christmas

I spent last Christmas visiting the concentration camp in Dachau. My flight from Chicago arrived in Munich after dawn. I took the train to the Hauptbahnhof; on the way, four brown men and a brown child were harassed by polizei for not having validated tickets. I stowed a backpack and a guitar in a luggage locker, took the train to Dachau, and then a bus to the concentration camp. There were a few tourists and the sky was gray. I was freezing - I had underpacked - so I tried to stay indoors, but that meant spending more time in rooms where thousands of people had lived briefly before they died. I snapped pictures of "ARBEIT MACHT FREI" and the photos of Nazi rallies in which well-meaning vandals had scratched Hitler's face off, then found a small church lit with candles where suddenly a chorus of nuns appeared and sang. There was nobody in the pews besides me and one other person, but I suppose they weren't singing to an earthly audience anyway. I fell asleep. I tried to stay as long as possible in the church because I had to wait until 8 p.m. to meet the person I had flown to Germany to meet - he was spending the day with his sister and father - but the church closed at four, so I left. I walked back to the train instead of taking the bus, and on the way passed the former plaza of the army camp (now a soccer field), a deflated inflatable Santa, and the word "BITCH" spray painted alongside German graffiti on a walking path. Back at the Hauptbahnhof, I pointed at something that looked edible and said, "Ein," and was rewarded with a small wheel of pizza-like substance. I asked for a "Wasser"; the cashier coughed out a stream of Teutonic noises; I said, "What?"; he said, "Mit Gas?"; I said, "Oh, yeah, mit," and then he handed me fizzy Wasser. After this I only ordered tea. I sat in the station for two hours and applied my cold brain to filling pages in a yellow spiralbound notebook, and then I collected my guitar and backpack and waited in front of platform 24 until a tall old man embraced me and told me we would be off to Regensburg soon. I barely spoke a word to this stranger on the train except to ask how to translate some colorful phrases into German. In Regensburg, he walked us around the medieval streets pointing at closed shops and darkened Christmas decorations before leading us to Geibelplatz. In one room was overhead lighting and dishes piled in the sink, in another was flannel shirts hanging off a lamp and an opened futon with a deep, body-shaped depression on one side. The last room was strewn with boxes. This is how I spent last Christmas. I didn't know then what I was doing and I guess if pressed I still couldn't say.

This year, I woke at 2 p.m. in the room I grew up in, tidied for four hours, and then went to Chevy's Fresh Mex with my parents and grandmother. Afterward, we found an open 24-hour CVS and poked around for forty minutes. My blood pressure was 94/64 and my pulse was 59 bpm.