Sticks and stones will break my bones . . .

One of Katharine’s favorite pastimes is to position her stroller beneath the mirror in the front entranceway, stand in the seat, and gaze rapturously into the mirror. On Wednesday evening, however, Narcissus met his nemesis. As Katharine reached forward to have a better look at the flower clip in her hair, the wheels of the stroller shot backward and Katharine fell forward. Only Katharine’s little arms broke her fall, and the fall, exacting vengeance, broke her right wrist. Our pediatricians had all gone home for the day, so I took Katharine to the emergency room—the Rettungsstelle, they call it in German, which means, more or less literally, the salvation station. We took a cab to the hospital, Katharine riding in my lap wrapped in her coat and her beloved pink monkey blanket. In my experiences, there are two sorts of taxi drivers. The cool, detached, skeptical sort and the warm-hearted, soul-bearing, salt-of-the-earth sort. Ours was decisively the latter sort. He even explained for my benefit, after learning that I was writing a history dissertation about Germany’s Constitutional Court, that Germany had had a republic once before—founded in Weimar—that didn’t work out so well. Germans, even the really nice ones, assume that Americans, even those who study their history academically, know no more of that history than can be gleaned World War II cinema.

In our haste to get to the hospital we forgot to bring something to do. This was a mistake. It was a long night rendered even longer by our lack of books in English. At one point, in desperation, I entertained Katharine by having her watch me play games, for the first time, on Lia’s cell phone. Only with herculean exertion did Katharine, who had missed both her nap and her dinner, remain awake. But the nurses insisted that I keep her awake. In the end we were at the hospital for around five hours, returning home closer to 1 a.m. than to midnight. Most of the time we spent waiting, waiting, waiting.

This may be just as well. The time in between waits was not pleasant. Worst of all were the X-rays, which for Katharine were akin to torture, as the radiologist twisted her broken wrist into impossible positions and commanded me to keep it there. One of the X-rays—the one with the most painful position—didn’t work and had to be repeated. By the end Katharine, otherwise indomitable on that long and anguished night, was crying that she wanted “to get out of here,” “to go home”—that, in short, she wanted “Mommy.” The nurse who put on the cast looked for all the world like a BYU graduate, speaking to Katharine in soft and reassuring tones and in admirable English. This was a grace: the nurse next door was a bearded man of middle age and wondrous girth, hardly a comforting figure after the ordeal of the X-rays. We took another taxi home and brave little Katharine cheerfully showed her mommy her new rose-red cast. She ate a leftover quesadilla and finally went to bed. In the days since then, Katharine has showed no signs of being chastened, no glimmer of increased caution. We even caught her this morning standing on her stroller, examining her cast in the mirror.

Today we celebrated the end of a long week by going to the Berlin aquarium—less impressive than the aquariums in Connecticut, but still a memorable family outing. Afterwards at home Eli decided to wind down with her “Daily Learning Drills” textbook. “I really like my daily learning drills,” she explained, in an immaculately clipped English accent. “I love to do them. They are the most important thing in my life.” I have some friends who are NASCAR team owners who say the same thing.