Author: N. Rae

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.

I’m no longer certain what brought me to find this little slip of memory, but I think I was looking for an Ai book and couldn’t find any on our shelves. I looked her up on Google but the poem I was thinking about wasn’t there. But I did find that Ai had passed away. It was such a shock. How could she have died? I went rummaging through the boxes in the garage and found this poetry collection. I opened it and there was this little boarding remnant. Odd the convergence of memories.

I heard Ai read in Pullman, Washington maybe in 1989. She was a revelation to me. Just magnanimous. She was brazen. Powerful. Yet quiet. I loved to read her poems to my friends who thought they didn’t like poetry. They had an idea of what poetry was. And I could smash it. Well, I also just loved reading her poems. I must have taken this book with me to South Africa. I must have had it with me on the plane.

I remember flying from Houston to New York to Switzerland. The flight to Zurich was filled with military guys on their way to an American base. I think Frankfurt. The flight was not full. You could make a bed out of an empty row of seats. One guy kept following me from seat to seat. Massaging my shoulders. “Come on. Relax.” He was really odd and nervous and kept wiping his hands on his pants when he wasn’t trying to touch me. I just wanted him to go away.

There was an 8 hour layover and I got a room in Zurich.  I had all my money in Travelers Cheques. It was so expensive to get this tiny beautiful hotel room. I regretted not staying at the airport. But there was this tiny wonderful shower and a wonderful white pristine fluffy duvet. I slept so soundly. It was night and snowing when I arrived and the street the cab took me down was filled with shops decorated with lights and toys and bric-a-brac.  I wanted to stay here in charming Zurich and go to all these stores instead of getting on another plane.  In the morning when I woke the bright fresh snow was much too beautiful on the pretty street down below.

I wore an extra large man’s blazer. Dark blue. I thought I looked quirky smart. I didn’t realize that outside of A certain part of the United States, I looked like a regular school kid and a proud one at that since only a twerp would walk around in their school blazer outside of school. There were so many lessons in context that year. In perception.

At the Zurich airport, I went into a shop to buy some treats before the long flight and the young woman rang me up and I could not understand how much money to give her. I got nervous and was busy reading the numbers on the register but there seemed to be too many of them and I was looking at these new beautiful notes and I said, “Sorry, sorry, just give me a minute.” She groaned, said, “I thought you were….” She looked at my blazer, sort of flicked her chin at me, then said the numbers in English. It seemed like contempt but it might have just been embarrassment over the situation.

When I got on the plane to Jo’burg, I did not expect it to be so damn large. I was feeling out of sorts, shy, anxious, and as if I had made a terrible mistake. As I walked down the aisle there were these older men—they seemed to be talking about me, sitting together, speaking a language I don’t speak. They were very loud and all watching me. I looked down at my feet. I thought that since I was in row 40, I would be at the back of the plane but when I looked up, I was so far past my seat, I just couldn’t understand. I had to walk by the men again and they laughed and clapped when they saw me. When I sat down in my seat I tried to make myself very small and inconspicuous.

It was such a long expensive trip. I hadn’t even arrived and I was ready to go back home.

When I got to Johannesburg, I then flew to Cape Town. They gave me a little bottle of wine to drink and cheese and crackers on the flight which was unexpected but great. I was a little pleased that I was of drinking age. I hadn’t thought of that. At least I can get shitfaced! I had been talking to one of the people in the department about arriving; about how to get from the airport to campus, and she had said, “Don’t you know anyone here?” I said I didn’t. She said she would pick me up herself. That was very kind.

My mother had told me to call her when I arrived. To “under no circumstances forget.” There were two phone booths on the floor of my dormitory and I couldn’t figure out how to make them work. I went back and forth between the two. I was flustered and worried that my mom was fretting over me. It had been many days now since I left home. I eventually learned that only one of the pay phones or tickey boxes could be used for international calls, but until I learned that, they were useless to me.

I walked to the upper campus and to the department of my major and found the woman who picked me up at the airport. She let me call out from her office phone. When I heard my mothers voice, I cried. I couldn’t speak for many minutes. I just cried. I turned away from everyone in the office so they couldn’t see me. My mother was saying “Nicki? Nicki! Is that you? Are you okay? What’s wrong? Are you in jail? I knew we shouldn’t have let you go. I knew it.”