Adapting, adopting

A brief line in Jan Morris – “and anyway he has never been very adept with the 24-hour clock” – set me to thinking about the small ways I’ve adapted to Switzerland and all the small Swissnesses I’ve absorbed, starting with the 24-hour clock. It probably took the better part of my first full year here for the 24-hour clock to become intuitive – though turning 9:00 pm into 21:00 remains, for some reason, a sticking point – but by now I have thoroughly welcomed the 24-hour clock into my life. My date book is full of little notations: “book club @15:00” “meet P @ 09.30” “Dr. Norwegian 16:00.” When I complain in my journal about Small Boy’s early-rising tendencies I write things like “Small Boy woke at 05.30 again.” It’s clear and efficient – no need for am/pm distinctions, no potential confusion about if your train leaves at 8 am or 8 pm, no need to write both numbers and letters into your agenda. Everybody is on the same page with a 24-hour clock. I have a confession, however: midnight on a 24-hour clock troubles me. On those unfortunate occasions I find myself awake at midnight my clock shines 0:00 and I can’t help but experience a brief sensation of ceasing to exist, that it’s not today until it’s 0:01 and yesterday stopped at 23:59 and I have stepped into some anomaly, some wrinkle in time.

I’ve adopted the European dating convention of day-month-year as well, though initially less willingly than the 24-hour clock. I got tired of having letters I wrote for German assignments being marked off for using the US dating style; since I was practicing for certificate exams I took the path of least resistance. At some point it became habit. This morning I dated my journal, which nobody sees but me, Wed 21 Feb 2007; letters to my family in the States follow the same pattern. R and I chose our wedding date – 10 October – in part because it reads the same way – 10.10 – in both dating conventions. By sheer coincidence, so does my birthday (02.02). No matter what country we live in, R has no excuse for forgetting either date!

Sometimes I don’t feel all that well integrated even after all these years. In spite of reading Günter Grass in the original; in spite of being the one R asks for the name of some Swiss politician; in spite of understanding (if not speaking) the local Dialekt; in spite of knowing and employing all the expected formulaic pleasantries I can’t decide if I’m integrated. Then I think of all the small changes I’ve made around the edges, the little adaptations, the little Swissnesses, and I think I’ve done pretty well here. There are times when Swiss life still seems to carry on in some secret code, but I can negotiate life here flawlessly for days on end before inevitably put my foot in it again. And often when I make those little faux pas – feeding Small Boy before I’ve paid for the biscuits, for example – I’m aware that I’m making them and choose not to care. It’s been a long long time since I’ve felt lost, adrift, truly out of my element. Maybe I haven’t integrated but I’ve certainly adapted and adopted.