Thanksgiving international style

Our English-speaking church in Salzburg hosted an international Thanksgiving.

As Canadian delegates, we felt it our patriotic duty to make Nanaimo bars.  The kids and I had made them the day before.  (They're supposed to "age").  They came out a bit rough around the edges, clearly a home-job and nothing you'd sell in a bakery, but good enough for a pot-luck where no one knows what they are anyway.

But what a hit!  The moment I set them out, I was descended upon by a flock of admirers who took a great sudden interest in all things Canadian and wanted to know exactly what was in them, especially that yellow stuff in the middle, and whether they might please sample one for quality assurance.  I shooed them away, seeing as we hadn't said grace yet, let alone started the main course.

Well, grace couldn't come soon enough.  The first two turkeys were gutted within ten minutes, and Therese volunteered me to carve the next one.  I found a knife and a pan to set the slices in, but the latter was wholly unnecessary; a flash-queue formed at my elbow as soon as I started slicing, and I spent as much time serving the turkey as carving it.  Not part of the original job description, but it was fun nonetheless.

Cornelia loaded her plate with enough desserts to feed three people, but she was inspired and finished the whole set.  Therese stayed for clean-up crew (anything to avoid bedtime child-duty), while the girls bussed me home, seeing that their tired father needed to be put to bed.

Serious silliness

"It's the mayonaise bus!" says Bettina as the white 28-bus approaches our stop.  She loves how the Salzburg buses come in multiple colours.  Some mornings we ride the ketchup bus.  Other days we ride the lime bus, and if we're lucky we get a blackberry bus.  And when we're tired of riding mayonaise buses, we'll call the white bus a marshmallow bus instead.

We get the sillies at the park, too.  The girls like it when we run races and I accidentally on purpose mess up the count.  "On your mark…GO!" is perhaps their favourite.  But they were not amused when we were about to race to the tree and back, and I said, "We'll start on the count of seven.  Ready?  One…SEVEN!  GO!"  I'd neglected to mention I would be counting by sixes.  They made me start over.

What passes for poetry around here

The older girls have gotten into making up tricked-you-into-thinking-it-would-rhyme verses.  They'll write things like

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Sugar is sweet

And so are...marshmallows.

or

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall

All the king's horses and all the kings men

Couldn't put...out the fire.

Or this one, to the tune of It's Raining.

It's drizzling, it's sizzling

The old man is fizzling

He fell into a pot

And he got too hot

So he had to be rescued by...Ralph.

We have beggars here, too

The mornings are growing colder.  The beggar on the sidewalk is holding his coin cup with his hands pulled inside the cuffs of his sleeves.  Bettina and I see beggars often along this stretch, but this particular sight tears at my heart.  I have no small bills to offer him, and we pass awkwardly by.  Bettina asks me why beggars beg.  She already knows that money comes from people working, and I explain as best I can.  Something about the double cruelty of not being able to work and having no family or friends to turn to.  "Can we give him some food, Daddy?"  That's an excellent idea.  There's a grocery store right here.  Bettina will be late for kindergarten, but this is education, too.  We go in, and she helps me pick out some things—bananas and a bag of rolls—and we walk the half-kilometre back to where the man is crouched.  I speak to him and Bettina holds out the items to him.  He takes her hand and kisses it.  His smile is half toothless, but Bettina does not recoil.  She's too young to be afraid, too wise not to smile back.  Jesus was right; sometimes kids are wiser than the rest of us, we who have perhaps just seen too much, who have forgotten just how insulated, tepid and comfortable we really are, how afraid we are to go near anything less comfortable than ourselves.