mofembot in france & germany

—About all that religion stuff and having moved on and all.

Back in the day I ran a couple of listservs and wrote copiously about mormon feminist issues. I pretty much packed all that in when we packed up and moved to Europe. Apart from occasional comments here and there, and glances at the younger iterations of online heterodox forums ("Feminist Mormon Housewives" and suchlike)... I've held myself aloof.

But today I have gotten drawn into a discussion on facebook based on a call for questions at a "sister-share"-like clone, "mormonmommyblogs" ("MMB"). Apparently the blog owner is going to get some face time with the current Relief Society General President, who is soliciting questions and input from the masses.

—All well and good as far as it goes, but as I stated (in my only post on MMB) in response to someone's thanking Sister Beck for being the first to do this sort of thing, "...an earlier RS General Presidency (Elaine Jack, Chieko Okazaki, and Aileen Clyde) also solicited input from women all over the church and tried to bring their concerns to the attention of the Brethren. I hope Sister Beck and her counselors have better success this time around."

Of the 300+ comments on MMB thus far, I'd say that well over half pertain to the same kinds of questions and concerns I and my fem-peers were talking about some 25-30 years ago. Of course, there are the usual Righteous Women chiming in who berate the "faithless" for not being content with their lot, yadda yadda. The patriarchy still has plenty of female allies to help keep the women in their place... and the anti-fem chorus would be much louder, of course, were the arch-conservatives a bit more e-connected.

As for me, I participated in the facebook thread more than is usual for me these days (especially in threads unrelated to politics, and I even ended up referring people to my Dialogue paper (1994! Oy!). I still am well-versed in mormonspeak.

As I head off to bed, I am feeling two things: (a) a bit sad that so many women are still giving voice to the same kinds of feelings that I had for so long — and still hoping for answers that simply aren't going to come; and (b) a twinge of nostalgia for the days when I was utterly steeped in the (futile) quest for positive changes in mormondom (particularly where women are concerned). Those were heady and — how can I say this — eloquent times. I argued my points well back then. But goodness, what a time sink the whole enterprise was — and still is.

Plus ça change, plus ça reste le même.

It's probably a good thing that nearly all of my mo-fem writings are in France. Reduces the temptation to jump back into the fray again.

Well, I guess it's official: today I found myself rehearsing in my pathetic, limited German the line "Ich lebe in Berlin" — "I live (or I am living) in Berlin," instead of what I had been saying up till now — "Ich lebe in Frankreich, aber mein Mann muss in Berlin arbeiten diese Jahr und nächste Jahr" (the likely grammatically incorrect way to say "I live in France, but my husband must work here this year and next year"— leaving the "so I must live here, too" up to the hearer to fill in).

Breathe here.

This all must mean that I am getting used to the idea of really and truly living in Germany, despite the fact that it may be too complicated to do so officially. But living here is hard. The language is hard (and no, not all Germans speak English, at least not here in Berlin!), but I think making friends is always the hardest aspect of any move. This said, I/we have made a little progress on that front, including getting to know the previous tenants of our current apartment a bit better; being a bit more social with David's work colleagues; resolutely going to Mrs Sporty — fitness club — and to pingpong several times a week; and even enjoying a bit more interaction with some of the neighboring artists out in the Weißensee studio building.

(Aside: I reflect upon the fact that were we still active mormons, we would have benefited from an instant social network no matter where we live. Lots of water under that dam and over that bridge, so to speak.)

I acknowledge Berlin's dynamism. This can be and often is a fun and interesting place — goodness, I've never experienced a New Year's Eve like the one we experienced Saturday night! And I certainly cannot complain about the cost of living (long may it wave).

Much as Mr Mo mocks the idea, however, there are still times when I feel Berlin's past weighing heavily upon me — often after the discovery of yet more nearby "stumbling stones" (brass paving stones with the names and relevant dates of Jews deported and murdered placed in front of, or close to where they used to live). I found two new-to-me stumbling stones up the street from Mrs Sporty on Winsstraße just the other day, and I'm astonished that I'd never noticed them before. (I try to notice them.)

There are all kinds of reminders about Berlin's atrocious Nazi past and East Berlin's tragic soviet past in plain sight all over the city and seemingly on every street. Potentially very psychologically heavy, yes (or, rather, "ja"). But today I'm starting to think that maybe what is really getting to me is the weather. As in Hamburg, the overwhelming tendency of the sky is unrelenting gray. There was a bit of sunshine in the late morning here, but as I write this a few hours later, it is raining again. Just as it rained yesterday, and, and, and.

I am not a fan of dreary. I am glad the days are lengthening, but it would be nice to see a lot more blue sky right now.

Making the scary, scary move from my former host site to new host site.

The Mother (Sonnet)

I live in a village of older people, mostly retirees. There are a few families here with young children, but very few people a half-generation or so away from Mr Mo and me (that is, in their mid-to-late thirties with kids entering or already in their teens). Mr Mo and I are on the young end of the older folks — as much as a half-generation removed ourselves, and our presence here (due to Youngest’s having attended a tiny, now-defunct anglophone school here for a while) has occasionally fooled people into thinking that we are retired.

If only.

Anyway, the older people are very nice: I very much like my across-the-street neighbors and am on friendly first-name bases with quite a few people; I play French Scrabble with several once a week when I’m here at “Arts des Mains” at The Circle of the Future (the name of the small assembly hall); I go to book club; I attend the monthly village lunches when I can. Today’s village lunch incites me to write, and not because of the food, though the “moules-frites à volonté” (all-you-can-eat mussels and fries) were pretty good. I am writing because of who was absent today: Monsieur Jackie Bertran (not his real name).

Jackie is probably the oldest man in the village now; if there are others, they are too infirm to be out and about. The oldest women in our village were at the luncheon today, but Jackie was not. I saw him slowly walking up the street towards me as I hurried to lunch at the Bar du Cours (Terrasse), so I greeted him and asked if he was going to the luncheon.

To my consternation, he was not going: he said that he had not heard about it all. This surprised me, given that I’d heard about it in several venues, including earlier this week in places where Jackie had been; we had received our little quarter-sheet notice in our mailbox; hadn’t he received one?

Off I went to the lunch, sorry that Jackie wasn’t going to be there: usually he attends these affairs, greatly looks forward to them, in fact, and usually he happily sings the “Quinson” song at some point during the meal, asked or not. (He still has quite a nice voice.) When our former neighbor inquired about “the man who sings” today, I told those at the table about my encountering Mr Bertrand just prior. And that’s where the conversation took a disquieting turn to some degree: not the expressions of surprise about Jackie’s seeming lack of awareness about this event, nor even the concern about his walking about without his cane (and indeed, to judge from the state of his chin, he’d fallen fairly recently) — but because of a small inkling that maybe, just maybe he’d been deliberately kept in the dark as punishment for picking the village flowers.

Our village has been anxious to be awarded a “village fleuri” sign for a while now, and planters have been put up along the major thoroughfares and planted in tulips and pansies and petunias and so on. And apparently Jackie has been picking them regularly and presenting his little bouquets to the ladies of Arts des Mains, to the amusement of some, certainly, but to the frustration of others who don’t want to see village money wasted, and who really and truly want that “village fleuri” sign to go up. (It means being listed as such and in principle attracting flower-oriented tourists, I guess.) Madame la Présidente of Arts des Mains very nicely but very pointedly talked to Jackie just this past Wednesday about how he must not pick the flowers. But to all evidence, either he didn’t understand or forgot or feels no reason to cease and desist. “If you don’t want the flowers, I’ll give them to someone else,” has apparently been his response to those remonstrating.

Was he excluded from the luncheon? Probably not; probably forgot… although his daughter lives nearby, and would she have been similarly overlooked? Wouldn’t she have made sure her father would be in attendance?

Poor old man, he has outlived his friends in the village — his best friend, one he’s known his whole life, whom he palled around with daily, died last year — and he is bored and lonely. It would be too cruel, flower-picking notwithstanding, to choose to isolate him further, even though I share the dismay about this untoward habit of his (especially when he doesn’t manage to gather all that he picks, and I find dead flowers in the planters and on the sidewalk). There are no florists here, and even if the rumor is true that a flower shop is going to open in nearby Montmeyan, even that is too far away to do Jackie any good. He wants to give flowers to the village ladies, thinking that they will be happy and flattered, but instead he is driving them crazy.

Hopefully not so crazy as to be punitive. Hopefully not.

[Addendum on March 16, 2011: I was in France several weeks ago and arrived in our village just in time to attend Jackie’s funeral. Not long after Christmas, so I was told, Jackie’s behavior became increasingly erratic to the point of violence, and he ended up first being hospitalized in a nearby geriatric hospital and then transfered to a rest home. I was not at all surprised that he did not live beyond a few weeks after leaving his beloved village. During the funeral, they played a low-quality recording of him singing “Quinson” at a local gathering.]

I went galloping through a few chunks of my missionary letters and diary and weekly reports and all, and my overall assessment is — snooze city. My writing overall utterly and completely sucked. It was almost wholly narrative instead of descriptive, there’s tons of whining and pseudo-spiritual introspective drivel, I’m nearly always promising to follow up with more details — virtually all of which have now been lost to time and memory… in short, pleah. (Or “beurk,” if you want to get all French about it.)

So at the very least, “Sister Mish” is not going to be epistolary in nature, if it ends up seeing the light of day at all. And that’s a big honkin’ if at this point, I gotta say.

But I have to admit that I’m also a bit disappointed that I didn’t do a better on-the-spot job of describing my surroundings and the people I dealt with both intimately and “de passage,” and that I was more interested in projecting an image of being a Good Missionary, a Good Mormon — than in finding ways to best (or better) convey what things were like for me in a multi-dimensional way.

I suppose all is not lost, if I really want to pursue the idea of “Sister Mish”— there are enough memory-jogging anecdotes and possibly even images (among my slides, especially as accompanied by the slide-show narrations I sent home with them) to try to construct something different. I guess the real question I have is whether in light of my current disbelief and cynicism and all — could I do the experience justice?

I wonder.

[Written in transit from Walldorf, Germany, to Marseille, France, on January 15th]

The catastrophe in Haiti saddens and appalls me — I am saddened for the loss of life, for the unfathomable sorrow of the survivors, the pain of the injured, for the fact that the survivors have lost so many and so much. Some have lost their entire families in addition to escaping with only what they were wearing at the time the earthquake struck.

I am appalled because much of the loss of life was preventable. Hmm. That may be hyperbole borne of wishful thinking: preventing the deaths in Haiti would have meant years of fixing so many systemic problems as to render “prevention” meaningless: replacing, for example, the shantytowns with affordable, built-to-code structures; providing meaningful employment; benefitting from competence rather than corruption at all levels of government, and so on infinitum ad nauseam.

The photos tell the story: there doesn’t seem to be one building anywhere in Port-au-Prince (among the ones left standing) that is undamaged. So much unreinforced or inadequately reinforced concrete! So many houses dwellings without any foundation whatsoever on inhospitable hillsides (many now in ravines)! It is catastrophe upon catastrophe.

The lack of heavy equipment and infrastructure will result in a death toll that will be far higher than the “should have been.” A 7.0 earthquake is nearly always going to result in deaths in any densely-populated area. But when people (notably the Haitian president himself) are speaking of a toll anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000, and possibly more, the world’s collective failure to pay attention to this poverty-stricken, wood-denuded one-third-of-an-island can scarcely be atoned for by rushing in trying to rush in however many search-dog and rescue teams and emergency aid.

…My saying this must mean that I think we, the world, the Earth, Earthlings, Terrans, human beings, including our governments and even our corporations, are indeed responsible for one another. And that we ought to think ahead and invest in our collective futures, rather than only reacting to disasters of such magnitude as to pique the most hardened heart and conscience.* (Oh, that does make me a socialist, yes, it must, and if so, I say: I am glad to be one.—But I digress.)

The lack of equipment means that many who are buried who might have survived will die for lack of water. It is hot in Haiti — 32/33ºC, and for better or worse, no rain is forecast. (Perhaps some water would have made its way to those buried, but I suppose overall it’s a good thing that there is no rain there. [16 Jan update: Now I wish that there were a bit of rain so that those going without water on the streets can fill up bottles and buckets, given the problems of distribution.])

Then there will be the aftermath victims: those rescued but injured whose wounds will be infected for lack of adequate medical attention immediately after. Whatever water infrastructure there may be (to say nothing of sewers and electricity) is hugely damaged, and the risk of cholera and typhus and so on is rising hourly. [Addendum: Apparently crush injuries are particularly insidious: once a victim is freed, the toxins that have built up in the affected limb(s) rush through the body and overwhelm the kidneys. This can only be counteracted by immediately administering IV saline solution plus “mannitol”… and of course most Haitians’ access to these life-saving substances is next to nil.]

Is there enough money in the world to fix what is wrong with the world? I don’t think there’s any way to answer that question: even if there is enough, it will never get into the hands of those who need it and/or those who are competent to use it wisely and well.

Scenes of looting and sheer chaos in Haiti seem to be on the screens of CNN International here at the Frankfurt airport. This social breakdown is not unexpected, certainly, but once again, a hideous tragedy is compounded by the failure of leaders on all levels and in all places and venues to address the problems of this locus of heartbreak long before the Earth ruptured.

How sad to see people trying through sheer brute force to move slabs of concrete with their own unaided strength. Dogs who are trained to sniff out the living will soon be replaced by cadaver dogs. (I’ve heard that rescue dogs get depressed if they end up dealing only with the dead.)

[At this point, it was time to board my flight to Marseille.]

*Apparently Rush Limbaugh has neither a heart nor a conscience.

It seems odd to be writing a little something about Chiune Sugihara while working here in Germany, and about whom I just learned in reading the second of the two Hark! A Vagrant! comics on this page. “Japan’s Schindler” went unnoticed and unsung back in his native Japan, after having risked his career (and possibly his life) to save anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 Jews by granting them transit visas as a vice-consul in Lithuania.

Had I known to look for the monument in his honor in Vilnius, and the other one in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, I would have done so.

Sugihara puts me in mind of Hamburg’s golden paving stones, sprinkled here and there in the sidewalks (usually in front of apartment buildings), and inscribed with the names and fates of the deported Jews who had lived in those places. Some apartment buildings were torn down, of course, and stores and markets put up in the spaces, but the paving stones remain, seemingly unnoticed by the hundreds of customers and passers-by.

I tried to notice.

I have not noticed any comparable tiles or stones or plaques in Heidelberg, though thousands of Jews were deported from here, and two synagogues were burned during the infamous Kristallnacht.

During one of my stays here, my landlady showed me a book of their family’s genealogy, including a photo of an ancestor in a Wehrmacht officer’s uniform. I did not ask her where he had been stationed nor what his duties had been. I am told that the rising generation in particular is taught and re-taught all about the atrocities of the Nazi era in public school, supposedly to the point of being thoroughly bored and sick to death of it all. I have to wonder about that; on the other hand, I do not recall having the greatest sins of America’s past (e.g., slavery, genocide of indigenous peoples) taught and re-taught when I was in school… but granted, I was in school rather a long time back and talking about such things, or feeling it appropriate to do so in public school, was only beginning to catch on.

Do German kids say, “Yeah, yeah, the Nazis, yeah, yeah, they were bad, they did horrible things, but that was a long time ago”? My landlord’s grown (and almost-grown) kids say yes. To which I have to reply (at least in my mind): maybe they’re not teaching the Holocaust in the right way.

I remember when Ingrid’s dad came to our seminary class to talk to us about what it was like to be part of the Hitler Youth and then conscripted into the army in his mid-teens in the waning days of the Third Reich. I remember the German army vet who was missing an arm and with whom I regularly played ping-pong at Skipper Steimle’s Pine View Lodge near Lake Arrowhead, CA. He was a good player, that one, with just a flap of his deltoid muscle remaining that would flex “reflexively” as he played. I never asked him how he lost his arm; I assume now as then that he lost it in the war. And I remember meeting a few Jewish survivors of the concentration camps, including some who had numbers (badly) tattoed on their forearms. Most of the camp survivors are now dead, and most of those who were part of the Nazi war machine (willingly or unwillingly) are dead as well.

It is too much to say that we as a species haven’t learned anything from the Holocaust, but given the continued slaughter of innocents in so many countries, the prolonged episodes of ethnic cleansing in many parts of the world, the best I can proffer is that perhaps things would have been worse without at least some people having taken to heart the horrors that Hitler unleashed on such a massive scale such a relatively short time ago. That is cold comfort, however, and as the world’s population continues to grow unabated, and as water and food shortages loom on an increasingly closer horizon, we may yet experience things even worse than those suffered by the targets of Hitler’s paranoia and wrath.

God forbid.

(Let me toss in a Shakespearean “forsooth” here to counterbalance the LOL-cat title.)

I didn’t post anything on January 5th. I thought I would, but got distracted (a) by a certain party (not me) who spilled her beverage onto a laptop keyboard (not mine), then (b) by cleanup (not particularly of laptop per se; Mr Mo kindly came back to Aix from Quinson, where he had driven just that very morning, to deal with this); then (c) by packing. But mostly, if truth be told, (d) by wanting to finish reading a book that I cannot take with me to Germany in a few hours. (I did not finish the book. It will keep.)

And thus it is. Amen. I will cut myself some slack if I manage to post another entry later today (at some sane time this afternoon, that is; this is a wee hours’ “I cannot sleep anyway” extravaganza).

Anyway, yes, back I go to Walldorf (the small one near Heidelberg where Johann Jakob Astor, aka John Jacob Astor of Walldorf Astoria fame, came from) to work for a few days. Too many technical questions to want to deal with off-site, given the tight deadlines. Fortunately, transport costs are surprisingly low and I will be able to sleep at Gerald and Gisela’s (the same people I’ve stayed with since the very beginning of my German gig; and also fortunately for me, while The Awful German Toilet is still there, other creature comforts, such as a shower curtain (!!) have gradually made their way into life at G&G’s).

The price of familiarity and convenience — the fact that I get to stay at G&G’s, who live fewer than 10 minutes’ walk from the Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof, and whose neighborhood I now know well, etc. — is somewhat offset by the fact that I will have to leave my room by around 7h15 every morning, because Gisela tends at least one baby early on in the day. (I think by the time I arrive in Heidelberg this afternoon, around 15h if my flight and train connections go as planned, daycare will be over.) Ah well, I am planning on putting in long days at my client’s. At least the room is entirely mine on Saturday and Sunday. I expect to mostly stay ensconced, given that the forecast for Baden-Württemberg calls for snow showers essentially every damn day I’m there. (I have bought long underwear and more warm socks in preparation for the evil. How is it that at my rapidly advancing age, I’m still not living in a warm climate year-round???)

The other price of familiarity and convenience is yet another round of “omg, I wish I (a) had taken more German in college, (b) had remembered the German phrasebook” (not that it really helps that much for the context of my trip and sojourn, really; I’ll see if Larry has one here at the apartment in Aix), and “(c) had a prayer of remembering what I ended up learning the last time I stayed for awhile.” My conversations with Gisela are extremely limited, to say the least, and Gerald doesn’t usually get home until late, and while his English is better, it is far from fluent. (Much, much, much better than my German, however.)

I can only hope that I will form a few dementia/Alzheimer’s-off-staving neurological connections by all of these comings and goings. But now I should really try to get a bit more sleep. Gute Nacht (more like “Guten Morgen,” but hey, it will still be dark outside for hours yet).

This morning we brought the trappings of an “American breakfast” up to Jim and Claudia’s — a Dutch/German couple who speak English to one another, and who have bought a condo in an old farm complex up on the Plateau de Valensole above Quinson. Claudia’s parents are visiting until Tuesday from Greater Frankfurt, and it was somewhat at the instigation of Claudia’s dad that this event transpired. (He’d mentioned in the course of our going with them for an impromptu drink at the local bar the other night that he and the missus loved, loved, loved American breakfasts, especially the breakfast buffets with all the bacon and eggs, etc. I/we offered to make them an American breakfast; however, given the fact that our tiny eat-in kitchen could not possibly accommodate seven adults, we prepared everything and took it up to J & C’s gracious and spacious place.)

Despite his fears that they would not turn out well and thus embarrass him, Mr Mo made pancakes and they were delicious as ever. We also brought with us our waffle maker and made Norwegian rice waffles, and I made scrambled eggs and bacon (cooking the bacon here at home ahead of time so as not to perfume J & C’s kitchen; as Claudia is vegetarian these days, I wasn’t sure if she’d find the bacon-waft offensive. Turns out she’s a recovered bacon-a-holic from her Boston days, during which she and her roommate apparently would eat entire packages of bacon — as in the family pack size — in one sitting.)

I had my bacon-with-breakfast for the 4th quarter of 2009 last week. I have now had my bacon-with-breakfast for the first quarter of 2010, though I suppose it’s possible that I’ll have some bacon and eggs at the quasi-American-style diner in Heidelberg this coming weekend. (Yes, I’m going back to Germany for about a week and a half, unless I wind up in Paris for the last part of my time away from home instead. When in Germany, I usually eat muesli in yogurt for breakfast on workdays — eating at my desk, since I leave for work at a time that is impossibly early to eat anything. Here at home, I often have cold cereal, but sometimes just a couple of pieces of toast and a fruit cup with my one daily cuppa joe… mostly without Bailey’s these days. Sigh. Mr Mo makes pancakes mostly on a weekly basis.)

I always have enjoyed an American breakfast. I was going to write that it is my favorite meal, but there are too many non-breakfast dishes that please my palate as much or (gasp) more than the breakfast spread. Growing up, my mom had a very regular schedule: we’d have some form of eggs on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; cold cereal on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays (except for the first Sunday of the month when we fasted as a religious observance), and then often something a bit more elaborate on Saturdays (pancakes from a mix being a frequent feature).

A noteworthy breakfast “accomplishment,” if one can call it such, was the Ward Breakfast (on the Fourth of July)… in particular the one at which I ate 65 (yes, sixty-five) little breakfast sausage links — and who knows how many scrambled eggs, but I lived for those links. We never, ever had them at home (my mom was strictly a Bacon Woman). My ability to eat in such astonishing piggish quantities has thankfully diminished with time.

Living in a land in which breakfast (for adults, at least) tends to consist of a measly tartine (toasted bread with butter or jam or spreading cheese) and coffee is a continuing source of disappointment, especially when paying for a “breakfast-included” hotel or guest room. I utterly refuse to pay 7+ euros for a most euphemistically-named “continental” breakfast (as mentioned, toast and coffee — and if one is lucky, maybe a yogurt or the possibility of a semi-stale bowl of cornflakes or “factory floor sweepings-style muesli)”, but that’s what they often charge at hotels in France and some other benighted parts of Europe. I don’t mind paying for a more robust breakfast, such as one finds — or usually can find — in Germany, the UK, Spain, and so on.

One would think, given France’s overall gastronomic reputation, and the French Health Ministry’s apparently futile effort to promote breakfast, that some chef somewhere would figure out a way to get the French to pay more attention to the first meal of the day. The overall effect of the health ministry’s push has been the expansion of supermarket aisles laden with sugary-crap kiddie breakfast cereals. I do not blame French adults for (a) not eating the sugar-shit themselves and (b) caving into the marketing for their kiddies.

As for me, bacon and eggs (scrambled, fried) notwithstanding, I think the traditional breakfast I most enjoyed during our travels was in… Turkey: hard-boiled egg, tomato, cucumber, a kind of feta-like cheese, and bread. (And often some kind of muesli-esque cereal would be available as well.) For reasons that quite frankly escape me, I have not ever tried to adopt this and other healthier-seeming breakfasts into my daily routine. But maybe I should. And maybe I’ll give it a go when I get back from Germany in mid-January.

NORWEGIAN RICE WAFFLES

(Corrected per Mr Mo’s comment)

3 cups soft-cooked rice

1.25 cups flour

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 cup vegetable oil

3 eggs

1 cup milk

1 tsp ground cardamom (best to grind these up fresh from the whole seeds if possible; feel free to add more cardamom than the recipe calls for)

Prepare as per usual in a waffle iron. Serve with butter. (FIne, you can top it with jam or powdered sugar or maple syrup or whatever if you must, but the cardamom-y flavor of these waffles is great with just butter.)