Auslanders: Prologue

This all began with a casual observation. That is all it was.

All I said was that we should go over and house-sit for the year.

I didn’t say that I was desperate to do it, or that we had to do it as a moral imperative or anything like that. It was one of those throwaway remarks people make all the time, like, “someday we should shave the dog down and paint him.”

When you make those kinds of casual observations, everybody knows that you are merely engaging in meaningless conversational speculation about any one of the myriad of probabilities open to free-thinking human beings at any given time under the circumstances present contextual to that conversation. You can say whatever you want. And you probably will.

Everybody knows that you don’t literally mean what you say. It is a common social understanding that there will be no sudden leaping up to grab the clippers or select from a palette of hues down at the hardware store.

Any one of you average humans in that dog shaving dialogue would instinctively know that you should not do any shaving or painting of a) the dog or b) any other animal of any sort. You would automatically understand that, within the social contract of any given strand of dialogue, one is likely to make such comments insofar as they are nothing more than random outbursts of recognition of any one of the millions of possible actions of which one is capable at any given time. Notice I said possible. Not probable. Or even likely.

In the normal world, after one says something like, “we should go over and house-sit for our friends in Germany for the year”, the person on the receiving end of that observation would be expected to say, without any kind of passion or intent, “yeah, that would be great” and that would be the end of it. All that other person has to do is to make some casual grunt of agreement to acknowledge the validity of your statement. Yes, we could go over and house-sit. We could also paint the dog or make gum hats and climb trees in our underpants, but that doesn’t mean that we are actually going to do those things. Because we are plain old, base-line average Canadian people who don’t do stuff like that.

You see, plain old, base-line average Canadian people in day to day existence don’t stop what they’re doing, put their regularly scheduled lives on hold for 365 days and move to Germany.

But I do.

I do this because I made that casual observation about house-sitting to my wife, and my wife does not recognize the difference between an affectlessly mundane conversational gambit and a mission statement.

So now, I am going to Meerbush, just outside of Dusseldorf, where I will live with my wife and kids for one year, teaching high school courses online and struggling to say peanut butter in German.

Wish me luck. I’m going to need it.

Oh, and by the way, it’s erdnussecreme.

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