How to Celebrate

We'd invited friends but they couldn't find us, sequestered as we were under my favorite wooden bridge. As it turned out, they wouldn't have fit anyway.

"It's September 11th, Nader," I'd said, "as an American I deserve to go to that faraway spot by the river with the fire-pit between the two streams," and so we had made the trip, our bikes piled optimistically high with meat and potato salad. When we arrived, we found that two German families had already taken it over, and that if we wanted to remain, we'd be reduced to the stones by the river instead.

"The stones are always so hard to sit on," Nader said. But still he spread our blanket over them and put two beers in the river - we were here, for the time being, and we'd make the best of it.

It was warm, then, and the Isar was sluggish with late-summer heat. "I'm going to swim," Nader said, and he wandered out up to his calves in it and stood blinking out at me, not quite knowing what to do next, whether to take the plunge or come back to the blanket. I watched the trees flutter beyond him, heard the German families laugh. The air smelled of cooked flesh and river-water.

In the woods, we gathered little half-wet branches and rested them on the coals we'd brought. Nader lit a fire, fanning and blowing it into submission. When the sticks had burnt down enough, we rested our wiry oily little metal grate on top of them, pried the Aldi Nackensteak out of its casing and let it sizzle as we drank the beers and stared at the sky.

It wasn't as blue as a September 11th sky should be. We'd started out a bit too late and now it was touched with evening, grazed with clouds. It was a German sky and we were an American and an Iranian beneath it, drinking German steaks and German beers (though the potato salad was thoroughly American - I'd found mayonnaise and mustard and celery and made a whole big Ikea bowl of it, which we demolished throughout the night, food poisoning be damned).

"How do you even celebrate this holiday?" I wondered. "What exactly are we supposed to be doing?"

"Maybe this," Nader said. "Another steak?" and so we sat, and ate, and drank. A child wandered over and we let him feed too-big sticks to our dying fire.

Later, a storm would come. Navy-blue clouds would loom in like Luftwaffe forces and would unleash an ominous bombing that started slowly: first a few drops, then rain. Being reasonable, the German family in our spot would pack it in, dashing for civilization, but we would remain on the stones, let our fire sizzle out, let ourselves sit together under his rain-jacket on the earthy cut-bank by the tree-roots. What I remember best is how, beneath that imperfect shield of soaked cotton, we would smoke cigarettes and laugh as the ice-pellets dashed our heads and wrought the day into something rough, imperfectly beautiful and stubbornly alive.