CONTACT

What do you think of when you hear the word "CONTACT"?  I used to think of contact with beings from outer space or about the internet, contact with new people on the internet.  How about contact with everyone you know when ever you want through our cell phones.  My son, Josef, thinks of making contact with new friends, exchanging phone numbers and making a play date.  My husband, Helmut, thinks of making connections with people or contact fighting, a form of boxing.  My sister Bobbie thinks of touching someone or sending an email, a contact lens maybe?  My mom thinks of contact paper, a paper that has a sticky side and you line your drawers or shelves with it.

I have recently re-evaluated my views on the word "contact".  The last 8 years of my life have been spent living in a small town in Bavaria with my husband and now two children, next door to my in-laws.  We share a garden, we have very separate entrances, but the houses are connected.  I've often heard them make a comment about how they could hear me fighting with the kids in the morning, or worse, when Helmut and I have come home late at night after being out together.  How much do you think they can actually hear?  How good can their hearing actually be at the age of 78?  Helmut's brother lives in our town as well.  He lives across the train tracks with his wife and three teenage boys.  Forget running to the store in your sweats with big sunglasses and Uggs on, hoping not to be noticed.  I've tried it and it doesn't work.  "Frau Mages, what can I get you?" is the first sentence out of everyone's mouth.  They all know me, and knew me from the first week I was here.  It took me years to get to know all of them!  There I am walking home from the bar at 12 mid-night, happy and a little drunk.  Someone is walking towards me with a wool hat pulled down low.  "Hello Stephanie" says the man....  Oh, it's Helmut's brother walking home from the theater!  Now I know that his parents will know that I was out, that I was out without my husband, that I was drinking and they'll probably receive a full account of what I was wearing!  I so didn't grow up in a small town.  I grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.  Besides our direct neighbors, we could pretty much go anywhere incognito.
It also means that when I don't rake the leaves on our side of the house once a week, the neighbors talk.  Or when my neighbor lets her two girls play in the street in November, BAREFOOT, then I talk.
Well, recently my husband's father died.  I've lost two of my grandparents, but for reasons I'm about to explain, it didn't affect me so much.  You see, growing up in a big city, even though everything might seem so jam packed and close together, it's actually harder to visit with people unless they're your neighbors.  There is so much traffic, and it takes so long to get any where.  My grandfather lived until he was 91.  I was 31 at the time of his death.  But throughout the years, I never lived that close to him.  I never spent a lot of quality time with him.  Living next door to Helmut's father, we spent a lot of time together.  Token holiday parties aside, we spent time in the garden together.  We went shopping together.  The kids play in the garden and then go over to Oma and Opa's house.  I have to find them...  Opa loved to work with wood and was always teaching us something about creating instead of buying.  He was a bee keeper and over the years I've gone with him and learned how to care for the bees in the hopes of becoming as good as him one day.  It was a day in, day out relationship with an older couple.  A relationship, that until this point in my life, I had never had.  I miss him, and the kids miss him.  Of course my husband grieves his father dearly.  Oma, over every one else, who has spent the last 60 years of her life with Opa, misses him the most.  I can see the pain drawn on her face, the empty hole that is now a part of her every day life.  We look at pictures of Opa all the time, and talk about him a lot.  So now you understand how my idea of contact has morphed into a new meaning, a positive one.  Close contact with other people, people who are older and in many ways wiser than I, is a totally new experience for me.  I look forward to deepening these contacts in this small town and smiling when my neighbors complain that my side walk isn't clean.