Enough’s Enough
Janet Kuypers
for the 10/3/12 show with the HA!man of South Africa
6/17/12
(but sometimes speaking is the problem...)
Once when I was in Bad Gastein,
where the Alps in Austria
gave every street in town
a sixty-degree incline,
I signed up for a bus tour
to go to the radon cave
at a nearby mining mountain.
Waiting outside for the bus,
I stood with something like seventeen
German-speaking Austrians.
There I felt so out of my element
that I was almost dying
for an American voice saying any words.
That’s when I then heard
a boisterous baritone,
so I made my way
to the booming,
distinctly American voice.
I merely asked,
“American?”
The large man heard my inflection
and immediately spoke.
“Hi, I’m Frank,
and the little missus here is Mildred,”
and this petite, subservient Midwestern woman,
standing with this almost circular melodramatic man,
made this couple look
like the perfect ten...
Frank asked where I was from,
and when I said Chicago
he sprung up to start on his speech,
schlepping his speil:
“We’re from Detroit.
I Worked for GM for 35 years,
and now that the kids are gone,
with my pension
I thought I’d take the little missus here to see the Alps...”
And that’s when I realized
that I could have stood
at fifty paces
and still heard Frank
telling the entire neighborhood
the epic of his life.
That’s when it occurred to me
how loud us Americans could be.
Because when first traveling through Europe
after the “war on terror” began,
the United States governemnt and airlines
wanted to inform Americans traveling abroad
that if they were concerned
about being a conspicuous target
by looking too American,
they offered these simple guidelines:
Don’t wear a University sweatshirt.
Don’t wear a sports team baseball cap.
Don’t chew gum.
Don’t yell.
And I could imagine Frank now,
yelling, “Mildred!”
So I made a point
to not sit near Frank and Mildred
on that bus,
but that was okay:
I could still hear them
from rows away
as we made our way
to the mountain range.
And to the Austrians on that tour
who spoke English,
a part of me wanted to tell them,
“Not all Americans are that loud,”
because even if us Americans
want to rest on our laurels,
some of us know
when enough’s enough.
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