Thankful---part2

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Another great convenience that has been a part of my life for some years now is the car, or rather a succession of cars. They are always old, and they always act up in ways befitting their age, but they are cars and they get me from here to there most of the time. We never had a car when I grew up, and I am still the only person in my immediate family to be a car owner. The trip to an uncle's funeral in a town thirty miles away, while wearing my Sunday best and riding on the back of a borrowed, temperamental moped driven by my father, is a memory that's guaranteed to last forever.

I remember the years that brought progress to my home as other people recall the dates of great, world-changing events. 1967-the refrigerator. 1972-the washing machine. A much-needed and long-overdue telephone-1978. How did we manage? We did what people everywhere have been doing since the beginning of time-we made do. Mother shopped almost daily for fresh food in neighborhood stores; leftovers and the few perishables on hand were kept on our hallway stairs where it was always cold, even in the middle of summer. And if some major event necessitated that one of my parents make a phone call, we took a walk to the post office where all four of us squeezed into one of three cubicles equipped with a telephone. A nod from the operator seated behind her desk signaled that we were connected.

Progress finally arrived in the form of a phone booth on our street, but somehow calling other people never really caught on in our family. It always remained a novelty, reserved for transmitting only the direst news. For everything else we had letters and postcards.

Times have changed, perhaps more so for me than for most others of my generation. I grew up at a time and in a place where farmers cut the grass with sickles and turned the resultant hay with wood-tined rakes; where people went to threshing parties and butchered their own pigs in the barnyard; where fields were planted with no-nonsense food like turnips, cabbage and potatoes, and fun for us kids was stealing fruit off other people's trees. It seems like ten lifetimes ago.

So long ago. Today my life is filled with gadgets large and small, and their existence has allowed me to focus on things other than keeping myself fed, bathed and in clean clothes. But always at the back of my mind are the uneasy memories of what it was like without, and I wouldn't dream of taking any of my gadgets for granted.

Thankful---part1

Late last night, after cleaning up a pet's accident, I found myself grateful once again for the miracle of running hot water. This sentiment may seem odd to most people in this country, but becomes more understandable when I reveal that I spent my first twelve years without this marvelous convenience.

Our domestic shortcoming affected my hardworking parents much more than me. They were the ones who had to deal with all its implications on a daily basis while I, a child and not knowing any better, wasn't bothered all that much. At least that's how I remember it, suspecting that time has erased some of the more gruesome details of growing up in a poor, post-war, cold-water-only household.

One thing I do remember vividly is the weekly bath my brother and I got to enjoy on Saturday nights. My father would haul the huge, galvanized metal tub from the basement where it resided next to our annual allotment of coal, a large wooden bin filled with potatoes and a stash of home-canned goods unrivaled in our village.

The tub was set up in the middle of the kitchen, while on the stove water was boiling merrily in mother's large canning kettle. Combined with enough cold water to keep it from scalding us, it filled the tub just slightly less than half full. To make the bath more interesting, my mother added a round pine-scented bath cake which, upon dissolving in a burst of fizzy bubbles, filled the room with an intensely foresty fragrance and turned the water that special shade of green known as "hazardous chemical spill".

The scrubbing my brother and I received was intense, making up on that one occasion for all the previous nights we went increasingly unwashed. It's hard to keep a body clean when all you have to work with is a cold-water faucet at the kitchen sink, the bathroom a luxury that didn't become a part of my life until I was almost a teenager. Since we spent all our free time playing outside, we must have been two remarkably dirty children.

The above-mentioned tub was also an essential part of my mother's weekly washday. For this she would go to another of the basement and fire up the small wood burning stove squatting there. With much water hauling and water boiling, engulfed in steam, suds and sweat, with the aid of a washboard, a stiff brush and a slippery hunk of yellow soap, she somehow managed to clean the entire laundry created by a family of four.

Anyone guessing that there was no electric dryer to cope with all this wet wash is guessing correctly. Outside to the clotheslines it went, piled high in basket after heavy basket, in weather of every description. It was on winter washdays I became acquainted with the expression "freeze-dried". It was something that happened to our laundry, its usefulness in food preservation still largely unknown. I remember many a half-dark, foggy winter afternoon when, walking home from school, I was greeted by those ghostly frozen forms hanging motionless in our yard like empty shells abandoned by their departed souls.

to be continued...

What sold me on this country-a tribute to the American people

Having come here from somewhere else people often ask me what I think about their country, these United States. I usually answer that I really like it here; that despite some shortcomings it's the greatest country on earth, for a lot of reasons. But what I like most about it is its people. The kindness I meet everywhere I go; the generosity toward those in need that I see all around me; the boundless optimism and the "we'll take care of that" attitude that just can't be stopped.

And then, sometimes, I tell them this story.

I am sitting in the courtyard of the apartment building where I live. I am five years old. With me is my best friend Lottie who is six. She's trying to teach me how to tie my shoelaces. I'm thinking that I've just about got it when a sudden grumbling sound distracts us-forgotten are the shoelaces.

Our curiosity on fire, we run out to the street. The distant rumbling has turned into the tortured clanging and clattering of many iron treads on pavement, as a long line of American tanks winds its way up the street. One by one they roll past our apartment block.

This is a novel sight! We cheer and wave at the green-clad soldiers leaning out of the tops of these awesome machines, and they smile and wave back at us. Then, a total surprise. Reaching into the depths of their clamorous, cannon-studded monsters, a few of the men come up with handfuls of something that they throw toward us. It takes us just seconds to identify the wrapped objects as chocolate bars. By then every child in the neighborhood has joined us, but after many tanks and many generous soldiers there is plenty for all.

It is five years later, an evening in early summer. Thanks to a government program several of my friends and I are en route to spend our six weeks of summer holiday on an island in the North Sea. Right now we are still in a train station, waiting to switch lines to get us from our little local onto the big one that will take us all the way up north, all the way to our ship.

A rowdy bunch of American soldiers spills from another train and tumbles toward us noisily. They say something to the woman in charge of us who, with helpless shrugs and polite smiles, indicates her non-comprehension.Giving up, they move toward the snack bar and out of sight.

We are still waiting for our connecting train when the soldiers reappear, even more boisterous and happy than before. Smiling all the while and saying things we have no way of understanding, they pull chocolates, obviously just bought, from their pockets, and hand one to each of us, even our chaperone. I guess we must have been a sorry-looking lot, a dozen or so scrawny, underfed ten-year-olds late at night in an ill-lit train station.

Fast forward to winter 1965. I am now thirteen and unfortunately, due to my parents' poor life choices, I am spending Christmas in a state orphanage. No one is feeling very festive when suddenly all of us children are invited to join in holiday celebrations at the local American Army base.

Ants must have been in our pants or in those bus seats because there was no keeping us still on the ride across town. As we pulled up, a crowd of people stood waiting, and as the doors of the bus hissed open, each child was greeted by a friendly, smiling family and led toward unknown adventures. The first of these turned out to be a dinner so sumptuous it seemed like a meal in heaven to us. Some of the dishes were strange but never mind, it was delicious and I ate it all, including a tiny box of ice cream.

Later on, we watched some cartoons and I know we all had a great time. I was in my first year of studying English during that winter and I'm sure that, despite my shyness, I must have tried to use a dozen words or so in our not-so-successful attempts at a conversation. There was no difficulty, however, when it came to understanding our expressions of gratitude, especially after we all received a beautifully wrapped Christmas gift.

I was too young then to realize all the implications of a foreign military entrenched in my country, and all the upheavals that had brought things to this point. After many years I understood that not all of my fellow citizens had the opportunity to form such a positive view of the situation. But, speaking for myself, I will always be grateful to the people who, through a few acts of kindness and generosity, made such a long-lasting impression on me, a little girl in another country.