German Holiday
Antique Frankfurt
For Christmas I got my Medicare card. Kind of funny because I had no health insurance through my teens and most of my 20s, but at 65 I am now covered by four health plans in two countries.
Make that five: I also have a new bike. Bicycles used to be for kids, now they are anti-prediabetic machines for adrenalin junkies. In Provence, for example, you can’t swing a wild boar without sending a speeding senior to the hospital.
Here in Germany they celebrate Christmas the day before you’re supposed to. This Heilige Nacht day Karl-Heinz and I stood the tree in the stand, inserting shims to make it look straight. Then Maria decorated it.
While she did that I translated a recipe from a French magazine, because I asked for cooking lessons and have to learn new vocabulary. French cuisine is a language in itself.
Karl-Heinz set up the Weihnachtskrippe he built decades ago, resting little Jesus and Mary and the manger on a table that once supported an old Durkopp sewing machine. Antiques are the norm here in the old country. The future and even the present, as Americans think of them, are illusions because the past is everywhere.
I agree with that, now that I am senior. Almost by definition a senior is a person with more of life behind them than ahead. So I’ve decided this New Year’s to fully vest in the life behind by automatically contributing each year the maximum allowable good memories.
Brigitte looked stressed all morning, though Susanne has lately taken control of the planning for, and much of the stress of, holiday meals. That said, almost everyone contributes to meals here. Lunch was leftover pizza that Anna made for dinner the night before. She also barbecued the Christmas wurst over a wood fire. Maria baked a pie. My daily contribution was clearing the table and washing the dishes, which this year included breaking an expensive teapot. I ordered a replacement online. Merry Christmas, Villeroy & Boch!
After lunch the women disappeared upstairs to wrap presents. In our family everyone knows their gifts in advance and chooses their gifts themselves. Susanne was insistent this year, however, that I get her something small that she didn’t ask for. That was hard because I’m bad at picking gifts.
We went shopping more than once and Maria and Anna helped me find what I was looking for. They also helped me buy clothes for myself. I love that — it’s a way to stay connected with my kids.
The two are a great improvement over me. To have children who are better than their parents is, it seems, a universal goal. May all parents be forgiven for our imperfections!
I’ve been thinking a lot about forgiveness, not because of the holidays but because my dad died in September. I even wrote a eulogy but didn’t post it. It’s kind of raw: I wanted to honor him but not gloss over his alcoholism or pretend it wasn’t a putz move to leave his family a half-century ago. Suffice it to say I forgive him. He also did some interesting things in life and, thanks to Polly’s patient support, did a half-decent job being an old man.
I also plan this year to forgive other folks from my past who, unlike him, were total dicks.
Forgiveness has the word “give” in it, but don’t be fooled: forgiving is the ultimate selfish act: None of the women and men I have in mind worried about being dicks or cared to whom they were being dickish, so this is about me deciding to create good memories instead of wasting thoughts on people who don’t matter.
It’s strategic. Like the young quiz show competitor I saw on German TV who made a brief hand gesture to empty his brain of the last question so he’d be ready for the next one, I want to forgive total dicks so I can move on to my next question, which is, “What can I do now that’s fun?”
Forgiving them may consist of making a brief hand gesture.
I hope to forgive myself, too, for any dickish behavior I myself may have committed. Chocolate, cappuccino, or other sincere forms of expiation may be involved.
In the afternoon, Markus and Frank arrived with their doggie Socke. Maria figured out how to put Christmas music on the speaker I brought from Apt, so I put on salsa. We opened gifts. Mia chewed up wrapping paper and seemed very happy.
We had dinner. My contribution to the conversation consisted of reading aloud Google’s translations of the German spoken at the table. It was very funny and occasionally rude, like my own attempts to speak German.
The next day, Christmas Day, was an afternoon affair. Susanne’s sister Tini and her family arrived, followed by more gift opening. Dinner was rouladen, my favorite. Then I hid upstairs to watch the rest of It’s a Wonderful Life, shedding a tear or two in the usual places.
The next couple of days we drove Maria and Anna to the airport and I went for a bike ride and saw this:
On New Year’s Eve, which the Germans celebrate six hours before they’re supposed to, we watched kitchzy entertainment on TV. Then at midnight we performed our annual ritual of comforting our trembling dog as the fireworks went off.
What’s so ‘happy’ about it?
On New Year’s morning we watched the mostly white Vienna Philharmonic perform waltzes as white people listened and danced to them — a little envious of Maria who was in Vienna at the time wandering the multiethnic holiday markets and our other old haunts, since we lived there for two years in what seems like another lifetime.
All in all, it was a successful effort at creating good memories for my ever-expanding past. Tomorrow we’ll drive back to Apt, where I intend to recommence seniorly dodging swinging boars.
