Travelogue 575 – September 2
The Never Waiting

Here the river turns south, and so does the bike path beside it, and one has for the space of five minutes a privileged perspective of the city. The river Maas itself is very wide here, and the surface placid. A boat or two will be plying the waters, ferrying goods or ferrying tourists. Scanning west, one sees the buildings of downtown on either side of the river. One sees the tower and strings of the Erasmus Bridge. Looking south, the city continues along the banks, on the far bank down to the tall minarets of the Essalam Mosque and the lights of the Feyenoord Stadion. On the north bank, there is the green grass of a park beside the river. And there is the Woudestein campus of Erasmus University.

During the summer the campus was a peaceful place, warm stone set around a reflecting pool. The streets nearby were shaded by rows of full trees. There was a feeling of space and air.

But this is a week of terrible consequence. Vacations are over. Workers have streamed back into town. Students are back. They have gathered in lively crowds at schools and university buildings all over town. The streets are crowded. The bike paths are dangerous.

This evening, the Erasmus campus is full of heat and noise. A temporary stage has been erected on the terrace above the pool, and anonymous bands are covering pulsing pop songs. Crowds are concentrated in formations in front of booths set up to vend food and beer. I have to thread a slow progress through these crowds to reach my appointed place.

I am meeting with the theatre group. We are working on a play. Many of the actors are instructors at Erasmus or next door, at the Hogeschool. I’m directing the play. It’s a silly farce by an American, about a disastrous production of Macbeth. We started rehearsals in the spring, and now we pick them up again. We have two months until show time.

We retire to one of the two student bars on campus after rehearsal. The chaos has not abated. The music acts are still pounding out their beats on the temporary stage. The bar is full, mobbed by young people devoting the evening to drink. They are on a mission to blot out the native intelligence that brought them to this prestigious university. They bring a commendable singe-mindedness to the task. I’m reminded of many of my own performances during university days. I had a talent for this activity myself, back in the day. The kids are shouting and singing songs and laughing. None of it is remotely original. And that is the beauty of ritual: to the participants it all feels new.

I am going to have a dream later. In this dream, I travel in time, back to my freshman year in college. I’m attending a meeting, but I’m far too distracted to participate. Traveling in time is much like traveling in space. One is far too engaged by the sights, sounds, and smells of, say, Rome, to attend to the everyday. In the dream, I’m aware that I’ve traveled in time, so I’m hypnotized by the familiarity of everything, and I’m marveling at the possibilities.

The dream arises from my visit to the university campus during the students’ revels, during the start-up of the school year. But it will also be encouraged by the movie before bedtime. Menna and I watch Terminator II, Arnold returning to the 90s as the redeemed and redeeming hero, Linda Hamilton all buff and muscling her way out of a mental hospital to save her son. The three of them are chased by a new class of Terminator, the melting man who runs like a machine.

Time as a pliable medium, a substance we swim through, perhaps with some individual volition: it doesn’t seem to have been a concept general to the human imagination. Time travel as a device seems, but for a few strange early exceptions, a nineteenth-century invention. Maybe it required a more mobile society. Shakespeare, model of social mobility in his era, had nothing to say about time machines. The frame of a time machine provides unique opportunities for satire and edification. It can warn us (Wells & Dickens), lampoon the past or the present (Twain).

But modern narratives tend to focus on the power dynamic in time travel. Owning time is owning an advantage, at least if the hero/villain has traveled backward, (as opposed to the lonely prospect of traveling forward into the unknown.) Power seems to be the keynote to nearly every production of pop culture these days. Is that because America more or less owns pop culture, just at a time when America suffers a crisis of faith in its own power?

In my own static and unyielding time, I set out for home from the Erasmus campus. Now the city along the river is outlined in lights against the night sky. It’s a new city, a night city. The same lights are dancing among the waters of the river, like reflections in a dream. Returning students are roaming in packs. I have to dodge the front wheel of one zealous novitiate, who is impressing the ladies in his group by riding only on his back wheel. Theirs is the power of timelessness. They have burst free from anxious chronologies. They trample pasts and futures underneath the tires of their vrijwielen.

Travelogue 574 – August 31
The Experience Waiting

There are no more signs today than on any other day that autumn is coming, but the premonition washes through me like a wave of gratitude.

When you leave the house early on a Sunday morning, the sky opens up above in silence. The Dutch sky gives few clues to the experience waiting on the bike ride.

As has been true for weeks, you can’t tell by the Dutch sky whether your lot is to be sun or wind or rain, even during the course of a twenty-minute bike ride. Will it be the patch of blue sky to the north, or will it be the clouds gathered in the south, holding their portions of rain?

As it happens, today I will have both. Even as the sun touches me, as I’m pushing the cycle onto the bike path, there is also a drizzle hanging in the air. As I’m passing beside the peaceful Schie River, I see the stippling effect on the glinting surface of the water.

The lights past the bridge are blinking yellow. They only do that on Sunday mornings, when the city can spare only an indifferent glance for the early risers. It has spent itself on the previous night. You watch for bottle glass on the bike paths.

Farther down the road, the police are blocking off a length of street with quiet lights turning on their car tops. The police themselves are standing together and chatting pleasantly. Their job, it seems, has been to figure out why there’s a little black car perched on the street’s meridian, windshield shattered and wheels wrenched off their axles. There seems to be no urgency to solving the puzzle.

One kilometer more and I’m at the central station. There is one man standing alone in the great plaza facing the station. He is turning slowly with his phone in camera mode held high. I only notice then that the drizzle has resolved into an uncertain haze.

I have been underground. I have locked my bike up in the ramps there, in the echoing concrete chamber dedicated only to bicycles. There are thousands of them, lined neatly on two levels. Somewhere there is one other person parking. I hear the chain rattling against the rack.

There were mornings last week with more of an autumnal chill in the air. Summer has made an unassuming return, slipping quietly back into the city, with a breath that is humid and mildly fragrant with grass and with old fruit.

I am crossing behind the man with the camera, safely outside the scope of his present shot. I’m wishing suddenly for more space than the square can offer. I’m wishing for the space of a cold beach.

It is only the hush of a Sunday morning, maybe most grave, maybe most light of days. Maybe the germ of the week. You hear the cry of a season inside it. It awakens proper gratitude. It is like the glimpse of gears inside a terrible machine. It’s a kind of comfort.

There’s a couple who pass at a brisk pace, a red-haired chihuahua frisking at their feet, always underfoot. The man trails a suitcase on wheels behind him. They are excited to be in motion.

Travelogue 573 – August 12
The Smithy Revolution

Revolution! Imagine what the ambitious young Peter Abelard might have thought. As popular as he was, followed around the muddy streets of Paris by hundreds of pupils eager for his words, he could only have been a name among theologians and philosophers, who spread his reputation by word of mouth, or occasionally by lending out a precious, hand-copied manuscript.

What if Abelard, king of words, had known Gutenberg, the goldsmith who, some three hundred years later, changed the intellectual world forever? Even that Abelard speaks to us now, after almost a millennium, is largely thanks to Herr Gutenberg. Together, they would have conspired to all sorts of dangerous ambitions.

After Gutenberg’s revolution, humanity speaks across time. Generations pass their wisdom on, and each generation adds to it. The pool of knowledge grows, as does the percentage of humanity that can access it.

Abelard’s revolution, if he had been given access to a printing press, might have looked a lot like Luther’s. Both men were brilliant in debate, and both were intolerant of opposing opinions. There is some paradox in that. It is probably better that the revolution was a tinker’s revolution and not a philosopher’s. There is something analogous to Abelard’s theory of ethics, separating intent and action. Here we separate the medium from the content. As it was, Gutenberg had no more ambitious agenda than to make more Bibles. We should be thankful for his nobility, or for his lack of imagination.

The very neutrality of the delivery system worked toward literacy’s benefit, creating access to literature of every stripe, and providing the incentive to literacy that reformed all society. Reading is not genetic. It must be taught, and -- as we are learning in Ethiopia -- there is little incentive to the task without materials to read. Efficient knowledge transfer needs the raw materials. The printers have provided it. Revolution!

Following in Gutenberg’s footsteps, the printers became workmen, technicians, artisans. They formed firms, formed guilds, and thoroughly commercialized the operation. They prospered. They received commissions from kings. They built urban manors.

There may be no better place to see that than at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp. The museum was once a house, a house facing the Vrijdag Market in Antwerp, a house for the Plantijn and Moretus families, and for their family business, a business that survived three hundred years. The firm was founded by Christoffel Plantijn in the middle of the sixteenth century. He was not only a printer-publisher of quality but had a canny instinct for survival during turbulent times, when Belgium was embroiled in the Eighty Years War, when Antwerp, the richest city in Europe, became a pawn in the tug of war between the Dutch and the Spanish. Plantijn managed to become printer for a royal Bible project, and leveraged this into status as Philip II’s ‘Architypographus Regii’, printer of royally sanctioned liturgical books. In the next generation, the business was passed to Christoffel‘s son-in-law, Jan Moretus. It remained in the Moretus family until they gifted the house to the city in the mid-nineteenth century.

The first reason to visit the museum is to see the two oldest surviving printing presses, dating back to around 1600. They are placed in the preserved workshop, where the printing took place, where letters were set and pages printed. It would have been a crowded, noisy, and chaotic room in its time, its centuries of time, having the capacity to print something like 2,000 pages per day. Now it has the silence appropriate to a museum, and it’s left to the imagination to sense the overwhelming roar and stink, among more than a dozen workers, that it took to produce a book.

Equally fascinating are the quieter rooms. One worth mentioning is old Christoffel‘s office, small as a modern closet, and almost as dark, preserved in its sixteenth and seventeenth century atmosphere, with wooden beams and walls lined with rare gilded leather. Here, the money was kept and counted. One can also visit the humble room where the proofreaders worked. There is little to see here but their desks, but learning about their work, one realizes how profoundly deep the reservoirs of intellect that were gathered in these printing houses. The houses may have been organized according to profit models, but there is no doubt that they effectively operated as centers of culture and learning, taking the place of the monasteries of Abelard’s day. The editors had to be prepared to apply themselves to works on a variety of academic topics, in any numbers of languages, modern and ancient. I managed to spot some letters cast from the Ge’ez, or historical Ethiopian, alphabet, among the boxes of preserved letters for the presses.

In a room next to Christoffel’s office, one sees portraits of Lipsius, renowned Renaissance humanist, friend to the founder of the house, and star in the firm’s first stable of published authors. In another room, one sees copper plates for illustrations designed by Mr. Rubens, friend to another, later patriarch of the family, one Balthasar Moretus.

Lastly, there is the patrician house itself, an architectural monument to status among the great business families of Antwerp. There is an interior courtyard, and set among the bricks walls are carvings of the family logo and busts of family notables. The two floors of the house are furnished with the self-indulgent complacency of success, commissioned portraits, fine furniture, tapestries, extensive libraries, a map room with man-sized globes, damask coverings. Goldsmiths as the arbiters of academia, goldsmiths bunking in the manor house; here’s the look of the revolution.

Travelogue 572 – August 7
Capital
Part Four

It’s another night in front of the TV. The Rocky series continues. Apollo Creed has retired. Rocky has been a model champ, taking on almost all comers. But there’s a fierce new challenger. He has the eye of the tiger.

There’s an ambivalence to the sky outside my window of the little salon, my refuge in loneliness. The humidity seems ready to turn. It might rain. The steady heat may well leak from the sky. Has the time of rains come? That’s always a decent wager in the Netherlands.

When it rains in movies, it is a call from high in the atmosphere for conflict and introspection. There should be some key exchange of dialogue in the street, characters exposed to the weather. Someone walks home, hands in pockets, in melancholy and uncertainty.

I’m wondering how Stallone sees himself in the history of cinema – as his latest oeuvre, Expendables III, hits theatres in Europe. I often wonder how artists describe their careers to themselves. Are there two camps, gathered round two replies to the critics? ‘It’s a job,’ says one. ‘They don’t get it,’ says the other. Maybe there’s a third, those who disavow grand narratives. The artist tries for greatness, gets there once or twice. The rest if fluff. Maybe Stallone just shrugs and says, ‘Hey, I wrote Rocky.’

And so, on a humid European summer evening, I’m reminded of a stretch of Texas desert, dry space broken open, revealing miles and miles of nature’s lazy design in rock. It’s still, and all is quiet, except for a few spare tones from a slide guitar. The notes don’t emanate from an earthly source, so they aren’t subject to the breezes or the vagaries of dimension. They come from the world of the film-maker, and so they seem part of the arch of heaven. There’s a man walking across the desert. We are given a man in a desert. We are given a story.

It’s a tenuous thread of story, a man wandering the desert, a victim of his passion for a woman. But any story is only as good as its telling. This story was picked up by French and German producers, was captured in a screenplay by Sam Shepard, was directed by Wim Wenders, was accompanied by music by Ry Cooder, and was acted out by a fascinating mix of 80s stars, character actors Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell, with model and Polanski protégé, Nastassja Kinski. A young boy named Hunter Carson turns in a great performance as … a young boy.

The film moves slowly, even meditatively. The story is the telling. The story is desert space; it’s an airport in L.A.; it’s downtown Houston. Just like Rocky, the story must succeed in mood as much as in plot. The narrative turns on long, dramatic dialogues between Stanton and Kinski. She’s behind glass and he is shrouded in anonymous darkness.

‘Paris, Texas’ won the Palme d'Or in 1984. In 2014, it’s enjoying an obscure little revival at Le Champo Theatre in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The theatre itself is a small piece of film history, built in 1938 and being a favorite among Parisian students and cinephiles. In its day, it has served for premieres for directors like Marcel Carné and Jacques Tati. Now it is known for its retrospectives.

Stallone has been to France – most recently, riding through Cannes on a Soviet-era tank with his ‘Expendables’ co-stars. So he must know what film means to the French. They have good reason for their affection. Cinema can be said to have been born here, with the invention of the cinematographe by the tinkering Lumiere brothers. The brothers were heirs to a family photography studio in Lyon, freed by their father’s retirement in 1892 to play with moving pictures. In 1895 they presented an exhibition of short films at the Salon Indien in Paris, in an event commonly heralded as the birth of the art form. Ironically, the Lumieres eventually decided there was no future in film and went on to become innovators in color photography.

Until the First World War, France continued to play a leading role in film, led by such characters as Georges Méliès, the Pathé brothers, Léon Gaumont, and Alice Guy-Blaché, the first female film-maker. It was only during the war that American film moved to California, and started picking up the role in production that it would hold through the rest of the century, filling the gap left by the warring Europeans.

After our film, Menna and I stopped at Le Reflet across the street, a humble little bar with some notoriety of its own, an old watering hole for film lovers and film makers. The signs of its history are the film posters on the walls. I’m studying the Bruce Lee above our table. Was he the first Expendable? Would he have ridden a tank into Cannes? Why not?

On TV, Rocky takes his beating, the blood sacrifice of the hero whom destiny has called to win. The summer sky contains itself, holding in its rains for another day. After the victory, I can turn off the TV. I could take a walk. I could stay lying here and watch the color of dusk change outside my window. It’s summer, the season of idylls and daydreams. Maybe I’ll stay and throw my dreams of boxing and theology onto the wall, pacing ghostly Parisian avenues across the deserts of the Lone Star State. It’s all one, the world title belt on a dancing Abelard, Latin perorations intoned by Burgess Meredith, a taste of wine under the timeless sky of the Contrescarpe, the sound of the adversary’s cheek hitting the mat. We have won, and all is right once again.

Travelogue 571 – August 6
Capital
Part Three

And there we were, listening to klezmer. We were having one last coffee for the day, sitting together among the banks of outdoor tables at the café facing the square. We had spent a day wandering among the shadows of centuries past, and we were resting at a café on the Place de la Contrescarpe. We were having a last coffee for the day, as the sun found its place among the western roofs above the Place. We were listening to two musicians who were making the rounds among the hundreds of seats facing the square that is not a square, but the irregular shape described by generations of ancient traffic emerging together from a variety of directions. There were two musicians, dressed with the delicate care of old hobos, one on trumpet and one on clarinet, the cases for the instruments at their feet. The melodies might have played themselves, so well-rehearsed by the long summer days. Occasionally one horn trailed off as the musician behind it made the rounds among the audiences, holding forth his soiled cap for coins. He moved from café to café, among the half dozen or so that encircled the historic square.

And this is what I can daydream about on solitary evenings while my wife is away. The sky in Zuid-Holland is a gentle summer consistency, humid and stirred by mild and cool breezes. I’ve muted the TV while Rocky works up a scene change on a commercial break.

Rocky is muttering in my ear with the sincerity of tireless youth, saying every fight is a good fight. ‘You know, you put up your gloves. Like this. That’s right. You go the distance.’ And I haven‘t even lifted the mute. He is a spirit of fortitude, a companion in solitude.

We have discovered the Place de la Contrescarpe twice. And each time, we have stopped for a coffee at one of the cafes facing the fountain in the square. The first time, we had descended from the Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, having emerged from the law students’ gate at the Sorbonne and passed beneath the sad height of the Panthéon, covered as it is these days by a white trash bag and scaffolding, past the celebrated university library and to the lovely and unique façade of the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, where Saint Geneviève herself lies buried. We had entered and reviewed the beautiful stained glass. We had moved on, among the narrow streets of the district, stopping in front of the residences of ghost Joyce and ghost Hemingway.

It’s the Latin Quarter, named for the language of poets and lecturers. And the writers have remained loyal through the centuries.

Stallone has forgotten his Italian. His cousins have forgotten their Latin. He’s composed his stories in the language of a new place called Philadelphia. The story is a morality tale, how losing is winning. He wins an Oscar for the screenplay.

The second time we arrived at the Place de la Contrescarpe, we have been walking south, returning along the Rue Mouffetard, famous clutter of shops and market stalls. We have stopped in cheese shops to count the types of cheese, and to swim in the scents. The name Mouffetard comes from mouffle, Old French for stink. But it’s not the stink of cheese. Rather it comes from the work of skinners, tanners, and tripe butchers by the river Bièvre at the foot of the hill.

The jumble of tiny shops – Orwell wrote of the Rue Mouffetard, ‘. . . a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching toward one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse’ – has led Menna to remark, ‘Now I feel like I’m in France.’

And the writers have remained loyal. Hugo and Balzac honor the area in books. If you go back far enough, you find Rabelais drinking at the Maison de la Pomme de Pin, among the university students looking for cheap wine. Rewind further, and you will find the poet Villon engaging in remarkably similar activities, when the Place de la Contrescarpe was no place, but a muddy meadow outside the gates of the city, where teamsters gathered for business and for pleasure.

I reach further, and I imagine it in the time of our tender-hearted intellectual, young Peter Abelard, who described himself as peripatetic, lecturing as he strolled among the open spaces that undoubtedly described the landscape on this side of the montagne. That he taught while he walked is probably as much a fiction as the one that had Aristotle teaching while he strolled the groves of the Lyceum. More likely he found some church or abbey to host his ‘school’. But I bet he did walk, and I bet plenty of wide-eyed pupils did follow him down the road. Maybe they bought him his wine at the roadside tavern that would mark the spot of the Maison de la Pomme de Pin, just to hear him dissect the ideas of the respected scholars at Notre Dame, cruelly and capably discrediting them and their thoughts. Some of the students could probably afford the bar tab, being second and third sons of nobility, seeking their fortunes in the powerful medieval church.

I’m thinking the young scholar Stallone, scribbling away in obscurity in the mid-70s, might have had a ghostly ally in Peter Abelard. In his Ethics, Abelard contends that moral value resided not in the action, but in the intention. This was a novel contention at the time, to judge by the charges of heresy brought against him. How novel is hard to say. What smithies grumble in the taverns often takes centuries to find its way into philosopher’s tracts. Once there, the most prosaic thought become fodder for political battle. Philosophy is a game of contention, and no one knew that better than Abelard, who was a difficult man to live at peace with. He was too sharp, too smart, and much too ready to prove it. He challenged every teacher he had, and often publicly.

Philosophers are fighters. Channel Seven has been airing all the Rocky movies, and then afterward all the Rambo films. I don’t have the stamina for Rocky and Rambo both, but I catch the beginnings of each one of the Rambo stories for nostalgia’s sake. This is the Stallone that we’ve become more familiar with over the years, laconic and sullen. Stallone of the Rocky era was a boy, eager and sentimental and even verbose. He had trusting puppy eyes then, not the staring and judging eyes of the elder prophet.

Both Stallone characters are innocents, and Stallone’s business has been the writing of moral fables. Whether boxing in Philly or shooting bad guys in Burma, the protagonist of any of the fables is an innocent at war with circumstance. The world is intrusive and demanding. It enters into life of the hero in the guise of some relentless antagonist. They aren’t always bad guys. In the older films, they are just people struggling with their petty ambitions, the redneck town sheriff, the vain world champ. The antagonist appears, and the hero responds to the challenge with righteous action: persistence, honest effort, and generosity.

In later movies, the casualties add up. If intention trumps action, I suppose the body count becomes only a detail. That is the story of action films in the 80s. What counts is the moral.

And this is where the hero of ‘Vanilla Sky’ fails. He kills no one, not even himself, as it turns out, but his intentions are muddled. He is weak, and therefore unforgivable. Morality tales require clear decision and resolute action. It’s acceptable to set aside ten minutes in the script for self-doubt, but ultimately the hero’s instincts are sure.

Morality tales are mirrors, and humans love mirrors. Religion serves morality, and religious art depicts angels in human form. The Bible is parable and story. Even the atheist has a strict code, and his clan has heroes. It’s not the after-life that motivates morality. It’s a keen sense of our own fragility. We have always been animals running in groups, measuring our chances at survival by status in the group. Morality is a code for trust. Survival depends on accurate readings of behavior. Behavior is guided by morality. Rambo may be a killer, but we know very well who he’s going to kill.

In any case, killing was on holiday in the Place de la Contrescarpe that day. We felt entirely safe and relaxed in that assembly of hundreds in a Paris square. The code of that group was in service of an idea called ‘summer’. Our behavior conformed to a code called ‘vacation’. It’s perhaps the highest form of civilization yet. God looked down upon us, as He moved His sun into position to set, and He was pleased. We were philosophers. We were free of both intention and action.

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.