Amazing Discoveries

It was about 10 p.m. when I climbed into my top bunk at the hostel and collapsed, worn out from an entire day of walking through Prenzlauerberg and Friedrichshain. I got out my book, intending to read until I fell asleep, when the door to the room opened and I heard a female voice say "Oh! You're back!"

She had the bunk below me, and introduced herself as Ling. Ling from Beijing. She asked me where I'd been so far on my trip, and I told her I only came to Berlin for the weekend. She launched into where she'd been so far on her trip, which lead into a detailed recounting of all the other places she's visited around the world. Between her travels and her perfect English, I concluded that her family has got itself some money.

She asked me if I had plans for the evening, or was I tired and just going to go to bed? To tell the truth, I had planned on going to bed early, sitting the night life out so I wouldn't sleep all day tomorrow. Trying to phrase this to not sound like such a sissy, I just said that I didn't have any plans to go out. She asked if I wanted to, and told me there was this jazz club on the west side of town that she wanted to check out, but didn't want to go alone, and did I want to go, just for an hour or so? Even though my feet were killing me, even though I wanted to get up early tomorrow, I said sure, because I am a pushover. And besides, she said just for an hour or so.

We took a cab. Once inside, Ling told me she was a kindergarten teacher. I told her I was a programmer. Then there was a lot of silence. We arrived, and Ling paid.

Walking into the club, she looked me up and down and asked: "Have you always been so heavy?"

It was more of an observation, as though she'd just asked "Isn't the weather nice?" There wasn't any of the disdain that you'd expect with a question like that. I said "Well, not when I was born" and she asked me if I ever exercised. I said no, and she laughed and said "You probably try not to move very much!"

The jazz club was appropriately dim but disappointingly not smoky. We took a table near the back. I ordered a mojito and Ling ordered a beer. When the waiter'd gone, she took out her digital camera and asked me if I wanted to see her pictures from the trip so far. Seeing as the conversation wasn't going so less-than-awkward, I was a little relieved to have something else to discuss and said yes. She turned the camera around so the little LCD screen was facing me, and showed me which button to press to move on to the next picture.

The pictures were all of ordinary things -- a sink in a public bathroom, the bed at the last hostel she stayed at, some random guy walking down the sidewalk, a cloud. Hundreds of them, these pictures of unremarkable things. She told me they were from Scotland, England and Germany and I had to take her word for it. I was pressing the "Next" button with ever-increasing frequency, the camera making a little electronic beep every time and its little screen becoming a blur of restaurant tables, dogs on leashes, brick walls and shoes. "Maybe she's into photography and there's all sorts of perspective and depth I'm missing here," I thought to myself without really caring. And that's when I saw it and my picture-flipping halted.

This is where, if someone else were telling me this story, I would stop believing it. The picture, it was an extreme close-up. It was a little blurry. It was off-center, as though nobody were looking through the viewfinder. It was slightly -- and if I were making this up, I'd make every effort to keep this teetering just on the edge of believability, and would never include something like what I'm about to tell you -- It was slightly -- and this is the kind of detail that could only find its way into either some kind of juvenile lie, or God's own truth, and if I wanted to lie to you I wouldn't have had to travel half way around the world -- It was slightly ... spread apart, and pulled open.

I stared at the screen, trying to think of what else it could be. Some kind of. . . flower? Or under-sea creature? But I couldn't think of anything else that looked like that. I mean, it looked like that.

Ling, noticing that the beeping had stopped its rapid-fire pace, asked me which picture I was on. It'd be more dramatic if I said there was a moment of panic, if I said that I was frozen like a deer in a pair of headlights, but apparently my brain, under pressure, skips the primal fight-or-flight adrenaline rush and goes straight for "flight." Without a moment's hesitation I pressed the "Next" button on the camera and said aloud "This one," hoping my voice would drown out the beep or at least distract her.

Either not noticing that I'd skipped to the next picture or not caring, she looked at the screen, her eyes lighting up with recognition, and said "Oh! That's in Scotland! It's called the 'high-lands.'" She said these last two words very slowly, with space between, making it clear that these were key words. "You can go hiking there" she added. Her eyes gave me the once-over a second time then came quickly back into contact with my own, and she said "You need to go hiking. It'd be good for you," and the band finally began to play.

In high school I had a teacher named Mr. Prost, in whose Personal Finance class we spent three weeks learning the basic math behind balancing a checkbook, a skill that anyone with the ability to get a receipt from the ATM and a short-term memory can do without. Mr. Prost wore large, colorful patchwork sweaters like the guy from Amazing Discoveries! late-night infomercials, and had that combination of blond, blond hair and blue eyes that gives one a look beyond "pale" and closer to "sickly." A good friend of mine once described him as "disturbingly Aryan."

Though his class was Personal Finance, that was really nothing more than a springboard for him to work his way into giving us advice that he was sure would help us all our lives. Mr. Prost was a big fan of the Oregon Institute of Technology, trying to steer each and every one of his students into a post-high school career there. "You go to OIT," he would say, once the subject eventually worked its way into any and every classroom discussion, "and you got a job." He promoted OIT with such enthusiasm that I used to wonder if he was getting a kickback, though today I recognize his enthusiasm and the importance he placed on college and workplace integration as that usually held by people who actually may have had it tough at some point in their lives.

His anecdotes about how he bought dog food in bulk and how much insurance he had to pay on his new SUV were tinged with pride, and would pepper each lecture about how to shake hands and sit up pretty for prospective employers. He was sanding off our rough spots, easing our transition into the real world.

Thanks, Ling, for reminding me that everything isn't under control. I forget that sometimes these days.