The Naked Truth

There are mistakes.

And then there are mistakes you make while naked, covered in lice shampoo, in a foreign country, after midnight.

This is one of those stories.

We were living in Germany and preparing for yet another work move—this one taking our family halfway across the globe and back to the States. It was late June, the kids were nearly finished with school; the house was half packed, and my husband had taken off with friends for a three-day concert somewhere in BFE, Europe.

In other words, I was alone with three small children, an international move, and entirely too much confidence in my ability to handle things.

Murphy took one look at that situation and said, “Hee, hee, hee.”

It started when I picked up the kids from school and my two oldest came running toward me, waving pink pieces of paper like they’d won a prize.

They had not.

There was a lice outbreak at school.

Now, I grew up in the South. There are certain things we know how to handle. Hurricanes. Humidity. Funerals. Feeding forty people when only six were invited.

Head lice was not on my particular list of God-given talents. I would rather have shaved every head and been properly done with it.

Five lice-treatment kits later, I was home treating heads, stripping beds, washing everything that couldn’t outrun me, feeding children, packing boxes, and dismantling what little furniture we had left.

By eleven that night, I had finally gotten everyone into bed.

All that remained was to treat my own hair, take a bath, and collapse.

Simple enough.

Which should have been my first warning.

Back then, lice treatment went onto dry hair and had to sit for about forty-five minutes before you washed it out. I stripped down, saturated my waist-length hair with something that smelled capable of killing considerably more than lice, wrapped a towel around my head, and pulled on my favorite hot-pink bathrobe.

No pajamas.

No underwear.

Just me, that robe, and enough pesticide on my head to clear a Louisiana porch of mosquitoes in August.

That’s when the phone rang.

Not our German line.

Our American VoIP line.

A call from home.

I raced downstairs to the basement office and grabbed it. My sister was on the other end, and we hadn’t seen each other in nearly four years. Naturally, we started talking about everything surrounding our upcoming move.

While we chatted, I headed back upstairs.

That’s when I noticed the bag of trash I’d left by the front door.

Now, a sensible woman would have left it there.

Unfortunately, no sensible women were present.

I tucked the phone between my ear and shoulder, grabbed the trash, opened the front door, and dashed down the steps to the bins.

Click.

I froze.

There are sounds your brain recognizes immediately as catastrophic.

A tree cracking during a storm.

A child saying, “Mama, don’t be mad.”

And the front door of your German townhouse clicking shut while you’re standing outside naked beneath a bathrobe.

“Oh, no.”

I ran back to the door.

“No, no, no, no.”

Oh, yes.

German engineering had just entered the conversation.

Our front door was a magnificent feat of German efficiency that automatically locked when it closed. There was no little knob to jiggle. No credit-card trick. No amount of sweet-talking it.

You either opened it from the inside...

or you had a key.

My key was inside.

Along with my clothes.

And my kids.

Who were very much fast asleep.

While their mother stood outside after midnight wearing nothing but a hot-pink bathrobe and a towel full of lice poison.

My sister was still on the phone.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’ve locked myself out of the house.”

A pause. Then a giggle.

“OMG no, why do these things always happen to me? Don’t answer that.”

Another giggle.

“Crap. The kids are asleep. Dave’s gone. I’m going to have to call you back.”

And thus began what would become the strangest neighborhood gathering I have ever accidentally hosted.

First, I rang the doorbell approximately four thousand times.

Nothing.

Then I threw sticks and pebbles at the children’s second-floor windows.

Nothing.

My children, it turns out, could sleep through anything. We were about to discover the full extent of it.

All our friends were away with my husband at the concert. My American VoIP line couldn’t call German emergency services.

Which left me with only one option.

The neighbors.

The family on one side had young children, and apparently my Southern upbringing was stronger than my survival instincts because even standing half-naked in the middle of the night with my children locked inside the house, I thought:

Well, I can’t go waking those babies.

There are some things your mama teaches you that apparently cannot be overridden by circumstance.

So I went next door.

Gunther and Irmgard were in their early eighties.

I rang the bell.

A second-floor window opened, and Irmgard appeared with her hair elegantly wrapped for bed.

“Dollie? Was ist los?”

Now seemed like an excellent time to discover that nearly five years in Germany had done remarkably little for my German.

“Hallo, Irmgard. Es tut mir leid, aber ich brauche Hilfe. Ich kann nicht... umm... ins Haus gehen... David ist nicht hier... Die Kinder schlafen...”

She listened patiently for a moment.

“Maybe is better, you try in English?”

Well.

Bless me for trying.

“I locked myself out. May I please use your telephone?”

“Oh nein! Yes, yes. I come to you now.”

Within minutes, I was sitting at their kitchen table while Gunther called the polizei.

I was mortified.

My children were asleep alone next door. I’d dragged an elderly couple out of bed in the middle of the night. I was completely naked under my robe, and the smell coming from my head could probably have stripped paint.

I apologized.

Then I apologized for apologizing.

Because Southern.

Irmgard patted my hand.

Then she stood.

“Wein,” she announced. “Come, we make a party.”

And y’all, she meant it.

Gunther started carrying chairs outside.

Irmgard produced wine and chocolate.

So there I sat under the German night sky, naked beneath a hot-pink bathrobe with lice treatment slowly marinating my scalp, drinking red wine and eating chocolate with my eighty-something-year-old neighbors while we waited for the police.

If that isn’t cultural exchange, I don’t know what is.

Eventually, two officers arrived.

They inspected the door.

They discussed the door.

They inspected it again, in case it had changed.

Finally, Irmgard translated.

“They cannot make it work. They must telephone the fire männer.”

Of course, they must.

At this point, why involve only one emergency service when we could inconvenience them all?

More chairs appeared.

More wine appeared.

Now the police were sitting with us.

Two firemen eventually arrived and began their own examination of what I had come to regard as Fort Knox with a welcome mat.

The discussion around my front door grew louder.

Lights flashed over the lock.

Men gestured.

Gunther joined the debate.

Then a second-story window opened in the house behind us.

It was another neighbor, Jochen.

“Hallo! It is now only three in the morning. What is happening?”

Gunther called back that Dollie had locked herself out, the police couldn’t get in, and now the fire department couldn’t either.

“Oh no! I come straight away.”

Naturally.

Jochen arrived with more wine and strudel.

And I think this may have been the moment I truly understood the Germans.

Where I come from, if somebody dies, you bring a casserole.

Apparently, in this corner of Germany, if somebody locks herself out of the house naked at three in the morning, you bring wine and confections.

Different customs.

Same principle.

You don’t let people go through things hungry.

At this point, however, I had developed a new concern.

The lice treatment.

What was supposed to stay on my head for forty-five minutes had now been there for hours.

I started wondering whether this story was going to end with me finally getting back inside my house only to emerge bald.

Because apparently humiliation has layers.

Another fire department was called from a neighboring village because our local department didn’t have the equipment necessary to defeat the door.

Our little gathering grew.

Eight people.

More wine.

More conversation.

More chairs.

And somewhere along the way, my embarrassment began giving way to something else.

Gratitude.

Here I was—a foreigner who barely spoke their language, in perhaps the most ridiculous predicament of my adult life—and not one person made me feel foolish.

Nobody acted inconvenienced.

Nobody complained.

Instead, they brought chairs.

They brought wine.

They brought chocolate.

They brought strudel.

And most importantly, they stayed.

There’s something about being raised Southern that makes you notice that sort of thing.

Maybe it’s because so much of the way I was brought up revolved around showing up. You didn’t necessarily have to know what to say or how to fix whatever had gone wrong. You just came.

You sat.

You fed people.

You stayed awhile.

And here I was, thousands of miles from home, surrounded by people whose language I could barely speak, realizing they understood that lesson just as well as any Southerner I’d ever known.

By around four in the morning, four more firefighters arrived.

Half an hour later, the mighty German door finally surrendered.

It swung open.

And twelve people cheered.

Glasses clinked. Hands were shaken. Backs were slapped. People hugged me despite the fact that I smelled like something you’d spray around the foundation of your house to discourage termites.

I finally got inside.

My hair, for the record, survived. Every strand of it.

My children?

Still asleep.

Completely unaware that while they’d been peacefully dreaming, their mother had hosted an international wine social with the police, the neighbors, and two fire departments in the front yard.

I’ve laughed about that night many times over the years.

I’ve cried about it a few times, too.

Because underneath all the absurdity—the bathrobe, the lice shampoo, the wine, the strudel, and one spectacularly well-built German door—is one of the loveliest things traveling has ever taught me.

People aren’t nearly as different as we sometimes imagine.

Kindness doesn’t require a shared language.

Neither does hospitality.

Sometimes it looks like somebody bringing a casserole after a funeral.

Sometimes it’s pulling up another chair because somebody shouldn’t have to sit alone.

And sometimes it’s an eighty-year-old German woman taking one look at a half-naked American standing helplessly on her doorstep in the middle of the night and deciding there is really only one sensible thing to do.

Pour the woman a glass of wine.

“Come. We make a party.”

All these years later, I’ve carried two indisputable truths home with me from that night:

Good people are everywhere.

And German engineering ain’t no joke.

Back roads. Good food. Stories the pictures don't tell.

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