Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Language barrier

This entry was originally posted on 19 December 2003 at 12:45 p.m.

Will it ever get to the point where i feel at home somewhere? Will it ever get to the point where i can walk down the street and run into people i've met and feel like i actually know them?

I was 17 when my dad retired from the military and took a job in the defense industry. Seventeen. Certainly, i've moved less than many people i know--no question about that. But...there's something about attending six schools before college when most people attend three that just makes me feel as though i've got less of a claim in this country than they do.

You'd think it would be the opposite, right? That i'd seen enough of this country that all of it felt like home.... But it doesn't work that way.

A story, then, from childhood, since that seems to be the theme this week:

My first school was an ugly brick Department of Defense school in Mainz, Germany. We lived on Benjamin Franklin Strasse (yes, the sign actually said "Strasse" rather than "Street") in Martin Luther King Village (yes, it was really called that, but as always with the military, there was an acronym: MLKV).

It was a military housing area, separate from the places where our parents actually worked. We had a PX, a commissary, a few playgrounds, a tennis court, and even the infamous Pizza Barn. We had a movie theatre, where, before every film we had to stand up for the national anthem. (When we moved back to the States, in 1983, my brother, sister, and i went to see Return of the Jedi. Before the movie started, my brother turned to me and explained that they weren't going to play the national anthem and that we weren't supposed to stand.) Our village was separated from the rest of Germany by a chain-link fence.

We weren't restricted to life in the housing area. We spent many a weekend in Mainz-Kastel: street artists drawing the Virgin in chalk, beggars hoping someone might toss them a few pfennigs, produce stands, cover bands playing on trailers in the plaza, Legoland. All around us, the sounds of the German language. I didn't know any different: this was home as much as Fort Ord, or San Antonio, or Fort Sheridan, or Latham.

I started school in Germany--kindergarten (how apropos), first, and second grades. Our classes were in English, but we learned German. We spoke it in the halls, our teachers occasionally spoke it to us, we used the odd phrase on the playground. We were accustomed to hearing it. Our field trips took us to German castles on German hillsides and taught us about German history.

During the summer between second and third grades, we moved to Tacoma, Washington. My father had been transferred to Fort Lewis. I was to start third grade at Whittier Elementary in September. It was exciting: we had our own house (no more apartment complex!) with a deck and a garage in a suburban neighborhood. We had our own yard with a big boulder in the front that i could climb if i were brave enough. It wasn't so different from Germany in some ways: towering pines, same latitude, similar climate.

Different school.

I'd never been to an American public school before. It wasn't so different in many ways, but it was strange for me because i'd never known anything other than my little DOD school.

It took me a few hours to realize that no one spoke German. I'm sure i must have greeted a few teachers the way i'd been taught, with a "Guten Tag" or "Guten Morgen." I'm certain they must have looked bemusedly at me.

I don't think i'd cried so hard since the day before my fourth birthday when i realized i wouldn't be three anymore. My parents, as always, were astounded to see me crying. What could possibly be so horrible about my new school?

Maybe it was just culture shock. Maybe it was just the shock of moving when i was finally old enough to begin to understand what it meant. Maybe it was that the realization that i was a military kid, that i was different, was finally setting in. But i will never forget the day when i cried because no one at my school spoke German.

2 Comments:

Blogger okay said...

I also lived in MUHA, or MLKV, on Benjamin Franklin StraBe (6713) and attended 7 schools before university. I moved to MUHA in '83, just as you were moving out. Funny.

July 7, 2008 at 4:57 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Certainly can relate . . . I attended elementary school in MUHA from 1977 to 1980. Great place to live as a kid, seems like I enjoyed that school the most out of the dozen I attended.

March 5, 2009 at 4:19 AM  

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