Before I forayed into art direction, I was actually a writer! A dream job of mine is to be the next Emily Henry or Jenny Han and have Netflix buy my books and turn them into movies. We all have a pipe dream lol.
This piece was written in my fiction writing class I took as an elective. Hands down one of the best classes I’ve taken. My professor always told us, “Writing is never finished, it’s just due.”
Ain’t that the truth.
Had Me at “Guten Tag”
Most college students’ first “adult purchase” (also known as their first one made with their Prime Student account) is a comforter or an air purifier. However, for me, it was the fall of my sophomore year when I added a $39.99 pair of lederhosen to the cart, covering the cost with my gift cards from last Christmas (because let’s be real, I wasn’t buying that with actual money).
As someone who is 100% German and grew up on a steady diet of butter and, well, butter, October is synonymous with Oktoberfest. The bright blue weather of my childhood was filled with days picking Golden Delicious apples straight from the branches of my Grandpa’s orchard and then baking plump dumplings with cinnamon drizzle alongside him, learning the wisdom of my Pennsylvania Dutch predecessors. The closest I get to that feeling now as a broke college student is the hard cider that my sister smuggles for me from the minimart downtown.
That’s why I decided to plan an Oktoberfest theme party as the social chair for one of my orgs. Really, I bought the lederhosen because:
A) having lederhosen at an Oktoberfest party would be purely iconic and
B) I wanted to see if my best guy friend at the time (and potential “love interest”) who I was bringing with me as my date liked me enough to wear them at the party in front of all my friends from this org who he didn’t know.
Some would consider objects in the enchanted realm to include the Magic Carpet and the Magic Mirror, but the Magic Lederhosen surpassed them all. One glance into his green eyes that complimented the golden stitching of the polyester overalls so well and my stomach twisted into scrumptious Bavarian pretzels. He and I had our first kiss while he was wearing those lederhosen, so I guess that the “Kiss Me, I’m German” button I had on worked.
—
Three years later, that same pair of lederhosen came back into my life, “Stein Juggler” and “Okto-beer-fest” pins still attached to its straps. I was in my first job in the city, and I’d made some new work friends who invited me out to their favorite bar. Although it was an Irish Pub, those bartenders knew their shit because the Sam Adams they poured me made my heart ache for more, while the junior account guy from the cubicle next to mine made my heart melt in that same pair of lederhosen. I think it must have been the combination of his deep blue eyes with the cream lace-up undershirt that did something to the German in me, making me fall even harder. The funny thing was that the next week, we were both put on the Sam Adams account.
Drunk off the sound of each other’s laughter, neither of us were complaining.
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Ten years later, I’m laughing harder than I ever have before while a little half-German, quarter-Italian, quarter-Portuguese child sprints through the kitchen like he’s pushing 100 on the autobahn. My husband flies around trying to chase the little menace to bring him back to the spot where we had been rolling out pastry dough just moments earlier, and I maniacally take photos of them, who happen to be sporting their matching outfits covered in flour (don’t ask, my husband started it). Meanwhile, the sweet, nostalgic smell of cinnamon wafts through the air, my grandpa’s apple dumplings’ almost ready for me to take out of the oven.
I don’t know what’s cuter–their little fedoras or the way my husband scoops up our son into the biggest hug I’ve ever seen when he finally reaches him over by the hope chest heirloom. As our son now sits perched on his shoulders, my husband strides over to me as confidently as a grown-ass man can while wearing a cheap-ass pair of lederhosen. I snap enough pictures to the point where my phone ever so kindly lets me know that I’ve run out of storage.
But the way their chocolate eyes–which happen to match their dark brown fedoras perfectly–look into mine, I realize that the love I feel for them in this moment is something so extraordinary that it can’t be captured in a photo (or shot on an iPhone with only 128 gigs of storage).
How a pair of lederhosen hypnotizes the men of my life into falling in love with me, I’ll never know. But all I know is that each one of them had me at “guten tag.”