Travelogue 570 – August 5
Capital
Part Two

It’s been another hot and beautiful day, high summer. Lying back into the couch, I can see the sky through the drapes. I’m guessing by the color creeping through the several high clouds that the sun is just now setting. My days are starting early and ending early. Menna is away, and I have little to do in the evenings.

Inside the TV, it’s night in Philadelphia. I’m looking out the window, and I’m thinking, ‘I may be ready for bed, but in Philadelphia it’s just past noon. The same sun is high in the sky there. Maybe it’s humid. Maybe people are sweating through a long and burning day there, in America’s first capital.’

My days are long and too solitary. Menna is far away, just about as far south as Philadelphia is west. She has returned to the capital of Ethiopia, where the strong sun is captive to the year’s rainy season. Without her here, my days are long work sessions, and my nights are long sessions with the TV. Guiding the work are a set of strong fall deadlines. They wake me early in the morning. Guiding my evenings, after my eyes are smoked past any more use at the computer, are the movie agendas of my local channels. As it happens, it’s Rocky week on Channel Seven. They are airing all the Rockies. I’m watching the second one tonight.

Tonight, in old Philadelphia, Rocky just can’t catch a break. Last night, in movie number one, he had the big break, of course, the biggest break there is, a shot at the title. It came to him out of the blue, bestowed upon him in his innocence. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t ask. In fact, there’s no more behind it than the ring of his name; and the lure of the old capital. It’s the country’s bicentennial, so for the extravagant Apollo Creed, it’s the lure of the town itself, grown so ugly by 1976. The champ wants a contest in the birthplace of freedom. Et cetera.

But Rocky’s successes only create more puzzles for him. He’s famous, but he can’t land a job. He doesn’t read so well, so his attempts to escape the docks and the meat factory end in failure.

Rocky has only one thing going for him. Rocky has heart. The world responds to his heart with the warmth of instinct. Even Creed, famous but embittered champ, cannot forget Rocky. The one, inconclusive fight won’t do. He steps into Rocky’s story a second time and Rocky responds with heart. That’s what he does. As a consequence of heart, Rocky II concludes with triumph.

I’m flipping channels. I’m not afraid I’ll lose the thread of Rocky’s story. On Channel Ten is ‘Vanilla Sky’, a movie I had all but forgotten. Hapless Tom Cruise, the actor everyone loves to hate, steps in where other stars fear to tread, once again. He volunteers to portray ugliness. His character makes ugly decisions, and he himself becomes disfigured. Where Rocky’s way is always to respond with heart, David Aames from ‘Vanilla Sky’ has an unerring instinct for selfishness and self-pity. While charmed circumstance follows Rocky through the bleak streets of his 70s slum, with something like the energy of a besotted Tinker Bell, life is never more for Aames than his own creation, something rarely to his benefit. Where Rocky’s heart is the perfect compass, Aames’ instincts point south. He pouts in his high-rent Manhattan flat, his high-walled brick stage set for 90s malaise, and he contemplates the wasteland of Self.

Philosophy is a game for the idle, so idly I ask, ‘what is the TV teaching me tonight?’ Is the lesson that morality is a contest won by the innocent, a sort of Christian formula that apportions blessings for the child-like? Or is it teaching me that choice is best exercised as reaction? I certainly have experienced the sort of Aamesian haplessness that follows upon free choice. The more self-determined, the more miserable. Left to our own devices, we will always spoil circumstance. We will be our own worst enemy. Et cetera.

I’m daydreaming. I’m watching the sky again, through the crack in the drapes. The field of blue is noticeably changing, becoming richer in tone. There are a few wisps of high cloud curling across the color of dusk. I am happy to project my idle thoughts there, to no purpose, to no gain.

I’ve begun to think of Paris. Am I missing Paris or am I missing Menna? We had such a nice time there. I see us strolling the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter on a hot July evening. We are slowly climbing the Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, district of philosophers. It’s this tradition that names the quartier ‘Latin’. Latin is the language of church and academia for more than a thousand years.

This side of the hill, facing the Seine, has always been settled, but once upon a time, the hill and the other side are the outskirts of the town, particularly in the early Middle Ages. There is King Clovis’s church for Sainte-Geneviève on the summit. It has a school for young church scholars, though the premier school would have been at Notre Dame on the Île.

It’s at Notre Dame that Peter Abelard studied as a young man, though only for a short time before alienating his famed teacher, William of Champeaux. It was a pattern for young Abelard. He was always contentious, and always victorious. By the time he set up a school on the Mont-Sainte-Geneviève in 1108, they say he was drawing crowds of hundreds of eager students. These were the exciting days that determined the future of the Latin Quarter, when small schools of theology were proliferating, probably to some degree drawing on the star power of young Abelard.

A century later, this constellation of small schools required some structure. Paris was becoming a center of scholarship, and the French royal family derived no small benefit from the reflected glory and the talent pool. So, early in the 13th century, King Philippe Auguste set up the universitas as an overarching community of schools, or colleges, governed by statutes, provided with living quarters for scholars, and offering diplomas to guarantee quality of education. In 1257, a new college was founded by one Robert de Sorbon. His college would set such a high standard in theology that the university would come to be known by its name.

Travelogue 569 – August 3
Capital
Part One

The sun is strong. We love this place in July. The sun is tonic.

We are standing below the grimy walls of the modern, ugly entrance to the beautiful campus. It was added on in the 1970s. We are scanning the political posters plastered everywhere. I am surprised to see so many National Front posters, photos of Marine smiling beside the local candidate in the recent European Parliament election.

An alumni of the Sorbonne is shaking her head. ‘Paris has really changed,’ she affirms. In her day – fifteen years ago at most – she says these posters would never have lasted. She says that French teens – with plenty of options for free university -- chose the Sorbonne because of its tradition of political activism. And that never, never meant activism for the far right. She is struck with horror. She relates stories from 1968, as though she had been there, when the students and workers had allied to shut down the city and country.

Maybe Parisian intellectuals have yet to realize how seductive the reactionary cause can be nowadays. It’s the seductiveness of radicalism. Young people hunger for radicalism, and maybe the left doesn’t provide it. Young people delight in the outrageous. Maybe there is little outrage left in championing the poor and the oppressed. To scorn is now outrageous. To be indelicate is an adventure.

Politics is in the blood of the Parisians. It’s built into the very geography of the place, the contrast between the island and the bank. For so long, the divide of the river was the divide between privilege and the people, perhaps since the Parisii set up command and temple on the island, overseeing the overflow of humanity onto the Left Bank. Certainly that is how it has developed since the Merovingians.

The Romans themselves centered the city in the Latin Quarter, specifically on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. But the Romans never designated the town a capital of any sort. In fact, during its first thousand years after the Romans, Paris was capital of empire or kingdom only occasionally. Its first stint was notably under King Clovis I, convert to Christianity, and his immediate heirs, founders of the historic churches of Germain and Geneviève.

But capitals were creations of caprice and exigency in the Middle Ages. In ancient times, the polis was origin and anchor of civilization. In early-medieval Europe, the city was only convenience. Empire was ruled by families on horseback.

I’m reminded of Ethiopian history. After the ancient era of Axum, the thousand-year stability of the city of Axum, the capital(s) of empire moved according to the whims of rulers and ruling families. Addis Ababa was only the last in a long line of dynastic sites, this one chosen purely for strategic reasons by the great king Menelik. It survived the transition into modernity, into the age of the nation-state and the need once again for rooted governance.

There is little of the ancient that survives in Paris. What inherit is largely a creation of the later Middle Ages. Even the good King Clovis left us little to remember him by, other than a few, rare bits of masonry in the first churches. It remained for later dynasties, in more stable times, to build a city we could recognize, a city of devotion, a city of intellect, and a city of art.

That brings us back again to the dichotomy, the stand-off between the Île and the Montagne, back to where we stand, on the venerable Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, underneath the summer sun, examining the posters of Marine in curiosity and wonder, trying to imagine Parisian students shaking their fists the European Union and heaping calumny on immigrants.

Walking through the doors of the great institute, on this side so humble and ugly, we find, only some several dozen meters farther, the grand gateway historically reserved for the students of law, and we emerge on the summit of the montagne, where stands the Pantheon and the old church of Geneviève.

Travelogue 568 – July 31
And She’s Far Away

It’s Menna’s birthday today, and she’s far away. We will talk on the phone, with any luck. The connection will be poor. Each will only just be able to make out what each is saying. We will have to speak in the shortest sentences, the simplest thoughts. ‘Are you happy?’

Menna’s sister has had a baby, the first of its generation. I can just make out the boy’s cries in the background when Menna and I do talk. “He’s a big baby,’ she says. ‘I’m holding him.’ I ask after her sister. ‘What?’ I ask after her sister. ‘She’s fine. She’s doing well.’ The snowy silences are winning, encroaching on our spare words.

Menna’s sister lives in the outskirts of the city. There is no internet nearby. They’ve canceled old CDMA services in the city, the mobile network services that we have used for years. They’ve canceled her old mobile number. We’re having to call via her Dutch number. We don’t know how long that will last.

I have dropped her off at the airport in Amsterdam, only days ago, at the beginning of this week. We have to wake at 4:30am for an early check-in. The taxi shows up outside the hotel. It’s a van, with seating space for half a dozen in the back. We squeeze together there, against the chill of the morning, against the last darkness of the night. It’s only a few miles to the airport, driving under the yellow spotlights of the big city. At the airport, numbers of summer travelers are already unloading their cars outside the terminal. Daylight is just breaking above us. In the long line for package check-in, there are listless people in shorts, speaking in Dutch, in German, in Polish, in Arabic, in Spanish, in French.

The day is just closing, the light loosening its hold, the sky becoming deeper and richer in its tones of blue. The red remaining in the sky is soaking into the brick of old Amsterdam. We are emerging from the Jordaan district, to the west of the busy centrum. This is our favorite area of the city, where the brick lanes and the tiny bridges are quieter, where the tourist traffic dips just a bit, where a couple might just walk hand in hand along the sweet old pavements and be alone for only a moment.

We have spent an hour of the evening in a fruitless search for the little restaurant where we had had a beautiful meal just over a year ago, when Menna had just arrived. The moment was a shout of joy then, a package of happy chaos, as Menna absorbed the beating light and sharp sounds of a place brightly new, and we walked and walked under a hot summer sun.

We can’t find the restaurant. We settle for a beer at a table set in the Noordermarkt square, quiet pause among the determined little lanes, overseen by the placid old Noorderkerek, almost four hundred years old, looking modest and New England Protestant.

We have walked under the fairy tower of the Wesrerkerk, baby blue crown at the top, and by the somber dissonance of the Anne Frank House, and among the streets of the Jordaan as far west as possible, out past the centuries to where the neighborhoods resign to functional modernity, where the chain markets take over and where the cycle paths re-assert themselves and where the Dutch language resumes its funny rhythms.

We will stroll back toward the train station together as the sun sets, as the reds remaining in the sky tint the brick beside us, like stern church wine, like the gravid shadows that haunted Mr. Rembrandt.

We will awaken at 4:30am in order to take Menna to the Schiphol Airport. We will stand in line with cheerful Europeans on holiday, and we will make our farewells in front of the chambers of airport security. I will watch her unpacking her bag into the bins for the security apparatus. She will be flying soon. I will have spent a day alone in our apartment before she arrives.

Outside the lonely apartment, summer carries on with unabated charm. My summer will consist of long runs. I’ll soak up the sun. I’ll enjoy the waters of the river that way. I’ll enjoy the parks. My autumn training is starting. I have a race in Den Haag. I have a race in Eindhoven.

Menna and I have had our summer. We have visited the beach at Scheveningen, diving into the cold waters and learning how to swim again, lying on our beach towels. Menna is afraid of the sun. She thinks she will burn. She thinks she will be too dark. I’m laughing at her.

We have visited Paris when the sun was hottest.

Travelogue 567 – July 6
The Cup

The people in orange are dancing. There might be a light rain falling, but they are dancing. Menna wants to scream. She lets out a shrill whoop into the night. It’s well after midnight. An ambulance with blue flashing lights speeds past. But the street is blocked ahead, cars lined up in the road, honking their horns. In the intersection, the people in orange are dancing.

We are laughing at them. The people in orange were on TV, too, and they were acting just like people in orange. ‘That’s exactly what they’re like,’ Menna cries. This match was method, so different from yesterday’s between South American titans, in which passion was preferred to method. Tonight, passing and stubborn possession took precedence. The chances came, several shots were magically repelled by the woodwork, and the extra periods passed without score. In the final minutes, the brilliant chieftain replaced the man in front of the goal.

Then they turned out, the men in orange, with dispassion in their eyes, and while the opposition gathered in a stormy circle of intent and affirmation, the men in orange stood by. When it came time to shoot, each one walked directly to the position, placed the ball, and with no hesitation at all charged the ball and shot. Each ball entered. Cold, the men in orange! When the new man at the net repelled the second ball from the opposition, the game was won.

There’s a grim single-mindedness to the performance of the Dutch in this World Cup. They demonstrate no hopes for glory. They were never favorites. They came in with a young team, with no explicit expectation to reach the final game, like they did four years ago. They arrived with only the heart and mind of the grand new chieftain, Mr. Van Gaal. They arrived with the power and impetuousness of Arjen, the nearest embodiment of Dutch passion. Van Gaal has coached Arjen at Munich. After the World Cup, the chieftain will be moving on to Manchester United.

‘They’re so tough,’ says Menna. ‘That’s what I have to deal with every day! That!’ She points at the TV with both amusement and horror. Yes, that’s the Dutch way, the frank stare and the unyielding attitude. When and if they lose, they will clear the field with the same matter-of-fact manner. ‘They were better,’ they will say, if it comes to that. But, until they lose, they will show up on time and ready for quiet and dedicated work.

We need fresh air. We need some blood flow in the limbs. We have been sitting in front of the TV too long. There was the Argentina game, with our neighbors Belgium. There was a movie starring Tommy Lee, and then there was Holland’s unblinking show-down for their place in the final four.

It’s after midnight. The air is alive with car horns and fireworks. The people in orange are dancing in the streets. Menna wants to scream. I say, of course you do, and her whoop echoes from the faces of the apartment buildings lining our street.

Travelogue 566 – June 23
Dreaming Minnesota
Part Four

It’s sundown. It’s rainy season. The evening reads like a vision before sleep. The damp cold makes you sleepy but also keeps you moving.

Just outside the gate to my household compound is the road, made of stones set in mud. The road climbs relatively steeply toward the asphalt road, just below the embassy. Less than two hundred meters up the road from my gate -- clicking it shut makes the girls who have passed look over their shoulder and giggle at the sight of me, -- the road crosses another neighborhood street. The intersecting road is a wide one, laid with cobblestone since last year, when we were visited by one of the crews sweeping through the city, chipping stone and digging, setting the stones like bricks in herring bone patterns.

Just here this cobblestone road crests a small rise, and there is in the intersection a small plateau, a wide and clear space in which one sees four ways. Toward the north, the mountain slope stands in a rainy season mist. The road bows upward in the middle, pushing the houses and their makeshift fences, overladen with climbing greenery, back and down, underscoring the image of road as Road, and underscoring the impression that the road leads right to that mountain slope.

People are passing, ambling slowly down the middle of the cobblestone way. The young men of the neighborhood like to gather here, on one side or the other, sitting on stones or kicking a homemade ball around. They comment, they laugh. There is an old woman who reminds Menna of a witch, who stands in front of one of the gates near the intersection and mutters to herself, glaring at whoever looks at her as they pass.

I can’t help the pause in my step whenever I cross this intersection, slowing to take in the scene, the peace of the mountains and the boys and their cackling. Once across, the stones and their puddles resume. I watch my steps. I make way, where the way narrows to one line of stones among the puddles, for a passing matron carrying groceries. I reflect on the enveloping damp, and on the gathering dusk. The season and the hour combine to create a singular atmosphere, something primeval in its darkness. The stones underfoot are slimy. Everywhere is mud.

How does one mark one’s next step in this season? The next relates to the last, I suppose. It arises in mud and falls in mud. The rocks are slimy. One climbs with one’s head down. At the top of the hill is the street. There the car can sweep me up, raising my shoes from the mud.

There is mud on the cement floors of the classroom. The children are seated at their low tables, heads in hands, some drawing in their notebooks. We are touring, and we are taking video of a few little stars up front. Away from the camera, I’m asking one boy with muddy feet to tell me about his drawing. He swivels his head to grin up at me. He does that a few times before he answers. That’s a house. That’s a ball. That’s a cat. It’s a familiar catalogue of items. It seems to round out the lives of the children table to table. That’s a flower. She swivels her head to look up at me. She has a grin and a giggle. I pick up the stubby and dull pencil, and I draw a quick star on the page, just to see something new. I take her drawing hand in mine, and she finds all this novel.

I climb into the back of the 4X4. I will be sorted there, shaken and filtered layer by layer as we cross the city one side to the other one day, one side to another side the next day. I will be sorted road by road. At each destination, my feet will swing from their perch to be set in mud. We are sorting. We are cataloguing.

We have arrived at muddy Jan Meda early one morning. The coach is standing alone in the damp air, tall and forlorn. He is looking old and so suddenly. He greets us with his natural graciousness. He points out the athletes, a thinning group in the distance, rounding a corner of the field. They will return to do calisthenics drills on the grass. Little Leyla, Ethiopian from America, will want her picture taken with some of the women. Ultimately, she finds herself more interested in the horses grazing in the field.

I have come round to the measure of the visit, and necessarily the steps turn round to the airport. Here, the foot falls on tile, tile laid over concrete. I know this place. I know how desperately depressing it is at night. There is no help for that. The flights home originate from nighttime. The lighting in the cavernous Bole terminal are yellow and perpetually fading into shadows of stale bardo, stretching on like rooms in opposing mirrors.

There is no space, every hall and every corner occupied by lines and clots of the hardy and the rosy-cheeked, the gee-whizzers and the har-har drinkers, dervishes of the arrested moment. Among them thread the intent labor pilgrims to Dubai. When those don’t pace with fierce purpose, they gather in cross-legged crowds on the floor, among their gowns and their piles of wretched luggage to chitter like flocks of birds being circled by predators.

In the final lines, we all become sullen and aggressive. There is a kind of angry hope in line. There might be an end to the yellow night. I have just skimmed an article about a study suggesting we will choose pain over boredom. Maybe that’s all it is, the story behind stories among us children of the mud.

Travelogue 565 – June 19
Dreaming Minnesota
Part Three

At first, it looks just like the café I left last year. Peace Coffee occupies the same brick-lined interior on Minnehaha, midway between Wes’s neighborhood and downtown and a few blocks off Lake Street, in one of those ambivalent zones of Minneapolis, in which subdued (resigned, and beaten?) domesticity mixes with understated hipster lifestyle, mixes with bitter-sweet immigrant stories, and mixes with mild industry, and everyone shares a kind of winter-stunned silence, staring, even in June, from pale and lined faces.

This seems a Midwestern brand, this unregulated threading of survivals into taciturn streets, into an intuitive map among the city blocks, every type of defiance wrapping itself in worn brown flags behind clapboard and brick.

But it’s not the same. For one thing, Andy tells me he’s leaving. Andy has always been there to open the café and start the espresso machine. He has remembered my name, even when I’ve been away for months. He has said hello, asked about things.

Andy has allowed himself the indulgence of ageing, trading over time the slight frame and spry energy of youth for the slower and more sober, gaining a few pounds on his frame and surrendering the luster of his fresh cheeks, trading the long hair for a plug in his ear lobe.

He’s moving on now. He says it’s just for a change of pace. He’s moving to another coffee shop that I haven’t heard of yet. I tell him I’ll stop by some day. ‘Great,’ he says, simply. ‘Though I’m not trying to steer people away from Peace,’ and he’s nodding in that uniquely American way, leaning lazily to one side, smiling easily.

Andy’s moving on, practicing the Minnesota art of sublime humility, making of a life change the most subtle of twists in narrative, as though something more would be vain dramatics. He will shift a mile or two into a new coffee shop, and hope that he hasn’t angered the snow gods with his self-indulgence.

It’s another chilly day. I had been anticipating a taste of Midwestern heat and humidity, but it’s just not to be. There are low clouds instead, and a persistent chill. I start with a long walk in the park, leaving the car in the abandoned lot close to the wall of trees. I follow the paved bicycle path into the forest. I follow the first dirt path that descends quickly away down toward the river and away from the asphalt cycle path. The earth is damp and soft. The trees encircle and hold me, forming a time of their own. I want a perfect dawn silence, but there is no such thing There is only the deceptive stillness of the trees. The never-ending buzz and the song of life are in full throat. There is no silence, only different types of noise.

I’ll catch my first glimpse of this year’s World Cup at Grumpy’s on Washington. Our board meetings are at the Open Book on Washington, just a block away, a perfect meeting for an agency dedicated to literacy. At our lunch break, the board wants Ethiopian food, and I want a Grumpy’s tuna melt. Grumpy’s is a bar committed to changelessness. It’s a comfort. Still the plain tables set amid black space; still the pool table to one side. Still the four TVs in the center set to face outward toward the patrons sitting at the central, rectangular bar. I see Mexico, and I sit. Mexico is playing Cameroon. My loyalties are divided. I feel I should support the African teams. That will be a thankless job in this year’s tournament.

A young Latina will sit next to me after a while. She will be rooting for Mexico, though her first loyalty is to Costa Rica. It’s going to be much more rewarding cheering on the Latin teams this year. She works for an NGO, an NGO that supports NGOs.

It is everywhere. Charity occupies the seat next to you on the plane. Charity drinks whiskey at obscure bars in Addis Ababa. Charity cheers the other team when no one else in the bar cares, when you have only stolen away for a tuna melt. Charity is a stealthy entity, and ravenous, girdling the world, becoming part of the definition of the world it endeavors to help.

I’ll take a quick walk. A few blocks away is the Mississippi River. There is a prospect there, above the Guthrie, from which one can see the Stone Arch Bridge, the 130 year-old railway bridge in tan limestone. There will be an art festival this weekend at the bridge. I’ll be able to see the activity there, as people set up their canvas tents. They will raise an itinerant encampment, artisans spontaneously chartering a new neighborhood. I’ll be reminded of the markets outside of churches on saints’ days in Ethiopia, goods on tarps and blankets along the road, merchants squatting beside each, and the milling crowds in white. It’s a scene that looks like forever, like sculpture, and then it melts away by the end of the day.

Sometimes you long for stillness. A city is made of silent buildings, but there is never silence, only different types of noise.

Below the bridge, the Mississippi will be high with the spring rains. There will be more white water than usual. The river is testing its banks.

Travelogue 564 – June 18
Dreaming Minnesota
Part Two

I’m drifting along the 55. It’s a diagonal across the map of Minneapolis. It used to be an avenue called Hiawatha. It’s as straight a shot from the airport to downtown as there is. It threads a lot of neighborhoods along the way, including Wes’s neighborhood, quiet rows of houses in the wedge between highways 55 and 62, just behind the massive VA complex with its green lawns behind chain link fences.

The sun rises over Wes’s neighborhood some time before 5:30, sending dim shadows across the TV room, where I’m camping out on the couch-bed. The expectant silence makes me hungry for the day. I lie with it before I move, before I dress and tiptoe across the creaking floorboards of the house. Outside, hot summer has lapsed into chilly spring.

So close to the highway -- already gathering its stormy energy, -- are the quiet banks of the Mississippi. One sees the whole of the spring here, pooling around the base of trees, the waters teased high by the rains, cutting short the paths that follow the banks of the river. Here the birdsong is brisk, and so is the song of the mosquito. I want to partake in the stillness of the morning but I do so at much risk. I turn back to the paths that climb up the bluff, to the old bike path.

This is Fort Snelling State Park, where the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers meet, where Europeans first settled to build an outpost among the northern reaches of the continent’s great river. They stood above the confluence of the waters in a great silence, waiting for the times.

The times were climbing the steps toward Sacré-Cœur. They were lodging in the hearts of the starving workers of Paris. While the Minnesota pioneers were struggling to channel St Anthony Falls and build their first mills on the river, while they were digging silent roads in the snow, Bismark had united Germany under the martial Prussians and had invaded France. The French emperor had buckled. A Third Republic was declared and its ministers tried desperately to negotiate terms, but when the Parisian mob insisted on continuing the fight, the Germans surrounded the great city, starving it through most of the winter of 1870-1871.

I’m standing on the stairway to Sacré-Cœur, overlooking the city historical and modern, well after the drama of the times have passed. The city is like a museum now. Like any good museum, the exhibits spark the imagination. I’m thinking of somewhere far away. I’m thinking of the hills of Shiro Meda in Addis Ababa, smoke from the ‘village’ wafting up against the eucalyptus green of the mountainside. In November, 2005, these hills were one of the first places in the city to ignite in rebellion against the perceived election fraud of the ruling party. Hundreds were to die in this conflict. I remember how the reports of unrest, and even the drifting sounds of it, moved like waves through the city from north to south, from the hills of Shiro Meda to Faransae, through Piassa, and through Kirkos, on into Bole. There were shots from the guns of federal police. There were screams and wailing. The sounds continued into the night, as police fanned out through the district, gathering sons and husbands for indefinite detention.

In 1871, it was a fight over the cannons remaining from the sad siege of the winter that sparked the rebellion that became the Paris Commune. The fight started on the hill of Montmartre. The hill was something of a slum then. There was no towering white church, no trails of tourists, no stands for itinerant artists selling quick portraits. And in March, there were cannons set to face north toward the invaders. The citizens were determined to keep the cannons as proof against oppression. Women and children rushed to stand between the imperial troops and the mob, and the troops turned on their commanders. Two generals were killed by the mob. There was no turning back. The rebellion spread, and within days, the city belonged to the Commune. The Republic retreated to Versailles. The Commune, which was only to last a couple months, declared a program that seems mild in retrospect, abolition of debt; return of pawned assets to the workers, worker ownership of abandoned businesses, and the separation of church and state. Mild, but people in the countryside could not identify. They distrusted the poor workers and the immigrants of the big city. By the end of May, the revolt had been violently stamped out.

It’s interesting that one legacy of the Commune, adamant about the separation of church and state, would be the beautiful but stern basilica at the summit of Montmartre. Tourists are not likely to know the history, and are even less likely to find it compelling. Every generation has its issues. If anything, we seem to be a generation that would fight to rejoin church and state. We recognize the rage in a man or woman a century and a half ago, but we find the triggers inscrutable.

For my part, I find the links among time fascinating. I calculate that the Commune was far closer in time to the French Revolution than to our own time. It happened only some eighty years after the Revolution, and just over twenty after the revolutions of 1848. The harsh treatment at the hands of the Germans preceded the First World War by only 43 years. The string of violent outbursts tells a story, and some of it is about the rights of men and women. Some of it is crazed nationalism. The lines are blurred, as just the example of the Paris mob in the early months of 1871 demonstrates. I look ahead from the Commune and note that Hemingway and the artists of the 20s were living in a Paris only half a century after the Commune. Again, their time stands far closer to 1871 than it does to our own. Memories of the Commune might have been alive for the writers of the 20s. Paris was a city of revolution.

You see no hills flying into Minnesota. What you see is a flat tabletop of land, trees neatly ordered among their houses, all woven together in a carpet rolled out to the horizon. There is one tight collection of towers, set rather arbitrarily among all the silent neighborhoods. That is downtown. One doesn’t notice the fort on the hill above the river. It throws no shadow from the perspective of the airplane. Reality needs feet on the ground. It requires the cool of the shade.

On the ground, the height is real. That’s why there is a fort there. It commands a view over the confluence of the rivers. In 2014, it stands above park lands. It commands a view over bicycle paths. The walls of the fort, erected stone by stone by lonely army men far from home, cap the steep slope above me as I follow the path back toward the parking lot. My only concerns are following the songs of the morning birds and making it to the café by opening time.

Travelogue 563 – June 17
Dreaming Minnesota
Part One

At first, it looks like Paris, a dream of a quiet cité. In this dream, I have traveled. I’m so tired, it’s hard to remember what preceded. I believe there were days in front of my little computer screen, monitoring wild spreadsheets and editing Spartan accounts of children sitting inside their mud-walled classrooms in Ethiopia. Then suddenly I’m emerging from the Metro station at Pigalle. Yes, I seem to have caught the Thalys train from Rotterdam Centraal one Friday midday. That’s how the dream goes.

I’m alone among the tables in front of the brasserie off the Place des Abbesses. The trash truck is idling across the street. The truck has disgorged men in overalls, who are roaming the street. They are sending cleansing water down the gutters. The coffee is right. The croissant is perfect. I am remembering where I am. I am sitting off the Place des Abbesses, where a carousel stands at the base of a hill. The hill leads steeply up to Sacré-Cœur. Facing the carousel is the Church of Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre, art nouveau beauty built at the turn of the last century, the façade a comforting set of bubbling arches and intersecting lines, rising together in brick and tile casing. It is a building proud of itself, first church built with reinforced cement, and example of artistic and architectural courage in a time when city officials could call for its demolition. It was not traditional masonry, and so was almost condemned.

I can see the side of the same church from my hotel window. It’s a tiny room, and there is little to do but to look out the window, from which the view takes in grey roofs and the side of Saint-Jean. There is a deep courtyard like a well at my feet. I can’t see the bottom, but I can hear the echoing laughter of children.

Yes, I emerged from the Metro, and I climbed a steep street toward Montmartre. Then I climbed five flights of stairs to my hotel room. Once I had descended again, I found a street grocer, where I bought two mandarin oranges. With those in my backpack, I could then find the stairway up to the strikingly white and austere Basilica of Sacré-Cœur, nineteenth-century monument to order. It was ordered to be built to ‘expiate the crimes’ of the uprising of the Commune of 1871, which had begun in Montmartre. The archbishop of Paris had been martyred during the uprising. His successor had a vision at the summit of Montmartre, a vision of the sacred heart of Jesus.

There is a carousel in the Place des Abbesses. There is another carousel at the base of the stairway to Sacré-Cœur. Here the tour groups pause for photos before they embark on the ascent to the summit. Just below Sacré-Cœur there are prospects where one can see nearly the whole of the city spreading out below. There is a Korean wedding party on the highest flight of stairs. Tourists are applauding the couple’s kiss.

Below is the unyielding hill of my hotel’s street. I am already descending with my backpack full for new travel. I have a long road ahead, even in getting to the gate for my flight, down the steps to the Metro, and from the Gare du Nord a rattling train with many stops, and then along many long hallways inside the airport, numbered and lettered and connected by whispering shuttles.

I have spent many hours sitting next to a delicate and tearfully silent ageing woman, with the golden locks of a thirty year-old, whose bag is full of pill bottles when the spare stretches of Minnesota appear outside the airplane’s windows. Some clouds are scraping along, close to Earth’s surface. They seem like creatures blind and stubborn. The city has not moved. We find it there, peaceful and resigned to the abrasive attention of clouds, stoic today and impassive. It had waited among its trees for me, at the end of a long, long day, sunlit across the Atlantic, a day still spreading its hand ahead toward the west.

It might be one of those dreams one has after periods of sleeplessness, brief and lurid, too vivid and intense and provoking sharp anxieties before abruptly ending, after which one awakens in a new place, though one never does that, really. It was a trip at a blur. I have only formed imperfect impressions of it, between coughing fits left over from the wet trip to Scotland, among sheer veils of exhaustion, among the plaited mists of motion without rest.

But reality wakes where it left off. I am driving north on 55. The late afternoon is a bright wash across the spaces of the American Midwest.

Travelogue 562 – May 27
Rosslyn Chapel

It’s a place of magic, located among the shallow valleys heading east among rolling hills toward the North Sea, just south of Edinburgh. The chapel was built by William Sinclair (or Saint Clair), earl and baron, descendant of the Normans, in the middle of the fifteenth century.

This was no trivial project for the earl. He imagined a much larger edifice than we see now, a standard cruciform church with a tower. He spent ten years after winning the charter for the new church just building the village to house the craftsmen. That was before construction ever began. By the time of the earl’s death, they had only managed to erect the choir and the chapel behind the choir, the ‘Lady’ chapel. Foundations were laid for the apse and transepts, but Sir William’s son didn’t have the heart or the funds to continue.

The little chapel’s magic seems to be its power to fire the imagination. Dorothy Wordsworth, William’s sister, wrote a poem, ‘Composed at Roslin Chapel During a Storm’, published in 1831.

“The wind is now thy organist;--a clank
(We know not whence) ministers for a bell
To mark some change of service. As the swell
Of music reached its height, and even when sank
The notes, in prelude, ROSLIN! to a blank
Of silence, how it thrilled thy sumptuous roof,
Pillars, and arches,--not in vain time-proof,
Though Christian rites be wanting! …"

A young Queen Victoria visited in 1842. She was so impressed by the chapel’s beauty she declared that ‘so unique a gem should be preserved to the country.’ Restoration began, and the chapel had a new lease on life. Centuries had passed with the chapel either abandoned or only marginally in use. The Catholic Sinclairs had moved away once the Reformation had begun in earnest.

Modern times found new inspiration. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it was a post-post-decadent-Gothic taste for the fabulous, for histories that sparkle with meaning and portent. The chapel harbors secrets about Jesus, secrets only our time could solve! These are the kind of mysteries, it should be said, that are not really mysteries. Rather, this is mystery of the type authors build airport novels around, in which we know we will be satisfied in short order, symbols decoded, clues deciphered, and wonders revealed.

I must say I do enjoy post-modern mythologies, like the ones that grew around Rosslyn Chapel, stories that re-fashion Jesus into a Jungian shaman whose profound union with Mary Magdelen merged universal animus and anima and inspired generations of priest-soldier-bankers to stand guard over their heritage. In fact, the holy couple’s heritage leads -- in rather wrenching ways -- right to old Sinclair himself, a descendant by blood!

The tour guides dismiss the stories in a way that strains to be playful, but of course telling the tale is telling the tale, even when you tell it in jest, and visitors can’t help glancing about among the shadows of the little chapel that has inspired such speculations.

The tour guide relates another old tale, the one about the Apprentice Column, one, briefly put, in which the naïve but talented young apprentice pays with his life for having carved the magnificent column during his master’s absence. Behind the story is a suggestive glimpse of old Sinclair himself, who has based a design for the column on something he has seen in Rome. He has been a crusader. Some say he has was more. Some say he reached the shores of North America some half a century before Columbus. The story tells us he sends the master craftsman to see the original column in Rome. Apparently the story itself owes much to one Annie Wilson, landlady of an inn in Roslin, who told the story over and over again to visitors that included Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Sir Walter Scott, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and Robert Burns.

Beneath the shimmer of the mythos is the chapel itself, the dusty local sandstone itself, rich in reds and yellows, quarried, carved, and arranged by men more than five hundred years ago. There is the enduring little temple itself, leaving itself as a message, and in truth the kind of message that confounds rather than explains. The building is a manifestation of a man’s and a time’s religion. He built it so that prayers may be said in perpetuity for himself and his family.

The religion of his time is just as confused as philosophies of our own times, philosophies that blithely weave psychoanalytical imperatives with the rigid fibers of ancient religion. In Sinclair’s case, it’s a Christianity that has been grafted onto pagan ritual and traditions. The most obvious and prolific examples are the many ‘green men’ carved into the walls and pillars of the chapel. The green man is a symbol of fertility; he has vines and leaves growing from his mouth and feeding a rich bed of growth surrounding him. There is also the Dance Macabre leading up one of the arches, a solidly contemporary Christian tradition, but one that smacks of the primal and ancient.

One can hardly blame the mythologizers for being attracted to a place like Rosslyn Chapel. The carvings are so elaborate, so careful, so abundant in reference common and arcane and even accidental; the camels and the gargoyles and the grains that look like corn; the square, styled stones set among the arches that inspired one writer to claim they were code for a song; the angels pointing to open books, closed books.

Outside, the meadows are quiet as ever. The Chapel is a short country-road stroll from the high street of the village of Roslin. I’ve arrived at Roslin by city bus. I wasn’t going to cycle the whole way so soon after the race. But I do cycle part of the way. I want to explore a little.

I’ll stop first at my new Caffe Nero, where the mom and her eager daughter stop for sweet fortification, where the girl collects last crumbs of mom’s attention, and so does mom, looking into the compact mirror. I’ll climb the slow hill toward New Town’s summit, skirting Charlotte Square and dodging through workaday pedestrian traffic, across the hectic interchanges and onto the Lothian Road. I’ll continue on to the Meadows, a vast park that lives up to its name, open grasses criss-crossed by pedestrian paths. There I’ll look back at the Old Town from a new perspective, from the south.

I’ll leave the Meadows to pedal south on Morningside Road. A mile or so later, where the road looks like it will indulge in steep hills, I’ll lock up the bike, and I’ll catch the next Number 15 bus, ascending to the second storey in order to enjoy the view. The road does start to roll over and down the rounded hills, taking us through the southernmost stretches of the city, and then beyond, into the countryside beyond, where the hills and meadows roll east toward the North Sea.

Rosslyn Chapel will be a short stroll from the high street of the village of Roslin. The road will be narrow, lined with trees, and I’ll feel like I’m lost in time, partaking of an ordinary Sunday stroll, until the chapel emerges, across its busy parking lot, behind the glass-paned modern entrance, cut into the old stone walls.

Travelogue 561 – May 26
Some New Parts

I have found this bike path near Ferry Road. It cruises for miles under canopies of green leaves, trees and undergrowth so rich and so vibrantly green it is dazzling, even to someone used to green places. I coast along this path on my rented bicycle, and I breathe in the damp, vegetal air in deeply. I absorb the light rains as they come. I absorb the rare sunshine when it comes. Living in this pinwheel of weather can feel like a week passing in the space of an afternoon. The path more or less follows the channel of the Water of Leith, Edinburgh’s river that resembles a busy brook. As the channel winds away from the harbor, it picks apart a few quiet Edinburgh neighborhoods, digging into the earth and leaving little rocky gorges to negotiate.

The café hasn’t opened yet. I’m kind of happy to find a Caffe Nero here. This is my favored coffee shop chain in the British Isles. A staff person is bustling inside, putting order to things behind the counter. Lights are on, though not all of them. The sidewalk sign leans against the inside of the door, as though propped against intrusion. But it will open.

There is a light rain falling, but it’s not a discouraging rain. It’s not a rain that drives one under awnings. I cross the street to the park. It’s a park that runs alongside the Water of Leith. I follow it, admiring the steep and rising bank on the other side, admiring the slabs of stone in the shallows of the river. I come upon a nineteenth-century monument, a columned gazebo with a statue of Athena inside. I walk on, as the land and path change pitch, slope upward. I walk until I’m just about under the inspiring heights of the Dean Bridge, finished in 1831, rising in four arches more than one hundred feet above our little river.

The café is open, and life is beginning to stir in Dean Village, Edinburgh. Everyone is making their way somewhere. Some pause in the café. There are a mother and daughter who stop here every morning. The daughter is uniformed in prep school plaid. The mother spends her time touching up her face. The daughter is eight or so. She tells her mother stories with wide-eyed urgency. Some people are making the brisk walk up the hill beside the café already. Turning one’s back on the Water of Leith, one has a choice among a few turning cobbled roads that take steep runs at the hill behind the café. Mounting that hill, one enters New Town from the west, behind Charlotte Square and the Albert Memorial.

I turn around, and I follow the Water of Leith toward its terminus, eventually veering off the bike path to wander among the streets north of Ferry Road until I can discover the waters of the firth. I find them beside an expanse of neglected asphalt and concrete. There are barren piers stretching out beyond chain link fences. There’s one ship moored out there, clean and silent, its tidy lines a testament to life in the abandoned harbor.

I turn circles on the asphalt, parting tiny waters with the rubber of the cycle tires, splashing among the puddles. There are still drops of rain falling, but lightly and randomly, as though they have been fashioned one by one, like bits of tender glass, and dropped as they are finished. The sky has broken open. The clouds are shattered and reeling one way and another, broken by morning sunlight. The delicate rain drops are spun by winds, and then they make their marks on the puddles of the asphalt field. They make their fleeting marks out on the firth, too, grey mass from here, stretching maybe five miles across to the bluffs of county Fife on the other side.

Travelogue 560 – May 25
Hey, Ho, the Wind and the Rain

Was renting a bicycle in Edinburgh the best idea? I am standing in the stairwell outside a department store on George Street in New Town while rain pours into the streets, running into fierce streams that spread from the gutters toward the middle of the avenue. People caught in the downpour are trying to leap over the streams, trying unsuccessfully and limping on in shoes soaked through. Teens run screeching and laughing, wet clothes clinging to them, hair plastered to their foreheads.

I came to Scotland wearing my Dutch winter like a hard-weather badge. I know about rain, I tell myself. But it doesn’t take long to be humbled by Scotland’s climate. The clouds scud along low and quick. They are more mercurial than even the Dutch variety.

The bicycle is meant to solve one logistical problem. My central purpose in coming to Edinburgh was to run the half marathon. I was late booking my hotel, and so I am stuck with a hotel on Ferry Road, a good ways from the starting line. The race is on a Sunday. Most of the buses don’t start running early enough. I realize the bicycle solves another challenge, how to warm up for the race without running more miles, adding more road impact to the legs than necessary.

I came to Edinburgh to run the half marathon, my second year in a row. Last year, the weather issue was too much sun. Runners were overheating. This year, it’s Scotland resurgent. I’m lucky enough to make it to the starting line on the bike without incident. There is no rain. But two minutes before the starting gun, the rain starts, at first a drizzle. I’m looking into the sky with dread. The one blessing is the moderate temperature. I haven’t brought a jacket. In cold temperatures, the rain would have been devastating. The gun goes off, and we start.

Yes, off we go, thousands of us, shuffling together in a tight crowd, forward toward the line drawn across the road, all of us set on our perpetually silly quest for the finish line, for a time, for the huff and puff, for the heart-busting and leg-pounding challenge of an exact set of forty-two grueling kilometers of paved and cobbled roads, laid before us to be conquest of the will, by eccentric will, by quirky human will. It’s like an exercise in mass futility, and we revel in it. Bring the rain, bring the wind, we say. And we make jokes, and we jump at the prompt of the starting gun.

The first few hundred meters are a walk, crammed in among the crowd. The first mile is a negotiation, a few steps forward, a few aside, some stutter-steps, and all the runners jockeying for position. We’re in tight quarters. It doesn’t matter that I avoid the puddles. The guy next to me doesn’t, and he sends a cascade of cold water across my shoe. There is no escape from the fact of rain. I will be carrying that extra weight in my water-logged shoes and water-logged socks.

As we pass beneath the bare green hill leading up to Arthur’s Seat, I look up beyond the ridge into the rain clouds. The rain is gathering force. So is the wind. By the time the race’s course emerges beside the wide grey waters of the Firth of Forth, at about the fifth mile, when the wind hits us unimpeded, pushing me a step to one side and making me gasp with the chill; by the time we can see the small but steely waves of the firth, I’m feeling the strain of leaning into the elements, feeling the bruise of the chill on the forward bits of skin, my forehead, my knuckles and forearms, and along the front of my thighs. I know I can’t beat my record this way, but I push back, and push into it.

We have to take a bus back into Edinburgh after the race. It takes forever, the walk to the bus station and then the drive back into central Edinburgh. The good news is, the rain has stopped. It would feel far worse post-race than during the race. As we’re pulling in at Waverley Station, the clouds are breaking. I have to hike to the bicycle. I’m calling it training for next year, as the muscles set into patterns of complaint.

By the time I pedal back to the hotel, the sun is breaking through. I’m eager to get back out and enjoy it, but after a hot shower, I cannot keep myself from collapsing into a deep sleep. It’s short nap, but in Scotland those windows of weather opportunity are fleeting and unforgiving. I dash outside and sprint toward New Town on the cycle, speeding along the left-hand margins of the narrow and meandering roads of my corner of the capital. I attack the steep hills that guard New Town from all but the most impetuous and impatient cyclists, downshifting all the way, and standing as I pedal, pushing slowly up Dublin Street like I’m marching, and only advancing at about the speed of a parade march.

I’ve just made it onto pleasant gridded tabletop of New Town when the first drops of the next rain come, and the first drops give way quickly to the second, and the third and fourth are angrily pushing the second on, and the fifth and sixth are even more impatient. There is only time to run for cover. I’m waiting out the storm in the stone stairwell of a department store. I’ve thrown the bike against the wall as I dismounted. Now I bide my time, and I watch the less fortunate as they make desperate runs at the street’s rushing waters, hoping for the best, wanting only to arrive somewhere with a hope for comfort.

Travelogue 559 – May 10
The Winds, the Call

Suddenly it’s a blustery and temperamental spring. The clouds are racing, eating up enormous patches of sky and then sailing on with the fleet toward the east. They cast light and chilly showers into the winds, and we run for cover.

Yesterday, it was already midday, and I hadn’t gotten the day’s run in. I figured I had better do it quickly, before the Americans started waking and picking up their phones. I would have to take my chances with the weather. I would have welcomed light rains because they would drive most people indoors and out of my way.

It wasn’t raining when I started. I ran along the Schie, up toward the village of Overschie. This is my route for a quick out-and-back course, when I want to build some speed. I’m feeling all right.

I’m just approaching the big mosque near the train tracks. I hear the call to prayer, and it’s the first time. I’ve passed the mosque, its dome and minarets, dozens of times and never heard the call to prayer. I’ve wondered how they handle that delicate duty to Allah while set in historically Christian countries. The answer is, with perfect moderation. It’s loud enough to hear, but restrained. I’m admiring the song of the call, carried on spring winds, when I see the storm. It’s sweeping across the northern half of the sky. What I see I see through the frame of the bridges over the road and over the Schie. The overpasses are like a doorway. I see the billowing rain beyond, like sheer drapes blowing in hard winds.

When it hits, I have arrived under the first bridge, which bears the highway overhead. I watch the rain hit the pavements with fierce intensity. I’m assaulted by a chill wind. I’m thinking it will pass. I thinking I will be fine; it’s a short run. So I set out to cross the twenty meters or so between the bridges. I’m almost immediately soaked through. The wind batters me; the rain stings. I stop again under the second bridge, a railway bridge, chastened and ready to wait.

It’s a cold wait. I’m stretching, trying to keep warm. The silvery waves of rain swell and break. They are breaking sideways in the blasts of wind. There is lightning. I’m pretty sure this will pass quickly, but I can’t wait so long that muscles get tight. As soon as the force of the rain abates, I set out again.

I’m right that the storm will pass. Weather moves quickly here. By the time I’m on my way home, I have sun on my shoulders. But the storm has a few more cycles to it. I’m not a half kilometer down the road before I get soaked by another wave of hard rain. It’s like being hit by a pail full of ice water. I’m gasping, and pushing forward. The wind is trying to sweep my feet from under me. The rain drops are drilling into my face. My clothes are clinging to me. My shoes are water-logged. They’ll make squishing sounds all the way home.

It’s another day. The rains have let up, but not the winds. Menna and I are on our bikes. Along one street, we don’t have to peddle because he wind carries us. At the big intersection by the hospital, we struggle to avoid being blown into the street. The wind strikes the front wheel, driving it sideways, and it overrides the brakes, as though seized with a will to destroy, like a baby swatting its toys aside. And just as suddenly it’s gone, and we are coasting along safely.

We take a short cut through the Museum Park. This is where Menna learned how to ride a bicycle. There is a paved plaza here, set under a big North Sea sky, a huge paved square painted with festive colors in playful geometries. It’s a plaza that exists for fun, set aside for fairs and movies, and for skateboarders. Its most salient characteristic, though, is its expanse of sky. The big clouds are still rolling overhead, intent on their own dramas. To the north, nearly half the sky is seized with a mass of them, black with their intent to storm. The winds are moving all that away, toward the east, so we can safely stand in the open, astride our bikes, and watch the clouds boil with rains caught up from the seas. The sky over us is white in shreds and grey in shreds, painting restless portraits in quick succession, crazy in love with itself, and tossing each pencil sketch aside: Power, Exhilaration, Disdain, Lethe, Light, Loss.

Travelogue 558 – May 4
Liberation

Yes, it’s true. I saw someone who looked like my dad this morning. It was just a face on the tram, seen from a distance. It was a Sunday morning, and such a quiet morning that anything moving took on special significance. The tram was taking the turn before the bridge, and sending forth that grinding cry that rails make, while the engine hummed. I was glancing through the empty cars of the tram, and spotted the face white at the window, wide like my dad’s was, his hair cropped short. It was a perception like a fleeting spark, leaving a spot on the blue sky above the street after the train had passed, like the dot in an exclamation point.

The gulls are crying over the Schie. They do that every morning. They wheel and they dive. They float on the water and they cast an assessing eye on the activities of the humans. I was on a morning run, a short run between hard training days. The race is approaching. Yesterday, I logged two separate workouts. I’ve been making a point of running in the mornings because the race will be a morning a race.

Sunday mornings are pleasant. The city seems deserted. Today is particularly quiet, as it comes before a holiday. The holiday is Liberation Day, celebrating the end of the Nazi occupation sixty-nine years ago. A lifetime.

Last night we watched a film at the old Cinerama. It was the story of the reconciliation between a British soldier and his Japanese captor and torturer. The film aspired to achieve beauty out of ugliness, and for all I know, it was successful. I did find the performances admirable, and the scenes visually compelling. There was some mystery to the motives of some of the Brits in their middle-aged, post-war years; there were one or two more tears than I’m comfortable with in a Saturday night film, but all in all, it was a well-crafted product. Still, I’m left wondering about the task that artists assign themselves sometimes, to, in essence, be the reflection, be the wonder. I’m not sure how to act with the director sitting right next to me.

A year or two of my father’s life were consumed by the same war, but in the European theater. Apparently he was part of the crew of a plane shot down over France. He was injured, and had a limp the rest of his life. But that’s the extent of what the living know. He wouldn’t speak about it. Somehow, in a life too short but full of moment, a life begun during the deprivation of the Depression, during which his own father, a veteran of the First World War, suffered a breakdown of some sort; a life adorned by post-war successes in school and in jobs; a life blessed and scarred by the fabulous creation and destruction of his own family; somehow I feel like this life my father led was stamped most decisively and indelibly by those several war-time years.

Once when my mother and father were struggling with the marriage, they dropped me off with an aunt and uncle in Colorado, and they took a trip to Europe. The trip was not successful in saving the marriage, but it’s hard to say what other small wonders people might have been achieved. I don’t know what the itinerary was. I don’t know that the anxious couple didn’t pay some tribute to the war experience. I would guess that any formal purpose was unlikely. But was there a moment, in France, when the echoes overcame the present?

I don’t think of dad too often. By now, I’ve spent the majority of my life without him. And my acquaintance with the man came during his later years, when his demons were winning the life-long war for his soul. We were accustomed to regarding him with some disdain. He was not all that, all damage and all rage, but there was enough of it.

Tomorrow, the Netherlands will celebrate liberation. I don’t think I’ll see my dad on the tram again. I can’t say I know what to do with today’s sighting. I have no director in this theater with me.

Travelogue 557 – April 26
Koningsdag

It’s King’s Day in Holland. It’s the first opportunity the Dutch have had to celebrate a King’s Day in well over a century. For that many years it has been Queen’s Day. Three queens in a row ruled this country, three very healthy women. It’s a healthy family. The new king, Willem-Alexander, is only the seventh since the monarchy was established in the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo. And monarchy was just a formality for the family that has ruled Holland since the mid-sixteenth century. Beatrix, the king’s mother and former queen, is still alive and well. Presumably, she just decided it was time to retire, perhaps to raise tulips.

The Dutch would not normally strike an American as particularly patriotic, until King’s Day. Suddenly the flags come out, as do the orange Ts and the orange hats, the orange ribbons and the orange crowns. The colors are worn in good fun. For most young people, I would imagine that the color orange arouses more football loyalty than nationalism, and I can’t at all imagine what being Dutch means to them. Is it a lifestyle more than a history, a smug civic philosophy more than a sense of blood ties?

In Europe or America, a holiday is a holiday, an excuse for a party. The crowds move slowly along the Oude Binnenweg. The bars are packed. Where the outdoor tables fringe on the brick walkway, the crowds slow even further. Spirits are high. In front of our café on Eendrachtsplein, there is a troupe playing drums. They are calling themselves African, though there is only one who is not white. Still, they rattle and thump their way on for hours intrepidly, and with commendable rhythm. Every so often one of them stands and dances in an approximation of African. The best is a white guy in a red T. There is nothing orange on him as he dips and steps with his arms spread wide. Menna is African, and she likes his dancing, so I’ll take that as a mark of authenticity, though it should be said that it’s only since we came to Europe that Menna accepts being called African. Usually Ethiopes resent the term. And it should also be said that dance looks nothing like this in East Africa. Or north, I dare say. When we outside apply the term African to music or dance, we know what we’re talking about, and it’s a quality that originates somewhat west of center, down there around the crook in the fat arm. Not by the elbow of the Horn.

A holiday is a holiday, and a party is a party. The night before we are visiting Den Haag. In party land traditions, the eve is always more important. Neither of us had registered the date, and so were surprised by the activity on the streets. There were guards at mall entrances. One young man directing us to the one sanctioned entrance explained. Things will get crazy, he says. Boys will get drunk. Cars will be turned over. It happens every year.

The walk back to the train station was entertaining, By then, night had fallen. Bands of patriots hooted and laughed and wended their merry way toward the city center. Boys on bikes turned in wobbly circles and stood the little machines on one wheel and then on the other, and they braked with a sneaker on the back tire. Interesting pee kiosks were set out for the men, four little sockets per hub. The sound of live music radiated from side streets. Groups of teen girls giggled as they looked for danger. The station was alive with activity, but our train home was nearly empty. The capital was clearly the place to be on King’s Day.

Travelogue 556 – April 12
Derrida and the Pelikaan
Part Two

I’m on course for Dordrecht again, but today I am not traveling by train. I’m cycling. I’m on course for old Dordrecht, but today I’ll stop short of the ancient river town. My destination is a town called Zwijndrecht, located just on the Rotterdam side of the Oude Maas, across from Dordrecht. I’m on a mission today, to see the Pelikaan side take on the boys from Alblasserdam, a village just across the Noord River.

The ride is about an hour. I‘m familiar with the way because of last year’s explorations. Last spring at about this time, compensating for a foot injury during training, I got up at dawn and cycled for hours. I know to cross the big river at the Erasmusbrug and head south, passing by the Feyenoord Stadion, and passing by the mighty A16 Bridge, staying to the long bike paths southward, beside the highway, passing by rows of lonely housing developments, by rows of flower greenhouses, and finally by nothing but open fields.

I’m not cycling at dawn this time. It’s a Saturday afternoon, and there is the usual weekend traffic on the bike paths: weaving teenagers, creeping old couples, gaping scooter boys, and of course the sport cyclists, whirring by, bent over their labours. The glances of the latter linger on me, trying to put the pieces together, the old bike that could almost be racing material, the pace I’m keeping though I’m not wearing the right clothes, in fact the carelessness of my ensemble, the polyester sweat pants and the runner’s jersey, the long hair under a runner’s beanie. I’m an odd notion in the flesh.

By the end of the ride to Zwijndrecht, I have ample evidence that I am no cyclist, intangible stuff, lodged mostly among the muscles of my buttocks. There is some of that in my knees, too. I coast into the sport complex, spacious, active. There are a number of clean pitches, and some smaller fields side by side, devoted today to girls’ field hockey.

I’m confused: there are a number of games to choose from. I decide it must be the one with the electronic scoreboard, the one with the turnstile and the ticket price. I pay my five euros and enter, walking by the temptation of the outdoor pub, straight to the sidelines, where we are separated from the pitch by only a foot of grass and a steel railing. A few meters behind us, boys are sprinting back and forth in an intense youth game.

Football league structure is deep in Holland, teams upon teams. It starts at the top with two national professional leagues, the Eredivisie and the Eerste, and runs down through one semi-professional league, the Topklasse, and through seven amateur leagues, starting with the Hoofdklasse. The Pelikaan club is in the Tweede Klasse. There’s no press coverage. There are not even bleachers. The crowd comprises just enough people to line the side railings, one row deep, and to populate the pub tables down by the home team goal. But the locals seem loyal, following the play with devoted attention and the proper cries and hurrahs. The pitch is fairly nice, immaculately kept, higher quality than most playing fields in America below the major leagues.

This is how the Netherlands remains in contention in world play, year after year, unlikely competitors among the perennial powers, among teams from places where football is like religion, like Brazil and Spain; among the football machines like Germany; among teams with salaries like Wall Street, like those in the English Premier League. The Dutch succeed by supporting strong local play.

Today’s game is entertaining, and there is talent on the pitch, as far as I can tell with my unpracticed American eye. The Pelikaaners are handily defeating the boys from Alblasserdam. They score two unanswered goals in the first half. There are some decent players among the opponents, but the sum is unequal to the parts somehow, and after every feverish advance the ball ends up in Pelikaan possession, without even a shot at the goal.

I only stay until halftime. I was able to resist the chill in short sleeves as long as I was cycling and keeping the blood moving. But the breezes have an edge to them. April has turned its face back toward winter. Standing on the sidelines, I’m losing body heat. I’m enjoying the game, but I came to see my barista buddy, and he’s not playing. I wonder if I’ve picked the right game, but it has to be. He said he might not be chosen to start. He must be reciting Derrida to his teammates, but I don’t see him on the bench.

I’m back on the bike, and it is painful. The cold has penetrated into sore muscles. And it takes a few miles of pedaling to warm up again. But I do. By the time I’m re-entering the city, I’m encouraged; I’m thinking about my race in May. I reach the neighborhood. I reach Het Park, and my endorphins count is up. I park the bike, and I start running. I’m going to do some speed drills around one of the fields.

Travelogue 555 – April 10
Derrida and the Pelikaan
Part One

The sweet April spring is in abeyance. The winds are up, and I arrive home with saddle -soak from the bicycle seat. I can wait out the brief showers, but my cycle is parked outdoors. The temperatures have fallen, but not to winter standards. It’s chilly, but not cold. The air is fresh. The birds give me heart, the sea gulls crying and the swans taking baths in the calm waters of the Schie. These things lift my spirits.

Menna was up before sunrise, retreating with her textbook to the other room. Exams are coming too quickly. She studies all the time. My race is coming too quickly. I train every day. The race will be a morning race. I need to shock my body into morning performance. Menna has woken me at a painful hour. No pain, no gain. I suit up, and painfully make my way down the steep staircase to the street.

I take to the banks of the Schie, jogging like a man who’s been in bed for six days rather than for six hours, jogging across the bridge and then around to where the Schie joins the Maas. It’s not until my last straightaway along the Maas that I feel something reminiscent of grace in my stride. It’s humiliating.

The day starts at the old café, my café from former times. I’ve had to take a leave of absence while they went through a minor re-brand. It’s been an awkward transition for them, and none too convenient for the regular.

The barista today is the football player. He’s a husky guy, blonde and good-looking in farm-boy style. He’s older than the other baristas. Most unusual is his good cheer and the way he engages in conversation. I’ve learned not to expect much from the Dutch in the way of personal engagement. But when this guy turns his attention on you, it’s with an intense sort of thoughtfulness.

Our first conversation was about Golden Earring, the Dutch band that produced ‘Radar Love’ in the 70s. I know my look makes people here think I’m a musician. He was testing me. I knew the song, though I hadn’t known the band. I approved his taste, and he was pleased, singing the song and bobbing his head as he worked the espresso machine.

This morning, his mood is sour. The oven is not working. He has been forced to apologize: there will be no croissants. I force myself to take it gracefully, though in fact this is a major setback for me. He is shaking his head. His English is not strong, so he has to take a few runs at the explanation: the cord can’t take the voltage of the oven. This re-brand has been rough.

I’m philosophical. He rewards me with philosophy. He tells me about a French film he’s seen, a film that featured the philosopher Jacques Derrida. This pop philosophe was speaking about paradox, and happy it would seem to manifest it in himself, protesting throughout against the authority being invested in him by the format of the film. I have no special knowledge he says, and then he lectures.

I laugh to be suddenly talking about Derrida. One discovers Europe in the oddest places. The jock barista is quoting Derrida. I’m grateful for that. I ask him how his season is going. He’s member of a local squad, based in Zwijndrecht, close to Dordrecht. ‘Okay,’ he says, qualifying it with a thoughtful pause. He has had some injuries this year, and he wants to tell me how he hasn’t regained all his strength yet. ‘I don’t have my body,’ he says, and he shrugs with discomfort. I know how he feels, when you can’t find the old ease and grace, when your movement is clumsy. I know it. ‘I’m sorry, Mister Barista.’

His club, called Pelikaan, has an important game coming up on Saturday. I tell him I’ll try to show up.

Travelogue 554 – April 3
Taking the Train
Part Three

The train settles into the station with a small groan, with only that sound, and otherwise so quietly. No one says a word. The doors hiss as they open, and I step out. The station is spacious and sun lit. The station is Leiden, university town. Just outside the station doors is a wide brick plein, in which people stand and drift and smoke, and they sway while they chat, and they fiddle with phones and music players, and they walk briskly toward destinations clear in their minds, and they study each other with silent hostility, all the things people do when they have space. There is a bike path painted in white lines across the plaza, lines painted right on the brick, but no one observes the rule. Lone bikes cross in every direction.

There is a collection of high buildings around us, set in a loose line along the rail line, demarcating another of those dead zones left by the bombing in WWII, but raised in none of the neat order of Rotterdam, and lacking the depth among them to really say ‘city’ properly. They stand around the station as heralds of a somewhat transparent modernism, failing to mask the enduring quality of the town, symbolized by the eighteenth-century windmill standing preserved not far from the station, now a museum, perhaps a source of irritation to the architects of the modern. The fact is, Leiden has the most extensive Golden Age town center outside of Amsterdam. And those narrow streets, set among a prolific network of canals, begin only a few hundred meters from the station.

I’m wondering today, stepping along the uneven brickwork of the street, how the architecture has survived our politics. Humans are creatures transfixed by their psychology. Every crisis is a flaw in the lens, playing itself out in the world outside the window. Politics is the passion play. We create beauty and we destroy it all as caprice. These are the same lands that saw the iconoclastic furies during the Reformation, when mobs broke into churches and trashed all the art there that smacked of idolatry.

These little houses, (now shops and now sandwich places,) were signs of status, and now they are signs of heritage. They might easily have been seen simply as signs of bourgeois complacency, symbols of class oppression, decadence and clutter. They are, after all, the vestiges of one of the world’s first independent bourgeois classes, a nation of merchants who warred against feudalism, as represented by the Spanish crown. In turn, they might have been upended by a new working class order. This is a university town, home to all sorts of political fancies.

Maybe it’s my own irritation that narrates these scenarios, as I make slow progress among the crowded streets. There is only room for two abreast on the tiny pavements of the tiny streets. When a bus passes, all foot traffic is made to pause. A truck unloads, and cyclists are desperately trying to see around the obstruction, slowing, stopping, blocking other bikes.

It is a pretty city. I’m here for an appointment, and only have time afterward for a short walk along one canal and another. I steer quickly away from the busiest streets. It’s just enough of an interval to quiet the thoughts of busy days, calm the strife of the mind. The tonic lies among the modest charms of the small Dutch town, modest lines of gables curving along canals, canals in gentle motion among their manmade banks, small bridges spanning them at intervals.

The streets were not built to ease the minds of overstimulated moderns. If anything, these streets were intensely active ones for the time. Farmers coming to market would have found them very exciting. The gabled houses are pretty, but to claim a universal aesthetic might be mistaken. If the architects built to an aesthetic, it was different than ours, triggering different pleasure responses than ours. It’s an alien setting, admirably adapted to modern needs.

Last week I was in Dordrecht, another set of pretty alleyways, but somehow more dim and more contained, as though the sun hadn’t penetrated quite as far into the brick as in Leiden, as though the brick facades in Leiden are healthier, rosier. There is a feeling of optimism in Leiden, as though it invites the sky in.

Trade is the reason for any medieval town’s success in the Lowlands, but for Leiden a new purpose was devised in the sixteenth century, with the establishment of the university. In Dordt, (as the Brits took to calling Dordrecht in centuries past,) identity is defined as sharply as the town itself has been by its surrounding rivers. Though it may be an island, though I have seen so much of it from the elevated train, the distances confound my exploration.

Just outside the Dordt station is the modern city. The way to the historical center is clear. It follows first the wide boulevard, which leads to the shopping street. Most Dutch towns are furnished with some version of Amsterdam’s Kalverstraat, the pedestrian way dedicated to brand name clothing chains, boutiques, parfumeries, and all. In Dordrecht it’s not so high-end as all that, making way for department stores and fast food. From there the smaller streets branch off, the brick streets, and the buildings shrink into age and lean in toward each other.

I’m looking for the Grote Kerk, passing peaceful plazas next to canals that are set deep in brick channels. The spring is young. The outdoor café tables facing the memorial statues in the squares are mostly empty, though the morning couldn’t be nicer. I am marching down long streets, by art galleries and antique dealers, and by places dark and abandoned. The narrow ways allow no vantages to see beyond. I must stumble upon the big church, led there solely by the logic of small town streets, coming upon it suddenly, from behind, as though I’ve stalked a massive animal. The ancient brick walls behind the altar are set in graded sections of a half circle. These are the oldest existing walls. That becomes clear as I make the tour around the whole edifice, the brick therein a fairer pitch of pink, many of them chipped, many eroded, some replaced in different colors, the wall a puzzle with pieces forced in from the intervening centuries.

In front of the church, under the funny, squat, unfinished clock tower, there flows the river, where the boats of merchants would have drifted in, looking for harbor. They would have sighted the tower from miles away, and they would have said, ‘We’ve made it.’

Travelogue 553 – March 30
Taking the Train
Part Two

Dordrecht is one of the oldest towns in Holland. In fact, it holds the distinction of being the oldest town in Zuid Holland to be granted city rights, back in the day of William I, Count of Holland. Before that the town flits through history, appearing under a number of variations of its name, all looking like phonetic puzzles. Its first appearance in history comes under the name Thuredriht. This appears in a history written in 1120 about the ninth-century incursions by the Vikings. This makes Dordrecht older than its big neighbor, Rotterdam, by a few centuries.

In its heyday, even as the villagers on the Rotte were debating putting up a dam to control the pesky flooding, Dordrecht was one of those high medieval Dutch and Flemish success stories, leveraging their access to waters and more waters to become a trading center for the resources critical to happy life in the feudal societies of northern Europe. For Dordrecht those goods seem to have been grains, wood, and wine.

The city occupies an island formed among the intertwining strands of rivers that make up the marshy delta lands of Holland and Belgium. This little island alone is apparently touched by no less than five different rivers, the Oude Maas, the Beneden Merwede, the Nieuwe Merwede, the Hollands Diep, and the Dordtsche Kil.

It’s fun to consider that, in all likelihood, most people who have approached this town, have done so by water. We rarely think about how our understanding of a place is shaped by the aesthetic experience of the approach. Maybe it’s one reason I love train travel, and by extension, European travel. Swinging through American towns on raised superhighways can be exciting, but it’s clearly different. The impression of the place is infused with the adrenaline of maneuvering among lanes at high speeds.

Coming into Dordrecht from the north is a descent from the heights of the bridge over the Oude Maas, and a slowing descent. You see the Grote Kerk by riverside, a stolid piece of Golden Age work, the tower of which is memorable for its four square clock faces at the top, like the open flaps of a box lid. You see all the historical town bunched in miniature, and you might, surveying the town this way, just feel you know it already. In contrast, I imagine the approach in water, during which the town would loom above. The church by the water might tower properly; streets might open alluringly onto the riverside, enticing by virtue of the veil drawn by perspective. The town would open up at eye level. Disembarking from the train, with the bird’s eye view in mind, you’re tempted to believe in the map in your mind, and the tour is an impatient exercise in connecting the dots.

You glide past the historical district on the train, and on past the long streetside façade of a modern shopping mall, descending to nearly street-level as you go, and pulling into the station. The station here is niets bijzonders, as they say, nothing special, just the long shelters over the tracks and one small station building, neat and clean and functional, but no occasion for celebration.

In Rotterdam, the celebration over the new station subsides. We take it for granted already, the high angled wing over the plein, shining silvery in its metal panels. Actually the new station’s dramatic outline has been in place for well over a year. The opening is a formality; the celebration is a farewell to the construction crews. There is little to remark on about the approach to Rotterdam. The train rolls through plain suburbs, and along flat routes into the city, largely without feature. The impression says ‘city along the way’, perhaps even if it’s your destination.

At least two long-time Rotterdammers are dismissive. We are returning to the station one evening, and they are recalling the long years of construction. The previous station was closed in 2007. ‘It’s all right,’ they say about the new one, with a shrug. ‘We’re happy the construction is done.’ They remember the previous station, built in 1957. They are similarly unimpressed with the old station. Maybe it’s Dutch reserve.

I’m disappointed they don’t recall the old one fondly. I’ve only seen it in pictures, so maybe I don’t have a right to say it, but I kind of prefer it to the new one. It may have been relatively bland, but it fit into the feel of postwar Rotterdam, its concrete chic, best exemplified now by the old Groothandelsgebouw building (photo above), which stands next to the station. It was built in 1953, based on the design of the art deco Merchandise Mart in Chicago. It was one of the first major builds post-war in Rotterdam. It was built on the site of the old city zoo.

Then again, the reserve of the native sons seems appropriate somehow. There’s something about old Rotterdam that invites deprecation. Its civic spirit dresses for grim business, and prides itself on the contrast to frilly Amsterdam.

Dordrecht has less at stake. It gets to be the small town at the meeting of rivers. It has no big agenda for me. I take to the humble streets, and I head toward the Grote Kerk.

Travelogue 552 – March 29
Taking the Train
Part One

The day starts at Fundame. Fundame is a café by the central train station. Well, actually Fundame is a town in the Kembata-Tembaro region of southern Ethiopia. The name of the café is Lebkov. Menna and I go to Lebkov often to study and to work. We also go to the café on the other side of the station, which has a long and complicated name. We just call it Azedebo, which is actually the name of another town in the Kembata-Tembaro region of southern Ethiopia. The two towns are near each other, and host twin kindergarten programs that we have implemented in recent years. It’s nice that we go to Azedebo and Fundame almost every day. We don’t get to see the four hundred children singing songs and reciting the alphabet. But we get nice croissants, which is something we couldn’t do in Ethiopia. All in all, it might be more fulfilling to see the children, but the croissants are a nice comfort.

It would be fun if we could pick up and go to Ethiopia, spend the day. I could pass on the croissants for a day. I was supposed to have gone about three weeks ago, but my dental meltdown pushed that off the calendar.

I like movement. Maybe that’s why I like hanging out around the central station. I like seeing the trains coming in and heading out again; seeing the people rushing to their platforms, eager for their journeys; reading the display of departures; reading the names of destinations.

And the station is a pleasant place to hang out now. After years of construction, Rotterdam’s Central Station is finished. The city celebrated its grand opening a week or two ago. The city planners have achieved their new, space-age look, and I hope it brings them the distinction the city deserves. But to my mind, the greater achievement is the convenience and comfort. The extensive plaza in front of the station is suddenly free from impromptu fences and holes, free of the men in orange and yellow work suits, free of the resounding clamour of heavy machinery. Just in time for spring, there is wide open space and places to sit beside grass or flowers, all with the prospect of downtown’s buildings at arm’s length.

Underneath that plaza is a vast parking ramp just for bicycles, space for several thousand bikes. Cyclists park in racks on the ground or in raised racks, in which individual slots roll out like drawers and tilt down so bikes can be rolled up and into position. The dry parking space is another attraction, living in a place as wet as Holland.

I usually get going early in the morning, and I take refuge somewhere like Fundame while the tremendous wave of morning activity overtakes the city, the good burghers of Rotterdam stirring and racing to their stations of daily service to the economy. I like movement, and weekday mornings are a study in the mass release of energy, croissants and coffee converted into fuel and fire, into a fury of intent. I’m working, and I’m watching. The lines at Fundame’s counters suddenly swell. Voices weave together into a chorus of subdued enthusiasm.

I like movement, and sometimes the temptation of the trains is too much for me. Today, after the comfort of my croissant, after one long work session, I stroll over to the ticket office. I’m going to take a short trip, just to feel the train pull away from its platform, just to watch the sun take us window by window as we emerge from under the vast shelter of the station. I love the gentle motion of the train. I love the spaces it accesses, letting go of the buildings and the streets, taking the track that bursts from the confines of the architects. I see grasses. I see rivers. The see the unfolded sky, the birds wheeling there in their flocks.

I’m going to neighboring Dordrecht.

Travelogue 551 – March 18
Stem!

Just as the signs of spring have overtaken us, flowers blooming and the smiles so like the awakening of babies; just as the first ducklings appear among the grasses beside the canals and the bicycles multiply on the bike paths; just as the bars see their roadside tables fill with new crowds of a Sunday afternoon and casual runners find the pale legs to propel them unsteadily on and past; just then the signs also abound that the season of elections has come to the city. One doesn’t need to know the candidates, the parties, the issues. One recognizes the signals. In politics, the signals are common across all cultures, I think, the bold acronyms in primary colors; the faces blown large but without fashion, without sex; the language of symbols that are favored by the political classes, bound in ribbons and banners; and the simple commands hung in empty spaces. ‘Stem!’ the signs say. ‘Vote!’

‘Stem’ also means voice. Speak! There are billboards saying, in Dutch, ‘In Rotterdam, we speak Nederlands.’ I’m assuming this is a conservative voice in the dark, shoring up anxieties that whisper, ‘We are losing our country.’ This is a potent appeal everywhere in the world, and lately it has special power in Europe. It means little that the history is available to provide perspective: there was only fleetingly ever a country for anyone to feel ownership over, especially the more tightly one attempts to define that country. It is true that Dutch represents one of the oldest manifestations of the Germanic languages that moved in during the time of the Romans, probably closer to the Ur-language than High German. But the lands with which that language have become associated have never been united. The Lowlands, in fact, have historically been those marshy delta lands in between other important places, through which all types of people have traveled in pursuit of trade. It has rarely, in two millennia, been a place that could afford to snub the speakers of foreign tongues.

But there’s little I can say with credibility, especially in Nederlands, because my own language studies have made excruciatingly slow progress. I, who used to excel in languages, have made a poor showing during the years I’ve lived overseas, when a facility with languages would have provided so much benefit and comfort. My own language is such a formidable stronghold and haven. ‘In America, we are stuck with English.’ We find it hard to explore.

Rather than Nederlands, the commanding voice in recent weeks has been pain. Since the operation that removed one more piece of wisdom from my head, pain has been an insistent voice inside my skull, rarely letting up. The post-op recovery didn’t go so well. I developed what they endearingly call ‘dry socket’, a stubborn wound that will not close and leaves the whole lower jaw vulnerable to the sparking current of irritation. The joys of spring mean little to that voice. It finds all that to be rubbish. It demands fealty, and the fealty is leads to a darker shade in the spectrum of seasons. It harks back to winter; it murmurs of age and failing powers. It represents the stark bare branches, rather than the budding ones.

At the central train station, the partisans are out, wearing T-shirts with party symbols and carrying clipboards in the crooks of their arms. They accost the people of the city as they are rushing to depart or arrive, the commuters and the pleasure travelers. They are cheerful, and they are mild. Politics is a friendly sport. Inside the café, partisans taking a break join the partisans from opposing camps at their tables. They laugh in indulgent ways, possibly laughing at themselves, laughing to message: we’re laughing. It’s all good.

We are fortunate that Nature cares little for the voices of humanity. Whether they speak Nederlands, or whether they say nothing at all, listening instead to the internal rantings of their autumnal pain, Nature will tend the cause of youth, the new leaves and the hatchlings. ‘In Spring, we speak Green.’

Travelogue 550 – March 6
My Dentist

I have been meaning to lose weight for my race, fast approaching. I suppose my dentist felt she should do her small part. She advised I have a tooth removed, and so I consented, thinking of the extra milligrams I won’t be carrying across the finish line, thinking of the kindness of my dentist.

We’ve been seeing a lot of each other this year, my dentist and I. She’s short and she has small dentist hands, so well adapted to her profession. She understands my aversion to pain. She says reassuring things as she draws up her tray of fine metal instruments. She says them in a French accent, because she is from France. She tells me that Dutch people often refuse novocain. I make sure she knows I’m not Dutch.

Isn’t this a corollary of the Stockholm syndrome, the peculiar bond of trust and sympathy with the person who is forced by fate to torture you? Maybe there’s a more specialized name for those who dig around in your head. I mean, how could many people have been literally inside your head? It’s a story of bonding. The bonding in breaking.

From where I sit in the dentist’s chair, I can see inside my mouth in the mirror overhead. I can also see out the window, see the Mathenesserlaan on a sunny day. Spring has come to town this week. That means only a thaw of a few degrees and some sustained sunshine. It’s been a strange winter, the only thing frozen being the thermometer, holding at five degrees or so for months, and the barometer, holding steady on the threshold of light rain under heavy clouds.

I gaze longingly out the window as the novocain takes effect. I gaze lovingly upon the dirty old street, wishing I would have enjoyed my hours on that avenue more, wish I had strolled the wide pavements like a drunk, like a lover, lifted my head to the skies, let the rain wash my diseased teeth. If only I had appreciated the numbered days I had had with that tooth.

But now, it’s only a matter of minutes. In her caring French accent, the dentist has explained the state of that poor wisdom tooth, a dead and broken wreck now at the back of my mouth, left there at peril to my future health. It will become the bad house on the block if I leave it. There is no choice. The deadening agent spreads through my lower jaw, and I will yield to the cold instruments on her tray.

These are moments in which we console ourselves with unvoiced comforts, vague reminders that we have survived previous procedures, false memories of procedures that turned out to be painless, vivid pictures of what we will do afterward.

This was not to be one of those reassuring experiences, the memory of which will steady my nerves the next time around. The wisdom tooth is reluctant to leave this world. The dying nerves inside the poor tooth fire with the same daydreams as the mind has, reminded of the ephemeral nature of life, longing for the feel of fresh air, for the touch of Holland’s spring rain along its enamel surfaces. The dentist has a struggle with it, finally having to break it into pieces in order to pull it out in bloody bits. It’s one of those bitter leave-takings that leave the bereft only exhausted and unable to rise to any sentiment.

My dentist quietly offers her condolences, and pats my hand with hers, encased in latex. She gives me gauze, and she gives me pain-killers, and she issues kind cautions in my healing. I must not take anything hot or cold; I must not spit.

Outside is the same spring day as bloomed an hour before, but of course advanced by that one crucial step on the clock, shadows grown and light spent. I have left behind my several milligrams. I have emerged with my wound. It’s odd to consider how humans can voluntarily enter into transactions that wound, can submit to injury, armed only with the logic that it is the right thing to do. We make friends of the people who habitually administer this pain. It’s unusual.