The jeans that escaped the gallows

Last week Cornelia's favourite pair of jeans sprung a hole at the knee that was too big to pass inspection at the door.  I handed down the death sentence.  She appealed it.  She got out the sewing kit, cut a denim oval from another pair of jeans awaiting a donation run (my own pair, it turned out), stitched her name onto it for emphasis, and patched her jeans with it.  The donor tissue was a match, and the graft held.  It's as if she were descended from an Oma who lived through the post-war or something.

Auf deutsch!

The kids have learned as much German at the public library as they have at school.  Back in Waterloo, you couldn't beat Cornelia or Vanessa into picking up a German book.  Now they devour them.  They got over the hump by reading German editions of books they already knew in English:  Calvin & Hobbes, Ramona Quimby, Garfield, Chester, The Smurfs, and now recently Harry Potter.  Cornelia has now re-read the first six Harry Potter books in German.

My own German, I fear, is about as fluent as it's going to get, which is to say, not very.  At least in this area, I'll settle for living through the accomplishments of my children.

Parenthood in the big city

Living in a dense city centre has been a windfall for Therese and me as parents.  North American suburbs are designed to make every destination in the city — school, shopping, church, parks, doctors offices, music lessons — far away and dangerous to get to outside the fortress of a steel automobile.  Thus, kids in suburbs can't go many places unescorted, making it harder to teach them independence.

The densely knit neighbourhoods of old European cities are a welcome foil to this model.  Because the buses are so frequent and so kid-friendly (a computer-voice announces each stop), Cornelia now braves the city bus to the library and home again on her own.  The first time we let her do it (and I admit I was anxious as hell), she came home beaming, almost trembling, with self-satisfaction.

We often send Vanessa with 10 euros and a shopping list to the corner grocery store, which she can walk to in under three minutes.  And she loves it!  She begs to be sent.  "Mom, we're out of sliced almonds.  Do you want me to go to the store?"  

Their school is just as close, so the girls can walk themselves there and back each day.  At 11:47 sharp every morning, whether I've gotten any work done or not, that (damned) door bell rings, and I push the buzzer to let the girls in.  From inside the apartment, I hear the street door click open, then the echo of their foot falls as they climb the stairs.  I make them lunch, send them to do their homework, then boot Cornelia back out the door for her second half of school.  (But not Vanessa, since she only goes half-days.  And it's killing me.)  With two heavy doors and two flights of stairs between her and the street, I feel safe leaving Vanessa at home while I go pick up Bettina from kindergarten.  Bettina hates being picked up, which of course is a great sign.  But we miss an awful lot of buses on account of it.

The Music!

Salzburg is perhaps best known for its classical music.  (Sorry, folks, but The Sound of Music is for tourists.)  I knew that before we came, of course, but only after attending several concerts did I see why:  the people here value it.  Every concert in the city sells out, every night.  In four concerts by different groups in different venues, I have yet to see an empty seat.  One example:  I took Cornelia to a Sunday matinée concert of Mozart and Brahms, expecting the usual 200-300 people in plaid and denim that you'd see at a similar Sunday event in Waterloo.  Not so.  The hall of 2,500 was filled to the last seat, everyone in formal attire, champage served at intermission.  Cornelia and I found our seats and wondered why no one had taken our tickets yet.  Did we skirt the gate without knowing it?  Oh no, it's honor system, explained the couple seated next to us.  Just like the bus system.  I love this country.

After the performance I chatted with one of the performers, whom we know from church.  I asked her what other gigs she does during the week.  "Oh, this is it,"  she said.  This orchestra is full-time?!  That a city of barely 140,000 can (and will) support a 100-piece orchestra at full-time salary is hard for a Canadian mind to fathom.  And there's about ten such groups in the city, with innumerable small groups in between.  There is, however, no hockey team.

The performance itself was wonderful.  I was worried Cornelia might be bored with the long, ponderous program, but she had a great time.  She was amused by the peculiar tradition of holding applause until the end of the final movement of a piece.  Perhaps it's a symptom of the age demographic in the room and its corresponding health issues, but we both laughed at the pent-up communal coughing fit that ensues at the close of each movement. In her words, "Oh, so you cough after movements 1, 2 and 3, and clap after movement 4?"   You got it, kid.

The middle piece of the program was by Fazil Say, a "modern" composer.  And we all know what that means.  ("Get the cat off the piano!")  I made myself stay open minded, and the effort was worth it.  The eclectic mix of percussion and a host of instruments I'd never heard before — ever heard a theremin? It's apparently the only instrument that you play without actually touching it — made the piece fun for me, though still challenging for a 9-year-old.  The latter observed, "It sounded like five different composers wrote five different pieces and played them all at the same time." Thankfully the final symphony by Brahms was beautiful (as only Brahms can be) and refreshingly normal.