Daniel Patrick Hazard
In my youth I was a flaming youth!
Down with racism. Up with feminism. It was my redoubled rant. Slowly, my flames have guttered. But those nerves remain to be enlivened. After an innocent youth, I married at 23. A gorgeous, High IQ blonde, who gave me three children, who were complicated enough to keep me single for thirty years.
Then at age 73, living alone in Germany, with their language forgotten over fifty years, I took my daily English fix at Theatreplatz by ritually buying the daily International Herald Tribune. Gradually I began to notice the lady I greeted daily: GUTEN TAG! I found myself beguiled by her fluent English, a trait oddly ingrained in a DDR school! Chatter led to lunches, later and later, until they became “dates”.
Hildegard diminished into Hilly, and her clever solution of my daily problems as a unspeaking foreigner compensated for our age discrepancy, 73 to 33. And she wanted a baby more than her freedom. I had no fear of her ambition, because it turns out, I had had almost no experience of babies my first time around, except at meals and holidays, so given was I to get a Ph.D. and put a firm foot on the bottom rung of the academic ladder.
And no matter that my first wife wanted a doctorate as greedily as I. Feminism or not she got in line: we parted shortly after she got her doctorate in 1970. I covered my losses by chasing women and traveling, occasionally simultaneously.
I was in Weimar to study the idealism of the Bauhaus, punctuated by glorious samplings of European art and architecture in situ. More and more with Hilly. We turned to the USA in our travels, totally new to her, and enticing. Ending in San Francisco where my best bud a City Supervisor married us on the steps of City Hall! I planned a honeymoon on Southwest Airlines: Pittsburgh to Nashville to Memphis to New Orleans to Birmingham to Pittsburgh.
Alas, 9/11 psychosis intervened (we were wed a week later) so we flew straight back to Frankfurt and spent what they call a Flitterwoche in the Harz Mountains. Since I had ceremoniously vasectomized myself in 1976 to celebrate the bicentennial of Freedom, Hilly had to go in vitro: three strike outs in Weimar, one home run in Berlin. Daniel Patrick Hazard duly arrived three days after Knut the most pampered polar bear in history on December 8, 2007.
We’ve been on a treadmill ever since! Hilly from nap to nappies in an endless cycle. Me watching. Only since have I understood the silent anguish of nursing mothers. I have yet to change a diaper. I’ve held only a few bottles in emergencies. I wash the dishes in penitence. I open the garage door as she drives Danny on her bike in the snow fifteen minutes away. I lock the garage door. She returns to fix my hot lunch—before going up the street to the Liszt Hochschule für Musik for a few of her ten hours a week as a librarian, scooting off at a quarter to three to bike Danny home. Feminism indeed.
I read to him in German and English. I watch animals with him on TV (the Germans coverage of their zoos is exemplary, making “Sesame Street” seem stilted and trying too hard). And tonight, Hilly returns to church choir practice, every Tuesday night, when I have to read him to sleep!
That is I why I suddenly find her slyly planning over her computer our next two vacations: two weeks with the relatives in June at the Baltic, one week in Talinn in July to feed my Jugendstil hunger. Getting away.
That is the latest feminist chant. With which I concur. Not flaming as of yore. But belatedly understanding why the first frau quit.
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