Living in the negative space

 

Tuesday I dropped everything, strapped on my helmet and pantleg elastic, and rode off to the FS training centre to take the Transitioning Home from Life Abroad course. I got lost twice. First I rode up one steep Gatineau hill, only to realize I must re-descend, then l did it again with another.

I hardly noticed the forest alongside but I knew it was there. I'd run its trails during a year of German training eight years ago. l arrived almost but not late to the course.

The pre-course readings included the usual graphs about the emotional stages of transition. It's okay, then bad, then slowly better. You'll just feel wrong. Then less wrong. No one cares how you've changed. Remember that they've changed, too. All this in much more eloquent words, all mostly accurate.

They included an article called That Discomfort You're Feeling is Grief. It was the first sign that someone understood, that all this could be understood. I read all the articles out loud to my husband.

An FS has to do many very different things, often on short notice and without preparation time or training, and must do them more or less competently. They must have this flexibility, self discipline, desire to learn, judgement and ethics, all without subsuming to the internal stresses these flexions create internally.

And one must do this for decades, through children, spouses, sickness, debt, neglected friends and family - all the many things that characterize normal life, while moving from country to country.

It’s very thrilling to satisfy one’s curiosity and fernweh, as the Germans put it - farsickness, as opposed to homesickness. It’s also exhausting. No wonder so many of us end up eccentric or divas, on the boards of one think tank or another, or alone. That’s another way of saying, there’s no way if knowing where this leads.

Another way of describing a life of change and discovery is to notice that new beginnings happen when things end. The things left behind can't be brought along, or not in their fully present way. They leave absences, holes so ragged they can't be stitched up in words. Or I can't.

My phone gives me the option of a typeface that is new to me, called Bahnschrift. This is German and it means, trainwriting. Writing of the way.

My Berlin life in Ottawa

The cheese man in the Byward Market tells me it's tough running a cheese shop in the Market. McDonalds is gone, he goes on, soon Timmies will leave, too. I exult that he sells Tomme de Savoie and Kaltbach, two of my favourite cheeses, but I'm sorry there's no Rote Teufel, which means red devil in German.

When I moved to Germany in 2015, I didn't know cheese. I liked Havarti and cheddar. For my first five years in Germany, I made no progress beyond this. Then, my friend H started invited me to join her on her Saturday morning trips to the market at Winterfeldtplatz. That means, winter field square.

There's a Turkish cheese seller, beloved among market stalls, who plies young customers with lollipops and serves up cheese samples to their elders. He has a smile, gives my change to my son, is always ready with a recommendation. And the prices are good. Sometimes we wait twenty minutes for our turn, canvas bags weighing us down. I don't notice. I'm strong from getting everywhere on foot, my backpack a permanent fixture over my spine.

H teaches me French cheeses, a wealth of information gained from paying attention to her French husband's relatives. Slowly I learn what I like. It takes all of my remaining three years in Berlin. Savoury sheep's cheese with coriander seed, hard oily Manchego threaded with truffles, the softer, younger Swiss mountain cheeses - Kaltbach. I like Brie de Meaux, my husband goes for creamy Delices de Bourgognes, my son likes Red Devil. I learn that I like mostly everything when eaten off the back of the cheese mongers knife. And that I get pickier at home, and as the days elapse since I visited the market.

I have H in my ear today as I pore slowly, lovingly over the cheese in the Byward market cheese shop. In Germany still, she's spending her afternoon watching Germany beat Serbia in the FIBA. We compare first weeks at school for the kids.

I'm alone in the store. Tourists fill the breakfast joints nearby. But the crowd of marketers I remember from Before-Berlin is gone. No one else is loaded down with bags.

During my first month back in Ottawa, I visited the Lansdowne market The crowd is lovely, it's a good market. The sellers are happy, they're selling. The fruit seller with the ponytail practices his German on me.

But the cheese and deli meat selection is spare. So, I'm branching out.

#condoliving #consolidation #ottawa
#ottawa #Berlin #tiergartensued #tiergartensuedcomics #comics #myottawa #bywardmarket #cheese