Walking to Frenchmen

The IHOP manager on Canal accosts Kyle and Amy, one of his visiting friends from Kentucky after they use the bathroom. They aren’t paying customers. I watch the altercation through the window, and after buying a water, I return outside and the two other Kentucky girls have found conversation with two obese middle-aged guys from out of town. I stand a few feet down, embarrassed by the whole group. The two walk out of IHOP with giant plastic to-go cups of Coke. Amy is wearing a red, short-sleeved sweater with a pocket. Kyle shoves his Coke in this pocket and Amy is already holding her own as well as a liter of soda from the dorm that someone forgot to mix with whisky. The travelers brought Old Crow and Southern Comfort and everyone learned in the common room that the later is from New Orleans. I call the group together and lead us down Bourbon. Who invited all of these people and why are they wearing Mardi Gras beads? Bright lights do attract the inebriated. I weave between people, get bumped, and turn back to see the revelers who echo the choruses of classic rock songs blaring from some daiquiri shop. After St. Ann where some consider the gay clubs, I charge on and the party fades behind us. We encounter a street band, and we pet their dogs. They don’t look too unhealthy and I wonder if the kids have a Daddy’s credit  card in case the charade gets old. But their song is sweet. He sits on a stoop, leans back on a blue shutter and plucks his banjo. We all join in, stomp the concrete, clap, riff on the vocals as background singers. The musician offers his hot and I drop a wrinkled dollar. Kyle gives him a few pinches of tobacco. They tell us their name and where they will soon play, but no one remembers. We are almost to Frenchmen Street, and the wind of the sudden cold front pushes us down the sidewalk.

Adaptation

a continuation/elaboration of sorts from the previous post...

Every time I take the stairs down into the Hauptbahnhof, the smell of waffles and crepes overwhelms the air. Now, it is a scent that I know, one unique in my experience to this specific place of my train station. When the H-Bahn (the "hanging railway") is closed on the weekends, my 20-minute walk from my dorm to the main campus is more readily visualized than any daily walk I used to take back home. And though it is not customary for cashiers at the discount grocery store in my neighborhood to bag one’s items and will yell at me if I taketoo long to bag, the store is nonetheless my grocery store now. I know where things are,and I recognize the face of the efficient but always greeting cashier. Already, I have breakfasted with a few German friends in an apartment kitchen on Lippestrasse. German breakfast is steaming broetchen warmed in the oven and the octopus of hands reaching, grabbing, sharing and lending jelly, butter, Nutella, cheese and sliced tomato. I listen to Lisa and Sarah’s German, and one will translate when the tenses overwhelm any familiar nouns. I struggle to describe yesterday so I keep to the present tense or eat more bread. After a month and a half studying abroad in Germany, I am struck by how a sense of home is capable of great elasticity, how something so different like a new country can become familiar. Adaptation is a magical thing because it just kind of happens like homeostasis.

Arrival

After an eight hour flight to Germany, sitting next to a man on whom I had accidentally sneezed; after taking a train I wasn't even sure was correct from the Düsseldorf airport to the Hauptbahnhof (main station) of the city in which I would be studying, I stood at track seven with my 50 pound suitcase and cumbersome backpack.

It was 35 degrees Fahrenheit and cloudy. Though it was noon in Dortmund, I had been displaced from my regular time zone so it might as well have been 6 a.m. since my traveling began the evening before in the U.S. As soon as my train arrived, I scrambled down through the crowds into the station to phone my university contact, using the change I got from breaking a 20 Euro bill with the purchase of Tic Tacs.

The track sign read that the S1 had been canceled, though at the time, I couldn't understand it or the man on the loudspeaker explaining. But then I met the angel of sorts that my mother promised I'd meet on the way, who informed me of the delay through his broken English. Someone threw themselves in front of the train, he told me.

My helper was also a student at the same school, so, once a back-up plan was announced for the S1, he led me through a route of buses and trains that I would never have been able to maneuver alone. After he showed me another pay phone at the university, he walked away and said, "Welcome to Germany."

Scene from Trinidad & Tobago, June 2009

A body of ash smolders and a few flames jerk as a big-bellied man with shaggy gray hair shovels the pile: a body was burned earlier today. Three pyres face the water at sunset, and the park will be closing soon. The man with a wizardry beard in worker’s pants shovels the ash around, tosses the funeral bouquets out into the river. Stray, emaciated dogs lay on the concrete framing where bodies are sent into the sky. Some tug at hardened stickiness that might be food or curl up as if they’ve found a hearth, but they all lope lazily after the tenderer when he leaves his work, his long shovel-rake like a staff. Nearby, a Hindu temple floats, an island in the water accessible by a pier. The structure with its two garlic clove towers failed many times, but the priest persisted. Flags of red, yellow or black triangles lilt around the temple’s perimeter and are fixed into the soggy earth at the shoreline. Behind the pyres lay a few white graves, black crosses perching like Ospreys, and through the trees, across the street, a mosque dome peeks. I would like to walk the stone pier, lined with bushes and shrubs, sit in the chapel while the evening sun gilds even the ash, but the blue gate is locked, and I notice the old worker looking over. 

A Hike

We are a hiking parade of three generations: Louise, my 26 year old sister and mother of two, lugs her two and a half year old son, Ben, in a strap-on backpack, and behind me, my 55 year old father carries the second grandchild, one and a half year old Caedmon, in a Velcro and buckle sling pouch. Dad and Louise wear stone-crushing hiking boots, and with thin canvas sneakers as my footwear, I am not so formidably equipped. Once again, I am the unsuspecting, unprepared victim of an outside adventure with my family, all experienced navigators of rough terrain. Visiting my sister and her family here in rural Arkansas, the Natural State's environment, the topography itself offers instant, intimate experiences with nature if only you drive to the base of any number of its mountains. After a two hour drive to Little Rock, and tending to Ben's scraped knee and Caed's dirty diaper from falling in mud, the five of us embark on the steepest hiking trail in Arkansas. I should have known what I was in for by the name: Pinnacle Mountain Summit Loop, a 2.6. mile trail with a rating of difficult. At the outset, the hike feels like a neighborhood stroll, but then our pace slows and thighs start to burn. The path begins smooth as moist soil but as we advance on the mountain's spine it hardens, offering no relief for the soles of our feet. My shoes have little traction so I grope whatever nearby branch or boulder to safely propel me forward. But carrying only water and hearty cereal bars in a backpack, I move lightly and move to lead the pack, leaving the baby-bearers to their more carefully required steps.