Seriously...

Been too long a while since I blogged it up, but the treehouse is being remodeled inside and out.

I understand that there are serious and highly important issues to choose to write about, and with just some minimal thought and attention to the morning paper, your favorite under-the-radar information service, or your own inquisitive mind one can’t help but be stirred to act upon or at least write on one of the many pertinent, sad, hilarious, horrific, passionate, significant, triumphant occurrences of today and yesterday, with the hope to put another voice out there for the readers of tomorrow. Yet… I have to say that Tide with Febreze is a fantastic detergent.

As is Persil! But you can only get Persil in Europe, or maybe just Germany. And knowing how even the pungent odor of mildew reminds me of a few of my happiest childhood memories in rural northern California, there’s something to be said for this. My clothes offered up the most pleasant smell to any room after they were bathed in Persil, the green liquid kind, offering a smell that gently permeated the air around my clothing, even (EVEN!) when my shirts were tucked away in a drawer in Toronto a few weeks later! That’s some good pungent-ness. And while I couldn’t get Persil in Toronto, I found Tide with Febreze to be the next best thing, and my clothes made the apartment, the elevator, and even the TTC subway cars reek with clean. So now that I am back in San Francisco I have a problem, and I think it’s found in the dryer. My clothes, though washed with Tide with Febreze, continually smell like a clothes dryer motor, the same scent they always had when I lived in San Francisco, using the same clothes dryer. After the heat turns cool, the Tide with Febreze has been, well, erased.

We use scent to contact our memories. I remember smelling the blanket that Dorothy laid on the first night she came over to my place in 2002 to watch a movies, and it had her lovely scented perfume on it when she left, subtle but ever-present. The next evening a good friend came to spend the night and I purposely hid that blanket from his patchouli-laden body, but even the hiding place was eventually infiltrated with this hippie oil effervescence, yet I hoarded that Dorothy-scent for as long as it could last, until it seemed to be gone, though it would definitely not be the last time I would have her over.

But now, the Tide with Febreze is another scent with an attached memory, and I have been robbed of it by the motor of an ancient clothes dryer. For to have that simple smell around me over the course of a day makes me happy, in the car, in a room, just below my nose and chin, whenever I need it. It just feels like it fades faster than it should, and the dryer is the thief.

Flavor, scent, color, harmony and texture. Thankfully, the senses shoot an unfiltered direct line to the memory when it comes to importance and significance. And thankfully, there is nothing we can do about it.

Vino

Back to Slovenia for a long weekend, land of nothing but wine as far as I have written, and happy people drinking it and celebrating with it. Celebrating what? Oh nothing more than their view on the hill, one another, and their fortune in living here. Many of these smiling and sturdy people are staying for the long haul (January 1 2007 = conversion to the Euro). They like the tourists, who are few for now, and the feeling is likewise.

But if you have family in Slovenia then you are in for a whole other experience. And if you are hosted by the Slovenian family of my friend Margaret, then you are in for a very long and good ride (see … and a Wedding below). Luckily she has friends who can roll with even the most indigenous of her Slovenian bloodline.

We can talk about the first night when our two cars arrived at the border and the border police refused one of us for not having a passport. Then we can mention the ride over to the other border, which from our view in the rear car looked something like this: first car eases up to open border patrol window, slows to a stop, momentary flashing of brake lights and then 0-10 mph in .01 seconds, us gasping and our car lurching to follow, us seeing a thermos of coffee and cigarettes in the window where the nasty guard is supposed to stand looming, us continuing to glide into second and third gear with no lights or flashings or guns or dogs behind, and then stopping with the first car about 10 miles later at an old train station in the middle of the night to do a spirited dance and boogie celebrating our alleged border jumping. But we won’t mention that, and this blog will be posted long after we have made our return escape. We can also talk about how beautiful our apartment was that night at 2am, seven people comfortably nestled on another hillside filled with wine, and a refrigerator stocked full of the same stuff in bottles.

But when we arrived for breakfast the next morning at 8am at the vineyard of Margaret’s uncle, we had no clue. Or perhaps the skinned goat wrapped in blue plastic next to the unassembled spit and the growing wood fire was our first clue. Second clue might have been the filled white wine pitchers next to the piles of sausages and salami for breakfast. A few were shocked. I was giddy.

The morning took off as soon as the third wine glass was emptied, fittingly since the wine we had just drunk was being replaced by the wine we were about the pick. But as I now know, wine doesn’t grow on trees, sweet and lovely white and light purple grapes do. As we were enjoying breakfast with very young and very old family members under the tressle, more and more people had arrived, so that the orchard below had turned into a parking lot around the now be-spitted skinned goat. Then buckets large and small appeared and a wooden press was pulled out of the wine cellar below the house along with massive plastic drums. The oldest women began peeling potatoes and hauling red meat for lunch into the kitchen, and I was given a shot of plum brandy before a large old bucket was slung to my back and everyone walked to the vineyard top about 300 feet up a small hill.

There were about 25 pickers and 6 haulers, and I was the happiest hauler of all time. Tim and I walked next to each other with a vine row between us like a picket fence, 50 pounds of grapes on our backs as we trudged down the uneven land and sidestepped piles of juiceless grape detritus from last year. Waiting for us at the bottom of the hill at that picnic table under the tressle was a clear jug of wine and a few green bottles of sparkling water, and as a hauler emptied the heavy grapes into the red electric mulcher and then into the massive wet drum below, he would turn to face the hill as another hauler would come down the hill, and there would be a meeting at the wine table. One full clear glass of wine per haul became the norm as the sun baked us and the wine sat in the shade. The pickers, roasting in the sun and moving slowly down the hill with their latex gloves and little vine snippers, thought they had the easy job. But as the day wore on, the haulers had less and less ground to cover, thus increasing the frequency of the meetings at the wine table. By noon, there was no need for haulers, the pickers could just empty their buckets into the mulcher and the drum themselves only 20 feet awa from the vineyard base. Good thing too, because the haulers were very happy - four Slovenians, an American and a New Zealander - all sitting at the picnic table, sweaty and reddened, feeling very, very refreshed. The process a few feet below at the press was old world. The grapes, once mulched, were poured into a barrel press and capped with a nice sturdy piece of wood which was topped with larger ancient blackened 2X4’s and a car jack all squeezed under the top of a hand-made steel frame. The jack would be cranked and the grapes would be pressed down so that the barrel would bulge and juice would seep out the slats down into a reservoir and drain into a bucket, where a pump would be waiting to send the juice through a hose down into the cellar and into a wooden keg, where it would wait to become wine. Magic. As the new juice makes its way to the keg through the cellar it passes a collection of its juice ancestors’ exploits, including older presses with 100 year old wood, kegs full of hundreds of liters of Chardonnay and Riesling, aluminum kegs with wine ready to drink, empty glasses, half full jugs, blackened wine residue. Among all this are crackers, a radio, a crate of beer, a few books and some dirty ashtrays. As he leaned upon his cane, Margaret’s uncle proudly told us with hand gestures and a smile that this cellar is where he comes to get away from it all.

The vineyard houses are not real houses, they are like ice fishing shacks times ten, each one called a gorice. They are there to accommodate harvest time living because they hold a large indoor room for eating and a large kitchen for cooking and that’s it, except for the cellars below which range from the cemented dingy fermented-smelling holds to brick-inlaid modern-drained recessed-lighted secret bungalows. But all hold kegs of old wood and fine wine within. And you would be crazy if you didn’t come to your family gorice in the winter, fire up the wooden stove, drink wine and dance with a beautiful woman all day. This is also what Margaret’s uncle did to get away from it all, before he broke his back working and the cane became his constant companion.

When we had finished this plot of land we had another plot of land to sweep about 15 minutes away, a smaller plot on a steeper hill with the rows once more lined up and down but this time we began at the bottom and worked our way to the top. The grapes larger, the stalks heavier, the calls for hauls came quickly. Calls to the other pickers sounded as yodels, responses echoing up the hill in cackles like pig calls or Bavarian beer-laden cheers. We were told that in some gorices the pickers are made to whistle while they worked to keep them from eating the grapes. We were asked to eat them to our content. Sun high and hot, no telling if your stomach pain was muscular or wine-related, the 80 gallon drums were filled three times in less than an hour. The uncle, our host, sat in the shade, pulled up his baseball cap, and thought of dancing with beautiful women as he stared at the grass.

Another 15 minute ride back to the first gorice and there was a feast waiting in the shade of umbrellas and the tressle. The goat was a shade of its former self, chicken and beef on massive platters, warm noodle soup, and peppers from the garden dotted the parts of the tables not holding jugs of wine and bottles of that lovely sparkling water. Roasted chestnuts in a pot were handed out, picked from the trees above us and warmed on the goat fire. Different wines were carried over to the table, the men worked into the night to squeeze every dram of future wine out of the grapes, and the moon came up slowly in a haze to tell us that perhaps it was time to think about going home. No aching muscles, no aching heads, a few ripped shirts, some sunburned faces, and everything on us covered in dirt and smelling sticky and sweet. Once back at the apartment overlooking the lovely valley and in the distance a humming power plant, I tried to spend as much time outside to catch my breath in the growing wind. Windmills, designed to spin small blocks of wood around to scare away grape-eating birds, could be heard all around the valley like walking ghosts clanging pots in the night. We uncorked one final bottle of Riesling on the wooden benches outside, and listened.

Munchin

Like any place, Munich is hard to leave but even harder to stay while you watch someone else leave. That’s the beauty of how it feels to be there, and anything less than the full compliment of your friends and you feel as if something is missing. After the wedding a few didn’t make it back to Munich at all, went back to their ports of call, but luckily a few had some extra days in Bayern, unthreading the ball of string a little longer, until I left to back to work, and then the ball didn’t exist anymore, perhaps becoming a partially drunken beer. An open bottle of Bavarian beer keeps for a day, you can still drink it later, but if you refrigerate and re-cap it, you can swig that baby a week or more later. Been there.

I’m on a train back to my day job from Munich, starting the last round trip I’ll have to make this summer. Munich is a pleasure palace to return to, because its red city trains you begin to see as soon as you get about 5 kilometers from the city. It means you are home, you could get on one of them, forget everything and be in the middle of the city, needing only to write a sign saying “Hauptbahnhof” and hold it while falling asleep and someone will wake you when you are there. I haven’t done this, yet. Once in the city you take the varied colored underground train lines to shoot through and around the city, and above ground you can take the blue colored electric trams or Mercedes buses to link you to within a ½ kilometer of every possible destination you could desire, and not desire. Add to these the trains’ comfortability, cheapness, and timeliness factors and you have a public transportation system that rocks not only your casbah but the original Casbah itself.

Alone on a train with a bag full of your necessary unmentionables is the essential European adventure. Being on this one now floods my memory banks with the varied and sundry train experiences of the past: midnight train from Milan, sleeping in the luggage hold with Ben, hiding from the polizi; tired feet stinking but relaxing on the seat across after a hike in the Alps; watching my family and their heads wobble comfortably on our way to Denmark for the first time. It’s so easy to sit here and be taken somewhere, my seat low on the train so my butt rides just above the tracks below, four seats to myself and this laptop and a few jelly-filled donuts with a cappuccino. The sun rising on the opposite side of the train, occasional trees saluting from within a field of corn, cars stopped on a Saturday morning waiting for me to pass before they drive over to the next village’s bakery.

For 18 Euro there is a train ticket - called the Bayern Ticket of course - with which one can spend the entire day on the trains of Bavaria, moving across the entire region through countless villages, stopping to explore that church or eat at the gasthaus or check out the beer selection in that gas station, and when you get back to Munich you ride all public transportation that day for free. 18 bucks. Baby. This is why teaching and summer vacations are so lovely. And if you don’t teach and only have your weekends off, you can use the Happy Weekend ticket, which does the same thing for 25 Euro but for two days and with parts of Austria included. Can’t lose.

My point? Yeah, I have none. Just that this city, if there was a competition or a brawl or a Survivor show that pitted city against city, is a place that I just might be forced to fight for.

Am I drunk? Of course not. I just get intoxicated by simple things here. Then, you drink beer and you realize that you must not keep writing in your blog unless you explain to those not savvy that beer is a very large part of the culture here, that it is similar to smoothies or soda fountains or McDonald's. All of them give you a high of some kind, that's why we go there - to feel good - and beer in Bavaria has been around for more than four times as long as America has existed. It feels good, just like my blog.

Me and my Cornfields

What I’ve come to learn from nearly 50 days in east southern Germany I can relate in terms of the greatest natural resource here. It’s all about corn. I’ve realized that the depth of a cornfield and its growth are deceiving, I respect the orderly nature of its planting, and the fact that they stand up to numerous peltings of rain and mud. Taken as a whole, cornfields are beautiful, slightly ubiquitous, and you should not allow yourself get too caught up in one, lest you get a wee lost.

I want to remind myself, for the last time please, that every unknown situation will become known in time. All that is foreign will become familiar. It changes. It can’t help it. While the remote strangeness of the rolling hills and small villages no longer makes me wince, the daily confusion of work has passed into grudging acquiescence of a helpless situation, so now I am proficient in waiting and able to use small amounts of time for good use. Then of course there are still the times when I sit and have no idea what I am doing teaching in the middle of a forest.

The trees are some tall naked variety, platinum stalks shooting for the same thing from different angles, and all of the rest of us playing beneath their lowest foliage. Some guy told me yesterday we were Ewoks, and we are everywhere just like the wind and rain storming around and through them. More lightening and thunder in one summer than in an entire lifetime of Midwest Illinois farmland summers.

Perhaps it’s the corn. If only the movie people looked up a little more often out here. Unfortunately, the mud everywhere forces you to look down most of the time. The heat during the first two weeks of shooting was unbearable, but now ice packs have given way to hand warmers, sunscreen off and parkas on, and the shorts have been shipped or packed away for weeks. Food continues to be plentiful, and the drink truck is full, the food truck re-filling daily, and the kitchen trailer is our hearth with warm soupy smells. The camera truck has a crate of beer in it, the sound truck too. But the construction and lighting trucks are both dry. The costume and makeup trailers are always filled with cigarette smoke, and the trailers that house the kids and their distractions are filled with heaters roaring unnecessarily at full blast, making children and their smells a little steamier. So I have a classroom, it’s a tent with a table and a couch in it, and when I am here alone I turn off the gas heater, and when I leave and come back someone has put it on full blast again. The kids like to hang out and listen to Johnny Depp on my iTunes, just not be in the steamy trailer with the dozen other smelly kids. I leave one flap open for ventilation and quick escape into the woods behind, where I like to pee. I don’t go number 2 on the job, it seems to have turned off until the evening when I am back in my hotel room with a couch and balcony, over at the Wellness Center and Health Spa that I have called home for something like a month now.

In the evenings here I leave my nook and walk down the road 200 meters and to the triumphant Disneyland of Spas, where two restaurants and a massive buffet are open till 11pm, with a crappy nightclub, a large rurally decorated hall adjoining to a smaller hall, and a very civilized dining room for all the guests, those who are staying in the 1200 person spa and health center. Germans are healthy people, they go to places like this to sauna, relax, swim, get massages, do absolutely nothing, and then go eat tons of food and drink great beer and dance till they get sweaty in the evening, then go to sleep and do it all over again. Of course, in the middle of this sprawling healthopolis lay the spark plug of the wellness engine - a fairly large biergarten with padded benches and live accordion music every night, played to the background of a Korg keyboard and its pre-programmed Deutsche Volkslieder. Here you can find many people of the older persuasion in tight-fitting hot pants or sweaters tied around their necks, whooping it up to the sounds of slightly flat singers. And naturally, everyone is smoking. It’s pretty sweet to have this only 200 meters from the quiet and gentrified place I am calling home. A walk past (or through) yet another cornfield and you are there, which makes the rollicking rolling return walk all too easy. Oh, and all the food and beer is cheap, far cheaper than anyone of you can imagine coming out of a place which I just called a Disneyland. A biergarten in a wellness center. Me in a wellness center. Both very funny.