cowboys and bulldogs

I have finally, after many, many months, seen a live broadcast of a football game. And what a game it was.

Gotta love the Wyoming fan's sign: "6-6 Doesn't Look So Bad When You've Played the Best."

repatriation: day one

Of course, having looked forward to a double-digit number of hours of sleep after the four total hours I'd enjoyed in the previous two (long) days, I slept for exactly eight hours, was up before the sun, and am now getting a fresh start on noticing things I'd forgotten about America.

Item: I am going to walk to a Wal-Mart (almost seems sacrilegious, doesn't it?) later to do a little light shopping. Mom asked me to look for a box of chocolates "but they might not have them." Even a "small" Wal-Mart such as I'm going to is a structure on a scale such that, were it an asteroid headed Earth's way, would be serious cause for alarm, and they might not have chocolates? It's going to be a while before I get used to not being able to pop into a gas station and come out with a box of perfectly serviceable chocolates should need arise.

Item: The esteemed manufacturers of Chex, having come to the stunning realization that the corn and rice from which their cereals are made do not contain gluten, are now trumpeting this achievement with a proud "Gluten Free!" label atop each box.

This country is weird.

last day

It's coming up on 1:30 in the morning. I've been up and about since 9:00, getting my apartment ready to hand over to Anna tomorrow (again at 9:00) and then pack and figure out the screaming little details that remain.

And it occurs to me that, it being well past midnight, it is now my last day in Berlin; departure is some 30 hours away. How odd. I think I can say truthfully, though, that I've spent the last days being, very deliberately, the person that I am now in the context I've lived in. It's been good to be here and say a lot of goodbyes and feel - without real relief, admittedly - that I did the job I was brought here to do, that it's done, and that soon I can rest for a little bit and then try to do the next one.

For now, it's all pretty unreal. It's not going to compute for a while, and I'm trying to be OK with that, trying not to force myself to think the right things or feel the right way or say all the words all at once. I want it to be all right if I don't perfect all my goodbyes. I want my last days to be like all the other days I loved here, to the extent that that's possible amid the stress and the bag-stuffing and the lack of sleep and flurry of visits. I guess I'll see in a few days whether I've succeeded at all.

Good night, Berlin. Two more sleeps. I'll miss you.

Ick liebe dir.

farewell words

I am trying to write a letter to my church. It's a strange thing to be attempting; I don't know that I've ever addressed them as a congregation, ever said anything for them to hear corporately. Honestly, I feel I've said very little even privately, revealed sadly little of who I am and what I think about things to the people who have been my church family here. That's a testament to the missionary's lack of competence, the expatriate's obscurity. I can express myself reasonably well in German, but not enough to feel quite that it's myself being expressed, not all the way.

How do you say a goodbye well? How do you speak to people you've had to fight so hard against seeing as projects rather than brothers and sisters, to comfort them and maybe leave them with a little bit more of yourself than you've been able to give all this time? It may be impossible, I suppose; maybe I'm in the process of learning that what's done is done - and what's undone will stay that way regardless of the eloquent expression of my sentiments.

I wish I were happier with words of generic goodwill. This is tough.

oooh

TCU is getting shiny new uniforms with lots of specifications and things for the biggest game of the last 70 years.

mauerfall

How serendipitous it has been to have spent these particular two years and change in Berlin - especially yesterday, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. We met friends for coffee and cake, hopped on the train and headed down to the Brandenburg Gate...

I'm glad to be able to say I was there. It was in some ways typical of that sort of event: it was dark, and cold, and rainy, and full of people jostling and spearing you through the eyeball with the tips of their umbrellas' ribs (if you are my height) or knocking your umbrella out of your hand with their eyeballs (if you are normal-sized), and dominated by a total lack of certainty as to when the climactic domino-toppling would happen - but we survived, We Were There, Twenty Years On.



It's in its own way a milestone for me. [DISCLAIMER: If you are any older than I am, the following might make you feel kind of elderly. Sorry.] I remember the news stories, some of the coverage, from when the Wall came down; I was in kindergarten, and I remember watching the news with my parents (our evening ritual led by MacNeil and Lehrer) and hearing over the next year how Germany was becoming one country again. How strange it is to remember hearing big news from twenty years ago. How strange to have finally reached an age where memory stretches back that far.

And now I was there.

gekündigt

All manner of things have happened, and I ought to write a bit about them. But the thing that happened today (well, one of them) is that I sent in my three months' notice that I'm moving out in mid-December.

I've effectively started the countdown; it's one of those point-of-no-return moments that feels disproportionately big. It seems silly to think about it so much in the midst of a fairly busy month, but it makes the return to America seem much more real. How frightening to have set myself a real deadline.

In that way, I've really officially started the end of my term. I'm a bit of a lame duck - I'm trying to do ministry stuff, trying to make the most out of the time left, but I'm also facing the frustration of knowing I can't invest a lot of months into anything I start up, and I can't really start up anything that isn't designed to be handed over to another team member or to Germans. And I'm necessarily thinking a lot about the future, which means it's so terribly hard to really keep my head in the game here.

That is where I am.

run away turn away

Heiko's latest selection for a song to translate into German:



He has also written a song for his girlfriend. He played it for me and showed me the lyrics. I feel decidedly outclassed.

burning truth

You Christian types thought this was gonna about the Gospel and stuff, didn't you?

No, I meant this. So true it burns.

on solstice hill

It's rash, hopping out of the train halfway home, still lugging the guitar, already tired and ready for home and quiet.

Still, I am pretty resolved. It's the longest day. I want to remember the sun the way it is here, lingering, making summer evenings that love you, take hours saying goodbye.

So we follow the fence a longer way than we thought we had to. Far off ahead, the sky is black - not the direction we want to look anyway. The wind picks up. Finally, the footbridge, red against the leaves glowing above and the tracks glowering below. Past the joggers, into the woods, we are mostly alone.

The light: oh! I want to drink it; mingled with the air, it's a golden wine, rich and strong. On the trees, it disorients, dazzles. Looking up, we see kaleidoscopic gilded green, the threat of black up ahead, the depth of the blue still visible in the broken clouds. I glance to the side into a dream I once had, or maybe a dream I dreamed of having so long ago I've forgotten. I still can't remember what it was about, but it must have been a good story.

We take a shortcut and are brought up short on the hill's far shoulder. Two rainbows climb above the rose garden below, fragile and wan and all the more lovely for that. We stare and try to find words, only briefly.

This time, we take the stairs, exerting ourselves for the sake of speed, and it pays: we're at the top with twenty minutes or more to spare, and we spare it, breathing deeply, sucking at the wind that shoves and prods and ruffles us, looking. We soak in the east side, then head a few steps to the west, see what the far-off sun has done with the blankets of clouds hanging, it seems, just overhead, just out of reach, a painting done with God's brush on His living room wall.

It lasts a long while. I say once how I feel, and that is more than enough.

The black in the east catches up to us. I try an umbrella for a bit, then give up and give in to being pelted by the chill summer storm. On the verge of letting go, heading downhill and homeward, we see the sun's farewell, the last gap between cloud and horizon, invisible until now, with all the desperate fury of the last light reaching out to us through it.

Knowing every moment that we need to go, we walk to the west tower, see the city settling into the twilight, watch the gold and red fade into memory, the sky fade into cool satisfied dark, even as it keeps pouring on us.

Soaked and giddy, we start back down, trying to hurry without losing hold of the ground, delighted soggy fools. All the way home, though, I feel I've been watered.

On the way down, I mentioned the dream, and she smiled at me.

holidays i learned about in school roughly 15 years ago and never forgot despite never observing

1. Juneteenth

Happy #1, everybody.

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