Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: cute

  • welcome, Auntie

    I’ve joined a Facebook group which posts pictures of people’s dogs. The rules are long and repetitive: only dog pics and pics of dogs being doggish and cute: no lost dog posts, no questions about dog food… just hounds.

    In the last week this group has taught me all kinds of new vocabulary. Boop is the thought dogs have when they come up and touch you with their nose. A blep is where they stick out their tongue a little bit; a mlem is when they stick their tongue out further. Well today an older lady posted in public in the group, “Auntie! You are now part of this dog group. Please enjoy the dogs’ cute little antics!”

    Within seconds a woman had come along to comment, gently, “Maybe just send her a private message.” I commented, Hi, Auntie! and my comment now has 40 likes. Meanwhile a thread of joyous appreciation has unravelled, so divine: 460 likes and over a hundred people have posted pictures of their dogs for Auntie. One is of a labrador gambolling toward the camera and it says “Running to say hello to Auntie.” “This is Cecil, he says Hi Auntie.” “Welcome, Auntie!” One man wrote, “Now we are all Auntie’s Nieces and Nephews” and attracted a trail of love hearts under his comment. In between people are tagging their friends and coming back to the thread to muse OMG so pure! This thread! Those comments, tho. Sometimes I truly adore you, social medina.

  • zwiebelchen?

    On the markets I passed a tourist with an American accent who was saying to his companion, “Jeez. So much amazing stuff to eat and drink!” Inexplicably he managed this in a tone of complaint. Jet lag? For how, I wondered, can you possibly turn that into a sense of personal injury. Woe is you. I bought a jar of honey; local honey is relatively flavourless because the Linden trees in Berlin have a very mild scent. I bought sweet potato at the potato stall where you can spend half an hour reading her scribbled handmade signs. She extols the nutritional benefits of orange vs purple sweet potatoes and sells fourteen kinds of spud. When I buy a bag of root vegetables she always pops a tiny round golden onion in the top, saying sweetly, “Zwiebelchen?” which means more or less ‘And may I offer you a tiny baby onion… an onionette?’ She’s so cute with it. What’s particularly cute is that she has clearly trained her husband to do this and he clearly doesn’t get it: when I buy from him he’s all blokey and dismal, ticking off the requirements almost visibly in his head: paper bag, turn down the top like a lunch pail, “Oh yes, the onion! Sorry – here, have an onion.” Muttering to himself that he almost forgot to throw that in. My eyes meet hers over the back of his head and we share a moment of feminine protectiveness and love.

    The potato lady is an old punk and always has some raddled spud which has started to send out its purplish tendrils, turned upside down for hair and with eye holes nicked in its face with a toothpick. Generally these guys will be carrying a flag or dressed in a scrap of fabric, propped up in front of middlemost bucket. I skirted the Turkish stall holders who sing their wares and scold their customers and fronted up at the endmost cheese stall, where some of the cheeses are eight years old. She also has butter, far younger, in fact churned yesterday. The woman in front of me was buying a slab of butter and as I sometimes do I composed the German sentence in my head while I was waiting. “Auch so ein Stück Butter, bitte.” Ie ‘I’ll have another such slice of butter, please.’ One of my greatest difficulties on the market is I don’t know the words for piece, slice, bunch, punnet – the collective nouns. When I came home with my basket over my arm, my friend was stretching up over her bicycle’s rump to pull my doorbell again. I told her of my triumph and we hugged each other gleefully. We are veterans of Germany’s indefatigably formal and prolonged migration processes, where ordinary German seems to acquire a top hat and a moustache. You see, I told her as we mounted the stairs to eat the Dutch pepper cake I baked this morning: I performed three distinct linguistic somersaults in a row, to get out that sentence intact. First there’s the two different Ks: auch, and Stück. The two different Us, ü and u. Then the two different but similar words, Butter which ends in a dry R, and bitte which ends in the kind of disdainful e we rarely use in Australian English. Out it came flawless. I somersaulted home.

  • New Zonked

    In New York we had dinner with two New Yorker friends, one from Chicago, who are both broadcast journalists, and a Southern boy one of our friends had picked up in the street and they had bonded. Southern boy had on a Hallowe’en pumpkin shirt over an American flag t shirt. My German companion made me laugh by innocently mispronouncing his views (sane) on American gun laws (insane): you walk into a school and it’s like that film, he said: The Texas Chainsaw Moussaka.

    Many Americans have a naivete that makes me feel protective of them, and not just about guns. More than once I have been complimented on speaking such excellent English, for an Australian. It doesn’t always seem to be because the speaker has confused us with Austria. I guess the sensation of believing one’s nation the centre, and pinnacle, of the civilised world – the use, even, of phrases like ‘the civilised world’ – might engender a certain self-satisfaction. On my very first visit, a few years back now, to New York I would marvel to anyone who’d listen how much better of a time I was having than I’d expected. “That’s because New York is the centre of the universe,” explained four or five unrelated New Yorkers, innocently.

    At JFK we had queued with our passports and I overheard the officer herding the line answer an anxious tourist’s question with, “I’m just doing my job here. Anything else you’re asking – is irrelevant.” “They’re handling people like goods,” said my companion, shuffling forward. Three days later up in the Bronx we went walking through one of the giant parks that make that part of town so beautiful. As we were coming down the hill a crocodile of children was climbing up. A little girl in front was walking rapidly backwards, her head tilted round to guide herself. “You can do it,” the teacher encouraged. “I believe in you, Destiny!”

    I said, to make her laugh, “We believe in you too, Destiny!” A second group of students followed them. One little girl was walking with her teacher, saying, “I’m serious!” “You can’t call a taxi,” the woman told her, “in a park.” It occurred to me I’d never said I believe in Destiny, before. I’m just… not American. Yet the sense of kinship with random passersby as we wandered up Central Park right from the bottom to the top, as we ventured into Harlem, as I got tangled in conversation with fascinating people on the D train, forever a stranger, was so spicy to me and so sweet. I loved the guy on the subway whose Superman socks were pulled high to the knee and inside out. I loved the wide-eyed baby whose daddy was so stoned he gave off a pungent weed reek. I loved the crazy Christian lady who tried to pick up my companion and when she’d asked, are you alone, looked at me and said, “And is that your… sister?” I loved the man who glanced into my camera’s screen when I stopped short at the top of the stairs into the subway station at Canal Street and said, “Nice photo.” It felt as it always to me feels in New York city, one of earth’s prototypical cities, as if we all are engaged on some giant endeavour, and none of us will ever see the outcome – in completion – we are fragments in a kaleidoscope like moths, we are our own art, we are brushing up against each other every day all day long as we go, handling the good like it was people.

  • the father & son skateboards

    Bearded guy walking past rather fast along the cobbles holding his cell phone up to type rapidly, with a sprig of green clutched in his other hand, at chest height. As he walks he types and as he types he keeps glancing over at the little torn-off sprout – it’s clear this green is what is informing his flow of ideas this fine morning. I guess he is describing it but can’t shake the sweet thought that it is somehow dictating to him: a poem, a song.

    This street is crowded with ice cream shops which make their own blends onsite. “The surest sign of gentrification,” said boyf as we were queuing in the sunshine to choose between matcha (green tea ice cream) and white chocolate with parmesan. When I first moved in, was it only last week? a man walked past with his skateboarding little son. The father had a skateboard of his own clutched under his free arm and was holding the little boy’s hand. As I watched, the man dropped his boy’s hand, dropped his own much smaller board to the ground, and hopped on. From behind, they were unmistakeably linked: little boy in colourful t-shirt covered with tiny dinosaurs, and drab pants; daddy wearing his own groovy colourful t-shirt (covered in Donald Ducks) and khakis. They set off together, paddling solemnly, right down the middle of the pavement, wearing their genes.

  • cold but sweet

    Finally experienced the piercing joy of eating ice-cream in the freezing cold, I always used to wonder why people would do that. But tonight I walked into this swanky ice-cream bar where the guy had just taken all the plastic rims off the deep buckets, presumably to wash them, and he was puzzling over putting them back each in its right place. I said, “Do you just take them off sometimes and put them back all different, then, just to confuse people?” And he gave me his slow, shy smile. “…No,” he said, somewhat reluctantly. “No,” I said, fondly, “because that would be silly.” Only I think I said “weird” or “freaky” because I always think “komisch” is going to mean “comical” then I remember it doesn’t. He didn’t take it amiss, thank god. There is not enough room in a passing pleasantry to say, I didn’t mean that as a passive-aggressive attack, it just came out wrong because my German is faulty. He had a service-smile and then a shyer, boyhood smile which he gave out only sparingly, from under the shelf of his brows. That was the one I remembered and will carry, which slightly alters everything. We’re in this world together! Each of us, gazing out, going: Wow, far out. We exchanged a look which acknowledged this. So then he gave me my ice-cream cone wrapped in a serviette and I ate it walking home in the cold, cold wind.