County fair

Yesterday I found myself shutting off the energy that I had been putting into my interactions with Hil, as if at a spigot.  I would have to have anyway, sooner or later, so it was only a matter of time.

I knew I would reach this point some day because we never had a lot to talk about besides work.  We'd tell some stories about our kids, but I never felt a clear opening to talk about something else.  Maybe it was partly the language difference: her English is very good, for that of a non-native speaker, but she still stumbles over things that are outside of her normal range of discussion.  Also, ... I don't know, call it a sense.  She loves coming to the United States on business trips because the exchange rate between euro and dollar is so favorable to Europeans, and our sales tax is much lower than in her stores back home, so she goes on shopping binges whenever she is here.  She always visits whatever Disney Store she can find in town and buys it out of anything she doesn't already have ... "to bring home for my girls."  Shopping?  The Disney Store?  Really, this is your idea of recreation?  So yeah, I never really thought it would be a good idea to bring up Plato or Thích Nhất Hạnh.  It did restrict the number of things we had in common to talk about.  (Whatever else can be said about them, D and Debbie conversed with me far more easily. Hell, so did Wife way back in the day before we started hating each other.)

She ran into another of my crotchets Thursday night at dinner, when she suddenly asked "Why did they put salami in this salad?"  It was a cheap Italian restaurant, so hell -- maybe they thought it was antipasto-like.  It's not like Hil is a vegetarian.  So she systematically picked out every single little bitty scrap of salami before continuing.  OK, she's a grown-up and it's her salad -- her division is paying for it -- but it won't surprise you to hear that I looked at her fussiness a little askance.  You have to be that picky?  Really?  [Readers are within their rights to point out that I'm being, in some ways, just as picky -- only at the level of scorning human beings instead of salami. I never promised to be consistent.]

What really struck me, though, was Friday, when we wrapped up early at work and decided to visit the County Fair that was going on in Sticksville at the time.  Parts of it were really interesting: they had a "Village of Yesteryear" area where the local historical society had reconstructed several buildings to resemble how they looked in the nineteenth century.  (It was scary to realize that nearly every building we walked into had "old-time" tools from long ago which exactly resembled stuff of Wife's we had packed out of the garage or the storage unit.)  She was also really interested in the model trailer homes they had on display: they were far larger, far more luxurious, and far cheaper than anything available in Germany.  (I could gladly have skipped checking out the trailer homes, but what the hell -- I went along to be gracious.)  And she nodded seriously when we strolled through the barns, looking at the prize cows and llamas, and then told me about the farm her granparents lived on while adding that there are virtually none of these farms left in Germany any more because they are no longer economically viable.  So far, so good.

Then we turned down the midway, towards the campier parts of the fair.  There was the Mr. Lumberjack competition, where a couple of muscular guys in blue jeans raced around an obstacle course while carrying chain saws and sawing off branches here and there: she explained very seriously that if you want to operate a chain saw in Germany -- at any rate in the public forests (to get firewood for the winter) -- you have to register with the local forest manager and pass a practical test in chain saw safety before you are issued a certificate permitting you to use the damned thing.  There were the food stands selling deep-fried pickles, deep-fried nacho-flavored cheese curds, deep-fried cookies, deep-fried cheesecake.  Other stands sold kettle corn, cotton candy, or "Corn ... dogs? Did I read that right? What's a ... corn ... dog?"  There were stands selling black T-shirts with designs all in glitter, hats advertising beer companies, and elaborate decorative wall hangings celebrating "The Second Amendment: America's FIRST Homeland Security!"  (I don't think she saw the hanging, or understood it. Fortunately I didn't have to explain it. She's already told me plenty about Germany's handgun laws.)*

Probably I was tired.  It had been a long week.  But it felt to me like the look on her face was turning from anthropological curiosity into scorn; and I felt ashamed.  It's not even like it had anything to do with me: county fairs aren't exactly my thing, and I wasn't the one who had suggested we go.  It's just that it's my country, and I felt somehow like we were all found wanting.

In retrospect it's very likely I was reading it all in.  It's very likely that she may have been puzzled but wasn't really scornful.  It's very likely I was just tired and grumpy.  But one way or another I let those feelings turn off the spigot of energy I had been putting into our interactions.  It would have happened anyway.  This was just how it came about.

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* I have no intention of entering a discussion about the pros and cons of handguns just now, though long-time readers will remember this is one of Wife's hot buttons.  I mention the topic only to give a sense of what this part of the fair was like as an ambience.