Serendipity: Impromptu Recollections

By Jim Lacey

This little book is a lively, autobiographical account by Jim Lacey, cheerful skeptic, college teacher, novelist, sailor, lousy golfer, sojourner abroad, resident of Brooklyn, NY, and romantic Willimantic, CT. Experience kids' street games, ice-cream parlors and pubs, nun-run grammar school, college pranks, life with street people, misadventures in the military, an idyllic romance, and much more!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jim Lacey
• Release date: Oct 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9781458073303

Jim Lacey

Jim Lacey is an analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses and a professor of conflict and global issues at Johns Hopkins University. Lacey was an embedded journalist with Time magazine during the invasion of Iraq, where he traveled with the 101st Airborne Division. His opinion columns have been published in The Weekly Standard, The National Review, and The New York Post. Lacey is the author of Takedown, Fresh from the Fight, and Occupation of Iraq. He lives in Alexandria, VA.

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Introduction

I never learned much about what my mom and dad did when they were growing up. I know that my mother worked at CanCo after she graduated from high school, and I gather that she had a happy, if impoverished, childhood with her large extended family, which included a carpenter, a postal employee, a professional gambler (as I learned much later), a hospital attendant, and a few others of no certain employment, including an uncle who was not quite all there and also a mysterious sister who seems to have been retarded. Their run-down apartment on the first floor of a tenement on 53rd Street near Third Avenue in Brooklyn was a large part of my mother’s life, and she spent most afternoons there with my grandma Lizzy and her aunts Gert and Annie when I was a kid.

My father was brought up in a more respectable row house with attractive late Victorian woodwork and decorated plaster just a few blocks away on 50th Street. He resented his own father, Michael, an Irishman who had worked his way through a few wives and had deposited his children with relatives here and there. My dad was brought up with an older cousin Eddie, who worked for the Grace Line, and they were later joined by their cousin Margaret when she came over from Ireland and by my dad’s half brother Bill. I vaguely remember a white-haired elderly woman there--everyone called her Auntie--and an imperious black cat, Jiggs.

Since I learned so little about my own family, I started to record these recollections haphazardly, thinking that my children and grandchildren might find some of them interesting. The first thing that came to mind when I sat at my Mac was a trip I had taken several years ago to Hamburg to attend a conference of the German Association for American Studies.

A Sojourner

I’m not an aggressive tourist like the stereotypical German with his schedule of monuments, buildings, museums, and other sites mentioned in Michelin he feels obligated to explore. When traveling, especially abroad, I tend to drift toward the old section of town, where I like to stay in modest lodgings, and then wander about, stopping at a pub or sidewalk café to sample the local beer or wine and observe the denizens of the town. I don’t think of myself as a tourist, but as a sojourner, trying more or less to fit in with the locals. I’m usually on my way to or from an academic conference; during my stay of course I always find my way to the cathedral, the park, the river or lake, and a museum or two.

The last time I was in Hamburg I picked up a Stadtrundfahrt brochure at the train station, but instead of taking the tour, I walked an abbreviated version of the route and ended up in St. Pauli, the infamous harbor-side district with its raucous nightlife. On a side street off the Repperbahn I sat outdoors at a table with some old salts who were swapping lies and, with my fisherman’s cap as credentials, joined the conversation. From them I learned that young people from all over Germany, evangelicals as they call Protestants, were in town for a week of religious and cultural activities, which explained why cheap rooms were hard to find. After twenty minutes or so, the Stadtrundfahrt bus pulled up, and a number of tourists, their disposable cameras flashing, took pictures of us at the table. I smiled and waved, delighted to be part of the local color.

The salts also said that the Lutheran bishop of Hamburg would be addressing a crowd in a nearby plaza that evening, an event which ordinarily would not interest me. When they referred to the bishop as she, I decided to give it a shot and, skeptic that I am, completely enjoyed the bishop’s rousing address to a crowd of more than 100,000 crammed together like at rush-hour in a New York subway. She insisted that Christians should devote themselves to the homeless, the unemployed, and to the cause of the Gastarbeiter, Turks mainly. When the enormous crowd concluded by filling the night air with We Shall Overcome in English, tears came to my eyes.

I had studied German in high school and college, where I drifted through an intermediate course. When I first set foot in a German-speaking country, I discovered to my chagrin that no one, not even the kids, spoke Intermediate German. Though I could make out most signs and find the men’s toilet, I realized that as far as language skills, I might just as well have been in Italy or Spain. To complicate the matter, I was in Bern, the capital of Switzerland, as an exchange student. The Swiss dialect is about as different from standard German as Dutch is, and often when I would to try my hesitant German, the clerk or waitress would reply in French, which was not all that much help.

My mentor at St. Peter’s College, Angelo Danesino, numbered me among his giants, bright students, diamonds in the rough, who needed the polish Europe would supply. Having read Hemingway, I pictured myself sitting at a café on the Boule Miche sipping cognac and scribbling away at the Great American Novel, so when Angelo twisted my arm to apply for every possible grant, I readily complied. When I was about to leave for Switzerland, he said, If you do only one thing, learn German. If you do not speak good German when you come home, I cut your legs! I assumed the leg-cutting bit was a literal translation of an Italian idiom and probably something to be avoided. So I was determined to learn German.

It was Erasmus, I believe, who said the best way to learn a language is in bed, but I suspected his method would result in a limited vocabulary. I did learn a lot of the language in bed, but in a humdrum fashion. Every day I went to the university, listened to four or five lectures, wrote down the words I could pick out but did not understand, and that night in bed in my small room in an apartment on Belpstrasse I would look them up in my dictionary and add them to a growing list. Most frustrating are words you know you have looked up four or five times but somehow can’t fix in your memory. Just being abroad on your own is an incentive to learn the language as well. If you need a fork or want hot mustard on your wurst, you’d better know the words.

At first at the university I could only pick up a few words here and there; soon I understood the topic being discussed but not what was being said about it. Gradually, as I got better, it became easier to take notes in German. In a month or so the separable prefix at the end of an elaborate sentence no longer came as a surprise, and I began to dream in German. Except for one course, Professor Kohlschmidt’s German Literature of the Classical Age, I began to understand the lectures almost as well as if they had been in English. Kohlschmidt was not Swiss but echt deutsch, and he spoke a baroque Prussian with an enormous vocabulary, which deployed about six clauses per sentence and concluded triumphantly with three or four verbs like a long freight train with so many cabooses. I was relieved to learn that the Swiss students, though they spoke of him with affection, did not understand much of Kohlschmidt’s lectures either.

One unusual circumstance was that a classmate of mine at St. Pete’s, Bob Kramer, also was awarded a Swiss government grant to the same university. Since we were shorter than John Wayne, we were called die kliene, the little ones, in the dialect, even though we were about as tall as the average Swiss. Bob and I came to an agreement about language. Before midnight we spoke German with each other; after midnight, usually at a pub, we relaxed into English. Bob’s German was much better than mine, and I picked up a lot from him. Maybe because of Irish bluster, I often did the talking when we needed information, however. Bob stuck to standard German, while I, perversely, enjoyed picking up what I could of the dialect. Swiss students then had a charming custom, the Handschlag. No matter how many times they met a day, they always shook hands with each other when separating. I felt Bob and I had gone native the first time with just the two of us there we unconsciously shook hands when saying goodnight. Though Bob and I lived in different quarters of the city and took different courses for the most part, we both sat in on Kohlschmidt’s elegant lectures, after which we walked over to the Studentenheim for lunch.

The Studentenheim then (1955!) was a modest student restaurant with cheap food and a costumed, cheerful, middle-aged waitress, Frau Foninsk. A number of students we met there became good companions. Foremost was Marcel Schwander, who cultivated us at first to clean up his spoken English by getting rid of the then preferred British locutions and picking up American vernacular. Marcel, who later became a journalist, teacher, and politician, was a walking, talking language lab, having absorbed German from his father, French from his mother, Italian from school, and English from the BBC and the Armed Forces Network. Fluent in all these languages, Marcel also knew quite a bit about dialects, sound shifts, slang, folk songs, and the like. When he and I hitchhiked to Copenhagen toward the end of the year, he picked up basic Danish in less than a week. He was also an extraordinary mimic, and he could hilariously caricature what came out when people from different Swiss cantons ventured to speak Schriftdeutsch, standard German.

Marcel joined Bob and me on our regular Friday night carouse. We introduced him to the notion of a kitty to pay for our rounds, which he thought was gemütlicher than everyone paying for his own drink, Swiss fashion, and he introduced us inveterate beer drinkers to wine--white wine, red wine, dry wine, halbtrochen wine, the works. When switching wines, usually from dry to sweeter, Marcel insisted that we chew on some cheese to savor the new vintage. I have since always been able to fake my way with people knowledgeable about wine, though to me the difference between a good table wine and a pricey vintage is not readily apparent. Once at the Gambrinuskeller when an overbearing Swiss student insisted that red wine was undrinkable, Marcel bet that he couldn’t tell the difference, blindfolded, between red and white. Marcel ordered a clever variety, and the fellow got four out of five wrong. Four years later, traveling with my wife Bobbi on a belated honeymoon, we got together with Marcel, who then was the editor of a newspaper in Biel, and of course we had to tour the countryside to taste the new vintages. To our mutual surprise, Marcel and I both sported bushy beards, which then were rare in the U.S. and unheard of in Switzerland

At the Studentenheim I also met Elizabeth Hamm, a music student from Hanover, who worked as an au pair girl for a Frau Professor--the honorific, I discovered, is extended to the wife. According to everyone, the very best Deutsch is spoken in Hanover. Elizabeth certainly did speak a clear, soft, precise German that was a pleasure to hear, and I managed to pick up some of her locutions and her much sweeter ich- and ach-lauts than the rough ones coughed up in Bern and Bavaria. Too gentle for rowdy pubs, she introduced me to the alcoholfrei tearooms and to concerts at the Casino. On our first date, Elizabeth said, almost as an aside, I never thought I’d go out with an American.

How come? I asked.

My first encounter with Americans was terrible (schreklich) and I’ll never forget it. We were children, coming home from school, when an American airplane swooped down and strafed us.

Anything happen? I asked.

Yes--they killed my sister.

I was stunned, and for once had nothing to say. We remained friends but quit dating when the relationship threatened to get heavy.

There were a number of American medical students at the university, who Bob and I ran into on occasion but did not spend that much time with. I have since met Fulbright scholars who after a year in the country could not even order breakfast in German because they had spent all their time with other Americans. On the opposite extreme was another giant Bob and I visited in Freiberg. When we got together, he wouldn’t say a word in English, but insisted on bombarding us with his bizarre German. To this day I recall him repeating, at the beginning of every other sentence, Es hängt davon ab, which, we finally figured out, was his way of saying Es kommt darauf an, meaning It all depends. Our colleague, nicknamed Butch to his chagrin, struggled valiantly to morph his working-class Jersey City pronunciation into proper British, but the result was an interesting concatenation of the two. The last time Bob and I ran into him in Europe was at the classiest youth hostel in the world, a posh estate outside Florence. Butch managed to get sick on the local red wine that night, and the following morning he blamed us!

Youth hostels I stayed at were always a surprise because of their variety: from a concrete Dachau-like structure near the Bodensee run like a reform school to the unattended barn near the border between France and Italy with us boys and girls passing around