Somewhere in the corner of my cupboard

In the corner of my cupboard, underneath a pile of clothes I no longer fit in, is a t-shirt from my dad. There is a photo image of an “Old Fart” (him) parachuting. He’s wearing a helmet of sorts. His face is squeeze up almost beyond recognition. His arms are extended outwards. He’s in the middle of a free fall. There is this wonderful goofy expression on his face.

The story behind this t-shirt is the following…

On the occasion of my father’s 70^th birthday, he spontaneously decided to gift himself a trip to Australia. A friend of his had sailed his boat from Canada to Chile, and then over to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. My father, apparently on a whim, decided to visit his friend and spend some time with him on his boat.

He took a bus journey through the outback of Australia: Sydney to a harbour where his chum’s boat was anchoured in the Great Barrier Reef. While making the journey, he noticed a sign in some town offering tandem parachuting adventures. Pay up front. Climb onto the plane. Make a jump.

Years before, he’d mentioned he had only two regrets; not having parachuted and not having gone paragliding. So, during that bus stop in the middle of Australia, he thought, “What the heck.” He walked up to the airfield and asked to be on their next jump.

He went up and parachuted, but he was so overwhelmed by the experience, his mind blanked. Therefore, he went up a second time. Just so he could remember the experience. It was on the second jump, the photo was taken.

He got the t-shirts printed up for his family as a way of announcing the event. We had no idea. I’m not sure any one of us would have given his our blessing if he had decided to ask us if we thought parachuting for the first time at 70 years old was a good thing.

Now, many years later, I toast you, Dave, for your craziness. Thank heavens you took the jump. Thank heavens you showed us that life is meant to take risks.

Everyday Heroes V

Everyday heroes we encounter are important influences on our lives. They have the ability to alter our thinking and, often, even the direction of our decision-making. This post is part of a series I am writing about the heroes I have met.



Name: Ruth
Profession: corporate law
Marital Status: married
Children: a daughter
Place of Origin: Cameroon

How we met:

Ruth came to live in Germany with her young daughter a year and a half ago. She came in the dead of winter. Ruth knew how to speak German and she had conscientiously studied all the facts and figures of this new country she was marrying into. What she couldn’t learn in the warm and wonderful climate of Douala, was what winter cold feels like. How deep damp winter weather can hurt you teeth and bones.

How the winter darkness can sap all the residues of sunny joy stored from childhood memories from the marrow of those bones.

How impenetrable are the blank facades in the faces of her German neighbours.

How confusing is the bureaucratic machinery that every citizen and resident must comply to.

Yet, Ruth proves to have more resilience and resourcefulness and quiet charm than all those dour beings and circumstances that are scattering stones in her way. She has forged loving relationships with her new extended family. She has become mightily efficient at navigating herself around the labyrinth called German bureaucracy. She’s helped her daughter find a place in her new neighbourhood. She has become a wise and kind friend.

What she has shown me:

She has shown an ability to move with assurance in a strange culture. She has show me that even if you are confused and at times desperate, you can’t stop moving in the general direction you see as forward. Whether it is forward or not, is almost irrelevant, just take purposeful steps as best you can.

Everyday Heroes IV

Everyday heroes we encounter are important influences on our lives. They have the ability to alter our thinking and, often, even the direction of our decision-making. This post is part of a series I am writing about the heroes I have met.



Name: Karen
Profession: librarian
Marital Status: married
Children: two daughters
Place of Origin: Ohio, USA

How we met:

When I first came to live in Germany, all those years ago, it was winter. It was dark and dismal outdoors. Indoors it was lonely. I felt lamed.

Not knowing how to speak German was a barrier. As the only woman in a large department of socially inept engineers, it wasn’t easy getting to know people. When I met an American woman, Karen, whose husband was an officer in the US Army Base down the road from where I worked, my world changed.

Karen was actively immersed in the social and cultural life of the city; unlike many of the officers’ wives who lived very isolated lives on base. She was a member of the Bach Choir, part of the women’s literary society, and active in the neighbourhood community where she and her husband lived on the outskirts of the city.

What made her special was her willingness to (learn and) speak German, as well as her willingness to (learn and) respect the various social norms prevalent to the area. Up until the time I met Karen, I had been struggling unsuccessfully to learn German. And, my attitude towards the mountain of social norms I was being buried under was, “If you could just leave me alone, I’d love to leave you alone.” Karen, in her infinitely gracious and gentle manner helped me to surrender myself to my lot. Through example, she taught me more about how to be happy living as a foreigner in a foreign land than anyone I have met before or since.

What she taught me:

The first way to get to know someone is through language, then shared interests and experiences, and finally, through shared sense of humour and value system. She also showed me that there wasn’t any short cut to get there.

Everyday Heroes III

Everyday heroes we encounter are important influences on our lives. They have the ability to alter our thinking and, often, even the direction of our decision-making. This post is part of a series I am writing about the heroes I have met.



Name: Maria and Helmut
Profession: social worker, mathematician
Marital Status: married
Children: three daughters
Place of Origin: small villages in southern Germany

How we met:

Maria and Helmut moved into an apartment in the house where I was living when Maria was veryvery pregnant with their first daughter. The owner of the house was an eccentric landscape architect, whose offices and private residence were on the ground floor. I was living in the attic apartment. Maria and Helmut moved into the apartment on the second floor.

Maria and Helmut were the first “alternative” people I met in Erlangen, a politically conservative region of Germany. Alternatives, are people who are green, liberal, environmentally conscientious and politically engaged. Now, I may have been liberal, but more or less out from default: being young and having artistic leanings. I had no notion whatsoever about any of the other things. It took me quite a while to find out what those things were, because Maria and Helmut don’t talk much about their beliefs, they live them.

What changed my thinking:

These two people have shown me over the past three decades in the most mild and graceful way that social and political conviction is not ideology but a life practice.

Everyday Heroes II

Everyday heroes we encounter are important influences on our lives. They have the ability to alter our thinking and, often, even the direction of our decision-making. This post is part of a series I am writing about the heroes I have met.




Name: Professor Wang
Profession: professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Marital Status: married
Children: don’t know
Place of Origin: Mainland China

How we met:

Professor Wang never extended a cheerful greeting to any of his students when he encountered them outside the lecture hall. Unless you counted the clearing-his-throat greeting he occasionally extended as he walked pass, staring straight ahead. All of his students could imitate that particular clearing-his-throat sound perfectly. When Professor Wang gifted a student with it, the student was likely to speak in an awed voice recounting the momentous moment to others.

Students either loved or hated Professor Wang, whereas Professor Wang seemed to hold all students in complete indifference. Not in the sense he didn’t care, but in perfectly balanced neutrality.

It was said that Professor Wang discovered the transistor. (For those of you who don’t know what this component is, it represents the beginning of electronics.) Not as the Nobel Prize winner, but as the PhD student that did all of the legwork for the two professors who received the acclaim.

I took two of Professor Wang’s courses: Quantum Physics and Advance Laser Theory. Professor Wang’s teaching style was Zen-like in it’s simplicity. He would walk into the lecture hall with only a piece of chalk in his hand, write the last formula he wrote on the board in the previous lecture and then continue to fill the blackboard with endless mathematical arguments and extrapolation of physical phenomena.

What changed my choice of career:

Professor Wang was invited to spend a sabbatical in some think tank in the States. Upon his return, we asked him if he would give a lecture on his field of research. The next day he enters the lecture hall with his customary piece of chalk, as well as a large map of the human body’s meridian lines. To our surprise, he proceeded to give us a three-hour passionate lecture about “Chinese medicine and the future of western diagnostics”. After the lecture, I went and asked him where I could go to work in medical equipment engineering. He told me Germany.

Everyday Heroes I

Everyday heroes we encounter are important influences on our lives. They have the ability to alter our thinking and, often, even the direction of our decision-making. This post is part of a series I am writing about the heroes I have met.

Name: Sandhya

Profession: mechanical engineer

Marital Status: married

Children: son and daughter

Place of Origin: Pune, India

How we met:

In 1985, a friend of mine asked me whether there was any possibility that I would take on a boarder from India for six months. Sandhya had been selected by a UN committee to be included in a group of 28 women engineers from various developing countries to go and do research at universities in England and Germany. Sandhya had arrived in Germany three weeks previous and was in misery. The university made arrangements for her to live in a student residence. She hadn’t had much to eat since she arrived because she could not face the general filth of the communal kitchen and the stink of the meat. My friend knew I was a vegetarian and so she hoped I would allow Sandhya to live with me until her contract was over and she returned to Pune.

The arrangement was that she would have my living room as a bedroom and we would share kitchen and bathroom. In my mind, it was just a practical solution to a bad situation. She was having a hard time adapting to the southern German love of meat in every form and manner. I had a room she could use. I wasn’t looking for friendship.

When I met her, we went through the guidelines of this arrangement: we’d each buy our own food, each person wash their own dishes, I liked to shower in the mornings if she could shower in the evenings, she could do laundry any time she wished, she could use the phone and just needed to keep a list of the calls she makes… It wasn’t a business arrangement (she wasn’t paying rent), but it was rather cut and dry.  

The first evening she came back from working at the research institute she was loaded down with all sorts of groceries. After a perfunctory “how was your day” sort of conversation, I went into my bedroom to read and listen to music. In the next hour, all sorts of delightful aromas began to whiff under my door. A tentative knock, Sandhya asked whether I would like to share her dinner with her. I thought it would be rude not to do so on the first evening of her arrival, and accepted happily. It goes beyond my ability to describe how delectable the meal was.

This procedure happened the next night and the night after, at which time it became very apparent that Sandhya loved cooking, I loved eating, and we had endless topics to converse about.

 

How she changed my thinking:

Sandhya had a husband and small son back home (she had a daughter as well later on). Her parents were both teachers. She had had an arranged marriage. When I asked her whether she was happy with her marriage, she asked me to be more specific. So, I asked her if marriage had lived up to her expectations. At this, she laughed and laughed, and said it is better not to have any expectation about marriage, for they are bound to be disappointed. The expectations, not the person.

She told me that she truly thought there were no persons better to judge who she should marry than the people that loved her most on this earth- her parents. She couldn’t imagine any twenty-year-old having enough maturity or sense to chose properly someone for her to spend her whole future with. Also, even though she went into her arranged marriage with full acceptance, she knew that her children would marry for love. It wasn’t because she discounted the practice of arrange marriages, she just knew that her world was changing.

Sandhya showed me there was another world outside of the one I had experienced and the one portrayed by the media. She made me realise that love need not be the initiator for marriage, as long as it becomes the motivator to stay married. She also showed me that her blind trust in her parents ability to choose wisely, contradicted mine completely in my parents. I always resisted my mother’s vain attempts at matchmaking. These ranged from the lonely Scotsman who played his bagpipes at sunrise on the edge of the cliff outside my parents’ home, to a charming ne’re do well who said he worked for the US treasury, but everyone suspected he was a spy.