When I was a little kid, we had family come visit from Germany. They stayed for three weeks. My mom was very excited. I was in elementary school but I don’t remember what grade. Maybe second. A lot of things were going on that I was not aware of. Like my mom taking diet pills so that she would look good. I do have an image of her cooking in the kitchen with masking tape over her mouth. But I didn’t understand why. It was so that she wouldn’t absent mindedly taste while she cooked. No extra calories.
Memory is often like piecing together a vague dream.
We took the Germans to Disneyland. Maybe Butterfields. I think the photo above is from Disney’s Frontierland.
We went to family reunions. I remember an older man with exceptionally long fingernails. His name was Sharky.
There was a picnic at a park. The photo below is from that. Someone brought a quilt to share.
And there was Heidi and Sabine staying at our house. They were maybe 18, 19 years old. We took them to our pool and Heidi got a tan while Sabine got a terrible sunburn and had to be inside in the dark for three days, resting on her stomach, to recover. I remember sneaking into her room to check on her and her hardly responding. The room was dark and cool. Her face turned to the wall away from me.
Heidi taught me German. We’d sit across from each other at the dining room table and roll a marble back and forth. At first, she’d say the word in German and Roll the marble to me. I would repeat the word, roll the marble back. Once I knew enough words, the game switched. If she said the word in German, I’d have to say it in English. If she said the word in English, I’d have to say it in German. The marble went back and forth between us. Getting faster and faster. It was fun. The magic of a green marble and words.
I remember Heidi wrote something down for me on a slip of paper and my grandfather asked to see it. I held it out for him to see but it was much too close to his face for him to focus on—I was just a little kid, what did I know? He took it from me and shoved the piece of paper in my face and said, “Can you see that?”
The most German part of my personal history, though, is a song. My great grandmother Mutti sung it to my mother when my mother got hurt, and my mother sung it to us when we got hurt. It involves kissing and chanting. It’s a sort of magical incantation for minor physical wounds. I’ve been trying to figure out the words these days but can’t. My mother no longer sings it correctly so she’s not helpful. And my German is so weak these days that I’m not helpful. It’s Schwaben, so the Internet isn’t helpful either. Every now and then, I look up German folk songs and such but cannot find even a hint of it. In our family the song came to be known as the Cha-Cha. When my first nephew would get injured, he’d come running to whoever, hold out the boo-boo, and say cha-cha. Soon the scrape or bruise would be all better and he’d run off to play again. The magic of rhyme and kisses.
