Lisa Smith Molinari

Posts Tagged ‘PCSing’

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My Styrofoam Cup Runneth Over

In military, modern culture, social scene on July 3, 2011 at 12:22 am

A week ago, I was sitting in my room in the base hotel, the night before my family’s final departure back to the States, sipping wine out of a Styrofoam cup and reflecting on the last three years living on a US Army base in Germany.

On one hand, the tour was a grand adventure. We climbed the steps of the ancient Coliseum, laid on the heather covered hills of Ireland’s county Kerry, ate our Thanksgiving turkey in a remote French farmhouse in Loire Valley, snuggled under a bearskin while riding a carriage through the streets of Vienna, and hiked among wildflowers and cowbells in the Swiss Alps.

On the other hand, with every tour, we leave family and friends behind, put spouse career plans on hold, store treasured belongings, cram into government quarters, tolerate extremely long work hours at mediocre pay without overtime, endure frequent separations, and for some, report for potentially hazardous duty downrange.

So why do we do it?

My husband, an intelligence officer, has enough years in to retire, so why not hang up the khaki uniform, grow a nice moustache and a gut, double his salary working for the private sector, and start living it up?

Good question.

Just before we moved out of our base housing in Stuttgart, my government-issue oven broke one night in the midst of making chocolate chip cookies. Despite the fact that I had packed up most of our kitchen supplies and was surviving on paper plates and take out, my daughter promised her social studies teacher that she would bring chocolate chip cookies in for the entire class the next day.

The dough was taking forever to cook, when finally we realized that the lower element was not heating properly. By this time it was nearly 11:00 pm, so we took a culinary risk and turned on the broiling element to heat the oven to the proper temperature, watching the cookies closely. It seemed to work, and we only had one batch left to bake.

My daughter put the last batch in, and came back to my room to ask me if I would watch them while she got ready for bed. I agreed. Seconds later, the fire alarm went off. I ran to the kitchen to find smoke billowing from the oven. Hurling the oven door open, I saw that my daughter had put the cookies on the uppermost rack of the oven, just under the red-hot broiler element.

 I threw the blackened pan of cookies onto the open window ledge and ran frantically around the base apartment, hoping to avoid setting the building alarm off, which would require all 11 families in the building to vacate and the fire department to come.

But then I heard it. Ear-piercing sirens from the stairwell, and confused voices shuffling in the halls. I knew there was no fire, but the alarms made it intolerable to stay inside the building so everyone was headed for the parking lot.

There they all were – the groggy residents of Building 2500 Patch Barracks. Men, women, children, cats, and dogs. All with crazy hair, wearing embarrassing bedtime clothing, staring up at our humble abode, looking for signs of fire.

“Uh, Howdy neighbors!” I waved nervously. “There’s nothing to worry about, it’s just a burnt batch of cookies!”

With sleep in their eyes, they all stared at me. At first, I was worried about bitter backlash due to our stupidity. I mean, who bakes cookies under the broiler? And at 11-o-clock at night?

But instead, they all yawned and laughed. Teenagers took the late night opportunity to steal away to their own corner of the lot and shoot the breeze. Little children warmed themselves in cars, and the rest of us chatted as if it was one of our weekend building barbecues.

Not only was no one mad at me, we all seemed to enjoy ourselves and light laughter could be heard bouncing off the walls of the nearby buildings.

After about 20 minutes or so, the serious German firemen arrived on their serious fire truck, suited up for a Towering Inferno. They marched seriously up four flights to my apartment, entered, and came out a few seconds later with smirks on their serious faces. We giggled at how mad they must’ve been to see that they had to come all this way for some “silly Americans” and their beloved chocolate chip cookies.

I offered my last apologies to my neighbors and friends and we all bid each other good night. It was actually a good time, and I was happy that my boneheadedness ironically resulted in one last fun Building 2500 get-together.

Reflecting on the past three years, I see what keeps us coming back to this way of life. Despite its hardships, life in the military offers job security and opportunity for adventure, but the most unique aspect of this lifestyle is the almost instant camaraderie among military families.

Sitting in the hotel awaiting our next tour of duty, I raised my Styrofoam cup in gratitude for the memories, experiences and friends we have acquired over the years, and I look forward to the good times to come.

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The Lame Duck in the Chicken Coop

In family, Humor, military, social scene on June 10, 2011 at 9:28 pm

For the last three years, I have been living in conditions that could be described as very similar to that of a chicken coop.

I reside on the 4th floor of a stairwell base housing unit on a US Army barracks in Germany. Our building looks almost identical to about 40 other housing units on this base, each one lined up neatly on patriotically named streets, within walking distance to the schools, commissary, and mail room, and all surrounded by a humongous fence.

However, it is not the appearance of this base that makes living here like living in a coop (truth be told, the fence and sterile buildings make this place more reminiscent of an asylum.) Nobody is throwing feed corn at us. No one has laid an egg as far as I know. But it is the pecking order that renders this place like an enormous cage full of clucking hens, strutting roosters and peeping chicks running wild.

When I moved here three years ago, I quickly became cognizant of this unique social order. As a new arrival, I took some time to nest, but after my rooster flew the coop for work and the chicks went off to school, boredom and loneliness set in.

I wandered the range in search of a flock to huddle with, but none could be found. Sure, there were hens everywhere (and a few stay-at-home roosters, I wouldn’t want to be sexist,) but I soon realized that I was at the bottom of the pecking order and would have to scratch and claw my way to roost with the others.

Careful not to count my chickens before they were hatched, I eventually laid the foundation for my social acceptance into the flock. By my second year, I was already familiar with most of the gaggle and was huddling with them, clucking away as we walked the chicks to school together, hatching plans for shopping trips, complaining about our wattles and chicken fat, and cackling on our shared patios.

I was securely perched at a comfortable elevation in the social pecking order, and life was generally good. As new chickens entered the coop, we chuckled from our high roost, fully aware of the work that they would need to do to find their places in our flock. Frankly, we got downright cocky.

Now, at the end of my third year of this tour, I must fly south and find a new flock in Florida. Thoughts of moving are leaving me a little wistful and reflective. I find myself pondering weighty ideas such as, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” and “Who came first, the chicken or the egg?”

This melancholy state has brought about a need for the comfort and companionship of the other hens in my coop, but alas, I have discovered that, as an outbound hen, I have been dumped back to the bottom of the pecking order! With only two weeks left in the coop, I find myself scratching for social scraps! How did this happen? Did I do something fowl?

After some thought in my pea-sized brain, I realized that I have become a lame duck in this chicken coop. I am no longer a contender in the social order simply because I am about to leave. As such, there is no reason for the other hens to invest valuable time in further incubating our friendship in this particular coop.

It’s not personal, there’s no reason to get my feathers ruffled, the sky isn’t falling. It’s just the way things work around here.

So as I prepare to take wing, I will thank my fine friends for their companionship, offer each a peck on the cheek, bid them a final cock-a-doodle-doo, and fly, fly away.

 
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Confectionary Comforts

In family, Humor, Middle-Age, military on May 23, 2011 at 10:40 am

Running my fingertip along the wrinkled peak of thin, gold foil, I find an edge. I insert a nail under the delicate lip and lift the sheet, hearing it crinkle as it expands like an accordion. I pause a moment, just long enough to pinch the end of the tiny paper strip, and tug it free from its host.

Satisfied that the sheath has been removed intact, I crumple the shiny square of foil and paper strip into a ball, and discard it. Popping the freed morsel into my mouth, I let it sit on my tongue for a few seconds, and feel my body’s heat react with the sugary drop. As it melts, a fragment of almond is revealed. In a sudden movement of tongue and teeth, I swipe the nut between my molars and feel it crack under pressure.

As I swallow the delicious mixture, my fingers search the bag for my next Hershey Kiss with Almonds. . . .

More than I should, I find myself reaching for chocolate. One might think the rich texture and undeniably delicious flavor of this popular confection tempts me, but I have a different motivation for eating chocolate.

Like a baby, I crave something soothing and repetitive when I’m stressed, tired or bored. Since Gerber doesn’t make pacifiers for 44-year-olds, and my husband isn’t inclined to rock me in a rocking chair, I opt for sweet treats.

I’m not talking about gorging on devil’s food cake, or slurping up Hot Fudge Brownie Delights. While I have been known to indulge in those delicacies from time to time, I find more comfort in chocolate treats that lend themselves to a prolonged ritualistic enjoyment of the process of eating chocolate.

We’re about to uproot our lives here on this US Army base in Stuttgart, Germany, and move back across the Atlantic to Mayport Naval Station in Florida.

Stressing over the logistics of this particularly complicated move has caused a flare up in my need for comfort, and as such, I’ve been hitting the chocolate pretty hard. Hershey Kisses with Almonds have been my recent remedy of choice, mostly because eating each tiny morsel involves several repetitive steps that I find quite soothing.

When I can’t get my hands on those, I turn to other chocolaty treats for my therapy. Most recently, I have eased my stress with Girl Scout’s Thin Mints Cookies. Regardless of the nutrition label, an entire sleeve of these delectable disks is really needed to calm the nerves.

Extracting a cookie from the top of the stack, I place it on my tongue and allow it to steep. The chocolate coating slowly melts, and then my saliva soaks into the crisp center, dissolving it into a mouthful of minty mush. I chew any remaining crunchy bits and swallow, as I lift another disk from the sleeve. 

Usually, one sleeve will do the trick, but on particularly stressful nights, I’ve been tempted to take the second sleeve from the box. I resist this urge, knowing that the guilt of eating so many Girl Scout Cookies will only add to my stress and thereby increase my need for confectionary comforts.

Even as a child, I remember ritualizing my consumption of treats. I never understood a kid who could take a bag of M&Ms, tear open the top, and pour the whole thing into his upturned mouth. What a waste!

I, on the other hand, would maximize my enjoyment, spreading the contents of each bag out, and separating the candies out into their colors (which were, back then, orange, green, yellow, dark brown and light brown.) I would then analyze each pile, eating only the most flawed morsels. Those that were misshapen or had an imperfect “M” were goners. I continued this process until I had whittled the lot down to one of each color. Those five, the Chosen Ones, would be scooped up together and ceremoniously sacrificed in one final chomp.

This may all sound nuts, but in times of stress, everyone turns to something for relief, and I figure that three-quarters of a bag of Hershey Kisses with Almonds is measurably better for one’s mental and physical health than three packs of Camels and a pint of Jose Quervo.

So why not dissect a dozen peanut butter cups, nibble the chocolate off the nougat center of a Three Musketeers Bar, or methodically pick apart a pair of Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls? It tastes good, it feels good, and stress melts away as fast as a chocolate Kiss on your tongue.

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