Meat and Potatoes

Our Grinzing neighborhood has a heuriger--beer garden--about every 50 feet, and our first evening here we ventured into one. We sat at a small table in the shade and checked the menu. Linda ordered wiener schnitzel, feeling that that was obligatory for initial familiarization with the area; after reviewing the other menu items, all of which featured boiled potatoes served in a variety of different cuts to please the eye and tempt the appetite, I went with "3 meat and potato." And we had lovely large steins of draft beer with it. When Linda's plate arrived, it looked as if the wings of gargantuan tropical moths had been hammered, breaded, deep-fried, and plopped on cut-up boiled potatoes; mine was two kinds of sausage bits and diced ham, with a smaller cut of potato mixed in. I sighed for pasta and sauces of Rome--then vowed to quit comparing.

And it was, nonetheless, a lovely evening, though not so much because of the cuisine. In the garden, edging from table to table, were a violinist and an accordion player. Accordions here are as common as potatoes, I am finding, and there is a fondness for them in the evening as there is for servings of cucumbers--much admired locally for their resemblance to sausages--on the lunch menus. The musicians played what I suppose were love songs, unintelligible to me, and they were okay, at least not so loud as to be annoying. We noticed seated at an adjacent table an elderly woman (by which I mean older even than I). The one dominant descriptor when I saw her was bagginess: baggy eyelids, baggy cheeks, baggy neck, baggy bosom, and baggy blouse and skirt. Her outfit hung softly on her, even as it seemed to cause her face below her milky blue eyes to sag even further. Between sets the musicians sat at her table, chatting and sharing drinks and cigarettes with her. As we were finishing our dinner, the three of them rose from the table and strolled to the center of the garden, where the musicians began to play cabaret songs, and the woman began to sing. Her eyes suddenly looked happy and alive. The bagginess vanished, and the rich, deep, cigarette voice, above all, let us know that, inside, she was in a place far away, perhaps the world of Edith Piaf. For me she was Lily Marlene, and she would, I thought, drift late in the evening to underneath the lamppost, time traveling back to the 1940s. What a privilege it was to hear her, to see her, and to let her songs transport me to my own imagined foggy pastiche of scenes of post-war Austria.

Arrival in Wiener World

Here at last in Weiner World. Our flight got in Friday morning on schedule; like most transatlantic flights. it was no more than a minor ordeal of being cramped and sleepless. Because Austrian Air appeared to have grouped children and cats into a 6-row section just behind the business class section, we had several pleasant little children nearby, along with one screamer, and two little boys who amused themselves through much of the flight by pushing the doorbell-sounding button to summon the flight attendant, who began ignoring the calls after the first few. The screamer from time to time brought back memories of the Flight of the Angry Babies, which I took from Rome to Washington in 2004, when the Italian Government expelled these shrill and hostile little beings all on one flight, all within five rows of my seat. Our Vienna flight left us little room for legs and feet, with Walter and Earl in their sherpa bags squeezed under the seats in front of us. For the most part, the two of them remained quiet, although 2 hours from Vienna we heard a good deal of meowing and frantic clawing from Earl's bag, and then Linda noticed a large white furry paw extended from a point at which Earl had managed to push back one of the zippers on his bag. I imagined he had sequestered in his bag a volume of Poe and had just finished reading the cat version of "The Cask of Amantillado," in which the central figure while being walled up screams at his host to let him out for God's sake. Linda shoved his paw back in and secured the fabric portal once more, and Earl went back into his semi-comatose state for the rest of the trip.

Another surprise awaited us upon landing and exiting the airport: just as at the Lufthansa desk at Dulles, no one checked the cats' health certificates, not even the ones specially embossed by the USDA office in Richmond. I wanted to kick myself for not bringing a slew of rabid animals into Austria. The airport was hot and stuffy, but perhaps that is the last time for many months that I shall experience such an atmosphere. Since the warm, sunny day of our arrival, the sky has usually been cloudy and the air cool and damp with fine, blowing spray, Middle English "small rain."

Of course, I imagined that upon the ride to our apartment from the airport we would see scores of men in lederhosen playing accordions, and rosy-cheeked Alpine milkmaids bedecked in edelweiss, skipping about beer gardens. The first-impression images, however, are rather more to do with what is not here than with what is here: no graffiti anywhere, no jaywalkers, no cars crowding a single lane to make it two, no trash in the street, and generally little that could be called disorder, though police are little in presence. There are often wide bike lanes, wide sidewalks for pedestrians, and greenery; there are cars that always stop to let pedestrians cross; few business suits are in evidence, as life here seems rather casual; life here is not loud. So far, so good.

last stage

State finally coughed up my passport without my having to go to Washington to administer a bureaucratic Heimlich maneuver. It is in my open briefcase, and Earl at the moment is trying to perforate it with his remaining fang. He seems to like the way it smells--maybe made from recycled tuna. All the paperwork for the move is done now except for the USDA health forms for the cats, which must wait until late next week.

Monday the packout starts, and we have nearly completed sorting and shuffling and some preliminary packing of things that are more fragile or beloved than other possessions. There is something quiet, soft, and gentle about this stage of a big move--a putting away of the past to make room for the new. Cleaning out boxes in the attic storage has meant rediscovering fragments of my past, particularly recalling other times I have had major moves. The Roman Capitoline museums have been frequent visitors to my sleep lately, and half-formed fragments of images from those displays have been strolling through the hallways of my mind just the way I strolled through those museum hallways in years past. Instead of time-travel through bits of inscriptions on tombstones, busts, and Roman mile-marker fragments, I found my mind drifting into the past via a frying-pan shaped ashtray from Harlingen, Texas, an item that was in the welcome kit when my family moved there when I was 11; a baseball bat nicked from the bluestone bits I swatted from our driveway in Vienna, Va; framed photos of the kids and grandkids that no longer look like them; a picture collage Bruce made in high school; a Japanese robot toy of Ben's from Okinawa; a caricature of Karen on skates, drawn at a fair in Quebec on a 1984 vacation....

Endings.... As Thackeray sort of put it, it is time to put away the puppets and close up the box, for the play is played out. Well, this act, at least, is about over. The future beyond Dulles on the 22d has scenes but, as yet, no dialogue for me to rehearse before we leave. My mind at this stage refuses to travel beyond July 22.

dates...at last

With a surgical adventure this week, I had a psychological dry-run of sorts for the flight. The schedule for inguinal hernia surgery--third time, same spot--required me to be in the surgery waiting room at 11:30 a.m. on Monday, a kind of pre-departure lounge very like one in an airport. One television monitor showed the status of patients--by numbered, pale-colored blobs that oozed slowly, horizontally, across a grid from "scheduled" to "pre-op" to "OR" to "recovery." All other monitors for those awaiting flights--and their accompanying families, there to see them off--were fixed on a single channel that silently showed scenes reminiscent of those viewed by the people in the movie Soylant Green undergoing the early stages of euthanasia: mountain sunsets, mushrooms by mossy stones, white water birds taking flight, the tide going out. Across these scenes, like a slow IV drip, rolled bromides in white letters in a funerary font, paradoxically interesting only because of their shallowness, messages like "Life is good when there is hope," and "With a goal, life has meaning." These drips of mental anesthesia were given attribution as well, from The Wife of Bath to Sylvia Plath; these trivial snippets may have been cut from Bartlett's, though I can't imagine that any of the authors or speakers would have wished to see these thoughts a second time. We endured this for almost 5 hours before being summoned to pre-op. I slept through the flight. Around 9 p.m. an attendant rolled me out to B level in the parking garage of the medical center.

After taking great care of me for two days, Linda went back to work, and, even though I'm getting around fairly well, if sorely, I wrote her today to tell her I had been crawling on the floor since she left and surviving on toilet water and raw potatoes, the only food I could reach, on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. Bruce kindly stopped by early this afternoon with a sundae for me from McDonald's. He also very graciously moved some boxes around for me, getting them out of the living room so the house seems a little less cluttered.

Our pack-out dates have finally been determined: we will be out of the house by the 14th and out of the country on the 22d. It feels a little bit frantic now. I met with our property manager this morning and passed over the keys, and I called State Farm to change the house insurance to that of a rental; afterwards I picked up our car titles at the bank, scheduled the cats' last visit to the vet to get health certificates, and tried in vain to get a cleaning company scheduled to come out on the 16th. This holiday weekend, while others are having grand times with their families, I shall stew and go over my lists and move some of my 50 sticky notes around.