Travelogue 714 – September 11
Flight

The white cockatoo refuses the call. ‘Kom op,’ insists the man, and he holds out his arm. Instead the small bird with the crest on its head, flapping in the stale air of the café, gracefully maintaining position there a moment, decides for a perch among the dishevelled morning hair on the man’s head. I find it endearing, but the man is not happy. He frowns and he coaxes the bird off to begin again. The bird flaps to the back of a seat. ‘Kom op!’ And the tiny parrot lands on his head again. The man is frustrated.

We’re on the second floor of the café. I saw the couple when I came in. It was a warm family scene. The man shared his pastry with the bird, setting the croissant on the left page of the newspaper he’s reading. The bird pecked, and pored over his articles. Everyone smiled as they pass.

When the man climbs the stairs to the bathroom, the cockatoo rests on his shoulder. I nod in familiar greeting. I’m sitting and writing. This is my table. This is where I have sat since my earliest days in Rotterdam, sat and done my writing, to the bemusement of staff and regulars. What does a writer look like? He looks like a guy typing for hours. The colours may be bright in the mind, but the exterior is cool and static.

Not for the first time do I envy the choices of friends like Troy, Wes, and Ben, whose choices in artistic expression are so much more engaging. What is there not to love about watching a painter work, seeing the eye and hand move in creation, the colour and shape immediate? And what is there not to love about the immediate warmth released at the touch of a guitarist’s fingers on the strings?

On the way back down, the man and bird stop to adjust. And now the bird is not happy returning to the shoulder. He flutters there in mid-air, a kind of moment’s ornament hung over the floor of the café. Then he bolts, swinging over the balcony rail and sweeping over the counter and toward the door. The man swears and runs to the stairway.

This vignette has an element of the summer to it. Maybe it’s the fluttering beat of the white bird’s wings, sustained over our heads. Maybe it’s the sober whimsy of the man and cockatoo reading the morning paper. The sun outside has been strong for weeks, Indian summer on the North Sea.

The bird didn’t escape. I’m sure it didn’t want to. It was just thrown by the space, like we all are sometimes, distracted by the opening of the sky, and driven to wild runs for the horizon.

Travelogue 713 – August 25
We Do Make It After All

I’ll remember this week through the autumn. I’ll remember the heat, almost overwhelming. I’ll remember the stars at night. The sky has been clear for days on end. I’m surprised to see the stars. It’s like unexpectedly encountering people you had forgotten about. You don’t know what to say. You are swept into the feelings of being a younger person. You are swept into memories of another place. Like Ethiopia.

It was almost too hot to go to the beach. But when the summer gives us one more opportunity, so late in the season, we feel it would be wrong to refuse. Troy is in town. Baby needs to see the sea. She was only a month or two old the last time she did.

It’s no easy trip. It’s one of the last weekends of the summer. The Metro to Schiedam is crowded. The train to Den Haag is so crowded we have to stand. The tram to Scheveningen doesn’t run as normal. We have to disembark halfway and board a hot and stuffy bus. People are politely allowing Menna to sit, thankfully.

And then we are crossing the hot sand. We sit, and we spread ourselves out. In the glare of the white sand, it’s the kind of heat that makes you apprehensive. It weighs on you like it might have mass. It constricts and oppresses. Baby starts fretting. She doesn’t like the sand. She recoils from it, and she cries. She protests against the sun tan lotion. We wrestle with the umbrellas, angling them for most shade.

When we are finally able to lie back and enjoy, the effort becomes worthwhile. The sky is clear and bright. The sea is reflecting all the intensity of the day, white light bursting from its surface. There is a boat offshore with all its sails unfurled, presenting itself in perfect profile. The nineteenth-century Kurhaus hotel glows under the spectacular sun. The longer we lie idle, the more our body temperatures adapt, and the less suffocating the heat becomes.

We take Baby to the water. She is fascinated, but she’ll have nothing to do with the wet sand. We’ve brought a little plastic shovel, but she finds it far more fun to wave in the air than to plunge into dirty sand. I carry her out into the sea. Menna wades out behind us, her big belly before her. She bobs up and down in the surf, and Baby laughs. I take Baby out far enough that incoming waves wash over her legs. She starts to enjoy it. She kicks at the water.

The sun sinks lower in the west. The heat dissipates as the afternoon light softens and becomes golden and beautiful. People are packing up. We stay long enough for another dip in the water. The water is never anything but cold. Now the breezes are cooling off.

We are walking back toward the long boardwalk. I see the white Bungy Tower off the pier, with its irregular, encircling staircase, and ‘Bungy’ in big black letters on the side of its crowning deck. There are people ready to jump, huddled on the platform suspended off the projecting crane, silhouettes against the evening sky. One lets go, just a shadow, and momentarily reaches the limit of its leash, rebounding up into the sky in a way startling even from this distance, and humorous. That’s a person there, submitting the body to wild gravity, bouncing like a ball, held in the sky.

Night approaches, and, after the long ride home, I will see Cygnus and I will see the Dipper. I’ll stand on the balcony outside our flat, admiring the constellations. It’s a privilege of summer.

Travelogue 712 – August 19
Russians at Sint Job’s

I’ve returned to Sint Job’s Pier. It seems ages since I ran here. For a while, I was here almost every day, following the perimeter of the pier, matching my pace to the grey and wet flagstones underfoot. I didn’t live far away then, and this was one of my favourite stretches of the running course. I could look out over the waters of the wharf and then the river.

Once in a while I would have to contend with groups of sarcastic boys of about high-school age. Now I know where they were coming from. Down at the end of the pier is the STC building, ‘the Periscope’. Its odd shape is a hallmark of the Rotterdam riverside skyline. It looks like a crooked cubist creation, checker-boarded in blue and pushing one asymmetrical piece out at the top to hang over the pier. STC is the Shipping & Transport College. This building is only one campus of a huge institution. It teaches ten thousand students from secondary up to post-grad levels.

I’ve started taking on some hours as a free-lancer in English language tutoring. As it happens, there are a few secretaries to the board on the top floor of the crooked building who would like to improve their English.

They greet me cheerfully every morning. They offer me tea. We take over a conference room, and we practice our morning small talk in English before the lesson begins. ‘Did you have a nice evening, Lonneke? Did you go out again? Yes? And where did you go this time?’ Oh, to be twenty-one again. Or not to be. She exhausts me with her social life.

I cycle to Sint Job’s pier in the morning. I get there early so I can stand by the river a while, meditating. There is much to meditate. There’s the river itself, and the barges already wending their way inland and to sea. Across the river, the horizon is dominated by the first of the ports that take over the river all the way west, almost to the sea.

There’s almost always a ship moored here at the end of Sint Job’s. Today it’s a three-masted sailing ship, pictured here, looking to be the restoration of some historical vessel. It’s a loose interpretation, if so, judging by the carvings along the bow, modern and humorous, possibly depictions of the crew. I don’t see a soul on board. It’s painted here and there with mysterious inscriptions in the Cyrillic alphabet.

I walk alongside the boat, wishing my cousin Paul were still in town. He visited three weeks ago, after officiating at some sailing races on the IJsselmeer. We saw a few similar boats at the yacht harbour downtown, but he didn’t seem too impressed. He has sailed in many places around the world, but even so, I think he’s probably seen everything there is to see right at home, in San Francisco. Me, I’m impressed. I have the enthusiasm of the unschooled.

Nearer to home, I took him to see the Delft, an eighteenth century schooner being reconstructed in Delfshaven. It was a warship sunk by the Brits during the Napoleonic Wars, sunk off the Scheveningen shore. The ship was originally built in Delfshaven, so now the project has been brought home. There is a museum, with bits and pieces of the original retrieved from the sea. Again, I’m impressed.

That’s my morning meditation. It’s time to turn away from the water again. I enter the crooked building and head to the elevator. I start with the English phrases in my head, preparing for the lessons. ‘There once was a man from Uz, ….’

Travelogue 711 – August 17
Picnic

We are experiencing summer this week. It’s almost too much responsibility. You watch the sunny day approach day by day in your forecast, and a part of you hopes a North Sea front blows it aside.

But this one has held steady, the sunny symbol of good times in the ten-day Google forecast. We must enjoy it. We breathe deeply and try to gather some energy.

We have been discussing a trip to the beach all summer. We’ve made it to the beach every year, and every time we’ve had a great time. It’s a lot to live up to. Now we have a rowdy toddler, and a baby on the way. Menna breaks into a sweat when we talk about having fun.

So we have decided to stay close to home. We want to have a picnic in Het Park in our old neighbourhood. We have a soft spot for the green lawns and the flower gardens. We used to run the paths together, before Menna was pregnant. We ran around the little lake and by the trimmed hedges of the small English garden by the quaint old clubhouse where the wedding photos are taken. We ran underneath the high Euromast, Rotterdam’s monument in 50s wowee style, a space-needle-type tower that rises on a massive concrete column and supports an observation deck and restaurant. In summer you occasionally see people repelling down the side of it.

We have chosen a picnic in the park over a trip to the beach. It’s simpler, but it still it takes a long time to pull together. We don’t get to the park until four. Baby was crying the first time we try to prepare for departure. Then suddenly she was asleep. Then suddenly Menna was asleep. I carried on with work at my desk, quietly typing. We packed what we can underneath the buggy. We set out at our snail’s pace to the tram station.

Jan is able to join us. His office is close, on Westzeedijk. I stop by his building on the way. He’s in shorts and looking molto bronzato from his summer trip with the family to Napoli. He scrolls through photos on his iPhone. His wife stands by a stone wall overlooking a prospect of green valleys. The children stand beside one of the short mules that carry supplies up the narrow switchbacks to the villages above. The children are making mule faces.

Baby loves the outdoors now. She struggles to get out of my arms. Once on the ground, she strides forward, throwing her arms up and squealing with delight. There’s not a lot of separation anxiety there. She doesn’t hesitate. She doesn’t check to see if we are behind her. She just keeps going. One of us has to jog to catch up. She’s standing over a couple who have been enjoying their own company. We apologize.

Oma Batu sits on the blanket in the shade. Jan lies on his side in the grass. He remarks on my bike. ‘The same bike.’ It’s true. I’ve had it for years now. And it’s true that every time I see Jan, he’s riding a new cycle. He says they’re stolen. I think he just wears them out. He rides like a happy boy. Often enough, he has all three children on the bike, front and bike.

Menna and I pick a sunny spot, and we play volleyball with Baby’s beach ball. The goal of the game is to keep Menna from falling over. We win, but I’m exhausted.

It isn’t the beach at Scheveningen, with its air of history and summer abandon. We don’t get our annual dash into the cold sea, laughing while struggling with the waves. But we are content. Baby has explored every square metre of grass in our area. We’ve eaten burgers. We’ve absorbed some precious sunlight. All good.

Travelogue 710 – August 4
Dagos

Summer might be finished here in Holland. The temperatures have snapped back to their slightly chilled norm, as though the heat were a dangerous indulgence. That may be all right for southern Catholic countries, but here the elastic bonds reigning in wicked summer must be strong. The North Sea winds and the drizzling chill are ascendant again, as they should be. Menna despairs of getting a chance for even one summer trip to the beach. We are on alert. We are waiting for the first day with sunshine and temperatures above twenty.

I’m missing the American heat, particularly the sultry Midwestern variety. I loved it, and I struggled with it. I couldn’t sleep. My skin developing instant heat rashes once I was in Minnesota. I suffered when I got into any super-heated car interior. But there were moments, strolling in the sun, as satisfying as swimming slowly in warm water. This was how summer was supposed to be.

The Air BNB where I started my stay in Minneapolis had no air conditioning. I slept with the window open, the second-floor window looking out over the sloping back yard, and beyond the tops of some trees, the green lawn of the Bryn Mawr Meadows Park. There was only a fan in the other window to cool the room, and it didn’t do much. I didn’t sleep. At sun’s first light, I resigned myself to being awake. I dressed to run.

I didn’t last long in that Air BNB. The owner of the house had very free ideas about living together, ideas that are easy to admire but not so easy to live with. The house was never locked. She came in and out of the bedroom to regulate ventilation on the second floor. Other guests appeared randomly, slept on couches, peeked in the bathroom. I decided I had to give the Air BNB service a rest. I moved to a regular B&B, an historic Victorian house I found in one quick web search. It was a beautiful place. The doors locked. I was served a very nice breakfast every day. No one wrote a review of my behaviour as a guest once I was done.

Coincidentally, this house was close to my last neighbourhood when I lived in Minneapolis. I lived in Northeast Minneapolis, a block from the river, near the brewery, near Dusty’s. Dusty’s was a local bar in its own tiny brick building on Marshall. Dusty’s had been there since the 1952. And it’s still there, though Dawn says the owner is getting ready to retire. When he retires, he will sell the bar. The property prices in the area have skyrocketed, and it’s too tempting.

Dawn recognized me when I walked in. It’s been fifteen years since Troy and I started hanging out there, ordering gin and sitting at one of the few round tables along the wall, playing chess. Dawn worked there then. She looks almost the same, the same military build and the same feathered haircut. Some of the blonde hair has turned white, but there is barely a crease on her face. There’s still the photo of her hanging behind the bar, from her days in the service.

I was astonished that she would remember me. I sat at the bar, and we caught up. I ordered a ‘dago’, which is a sausage and onion sandwich and a specialty of Dusty’s. I have never seen dagos sold anywhere else but Minnesota. I’ve heard it originates here.

Thirteen years ago, Troy and I went to Dusty’s. I was in a mood. I hadn’t heard from Leeza. We were supposed to go out that night, and I never heard from her. Troy and I played chess, and then took a walk down to the river. We sat on the railway bridge, and we watched the aurora borealis. I wonder what we talked about. It would have been a mundane conversation, though it was not a normal night.

If I could time travel, I might like only to eavesdrop on old conversations. If I could listen to my own, I imagine I would be embarrassed. I would discover a lack of wit and a lack of grace. I would find great holes in knowledge and wisdom. Perhaps I was able to demonstrate great enthusiasm, but that faded as I aged. It’s funny we aren’t able to remember conversations. They mark our paths nad our biographies like stepping stones in a garden, everywhere we go, in celebration and in tragedy. We talked of this and that while the world turned.

Travelogue 709 – July 24
Los Angeles
Part the Third

This year we’re holding our annual board retreat at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Thanks to Elias at Tsehai Publishing, we have a few rooms in the old Hughes World Headquarters. It’s a pretty building, three floors arranged in open balconies above a long, clean lobby. There are lots of skylights, and trees growing in planters up on every level. But the building isn’t easy to navigate. The elevator systems are staggered and hidden from view. You can’t ride one elevator from top floor to the lowest parking garage. They say this was the product of Howard Hughes’s paranoia. There is no quick exit or entry.

Howard Hughes left his stamp on this part of the city. Below Loyola Marymount are the fortune-blessed streets of Playa Vista. It was right here that Hughes set up first a private airfield and then his aircraft company during the war.

Hughes’s parents had died in his teens. He inherited quite a bit if money at age 18, and in 1925 he moved from Texas to L.A. to try his luck in film-making. His luck was good, and he became a Hollywood success, producing and directing four films in his first five years that were Academy Award nominees. In 1932, he produced the controversial first ‘Scarface’.

Hughes had many talents and many interests. He was a precocious kid. At 11, he built the first wireless radio transmitter in Houston. At 12, he built the first motorbike in town from parts of his father’s steam engine. He was born to be an engineer. In the 40s, while he was recuperating from one his near-fatal plane crashes, he designed a new hospital bed that became the inspiration for the standard hospital beds we see today.

By the 30s, he was indulging his love of flying, setting world speed records and records crossing the U.S., records circling the globe. And in every case, he was tinkering with the planes, innovating in in ways that would leave a permanent mark on the industry. By 1932, he had founded his aircraft company, which would become defense contractor and then player in aerospace.

In 1941, he moved into Playa Vista. It was here he built the Spruce Goose, wooden monstrosity designed for World War II but not finished in time for deployment, built with the largest wingspan in history.

I run by the post-Hughes Playa Vista, the still-new development being called ‘Silicon Beach’ in honour of its status as tech haven. Steven has drawn me a map to the local running paths. Still waking at 5am, I have the run of quiet eight-lane L.A. streets. I cut over to Centinela and through the little park behind the Clippers’ Training Center. The path begins nearby and climbs up the side of the bluffs that run toward the ocean. There’s no construction allowed on the steep hillside; it’s a kind of preserve, harbouring a healthy variety of brown California vegetation that awakens all sorts of childhood memories in me. It’s feels like this geography survives in the cells of my body.

Running for a half hour, nearly the full length of this bluff, I have a view over much of this trendy little neighbourhood. I pass by the old Hughes hangars acquired by Google. I run by the You Tube Space office. I run by the pretty little condos, some still under construction, and their mall and the Imax cube. I look out over the quiet streets where cars share the road with electric buggies like golf carts.

I run as far as the white LMU letters laid out on the hillside. I can see Lincoln Boulevard and the Ballona wetlands beyond, pushed west by the Playa Vista developments. Beyond that are the beaches.

One day, with an hour to kill, I spontaneously turn the car toward the beach. Miraculously, I find a parking space, and I trudge through the white sands in my shoes and jeans, past the paved ribbon of bike path and beyond to sit just beyond the reach of the water. I watch the waves, settle a long gaze on the horizon. I soak up the strong sun, and I think to myself, there is something blessed about this place, after all. Remarkable.

Travelogue 708 – July 23
Los Angeles
Part Segundo

This is Daisy Dell in the 2010s. In the 1910s it was a popular picnic spot in the Cahuenga Pass above Hollywood, just grass and sea breezes among the dry needles of the trees. In 1920, the pacific little valley was scouted and then purchased by one Christine Wetherill Stevenson, heiress and theatre enthusiast. The dell was a natural outdoor amphitheatre. There were recitals and theatre productions. A few short years later, the son of Frank Lloyd Wright was offering designs for the shell over the stage. His second attempt produced the concentric arches that have formed the basis of all subsequent designs.

Daisy Dell is lit up and resounding with sound. I’m taken back by the power, We’re halfway up the steep incline, and still the flashing lights right behind the band are blinding. The bass vibrates among the benches, even as high as we are. We’re about halfway up the steep incline. The band itself is a set of small, dancing figurines. We can watch them in the massive TV screens. At least, we can watch Mr. Sting. Peter Gabriel prefers to devote his TV time to distortions and abstractions.

I have never been one to go to many large concerts. I wondered what the point was if you could not see the musicians. For me, ‘seeing’ music was witnessing the making of music.

The audience answers my concerns. It’s a celebration, they say, rising from their seats when Mr. Sting launches into ‘Message in a Bottle’. The song is a palpable artefact of our culture. It has defined a mood and a time. It has inserted itself into private moments among all these thousands of people. Now we are here together. The artist is present. He makes the song again, just for us. We celebrate.

Daisy Dell is a lovely spot for a celebration. A hundred years on, the theatre could still be the location for a picnic. Up above the highest rows of seats, you can still see the natural summit of the hillside, the grass and the trees. The sun sets; the gloaming settling in among the quiet hills. Gentle breezes bring a sense of the ocean. ‘Hollywood,’ declares the sign on Mount Lee. It was once an advertisement for a real estate development

There is still the feeling of magic and possibility to Los Angeles, city la más grande of the Golden State. I’m surprised to discover again this youthfulness. I left it so many years ago, I have imagined it to have changed as much as I have. I have fast-forwarded it from my childhood into its own adulthood and senescence, imagining it a dirty, decaying, and cynical city to match its prodigal son. Instead, I find the same sunny insistence on hope that I remember, the memory more like a dream than life.

On another day, Carolyn and I drive through Santa Monica. It’s sunset. We wait patiently in the traffic on Ocean Avenue, while hundreds of people promenade in the park by the road. The park overlooks the beach. It feels like a holiday. There is a bright-eyed ebullience to the procession. Any day can be a holiday. Just like every day is a traffic jam.

We come in sight of the pier. The entrance is marked by the famous arching neon sign from 1941, advertising Sport Fishing and Boating. We can see the amusement park, a feature of the Santa Monica Pier since the 1910s. More importantly, we see the heavy tide of people surging across the park and the pier. We decide it may be more fun to watch the action from inside the Red O on Ocean Avenue, contemplating the ocean sunset over margaritas. It’s dark by the time we merge. The Ferris wheel on the pier is lit in many colours.

Carolyn met in another California beach town when we were both university students. It was our freshman year. We lived in a dorm off-campus, and we were devoted to the kind of perpetual, riotous celebration we see broiling around the Santa Monica Pier. That was Santa Barbara, before it was a TV show, before it was another expensive lifestyle, laid out for boutiques and spas. Back then, the town was just a town. And there were beaches under gentle bluffs. Oil rigs stood at intervals in the ocean. The beaches smelled like tar. I ran the circuit around the university’s lagoon. I ran in sand. I attacked the cold water, swimming straight out, in defiance of the slanting lines of the powerful waves.

Travelogue 707 – July 22
Los Angeles
Part One

‘Red rain,’ he says, ‘red rain is coming down.’ He has said this before. He is offering it to us, a crowd of seventeen thousand. He is standing at the keyboard and singing. The video is capturing him and relaying it on to seventeen thousand people arrayed up the side of the canyon. ‘Red rain is pouring down.’

That was Monday. I’m back in Nederland now. The jet-lag is so powerful it drags me into heavy sleep at night. I awake in the dark gasping. In a dream, something has fallen on me. Maybe there’s been an earthquake and a massive beam has taken me down and trapped me. A policeman is telling me they won’t be able to move it in time. He tells me I’m going to die. I feel it coming then, like a swelling tide. It shuts out the light. It has a certain light of its own. I’m thinking to myself, this is the thing I have feared and wondered about for so long. I have to figure out a way to say good-bye, and all I can think of in the rush of events is to say, ‘I love you’. It’s a kind of declaration to all things and all people.

Monday, I was in Los Angeles. In the morning, Carolyn and I visited the beautiful Getty villa, a place like a dream, made for L.A.’s golden light, a museum for antiquities with a garden laid out like a senator’s villa in Pompeii. It’s empty when we arrive, peaceful under a cloudless, blue morning sky. I wonder about the leisure that a garden like this one suggests, a life of rest. And a life of politics. From what I hear, the modern institution also does a decent job replicating the Roman politics behind the scenes. We are just guests. We stroll the circuit of the garden just once. Busts of forgotten men watch us with terrible restraint.

Monday night, we attend a concert in the hills. It’s light when Carolyn and I tales our seats. Through a break in the brown hills ahead, we can see the Hollywood sign on Mount Lee, white letters raised among the California brush and grasses.

‘Mr. Sting,’ he calls his friend. They are sharing the stage for this tour, collaborating in each other’s music, thirty years of catalogue. ‘Red rain,’ he’s singing, and Mr. Sting shares the stage with him still. They have shared more than the music, each taking a turn voicing concern over the violence of recent weeks. Peter Gabriel knew Jo Cox, the MP shot by a fanatic supporter of Brexit. Was this really a reason to shoot, a reason to die? If there is a soul, I wonder if it hungers for absurd ways to die. There might be a sort of spiritual symmetry to the absurd exit from this kind of world.

I’ve been in America two weeks and there have been half a dozen scenes of violence, in Dallas, Baton Rouge, Minnesota, and more. I’m stopped one morning in a long line of traffic down University Avenue. I turn down a side street and escape, taking a long route round the highway entrance. The radio informs me that the traffic was caused by a protest on the highway, an expression of rage for the police killing of Philando Castile.

Will the soul of Philando have seen much irony in his demise? It seemed something desolate to the rest of us, a smear on the glass, an offense against decency.

But then, if my dream is any indication, death comes as a surprise, making up its own urgency and blotting out the rest. I still wonder, because I only have dreams. ‘Pouring down all over me,’ he sings, and it sounds like a kind of protest. It wasn’t what I had in mind.

Travelogue 706 – July 7
Racing West

Outside, the clouds gather. Outside the windows of this dull café, the clouds are gathering. They gather out east, beyond the Minneapolis city park across the street. The park is one city block of green grasses, sedate trees, and chain-link fences setting apart play areas. There’s a squat, orange building with curving walls. It looks like a playground toy itself. It couldn’t house more than a few rooms. The park lies very still underneath the grey skies. The clouds are dark in patches, proposing rain and then holding back.

Earlier, at 5am, there was a light rain falling, like a Dutch rain, and the cool breezes that blew in the open window of my bedroom cooled me. I dressed in running gear, and I went outside. I have switched lodgings, from my friend’s house to an Air BNB recommendation. This is a small house in a little neighbourhood west of downtown, wedged in among highways, railway tracks and large tracts of parkland. Jogging no more than half a mile, I can cross over a railroad track and over a creek, and then turn onto a bike path that circles an extensive city park. This park is larger than a city block. It’s at least a dozen city blocks, fields of grass that stretch alongside one of the busiest highways rushing out of downtown. People meet there in the afternoons to play soccer, ultimate Frisbee, and even cricket. I know this because I took a long walk after moving in, and I slowly passed by game after game under a strong summer sun.

There’s a place where you can pass underneath the highway, and underneath another railway line, and reach a set of busy bike paths, where dozens of cyclists pass with the same sort of iron determination exhibited by cars racing by on the highway. They race the length of this pretty little valley, sided by the raised highway one on side and hills on the other. Over the hills is a well-to-do neighbourhood called Kenwood, where expensive houses line tidy, meandering lanes. Down here, there are only quiet meadows with high grasses, and stands of high trees that obscure the distances the summer cyclists will cover. Atop one of the Kenwood hills is a brick water tower dating back to 1910. It’s a stern watch tower the colour of dried blood.

When I first moved to this sombre town, many years ago, I rented a room just down the street from that tower. That would have been as long before dating Leeza as it has been since she died.

I invite the vision: He’s thinner. He has more energy. He has blustering confidence, even though his life is a mess and he’s scared. He has left the east coast for Minnesota. He’s working terrible temp jobs to survive, riding the buses in the chilly weather of autumn. Winter is closing in.

The chaos makes sense to him. His struggles are brushes with meaning

‘I am unequal to these puzzles,’ I say to him. He nods. That was apparent to him. He’s asking what was the point of it all, if at my age I have nothing better to say. When he contemplates all he is suffering for his passions and his ideals, the older man and the subdued narrative he represents seem hardly worth the effort. My life, these many years later, appears arid. What is life without the wrenching emotions, the wild risks, the life-changing decisions over and over, the reeling emotions, the daily confrontation with meaning?

There are things he doesn’t foresee. Passion is a branching road, and one offshoot leads to Addis Ababa. Young people conceive a passion for experience. They have energy like the winds off the sea. But we don’t have the resilience of the winds. Experience batters the sea walls. We get older.

‘I am unequal to these puzzles,’ I say to him. What I can’t say is that the puzzles become landscape, and then they become a part of you. They aren’t solved. They aren’t there to be solved. They unfold, eventually revealing a certain intuitive sense. Maybe they solve you.

I release the vision. I’m not moved. Perhaps it only validates Youth’s low opinion of me that I’m not moved. I’m after all content with my sangfroid. Youth must return to his struggles, and all I have to do is to complete my peaceful walk among the meadows of the westward valley.

That was yesterday. Already. Today is a day just starting. The beginning of it is brooding. The clouds gather over the park. There might be some rain to slow us down this morning. I am watching from this cold room, the café over-climatized in Minnesota style. We shiver as the midsummer day progresses.

Travelogue 705 – July 5
Peace Be Upon Us

The sun hasn’t risen, but I’m sweating. There’s no one out but the mosquitoes and a few conscientious dog owners. When I start my run, clouds are tinted pink in the east. That’s the direction I’m headed. I jog alongside the long chain link fence enclosing the V.A. Hospital. It takes a full eight minutes to get from Wes’s house off 43rd Avenue to the expanse of asphalt that is the 55. I’ve run this way many times before. I know exactly how long it will take. Traffic is light. I don’t have to wait for the slow lights. On the other side of the highway is the park.

Jet lag has gotten the better of me. After 3am, I won’t sleep again. I plan for the day. I call Menna, who is now thousands of miles away. We activate video, and I chat with Baby, who has recently starting walking She stands and stares at me through the phone uncertainly. It’s midday there. The light in my video is dark and yellow. I look like I’m broadcasting from a cave.

I dive into the trees, following the bike path that winds among the bluffs underneath Fort Snelling and above the Mississippi River. The canopy of leaves is thick, and it counters the growing strength of the sun. The air is humid and rain forest green. The running is effortless. I am reluctant to turn around. By the time I emerge onto the broad roads of the city again, the roseate effect of the dawn has moved into the western sky. The daylight is approaching full intensity.

I left Holland in the morning. It was a sunny day. But there was nothing of the sultry heat of the American Midwest. You are so rarely out of the reach of the North Sea chill in Holland. I delayed my departure as long as I could. I wanted to watch Baby wake. I wanted to hold her on my chest as she dozed. There’s a ritual to her waking. She has to cry out loud and raise her head to scan for us with bleary eyes. She has to drop her head again, like a heavy sack into the mattress. She might catch your chin or nose with a sharp blow. She rolls over a few times. After quite a while, she opens her eyes, suddenly alert. Yesterday I was gone before that happened.

I’m sweating. I’ve made it back to the house, and I’m pacing to cool off. The neighbourhood is so silent. I feel, among the tall trees, as though I were in the country.

Summer has been a spinning wheel of climates for me, flying from chilly Adds to sweltering Dubai, and back to Holland, where you’re never quite sure whether you want to be in a T-shirt or a jacket.

It was Ramadan in Dubai. The streets were sleepy. The cafes were closed. I was drawn to walk in the heat, but could only stand it in short bursts. The sky was a white haze. It wasn’t until I was about to wrap up the day that I could make out the Burj Khalifa in the distance, sunshine glinting off the glass windows of the spire.

I watch Ghost Protocol again on the plane. The man next to me is fidgeting. He’s a big man and he has a lot of energy for someone fasting. He explains to the stewardess that it’s Ramadan. He holds up his watch, and he tells her exactly when he can eat. When it comes time, there is still sunlight coming in the windows. The Prophet might find this a strange world.

Travelogue 704 – June 19
She Plays with the Balloon

I’m missing Baby. This trip is work and sleep. In between there is solitary time to reflect. I think of her often. I laugh when I think about her first birthday party. I watch the video in which she’s crawling across the floor with a balloon held in her new teeth. This is a trick she really enjoys. With all the formalities of the party, she was a star, taking centre stage very naturally.

It was all Ethiopians and Eritreans at the party. Chuchu and his family drove up from Antwerp, so Baby had friends. Chuchu’s second daughter is one week older. We had a big cake, and all the adults sang birthday songs. Solomon worked the camera. Baby sat serenely with her friends in front of the cake. She seemed to find all our antics intriguing. Left to play, she found the balloons the most fun.

I go to the office. The children sitting in the library make me think of Baby, make me wonder which little girl she might be like. Will she be the shy and giggling one, the bold and saucy one, the serious and bookish one?

We work in the top floor conference room. That room has a small balcony outside a sliding glass door. I take a break and I watch the activity in the tiny courtyard below. The children take breaks. Several small boys play outside. They kick a ball around. When they tire of that, they kick puddle water at each other out in the small dirt road. A passing grandmother admonishes them, but they don’t stop. Two little girls are playing on the swing set frame that we are storing in the courtyard. One climbs to stand on the supporting bar, and the other tries to push her off. One looks up to see me watching. She smiles in a most beguiling way. She whispers to her friend. Then she pushes her. The guard stops the game.

I take a break on the third floor balcony, and I look out over the neighbourhood. From here the view is rich with detail. The hills seem tightly gathered around us, houses amid the trees and roads winding among them. The few multi-storey buildings appear nestled among the houses, and then again farther out, where one senses the big city. But bigger than the big city are the mountains beyond and, here and there, the domes of the churches, echoing the spirit of the heights.

It’s funny, but with all there is to look at, my view is habitually drawn down to the familiar street view. People pass only occasionally. Some notice me up on my balcony. Most don’t. I prefer they don’t, because even these sorts of innocent interactions between the local and the foreign can become complex. I prefer the children. They see the same white face, but the difference between us is a kind of game. I smile at them, and they become shy. They shout back. They perform. They pose, and they run away.

I’m wondering which little girl is Baby. And how can I make her laugh?

Travelogue 703 – June 18
The Anxious Clouds

Places like Minnesota and Holland may boast their construction seasons. Certainly there’s every day a new detour in Rotterdam these days. But nothing compares to Addis Ababa. There is no landscape as mutable as the cityscape in the Ethiopian capital. Whole districts change beyond recognition from one year to the next. Selfishly, I’m sad to note on this morning’s taxi ride that there is more work at the Sidist Kilo campus of Addis Ababa University. I remember it as a calm place of trees behind the several antique stone gates that survive from the days of the Emperor’s palace. I remember a spacious campus inside reflecting the layout of the imperial gardens. Now, many of the trees are dug up for ambitious construction. New buildings are claiming piece after piece of campus space, and the gates seem imperilled, crowded by scaffolding and covered in dust.

This summer, it’s the road in front of my home gate that is under construction, victim of the lengthy project to convert all dirt roads in the city to cobblestone or macadam. The way has been steamrolled flat, and along both sides are laid the huge concrete cylinders that will, I assume, serve for drainage or sewage. I never see any activity. Perhaps the road will lie in this unfinished state all rainy season.

I wake early, after going to bed very early. Travel is an opportunity to work and sleep. Between them is only the small window I make for a Euro Cup match and a light dinner. At night, the sleep comes fast and goes deep. There’s an urgency to the sleep that comes from months without much of it.

I’m sleeping a lot, and I’m paying the price. My back aches from the long hours on my tiny Ethiopian bed, sleeping on a foam mattress compressed with years of use. When it comes time to rise, I have to sit a while and delicately work one shoulder to ease the pain in my neck. Nothing comes gratis anymore. Rest is purchased with pain.

There will be more. I check the faucet, in futile hope, and there is nothing. I pull out the bucket, and splash the cold water over my face, over my torso. I wince, and it hurts. I can’t move freely yet because of the neck pain. The air is chilly. It’s rainy season. I dry and dress.

It’s not raining when I leave, but it’s cloudy. There is something unsettling about these moody storm fronts during rainy season. They impress the unconscious with dread. Maybe it’s just me. The Ethiopians seem to enjoy rainy season. But these aren’t the peaceful clouds of Holland, or the gentle showers of northern Europe that can be beautiful and soothing. The weather seems unstable. The clouds gather and menace, sometimes eerily yellow underneath, like the sky is bruised. The darkness they bring doesn’t tease out any beauty in the cityscape, like the European clouds can, highlighting the greens of the parks, the opaque depths of the rivers and canals, and the weird sentience of the architecture. What is highlighted here is the dirt and everything aged.

The only beauty comes in the morning, when I’m walking up my little road, now under construction and lined with mud, when I can catch a glimpse of the mountains, topped by mists and carpeted in shadowy greens. I relish that. The hymns emanating from the churches in the hills seem written for these moments.

Travelogue 702 – June 16
The Ethiopian Story of Beer and Coffee

The top two football teams in Ethiopia are called Beer and Coffee. Ostensibly, this is a matter of sponsorship, though that only seems true in one case. Either way, Addis Ababa’s top two teams have been around for years, battling each other for the title in the capital city’s decrepit old stadium before rowdy crowds. At the moment, Coffee has been banned in two stadiums because of the hooliganism of their fans. They are the Russians of the Ethiopian leagues.

I arrived in Addis Ababa yesterday. After a few hours at the office, I retired to a hotel for dinner. The Slovakia-Russia game was on. Actually, what was on at the moment was a frozen picture of the game on one small TV, an abstract caused by the broken broadcast, yellow squares dispersed among the green of the pitch, players in red and white stopped mid-play. And in the lounge area, a few of the waiters were engaged in what appeared to be a comic skit, trying to set up a recalcitrant projection screen. They extended the frame, and it wouldn’t catch. They stretched the screen; it snapped back and fell to the ground. They tilted it. They kicked it. Then there was the projector. They had to focus and re-focus. Ultimately, the game was projected on the screen in all its distressed glory. We were sixty minutes into the game.

Having lived in Slovakia for a year, my allegiance was decided. And I was immediately, enthusiastically, engaged when I saw the Slovaks were winning. They were winning by two points. Much of the rest of the game was Slovakia on the defensive, as the Russians launched assault after assault. They did manage one goal, but no second to tie. The Slovaks were ecstatic. The team joined in a circle, jumped and shouted. Fans in the stands looked stunned.

The Israeli men next to me were similarly stunned. I don’t speak Hebrew, but it’s clear they were surprised. I couldn’t really tell whether they were happy or sad for Russia’s loss. They dismissed the topic with the same vigour they brought to every topic during their tenure in the seats next to me. They were big fellows, and occupied much more space than seemed possible, with their luggage spread around the room, their voices booming, their legs splayed in all directions. They had ordered nothing. Rather than leave the table in front of them empty, one placed his feet there. Football is universal, so when I asked one to sit rather than gesticulating in front of the screen, he complied meekly. There was no need to explain. It was the Euro Cup.

Apparently it was the Greeks who launched modern football in Ethiopia, with the founding of the St. Giorgis team in Addis in 1935, just as the Italians invaded. The team became a symbol of Ethiopian nationalism. These days, it is still Ethiopia’s favourite, often number one, and arch-rival to the Coffee Team founded in 1975. Though it is popularly associated with the beer of the same name, I’m not sure there is actually any connection between St. Giorgis beer and St. Giorgis football. It is supported by Sheik Al Amoudi, Ethiopia’s richest and most influential man outside government offices.

When I ask about Coffee’s antics, Ijigu is immediately defensive. He cites Russia and England, and I assure him that, yes of course, I know the European teams are far worse. But, hey, give me the dirt. He shrugs, and in his inimitable way, states in a few words that it’s a story as old as time. The fans had stormed the field in Hawassa in protest of an opposition goal. The coach is being investigated for inciting violence. And Coffee is under a shadow of scandal. Ijigu cynically implies that Beer is just as bad, but they are protected by the riches of Al Amoudi. And so it goes in the perennial struggle between Beer and Coffee.

Travelogue 701 – June 9
The Spaansebocht

Behind my apartment complex, the Effen Block, there’s a quiet little canal that describes a gentle arc between the Marconiplein and the Sparta Stadium. That kilometre or two is the extent of its existence. Beside the canal runs a quiet brick lane called the Spaansebocht.

In the mornings, I steer the bicycle out the gate of the complex, turn onto the Potgieterstraat, and then right onto the Spaansebocht. I turn the pedals as slowly as it takes to keep the bike upright. I listen to the breezes among the leaves, and I watch the ducks as they make their waddling way across the grass beside the canal. There’s a mama coot that sits on a makeshift nest made of sticks and grass in the middle of the shallow canal.

The canal follows an old rail line no longer in use. The tracks are raised above the level of the road, hidden from view on top of a grassy slope. There is a line of trees and shrubbery at the base of the slope. There is a footpath with benches every hundred metres or so.

It’s a comfort to me that the Spaansebocht is there every morning. It’s a bit of peace first thing in the morning. It’s called ‘Spaanse’ after the nearby polder project, the Spaanse Polder, completed in 1961. So says the historical sign attached to a nearby school building. Bocht corresponds to the English word ‘bight’. And ‘bight’, I have discovered, refers to the curve in the canal. It can also mean a loop of rope.

It’s a comfort to me that the Spaansebocht is there every morning. The solstice approaches. Dawn comes earlier every day. I was awake briefly at 5:20am, and I stood before the window looking up at the pink clouds. I went back to sleep for a short while. Before I rose to go, I held Baby on my chest, listening to her breath as she slept.

Leaving the apartment in the morning, I walk along the upstairs balcony, assessing the sky and the prospects for the day. Today is chillier than yesterday, but there’s enough blue sky to make me hopeful. I say hello to the caretaker, who is setting up a vacuum in the stairwell. He doesn’t speak English, but we exchange friendly greetings in Dutch. He throws a one-word question after me as I descend the stairs, and I reply with a hearty ‘Ja,’ though I didn’t understand. I’m thinking it was something about the weather.

I unlock the bike, and I’m off, steering out the gateway and into the road. During the night, I was enduring some variation of this year’s repetitive dream struggle, some knot that will never come loose, and I wake tired. I’m longing for peace, and the bike ride in the morning is one of my only opportunities for it. The birds are sympathetic, offering their song, telling me every little thing is going to be all right.

It’s a peaceful routine.

Yesterday was Baby’s birthday. She’s going to have a big party on Saturday, so we kept the celebration simple. She got her own piece of birthday cake to smear all over the table. She made a face when she tasted it. She preferred the tactile experience. We helped her blow out the candle. I can’t say whether she made a wish. I wished for her happiness.

I marvel sometimes to think she is just starting out. I watch her play, and idly I review experiences from my own life, like flipping through pages, and I marvel that she has all this ahead of her. It’s hard to fathom what it means to be at the start of life. I was there once, wasn’t I? It’s hard to imagine.

Travelogue 700 – May 27
The Consulate
Part Two

We have travelled to far and exotic Brussels in order to visit the Ethiopian Embassy. The travel is tortured, requiring a transfer at two different train stations. But we arrive in time for our business. Brussels still feels like a place under siege. Military personnel patrol the train station in pairs, sporting camouflage and big guns, still trying, despite the deadly machinery slung over their shoulders, to appear like friendly public servants. Beyond that, nothing looks to be in out of the ordinary. But there is an anxious feeling in the air, a kind of dissonant note, sad and subdued. At the embassy, I glance through an article in a local magazine about the crisis of faith in the aftermath of the bombing, the sense that the identity of this world city is in pieces. The article comforts and exhorts. They will find their way again.

The embassy is cosy and casual. The Ethiopians working there are friendly and confiding, with only one Belgian national to uphold the age-old embassy tradition of chilly obstruction. The Ethiopian guard waves us in with the minimum of formalities. The Ethiopian visa officer foregoes ample cause to deny us our papers and send us away. He is a chummy sort, who enjoys being able to help.

In the back of the building sits Mr. Teklu, who is assigned to help us with our legal document. Mr. Teklu is a typical type among Ethiopian officials. He is older, reserved and dapper. He takes our paperwork with a stern look, and begins slowly poring over it. He is a careful man, careful as a lawyer. Though there can be no more than two hundred words in this document, and in Amharic script, Menna is forced to sit in Mr. Teklu’s office for two hours, enduring the frequent interruptions of a young and brash embassy officer who is handling the case of a demanding group of Dutch NGO organizers.

It’s not a large office, and whenever this young man rushes in, we have to turn in our chairs to make room. He’s dashing from shelf to shelf, pulling fat books of policy. Mr. Teklu seems bewildered by his exertions. The office is cluttered and drab. The only decoration is a huge map on the wall, which I spend some time studying. I laugh to see that the map is so old that the borders of Ethiopia are out of date.

Finally, as the time is coming precariously close for the embassy to close for lunch, and shut down all consular functions for the day, Mr. Teklu produces some comments on the text of our document. How are we going to complete this in time? Mr. Teklu helpfully pulls out his white-out. He proposes writing in the corrections with a pen. Menna is sceptical.

I tell him I have the document on a flash drive. He hesitates. He shouldn’t introduce a foreign drive onto the embassy computer. But he nods agreement, reaches for the drive. He crouches behind his computer to plug it in, and his forbidding formality begins to break down. When he sits at his desk, I tentatively stand over his shoulder in order to help. I help him find the drive and open it. And when the document appears, I help him spot the changes made. I’m now enjoying this uncharacteristically personable embassy experience. We print the document and sign. He stamps it, and we shake hands, all friends by the end of the ordeal. The friendly guard is urging Mr. Teklu to allow him to shut down, and I sense this is a familiar ritual necessary with kindly Mr. Teklu. We’re the last ones out of the building.

Outside, we are dazzled by even the meagre Belgian sunlight. We start walking down the Avenue de Tervuren, admiring the row of bourgeois residences become embassies and businesses, tidy and quiet. We’re walking toward the arch of the Jubilee Park, and we’re considering taking a walk through the park’s gardens, though we doubt we have the time.

We’re consulting a map near the Metro station when someone says hello. It’s Mr. Teklu from the embassy. He is offering his help again. Menna asks him about the subway, and he volunteers to guide us through the station, helping us buy tickets, and showing us which line we need to take to get back to the train station.

Three hours later we are seating among the outside tables of a bar in Antwerp. We should have breezed through Antwerp hours ago, but the train lines are all tangled today. We could only find a local train heading north, and it turned a half-hour journey into nearly two hours. At Antwerp, our train north has been delayed an hour. We resign ourselves to our unique fate, stranded by the rail system. Our errands in Brussels will have consumed the entire day. We call Batu to have her pick up Baby before daycare closes.

Fortunately, the sun is out. We sit at the table closest to the street, outside the shade of the patio’s canopy, catching the sun’s warmth. We are within sight of Antwerp’s grand central train station. Our friend Chuchu and his family show up. We have called them in our distress. The three year-old sits at the table and eats the remainder of our fries. The one year-old stares at me from vantage of the sling against Chuchu’s chest. We stay as long as the summer’s evening sun hangs above the roof line of the street’s shops. When it descends, we return to the station to complete our long trip.

Travelogue 699 – May 26
The Consulate
Part One

It was a day of trains, unfortunately. We were up early because we only had until 1pm to conclude our business. The consular hours are very precise.

We dressed Baby while she slept, and we dropped her off at day care, where she awoke suddenly, and cried in despair to be left behind. We hurried off, ignoring all the alarm bells that her crying triggers in our mortal parents’ nerve centres.

We bought our tickets, but the clerk told us that the next train was cancelled. We groaned with such hopelessness, the clerk started typing in a search for alternatives. We had been trying to get this business in Brussels done for so long, and always there had been a hitch. First there would be a Dutch holiday, and then an Ethiopian holiday. Then some urgent homework would come up for Menna, or some deadline in the spiralling misery of my job. This was to be the day to complete the tasks that have lain upon our conscience for months and months. And we had to travel to Brussels to do it. For, you see, there is no Ethiopian embassy in the Netherlands.

The clerk managed to patch together three trains to make up for the one cancelled, and we were on our way. It took two and a half hours to get there, and we had to catch a taxi in order to get to the embassy in time.

Brussels is a town I never see much of, passing through or stopping only briefly, and what I see doesn’t tell me much. Sometimes it looks like a poor cousin to Paris, exhibiting some of the beauty and flashes of the panache, and then at other times it has the grubby nonchalance of the darkest corners of Antwerp, where the architecture on the chaotic streets is a hopeless jumble and people mill about as though lost.

There are times Belgium feels like a failed state, poorly tended and chaotic, Belgians referring to themselves and their sagging national identity with a kind of gritty irony. From this perspective, it may be the perfect capital for a beleaguered European Union, with its porous borders and secessionist states, with its parliament paralyzed by bureaucracy and manned by delegates elected to discredit the institution.

The Ethiopian embassy is a pleasant stop, recommended for anyone who has travelled a lot and who has suffered in a number of world embassies. The building is a fine old residence on the Avenue de Tervuren, a short walk from the monumental arch of Jubilee Park, a vestige of a time of high nationalism. The nation wasn’t even one hundred years old then, and already exerting itself in the imperialistic rush on Africa. Within another generation, the Germans would launch their first of their devastating campaigns across the territory of the small nation.

Inside the humble residence, one still sees the ornamental plaster work on the high ceilings. One sees a few old tapestries on several of the walls. There are only a few rooms on the ground floor. A guard greets you at the entrance and writes your passport numbers by hand in an old ledger, and you pass into what must have been the salon, where a woman sits at a reception desk, very ready to ignore you. She’s the only Belgian national working there, and the only one with a traditional embassy attitude. There is a TV in the salon, broadcasting ETV, the most Ethiopian element to the atmosphere. In Ethiopia that broadcast is something nearly impossible to escape.

We have a few tasks to accomplish, so we separate and work with two different officers. The officer in charge of passports and visas is in the front office that opens off the salon. He is a small and jovial man, whose first response to any query is a loud complaint. “Where is your form? Where are your photos? Why didn’t you fill this out properly? Look here.’ Then he nods in confidence like a friend, and he tells you he’ll take care of it. And he does!

Travelogue 698 – May 13
Donald in Wonderland
Part Three

And so the controversy continues. Mr. Trump has secured the nomination, but not the love of his party. He meets with Republican leaders, and he succeeds in keeping his name in the papers, if nothing else. The controversy serves.

Outrage and negative publicity is like oxygen to the fire, and this candidate needs a blaze that never goes out. In starting fires, Mr. Trump had the best of mentors early in life, in his lawyer and friend Roy Cohn.

‘He once told me,’ wrote Mr. Trump, ‘that he’d spent more than two-thirds of his adult life under indictment on one charge or another.’ That has an impact on young rich boys. With his usual strangely flat affect, Mr. Trump wrote, ‘That amazed me.’ It did more. It inspired.

Mr. Cohn about himself: ‘My scare value is high. My area is controversy.’

‘I confess that I am an agitator,’ wrote Lewis Charles Levin in the nineteenth century. ‘What storms are to the atmosphere - what tempests to the ocean - the agitator is to the political world.’ The words of the first Jewish Congressman, whose political program consisted solely of persecuting Catholics.

Spectators enjoy these sorts of arsonists. They celebrate them as ‘winners’. Winning is the light and the heat. The details are left among the ashes.

Sixty-five years ago, Cohn was an ambitious young lawyer working his way up through the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan. He landed a place on the team prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for sharing nuclear secrets with the Soviets.

While there was never much doubt about Julius Rosenberg’s guilt -- an operative for Mr. Stalin, he recruited spies and arranged the theft of secrets, -- the case became something more than the sum of its parts. Mr. Cohn crafted it into a political performance piece. There had to be symmetry. There had to be climax.

It seems Ethel Rosenberg had very little to do with the espionage. But that didn’t serve the aesthetics of the case. Mr. Cohn pressured a key witness to falsely testify against Mrs. Rosenberg – in order to protect the actions of the witness’s own wife, as it turns out, -- and make of the villains a husband and wife team. The two were convicted, and then they were sent to the electric chair. Mr. Cohn boasted later that it was his influence that had led to the death penalty.

He wasn’t even twenty-five yet, and he had reached these heights, professional and moral. He had attracted the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, and the great man recommended him to the junior senator from Wisconsin. It was a career begun with much light and heat, leaving people’s lives or careers among the ashes, and on it went for decades as he represented corporate overlords and Mafia bosses, always with much sound and fury.

In 1986, he was disbarred. One of the four cases against him sounded like this: ten years earlier, he had entered the hospital room of a dying multi-millionaire and forced a pen into the old man’s hand so he could sign a codicil to his will that would have made Mr. Cohn and the old man’s granddaughter executors. The signature was found by the court to be indecipherable.

‘He was no Boy Scout,’ Mr. Trump shrugs. But he was a winner.

Travelogue 697 – May 7
Donald in Wonderland
Part Two

Europe is on the move. The people respond to sudden summer as though called to rally for the nation. Maybe it’s the spirit of Liberation Day on the 5th. They are out and mobilized. Bikes crowd the bike paths with purpose. Trams and trains are ringing with determined celebration. The massive hall of Central Station is occupied by swirling groups of summer partisans. In the café, we stand next to three policemen with guns on their hips. It’s a reminder that the terroristas may find the weather just as exciting.

In the U.S., Mr. Trump starts up with some midsummer night’s rhetoric, conjured from mysteries and fancy. He accuses Clinton of planning to repeal the Second Amendment of the Constitution. (How does one person do that?) And he adds, ‘The government has no business dictating what types of firearms good, honest people are allowed to own.’ I’ve never applied for a gun license. I’m nervous I wouldn’t pass the ‘good and honest’ test. Is it a blood test? A colour on the tongue?

Mr. Trump is combining ideas here in a creative way. His opponent will abolish the right to bear arms, and will also restrict choice of guns for the good and the honest. I’m failing my license test: I don’t get it. Is the Second Amendment a guarantee of consumer rights? Do we need a Constitutional Amendment for every consumer item? Shall we guarantee the right to beer? I would vote for that. I will not have my choice of beers circumscribed. We can’t go back to the days of 3.2 monopoly.

It’s cases like these that mark politics as an arcane science. I will sooner understand quantum physics. I had imagined the Second Amendment as an early sign of American paranoia, perhaps more justified in the days when we were a tiny republic of farmers who had recently pissed off a powerful empire.

We survived our fragile beginnings. One might think that that would have bolstered confidence. But it seems we became more scared with every generation. When Senator McCarthy suggested we were being betrayed by Communist agents within our government and our army, the good and the honest people responded with panic.

Mr. McCarthy took charge of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. During the next two years, the subcommittee held 169 hearings. There were a shocking number of Communist agents in the government. It might have taken Mr. McCarthy three of four more terms to root them all out.

But then the mysterious properties of quantum politics interfere, and I don’t feel competent to follow the logic of it all. The subcommittee takes a detour. It becomes interested in prosecuting homosexuals, as some sort of ancillary threat. Mr. McCarthy’s chief counsel on the subcommittee is a homosexual. He doesn’t publicize the fact. Does that make it better? The chief counsel is Mr. Roy Cohn, a somewhat brutal litigator who had just participated in the Rosenberg trial.

All seems to be going swimmingly, all sorts of dangerous people paraded before the subcommittee, until Mr. Cohn decides to take on the Army. It seems Mr. Cohn and Mr. McCarthy have developed a very close relationship with one G. David Schine, pretty boy and heir to great wealth. Mr. Schine has been recruited to advise the subcommittee because he wrote a six-page pamphlet excoriating Communism. Mr. Cohn and Mr. Schine have toured Europe together for ten days, inspecting Voice of America libraries for pernicious Communist influence, one more light moment in Euro-American relations.

But there is a complication. Mr. Schine has recently joined the Army, and he is upset that he has been forced to start his military career as a private. Mr. Cohn feels his friend deserves better. He makes calls. He cajoles and threatens. He declares he’ll ‘wreck the Army’ if they don’t promote his friend. The Army eventually threatens back with legal action. Mr. McCarthy declares the Army’s accusations a scurrilous campaign motivated by Communists, and the game is on.

The Senate creates a special subcommittee to hold hearings, since Mr. McCarthy can’t chair in his own case. The proceedings are televised, and somehow the chemistry of the situation changes. Mr. McCarthy starts to lose support. He is finally acquitted of charges, but the damage is done. He has lost so much credibility that the Senate turns on him with a censure. He dies in relative obscurity only a few years later.

Mr. Cohn’s career, however, is just getting started. He goes into private practice, and he represents many wealthy clients with a singular ferocity and flair for playing the press. He carries on for several decades, leading a flamboyant and controversial public life in New York City. He never moderates his aggressive style. The one inspirational quote I can find online attributed to Mr. Cohn is, ‘Go after a man's weakness.’ Among the good and the honest he represented: mafia boss John Gotti and Donald Trump.

Travelogue 696 – May 3
Donald in Wonderland
Part One

But, hey, ho, the wind and the rain, the rain it raineth every day. Even as the sun stages its resurgence, even as Christian Ethiopes celebrate the resurrection, I’m struck down again by the same virus I’ve been fighting for weeks. And so winter stays with me, lodges in my throat and shuts down my voice, makes every swallow an ordeal.

I think my little baby girl, half Ethiopian, is my new Ethiopia. I escaped the country itself, where I was repeatedly ill. But now my Ethiopian baby brings home all the choice viruses from day care. I don’t stand a chance.

'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate. It seems Mr. Trump has secured the nomination. He celebrated a latest string of victories with another strange speech, sounding his own quirky note of optimism, declaring about Hillary Clinton, ‘the beautiful thing is women don't like her, okay?’

It’s a form of oratory, I suppose. Or it’s a modern American innovation, an anti-matter to rhetoric. For millennia, the demagogue relied upon powers of oratory. Now it seems that nonsense and buffoonery are the demagogue’s best devices. It’s a modern twist for the religious conservatives, perhaps, a demonstration of faith. At every challenge to the candidate’s logic or sanity, the supporters flock to him with greater vehemence. He dismisses the opposition. He declares his Mexican wall will be so high, you won’t see the ground from its apex.

Mr. Trump breaks from tradition with his Wonderland rhetoric. He breaks from it with his breezy manner. The presidency is just a part of his legacy. Daddy had set it aside for him in his will, set it aside for the Donald’s seventieth birthday.

Studying, for example, Mr. Lewis Levin in the mid-nineteenth century, you see a more typical history of frustrated attempts to succeed. What sets the demagogue aside from other failures is the engine of rage that generates boundless energy. Mr. Levin created quite an oeuvre of florid rants in a burst of only a few short years. He rode the momentum of his bitterness into the House of Representatives. He almost succeeded in creating the first nativist political party to operate on a national scale.

One hundred years after Mr. Levin failed in his bid for a fourth term in Congress, the junior senator from Wisconsin rose before a women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, and he held high a piece of paper that he declared was a list of Communists working inside the State Department.

The senator had already served three years without distinction. He was a popular orator outside the Senate, but not a very effective legislator. He was looking for a crusade. Oddly enough an earlier attempt had shown a strange sort of nobility, participating in an investigation into charges of torture in the aftermath of World War II. Of course, the defendants were Nazis charged with a massacre of American prisoners, and the senator was already proving himself something of a headstrong sensationalist. He eventually walked out of the proceedings, accusing the Army of a whitewash. Within a year, he had struck gold with his next crusade, holding high that list of alleged Communists.

Four years later, Joseph McCarthy had another go at the Army.

Travelogue 695 – May 1
May Comes

It’s the first of May, and just like that everything looks like May. The skies are clear. People are taking their coffees outside in the sun, even though the morning air is still chilly.

It’s also Ethiopian Easter today, something I might have forgotten were it not for the mass of people in white shawls at Central Station this morning. Most of the celebrants will be Eritrean, rather than Ethiopian, something I can confirm passing near to them and listening to the throaty accents of the Tigrinya language.

I find it an uplifting sight, this sudden evocation of the horn of Africa. I have no memory for holidays, so they always come as a surprise. Today’s surprise is a sunny one, the white shawls in the new light like spring inside spring. There’s something so joyful about Ethiopian and Eritrean celebrations. They have brought us the sun.

The last week of April was a challenge. We were plunged back into winter for a week, and it was more of a test than the darkest days of January. I have a race coming up, and last Tuesday was going to be my last long run in preparation. I knew I was taking a risk. The weather had been awful, but there was no point delaying. The weather was projected to be awful all week. I checked out the window. There were breaks in the clouds. There was no rain falling. I would take my chances.

I was only twenty minutes into the run when the rain started. Chasing the rain was an icy wind. By the time I’d been running thirty minutes, the rain was coming in at a forty-five-degree angle. My face and hands were raw from the cold. The clouds were a solid bank of grey, and there was little hope of a break. I needed to put in another hour of running. I headed toward the Zestienhoven Park. My only hope was the refuge of some high trees.

The strategy worked. I made it to the park, and I followed the sheltered trails there for most of the next hour. I circled a field of green grass, and I wound through the woods of the park, re-emerging by the field of grass. I turned slowly again around the rectangular meadow, so quiet but for the patter of rain.

I kept this up under the gloomy skies, sheltered from the worst of the wind, until finally it seemed as though the rainstorm took a breath. The clouds were allowing some light. I could see that the grey mist was lifting, allowing the high clouds to take shape. This was a sign that the rain was going to relent. I was soaked. My shoes were heavy with water. My hands were frozen. It was just about time to head home.

I was thinking about the people who, for hundreds of years, have ventured out into the cold here. I was thinking about how it feels to age, even as the elements themselves never aged. I was thinking this conflict must be bred into us, hard-wired into our genetic code by now. The winds never became tired. They were fresh every season, even as each of us humans slowed and bowed. The enthusiasms that drove us out into the weather faded.

We’re made to see life as a struggle. We import it to our modern stories, the ones told behind the strong walls we built to break the wind.

I had earned my stripes. My body ached as I eased into my final steps, entering the compound where I lived. I was eager to get inside, get warm. But I paused to stretch, breathing in the last punishing draughts of the chilly afternoon, walking among the puddles, feeling the mix of sweat and rain water on my skin.