Monday, July 11, 2005
There’s something about days like today that make me need to write. It must be the electricity in the air, the smell of ozone, something that says, You must sit down and write something today… Okay, so it’s not my WIP which I’ve been working on for a year and am only 25,000 words into it (which equals ¼ of a manuscript, or 100 pages), and it’s not a new short story. But at least it’s a thousand words of something, and something is better than nothing, even if it is only in journal form. I’ll be the first to admit it, journaling, no matter how you slice it, is really just one form of mental masturbation.
Now really. Is that a good way to start a new blog? Probably not. But I’m nothing, if not truthful.
And the world’s most accomplished procrastinator.
Just look at how I scurry around the house in a fervor to make it look presentable the 90 minutes before my husband is due home from work!
***
The day started out cool and humid, but as the afternoon wore on, the sun beat down on the earth, warming our Black Forest community. My son went swimming in his wading pool (though children’s pools are not really waders anymore, are they?). I did the laundry and hung it out to dry in the sun. I got three loads done and one already sun-dried, the other two still wet and hanging, when the storm hit. The clouds came quickly over our forested hill, the wind suddenly picked up like it does in the Midwest, and fat drops began to fall. Thunder rolled across the treetops, and I ran up the stairs and through our big kitchen to the terrace, where the laundry hung, getting wetter by the second. I dragged the frame bearing our clothes inside, and scurried around our huge patio, picking up inflatable water toys before the wind did, stuffing them between the wall of the house and some heavy objects: patio table, 50-pound bag of potting soil, a large planter filled with sand for our visitors who smoke.
I love weather like that, and I miss the plains of Illinois for the drama the weather plays there. It’s much scarier there. Here in the Black Forest, we don’t get tornados. There’s really no threat at all when the occasional storm brews up a wild wind. But as the little storm passed over us, it left behind a pocket of fog nested between the hills, like clouds . I love to look out our windows to see the spectacular views of the Schwarzwald stretching from our backyard and across the steep hills to the west. It’s really something to behold.
***
This morning, my son said to me, “Mommy, I want to walk to Kindergarten by myself, today.” Being the fearful mother I can be, and his being only five years old, I knew that plan wasn’t going to work.
“How about this,” I answered. “How about if you walk ahead without me, and I’ll walk behind if you need me.”
He said, “Okay.”
A few minutes later, in his unique German-English patois, he said to me, “Mommy, Ich denke mal about walking alone and you walk behind me bis we’re outside. Is that eine gute Idee?”
I said, “That sounds like a great idea, sweetie.”
True to his word, when we finally left the house, he had thought it over, and decided he would hold my hand until we reached the intersection two streets away from the Kindergarten. At that point, we said goodbye, did our hugs and kisses, and I reassured him that I would, indeed, stand and watch him walk the rest of the way to the preschool. He turned around and waved occasionally, but made it just fine by himself. My little boy is growing up.
***
I have a job interview tomorrow. I’m an American expat living in Germany. My husband is German, my son is German and American, and holds two different passports to prove it. I’ve been living in Germany for six years, which is as long as we’ve been married. My husband didn’t want me to work, wishing me instead to stay home with our son and take care of the household.
Fine, I said. No problem. I was quite happy to give up my old job as an editorial manager at a large agricultural publishing company: Too many deadlines, too many editors who ignored those deadlines, and too much stress being the middleman. But, since the conversion from Deutschemark to Euro, the economy has taken a bit of a dip. It’s no long quite so easy to stretch that Euro as far as the D-Mark went, and not quite so easy to raise even a small family on one income. Slowly, Germany is becoming more and more like America in that respect. We’ve found that, while my husband’s income can support us, we don’t have enough to save. Not for vacations, not for the possibility of moving to America, not for the couch for the living room and the big-boy bed our son so desperately needs. And to his credit, my husband is averse to buying things on credit.
So, naturally, we decided I should find a job. But it’s not so easy for an educated woman to find a job in a foreign country, when her language skills are less than good. Really, my only hope is for cleaning rooms in hotels, and such. But we took it as a good omen when my husband stumbled across an ad in the local paper last weekend, by an American company, written in English, requesting an administrative position to be filled by an American citizen, eligible for security clearance.
I ran right to my still-unpacked boxes full of writing materials, found the floppy with my resume on it, dusted it off, and sent it straight away. And now, I have an interview in the morning. And I have very mixed feelings about it all. So many questions, so many issues to clear up if I get the job. What happens to our son? He only goes to Kindergarten (preschool in Americanese) for a half-day. What about the afternoons? What about when summer vacation starts in two weeks? What about when he gets sick? What will we do with him? And then I remembered that those are the same questions everyone everywhere has to answer, and we’ll answer them when we have to, not before.
