What was Your First Big Vacation on Your Own (or w friends) and not...

[DFW]

44. When you live in a country that borders on nine others

You have to be a cultural hermit, very arrogant, over the age of 80, or a complete idiot if you know only one language. Since I’m in a different country practically every day for work, I’d lose a huge amount of time if I needed to find someone who spoke English every time I needed to communicate. Plus my wife and I have spoken only German with each other since we met, and that was back in the early days of the last Ice Age.

Although one grandfather was originally from South Carolina, my other three grandparents are from the NYC area. My mom’s dad is descended from deadbeat Mississippi river boat gamblers who fled north to escape their gambling debts. Her dad, my other grandfather, grew up poor in Hell’s Kitchen. He came into an upper middle class income late in life when his incredible wit was noted by some Madison Avenue advertising agency, and suddenly he could afford a decent apartment at age 50. My South Carolina grandfather worked his way through college as a janitor, but got an education that was enough for him to be deputy mayor if NYC for a while. His wife, my grandmother, was a firebrand “libbrul” who worked for Fiorello LaGuardia as labor liason until he canned her for being friendlier with labor than with the mayor (LaGuardia was a Republican).

As a small child, I would travel frequently with my parents to NYC to visit the grandparents, great grandparents, and various other relatives. We visited my former ad agency grandfather a lot, since he lived to 102. My elder daughter was especially taken with NYC, and as a teenager was already saying, “This is home. I will live here some day.” And now, indeed, she does. We always tried to convince our daughters, despite the Darwinian German school system, that there was nothing that they couldn't do.


Although he grew up in NYC, my dad’s employer, a newspaper in a small one horse town in upstate New York, decided on a (for 1950) bold experiment, and opened one of the first one man permanent correspondent bureaus in Washington, DC. of a tiny provincial newspaper. My dad was offered the post, and jumped at the chance. As one of the first of his kind, he got to be one of those not-famous “he knows everybody” guys in the DC print press, and he introduced me very early to a LOT of people whose names are well-known in the history books. In the beginning, I didn’t why my friends were all named Bill, Jimmy or Greg, and his friends all had the same weird first name, namely “Senator.” Hey, I was 7 or 8. How was I to know? Some used to come out to our house in Virginia on weekends. Senator Church of Idaho, Senator Javits of New York, just the usual friends of my dad. Again, how was I to know?


The midnight sun was very disorienting, but down in places like Oslo, Stockholm or København, I loved the ling summer days. I hate the grim short days of winter here. In Norway, winter is known as the time of the most suicides, as many people can’t handle the eternal darkness. It is called “mørketiden,” or “the dark time,” in Norwegian. Even “down” here in Germany we have sunset at 10 PM in June (fine with me) and at 4:15 PM in December, which I hate. We must be a thousand miles or so north of Virginia. The things we do for love, right?