![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Living ghosts of the past
Oct. 5th, 2007 09:22 amSo yesterday I received an e-mail message out of the blue from N., whom I hadn't heard from in probably well over a decade. She had googled her name and found a piece I wrote for Apparatchik in 1997 in which I mentioned her. That led her to further googling, which brought her here, where she found my e-mail address. (Hi, N., if you're reading this. I'll try not to embarrass you!)
I met N. on Memorial Day weekend in 1989 at whatever club it was that replaced Jazz Alley in the U District after Jazz Alley moved downtown. (That space is now split into the Gyrocery and a little pan-Asian restaurant.) She was from Germany and had come to the US for a year after graduating from Gymnasium (roughly the equivalent of high school in the US, except with an extra year or two of college-level coursework). After working as an au pair in the Bay Area for most of the year, she and a couple of German girlfriends bought a van and traveled all the way around the US in a big loop, ending up in Seattle on the way back to SF and thence back home to Germany. Like me, they had come to the club to catch the local reggae band, the Defenders, who were playing that night.
Adventures ensued -- in Seattle, in San Francisco, and, at the end of the year, in Germany. She had started studying Psychology at the Freie Universität in Berlin by then, and after Christmas in her hometown in the south we drove to Berlin just after New Year's. The Wall had just opened, although it still stood. As an American, I still had to go through Checkpoint Charlie when we went to the other side, but she was free to just take the subway, as I recall. The Iron Curtain was crumbling. Berlin was ground zero of a new historical era. It was a very exciting time to be there.
That trip was basically the end of our romance, although I was too blind to see it until I went back again a year and a half later. Everything had, very awkwardly, changed between us, but I still really enjoyed exploring Berlin -- the amazing museums, the lakes, the cafes, Potsdam, Sans Souci. She had moved to an old working class neighborhood called Wedding that still had WWII bullet holes in the sides of the rundown apartment buildings -- a rare part of the city that hadn't been completely flattened by bombs in the war. The Wall was already mostly gone, except for a watch tower that had -- cheekily? ironically? crassly? -- been turned into a touristy cafe, plus a seemingly forgotten section next to a long-abandoned chapel in an old overgrown cemetery, where a friend of N's got me high for the first time in Europe, sitting on a tombstone smoking a hash and tobacco cigarette on a beautiful sunny day in the shadow of the past.
And now it's many years and maybe another historical era later -- undoubtedly several eras in my personal history. N. tells me she's a cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist now, working with people who suffer from borderline personality disorder. She's lived in Zürich for the past ten years. I'm still living in the same house and working in the same building on the same floor as when we met. I had only started my full-time position here three months before that night at the former Jazz Alley. When I got the first e-mail from her yesterday, I immediately went to tell my old boss about it, and we both shook our heads in disbelief. The old days! Back then, she let me rearrange my work schedule so I could take German language courses during the day, although I took the second year in the evening. Not that I ever really learned to speak the language. Leider nicht!
I guess this is what happens as you get older. People you knew from ten or twenty years ago find you on the internet and say hello. Suddenly the past comes crashing into your head again. Berlin in January 1990. I remember a West German woman telling me she'd been at the Wall a few nights earlier, perhaps it was on New Year's Eve, when some people on the other side were trying to chisel a hole through it. She said you could feel the hammer blows through the still-unbroken wall; it felt like a baby kicking the side of the womb, getting ready to be born.
Strange how the phrase "West German" already seems like an archaic artifact. Guess that makes me one too: just another living ghost of the dead past.
I met N. on Memorial Day weekend in 1989 at whatever club it was that replaced Jazz Alley in the U District after Jazz Alley moved downtown. (That space is now split into the Gyrocery and a little pan-Asian restaurant.) She was from Germany and had come to the US for a year after graduating from Gymnasium (roughly the equivalent of high school in the US, except with an extra year or two of college-level coursework). After working as an au pair in the Bay Area for most of the year, she and a couple of German girlfriends bought a van and traveled all the way around the US in a big loop, ending up in Seattle on the way back to SF and thence back home to Germany. Like me, they had come to the club to catch the local reggae band, the Defenders, who were playing that night.
Adventures ensued -- in Seattle, in San Francisco, and, at the end of the year, in Germany. She had started studying Psychology at the Freie Universität in Berlin by then, and after Christmas in her hometown in the south we drove to Berlin just after New Year's. The Wall had just opened, although it still stood. As an American, I still had to go through Checkpoint Charlie when we went to the other side, but she was free to just take the subway, as I recall. The Iron Curtain was crumbling. Berlin was ground zero of a new historical era. It was a very exciting time to be there.
That trip was basically the end of our romance, although I was too blind to see it until I went back again a year and a half later. Everything had, very awkwardly, changed between us, but I still really enjoyed exploring Berlin -- the amazing museums, the lakes, the cafes, Potsdam, Sans Souci. She had moved to an old working class neighborhood called Wedding that still had WWII bullet holes in the sides of the rundown apartment buildings -- a rare part of the city that hadn't been completely flattened by bombs in the war. The Wall was already mostly gone, except for a watch tower that had -- cheekily? ironically? crassly? -- been turned into a touristy cafe, plus a seemingly forgotten section next to a long-abandoned chapel in an old overgrown cemetery, where a friend of N's got me high for the first time in Europe, sitting on a tombstone smoking a hash and tobacco cigarette on a beautiful sunny day in the shadow of the past.
And now it's many years and maybe another historical era later -- undoubtedly several eras in my personal history. N. tells me she's a cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist now, working with people who suffer from borderline personality disorder. She's lived in Zürich for the past ten years. I'm still living in the same house and working in the same building on the same floor as when we met. I had only started my full-time position here three months before that night at the former Jazz Alley. When I got the first e-mail from her yesterday, I immediately went to tell my old boss about it, and we both shook our heads in disbelief. The old days! Back then, she let me rearrange my work schedule so I could take German language courses during the day, although I took the second year in the evening. Not that I ever really learned to speak the language. Leider nicht!
I guess this is what happens as you get older. People you knew from ten or twenty years ago find you on the internet and say hello. Suddenly the past comes crashing into your head again. Berlin in January 1990. I remember a West German woman telling me she'd been at the Wall a few nights earlier, perhaps it was on New Year's Eve, when some people on the other side were trying to chisel a hole through it. She said you could feel the hammer blows through the still-unbroken wall; it felt like a baby kicking the side of the womb, getting ready to be born.
Strange how the phrase "West German" already seems like an archaic artifact. Guess that makes me one too: just another living ghost of the dead past.
