Make no flash judgment.
We have a camera, and we take pictures. Light comes into the device. The entirety of what we can see is captured. An unknowing viewer might say that Heidi's Hostel is unkept, but to Justin and me, the eclecticism of decor, hodgepodge of furniture, and smell of cats were complex pleasures.
The woman pictured next to me is Heidi Beyeler. At first, we thought she was crazy from senility, but our minds changed after a conversation writ with sharp memories as an Alpine native.
Heidi owns a place in Switzerland not far from the Interlaken West train station where people pay to have a place to sleep in a room other globe trotters who do not want to or cannot pay for kitchey hotels and room service.
*
Heidi's husband operated the building on Bernastrasse 37 as a destination known in the 1950s as Garni-Hotel Beyeler. At the end of our two night stay in one bed of a room with six bunks topped with mismatched patterned comforters, Heidi kissed me on each cheek and gave departing gifts to Justin and myself.
To wish us farewell, the vibrant-eyed old woman pulled a colorful brochure out of a glass cabinet. By the look of the typeface and style of clothing worn in the pictures featured within it, Justin and I figured that the folded piece of paper was produced at least thirty years ago. We conjointly gathered that it advertised her husband's business during its hay-day. In our minds, it cued scenes of rich European yuppies wearing brightly colored coats skiing down the valleys of the Alps.
*
After telling Heidi that I had recently graduated from a university, she congratulated me with a shot glass painted with the word "Grindelwald" in gold metallic lettering and a small blue flower. Years of handling likely contributed to the souvenir's discoloration and the ambiguity of its half-scraped label.
Grindelwald is where we took the gondola to Pfingsteg earlier that day. The lift took Justin and me to an altitude of 4,564 feet near the base of the Alps. I am unsure of where the hike towards the top of the misty mountains took our bodies, but a map tells me that Eiger, the nearest documented peak, shoots itself 13,380 feet into the sky. We could see Jungfraujoch, the "top of Europe," from almost anywhere we looked. The only time it was hidden from view was when we were in the cover of a forest, restaurant, or touristy attraction (i.e., Swiss knife shops and chocolatiers).
Mid-day, Justin and I panted our ways up and down a steep trail, rewarded ourselves with coffee, and cringed with hunger on our way back to the small tourist town.
*
The shot glass Heidi handed to Justin featured an Eidelweiss flower. It was a recipricocity from him pulling out a box of truffles from Laderach, a Swiss chocolate company, and offering a morsel to Heidi just moments before the engagement of various material-emotion exchanges.
The 79 year-old woman wearing a stained pink blouse told us in slightly broken English how she would go to the mountains and pick the white flowers from the higher parts of the mountains when she was younger.
"All the ones, higher and higher, we would try to get. The best were higher. Always higher," she said, in reference to the Eidelweiss bloom. She mentioned she'd return home with a bouquet of them after a day of gathering.
Now Heidi's ankles are bandaged. She says the doctor told her she must wear a wrapping around each foot for the rest of her life. She is unable to make the trek for blooms.
"C'est la vie!" Heidi said before we walked out of her door to catch a train to Zurich and then to Stuttgart, Germany.
On board, Justin quipped that "Judgment is only based on you knowledge of the past. It implies that old people have the best judgment. But I think in generalization's terms, older people often have the best judgement."
The word "often" leaves a loophole. I am thin enough to slip through cracks, so I have been through many. Recently, I have felt judgement passed on my being.
"You're different," a southern American woman told me. "And people don't like that."
In Boeblingen, Germany, I see middle-aged men roller blading to work with ski poles in hand. I smile over the assumption that they offer themselves as spectacles in order to avoid crowded busses and redundancy of bicycling.
In retrospect, I let that phrase slice me in half just a statement a man from the far north of The United States said in reaction to hearing that people are "self-interested." (Girlchildwoman says so!)
"That's not my philosophy on life," he said.
I wish it wasn't my own, but what can one do but think that the older must prove they are wiser sometimes by stepping on younger, faster toes?
I desired "A" hard-earned gratification once upon a time. A grade. A mark. Three of them to be exact. Three I for which I hoofed. The effort for one contributed to the hospital visit--long nights that sent me walking home at 2 a.m. in chilly weather. The other kept me awake, too, by reminding me that I cannot close my eyes and dream immediately like so many do.
To me, it is unfortunate that supremacy is in cases kept by the ones whose feet not once tried on red running shoes. Acknowledgements and records loaded with hard effort are granted in stingy measures on occasions when strings and balls are attached.
All the girlchildwoman wanted was "A" stamp of approval that she met requirements and proof that time she spent thinking until her brain spun out in maddening sleeplessness was known.
Heidi gratified me for smiling at her. For listening to her. For being personable. Snap judgements on my own behalf and my learned tendency to avoid people were likely at play when I was denied credit for something I worked days and/or months to learn and/or experience.
I cannot say that I am settled in the last hand that was dealt to me while attending college, but at least now I know that experience is not a letter grade, nor is it all in being squashed with poor reason by an authority figure. Experience is being at high altitudes with head and lungs full of oxygen, feeling the cold mist in the air and the world moving below, grasping for an unseen Edelweiss flower.
Move on, girlchildwomanself, move on. . . Higher heights await!
at any work of art, save for with an open mind and patience."
--Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times
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