May 1

I just got done having a lovely, lovely two hour coffee date with Diana, my – let me see if I can do these relations correctly – first cousin once removed’s wife. I’m sitting in a café in the Sunset district of San Francisco and spent last night at Patrick and Diana’s house, the house where I lived during my internship last summer, almost a year ago, as we realized last night at dinner. The two kids, Samuel and Athena, are a year older than they were then (which makes sense). I’ve been to Budapest and back, my dad’s job is no longer his “new” job, and everyone has lived almost a whole year since I was here. Pretty crazy to realize how time flies.

Samuel has gone from being focused on both chess and baseball to now really only focusing on baseball – and for a 2^nd grader, he’s pretty damn good at it. Athena is regaling me with stories about her favorite characters from Frozen, laughing at me when I said the moose was my favorite character ((this was a tactful choice of mine - had I picked one of the classic favorite characters, I'm sure she would have told me that my choice was wrong, but when I said the moose - well, she just had no idea what to say to that, and simply concluded that I am silly)), and being as sneaky as ever as she beat me at Candyland (thrice), Crazy Eights (twice), and war (once, where she declared that she had won because I insisted it was bedtime, and she considered that forfeit on my part). She insisted that it had been a thousand years since I lived there, but refused to believe that that meant we were both over a thousand years old now. I missed the two of them. And their parents, too.

We (Diana and I) walked them to school this morning and I was hit by waves of memories from my elementary school days. Since I’ve been tutoring kids in Santa Cruz at the high school level, I’ve thought about my own high school quite frequently of late. Sometimes I arrive to tutor just after school ends for the day and the bell rings and I’m surrounded by a throng of hormonal, growth-spurt-y, drama-obsessed, finding-themselves-teenagers, and it can be so overwhelming! It’s a wonder we all survive it. This morning, I got to see the much younger end of the spectrum .The kindergarten classroom with different colored patches on the carpet that form a big design, the chairs whose seats barely rise above my knees, and the piles of coloring and painting materials in the corner. And I watched Samuel wander through the playground, through the milling crowds and prepare himself for the day to start. Sometimes, when I think about it from where I’m standing, being a parent seems like it might be the scariest thing I’ll ever do. But the older I get, the more sure I am it’s going to happen.

Well, that’s quite a lot of thoughts for one morning. In addition to all of that, I have also finally taken that enormous German exam I mentioned. Five hours inside the Goethe Institut last Thursday – and they said I would most likely have my results on Monday or Tuesday this week.  As it is already Thursday, you can imagine my apprehension and impatience to find out!

The exam itself ended up being quite fun. I had a nice conversation with the two women who were working at the Institute when I arrived (as you might imagine) about 35 minutes early. It was fun to speak/write German all day long, and for part of it, with actual German people. Studying has been (apart from the incredible helpfulness of C by correcting various complicated sentences I sent her way to test my skill at adjective endings and fancy structures) a very solitary activity. But in the final part of the exam, the speaking part, I was partnered with one of the other test-takers, an older Gentleman who hadn’t spoken much during the breaks of the exam. I wasn’t quite sure what his story was. We received our topics that we were suppose do discuss (one topic each to present individually, then one topic to discuss with each other as the evaluators listened) and presented our individual topics. Then, it was time to discuss the last topic, which happened to be basically “You have an eight hour layover in between two long flights in a foreign city. What do you do during this time?” We turned to each other to start to discuss and after we introduced ourselves, it turned out that he was from Hungary and as I was just in Budapest, we chose that to be this “foreign city” and spent the whole time discussing our favorite parts of the city and he gave us (both me and the examiners) a virtual tour of the city. So much unexpected fun at the end of hours of testing.