Travelogue 644 – August 24
Vinyl in the Desert
Part Three

Menna and I have taken a bike ride. We have ridden into nearby Schiedam. We are resting now at the nameless bar I’ve inducted into my circle of watering holes. It’s a nice summer spot, with a terrace outside, nestled in a small sloping plaza among the buildings of old Schiedam. At the top of the slope is a narrow shopping street, dreary in its iteration of storefront windows, reminiscent of scenes in England, where streets run on in two-storey monotony. This little space opens up suddenly to one side of the shopping street, and once upon a time it was just a sweeping brick slope down to the curving alleyways below, where small houses squeeze together, shoulder to shoulder. I’ve seen photos from a hundred years ago, people standing awkwardly, the way they did for those old pictures, standing among the same buildings. There is no terrace, but an open and undeveloped space.

One of those houses is now the bar, and the slope has been excavated for the terrace. The patio sits on its disc of concrete balanced in between, a few steps up to the road, a few steps down to the bar. There are placed there the standard European outdoor table sets, with umbrellas and the fake cane chairs. Sitting there, I can see the roof and spire of Town Hall rising above the steepled roofs of the houses on their way down the slope. When I face that direction, the used bookstore is behind me. The shop occupies the bottom floor of a nice little art deco construction with curving face in yellow brick. The bookshop owner sits among his piles of books, looking uncertain. He asks what it is you’re looking for, gestures an invitation to browse. He parks carts of old paperbacks against the railing overlooking the terrace. Across the plaza from the bookstore is a nice old building, straddling the juncture of the shopping street above and the alleyways down below. There’s a drop of almost two meters from storefront on the shopping street down to the other street below. I like to study the building from the side, figuring out how they solved the drop in altitude. There’s not quite enough of a drop to add another complete floor. It’s clear that there must be a break between levels front and back, and I try to imagine where that happens. There are no telling lines among the brick of the exterior, tracing floors or stairs. It’s hard to tell from the placement of the windows on the side and the back, which seem placed rather by whimsy than by plan, small and staggered on the side, long and low in the back, making it look like a shady student flat on the alley. It’s an odd complement to the tidy children’s clothing shop in front.

I start to tell Menna about my encounter with the 70s in the morning, and by proxy, with my brother and his family in their youth. This one song, I say, it makes me think of that time. She doesn’t know the music I’m referencing. She assumes I’m frustrated by that. But I find it refreshing that someone doesn’t have the same song catalogue in her head. ‘Imagine taking a long trip, but everywhere you travel you hear Amharic. You’re in a hotel in Peru, and a man from China is speaking Amharic with the German woman. Then you notice they’re playing Aster in the hotel bar. How would you feel?’ But that’s something totally different, she says. That’s true. There is no very effective analogy to be made.

There are seats and tables placed just before the entrance of the bar. This is apparently where the regulars prefer to hang out. There are two guys passing a guitar back and forth, trading off on picking familiar rock riffs. They are both over fifty, and looking like they were once the town’s aspiring rock stars. One is tattooed and bug-eyed, glancing around conspiratorially, grinning sarcastically. He wears flared bell-bottoms with flaps sewn in in the colours of the Union Jack. The other looks like a long-haired Bill Nighy after years on Skid Row. He has the slightest soul patch, and one thin line for a moustache. He might just have woken. They start quietly spending as much time smoking and staring as they do playing the guitar. They strum quietly, without finishing more than a phrase.

The bar crowd doesn’t mind, and beer emboldens the two. They sing a few lines. A few regulars respond, adding voices. The songs are recognizable. Everyone knows at least a few of the words. Everyone but Menna. She’s enjoying, while also uncomfortable. It’s hard to say what makes her more uncomfortable, everyone singing snatches of songs she doesn’t know or the increasing volume. It’s not surprising that Menna finds white Dutch culture intimidating. They are loud and abrupt. It’s a culture of big, clumsy uncles.

‘My baby, she’s got it. I’m your Venus ….’ They’re laughing, and the guitar changes hands. The young bartender wants to showcase his opening to ‘Stairway to Heaven’. The old rock stars are supportive, give him some quiet applause, take back the guitar.

They play a familiar riff. ‘Ground control to Major Tom,’ one sings, and people are turning from the terrace to sing along. Another haunting song from the 70s. We’re lost in space, and alone.

I’m thinking again of the morning’s encounter with the 70s, time collapsing, the old hopes and sentiments discovered so close at hand. The line between two points in biography doesn’t always pass through the events separating them, but through space. Nothing has been done, no progress charted. One senses the long time again, uncompromised.

‘Here am I sitting in a tin can,’ one intrepid bar fly continues, and he gets a laugh for his efforts. Everyone knows a line or two. I’m marvelling again how unifying are the small tokens of Anglo-American pop culture. It’s wonderful. And then it’s disappointing. Sometimes I’d rather truly be set adrift in space. Maybe it’s what I wanted to say to Menna, that being American is to occasionally feel cheated of the sensation of being lost. It’s a great privilege for the traveller.

Travelogue 643 – August 23
Vinyl in the Desert
Part Two

The café is in a 70s mood this summer. It’s nice for me. I came of age among these songs. I believe the 70s are a classic period for pop music. The forms birthed in the 60s find full expression in the 70s. And what entirely new form have we seen since? All the tired formats of 2015 were fresh in the 70s, from rap to R&B to punk to metal. I can’t imagine what the pretty young toughs next door experience when they hear stuff from the 70s. I’m sure they nod their heads in a form of recognition. Kids have always been tempted to boast of their encyclopaedic knowledge of pop music. But what is the aesthetic experience for them? They clearly prefer their Hello Kitty dance beats. What kind of evolution of aesthetics does that represent? Trace it back to granddaddy Barry Gibb? I don’t know.

It’s nice for me that the 70s is popular in Holland. Different cultures have their own music. Different cultures have their tastes in Western music. In Ethiopia, there’s an appetite for R&B and reggae. In Holland, tastes run more toward old rock and soul.

Now it’s Elton John offering his 1972 hit, ‘Rocket Man’, a song that never fails to trigger sentiment in me. The summer I connected with that song lives in me through the song. It was not 1972, but it was still the same decade. I was visiting my brother in Tacoma, Washington, where he was based while he was happily flying big planes through the sky, maybe for the Air Force, maybe for American Airlines. I forget which it was now.

I was running amid the lush green of Washington State, already a marathoner at heart, never lacking the energy to attack long roads. I was young, in the middle of high school, and even younger than my years, daring to entertain phantoms of optimism. I had a job untangling hope from sadness. My childhood had been a dance with tragedy, Daddy something of a brute, and Mom beaten into long, lingering apathy and sadness.

Washington had forests! That was novelty for me, having grown up in dry Southern California. It was so green, and the green was everywhere. I loved it. I was charting my miles during the summer. I wanted to be a champion during the coming school year. I was a teenager. I was learning how to want things fiercely. Desire is an easy lesson. Still ahead was the long road learning to manage desire, to live with it. I’m building my endurance, day by day.

At my brother’s house, I listen to ‘Rocket Man’ with a kind of studious intensity. There’s an open-handed guitar chord and then the rising synthetic tone like lift-off. The refrain starts again, ‘And I think it’s going to be a long, long time.’

There’s a poignancy to the statement, even standing alone. There’s a longing inside it, and my marathoner mind senses it’s the long time itself that the space man longs for. This is the romance of the road being birthed in my young mind.

The moment survives for me. I can still picture the salon of my brother’s house, the shag carpets, the stereo system. The windows opening to views of green trees. There are vestiges of thoughts in the memory, like ghost forms. I’m already thinking about writing. There’s a plot for a novel buzzing around my head, set during the American Revolution, something heroic, something set among green East Coast forests, looking like Washington forests. The story must feature Native Americans, must follow them into the shadows of the trees.

I sense the boy’s ambitions, the anticipations. I’m thinking about new school year. I’m thinking about the cross country season. I’m thinking about girls. My brother and his wife are starting their lives. A baby is on the way. All this is a mystery. How does one arrive at a place like this in life? I have no idea.

I’ll play the song one more time. The music is composed to open out open space when the refrain begins, ‘I think it’s going to be a long, long time.’ It captures a sensation so perfectly, a sense of surmounting a long plateau and the sky opening out before me. It’s as though I were created to travel a long ways. There’s no way to understand that.

Travelogue 642 – August 22
Vinyl in the Desert
Part One

It seems as though there’s a lot of 70s going on at my café lately. Is it a summer flavour? I’m hearing songs reminding me of my childhood. It stops me, evokes something, memories and their feelings.

As I get older, I realize just how universal music is not. I can write this after a night of listening involuntarily to the tunes of today’s youth. My young neighbours have a taste for a sound that I can find no sympathy for whatsoever. It sounds to me like synthetic dance beats for pre-teens, looping with vapid insistence. ‘So fun, so fun,’ the songs posit with a kind of Hello Kitty creepy charm. My head spins with it. Outside the neighbours’ apartment are an assortment of young men dressed in thuggish themes, nodding their heads with sleepy eyes, so self-consciously tough they can barely move. And this is the music they play tough to. I find it baffling, an image that has so far overshot comic that it becomes a kind of Zen riddle. In this brave new world, Sartre is the old country bishop, his notions of the Absurd quaint.

My father says, ‘It all sounds the same.’ The same beat, the same guitar noise. The same boyish, undeveloped voices. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ he parodies the Beatles, not even aware how dated his mocking reference is. My eldest brother has hair to his shoulder. He dances in his room to rock and roll. Vinyl is the new flag.

At home we’re forced to listen to Dad’s music, the happy swagger and Italian voicings of the Rat Pack and their ilk, the gruff, atonal musings of Johnny Cash, the excesses of Tijuana Brass. At this distance, his music has gained a prestige he would have appreciated. I don’t remember disliking any of it. But it was suspect, being Dad’s music. I didn’t understand my brother’s music. I was too young. His passion about it was also suspect. I would have to re-discover music in my own time.

The music Dad despised and my brother loved now forms a canon, surviving the mixed feelings about the generation that produced it, surviving even the tide of forgetfulness. Kids sing along to protest songs without one complete notion about Vietnam, unable to pick out Nixon from a line-up, as likely as not to believe your stories of how Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King shook hands once at the Chicago Democratic Convention. They hear the opening harmonics in ‘For What It's Worth’ by Buffalo Springfield, and they start in right away with the words. I sense that the 60s has been distilled to a dozen images in most minds, blurred images like old colour TV, images that reference hippies and civil rights and protesters holding up the peace sign. But all images serve the music. In the popular imagination, the 60s is music. Vinyl was currency.

Music makes me think of the soul. It has the same characteristics, being insubstantial and being fleeting. It leads one to religious ideas. A good song passes too quickly, leaves an idea, makes one wonder about a God that allows so much beauty to pass.

I live too much in Time, a place like a sandy desert, where all trace of passage is blown clean in short order. I find a beautiful melody to be a challenge to the state of nature. It’s like a crystal suspended in mid-air for just a moment. When it vanishes it does so with a question. Why?

Is there really a deity so free with Creation, running through Time like a maenad, throwing blossoms in every direction, and running on while the blossoms wilt? How many songs have been forgotten? How many things of beauty burned?

Travelogue 641 – August 8
But They Built the Pyramids
Part Two

‘How about that beer?’ The three of us reclaim our bikes, Oscar labouring over the locks with intensity.

The beer is only a kilometre from our last stop, where we admired the heavy waters of the river that made Rotterdam king of commerce. We turn wobbly wheels toward the west, riding along the tram tracks of the Number Seven toward the yacht harbour and Het Park, until we reach the old bar and eetcafe, the Loos. We settle in at a table by the window, and we study the menu. Carolina loves England; we’ll order fish and chips.

I’m just back from Ethiopia, and I hear from Zuzana that her husband Oscar and her daughter Carolina are touring Holland and Belgium. The two have escaped from the annual trip to Oscar’s and Zuzana’s native Slovakia in order to see more of Europe. I tell her they have to call me. They have to stop in Rotterdam.

Before Amsterdam, they travelled to London. That was Carolina’s favourite. She says she will leave Canada at first opportunity. She will live in London. She will enjoy the fog and clouds. She will study somewhere where intellect is appreciated.

‘Carolina, can you check on the bikes?’ She stands, but I tell her I’m just joking. I’m indulging in new parent humour. Get-rid-of-the-kids humour. Not that I mind having Carolina around. In fact she is enjoyable company, making fun of her classmates in Canada, mimicking their broad and vapid American accents. She’s too smart. They’ve had to move her from the Catholic school, where the students used up most class time openly jeering their teachers.

Now she does her imitation of a British accent. She tells us the difference between Japanese and Korean pop music. She tells us the difference between Swedish and Norwegian. Oscar does an impression of a Russian bad guy in the movies.

Several rounds of excellent Belgian beers later, we succeed in convincing Carolina the bikes need checking on. We join her outside, and Oscar sets himself to the task of unlocking the cycles. He is studying each step of the process as though he were going to write a technical manual.

Our last stop on the tour is the Museum Park, where we coast in easy circles around the huge, paved skate park where Menna learned how to ride a bicycle. The sun has set and the dusk is settling over the buildings that surround the park. It’s a big sky, and looking up into it, I lean into long and free turns in the open space. I chase Carolina, and, listening to the bad counsel of the Belgian beer, I turn too sharply and make her fall. That was bad parenting. She’s fine, and Oscar shrugs. I lead away from the park, and back onto busy streets.

We’re returning the rental bikes at the Central Station. The man working the rentals was a Navy man. He travelled extensively in his youth. He’s seen Egypt and Peru and the Antilles.

‘We have nothing to complain about in Holland,’ he says. ‘But we complain.’ We smile. That’s life.

‘I’ve seen places where life is really hard,’ he says. ‘You see families in Peru. They have nothing. They live in shacks. But they smile. Here, well, we have everything, and we ….’ He puts on an exaggerated frown.

‘Egypt,’ he declares. ‘Have you seen the pyramids? Egypt was a great civilization. The center of the world. You should see it now.’

‘I have,’ I say.

‘You’ve never seen such poverty.’ He shakes his head. ‘How does that happen?’ He hands me the receipt.

‘We have nothing to complain about in Holland,’ he says. ‘Just the weather.’

It was beautiful today, though.

Travelogue 641 – August 7
But They Built the Pyramids
Part One

The man was in the Dutch navy when he was young. He travelled. He remarked when I knew my passport number by heart, didn’t need to pull the passport out in order to fill in his form. He knows what it’s like to be a traveller.

Now the old man works at the bicycle rental shop in the central train station. He is cheerful, and for a few minutes I envy him his job. ‘You need hand brakes or pedal brakes?’ He pantomimes the difference, in case his English isn’t hitting home.

I’m taking Oscar and his fourteen year-old girl out on a tour of Rotterdam. I knew Oscar and his wife back in my days in Slovakia, twenty years ago. The family is visiting Slovakia for the summer, but dad and daughter are breaking away, leaving mom and youngest daughter in Trencin.

It’s Holland. I insist we have to tour on bikes. Oscar is offering every excuse not to. ‘There’s plenty of public transit,’ he says. When the old man says there is a deposit required on each bike, Oscar shrugs his surrender, but I offer the cash. I have an ally in young Carolina. It sounds fun to her. They live in Canada now. There’s no time for anything but the auto there.

We push the bikes up the moving walkway to the open plaza in front of Central Station, and we’re ready. With a sigh, Oscar swings a leg over the bike.

It’s slow going. They pedal as though there were mountains to climb. They wobble a bit; they weave. They get in the way of other cyclists. But they are enjoying.

We make four stops on our lengthy circuit around Rotterdam. The first is to peek into the new Market Hall in the Blaak. The Blaak is the massive central square in old Rotterdam, where stand the famous cube houses, each positioned as though standing on one corner, windows tilted toward the ground or toward the sky.

The Blaak became the center of rebuilding the bombed city after the war, became a place to experiment with new architectural forms. In that spirit, a new building opened just last year across the plaza from the cube houses, the new Market Hall, a unique looking building, eleven storeys in the shape of a long archway, hollow inside and the interior filled with market stalls. The entire inside of the arch is painted with a very vivid mural of fruits and vegetables and flowers.

We take a lot of pictures, but it seems like the primary pleasure for Oscar is being off the bicycle. He also has fun figuring out the bike’s locks. There’s one lock mechanism governing two systems, one that closes a loop through the spokes at the top of the rear wheel, and the second a chain that locks with the same key. Oscar lavishes quite a bit of attention to locking the bicycle. It’s a puzzle. He is muttering, ‘We cannot lose this bicycle. Our friend has paid a deposit.’

Inside the Market Hall, he asks, ‘Is it time for that beer?’ I’ve promised him a beer stop. Not yet.

First we have to stop by the Maas, of course, where Carolina can take pictures beside the monument to the merchant marines fighting in WWII, the monument called the Bow for its grand design, the cutting edge of a ship’s bow breaking the waves; where we can admire the big Erasmus Bridge; where we can search among the flags along Boompjes Boulevard for Slovakia and Canada, reminding me of the way Tati and Menna searched for theirs a few weeks ago. It’s odd how flags awaken a sudden urge to identify oneself. There we are! Us. Canada. America. Ethiopia.

We look back over the waters of the big river. ‘Pretty.’ We nod. ‘Nice place.’ It is. ‘How about that beer?’

‘It’s not too bad, is it, old Rotterdam?’ the old man shrugs as he accepts our bicycles back. ‘Holland is not such a bad place. Nothing to complain about. Nothing but the weather.’ He smiles. ‘Just the weather.’

Travelogue 640 – August 6
Looking Up
Part Three

It’s a wonderfully entertaining view from the third-floor balcony of the Addis Ababa office, an absorbing diversity of detail, lively window onto the variegated particularity of things. The hills of Kebena and Arat Kilo offer multiple tree-lined horizons, buildings new and old struggling to rise into view. Prominent among them is the dome of the Kidhane Meheret Catholic Church in Kebena. Dotting the nearest hill are the tin roofs of the houses of our districts good citizens, their flimsy gates, made of the same tin as the roofs, open onto the curving dirt road directly below, the quirky little road that you only find by driving through to the back of the Oil Libya gas station. The road is often empty. When it’s not, when our neighbours walk by, their voices rise all the way to the top floor. The staff pause to listen and laugh. Every so often, our meetings are interrupted by the abrupt call of a guard dog or the perplexing call of some bizarre bird or the whining summons of the pedlars selling their mops and brooms or garlic and eggs. I can see down into the neighbouring yard. If there is a women there, she is doing laundry. If it’s a man, he’s doing an odd assortment of energetic exercises, shirtless and earnest.

I return into the third-floor conference room, and I’m greeted by the project staff, working out their seat arrangements, some carrying in more chairs, some sitting with eyes down and notebooks open in front of them. They are still laughing, but they will settle down. I’m enjoying the laughter.

I know this routine. We all do. This staff and I have worked together for several years now, some longer than others, some for five years and more. It’s a strange form of intimacy, the sharing of ritual formality inside a broader context of something that isn’t friendship, but is not too, too far from it. They become silent, and we start. The formality is painful for me. Questions go unanswered. I have to prompt over and over to get discussion. Suddenly everyone is shy. Voices drop to a whisper.

This is culture again, inserting itself into every context. Speech is governed by it. Translation can bridge the gaps in language, but can’t bridge cultures. Two cultures meet in something like a ritualized stage play. Everything about communication is governed by culture, volume, gesture, eye contact, indicators of emotion, routes to a topic and through it. The only moderating influence is compassion.

I want to return to the balcony. I feel like I haven’t looked enough. I always feel that way. I’m hungry. I want to see more, spend more time watching. And I want to look into the sky. I want to drink it in. Watching it all day, I would understand nothing of it. Some insightful person invented the word ‘sublime’ for this purpose.

There’s a kindness to their nature. Are the Ethiopes more civilized? I would say they are, in certain ways. We in the developed world have conflated civilization with prosperity for so long, it is little wonder we are so cynical. We applaud the gangsters, spiritual and temporal. They’re entertaining.

Codified behaviours are aesthetic choices, ultimately. They are broad aesthetic choices formed more or less democratically, even across generations, and then enforced by the aristoi, the betters in society, for the good of all. It saves time when we have some things already decided. It comes packaged as culture. It’s a comfort. When we encounter other cultures, we celebrate our own.

After the meeting, I’ll stand on the balcony, drinking in the light. What is sublime transcends culture.

Baby likes to look at the light. She will smile laughingly while staring at the orange light spilling from the top of the bedroom lamp onto the wall, as though there were a spirit cavorting there, making silly faces just for her.

On the day before my Ethiopian trip, Menna and her mother have left me outside with Baby while they enter the Metro station to re-charge their transport cards.

There are three women walking by, three middle-aged Latinas, who have disembarked from one tram or other and are on their way home. They walk in a loose formation, barely together, shouting to each other. They remark on the daddy with her girl. They follow Baby’s gaze up into the sky, as I have been doing.

One calls out to me, ‘Meisje?’ Is she a girl? Yes, I say, and the woman nods as though vindicated in some long debate.

Another of the women follows Baby’s gaze up and she says, ‘El cielo’, the sky. She makes a gesture that says, behold. And one of her friends says, ‘Los angelitos.’ Baby sees the angels in the sky. The three women split here at the stairs and walk off in three directions.

Mother and daughter are returning, walking across the plaza, crossing the tram tracks. ‘Look, here comes mommy,’ I say to Baby. But she’s still studying the sky.

Travelogue 639 – August 5
Looking Up
Part Two

The day starts in Ethiopia, and I stand in the courtyard of my house. I look for the doves who have been calling. There is one perched above, atop the telephone pole. She watches the neighbourhood with a twitching concern. There is enough sunlight, on a clear morning during rainy season, to highlight the iridescence among her feathers. She looks noble. She examines every corner of the neighbourhood from her perch on top of the splintering pole. I salute her. I thank her and her cohort of angels for the good weather on my first morning in Ethiopia.

Holland is another place where one has to be grateful for sunshine. The sun is shining on the morning before I leave for Ethiopia. My little family is travelling into town. We pause at the top of the stairs leading to the tram station. Batu and Menna need to add money to their transport cards. So they walk together toward the Metro station, and I’m left with the baby in the plaza.

Baby likes to look at light. She finds the lamp in the room, or the nearest window, and she studies it for long spells. Now she is looking up into the sky.

I follow her serious gaze. At northern latitudes, the sky is higher, as though we were closer to that field of blue at the equators and then the globe pulls away as it curves. It’s a child’s way of thinking.

I have a vague memory from my days as a baby, the curious sensations of near and far, like separating the two for the first time, weighing the difference. It’s like a dream. How babies puzzle all this out, I cannot say. There’s this feeling in my recollection of being taught. At some fundamental level, the conclusion is unavoidable, teaching and learning are coded into the experience of life. Maybe it’s a pedagogist’s way of seeing the universe, and somewhat facile. But how the notion of it leads into such vast spaces. While we chatter about Donald Trump’s latest gaffe, millions of babies are deciphering colour, sound, dimension, light and shadow.

And the sky. Do we ever decipher that? Do we settle for a metaphor? Even as we look into it every day, it defies codification, interpretation, quantification, or packaging as a concept. It’s not empty; it’s not full. It’s infinite. One looks into infinity that direction. One meditates the sky like one might the unconscious. The picture doesn’t resolve.

The dove takes flight, dropping toward the wall of the compound and then flapping noisily to escape gravity, to dart over the roofs of the neighbouring houses.

I have to get ready for work. I will retreat from the sky, from the unconscious into the confinement of the office and the duties of the conscious. We adults take on modest projects, comprised of the modest single tasks, lined up one after the other. Who will make this call? Who will collect this subset of numbers? Who will buy the pencils?

I call a meeting. The Ethiopes are gracious. They are slow. It takes a while for them to make their way to the conference room on the top floor. Fortunately there is a balcony there, beyond a sliding glass door. I can stand there, above the small courtyard in front of the building, where the children attending our library can play. I can look out over our street, a mere bend in the dirt road. Two young women walk slowly by, in traditional skirts topped by modern jackets, their hair pinned up so it makes their scarves point toward the sky. They are laughing with each other. They never look up, so they never see me watching them. One by one, my staff drifts in behind me, taking seats at the big table.

Travelogue 638 – August 4
Looking Up
Part One

It’s rainy season. The old house in Shiro Meda is damp and chilly. I stay in bed for a while after I wake. I went to bed so early that I’m awake long before I need to be. The light through the curtains is dim still, slowly gathering strength.

I spent the night before last on an airliner – taking off at very last light in Germany and landing in the first light of day in Ethiopia. I rested a few hours at home and spent the balance of the day at the office.

I lie in bed, and I listen to the sounds of the neighbourhood, the greetings of neighbours in the street outside, the calls of the doves in the yard. It’s rainy season, and the damp has insinuated itself into everything. You don’t readily escape it. Even the sheets feel a little damp when I move.

I’m up. When I pull back the curtain, I see that the skies are clear. That’s a nice surprise. I love the mornings in Ethiopia, the field of equatorial sky, an essence of peace.

When Mimi and I emerged from the airport terminal yesterday, the ground was wet from recent rain. The clouds were breaking apart. We were safe from rain until afternoon. Mimi is my sister-in-law. She is the one to meet me at the airport these days. We walk across the parking lot, among travellers ad taxi men, and I thank her for meeting me so early in the morning. It’s no problem, she insists. The graciousness of the Ethiopians is so refined, so natural, I could believe it: coming to the airport at dawn on a work day is no inconvenience at all.

(The play has many acts and many costume changes. The scenes trade locations indulgently, and there are too many characters to track. There are all sorts of themes to the script, but the words all seem to return, almost monotonously, to the one called ‘culture’. What is culture? Why are human societies so insistent on it? The audience might become weary of it.)

‘How is work, Mimi?’ Mimi is such a hard worker. She is always working, and she is always working in the most thankless positions. In her last job, she spent years standing between corrupt management and her ravaged budget. All that that earned her was abuse. The new job was going so well, but her boss quit suddenly, and she’s working overtime again. I was reading recently a glib piece about the curse of competence, and I was thinking of Mimi as I read it.

Mimi and I walk through the parking lot, and the taxi drivers ask if we need a taxi. She says no. She has already called Shimeles. He meets us at the entrance to the parking lot. I recognize him among a hundred other taxis, in his boxy blue little pug of a Lada, stickers in the windows, advertising Jesus and Chelsea, and the white tube-like fittings along the sides.

Language prevents us from trading lengthy greetings, but we enjoy seeing each other again. It’s been a long time. I’ve been in Europe seeing to Baby and Menna. Shimeles asks after Baby, and I am a shamelessly happy daddy. ‘She is beautiful.’

We drop Mimi off at her place of work, place of misery. We arrive at my house, splashing through puddles in the cobblestone and the mud. I walk down the temperamental slope toward my house, down the road paved with neither asphalt nor cobblestone still. Some of the boys recognize me. The key to the gate becomes stuck in the lock. The gate rattles as I wrestle with it. The dogs inside bark. I am home again. Another scene.

Travelogue 637 – July 31
Summer Reading

‘Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier, …’

It’s the last day of July. I have to remind myself it’s summer. It feels as though autumn began weeks ago. But no, it’s summer by the calendar.

The calendar says it’s Menna’s birthday. Baby seems to know. She’s in a good mood. She gets all limbs pumping, and she’s laughing. She’s making new sounds, a kind of gurgling dialogue. She looks at us, and she says. ‘Aaa-ooo.’ Since she’s half Ethiopian, we can call that her first word. ‘Ow’ is Yes in Amharic.

I’m leaving in a few days for Ethiopia. It will be my first trip away from Baby. I’m feeling the heartache of separation already.

I think instead about which books to pack. My summer reading has been diverse, from the frivolous to the serious, from mysteries to Hunter S. Thompson to biography. I’ve been reading about great politicians of the nineteenth century. That’s my idea of summer fun. First there was Bismarck. Now I’m reading about Gladstone and Disraeli, duelling British prime ministers in mid and late nineteenth century.

For the sake of expediency, I’ve chosen biographies written more for popular consumption, the kind in which authors veer suddenly away from the defining work of their subjects in favour of family gossip, Victorian celebrities, Victorian lifestyles, or Victorian sex. I learn more about their summer houses than their policies. I’d rather read about the policy. Perhaps that only reveals how sedate I’ve become. The drama I want is the parliamentary kind. Of course, Parliament in the nineteenth century was no placid tea party. Debates were fierce.

I’m coasting downhill on my bike, down the far side of the big bridge over the little River Schie, and I’m feeling the sting of the early morning chill. The calendar says summer, so I stubbornly dress in shorts. The weather of the day is written across the sky, a scrolling in vast circles of condensation, written in a generous looping hand, sets inside sets of clouds rolling across the sky still blue behind. The wind is in my face at once, at my back next. Seagulls are calling. It’s their kind of weather.

My backpack has all sorts of work inside. The important piece of cargo is, of course, the little computer, indispensable index of personal knowledge. I’ll set it up at the café, and I’ll devote a few of the day’s first hours to work. I also have space for the odd book and notebook. I have my dictionary, Nederlands-Engels. I will set ten minutes aside to browse the day’s paper, deciphering bits of text in the language of my hosts. It’s a good practice, good for the heart.

I wonder whether it’s all the fault of the authors that policy seems so shadowy and elusive. I realize how full career perspectives of the great politicians can be confusing. It seems the game is a steady renegotiation of position. The great coup of a parliamentary politician may consist of nothing more than choosing the right moment to surrender … and making a great speech about it.

Still, one theme does emerge. Parliament is battling over free trade. The nineteenth century sees the broad transition from economies based on ownership of land and protectionism to industry and trade. The great ministerial proponents of free trade, Robert Peel and William Gladstone, between them an influence on most of the period between Waterloo and the First World War, were both sons of the new order. Peel’s father was a textile manufacturer, and Gladstone’s a wealthy merchant and slave trader. They set an agenda that should be familiar to us in these days of austerity: cut taxes, cut budgets, cut tariffs.

Among those scarce strong oaks of policy, the politics sway like reeds in the wind. Members of Parliament reluctantly debate the ‘Eastern Question’, the insoluble issues of the grasping Russian Empire, the decaying Turkish one, and the Balkans in between; the nagging ‘Eastern Question’ that would ultimately drag the whole nineteenth century system down, like a tangling string caught in the machine and eventually choking it. In response to every crisis, the politicians improvise. Sometimes it’s treaties; sometimes it’s war. The solutions conform to the policy fashions of the moment, and are forwarded as bargaining chips in larger debates. I will trade you one punitive expedition against the Russians for one …

I’ve had my coffee. I trade the computer for the newspaper. One the cover is a story about Russia. It takes some labour, but the sentences do pull together. Dutch syntax is absurdly obscure, but there is a logic to it. And that’s the wonderful things about language. It has logic quite independently from the content of its sentences.

The Russian delegate to the U.N. rather dully votes Nay. The press captures his image. The story can describe but it can’t explain.

‘Ow,’ says Baby when I return home. And ‘Ow,’ I reply. It’s always Yes with my baby if it wins me a little smile.

Travelogue 636 – July 30
Summer Politics

‘How now, spirit! whither wander you?’ says Puck.

The headlines this morning in Holland are all about Russia. One paper has the photo of the Russian delegate voting in the U.N., raising his hand to say ‘Nyet’. Despite convincing evidence that pro-Russian troops in the Ukraine shot down a passenger flight over the Ukraine last summer, the Russians vote against renewing the investigation. The flight originated in Amsterdam, and many Dutch nationals died in the crash. The Russians say a UN tribunal would be ‘premature’ and ‘counter-productive’. Mr. Putin has never had the lightest touch.

It is still midsummer, though it can be hard to tell here in Holland. It’s become a summer of caprice. In the morning, the clouds are high and dramatic. Temperatures are below fifteen C, and the air is autumn fresh. Some time mid-morning, the winds pick up. There is a dark shower, sweeping in quickly, tapering off. The rains clouds are cleared out quickly by the gusting winds. The rest of the day is uncertain. You look to the sky a lot, always gauging. You are sure to get wet if you’re outside, but it is impossible to predict when. If your mood responds to the weather, then the day is a bit of a carousel.

Politics is a funny merry-go-round. It’s timing over substance. I imagine one gets into politics for the substance, and then becomes hypnotized by the complex dance of opportunity. Everyone manoeuvring for a moment’s primacy. One dreams up long sequences of cause and effect, all to catalyse the cherished moment. One imagines the intense satisfaction.

The Russians blame the Ukrainians, laying it at their door like a threat. The families of nearly three hundred mourn. Who takes aim at a passenger plane, one wonders?

Every so often, the clouds capture my complete attention. I stop and turn, to take in the whole sky. The clouds are an inspiration. They say to me there are bigger things in Nature. When we enter the sky, the daily affairs of humanity become small, shrink away, like the landing strip when we take off.

I want to write a story for Baby. The sky has everything in it. It has rain for the green things and sun for the lizards. It has wind for the birds, and it has clouds for the dreamers. There is lightning for people who need kings. And at night, there’s the bright moon for Baby, like a mirror. Every day is a show.

Travelogue 635 – July 20
Midsummer Dream

So we’ve taken a seat at the prow of the ship, the ship that is the Wilhelmina Pier in Rotterdam, where the jetty juts out into the river in the direction that the sun, still high, will eventually set. We sit on the patio of the New York Hotel, once headquarters to a shipping company, and gaze out over the afternoon light playing on the river waters. I have brought my group of Ethiopians here, even the half-Ethiopian who sleeps in her buggy, peacefully sleeps, her arms thrown back in her preferred position for abandoned sleep. Baby abandons herself to sleep. With what other spirit can a baby face the new world? It all must be arms outstretched.

Tati has introduced the city to her mother as ‘real Europe’. We quietly contemplate that now. We are tired from the day’s long tour. All around us is water. The buildings of downtown stand across the river, symbols of modernity. They might be abandoned. What else could we do in the light of our new world?

It’s a bright day, weather perfect. I’m reminded of a previous visit to the New York Hotel, in which I so briefly sketched out the history of Holland for the ladies. Napoleon joined arms with Willem the Silent, and they marched forward, leading toward the future with gestures high over their heads.

The blue of the sky seems almost miraculous. Sunny days in this part of the world are absurdly cheerful. They stimulate some lobe of the human brain to a giddiness like a flavour in Belgian ales. My Ethiopians are immune. They turn away from the sun, facing into all the European faces turned toward it. In southern climes, the sun is something different, power and majesty. Could we imagine a Belgian Moses, a Solomon born in Elsinore? Conversely, how do you explain ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ to a classroom of undergraduates in Ethiopia?

Baby is rarely silent. Even while she sleeps she emits a sighing song with her breath. Sometimes she smiles with a dream. Sometimes she moves her lips, mouthing a bit of dialogue. We are all just ‘mechanicals’, she says, meeting in the woods to rehearse. ‘We will meet;’ says Bottom, ‘and there we may rehearse most obscenely and courageously. Take pains; be perfect: adieu.’

I’m feeling a right Bottom myself this summer. ‘Let me play the lion too: I will roar!’ I try it all, with summer giddiness, and like the fool of the play, I fail but fail in delightful ways.

The smoke alarm in our apartment needs a new battery. It trills with a double tones every few minutes, and it has been doing that for days. It sounds alarum, and we let it go. We become used to it. It becomes a part of our thoughts. ‘Beep-beep,’ say the fairies in Baby’s dreams. ‘Beep-beep.’ She chuckles, and she tries to whisper a spell. The fairies form a circle in the moonlight.

I’ve been thinking that there is a shadow of medievalism persisting in the psyche of the northern Europeans. The Romantics believed it. The Nazis did, too. They play with Masonic signs, they leave bread crumbs for fairies. When summer approaches there are still the May pole rituals. The best things come in fits of madness.

The time has come for Tati and her mother to make their way back to the Central Station, catch the train home. It’s with some regret that I pay up and get ready to leave. The sun over the river is too sweet a vision. It’s like a view into wordless revelation. It imparts evaporating wisdom, and makes us thirsty.

We say good-bye to the Ethiopians. It’s supposed to rain this week.

Travelogue 634 – July 19
The Real Thing

‘This is the real Europe,’ she keeps saying. Tati’s mother leaves home for Ethiopia next week. She takes her mother on one more little trip before she has to go. She brings her to Rotterdam to visit us for a day. She wants her mother to see ‘real Europe’, and apparently we have a piece of it here.

Tati’s mother is very nice. She is gracious. And she has adapted well to Europe, judging by her breezy summer clothing. I don’t see the usual Ethiopian reserve in clothing. She is comfortable in the loose fitting summer pastels. I ask her how she’s enjoying her trip as we take the tram toward the house, but she doesn’t speak English. She smiles and waits for the translation.

Tati points out the architecture of Rotterdam. She wants her mother to see the highest buildings. This is Europe. I’m not sure what her agenda is. I would have framed it all quite the opposite, if, for example, I were taking one of my compatriots to her town, Antwerpen in Belgium. Here you see the real Europe, I might have said, gesturing generously toward the architecture, King Leopold’s legacy along the avenues near the classic train station, and to the medieval houses gathered around the cathedral and the beautiful Stadhius.

How do our needs diverge, as we look for a frame of reference? We are two alien residents in Europe, coming from far away. She needs to show visitors a place rich and modern. I need to show visitors a place old and still living with its long history. Is it as simple as the contrast between Ethiopia in its rush toward the future and America, suffering from its own long, mad rush toward the future? Future as hope, future as product?

Ethiopia is an ‘emerging’ culture, ‘emerging’ market in just about every sense. The Ethiopians ‘emerge’ everywhere in the world, wonder and hope in their faces. And at home, growth and opportunity are bywords. Politically, the forces at play seem simple enough, essentialist in nature, repression versus democracy, freedom versus authority.

I accommodate Tati’s agenda. After some coffee at home, served in the ancient jebena, we set out to find a real Europe; that is, a city of gleaming, high buildings, a city of business. But there’s no reason we can’t see it from a pretty angle. I take everyone down to the riverfront. We start at Blaak, where the reconstruction of Rotterdam began, renewal embodied in those block houses that have become a symbol of the town. We walked over the canals of the Wijnhaven and to the River Maas. For the stretch of half a kilometre or so we get the face of a successful city, high buildings and the promenade. The flags of the world line the avenue by the river, and we look for Ethiopia’s. Across the river is the Noordereiland, long and narrow island presenting the faces of a more historical town, a line of traditional Dutch house and shop fronts.

We’re crossing the Erasmus Bridge together, and it’s one of those summer days again, in which the sky seems to aspire to something beautiful. The sun is generous host to clean clouds. The wind off the sea is mild. The river is wide and sparkling. We stop for many photos. On the other side is the Wilhelmina pier, site of vital burst of city renewal. Our destination is at the end of the pier, the piece of history among signs of Tati’s ‘real Europe,’ hundred year-old vestige of the cargo and cruise shipping line to America.

Tati is entranced by the KPN Tower on the other side of the bridge, a high building with one side leaning forward like a book cover and held in place by one support that is little more than a blank pole. This side of the building is divided into a grid that could be a game board. There are knobs there that are also lights.

Batu, my mother-in-law, seems unmoved by the architecture. She is having fun, if only because of the company of Ethiopians. She stops for photos. Batu has aged well; she is till pretty. She isn’t so easy with new fashions as Tati’s mother. She is dressed well, but dressed in the mould of most ‘modern’ Ethiopian women her age, meaning she has graduated from traditional Ethiopian cotton gabis, but not ventured much beyond the conservative sense of half a century ago.

Our destination is the New York Hotel, of course. Menna and Batu enjoy this spot at the end of the pier, where one feels as though one might be at the prow of a ship facing into the river, moving toward the sea.

Travelogue 633 – July 11
Twelve Years

It’s Zaterdag, and the weather is nice enough. But the day seems flattened. The cause is anxiety. Today I have yet another operation scheduled for my mouth. I have to get another root canal. I’m keenly aware of the Dutch macho sensibility about matters of medicine. Don’t hide from the pain. And this is what anxiety does to the weather. It places one big, flat palm against each end of each dimension, and it squeezes. Three dimensions squished. There’s no room to breathe. The colours of the world are condensed and robbed of value.

Despair and depression do the same thing. I recall the days after Leeza died. The world was like a slab of cloudy glass. The sky was pressing against my shoulders. The pavement kept rising toward me. Every direction was uphill. This state lasted a long time.

It’s twelve years today since Leeza passed away, meeting up with her event, the fatal accident, the event that god-sized hands pass back and forth, fingers turning it as though to decode. One clean dozen years, a round and decodable number, since the innocent met her Fate and met circumstance, one clean incidence of violence. She was gone.

I have been left to wonder where she went. I have been left to wonder what my role was in the event. I helped her choose that car, the space in which she died. As she drove, I waited at her destination. I am a part of the magnetic field, destination to departure. Was I the unstable pole in that field? Was I the malignant influence?

A dozen years later, Baby stirs. It’s time to eat. You can see that hunger is a sensation that dawns on her like a fresh discovery each time. She is lying on her back, on a blanket on top of the bed. I am enjoying some time with her, just watching her, mercurial Baby. The moments overtake her, one by one, each with its restless energy and restless mood.

She has been looking, the way she does, into some fascinating space, toward the window or just up into a corner of the ceiling. She occasionally kicks, swings an arm around. She works her mouth, mood after mood. Then a shadow crosses her face. She starts to fret. Her feet kick with more urgency. She pumps her fists above her. She opens her mouth to bawl. She looks up into my eyes in mounting distress.

This is the way the future moves for her. It is upon her, and it is urgent. Anxiety has no dexterity in the fingers yet. The past gathers, a drop at a time, like dark coffee, dark and undecipherable. We don’t know what kind of impurities are gathering there, among the grounds of coffee, like particles of indigestible sand.

There’s nothing to be done. I must meet up with that event. I must show up at the dentist’s office at my appointed hour. He is prompt, this grim-faced man with overgrown grey eyebrows. He slouches inside his ill-fitting white uniform. His eyes meet mine in that unflinching way of the Dutch that seems calculated, impertinent, but is a variety of friendliness.

My fears are justified. The dentist says little, dives in. He cracks my jaw open like the recalcitrant rind of a melon, and he jabs my gums viciously with shots of novocaine. He counts off no beats to allow the shots to take effect; he reaches directly for the drill. I am kicking. My hands grip the armrests. All told, the root canal is accomplished in fifteen minutes. I am led out of the operating room before the tears are dry, and led to the payment line. I have to sit a while in the waiting room to recover. I am overcome with pain, more pain than I walked in with.

I was never completely sold on the diagnosis. It was another dentist who made the call on my last visit. He was a young guy, full fashion beard and eyes that questioned while they declared. He pointed to the shadows on the x-ray, saying there was a big hole there, see? And it was too close to the nerve. It’s time the dying nerve must go. We will excavate that nerve, shut it down forever. All right then, let’s set your appointment.

I have little choice, in the end, but to accede to the will of the experts, spokesmen for Necessity. This is the pain that I must commit to.

I’ve taken my pain pills. I can make it to the tram now, make it home. The sunny day is beset by weather of another sort. The substance of the day contracts, drawing everything closer. The tenderness registers everything.

Travelogue 632 – July 6
The Tour de France
Part Two

I expected more people – and indeed, I hear later that roughly a third of the Dutch population ventured out to see the passing Tour, -- but I suppose that’s the beauty of a three-thousand-kilometer course: there will always be plenty of room for spectators. There is a crowd strung along both sides of the road, but no one has to fight to get to the kerb. We are checking our watches. We are dealing with professionals here: they will be right on time, machines in human form, fighting the winds, the heat, the wearying dance of thousands of fans.

I’m surprised to discover that the entourage may be one of the funnest aspects of the Tour. They start flying by a good ten minutes before the cyclists arrive, press vans and motorcycles, police and black cars marked ‘Gendarmerie’, and the fleet team cars with stacks of bikes on top, all racing by with an urgency that is comic and exciting, a kind of celebration. They sounds their horns. We cheer. The most entertaining of the lot are the press cameramen, riding in pairs on their motorcycles. They are like circus clowns, speeding, weaving, circling the peloton, watching for the space to insinuate themselves into the action.

And then the cyclists are upon us. There is one alone. Then there are three together. These have broken away from the peloton, pursuing some obscure team strategy. We all roar for them. There’s a pause, and then the great peloton is upon us, like a Dutch wind unto itself, almost two hundred riders in one tight formation streaming by. I had placed myself among the spectators on the inside curve of the road, thinking there would be an advantage. I might see them coming, with a good view of a half mile of road. But the crowd obscures any preview, and when they are upon us, I realize my mistake, stepping back quickly. The cyclists will use every square centimetre of asphalt, and they are leaning into the curve. We have to make way or get hit.

And they are gone. The crowd stands stunned a few moments, more team cars passing, more police. And they we disperse, cheered by this show of bravura, our lethargy expiated by their intensity. There is a rain coming. I’m actually feeling chilled as I bike away among the many others. Hobby cyclists have gathered by the hundred, in their gaudy gear. They shout to each other and laugh, and they set off with some arcane purpose in mind. They will celebrate with some kilometers of their own, I suspect, heartened by their heroes.

Myself, I am inspired to order an ale at the British pub by the station where an intrepid crowd of non-athletes has gathered to watch the balance of the stage. The cameras of our boys on their motorbikes are now blurred by rain. Above, the press copters take panoramic shots of the flat countryside and we see the sheets of summer rain falling at a slant across the countryside. The green and yellow terrain is divided into farms. There is a thin ribbon of road crossing it at an angle. The camera zooms and we see the brave convoy. We see the small dark masses that are cars and vans. We see the hunched little bees that are out boys on motorbikes, buzzing forward and back. And there, the delicate outlines of the bicycles, strung out in diagonals in their wind formations, wheels and frames just filigree in a finely etched landscape, and in the distance the pewter stretches of the sea, quiet from such a height, but still overwhelming in its surfeit of space and perspective. The copter cam zooms; we sense the movement now, the velocity that was lost among the hectares of land.

With only twenty kilometres or so left, the cameras struggle suddenly with an access of sunlight. The pictures wash into white, and the press men adjust their lenses on the run. The cyclists come into focus again. The puddles in the road flash with summer light. The racers show no sign they notice the caprice of Nature. They pass through small seaside towns, swinging around either side of traffic circles and pushing on, individuals trading positions inside the several attenuated pelotons, creating as they do a kind of whimsical rotation among themselves, stringing colours as though in one long banner snapping in the wind, changing as it flies.

The boys on their motorbikes train their sights on the famous athletes, following them with intensity, even as the athletes themselves have sunk deeply into their concentration, having tuned out the carnival around them, always new crowds shouting by the side of the road, always the hornet-like persistence of the motorcycles, flying forward, falling back, dodging each other and the cars with unflagging enthusiasm.

At the end, in the final stretches of road, as the long bridge that carries them toward the tiny manmade island, whimsical in itself, as they pass over the churning waters that join the sea, the day’s leaders, the specialists in speed, will break into a crazed sprint, manhandling the bikes, swinging them left and right in a push for consummation. Silently, the finish line has appeared, giving us no warning, and all we see is the frenzied dash. Four of them are vying for the day’s glory, and they cross the line together, their places determined by a difference of only centimeters. The rest coast across the line in their groups, showing remarkable tranquillity and cordiality as they roll en masse across the line. There’s an element of philosophy to the Tour, I suppose, because the team interests balance the individual, because everyone has their day – the sprinters, the climbers, the indefatigable endurance runners.

I’ve turned in a fair performance at the bar, putting away a full pint of expensive British ale. I’m satisfied I’ve done my part. Tomorrow the boys will be back at it, attacking the roads of Belgium. I’ll have to leave them to it, following when I can online. The sun will return. Batu will pace. Summer will resume, stirring summer ambitions. People will rediscover each their own contests when they wake. The Greeks and the Germans will shout. Doubtless there will be an excuse for a bomb somewhere in the world. And I’ll get on my bike, if the rain allows, to log a few more slow miles going somewhere important.

Travelogue 631 – July 5
The Tour de France
Part One

The restless ambition of humanity continues apace, despite the summer heat. Baby howls, while Batu paces back and forth, murmuring, ‘Mukat, mukat.’ It’s hot, it’s hot, she says, over and over, as though in a weary trance. I try to taint her. You’re from Africa. How can you complain about the heat? But suddenly her English is at the ready. ‘No, Ethiopia is moderate in climate,’ she chides me. ‘Oh,’ she groans, and she returns to pacing, ‘Mukat, mukat.’

The day reveals its ambitions. I may struggle just to swing my legs out of bed, will wilted in the heat of the early morning; I may have trouble attaching one word to another in my thoughts – they drift like the lily pads in the sun-blasted canals; -- but in Greece, the people are taking to the blistering streets to campaign against austerity and the oppressive regime of the euro. They are ready to thumb their noses at Merkel and her coterie of bankers, no matter the amplitude of the Greek sun.

And in nearby Utrecht, a few hundred athletes start into one of the more gruelling of athletic contests of the year, the Tour de France. They begin with time trials, some sprints to warm up for the three weeks and the three and a half thousand kilometers of territory they will be covering on their little metal steeds, crowding each other the whole way. It has become custom recently for the Tour to start outside of France, and this year, they have chosen cycling-crazy Netherlands. Today, they will set out from Utrecht and cycle all the way to Zeeland on the North Sea.

It’s afternoon. Unexpectedly the day has turned, the accumulated heat collapsing in on itself. There is a sudden wind, and the clouds gather. The riders have set out from Utrecht already. They are on their way to Rotterdam. I have set up in a café not far from their route through town, in case I felt the stirrings of an ambition to move my heavy limbs. I would like to show my support.

I’ve been sweating through my portfolio of Sunday work, sedentary myself but making my little computer burn. Then the winds start. I think of the cyclists wending their way toward us across the flat terrain of old Holland, suddenly set upon by these winds. The Dutch windmills turn, and the pedals turn faster. I decide then – assisted by the quickly falling temperatures – that the boys need me. I start packing up.

The second stage of the Tour leads the cyclists right through the city center, leading them into town by the Erasmus University campus and directly to the side of the River Maas. They will race alongside the river to the middle of town, and then they will be diverted for a quick sprint by the Stadhuis and around the fountain at the Hofplein. Then back to the river, and across it on the pretty Erasmus Bridge. From there, they occupy themselves with escaping Rotterdam and heading for the sea. They will finish about an hour and a half later, on a small island in the middle of one of the windblown deltas that eat away at the southeastern corner of the country.

I’ve been hanging out on the eastern side of the city center. I only have to ride my bike a few blocks south to arrive at the river, and at the route of the Tour.

Travelogue 630 – July 2
The Velocipede

I wake, and it seems like the air has not moved all night. The sun has risen above the apartment buildings outside our eastern windows, and it lays a heavy hand on my bare back. Every movement requires an effort. The muscles in my legs and arms feel as though they have liquefied. It’s not even 6:30 yet.

I roll out of bed, and I start collecting the parts of myself, the bits of the workaday self. The clock ticks. I am desperate to get to the front door, if only to access fresh air. Outside, the sky is clear. There is just enough of a temperature differential to fuel the momentum, get me downstairs.

The bicycle is a blessing. With a few lazy turns of the pedals, I have a breeze. I am in no hurry. I make the slowest of starts, setting out along the narrow brick lane outside the building’s gates. The lane runs alongside a small canal with verges of grass. The ducks know better than to stir. They rest among their families in the grass.

When Baby is sick in the tummy, they say we can help her with some gentle bicycle motion. Take her little feet, and turn them slowly. She seems to like it. The machine that is less than two hundred years old was already in our bodies.

I’ve joined the big road that crosses the Schie by Sparta Stadium. There is more traffic here. People are awake, alert, and moving. I’m surprised by the ambition with which some cyclists are attacking the long incline toward the bridge. Where do they find this energy?

The first bicycles were called velocipedes. It was the nineteenth century, and technical innovations were like parlour tricks. Behold the velocipede. It sounds to me like a creature from Jurassic Park, maybe something with many rows of legs rather than only two wheels. But the name was catchy enough to eclipse the more prosaic term ‘bicycle’ for decades. Perhaps it’s right that the precursor to the velocipede was the ‘dandy horse’. The latter contraption looked more like a modern bicycle than the typical velocipede, two wheels of equal size, bar across the top, etc. The velocipede evolved toward the elegant but awkward beast with oversized front wheel. The dandy horse was little more than a sit-down push scooter, which you propelled by running.

Interestingly the dandy horse was dreamed up two hundred years ago next year by a German baron and inventor, who came up with the machine as a response to a crop failure that was starving his horses. Later, Mr. Drais also invented the first typewriter with a keyboard. Later still, he had his title stripped from him because he had declared himself ‘Citizen Drais’ during the excitement of the revolutionary days of 1848. He died penniless a few years later. So much for the ambition of the first cyclist.

I’m over the high point of the bridge and coasting downhill. It feels great, one of the joys of two wheels in the open air. This kind of easy speed is why I will always stick to skinny tires.

It didn’t take too long after chain and pedals were added to the machine before people wanted to race. The Tour de France was launched in 1903 as an innovation to sell newspapers. It was only an innovation in scale. Races had been popular for decades. The ploy was successful, sold a lot of papers. But it was a logistical nightmare and an absolute danger to its participants. The newspaper’s editor wanted to give it up after the second year.

This year, the Tour begins in the Netherlands, starting in Utrecht, and riding through Rotterdam on its second day, on Sunday. Still coasting on the bike, milking every bit of momentum, I can’t imagine the ambition. In this heat, even getting up and out to watch the race seems a challenge. But I will try.

Travelogue 629 – June 28
Summer Outing

We’re attempting a family outing. We want to introduce our summer baby to summer pleasures, fresh breezes alongside the big river. We have travelled by tram to the city’s old yacht harbour. It’s a relatively small marina in this city of enormous port facilities, where harbour cranes crowd miles of the western horizon. Here the yachts are crowded into a dense thicket of masts, and enclosed on three sides by historical blocks of old Rotterdam. They are beautiful things in themselves, these boats. Some are clearly antique and objects of much loving care. Behind us in our photos is the clubhouse, the 1909 creation in modest Jugendstil, where is housed the rich Royal Maas Yacht Club, one of the oldest in Holland. It’s a royal club because the royals are members. The House of Oranje has given their sanction many years ago. The new king is find of wearing naval cuts, I have already noticed. I can just about see him standing at the helm of his own extravagant yacht, flute of champagne in hand.

It’s common to see yacht club members in the nearby eetcafe, the venerable old bar and restaurant called the Loos, pronounced like the Los in Los Lobos. One may not realize one has stored away a stereotype of the yachtsman until one recognizes it embodied, in baggy, striped shirts, or polo shirts, in jackets cut in nautical style, the shorts and loafers, a style that one might have called preppy in its day. Either way, the Loos is a good stop for beer and fries. The ladies order apple juice, Batu comments that the apple juice here tastes like the final batch when brewing t’ala, the traditional Ethiopian beer. That’s not a compliment. Menna likes it. When we want to order more, Batu pulls one of her faces. Food and drink are serious matters, and there is no polite way to decline. She doesn’t say, ‘No, thank you.’ She grimaces with distaste and shakes her head, saying nothing. We see this face often. It’s all well and good to have good roads, safe streets, schools and parks and trams to carry Baby to the doctor. But food is the true stuff of civilization. She need say nothing. She holds her head high, gaze set high, over all the tables of faranji food.

Batu is proxy for ancient Ethiopian civilization here, reminder of what is right and wrong in the scales of time, guardian angel for the African half of Baby’s genetic make-up. Food and drink are serious matters. Baby herself reminds us of that at frequent intervals with lusty exhalations of pure sound. It’s both moving and amusing to observe the force of her protest when she’s hungry, body arched and fingers clenched and her toothless mouth open wide. I laugh every time. Batu frowns at me, but I can’t help it.

We play cards while Baby sleeps in the buggy. Batu is winning. We tell her it’s the apple juice that has made her dangerous, but she shakes her head no. She turns her cards toward Menna and asks advice. After a quick session in Amharic, Batu plays a series of cards for points. She discards and Menna picks up the discard to use in her own run of points. I want to protest to the rules committee, but I think I will be outvoted. I see the lay of the land by now. One doesn’t win against young mothers. Old mothers. Any kind of mothers. Or little girls. This is my fate.

We take a walk before heading home, passing through ‘Het Park’, crossing long grassy lawns that make Batu marvel. People are having picnics, lying in the grass, playing Frisbee. We find a small English garden overlooking a small lake, and we take more pictures. ‘Des yilal’, Batu says. This is kind of the Amharic catch-all for fun times, good things. Literally it means something like, ‘It’s called happy.’

We have made it to the Metro station, well satisfied with summer and sleepy. Batu must negotiate the escalators on her own. I have to handle the buggy, and Menna is carrying dozing Baby. I watch as Batu clutches onto the moving handrail with both hands, her face a mask of apprehension. The handrail is pulling her and she must step forward. She does so, just before the handrail would pull her off her feet, taking a sudden, jumping step. She rides down, still leaning into the handrail, holding on with both hands.

There is nothing to look at windows on the Metro. I wonder why they have them. Just to counter any sense of claustrophobia, I suppose. Earlier, Batu was looking out the tram window and noting that all the buildings we were passing were ‘G+3’, meaning four storeys. And I thought suddenly how striking the uniformity here must be. Addis is an architectural free-for-all, multiple storey buildings rising to order, any size, any style, any position along the street. And they stand alongside the city’s prevailing lack of form, the expansive shanty-town, corrugated iron shacks beside small concrete improvisations, unfinished, rebar rising from the highest corners in an expression of hope.

We’re home. Baby is settled among the signs of home. She makes no acknowledgement of the day’s adventure. It’s just another day, another new world, another feeding time. She’s getting fussy. She’s balling her fists and she’s making her little body-builder’s motions, getting ready to howl. It’s all about the food.

Travelogue 628 – June 27
The Adventure

Baby doesn’t think much of the big world outside the doors of the flat. She doesn’t think too much of the open air and the noise of the streets. She doesn’t know what to make of the bumpy ride in the buggy.

She’s a summer arrival. During the winter, we imagined the fun in taking her out for fresh air in the parks, imagined the pleasures of her company on walks along the canals. She has so far been indifferent.

Her first expedition outside was one of necessity. We had to take her to her first hearing test. It meant getting her onto the tram. The motion and the sudden sunlight were perplexing. She flinched at the strong light, and she stared at the wall of the buggy. Her buggy was parked at the back of the tram, and it rocked with the motion of the rails. She was looking at nothing and she was working her arms.

I found myself again – how many times just that day – wondering what she experienced. What was her new brain processing? And without language, what was the order she put to things? I was amazed by her resilience and her trust. This degree of newness and alienation would have sent most of us older units into a steep spiral of shock.

At the doctor’s office, I didn’t know how to maneuver the buggy, so I was acting out the new parent comedy, bumping into walls and blocking foot traffic, multiplying Baby’s trauma. She was a good sport. She only cried when the nurse stuck a probe into her ear. Even then, she was open to being convinced that a hearing test while feeding wasn’t such a bad thing. She passed her test. She fell into her sweet milk coma. The ride home was peaceful.

The second trip outside is purely recreational. It’s a perfect summer day. We have to enjoy. We stop at the park next to Sparta stadium in our neighbourhood. It’s the closest kiddie park in the neighbourhood, and I have business at the stadium. Sparta is the oldest team in Holland, played Chelsea in one of its first matches. Now the season is over, and Jan is playing in the stadium with his league of ageing enthusiasts. I get to stand pitch-side in the big boy stadium, empty now, and cheer for the wheezing and happy athletes alongside a few of their wives and children.

The kiddie park is fun, too. We watch a group of girls, about age four, playing in the sand, tossing the stuff in the air and then all rubbing their eyes and then starting over. After that game, they run to the swing set. Two sit face to face on one seat and start to swing. A third watches just out of range of the jutting feet of her friend. Mothers, groups in Muslim headdress, sit on the benches and indulge in breezy chatter. There is a very old man being led round the central circle, where the sand and swing set are, being led round and round for exercise He pushes his own wheel chair while his middle-aged son holds his arm. The old man stares dead ahead with either intense focus or an intense lack of all focus, unconscious but for his shuffling feet.

Standing at long last, we are in no mood to quit the sunshine. Baby has settled into restful slumbers, the kind that won’t be easily disrupted. We decide to try a trip into town. We bundle buggy and baby onto the number eight tram. We’ll head toward the old and scenic yacht harbour of the city where we can pose for photos that will inspire jealousy in family back home.

Travelogue 627 – June 18
It’s the Squirming

Neil Young is singing this morning. It’s 1972, he wants to tell us, and this window looks out on an uncomplicated landscape. The setting is North American prairie, a sketching of a morality of the heart. He says you can just about sketch it out. And then the wind takes it.

What is Baby saying? It may be in reply, it may not. She is not in attendance at the café, not in the flesh. I left her at home, asleep, blessedly asleep. She does not know Neil Young. But it could be she’s dreaming North American prairies. She’s never seen one. She has no word for it. But she only dream about her blanket and her mother’s nipple, over and over? The truth is, she’s a philosopher. She teaches me.

The café presents as a space of relief, as point of contrast to the cold and the bustle of the world outside. I’m happy to buy into that illusion, for the price of a croissant and an espresso. The colours and the aromas are warm ones. The routines of ordering, of small talk, of finding the comfortable seat, all these things are reassuring. Neil is singing that it’s 1972 and there is hope for the heart.

She likes to stretch a lot, my baby. We clenches her little fists; she arches her back. She makes funny, breathy chattering noises. Then the hands open, and the fingers uncurl from the pinkie toward the tiny thumb. Then her arms shudder and flap, and she cries out in a voicing of excitement.

‘And I’m getting old,’ Neil Young says. I’m not sure if it’s a play on his name, or the stunned cry of someone not even thirty who is suddenly tired. There are a lot of miles to cover in the prairie. ‘It keeps me searching …’

Baby has her way of teaching, her own squirming pedagogy. She teaches as she moves, and she teaches as she looks up at me with eyes that are curious and then that are fretful. She says, look at me, I’m a furnace of creation, like a biological star. I can’t bear to be still.

She pauses and looks up into my eyes, and she starts with a passing crinkling of the smooth, pink brow, she starts to tell me that she understands why the people researching artificial intelligence have such a hard time of it. They hypothesize static states of knowledge and action. They have to. It’s hard, she says with some compassion, having to start from the dynamic complexity of the double helix, geometry forged from motion. There is more to this than the quiet stage-sets of classical physics.

You don’t say, I reply, tapping her gently on the end of her upturned nose. She stops the slow windmilling of her arms with a stunned look. Then she puckers her red lips and she continues. You must see it, she says, and she begins in a slow and intense fretfulness. There is no programming language for pain. Perhaps a circuit can be said to digest electricity, but the metaphor just doesn’t suffice. There is no struggle among the intestines of a circuit. No circuit is birthed in pain and struggles with its own physicality, a struggle of years.

Well, he did get old, after all, Mr. Young did. Perhaps there has been a moment, stored away among the memories of this world, in which Mr. Young driving alone across the prairie, heard through the speakers of his car radio the lament of a young man. ‘I want to live. I want to give.’ And the sound evokes an emotion in the older Young, and he realizes now that the isolated emotion has very little significance. He knows it as he experiences it, even as he enjoys it. The whole was the answer, the circuit now completed. And he thinks, ‘Hm. It was always in the squirming.’

The answer, Baby says, and she raises her eyebrows in a show of both wit and amazement, the answer is in the squirming. In robotics, all this motion would be wasteful and dangerous. No businessman would sustain the expense. No economic output justifies it. It’s our age that would like to contain all uncertain economies in the box called Aesthetics.

She wants to kick now. She’s going to be a fine runner, I’m thinking. But there is no purpose to it, she cautions me. The legs pump with surprising strength. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but there lies a lot of territory between repetitive motion and artificial intelligence. We measure AI by capacity to solve problems, but there is fallacy woven all through that. Baby is really getting worked up now, hard to hold. ‘Waa,’ she cries. Problem isn’t the stone that breaks the calm surface of the water that is life. Problem is the water. It’s the twistings and turnings that keep us afloat, moment by moment. It’s the squirming that teaches us to swim. When we think of problem-solving as a function of the mind, we have failed at the outset. It is body and mind. Body never still, a pulse within a pulse, and still again within greater pulse. These are systems without end, and the ‘solution’ is in the squirming itself.

That’s all fine, Baby, but Mommy and I would love it if you could take a rest now. We would like it if you would sleep a while. ‘To sleep, perchance to dream,’ she quotes, suddenly calm and contemplative, before she starts to lick her lips. 'Aye.'

The milk is a great soporific. She will dream. It might be the prairies of Mars, for all that we know, when her eyelashes twitch with vision. A plain governed by the sound of one harmonica.

Tomorrow it will different. She will move and she will move. There was a time when scientists amused themselves trying to design machines for perpetual motion.

For the moment, I’ll be satisfied with rest in the haven of coffee. ‘It keeps me searching…,’ Neil sings again. The melody is a comfort. We tell ourselves it’s the same as last time.

Travelogue 626 – June 17
Miner

‘I’ve been a miner for a heart of gold,’ Neil Young is singing as I enter my morning café. Harvest plays, and suddenly I’ve left Europe well behind. Neil’s sound is pure prairie to me. Maybe it’s the incipient country sound, the pumping harmonica, his barroom warbling, his sentiment, the primitive 1-2-3 from four, but whatever it is, it seems like it could only come from North America, where space is the rule, where spaces can make everything fade into the call of the loon. I’m homesick.

Outside, the European city is waking to its purpose, a confined sense of bustle, its tidy servings of business. We’ve been gifted another rare sunny start, and people are brisk about their joy. I got started a few minutes later than I usually like to, distracted by Baby’s peaceful sleeping face. I can happily do nothing but look at her for long spells at a time. I awake; my start is late. It isn’t much later than usual, but the rate of change on mass transit is steep on workday mornings. Every five minutes before eight o’clock means a loss of so many seats on the Metro, so many square centimeters of breathing room.

When I was young, I scanned a map of population densities around the world. I wanted to find the lowest densities and immediately board a ship to one of those places. I made hasty plans for Australia, for South America. I had to find those quiet and least human of places. There I would find a life of untroubled contentment. The trees would offer no lip. The animals would steer wide circles around me. The sands would encourage meditation. The time would fly.

And here I am today, living in one of the most densely populated countries on the planet, measuring over four hundred people per kilometre squared. That compares to about thirty in the US. How did that happen?

Standing on the speeding Metro, I’m contemplating the mysteries of Baby’s sweet face again, so innocent, so unguarded. I’m surrounded by adults now. The expressions on their faces are composed. The muscles in the face are engaged in holding the whole of it firm. The expressions are uniform. There is a mould the faces conform to, some standard of polite neutrality. There’s also an element of self-protection, a suggestion of the bellicose. I wonder about this. When does this happen? Is there a hormone responsible? A shot of fear as the social instincts become predatory?

It’s true, I had high hopes for civilization as a child. I dreamt about the highest achievements of humanity, all the best impulses, all the best thoughts. I dreamt of cities as centers of enlightenment. That was the counter-poise to my instinct to run away from humanity, to find an outback of the soul.

And so this is the way the wind has shifted for me, indulging the dream of civilization. The city works like clockwork. Systems click with wondrous efficiency. The city is aesthetic wed with productivity. The state delivers its doses of compassion. It is tempting to believe in civilization. It is tempted to see humanity in its largest productions. If the state is compassionate then the people are humane.

The Metro has reached my station. We engage in the rituals of disembarkation, the shifts in posture that signal a claim of territory. There is a contest for ranking in the order we will go through the nearest door. The same contest is going on outside the door as the train slows to a stop. No one looks into the eyes of another, and when the door opens, the advance is undertaken with an insistence on straight lines that brooks no opposition. In the most crowded country in Europe, one must act as if there is no one in his path. If it becomes necessary to go round a human obstacle, one does not acknowledge it as human.

‘It’s these expressions I never give,’ says Neil as I enter the café, ‘that keep me searching ...’ There’s that feeling again, melody as counter-argument. It is the reply of the primitive inside the civilizing. There is an affecting generosity woven into the chords, something lonely and wind-blown, an imaginary place with a flickering dimensionality. It dissolves into the song.

It does make one wonder. How do a people lacking warmth create a system that delivers care with a quality so uncanny a counterfeit of warmth? If it is the thing itself, compassion, then it is a compassion that arises from the cold mind, rather than the warm heart. It is conviction. It is principle.

Place is a tricky game in this world of places. It is firm; it is inescapable. It. It could be just the through that holds it fast. And yet, it can nonetheless be dissolved in a solution of song, even if only for a moment.

Place is a tricky game. It’s a world of places, and one has to choose. Place remains firm, only becoming more so under the weight of the passing millions. It becomes a nexus of history and character, quite independently of one’s imagination. There comes the time that the escape is the more creative pursuit. ‘It’s such a fine line that keeps me searching …,’ the man says.

Travelogue 625 – June 14
Hode and the Metro

I’m walking toward the Metro. That means leaving the apartment complex and walking among the subdued Sunday morning neighbourhood, between rows of quiet flats by the small playground usually resounding with boisterous shouts. Past the two-storey flats facing each other across a pedestrian walkway, I cross one more silent side street and there is a flight of stairs up to the open-air transit center, where buses swing round their circle of stops to the right, where trams rest at a series of covered stops dead ahead. Beyond that I enter the Metro station.

I’m getting used to this strung out feeling. Baby is six days old. She had a rough night last night, and the three adults of the house spent hours comforting her and discussing high strategy. There’s an awful lot of problem-solving when it comes to babies. And it seems so many problems originate in the stomach. Here my mind inserts the Amharic word for stomach, hode, which carries something more with it than the biology. Witnessing Baby’s struggles makes me wonder about humanity and the hode. The cycles of it come so surely, so quickly, the feeding, the contentment, the troubling stirrings of the digestive system, the varieties of its mild misfirings and bubbling workings, then the respite and rest until the next high tide of hunger. I’m fascinated by the urgency and the relentlessness of this cycle. Freud imagined civilization as what comes after, or even as a product of, the regulation of what is primitive. The primitive would consume all time and attention with a chaotic and unrestrained will if allowed to. But well before instinct is this issue of the hode. How much have we transcended these struggles of infancy? Don’t we all, at some sublimated level, twitch our way through each day, from hunger to stimulation, to digestive distress and remedy, and rather than crying when the heavy doses of coffee turn sour we snap at the spouse, scream on the highway, or botch something at work and irritably blame the system? Or we eagerly accept the label of ‘depressed’ because, of course, in the twenty-first century there will be a pill for it. The result must be a sandpapering of all surfaces into smooth contentment and productivity.

Anyway, the adults in the room came up with some marvellous theories, but none of them seemed to make much difference. Baby fell asleep on her own schedule, and took the secrets of her pain with her into dreamland.

There’s no place as anonymous as a Metro station. In most cases, there lacks the orienting features that nature provides. These are just chambers of concrete, after all, accessed by tunnels that are all dug and lined to uniformity. There’s no sun or city skyline, no paths or line of hills, no street signs. Engineers pal up with practitioners of design of one stripe or another, and they lay tile, pave, paint, and place photos and art pieces, and all this helps to identify the station from inside the train, and to entertain the waiting commuter, but it does little to actually place one inside the belly of the underground beast.

Then one day you discover that you know where you want to stand on the platform. You know where you need to be on the train in order to exit at the most convenient spot. At the destination, you know where the stairs are and where is the old, cranky escalator. You turn at the head of the stairs without having to think. You know where each exit will place you on the street overhead. These are the signs of citizenship.

You know what behaviours to expect from fellow passengers, the rush for the turnstiles, the dead-ahead walk eyes averted, jaws set grimly, the odd and indirect dance on the platform, and then the funny drift forward when the train comes in, strangely competitive, as though we’ve all spotted our door at once and there will be a struggle. This is the way of citizens, each facing the day’s battle with digestive issues as best they can, sharing if possible the sour experience with a stranger.

It’s Sunday, so things are quiet. There are plenty of seats on the Metro. I emerge in the Eendrachtsplein, the square of harmony, where my Rotterdam life seems to have begun, a seedy little brick-lined square, where they board up the glass-lined entries to the Metro on holidays and long weekends, where I often stop in the mornings, pouring the first bitter coffee down my throat and starting the gaseous story of the day.

Travelogue 624 – June 10
Baby

And now she’s here. Two days old. She arrived six days late, and she didn’t come without a struggle. Menna was a hero, bringing her into this world. It was a privilege to be there. As it happens, I was first contact (aside from the very close contact with mommy, of course,) literally catching her as she entered the world.

Waking again, this time at home. It’s 6am. She is stirring. Like she was at 12 and like she was at 2am, and perhaps there were a few other times I slept through. She is making those amazing sounds, like a sweet whimper, sometimes a songbird’s sound, sometimes a sigh, sometimes the mwa, mwa-a-a that comes with a contortion of her face into the mask of tragedy. It makes me laugh every time. These are really the sounds of a siren, irresistible.

Her hands wave like the fronds of an otherworldly plant, the fingers running through an obscure set of positions, like signs from a Hindu dance. Her arms shudder through a long stretch, and she yawns. I stop to watch.

Her face is so expressive, but it’s expression uninformed by society. It communicates, but the messages are secret ones. I can’t know, and she won’t retain them. The feelings behind them are mercurial, passing across the fresh skin of the face, painting quick suggestions and then surrendering to more, messages in sand.

Her dreams seem intense. Her breathing is rapid and shallow. She moans in a high, windy way as she breathes. Her eyelids pulse in a regular rhythm. The eyes even open a crack, but she isn’t seeing. When she’s awake those eyes open and she looks tentatively into the space of the room. There is a wrinkle of befuddlement or concern on her brow. The eyes won’t focus yet. She is capturing only blurred form and movement. None of it can make any sense yet.

But there’s the rub, and there’s the fascination to baby. What sense? Making sense without sense must be a wonder. It all must make perfect sense without parameters for sense.

Baby whimpers as she dreams. Her leg twitches as she dreams. Menna says maybe she’s dreaming of running. I say, how does she know about running?

We wake. The first waking is in the hospital, the four of scattered among makeshift beds, as though we were tossed in with the luggage. The nurse knocks and quickly comes in, voicing a brisk optimism. This is the gebortecentrum, the birth center. Only optimism will make sense among people drunk with sleeplessness and biological success. She must take tests. She talks us through it all, including the policy behind it, even though we are only staring blankly and silently back with exhaustion.

There is something benign and insistent about the Dutch health system’s intervention in parenting. I can’t help admiring and appreciating it, even as I am reminded of recent reading among the works of Foucault, who describes power since the Enlightenment as a process acted out on the body. There is nothing private about biology.

Baby has spent much of her first night in the hospital crib, which is little more than a plastic tub. I’ve taken it off its stand and set it on the bed next to me. Menna needs her sleep. Baby is made content with a finger to suck on. She sleeps fitfully, sighing, waking to look for daddy’s finger, dreaming again about all those shapeless children she hasn’t met yet and running with abandon in the park.

Travelogue 623 – June 4
Summer’s Bridge

I owe this to Batu. We are strolling in bright sunshine. We are strolling across the Erasmus Bridge, over the expansive waters of the Maas, the miraculous waters as they appear to me now, through the eyes of the woman who spent her whole life in Addis Ababa. We stop to watch the huge barges pass underneath us, the huge barges made small. We take photos. In Ethiopian fashion, she is holding an umbrella up as shield against its powers.

We will cross to the Wilhelmina Pier. We will sit for a while among the celebrants of sunshine in the outdoor patio of the New York Hotel. We are there near the tip of the pier, looking out over the river as though from the prow of a great ship. We find a table that is half shaded by the table umbrella, so that I can have the sun on my back and she can continue to hide. She will repeatedly ask what time it is, still marvelling that the sun is this high in the sky on into the evening.

I owe this to Batu. Only a few days ago, we made her go out on a day more common to Holland, blustery and overshadowed by swift clouds, swept with recurring showers. She was miserable. ‘Does it get any colder than this?’ she asked in surprise. It had dipped down into the 50s. Her fingers were hurting, she said.

Menna and Batu had volunteered to watch me run a 10K. I had had misgivings once I saw the weather report, but they insisted. And it seemed like a good chance to see Den Haag, neighbouring town with the cosmopolitan flair to complement Rotterdam’s stolid, business-day vibe.

This was the aristocrat’s town, built around the count’s palace. It has the open-avenue stateliness of a capital. Sometimes you still see the town’s original name here and there, ‘s Gravenhage, meaning something like the Count’s Hedge.

Not far from the central station there is a large park called the Haagse Bos, open meadows and small stands of words with walking trails. This was the peaceful and scenic setting for the 10K set. Unfortunately for spectators, the start and finish were in a rather stark and unromantic spot under a railway overpass.

We arrived late, a family tradition when Menna and I go to races together, and I have had to climb in among the crowd of runners at the back, just as they are counting down for the start. I’d had to abandon Menna and her mother among the wet asphalt lots, hoping they will find a dry spot to wait. Fortunately it was only a 10K, and I would be back relatively quickly.

The race was on. The worst weather for a spectator can be the best for a runner. The summer chill felt perfect. The rain was light. It only enhanced the silence of the park and focussed my attention on the puddles of road and the mud of the park trails. There was only the sound of everyone’s steps and the steady exertion.

Just past the finish line, I saw Menna. She was waving happily, and bid me stop in the runner’s chute for a pose of victory. I was relieved. She seemed fine. We circled back toward the registration tents. We found Batu huddled against a brick wall, shivering under her umbrella, looking shrunken inside her big sweater and her headscarf. I felt so sorry for her. I should never have encouraged them to come along. I led them quickly back toward the train station, new medallion swinging from its ribbon round my neck.

Today we will soak up as much sunshine as it takes to warm poor Batu’s chilled bones. Menna laughs at her. She tells her horror stories about winter here. I wouldn’t know how to say that the mild winters are something I love about this country. I can cycle around town year-round.

The weather is so bad, Menna affirms, as we enjoy the blue skies. Why was everyone always fighting for this place? She’s been learning some history. She has some trouble differentiating the various eras of Dutch history, events crowding each other in a rush through time. William of Orange and Napoleon are temporal neighbours to her, the two-and-more centuries losing all distinction. Even the characteristic costume of each, the ruffles vs. the funny hat, provides no clue to her, raised so far outside the stream of imagery of European culture.

Why fight for little Holland, we ask, gazing over the precious waters heading seaward and glinting with rare sunshine, where just discernible at the far turn of the river are the hundreds of cranes of the port.