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Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2008 14:29:39 -0500
From: "Helen Klein" (dj.rustynailz at gmail.com)
To: dgtized at gmail.com
Subject: Marcel

In april Marcel sent me this.

"Here is the essay I wrote for my friend about moving away, if yer
interested.
In 1951, their families and country damaged by war, Heinz, Regina and their
young daughter Angelika moved from their home in the outskirts of Berlin to
a foreign country, the native land of the occupiers of one-half of Germany's
capital. They learned the language, found work and then careers, eventually
settling in a suburb of Chicago to raise five more children. In 1975, a man
from Ohio married their third daughter, Veronica, and a few years later I
was born. I can't really know what the relocation must have been like for my
grandparents, nor for my father, but having now moved away from Oak Park
myself (albeit not so distantly, nor with or for wife and child), I can
imagine.

The first date, the job interview, almost getting hit by a car, a fever that
overtakes you in a supermarket; moments of strangeness that drive you to
seek out the familiar, to touch base - but in your first weeks and months in
a new city, your base is so new you can still remember the first time you
touched it, and with no retreat, the newness seeps in irrevocably. Returned
from a funeral, removing his tie, my father told me that one of the hardest
aspects of death is not just losing a friend, but losing the part of
yourself only they knew. All your shared memories, now held only in your
fragile recollection and subject to your smudgings and edits, and the smile
only they could provoke now put up on a high shelf, perhaps never to be
brought down again. Moving away from home, alone, can be like that; never
asked to tell that stupid story again, you are no longer the person who
groans, secretly happy, and starts, "Alright, so I had just got my first
driver's license..." You realize that who you are does not stop at your
skin. When you smile, it is at different people, and when you are lonely,
you go different places, and like a canyon swept out by new winds, you
change.

As you begin the act of living in a foreign land growing familiar, like the
first date, between the sidewalk glances and forkfuls of food, casual
conversations, small tragedies and autobiographic confessions, you may find
yourself asking your new home, "Are you worth getting to know? Will we fall
in love? Will you remember me?" and you may begin to feel the strange tug of
a new smile you have never used before, and living stories you will be asked
to recount by dear strangers. "