Letter from Germany 26

Thursday, March 25, 1993

born: John Gutzon Borglum 1867

died: Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck 1825

1306—Robert the Bruce crowned Robert I, King of Scots

It’s Thursday in Berlin. I'm heading down to Frankfurt on Monday morning to spend a few days helping a couple of jugglers choreograph their acts. One of them is a former student, so that is a good vote of confidence that he wants to work with me again. I will be back by Thursday of next week.

I have lots of questions about your move and how you are doing in Hong Kong. I'm starting to formulate a plan to spend several months in Shenyang working with a Chinese acrobatic troupe I met in England. This may happen in 1994, but who knows?

Andrea is spending Easter in the Canary Islands with her sister and mother. Without her around the place is a mess. I have a lot of cleaning up to do before Monday.

Lots of false starts about how to explain my latest accident. There's so much to talk about, not being able to tie shoelaces, take showers, or utilize other modern-day comforts like knives. The cast is finally off, and I can type again. I can also touch my nose and eat right handed, but that’s frosting on the cake (or in the mouth and not on the nose, in this case). After falling down and breaking my arm a month or so ago, I am recovering. The most immediate pleasure of being cast-less is being able to take a shower without first hermetically sealing my right arm in a size 72 Hefty bag. The freedom was somewhat distilled by the fact that everyone wanted to get in a congratulatory handshake. I suffered through most of it intact.

The weather on that fateful day couldn't decide if it should rain or snow, so was alternating between the two. I had been alternating between renting violent war movies and violent kung fu movies to soldiers and their families. After lunch—as I left the cafeteria to get back to work—my first step outside was on a patch of watery ice just outside the door. I never got traction and fell down the three porch steps face first. Putting both hands up and out to protect chins and noses seemed a natural thing to do. I later found out this is also a natural way to break a bone. In my case, it's the radius, which is the forearm bone on the thumb side. To this untrained eye, the x-ray shows a classic hair-line fracture at the joint.

Went back to wash the snow, dirt and gunk off my clothes. A small irritation in my forearm seemed—at first—like a sprained muscle. Back at work, I tried to pick something up with both arms and got a strong sense I shouldn’t be back at work. One advantage to working for the military is proximity to people who know how to patch others up. A video rental clerk/emergency room nurse convinced me to fill out an accident report and go home. Every lurch and jolt of the bus was sent down to my arm. Once home it seemed like a great idea to take the night tour of Berlin, with a special focus on hospitals.

The US Army hospital has the most wonderful British telephone receptionist on Sunday nights. Her accent makes everything sound positively charming. After discussing symptoms, she suggested I pop on over for a look see. A trip to the ER sounded like a pleasant invitation to go on a picnic in the English countryside. Once there I was confronted by an eager Corpsman who just that day learned a new splint procedure. He was overjoyed to see me. Every time the x-ray technician asked me to adjust my position I managed to bang my head against the overhanging x-ray machine. I politely suggested it be redesigned with soft, curved edges.

The doctor wasn’t interested in my career, either past, present, or future conditional as a juggler. While she was looking at the x-ray for a fracture, I was trying to figure out why my right hand naturally throws one and a half spins instead of a double when I attempt five clubs. She wasn't much interested in the interior bio-mechanics of juggling and also couldn’t tell me if the arm was broken. After we both went through her college textbook illustrating classic breaks, she didn’t want to commit to it being broken. The next day my foreboding about my forearm was confirmed, and I got to choose a lovely shade of purple for my cast. I now hate purple.

Anyway, the cast is off now. Slowly, I am getting mobility back in my arm and in another few weeks should be able to carry more than five pounds. In the meantime, my German is being taxed to new levels as I can no longer demonstrate any juggling techniques to my students and must explain everything using words I have not yet mastered.

Don't know if this is a sign that I have joined the middle class, middle age, or both, but after a bout of food poisoning my favorite breakfast reading topic has been the fiber content of different cereals. Enough said about that.

I was invited to teach a workshop at the circus school in France and got a chance to visit cousine Janine. She is doing well in Paris. I took her to see a circus competition where a couple of my former students were performing. In between the acts she was trying to get a sense of what, exactly, my job was. After a couple of false starts with questions and answers, I recall pointing out more than once that her Midwest was showing. She then started to get it. I think the breakthrough line was, "You're not here to work; you're just here to have fun." Seems no different to me than any other convention I've attended, except the people you talk with are hanging upside down or have red noses.

Châlons invited me to spend a week working with some very advanced students who were only there for a three-week intensive workshop. Wearing a cast excused me from actually juggling, so I got to sit back and act as choreographer/director/artistic consultant/mirror of sorts. Three students were French and two were German. All five were great in different juggling skills so I would alternate between expressing amazement in two languages.

It's great fun to be able to meddle in other peoples' acts, a bit like having all these really talented puppets to play with. The students would show me something, I would get an idea for some incredible combination, suggest it in bad French or German, and they would figure out a way to do it. The best new tricks came when they didn’t understand what I was trying to say and—in their confusion—would develop something none of us had thought of.

These days I'm busy trying to finish a second book about diabolos. I'd like to get it off to the translator by Easter. My publisher would like it a bit sooner.

Ciao,

Todd Strong

Berlin

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