The Deal With German

Jill and I are off on our first vacation together in 17 years. We want a whiz-bang, someplace exotic but not too dangerous and where we never really thought of going before. On a weekend drive up to see Alex at his residential school, I say, “Maybe we should go to Berlin.”

German was my favorite foreign language in school, though Zeit has rewritten every line. I took it for a semester in 11^th grade from one of my favorite teachers ever, then for another semester in college after I moved to New York. That college class culminated in a bunch (Haufen, I think) of us headed to the then-thriving German Upper East Side where we asked a waiter if his restaurant had live music and he tossed the guts of a music box on the table.

A few years from now I’ll have the time to take a class, maybe even take a few days to live a subject like a language 24/7, just as Alex does now, except his subjects are life and maybe someday holding a job. For now I’m going to a place where I don’t understand the signs and on occasion I may not understand how to behave. What if somebody sneezes? What’s German for gesundheit?

The Air Berlin crew gives the take-off announcement to us Fluggaste first in German, which I don’t understand at all, then in English, which I follow pretty well. The common airline signage is all in German: Schwimmweste unter ihrem sitz, Bitte Angeschnallt Bleiben, Meinen Masse. (Back home days later, Jill will be watching a German version of The Nightmare Before Christmas song “This is Halloween” on YouTube when she’ll exclaim, “Masse! Mask! Like on the plane!”)

Why, you might wonder, didn’t I take more seriously learning the language of the country I’m going to visit? I’m not sure. Some laziness, hearing constant assurance that most Germans speak English (Russian, too, if they grew up in the old East Germany), and the need to wing important stuff even more in my early 50s.

I sleep on the plane, waking up in time to see the dawn (and to a far better economy-class breakfast than we would’ve received on an American airline) at what for me is 1 a.m. “It looks like Queens,” Jill says, looking out the window as we begin to land. “Is that a nuclear power plant?”

Getting a cab is remarkably like getting one at LaGuardia. The driver’s patient with our German (that is, he switches the conversation to English) and soon we’re zipping past houses, streets, what looks like a hell of a hobby shop and a business area that reminds me of Boston. The colors are bright in the morning sun; the words are all wrong.

“Ever take a cab ride in a Mercedes before?” I ask Jill. I make a joke out of being the Ugly American by asking “What’s the deal?” with everything. What’s the deal with these Strassen? What’s the deal with umlauts?

(I believe that I can substitute here two letters S for the German eszett, which looks like an unclosed B. My keyboard doesn’t make umlauts, either.)

“Ich heisse Jeff Stimpson...” I try to say to the lady at the hotel desk. She smiles at me with a cabdriver’s patience and we wordlessly agree to continue in English to save money on subtitling.

We can check in early! “And we have the James Bond suite – Room 007!” she says. Does she think I’m British? Cool. How do I look to others in this part of the world?

We spend a week looking around. In a Bahnhof I see a sleeper train of people packing their little bedrooms to roll to Sweden. We eat a mile of wurst; Alex would love this place once he got over the new name for hot dog. At a hamburger joint in a former public toilet, I see my first Gypsy.

I spend a week in front of doors trying to remember that drucken means push (“No, Alex,” I used to say sometimes curtly, “it says pull…”). In a stationery shop I see the innards of music boxes arranged as collectibles. Everything becomes enlightening, and only clerk replies to “Sprechen Sie Englisch?” with a short “No.”

One evening Jill walks us 45 minutes down dark sidewalks to try to find a nightclub in an abandoned bread factory; another night she tries to get us into a dance club under a railroad bridge. One night we get so lost that we catch a city bus, ride it a few stops before we realize we went too far, get off the bus and walk across the street to another bus stop. As we watch, the same bus we got off takes a regularly scheduled turn at the end of the block and starts back in our direction.

“That bus isn’t going to turn the corner and be the one to pick us up, is it?” Jill asks.

Been a long time since I found getting lost this easy. Late one night Jill and I are all turned around (we were four blocks from our hotel) and, exhausted, we hail a cab. This driver speaks a little English; my German skills soon reveal how much. “Jeff,” Jill says, “he needs to know the address on that street.”

Next morning we get an egg and (great) coffee at a little spot. “Have a good week,” the waitress says as we leave. “No, I mean ‘day.’ I’m sorry.” Nicht sein.

What’s the deal with coming to grips with National Socialism, turning the former headquarters of the SS into a renowned museum dedicated to terror? Building a Holocaust memorial that appeals to tourist curiosity and, as you wander the rows and rows of identical featureless columns, slowly overwhelms you with each shadow and angle of sharp Berlin sunlight?

What’s the deal with a ham wrapper? “Original grusten-karree vom stuck (ofenfrisch aufgeschnitten). Netto gewicht, 80g.” Faucets read kein wasser trinken. The music box course taught me enough to understand that, words that sound a little bit like words in English so I assume that they mean the same as the word they sort of look like in English. Bower. Flowers? Power plant? Sounds like “flowers” and so must be right. One night in our hotel I try to do our laundry.

“Oh Jeff, no,” Jill says, as the pre-wash just doesn’t seem to start, “this is the dryer…” Her voice dips in amazement that after all these years she can still lose faith in my ability to figure out anything. Well see, the washer instructions were on the top of the sheet of paper taped to the inside of the bathroom door, and the dryer sits on top of the washer. All wording on both machines is in German. What’s the deal with that?

And in restaurants am I tipping too much? At a seafood counter I recognize austem because I’ve seen it before, just like Alex has seen “Chicken and French fries!” in diners. I walk right up to a counter and ask for “Zwei wasser, bitte.”

“You want that cold?” the counterman asks.

One afternoon at a big flea market Jill finds me at a picnic table. “You look so German,” she says. That’s because my mouth is shut.

I come close to fooling some. After we see the Memorial, Jill wants to attend Friday night services at a synagogue. As the line forms afterward to shake the rabbi’s hand before we leave, I let a few people get between me and Jill in line. The rabbi says “Thank you for coming” to Jill but “Wilkommen” to me.

With renewed confidence I order a drink in our next restaurant. “Eine Berliner pilsner, bitte.”

“Large or small, sir?”

On the last night we stay in and watch German TV. We get mildly hooked on a soap called “Rote Rosen.” What’s the deal with the couple on the show who seem to think it’s the 1890s? Colorful as Elmo, which Alex still watches. We watch “The Simpsons,” a dinosaur documentary and “Band of Brothers.” Here and there I pick out a noun or verb.

On our last day, a lady – she’s German! – asks us for directions. We don’t get her lost and the world makes a klein more sense.

Batter Up

Both my boys have found sports. We’re not sure where they get it. Jill skates. When I was 12 I played defensive end in Pop Warner. Earlier I’d played Farm League baseball; I sat on the bench all through our one playoff game and when I got up late in the game to ask the coach why I wasn’t playing, he snapped, “Because we’re trying to win, Jeff!” I gave up baseball.

In adulthood, at least until this summer, athletics mostly meant I understood fewer sentences from Ned, who lives for high school JV football. “In practice today,” he said last fall, “I was playing shallow corner and they flooded the zone, so I grabbed a pick and took it to the house.”

You what, Ned? What are you, in The Sting?

He does have an eye for the game. Ned and were watching a Redskins game in a bar when a guy tapped me on the shoulder. “If I ever can’t find where the ball is on the screen,” he said, “I watch your son.” Other times we’ll be home watching a game and, before the snap, he’ll describe what players on both sides of the ball will do in the coming play. He’s usually right. They say Emmitt Smith did that when he was 2.

Ned’s taken QB reps (...you go flood the zone ...) in off-season practice, which I felt fine about until his team hosted a recent benefit pancake breakfast and I got reminded of how many guys on his team look like just plain big. The first time I watched Ned walk onto a field in a football uniform, at a scrimmage 10 months ago, I called out “Roll Tech!” from the sideline. Ned glanced and nodded toward me, slight and curt like Boba Fett in Jabba’s castle. My son was gone a little bit.

Later in that game he lined up at cornerback, and before the snap of his first play Ned eagled-eyed the other team’s quarterback like a hawk. Too bad: The offensive receiver, a vet (much as 10^th grade has veterans), noticed that he didn’t have Ned’s attention and, at the snap, rammed the heels of his palms into Ned’s shoulder pads.

A good clean hit, it sent Ned on his back and got his head into the game, where it remains today (sometimes to the exclusion of Spanish and algebra). I tell Ned to go into coaching: all the free tickets and none of the concussions.

Alex likes baseball. His residence school put him on their team and he plays every Saturday. All week, they tell us, he says “baseball” and asks for “Coach Mike.”

Sports in Alex’s world are both different yet remarkably similar to sports in Ned’s. Years ago, for example, I covered a Special Olympics ballgame in Brooklyn. They used a T ball stand, sort of a tall golf tee for a baseball. There were cheers and medals aplenty – the introductory levels of Special Olympics stress enjoyment and achievement above all – but when the kid sliding into second tried to spike the baseman’s ankles, the two players went nose to nose just like in the majors.

Jill phoned me a few mornings ago. “Alex’s teacher just called,” she said. “They’ve got a field trip today. They’re going to a minor league baseball game. Guess who’s throwing out the first pitch? It’s somebody you know.”

Chris Fleming? He’s a rising comedian (“Gayle” is the best thing on YouTube) and he had a Super Bowl commercial, so it’s possible. “No, it’s somebody you know personally.”

Pause. “Alex.”

I find out too late to blow off work and go – Alex’s teacher promises videos and photos, and says Alex will meet a Yankees pitcher recovering in the minors as well as the most likely prospect to move up to the Bombers this season, infielder Rob Refsnyder. (I ask my friend Jon, who bleeds Bosox red, if he’d like an autograph. No reply yet.)

I feel sad and then decide that I want Alex to have this for himself. If we showed up he’d might want to leave the stadium and get some chicken fingers in a coffee shop. “I’m very excited for Alex,” his teacher emails, “and his new-found love for baseball.” I’m proud of Alex, pride with a seedling of relief; I had nothing to do with him getting a ball in his hand in that stadium.

I’m not sure who his team (“Dodgers”) plays, but from where I stood behind first base at the last game I saw him on his team’s bench, rocking on his feet and just another of the guys in supernaturally bright blue sports jersey. Alex didn’t watch the game while his team batted. He didn’t wear a cap.

Then I watched Alex bat. He held the wood out as if holding a flag at an assmbly; the thick plastic batting helmet slid over his eyes. This was one of the first times I ever saw him when he needed armor. His para guided his arms and whispered to him when to swing, but still Alex didn’t even turn his head as the slow pitch floated past – something he didn’t quite comprehend. The infield was quiet; some of the other players were watching him bat.

Soon the other team came to bat and Alex and his para took third. He looked good in a glove, and when giggling he tossed a grounder back to the pitcher what he lacked in power and direction he made up for in a love of throwing. He also seemed to love running the bases. (No surprise: Not long ago he was six years old and I was trying to catch him in Central Park. It was like trying to catch a dragonfly.)

I help him his next time up; I put my hands over his on the bat. “Okay, Alex, hold it like this, right here… Watch the pitcher.” We whiff one slow ball, chip the second, then on the third pitch Alex’s hands on the wood arch the lumber across his waist and connect with a tonk. “Run to first, Alex!” He does. A good clean hit to get him into the game.

 

Six Months

Alex moved to his residential school just before last winter. Brutal weather for months: The parking lots there had 10-foot banks of plowed snow, and a wind that didn’t downshift from knifing to merely keen until far into April. On weekend trips to visit him through this first winter, what could we really do?

We explored every aisle of a nearby Walmart, laid eyes on every shelf of half a dozen dollar stores, found diners with the good pie. Week by week in Walmart, Alex grabbed every WWE doll he liked and named each after a different relative.

He came home for a few days at Thanksgiving (he had a beard!), at Christmas and most recently on his spring break. Funny how far away last fall suddenly seems. When he’s home, I climb into bed remembering that he might bolt from our apartment in the wee hours. He hasn’t done that in months but we never know.

He’s away from home to get his equivalent of a college education; it seems to be working. His teacher Abby just emailed to say that Alex has asked to be on the school’s baseball team. A few weeks ago during the school day I called Abby and heard Alex grab the phone and say, “Daddy! Eight, eight! Seven! Six!” They do a lot of countdowns at transition moments at his school. Thing is, no one told him that Abby was talking to me on the phone. He’s getting the life he needed next.

So are we. Dinner’s become quieter, no Alex bobbing and weaving, just oft-surly teenage Ned refusing to stop texting while Jill and I chew our way through “Broadchurch” or “Better Call Saul.” Some evenings I play too many computer games or stay out to play pinball. I played pinball all through high school and long after, but not for many years now. Sometimes Jill and I go to Broadway. We do a lot of things because I don’t have to bolt for the subway at 5:01 to stop the clock on some babysitter for my 16-year-old son.

Why do I spend every evening playing online variations of Battleship? Why do I blow Ned’s 529 on a vintage “Twilight Zone” machine? Maybe these are solvable puzzles, unlike the looming adulthood of the young man who still asks to watch Elmo. What was he supposed to do? Stay with only us forever? That would’ve prepared him for nothing. His version of college.

“That’s just what you tell yourself!” typed a troll on Twitter just before she hashtagged me and Jill “Worstparentsever” Frankly, sounds like somebody’s own parents once put her in some place she didn’t like.

Alex’s school took great pains to guide us through his move there. They gave us a binder containing many pages of parents’ thoughts on every stage of this huge transition. Frank stuff, too, from these parents:

Nights finally to yourself and evenings of guilt. Siblings wondering if passersby realize that the family isn’t all there. Family and friends who use the phrase, “… Put him away.” A long-delayed cruise. Volunteer work and hobbies (“… I’m Talking Tina. Here’s your extra ball…”).

Family dinners with an empty chair, dusting off careers and connections to see if either still work. A decade ago, a nurse or a lawyer – what am I now? Not having to care as much for a permanent child anymore, but will a marriage survive?

How does my child know I’m coming back? Who’s there when he cries? How is he eating?

I have questions for Alex when he comes home on this recent break. I try to let him know it’s just for a few days (we figured he’d be bored with no walks and no structure). “Today’s Monday and you’ll go back to school on Thursday, Alex. You’ve done well there, Alex. We’re very proud of you. Back to school.”

“Back to school,” he says.

“Do you have any friends at school?”

He looks at me for a second. “Noooo,” he says. “Naahhhooo!” Uh oh.

They love him there. He seems to love them. We’ve seen pictures. We know it’s true. Maybe it’s cabin fever or, best case, a typical teen just wanting to do what’s easiest and more fun, like sneaking off texts during dinner.

On Thursday, “Michael’s!” Alex says, beginning to barter for a last gift at home, a chance for me to prove at the cash register exactly how proud I am of him. “Apple store?”

“No, Alex, we’re not going to the Apple store. We can stop at Walmart up near the school…”

“Walmart,” he says. Now, after this long winter, Alex must study the doll rack a long time to find a relative he doesn’t already have. He never buys (or has me buy) one he already has.

“Alex likes to see new things” Jill says.

I drive him back. The 10-foot banks have turned to gnarled and blackened islands in the parking lots; we can all start thinking of concerts and walks. Maybe some hiking, except Alex will probably keep wanting a Michaels! around every bend in the pines.

“He seems happy to see us now on weekends,” Jill says. “Not very happy, just happy.” Perfectly sensible behavior from the boy who’s becoming a man somewhere else.

 

Eating Out

Alex waits patiently now, shops with his younger brother without bolting out the store fire exit, says “Thank you” in context. He also now decides when he wants to hit the hay, and puts himself to bed without always needing Jill to softly sing to him – although the first night home for the winter holidays he did get right in her face about 10 p.m. and bark, “Down in the Valley!!”

Eating’s the biggest change in him. Top of a lasagna. A Taco Bell chicken quesadilla. Swiping a slice of my steak in Applebee’s. In headphones and bobbing over music with a pizza slice drooping from his hand, the picture of almost every teen for the past 60 years.

Eating, to my mind, is almost as important as conversing when it comes to trying to get Alex into the rest of the world. A long struggle: From his earliest days we had to sneak calories into the few things he would eat – baby food laced with cream, for instance – and even bacon he’d often heave over the side of his high chair and proclaim, “Noooo. Noooo!” Eventually he did move on to chicken, yogurt, hot dogs, what we told ourselves constituted variety in his diet. To beloved junk food he gave cute names (“Bu-gulz” “pret-ZULS”).

But eating remained a wall between him and others, from finding the connection that happens when people sit down at a table and chew and swallow.

Even now, when since last fall a residential school has brought him a long long way, we still wonder about his eating. We email his feeding therapist before he comes home for the holidays: “What should we include or exclude in his diet when he's home? Is there anything we should send back with him to school? Frozen corn on the cob?”

Months ago, Jill got him to first eat corn on the cob; she’s usually the one who gets him to eat new stuff. On one of our recent visits to him at school, we arrived to find Alex at the dining table of his residence house, spooning applesauce. Beside the sauce on his tray sat an untouched sandwich. Jill got him to take a bite of it. I don’t know if he swallowed. He still doesn’t always swallow: First time they tried spinach pie at this school, when he arrived last fall, he put it in his mouth, strode to the nearest trashcan, opened his mouth and let the pie fall out.

Alex’s school incorporates food into learning, smoothly transforming a swallow at a dinner table into another lesson. They’re concerned about his weight loss in the weeks since he started school. A typical condition for new students, but they still welcome tips. “Oh he eats ice cream?” they say. (Not everyone does in this population.) Alex himself helps his feeding therapist figure out that he likes to prop select members of his plastic toy figure collection near his dinner plate, including his latest 6-inch WWE wrestlers to whom he recently started assigning the names of relatives. I like to think that in Alex’s eyes I’m Jack Swagger.

Foods Alex has eaten at school: roast chicken, grilled chicken, breaded chicken, spice-rubbed chicken (“… he’s liking lemon flavor ...”); muffins; Mexican chocolate cookies; Chex cereal; veggie stix (with and without applesauce). Maybe his new teachers and therapists make such progress because they haven’t known Alex for years and can work free of preconceptions. (I guess it also doesn’t hurt that their shift ends.).

“I show up for breakfast with him before he goes to school,” his feeding therapist says. “We sit right down.” Ready and pumped for work (…Nooooo…) by 7:30 every morning. “Alex is such a kind polite gentleman,” she adds, along with her tips:

- Make mealtimes fun! Instead of focusing on just the eating aspect of the meal you can make it enjoyable for Alex by playing. Kissing foods, building with toothpicks, making his figurines eat the food, letting him feed you guys. We’ve seen him really come to love his time playing with his foods.

- Provide a goodbye plate. He can put foods that he does not want on a goodbye plate. I have started having Alex kiss and lick foods goodbye to have him be more comfortable handling foods that may not be his favorite.

- Present a preferred food with a non-preferred food. On Thanksgiving make him something you know he’ll eat with something he isn’t so familiar with, like turkey.

- We found he was rushing through his meal to get to a preferred activity (typically the iPad). So maybe he can do a quick chore before he gets a preferred item.

Well, if anyone at school reads this, we tried over the holidays, we really sort of did. The structural integrity of Alex’s improved eating habits got their test, like a bridge in a high wind, and I don’t think the habits buckled. At Thanksgiving, he sat beside me through the whole meal, not touching the turkey but eating two ears of corn. At a family dinner on Christmas afternoon he sat at a table and twirled noodles up with a fork. With a fork!

I hope he’s on his way. I needed three days on a beach in the sun, not five days in slush kissing chicken and trying to get Grandpa (aka “Bad News” Barrett) to help Alex nibble a muffin. But I got the five days anyway, and was sort of very grateful.

 

Just Visiting

Alex came home for Thanksgiving from his new residential school. On that Tuesday I sat in the parking lot where I was to meet his van and wondered what he’d be like coming home for the first time since going to the school. Would he vault with joy at seeing me? Shake his head and say No! No! over the long weekend as time loomed to leave home again and head back to school?

He sure didn’t vault out of the van and bound into my arms that gray morning. He loped out with a beard on his chin and an iPad in his hand. Alex has a beard! He looks like a cross between Bob Denver in “Dobie Gillis” and Mr. Spock on the evil Enterprise. The beard probably weighs more than he did at birth.

“Welcome home, Alex! Welcome home!”

“Elevator,” he said. “iPad. Pret-zuls!” As I pulled into traffic with Alex a suddenly strange weight in the back seat, I wondered how we’d preserve the progress his feeding therapist had made away from junk food. But the five days passed well. When he first got home he did try to bury his emptied suitcase in the back of Jill’s closet.

Did he understand how long he was, and wasn’t, home for? He seemed to.

“Back to school in three days, Alex, back to camp. I mean school camp.”

Back to school in two days, Alex. Back to school tomorrow. “Tomorrow Davy,” he replies. Who’s Davy?

On our last morning, I took him out to buy a plastic animal (sort of becoming a ritual) and as we walked down the street when he did a double take at Christmas trees for sale on the sidewalk. “Christmas,” Alex said. “Christmas tree! Back to school.”

He went back. Our house got quiet again, half an empty nest. Over the following two weeks, before our first bona fide visit to his school, we called on a few evenings. They told us that Alex asked for us. Hope it wasn’t his way of saying, “When the hell are they coming to see me!?”

Tonight Jill dials; I’ll speak to him afterward. “Hello, Alex,” I hear her say. “Are you enjoying school? What are you having for dinner? Are you enjoying school?” When I get on the phone he says nothing; I ask the same questions about dinner and enjoyment, tell him we’re going to see him soon.

Then his residence manager gets on and tells me that Alex was about to hang up.

“You know Alex,” Jill says. “Not much for talking on the phone.”

Visits will be the last hurdle in this experiment, when we come to see Alex at his school but he doesn’t come home with us. We’ll start out in the morning without him and return home in the evening without him. We will pop in on someone who has no real idea that we’re coming. Will he plead or throw a fit? He hasn’t once in this whole process, but will he now?

When we arrive he’s at the kitchen table of his residence house, spooning applesauce, with a sandwich in front of him. A sandwich! A few years back, when we tried a sandwich he handed it right back to us and shook his head.

Alex looks up from over his plate and drinks us in, seems to slowly realize that his day is about to take a new direction. “We’re here to visit, Alex. We’ve come to visit you.” I put my arms around him and he presses quickly against my shoulder. He doesn’t seem to want to hug me as much as when he was younger. Is he pissed? Is he just typically 16? A little of both?

Alex hasn’t attended this school long; though the nearby countryside looks beautiful, tons of nature in prime ski country, but it’s just beasty cold today. Joined by Aunt Julie and Uncle Rob, Jill, Ned, Alex and I hit a nearby diner for lunch.

“Elevator?” Alex asks at the table.

“No, Alex. This is just a school visit.”

“A school visit,” he says. “School visit. Grandpa?”

“No. Aunt Julie and Uncle Rob came this time. Grandpa will come soon.”

“Grandpa wilca soon. Chicken? Chicken and French fries?” Chicken fingers aren’t on his diet; the school works hard to tie nutrition to health and social development. Alex doesn’t need long to realize that his feeding therapist isn’t in this diner. Jill pulls out a day planner and soon over the fries is showing Alex the coming month.

“We’ll be back to see you in two weeks,” I hear her say.

We eat. Alex sits pretty well – at Christmas he even ate pizza by the slice and pasta off a fork, so we sure don’t want to get too far from a feeding therapist. He gets up to bob and weave a little when the check comes. On the way out, Aunt Julie hands me the local parenting giveaway from the pile by the payphone and says, “Maybe this’ll show us something to do around here besides Walmart.”

Diner and shopping seem light enough fare on this first outing, like melon and seltzer on a hot day. We head to Walmart. In the store I watch Alex and Ned disappear with a cart: Ned pushes, Alex weaves alongside, two young men off to ravage retail. My boys used to bolt for the toy department – which Alex still does before we leave; I shell out $10 for a WWF plastic figure that he swiftly names “grandpa.” I find the cart later, seemingly abandoned in not in toys but in men’s wear and brimming with T shirts, pants and three boxes of shoes. Ned picked out a lot of this stuff for himself and for Alex. Some cool looks, too.

Alex I find nearby, collapsed in a beanbag chair in the center of an aisle. “I found the chair,” Ned says. “He liked it when he sat in it and I pushed him around.”

We bring Alex back to school; it reaches that time of day when I begin to calculate how much evening the two-hour drive home will leave. A residents’ and counsellors’ meeting is beginning in Alex’s house. Alex has been delighted to see us but doesn’t seem like the kid of six months ago. “See ya later,” he says, all of 16 and waving to us before turning to his residence manager, putting his face right up the man and saying, “Christmas tree!”