – of the daily life of a twenty-first century Berliner. I want to know – what is an everyday like for, say, someone who can barely remember a wall, who has by now no more relatives who may have been soldiers at war?

And I want to know – how are Berliners toward the outside world? I hear all the time how young people love this city! It’s time I tried to understand why.


The guide books tell you that you should stay close to historical Mitte – that’s where all the museums and monuments are clustered. I say you should stay anywhere but there. Try, instead, to place yourself in a less formidable environment. Find a neighborhood that is filled with small shops and cafés. Find quickly the places of a Berlin you can love, or else you may have a hard time remembering that there is this other side to life here.

And in these neighborhoods of a vibrant, younger life, I discover things that make me smile.

At Curry 36 – a place where lines form to buy Berlin’s favorite snack food – sausage sprinkled with curry, doused with ketchup and served with hot fries – we pick up a couple of platefuls and we stand around outside tables and savor the taste of this delicious Berlin street food. A woman watches me eat, take a photo, eat some more. She smiles. I smile. A brief encounter over a piece of sausage. It’s a good beginning to our neighborhood stroll.











And it continues in this quietly pleasant way. We pause for a cup of coffee in one of the numerous cafés – I am almost convinced that Berlin has even more cafés than Paris, and this could hardly seem possible, but when you walk, say, along the Bergmannstrasse, you really believe that it may be so.

In this particular café, run by a ma and pa , we are greeted in what I begin to see is the German way – politely, not effusively, without a warm smile, but with a subtle yet definite gesture of welcome. Here, our cappuccinos are served with a smiley face.





Elsewhere, a door is held open, a chocolate gingerbread cookie is carefully packaged and handed over with a bitte – small gestures, but there are many. One guide book says that Berliners are helpful if not exactly friendly. I’ll amplify that – maybe there’s hidden warmth there. Maybe it needs a little nurturing.





There are Christmas trees in front of shops that line the streets. Because the snow remains stubbornly in place on the sidewalks, parents and grandparents do errands with young children perched on sleds -- the kind that you rarely see anymore back home: with two runners and wooden slats.




I was pulled around in this way too, more than fifty years ago!

Is this why it all looks so familiar to me now? That, even as I walk in a city that I avoided for thirty five years, it feels not that distant from the Warsaw, where, too, you can eat a slice of cheesecake in a café or buy a chocolate covered gingerbread cookie to take back home?






In the late evening we go to dinner in a building that stands right at the spot where a rail line once linked Berlin with Paris to the west and Moscow to the east. My first trip ever to the countries of the west took place exactly fifty years ago when I boarded that train with my family in Warsaw, and got off in Paris, so that we could travel by ocean liner to New York.

Now, on this night, we eat at the restaurant called Paris-Moskau and it is such a fine mix of foods with layers of Frenchness, and nods to Russia (imagine splashing a drop of vodka into a white wine and cassis aperitif) and elements of Germany and Poland thrown in.

I eat a (cinnamon spiced) beet broth with duck livers on the side, followed by wild boar with poppy seed dumplings and I drink a German wine and I think – maybe you can mix tastes and people in a friendly fashion and emerge with something new, without disturbing whatever was once richly beautiful.





The staff at the restaurant is young and dynamic and I’m thinking – let’s hand over our old cities to the young people. Let them have a go of it. Seems they’re doing a fine job of reinventing Berlin. And that’s a good thing.

from Berlin

With more delays and more apologies, the flight for Berlin takes off. We are a packed plane, holding scatterings of passengers from so many cancelled Berlin flights! After two nights of minimal sleep, my daughter and I alternate between throwing out options on how to rework of our itinerary and drifting through states of half sleep and fuzzy awareness.

And finally we are in Berlin. And perhaps it is to be expected: one suitcase makes it, the other, hers, does not. I am poised for the quick run to the lost and found even as the last bags roll out. Hers is one of many missing and I know there will be a line.

When it is our turn, we face the realities of travel – ours is a chopped up schedule with, at this point, some uncertainty thrown in as to dates. We’re about to add a day to Berlin, but we don’t know if I can make the needed adjustments. I take a wild stab at giving the agents our schedule with addresses and phone numbers, but here’s the thing: the agent, an extremely sweet and empathetic woman, hired perhaps for exuding all these good qualities hundreds of times each day for distressed travelers, tells us that we cannot hope for recovery for a while.

It appears that even as we speak, the Berlin airport is filled with suitcases that need to be reunited with weary travelers. And each flight brings the next set of passengers with misplaced luggage. They are working round the clock, but the airport has been forced to find additional space – it is overwhelmed with people’s possessions.

So we do the best we can in giving them information and they do the best they can in offering some meager reassurance that eventually it will all come together – somewhere, someday.

It is past 11 at night by the time we are in the Hotel Camper. Techy, bold, new, set in the midst of Mitte – the former East Berlin and the hub of where we will want to walk.

Berlin. Even as it is a city that eats and parties like there’s not tomorrow (they say), the desk clerks tell us that by now, the food scene is closing down for the night. No matter. We don’t want a fine meal. We want a Berlin supper of this time, this moment – we want to go to Schlemmerbuffet.

Unlike Warsaw, Berlin is a city of many ethnicities and diverse peoples. The community of Turkish immigrants, for example, is quite substantial. And on this night we are determined to eat what is a uniquely Turkish-German creation – the doner kebab.





It’s bread stuffed with slivers of roasted chicken smothered in garlic sauce, heaped with raw onions, cabbage, lettuce and tomatoes. With a Berlin beer, it has to be the best fast food on the planet.

One of the cooks sits down at our table to eat his supper and we ask him about his work here. He’s a fairly recent immigrant. His uncle, the guy in the fancy duds, owns the place.





The cook's ambitious and friendly and has a smile that is engaging and optimisitic.





This is our introduction to Berlin.

We walk back along the snow covered sidewalks of this very complicated city. The ground feels cold from the bottom up. I have no doubt as to where I am. Berlin. East Berlin – with shops and edgy bars now everywhere, updating, but not changing this hard place with a harsh history.





I wake up and pull back the curtains. Yep, Berlin.

not to Berlin, continued

It’s midnight in Paris: Wednesday is quickly becoming Thursday. I'm struggling to stay awake to put up a post. Alarms are set for some horrifically early hour, but I know I wont need them. I am on automatic pilot. I never fail to wake up when I have to.

We leave our Parisian hotel shortly after 6. Every surface is iced over from a night freeze. We walk very very slowly to the RER train for the airport. Goodbye Paris.





At the airport, we step over sleeping people, tired people, waiting in line people. We did the waiting last night. We’re holding onto precious boarding passes for a late morning flight to Berlin.

And then, just before scheduled boarding, the red sign flashes: canceled.

Oh, you can ask the whys and whereofs, and you can pretend to understand, but really it is all a mess out there in central Europe. Berlin, too, has the snow, and now it doesn’t, but it’s still recovering and who knows for how long.

We are told to retrieve our suitcases from some secret passageway and indeed, one shows up, but the other does not.

I mention this not because it is particularly novel – flights get canceled, suitcases get lost or delayed, sure, all that. But the attention we received from the Air France suitcase people is beyond lovely. Monsieur explains to me what steps have been taken and what happens in case my daughter’s suitcase does not appear with her in Berlin tonight. He asks us to check back in a couple of hours on the status of things and I wince slightly because the day is still young and our flight is way later and I would love very much not to spend the entire day at the airport. Part of it – yes, to pay our dues, but not the whole day.

Madam le manager steps in and tells Monsieur that he is a fool because she of course will attend to our suitcase issues and we should go into Paris and have fun. Monsieur turns to us and translates what needs no translation – she said I am stupid, he tells us. He does not appear to be diminished by her comment.

Monsieur asks us how we’re getting into Paris, the assumption being that this is our first venture there. Oh, if he only knew! Just this morning...

I say we will catch the RER train and he winces. So déclassé! That will give you a bad impression of us! Take the bus!

We thank him profusely for all his help, shaking hands all around, and head toward the déclassé RER.

And some forty minutes later, just after noon, we alight (again) in Paris. Hello Paris.

We’re at the tip of the Luxembourg Gardens and we walk along the icy snow-covered paths and it’s all so bright and lovely! Yes, sure, the flowers are suffering and Parisians seem rather dazed by this record snowfall (4.33 inches), but for us, it is supremely pretty and the air is only modestly cold (maybe 28 F?).





And now it’s time for lunch.

There is this great little place just a short few blocks from our hotel, from our Gardens, from where we are right now – Le Comptoir. I have never been able to get a table there – it’s extraordinarily popular and I can’t get myself to book a dinner more than a week or two in advance. But for lunch, they will find us a table, if we agree to wait a wee bit.

And soon a table opens up. Outdoors okay? Madame asks. Well, it is below freezing and I can see my breath, but madame assures us that we can have blankets and there will be heat lamps.





We sit at a wee table – me in the bright and warm sun, she under the heat lamp and it is so glorious and decadent to be eating lunch in Paris in this way! We laugh at our travels and I eat a lamb confit, and she eats a grilled oyster, and Madame brings a demi carafe of wine and it just doesn’t get any better than this.





And now we are back on the train, and now at the airport, watching the screen for that moment when the sign will change from “on time” to either “now boarding” or “canceled.” Which one?

no, not to Berlin

One person’s chaos is another’s yawn. That’s the punch line.

Oh! Finally! A photo from this side of the ocean:




Not Berlin, is it? You’re right. Not Berlin.

After a six hour wait for the second Berlin-bound flight (the first one was canceled), all the while watching the wet, cold, misty skies turn wetter and mistier, we finally board the plane. Departing on time. What a relief.

Except that it isn’t a relief at all. In the minutes before departure, I note how a two degree dip in the temperature outside can transform drizzle into light snow and then into heavier snow. And now we have a further delay.  There is a backup of flights waiting to be de-iced. And waiting, too, for available runways. And then, in the end, there are no open runways at all because the airport suddenly closes. Except that we are still on that plane waiting to go somewhere, but really nowhere at all.

Snow arrives in Paris and the city, unused to such nonsense, gives up for the day.

We spend four hours on the plane, waiting, waiting, the pilot nicely updating, the attendants handing out sandwiches. My seatmate to my left tells me – that’s the French famous singer in the row in front of us (Mirelle Mathieau). She was going on a tour of Germany... Snow storms do not discriminate. They make everyone wait and then, just when you've decided you can wait no more, they have you get off and wait in long lines to figure out what's next.

I ask my kind seatmate to my left for his cell phone and I call my little hotel in Paris. Do you have a room for tonight? Last one! You are lucky. Paris is fully booked tonight, because of the storm.

Chaos at the airport. Chaos in the city. The snowstorm has wrecked havoc.

We retreat, taking the train to town (running at half the speed), no suitcases – who knows where they are and when we will see them again – but with flight reservations for tomorrow. Maybe. If all goes well.

An inconvenience. A huge, terrible, head-spinning inconvenience.

Except, after all, it’s Paris.





It’s late, but we have time to shower and set out for a dinner at the new and bright Ze Kitchen Gallerie bistro. It’s Fench, but it’s a bit Asian, but really French – a confusion of places, which is so right, because we are in the thick of a confusion of places.

All because four inches of snow fell, unexpectedly, over the city of Paris. Chaos. (Or, from the point of view of a Madison snow removal worker: yawn.)

to Berlin

December in central Europe is a dreary time of biting cold, wet air. I have such vivid memories of this -- dating back to my childhood years in Warsaw. Of hardened snow along the curb, forcing you to find a trampled path over banks of it, just to cross the street. Of dark afternoons. Of my mother taking me skating for the first time, on the patch of ice by the market. Double blades, fastened to a laced-up brown shoe. The feeling of night at midday, with people crowding streets, moving quickly to keep warm. Of thick drapes hanging by entrance doors in stores, to keep the cold air out. Dim street lights, wool coats, sometimes with fur collars. Hot tea with fruit compote to sweeten it.

But that’s Warsaw. What’s Berlin like?

My earliest visits to it where passing through ones.  In the 1960s, you could not fly from Warsaw to, say London or Amsterdam (to connect to New York, where my father worked for a half dozen years) without stopping in East Berlin. We would disembark and sit in the rather empty wait area. Tables with stained coverings, glasses of tea, German announcements over the loudspeaker. I was a postwar child and the German language sounded menacing, harsh.

Later, I passed through Berlin with longer pauses. Once, I vacationed with my family in East Germany and Berlin was our jump off point. We were allowed to spend an afternoon in West Berlin, even though at the time (1969), the wall separating the two parts to the city was at its most guarded moment. West Berlin was glitzy and commercial. East Berlin was an expanse of vast spaces and monochromatic buildings.

The last time I was in Berlin was in 1975. My sister and her then husband needed someone to drive a car for them from Paris to Warsaw and I volunteered. I was studying in the States, but I spent every free month in Europe – mostly Poland, and this offered a chance to take a slow poke through both West and East Germany.

I’ll long remember the corridor road that linked West Germany with West Berlin. If you can imagine it: a passageway, with an imposed hostility on both sides (relations between East and West Germany remained strained then). We stayed in West Berlin for a few days before crossing over to the East. And again I thought it offered little beyond the commercial avenues filled with the kind of stores you’d like to see in the East – cheap and plentiful stuff. Lots of stuff.

The road linking Berlin with Warsaw remained poorly maintained – even as it was, at the time, just about the only real highway in all of Poland.

So, what’s Berlin like now?

We’re spending many hours at the Paris airport (worse fates could befall us than sipping endless espressos and eating numerous pain au chocolat). The morning flight to Berlin is cancelled. The weather is to blame. You guessed it – freezing, wet, dreary. You expect it in Berlin, in Warsaw. This time it’s made its way to Paris too.

from O’Hare in Chicago, waiting for my flight

We’re going to Poland, my younger daughter and I, but not immediately. Our first stop is Berlin. From there, on the week-end, we’ll take the train to Krakow.

Berlin. Uff! My time in that city predates the falling of the wall. So I have memories alright, from my youthful years (as a foreign diplomat’s daughter) when I could cross from East to West and back again, even at the tense times when so many others could not.

I’m thinking a lot about Berlin – right now, mostly about the snow storms that are pounding central Europe these weeks. Some of our flights are already cancelled and rebooked – it should be the usual winter travel saga.

But, I am at the airport, about to take off, thinking how central Europe still holds this spot in my soul: I can’t quite do without it.

day before

The day before a departure is always wild. It starts early, with my reaching for the computer before dawn and it ends with a slight worry that I wont get everything together on time.

(I’ll say this much: I know when to call it quits with the bike. Unlike the average UW kid...)





And I know where to find bright color on a December evening...





I’m there, at the mall, looking for holiday gifts for people back in the old country. And I'm wondering -- why is it that kids no longer go for the mall Santa thing? Not a kid in sight this evening. He has to make do with a wave toward people like me... Are kids all Santa'd out these days? Is that a good thing?

Anyway, I'm off and away tomorrow. Travel is a blogger's friend and enemy. You hope to write, you don't know if there will be the opportunity. But you know I'll try. And I'll connect as soon as I can.

Wisconsin winter days

A day of wonders and exclamation marks. Perhaps I’m the only one that can appreciate them, but still, I have to note here that I am impressed. With the entrepreneurial spirit and with the weather.

The first: Apple. The computer. After several days of Genius sessions and attempted fixes, Apple reps call me and ask if it’s okay for them to simply replace my computer with a new one, of an upgraded type (all data neatly migrated to the new one so I would not be bothered with teaching the freshly minted one how to walk and talk). Showing no loyalty whatsoever to what is, after all, a mere old box, I said “yes, yes, YES! and Thank you....”

As a dedicated laptop user (I’d say that in our indoor nonwork time, we have a machine suspended on our bellies pretty routinely), I am impressed by the loveliness and smoothness of processes on new machines. Ed, of course, is more focused on keeping his old and cheap running for as long as possible. Fine, but the fact is that newer is better in technology. And today, I get lucky – I get newer. [p.s. with all new glitches!]


In other news, I put down my work shortly after noon. When the sun comes out after a snowstorm (this is a frequent occurrence in Wisconsin), the world glistens. Even if it’s disturbingly cold outside.

Snow. I suggest to Ed that we take our skis out (for the first time). Neither of us has much time to spare, but we’re willing and enthusiastic and so we set out to do a short run around the perimeter of the Arboretum.









It’s unfortunate that shortly into the ski venture we get lost. And then again, and again. A wrong turn can be costly when, after an hour or two, the sun sinks low...





...and lower...





...until there is very little left.






It’s now that you hear the birds. But you have to stop to hear and see them. I’m waiting for Ed (in skiing I am perhaps three times faster on the trails – it is the only place where he appears to exude caution) and I look around me. One, two, five, eight robins congregate. They hardly twitter. A rustle, another, silence.





Lovely. It is all so very lovely. I’m leaving Wisconsin the day after tomorrow, to head back to the part of the world that was my home for most of my formative years, and I am exceptionally excited about this, but I know returning, too, will be a good thing. It’s just so darn lovely here!

snowflake

Well, now, that was pretty cool. Go to sleep in shades of gray and wake up to a bleary predawn world of blue and white.



At least that’s the first reaction. Not that it was a ticklish and delightful snow. Stepping outside I thought it was rather prickly and meanspirited. But still, lovely to behold.

I think about snowflakes even as my daughters are in New York attending (among other things) the Nutcracker this afternoon. My girl was a snowflake (among other things) in one such show. How long is one’s memory of poignant moments? Mine trawls back even further -- to when I attended the Nutcracker when I was a kid. It was the first time in my life that I cried because I found something to be beautiful.


Unfortunately, today was a day of work for me and so I could not spend much time contemplating the freshly white landscape. And so I guess I should feel thankful that my baby Apple (anything that’s less than two years old is a baby – and luckily still under my health insurance, excuse me, warranty, thank goodness) still needed urgent care (though her symptoms are improving, so there’s that). Twice I needed to go to the Apple Store at the mall and so I could ask Ed to detour through the prettier places on Madison’s west side, including the delightful Owen Woods.





I have to give Ed praise for never complaining on matters of detours, even when such suggestions are sometimes a bad idea – for example, when the roads are snow covered and slippery and the park driveways even more so, and when we are in his light and airy (the wind hits you in through the rusted parts) Geo with very easygoing tires that basically like to roll along and not rigidly adhere to much of anything.

He fights the slight incline while I get out, give an ineffective push and concentrate on taking a photo or two.





Eventually we make it back. Of course we do. I wouldn’t be writing if we didn’t.

the last ride

These are exciting times. And though the conventional wisdom is that December is stress central, I feel it to be the opposite. When the weather outside is delightful (on a good spring, summer or fall day), I’m compelled to take note. So beautiful! Have to enjoy it. Yes, really – it deserves my full attention!

But on days like today? No pressure! It’s gray and bitter cold. Whatever I do outdoors is bonus points. Like eating yesterday’s brussel sprouts. Makes me feel proud: despite the temptation to be lethargic and eat junk, I moved and ate leftover veggies!

So I biked to work today, even though I didn’t have to. If I had put away the darn cycle for the winter, everyone would have understood. But at the last minute I changed my mind. The semester ends this week and I will finish it off with cycling to and from work. Yeah!

Did I mention that it was gray?





No photoshop color correction on that one. Indeed, by afternoon, the clouds are thick enough to obliterate any tones of gold. We are part of one big gray canvas of sameness.

But exhilarating!

And speaking of excitement, I must mention the early morning car trip to my daughter’s place (she lives on the other side of town) so that I could take her to the airport. When we purchased the holiday tree a few days back, I left it on the roof of my red Ford Escort. I rarely drive the thing and besides, I’m going out of town for nearly two week. As are my daughters. We’ll put up the tree when we reconvene in Madison in the week of Christmas.

But life throws you interesting punches and one such punch is my limping computer, which required a car trip (with tree on top) to the mall last night. And now, here I am this morning, driving my daughter to the garage where she is leaving her car for repairs and then from there, to the airport.

In the middle of the very busy, fast moving Stoughton Road, the twine holding down the tree displays an impish desire to let loose. Or something. Animated in chatter with daughter, I do not notice until I glance at the mirror and see the tree slipping down the hatch in the back.

Oh dear.

I pull over and do some makeshift tugging and tightening. One minute later it starts slipping again. I tug and tighten. We move forward, it slips anyway. We stop, etc. etc.

We limp along this way to the airport and we hold on tight to the twine inside thinking that at least we’ll not let the tree roll  freely on the road.

The ride back from the airport is equally exciting, especially since now I am holding on to the twine and driving and wishing I were the type who prayed in stressful times. It would at the very least take my mind off the image of a tree bouncing off and doing damage. I teach Torts, after all. I know too much about personal injury cases.

You may think I am inept, as I let the tree hang loose in this way. Not so. It's because the cord is too short and on this particular car, there aren’t many trustworthy parts where you can fasten something and rest assured that the cord and car part wont break off and go spinning into space. You have to remember that the entire rear bumper and good part of the front one are held up by tape.

But, I worry too much. After all, I'm holding on to the twine and at worst, the tree will have been knocked about in an Isadora Duncan sort of way.

In the end I make it home with tree trunk pointing wickedly into the air, but with the rest still remaining more or less attached to the car.

Can you see why I prefer biking? (Though do note though that yesterday’s ripples along the shore are today’s ice. Brrr...)





Quick clarification: The last photo suggests we are have snow. Not so. What you’re seeing is the icy stuff that accumulates at the shoreline. Our ground is frozen, but bare.

Tomorrow, though, things may look quite different.

turning points

Should I? Yes, of course I should. It's 16, but it's dry and sunny. I've seen worse.

Yes, but the cold... And it will feel worse later, when I am tired from the long day.

Okay, but if I don't, I miss out on so much!

Fine. I have a half hour. It's a twenty two minute pedal, let's go!

I'm bundled to the max. Cap under helmet, scarf, down jacket. Still, it's biting out there! I pull up the scarf to cover the face.

At the lake, I see the first stages of freezing. Beaver dams rise over sheets of thin ice.


 


Shoreline branches are frozen. As if they know what's coming and they see no point in avoiding the inevitable.





The birds retreat to the less solid waters. For the most part.





I need to hurry up! I have an early morning class Thursdays! It's the last day of classes, too. Hurry up!

What's this?! Lake shore path is closed? Why? Oh, tree maintenance? Well fine, but how do I proceed now? I have no time to spare! Okay, Observatory -- I'll take Observatory. Uff! That is one uphill climb! I am tired before I even enter the Law School doors.


For my first class, I have invited a guest. He's been an honored speaker in years past and I have come to depend on him to fill certain voids that I cannot tackle. I listen as always, but this time I note that there is something different about his presentation. It's the same talk, the same person, and yet... I ask him afterward -- did I hear you say that you've had some issues? Yes, this summer I almost died. I had a brain bleed. 

And it all comes back to me. It's as if I am listening to myself speak. Because some fifteen years ago, I was in his place -- freshly recovering from a brain hemorrhage. I know too well the feeling of post trauma vulnerability. The shocked relief at being alive. He tells me -- thirty percent die, thirty percent have significant brain damage, thirty percent survive with no lasting damage. I know those statistics well. They haven't changed in the last decades.

We talk for a while and then I have to hurry on. I have two more classes to teach.
 It's good to see you -- I say. It's good to be able to see you -- he tells me.


And now the day is done. Last class ends. I look out at the faces of my fall semester and I think -- wow, this is our last meeting as a group.  They've been my daily fare and now  -- pfft! gone. 

Home. I wish I could merely pedal home. It's cold, yes, that. But I also know that at home I have a laptop that spontaneously shuts down for no good reason. And I am going away next week. And I can't afford spontaneous shutdowns when I am far far from an Apple Service Center.

I spend two hours with the Apple Genius bunch and they try, they really do, but it's no use. My baby needs an overhaul and it is doubtful that needed parts will arrive before my departure next week.

I've seen people fall apart over computer issues and I am determined not to be one of them. I'll make do! I'll figure it out!

I rush home and make spaghetti sauce -- a family favorite. My old daughter comes by for dinner, Ed's there, being Ed.

The night sets in. Deep sigh. I have no complaints.