A Time for Making Friends
by Jim Curtiss

 

Billboards proclaiming the FIFA World Cup soccer championship as a “Time for Making Friends” appeared all over Germany months before the actual event. This struck me as a wonderful campaign slogan, because I’ve lived in the Saxon-Anhalt city of Halle for more than three years, and while its inhabitants are not exactly hostile, they will never rate much higher than “Prussian” on the friendliness scale.

Indeed, this campaign for making friends seemed like such a good idea that I immediately concocted a plan: I would use this World Cup campaign to expand my circle of German friends. I would be open and friendly to every person I met, and if rebuffed I would cite my adherence to the “Time for Making Friends” campaign as an explanation for my odd, i.e., friendly behavior.

I decided to start close to home and work my way outwards. The victim of my first random act of kindness was the woman who had just moved in next door. When I ran into her, it was in our building’s foyer. She was struggling through the entrance with a bike, so I hustled over to hold the door; she said a curt “thanks” as we passed. Noticing that she was wheeling the expensive mountain bike I had been admiring, (she also drives one of those cool Minis), I said, “Oh, so that’s your bike. It’s really-“

“Of course it’s mine,” she spat. “Why?”

I raised my eyebrows and said, “Uh... Because it’s nice?”

She just grunted and went about locking the bike, so I went out to check the mail. When I returned she was gone. Haven’t seen her since.

Afterwards, it occurred to me that perhaps my self-conscious German was the problem, that maybe instead of saying, “Nice bike,” I’d really said, “You ignorant cow,” so I decided to ratchet down my friendliness to a non-verbal level; I embarked on a waving campaign.

My first setback occurred in the bedroom. For through that window and across the courtyard, one can see a lovely and spacious terrace brimming with foliage. Occasionally I am in the bedroom at the same time as the terrace people (whom, I confess, I envy intensively due to our lack of a terrace). Prior to my friendliness campaign I had played along with their I-ignore-you, you-ignore-me charade. But this time when I saw the four terrace dwellers lounging in the sun, I opened the window, called out a friendly hello to get their attention, and waved.

To a one, they stopped talking, looked at me briefly, and then turned away deliberately, as one might turn away from a bedraggled street beggar. Chuffed, I called out, “Hel-loooooo, Hel-loooooo,” while waving both arms in an attempt to break through their willful ignorance. After a tense minute of my gesticulations being offset by their snootiness, however, the effort became just too embarrassing. Defeated, I stammered at them, “I thought it was a time to make friends,” and gave them the finger.

Somewhat darker of mood , I trudged down to the grocery store, and in the checkout line recognized the guy from the video store where I've rented videos weekly for the last three years. Though we're not buddies, the video man is patient and always ready to give me a good-natured German lesson. Here was my chance! I waited until video man happened to look my way, then smiled and waved at him, and damned if he didn't jerk his head the other way! He did it so quickly I was worried he'd sprained something. He was clearly shunning me, and when I asked him about it the next weekend as I was renting a film, he testily replied – as if there are any other goofy-looking Americans in town – that he hadn't recognized me.

Dejected, I walked towards home musing on my failures to connect with the people of Halle until I happened to pass by one of the “Time for Making Friends” billboards. I stopped in my tracks. The slogan was in English! That must be the explanation: people didn’t get the thrust of the campaign because it was in English, not in German!

So that night, I snuck out with a can of spray paint and grafittied in German underneath, “A Time for Making Friends. This means YOU, Crabapples of Halle!”

Oddly enough, the results of this new campaign have not yet been discernible.

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