Nussbaum Park

Luke and I got home from work early and sat around discussing the details of our trip to Neushausen ob Eck for the Southside Festival. We talked about what types of food to get, butting heads on a few things, but working through it. I made tea and sat on the windowsill for a cigarette letting the afternoon sun warm my face the way it has so frequently these past months. Luke suggested something for dinner--steak, hummus, rocket wraps. We took our three cases of empty bier bottles left over from the party down to Tengelmann. We wandered around the store-hungry- figuring out what we could buy for dinner that night and we could bring with us to the festival. I solved one of our problems while wandering around the store. If we prep the meat and then freeze it, it should still be good after Radiohead plays and we're ready for dinner, dispelling our qualms about raw meat sitting in a tent all day and figuring out when exactly we would cook it, etc. I got a half kilo of ground beef and some sausages. I also had the thought of filling plastic bottles with pre-mixed rum and coke (since glass bottles aren't allowed and the problem of keeping the beer cold has been vexing me for at least a month). Luke suggested this as we were standing in line. I think we have it all figured out. We got home, with dinner fixins and a case of beer. Luke cooked the steaks and we made the wraps. I suggested we pack it to go and head down to the little park at the end of our street. We put 4 biers and the wraps in a bag, took a bier each to go and headed out. It was an evening that has been typical in Munich recently. It rains in the morning, then clears up by mid-afternoon, leaving a cool, clean feel to the air and broken clouds in the sky filtering the gold-orange sunlight. We passed people walking their dogs, passed the group of old people that plays chess on the over-sized chess set with broken, old wooden pieces. We found benches and began eating. We finished three wraps each and sat talking and smoking cigarettes. I talked about my fears about America and what we can do to rescue it from oblivion. We watched two guys playing soccer and watched as they kicked it into a tree. We sat and swung on the tire swings as they threw a rock at the ball twice, then walked to the bench, changed their shoes, had a cigarette and walked off. "They didn't try very hard" I said and took a swig of my bier. A small Turkish boy with the face of a thirty-five year-old picked up the same rock and tried to knock it down with no success. I commented on the Muslim women who must cover their faces completely except for their eyes. A woman was sitting next to a German man, just sitting and talking, black and concealed as a ninja. We talked about how little self-esteem they must have. "How could you live like that? You must feel like a piece of shit all the time." "How could you live being treated like less than human your entire life?" I said, "That's one thing that's great about America. It's so easy to forget. Move to America, abandon your faith, change your name, become and American citizen and work in a factory and you'll never look back. People have done it since the beginning." Luke climbed on the jungle gym as I walked over to inspect the location of the ball and whether it would be possible to climb, mirroring the conversation we had been having earlier about how Germans cut down the lower limbs of trees rendering them nearly impossible to climb.

I set down my bier and called Luke over. I tried giving him a leg up, but he could do it. We switched places and after the first attempt in which I fell down, I was up in the tree like a ninja. I knocked down the ball and hopped down. We kicked the ball around, feeling good. We tried to juggle, I threw my bier bottle at the ball at one point. We felt like kids, like we could really just live in this moment, kicking a ratty ball around drink bier and having fun. I forgot about going home, I forgot about living with a miserable room mate for the past year, I forgot about how my worries about America and every news article I read that makes me loathe America more and more, I forgot about reading that Bush wants to start drilling for oil in off-shore oil rigs and tapping into our reserves, the cost of oil, America's inability or refusal to accept the inevitable, and everything else that constantly tickles the back of my mind. Just kick the ball, run and get it, laugh at how bad we are. Luke went for the ball and slipped on a patch of mud and landed on his ass and we laughed and knew it was time for a bier. We sat down, still laughing and elated by our random night. We knew it had to end, so we packed up, finished our cigarettes, took our biers with us and headed home.

I'll be home in 28 days. These are the moments I'm going to miss. Freedom, anonymity, solitude.