Where to begin?

Beginnings seem arbitrary, miraculous, tiny perturbations in the fabric of things, instabilities.

Perhaps the beginning is when my parents made love in 1952, conceiving me.  But what about the evening they first met in 1947, necking on the streetcar on the way home from the black market in Göttingen?  My mother’s cousin had set them up. “No, Rosemarie, a nice girl like you is not the sort to go shopping on the black market alone, but I know just the person to accompany you.”  At the time my mother was engaged to another man, but as she told me, by the end of the war the admirable men from her social circle had all been killed.  My father, on the other hand, had survived eleven years in the Soviet gulag, defected to the German side in 1941, and survived that too. He was that rare thing, someone who was saved by the Germans.  When my mother met him she had just finished her dissertation on the lyric poet Eduard Mörike and was about to start writing for a daily newspaper—the Badische Zeitung—and he was a painter without a ration card, following the circus in the British-occupied zone.  As she was fond to recall, when she first saw him, he was wearing tweed knickerbockers but sandals with no socks!  An absurd combination to a girl from Dahlem, the affluent suburb of Berlin.

Portraits of my parents by my father, Leo Saal (1912-1996). His portrait of my mother Rosemarie Saal (1921-1976) was painted the year after she died. His self-portrait was painted circa 1957.

Is a beginning mere happenstance?  What if they had taken different trains, or gotten off at the wrong station?  By this logic, an unbroken chain of events must go back in time, to the very beginning of the universe, linked by every cause in between.  They say that the egg exercises some intention in selecting which sperm it allows to enter.

But no.  I, Bodger concerns a more recent happenstance, an urge beginning a month or two ago, to teach myself how to turn wooden bowls on a lathe...