Travelogue 900 – April 19
Choosing the Gulls

The sea gulls are loud. It’s all I hear as I wake up. I lie still and listen to them. I like bird song, even the plaintive cries of gulls. I can imagine them circling around each other, perhaps fighting over some scrap of food. I know some people hate gulls, but I’ve always liked the sound of their voice. They remind me of the sea.

It means a lot to me, living by the sea. But it would be hard to say what that means. Without the sensory experiences of the winds, the North Sea clouds, the occasional salty smell, and the cries of the gulls, how would I know the sea was there? I rarely visit it. The sea is more an idea than a fact, and the gulls the opposite. The mind likes ideas, but the emotions favour facts. I see the gulls every day. Did I choose the sea or the gulls?

The sun is out again, after only one day of light showers. It’ll be another beautiful spring day, and I can’t wait to take the girls out for a walk by the canal. The grass will be strewn with pink petals from the cherry blossom trees. They’ve been in full bloom for weeks and their flowers are beginning to drop. If we can get out in the morning, there will be a pleasant chill in the air.

It’s Sunday; ballet classes come first. Ballet class doesn’t mean leaving home. Nothing does anymore. It all happens by video call. Little Ren’s class is first. We set the computer on a chair in the kitchen so the girls can dance on the clear floor of the attached dining room. I help her slip on her pink ballet shoes. I join the meeting on Zoom, and we all say hello to the teacher. Other children show up in their windows.

It’s wonderful that the lessons continue despite the shutdown, but the rituals around a family activity can be as important as the activity itself. We used to arrive early and change, while the other families arrived. I would take Little Ren into class. We would sit together on the wooden floor while the other children entered. After both classes, we would go out to a café for treats.

Living the video conferencing life is convenient. It saves us a lot of time. But I’m sure the girls miss the excitement of seeing everyone, the immediacy of dancing for your teacher in the same room. Little Ren finds it hard to concentrate in this format. She gets distracted; she wanders. Seeing the world through her eyes is a reminder of how small the computer screen is, and how flat. If we could afford the thoughts, we might wonder at the arbitrary power we’ve invested in these little screens and their pictures.

Travelogue 899 – April 11
The Lonely God

Someone on Facebook has warned me to beware any vaccine they develop for the coronavirus. It’s part of a plot on the part of Bill Gates to wipe out a portion of humanity. It wasn’t clear what Gates’s reasons might be for that; and it didn’t seem to matter much. Guys like Gates have evil agendas. They eradicate people like weeds. They take guns away, like ice cream from babies, just to watch children cry.

I shouldn’t find it funny, but I do. Isn’t it wonderful that fans of the Avengers find adventures in the headlines, that they should see Thanos in the spindly figure of Bill Gates? The human imagination is dazzling.

Who are we to each other? I think the pandemic has offered opportunities to take stock, look at society and our fellow humans with a new eye. In general, has it made us appreciate each other a litte more? Does absence make the heart grow fonder? Or was alienation already a cancer in the body of post-modern societies? And has the pandemic only exacerbated the situation, making our fellow man even more sinister-looking beyond that metre and a half, behind their masks, behind their windows and doors?

Edgy people are getting edgier. Those not used to courtesies and self-sacrifice are finding an end to their patience. They stalk the streets and host vengeance-on-the-world parties. Ideologues have had time to dig their trenches. Behind their lines, they scribble pages of new twists on old paranoia.

“Men exist for each other,” Aurelius writes, in one of his blunter formulae. “Then either improve them or put up with them.” It’s a sentiment he returns to repeatedly, and you feel the depth of the challenge. We don’t know much about the emperor’s social life. He may well have been an amiable gent and a gregarious host. But the essential friction among people affects extroverts as much as introverts. Even the cheeriest garden party only allays our tensions for a minute.

That said, the landscapes that I glimpse through his prose are lonely ones, not unlike the recent photos on Facebook posted to illustrate the lonely feeling of social distancing. “It’s a lonely job,” the cliché tells us, being at the top. Holding all the power, in a position that comes with godhood, might isolate a person. He talked himself through his trials, drawing on the wisdom of his teachers from the past, the philosophers. These pep talks are his Meditations.

How many are writing their Meditations in these lonely times? What ratio would describe the Meditations being written compared to the treatises of raging propaganda?

Travelogue 898 – April 6
A Different Time

The girls are adapting easily. How would they know whether it’s a new world? Coming one year later, the pandemic might have been an event that really registered with Baby, an event that made a permanent mark in her memory. But she’s too young. She was going to school every day. Then, quite suddenly, she wasn’t. She didn’t ask questions. She plays with Little Ren, her little sister, and she does her lessons with Mom at the kitchen table. The rhythm of life is familiar enough.

For older kids, I imagine it will be a milestone of sorts. For young adults, it will be more, a turning point, perhaps like 9/11 was for a previous generation, perhaps like the fall of the Berlin Wall for another. For old-timers, it’s more like a quiet watershed, like a massive mudslide you watch from a distance, too far away to hear, an event that changes the landscape you’ve been admiring for years. Who knows? There are plenty of partisans out there ready to tell me that everything corona is hyperbole. Why did we ever shut down the taverns and the stadiums?

I’m happy if the girls are free from worry. They don’t need this particular dose of cold water to the face. The world is not safe, and they’ll find that out in due time. For now, adversity wears the mask of the sister. They make each other cry. They monopolize toys; they pinch; they steal more kisses from Mama than is fair to the other.

Leave it to us to shoulder the horror. Leave it to the ouders.

At night, I listen to my ghosts, and I turn to my solaces. I read a verse or two from Aurelius, the counsellor, the consoling voice to those with a plague of concerns. He’s a good counsellor because he’s an anxious man, confiding to his journal the needs of the soul for order and sense. An emperor, he felt powerless. Someone unique, he felt anonymous before time and fate. His meditations read like affirmations, like the comforts one breathes to oneself at the end of a tough day.

And then he reminds us he’s from another age. “You have perhaps seen a severed hand or foot, or a head lying by itself apart from its body,” he writes, reminding us he’s a ghost himself. My fears have no life anymore, he slyly says.

Travelogue 897 – April 2
Farther

There’s always some train passing. I see a tram, or I see the intercity trains. The interiors are empty. The sun shines through the windows unimpeded. If auto traffic doesn’t look to have slowed much, public transit looks hard hit.

In Week Three of the Shutdown, I’ve wandered a bit farther afield on my walks. When the sun has been shining, I’ve been drawn to walk into the sun. It’s the end of the day, and sometimes I find myself on the high road leading west to Schiedam. I say ‘high’ because it rises above the level of the neighbourhood, passing over a busy artery that leads north into the Spaanse Polder. That’s about where the elevated Metro curves in to run parallel to, and above, the road to Schiedam. Dead ahead, at this time of day, at this time of year, shines the sun. I can’t turn away from the warmth and light, and so I keep walking.

Without turning around, I enter Schiedam, following the road into the town centre, following the Metro line to the central train station. It isn’t far; I can see the zig-zagging roof of the station from where I start on the Schiedam road. My eye follows the elegant curve of the elevated Metro track as it turns to the right, gliding down the gentle hill toward the station.

The effect of the station itself is unsettling. It’s nearly empty. The people who are there seem lost or vaguely hostile. Everyone walks around each other without looking, except for the teenage boys horsing around and laughing too loudly. The quarantined world is one that bad boys seem to enjoy. I check the boards, curious to see what is still running. The train schedule seems normal, except for the abundance of red script identifying trains that have been cancelled.

The Metro ride back is also an eerie experience. There are four of us in the car. All of us are male. Three of us are young and shrouded in hoodies, - meaning, the other guys. All in all, public transit is a spooky experience. The Metro train takes no time to cover the distance I’ve fashioned a long walk from, taking that long turn in the sky over the football pitches in less than a minute, while I watch out the window from my seat, trying to count my steps.

Travelogue 896 – March 28
Under the Metro

It’s not the most colourful neighbourhood to be trapped in. We didn’t move to Spangen to contemplate the littered streets and drab, decaying architecture. We moved here five years ago to have a nice apartment on our budget, and to be within reach of the rest of the city.

Now it seems the rest of the city has faded away. I spot the high buildings once in a while, when cresting some small rise nearby, and I salute wistfully. Once I lived in a city. Now I live in a neighbourhood. There will be many lessons learned from the coronavirus, and one will be that a place is only as good as its half-kilometre radius.

Now it’s been nearly two weeks since I’ve seen any other part of the city. The furthest I go is the supermarket, which is on the other side of the Metro station. In the other direction, I take walks occasionally in the afternoon. Years ago, walks were my daily staple for sanity. It’s nice to have them back. But my past lives had prettier backdrops. It’s a struggle to squeeze any inspiration out of this one.

I find myself drawn to the pitches on the other side of the Metro line. Out here, the Metro line itself rises from the earth like a stalking giant, extending a high platform away from the city and toward the rail line’s next stop in the neighbouring town of Schiedam. Under that elevated track are the pitches I’m talking about, a complex of half a dozen or more community pitches.

Some young people and families flout the social distancing rules to come out and kick around a football, but, for the most part, the pitches are now quiet. It’s the peace that draws me. And it’s the sense of space. It’s nice to have one place nearby where you aren’t ushered down narrow alleys among city buildings, and where you can see some distance. The mind and body respond immediately, as though there is more oxygen and as though thoughts find more space.

I turn one corner and cross in front of a school that is dark and neglected. I turn another corner and walk the length of a parking lot facing the pitches. Half the cars parked there are occupied by someone busy with their mobile. I’m from another time; I can’t see that as anything but creepy. Down farther, I pass the broken façade of an abandoned fire station. Leaving the parking lot, I follow a path underneath the elevated tracks, skirting the edges of the far pitches. These fields are grass, and no one plays out here. It occurs to me that I would rather play on grass, but then I’m no football player. Gaming fields have their measures, and my walks are short.

We’ve turned a corner in the corona shutdown. We’ve entered long stretches of temporal space that we hope are the middle stages of the crisis, though it’s hard to escape an uneasy feeling we’re entering a vast open territory we would call the Future, or a new age, if we just knew.

Travelogue 895 – March 24
Week Two

I can still find my class schedule on the school website, like a report from a ghostly life beyond the reach of the coronavirus; like glimpses of people in a parallel Metro train, where they don’t have to keep 1.5 metres apart; like the world you think you wake up to before your memory corrects you.

In my ghostly class schedule, I see the rooms numbers where students would have been waiting for me on this very day; where I would have flung my jacket around the back of the chair and sat in the swivel chair to log in on the computer; where I would have stood at the window during the last minute before class started, staring out over the decommissioned harbour six storeys below.

But that is just our shadow world now. Each day’s events take us further away, as though those Metro trains were drifting steadily apart on divergent tracks. This world is the quiet one, in which everyone maintains an empty seat between themselves and their neighbours.

It’s funny how quickly it all happened, and how easily. It overtook us like a spring breeze, rippling grasses and bending slender branches among the trees, then raising goose bumps when it arrived. It was all the stranger in the way it arrived with spring, blue skies dawning on quarantine.

Our last day of normality was a rainy one. I dressed Little Ren up and put her on the bike. Wow, I’m already nostalgic for that kind of whimsy: to take my little girl out to the café, just because we felt like it; just because we craved a treat; just because we wanted a change of scenery. I worked on the laptop at our table; Little Ren played among the toys in the children’s corner.

As I paid our bill, I asked the barista what time they opened in the morning, and he told me with an awkward smile that the boss had just called to say that the government was shutting cafes and restaurants for three weeks. A chill ran down my spine. Life without the café? Now it’s been almost two weeks.

Those were grand days. People sat freely at tables, all in the same room, sharing the same air, touching tabletops that strangers touched only moments before. We lived dangerously.

Travelogue 894 – March 18
High Noon at Eight O’Clock

We have found our quiet routines for a quiet new era. It doesn’t take long. Animals are built for habit. We’re up early. Even with nowhere to go, sleeping in is not an option. Little Ren wakes up, and she makes her noisy way downstairs. She dresses herself. She insists it’s time to go.

When the corona shutdown began last week, it triggered a wave of hoarding. By Saturday, many shelves at the local Albert Heijn were empty. There was no meat, no greens, no fruit. There was no rice, no pasta, no bread. “Aha,” I said to myself, standing forlornly amid the desolation. Shopping could no longer be random.

That’s when we started shopping first thing in the morning, right when the supermarket opens. Little Ren took this mission to heart. After the first morning trip, she was committed. We were not going to miss a day. She dresses herself in the morning. She puts on her tights and shoes. He pulls on her own jacket, though she leaves the zipper to me. She finds the bicycle helmet, and she silently, but impatiently, waits for me to be ready.

The ride to the store is quick and agreeable. Little Ren chatters the whole way. She likes to tell me, “You’re going the wrong way, Pop.” I play along. “Oh, really? Well, let’s try this way.” There are enough turns along the way to make that game possible.

The weather has been fine. The moment the corona crisis broke, spring came to the Netherlands, as though nature had only been waiting for a sacrifice. The weather has been eerily pleasant; all the more eerie for how miserable the winter was, relentlessly wet and windy.

The cherry trees have blossomed. Tulips and daffodils are blooming, often in bright patches among grass strips dividing the roadways. The girls are at an age that they love flowers. These are the high points of cycling with them, when they shout out in delight at the sight of more buds opening.

The shelves are never as empty as they were last weekend, but there are always a few key lacunae. Some gaps rotate; some are constant. Fruit and vegetables, for example, come and go in quick succession, different colours for different days. Pasta and pasta sauce come and go. Meats each have their two- or three-day season. Even precious toilet paper appears suddenly in great bounty. The more fixed gaps are among the soap and medicine shelves. Sanitizer and paracetamol are simply gone.

When we arrive at the supermarket, Little Ren takes charge. She marches through the entrance and straight to the turnstile. There she pauses like a gunslinger at the doors of the saloon. This is it. Papa, grab that basket.

Travelogue 893 – March 11
Real Men, Real Viruses

The coronavirus panic is spreading quickly in Europe. Italy is in lock-down, and schools have been closed in Spain and Greece. I read this morning that a hundred are dying per day in Italy.

It’s surprising that the simple fact of a virus loose in the world would be controversial. There’s a lot of chatter in Europe, not much of it real controversy. But the news from the U.S. relays all kinds of debate and indignation. The cult of politics is omnivorous. Its appetite is limitless.

On the right, people have suddenly developed strict standards about how many need to die before a virus gets a badge of authenticity. Not enough people have died! Anyone promoting containment is … a cry-baby, a socialist? Is that what they want to say? It seems like an odd line to draw in the sand, but I suppose you have to admire their bravura in the face of a threat that typically makes people mad with fear. Humanity doesn’t generally spit in the face of disease.

Denial of frowning faces is kind of a vogue among the right. So much bad news is exaggerated, they say. Racism and sexism, Russian interference and the Holocaust, they’re all bogeymen. Mexicans are rapists, but the wall stops them. It’s quite a happy and uncomplicated world the right sees out the window. There’s something nice about that, I guess.

I continue my daily reading project, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. I take in a few lines every night. It doesn’t seem as though the emperor’s world was so tidy as Trump’s. His duties weighed on him. Moral choices didn’t seem so obvious. And mortality was a concern at closer proximity. His regular contemplation of mortality was common enough for philosophers of all ages. It was an exercise in humility. It was also a kind of booster shot against the horror of non-existence. The daily reminder was like exercise or toothcare, a kind of small pain as inoculation against the big one, inevitable though it may be.

I think about our solaces. I think about our conversations with nature. “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away,” to quote another philosopher. “Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither.”

Travelogue 892 – March 6
What Are the Odds?

A hundred percent, the weather app says. The chance of rain in the next hour is one hundred percent. I linger over that prediction a moment before I share it with Little Ren.

Little Ren wants to go outside. She requests it over and over, so that it’s hard to say no. “It’s raining outside,” I say, and I hold her up to the window so she can see. The pavements are dark with the damp. The brick wall opposite is streaked with rainwater. The rain gutters are full. In every puddle, we can see the drops of rain splashing.

Little Ren loves the outdoors. She’s curious. She is drawn to the open spaces and new sights. On occasions when we do step outside, she wants only to run. She feels a joy in the act of running. I can tell: I still feel the same sometimes. Her short legs plug along, churning quickly. She looks down at her feet, always wondering, and she stumbles. I watch her from behind. She’s always running away, and without hesitation.

Water is beading on the windows. The patter of rainfall is steady. The clouds above don’t vary in the grey shadow they cast over the city. I suggest to Little Ren that we go out later. She hears any equivocation as a no. She stomps away, dejected.

This is our world now, warmer, wetter, and windier. It’s been a dreary winter, a drag on our spirits. It takes energy to travel into the wind. It takes energy even to live with so little light. Ice and cold have their own effect on morale, but they offer something to engage with. The scenery changes. Landscapes are white. Or, at the very least, the chill air makes for sharp perspectives. Puddles ice over; your steps crunch. Climate change is just making the world greyer and more tired.

I think about our solaces. I think about our ghosts. I think about the conversation between humanity and nature. I reflect on the echoes and the harmonies that we interpret as chatter. They inform us, whatever their source or their motivation. God talks to us; the moon talks to us; the unconscious talks to us. Even conceding that each of those may exist, even conceding they talk, do they see us as interlocutor? Is it wrong that we collect their utterances as text or captions for our stories?

I return to the weather report contained within my phone. One hundred percent, it says. When does a calculation of odds become a flat statement of fact? At one hundred percent? Do we sometimes forget what we meant when we created the idea of probability? Can we use probability to overrule chance? Do we then become creators? Let there be light. The grammar seems ambiguous.

Travelogue 891 – February 25
Sun as God

I wish it were still in fashion to worship the sun. It makes perfect sense to me. It’s the source of life, nurturing and constant. It sheds light and warmth on us all.

Okay, maybe I’ve become a little over-excited by the shining sun this morning. It’s the first sighting in days, maybe weeks. After a windy morning shower, the clouds suddenly parted. I put little Ren on the bicycle. By the time we had left behind the streets of our neighbourhood, the clouds had opened to reveal a wide, blue sky. The sun shone unimpeded over the south-eastern horizon, into our eyes. The light was startling. It was disorienting. We had to stop to admire, as though we had spotted a glowing elephant ambling down the Vierhavensstraat.

Well, why not a god? Even in the age of science, the sun is still rather mysterious. Its face is too bright to look at. Its face is ever-changing. There are storms and spots. Its mass is stable and unstable. It burns on and on, for billions of years. It throws out threads of fire millions of miles long. And waves of radiation. Recent pictures of its face show cells of fire in constant motion. (As big as France, I believe they said. Everything big is as big as France.) But we insist on simple-minded categories of animate and not, and the sun remains a thing. Even as we discover the complexity of the biosphere here on Earth. Even as here, on the tiny rock that is Earth, we find systems so interlinked in sophisticated networks, animate with inanimate, that they might seem lifelike to the superstitious. Doesn’t the line dividing life from lifeless seem a little dated, reminiscent of a diagram from a 1950s textbook?

Being that as it may, it seems as though European cultures favoured storm gods like Zeus and Thor. I suppose that’s understandable, given the climate. But storm gods were gods to fear, rather than gods to admire and love. That’s a pity.

The clouds are already gathering again. By afternoon, it will be raining. We had our moment of joy. We were reminded of the power of the sun, and then, just as quickly, of the power of the storm.

Travelogue 890 – February 23
Dear Diary

February is a short month, fleeting and tumultuous. It enters with authority; it comes as a challenge. It occupies its place in the calendar like a Bonaparte. February commands. It marches us through marshy territory. We are only reluctant and hungry troops who must be led into the more hopeful terrain of March. That will mean facing into the wind. When there’s no wind, there is rain. When there’s no rain, there is fog. After a quiet night, the morning comes with a new wind.

It’s the middle of the night. It’s raining outside. I’m in need of consolation. At this hour, this quietest hour of the night, I can hear the muttering of the ghosts.

I’ve been reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. I read a little bit every evening, just a ‘verse’ or two. It’s a book of consolations, written by a Roman emperor nearly two thousand years ago. It was written to console. But it was not written for any reader. It was written to console an emperor.

It’s an enigmatic book, written as a personal journal. That’s my interpretation, anyway. There isn’t a lot offered for context. It was passed along through history in twelve books of somewhat random notes, and it was studied as a philosophical text. Aurelius was looked upon as a philosopher, even in his own day. His reputation in intellectual history rests upon this volume. I wish I knew the story of the manuscript, how it survived from Aurelius’s tent, or palace, to make it into the hands of scribes. It’s probably something as banal as a play by his son for reflected glory. Or perhaps the vain emperor passed his notes among friends on the rare occasions he was in Rome.

Aurelius was, in fact, a warrior emperor, spending much of his reign in the field, marching against foes of the empire. That wasn’t unusual in that era. I can see how it added to the mystique of an emperor. Who wants a stay-at-home emperor? This was Julius’s mould, set in the conquests of Gaul and Egypt. Who wanted him languishing in Rome?

Aurelius’s notes are repetitive, as any personal diary must be. Much of it is Stoic philosophy, calls to duty and reminders of mortality, sounding like this one I read in the evening: “How many whose praises used once to be sung loudly are now relegated to oblivion; and how many of the singers themselves have long since passed from our sight!”

Travelogue 889 – February 13
The Colour of Ciara

Baby and I had penance to pay this morning. When Storm Ciara blew through town at the beginning of the week, we took a pass. I wasn’t going to take her to school on the bike in winds of 45K per hour or more. So we indulged in public transit.

Sunday night had seen winds measured at 100-120K per hour. We left the house on Monday morning to see the damage. It didn’t seem we’d been hit too hard. There were twigs and branches strewn everywhere, but no trees were down. Frankly, the debris from New Year’s was worse. But fireworks wouldn’t have downed the art piece on the roof of the building next to my workplace. The piece was simply the date of the building’s completion written out in neon several stories high. Yesterday, I noticed it was tipped over.

It’s become clear that Ciara was not going to be an isolated event. It’s been such a mild winter, I’ve become complacent. Vaguely grateful, but complacent. No, the winds were not going to abate completely. Neither was the rain. And then we found out about Storm Dennis, due at the end of the week, another bout of heavy wind and rain.

We woke to rain this morning, and we realized there was no reprieve this time. We would have to face the weather this time. We would have to be tough Nederlanders. ‘Just get on with it’ is the national slogan.

We dressed Baby in her pink rain overalls. I ran up and down the stairs looking for my rain gear. How does everything get spread around the flat like this? We were finally ready, several layers of weather gear covering us, Baby’s helmet in place. Once we were outside and under way, it didn’t seem so bad. But the steady wind was colder than the five degrees or so Celsius in air temperature, and my hands were raw before we were halfway. I was cycling into the wind, and it felt like Baby had gained ten kilos overnight.

Baby is the shy type. She didn’t want anyone to see her in her pink rain pants. She insisted we strip them off in the hallway, out of sight. My fingers were useless, and these pants were nearly impossible to get off around her shoes. By the time I got her seated in class, I was exhausted. Juf Jessica, may I just stay and colour? ‘Juf’ is the common title for female teachers, short for Juffrouw, or miss. She would have smiled in that sweet and commanding way, and I would have had to go.

Baby engaged with her colouring task this morning. Her mama paints, and so Baby is quite enthusiastic about colouring. This morning she was asking what colour her new shoes were. When she asked, she needed precision. Brown? No, bronze. She was asking if they might not be ‘burnt umber’. Um, you’d better ask your mum.

Travelogue 888 – January 27
Dark Town

And so 2020 has been a year, so far, of grey skies and mild temperatures. It’s been a year of running. I’ve been accumulating the kilometres, turning in the long runs with fierce discipline, allowing only minimal down time between them. And I’m feeling fine.

Once I reach a certain training distance, I start arranging runs to Delft. When I’m not running, I find myself missing this dark little town. It’s small and accessible. It’s local. It’s pretty. It’s many shades of rose, darkening into brown and charcoal, all shades reflected in the town’s small canals.

When a run is two hours long, it’s hard to reach Delft before dark, even on weekends. So the town lives in my imagination as a stimulating mix of shadow and endorphin high. There’s a dark quality to the medieval, in any case. Whether that’s the preponderance of stone and brick or the narrow streets and the high shadows, I can’t say. If it’s dark in summer, it’s sepulchral in winter.

Even the earliest start in winter means I spend twilight in the flat fields between Schiedam and Delft. I watch the clouds change colours; my watch buzzes when it counts off the kilometres. Once I’m near town I steer myself by the crooked tower of the Oude Kerk. The tower is distinctive for its fourteenth-century beauty, its clockface, its turrets at four corners and its central spire. It’s distinctive because it visibly leans. It was probably built on land reclaimed from the nearby canal, a canal that was redirected for the church’s sake. The tower began leaning before construction was done. It came to be known early on as Scheve Jan, ‘Crooked John’. The Old and the New Churches dominate the small town and the surrounding flat landscape, as they have for centuries.

If we’re able to arrange a baby-sitter, Menna meets me at a café near the Oude Kerk. We stroll through town. We find somewhere for a beer, where the tables are set too close to each other, where candlelight barely penetrates the gloom, where university students practice laughing at volume.

The way back to the station leads through alleys so narrow that we have to stagger ourselves to let others by. It doesn’t stop the students on bikes. The tighter the space, the harder that Dutch people concentrate on staring past you. That’s all right. We all avoid mishap, and the two of us enjoy our walk under the uneven brick gables.

Travelogue 887 – January 21
On the River

The Maas Tunnel was closed for renovation, and I had to find a way to get home. Fortunately, it wasn’t too cold. I had time to regroup. But when you’re standing outside in shorts, covered in sweat, it doesn’t take much to send the body into a spiral of cold. I had to keep moving. I had directions to the ferry, so I set off, jogging along the path beside the river. The neighbourhood consisted entirely of humble apartment buildings. There were shabby parks by the river, bits of grass, bits of old pavement. No one was out. There was a little café near the tunnel entrance. Inside were three men smoking shisha watching me go by. Any further west, and the riverside turned into port facilities. You could see the forest of cranes.

The ferry departed from a little square harbour called Sint-Jan. It wasn’t any further than half a kilometre from the tunnel. Even in the worst case, I wouldn’t have to wait more than twenty minutes.

Worst case: as soon as I was in sight of the entrance to that harbour, the bow of the ferry emerged into sight, leaving the harbour and heading toward the other side. I cursed my luck. I carried on running until I reached the little quay for the ferry. I watched the ferry go. You could watch it all the way across the river. But I needed to keep moving. Rather than take any risk getting lost or losing sight of the ferry itself, I turned around and ran back to the tunnel. I watched the low-lying boat, looking like a padded dust pan, chugging across the river and then gliding into the harbour on the northern side of the river, a harbour called Sint-Job. That’s a place I know well, only a few kilometres from home, only a few blocks from Baby’s school.

I watched the squat little boat return. I was at its quay in plenty of time, and I watched it drift into place. The gate was opened for southbound passengers. And they opened a gate for us. I boarded the ferry, which offered so much more space than we humble passengers needed, built as it was to carry autos and now carrying only a few two-wheelers and a fatigued runner. I searched quickly for a place out of the wind. There were a few little cubbies built for narrow benches set in shallow recesses with foggy windows. I sat. I stretched, and, without much ceremony, the boat lurched out into the water.

This is where the story discovered a new tone, where the misadventure became adventure. Being on the water was different than admiring it from the shore or the bridge! It was so easy to forget the simplest things during the ordinary course of my days. On the water, the quality of sound changed. The quality of light changed.

It was so refreshing. The sun had just set, and the city stood on the shores, removed and hushed. The play of colours on the water were subtle and complex. The sky and its quiet revolutions seemed more immediate, while ever untouchable. And this was not at all a scenic bit of cityscape. Here were both the verges of the big city, the lights of which lay east, and the verges of the port, the garish lights of which looked like they might aspire to be the set of a Netflix science fiction series. But the whole canvas was both dynamic and peaceful, a sum more than its parts, and being here on the river awakened some old affection for the city. In recent years, I had passed a point of deadening familiarity.

I disembarked at Sin-Job feeling sincerely renewed in some way. This complication in the day’s schedule had cost me very little: I lost half an hour at most, and I felt fine once I started running again. And in return, I had taken on a little light.

Sometimes renewal and refreshment seem absolutely inaccessible. And sometimes they are so easy. You stumble over your own soul sometimes, like tripping over a running shoe left at the foot of the couch.

Travelogue 886 – January 20
Over the River and Under

I’m passing over the river this morning, like I do every workday, pedalling the bike up and over the Erasmus Bridge. It’s always a nice view, looking west over the widening river and toward the clutter of machinery in the distant port, looking east into downtown, looking down at the rows of tidy houses on the western end of the river island known as Noordereiland, red and white houses from another time. Further east stands the red Willemsbrug, linking the other end of the island to downtown.

Just yesterday, I ran over the Willemsbrug. I set out from home in mid-afternoon. I had just enough time to put in a long run before the sun set. I was scheduled to put in at least seventeen kilometres. I ran into downtown. It was a clear day, cool but not cold, just about perfect for a winter run. I crossed the Willemsbrug and did a loop around the island before crossing to the south side. My plan was to run west to the Maas Tunnel, cross under the river and run home.

When I lived a bit closer to it, the Maas Tunnel was a staple among my training routes. It was fun to run underneath the river. The tunnel had a pedestrian level, and so I was saved the emissions and noise that came with running alongside a highway. Completed in 1942, the tunnel had an atmosphere I enjoyed; maybe the closeness of the space, maybe the close air, maybe the green tiles and the wartime yellow lighting.

It had been a long time since I ran this way, crossed one of the bridges and run through the south side of the city. I realized how long when I passed my workplace, and it came to me I hadn’t run this way in the year and a half since we relocated. I realized how long when I arrived at the entrance to the Maas Tunnel to find it quiet and encircled by construction barriers. It had been closed for renovation for two months already, I found out later.

I stood there in disbelief. Going back via the bridges would add another at least five more kilometres to the run, just when I was about to wrap up with the final stretch. I knew I couldn’t deliberate too long in the winter air. The site seemed deserted. What were my options?

But I had an abiding faith in Dutch systems. I knew there had to be a plan. This is a land of convenience and contingency. There was always a plan.

I finally spotted someone in the neon colours of construction sites everywhere. I rang my keys against the barrier and waited. She ambled over, and sure enough she spoke English, and sure enough there was a plan. She fetched a pamphlet for me, pointing out the map leading me to the ferry. For the duration of the renovation, this ferry across the river would be free.

Travelogue 885 – January 13
Friends of the Moon

Leaving our flat together in the morning, Baby and I are singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider”. We walk by the quiet flats of our neighbours in the half-light of dawn. “Out came the sun and dried up all the rain ….” Above, the clouds are crawling like spiders across the sky. They are crawling across the face of the gibbous moon. After they have passed over, the moon is bright. Baby likes to say the moon is following us. “It likes us,” she says, and I agree.

It seems to me the moon was full three days ago or so when I did my long run to Delft. The sun was going down on my left and the moon rising on my right, just as I was crossing the fields that lie in between the two urban areas. The land was completely flat. It was the perfect place to witness the end of the day. The clouds in the west were lit by a low fire. And high above, clouds were pink with the last of the direct light. That pink rose higher each minute, until the fire went out. Then it was like a light was shut off among the clouds. There was still light in the sky, but cooling into blue now. In the east, the moon hung just above the fields, a round white orb, swollen by the humid air into something grander than the sun, huge and elegant. It was an active hour for the birds. Flocks flew overhead, and dozens bathed in the canals beside the bike path. They were raising quite a fuss.

This morning, the moon is waning. And it’s on its way toward setting. Baby struggles with the idea of the moon ‘going down’. She asks me about it repeatedly as we descend the stairs to ground level. “Is the moon going down?” she wants to know. “Is it going down like we are?” She has a way of posing challenging questions. Is she asking if the moon has its own stairway? Or is this some observation about humanity?

“The moon likes us,” she says. It’s following us! I can’t say how refreshing it is to hear something so positive, so encouraging, so cheering. Could it be possible, after all, that the elements in nature do smile on us, like they do in children’s cartoons? I hadn’t realized how choked the stream of hope had become. Year after challenging year, the world around me took on steely shades of hostility. The gods became Greek in their capriciousness and contempt. But here it is again, optimism, like a spring flower.

“The moon likes us,” she says, and I enthusiastically affirm that it must.

Travelogue 884 – January 9
The New Number

The year (the decade?) came in with a bang, as is the tradition in the Netherlands. No one sleeps; fireworks are set off all over the city through most of the night. You emerge in the morning to the debris of battle, stepping over scattered piles of spent casings of firecrackers rockets, little pink, cardboard cylinders, burnt at one end and abandoned. After a few days, and a few rain showers, they melt into a pink sludge, gathered in anonymous mounds along the pavements.

We didn’t dare step out, but at midnight we held the girls up to the windows and watched the rockets in the night sky. Some fireworks were part of the shows downtown; some were set off a block away, and their sparks rained down on the roofs of the apartments across the street.

As it happens, a few days ago, the city council in Rotterdam decided to ban consumer fireworks, making it the first major Dutch city to do so. They cited injuries, and ‘an atmosphere of lawlessness’.

It did always strike me as a bizarre indulgence, this city-wide assault on the senses. Locals would call it ‘celebration’. Admittedly, there’s a moment or two among all the cacophony that does feel celebratory. I hold Baby as she stands in the upstairs window, and she watches with amazement. She names the colours among the explosions in the sky.

Then I think about the kids down in the streets, lighting rocket after rocket. I see the fun in ten minutes of that. I have trouble seeing the fun in hours and, indeed, days of it. Even the girls are losing interest after ten minutes or so of watching the lights in the sky.

I explain to Baby that it’s a new year. I recite the number. But this is rather abstract for her. She’s only recently gotten a grasp on seasons. Christmas came, and then it was winter. She complains that there should be snow if it’s really winter.

I’m not sure I’m really on top of the concept myself, the concept of these changing years. The change comes too abruptly. The timing of it seems odd. Why this moment a few weeks into winter? And why in the middle of the night? As I’ve said, I do find the human response to the new year hard to fathom. Let’s light up some gunpowder! But I’ve always been partial to reflection over celebration. And if any holiday seemed made for reflection, it would be New Year’s. Instead, we make the most noise possible, as thought to drive off reflection. Reflect on this: what sort of profile would you draw up for a personality averse to reflection?

Travelogue 883 – December 29
The Letters in Love

Being ill has forced me to recover a feeling for idleness. Rest is a good thing on its own merit. That’s a revelation. Even when you’re all slept out, lying idle is a good thing. Staring out the window, and indulging only the emptiest of thoughts becomes something positive. What a revelation.

I think I’ve rarely in life been as busy as I was this last fall season. It picked up in September, and it never really let up. I had something to do at all times. Every day, there was somewhere to be, multiple somewheres. That kind of hustle can be exhilarating. It informs a sense of purpose. Ultimately, though, being busy doesn’t invest the busywork with significance. You can be busy with trivia, and frankly most of us are. Society values motion over substance. It’s something like staring at the phone on the Metro – even if it’s Solitaire – instead of staring out the window. The phone apparatus itself invests its owner with seriousness.

But I was beginning to resent the motion. It doesn’t pay off. In a society that values motion, there’s no one left to notice what you’re doing. They will surely notice if you stop, but no one has time to check on your motion. Who polices the Solitaire players on the Metro? Those people should at minimum be shopping. Or they should be advancing the progress of some new trend.

I’ve had time to attend to the things that the girls love. They have a passion for puzzles and for drawing. Little Ren in particular is mad about puzzles. She’s solving puzzles well beyond her age level. Baby is the artist. She loves drawing and painting, an interest she probably picked up from her mother, who has been dedicating herself to water colours lately.

And Baby started reading! One evening she took a sudden interest. It had clicked in her understanding that letters added up to words. She looked down at her T-shirt, where one word was emblazoned in big letters. She read the letters as she saw them, looking down: E-V-O-L. The next day, she wrote her first word, EVOL. We cheered her on. Mama gave her new words to puzzle through, a list of three-letter words, vowels in the middle. And Baby was thrilled. It’s amazing how things start. I wish I could remember the first word I read.

Travelogue 882 – December 23
Winter Hero

I was hero for a day. We have been laid up all weekend, the whole family, with a horrible flu. The house was a mess; we were a mess. We were out of medicine and out of tissues. The situation could not have been more dire.

The world outside seemed menacing. It was solstice time. The days were short. Light was in short supply. Even at two o’clock, the was sun having a hard time penetrating the clouds. And, yet, even in that debile light, I knew there would be people in the streets, making their rounds. They were likely to be smiling, these people. They were likely to be in a Christmas spirit. They were going to be healthy and cheerful.

There was nothing to be done. I stood. My aching limbs would make dressing slow, but I had to push through the pain. My family depended on me. In the tradition of proud fathers through the centuries, men who have braved all that nature and humanity might hurl against them in order that their families may survive, I braced myself for the elements, and I set out for the store. It would be an epic trial, my steps slow and feeble, the weight of the backpack on my shoulders crushing. The light was dim, the rain gentle but persistent, the temperatures fiendishly mild. In short, everything was stacked against me.

So anyway, I made it. I won’t brag. The mission was accomplished. No one celebrated me along the final stretch toward home. I had no cheers. Even my family took my offerings in stride. To the girls, these were no presents. Medicines were more inconveniences. Baby was too wiped out to shower me with gratitude. She just stared at me from underneath her blankets. It made me sad again to see her in such a state.

The truth is, I may not have suffered for my family the way I should have. There were moments I enjoyed being out of the house. The walk was almost pleasant, once I’d accepted the slow pace and once my body had warmed up to the unaccustomed movement. Indeed, the store was crowded and loud; and, indeed, the people were offensively healthy and high-spirited. But I slipped through their nets of peppiness with minimal injury. I paid and packed my bag and was on my way home through the drizzling rain before they’d known it. The quiet courtyard of my building was a welcome salve to the aggravations of a season. I paused only a moment, but peace is potent in small doses.

Travelogue 881 – December 16
Take Solace, Republic

After watching the quiet and melancholy fall of Labour in England’s election, I confess to a certain pride in the vitality of the opposition in the U.S. I admire Bernie’s dogged persistence and consistency. I appreciate Mayor Pete’s earnestness. I’m fond of ‘Sloppy Joe’ the way many Americans are, guiltily but sincerely. And who could help but admire the powerhouse that is Elizabeth Warren?

I read an article recently that drew the tired parallel between the U.S. today and Rome in its early imperial era. The author wasn’t claiming it was a new idea but directed the analysis away from the emperors and toward the failing legislative bodies. The failure of the Roman Senate was the story of weak and self-interested old men. And therein lies the author’s caution.

The sad visages of Moscow Mitch and Lindsey Graham drifted through my mind as I read, but to say the two eras are the same is to miss one huge difference. The Trump story features a host of strong and charismatic women rising in opposition, and, by the way, being rather effective. They have provided not only critique but alternatives, whether in substance or style. The story of Trump is also the story of Pelosi and Warren and AOC.

There are men in there fighting the good fight, too, guys like Schiff and Nadler. What is refreshing is that they don’t seem threatened by Pelosi’s leadership. They aren’t stealing any scenes. They do their job.

It’s a refreshing change. To deny the good news here is to make an effort to look the other way. I don’t think that’s unfair to say. It’s the kind of mentality that constructs insults for Greta Thunberg. It takes an effort to be that cynical.

As tiresome as the drums of the left can be, the reactions in our times to Obama, Hillary, and Greta make it pretty clear how deep the biases and hatred run, and how ugly they are. To put it another way, the violence of the bigots gives them away. The right doth protest too much. Their pathology alone ought to convince those on the fence, those who may be intimidated by the forceful rhetoric about racism or sexism. Take a breath; comfort yourself that people like Trump will have money and power behind them for a long time to come; and take a quiet look around.

Rational and positive opposition is a good thing. Be concerned when your screaming succeeds, and yours is the only voice in the room. That’s when the ghost of Caligula comes a-calling.

Travelogue 880 – December 5
Sint-Niklaas

Santa is a more elusive character than his Dutch counterpart, Sinterklaas. Santa may show up occasionally at shopping malls to meet the children, but those appearances are random and serve little real purpose in his mission, except perhaps to gather gift ideas. Would a wise old man compile his lists this late?

When it comes to Santa’s central mission of delivering toys from the North Pole, he works in secrecy. He circles the globe in one night, eluding all surveillance, and then he disappears into the first light of Christmas Day. Kids never spot him breaking into their houses. He’s forgotten once the gifts are open.

Sinterklaas, in contrast, lives a much more ordinary life, befitting the pragmatic character of the Dutch. We need not imagine him as an ascetic dug into arctic seclusion. Sinterklaas lives in Spain, a more commodious place for a workshop, I’d say. He doesn’t constrain himself to one night. He enters Holland weeks ahead of the holidays, and he arrives in the light of day. He doesn’t sneak around, but arrives by boat, and then joins a parade through town.

The parade in Amsterdam is usually in mid-November. For the next few weeks, children watch for gifts of candy left in their shoes, and then, on the 5th of December, Sinterklaas leaves his presents at families’ homes.

The timing is aggressive for transplants. We’re used to having all December to shop for Christmas. We struggle, especially given the timing of Little Ren’s birthday, just days after Sinterklaas. We don’t have the option to ignore the Dutch holiday anymore, since Baby started school. She comes home with lots of chatter about Sinterklaas and queries after her presents.

In fact, today, Baby came home from school, to tell us she had seen Sinterklaas himself. It turns out the teachers had taken their kids out to the pier in Delfshaven to see Sinterklaas arrive by boat. The school posted a video of the event for parents, the scene a mob of children cheering the approach of a small boat with a waving Santa figure. The suit is similar, all red and white, but in truth Sinterklaas is more fit than Santa. His beard is longer, looking more old-time prophet than jolly elf. But there he is, recognizable as the type, Father Christmas.

Baby was suitably awed. She is now the authority on Sinterklaas, even correcting me on the name. “Papa, his name is Sint-Niklaas!” The stage is set. Now we arrange the gifts for discovery this evening. Sinterklaas has come! Excuse me, Sint-Niklaas.

Travelogue 879 – November 19
De Dingen
Part Two

It’s not even six, but it’s nearly the pitch of night outside. The café is cosy enough, furnished in hues of warm wood and bits of higher colour in the wall art and chair cushions. It still feels dim and hushed, though. It’s not an easy thing combatting the winter darkness.

Cosiness is important in winter. The Dutch might say the café is gezellig. That roughly translates to ‘cosy’. But it’s more. It doesn’t translate well, as Dutch people are eager to tell you. Gezellig is really a standalone concept for the Dutch, a mood. It could be good company, good cheer, comfort and warmth. I hypothesize now, sitting in the dim café, shielded from the cold, that the word grew organically in opposition to the lingering winter.

Kermit doesn’t receive much comfort at his post. We say he doesn’t require any. But what do we know? Physics teaches us that his body stands against gravity because the body pushes back. Already matter is mysterious. How do we reason through the state of the inanimate?

‘Inanimate’ describes matter that is imbued with no anima. Anima is soul or mind. It’s what motivates, makes us move. A chair is inanimate. A statue is inanimate. Is a dead body? Probably. But what about a zombie? I don’t think this concept has been fully worked out.

Our ghost has taken to leaving the door in our entryway open. It’s as though he craves the cold. This door shields us from the air that leaks through our front door. It’s an instinct now to reach for that door every time we enter the kitchen, it’s left open so often. We don’t think about it anymore.

Presumably a ghost moves. But it has no substance. Is it anima without matter? Does it speak to inanimate matter? Could Kermit communicate with our ghost? Maybe he is too busy pushing against the substance of the building below him.

Why does he do that? Why does he stand so long without a break? Why does our ghost like to move things around? Maybe what really matters to the inanimate is geometry. There’s some big blueprint where all the angles are right, or a common sense of symmetry concerning the alignment of all things.

Me, I’m cheered by the taste of carrot cake, and the aroma of my coffee. These are forms of solace. That must seem impossibly simple-minded to the inanimate.

Travelogue 878 – November 18
De Dingen
Part One

It was going to be our last rehearsal for the fall plays. That meant it would be the last time I would be in The Hague for a while, other than for the performance itself. I arrived in town early. I wanted to take my time cycling, enjoy the place. I wanted to see Kermit on Piet Heinstraat.

I rented my ‘OV Fiets’ at Central Station, and I leisurely made my way north and west across the centre of town. It was the end of the workday, so crowds were crossing city spaces in every direction. The bike paths were busy. I didn’t mind; I drifted along on the right side of the path, and I took in the sights of this pretty town. Just north of Central Station was the spacious, green park that I had always found so peaceful. My urban life hasn’t afforded me many views across open spaces. It’s a kind of salve to the agitated mind.

I settled in at the café on Piet Heinstraat. It was a stormy evening, and dusk had been coming earlier every day. It was already getting dark when I first spotted Kermit, still occupying the top of the gable across the street. He stood atop this four-storey yellow house on the corner, and he raised his arms in a kind of salute to the yielding summer, to the passing year. He grinned perpetually and hopefully toward the south. He grinned endearingly, fatuously, and without rest.

I could only make out his silhouette against the last of the day’s light that made its feeble way through legions of clouds. It made him seem heroic, standing against the darkening clouds, his features obscured. The night advanced inexorably, taking no note of Kermit. Despite Kermit’s efforts on behalf of warmth.

All this was conjecture, of course. Kermit was a happy puppet, but he was a puppet. I had no access to his thoughts. Perhaps the season was well aware of the tiny frog. More than aware. Perhaps Kermit was the wizard that summoned the winter.

Somehow this did seem like his time and his world, a winter dusk in the city, when people were rushing home to flee the cold and the bleak streets. It was the time of year we humans abandoned the cold out-of-doors to the rule of the things that had no nerves and no emotions. Buildings stood silently and sleek cars flashed by, dark and sealed and offering only the reflection of the city lights from their polished surfaces. Soon enough, the street would be still as Kermit, cold and silent.

Travelogue 877 – November 17
Show on the Train

Screening the film in an old church was, after all, appropriate. The film was almost a hundred years-old itself, a relic from another age. There was some correspondence in relative ages between the event and its setting, I would say. In the history of film, a hundred years is ancient history.

The film was a silent one, and so the high pipes of the organ displayed so prominently behind the film screen were put to good use. The church reverberated with musical accompaniment for the duration of the film. Much of the music turned around a motif of ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’.

Presiding as movie star was one of the early high priests of film, Buster Keaton. This film he made during the decade of his prominence, in the 1920s. It was called ‘The General’, and it was set during the Civil War. The plot was based on actual events, when a set of Union spies stole a train and led a wild pursuit around Tennessee, as they left a trail of destruction. Keaton played the part of a clumsy Confederate engineer, who single-handedly chases after the spies, even as far as Union territory (where he rescues his beloved, who was kidnapped with the train).

The film was funny, of course. Keaton was a master of physical comedy, and the trademark deadpan expression just made him more endearing as the film went on. He pulled off some of his imaginative stunts, like sitting on a coupling rod among the train’s wheels as it set off, and leaping on and off the train and between cars as though he were an elf. But the film was more. Keaton was earnest about setting the scene. Town scenes and props were authentic. There were plenty of expansive landscapes. The trains themselves were amazing, and the battle scenes impressive. There was a surprisingly panoramic feel to this comedy. In one scene, a rail bridge was blown while a train crossed. Apparently, the wreckage remained there for decades as something of a tourist attraction. (The movie was filmed in Oregon.)

Considered his masterpiece now, ‘The General’ was poorly received. People didn’t find it funny enough. Its dismal performance at the box office undermined his role as independent filmmaker. He never quite recovered his status as director.

I’m no genius, but I can appreciate how Keaton might have felt, since I’ve just wrapped up a run of several plays. Audience reaction is a mysterious quantity. I have people approach me afterward with a light in their eyes and a smile, who dive right into a list of critiques. They’re too excited for introductions. Some of the criticism is quite helpful. Some is strange and off the mark. But I always smile, wondering about the impact that art has on people. Many of my audience were probably coerced into attending, being friends or family of actors. But they were touched. It’s not the bored and indifferent who approach a writer afterward. They find it hard to verbalize how theatre affects them, so they speak in accessible, analytical ways. I’m not boasting that it was the written word that touched them. It might have been the acting, the immediacy of the art form, or just the ritual of live events. But something did touch them, and that is gratifying.

Keaton started as a child vaudeville star whose singular talent was taking a beating. The concept of the act was a naughty boy annoying his father and being tossed around the stage. His particular forte was his ability to take a fall. It’s said that his dead pan style evolved from his observation that audiences didn’t respond well to his laughter while being thrown into the orchestra pit. That is an attentive artist.

The film ended, and the Dutch audience clapped. The shadows in the old church seemed long. The evening had deepened outside. The shadows were sombre. This might have been the genesis of comedy, I thought as I left, a tonic to nights in the temples.

Travelogue 876 – November 16
Show in the Church

I was writing about how theatre is made. The cast and the crew work slowly and carefully for months, and then, when the actors take the stage, time plays its trick. The springs are pulled from the clock, and everyone is abandoned to a shocking free fall. It feels like the show collapses into a spinning series of stills, and then it’s over.

A week later, I was scouting for a different experience. I wanted to join the audience. Time treats people in the seats with more respect. When a performance works, time eddies in a pleasant pool, still enough to catch a rich set of reflections. Even when the show doesn’t work, time gathers, though it might gather at one’s feet like a puddle of waste.

There was a film festival in Schiedam, the next town west on the Maas River. It’s a ten-minute cycle ride. The film I chose started early enough that I could be home again for dinner. The venue was the town’s central church, the Grote Kerk.

Schiedam rose from the marshes at about the same time as Rotterdam, in the thirteenth century or so, (though marginal villages existed on these sites earlier). For centuries, the two towns were probably very similar, towns with dams, towns with big-river access. It took a while for Rotterdam’s port to gain primacy.

Schiedam held her own during Holland’s Golden Age in the seventeenth century, but did even better when Dutch genever, or gin, captured the fancy of Northern Europe’s sailors and drunks. For more than a century, it was the premier origin of Holland’s magic liquor, so much so that the town’s name survived in French and English for a while as a generic name for the stuff.

Whatever the means, Schiedam had its salad days. And so it is that, despite its current reputation as a dumpy little city with a crime problem, Schiedam does have a very attractive historic centre, a district more cohesive than Rotterdam’s, which was lost in the Second World War. At the centre of this pretty little district is the Grote Kerk.

The church is no Chartres, but it’s a solid beauty in sooty red brick, comparable to other Golden Age churches in South Holland. It could be little sister to Den Haag’s Grote Kerk, smaller, more angular, only lacking the graceful heights of the nave in Den Haag. It could be an older, shrunken sister to Rotterdam’s Grote Kerk, missing the lighter Renaissance touches. But she is a pretty addition to this swampy little region at the delta.

The film was projected onto a huge screen set up underneath the sixteenth-century organ case, which occupies all the space in its high arch. The case is a beautiful work to contemplate in itself, composed of dark wood with many ornamental carvings, including the Dutch imperial lions with the crown. There appear to be a pair of fit mermen holding up the highest set of organ pipes. At the top, lost in the shadows of the arch is a winged angel equipped with a trumpet.

Travelogue 875 – November 12
Show of the Season

The sky is shreds and tatters this morning. In the north, the clouds are dark as dusk. I’m watching out the windows as we dress Baby in a rush. We have some new rain pants for her, and we’re struggling with those. They are lined with fleece, and so they must be rolled on and peeled off. Baby amuses herself by lying limp in our arms as we try to put on the final layer.

Baby and I are finally on the bike, pedalling south. In this direction, the sky is shreds and tatters. The clouds are flying low. Some are white, and some are grey. Between some of them are glimpses of blue sky. It’s a sky of conflict, and it’s a sky of paradox. There’s a play up there, a story to be told. The clouds tear as they race. Among the trailing threads of their raiment, the open sky is allowed brief windows.

I’m in theatre recovery. The plays had their first show last weekend. All of the fall has been devoted to this point to pulling together these shows. Next week, we perform in The Hague. And then that’s it. That’s the shock and the joy of doing theatre, how quickly it’s over. Months of writing, planning, rehearsing, and promoting can begin to feel like a job, or like a second family. Then, quite suddenly, you’re stage-side as the lights are coming up.

I think it’s something we all love and hate, the precipitous nature of that moment, without being able to reconcile the duality. The moment breaks from the physics of time, arriving outside of its objective place, and passing like a cascade in an otherwise slow stream. You shake off the spell at the after party, scratching your head. All those weeks rowing along in the calm waters of rehearsal, your careful thoughts measured like the motion of rowing, and then the tumble of the cascade reduces everything to instinct, and you can’t be sure of the result, of how exactly you did.

As fall came on, Baby was rehearsing the seasons in her mind. She always had trouble distinguishing summer from sunny and cold from winter. When fall’s first chill came on, she couldn’t understand why I would deny it was winter. I couldn’t interest her in this intermediary season. She only wanted to know when the snow would come. Last year, she was quite taken with the change of the leaves, so I tried reviving that interest and giving the season its name, but the fascinations of children – or this child – rarely have long lives or afterlives. And so, we’ve reached a temporary impasse in understanding the four seasons. She does have a remarkable memory, though. She remembers the leaves of last year. She remembers throwing snowballs at Mama and where they landed.

To be fair, the seasons are each distinct, aren’t they? We do them a disservice to stress their homogeneity too much. Every autumn is not the same; what makes them beautiful is the variation on a theme. Children have an instinct for these things, and we would do well to pay attention. Winter comes. Where adults take comfort from the familiar, children just want the opportunity to throw snowballs.

In theatre, we play games with time. We narrate a season, and we re-enact it. It may be meant as an act of solace, but the ephemeral nature of it projects more shadow than light. We start with sentiment, but we act out something stark and frightening. Afterward, we give in to a slight shudder. We raise our glasses to each other’s health, and the terrible premonition passes.

Travelogue 874 – October 22
Frog Days

Out the window, above the roofs of Piet Heinstraat in The Hague, I see only blue sky. There isn’t a cloud in sight. The sun is low. Cyclists rushing home at day’s end along the narrow brick street are squinting into the western sun. It doesn’t slow them down. They cruise along, never hesitating at the speed bumps. And everyone is bundled up, though it was nearly fifteen degrees all day. It’s as though we were impatient for the ambiguity of summer’s long farewell to be done. When autumnal clouds moved in, we threw on our best winter coats and raced into the showers on our bikes. Still, we haven’t seen any temperatures remotely approaching freezing. In fact, now the forecasts say that the weeks of daily rain may be coming to a close. Certainly, those blue skies I see are heartening.

The view out the café window is far more involved than clear skies. The quaint clutter of this neighbourhood predominates, a clutter made up of three- and four-storey structures, lined up in close order along the tiny lane that is crowded with bikes, bikes moving or bikes parked in messy rows. Each narrow building is fronted with brick of yellow or red, and fitted with humble but distinctive features, whether gables or square jutting bay windows or Jugendstil stained glass or tiles.

Another lane empties into this one, just opposite my window. It’s just as narrow, but long and straight. It diminishes into distances washed in brick red. The houses there are more uniform than the ones on Piet Heinstraat. The latter is like a hip high street, blessed with boutiques, health foods, collectibles, and expensive coffee. On the corner outside, there is a store advertising comic book paraphernalia, toys and apparel, DVDs, models and books. In a transom window upstairs, above a balcony door cracked open for a fresh western breeze, there stand a family of wooden toy horses, painted pink and black. Above that transom window rises a simple gable, chimney-like and straight-edged, set inside mansard roofing shingled not in tile, but in asphalt. Decorating the highest metre of the gable is a crude relief of a rising sun’s rays. Set upon the very top ridge is a celebrant Kermit, raising his plastic arms toward the south, as though exultant that the sun has survived another tilt of the planet and even now warms the backs of his cousins in equatorial lands.

Travelogue 873 – October 10
Thousands Must Die

“Kurdish,” is her answer. I teach an evening class for adults. Before class starts, before most students have arrived, I’m asking what languages are represented in the room. Among four students, we have four mother tongues. L tells us, “Kurdish,” and my heart sinks. I know already she’s from Syria. I didn’t know she was Kurdish. She has replied without any emotion.

I ask her if her family is safe. It’s an intrusive question, and I might not have asked it if I had thought about it first. But I felt bad for her immediately. I felt guilty about our president. I felt ashamed by this one man’s shamelessness, and about my nation’s powerlessness to provide the slightest check. Policy is whim in the White House, and so little guided by thought, or really any recognizable internal process, that I wonder whether the best check might not just be a twenty-four-hour snooze function. Chances are the man wouldn’t recognize his decisions the next day. He would denounce the same as liberal plots. Meanwhile, thousands must die because we can’t figure out what impeachment means.

I utter some mild words of solace for L’s benefit. No one else in the class seems to understand our conversation. It could be they didn’t hear her. Maybe they are confused by her bland tone. Maybe they aren’t following the news, or don’t know what Kurdish signifies. L doesn’t respond any further. She is occupied with her phone, and I’m thinking it might very well be an effort to find out some news about her family. She may just be texting about her evening plans. There is no affect at all to judge by.

We are studying language in this classroom, and I’m reflecting during these quiet moments before class begins that language is only one plane of communication. L is very effectively communicating what it’s like living in the world that men like the U.S. president and Mr Erdogan seem intent on fostering, a world of random cruelty and persecution with impunity. People find themselves targets suddenly. Old prejudices flare. Overnight, alliances shift, and, just that quickly, their families are on the run - again. The failure of reason to explain reduces all values to survival and vendetta. Expression is reduced to flight and silence, violence and passivity. That’s how the ninety-nine percent were born to live. So says Don Jr at the country club, with an indifferent shrug. The waiter quietly prays for justice behind an impassive face.

Travelogue 872 – October 8
The Random and the Lost

“I want to say this with great solemnity,” Pat Robertson announced yesterday, “the president of the United States is in danger of losing the mandate of heaven if he permits this to happen.” He’s speaking about Trump’s sudden abandonment of the Kurds in Syria.

These times defy easy analysis. We can say the televangelist’s god is a capricious one. Indeed, that seems to be the central message of the god of our times: I am Random. Which is more random, the sudden pronouncement of Trump that the Turks have free reign in Syria or the pronouncement that this is the trigger for Robertson’s god’s displeasure? But these are just details in a sea of senselessness.

The sea here off the shores of Holland feels no need to provide sense to humanity. The sea doesn’t bow to thought. It bows to the winds and tides. It provides us only the wisdom of water, water set free to the skies, water for the clouds and the rain. These are the real principles of our lives.

We’ve left the house already when I realize I’ve left the rag. Baby and I are walking past our neighbour’s doors. Baby is holding my hand and singing. She’s got her jacket on; she’s got her helmet. I’m relieved we made it out of the house early. I run through the long catalogue of things I must carry with me now that the weather has turned. It’s been raining for about three weeks already. You would think I would have this routine down. But there are so many details. It’s not raining at the moment, but it rained during the night. That means everything is dripping. That means the bike seats will be wet. That’s right, I need the rag. I don’t want Baby to spend the day with a wet behind. We turn back. We’ll be late again.

That’s the depth of philosophical principles here. Maybe we lost the “mandate of heaven” long ago. That’s why the rain never moves on. That’s why no one alerts us with these pronouncements when we get close to the line, when we might “permit” things to happen.

“ … if he permits this to happen,” Robertson says about Trump. It’s a strangely passive phrase, given the circumstances. The president is no witness to disaster here. Disaster has been his fiat.

Robertson is a man serving a god. He unleashes nothing unholy on the world, does he? He accepts his fate from unearthly forces. His flock fall in line with faith, or they permit awful things to happen. They make history with these sorts of demure gestures. They submit. Five times a day they surrender. Things happen. Mandates are granted; they are taken away. Masters are feckless; ministers are fey. The days turn. More clouds.

Travelogue 871 – September 27
Dry on Arrival

I’m monitoring the weather constantly. I watch the skies. I check the forecasts. The daily forecast says the same thing every day now: rain. But the general forecast for the day is not enough. I need to see the hourly forecast. Being on my bike so much has made me acutely watchful.

The first half of September was lovely. I seem to always forget how beautiful September can be. Thoughts of September during any other part of the year are coloured by the remote stress of returning to work and starting the school year. Then September arrives like a gentle, cool breeze at the end of a summer day, coming in so much more quietly than imagined. It was a lot of exercise, hitting the bike paths again, but the skies were clear. The temperatures were perfect. And the wheels at work started turning again more gradually than I had feared.

This week, the skies changed. We had watched the change coming. Every day, the block of rainy days approached, and we saw there was no end to the chain of days devoted to rain. At the last minute, the leading edge of those days softened. We were blessed with a few more nice days. But there would be no escape. I dug through closets and boxes to locate all our most serious rain gear. It turned out we didn’t have much.

In Ethiopia, weather forecasts were irrelevant. It was sunny. Then it was rainy season, and it rained every day. In rainy season, you stayed indoors. You travelled by taxi. There wasn’t much at stake when it came to the weather. The stakes had been much higher in Minnesota, where temperatures could plummet fifty degrees in one day. You could find yourself driving in a blizzard. You could really suffer.

In Holland, the stakes are different. The risks are rain, rain, and more rain. Sure, compared to the risk of freezing to death in your car during a Minnesota white-out, rain is an inconvenience. As a Minnesotan, you take it all rather lightly. But then one day you find yourself on your bicycle in a sudden shower on your way to work. In moments you are soaked. You start the workday wet. Even your shoes are wet. Everywhere you look, people are sniffling. The view out your windows is gloomy. You begin to shiver.

The stakes change. Daily strategies change. In the Low Countries, water is our element. It shadows you in canals. It washes across the road. It leaks into your shoes. It falls from the sky. You invest in the best gear. How do you get on a bike and arrive dry three kilometres away? It’s an absorbing puzzle.

Travelogue 870 – September 17
Dredging Season

The new sculptures beside the river are dark in theme. They’re dark in colour, a gritty reddish brown. They are cast in familiar shapes, bicycles and shopping carts and scooters, but these are depictions of abandonment and decay. They sit among trails of debris; they are making a mess of the pavements.

This must be the season for dredging. I don’t know when they do it, but suddenly these items are appearing alongside the river. I take my exercise there, running several kilometres along the river and crossing to return on the other side. The route is now populated by these relics. They are rusty. They are coated with mud. Some have shells on their flanks, like barnacles on the keels of ships.

I can afford a few distractions in my running routine. This fall’s training season hasn’t been pleasant. It’s allergy season, and that has become an issue. It’s not just that I have sneezing fits and a stuffy nose. Bad allergy days leave me dead tired and muscle-sore. I just want to sleep.

With the date for a half marathon approaching, less than a month away, I’m not sure what to expect. Some days, I feel the benefits of all the training: new strength and new resilience. Some days, I feel only the days I’ve had to skip because of allergies: fatigue and failing speed. So I vacillate between great hope and sad resignation.

The barge comes to my rescue today. I’m running north up the Schie, and the boat is heading the same way. These boats ply this river all day long, long and shallow troughs, lying so low in the water it seems they’ll founder. They’re sturdy; they move smoothly forward. They are driven from the stern, where there is a deck and a cabin. Often there’s a compact car tied down on the deck somewhere. In the bed of the long trough is often nothing but piles of sand.

These barges are perfect rabbits. Their speed is closely matched to mine, though a knot or so slower. In the span between bridges over the river, I can overtake one; sometimes I can pass it. Usually the boats chugging this direction are loaded down with sand. I’m able to catch this one easily, and I run alongside it now.

Up ahead the bridge has been lifted. I arrive there before the barge does, running underneath the road that passes so near overhead. Pedestrians are waiting for the bridge; they watch me run underneath them and underneath the bridge. It’s cold there, and dark. The part of the road that rises is a short piece over the middle of the river. The road is held up by rows of pillars. I’m running in a narrow passageway between pillars dividing the river’s edge from the parallel road and the pillars dividing a small channel from the wider middle, where the barge will pass.

Emerging into sunlight again, I consider idly how far ahead of the barge I can get in the next span. I consider pushing myself into a sprint to the next dredgers’ sculpture.

Travelogue 869 – September 11
Bogeymen

We had ghost issues last night. I’m feeling rough today. My eyes are burning as though the tear ducts have dried up and have accumulated dust through the night. It’s a long day for me: three long classes and a play rehearsal. I wish I could close my sandy eyes. The days never start in gentle ways. The girls are fed and dressed, everything in a whirl, and then I’m lifting Baby into her bike seat. I shove off from the curb, and we’re on the road.

At midnight, the fire alarm went off. We jumped out of bed and stumbled around in circles. We retrieved a chair for me to stand on so I could bang on the disc hanging from the ceiling, jab at the mysterious buttons on its surface, twist it in efforts to unseal the cap. But the thing kept sounding. We opened doors to clear the phantom smoke. Nothing seemed to work, until something unnamed did work, and the thing shut off. We stood underneath it in wonder, breathing from our exertions.

Ten minutes after we returned to bed, the alarm went off again. And a ceiling light that had been dead for months turned on.

The ride to school is a pleasant one. We wind through the quiet streets around our building and by the busy transit hub at Marconiplein. Then we have a long stretch along a bike path well-insulated from the busy street. It’s misting this morning. I tell Baby to pull the hood of her jacket over her head. “Why is it so donker?” she asked when we woke her at 7:15. Why is it so dark? “Winter’s coming, Baby.”

Ghosts always seem like they’re distracted. Their efforts are sporadic and indirect. It’s like they can’t focus very well. Or they just don’t have the energy to do everything they intended. They communicate by means of these trivial acts, and the message is foggy at best. They become alien to us; their logic changes over time. What seems clear to them is a mystery to the humans.

Our ghost doesn’t seem particularly malicious, though I don’t like much that he’s messing with the electricity. Usually, he’s content to pace and whisper. He sets a ball rolling in the middle of the night. Once in a while, he turns on the TV. He’s like a bored pensioner.

Baby and I arrive at the school yard. I release all the straps and lift her out of the seat. I lock the bike, and we head in. The halls are busy. This is the busiest building in the neighbourhood at this hour. The teacher greets us with a smile. I wish I had more to give back. I’m something of a ghost myself today, my concentration waning and every effort half its intention.

Travelogue 868 – September 9
Dutch Parenting

Suddenly, I’m on my bicycle more than I have been in months. Suddenly I’m on the bike more than I’m on the ground in many of my destinations. And, what’s more, it’s not the same old bike. Suddenly, it’s a lumbering beast of burden. I’ve added a tall and clumsy children’s seat on the back. It’s worth more than the bike itself, so I’ve thrown on various security devices that I have no room for. There’s a chain I have to wrap around the handlebars and a U-lock that fits into its holder on the down tube.

Any true Dutchman would have known better than to install a children’s seat on the back of a traditional ‘men’s’ frame with top tube. Mounting is a new and strenuous procedure, particularly when Baby is strapped into her seat. To make matters worse, when Baby is in her seat, I have to wear my heavy backpack in the front. I’m getting used to all this re-distribution of weight. Our most perilous moments are not on the street, but when Papa is trying to get on the bike and then trying to get it into motion.

Baby is a good sport. It’s exciting for her. She shouts, “Whee!” and I shout it back to her. We cruise steadily down the bike path. Papa takes it slow. It feels like we’re riding high because of the very proper posture enforced by the bag in front of me. We come to slow stops at traffic lights, get very slow starts.

Baby finds the whole routine of going to school very entertaining. She brags about every aspect of it to her little sister and makes her cry. We have to comfort Little Ren that she has her own pre-school, and Papa will take her on the bike one day. I’m comforted that my girls fight about who gets to go to school, and who gets to ride with Papa. Realizing they will roll their eyes over all of it in years to come, I relish every moment.

But do I have the stamina? During the summer, a cycle ride was the height of relaxation. Now, overnight, it’s become fall, and pedalling is hard work. I’m pedalling to Baby’s school. I’m pedalling across town to work. After work, I do the reverse. I have to fit in a side trip to the store, where I add some more weight to my self-powered lorry. Then come the evenings. Some evenings I’m cycling into town for an evening class. Other evenings, I’m cycling to rehearsals in The Hague.

Precisely the week that school started up, we started rehearsals for the fall performance of my new plays. I go to the Schiedam train station, where I catch a train to The Hague. In Den Haag, I get an ‘OV Fiets’, a very cheap bike rental provided by the public transit authorities in every train station. I pedal across the centre of Den Haag to our rehearsal space. After a breathless rehearsal, I’m straining to make my train. Otherwise, I wait an extra half hour at the station, when I should be getting the girls ready for bed. Getting ready for my own bed ….

Lying still and waiting for sleep to come, I’m beset by images that flash across the mind like fragments of the day, torn apart by its own centrifugal force. Images are shot through with late summer sunshine, piercing through the gloom of fading consciousness like it did through the clouds. The days are a perfect prelude to fall, bright spells of warmth overtaken by quick showers. Grey clouds are ever on the horizon, blown by chilly gusts. It’s impossible to avoid the rain altogether, but the precipitation is light and blows over quickly. The sun dries you before the next shower.

Travelogue 867 – August 31
So Many Homes

I’m excited for her. Of course I am. When you are witness to the beginning of a life, privileged to see the unfolding of a new story, you are joyful and expectant. You are also humbled.

My Baby. I’m sitting across the table from her. She’s sitting with her mama, and her sister is sitting with me on my side of the table. We’ve stopped for some snacks after playing in the park.

My Baby. My oldest. She is in a buoyant mood today. She’s been chatting without stop, telling herself stories. Actually, this is her happy state most of the time. She is a cheerful soul.

She will start school in a week or so. She has little idea what that means. She’s not thinking about it much. I am. I’m making myself melancholy thinking about it. “These are our last days,” I’m telling myself, with some melodrama. “She will make friends at school. She will fall in love with her teacher. Her world will expand, and Mama and Papa will start their long slide deep into the supporting cast.”

Every month, every year is the start of a new phase. But starting school! That is something too big to contemplate. I find it hard to absorb all that it means. You can’t see it all. What is clear is that the start of a big phase is also the end of a big phase. And this has been a time so special in my own life, that I can’t help but mourn. It has been just the four of us all this time.

Baby has been narrating a dream. She tells us she dreamt about her parents. “Their names are …,” and she hesitates. Menna quietly points to me and to herself. I watch with interest. “No!” Baby responds emphatically. “My parents live far away!” We laugh.

Everything Baby does, she does with urgency. She’s a passionate soul. But there’s also a mischievous (and miraculous) self-awareness. She’s laughing inside, with some special joie de vivre. It colours everything she does with such freshness that I’m continually charmed and admiring.

Explaining her dream, she leans over the table and looks into my eyes. She communicates with such earnestness and with mischief, I am captivated. Baby tells us she has many homes, and she has many parents. “I have so many homes.”

“Really?” I’ve seen Menna wanting to correct her. I’m hoping she doesn’t. I’m curious.

“In my home, the walls are pink, and the door is red.”

“Oh, that sounds beautiful.”

“You can visit,” Baby says graciously. “And Mama can visit. And Little Ren can visit.”

We are guests in one of her many homes.

Travelogue 866 – August 28
Fictions – 4

She had risen above the maelstrom on the toes of her ballet shoes. Turning slowly on pointe, she had risen slowly above the land, freed from gravity.

She had laughed with joy the first time she had seen a pirouette. Her father had taken her to a ballet performance. She was only four then. She told everyone she was a dancer like her cousin. She had told her cousin, and her cousin had showed her how to do a pirouette.

It felt like being a leaf that was caught by the wind.

Fall was coming, her father said. She asked him often. Last year, they had walked together by the river every day, and they had stopped to watch the leaves. She asked him often when the autumn would start. Summer was too sticky. It would come soon, he said. Don’t worry, it will come. He had a gentle voice. It reminded her of the river.

Her father had taught her that Hiroshima was a city of six rivers. She would have liked to see them all. She was high enough now. Turning in the sky, executing perfect form, she could have surveyed the whole city below. But all she saw was grey, roiling dust and smoke.

After the light came these horrible clouds. It’s like they were alive and eating the sky. Would she ever be free of them? Now that she could dance in the sky, she would have liked to have the blue sky as her backdrop. Would there be any sky left? They were so hungry.

Travelogue 865 – August 22
Fictions – 3

It was a festive occasion. The mayor of Rotterdam was there with his wife, standing with several hundred other citizens in a circle around the sculpture. It wasn’t the most pleasant weather. It was a chilly day for May. A fog had settled over the big river and its city. Still, people had come out for the ceremony.

The occasion could have been a solemn one, since the sculpture memorialized the suffering of the city during the Blitz of 1940. The German air attack had wiped out the centre of the city. Most people standing there remembered the attack. They certainly would never forget the war. It lingered like the fog, lingered in the ongoing reconstruction and in rationing and other privations. And still, the people there were smiling. The years after the war were ones of sustained optimism.

The artist had come from Paris to oversee the installation. Ossip Zadkine was an odd-looking man, rail thin with a shock of white hair. His face was wedge-like, tapering to the chin, and fit with outsized ears. His movements were nervous and awkward. It was strange to think of him sculpting, shaping stone and bronze with the grace of a lifetime artist.

This huge bronze standing sixty metres high in the square was his creation, a bronze figure named “The Destroyed City”. Once the tarp was pulled from the statue to the crowd’s applause, it was revealed to be a towering Cubist depiction of a man with his head thrown back and his arms thrown high in the air in horror. There was a hole where the man’s heart would have been, symbolic of the city’s grief. The people in attendance stood politely in its presence, maintaining their circle, and commenting quietly to each other.

The dramatic effect of the piece was accentuated by the airy plaza, set between the busy avenue of the Westblaak and the harbour. The space underscored both the size and the insignificance of the artwork, even as the emptiness of the place portrayed the devastation the city suffered more poignantly than any sculpture.

There were others there. There were always ghosts at these events. Where there was something to mourn, there were plenty of mourners. The tall man moved toward the circle of people, approaching across the expanse of flagstones.

“Another damned ruined city,” he mumbled. “How many can there be?”

He would have been an awful sight if anyone could have seen him, one side of his face burn-scarred and his leather jerkin abraded and spotted with blood. He limped slightly, though it may have been with boredom, as he had been wandering for centuries, since he had fallen from the tower with his brother.

“And so which war is this? Which universe is this? A damn ugly one, I have to say. Everything is grey as slate.” The ghost had been drawn some ways just to witness the unveiling of this statue. He had lumbered through the centre where, eight years after the war, there were still broad spaces lying unnaturally vacant. It was ugly and familiar. He knew what it looked like when cities were set ablaze.

“And what is this monstrosity?” the dead soldier muttered, passing through the crowd and toward the artwork. He stopped to stare up at it. It was a statue. “Is this a god? It’s no king.” He glanced back at the living, who were still maintaining their circle, admiring and chatting quietly. “It’s a dark god,” he concluded, looking up again, “deformed and horrible. He’s calling down a curse, and his magic is melting him.” The ghost shook his head sadly. “This is how the war must have started. It was summoned by an evil god. After this, the fire rained from the skies.”

The ghost averted his gaze, and he stumbled forward again. “I have seen enough of fires from the skies. I wish the gods were done with fire.” Gloomily, he followed the harbour to the river. He lowered himself into the waters of the Nieuwe Maas. With laboured steps, he pushed through the silt at the bottom, following the current.

Travelogue 864 – August 12
Fictions – 2
Pope of Fools

more apologies to Victor Hugo

In the twinkling of an eye, all was ready to execute the contest for Pope of Fools. Bourgeois, scholars and law clerks all set to work. The little chapel situated opposite the marble table was selected for the scene of the grinning match. A pane broken in the pretty rose window above the door, left free a circle of stone through which it was agreed that the competitors should thrust their heads. In order to reach it, it was only necessary to mount upon a couple of hogsheads, which had been produced from I know not where, and perched one upon the other, after a fashion. It was settled that each candidate, man or woman (for it was possible to choose a female pope), should, for the sake of leaving the impression of his grimace fresh and complete, cover his face and remain concealed in the chapel until the moment of his appearance. In less than an instant, the chapel was crowded with competitors, upon whom the door was then closed.

The grimaces began. The first face which appeared at the aperture, with eyelids turned up to the reds, a mouth open like a maw, and a brow wrinkled like our hussar boots of the Empire, evoked such an inextinguishable peal of laughter that Homer would have taken all these louts for gods. A second and third grimace followed, then another and another; and the laughter and transports of delight went on increasing. There was in this spectacle, a peculiar power of intoxication and fascination, of which it would be difficult to convey to the reader of our day and our salons any idea.

Let the reader picture to himself a series of visages presenting successively all geometrical forms, from the triangle to the trapezium, from the cone to the polyhedron; all human expressions, from wrath to lewdness; all ages, from the wrinkles of the new-born babe to the wrinkles of the aged and dying; all religious phantasmagories, from Faun to Beelzebub; all animal profiles, from the maw to the beak, from the jowl to the muzzle. Let the reader imagine all these grotesque figures of the Pont Neuf, those nightmares petrified beneath the hand of Germain Pilon, assuming life and breath, and coming in turn to stare you in the face with burning eyes; all the masks of the Carnival of Venice passing in succession before your glass,—in a word, a human kaleidoscope.

“Hurrah! Hurrah!” shouted the people on all sides. That was, in fact, a marvellous grimace which was beaming at that moment through the aperture in the rose window. After all the pentagonal, hexagonal, and whimsical faces, which had succeeded each other at that hole without realizing the ideal of the grotesque which their imaginations, excited by the orgy, had constructed, nothing less was needed to win their suffrages than the sublime grimace which had just dazzled the assembly. We shall not try to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedral nose, that false mouth; that little squinting eye under red, bushy, bristling eyebrows; of those teeth like the embattled parapet of a fortress; of that callous lip, upon which these teeth encroached, producing the grin of a hungry weasel; of that soft chin; of that leathery skin of unnatural colour; and above all, of the expression spread over the whole; of that mixture of malice, amazement, and greed. Let the reader dream of this whole, if he can.

The horrible mouth opened, and it spoke to the crowd in the chapel. “You remember the word deplorable? You remember when Hillary used the word deplorable? She used two words. She used deplorable and irredeemable, right? I said, what a terrible mistake that she used the word irredeemable, but it turned out to be deplorable. Deplorable was not a good day for Hillary. Crooked Hillary, she is a crooked one. Crooked. Crooked. She is crooked.”

People were perplexed. They were silent. and then they applauded again. The acclamation was unanimous; people rushed towards the chapel. They made the lucky Pope of the Fools come forth in triumph. But it was then that surprise and admiration attained their highest pitch; the grimace was his face.

Master Coppenole, in amazement, approached him.

“Cross of God! Holy Father! you possess the handsomest ugliness that I have ever beheld in my life. You would deserve to be pope at Rome, as well as at Paris.”