Normally a 51st birthday isn’t a milestone, but Covid-19 had consigned the celebration of my 50th to my parents’ minivan, parked outside a gas station along I-94, halfway between Minneapolis and St. Cloud, Minnesota. Mom and Dad stayed up front with the engine running for heat on a cold day in January while I socially distanced far in the back, enjoying a homemade pastry and asking my mom if she remembered where she was on the day I was born. It was nice, but…

The next year I flew to Berlin. My grand plan was to go on a date on my birthday, with a real woman in a real restaurant and have a real conversation in German. That was all. I wasn’t imagining some epic transoceanic romance—Hot Love during the Peak of the Omicron Variant—just a pleasant evening.

Arranging a date before getting to Berlin would have been a good idea. I could have signed up for an app. But I wanted an adventure, not a good idea or an app. I wanted to wander around and let the universe have its say, the way things played out when I was younger and amazing opportunities fell into my lap to enjoy—or squander and reflect on, decades later, wondering: what happened back then? 

In early 1991, while the first Gulf War was being broadcast live on CNN, with Wolf Blitzer hosting and Christiane Amanpour reporting live amid the explosions, I was studying German at an international language school in southwest Germany. German, not English, was the lingua franca among students, and we hung out all the time in flirtatious ways that could have easily been mistaken for group dates. 

I was also introduced to a large group of Germans my age. People were single. Socializing was nonstop. I went to a play in Stuttgart with one German woman, and enjoyed a long fancy meal in an elegant Greek restaurant with another. They were wonderful evenings that, from my perspective, happened organically, as if by magic, because I kept getting asked out. 

Going to Berlin in 2022, I knew I’d have to work harder than that, but in my mind I expected to find the same spirit of open inclusion, albeit most likely with divorced women more or less preoccupied by the questionable choices being made by their young adult children. No worries. I’m also divorced and can be quite childish. No problem.

Actually, there were bigger problems. As soon as I got to the airport, bad omens abounded. Empty concourses felt haunted. Shops were shuttered. Masks obscured the few faces I saw. On the train to the city, an older woman, obviously unhoused, was chased from the car to the platform before we left. Once underway, I watched an increasingly tense confrontation between a conductor and three young women, one of whom hadn’t paid. The conductor was stern but calm while speaking German, then for some reason became harsher after switching to English, then promptly called for security back-up once the students let on that they understood Arabic. They, too, were kicked off, begging and crying. It was a miserable vibe. The universe felt forbidding, not expansive. 

Also, I was stupid with jet lag. Going on a date felt stupid. I was a fool.

After finding my flat, I got groceries and went for a walk. A pink helium balloon from a party store brought me some joy. Then, a small boy’s eyes went wide when he saw my balloon. I had to give it to him. His parents seemed annoyed, probably imagining the boy’s inevitable meltdown when he relaxed his grip and the balloon lifted into the night, but the boy was so happy. His grandmother thanked me like I’d saved his life. This all transpired beneath a billboard graphically promoting the importance of STD testing.

Walking away from that boy, I started to cry. I was a mess. My first day in Berlin was a mess. Who’d want to go on a date with a mess?

Back at my flat, I researched free dating apps, despite my ironclad rule: No dating apps. I downloaded an app and signed up. Hours later, exhausted but not sleeping, I checked. I had one match—in Switzerland, ten hours away.

That was it. I admitted my middle aged folly and gave up on finding a date. I left my flat and walked the cobbles in the cold rain until I saw a bakery opening at 5am. I asked the baker which items were best. She said, “Come back in ten hours and you’ll see what’s been eaten.” That reminded me of my German grandma, who might have said the same thing. I felt better. I chose three random pastries and kept walking.

And kept walking, miles and miles, all over eastern Berlin, for days, wandering neighborhoods, breathing the air, forgetting about finding a date.

I also drank a lot of coffee, so I stopped often to pee, each time making a purchase to get the toilet key. For unknown reasons, on the afternoon before my birthday I bought a Coke instead of more coffee. That Coke was so good. I drank it fast and stashed the empty in my back pocket. All that sugar gave my step extra bounce as I hurried to beat a red light. The bottle popped out.

I stopped to pick it up. A man called, “Wait!” He was talking to me. I waited.

He jogged over. He wanted the bottle I’d dropped. He was a pensioner, he said, and a bottle collector. Each morning he woke at four to be on the cobbles by five. He’d earned thirty-five hundred euros in 2021 from his bottles. He showed the amount on thick fingers that reminded me of my German grandpa who, as a young man, had milked cows by hand.

Going out early on the cobbles, gathering bottles, this man said, connected him to his grandfather’s spirit. After the war, when even the cobbles were rubble, each morning his grandfather wandered the city, collecting whatever he could.

The man was talkative, but eventually I had to speak. I briefly tried the old game, to pass as someone from elsewhere in Germany, but I made one mistake, then another, then couldn’t find my words, until I admitted I was from the USA, on holiday, and my German had slipped.

His eyes got wide. U-S-A! He’d grown up in East Berlin when that distinction mattered. 

U-S-A! still mattered to him. 

He traveled to America in the late ‘90s, after the wall fell, with a wealthy German man connected to Norman Schwarzkopf. Did I know General Schwarzkopf? No—and I hadn’t thought about him since 1991, when those German women who took me on dates kept asking about the Gulf War and whether I’d have to go fight. They despised war. They said I should go to the concentration camps, to see for myself.

On his travels, the man visited Manhattan, which he didn’t like, then he went to—and he couldn’t pronounce it in English, but I understood what he meant so I helped: “Miami Beach?” 

Ja! Mee-am-ee Beech! Whereupon he described the marvels of the greatest place he’d ever seen, squeezing my arm for emphasis.

He asked what I thought of Biden. I learned long ago how to answer such questions when traveling abroad. “He’s an asshole,” I said. He laughed, then asked about Trump. “They’re all assholes.” He doubled over laughing, then asked what I thought of the new German prime minister. I knew that answer, too: “No clue, but I hope he does a good job.” 

We walked slowly down the long boulevard, talking and laughing, until we reached a major cross street. I was going left, he was going right. We shook hands and said good-bye, neither of us trying to prolong the moment or suggesting that we might meet up again.

So that was my date. It was on the street, not in a restaurant; with a man, not a woman; and on the day before my birthday, not on my birthday. But we’d had a great conversation entirely in German and, as I reflected walking back to my flat, it was exactly the date that I wanted and didn’t even know.

The baker was right: No one can tell first thing in the morning which pastries are best on that day.