Distance, Death and Facebook

Whenever I go to Michigan to visit my parents I bump into somebody from my past.  A high school friend at Starbucks, a familiar face at the movie theatre, a wave to someone whose name escapes me at the gas pump.

I hadn’t seen Jeff in years.  My most vivid memories of him are in a hockey jersey when we were ten, maybe some high school snapshots, a moment or two from college.  And then I am back in my hometown for one of those short visits, where you fly in at an un-godly hour so you can squeeze in four meals (lunch, dinner, breakfast, lunch). 

On the way to my parents’ house I stop at Steve’s Deli for a corned beef sandwich.  Walking in my eye catches a familiar face, I stop to say hello.  He is sitting outside at a table with someone having lunch.  I approach him, my hand outstretched and his arms open wide and he welcomes me back as a long lost friend.

He looks healthy and strong and maybe even he didn’t know what poison was moving through his body.  I welcome the embrace.  We talk for a few minutes, exchange family anecdotes, I ask about his wife.  “It was great seeing you, take care.”  “And you too.”

And 24 months later he is dead at 43.  It was the last time I saw him and it is my most enduring memory.  I recall almost nothing from the trip, but I do remember saying to my mom, “Guess who I just bumped into at Steve’s…Jeff Camiener... Yea, Emily Holzman…He’s doing great.”

Living away from your hometown you feel a detachment at first and then a complete dislocation.  You return and the places are familiar, but the names and faces have changed.  No one lives in those houses any more.  You remember the street names, but have trouble finding them from behind the steering wheel.  When you move to a new country the time change makes finding a convenient time to talk impossible, and your efforts to stay connected move online.

When Jeff got sick his friends started a Facebook page and I felt like a voyeur watching his illness, his life and death unfold.  And when it got near the end I checked more frequently for updates.  And then the messages morphed from, “Stay strong” to “the world has lost a mensch.” 

And I wanted to reach out because I felt so close to them, but I was still distant and I knew the closeness was one sided.  And then the funeral was broadcast midday in Detroit and here in London it was closing time and my office mates were going to the pub, but I stayed behind.  And here I sat alone in my office, 4000 miles from home watching the drama of a young man’s funeral as his parents, wife and two young sons escorted his coffin. 

So when the camera pulled back I scanned the crowd for faces of old friends, memories.  And I spotted some familiar people, mostly older, bigger, grayer.  And I was grateful for the connection to these people and places and the technology that allowed me to appreciate a life even in his death.

Is it Still Thanksgiving if…

I have been having Thanksgiving in roughly the same place with just about the same people my entire life.  It is these family traditions and rituals that make life rewarding, fills our heads and hearts with memories.  The sights, sounds, smells and feel of these family events are comfort food.  They have morphed over time.  People have come and gone:  Divorce, death, moves out of state, have transformed these holidays.  The location has scattered from Southfield to the Silverdome, Bethesda, New York, the Poconos. But the basic set up is always the same.  Certain essentials persist.

Until this year. 

Imagine a Thursday in late November with no Macy’s Day Parade, no old-timers football game, no last minute drive to the store, no Black Friday sales.  Imagine the Wednesday before without the office talk of where you are going, the incessant traffic and weather reports.  Imagine no AAA announcements about how many more/less people will be on the road this year versus last.  

Instead an officemate asked me:  "Is it always on Thursday?"

So instead of lacing up the tattered cleats for old guy football, I donned khakis and loafers for an American Thanksgiving Day Service at St Paul’s Cathedral.  Since the Detroit Lion game didn’t start until dinnertime there was no need to be home and eat lunch on the couch.  So we ate out and bumped into a mild UK celebrity who was worldly enough to wish us a Happy Thanksgiving.

My mid-afternoon ritual of running to the store was relatively unchanged except that finding a Whole Foods in London via the tube was a lesson in orienteering.  I needed to buy ten 500 g servings of stuffing since the British chef who was cooking our Traditional Thanksgiving fare refused to make stuffing without pork.

Dinner wasn’t in Manhattan, but Notting Hill.  It wasn’t in a living room, but a pub.  We weren’t surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins, but by friends. 

Instead of lamenting another Lion Thanksgiving Day collapse at dinner, this year’s point of contention was trying to watch the game on our laptops through the restaurant’s spotty WiFi connection.

And instead of nursing my football injuries on Saturday and watching Michigan/Ohio State, we were on a train headed 2 hours North for the Manchester United v Newcastle football match.

And so back home, this very American tradition lived on with its overdose of football, family and faux pageantry, but without us. And although we love it, we didn’t miss it.  In part because it didn’t feel anything like Thanksgiving here.  In London they call it Thursday. 

And then it hits us.  A delayed reaction perhaps.  Now that we see the pictures and hear stories we realize it really was the fourth Thursday in November, and the parades occurred and the games happened and the traditions carried on. 

But we had something else.  We created new memories and a special day, indeed, but was it still Thanksgiving?  I’m not sure you can have Thanksgiving without being in America.  This was a very special holiday in London. 

Snippets of Copenhagen

The flight to Copenhagen is only an hour thirty, but I fly from one season to the next.  I left the British Autumn and entered the Denmark Winter.

The town has a vaguely East German feel, circa 1975.  The sky is slate grey, the whipping wind made empty bags and burger wrappers dance and the street construction was relentless.  On my way to my first meeting I stop at a small coffee shop for a sandwich.  The entire space can’t be more than 500 square feet, with a big counter and room for six tables and a couch.  It’s in the basement of a building, a few steps down from the main road.  A man in his 40’s is behind the counter, an Iranian who made me egg salad on a bagel and a coffee with the care of an artist.

I am the only one in the place.  The Conversation:

 “Why Denmark?”

“Because Tehran was not a good place to be a young person 20 years ago.”

“Do you like it here?”

“No place is perfect right?”

“Have you ever been to America?”

“No, but I want to go very badly.  I want to go to New York.  I want to see Broadway.  It’s beautiful, yes?”

“It is.”

"The construction (the road and building repairs outside his restaurant) hurts my business.  And so I ask for a change in rent.  And they say:  ‘too bad’.  And I am surprised.  I expect different from a place that calls itself a modern democratic society.”

I am impressed by his English and his manner.  But mostly by his expectations of what a democratic society is.  He wants to be treated fairly.  He feels like the construction is the owner’s way of taking advantage of him.  He wants to trust the government.

At 8:00 at night I finish my meetings and head to see Tivoli Gardens, the big attraction, especially under the Christmas lights.  I walk through the shopping district with a piece of cheese-less pizza and a Carlsberg, it is much prettier at night, but the temperature is dipping.

A block from Tivoli I stop at a Pub for a pint and to warm up, the gardens are open until 11.  There is a guitar player singing “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel.  Just him, a guitar and a harmonica and it’s perfect.  The bar is warm and friendly, everyone is talking and laughing, I forgot, it’s Friday night.

During a break he tells me he is Swedish, but plays all American songs.  The pub smells of stale beer and during a series of Springsteen songs I am transported back to Ann Arbor listening to the songs of my youth, surrounded by drunkards singing and swaying together.  Hours, beers, and a long rendition of Whiskey in a Jar and Proud Mary later I walk past the now closed Tivoli and to my hotel room, which reminds me of a hostel from my Euro-rail days. 

It is good to be in the company and kindness of strangers.  Different language, same songs , just people.

The Process

I’m not a big believer in epiphanies or love at first sight, but I do believe in moments of clarity.  Things take time to digest, to percolate.  And living abroad is no different.  You may be in love with the idea or even the Christmas morning newness (I know I shouldn’t use cliché’s especially this one since I don’t even understand Christmas morning) of the whole thing, but it takes time, especially for the kids.

And so the process completes when they have their first trip home.  The kids were told they could go home for certain special events but we’re not flying across the Atlantic every time someone has a party they don’t want to miss.  And so for daughter number two her big trip was here.  And you could see it in her step in the week leading up.  There was a relief, an exhalation, that finally she would be home, in her bed, with her dogs and best friends and Bethesda Avenue and all that is good in the world.

And the time home does not disappoint.  The dogs are in the car upon arrival, her room looks like it should, the friends are waiting at the door, the hugs, the smiles, the food all make her feel complete. 

It’s a mind-shuffling 70 hours of walking the mall and hugging and bat mitzvahs and brunches and telling everyone the same stories about what’s good and what’s hard.  Amid the love of old friends, however, she sneaks in a moment for something else.  She has a need to reach out to her new friends back in London.  And one of the first things she does, after hugging and screaming and being a 13 year old girl, she gets online and video chats with her London friends so they can see what her room looks like.

And in a blink she is boarding the plane to return.  And she’s tired.  And she loved it.  But she realizes that back home things changed and stayed the same.  She understands that when you leave a place the world doesn’t stop turning.  Especially at her age, people get bigger, taller, fuller, more mature, growth happens.  But she also learned, nothing changed.  Her friends are still there, her room is how she left it, the smell of the house remains.

And she is happy to come home.  Which home?  The home she has now.  It is the air that she breathes today that is special.  And for her the process is complete.  She now understands what it is like to come someplace new and make it your home.

11-11-11

At 11 o’clock in the morning alarms throughout the city rang.  I was in an office building lobby waiting for a meeting to start when the fire alarm sounded and everything got quiet.  Because at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month the entire city pauses for a full two minutes in honor and memory of veterans.

Veteran’s Day isn’t quite the same in the States.  There are people selling Poppies, but here in England the poppy appeal is quite broad with veterans young and old selling them everywhere, at the underground, the stop lights, on the bridge to work.  There was a bit of a row (that’s British speak) here when FIFA, the football organizing body, at first would not, and then did, allow England football players to wear a poppy logo for their game against Spain on Saturday.

While it is a Federal Holiday in the US, schools are no longer closed, like they once were, and most offices are open for business, as are the world stock markets.

The two minutes of silence was interesting in part because it wasn’t a moment, but a full two minutes.  That length of silence can be off-putting.  All I could hear was the drip of the waterfall in the office lobby.  Everyone either stood or sat, looking off somewhere in the distance, not down at their Blackberrys.  Cell phones rang and beeped and let out other burps of noise, but everyone took it very seriously.   The Brits, who oppose most formality and public displays of emotion, took this with a depth that surprised me.

And when it was over, it was as if a game of Simon Says had ended and everybody began moving about, carrying on, the two minutes had passed.

In our house 11-11 always meant my mom’s birthday.  On 11-11-11 it means her 70^th.

Father the Incompetent

The conversation was garbled.  I couldn’t tell if they were speaking softly or whether the distance drowned it out.  The voices had to travel from my daughter’s bedroom, underneath her closed door, down the stairs and into my room.   They weren’t sounds, but words.  I heard things like:  But someone has to get me up in the morning.  Who?  Can you call somebody to help him?

My wife is making her first trip back to the States with daughter number one, putting me in charge of my son and daughter number 2.  When daughter number 2 was told that her mother would not be here for a swim meet and other weekend events, she asked how it will all get done.  And when my wife (still wife number 1) told her “Daddy will be here to take care of it,” there was, for me, a troubling reaction.

The only way to describe it is frozen terror.  She acted as if my wife told her, “You’re on your own for the weekend. See ya Monday.”

Her reasons for my incompetence were many.  Her explanation for my lack of qualification, vast.  She just couldn’t wrap her little head around how I could get her up in the morning, get her fed and off to the meet (or gala as they call them here) on time.  Incomprehensible!

I wanted to go upstairs and explain to her that for years I’ve been waking myself, getting to school/work/gym, whatever the day calls for, with my pants on straight, my teeth brushed and my fly closed.

Her arguments were not made in jest.  There was real concern pouring from this scared child.

I sat there thinking it through.  What have I done to give her this impression? 

I know she has seen me get out of bed without my wife’s help.  She knows I drive a car (licensed by the State of Maryland).  She knows I hold down a job and eat without spilling my food.  Why, when it comes to helping her with tasks, that I’m sure I had a role in teaching her, she thinks my chances of success are so low.

We’ll see.  Tomorrow is the first big test.  I need to be home at four o’clock when she gets home from school.  This is my big chance, my moment to prove to my 11 year-old that I have the qualifications of a high school baby-sitter. This weekend I will do it, without a net.  I will be waking her up (on time), getting her to a swim meet (on time), getting her fed (with real food), filling her back pack with a swim suit.  Wish me luck.

Feeling the Distance

So everything is great in London, yada, yada, but when do you miss home?  When do you feel the distance?

Not at the times you might think.  Not the holidays or the special occasions, at least not so far, but instead when you need that safety net you’ve built around you. 

Walking home from dinner late on a Sunday night we realize no one has a key.  I left early with my parents, so I assumed the others left the house with keys as they set the alarm.  A false assumption. 

Now we stand before this house in the cold darkness, a house that has been our home for three months and suddenly it’s a foreign place.

I don’t know how to break in, I can’t even get around to the back yard to see if there is some secret access.  The second floor now appears miles above our heads and even so the windows only open part way.  The place is an impenetrable fortress.

I disturb our next door neighbors who we’ve barely met, a sweet French/English couple without kids who let me and my son scale their back wall to enter our garden to see if we can get in.  They also welcome and warm my parents.  And while they couldn’t have been more accommodating, I’m fairly certain this is not what they planned for a Sunday night.

I experienced the strangeness of peering in on our lives from the outside.  I see my desk, side lamp still on.  I see the coffee cup on the kitchen counter, the open math book, the resting laptop.  I felt a bit like George Bailey looking down at his life, but none of us were there.

Options: 

1.       Call the owners who live outside the city and may be out of the country. 

2.       Break a window that would set off the alarm and I have no idea what alarm company-police station issues that would trigger. 

3.       I could try to force the back door open, it looks weak, but if it doesn’t work, see number two.

There was a real moment of something, panic is too strong a word, but helplessness.  I had no way of getting in and no idea what to do. We were facing the real possibility of checking into a hotel.

We called a lock smith and he said it would be an hour plus.  We called the owners and they weren’t around.  We had no neighbors with keys or friends we could stay with, nothing under the front door mat, no back-up plan.  How could that be?

But then my wife found a woman we had used as a baby sitter and she found a key and we met her at a local pizza place and we thanked our neighbors and made it inside.

It wasn’t the drama of the story, but rather the fear of where to look. We don’t know a locksmith or even the name of the alarm company or the type of lock or how to reach the landlord or whether our neighbors are home or who they are.  We would have answers to all of these were we back home.  The home we now miss.

The Shrinking World

The times when I am amazed by the shrinking of the world, seems to be growing. 

But when you play “who do you know” you soon realize that in our lives we run in fairly small circles and so the chances of knowing somebody is pretty high.  And when you read Freakonimics or Malcolm Gladwell, you realize that probability suggests increasingly strange coincidences.

But in the larger world, outside our small geographic or socio-economic realms it becomes more surprising.  And I am continually impressed as I travel the small streets, the back alleys, the mews of Europe to find so many people who know, use and rely on http://www.marketresearch.com/.  It is a perspective you miss from the behind a desk in Rockville Maryland.

I have been in tiny offices in Brussels and office shares in London, picturesque buildings on the banks of Lake Zurich and on top of the tallest skyscrapers in Canary Wharf and found our clients experiencing what we hoped they would when we started the company 10 years ago.

I have spoken to people and watched orders come in from all over the world and am amazed at the impact.  When you hear someone at a university in Brussels, in broken English/French using our lingo, KWIC, Kalorama, Profound, I still find it remarkable.

But so far this is the strangest twist. 

My wife goes on an overnight walking trip to the Cotswold’s and meets a woman who tells us she is moving back to the states.  On their 11-mile walk she lets out that there are some things she’s trying to divest herself of.  A week later I am in her packed up apartment picking up space heaters, alarm clocks and half empty bottles of Pimms.

Sad to leave London, but overflowing with praise for the three years, her husband enters the room and we begin talking about his return home.  The job he has in the UK?  Head of Market Research for an international consumer goods company.

And so he volleys back to me "and what do you do?" 

I have a market research company, named Marketresearch.com.  And he returns, I am a customer of Marketresearch.com and I use Packaged  Facts and I know Larry (his sales rep).

Although I receive no further discount on the goods I am buying, walking home down Maida Vale lugging their leftovers I realize again that in this overlapping/combined world the chances of chance meetings are increasing every day.