Flotsam

I couldn’t decide what to post today—more Alexa Abroad! or something about Simone’s first encounter with other children, an encounter that resulted in tears. Some might suggest that ten days after my return is too late to continue a series of posts about my travels, but I have not, er, finished unpacking yet, and I maintain that a person can’t be expected to wrap up the story of her trip before her suitcases are empty. That seems like rushing things, don’t you agree?
So it was between goat pictures and toddler comedy, and then the California Supreme Court went and made the decision for me.

Two years ago today, Scott and I got married. The picture at the beginning of this post is of our cake toppers, and from those cheery felted birds to the mashed potatoes and impromptu outdoor hobo theater, everything about the day was perfect. I had never been much of a wedding girl, and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, but more surprising, to both me and my new husband, was how transforming it felt.

Scott and I had lived together for years by the time we got married. In fact, a week from now will mark five years since we began dating, and we were looking at apartments less than three months after that. We hadn’t planned on marriage—not that we were against it, mind you, it just seemed like a low priority. We already knew that this was capital-”I” IT: we were trying to have kids, our book collections had mingled, and I had long since abandoned the pretense that I always wore makeup. Or contacts. Or brushed my hair.

One afternoon, however, I had a migraine, and Scott was lounging on the bed next to me when he asked hey, did I want to get married next spring? I said yes. It seemed unlikely that a ceremony would make much difference, beyond a legal standpoint.

But it did. I don’t know how, exactly, but it made everything different.

The idea that two adults in love can be banned from standing, as we did, in front of a judge to be declared married, banned because their genitals happen to match, is repugnant. That they would be forced to use another word for their union, in the name of protecting the sanctity of mine, is ridiculous and offensive.
I respect the right of the religious to believe in virgin birth, and to decide that marriage in their church is reserved for heterosexuals, but there is absolutely no justification for the legal system to enshrine this discrimination. If anything makes my marriage feel smaller or less meaningful, it is the meaningless borders set upon it as an institution.

In a few hours, Scott and I are going out to dinner to celebrate our arbitrarily legal union. Perhaps we’ll toast to the hope that one day, the presence of exactly one penis per couple will not be considered a prerequisite for a wedding.

Gruezi!

That is how you greet someone in Switzerland (well, it ought to have an umlaut, but I can’t get one to appear). It is what people chirp at you when you enter a shop or a restaurant, and I got quite good at chirping it back, if I do say so myself. You roll the “r” a bit, which is a particular talent of mine. I became so proficient with my Gruezi, shop people often mistook me for a native and followed it with a rapid-fire stream of Swiss German, but their mistake was swiftly corrected by my glazed look and obvious lack of comprehension.

While we are on the subject, the German language has some serious problems with boundaries. Why have three words when you could mangle them infuriatingly into one? it asks, and an answer comes there none. Perhaps a teutonic desire to streamline simply got out of hand, but for heaven’s sake, it is not a CRIME to allow an adjective to have a little SPACE, now and then. I remember reading Being and Time my first year at Sarah Mawr, and because it was translated from the German, there were all these hyphenates, meant to stand in for an entire concept that in the original was one long, consonant-heavy word.

But never mind that.

SUNDAY:
I woke up feeling physically confused. No longer on Minnesota time, not yet fully acclimated to False European Time, and frankly I had probably walked more the day before in Zurich than I had during the whole of the recently ended six months of RSV season. We decided a relaxy day was in order, and after a leisurely breakfast of coffee, soft-boiled eggs, and toast with quark—a delectable dairy product somewhere between cream cheese and sour cream, to which I could easily devote an entire entry—I took a bath in my mother’s sinfully long tub.

For lunch we walked down the block to a restaurant the name of which I cannot remember, possibly because it was always referred to simply as “The Fish Place.” It is right on the water, and we sat outside overlooking the Zuger See.

I had the fish.
I also witnessed a Swiss woman eating a hamburger with a knife and fork, and my mother informs me that many people, over there, eat their FRENCH FRIES with a fork as well. I suppose this should not surprise me.

The fries in Switzerland are uniformly excellent—by which I do not mean only that they are excellent everywhere, though they are, but that each is uniformly crisp, uniformly salted, uniformly uniform in every way.
Which brings me, of course, to The Potato Council.

{Or would, if my writing time weren’t up. Like one of those sailboats-in-a-bottle, the only way to get this story out is in pieces. Many, tiny pieces. I think you all know who to blame for that.}

{Hint: Bald, stands about two feet tall, bites}

THURSDAY:

Having spent the previous few days contorted into a terrified rictus, I was surprised to find myself calm on the day of my departure. I was frazzled by packing (I had selected nine books for the trip, but my mother felt nine was too many and I was forced to winnow), but generally felt prepared, and even excited. Before we left, I asked my mother to take a picture of me, Scott, and Simone, presumably so that after they perished in a car crash while I drank capriciously in some far-flung sidewalk cafe filled with dissolute European gentlemen, I would have something by which to remember them:

{fig. 1: …and they were never seen together again.}

I kissed Scott and clutched my baby, and was whisked away in a taxi.

At the airport my mother and I had cocktails and a pot roast sandwich, and the mood turned festive. Why, I wasn’t nervous at all! I was on vacation, and felt nothing but peace and the comforting heft of gravy in my stomach. I reflected upon How I Had Grown As A Person while I chewed a french fry, regarding my former self with a wise pity.

Because my mother flits back and forth so often, we had managed to wrangle seats in INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS CLASS, for people on very fancy international business, and let me tell you, it is the only way to fly. Free champagne before takeoff! Menus from which you may choose a variety of entrees with appetizer, cheese plate, and dessert! A sort of pod-recliner to sleep in, with a down pillow and blanket! Complimentary toiletry kit with sleep mask!
It was all very exciting, and I settled in to read, wondering which on-demand movie I would watch later, after my hot towel and personal dish of mixed nuts. I used my blanket as cover to wriggle out of my bra. This was living.

About an hour or so after take-off, my chest began to feel constricted. I was seized with a desperate, terrible dread, my hands numbed, and suddenly there it was, a panic attack, and all I could think was I want to go home. But it was too late! Six more hours TRAPPED ON THIS PLANE MY GOD, and in order to get back I would have to do it all again. I thought of the Concorde—was there some special speedy-jet for mental health emergencies? My mother, so pleased by my sportsmanship thus far, was obviously disappointed at the turn of events that left me breathing studiously while staring wild-eyed at the air in front of me, and her disappointment only panicked me further. I took one Klonopin after another, cancelled my dinner order, reclined my seat and scrolled quickly to my calming ipod playlist while pulling up the covers and slapping my lavender sachet over my eyes, the one I used every night on hospital bedrest. After four tranquilizers and what seemed like six or seven months but was almost certainly only an hour or two, I was asleep.

FRIDAY:

I awoke feeling fabulous. The sun was shining outside my airplane window, and all was well with the world, or at least above it. Snug in my pod, I dozed on and off for a bit, and then sang Roxanne to myself as the plane began its descent into Amsterdam “You don’t have to put on your red light! You don’t have to sell your body to the night! Unless you want to! Because it’s perfectly legal!”
Strangely, I didn’t feel particularly tired, despite the fact that it was three in the morning back at my apartment, and only in False European Time was it anything like an appropriate waking hour. That is the useful part of having a baby where international travel is concerned. You are already accustomed to, say, getting two hours of sleep and waking for the day while the rest of the world is deep in REM stage slumber.

After the luxury of INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS CLASS, the tiny puddle-jumper from Amsterdam to Zurich felt barbaric. I was like a veal, forced to sit upright in a seat with another seat RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. We were served a long thin box containing an odd Dutch breakfast, part of which was a tiny caramel tartlet, and the rest of which I do not feel qualified to identify.

And then we were in Zurich, and if I hadn’t already known I was in Switzerland, I would have figured it out by the scene at baggage claim. In every American airport I have visited, the baggage claim area is something of a zoo: people reuniting, talking loudly on cell phones, jostling for position around the lurching carousels. In Zurich, however, baggage claim was silent, populated by quiet citizens standing patiently and evenly-spaced around the conveyor belts.
The Swiss (with the exception of me, apparently) are an orderly people. The clocks in Swiss train stations have an extra red arm, and when this arm reaches 12, the clocks—and all other official clocks in the country—stop and synchronize. In some apartment complexes, men are not allowed to urinate standing up after 10:30 p.m., in their own bathrooms, because of the noise of the urine splashing into the bowl. The trains have designated “Quiet Cars,” on which you are not permitted to speak, or even to wear headphones, so as not to disturb other passengers.
Contrast this with the subways in New York, where even a “No Masturbation Car” would have a difficult time gaining a foothold. Like I said, an orderly people.

My mother lives in Obervil, about a six-minute train ride from Zug, which is about a twenty-minute train ride from Zurich. A car met us at the airport, and as we wound through an unsavory part of the city, I began to feel overwhelmed, and to wonder again whether this had been a good idea. Foreign countries are so foreign, you see, and I wanted to be home with my boy and my baby, not whipping along cramped and unfamiliar roads far from my beloved couch. Later that night I would try to call home, misremembering the time difference and reaching my mother-in-law instead, who is staying the week to watch Simone, and I would utterly fail to hide the fact that I was weeping with homesickness (or, more probably, exhaustion). But my mother’s apartment eventually won out over my anxiety:


Pictures, regrettably, do not do it justice. It is the most peaceful place you have never seen.

SATURDAY:

Saturday we took the train into Zurich. A full night of sleep—no baby kicking me in the ribs! No cats yowling at phantoms!—had acted upon me like a powerful drug, and I was nearly skipping along the cobbled streets, babbling a mile a minute and grinning loonily.

Our first stop was a tapas restaurant, where we snagged a table outside, perfect for people watching. We drank chilly Spanish rose and ate fresh, pale sardine filets on a cluster of diced tomatoes, a ceviche of octopus and shrimp, perfect wedges of Manchego drizzled with oil, and patatas bravas—which I believe were lovingly battered in crack cocaine before being presented alongside a sauce made from the happy tears of a Spanish unicorn.

Next, we walked through the entirely fake-looking and overly picturesque streets of Zurich’s Old Town, where I bought a fabulous pair of shoes (to be pictured later, maybe tomorrow), and gazed about wonderingly.

Then to Cafe Odeon, which was the first place EVER TO SERVE CHAMPAGNE BY THE GLASS. Before then, it was a bottle or nothing—back when people lived in caves, and such. We each had a glass of bubbly to celebrate our freedom from tyranny.

Cafe Odeon was frequented by Albert Einstein and James Joyce, and the DaDa movement was born there. Trotsky, Lenin, Mussolini, and Mata Hari were all regular patrons. I’m not sure whether you can tell from the above picture, but I am thinking about revolution, blood, espionage, and bending a people to my will.

Later I sampled perfumes, bought a snakey wooden ladybug for Simone, humored a strident young person in order to take one of her pamphlets for my vegetarian husband (Bloody animal heads, strident German about FLEISCH!), walked until my feet burned, and then I collapsed onto the train beside my mother. Zurich is beautiful. It was perfect.

TO BE CONTINUED…