The 'boob tree'

we pass this uncompromisingly 'designed' tree on our daily excursion, doubtlessly its name givers must have had a lot of imagination...anyway, it is famous in this town.

"One Day"

My sweet and amazingly talented sister Alrun brought me this gorgeous painting from her personal collection of the pieces of her work she wanted to keep herself and it now livens up my home with its warmth and beauty.  It shows a potter and a female observer.  She has beautiful work and if anyone is interested to see more of her work let me know.  She does work on commission.

The inner compass showing the way to gold

  On this steely skied, cool and grey German morning, fizzy rain, blustering wind, the summer transitioning into fall, our trail is being decoratively littered with fall colored leaves of many German tree style shapes, that are making their way to their last glory as part of a thick sea of stunning but short lived groundcover.  Too weak to withstand the shuddering of the branches from the wind, they are sailing onto the freshly plowed field framed by the forest and the small path meandering past a creek where we are standing, watching a yearly recurring spectacle in wonderment.

This technically is a shitty day, best spent in bed watching endless reruns of my feel good buddy Jon Stewart’s Daily Show.
Yet, we are out here in the grey, the wind and rain, just outside of a small German suburb, where we are visiting a friend of my mom, happy to witness the passage of time and the changing of the seasonal guards.
Most of the agricultural fields are now in transitional costume, wearing muddy brown, beautifully striped from recent plowing.  The trees are busy shedding their summer clothes and naked trunks and branches making a fashionable comeback.  Creeks are filling up and the air starts smelling of composting foliage.

While Munna has her nose glued to the ground, relentlessly meandering, zigzagging and smell-scanning the wet soil, looking for some yucky pile of something fabulously stinky to rub herself in, I am looking up at the sky, fascinated by the amazing amount of leaves dancing in the air on their long way down performing many horizontal and vertical detours, a dance conducted by the constantly direction-changing wind.
The temperatures have dropped and layers of clothing are getting added.  October is knocking and fall's relentless march onwards seems accelerated here in Germany.
Even with weeklong rain spells, California somehow never sheds its lightness and ease.  We always know that a sunny day is around the corner.  Here you know more rain is around the corner.  The stony heaviness of the buildings of the residential architecture seem to team up with the monochromatic skies, tinting everything into shades of grey and adding extra gravitational pull to the beings passing through.

Here you've got to look for your inner sunny side with fierce determination and go to a tanning booth on occasion to not assume the sullen expression displayed on so many faces. 

I am slowly arriving and that also means that the exhilarating whirlwind of farewell sentiment on one end and welcome exuberance on the other is giving way to bureaucratic errands, lots of questions internal and external, the noticing of the cold and wet weather and some home sickness (expected but to be lived through nonetheless), made more intense by my mom's best friend's comment upon seeing pictures of my Mill Valley home, my friends and Mount Tam:
" When I see those pictures, I doubt you'll be able to stand being here for very long".  Ouch! Even though my inner compass is steady, hearing this adds some ache to the longing I already have on my own.

When I was 11 or 12 my dad once wrote one of those trite but true proverbs into a little book I kept, as was custom those days, asking friends and family to immortalize a thought, a poem, anything on its pages and I am, for some reason, now frequently reminded of it.  Loosely translated it goes like this:

'Not all things shiny are made of gold. Remember this.'

This proverb from many years past, suddenly dropping like a falling leaf from the sky into my mind, formed my response to my mom's friend, while I know, very well, that my California home is gold to me, starting with my friends, the incomparable beauty of the land, Mount Tam and my little home on the hill.  So, I decided to rephrase the proverb for myself:  'Which one of the shiny things in your life are gold, is determined by what is truly important and needed at the given time in your life.'
Gold to me, in this moment, is the opportunity to receive assistance from the government of my birth country and the vicinity and love of my family to help me in my quest to heal my body.  
 The gold for me is in Germany right now, notwithstanding the color of the sky.

Missing you all...

"Rotate"!

And the journey begins…

Rotate

„Rotate!“ The short, one word command prompts the pilot of a plane to execute a small adjustment to the wing surface constellation, without which no plane would get airborne and consequently no flight attendant would hand out tongue burning , overheated food while going 600 mph at 37,000 feet, to a random seeming grouping of humans who, individually, for one reason or another, through many little and big choices made in their lives, ended up on this very flight with me here today, at 7pm on September 14^th, 2010.

Somewhere down in the cavernous belly of this giant metal bird is a plastic crate housing a slightly drugged up, brave little dog, whose stomach, I am sure, is also rotating.

In the predictable and irritating manner of an overly proud mom, I am sharing with anyone close enough to hear, that I have my dog with me and that she is down there, by herself, and that quote ‘oh god no, I would never leave her behind and oh, no, no there is no quarantine for Germany and it’s as easy as 123 with this awesome, dog loving country that allows pets into restaurants and public transportation’ unquote. Surely someone here must be wondering , if it was wise to change seats…

The woman to my left is trying to get a word in edgewise, as I am espousing my awesome dog’s and birth country’s virtues, by unloading another one of those boring ‘’guess how many delays I had to go through’’ complaintive rants about air travel that always amaze me, because, I think, we are so lucky and privileged to be here in the first place, no matter the delays. As I am self righteously marinating in my gratitude practice in adverse conditions, snuggled comfortably into my gifted economy plus seat, the pilot comes on the speaker from the cockpit (flight deck as they like to call it…) and announces in his Chuck Yaeger-ish ‘’bring on the sound barriers’’ voice that all pilots seem to have down to perfection, that after we had been sitting motionless on the taxiway for about 30 unexplained minutes, we will have to return to the gate to fix a ‘baggage imbalance’ issue. What the §%&? Baggage imbalance?

I catch myself, smile at the woman, whose face now bears the unmistakably victorious expression of ‘’see, I told you so’’ and I tell myself to sit back and enjoy every second of this wonderful, privileged journey.

An hour later we are ‘rotating’ and I and all these lives around me hurled into the night sky, suddenly settle into an attitude of timeless oblivion, so typical for and only encountered on long haul flights. I pop an Ambien, last minute courtesy of a friend, comment cheerfully on the athletic build (he’s huge…) of my neighbor, a Swedish ex football player, who is miserable, trying to recover from a nasty food poisoning.

Several outlandish (literally) dreams and unhealthy meals later, we touch down on a different continent, in a different country, almost 6000 miles away from our take off location.

Navigating the hub of European travel

You know you are in Europe, when virtually the only luggage circulating on the baggage claim caroussell after an 11 hour flight, is your own. Out of the more than 300 people on board, I am the only one not making a mad dash to catch a connecting flight. Wow! I turn and see that Munna is already there, waiting in her crate and tears are starting to make their sweet way down my cheeks. There is my little girl, she is such a stud! She literally explodes out of the crate the moment we unlock the door and we are reunited. With 2 large luggage carts absurdly filled beyond capacity, I charm airport employee Osman from Turkey into helping to lug them to the car rental office 5 million miles away, after all this is Frankfurt airport, the hub of European travel, so everything is about 5 million miles away.

After forcing a generous gratitude tip onto my protesting helper half an hour of cart pushing later, I am off to the garage to load the car in two runs. As Munna is sniffing her low level way through the smelly airport, fetching a lot of smiles and curious looks from by passers, I, fetching none of the above, am listening my way through the endless hallways-virtually everyone seems to be speaking a different language.

130mph is not fast enough

You know it’s been a while since you have driven on the German autobahn, when, as you are steering your brand new rented Volkswagen at 130mph down the 3 laned freeway, both hands whiteknuckling the steering wheel (not a trace of Chuck Yaeger in me), palms sweaty from the adrenaline rushing through your veins, all of a very, VERY sudden one of those awesome, built-for-speed German cars comes up behind you like you are standing still. You are expected to move over, and FAST!!

In most cases this shameless display of horsepower and nerve superiority is accompanied by humiliating headlight flashing. If you can catch a glimpse of these racing business men, they do all this with extremely irritating ease and nonchalance, lazily reclined so that you almost can’t see them and probably closing some deal on their Blackberry, as they shoot past you at a certain 160 to 180mph.

Two and a half hours, two enormous German sausages shared with Munna, two coffees, and two bathroom runs later I am hugging my mom. We are home. We are in Germany. We have two homes. We are lucky.