On the work front this trip has been a great learning experience. At the same time, I feel like I’m moving slo-mo through a foggy blanket of memories, as gray as Zurich in the wintertime.
I lived in Zurich when I was 21. That was a time of revelation and deep loneliness. It was my first trip to Europe and the first time I ever lived away from my sheltered life in Massachusetts. I look back to that time and see an unformed amorphous person floating in a painless sea. My whole life was in front of me, I had no clear idea of where I was going, and I had no foundation.
My job was working as an au pair in the household of a well respected pediatrician. My days were spent on playgrounds, at the skating rink, or at the zoo. I was not a gifted caregiver so managing a rambunctious 5 year old was a challenge. I had no money and few friends. Sundays, my day off, were often spent writing and reading in bed, with a trip to the Bahnhoff to buy a carton of yogurt from the automat my only interruption. During the winter, I got fat on cheese, bread and chocolate. In the spring I lost the weight and got my first boyfriend. (I was a late bloomer.) The night we met he wrote his phone number with chalk on the street outside my house. For the first time in my life I felt the electricity of a man’s touch. He had no idea that he took my virginity on his parent’s bed, the first of many secrets I have kept from men. A faint scar from his motorcycle’s engine graces my inner left calf to this day.
On Sunday I visited the pediatrician and his wife. Zurich hadn’t changed much and neither had they. They still live in the same apartment where I learned how to make birchermuesli, risotto, and halting swiss german sentences. It was there that I learned the Swiss way to fold a sheet.
After washing, we hung the thick cotton sheets in the attic to dry. They were flat, never fitted, and smelled unlike the Tide of my youth. Rather they smelled fresher and more European to my unsophisticated American exburban nostrils. The folding took both of us, holding two corners each. On cue we would tug at opposite corners vigorously and simultaneously. After a few well choreographed jerks, having achieved the desired tautness, we stepped gingerly toward each other, joining our corners in pursuit of a rectangle. This rectangle would then undergo the same vigorous corner tugging, morphing into another rectangle and yet another until the whole was neatly collapsed.
A rare moment of cooperation between us, those sheet folding waltzes.
She said that she had grown up a lot since her “au pair” days, which led me to believe that maybe she was young then too. That maybe she regretted some of the barbed words and sharp manifestations of disapproval she aimed at me. She has softened over time, I'll say that.
He dug out a colored pencil portrait I made of the youngest child. I had lots of time to draw that year.
And what about me? Have I changed? In the intervening years I have pursued multiple career paths, visited scores of countries, and loved many men. Yet here I am, despite the layers of experience and wisdom, very much alone. I have learned and grown so much since I was 21. So why do I now feel so much like I felt that year in Zurich? How could I have come so far yet stood so very still?
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