Children in Wiener World--A Sample

Random Mass Migrations

Schools opened last week. I do not yet have a grasp of the hours and find the students abroad in great numbers at different times throughout the morning and afternoon. This morning around 11:00 I was walking home from the Embassy fitness center. Quite a crowd of school children--preteen and early teen--was identifiable at a distance of several blocks owing to the cloud of cigarette smoke hanging above them. They had poured out of a "gymnasium" onto a narrow sidewalk next to a busy street and tram tracks, making the way impassable for all other pedestrians. I have not seen such a roiling mass of activity since feeding time at a Japanese carp farm. Across the street from them, a tram stopped, and, like the wildebeest migrating over the Uele, they plunged into the street, milling and churning in front of the stopped traffic, then bucked and scampered up the river bank, through the open tram doors. The doors closed, barely, and the tram groaned its way up the hill. Not two blocks further on, I saw two more trams going the opposite direction of the first and similarly packed with school children of the same age. These trams, I knew, were not dedicated school transports, because in the windows of each of the cars were visible the faces and upper bodies of a few elderly who had managed to occupy the seats specially reserved for the aged and disabled. One woman, winter coat buttoned to the neck, had her cheek pressed to the glass and her wool hat awry; other elderly were mashed to the sides of the tram, and I could see through the window twisted arms, a crutch, canes, and the curved handle of a walker protruding at odd angles above their heads. These were the faces on a vehicle that had plunged into a river, the passengers looking out the window for help that, they knew, could only come too late. Now and again in the remaining two miles of my walk, I would see small numbers of students descend from trams and amble along the sidewalk. When I got home, I dropped off my gym bag and picked up my grocery list and empty shopping bag, and I headed off to the store across the street from the tram terminal, where another 30-40 children were waiting to board the next cars for downtown, and dozens more were disembarking. These last, who had come home to Grinzing or to school in Grinzing, proved to be a blessing. When I had finished my grocery shopping, I did not have to do the usual peril-filled traffic dodge to cross the unmarked intersection: a very large man dressed in an ankle-length greenish yellow slicker and matching helmet held up a large red lollipop with "STOP" on it; the traffic indeed did, and I was able to cross under his aegis in the company of a half dozen small wildebeest.

Vignettes

Several mornings recently I have been in the Embassy fitness center at the same time as a mother and her little boy of perhaps 3, who is named Luke. While the mother exercises, Luke asks questions, or rather the same question repeatedly: "Why?' He wants to know why his mother pulls on a weight bar--to exercise--why she exercises--to feel healthy and strong--why she wants to feel healthy and strong--and on and on. His world outside himself is mostly a world of nouns, and he is in the process of deepening it, giving it predicates and adjectives and adverbs; giving it layers, giving it texture. Like Whitman's noiseless, patient spider, he is throwing out filaments to get himself connected to the rest of the universe. Like me...in Vienna.

Walking on the street downtown, a young father with a baby zipped up inside his jacket. Just the child's head was visible, apple cheeks and round blue eyes, peeking out like a curious kitten.