Travelogue 1154 – 29 November
Piets On the Map

Despite temperatures being close to zero, parents and their children were milling about in front of the school this morning. Juf Franca, Little Ren’s teacher, told us we were waiting for the Piets. She showed my girls a map on her phone, pinpointing just where the Piets were, across the river. They were running late.

The Piets are Sinter Klaas’s helpers. Sinter Klaas and the Piets have been in the Netherlands for several weeks already. They arrived from Spain in mid-November. That has meant gifts and candies at home (left by the Piets) for two weeks. But it has also meant lots of public appearances from our high-profile visitors, all leading up to Pakjesavond on December 5th, when big gifts will be delivered, and the whole merry crew will bid us adieu. “Hasta la vista!”

Now the Piets are on their way for a visit to our girls’ school. This is something I like about the Sinter Klaas tradition. It’s very concrete, and very Dutch. By contrast, though Santa Claus appears in movies and shopping malls, he is still something of a cross between mythical figure and celebrity, everywhere and nowhere. Sinter Klaas exists on the map. He lives in Spain. He arrives in the Netherlands every year in a very public way. You can go watch him chug into town on an old barge. You can follow his daily itinerary. The Piets are busy scampering around the towns, delivering gifts and engaging in mischief.

The story is absurd. Children scratch their heads at the many faces and shapes of the Piets and Sinter Klaas. They wonder at the timing, at the resemblances to Santa Claus. But they are very ready to roll with it. Why not? It’s less glamorous than nesting at the North Pole and soaring round the world behind rows of reindeer, but the rituals have a charm that excites a loyalty that I don’t think Santa ever achieves. We love the Santa story, but do we love Santa? He's venerable more than loveable, sparks a wistful affection more than a playful one, engages the fancy more than the mundane sense of fun. Sinter Klaas is a man of the people.

Travelogue 1153 – 20 November
Hailstones

The gentle showers of one day turned into hail the next. I had to travel to an appointment in The Hague, and the schedule was tight. The girls had a half day at school. Between dropping the girls off and picking them up, I had only a few hours. Everything – apart from the train between Rotterdam Centraal and The Hague Centraal - I did on bicycle. In Rotterdam, I rode my own bike, of course. In The Hague, I rented a bike. All in all, I spent over an hour pedalling in the weather.

The stinging impact of stones came and went. Sometimes the ice was traded for rain. I splashed through puddles, steering with one hand into the wind as I held the hood of my rain jacket, as I made slow progress toward the dentist’s office, amazed that I would go to this effort to sit quietly in a chair for the man who would tap at my broken tooth and prod my tender gums with a metal instrument manufactured for no other purpose than to jab at people’s gums. Pain upon pain, I meditated each. This is the life we lead.

Even so, I’m also enjoying myself. There’s a spark inside, a centre that I observe, and from which I observe. There’s some peace there. When my systems aren’t flooded by anxiety, there’s some peace. I’ve become such a practiced dentist’s patient that my anxiety is quieted. The hail picks up again. There’s nothing to be done but to keep pedalling, keeping the wheel straight in the wind.

Travelogue 1152 – 19 November
Complicated Skies

Before six, a gentle rain is tapping at the window. It will be cold out. The season has turned. Yesterday was a day of complex skies. The clouds were everywhere. The sun never quite found its patch of blue because it sails so low now, but it shone through the vaporous masses and lit them with pretty pastels, linking sunrise to sunset in a way only winter can do.

Sinter Klaas is in Holland, and I’m happy to report that the girls still believe. Baby Jos complains that many of her classmates don’t. She chooses to, and I’m pleased. It’s such a sweet tradition, and I’m grateful to have one more run. Already the girls giggle at the silly romances of cartoon characters, and I cringe at the relentless approach of the great introversion called adolescence. I have enjoyed their childhood at least as much as they have.

The teenage years orient us toward humanity, toward each other, toward society. It becomes a mania that defies recovery. Most of us have marks from those years, as though we survived a pox. I have an impulse to protect my girls, a wish to protect the magical realism of kids’ days. Of course it’s futile. And I can’t say there is no beauty among the clouds. There fly there ideals and passions, insubstantial things that fuel hope and renewal among people. Those are desperately needed.

Travelogue 1151 – 16 November
Wonders

Groggy, I’m up before six. On a Saturday. I’m up hours before light on a weekend for a sport that I had never heard of before moving to Holland. Or if I had, it had made the kind of impression that my dreams made last night, leaving a kind of echo of something, a reverberation to be picked up later in another form.

It’s not enough that I’m up before light, I have to get gear ready and pack fruit for the whole team. I have to be sure the girls are dressed for their games. I have to travel with Baby Jos to the far reaches of the metropolitan area on a long tram line. We will ride all the way to the last stop. Beyond the club’s fields are only parklands and farmers’ fields.

There will be a clubhouse next to the hockey fields. I will mill around with parents, hoping for coffee, while our daughters warm up in the cold outside. Afterwards, we parents will stand in the wind together, shivering in our coats, while our teams of young girls clash on the field. Baby Jos has reached the age where games occupy the full field and one full hour. That’s a long time. There are no benches; we stand beside the field.

The clubhouse there is comfortable enough. It’s newer than our clubhouse in the city. But we have more fields. And just a week ago, the dome went up. Every winter, the clubs all play ‘zaal’ (hall) hockey indoors. The bigger clubs, like ours, erect temporary halls for the purpose, arching, white, balloon-like structures with a rectangular base fitting snugly onto one of the regular playing fields. Inside are half a dozen smaller fields with smooth flooring to make the indoor game fast.

That a building like that goes up in a few days still amazes me. Maybe it’s because I am reading a lot of medieval history lately. In a modern setting, sure, why not? There’s construction everywhere. But I can’t help imagining the wonder this place would excite among Charlemagne’s masons. That hockey zaal would instantly be the biggest single room in the county, aside, perhaps, from a few basilicas in the most important towns. The age of the cathedrals was still centuries away. They would marvel at the ceilings held high without pillars. The biggest shock would be that the room was for children’s games.

Travelogue 1150 – 6 November

Elections

I was home ill on America’s election day. It seemed only fitting. Much of the campaign season sounded like the rantings of a man with a life-threatening fever.

Somehow everyone managed to stay healthy through our trip to Venice. We wore no masks. We ate whatever we liked. I made a list of everything we tasted the first night in Venice, sitting outside at a table by a quiet canal: octopus and squid, shrimp, sardine, mussels, clams, sea bass, polenta, lasagna, and mascarpone cream. We were offered five courses, and we never hesitated. Sure, we were slow moving in the morning, but we soldiered on, stepping right out for caffè and brioches filled with marmellata to fortify our aching bellies. Then we started our tour with the Ca d’Oro and a traghetto ride across the Grand Canal to the Rialto Market.

The next day, we had an appointment in a church in Mestre, where we would attend the battesimo of a sweet little girl growing up in the Netherlands, far from the beautiful land where her father grew up.

My original home is faraway, too, in many ways. It’s become a matter of language. “He speaks my language,” Trumpistas will say. “He says what I want to say.” If so, this is a code that I find indecipherable. On the surface, it’s a hotch-potch of insults and nonsense, belligerence and incoherent parables. But underneath, there must be a powerful code. So powerful it outweighs the speaker’s character, which the most debauched Roman emperor would have described as “filthy”. If it was a smell, it would be a penny lost in Vance’s sofa. If it were a clue in Pictionary, it would be a sketch of a soiled toilet brush.

I have read that this will be the criteria of our age, not credentials but authenticity. It’s a damning indictment of traditional politicians if the huckster rings to the ear as more authentic.

We have developed – maybe through film texts – a mythos that the criminal is, at the very least, sincere. According to this strange frame of reference, being openly evil spares the individual any need for artifice. Extending that logic, being good requires artifice. That’s how the average American feels. Civility is suspicious. Better to be evil than to be false. It’s a degrading ethos to live by – made more degrading by forcing others to live under the reign of criminals.

Travelogue 1149 – 1 November
Dark Edges

The darkness over the water is eloquent. It is not silent. The water laps there; the boats’ engines roar. The darkness does not speak, but it is expressive. In the distance, the city lights are chattering. The waters are watchful, and they keep their counsel.

The evening falls quickly over the lagoon. It is autumn, and the season’s night comes on early. We have travelled across the water to the island of Murano. We sat for snacks and drinks in a square there as the day drew to a close, the sky above the piazza changing colour, becoming violet and losing its light.

Afterward, we rode the water bus back to Venice in night. The lagoon was rung round with the yellow lights of towns and roads, but the blackness ate up all the space between. Lights were reflected upon the waves, then the darkness ate them again. Ahead, Venice was sparsely underlit, as though asleep already, brick towers over the jumble of rooftops, their white stone highlights, their history, obscured by the night.

There was life in the streets. It was early. But the crowds had dwindled. The people walking had purpose, as though, night drawing on, they must get home. Crossing bridges, we came upon darkness again. Canals that featured no access, where buildings walls dropped into the water, had no lighting. Shadows fell precipitously off the bridges. Above, there were ancient buildings we passed that had no lights in any windows. Many seemed abandoned above the ground-floor shops.

La Serenissima emerges from the shadows, the ancient city still there underneath the noise of the jaundiced lights of the modern.