7 posts tagged “fridolin”
This is a personal narrative I was assigned to write for my Teaching Writing P-12 class. It's a reprise of a poem I wrote and posted here about a year ago, recalling my most terrible event while living in Austria. This, obviously, details the event a little more closely than does the poem. Whether it's as good, I can't really say.
Tragedy Raised a Hand
All summer long Jana had been
promising me we would take a trip to the thermal swimming pools of Baden. While most people would find the idea of plunging
into heated water during the swelter of a Viennese August uninviting, nothing
invokes such a sense of euphoria in me. Swimming in heated pools is like
returning to the womb, letting yourself simply be as the water envelopes and suspends your body, while your mind drifts
into limbo, unaffected by anything above the surface. I had first discovered
this felicity several years before in Vienna
on semester exchange. Some friends and I somehow stumbled via trolley upon the
most elaborate swimming facility any of us had ever seen: dual heated pools of
varying temperatures, both partially in- and out-of-doors, with ambient music
playing from clandestine speakers beneath the water. Floating face-up with ears
submerged and quaffing the faint mixture of submarine tunes and the muffled din
of humans at play above ground, I knew I was in love.
It goes without saying, then, that today I was poised and ready to return my body to the incalescent depths. I had the car packed, my recently purchased goggles in hand, and I was already wearing my trunks under my pants. Jana was still bustling about the kitchen, whipping up just one more pie for her arsenal of delicacies (packed as tight as dynamite in our picnic basket), while calling upstairs for her son, Fridolin, to come down and bring her his shoes. Jana never could settle on a single task, and she would flit and fly deftly about any room she found herself, much to the detriment of her French bob, and constantly worrying about when she could work in her vacuuming. She was like a master chess player, always thinking several moves ahead. Were there awards in Austria for the most industrious homemaker, she would have undoubtedly made the short-list.
I knew it was best to stay out of Jana’s path in the last half-hour before any departure, so at this point I was in the basement listening to a few tunes on Chris’s phonograph. Generally Chris worked during the day and I stuck around to help Jana out with household chores, but mainly to entertain Fridolin. Since I had come here a year earlier, he and I had formed an unusually close friendship, in spite of our ample generational gap. By now I had been out of work for a few months, with my visa expired, so I made myself useful to Chris and Jana, my two best adult friends. Since the young Fridolin was only now reaching what Piaget called the preoperational stage, it was safe to say he considered all things culled merely for his own enjoyment, and perhaps in me he had found a toy like none other: interactive, larger-than-life and always (usually) smiling upon him.
For several months now Fridolin had been testing the limits of his mettle, and with it the limits of our smiling approval. Lately he was most concerned with doing the only the things that amount to defying his parents’ wishes. Eating with a fork? Nein! Wearing a helmet on your bicycle? Nein! Withstanding the urge to throw everything out the tree house window? Nein! He had recently expressed his hope to jump from the upstairs window of the house to the tippy-top of the cherry tree he had seen me climb now and again. By all accounts these positions could have been deemed outright insolence, but as Frodo (as we had nicknamed him) was only two, we took them to be due to the audacity of hope rather than of spite.
But Fridolin’s hopes had slowly been growing larger than the wrought iron fence around his parents’ yard could contain. Not only had he started to toss valuables over the fence into the street – something even his usually sanguine papa couldn’t abide – but he had even tried his hand at opening the gate to take a stroll all on his own. Thankfully up until now he hadn’t succeeded in this latest endeavor, as the gate was generally wedged shut, and little Fridolin hands couldn’t manage to open it.
I was probably listening to my fifth or sixth tune on the phonograph downstairs before I noticed how late it was getting. Was Jana ever going to finish that last pie and call me upstairs? I had woken up that morning practically salivating at the thought of thermal swimming, and here I found myself in a damp basement flipping a record over. The longer we waited on cooking pies, the less time we’d have to blissfully atrophy our bodies in the calm, smooth warmth.
I lifted the needle from the vinyl and set it aside, hit the light and ascended the stairs. When Jana heard me shut the door to the basement, she started and looked toward me as though I were a stranger. She had been so wrapped up in her preparations, I thought, that she almost didn’t recognize me.
“Where’s Frodo?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” she said. “I sent him outside to find you and play a little while I finished here.”
“Well, I’ve been in the basement waiting on you,” I replied with a grin. “I’ll go out now and keep him occupied.”
I walked out on the veranda and was immediately warmed by the morning sun. It was late in the month, and the mornings had begun to stay cool up until around noon. The air was brisk enough to isolate the sun’s rays when they hit your face and neck, and quicken the hairs on your back beneath your shirt. In fact, it was the perfect weather for thermal swimming.
I glanced about the yard for Fridolin, but found no sign of him. The yard was relatively big as far as Austrian yards go, and there were lots of terrific hiding spots the little Lausbub loved to exploit. I looked behind the mini-skateboard ramp, where Jana grew her roses. We often had to remind Frodo that the roses would give him an “owa” if he got too close. I didn’t find him there, so I walked over and peeked under the pine trees that buffeted the yard with the neighbor’s, where Fridolin had fashioned his “workshop.” There was stacked his usual bunch of leaves and sticks, his “tools,” but there was no Fridolin. I walked to the back around the plum tree and strawberry garden, thinking perhaps he was sneaking a berry or two into his mouth while unmonitored. We had explained to him how the berries weren’t quite ripe yet, but I think the sour taste only whet his palate more. Strangely, all the berries hung silently and undisturbed.
Growing a little concerned, I trotted to the gate, but it was shut as usual. Perhaps he’s still inside, still upstairs without his shoes on, I thought. I hurried back to the veranda and through the door, and without a word to Jana I hustled up the stairs, taking two with each stride. No sign, no sign, I began to recycle in fear. When I came back down, Jana knew something was wrong and had left off her pies.
“Where is he?” she spoke, suddenly gripped as I was.
“No sign, no sign!” I struggled to announce in German.
Next we were out on the street, calling his name, sprinting up one street and down the next. Jana was crazed, had jumped into her car weeping, shredding her larynx on his name. I had absolutely no idea how it had come to this, how we had shifted from the high anticipation of genuine calm to complete hysteria. I was running up and down the streets and alleys, in and out of strangers’ yards, asking anyone I saw where he could be, the mesh of my swim trunks drawing tighter around my thighs.
I ran to Napoleonwald, a thinned-out wood where there was a playground we often took the Lausbub, and just a block from Chris and Jana’s. I remembered there had been some construction workers operating tractors and dump trucks that week – Fridolin’s favorite things to watch after his papa’s skateboard videos. I reached the edge of the wood and stopped. I saw the machines and the men working them, but no sign, no sign, I couldn’t see him. I ran back to the house and began combing the streets again. I ran harder than I had run in years, harder than I had ever run in 18 years of playing soccer. I ran like I had run from Jason Summers, who once chased me down with a tennis racket after two neighborhood kids and I had spent our leisurely afternoon throwing crabapples at him and calling him an albino. I couldn’t breathe and I felt ready to collapse and die, or puke, or all three.
In the distance I could hear Jana still screaming, still revving up the steep streets. I prayed she wasn’t going so fast she couldn’t stop if she saw him, if we were to ever to see him again. I had entered a state of mind tethered neither to hope nor despair. I could not chalk this up to my usual philosophy of how things just work out for the best, because I was beginning to think this time they might not. I began to wonder how I might take it, how I would cope and offer consolation to the mother who thought she had merely sent him out into the yard only to find me, and not to his death. I recognized that tragedy was completely foreign to my psyche, that I hadn’t cried over someone in a decade, and then only for a broken teenage heart.
I still wasn’t crying. I was racing against it, up and down those steep
streets, and turned the corner one last time back onto the street where it had
all started. The gate was still closed, as it had been after us when we rushed
out to begin our search. But Jana was there now, having just pulled up and
leapt back out of the car to snatch up her boy, who stood there, now starting
to cry, as though he understood only then that he had been alone.
This morning Fridolin stole from his mother's care,
opened the lattice iron gate on his own
and fled to the thinned forest
to gape in awe at the industrial mower
there rumbling about,
to watch himself mount its pleather seat,
fit his cherub hands over the gears
and wind the wheel back and forth
the way he'd seen the dark-skinned men do
before from the distance sheltered
by the cradle of his mother's arms.
Frodo couldn't see his mother's face
when it turned to terror
streaked pale with rage;
didn't hear her voice
shred on the knives
of his name as she called
and called again without ceasing,
without hope and without ceasing,
stumbling half-blind through
the suburb streets
unaided, unconsoled,
picturing only the friction
of his dwarf's legs, they
striking against each other like flint
as he ran, setting sparks
upon the pavement,
his bantam body darting in
and out of various
neighbors' gardens,
darting finally
from the cloak
of a parked car into
the shadow
of another in motion,
his own motion stilled
for life.
Fridolin stood watching his hero
for over ten minutes before
he turned again toward the street,
looked both ways as he'd been taught
every day of his 32 months, crossed
and tottered down his own street
to the lattice frame where he stopped,
saw only now he'd been alone
and began to cry.
OK people! I've got less than a month before I head backwards, or westwards if you will, following the sunset until I reach Louisville, Kentucky. It boggles the mind to look back and remark just how long I've been here. Now granted I'm no Ulysses but a lot has happened over the last year and some months. I've grown a lot in ways I don't think I could have ever imagined prior to my trip. Sometimes I'm tempted to think I haven't changed since high school, that only the world and people around me have changed, but this is a half-truth and it's ludicrous. But as every creature of God's creation I too am given to change, and sometimes I'd like to think change for the better. So after putting my mind to it these last weeks I've come up with a list of things that have changed about me in the last year, little habits or common activities I've picked up in my time here that I want to keep doing once I'm back in the USoA. Some convey simple comforts I've become used to and don't think I should give up even if my native culture doesn't comply. Others evince a distrust I've had for parts of my native culture for a while now but have become more focused in my time away from it, and so the my habits here are part of my rebellion. (Of course, the rebellion won't really begin until I'm back on native soil, so I need everyone reading this to contribute by keeping me accountable.) Others are just things I think are funny about the way I live now.
So here we go:
The ABCs of Austrian Living (according to Derek)
A. Take my shoes off when I come inside the house.
B. Wear slippers in the house.
C. Use cool Austrian words like:
"Leiwand" (the coolest word for cool)
"Sapalot!" (sort of a soft fun way to say "Dammit!", sort of like our "dangit!" or "dagnabit!")
"Pfiati" (God protect you in dialect)
"Ciao" (Not really Austrian but we use it here like it were our own)
"Servus" (for hello in a humble way)
"Bist du deppert!?" (an incredulous expression like "You gotta be kidding!" or "Are you nuts!?")
D. Walk places. (Not having a car and preferring to use the public trans. anyway, I get the chance to walk just about everywhere here -- to and from the buses & trains, through neighborhoods, through canals, alleyways, forests and fields)
E. Buy organic meats and vegetables.
F. Eat GOOD bread. (Seriously, we're killing ourselves with the white stuff)
G. Really, truly, and seriously recycle. (As the small country that Austria is, people are simply more aware of the limits of natural resources, so the government has a pretty effective system going, which most observe. It's going to be more difficult working against the grain back home, as the existing system in most places is laughable at best.)
H. Play with 2-year-olds often and on a regular basis.
I. Mix my juice with water. (It's great once you get used to it.)
J. Greet friends with a kiss. (usually girls but I'm open-minded)
K. Hang my clothes to dry. (In other words, don't spew nasty fumes into the air just 'cos I like soft clothes)
L. Use butter, not margarine.
M. Sit around in restaurants or cafes longer enjoying the time. (We have a way of rushing off back home. It's that protestant work ethic I guess. Austria tends to be a "sit-around-and-relax" culture.)
N. Drive the country backroads. (Trying always to save time we lose a great deal.)
O. Never use ice.
P. Grow fruit trees and eat from them. (seems like everyone here has their own apricot or apple or plum tree... maybe even their own vineyard)
Q. Pay with cash. (Stay out of debt! The hell with plastic!)
R. No fast food and no Wal-Mart. (OK, granted, there's no Wal-Mart here, but the point is I'm not giving my money to them or companies like them)
S. Don't drink soft drinks save Almdudler (which you can only get in Austria).
T. Eat outside weather permitting.
U. Make conversation with strangers. (People do this here a lot, and not just the elderly. It's a sign people have at least a basic trust of one another, and find one another interesting enough to shoot the breeze)
V. Climb mountains.
W. Eat GOOD chocolate.
X. If possible, avoid using the car. (It's amazing how people can function without one. Plus, it sure is nice to save all that gas money)
Y. Don't use air conditioning. (I've thought about this for a long time.
What good are we doing our bodies and the world by using AC? We train
our bodies not to sweat, ergo retain whatever toxins we should be sweating out, and the money we pay and the energy we use to keep those machines
running really is nuts. Like using ice, what was a luxury fifty years ago is now a necessity, and few are counting the cost)
Z. Be less than dependent on the cell phone. (That isn't to say independent. The cell phone has its use, but people here as well as at home I've found that use has become something much more like an abuse. Plus tests are showing it causes tumors and prostrate. Good thing my friends here are few enough to keep me off the line.)
And since there aren't any more letters in the Alphabet, I'll just leave this last one to the visual realm:
Fridolin is learning something new.
Last week Jana and Fridolin took a trip to Venice with Jana's parents. Chris stayed behind because he was low on dough, so he enlisted my help in building a couple things for Fridolin while they were away. I had told Chris earlier this year that I wanted to help him build something this summer, as that's a skill I'm interested in learning for my own future's sake, i.e. building. So starting Sunday of last week we began work on what would turn out to be a six days full of long and satisfying work, quite the contrast to what I had been doing weeks prior to that since the school year ended, i.e. sitting around and reading, writing, traveling a bit, but feeling unused overall. Here I'm going to share a few pics and vids of the building process, as well as Fridolin's initial reaction to seeing what we had built for him come Monday morning. Needless to say, he was a very happy Lausbub!
For those interested, I just added a few more pictures from our trip to Berlin, only these are some Chris took. I generally don't take many photos of myself on these sort of trips, so I figured I'd take some of the ones he took of me (and Jana) to post here for those of you dying to see my face, as well as a few of Chris' more artistically positioned Berlin shots. If you want to see them, scroll down and click on the Berlin folder and look for the pics that are tagged with both "Berlin" and "Chris".
So here begins our building adventure:
Now for a step-by-step pictorial account:
Hey punks!
I have some photos from recent events I attended. A couple weeks back, actually just as I was returning from Ireland, there was a Ritterfest, or "knight festival", basically a low-budget Renaissance festival, held close to Chris and Jana's place. We took the Lausbub down there and watched all the biker dudes dressed up like barbarians play their drums and flutes and bagpipes. For a low-budget event, it was very well-produced. I really felt like I was living in the middle ages. They had archers and axe throwers, mead various handmade crafts. You could buy strange medieval garments, and there was a big bale of hay Fridolin just went nuts in. You can see a bit of what I saw below, including a snot-faced Fridolin jumping around in the hay with his friend Elias, who didn't like Fridolin trying to wrestle him into the hay.
Then, I guess it was two weekends ago, I had a most divine experience when the family and I took a trip to Erdbeerland! Translated directly you get the funny title, "Strawberryland", but really we'd just say strawberry field in English. We went to a small city called Neulengbach Stadt where there is a huge strawberry field, in which you can go through and pick strawberries by the bucketfull, and take them home for cheap. While you're picking, you're allowed to eat all the berries you want!!! I think we were all in heaven, tasting those most delicious strawberries. Fridolin was being very delicate with the berries, helping his mama to pick them. Jana herself was in a serious paradise, working like a machine to pick all the berries she could. After Chris and I were pretty tuckered out from all that picking, she went back up the hill to pick two more baskets' worth. Fridolin by this time was also pretty tired, so while I helped Jana pick more berries, Chris and Frodo stayed in the shade, and Frodo ate more berries, looking pretty blood-thirsty afterwards.
So, in case any of you are interested in seeing where I worked this past year in Austria, I took some pics of the school before I said my final goodbyes last week. I have to admit, they weren't very emotional goodbyes, but I suppose that's not a big deal. I did make a few good friends there, and I expect to see them throughout this summer. Maybe they'll give me a taste of a few homecooked Austrian meals for free. I'll be on the lookout. Included with the school pics are some of the chapel within the school. I spent a lot of free hours here in prayer. I might miss this more than anything else.
Last, I guess I'll treat you to some videos I made this week of Fridolin. The first is of me and him in his room, and he's asking to watch the video "one more time" (or nocheinmal). He's learned how to trick his adoring fans into doing everything he wants "one more time," even if it means we actually end up doing it two or three more times. Here I'm reminding him to say, "one more time, please," or bitte nocheinmal. The second video is of me pushing him on the swing (though you can't see me, as I'm behind the camera).
Fridolin is the toddling son of my best Austrian friends Chris and Jana. I go over to play with him multiple times a week. It's really anstrengend (tiring), but worth every minute of our five-hour long play periods. Here I'm including several videos of my time with him. As you can see, he's really into talking, climbing, jumping, dancing, playing the drums, sliding, and being generally a Lausbub (an endearing term for something like "troublemaker"). I think I must be his best friend/toy. Indeed, I love playing with him so much that I do just about everything he asks of me. "Darak, rutsch!" (Derek, slide!) "Darak, auch auf!" (Derek, up too!). It's really amazing to be part of a near-two year old's budding vocabulary, to be on his mind when he wakes up wanting to play.
Some of the videos are pretty dark, but maybe you can still make out how much fun we're having! (I'll keep adding more vidoes of this kind as they become available, so if you enjoy these few, then keep coming back to this post for more.)
