A Year of Not

I have now not blogged for as long as I ever blogged, a condition I could blame on lockdowns that left us without Kita for stretches, on work filling the blank spaces that were once pleasant to occupy with  thought, on the disappearance of the red cafe tables on Dunckerstraße where you could sit and write in the refreshing Freiluft, or, maybe more to the point, on an absence of movement and event–of anything much to write about besides the things I wrote about already: coffee shops and playgrounds, basically.

It is easy to recite things that did not happen: the visits we were to receive from J.’s grandparents; our trip home for Christmas; adventures across Europe from Berlin’s new airport, opened ten years late at a tragically useless time, whose red double-decker trains J. recognizes from trainspotting afternoons on bridges as Flughafenzüge, even though we’ve never been to the actual Flughafen. (The way things look, with new viral waves, mutations, and the EU’s limping vaccine rollout, our first trip there might be the day we fly back to the US.) To say nothing of adventures within Berlin: concerts in the Philharmonie, tours of strange Communist buildings and Nazi bunkers, galleries, restaurants, maybe even, if a babysitter could be found and we could stay awake late enough, infiltrating a sweaty, loud, Ecstasy-addled club just once? 

Our one trip, for my 40th birthday in August, which I neglected to write about before, has assumed a sort of mythical status for J., who for a long time afterward would talk about it some nights before falling asleep: the night train to Switzerland, the chugging red train to the mountains, the yellow bus that took us careening over the Maloja Pass (where he threw up twice in the 1000m descent before reaching the floor of the Bregaglia Valley, a low moment for the papa who planned the trip), the switchbacks leading up to the tiny town of Soglio, where an enormous sequoia and a hidden Spielplatz lay behind the hotel we stayed in, where days began with muesli and ended with chestnut gnocchi, always with an astounding view of jagged peaks and glaciers. 

And then? Back to Berlin, where, apart from a few excursions into the curiously characterless countryside of Brandenburg, which makes me long for the hills and blue skies of New England (if not the Alps), we have hardly left our neighborhood for seven months. I sound like I’m complaining, and I am a little bit, emboldened by a recent Times article whose writer observed that, when you ask people about the last year, the most common response is, “I really don’t have it that bad…” But, said the writer, you have a right to grieve for something, even if nobody in your family died or got sick. “Loss of life” usually means death, but this year represented smaller losses of life for everyone, in the sense of missed opportunities, of time slipping by with too little to show for it. 

And yet! My intention is not to bemoan this year, but to consider: if there are so many things it was not, then what was it? For one thing, it was a very good year for a small child. A short radius, regularity and familiarity, endless time with one’s parents, moderate hits of stimulation and social activity: with the noteworthy absence of grandparents or other family, our year was practically designed for a two- (soon three-) year-old. For J., it was not much different from what another year here would have been: he had Kita most of the time, easily ten nearby playgrounds to rotate among (after their closure last spring, they stayed open; the Germans have shown different attitudes from Americans about congregating outdoors: no mask, no problem), and more time with Caroline and me than ever, since we had no reason to leave the neighborhood for work or much else. Every afternoon, one of us, sometimes both, would pop out to a Spielplatz, or play at home with trains, magnets, Duplos, for hours. When the library wasn’t closed, we took out dozens of books, then went back for more. 

I recently read an American doctor’s advice to parents to find at least twenty minutes a day to play with their child doing something the child chooses (not meals, bath, bedtime, getting dressed, or errands, but really playing) and felt a kind of appalled pity: twenty minutes? Many days, Caroline and I do this for three, four hours, sometimes on weekends nearly the entire day, spelling each other to do some work, go on a run, take a nap, read a little. Many households here seem to function similarly. The German emphasis on children’s welfare, happiness, amenities, and infrastructure, which could hardly be more acute than in Prenzlauer Berg, has been turned up a notch this year, if that’s possible: mama and papa were always around; no one ever went out on a date, never mind a business trip. 

Ibrahim, still my number-one barista, points out that Prenzlauer Berg is unusual even within Berlin in the lengths to which people go to make life child-friendly. We experienced the most remarkable example of this after a rare (once every ten years, the Berliners said), sizable snowfall last month: we discovered that the sidewalks are left less than fully plowed on purpose, leaving an inch of hardpack for children to sled on. It is easy to walk on too, and your shoes are never ruined by salt as in North America (seen here as a barbarism). The day after the snow fell, Caroline ran out to buy a sled–a wooden one with runners, the only kind anyone uses here–and for a whole week we commuted to Kita by sled, pulling J. like a pair of human Huskies. "Whoa, whoa, whoa," he said as we went, like a gentle little siren: the same sound he made the one time I took him down a bunny hill on skis, holding his one-year-old self in what feels like a long-ago New England winter but was actually only 15 months ago.

And what about mama and papa? Clearly it's good to spend time as a family, but is it possible to get too much of a good thing? Sometimes it is good to leave the neighborhood, which I do on runs and bike rides, often with a destination coffee shop or, in Sisyphean style, a bakery en route, returning home with telltale flakes of croissant on my jogging clothes. For my birthday, I bought a used Swiss racing bike from a German ex-racer living on Mallorca, which I take on longer rides when I have time: at first into the countryside to the west and north of Berlin, and more recently on long rides through and around Berlin: past the Reichstag and the Tiergarten, along the canals to the Schloss Charlottenburg, back across Berlin to Tempelhof Field, which, though ugly, offers an experience of sky and openness that no other city has. There, you feel vaguely like some participant in the 1936 Olympics, but a strange alternative leftist-collective version of it, racing around and around past the Albert Speer-ish terminal, dodging other cyclists, rollerbladers, children on Laufrads, and many practitioners of weirder sports, including one that involves riding a skateboard with a huge sail over your head. At the airport, there you feel free, kind of. 

Yet after a few hours speeding around Berlin, a city I still have strongly mixed aesthetic feelings about, I am always glad to return to our neighborhood, which I have come to see as a really perfect urban place: walkable, village-like, dense in appealing people, bicycles, and tasty things to eat, with relatively few cars on the street (but the parked cars include many charming and wacky ones: old Mercedes, enormous disused fire-department vans that families take camping on weekends, and many of what J. calls "babalops," which are anything in the genre of Land Rovers and Jeeps).

Our hardly ever leaving the neighborhood has made me appreciate its merits more keenly, but I think the neighborhood also has special qualities. In a way that was never really true in Brooklyn, I exchange greetings with many people on the street every day: neighbors, Kita parents, friends who live in the neighborhood, and acquaintances from Spielplätze–which, Caroline has observed, function as a continuation of the parties where you meet people in Berlin in your twenties or early thirties, only now you see them earlier in the day, with your kids. (A telling metaphor, I think: if American kids are all about organized sports, the Berlin kid is in training for nightlife.) I’ve reached friendly-greeting status with local business owners: the guy from Milan who makes fresh pasta around the corner, the Egyptian owner of the healthy-vegan-bowl place on the block, the Greek-Austrian guy who runs a shop selling only Greek wines, and a slightly embarrassing number of baristas who know me as a regular customer. 

Staying put, in short, has made it all the more palpable what here actually is like. All the travel that we haven't done feels, in a way, like something we can do another time, when we don't live here anymore.