Ice cream is the best conversation starter

I'd heard what I'd expected at parent-teacher interviews:  both girls excel in their school work but would benefit by being more outgoing with their peers.  Time for some fatherly feedback.  And what better way to grease the wheels of conversation than a pair of ice cream dates in the park, one daughter at a time?  At dinner there are no objections to this proposal.  The only debate is over which child gets to have her ice cream date second!  (We've done too good a job it seems in teaching the girls the value of delayed gratification.)  Cornelia "loses" and gets her outing first.

The early evening air is soft, almost glowing.  We walk hand-in-hand to the ice cream stand, order a scoop of Nutella flavour, and enjoy a happy-go-lucky stroll through the Mirabellgarten.  Converstation drifts breezily from one theme to another.  All the cities we've ever been to, being more outgoing at school, why do some people smoke, being more outgoing at school, how much we miss our friends in Canada.  And by the way, how are you getting along with your friends at school?

All too soon we must heed our internal pajama-time bells, and I give her a piggy-back ride home.  I deliberately relish this moment.  All too soon, she will be the one carting me around.

The worst tourist outing in European history. Because griping is just fun.

How can one capture in print the idiocy that is the Spanish Riding School in Vienna?  Prancing, leaping Lippizzaner horses, meticulously bred for centuries, groomed to a dazzling white in their polished saddles, led by Austrian gents in full riding regalia.  As a father of three horse-loving daughters, how can you go wrong with that?  By taking them there, that's how.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Knowing the Spanish Riding School to be one of the most popular tourist tra—er—attractions in Vienna, I buy our tickets the second the box office opens. What a smart father!  We're through the line in under a minute, and so with an hour to kill before the 10:00 show, I lead the girls on a leisurely walk through the old city.

That was Mistake #1.  For when we return at 9:48, a crowd of over 200 people is jammed into the entrance hall, which was designed for perhaps 10.  Over the heads of the crowd, I see that this bowl-shaped entrance hall is emptying into a corridor barely two butts wide, at a rate of about 1 person per 5 weeks, so these poor saps are going to be waiting for a long time.  But not us, right?  Surely there is a separate entrance for Smart Fathers who bought their tickets early, right?  Oh, no, the usher tells me.  That crush of people IS the entrance for advance-ticket holders!  Oh, and it's also the line for buying tickets.

"Daddy, why are we waiting here?  Don't we already h—"

I'm too mad to even explain it to them.  Twenty-five minutes later (the show has already started), we have fought our way through the "line", shown our tickets, and walked into the arena, ready to take our seats.  Except there are no seats.  The 80 or so chairs in this arena went to the lucky few who made it through at 9:18.  For the remaining 180 suckers who showed up at 9:48, it's standing room only along the railings!  Ah, but wait!  Here come the horses with their noble riders!  The show is on!  The day is saved!

No it isn't.  This is the most boring and lifeless performance I have ever paid admission to see.  The riders seem unaware that their audience has waited an hour to see them, or even that there is an audience.  They cooly put their steeds through gentle paces, nothing too strenuous, old chap.  A cantor here, a little prance there.  No galloping, no jumping, and certainly none of the formation riding the School is famous for; we mustn't tire our horses before the evening show.  The canned parade music playing over the speakers is the last straw.  After 20 minutes of this drivel, we walk out in a huff.

Next up on the Vienna-day-tour:  the Vienna children's museum!   As a father of three museum-loving daughters, how can you go wrong with that?  The answer by now should be obvious:  by taking them there.  The long walk to the museum from the Spanish Riding Sham is made even longer by our crummy mood.

"One adult with three kids, please," I say.

The cashier, however, informs me that it doesn't work like that here.  You see, sir, this is not a "normal" museum.  You make reservations the day before.  Then you show up at your prescribed time, and they lead the kids through in pre-arranged groups.

Oh.

WHAT KIND OF CHILDREN'S MUSEUM REQUIRES RESERVATIONS?!  Viennese, that's what kind.

Well, the kids are about ready to vote me out of office.  There's only one "attraction" left on our list:  the famous Viennese ferris wheel.  After this morning, those first two adjectives alone should be enough to make me call it off and go back to the hotel.  But I can't lead them home on a note like this.

"All right, girls, we're going to try one last place.  If it also turns out to be a dud, then we'll declare this the Worst Day Ever, okay?"  This attempt at self-deprecating humour perks them up a little.

The map shows two subway stations nearby that lead to the ferris wheel.  Which one is closer?  On the theory that every decision I make today is bound to be wrong, I know that whichever station I pick will end up being farther away.  So I instruct the kids to do the opposite of whatever I tell them.  The kids like this idea, and it works!  From the map I calculate that Station A is closer, so we head towards Station B.  And reach it almost immediately!  We laugh ourselves silly for the first time today.

In a welcome boost to my approval ratings, the ferris wheel is A) easy to get to, B) has a short line, C) is actually fun.  Finally, a success.  I acknowledge that 33% is not an impressive ratio for a vacation day, but at least we ended well.

Vanessa falls asleep on my shoulder in the restaurant, and so when Cornelia volunteers to plan our subway route back to the hotel, I happily acquiesce.  She does a fantastic job.  Map in hand, she tells us exactly when and where to get off and on which platform to stand to catch each connecting train, while I lug our stuff and her sisters behind her.  I'm so proud of her.  At least I did good in the long term.

Visiting the Dachau concentration camp

We’ve seen the images all our lives, probably starting in a history class. The yellow stars.  The striped suits.    The ovens.  The piles of corpses stacked like pipes.  We know it and we are repulsed by it, but we seldom feel it deep in our bones.  It seems too distant.  It all happened way back then, over there, in black & white. 

Even as I approach the entrance of the Dachau concentration camp, holding the audio guide to my ear, it’s hard for me to sense viscerally that the Holocaust really happened, right here under my feet.  But suddenly I reach the gate, and I see the block letters wrought into the iron—ARBEIT MACHT FREI—and my blood turns cold.  The breath leaves my chest, and I feel nausea rising.  I can see the prisoners on the Appellplatz, standing in their pajamas in the snow, at attention, for hours at a time as the roll is called, slowly.  I press my fingertip into the barbed wire.  I see the hooks in the ceiling.  And peer down the chute where they dropped the pellets.  When I can’t take it any longer, I head back to the bus stop.

The Nazis built the camp at Dachau to imprison their opponents almost as soon as Hitler seized power.  They continued their abuses—torture, murder and starvation of prisoners—right until the very end, just a week before the surrender.  But Dachau was, incredibly, a mere shadow of what went on elsewhere.  The savagery is beyond comprehension.  An hour east of Salzburg, at the Mauthausen labor camp, SS guards would march inmates to the edge of a quarry cliff and give them a choice:  jump to their deaths or push one of their comrades.  Guards at the Janowska death camp in the Ukraine made Jewish orchestra players play tunes as the guards executed prisoners in front of them.  Because they liked killing people to music.

Who were these monsters?  Are they really the parents and grandparents of all these ordinary, iPod-wearing, Facebook-posting people I see walking past me on the streets of Salzburg, pushing their kids on merry-go-rounds at the park, weighing their bananas at the grocery store, inviting me for a beer after dance class with a chummy pat on the back?  The more I see of Austria and Germany—the normalcy of it, the everydayness of it—the more I’m convinced that the Holocaust could have happened anywhere.

All the ingredients of a holocaust—racism, resentment, delusions of exceptionalism and entitlement, the desire for order and uniformity over freedom and diversity—these are universal human phenomena.  There is nothing German or Peruvian or Mongolese about any of them.  They swell up in every country from time to time, but usually, thankfully, not all at once.  I can only conclude that post-Weimar Germany was simply one of those freak collisions of the universe, a singularity in space-time in which all of those hazardous ingredients converged in a single country in a single era, stirred and whipped into an explosion by a charismatic leader who just happened to live right there and then.

Would you and I have followed orders?  Or stood by idly as others followed theirs?  Or would we have dared to speak out and resist, knowing our families might be murdered for it?

Down the road from the Dachau memorial, there is a kindergarten.  As our bus rolled by it, I felt that in that building, behind the painted smiley faces hanging in the windows, there were women who were at that very moment teaching little children the Golden Rule—and for as long as they do, in this place and elsewhere, there will be no more Dachaus.

When it pays to stick to your guns

ME:  "Let's go do X today."

KIDS:  "Noooo, we don't want to do X, even though we have no idea what X is.  We'd rather stay home and do Y like always."

ME:  "But we can do Y any day.  X is only happening today.  Let's go do X."

KIDS:  <Whine.  Drag feet.  Mope.  Howl.  Grumble.  Bleat.>**

ME:  "Besides, X will be fun and educational.  Trying new things builds—"

KIDS:  "No, Dad, don't say that word!"

ME:  "—character.  Now get dressed, we're going."

KIDS:  <see **>

We go do X.  The kids have a fabulous time and even ask me if we could please stay a bit longer.  Of course, they have forgotten our conversation and neglect to thank their prudent father for overruling their prejudiced and groundless opposition to X earlier that morning.  I don't mind, though.  The smiles on their faces, the knowledge that I have given them a unique, enlightening experience, my relief that X was a success when it could very well have flopped (and there have been some flops), are gratifying enough.

By now this pattern is so familiar that I can encode it with variables.  X has been concerts, hikes, street carnivals and day camps.  Today, though, it was a recorder competition played by youth ensembles from around Salzburg.  One group performed a fabulous 5-recorder arrangement of The Bare Necessities.  One 4th grade boy as part of his act played two recorders at once, one in each hand.  He wore a Transformers t-shirt to match, perhaps to underscore his virtuosity in baroque music.  

Vanessa, our budding recorder enthusiast, stayed for the last few acts while I led a tiring Bettina out to the lobby to read her some books we'd brought along "just in case".  This unplanned solo act itself drew a crowd of eager pre-school-aged listeners who were in the lobby for the same reason we were.  I hadn't meant to start a reading circle, but I rode the tide and read to the whole group, drawing as many smiles from their parents as from them.  See, aren't I glad I did X?

What does 'ugly' mean, Daddy?

I was taken aback when Bettina asked me this at the bus stop one day. Seeing how often in children's literature we read of ugly witches and ugly step-sisters (but never ugly wizards or ugly step-brothers), I marvelled that my 5-year-old didn't know the meaning of this word. I was about to define it for her in the usual fairy tale sense, but thought better of it. In the cruel world of elementary school, the word "ugly" is almost always used to describe a person. And in the fairy tale logic we all grew up with, that means that the reviled person is also evil. Indeed, how many hideous mermaids or ravishing sea witches do we read about? Glenda the Good Witch of the North said it best: "Only bad witches are ugly." And Dorothy, with her liberal Kansas upbringing, just stood there and took that?

Maybe we can fix this fallacy, one kindergardener at a time. It's a dangerous thought, and one that would positively wreck our economy, but what if no one ever commented on, reacted to, or even thought about people's appearances? What if we reserved the words "beautiful" and "ugly" to judge people's thoughts, words and deeds? What if—

"Daddy!"

"Hmm?"

"Didn't you hear me?! I SAID, what does ugly mean?"

"Oh, sorry, sweetie, I got distracted. C'mere, I'll show you what ugly means. You see the cigarette butts and trash around this bus stop? They make the bus stop look ugly."

She bought it. And now we must reinforce it. From now on at at story time we will speak of Cinderella's poorly raised step-sisters; of intelligent princesses who marry thoughtful princes after a long, discerning courtship; of monsters and sea witches who are simply ill-mannered and who just might, with a bit of empathy and constructive feedback from the rest of us, learn to be pleasant, productive members of medieval or oceanic society.