Skill Set

While rehearsing this afternoon for an upcoming choral project with Mendelssohn's oratorio Paulus, I had a chance to help out in a way I might not have expected. I joined Heilbronn's Vokalensemble in April, and next weekend's performance will be the first major work, with orchestra in Kilianskirche, that I will perform as a member of the choir. Together with a second and slightly larger group, we are about 120 voices strong.

During rehearsals, I have been puzzled at times about pronunciation, always tuning my vowel color to that of my neighbors. After all, they are native speakers, and we are singing in German. Now and then, particularly on "e" vowels, I've had the feeling that I learned a different pronunciation, back in my diction classes at Oberlin Conservatory in the 1980s.

Whether you're singing on an "eh" (as in "head") or closed "e" (not found in English, but like the second syllable in "obey" without the drop into the diphthong) makes a big difference in terms of vocal color and resonance. Apparently, as I learned in the spring, people with the local Swabian dialect throw in some closed "e" sounds where they don't belong (that is, according to the rules of Stage German (Bühnendeutsch) that I was drilled in during college). So, I went home from rehearsal in the spring and spent some time with my dictionaries to clarify vowels for myself.

During a break today, I had pointed out two vowel questions to our conductor, who seemed a little too harried to work on the finer points of diction. But he diligently made note and said he'd see what he could do. He is not from the Heilbronn area, although his Black Forest roots don't necessarily bring him closer to the Hochdeutsch of the Hannover region. To my ear, his spoken pronunciation is spot on, but (like many conductors of my acquaintance) he hasn't learned the code (International Phonetic Alphabet) and lacks the vocabulary to describe the sounds. Which is usually just as well, since most choral singers go cross-eyed when I bring it up. (Here's a quick test: did you like that link? If it looks like magic, you're with me. If your eyes are crossed…well, I've seen that look before.)

But to my point. Toward the end of rehearsal, we came across the word: Jerusalem. In English, dzeh-ru-suh-lemm. In German, ya(y)-ru-za-lemm. But in Swabia (where I live), apparently ya(y)-ru-za-la(y)m. It was one of the words that had bugged me, and I'd looked it up. So, when my German choral conductor cast his eyes toward the choir for verification on the final vowel sound, he looked at me, the American in the second sopranos. Lemm, I said. Like "Bett" (bed) or "hell" (bright). I'm sure about that. I looked it up.

Little Miss Diction hasn't lost her touch.

About a pumpkin

I still grow the pumpkin my son Simon brought home from first grade as a sprouted seed.

So begins "Simon's Pumpkin," a short piece of writing (vignette, essay, meditation, rumination?) that I posted to Simon's Place on July 25, 2007 and polished to read at conferences in the summer of 2008 (Wesleyan, Writers at Work in Salt Lake City). The January 2, 2008 entry offers an intermediate version of the final essay, while the July 2007 entry tells the history and shows photos of this special pumpkin from 2004 to 2007.

The reason I bring up Simon's Pumpkin is that I am watching it grow again this summer in our backyard. It's the 8th generation--or vintage, as I like to call it. Technically, there was no pumpkin crop in 2010 because we spent the summer relocating from Salt Lake City to Germany. However, one very persistent pumpkin from the 2009 batch held on as a decoration for more than a year. My friend Maritza harvested its seeds in early winter 2010, thus creating an honorary seed for the missing year. Mysteriously, the "2010" seeds were the first to sprout when I started this year's crop in May, followed closely by seeds from the original 2004 pumpkin.

There's more to show and tell about this summer's pumpkin, but I'll end for now with a current photo, followed by the most recent "finished" form of the essay (the last of six vignettes collected with pertinent quotations in 2009). Open-ended, like the pumpkin project itself, the writing remains unpublished.

Mid-summer pumpkin, August 16, 2011.

Simon's Pumpkin

“How do you parent your deceased child?”

Markus, on Simon’s “ninth” birthday,

May 2006.

I still grow the pumpkin Simon brought home from first grade as a sprouted seed. The tiny plant sat in a styrofoam cup by the kitchen sink, bent and wan with its companion sunflower sprout. We nearly forgot about the little plants, but some impulse of preservation possessed me to plant them by our backyard fence.

Now, when the newest generation sprawls across the yard each year, I relive my first encounter with Simon’s pumpkin. I remember the children who planted seeds while Simon missed school for a whole month. It was the spring of 2004. A painful tumor appeared in Simon’s jaw—the first one we could actually see and touch. The severity of the tumor propelled him into a week of radiation treatment—strapped flat on his back like a mummy, pinned under a tight-fitting mask, and left repeatedly in isolation with the beam-throwing machine. Radiation stopped the tumor’s assault but raised life with cancer to a new level of torment.

I took Simon back to school a little late on a morning in mid-May. He stopped short of his classroom, too shy to enter. His teacher shot me a “what now” look. I shrugged. I coaxed. Then all twenty-three first-graders appeared in a circle around him in the hallway—close, but not too close. Simon inhaled their affection, and I felt his head burrow into my shoulder as I crouched beside him. One friend broke the silence: “I hate it when Simon isn’t here.”

As we proceeded into the classroom, the children told us all about their seed-planting project. Simon’s seeds had sprouted first in the whole class—his pumpkin and his sunflower, they reported. Then, I easily believed Simon’s seeds had special magic. Now, I carry a riper view of rapid growth, having witnessed cancer gone wild.

Simon’s pumpkin and sunflower grew side by side that first summer. The cheery orange-yellow pumpkin blossoms burst open every morning until one day we discovered a mottled green sphere below a broad leaf. I think it was the size of a grapefruit in early July when Simon lost interest. My attempts to show him the plant—to break into his boredom and distract from his misery—met with disdain. Despite his indifference, I nurtured my own connection between Simon and his garden.

“Save the seeds,” said Simon’s hospice nurse one morning near the end. “That’s Simon’s pumpkin. Grow it every year.”

And I have. The sunflower, too, which opened its first bloom in a deep rust-brown, solemn and majestic, the day after Simon died.

Intrusive as a bee, I inspect each blossom. When I discover a pale green ball, fertilized and starting to swell, I relax a little and wonder if this one will grow to Jack-O-Lantern size. Or if I’ll make soup, or another pie inscribed: We miss you Simon.

Each year’s vines emerge from the earth like cords reaching into the present from an ever-receding past. Something is preserved in this ritual garden, some part of the bond begun when Simon’s embryo found my uterine wall. The plants grow, heedless of the ache I need their help to bear. And I measure the distance between my reality and the one I imagine in other families' homes where seedlings shrivel by the sink while children play in the summer sun. (c) 2009

In case an actual person cares…

I have temporarily retired a post from December 16, 2010, about shopping at IKEA. Apparently, a robot or two have turned up that post and are generating page views to that particular post. A similar thing is happening with the Google translate feature, through which someone (thing?) is calling up a mediocre rendering of the IKEA post. The care label images that I posted there have also made their way into various image databases.

I can see basic information about traffic to the site through blogspot statistics, which is how I have an idea of what's going on. I wondered if, perchance, someone had taken particular interest in my thoughts on IKEA and had forwarded the link to a bunch of people. But I think the robot theory, which I read about on a google forum, is a more likely explanation.

Anyway, in case you are a real PERSON and are interested in that post, please contact me via email at chapterthis@umich.edu.

Ending a long blog break

The Fourth of July has come and gone, and I have taken a long break from blogging. Among other impediments, the slow and methodical collapse of my laptop has kept me distinctly off-line. I'm working my way back into things electronic.

When was that wedding in England, Kate Middleton and her prince? Miriam was searching for images of Buckingham Palace for a school report. She was working at my desk, on my laptop, because that's where we have a printer. Suddenly my computer screen began to shudder. There was even a Safari screen warning of a possible Malware site, which at least opened the idea of something suspicious having happened. I rebooted and had several OK days. But the problem returned. Was it the screensaver going kerflooey? Then things worked fine again--well enough to download "The King's Speech" and play the whole film from iTunes to our TV screen. (If you've never rented a film on iTunes, you might not know that it takes several hours to pull in a feature-length film.)

I ran the little diagnostic CD, but it cheerfully reported finding nothing amiss. Repeatedly. The final death throes involved a flickering screen, freezing mid-task with no response to force quit moves, loss of mouse functionality, and finally the dreaded "You will have to shut down your computer and restart" in English, French and Japanese before the whole thing just stopped reacting at all when I pushed the power button.

Due to geography and the scarcity of Mac repair service, we got two trips to Stuttgart out of our quest to revive my 2008 MacBook Pro. Its predecessor had required a new hard drive at about this age, so I wondered if it might be that. The tech simply took the machine in hand, looked quizzical when I mentioned the virus alert, and said they'd be calling us.

Am I making this dramatic enough? It turned out to be the graphics card. A new motherboard took care of that. And they replaced the DVD drive, which I'd noticed failed to play a disc once, but I thought it might have been the disc. The motherboard was under warranty, and the DVD drive was a reinvestment we decided to make. We bantered back and forth on terminology until I grasped what had been repaired. "Hauptplatine" is a motherboard, for example. But not the "Festplatte," which is the hard drive. Nothing amiss with my data. All done.

In other news, we had a quiet celebration, just the three of us, on the Fourth of July. No one else around here seemed to notice, although if I mention "Unabhängigkeitstag"* (Independence Day), my German counterparts nod their understanding. Still, no fireworks (I understand you see them around the US Army bases in places like Heidelberg). No holiday. Just a Monday evening, and us three having a little pan-fried steak (we don't have a grill yet, having left our ashy Weber back in the States). And Miriam's fabulous flag cake.

A family collaboration: "Bisquit" cake (Mary), whipped cream as frosting (Markus), and the stars and stripes in blueberries and raspberries (Miriam--who also served as instigator of the project).

*For anyone with a desire to pronounce this delightful word:
Un-ab-häng-ig-keits-tag
oon-ahp-heng-iç-kites-tak
["ç" is the phonetic symbol for the sound at the beginning of the English word "hue"]

May 17th Coming Up

Certain dates acquire meaning. For most of my life, May 17th was a day I wouldn't notice passing by for any particular reason. Then I gave birth to my son, Simon, on a May 17th. And suddenly that date took on a grandeur and importance beyond any I had ever known. Not my own birthday, nor any other member of my family's. Not the day I got married. But May 17th, the day I became a mother.

Simon arrived eight days "late," having been predicted to arrive on May 9, 1997. It was a cool spring, and the flowering trees still huddled with their blossoms tight in buds. I don't recall being terribly impatient, that last "extra" week. Markus and I went in for one "post-due" monitoring appointment with an ultrasound check-up to see if things looked OK in there. I remember walking, in my winter coat, that Friday after the appointment. We strolled in the Arboretum at the University of Michigan, up near the hospital entrance. The nurse had offered to apply a bit of prostaglandin gel to my cervix to "help things along." But after checking for signs of softening and dilation, she decided I was on my way and would probably have my baby before the weekend was over.

She was right. I woke to sharp cramping pains in my low back the next morning. By mid-day it seemed like time to go in to the hospital. By 2:30 that afternoon we were holding our little boy (7 pounds, 13 ounces and fabulous).

When we took Simon home the next morning, the crabapples and cherries had begun to burst into voracious bloom. I wondered if Simon had been waiting for the warmer weather, just like the trees.

Tomorrow will be my first May 17th since moving back to Germany. And, as has been true for the past seven years, we have the strange task of marking the day of Simon's birth without him here to celebrate with. His last birthday was in 2004, when he turned seven.

For the first four years, we held Lemonade Stands on his birthday to remember him and raise money for childhood cancer research. In 2009 we took a trip to visit family in Germany (and for Markus to attend a conference in Istanbul). We celebrated Simon's birthday with my parents-in-law, eating a cake Miriam baked with her grandmother. In 2010, we were in Salt Lake City and kept the day just for the three of us. If I recall, we went out to eat at The Spaghetti Factory (in Trolley Square), which had been a favorite of Simon's.

We haven't made particular plans for tomorrow. We'll light our candles to remember Simon. Maybe we'll bake a cake or a pie. There's no easy way to do it. May 17th will never return to being any old day in May. And we had eight really good ones--the day Simon was born and the seven celebrations of that day with him.

Without him, we do our best. Maybe we'll take a short walk tomorrow. Or a bike ride. And remember.

A brief photo history:

Early May 1997

About a day old (1997)

Happy Birthday at Linda's house (1999)!

Happy Birthday in Family Housing, Ann Arbor (2000)!

Happy Birthday in Salt Lake City (2004)!

Lemonade Stand 2005.

Ten Years Ago

Listening while I type to The Takeaway--streaming radio from the USA to get a grasp on the news that Osama Bin Laden was found and shot and killed yesterday. The incidental music, of which there is a lot today, twangs and twists through an impure internet connection.

Where were you when you heard? asks John Hockenberry, the show's host. If the world were a facebook page, its status would have changed overnight, he states. I was in the car this morning, having dropped Miriam at school, then Markus at work, giving both of them a bus holiday on this first day back after Easter break. The German newscasters, it seemed, were talking about Osama Bin Laden in the past tense. What's this?

I admit that I do not often give coherent thought to Bin Laden. But hearing the news of his death has opened a pathway of thought that reaches back ten years.

Remember ten years ago? For us, April 2001 was a family trip to Germany and Austria. Almost-four-year-old Simon, eighteen-month-old Miriam, and Markus and I, still in our thirties. We visited Vodosek grandparents in Stuttgart and extended family in Austria. Airport security focused on Mad Cow Disease back then. When we returned to Detroit, the customs folks asked if we'd been near a farm. We hesitated. We'd walked out in the country a bit. Just to be sure, customs staff briefly confiscated our shoes and washed them clean.

Pre-September 11th. Pre-2001. A different world.

For us, the year brought considerably more than the stupefaction of being distant observers of horrifying events in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. In November, the father of my dearest childhood friend died of prostate cancer. I sang Vaughan Williams at his memorial service: Bright is the Ring of Words (Robert Louis Stevenson). Already unsteadied by world events, we of Oak Street in Oberlin, Ohio, had lost our invincibility. We needed no further convincing that it is possible to die of unfairness. Yet immediate, additional proof nonetheless came when Simon (then four and a half) was diagnosed that December with the cancer that took him when he was seven.

I remember that April trip as being rooted in BEFORE. Before so many difficult changes. Below are a few photos that came before our first digital camera (scanned in from prints). We didn't know anything yet. But looking at Simon now, I can't suppress an obsessive thread of wondering if he was already carrying cancer. What's that yellow color in his skin? Just an off-color in the photo? It's hard to let that sort of thing go.

I have a volume of Vaughan Williams (Songs of Travel) out from the library. When the Bin Laden news cut me loose from any feeling of planned activity this morning, I eventually found myself at the piano, singing through the song I had sung in November 2001 at the memorial service for Jeff Blodgett, a man noted for his oratory:

Bright is the ring of words
When the right man rings them,
Fair the fall of songs
When the singer sings them.
Still they are carolled and said --
On wings they are carried --
After the singer is dead
And the maker buried.

Low as the singer lies
In the field of heather,
Songs of his fashion bring
The swains together.
And when the west is red
With the sunset embers,
The lover lingers and sings
And the maid remembers.
(Robert Louis Stevenson)

I'm not sure that I can make sense of any of it, even ten years later. But I do know that certain events require us to live through past events again. And perhaps during these iterations we come closer to glimpsing what has actually occurred.

Today I remember Jeff Blodgett. I remember traveling with two adorable young children in Europe. I remember the eerie stillness of every plane in the United States being kept on the ground. I remember singing in Jeff's honor. I remember (barely and with effort) how we exited the highway of life as we knew it and began to travel on this other one.

So many things, not least of them 9/11, could have turned out differently. But here we are now, and it's the only place we can ever hope to understand anything from.

Flashback to April 2001

Strollering in Stuttgart, April 2001.

Miriam, the architect.

Simon, the tree climber.

Simon making Easter eggs with Oma.