Willkommen auf Deutschland

Well, we made it. Weeks ago Lia misremembered the details of our flight when she told me our departure and arrival times. I did the math on how long the trip would take based on her bogus estimates and figured that our flight from Detroit, the paradisiacal locus of our connection to Frankfurt would take 12 to 13 hours. Happily, when we printed off our flight information last week, we realized the flight would take only 8 hours. That is still a very long flight with three small children—but a hell can seem heavenly when its duration is abbreviated.

Our momentous travel day began early. The powers that be encouraged us to be three hours early for an international flight. As the cautious Collings clan has for generations displayed its loyalty to the merest suggestion of the powers that be, we scrupulously obeyed this injunction.

Too scrupulously, it turns out. Our flight was at noon, and we figured we would give ourselves a cushion in case of traffic. But people, it transpires, don’t work in Hartford on Wednesday, and we shot up to the airport like a rocket. We were closer to four hours early than to three. Still, a Collings always prefers boredom to stress (a Suttner, on the other hand, would choose a generation of anarchy over a moment of inactivity), and in airport matters my familial inheritance has carried the day. So we took a lot of walks around the Hartford airport and read a bunch of stories—a process we got to repeat during our layover in Michigan.

As Fortune had it, we were seated on the front row of the economy section during our flight from Michigan to Germany. This meant we had a wall in front of us, but also extra leg room and no front-neighbors upon whom Eli could bestow her customary array of kicks in the back. It also gave room for Julia to sleep on the floor when night came.

The girls were, all things considered, very good during the flight. Katharine was a minor exception for some of the time—I sang a couple dozen hymns to her sotto voce as we made laps around the restroom complex in the center of our massive plane—and Eli exploded with wrathful discontent when the earphones supplied for her co-viewing with Julia of The Princess and the Pauper proved not to her liking. After that movie, the girls all “went to bed”—Julia slept on the floor, Katharine in Lia’s arms, and Eli curled up sweetly in her own seat. It was about 9 p.m. Connecticut time, 3 a.m. German time. Our flight had 4-5 hours to go. Lia and I proceeded to be very bored. We couldn’t talk or turn on our reading lamps for fear of waking the girls. We finally gave in and watched in-flight movies.

The pickings were slim—which is to say that the For-the-Strength-of-Youth-pamphlet-appropriate pickings were slim. Lia opted for a Disney classic, The Race for Witch Mountain. After a few false starts, so did I. It was a wondrous, bumptious, rollicking brew of inanities and improbabilities. It was also surprisingly violent for what was billed as a family adventure film carrying the benignant banner of Walt Disney. The main character, a reformed-convict-turned-Vegas-cab-driver who falls in among two young aliens and an attractive, “serious” alienologist, responds to problems as they arise in life by smashing together the heads of the two ruffians—there are conveniently always two—who cause them. It was wonderfully stupid stuff, though preferable, one must concede, to the manifest trash that billowed from the screens of fellow passengers.

Actually, it was thanks to those fellow passengers that we knew that we could watch movies. A big screen on the wall in front of us featured only rotating images of our flight’s trajectory and statistics about its progress. A watched clock, they say, does not tick, and watching our flight’s slow arc over the Atlantic did not help that flight seem any shorter. We had no neighbors to the front of us, so it looked like we were deprived of the privilege of consuming nonsense from a screen on the back of our neighbors’ seats. In any case, we assumed those neighbors’ screens were just flashing the same interesting information that we had on the big screen in front of us. But when I was making laps with Katharine, I realized that everyone on the plane was watching a different movie on the back of his or her neighbor’s seat—and that even those without neighbors had screens that slid out from under their arm rests. But for this observation, we would never have had the life-changing experience of viewing The Race for Witch Mountain, and our flight would have proved even duller than it actually was.

For it must be conceded that watching The Race for Witch Mountain, in all its colossal majesty, did in fact kill time, which was its primary purpose. That purpose accomplished, we began our descent over Frankfurt. Julia awoke just in time to shout us home. We had billed the trip as something of a Dora adventure, complete with three steps systematically outlined on “the Map”—Hartford; Michigan; Germany—and an all-consuming sense of mission: saving Snow Princess Jini from the Nazis (Lia’s sister, Jini, would be waiting for us at the airport). So Julia had loud and plentiful things to say on the way down about saving the Snow Princess.

After we landed but before we deplaned, Eli woke up as well and, as is her unshakable custom, she awoke with staggering verbosity. Indeed, one can never be sure whether talking or consciousness begins first. They appear to be all but simultaneous. In any case, Eli awoke and informed all non-deaf passengers of some very interesting things. One of which was that she can count in German.

“Daddy,” she cried, “I can count in German because we are in Germany.” Then came the demonstrative proof: “EINZ! ZWEI! DREI! VIER! FUNF!!! (Eli’s favorite got special emphasis) SECHS! SIEBEN! ACHT! NEUN!!!! I counted in German, Daddy! Because I can count in German!”

Nearly overwhelmed with pride, but conscious also of the duty to appear modest in public I commended Eli and humbly noted that perhaps others on the plane could count in German as well—but none as well as she, I added in a whisper.

And so we were there—or rather, here. We slouched through passport control and on to the baggage claim where we learned, with wonderment and pleasure, that European airports supply baggage carts for free. We then hauled our baggage out into the civilian world, where Jini met us and, with her, Rick, the more-than-dutiful local elders quorum president who offered his time and his minivan to provide a ride to our temporary retreat in a vacation apartment in Usingen before our final move to Frankfurt, where we cannot move into the apartment we are renting through the Goethe Institut until the day before my class begins. Jini had met Rick at the church the night before. In addition to the ride, Rick invited Julia and Eli to his son Landon’s third birthday party on Saturday. We hope to find a way to go.

Unfortunately, we were not well prepared to tell Rick exactly how to get to our temporary refuge. We had printed off directions in German from the place’s website, but those directions included only a street name, not a specific address. Rick misread one of the directions and we took a wrong turn. As he pulled over to look the place up on Google-Maps using an iPhone, Lia suggested that if he could find a library, she could use the Internet (she didn’t, thankfully, call it the World Wide Web) to find the exact details. Rick gently noted that he held the Internet in his hands.

We soon wended our way to Westerfelder Weg, where Lia assured Rick that, though she didn’t know the lodge’s exact street number, she would surely recognize it from the pictures on the Web. “It is yellow and L-shaped,” she explained helpfully. Soon enough we recognized the place, stopped, and unloaded our luggage. Then we rang the intercom. No answer. Thankfully, Frau Zimmermann, our hostess, arrived very quickly on her bicycle and led us in. Not trusting her own English, Frau Zimmermann invited Rick inside while she showed Lia around to translate if need be (there wasn’t room for Jini in the car, by the way, so she had taken the train to Usingen). This put Rick in the awkward position of wasting more time in the service of strangers than anticipated and of leaving me to bring all the luggage into the apartment alone. He bore it all more than gracefully, however, and the tale of his charity will resound among this blog’s billions of readers and will be remembered to his honor in the Valley of Jehoshaphat.

We soon got settled and sent Rick on his way with our deep gratitude. Jini, who had adventures of her own navigating her train route to Usingen arrived at the train station a couple hours later, where we were waiting for her and reading “Amelia Badelia” stories in the shade. We can thank Rick all the more for sparing all those same adventures.

We staggered through the combined effects of jetlag and a sleepless night, only to have Katharine refuse, flatly and deafeningly, to go to sleep when night fell. Thankfully, she was in my and Lia’s room, so we could let her cry it out without doing too much violence to the beauty rest of Jini and her two oldest nieces.

Lia and I, energized by an odd kind of second wind (maybe by then it was a fourth wind), took a leisurely late-evening stroll (it stayed light till nearly 10:30) around Usingen, commenting as we went on the beauty of our surrounding and on the arrant stupidity common to teenage boys, a few of whom were loitering the streets of Usingen, everywhere in the world.

When we returned Katharine still cried, though with less volume and ferocity. We relented, and brought her into bed with us where we all watched a German equestrian competition, hoping against hope that the soporific powers of such a spectacle would do us all in. It sort of worked. Katharine triumphed in that she got to sleep in our bed, and we were grateful to get to sleep at all.

Soon after Katharine went to sleep, however, Eli began to cry. I went to see what was the matter and was told in terms of pellucid firmness that Eli was “mad” because the previous day (Wednesday morning, back in New England) she had wanted Cheerios only for a snack but was instead made to eat them for breakfast. I promised that she could have cereal for a snack the next day, but apparently I missed her point. “But I wanted cereal for snack this morning! I don’t want cereal for a snack now!” At this point I caressed her sweetly and told her bluntly to go back to sleep. I then tried to do so myself.

But Eli came calling again, more than once. First, a little after 1 a.m., she climbed merrily out of bed and announced gleefully, “Daddy, I’m up! I’m getting up!!” Never did graveyard specter haunt the heart of a trepidatious nocturnal visitor more than the prospect of Eli beginning her day just then haunted mine. I conjured what persuasive rhetoric my muddled brain could muster, kissed her again, told Julia, who had been whispering helpfully all the while, to stop aiding and abetting Eli in her crimes, and went to bed again.

Eli made a final appeal at about 2:30. This time she wanted, at that instant and at no other, “to read in bed” and was unwilling to let any force—heavenly, earthly, or infernal—impede her. I began with a logical exposition of the absurdity of the scheme and ended by threatening to commence with an oath over my ancestors’ graves to destroy systematically every vestige of every artifact denoting the existence on this planet of such a thing as a princess, real or imagined, in any age of the world. I’m not sure whether they obeyed me or were just tired, but the night was quiet from then on. We woke up, much muddled, at about 10:30 the next morning.