Saying Queer Out Loud

I am on a bus to Portland, Oregon to meet up with my daughter. I have a few pieces of lined paper and I am furiously trying to put down some ideas which have been circulating in my mind all week. It's about hope in what appears to be a hopeless world.

My daughter gives me hope. She is thoughtfully edgy and uniquely herself in a world that smothers uniqueness. When she was nearly fourteen, she “came out” to me as a Lesbian. Like a moment of historical significance, I remember exactly where we were: sitting facing each other on our living room couch. As her confident words flowed, my love for her increased. There was never any question for me about the wonderfulness of my daughter, but I did have fears about the world's discrimination. I also wanted her, if she were to so choose, to be able to marry and have a family. But I was getting ahead of myself, for there was so much more for me to learn and to consider than my teenage daughter's future marriage.

The bus arrives right on time at the Portland Train Station. I am full of getting-to-see my daughter energy as I hop off the bus, speed-walk towards Burnside and enter Powell's Bookstore, where we have agreed to rendezvous. I look around expecting her to already be there and make my way to the Cafe. I cell phone and find she is still on the Max. So after ordering a coffee and a biscuit, I sit and wait. Mothering has become just this, long pauses of waiting in between brief and fleeting encounters. With her statuesque beauty framed by the wooden cafe entrance and her reddish-auburn hair softly waving, my daughter arrives.

We are both excited because after dinner, we will return to Powell's for a reading/talk by Dan Savage and Terry Miller. Dan Savage, a sex advice columnist from Seattle, created an Internet site with his husband, Terry at www.itgetsbetter.com. They produced the first video for LGBTQ youth about how life gets better after the bullying and marginalized existence of high school. Their personal confessions about their own difficult adolescent lives encouraged thousands of other videos from both famous and every day Gay and Straight adult allies to pour into the site. Now they have edited these visual entries into the first It Gets Better book.

At twenty-one my daughter has made it through the adolescent bullshit, a first-time living together, horrendous break-up romance, and is on her way to becoming a solid, creative, compassionate human being. After reading the myriad sad yet strength producing stories from It Gets Better, I realize I will never fully understand what my daughter must have gone through, and may still be going through, during her growing up years. I stand on the sidelines as her truest supporter waving a rainbow flag but I will never know what “liking and dating girls”, the phrase she uses to describe herself, means for her.

When she came out to me, I quickly became a mother lion and a PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) mom. I immersed myself in the LGBTQ world, becoming friends with long term same-sex couples, learning what it meant to be Transgender, learning what it meant to be Queer. My daughter hated the word Lesbian, and as she developed relationships she hated the word partner or lover. Girlfriend worked for her but most straight people understand “girl friend” as meaning “friend.” When she sent a picture of her and her long-time love to grandma, grandma's reply was, “Nice picture of you and your roommate.” I am extremely proud of my daughter and I never hesitated to share about her and her romance. So I'd try to say girlfriend with an added and “I mean girl friend in the sense of her love.”

For a while my daughter preferred “Queer” and I did try and do try to wrap my head around the use of this claimed back, descriptive title for my dear one. I asked an older “Dyke” friend once about my uncomfortableness with the Queer word and she suggested I say, “Queer Identified.”

Sitting across from each other in the dimly lit and cozy Pastini's, we have a pleasant dinner and joyfully talk about our days. I stare at my daughter as she, with great animation, shares stories about her retail experiences: “There is no way to carry around a bunch of prom dresses all at once without looking completely ridiculous and ending up covered in glitter.” Then she proceeds to describe some of her customers as if they were fictional characters, full of whims and unfilled wants. This part-time job has immersed her in American consumer culture and she is loved because she listens and cares. Suddenly, I just have to blurt out: “This is so fun, having dinner with my adult daughter.” We both laugh as we head out the door and back down the boulevard to Powell's.

I grab a couple of seats in the back row while she browses. It is half an hour before Dan and Terry speak, but it is already standing-room only. Dan and Terry enter, two ordinary guys in jeans, tennis shoes and t-shirts. They comfortably stand at the podium together and take turns reading essays from It Gets Better. They have been a couple for sixteen years and have one son, D.J., now thirteen. Terry is the quiet, stay at home dad, while Dan Savage has gained fame and maybe some fortune through his sex columns, podcasts and books. You can see how much they love each other by watching their faces while the other one reads or speaks. Each face beams devoted pride and unconditional passion. Terry prefers not to be in the limelight, but as a bullied youth, he feels the weight of the responsibility to be a Gay mentor and role model. Dan, on the other hand, has no problem putting words to his causes: the unjust and bigoted treatment of Gay adolescents, the discriminatory way many American States view same sex couples by not allowing same sex marriage.

Dan's outspokenness, both in his frank speech and his honest writing, includes the “Queer” word and plenty of “Fucks.” I have been known to use the F word myself and I always tell my daughter my teenage students taught me all I know. As an English teacher I am an enthusiastic lover of words and I realize all the lists of “bad words” are only bad because we label them so. Words have the power we give them. I keep listening to the “Queer” word and occasional “Faggot” coming out of Dan's mouth. I understand that by claiming our enemies' derogatory, forbidden terms we lessen their sting. I know words can harm. My high school daughter mentioned often how she would hear “Faggot” and “That's so Gay” wafting down the high school hallways while she transitioned to her next class. I know I don't want to use words that hurt, only words that heal. And I think this is what Dan Savage is trying to do through his truthful speech.

So what is my truthful speech going to be? We live in an assumed heterosexual, conformist world. To stand out, to be different in any aspect of our lives is to be ridiculed. And to be Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer or Questioning is to be on the far end of the conformist spectrum. But this is what I love about my Queer daughter: she dares to be her genuine self, she dares to contradict the cultural norm and by this contradiction to expand the definition of what it means to be an authentic, self-actualized human being. She motivates a more tolerant, open me who walks outside the straight and narrow. Diversity and Queerness are gifts to all humanity I understand now. If I say Queer out loud, I make the once hate filled word a term of endearment and respect for the richness of an edgy, unique life fully accepted and lived. I love my Queer daughter beyond measure!

© 2011

Tortuga

 What makes us happy? Are we here to try to become happy? Or are we happy because we are here? Sometimes I fall into the trap of thinking that if I just buy this pair of shoes or replace my kitchen floor with terra cotta tiles, I'll be happy. For a few moments I do have a new exuberance and lightness to my being as my feet feel the comfort of those new contoured sandals. But after walking around in them for a few weeks, I'm once again at ground level. It doesn't seem to be things which lift my spirit, but experiences.

During Spring break 2002, I had an experience which made me rethink the definition of happiness. My daughter and I signed up for an EcoTeach adventure to Costa Rica. This is a trip for kids and their parents, which is more of an educational/hands-on journey than a tour. One of the hands-on tasks was to assist in the extinction prevention in Costa Rica of the endangered leatherback turtle.

After thirty hours on a plane and a brief respite in the capital, San Jose, we were whisked away down through the Cloud Forest to our second destination, Tortuga Marina, a turtle station amongst the jungle clime on the eastern coast of Costa Rica. We arrived near dusk to find a primitive headquarters built for low environmental impact. There was no electricity and each pair of bunk bed rooms shared a simple bathroom with “sensitive toilets.” By the end of our stay, we were four rooms to a bathroom rather than two. Each room was equipped with a candle and each bed with a thin blanket. Since I had been sweating all day from the heat and humidity, the need for a nighttime cover was the furthest thing from my mind.

As we groped around for matches, lit our candles and found our flashlights, we quickly settled in and changed to long dark pants. Though not bunking with my daughter I requested a turtle patrol shift with her. Our shift would be after dinner from 8 p.m. to midnight. Our small group of five would be led by devoted patrollers who as conservationists volunteer to do this every night.

During a simple dinner of rice, beans and fruit, we began noticing a gathering of clouds and the darkening of the sky. As our eating was accompanied by constant sweating, both my daughter and I ignored the idea of bringing our rain ponchos on the patrol. What’s a little rain! It would be wonderful to be wet and cool.

Our dark pants and shirts would be our beach camouflage. Flashlights were also not allowed; only patrol leaders carried small darkroom red lights. Among the interesting facts we learned that night was not only do these leatherback turtles come back every three years to the same beach to lay their eggs, but they can be misdirected away from their return to the shore by bright lights or bright colored fabrics. It is the night’s naturally lit reflection on the foam waves that guides them in to this home from deeper waters.

We excitedly gathered with our leaders to exchange “holas” and to receive our safety briefing. The nighttime patrols' main purpose was to discourage poachers from harvesting the newly laid turtle eggs, or even killing the turtle for meat. With the establishment of this station five short years ago, poaching has been cut in half in this part of Costa Rica.

Our leaders instructed us to stay together as a group, with several leaders in front and one leader, called a guard, walking near the edge of the coastal woods. If we were to see a turtle, she must always be approached cautiously from behind and never from her front. Under a quiet, blackened, impending stormy sky, we were ready to begin our patrol.

Though I had been exhausted after only a few days of non-stop activities, once my feet hit the sandy shore, I felt invigorated. We walked cautiously, chatting sparingly, attentively listening to our patrol leaders. The gray sky made the night quite dank, and without flashlights we stumbled over driftwood. About twenty minutes into our walk, the front patrol leaders made a rush forward. Possible poachers were sited a few yards ahead. We waited while our leaders confronted them. The moisture collected above us and we felt a few drops of welcomed rain. This impending storm only seemed to increase the night's drama. The poachers were peacefully directed away from the beach, and we continued walking.

The rain pelted us steadily, the wetness replacing my perspiration. My daughter and the others seemed totally focused on their mission. Suddenly there was a flurry of activity. Patrol leaders were running back and forth and up ahead there was a flicker of something moving in the foggy darkness. Our main leader, Juan, returned and said a leatherback was a few yards away. Our hearts beat faster. We gathered together and sat on a nearby log. Other leaders came with further news: the leatherback was digging her nest in the sand and we would be able to see her laying her eggs. Juan explained our tasks and asked for volunteers. He needed two people to measure the turtle, a person to record this info and two people to catch and count the eggs. Alison and I volunteered to be turtle measurers and my daughter Aspen and another girl Arab would be catching the eggs. We had hit pay dirt!

Turtle eggs are considered by many in Costa Rica to be a delicacy. To preserve the leatherback, eggs are collected in March and put in incubators to insure the hatching of as many leatherback babies as possible. During the month of June these babies are then returned to the sea as if they had hatched naturally in their sandy nest.

Suddenly the storm exploded and we were drenched. I welcomed being clean after a hot sweaty day, but slowly I caught myself shivering. All our energies, however, were focused on the adventure at hand. Juan repeated his request to only approach the turtle from the rear. “She must not see us,” stated Juan. Being in a trance the leatherback would not even know her eggs were being taken. She would assume her eggs lay buried in the sand.

We crept forward to where the turtle continued to dig her nest. My eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness and when I finally could see the mother turtle I was completely taken aback. She was gigantic! Looking through the sheets of rain she appeared to take up half the beach. She had dug a fairly large hole. Arab was down in this hole holding back the turtle’s flipper while my daughter held a long plastic bag and was helping to catch the eggs as they were being laid. Another patrol group had been radioed about our turtle and was now standing next to us.

As I stood behind Aspen and Arab with the windy showers blowing in my face and with my soaked shirt and pants clinging to my skin, I felt connected to a universe that had been existing for millions of years, before the dawn of humans. The waves were pounding against the shore, the foam was being lit by a soft, barely visible moon and my daughter who was now knee deep in mud turned around while still maintaining contact with the turtle and said, “Mom this is the most incredible experience I have ever had.” Tears mingled with rain as I realized this was a moment of bliss that could never be bought. This was a moment being lived.

Some of the group signaled their need to return to warm lodging. Aspen, I and several others echoed our commitment to staying. We did not want to miss seeing this mother turtle make her way back to the sea. Her egg laying finished, she appeared to be resting. Juan said it can take a leatherback hours to return to the ocean waters. We continued our patient, reverent watch. Steadily this huge, sometimes awkward, but deeply graceful beast swirled her enormous flippers through the sandy terrain.

I found myself inside a capsule of stalled time. I heard each breath I took; I felt each drop of rain as my eyes followed this creature's every movement. I felt incredibly honored to be alive, standing on that Costa Rica beach. My daughter and I held hands as the swooshing of this leatherback's powerful flippers inched her towards the sea. She got to the water, the clouds parted, the rain stopped, the moon flickered and she dove and disappeared. We saw no other turtles that night, but we needed only our one miracle. And with this one miraculous experience my daughter and I have been filled with a life time's worth of happiness.

© 2011

Soldier Boy

Ettrick Alvo Koch, came home from World War II to bury his German-born father, who was killed by a hit and run drunk driver. Nearing the end of high school, I began to understand how this war, and his experiences fighting on the front lines in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe, buried the gentle, sensitive man who would be my father. I am a baby boomer, born a few years after my father’s return. He met my mother before the war at the Glendale Star newspaper office in California. She was petite and well groomed, with dark hair and blue eyes. He was six feet tall with, according to my mother, a John Wayne swagger and charm. Unfortunately, my mother was engaged to marry her high school sweetheart, Rex. When my father came home with broken bones and malaria, my mother visited him in the hospital. During the four years my father was on the front lines, my mother had married, been unhappy, divorced, and given up her first-born.

I realize now my parents’ union was based on a foundation of deep sadness and loss. They created a marriage and family to rescue themselves. The heart of my father was family; this was all he talked about: how important it was for a family to stick together against the dog-eat-dog world. With the help of his father-in-law, he built a solid cement wall around our entire backyard. Our corner lot with the three-bedroom home became his kingdom and we children became part of his spiraling, dysfunctional web. When my siblings and I were young, he was a loving, devoted man. As we inched towards adolescence, all the anger compressed inside gushed out. Dad wanted home, family, security, understanding and sympathy for his pain. But the older I got, the unhappier my father became.

Beginning in elementary school, Dad often took us to the local rifle range for target practice. He was an excellent marksman. While we excitedly tried to shoot and make a mark anywhere on the target, Dad consistently hit a bull’s eye.

My father started sharing war stories. His favorite, the one about the tomatoes, began during a soupy black night. His 30^th Infantry was slogging through the European countryside. Mortar fire echoed off the hillsides. As my dad relived these moments, the cigarette, dangling at the corner of his mouth, lit up the raging purpose in his eyes. We leaned in close to my father and couldn’t wait to hear what happened next.

It had rained the day, before and my father shivered as he hiked through the field. His pack was heavy, his gun loaded, his nerves on survival mode. As his feet squished through the dark dirt, he stopped and looked down. He noticed something red beside his mud splattered boots. He reached and touched a gooey, soft roundness. To his amazement he was walking through a tomato garden. Lagging behind the other soldiers, my dad picked tomatoes and shoved them one by one in his mouth. The juice rolled down his grinning, weary face. He picked more tomatoes and shoved them into his pack. Soon dad’s comrades turned and saw dad’s tomato stained smile and the tomatoes he carried to share with them. It became a tomato feast with everyone happily stuffing themselves. Dad always said this was one of the best days of his life.

While telling this story, my father became young again. Though mentioning The War brought an intense and nervous gravity to my father’s demeanor, the tomato story revealed his humorous optimism. No matter how much we plagued our father to tell us more war stories, he never told stories about shooting or killing. To hear Dad talk about The War we would never have known that he fired a gun. He only spoke about the awful rations, the closeness of he and his buddies, the time he stood at attention and saw Winston Churchill stroll by. Mostly, he expressed amazement at his survival.

As I entered adulthood, I saw the damage that The War had done to my father’s soul. He worked hard as a self-employed gardener, came home, showered, put on a suit and constantly talked to himself in the bathroom mirror: “Goddamn bastards…world’s gone to hell...what am I to do?” Before becoming a gardener, he had worked for the Los Angeles Water and Power Company. There, he also occasionally talked to himself. He was a harmless, lonely, disillusioned young man who had difficulty transitioning from soldier to family man. His co-workers became brutal rather than supportive. For his self-talk, they had him committed to a stay at a mental hospital. As a child I wondered what had happened to my father when he was gone for several weeks. After a series of involuntary shock treatments, my father was deemed “normal,” and allowed to come home. But with his unemployment, we were poverty-stricken. My mother had my two-year-old brother taken care of by her parents during the week so she could begin working at our local savings and loan.

This hospital incident was a turning point in my father’s life. His brain had been cracked open, and the result was despondency and periodic violent outbursts. Through the years his work with the earth as a gardener gave him back the grounding he had lost. But he was never the same. His humor, his storytelling flattened. Unhappiness swelled and put a depressive damper on our household. Whenever the truck pulled into the driveway at the end of his work day, we anxiously cringed, not knowing his mood.

War movies, preaching and storytelling soothed my father. He desperately wanted to love his children and to give them “a better life” but he didn’t know how. As we left to lead our own lives, he frantically clung to us. He would show up at my college apartment unannounced to take me out to dinner. I would dutifully sit with him and soak up the sadness he exuded. But I was entering my rebellious phase and wanted little to do with this depressed man.

After a year studying abroad, I remember my father meeting me at the Los Angeles Airport at three in the morning. His tan, weather-worn face was wrinkled, his hair disheveled, his formerly tall, thin body was overweight and bent. As he timidly walked towards me, I felt a stab of emotional pain: my father had gotten old! His shyness in sharing his feelings was pushed aside in the predawn darkness as he told me, “I missed you so much.”

By his sixth decade, Dad's softened anger allowed him to accept his humble fate. He loved nothing more than working in his garden or on his house. He remained the king of his small kingdom, but now he treated Mom with respect. He frequently told me how much he loved her and how much he loved me. His life had betrayed him, and he never fully understood why. Although he died before the Gulf War, the War on Terror and the Iraqi invasion, he never knew what to make of Vietnam.

We placed his ashes in a small garden at Forest Lawn. I cried more than I have ever cried before. I cried for the young, sensitive, intellectually curious boy my father lost and I cried for the mellowed, older gentleman he became. The one object I wanted was his Bible. He never attended church, but this Bible became his memory book. Inside were collected magazine and newspaper clippings, pictures of us children, report cards, personal ramblings and a few school essays we had written. I opened this treasured book and carefully unfolded the brown stained articles.They included statements about the perils and futility of war:

“…Man, biologically considered, and whatever else he may be into the bargain, is the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on his own species.” From The Philosophy of William James

“…The 3^rd Infantry Division (my father’s division) had suffered more casualties than any other division in the entire American Army. You don’t celebrate things like that.”

My father had double-underscored the last line above: “You don’t celebrate things like

that.”

When, in the early eighties, I visited Russia as part of a Women’s Journey for Peace, we were welcomed at a special ceremonial luncheon by the Mayor of Minsk. “I met and fought with American soldiers and they became my friends, my compatriots. I will never forget them and I hope we will eventually learn the lessons of war.”

Emotionally responding to the Mayor's simple words, and without realizing what I was doing, I stood up. The Mayor smiled and leaned forward. “My father fought in The War,” I said, “and I am touched by your words and honored to be here.”

Stepping down from the podium, the Mayor reached into his pocket. “Your father was a brave man.” He shook my hand and handed me a small silver bison. “This,” he said, “is my city’s symbol of courage and bravery and I give it to you as a token of remembrance.”

The silver bison stands on the bookshelf as I write these words. Tears flow as I relive this experience, and as I reread a typed note written in response to one of my high school essays and tucked inside my father’s Bible:

B10 English, Students Victoria, 15 and Dad, 45. Subject: Simple Enjoyment

Our Blanket of Stars

…and the sky of blue mist with its hem of woven stars that often seems so wonderful to you and me, Dad.

We find endless beauty as we look up and lift our eyes to a golden sunset…a fluff of clouds…a thunderhead of majestic importance…how fast the sky’s expression changes with the power of a storm.

I enjoy your phrase, ‘hem of woven stars,’ Victoria. The sky is a magic lighted highway…a parade of lasting beauty. I even enjoyed it during the war…with bombs bursting in air…I looked to see if ‘our’ sky was still there.

Let’s be thankful this miracle of miracles has been enjoyed by you and me.

© 2011

Walking Through Walls

In 1989 my daughter is born and the Berlin Wall comes down. In 2011 people all over the Middle East are rising up and demanding free, democratic societies.

I am in my early twenties, sitting under a tree by a small lake in West Berlin. I am furiously writing in my journal, sensing that if I do not put my words down quick enough, my thoughts and memories will fall into the water and drown. It is 1973 and I am living in Dusseldorf, West Germany as a “Mittelschule” English teacher. After being a student at Gottingen Universitat from 1968 to 69, all I could think about was returning to Europe. And here I am in West Berlin on a paid-for, organized trip for foreign teachers. We have sat in the third row of the opera house and seen Beethoven's Fidelio. We have climbed the huge stone steps to a floor-to-ceiling windowed monolith to hear the Berlin Philharmonic. The opera's haunting overture, the symphony's musical power, the history and art I have only previously read about in text books captured here in museums have made my head and heart spin.

As a foreign traveler, however, I am not comfortable in groups. Similar to when I was a university student, I want to blend in, become one with this ancestral country of mine. And so I break away on my own and plan some day trips to East Berlin. East Berlin, East Germany has barely been mentioned during our lectures and discussions. That other country, the one behind The Wall, houses Germans too. As a student near the East/West German border, I felt the rumble of Soviet tanks as they quelled the late sixties Czechoslovakian discontent. I want to see; I want to know what is behind the curtain.

I take the tram to Check Point Charlie, the easiest cross over station. As I enter the austere, drab colored station, the Russian guards and men behind the windowed counters seem to be staring at me. I feel chilled to the bone as I hand over my passport and take a seat on an uncomfortable wooden bench. The other people waiting with me are silent. My curious eyes wander to the serious faces of the mannequin guards. When my name is called, I walk slowly to the window and try to politely smile. The tall, glaring man shoves my passport forward through a small opening and motions me onward to the right. One of the mannequins moves an arm and opens the iron gate to let me pass. I walk through to the other side of Check Point Charlie and enter a world that has literally been stuck at the end of World War II.

Where West Berlin has been a hub of cars and people and modern buildings, the streets of the East are deadly silent. I feel as though I am in a science fiction movie. There are a few people walking towards the main, open square and I follow them. This square is surrounded by apartment structures, worn and in need of repair. I sit on a stone ledge of what must have once been a water fountain. I look and I wonder. A few people are carrying cloth shopping bags; one elderly gentleman is smoking, some are conversing softly. Nothing is loud here; nothing is bright. Grays, browns and blacks dominate...even the sky is covered in sooty clouds. 

I wander from the square down a narrow, typically European stone-cobbled street. At the end of this street I turn and see the still remaining debris of bombed out concrete buildings. As I head back to the square I notice a small theater with a poster advertising a Bertolt Brecht play, Galileo Galilee. I jot down the performance dates and times. This is the Germany I want to see. This is the history I want to understand.

The square is more crowded when I return. I yearn to communicate with someone but find I am terribly shy. Then suddenly a young woman standing next to me starts to speak. I turn towards her and reply in my finest German. I do not look American and she is surprised when she learns I am a visiting teacher. We converse comfortably as women often do and she invites me to her small apartment on the other side of our meeting place. I quickly accept and just as quickly find myself inside a three-room living space made for one occupant on the Western side, but housing a whole family here. As we stand in the kitchen while she makes us coffee, I notice how simple and sparse her living quarters are. The cupboards have only canned goods. One loaf of bakery bread sits on the counter and there is little fresh fruit or produce. We sip our coffee and she talks about the long lines to buy food but her talk is not negative or bitter. She has grown up here and this is all she knows. Fresh food or canned food, it is all the same. Whatever is available is what they eat. Her brother comes home and we exchange “ Guten Tags”. Their parents both have jobs and for this they are grateful. At the end of our visit, I vow to come back the next day and our smiles brighten the drab surroundings.

On my next cross over to East Berlin, I feel I am coming home. My visit with my friends is not until the late afternoon. I have no plans except to walk and keep my eyes open. I see war monuments...huge warriors on horseback...standing ominously in the middle of once lush green parks. I veer away from the main streets and to my delight come upon an old museum housing ancient artifacts and paintings. It's open and I pay the fee and enter. The prevalent dust and stillness make me wonder if anyone knows about this treasure. There appears an older, sturdy, round woman and a slender, dark-haired young man in the next room. We glance at one another and as only seems to happen with strangers on a foreign journey, we end up in pleasant conversation. The woman and man are an aunt and a nephew visiting from Hungary. Having German as my second language has opened more exotic doors for me than I can count. This older woman and I make a fast and intimate connection. She literally takes me under her historical and personal wing, feeding me tidbits of knowledge about the museum's contents, about her life in Budapest, Hungary and how this is their first visit to East Berlin. Their travel is restricted to the Eastern Bloc countries, though she hopes one day to visit the West.

I am elated when I leave the museum. I have a Hungarian address in my pocket and a sincere invitation to have homemade goulash! It will be much later the following year, but I do make it to Hungary to visit the sister of an Hungarian/American friend of mine and I do have a warm, goulash-and-pastry-filled visit with this woman friend.

Back at the square I head to the northern apartment and ring the bell. My East Berlin friends greet me as if I am a close relative. We sit down to coffee and kuchen and deep conversation. The brother is soon to join the army and when this happens he will not be allowed to have any contact with any American. They have given me their address and we do write for a few months, but just as the brother predicted the writing stops when he becomes an East German soldier. They have been gracious, generous hosts and I have never forgotten their kindness. The sky is fading from day to night as they walk me to the crossing station. We stop at the entrance and hug. It feels so awkward to me that they can go no further. They cannot go where I can go. They cannot walk to the western side of their own city. They smile and wave as I enter the building. My heart, however, is heavy and sad. The Wall, the guards are there to keep us apart. But we human beings “Menschen” have met and we have touched one another and cannot be separated for long.

I return to East Berlin one more time. I visit a small museum located directly on the East/West German border by the Wall. Here there are pictures and tributes to people who have attempted to cross the Wall to the West. Some have successfully escaped and some have not. People have hidden in special compartments under cars and in trunks. People have climbed the Wall and made it. People have climbed the Wall and been shot. As I sit in the theater watching Bertolt Brecht I know why humans never stop striving for freedom and justice. It's in our genes to make connections, to climb over obstacles if we are to grow and change and develop as people. And if we can't climb over walls, we will walk through them.

© 2011