Water and stones. White snow over black earth. Sunlight sieved between branches and leaves. Dark, heavy trunks. Limbs languid with green mantled fur. And everywhere, everywhere, ribbons of achingly bright blue.
The drive to the girls’ school from our new apartment is so lovely, it’s ridiculous. And I know pretty isn’t everything, but it’s something. It’s more than nothing. But what’s it for, all the beauty? We don’t need it. It doesn’t last. It doesn’t feed the hungry or cure the sick or mend the broken-hearted. It’s often ignored, standing there silently, gracious arms holding out fistfuls of wonder while we race by, our eyes on the ground, our thoughts full of mud. The world could just as easily have evolved into ubiquitous Camden winter grey. Or we could have mutated into creatures with no appreciation of beauty.
It didn’t. We didn’t.
There are people who posit that real living requires working with the mess. And they are not wrong. Life is pain. But it’s not only that. It’s not just sorrow and sadness and failed connections and missed trains. It’s so much more, so much good: laughter and a perfectly frothed cappuccino and a zoo lion that comes right up to the glass to stare curiously; it’s an old thought finished by a new friend and a kiss shared in the cold and light over the mountains and unearthing fragments of your past that you gift your future. It’s everything, all of it, which is heart breaking in its own way because sometimes the experience of any of it, of even a little of it, it feels like too much. You know? Yes. You do. You know.
True beauty, I sometimes think, isn’t soft, isn’t delicate. It’s not butterfly wings, edelweiss, snowflakes. It’s mighty, inspires awe. It’s a proper Goddess–not simpering Aphrodite but Athena, wonderful and terrible to behold. It has gashes and weight, contains within it the certainty of death. It’s difficult to live with it, then, because its very essence reminds us of its impermanence. This is why I wonder, sometimes, if celebrating loveliness takes the most courage. It requires hope, and the only thing that hurts more than hope is the losing of it. Perhaps it’s easier, then, to stay in the muck, mired in how Real it all is, because there you can never be disappointed by a surprise too small to fulfill your longing for it.
How else to explain why, if we have the option (do we? can we truly choose?), we clutch long held grudges, we cup the blood of our hurts, of our failures and losses and slights, in our hands, clawing the earth where it falls, claiming that this is our right, our need, our fate. Why is anger and ugliness and hatred so much more powerful a moving force than grace and beauty?
“There is so much Everything/that Nothing is hidden quite nicely” the poet says. But shouldn’t the purpose of beauty be more than just distraction?
Maybe, like existence, it simply has its own reasons for being.
One of my favorite sounds in the world is the snap of a ski boot into a binding. Click. Click. All the wrestling with clothes and clasps and gloves is done. The lift line surges ahead. The mountain shimmers before you like a glass heart. All that’s left is to crack it open, chew it up, devour its shardy center.
I remember when I learned to ski. It was a good family trip, one that didn’t end in drunken brawling and suitcases hastily packed in the middle of the night. After a group lesson where I got poked in the cheek by someone else’s errant poles and skied over by another not exactly controlled classmate, I was set loose on the slopes with my boyfriend and his mother. The first lift open fed only intermediate slopes. It was freezing, Colorado icy, and the technical challenges were beyond my snow plowing techniques. I fell and fell and fell down the top half of the mountain, wedging my way back up until I finally collapsed in a sodden heap by a stand of trees while my future mother-in-law laughed at my tears. It wasn’t until later, in the de rigueur apres ski hot tub, that she noticed the bruise extending from my knee all the way up the back of my thigh to the crease of my ass, and on the other shin, a livid lumpen mass from where I had slammed the edge of a ski into my leg.
*****
Frankie’s been crowing for weeks that she is going to learn to snowboard. That she looks like a snowboarder and she’s going to do tricks and kick ass and once she learns everything, we have to buy her her very own snowboard. Ruby’s been exuding a more quiet confidence.”I don’t know why I have a talent for skiing. I just do,” she grins demurely.
We’ve been trying to make these soaring snow dreams of theirs come true. But everything seems to take twice as long to figure out in Switzerland. This may explain why two weekends in a row we’ve failed to ski on a Swiss alp. The first day we managed only to drive to the mountain, enjoy a lovely, leisurely lunch and purchase ski lessons for the girls. We spent the entire second Saturday renting equipment.
So yesterday was finally the day to ski, and nothing, I mean NOTHING, was going to get in our way. Nothing except getting out of bed. And an unplanned stop to affix snow chains to our tires. And a pile of misinformation about lesson times and availability.
Adventures sure can be exhausting.
You know where this is going, don’t you? Frankie refused to ride her snowboard even once during her entire two hour lesson. And Ruby. Poor Ruby, once her ski school was over, got stuck on a long blue run and cried her way down the whole thing, refusing to try again.
*****
It never occurred to me to give up that day I fell over and over down the slippery slope. I just decided I’d try harder, no matter what, until I conquered it. But I’ve got a snaggy edge. Ask my friends–the same toughness that kept me on that mountain until the lifts closed is the one that will catch you, jagged, with five tossed off words.
I want my daughters to have the same stubborn determination. But I don’t want them to develop all the callouses and the barbs. How do you do it? How do you get kids who are tenacious and persistent, who won’t quit because things are difficult? How do you keep them soft and open to everything else?
Or perhaps that’s a little like asking for the secret in the heart of the mountain.
An appalling travesty at the Kunsthaus, one of Zurich’s major art museums, is the sliver of a dim hallway in which hang its slim collection of Surrealist paintings. Magritte, of course. Dali. Some Paul guy (not Klee; he’s got his own room.) Or maybe it was Roy. So many famous artists, first name of Roy. How does one keep them straight? The greatest disservice is paid to a Dali, Femme a tete de roses. Housed behind reflective acrylic, its exquisite detail, peculiarities of light and flat surface, slick and sharp as the edge of a knife, are lost in shadow. Feel how you will about Dali’s sensibilities, composition, originality of expression–the dude could fucking paint.
The Surrealists. They have a point, don’t they?
We’ve spent the last few days trying to buy a car, and I don’t possess the writerliness required to do justice to the absurdity of this endeavor, two non-German speaking Americans (the Swiss do not choose neutrality out of a deeply felt belief in peace, by the way) practically begging people with severe allergies to eye contact and common courtesy to please please take their money in exchange for a motorized vehicle.
Rather than sitting through my faltering explanation, just imagine a Magritte painting. Any one will do–that one with the apple. Or the guys in the bowlers. The seascape in the window. Any of the window ones, in fact. Whichever. Choose a painting. You got it in your head? The ridiculous juxtapositions? That apple does not fit into its room. How’s your level of discomfort? The steam train evacuating the fireplace probably has you sort of twitchy. And the lovers’ heads–they should not be draped in shrouds. Does the accumulation of incongruities both amuse and madden you at the same time, so that you must laugh and wail all at once?
There. Now you know exactly how buying a car in Zurich feels.
I was cooking North Indian chicken curry the other day. ”It’s very healthy,” my Indian friend says. ”No cream or butter or coconut milk like all the other curries.” Wait. How in the hell, growing up in Indonesia and Malaysia, did I miss the creamy buttery coconut milk curry? And why aren’t we making that right this minute? Because my jeans continue to slip down my butt, no matter how much triple creme brie and bergkase I remember to slide down my throat, and while that may not seem like a problem to you, I can’t afford new pants. You’ll see why in a minute.
So I’m cooking Indian curry and idly chatting with some expat wives while pounding cumin seeds and coriander into powder. ”It’s a really good thing we don’t have to pay our speeding tickets,” one of them offered, her crisp British accent matching her cropped henna hair. ”Mmm?” I responded, only half listening. Onions, garlic, ginger, sliced green chiles, hold the garam masala ’til the end, I was busy not exactly thinking.
“Because Bernie gets about 10,000 Fr. worth of them a year.” (It might be helpful to know at this point that the franc more or less has parity with the US dollar. So the conversion math on that one is possible even for me.)
Cough. Choke. I doubt that was the spices inhaled unexpectedly.
“10 thousand francs a year in driving fines? How is that even possible? How about–oh, here’s a novel thought–slowing the fuck down? And who’s paying for it, if you aren’t?” These are not the actual words I said. Instead I nodded semi-encouragingly while she detailed the driving habits of her husband and shared the news that she herself had just gotten a 250 Fr. ticket the other day for running a red light.
Shit. I’m pretty sure I ran two red lights this week, and on the same day. Shit, shit, shit. Maybe I should reconsider those snotty thoughts about more careful driving.
My children attend school in one of Switzerland’s tax havens, one that corporations use to stash their high level executives and their crisp, clean cash. Word on the street says the main Coca Cola dude lives there (I was going to use the phrase “urban legend” but as Switzerland doesn’t have much “urban,” it seemed inappropriate. Mountain lore, then?). And the head of some other big company I can’t remember. Also, another one. And that one, too. You won’t meet many men who don’t claim they’re running their outfit’s national or transnational or multinational empire. So. These people have money and fat, perky expat packages. And one of the perks seems to be that all transportation costs are covered, even the cost of being sort of unsafe and a dumbass.
(We do not have the expat package. I know you were wondering. We have the “Here’s some money. Good luck in the 2nd most expensive city in the world!” deal. Not to whine; simply to be clear. Clarity now!)
I’m telling W this story, about the highly fined super guy with the generous employer and he’s kind of scoffy, “That can’t possibly be an American company.” Right. Because we know how responsible those guys are with their compensation packages. I sense, somewhere over my left shoulder, Glenn Beck beginning to cry again just thinking about the wastefulness of these god-hating Socialist Europeans and their lack of real morals who are working with the devil to bring America the Great to its elephantine knees.
And I’m with him, man, I am. The financial irresponsibility! The perpetuation of the working pussy! The squandering of middle class resources, my god! My God!
Only right after I finish that last concurring fist pump, another traffic camera flashes its bright ugly eye at us as we motor by it. We’ve lived here one brief month (a month! where’d those 30 days go?) and have already collected at least 4 tickets (not counting my red light indiscretions).
Fuck.
I want the expat package.
The Swiss seem to appreciate a mindless bureaucracy as much as the next micro-managed European citizenry, but they appear to draw the line at creating rules to manage fire safety. Our current apartment, heavy beams crisscrossing the eaves and walls, has no smoke detector. There’s only one way out, down a narrow staircase that feeds the whole building. It’s not just here, though. I haven’t found an apartment yet that has what a good American would consider proper fire protection.
Now, see, this doesn’t bother me so much, because I grew up in the jungle in a stilted house made entirely of wood that would have burned up like cellophane fairy wings had the termites not eaten out its walls before any flames could lick it to bits. And although more’s the pity, rainforest firefighters are to be found exactly nowhere. It wasn’t until my own kids started school that I even realized we were supposed to have a family fire plan. Fire safety has never been a blip on my radar, is what I’m trying to say.
But I think it’s well-established that I’m not exactly normal.
Still, I live with a guy who, while also not exactly normal, is concerned with keeping his family alive in the event of a catastrophe, like a fire or a nuclear apocalypse or a sudden worldwide famine of cheese. He mentioned the lack of smoke detectors and alternative exits to someone, some Swiss person, who probably did this thing the Swiss do when they’re not going to tell you a damn thing you want to hear, where they shrug their shoulders and pout their lips a little bit and lift their hands, palms up, and bobble their heads as if to say, “Hmm. Interesting. But I don’t have an answer for you, so deal with the ambiguity, shithead.” Maybe not the shithead part. That’s what they’d add if they were American, probably. Or French.
“No, we do not need fire protection devices in our homes, because should your domicile begin to burn, you simply ring the fire department, and they will arrive in 2 to 3 minutes to rescue your fat American posteriors, ones that were foolish enough to overheat your fondue in the first place.” I think that was the answer that came after the shoulder shrugging palms up pouty lipped head bob.
Okay, that’s all good, but I worry, still, that I may somehow inadvertently not follow the 27 rules of proper fire department dialing, and we’ll all end up slightly scorched. Or worse. Like, you know, slightly no longer alive.
Until today, I’d never even seen a fire truck. But I was rounding the corner on a run when I noticed the yellow vehicle, its ladder strung up to a fifth floor balcony, the attendant police van and milling passersby, waiting in hopes of a great adventure. I considered stopping myself, to assess the future of my safety or to gather the pieces of a compelling narrative. But there were no tongues of flame, no acrid smoke, no screams of despair. And I was on a run, you see, my own flagging self to overcome, my own demons to outpace. Couldn’t be distracted by possibility when there was so much reality stubbornly demanding my attention.
