Tired as I was I still had that Christmas morning feeling of excitement that had me wanting to get out of bed. I’d been up since 01:11 and committed myself to staying in bed until 3. Something about 3 vs. the 2 o’clock hour seemed more plausible, though both were mad to most. Here on the top floor of my mom’s in this old fachwerk house it was so quiet, what strange sounds would emerge if I just lay with the silence? Only the soft buzz next door of mom’s Hungarian lodger Laszlo’s snoring.

If that Christmas morning feeling of excitement was a “10” for a child, mine was more like a 3. Going on 55 now that was maybe the closest I’d get again to 10.

It was past 3 on a Monday morning now, just Sunday night back home. So part of me had that Monday morning brain while another, still Sunday: a Sunday I’d kind of skipped over.

Remarkably, my flight into Frankfurt and all the trains were on time to the minute. I told mom and Lily in separate messages I’d be in by 15:41 but when I got to the train station in Besigheim no one was there, which was fine, though I always loved the thrill of the train station reunion scene: the polar opposite of leaving. Instead, I heard my mom’s voice rounding a turn by the dodgy Dönner kabob shop and there they were: mom, Lily and her two college friends Naomi and Lucia. Lily squealed and came running for a hug (you have to love the 10s of youth).

I lay in bed with Laszlo snoring next door remembering all this, playing back the first night, so red-eyed and slap happy trying to understand German in a crowded restaurant standing by a table with my mom’s older friends all looking at me and talking at the same time, unable to comprehend a word.

Cradled in the silence of this room with only the occasional car engine on the 27 below; who’s got anywhere to be at this hour on a Monday, not even 4? Laszlo’s snores almost peaceful, like I’m in a mountain cabin scene by a wood-burning stove and some cartoon guy in a stocking cap is making the sound of a steam whistle blowing. Each time he snores, his blanket curls up when he inhales and then blows off when he breathes out. The silence has a high-frequency tone and feels like a shroud.

My arrival overlapped with Lily and her friends’ visit and that made the sleeping arrangements complicated, Lily already sharing a bed with my mom and her two friends sharing the one I normally sleep in downstairs. But there is an unoccupied room right next to Laszlo on the top floor, the same one where Dawn and I slept when the kids were young and we lived here. The same bed I think our French friend Laurent (who’s big) broke once. After you sit in a metal chair for 10 hours any horizontal surface will do.

When Lily texted me she was going to look for a Dirndl she said she was going with someone named Timo who I assumed was a girl and a friend her age but when I arrived I learned Timo’s actually a man, my age or older, German, who speaks perfect American English, has a beard and two kids younger than ours, and smokes Gauloises.

I’m still not clear how my mom befriended Timo even though I asked and she told me. I was so sleep deprived nothing made sense, but often these details with my mom are like that, you lose the plot.

Timo was there at Berne’s, the former owner of the Hirsch, the restaurant/bar/guest house in the center of the village, a one-minute walk from my mom’s and her main hang out. She’d graduated a long time ago to the locals table right by the front window.

Timo was there smiling and stepping away from our table to finish a cigarette and making small talk in that way that’s so surreal when you get off a plane and you’re thrust into the vibe of a different day and country, language and culture. It really is like teleporting across the earth. What’s more surreal is it seemed like everyone knew Timo but me and I kept wondering, should I know him? He acted like I did.

Timo is with the five of us (Lily and her two friends, mom and me) walking through the village to the cemetery (I want to show them some creepy tombstones), past an apartment with a room Timo might rent (why does he need a room?), past the town’s only Chinese restaurant that just says Asien out front and always spooks me, the thought of German Chinese. But Lily’s friend Naomi, who’s Chinese American, pokes her head in to see, are they German or Chinese, and soon an elderly Asian woman emerges, and she and Naomi engage on a solid five-minute chat in Mandarin, with me and Timo off to the side nodding and smiling.

We go by the river with the swans on the walk I recount for Lily we took on her last day of kindergarten, 2009 and then she wants to take her friends by the gymnasium so they can see where she attended school 10 years ago. I suggest to Timo and my mom they don’t need to join us (by now it’s dawning on me I’ve never met this guy Timo before and though he’s nice it seems weird he’s just there).

Lying in bed on the top floor knowing the house is full of people asleep it feels good, the sound of a distant truck almost soothing. After a time though I can’t stand it anymore, I need to get up. Looking down from the high windows upon the Spielplätz below the Jack the Ripper fog is back on the street lamps, the same from my last visit, last January.

I crept down the steep stairs with my phone flashlight and when I got to the bottom floor someone had left the lights on so I turned them all off and lit a candle. I got the German yogurt out, sliced a banana, some granola from a jar, then our friend Christoph’s honey (licked the spoon). I knew where all the utensils were on the first try. And then I turned off the radio mom keeps on in her kitchen all the time. Not sure if she does that to keep her company or dissuade a burglar, but the music was bad and the time on the display was wrong, not even close.

Lit a stick of incense and sat on the little divan in my favorite room of the house, by the portable heater. Put a recent favorite record on, a collaboration between a Scottish band called the Pastels and a Japanese one called Tenniscoats, a song called “Vivid Youth.”

It was just the beginning now, the polar opposite of the end.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, travel, Travelogues

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, travel