Travelogue 629 – June 28
Summer Outing
We’re attempting a family outing. We want to introduce our summer baby to summer pleasures, fresh breezes alongside the big river. We have travelled by tram to the city’s old yacht harbour. It’s a relatively small marina in this city of enormous port facilities, where harbour cranes crowd miles of the western horizon. Here the yachts are crowded into a dense thicket of masts, and enclosed on three sides by historical blocks of old Rotterdam. They are beautiful things in themselves, these boats. Some are clearly antique and objects of much loving care. Behind us in our photos is the clubhouse, the 1909 creation in modest Jugendstil, where is housed the rich Royal Maas Yacht Club, one of the oldest in Holland. It’s a royal club because the royals are members. The House of Oranje has given their sanction many years ago. The new king is find of wearing naval cuts, I have already noticed. I can just about see him standing at the helm of his own extravagant yacht, flute of champagne in hand.
It’s common to see yacht club members in the nearby eetcafe, the venerable old bar and restaurant called the Loos, pronounced like the Los in Los Lobos. One may not realize one has stored away a stereotype of the yachtsman until one recognizes it embodied, in baggy, striped shirts, or polo shirts, in jackets cut in nautical style, the shorts and loafers, a style that one might have called preppy in its day. Either way, the Loos is a good stop for beer and fries. The ladies order apple juice, Batu comments that the apple juice here tastes like the final batch when brewing t’ala, the traditional Ethiopian beer. That’s not a compliment. Menna likes it. When we want to order more, Batu pulls one of her faces. Food and drink are serious matters, and there is no polite way to decline. She doesn’t say, ‘No, thank you.’ She grimaces with distaste and shakes her head, saying nothing. We see this face often. It’s all well and good to have good roads, safe streets, schools and parks and trams to carry Baby to the doctor. But food is the true stuff of civilization. She need say nothing. She holds her head high, gaze set high, over all the tables of faranji food.
Batu is proxy for ancient Ethiopian civilization here, reminder of what is right and wrong in the scales of time, guardian angel for the African half of Baby’s genetic make-up. Food and drink are serious matters. Baby herself reminds us of that at frequent intervals with lusty exhalations of pure sound. It’s both moving and amusing to observe the force of her protest when she’s hungry, body arched and fingers clenched and her toothless mouth open wide. I laugh every time. Batu frowns at me, but I can’t help it.
We play cards while Baby sleeps in the buggy. Batu is winning. We tell her it’s the apple juice that has made her dangerous, but she shakes her head no. She turns her cards toward Menna and asks advice. After a quick session in Amharic, Batu plays a series of cards for points. She discards and Menna picks up the discard to use in her own run of points. I want to protest to the rules committee, but I think I will be outvoted. I see the lay of the land by now. One doesn’t win against young mothers. Old mothers. Any kind of mothers. Or little girls. This is my fate.
We take a walk before heading home, passing through ‘Het Park’, crossing long grassy lawns that make Batu marvel. People are having picnics, lying in the grass, playing Frisbee. We find a small English garden overlooking a small lake, and we take more pictures. ‘Des yilal’, Batu says. This is kind of the Amharic catch-all for fun times, good things. Literally it means something like, ‘It’s called happy.’
We have made it to the Metro station, well satisfied with summer and sleepy. Batu must negotiate the escalators on her own. I have to handle the buggy, and Menna is carrying dozing Baby. I watch as Batu clutches onto the moving handrail with both hands, her face a mask of apprehension. The handrail is pulling her and she must step forward. She does so, just before the handrail would pull her off her feet, taking a sudden, jumping step. She rides down, still leaning into the handrail, holding on with both hands.
There is nothing to look at windows on the Metro. I wonder why they have them. Just to counter any sense of claustrophobia, I suppose. Earlier, Batu was looking out the tram window and noting that all the buildings we were passing were ‘G+3’, meaning four storeys. And I thought suddenly how striking the uniformity here must be. Addis is an architectural free-for-all, multiple storey buildings rising to order, any size, any style, any position along the street. And they stand alongside the city’s prevailing lack of form, the expansive shanty-town, corrugated iron shacks beside small concrete improvisations, unfinished, rebar rising from the highest corners in an expression of hope.
We’re home. Baby is settled among the signs of home. She makes no acknowledgement of the day’s adventure. It’s just another day, another new world, another feeding time. She’s getting fussy. She’s balling her fists and she’s making her little body-builder’s motions, getting ready to howl. It’s all about the food.
Sunday, June 28, 2015
Saturday, June 27, 2015
Travelogue 628 – June 27
The Adventure
Baby doesn’t think much of the big world outside the doors of the flat. She doesn’t think too much of the open air and the noise of the streets. She doesn’t know what to make of the bumpy ride in the buggy.
She’s a summer arrival. During the winter, we imagined the fun in taking her out for fresh air in the parks, imagined the pleasures of her company on walks along the canals. She has so far been indifferent.
Her first expedition outside was one of necessity. We had to take her to her first hearing test. It meant getting her onto the tram. The motion and the sudden sunlight were perplexing. She flinched at the strong light, and she stared at the wall of the buggy. Her buggy was parked at the back of the tram, and it rocked with the motion of the rails. She was looking at nothing and she was working her arms.
I found myself again – how many times just that day – wondering what she experienced. What was her new brain processing? And without language, what was the order she put to things? I was amazed by her resilience and her trust. This degree of newness and alienation would have sent most of us older units into a steep spiral of shock.
At the doctor’s office, I didn’t know how to maneuver the buggy, so I was acting out the new parent comedy, bumping into walls and blocking foot traffic, multiplying Baby’s trauma. She was a good sport. She only cried when the nurse stuck a probe into her ear. Even then, she was open to being convinced that a hearing test while feeding wasn’t such a bad thing. She passed her test. She fell into her sweet milk coma. The ride home was peaceful.
The second trip outside is purely recreational. It’s a perfect summer day. We have to enjoy. We stop at the park next to Sparta stadium in our neighbourhood. It’s the closest kiddie park in the neighbourhood, and I have business at the stadium. Sparta is the oldest team in Holland, played Chelsea in one of its first matches. Now the season is over, and Jan is playing in the stadium with his league of ageing enthusiasts. I get to stand pitch-side in the big boy stadium, empty now, and cheer for the wheezing and happy athletes alongside a few of their wives and children.
The kiddie park is fun, too. We watch a group of girls, about age four, playing in the sand, tossing the stuff in the air and then all rubbing their eyes and then starting over. After that game, they run to the swing set. Two sit face to face on one seat and start to swing. A third watches just out of range of the jutting feet of her friend. Mothers, groups in Muslim headdress, sit on the benches and indulge in breezy chatter. There is a very old man being led round the central circle, where the sand and swing set are, being led round and round for exercise He pushes his own wheel chair while his middle-aged son holds his arm. The old man stares dead ahead with either intense focus or an intense lack of all focus, unconscious but for his shuffling feet.
Standing at long last, we are in no mood to quit the sunshine. Baby has settled into restful slumbers, the kind that won’t be easily disrupted. We decide to try a trip into town. We bundle buggy and baby onto the number eight tram. We’ll head toward the old and scenic yacht harbour of the city where we can pose for photos that will inspire jealousy in family back home.
The Adventure
Baby doesn’t think much of the big world outside the doors of the flat. She doesn’t think too much of the open air and the noise of the streets. She doesn’t know what to make of the bumpy ride in the buggy.
She’s a summer arrival. During the winter, we imagined the fun in taking her out for fresh air in the parks, imagined the pleasures of her company on walks along the canals. She has so far been indifferent.
Her first expedition outside was one of necessity. We had to take her to her first hearing test. It meant getting her onto the tram. The motion and the sudden sunlight were perplexing. She flinched at the strong light, and she stared at the wall of the buggy. Her buggy was parked at the back of the tram, and it rocked with the motion of the rails. She was looking at nothing and she was working her arms.
I found myself again – how many times just that day – wondering what she experienced. What was her new brain processing? And without language, what was the order she put to things? I was amazed by her resilience and her trust. This degree of newness and alienation would have sent most of us older units into a steep spiral of shock.
At the doctor’s office, I didn’t know how to maneuver the buggy, so I was acting out the new parent comedy, bumping into walls and blocking foot traffic, multiplying Baby’s trauma. She was a good sport. She only cried when the nurse stuck a probe into her ear. Even then, she was open to being convinced that a hearing test while feeding wasn’t such a bad thing. She passed her test. She fell into her sweet milk coma. The ride home was peaceful.
The second trip outside is purely recreational. It’s a perfect summer day. We have to enjoy. We stop at the park next to Sparta stadium in our neighbourhood. It’s the closest kiddie park in the neighbourhood, and I have business at the stadium. Sparta is the oldest team in Holland, played Chelsea in one of its first matches. Now the season is over, and Jan is playing in the stadium with his league of ageing enthusiasts. I get to stand pitch-side in the big boy stadium, empty now, and cheer for the wheezing and happy athletes alongside a few of their wives and children.
The kiddie park is fun, too. We watch a group of girls, about age four, playing in the sand, tossing the stuff in the air and then all rubbing their eyes and then starting over. After that game, they run to the swing set. Two sit face to face on one seat and start to swing. A third watches just out of range of the jutting feet of her friend. Mothers, groups in Muslim headdress, sit on the benches and indulge in breezy chatter. There is a very old man being led round the central circle, where the sand and swing set are, being led round and round for exercise He pushes his own wheel chair while his middle-aged son holds his arm. The old man stares dead ahead with either intense focus or an intense lack of all focus, unconscious but for his shuffling feet.
Standing at long last, we are in no mood to quit the sunshine. Baby has settled into restful slumbers, the kind that won’t be easily disrupted. We decide to try a trip into town. We bundle buggy and baby onto the number eight tram. We’ll head toward the old and scenic yacht harbour of the city where we can pose for photos that will inspire jealousy in family back home.
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Travelogue 627 – June 18
It’s the Squirming
Neil Young is singing this morning. It’s 1972, he wants to tell us, and this window looks out on an uncomplicated landscape. The setting is North American prairie, a sketching of a morality of the heart. He says you can just about sketch it out. And then the wind takes it.
What is Baby saying? It may be in reply, it may not. She is not in attendance at the café, not in the flesh. I left her at home, asleep, blessedly asleep. She does not know Neil Young. But it could be she’s dreaming North American prairies. She’s never seen one. She has no word for it. But she only dream about her blanket and her mother’s nipple, over and over? The truth is, she’s a philosopher. She teaches me.
The café presents as a space of relief, as point of contrast to the cold and the bustle of the world outside. I’m happy to buy into that illusion, for the price of a croissant and an espresso. The colours and the aromas are warm ones. The routines of ordering, of small talk, of finding the comfortable seat, all these things are reassuring. Neil is singing that it’s 1972 and there is hope for the heart.
She likes to stretch a lot, my baby. We clenches her little fists; she arches her back. She makes funny, breathy chattering noises. Then the hands open, and the fingers uncurl from the pinkie toward the tiny thumb. Then her arms shudder and flap, and she cries out in a voicing of excitement.
‘And I’m getting old,’ Neil Young says. I’m not sure if it’s a play on his name, or the stunned cry of someone not even thirty who is suddenly tired. There are a lot of miles to cover in the prairie. ‘It keeps me searching …’
Baby has her way of teaching, her own squirming pedagogy. She teaches as she moves, and she teaches as she looks up at me with eyes that are curious and then that are fretful. She says, look at me, I’m a furnace of creation, like a biological star. I can’t bear to be still.
She pauses and looks up into my eyes, and she starts with a passing crinkling of the smooth, pink brow, she starts to tell me that she understands why the people researching artificial intelligence have such a hard time of it. They hypothesize static states of knowledge and action. They have to. It’s hard, she says with some compassion, having to start from the dynamic complexity of the double helix, geometry forged from motion. There is more to this than the quiet stage-sets of classical physics.
You don’t say, I reply, tapping her gently on the end of her upturned nose. She stops the slow windmilling of her arms with a stunned look. Then she puckers her red lips and she continues. You must see it, she says, and she begins in a slow and intense fretfulness. There is no programming language for pain. Perhaps a circuit can be said to digest electricity, but the metaphor just doesn’t suffice. There is no struggle among the intestines of a circuit. No circuit is birthed in pain and struggles with its own physicality, a struggle of years.
Well, he did get old, after all, Mr. Young did. Perhaps there has been a moment, stored away among the memories of this world, in which Mr. Young driving alone across the prairie, heard through the speakers of his car radio the lament of a young man. ‘I want to live. I want to give.’ And the sound evokes an emotion in the older Young, and he realizes now that the isolated emotion has very little significance. He knows it as he experiences it, even as he enjoys it. The whole was the answer, the circuit now completed. And he thinks, ‘Hm. It was always in the squirming.’
The answer, Baby says, and she raises her eyebrows in a show of both wit and amazement, the answer is in the squirming. In robotics, all this motion would be wasteful and dangerous. No businessman would sustain the expense. No economic output justifies it. It’s our age that would like to contain all uncertain economies in the box called Aesthetics.
She wants to kick now. She’s going to be a fine runner, I’m thinking. But there is no purpose to it, she cautions me. The legs pump with surprising strength. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but there lies a lot of territory between repetitive motion and artificial intelligence. We measure AI by capacity to solve problems, but there is fallacy woven all through that. Baby is really getting worked up now, hard to hold. ‘Waa,’ she cries. Problem isn’t the stone that breaks the calm surface of the water that is life. Problem is the water. It’s the twistings and turnings that keep us afloat, moment by moment. It’s the squirming that teaches us to swim. When we think of problem-solving as a function of the mind, we have failed at the outset. It is body and mind. Body never still, a pulse within a pulse, and still again within greater pulse. These are systems without end, and the ‘solution’ is in the squirming itself.
That’s all fine, Baby, but Mommy and I would love it if you could take a rest now. We would like it if you would sleep a while. ‘To sleep, perchance to dream,’ she quotes, suddenly calm and contemplative, before she starts to lick her lips. 'Aye.'
The milk is a great soporific. She will dream. It might be the prairies of Mars, for all that we know, when her eyelashes twitch with vision. A plain governed by the sound of one harmonica.
Tomorrow it will different. She will move and she will move. There was a time when scientists amused themselves trying to design machines for perpetual motion.
For the moment, I’ll be satisfied with rest in the haven of coffee. ‘It keeps me searching…,’ Neil sings again. The melody is a comfort. We tell ourselves it’s the same as last time.
It’s the Squirming
Neil Young is singing this morning. It’s 1972, he wants to tell us, and this window looks out on an uncomplicated landscape. The setting is North American prairie, a sketching of a morality of the heart. He says you can just about sketch it out. And then the wind takes it.
What is Baby saying? It may be in reply, it may not. She is not in attendance at the café, not in the flesh. I left her at home, asleep, blessedly asleep. She does not know Neil Young. But it could be she’s dreaming North American prairies. She’s never seen one. She has no word for it. But she only dream about her blanket and her mother’s nipple, over and over? The truth is, she’s a philosopher. She teaches me.
The café presents as a space of relief, as point of contrast to the cold and the bustle of the world outside. I’m happy to buy into that illusion, for the price of a croissant and an espresso. The colours and the aromas are warm ones. The routines of ordering, of small talk, of finding the comfortable seat, all these things are reassuring. Neil is singing that it’s 1972 and there is hope for the heart.
She likes to stretch a lot, my baby. We clenches her little fists; she arches her back. She makes funny, breathy chattering noises. Then the hands open, and the fingers uncurl from the pinkie toward the tiny thumb. Then her arms shudder and flap, and she cries out in a voicing of excitement.
‘And I’m getting old,’ Neil Young says. I’m not sure if it’s a play on his name, or the stunned cry of someone not even thirty who is suddenly tired. There are a lot of miles to cover in the prairie. ‘It keeps me searching …’
Baby has her way of teaching, her own squirming pedagogy. She teaches as she moves, and she teaches as she looks up at me with eyes that are curious and then that are fretful. She says, look at me, I’m a furnace of creation, like a biological star. I can’t bear to be still.
She pauses and looks up into my eyes, and she starts with a passing crinkling of the smooth, pink brow, she starts to tell me that she understands why the people researching artificial intelligence have such a hard time of it. They hypothesize static states of knowledge and action. They have to. It’s hard, she says with some compassion, having to start from the dynamic complexity of the double helix, geometry forged from motion. There is more to this than the quiet stage-sets of classical physics.
You don’t say, I reply, tapping her gently on the end of her upturned nose. She stops the slow windmilling of her arms with a stunned look. Then she puckers her red lips and she continues. You must see it, she says, and she begins in a slow and intense fretfulness. There is no programming language for pain. Perhaps a circuit can be said to digest electricity, but the metaphor just doesn’t suffice. There is no struggle among the intestines of a circuit. No circuit is birthed in pain and struggles with its own physicality, a struggle of years.
Well, he did get old, after all, Mr. Young did. Perhaps there has been a moment, stored away among the memories of this world, in which Mr. Young driving alone across the prairie, heard through the speakers of his car radio the lament of a young man. ‘I want to live. I want to give.’ And the sound evokes an emotion in the older Young, and he realizes now that the isolated emotion has very little significance. He knows it as he experiences it, even as he enjoys it. The whole was the answer, the circuit now completed. And he thinks, ‘Hm. It was always in the squirming.’
The answer, Baby says, and she raises her eyebrows in a show of both wit and amazement, the answer is in the squirming. In robotics, all this motion would be wasteful and dangerous. No businessman would sustain the expense. No economic output justifies it. It’s our age that would like to contain all uncertain economies in the box called Aesthetics.
She wants to kick now. She’s going to be a fine runner, I’m thinking. But there is no purpose to it, she cautions me. The legs pump with surprising strength. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but there lies a lot of territory between repetitive motion and artificial intelligence. We measure AI by capacity to solve problems, but there is fallacy woven all through that. Baby is really getting worked up now, hard to hold. ‘Waa,’ she cries. Problem isn’t the stone that breaks the calm surface of the water that is life. Problem is the water. It’s the twistings and turnings that keep us afloat, moment by moment. It’s the squirming that teaches us to swim. When we think of problem-solving as a function of the mind, we have failed at the outset. It is body and mind. Body never still, a pulse within a pulse, and still again within greater pulse. These are systems without end, and the ‘solution’ is in the squirming itself.
That’s all fine, Baby, but Mommy and I would love it if you could take a rest now. We would like it if you would sleep a while. ‘To sleep, perchance to dream,’ she quotes, suddenly calm and contemplative, before she starts to lick her lips. 'Aye.'
The milk is a great soporific. She will dream. It might be the prairies of Mars, for all that we know, when her eyelashes twitch with vision. A plain governed by the sound of one harmonica.
Tomorrow it will different. She will move and she will move. There was a time when scientists amused themselves trying to design machines for perpetual motion.
For the moment, I’ll be satisfied with rest in the haven of coffee. ‘It keeps me searching…,’ Neil sings again. The melody is a comfort. We tell ourselves it’s the same as last time.
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
Travelogue 626 – June 17
Miner
‘I’ve been a miner for a heart of gold,’ Neil Young is singing as I enter my morning café. Harvest plays, and suddenly I’ve left Europe well behind. Neil’s sound is pure prairie to me. Maybe it’s the incipient country sound, the pumping harmonica, his barroom warbling, his sentiment, the primitive 1-2-3 from four, but whatever it is, it seems like it could only come from North America, where space is the rule, where spaces can make everything fade into the call of the loon. I’m homesick.
Outside, the European city is waking to its purpose, a confined sense of bustle, its tidy servings of business. We’ve been gifted another rare sunny start, and people are brisk about their joy. I got started a few minutes later than I usually like to, distracted by Baby’s peaceful sleeping face. I can happily do nothing but look at her for long spells at a time. I awake; my start is late. It isn’t much later than usual, but the rate of change on mass transit is steep on workday mornings. Every five minutes before eight o’clock means a loss of so many seats on the Metro, so many square centimeters of breathing room.
When I was young, I scanned a map of population densities around the world. I wanted to find the lowest densities and immediately board a ship to one of those places. I made hasty plans for Australia, for South America. I had to find those quiet and least human of places. There I would find a life of untroubled contentment. The trees would offer no lip. The animals would steer wide circles around me. The sands would encourage meditation. The time would fly.
And here I am today, living in one of the most densely populated countries on the planet, measuring over four hundred people per kilometre squared. That compares to about thirty in the US. How did that happen?
Standing on the speeding Metro, I’m contemplating the mysteries of Baby’s sweet face again, so innocent, so unguarded. I’m surrounded by adults now. The expressions on their faces are composed. The muscles in the face are engaged in holding the whole of it firm. The expressions are uniform. There is a mould the faces conform to, some standard of polite neutrality. There’s also an element of self-protection, a suggestion of the bellicose. I wonder about this. When does this happen? Is there a hormone responsible? A shot of fear as the social instincts become predatory?
It’s true, I had high hopes for civilization as a child. I dreamt about the highest achievements of humanity, all the best impulses, all the best thoughts. I dreamt of cities as centers of enlightenment. That was the counter-poise to my instinct to run away from humanity, to find an outback of the soul.
And so this is the way the wind has shifted for me, indulging the dream of civilization. The city works like clockwork. Systems click with wondrous efficiency. The city is aesthetic wed with productivity. The state delivers its doses of compassion. It is tempting to believe in civilization. It is tempted to see humanity in its largest productions. If the state is compassionate then the people are humane.
The Metro has reached my station. We engage in the rituals of disembarkation, the shifts in posture that signal a claim of territory. There is a contest for ranking in the order we will go through the nearest door. The same contest is going on outside the door as the train slows to a stop. No one looks into the eyes of another, and when the door opens, the advance is undertaken with an insistence on straight lines that brooks no opposition. In the most crowded country in Europe, one must act as if there is no one in his path. If it becomes necessary to go round a human obstacle, one does not acknowledge it as human.
‘It’s these expressions I never give,’ says Neil as I enter the café, ‘that keep me searching ...’ There’s that feeling again, melody as counter-argument. It is the reply of the primitive inside the civilizing. There is an affecting generosity woven into the chords, something lonely and wind-blown, an imaginary place with a flickering dimensionality. It dissolves into the song.
It does make one wonder. How do a people lacking warmth create a system that delivers care with a quality so uncanny a counterfeit of warmth? If it is the thing itself, compassion, then it is a compassion that arises from the cold mind, rather than the warm heart. It is conviction. It is principle.
Place is a tricky game in this world of places. It is firm; it is inescapable. It. It could be just the through that holds it fast. And yet, it can nonetheless be dissolved in a solution of song, even if only for a moment.
Place is a tricky game. It’s a world of places, and one has to choose. Place remains firm, only becoming more so under the weight of the passing millions. It becomes a nexus of history and character, quite independently of one’s imagination. There comes the time that the escape is the more creative pursuit. ‘It’s such a fine line that keeps me searching …,’ the man says.
Miner
‘I’ve been a miner for a heart of gold,’ Neil Young is singing as I enter my morning café. Harvest plays, and suddenly I’ve left Europe well behind. Neil’s sound is pure prairie to me. Maybe it’s the incipient country sound, the pumping harmonica, his barroom warbling, his sentiment, the primitive 1-2-3 from four, but whatever it is, it seems like it could only come from North America, where space is the rule, where spaces can make everything fade into the call of the loon. I’m homesick.
Outside, the European city is waking to its purpose, a confined sense of bustle, its tidy servings of business. We’ve been gifted another rare sunny start, and people are brisk about their joy. I got started a few minutes later than I usually like to, distracted by Baby’s peaceful sleeping face. I can happily do nothing but look at her for long spells at a time. I awake; my start is late. It isn’t much later than usual, but the rate of change on mass transit is steep on workday mornings. Every five minutes before eight o’clock means a loss of so many seats on the Metro, so many square centimeters of breathing room.
When I was young, I scanned a map of population densities around the world. I wanted to find the lowest densities and immediately board a ship to one of those places. I made hasty plans for Australia, for South America. I had to find those quiet and least human of places. There I would find a life of untroubled contentment. The trees would offer no lip. The animals would steer wide circles around me. The sands would encourage meditation. The time would fly.
And here I am today, living in one of the most densely populated countries on the planet, measuring over four hundred people per kilometre squared. That compares to about thirty in the US. How did that happen?
Standing on the speeding Metro, I’m contemplating the mysteries of Baby’s sweet face again, so innocent, so unguarded. I’m surrounded by adults now. The expressions on their faces are composed. The muscles in the face are engaged in holding the whole of it firm. The expressions are uniform. There is a mould the faces conform to, some standard of polite neutrality. There’s also an element of self-protection, a suggestion of the bellicose. I wonder about this. When does this happen? Is there a hormone responsible? A shot of fear as the social instincts become predatory?
It’s true, I had high hopes for civilization as a child. I dreamt about the highest achievements of humanity, all the best impulses, all the best thoughts. I dreamt of cities as centers of enlightenment. That was the counter-poise to my instinct to run away from humanity, to find an outback of the soul.
And so this is the way the wind has shifted for me, indulging the dream of civilization. The city works like clockwork. Systems click with wondrous efficiency. The city is aesthetic wed with productivity. The state delivers its doses of compassion. It is tempting to believe in civilization. It is tempted to see humanity in its largest productions. If the state is compassionate then the people are humane.
The Metro has reached my station. We engage in the rituals of disembarkation, the shifts in posture that signal a claim of territory. There is a contest for ranking in the order we will go through the nearest door. The same contest is going on outside the door as the train slows to a stop. No one looks into the eyes of another, and when the door opens, the advance is undertaken with an insistence on straight lines that brooks no opposition. In the most crowded country in Europe, one must act as if there is no one in his path. If it becomes necessary to go round a human obstacle, one does not acknowledge it as human.
‘It’s these expressions I never give,’ says Neil as I enter the café, ‘that keep me searching ...’ There’s that feeling again, melody as counter-argument. It is the reply of the primitive inside the civilizing. There is an affecting generosity woven into the chords, something lonely and wind-blown, an imaginary place with a flickering dimensionality. It dissolves into the song.
It does make one wonder. How do a people lacking warmth create a system that delivers care with a quality so uncanny a counterfeit of warmth? If it is the thing itself, compassion, then it is a compassion that arises from the cold mind, rather than the warm heart. It is conviction. It is principle.
Place is a tricky game in this world of places. It is firm; it is inescapable. It. It could be just the through that holds it fast. And yet, it can nonetheless be dissolved in a solution of song, even if only for a moment.
Place is a tricky game. It’s a world of places, and one has to choose. Place remains firm, only becoming more so under the weight of the passing millions. It becomes a nexus of history and character, quite independently of one’s imagination. There comes the time that the escape is the more creative pursuit. ‘It’s such a fine line that keeps me searching …,’ the man says.
Sunday, June 14, 2015
Travelogue 625 – June 14
Hode and the Metro
I’m walking toward the Metro. That means leaving the apartment complex and walking among the subdued Sunday morning neighbourhood, between rows of quiet flats by the small playground usually resounding with boisterous shouts. Past the two-storey flats facing each other across a pedestrian walkway, I cross one more silent side street and there is a flight of stairs up to the open-air transit center, where buses swing round their circle of stops to the right, where trams rest at a series of covered stops dead ahead. Beyond that I enter the Metro station.
I’m getting used to this strung out feeling. Baby is six days old. She had a rough night last night, and the three adults of the house spent hours comforting her and discussing high strategy. There’s an awful lot of problem-solving when it comes to babies. And it seems so many problems originate in the stomach. Here my mind inserts the Amharic word for stomach, hode, which carries something more with it than the biology. Witnessing Baby’s struggles makes me wonder about humanity and the hode. The cycles of it come so surely, so quickly, the feeding, the contentment, the troubling stirrings of the digestive system, the varieties of its mild misfirings and bubbling workings, then the respite and rest until the next high tide of hunger. I’m fascinated by the urgency and the relentlessness of this cycle. Freud imagined civilization as what comes after, or even as a product of, the regulation of what is primitive. The primitive would consume all time and attention with a chaotic and unrestrained will if allowed to. But well before instinct is this issue of the hode. How much have we transcended these struggles of infancy? Don’t we all, at some sublimated level, twitch our way through each day, from hunger to stimulation, to digestive distress and remedy, and rather than crying when the heavy doses of coffee turn sour we snap at the spouse, scream on the highway, or botch something at work and irritably blame the system? Or we eagerly accept the label of ‘depressed’ because, of course, in the twenty-first century there will be a pill for it. The result must be a sandpapering of all surfaces into smooth contentment and productivity.
Anyway, the adults in the room came up with some marvellous theories, but none of them seemed to make much difference. Baby fell asleep on her own schedule, and took the secrets of her pain with her into dreamland.
There’s no place as anonymous as a Metro station. In most cases, there lacks the orienting features that nature provides. These are just chambers of concrete, after all, accessed by tunnels that are all dug and lined to uniformity. There’s no sun or city skyline, no paths or line of hills, no street signs. Engineers pal up with practitioners of design of one stripe or another, and they lay tile, pave, paint, and place photos and art pieces, and all this helps to identify the station from inside the train, and to entertain the waiting commuter, but it does little to actually place one inside the belly of the underground beast.
Then one day you discover that you know where you want to stand on the platform. You know where you need to be on the train in order to exit at the most convenient spot. At the destination, you know where the stairs are and where is the old, cranky escalator. You turn at the head of the stairs without having to think. You know where each exit will place you on the street overhead. These are the signs of citizenship.
You know what behaviours to expect from fellow passengers, the rush for the turnstiles, the dead-ahead walk eyes averted, jaws set grimly, the odd and indirect dance on the platform, and then the funny drift forward when the train comes in, strangely competitive, as though we’ve all spotted our door at once and there will be a struggle. This is the way of citizens, each facing the day’s battle with digestive issues as best they can, sharing if possible the sour experience with a stranger.
It’s Sunday, so things are quiet. There are plenty of seats on the Metro. I emerge in the Eendrachtsplein, the square of harmony, where my Rotterdam life seems to have begun, a seedy little brick-lined square, where they board up the glass-lined entries to the Metro on holidays and long weekends, where I often stop in the mornings, pouring the first bitter coffee down my throat and starting the gaseous story of the day.
Hode and the Metro
I’m walking toward the Metro. That means leaving the apartment complex and walking among the subdued Sunday morning neighbourhood, between rows of quiet flats by the small playground usually resounding with boisterous shouts. Past the two-storey flats facing each other across a pedestrian walkway, I cross one more silent side street and there is a flight of stairs up to the open-air transit center, where buses swing round their circle of stops to the right, where trams rest at a series of covered stops dead ahead. Beyond that I enter the Metro station.
I’m getting used to this strung out feeling. Baby is six days old. She had a rough night last night, and the three adults of the house spent hours comforting her and discussing high strategy. There’s an awful lot of problem-solving when it comes to babies. And it seems so many problems originate in the stomach. Here my mind inserts the Amharic word for stomach, hode, which carries something more with it than the biology. Witnessing Baby’s struggles makes me wonder about humanity and the hode. The cycles of it come so surely, so quickly, the feeding, the contentment, the troubling stirrings of the digestive system, the varieties of its mild misfirings and bubbling workings, then the respite and rest until the next high tide of hunger. I’m fascinated by the urgency and the relentlessness of this cycle. Freud imagined civilization as what comes after, or even as a product of, the regulation of what is primitive. The primitive would consume all time and attention with a chaotic and unrestrained will if allowed to. But well before instinct is this issue of the hode. How much have we transcended these struggles of infancy? Don’t we all, at some sublimated level, twitch our way through each day, from hunger to stimulation, to digestive distress and remedy, and rather than crying when the heavy doses of coffee turn sour we snap at the spouse, scream on the highway, or botch something at work and irritably blame the system? Or we eagerly accept the label of ‘depressed’ because, of course, in the twenty-first century there will be a pill for it. The result must be a sandpapering of all surfaces into smooth contentment and productivity.
Anyway, the adults in the room came up with some marvellous theories, but none of them seemed to make much difference. Baby fell asleep on her own schedule, and took the secrets of her pain with her into dreamland.
There’s no place as anonymous as a Metro station. In most cases, there lacks the orienting features that nature provides. These are just chambers of concrete, after all, accessed by tunnels that are all dug and lined to uniformity. There’s no sun or city skyline, no paths or line of hills, no street signs. Engineers pal up with practitioners of design of one stripe or another, and they lay tile, pave, paint, and place photos and art pieces, and all this helps to identify the station from inside the train, and to entertain the waiting commuter, but it does little to actually place one inside the belly of the underground beast.
Then one day you discover that you know where you want to stand on the platform. You know where you need to be on the train in order to exit at the most convenient spot. At the destination, you know where the stairs are and where is the old, cranky escalator. You turn at the head of the stairs without having to think. You know where each exit will place you on the street overhead. These are the signs of citizenship.
You know what behaviours to expect from fellow passengers, the rush for the turnstiles, the dead-ahead walk eyes averted, jaws set grimly, the odd and indirect dance on the platform, and then the funny drift forward when the train comes in, strangely competitive, as though we’ve all spotted our door at once and there will be a struggle. This is the way of citizens, each facing the day’s battle with digestive issues as best they can, sharing if possible the sour experience with a stranger.
It’s Sunday, so things are quiet. There are plenty of seats on the Metro. I emerge in the Eendrachtsplein, the square of harmony, where my Rotterdam life seems to have begun, a seedy little brick-lined square, where they board up the glass-lined entries to the Metro on holidays and long weekends, where I often stop in the mornings, pouring the first bitter coffee down my throat and starting the gaseous story of the day.
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Travelogue 624 – June 10
Baby
And now she’s here. Two days old. She arrived six days late, and she didn’t come without a struggle. Menna was a hero, bringing her into this world. It was a privilege to be there. As it happens, I was first contact (aside from the very close contact with mommy, of course,) literally catching her as she entered the world.
Waking again, this time at home. It’s 6am. She is stirring. Like she was at 12 and like she was at 2am, and perhaps there were a few other times I slept through. She is making those amazing sounds, like a sweet whimper, sometimes a songbird’s sound, sometimes a sigh, sometimes the mwa, mwa-a-a that comes with a contortion of her face into the mask of tragedy. It makes me laugh every time. These are really the sounds of a siren, irresistible.
Her hands wave like the fronds of an otherworldly plant, the fingers running through an obscure set of positions, like signs from a Hindu dance. Her arms shudder through a long stretch, and she yawns. I stop to watch.
Her face is so expressive, but it’s expression uninformed by society. It communicates, but the messages are secret ones. I can’t know, and she won’t retain them. The feelings behind them are mercurial, passing across the fresh skin of the face, painting quick suggestions and then surrendering to more, messages in sand.
Her dreams seem intense. Her breathing is rapid and shallow. She moans in a high, windy way as she breathes. Her eyelids pulse in a regular rhythm. The eyes even open a crack, but she isn’t seeing. When she’s awake those eyes open and she looks tentatively into the space of the room. There is a wrinkle of befuddlement or concern on her brow. The eyes won’t focus yet. She is capturing only blurred form and movement. None of it can make any sense yet.
But there’s the rub, and there’s the fascination to baby. What sense? Making sense without sense must be a wonder. It all must make perfect sense without parameters for sense.
Baby whimpers as she dreams. Her leg twitches as she dreams. Menna says maybe she’s dreaming of running. I say, how does she know about running?
We wake. The first waking is in the hospital, the four of scattered among makeshift beds, as though we were tossed in with the luggage. The nurse knocks and quickly comes in, voicing a brisk optimism. This is the gebortecentrum, the birth center. Only optimism will make sense among people drunk with sleeplessness and biological success. She must take tests. She talks us through it all, including the policy behind it, even though we are only staring blankly and silently back with exhaustion.
There is something benign and insistent about the Dutch health system’s intervention in parenting. I can’t help admiring and appreciating it, even as I am reminded of recent reading among the works of Foucault, who describes power since the Enlightenment as a process acted out on the body. There is nothing private about biology.
Baby has spent much of her first night in the hospital crib, which is little more than a plastic tub. I’ve taken it off its stand and set it on the bed next to me. Menna needs her sleep. Baby is made content with a finger to suck on. She sleeps fitfully, sighing, waking to look for daddy’s finger, dreaming again about all those shapeless children she hasn’t met yet and running with abandon in the park.
Baby
And now she’s here. Two days old. She arrived six days late, and she didn’t come without a struggle. Menna was a hero, bringing her into this world. It was a privilege to be there. As it happens, I was first contact (aside from the very close contact with mommy, of course,) literally catching her as she entered the world.
Waking again, this time at home. It’s 6am. She is stirring. Like she was at 12 and like she was at 2am, and perhaps there were a few other times I slept through. She is making those amazing sounds, like a sweet whimper, sometimes a songbird’s sound, sometimes a sigh, sometimes the mwa, mwa-a-a that comes with a contortion of her face into the mask of tragedy. It makes me laugh every time. These are really the sounds of a siren, irresistible.
Her hands wave like the fronds of an otherworldly plant, the fingers running through an obscure set of positions, like signs from a Hindu dance. Her arms shudder through a long stretch, and she yawns. I stop to watch.
Her face is so expressive, but it’s expression uninformed by society. It communicates, but the messages are secret ones. I can’t know, and she won’t retain them. The feelings behind them are mercurial, passing across the fresh skin of the face, painting quick suggestions and then surrendering to more, messages in sand.
Her dreams seem intense. Her breathing is rapid and shallow. She moans in a high, windy way as she breathes. Her eyelids pulse in a regular rhythm. The eyes even open a crack, but she isn’t seeing. When she’s awake those eyes open and she looks tentatively into the space of the room. There is a wrinkle of befuddlement or concern on her brow. The eyes won’t focus yet. She is capturing only blurred form and movement. None of it can make any sense yet.
But there’s the rub, and there’s the fascination to baby. What sense? Making sense without sense must be a wonder. It all must make perfect sense without parameters for sense.
Baby whimpers as she dreams. Her leg twitches as she dreams. Menna says maybe she’s dreaming of running. I say, how does she know about running?
We wake. The first waking is in the hospital, the four of scattered among makeshift beds, as though we were tossed in with the luggage. The nurse knocks and quickly comes in, voicing a brisk optimism. This is the gebortecentrum, the birth center. Only optimism will make sense among people drunk with sleeplessness and biological success. She must take tests. She talks us through it all, including the policy behind it, even though we are only staring blankly and silently back with exhaustion.
There is something benign and insistent about the Dutch health system’s intervention in parenting. I can’t help admiring and appreciating it, even as I am reminded of recent reading among the works of Foucault, who describes power since the Enlightenment as a process acted out on the body. There is nothing private about biology.
Baby has spent much of her first night in the hospital crib, which is little more than a plastic tub. I’ve taken it off its stand and set it on the bed next to me. Menna needs her sleep. Baby is made content with a finger to suck on. She sleeps fitfully, sighing, waking to look for daddy’s finger, dreaming again about all those shapeless children she hasn’t met yet and running with abandon in the park.
Thursday, June 04, 2015
Travelogue 623 – June 4
Summer’s Bridge
I owe this to Batu. We are strolling in bright sunshine. We are strolling across the Erasmus Bridge, over the expansive waters of the Maas, the miraculous waters as they appear to me now, through the eyes of the woman who spent her whole life in Addis Ababa. We stop to watch the huge barges pass underneath us, the huge barges made small. We take photos. In Ethiopian fashion, she is holding an umbrella up as shield against its powers.
We will cross to the Wilhelmina Pier. We will sit for a while among the celebrants of sunshine in the outdoor patio of the New York Hotel. We are there near the tip of the pier, looking out over the river as though from the prow of a great ship. We find a table that is half shaded by the table umbrella, so that I can have the sun on my back and she can continue to hide. She will repeatedly ask what time it is, still marvelling that the sun is this high in the sky on into the evening.
I owe this to Batu. Only a few days ago, we made her go out on a day more common to Holland, blustery and overshadowed by swift clouds, swept with recurring showers. She was miserable. ‘Does it get any colder than this?’ she asked in surprise. It had dipped down into the 50s. Her fingers were hurting, she said.
Menna and Batu had volunteered to watch me run a 10K. I had had misgivings once I saw the weather report, but they insisted. And it seemed like a good chance to see Den Haag, neighbouring town with the cosmopolitan flair to complement Rotterdam’s stolid, business-day vibe.
This was the aristocrat’s town, built around the count’s palace. It has the open-avenue stateliness of a capital. Sometimes you still see the town’s original name here and there, ‘s Gravenhage, meaning something like the Count’s Hedge.
Not far from the central station there is a large park called the Haagse Bos, open meadows and small stands of words with walking trails. This was the peaceful and scenic setting for the 10K set. Unfortunately for spectators, the start and finish were in a rather stark and unromantic spot under a railway overpass.
We arrived late, a family tradition when Menna and I go to races together, and I have had to climb in among the crowd of runners at the back, just as they are counting down for the start. I’d had to abandon Menna and her mother among the wet asphalt lots, hoping they will find a dry spot to wait. Fortunately it was only a 10K, and I would be back relatively quickly.
The race was on. The worst weather for a spectator can be the best for a runner. The summer chill felt perfect. The rain was light. It only enhanced the silence of the park and focussed my attention on the puddles of road and the mud of the park trails. There was only the sound of everyone’s steps and the steady exertion.
Just past the finish line, I saw Menna. She was waving happily, and bid me stop in the runner’s chute for a pose of victory. I was relieved. She seemed fine. We circled back toward the registration tents. We found Batu huddled against a brick wall, shivering under her umbrella, looking shrunken inside her big sweater and her headscarf. I felt so sorry for her. I should never have encouraged them to come along. I led them quickly back toward the train station, new medallion swinging from its ribbon round my neck.
Today we will soak up as much sunshine as it takes to warm poor Batu’s chilled bones. Menna laughs at her. She tells her horror stories about winter here. I wouldn’t know how to say that the mild winters are something I love about this country. I can cycle around town year-round.
The weather is so bad, Menna affirms, as we enjoy the blue skies. Why was everyone always fighting for this place? She’s been learning some history. She has some trouble differentiating the various eras of Dutch history, events crowding each other in a rush through time. William of Orange and Napoleon are temporal neighbours to her, the two-and-more centuries losing all distinction. Even the characteristic costume of each, the ruffles vs. the funny hat, provides no clue to her, raised so far outside the stream of imagery of European culture.
Why fight for little Holland, we ask, gazing over the precious waters heading seaward and glinting with rare sunshine, where just discernible at the far turn of the river are the hundreds of cranes of the port.
Summer’s Bridge
I owe this to Batu. We are strolling in bright sunshine. We are strolling across the Erasmus Bridge, over the expansive waters of the Maas, the miraculous waters as they appear to me now, through the eyes of the woman who spent her whole life in Addis Ababa. We stop to watch the huge barges pass underneath us, the huge barges made small. We take photos. In Ethiopian fashion, she is holding an umbrella up as shield against its powers.
We will cross to the Wilhelmina Pier. We will sit for a while among the celebrants of sunshine in the outdoor patio of the New York Hotel. We are there near the tip of the pier, looking out over the river as though from the prow of a great ship. We find a table that is half shaded by the table umbrella, so that I can have the sun on my back and she can continue to hide. She will repeatedly ask what time it is, still marvelling that the sun is this high in the sky on into the evening.
I owe this to Batu. Only a few days ago, we made her go out on a day more common to Holland, blustery and overshadowed by swift clouds, swept with recurring showers. She was miserable. ‘Does it get any colder than this?’ she asked in surprise. It had dipped down into the 50s. Her fingers were hurting, she said.
Menna and Batu had volunteered to watch me run a 10K. I had had misgivings once I saw the weather report, but they insisted. And it seemed like a good chance to see Den Haag, neighbouring town with the cosmopolitan flair to complement Rotterdam’s stolid, business-day vibe.
This was the aristocrat’s town, built around the count’s palace. It has the open-avenue stateliness of a capital. Sometimes you still see the town’s original name here and there, ‘s Gravenhage, meaning something like the Count’s Hedge.
Not far from the central station there is a large park called the Haagse Bos, open meadows and small stands of words with walking trails. This was the peaceful and scenic setting for the 10K set. Unfortunately for spectators, the start and finish were in a rather stark and unromantic spot under a railway overpass.
We arrived late, a family tradition when Menna and I go to races together, and I have had to climb in among the crowd of runners at the back, just as they are counting down for the start. I’d had to abandon Menna and her mother among the wet asphalt lots, hoping they will find a dry spot to wait. Fortunately it was only a 10K, and I would be back relatively quickly.
The race was on. The worst weather for a spectator can be the best for a runner. The summer chill felt perfect. The rain was light. It only enhanced the silence of the park and focussed my attention on the puddles of road and the mud of the park trails. There was only the sound of everyone’s steps and the steady exertion.
Just past the finish line, I saw Menna. She was waving happily, and bid me stop in the runner’s chute for a pose of victory. I was relieved. She seemed fine. We circled back toward the registration tents. We found Batu huddled against a brick wall, shivering under her umbrella, looking shrunken inside her big sweater and her headscarf. I felt so sorry for her. I should never have encouraged them to come along. I led them quickly back toward the train station, new medallion swinging from its ribbon round my neck.
Today we will soak up as much sunshine as it takes to warm poor Batu’s chilled bones. Menna laughs at her. She tells her horror stories about winter here. I wouldn’t know how to say that the mild winters are something I love about this country. I can cycle around town year-round.
The weather is so bad, Menna affirms, as we enjoy the blue skies. Why was everyone always fighting for this place? She’s been learning some history. She has some trouble differentiating the various eras of Dutch history, events crowding each other in a rush through time. William of Orange and Napoleon are temporal neighbours to her, the two-and-more centuries losing all distinction. Even the characteristic costume of each, the ruffles vs. the funny hat, provides no clue to her, raised so far outside the stream of imagery of European culture.
Why fight for little Holland, we ask, gazing over the precious waters heading seaward and glinting with rare sunshine, where just discernible at the far turn of the river are the hundreds of cranes of the port.
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Travelogue 622 – May 28
Batu
I hear it again. The clinking of dishes downstairs. It’s Batu, my mother-in-law. She loves that kitchen. And she can’t sit still. Menna is drifting in and out of seep. She has such trouble sleeping these days, for the past month. She habitually spends hours in the middle of the night downstairs in the salon, doing nothing, playing games on her phone. Her stomach hurts. She has heart burn. The baby kicks.
It’s time for me to get up. I resent the kitchen noise, but I’m also grateful. Some mornings, it’s hard to get up. I see outside the window that the clouds have returned. Generally that’s the best measure of how eagerly I will rise from bed in the morning. When Holland is being grey, I will start with melancholy. Is the mind such a simple machine? Sometimes, I’m afraid it is.
Dehnadark, she says with a cheery smile as I come downstairs. Good morning. The smile works; it cheers me a little. I’m facing another day scheduled so heavily that starting feels like leaning into a yoke, feels like I’ll be pushing until bedtime. These days, the sun is shining at bedtime, too.
Menna laughed herself to sleep a night or two ago. I enjoyed that. She was replaying scenes from the day, when we introduced her mother to the city, and to the Metro. First, Batu had to master the transport card. Swipe it and then enter through the gate. The hardest thing with machines is their unforgiving nature. When the gate opens, you must enter. It does not wait; it won’t adapt to the variety of human rhythms. It opens and shuts. Batu was forced to bustle through the narrow gate with a startled look on her face.
Then we had to make it down the escalator. She paused at the top with Menna at her elbow, holding her step in fear, stutter-stepping, clutching onto Menna’s arm, thrusting toes forward and then pulling back, while a line formed behind them. She finally made a short, terrified jump, and she was on the steps. Once she was on, she faced the dismount, and again the machine would not wait. I watched Batu’s face, as she concentrated on the upcoming test. At the bottom, she made another frightened jump, and she was safe on solid ground.
A few of the people held behind her stopped to offer some encouraging words, and Batu smiled without comprehension. The underground train arrived with a rush of wind, and again we were rushing her forward. The doors would not wait. With fresh anxiety, she found herself running. Inside, we breathed again, and we laughed. The train accelerated with a rising hum, and she reached for something to hold onto. She looked at us with wide eyes.
It’s not that transportation in Addis is a picnic. Getting on the mini-buses can be a battle. But it’s a human battle, complete with shouts and elbows. The wayalas shut the van doors themselves, and make sure that everyone and all body parts are inside. There is no impersonal timing mechanism. Here, the people are gentle, and the machines are exacting. It doesn’t matter if only two people are embarking at any stop, that door will shut with the same imperative. The two people will board with the same urgency as fifty.
Batu arrived Monday, after an overnight journey from Addis Ababa. We waited for her in the arrival hall at Schiphol in Amsterdam. And we waited. She called twice, using a phone in baggage claim, the first time to tell us that her baggage was missing, the second time to allow us to talk to an airport staff person. Then we waited again. We drank coffee. We played with the camera. We laughed with a crowd waiting for the parents of a traveller, who were holding up a big, homemade banner and were cheering for everyone who emerged from the baggage claim.
The cheering family were long gone by the time Batu emerged. There was no one left to cheer for her. She emerged wide-eyed, and she pushed a cart piled high with luggage. ‘I found them,’ she said simply. It was time for embraces. We laughed as we walked out of the airport, as she told us the story of being delayed by customs. Habesha travellers regale themselves with stories of what they managed to get through customs. It’s all about the food. Often it’s confiscated. Batu had none taken. She says she looked up at the customs man as he sorted through the contents of her bags, and she said, ‘I’m Ethiopia. We’re a friendly people. We are no trouble.’ She has a sweet smile. She made him laugh.
Now she is already peacefully installed in our little flat. She likes the kitchen. That’s where all her food from Ethiopia is stored. She washes dishes. She puts dishes away. She tidies. Later she will doze in the armchair.
Batu
I hear it again. The clinking of dishes downstairs. It’s Batu, my mother-in-law. She loves that kitchen. And she can’t sit still. Menna is drifting in and out of seep. She has such trouble sleeping these days, for the past month. She habitually spends hours in the middle of the night downstairs in the salon, doing nothing, playing games on her phone. Her stomach hurts. She has heart burn. The baby kicks.
It’s time for me to get up. I resent the kitchen noise, but I’m also grateful. Some mornings, it’s hard to get up. I see outside the window that the clouds have returned. Generally that’s the best measure of how eagerly I will rise from bed in the morning. When Holland is being grey, I will start with melancholy. Is the mind such a simple machine? Sometimes, I’m afraid it is.
Dehnadark, she says with a cheery smile as I come downstairs. Good morning. The smile works; it cheers me a little. I’m facing another day scheduled so heavily that starting feels like leaning into a yoke, feels like I’ll be pushing until bedtime. These days, the sun is shining at bedtime, too.
Menna laughed herself to sleep a night or two ago. I enjoyed that. She was replaying scenes from the day, when we introduced her mother to the city, and to the Metro. First, Batu had to master the transport card. Swipe it and then enter through the gate. The hardest thing with machines is their unforgiving nature. When the gate opens, you must enter. It does not wait; it won’t adapt to the variety of human rhythms. It opens and shuts. Batu was forced to bustle through the narrow gate with a startled look on her face.
Then we had to make it down the escalator. She paused at the top with Menna at her elbow, holding her step in fear, stutter-stepping, clutching onto Menna’s arm, thrusting toes forward and then pulling back, while a line formed behind them. She finally made a short, terrified jump, and she was on the steps. Once she was on, she faced the dismount, and again the machine would not wait. I watched Batu’s face, as she concentrated on the upcoming test. At the bottom, she made another frightened jump, and she was safe on solid ground.
A few of the people held behind her stopped to offer some encouraging words, and Batu smiled without comprehension. The underground train arrived with a rush of wind, and again we were rushing her forward. The doors would not wait. With fresh anxiety, she found herself running. Inside, we breathed again, and we laughed. The train accelerated with a rising hum, and she reached for something to hold onto. She looked at us with wide eyes.
It’s not that transportation in Addis is a picnic. Getting on the mini-buses can be a battle. But it’s a human battle, complete with shouts and elbows. The wayalas shut the van doors themselves, and make sure that everyone and all body parts are inside. There is no impersonal timing mechanism. Here, the people are gentle, and the machines are exacting. It doesn’t matter if only two people are embarking at any stop, that door will shut with the same imperative. The two people will board with the same urgency as fifty.
Batu arrived Monday, after an overnight journey from Addis Ababa. We waited for her in the arrival hall at Schiphol in Amsterdam. And we waited. She called twice, using a phone in baggage claim, the first time to tell us that her baggage was missing, the second time to allow us to talk to an airport staff person. Then we waited again. We drank coffee. We played with the camera. We laughed with a crowd waiting for the parents of a traveller, who were holding up a big, homemade banner and were cheering for everyone who emerged from the baggage claim.
The cheering family were long gone by the time Batu emerged. There was no one left to cheer for her. She emerged wide-eyed, and she pushed a cart piled high with luggage. ‘I found them,’ she said simply. It was time for embraces. We laughed as we walked out of the airport, as she told us the story of being delayed by customs. Habesha travellers regale themselves with stories of what they managed to get through customs. It’s all about the food. Often it’s confiscated. Batu had none taken. She says she looked up at the customs man as he sorted through the contents of her bags, and she said, ‘I’m Ethiopia. We’re a friendly people. We are no trouble.’ She has a sweet smile. She made him laugh.
Now she is already peacefully installed in our little flat. She likes the kitchen. That’s where all her food from Ethiopia is stored. She washes dishes. She puts dishes away. She tidies. Later she will doze in the armchair.
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Travelogue 621 – May 14
The Meuse
Part Five
Renting the bicycle was a good idea. A town like Maastricht, a town of medieval proportions, yields itself readily to the tourist on a bike. I’m able to swing around the centrum and catch many sights in the arc of my ride, from the duelling Romanesque basilicas, Sint Servaas and Onze Lieve Vrouw, to the university, to old wall and battlements, and back to the River Meuse.
The rental bike rattles on the cobblestones. I weave along the middle of the lane, looking everywhere but where I’m going, quickly dodging students on their bikes. The lanes curve, and they change all the time, among trees and sudden canals, buildings rising from history, connected by the modern.
I’m back to the river, and I walk the bike up a flight of stairs to the bridge. On the other side there is a complex of modern buildings built around a spacious square. There is an outdoor café there, and I have to stop. The clientele is an international one, from the over-sized blonde Dutch women loudly reviewing paperwork, to the hilarious Australian cyclists who use the f-word with jarring regularity, to the prim Englishman in a suit, who seems proud of his accented Dutch. Across the square comes a line of students pulling suitcases, heading for the bridge. Are they returning from a vacation, enrolling in a summer session? They are so relaxed
I have one more destination. It lies south on this side of the river. I swing onto the bike seat and coast across the square toward the riverside. There is a promenade, and I coast along by the water for a while, until the promenade ends and there is a single narrow walkway still following the river. The city buildings have become progressively more bureaucratic in style, less corporate, and they are growing older, too, by the decade, not by the century. There is an island in the river, a very small one, connected to the riverbank by one slight bridge that I pass underneath. On the island there is a group of brown buildings built in a self-aware style common among international institutions, melding dignity with 80s futurism, high angles to lend scale to small structures.
This is where the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1992. The treaty created the European Union and the euro. I’m the only tourist here. The European Union is not so popular these days. Elections for the European Parliament send in anti-European members. The re-elected British prime minister is promising to re-negotiate Britain's EU membership in the EU.
It’s amazing to think how quickly things developed in those days. It had only been a few years since the wall had fallen in Berlin. Helmut Kohl was on a union crusade, first uniting Germany and then Europe. Mitterand in France saw his opportunity to anchor the energy of a renewed Germany in a greater Europe. He pushed for an accelerated timeline for the united currency.
We live with the consequences of those heady times, one euro crisis after another, only enhancing the power of the German chancellor over Europe. It’s an interesting dilemma, living with the after-shocks of good intentions.
So I visit this signal place in the history of a new Europe, and I’m alone in contemplating it. Just past the island and its government buildings there is parkland along the riverbank, and a quiet trail leading south through the woods and toward Belgian border. It’s awfully tempting to steer the bike back the way I came earlier this morning, but I have to get back to the train station.
Rotterdam is still a part of the Meuse family of cities, though even the Meuse itself must be defined more loosely the closer it gets to the North sea, where the Rhine and the Scheldt mix in a general rush toward the sea, where rivers unravel like string into thread in the massive delta system. In Rotterdam, the feeling of the calm river valley has given way to the stormy clime of the sea. Green hills have given way to the flat and windy lands of the delta.
Much of the Dutch port of Rotterdam, the biggest in Europe, is called the Europoort, product of a project that predates Mr. Kohl and his union.
The Meuse
Part Five
Renting the bicycle was a good idea. A town like Maastricht, a town of medieval proportions, yields itself readily to the tourist on a bike. I’m able to swing around the centrum and catch many sights in the arc of my ride, from the duelling Romanesque basilicas, Sint Servaas and Onze Lieve Vrouw, to the university, to old wall and battlements, and back to the River Meuse.
The rental bike rattles on the cobblestones. I weave along the middle of the lane, looking everywhere but where I’m going, quickly dodging students on their bikes. The lanes curve, and they change all the time, among trees and sudden canals, buildings rising from history, connected by the modern.
I’m back to the river, and I walk the bike up a flight of stairs to the bridge. On the other side there is a complex of modern buildings built around a spacious square. There is an outdoor café there, and I have to stop. The clientele is an international one, from the over-sized blonde Dutch women loudly reviewing paperwork, to the hilarious Australian cyclists who use the f-word with jarring regularity, to the prim Englishman in a suit, who seems proud of his accented Dutch. Across the square comes a line of students pulling suitcases, heading for the bridge. Are they returning from a vacation, enrolling in a summer session? They are so relaxed
I have one more destination. It lies south on this side of the river. I swing onto the bike seat and coast across the square toward the riverside. There is a promenade, and I coast along by the water for a while, until the promenade ends and there is a single narrow walkway still following the river. The city buildings have become progressively more bureaucratic in style, less corporate, and they are growing older, too, by the decade, not by the century. There is an island in the river, a very small one, connected to the riverbank by one slight bridge that I pass underneath. On the island there is a group of brown buildings built in a self-aware style common among international institutions, melding dignity with 80s futurism, high angles to lend scale to small structures.
This is where the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1992. The treaty created the European Union and the euro. I’m the only tourist here. The European Union is not so popular these days. Elections for the European Parliament send in anti-European members. The re-elected British prime minister is promising to re-negotiate Britain's EU membership in the EU.
It’s amazing to think how quickly things developed in those days. It had only been a few years since the wall had fallen in Berlin. Helmut Kohl was on a union crusade, first uniting Germany and then Europe. Mitterand in France saw his opportunity to anchor the energy of a renewed Germany in a greater Europe. He pushed for an accelerated timeline for the united currency.
We live with the consequences of those heady times, one euro crisis after another, only enhancing the power of the German chancellor over Europe. It’s an interesting dilemma, living with the after-shocks of good intentions.
So I visit this signal place in the history of a new Europe, and I’m alone in contemplating it. Just past the island and its government buildings there is parkland along the riverbank, and a quiet trail leading south through the woods and toward Belgian border. It’s awfully tempting to steer the bike back the way I came earlier this morning, but I have to get back to the train station.
Rotterdam is still a part of the Meuse family of cities, though even the Meuse itself must be defined more loosely the closer it gets to the North sea, where the Rhine and the Scheldt mix in a general rush toward the sea, where rivers unravel like string into thread in the massive delta system. In Rotterdam, the feeling of the calm river valley has given way to the stormy clime of the sea. Green hills have given way to the flat and windy lands of the delta.
Much of the Dutch port of Rotterdam, the biggest in Europe, is called the Europoort, product of a project that predates Mr. Kohl and his union.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Travelogue 620 – May 13
The Meuse
Part Four
There’s a moving carnival set up in the square of St. Servaas. I think I recognize it from Rotterdam, particularly the ride called ‘Das Omen’ set up just below the great basilica of Sint Servaas, the ride’s imposing horror film set façade welcoming children into the ride, the trailer truck behind containing the ride or experience itself, whatever it may be. This is a much more prestigious locale than the one they occupy when they’re in Rotterdam, where they move into an open asphalt lot beside the river near Delfshaven. Every spring they come, and they block my running route by the river. Now we’ve moved into a new flat, I won’t be running by ‘Das Omen’ anymore.
There aren’t too many people around. It’s early. I’m not sure the carnival is open. The weekend is over. I’ve caught the train out of Visé, checking out of the hotel by 7am, standing on the one long platform that serves both directions, waiting with a few early birds for the train to Maastricht. At the train station in Maastricht, I’ve rented a bicycle. I’ve pedalled across the Sint Servaasbrug over the Meuse – this bridge said to be the oldest in the Netherlands -- and into the old center, up the medieval-made-modern street to the Square of Sint Servaas.
There I see the sleeping carnival, set up just under the twin towers and the curving apse Of Sint Servaas. I take a tour around the outside of the church, starting from the accompanying baptistery with a high red tower, called Sint Jan, of course, after the ‘Doper’, or the Baptist. I stare through the protective glass at the famous ‘South Portal’ of the basilica, where the archway features original sculpture from the twelfth century, kings and saints seated in mounting order toward the pointed arch above. I’ve walked along the western wall, the wall become one high brick side of a narrow way, and I’ve emerged on the north side, by the public entrance to the basilica, inside which a booth is set in the cloister and manned by a forlorn lady with a German accent, waiting to collect fees from any visitor. I debate entering, but I have a lot I want to see this morning, including the basilica’s rival church downtown, the Basiliek van Onze Lieve Vrouw, or Notre Dame if they were to speak French here, like they do only a few kilometers away. But they don’t.
They speak Dutch here, and so I feel that little bit more comfortable ordering at the cafe around the corner. I sit outside, facing the square, the square littered with carnival. It’s still a pretty square, in a pretty town.
Maastricht is a small town, but it bears itself with an imperial sauciness. It became Roman with Caesar. The city’s first bridge was a Roman project from Augustus’s time, and they say there are still a few bricks from the original in the old Servaasbrug. Much later it was an imperial city in the heart of the empire of Charlemagne and his heirs. As such, it breathes Holy Roman air, and did for a long time, even as the Middle Ages waned and its power with them. The city thrived in the fluid days of the high medieval, when cities and church, landed aristocracy and kings all played each other in a fantastically complex game of authority, before the religious wars tore the system apart and nationalism marched in. This is the time of Jan van Eyck, the painter, who was born near Maastricht, the time when artists travelled the roads between the various imperial cities, studying and vying for commissions and for court favour.
Cities like Maastricht and Bruges can still boast a lot of flair passed on from that era, when art and architecture were like plumage for the leaders of society. We still enjoy it at our leisure, in these days of cappuccinos and corporate stoicism. We look for the signs of it behind the banners of the carnival.
The Meuse
Part Four
There’s a moving carnival set up in the square of St. Servaas. I think I recognize it from Rotterdam, particularly the ride called ‘Das Omen’ set up just below the great basilica of Sint Servaas, the ride’s imposing horror film set façade welcoming children into the ride, the trailer truck behind containing the ride or experience itself, whatever it may be. This is a much more prestigious locale than the one they occupy when they’re in Rotterdam, where they move into an open asphalt lot beside the river near Delfshaven. Every spring they come, and they block my running route by the river. Now we’ve moved into a new flat, I won’t be running by ‘Das Omen’ anymore.
There aren’t too many people around. It’s early. I’m not sure the carnival is open. The weekend is over. I’ve caught the train out of Visé, checking out of the hotel by 7am, standing on the one long platform that serves both directions, waiting with a few early birds for the train to Maastricht. At the train station in Maastricht, I’ve rented a bicycle. I’ve pedalled across the Sint Servaasbrug over the Meuse – this bridge said to be the oldest in the Netherlands -- and into the old center, up the medieval-made-modern street to the Square of Sint Servaas.
There I see the sleeping carnival, set up just under the twin towers and the curving apse Of Sint Servaas. I take a tour around the outside of the church, starting from the accompanying baptistery with a high red tower, called Sint Jan, of course, after the ‘Doper’, or the Baptist. I stare through the protective glass at the famous ‘South Portal’ of the basilica, where the archway features original sculpture from the twelfth century, kings and saints seated in mounting order toward the pointed arch above. I’ve walked along the western wall, the wall become one high brick side of a narrow way, and I’ve emerged on the north side, by the public entrance to the basilica, inside which a booth is set in the cloister and manned by a forlorn lady with a German accent, waiting to collect fees from any visitor. I debate entering, but I have a lot I want to see this morning, including the basilica’s rival church downtown, the Basiliek van Onze Lieve Vrouw, or Notre Dame if they were to speak French here, like they do only a few kilometers away. But they don’t.
They speak Dutch here, and so I feel that little bit more comfortable ordering at the cafe around the corner. I sit outside, facing the square, the square littered with carnival. It’s still a pretty square, in a pretty town.
Maastricht is a small town, but it bears itself with an imperial sauciness. It became Roman with Caesar. The city’s first bridge was a Roman project from Augustus’s time, and they say there are still a few bricks from the original in the old Servaasbrug. Much later it was an imperial city in the heart of the empire of Charlemagne and his heirs. As such, it breathes Holy Roman air, and did for a long time, even as the Middle Ages waned and its power with them. The city thrived in the fluid days of the high medieval, when cities and church, landed aristocracy and kings all played each other in a fantastically complex game of authority, before the religious wars tore the system apart and nationalism marched in. This is the time of Jan van Eyck, the painter, who was born near Maastricht, the time when artists travelled the roads between the various imperial cities, studying and vying for commissions and for court favour.
Cities like Maastricht and Bruges can still boast a lot of flair passed on from that era, when art and architecture were like plumage for the leaders of society. We still enjoy it at our leisure, in these days of cappuccinos and corporate stoicism. We look for the signs of it behind the banners of the carnival.
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
Travelogue 619 – May 12
The Meuse
Part Three
It’s only fifteen minutes or so on the train to Liège. I’m going to go just long enough to see more of the countryside, and to stroll around the city. It’s Sunday. I don’t expect to see much going on.
It’s a beautiful afternoon, but it is spring in a wet country and clouds are never far. As I wait on the train platform, we are beset by a quick sun shower, clouds piled up in one corner of the sky and shedding their light rains while still the sun shines. By the time the train comes the shower has passed.
The ride south alongside the Meuse is pretty as expected, but the character of the valley changes as we go. The bluffs beside the train, on the left, the eastern side, grow and crowd the track. They stand over houses that seem also to grow in stature, as though there may have once been good reason for the rich to live here. The bluffs advance, and then they recede, having spent their aggression. They ease away, and there appear brick villages that remind me again of the Upper Midwest. There’s something of the same working bourgeois sturdiness to them. The villages that pop up seem crafted in an age of industry.
And indeed, I have entered what is called the Sillon Industriel, Belgium’s historic industrial zone, the first in continental Europe, concentrated along the river valleys of the Meuse and the Ourthe, where steel and coal reigned through much of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
The name of the city Liège evolved somehow from the Latin Vicus Leudicus, which seems to mean something like Village of the People. It’s a city with an upstart history of rebellion, starting with an uprising against the bishop Engelbert in the fourteenth century, and the rise of a unique guild system of governance. And history carried the People on into many causes for rebellion, through the idealism of the French Revolution, the rebellion against the Dutch, resistance against the German, and finally into the era of strikes, which the French-speaking Europeans do love so tenderly. Liège came to be known, somewhere along the line, as la cité ardente.
The city is quiet today, as the train follows the Meuse into town, following the nearly ninety-degree turn toward the west that provides a panoramic introduction to the city that is pocketed in that corner of the river, among the bluffs along the east bank that form a kind of stadium effect. The train station stands there below the highest bluffs, a dramatic new construction for the modern city, high white arch and capping brim that rises over an expansive plaza fronting the station. I stroll slowly across the plaza, enjoying the open space and the view it affords of the city among the hills of the river valley.
I dive in among the narrow streets. I don’t find much. La cité ardente seems something less than ardente on this Sunday. I just stroll among its quiet avenues, looking for a sense of who it might be. I don’t get too far. It feels like a variety of other cities, like Antwerp for a minute, and like Köln for another. But decidedly French-speaking. The whole region is. The border just south of Maastricht is a real border, run across it as we may in the course of a weekend jog. It’s a border, and quite suddenly, one hears French everywhere.
I find these passages uncanny. There’s a ruthless species of beauty at play here, the concentration of language. We call borders natural. Then we call them necessary. And then there is simply the gauge of the blade that divides people. One might imagine a soft linguistic blur across such a mellow landscape, but I suppose the people have sorted themselves centuries ago. Step left here, speak Dutch. Step right, speak French. It’s funny.
The sunlight is still strong as I board the train for Visé. We’re beginning to enjoy the long days of summer. I sit by the window to watch the river go by again. Three young students of international law take the seats around mine. They have an interview coming up, it seems. They study in Masstricht. They speak in English, though none are native-born English speakers. One seems French, another Eastern European. They seem absurdly young to be interviewing to be lawyers. They discuss wardrobe. They discuss upcoming tests, how many times they have been through the text entire, studying and studying. The River Meuse slips by.
The Meuse
Part Three
It’s only fifteen minutes or so on the train to Liège. I’m going to go just long enough to see more of the countryside, and to stroll around the city. It’s Sunday. I don’t expect to see much going on.
It’s a beautiful afternoon, but it is spring in a wet country and clouds are never far. As I wait on the train platform, we are beset by a quick sun shower, clouds piled up in one corner of the sky and shedding their light rains while still the sun shines. By the time the train comes the shower has passed.
The ride south alongside the Meuse is pretty as expected, but the character of the valley changes as we go. The bluffs beside the train, on the left, the eastern side, grow and crowd the track. They stand over houses that seem also to grow in stature, as though there may have once been good reason for the rich to live here. The bluffs advance, and then they recede, having spent their aggression. They ease away, and there appear brick villages that remind me again of the Upper Midwest. There’s something of the same working bourgeois sturdiness to them. The villages that pop up seem crafted in an age of industry.
And indeed, I have entered what is called the Sillon Industriel, Belgium’s historic industrial zone, the first in continental Europe, concentrated along the river valleys of the Meuse and the Ourthe, where steel and coal reigned through much of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
The name of the city Liège evolved somehow from the Latin Vicus Leudicus, which seems to mean something like Village of the People. It’s a city with an upstart history of rebellion, starting with an uprising against the bishop Engelbert in the fourteenth century, and the rise of a unique guild system of governance. And history carried the People on into many causes for rebellion, through the idealism of the French Revolution, the rebellion against the Dutch, resistance against the German, and finally into the era of strikes, which the French-speaking Europeans do love so tenderly. Liège came to be known, somewhere along the line, as la cité ardente.
The city is quiet today, as the train follows the Meuse into town, following the nearly ninety-degree turn toward the west that provides a panoramic introduction to the city that is pocketed in that corner of the river, among the bluffs along the east bank that form a kind of stadium effect. The train station stands there below the highest bluffs, a dramatic new construction for the modern city, high white arch and capping brim that rises over an expansive plaza fronting the station. I stroll slowly across the plaza, enjoying the open space and the view it affords of the city among the hills of the river valley.
I dive in among the narrow streets. I don’t find much. La cité ardente seems something less than ardente on this Sunday. I just stroll among its quiet avenues, looking for a sense of who it might be. I don’t get too far. It feels like a variety of other cities, like Antwerp for a minute, and like Köln for another. But decidedly French-speaking. The whole region is. The border just south of Maastricht is a real border, run across it as we may in the course of a weekend jog. It’s a border, and quite suddenly, one hears French everywhere.
I find these passages uncanny. There’s a ruthless species of beauty at play here, the concentration of language. We call borders natural. Then we call them necessary. And then there is simply the gauge of the blade that divides people. One might imagine a soft linguistic blur across such a mellow landscape, but I suppose the people have sorted themselves centuries ago. Step left here, speak Dutch. Step right, speak French. It’s funny.
The sunlight is still strong as I board the train for Visé. We’re beginning to enjoy the long days of summer. I sit by the window to watch the river go by again. Three young students of international law take the seats around mine. They have an interview coming up, it seems. They study in Masstricht. They speak in English, though none are native-born English speakers. One seems French, another Eastern European. They seem absurdly young to be interviewing to be lawyers. They discuss wardrobe. They discuss upcoming tests, how many times they have been through the text entire, studying and studying. The River Meuse slips by.
Monday, May 11, 2015
Travelogue 618 – May 11
The Meuse
Part Two
Visé is so close to the Dutch border we could run there. We do run there. In the course of our half marathon, we are able to slip across that invisible barrier and back again. There’s even a remainder of race distance to allow us to pass back through Visé and head south toward Liège. And so we get a luxurious tour of this rural section of the peaceful Meuse.
I’ve seen somewhere this river described as one of the oldest rivers in the world. That’s a rather mysterious designation, old river, prehistoric river; and a mysterious operation behind it, attaching a sticky note of time to the moving water. How does one do that? One studies the geological features of the river’s course, I suppose, and proves that water has run just this way for many, many years.
If age makes for peace and wisdom, then I might see some corroborating signs in the general amiableness of the Meuse. It makes for an unusually pleasant journey. The river valley is pretty in that gentle way that gets under your skin, proves disarming, endearing. At first, it seems not so different from the Mississippi River valley in southern Minnesota, in summer, friendly meadows stretching over low-lying hills, humble farmlands, and the occasional small town that seems both bland and inviting. But there is something unique here.
After the race, I indulge in a Belgian beer at a brasserie on the Rue College. I’m reading a book, something I just picked up a charity shop, but it’s a leisurely attempt to read, achieving no more than ten pages in an hour. Instead, I’m people watching. I think it’s only fair, since I’m being watched with such acute attention by the locals. It’s a small town, and quite evidently not used to large events in their town yet. They attach curious and assessing gazes on the strangers. When I step inside and ask the awkward young waiter if he speaks English, it inspires no few snickers from the ageing couples sitting just inside the door with their drinks. The young waiter blushes, though he does make a serious go of communicating with me. Later, when I come back to settle up, someone croaks, ‘Do you speak English?’ with a cackle, to make the young man blush again.
It’s a Sunday, and it’s a beautiful afternoon. The town is on promenade. I have sat next to a very popular old man, it seems. He waves at just about every passer-by, and they wave back. Cars slow; the drivers wave. He doesn’t miss a beat in his conversation with his plump wife. The two of them speak French. On the other side of me, two couples visit with each other, chatting effortlessly in two languages. They switch from French to Dutch with such easy fluidity that I have a hard time tracking each. That seems odd, given how different the languages are, but the Flemish variety of Dutch can have a slushier quality to it.
Friends meet, and they exchange kisses on the cheek. And that goes for men meeting men, as well. They seem genuinely content. They continue non to do some window shopping along the Rue College. I stay where I am. I study the onion dome of the building across the central square, covered in the slate grey shingles of the area. The exotic dome sits atop a building very Flemish in character, red brick framed in white stone quoins corners.
Strolling away from the brasserie, and its street of cheerful Sunday commotion, I decide I have time for a short sight-seeing trip. I head toward the small train station.
The Meuse
Part Two
Visé is so close to the Dutch border we could run there. We do run there. In the course of our half marathon, we are able to slip across that invisible barrier and back again. There’s even a remainder of race distance to allow us to pass back through Visé and head south toward Liège. And so we get a luxurious tour of this rural section of the peaceful Meuse.
I’ve seen somewhere this river described as one of the oldest rivers in the world. That’s a rather mysterious designation, old river, prehistoric river; and a mysterious operation behind it, attaching a sticky note of time to the moving water. How does one do that? One studies the geological features of the river’s course, I suppose, and proves that water has run just this way for many, many years.
If age makes for peace and wisdom, then I might see some corroborating signs in the general amiableness of the Meuse. It makes for an unusually pleasant journey. The river valley is pretty in that gentle way that gets under your skin, proves disarming, endearing. At first, it seems not so different from the Mississippi River valley in southern Minnesota, in summer, friendly meadows stretching over low-lying hills, humble farmlands, and the occasional small town that seems both bland and inviting. But there is something unique here.
After the race, I indulge in a Belgian beer at a brasserie on the Rue College. I’m reading a book, something I just picked up a charity shop, but it’s a leisurely attempt to read, achieving no more than ten pages in an hour. Instead, I’m people watching. I think it’s only fair, since I’m being watched with such acute attention by the locals. It’s a small town, and quite evidently not used to large events in their town yet. They attach curious and assessing gazes on the strangers. When I step inside and ask the awkward young waiter if he speaks English, it inspires no few snickers from the ageing couples sitting just inside the door with their drinks. The young waiter blushes, though he does make a serious go of communicating with me. Later, when I come back to settle up, someone croaks, ‘Do you speak English?’ with a cackle, to make the young man blush again.
It’s a Sunday, and it’s a beautiful afternoon. The town is on promenade. I have sat next to a very popular old man, it seems. He waves at just about every passer-by, and they wave back. Cars slow; the drivers wave. He doesn’t miss a beat in his conversation with his plump wife. The two of them speak French. On the other side of me, two couples visit with each other, chatting effortlessly in two languages. They switch from French to Dutch with such easy fluidity that I have a hard time tracking each. That seems odd, given how different the languages are, but the Flemish variety of Dutch can have a slushier quality to it.
Friends meet, and they exchange kisses on the cheek. And that goes for men meeting men, as well. They seem genuinely content. They continue non to do some window shopping along the Rue College. I stay where I am. I study the onion dome of the building across the central square, covered in the slate grey shingles of the area. The exotic dome sits atop a building very Flemish in character, red brick framed in white stone quoins corners.
Strolling away from the brasserie, and its street of cheerful Sunday commotion, I decide I have time for a short sight-seeing trip. I head toward the small train station.
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Travelogue 617 – May 10
The Meuse
Part One
By the vineyards, by the orchards. It’s noontime, and the air is thick with moisture. Not a breath to be had.
I’m nearly halfway through the distance. I’m making good time. Maybe it’s the heat. I feel a flutter in my breast, and I am having trouble accessing catching my breath. I drop the pace, just for a moment. But it’s enough. Enough both to regain my breath and also to break the rhythm I’d built toward my best time.
Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s just the leeftijd. Don’t forget your age, the body says. You don’t escape that, despite the exhilaration of the race. Each moment of life comes tagged with time and context, like hidden code. Yes, the body says, you have done well in adapting these muscles to the sport. And yet, there is the ageing heart. There are the lungs made tired from years of pollution in Addis Ababa, years of recurring asthmas and bronchitis.
I’m a long-distance runner. (We weave our sub-plots. We rebel against the imperatives of narrative. Diverting as they are, there is no escape.)
My readers will pardon my use of the Dutch word for age above. The mind wants to produce the funnest word for the moment. And Dutch provides many fun words, if only for the ringing sound of them, like cute, hearth-side innovations. It’s a perfect little word for age, leeftijd, a time of life. The Dutch have assembled words this way, well before the first local grammarians could have frowned at the practice, and so it is that in the twenty-first century we still communicate with words conceived from an almost childlike instinct. So it is you can listen to everyday language like a song, in any tongue, closing your eyes, setting aside all the signals of the cynicism of the age, and you hear the vestiges of a heart-breaking innocence.
So the leeftijd has its say, and I say that’s fair enough. Running is such a mental sport, I forget once in a while that the body has its part, has its price to pay for the activity. I chop up the steps, slow it down, recover equilibrium, and then resume as best I can.
By the garden, over the cobblestone. We are going to cross the river again. I can see the bobbing coloured running jerseys on the bridge ahead.
The river is the Meuse. The River Meuse runs placidly along through this pretty country, made so green by the spring. It flows placidly through the little town of Visé in Belgium. It’s a town of less than twenty thousand, small jewel of Wallonia, a place with two little avenues running parallel to the river for a mile or two, the Rue College set with quaint brick and chain retail outlets, set with bistros and brasseries. At the southern end of the rue stands the modern reconstruction of the very old church of Saint Hadelin, built first, according to tradition, from a benefice granted by a daughter of Charlemagne. Saint Hadelin had been one of a corps of missionaries converting the Belgians, not much earlier than old Charlemagne himself.
The crowd of runners is thinning out. We form a trail along the country road, leading by small orchards and past the small houses of the families who tend them. We share the road with cyclists, easing by, and with nervous motorists. We are heading north toward the Dutch border.
The Meuse
Part One
By the vineyards, by the orchards. It’s noontime, and the air is thick with moisture. Not a breath to be had.
I’m nearly halfway through the distance. I’m making good time. Maybe it’s the heat. I feel a flutter in my breast, and I am having trouble accessing catching my breath. I drop the pace, just for a moment. But it’s enough. Enough both to regain my breath and also to break the rhythm I’d built toward my best time.
Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s just the leeftijd. Don’t forget your age, the body says. You don’t escape that, despite the exhilaration of the race. Each moment of life comes tagged with time and context, like hidden code. Yes, the body says, you have done well in adapting these muscles to the sport. And yet, there is the ageing heart. There are the lungs made tired from years of pollution in Addis Ababa, years of recurring asthmas and bronchitis.
I’m a long-distance runner. (We weave our sub-plots. We rebel against the imperatives of narrative. Diverting as they are, there is no escape.)
My readers will pardon my use of the Dutch word for age above. The mind wants to produce the funnest word for the moment. And Dutch provides many fun words, if only for the ringing sound of them, like cute, hearth-side innovations. It’s a perfect little word for age, leeftijd, a time of life. The Dutch have assembled words this way, well before the first local grammarians could have frowned at the practice, and so it is that in the twenty-first century we still communicate with words conceived from an almost childlike instinct. So it is you can listen to everyday language like a song, in any tongue, closing your eyes, setting aside all the signals of the cynicism of the age, and you hear the vestiges of a heart-breaking innocence.
So the leeftijd has its say, and I say that’s fair enough. Running is such a mental sport, I forget once in a while that the body has its part, has its price to pay for the activity. I chop up the steps, slow it down, recover equilibrium, and then resume as best I can.
By the garden, over the cobblestone. We are going to cross the river again. I can see the bobbing coloured running jerseys on the bridge ahead.
The river is the Meuse. The River Meuse runs placidly along through this pretty country, made so green by the spring. It flows placidly through the little town of Visé in Belgium. It’s a town of less than twenty thousand, small jewel of Wallonia, a place with two little avenues running parallel to the river for a mile or two, the Rue College set with quaint brick and chain retail outlets, set with bistros and brasseries. At the southern end of the rue stands the modern reconstruction of the very old church of Saint Hadelin, built first, according to tradition, from a benefice granted by a daughter of Charlemagne. Saint Hadelin had been one of a corps of missionaries converting the Belgians, not much earlier than old Charlemagne himself.
The crowd of runners is thinning out. We form a trail along the country road, leading by small orchards and past the small houses of the families who tend them. We share the road with cyclists, easing by, and with nervous motorists. We are heading north toward the Dutch border.
Friday, May 01, 2015
Travelogue 616 – May 1
West
Just one kilometre can make the difference. We’re further from the centrum now, and I suddenly there is more drag on the bicycle. I get up in the morning, and I don’t feel the energy to ride in as far as the central station for my first coffee. I do like starting early, and I like starting with some exercise, travelling to my espresso. But how far?
Today I try going further west, toward Schiedam, instead of east into town. Schiedam is a satellite town, the first of a series that follows the Maas toward the sea, toward the Hoek van Holland, or the Corner of Holland, that jutting lip of land that identifies the coast of South Holland.
I had never thought much of Schiedam. It’s a train stop on the way to Delft and Den Haag. But now it’s so close. It’s really only a smooth and straight ride along one bike path beside one road, passing the endless ports on the left, and quiet little blocks of flats on the other. Suddenly I’m in Schiedam Central.
It’s early, and only a few wall-eyed pubs are open, a few dazed men sitting out front with coffee. I stay on the bike, and wander among the alleyways of the town. I discover that it’s not the blank suburb I assumed it was. It has history and character, founded around the same time as Rotterdam.
I take a turn along a curving alley, laid in cobblestone and describing an arc circling around to the station, running parallel to a pretty canal. It passes church and museum, old city hall and eventually the basilica. All of these are signs of venerable age, signs of Schiedam’s success over the centuries as port on the dammed Schie, and later as center of production of sacred genever, gin of the Dutch. It becomes known as place of high windmills, only because men must build high to clear the genever distilleries and warehouses.
Still, circling all the way back to where I started, I don’t see a café. I enter the ‘Passage’, a shabby indoor mall, furnished with all manner of convenient shops. There’s a bakery but the bakery has no tables or chairs. I end up having breakfast in the cafeteria of the Hema store. Hema is a chain of department stores, perhaps analogous to Target in the U.S. My breakfast costs one euro seventy-five, and I listen to the store mix of inoffensive music, interspersed with their advertisements, always preceded by their little whistling jingle, an insidiously invasive sample that corrodes thought with surprising efficiency. I sit at one table among many, nearly all occupied at this hour, by elderly locals and working moms with their kids.
Back in my own neighbourhood, I stop at an Arab bakery. I’ve become fairly knowledgeable, and fairly quickly, about the map of these bakeries in the area. Menna and I have developed a taste for baklava, and there are many varieties to try. The Turks and Arabs are thick on the ground in Rotterdam West, and there are plenty of options to choose from. There are blocks whole and long sections of road that sound and smell like the Middle East. I stand in line with men just leaving the mosque, bearded and robed and chatting happily in some language far from Dutch. I point to my choices behind the display case so the woman in her dark head scarf can package them up for me. I will put them delicately in the backpack for transport back to the house. We’ll have a snack tonight.
West
Just one kilometre can make the difference. We’re further from the centrum now, and I suddenly there is more drag on the bicycle. I get up in the morning, and I don’t feel the energy to ride in as far as the central station for my first coffee. I do like starting early, and I like starting with some exercise, travelling to my espresso. But how far?
Today I try going further west, toward Schiedam, instead of east into town. Schiedam is a satellite town, the first of a series that follows the Maas toward the sea, toward the Hoek van Holland, or the Corner of Holland, that jutting lip of land that identifies the coast of South Holland.
I had never thought much of Schiedam. It’s a train stop on the way to Delft and Den Haag. But now it’s so close. It’s really only a smooth and straight ride along one bike path beside one road, passing the endless ports on the left, and quiet little blocks of flats on the other. Suddenly I’m in Schiedam Central.
It’s early, and only a few wall-eyed pubs are open, a few dazed men sitting out front with coffee. I stay on the bike, and wander among the alleyways of the town. I discover that it’s not the blank suburb I assumed it was. It has history and character, founded around the same time as Rotterdam.
I take a turn along a curving alley, laid in cobblestone and describing an arc circling around to the station, running parallel to a pretty canal. It passes church and museum, old city hall and eventually the basilica. All of these are signs of venerable age, signs of Schiedam’s success over the centuries as port on the dammed Schie, and later as center of production of sacred genever, gin of the Dutch. It becomes known as place of high windmills, only because men must build high to clear the genever distilleries and warehouses.
Still, circling all the way back to where I started, I don’t see a café. I enter the ‘Passage’, a shabby indoor mall, furnished with all manner of convenient shops. There’s a bakery but the bakery has no tables or chairs. I end up having breakfast in the cafeteria of the Hema store. Hema is a chain of department stores, perhaps analogous to Target in the U.S. My breakfast costs one euro seventy-five, and I listen to the store mix of inoffensive music, interspersed with their advertisements, always preceded by their little whistling jingle, an insidiously invasive sample that corrodes thought with surprising efficiency. I sit at one table among many, nearly all occupied at this hour, by elderly locals and working moms with their kids.
Back in my own neighbourhood, I stop at an Arab bakery. I’ve become fairly knowledgeable, and fairly quickly, about the map of these bakeries in the area. Menna and I have developed a taste for baklava, and there are many varieties to try. The Turks and Arabs are thick on the ground in Rotterdam West, and there are plenty of options to choose from. There are blocks whole and long sections of road that sound and smell like the Middle East. I stand in line with men just leaving the mosque, bearded and robed and chatting happily in some language far from Dutch. I point to my choices behind the display case so the woman in her dark head scarf can package them up for me. I will put them delicately in the backpack for transport back to the house. We’ll have a snack tonight.
Monday, April 27, 2015
Travelogue 615 – April 27
King’s Day
‘Happy Holiday!’ I bid Jelle the barista. The café staff is overwhelmed by a mid-morning rush, and Jelle is looking grouchy. ‘Happy?’ he replies. ‘Are you happy?’
I tell him I am. I tell him I’m happy because my wife is happy. There is a King’s Day tradition called vrijmarkt, which allows the good citizens of the city to set up stalls to sell their second-hand goods in squares throughout town. We’ve been shopping early. We’ve found a few nice chachkas for the new flat. I’m happy because the rise of a bitter wind cut short our shopping expedition.
‘It’s too happy,’ Jelle complains about the holiday. He apparently finds it a bit galling. Too sentimental. Or maybe he just resents the intensity of the traffic at the café counter.
But it is a happy holiday, after all. The city center is bustling with smiling families. Many are wearing orange, carrying orange balloons, sporting orange cowboy hats and blown-up orange crowns and over-sized, plastic orange sunglasses.
The Dutch Republic, one of the earliest republics in Europe, celebrates its king. It’s an odd story, the story of the republic that chose to become a monarchy, and that in the aftermath of a long occupation by the Emperor of the French.
But the house of Oranje had always cast a long shadow over Holland, since William the Silent led the old provinces into revolt against Spain in the sixteenth century. A special place was crafted for his descendants, adapted from a medieval feudal role, called the stadtholder, and this became a sort of monarchy.
James Madison had a few words to say about the odd republic built around this collection of rebellious provinces that made up the Low Countries, held in uneasy union by the Stadtholder. It took a drunken boy on the train to remind me that the American Madison had written about Holland. But, however the drunken boy remembered Madison’s words, they weren’t approving. In his Federalist Paper No. 20, Madison described a state mired in ‘discord among the provinces,’ and even ‘imbecility in the Government’.
But it’s often forgotten that, by Madison’s writing, and pre-dating France’s spectacular revolution, the Dutch had already begun a rebellion of their own against the stale rule of the Stadtholder. This rebellion became known as the Batavian Revolution, and the rebels as the Patriots. The struggle was only resolved by the French, who marched in in 1795, and helped to declare the Batavian Republic.
The House of Oranje waited out the storm in London. When the new European order was put in place, two hundred years ago this year, the son of the old Stadtholder became the new king, Willem I, direct antecedent to the present king, Willem-Alexander.
‘Too happy,’ grouses the busy barista. Yes, it does seem as though those two hundred years have eased some of the ‘discord among the provinces’. The children wear orange and proudly they march around the café, shouting their acclaim for the republic and its king.
King’s Day
‘Happy Holiday!’ I bid Jelle the barista. The café staff is overwhelmed by a mid-morning rush, and Jelle is looking grouchy. ‘Happy?’ he replies. ‘Are you happy?’
I tell him I am. I tell him I’m happy because my wife is happy. There is a King’s Day tradition called vrijmarkt, which allows the good citizens of the city to set up stalls to sell their second-hand goods in squares throughout town. We’ve been shopping early. We’ve found a few nice chachkas for the new flat. I’m happy because the rise of a bitter wind cut short our shopping expedition.
‘It’s too happy,’ Jelle complains about the holiday. He apparently finds it a bit galling. Too sentimental. Or maybe he just resents the intensity of the traffic at the café counter.
But it is a happy holiday, after all. The city center is bustling with smiling families. Many are wearing orange, carrying orange balloons, sporting orange cowboy hats and blown-up orange crowns and over-sized, plastic orange sunglasses.
The Dutch Republic, one of the earliest republics in Europe, celebrates its king. It’s an odd story, the story of the republic that chose to become a monarchy, and that in the aftermath of a long occupation by the Emperor of the French.
But the house of Oranje had always cast a long shadow over Holland, since William the Silent led the old provinces into revolt against Spain in the sixteenth century. A special place was crafted for his descendants, adapted from a medieval feudal role, called the stadtholder, and this became a sort of monarchy.
James Madison had a few words to say about the odd republic built around this collection of rebellious provinces that made up the Low Countries, held in uneasy union by the Stadtholder. It took a drunken boy on the train to remind me that the American Madison had written about Holland. But, however the drunken boy remembered Madison’s words, they weren’t approving. In his Federalist Paper No. 20, Madison described a state mired in ‘discord among the provinces,’ and even ‘imbecility in the Government’.
But it’s often forgotten that, by Madison’s writing, and pre-dating France’s spectacular revolution, the Dutch had already begun a rebellion of their own against the stale rule of the Stadtholder. This rebellion became known as the Batavian Revolution, and the rebels as the Patriots. The struggle was only resolved by the French, who marched in in 1795, and helped to declare the Batavian Republic.
The House of Oranje waited out the storm in London. When the new European order was put in place, two hundred years ago this year, the son of the old Stadtholder became the new king, Willem I, direct antecedent to the present king, Willem-Alexander.
‘Too happy,’ grouses the busy barista. Yes, it does seem as though those two hundred years have eased some of the ‘discord among the provinces’. The children wear orange and proudly they march around the café, shouting their acclaim for the republic and its king.
Thursday, April 23, 2015
Travelogue 614 – April 23
What the Medicine Says
‘Read your medicine!’ he insists as he stands to exit. He has been sitting across from me since the Den Haag station, focusing his innocent blue eyes on the stranger. The drunken boy has become innocent again in his revels.
I’m returning home on the train from an evening in Den Haag, and it’s late. The trains in Holland become rather like a moving carnival, people weaving about and singing, shouting to each other in sudden camaraderie.
There are three of them, and they occupy the three seats around me with a rush of boozy air. ‘How are you, sir? Where are you from?’
I fold the newspaper and stow it. ‘Minnesota,’ I reply, and I let them struggle with that for a minute or two. They resolve this mystery in each their different way. Blue eyes just nods and repeats. The hefty boy next to me tells me he loves New York. And the third stares, and finally returns to his demand that I love Feyenoord. I tell him I’m for Sparta. I don’t tell them it’s because my new house is a few blocks from the Sparta stadium. Whatever my reason, they cheer.
‘Where are you from?’ I ask. None of them are from Rotterdam. They are from Arnhem, Breda, and Leiden. ‘Arnhem?’ I’m going to challenge the leader of the pack, the one with the innocent blue eyes. ‘That’s not even Holland. You’re German.’
‘No!’ he protests. The others laugh at him. ‘And you,’ I continue, ‘from Breda. You’re just a Belgian!’ He is the farthest gone of the three, the one who was shouting for Feyenoord. He stares at me with wide eyes that he is having trouble focusing. He will compose sputtering denials for me when he pulls himself together.
‘And here is the true Nederlander,’ I say, smacking the back of the young man from Leiden. He’s the quiet one, sitting beside me. He’s the one looking like a thug, in contrast to the others’ choir-boy-gone-bad style. Suddenly he’s soft-spoken, almost urbane. He starts to explain how his accent is so different from that of the other boys, a rather arcane claim for heritage, but I’ll listen.
Leiden is quickly drowned out by the others. No, I say, trying to shush Breda, you don’t get to root for Feyenoord. You’re closer to Eindhoven, where the local team, PSV, is in any case outperforming Feyenoord. ‘No, no, no!’ he shouts. What’s so bad about PSV? ‘I don’t like them. They’re arrogant,’ he replies. It’s what they have already said about Ajax, Amsterdam’s team. All the good teams are arrogant.
Blue eyes is going to defend Arnhem. But they have run out of time. They are getting off the train in Delft. Delft is a big university town, but somehow I don’t think this is an academic visit. Blue eyes makes one point as he goes. ‘Read medicine!’ he insists. ‘Read medicine!’
‘Medicine?’
‘Your father. Your founder.’
‘Oh, Madison. My father, James Madison. …Really?’
‘He wrote about Arnhem. He loved the republic.’ And the boys are gone.
The republic of Arnhem? I’m stunned, and intrigued. How mysterious the mind of drunken college boys. I try to follow this lead, to read my medicine, but the only reference I’m able to find at this short notice is a relatively uncomplimentary essay about the Dutch republic among the Federalist Papers, written in 1787, written on the eve of the revolution in France that would destroy the republic. And no mention is made in the essay to Arnhem at all.
Well, so it goes with fathers. We cling to their spare words, exaggerating the hint of praise inside them, making them in our memory into personal encomia to share with strangers on the train.
Cheers, boys. And long live the Republic!
What the Medicine Says
‘Read your medicine!’ he insists as he stands to exit. He has been sitting across from me since the Den Haag station, focusing his innocent blue eyes on the stranger. The drunken boy has become innocent again in his revels.
I’m returning home on the train from an evening in Den Haag, and it’s late. The trains in Holland become rather like a moving carnival, people weaving about and singing, shouting to each other in sudden camaraderie.
There are three of them, and they occupy the three seats around me with a rush of boozy air. ‘How are you, sir? Where are you from?’
I fold the newspaper and stow it. ‘Minnesota,’ I reply, and I let them struggle with that for a minute or two. They resolve this mystery in each their different way. Blue eyes just nods and repeats. The hefty boy next to me tells me he loves New York. And the third stares, and finally returns to his demand that I love Feyenoord. I tell him I’m for Sparta. I don’t tell them it’s because my new house is a few blocks from the Sparta stadium. Whatever my reason, they cheer.
‘Where are you from?’ I ask. None of them are from Rotterdam. They are from Arnhem, Breda, and Leiden. ‘Arnhem?’ I’m going to challenge the leader of the pack, the one with the innocent blue eyes. ‘That’s not even Holland. You’re German.’
‘No!’ he protests. The others laugh at him. ‘And you,’ I continue, ‘from Breda. You’re just a Belgian!’ He is the farthest gone of the three, the one who was shouting for Feyenoord. He stares at me with wide eyes that he is having trouble focusing. He will compose sputtering denials for me when he pulls himself together.
‘And here is the true Nederlander,’ I say, smacking the back of the young man from Leiden. He’s the quiet one, sitting beside me. He’s the one looking like a thug, in contrast to the others’ choir-boy-gone-bad style. Suddenly he’s soft-spoken, almost urbane. He starts to explain how his accent is so different from that of the other boys, a rather arcane claim for heritage, but I’ll listen.
Leiden is quickly drowned out by the others. No, I say, trying to shush Breda, you don’t get to root for Feyenoord. You’re closer to Eindhoven, where the local team, PSV, is in any case outperforming Feyenoord. ‘No, no, no!’ he shouts. What’s so bad about PSV? ‘I don’t like them. They’re arrogant,’ he replies. It’s what they have already said about Ajax, Amsterdam’s team. All the good teams are arrogant.
Blue eyes is going to defend Arnhem. But they have run out of time. They are getting off the train in Delft. Delft is a big university town, but somehow I don’t think this is an academic visit. Blue eyes makes one point as he goes. ‘Read medicine!’ he insists. ‘Read medicine!’
‘Medicine?’
‘Your father. Your founder.’
‘Oh, Madison. My father, James Madison. …Really?’
‘He wrote about Arnhem. He loved the republic.’ And the boys are gone.
The republic of Arnhem? I’m stunned, and intrigued. How mysterious the mind of drunken college boys. I try to follow this lead, to read my medicine, but the only reference I’m able to find at this short notice is a relatively uncomplimentary essay about the Dutch republic among the Federalist Papers, written in 1787, written on the eve of the revolution in France that would destroy the republic. And no mention is made in the essay to Arnhem at all.
Well, so it goes with fathers. We cling to their spare words, exaggerating the hint of praise inside them, making them in our memory into personal encomia to share with strangers on the train.
Cheers, boys. And long live the Republic!
Friday, April 17, 2015
Travelogue 613 – April 17
The Strength of Suns
The afternoon verges on evening, and the Locus Publicus is positioned fortunately on the Oostzeedijk, its streetside window turned just the perfect degree west, so that while I sit at my table I feel its touch on my shoulder. Sometimes it seems like this might be the real narrative to my life, the thread that connects moments in the sun.
Jamie and I are talking about suns, but just for a moment. We never talk about anything for more than a moment. To do so would be a disservice to the seriousness of God’s creation. We have been discussing movies, and the films for the moment are ‘Interstellar’ and ‘Sunshine’. We have been analysing the physics in each story, the terrible power of gravity in suns dead and alive. In Interstellar, the hero must survive a descent into a black hole. In Sunshine, setting a bomb off inside the sun should save it. Each movie tries to evoke a sort of mysticism from the experience of deep space. ‘Sunshine’ was probably the more successful, weaving a scary spell around the light of the sun and gravity at close quarters.
With surprising perspicacity, Jamie and I demonstrate that the science in the films is faulty. How much more impressive is this show of intellect, I’m thinking, when neither of us has studied physics.
We move on to the coming premiere of the new Avengers film. Though we must speak about it with some reverence, Jamie does feel he must set the record straight on how the characterizations diverge from those in the comic books. And I must make sure that the pub realizes that, though the Avengers movies are fine creations, they will never measure up to anything by Christopher Nolan.
These pressing matters settled, we are free to open the beer apps on our phones, and log our choices. I have chosen British beers for the night, perhaps in tribute to Jamie, who hails from Bath, one of my favourite places on this sunny globe. Sadly, I have to assign poor marks to tonight’s choices. While I like British ales and American IPAs, it would seem that British IPAs are not going to be the right compromise.
The Locus Publicus is a bar proud of its beer selection, in the hundreds. Last time, I devoted myself to Belgian blondes and triples, and I was well pleased. The pub is small enough that they could probably line the walls with the menu in bottles. Instead, we are presented with a variety of blackboards, beers listed in a baffling sort of order that began as alphabetical, muddled by erasures and additions, new As and Bs appearing among the Ms.
Above the working area of the bar, there are scenes in ceramic tile that are very Dutch, farmyard scenes painted in a cheerful, glossy style onto large panels made of palm-sized square tiles.
The beer app has stalled, as it so often does. Jamie’s does, as well, and he tosses the phone onto the table. We are left with only the real beers. Last time we were able use the apps to research the beers, find provenance and family, find recommendations for the next round.
Sandra and Wouter show up just as we are resorting to ‘Game of Thrones’ for conversation, talk of the Imp, and so forth. Wouter is Dutch and Sandra is French, and they conduct their relationship in English. I find that amazing, and certainly a sign of the times. I’m sure that would never have been the case before, even thirty years ago. The thought of this language play makes me recommit to my language study. All sorts of wonderful things are possible in this world, all sorts of wonderful ways to misunderstand one another, and all in the name of culture. The two are a study in stereotype, Wouter laconic and literal-minded, Sandra vibrant and laughing.
Sandra tells how their first fight was over a night out, and the misconstrued meaning of ‘night out’. He took her to a pub, and she didn’t talk to him for a week.
We play guess the baby’s name. Sandra will not give up, after I have told them that we have chosen a French name. There are a lot of French names, we realize, and most of them have English cognates, which we have to explore. Finally I have to go, mystery unsolved. I won’t tell them; it feels like a jinx.
It takes longer to cycle home from city center than it used to. The sun is still up, though angling for its exit, radiant just above the horizon. I am heading more or less west, following the long curve of the River Maas, past my old neighbourhood, Delfhaven, and out toward Schiedam, aiming for the three square buildings that standing alone as road signs toward Marconiplein, the western edge of Rotterdam, where our apartment complex stands. I’m speeding along with great enthusiasm. It’s a perfect spring evening.
The Strength of Suns
The afternoon verges on evening, and the Locus Publicus is positioned fortunately on the Oostzeedijk, its streetside window turned just the perfect degree west, so that while I sit at my table I feel its touch on my shoulder. Sometimes it seems like this might be the real narrative to my life, the thread that connects moments in the sun.
Jamie and I are talking about suns, but just for a moment. We never talk about anything for more than a moment. To do so would be a disservice to the seriousness of God’s creation. We have been discussing movies, and the films for the moment are ‘Interstellar’ and ‘Sunshine’. We have been analysing the physics in each story, the terrible power of gravity in suns dead and alive. In Interstellar, the hero must survive a descent into a black hole. In Sunshine, setting a bomb off inside the sun should save it. Each movie tries to evoke a sort of mysticism from the experience of deep space. ‘Sunshine’ was probably the more successful, weaving a scary spell around the light of the sun and gravity at close quarters.
With surprising perspicacity, Jamie and I demonstrate that the science in the films is faulty. How much more impressive is this show of intellect, I’m thinking, when neither of us has studied physics.
We move on to the coming premiere of the new Avengers film. Though we must speak about it with some reverence, Jamie does feel he must set the record straight on how the characterizations diverge from those in the comic books. And I must make sure that the pub realizes that, though the Avengers movies are fine creations, they will never measure up to anything by Christopher Nolan.
These pressing matters settled, we are free to open the beer apps on our phones, and log our choices. I have chosen British beers for the night, perhaps in tribute to Jamie, who hails from Bath, one of my favourite places on this sunny globe. Sadly, I have to assign poor marks to tonight’s choices. While I like British ales and American IPAs, it would seem that British IPAs are not going to be the right compromise.
The Locus Publicus is a bar proud of its beer selection, in the hundreds. Last time, I devoted myself to Belgian blondes and triples, and I was well pleased. The pub is small enough that they could probably line the walls with the menu in bottles. Instead, we are presented with a variety of blackboards, beers listed in a baffling sort of order that began as alphabetical, muddled by erasures and additions, new As and Bs appearing among the Ms.
Above the working area of the bar, there are scenes in ceramic tile that are very Dutch, farmyard scenes painted in a cheerful, glossy style onto large panels made of palm-sized square tiles.
The beer app has stalled, as it so often does. Jamie’s does, as well, and he tosses the phone onto the table. We are left with only the real beers. Last time we were able use the apps to research the beers, find provenance and family, find recommendations for the next round.
Sandra and Wouter show up just as we are resorting to ‘Game of Thrones’ for conversation, talk of the Imp, and so forth. Wouter is Dutch and Sandra is French, and they conduct their relationship in English. I find that amazing, and certainly a sign of the times. I’m sure that would never have been the case before, even thirty years ago. The thought of this language play makes me recommit to my language study. All sorts of wonderful things are possible in this world, all sorts of wonderful ways to misunderstand one another, and all in the name of culture. The two are a study in stereotype, Wouter laconic and literal-minded, Sandra vibrant and laughing.
Sandra tells how their first fight was over a night out, and the misconstrued meaning of ‘night out’. He took her to a pub, and she didn’t talk to him for a week.
We play guess the baby’s name. Sandra will not give up, after I have told them that we have chosen a French name. There are a lot of French names, we realize, and most of them have English cognates, which we have to explore. Finally I have to go, mystery unsolved. I won’t tell them; it feels like a jinx.
It takes longer to cycle home from city center than it used to. The sun is still up, though angling for its exit, radiant just above the horizon. I am heading more or less west, following the long curve of the River Maas, past my old neighbourhood, Delfhaven, and out toward Schiedam, aiming for the three square buildings that standing alone as road signs toward Marconiplein, the western edge of Rotterdam, where our apartment complex stands. I’m speeding along with great enthusiasm. It’s a perfect spring evening.
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Travelogue 612 – April 12
A Song of Comfort
The little angel is dressed in white. Still he doesn’t mind lying full-length on the floor. He’s searching for his car under the sofa.
The little angel is dressed all in white because today is Easter in the Orthodox calendar. It’s traditional garb, silky little shirt with sash and straight-legged slacks. He somehow keeps it all clean, despite slithering across the floor. It’s a testament to his mother, no doubt, pregnant with an angel’s brother and still industrious.
His name is Rufael. He’s named after an angel. Angels are made to work, and he has a lot to accomplish today. He needs to stamp in place for a while, watching his bare feet strike the panelling of the floor. He needs to run up and down the passage outdoors and watch his shadow as he’s running. He needs to explain to guests exactly who Dusty the airplane is and what he can do. He’s got to fish the red car out from beneath the sofa.
It’s a special day. He’s in his whites. His mother has put on traditional dress, and she makes coffee for guests. People are stopping by. There is doro wot, the holiday dish in Ethiopian homes.
This is how the holiday goes. I have seen a few more than Rufael has. I know the drill. We will gather in front of the television, where Ethiopian music videos are looping. Conversation spirals round a few familiar topics: where to shop and how much to pay. There are a few new topics, such as how to treat the aches and pains of pregnancy, and what the big day, the day of delivery, will look like. Rufael is expecting a brother about the time that we are expecting our little girl. He tries to look up his mommy’s dress when they talk about his brother. Then he lifts her hair and searches into her ear. Where is he?
This little family communicates in three languages, blending them continuously, shifting mid-sentence, one language feeding the right word when the others fail. ‘Opstaan, Rufi. Na. Come here.’
All this I’m used to. The kaleidoscope of languages, the chatter, and the food. I’m used to the full and over-full feeling after the huge meal, and the sleepiness. I’m used to the collapse into sofa cushions while the coffee is being prepared. On TV, well-fed Ethiopians dance on American streets. ‘This one,’ daddy tells me. ‘He is famous now.’ This dancer and his colleagues have already appeared in a few videos this afternoon, videos for very different singers, singers from diverging styles and different generations. But there they are again, lined up and smiling on sunny American lawns. The famous one is sincerely happy. He moves with perfect assurance, sinuous and muscular. And he smiles as if he sees you. ‘Have a good holiday,’ he says with a wink.
We share a secret, don’t we, famous one? The secret must emerge cathartically, during the meal. ‘Things are getting worse.’ I have to nod in affirmation. I’ve seen it myself. Things are becoming even harder for their countrymen back home, for the countrymen of Rufael’s family, for the countrymen of the dancers. I see it more often than they do.
Daddy attempts to draw a picture of it, how, emerging from a restaurant where altogether your bill amounts to over a thousand birr, emerging after a long meal and many beers, you are confronted by a gauntlet of boys begging, boys who have not ten birr between them, boys who sleep in the streets. He tells us emphatically, urging its truth. There is a horror to it, a sentiment alloyed with shame and fear. Are we not here, a shudder of panic, are we not here at this Easter table? Touch wood. Steady oneself at the table.
Rufael doesn’t find any of this frightening. This is his home. And Rufael is his name. He will bear the name of his angel. He will carry it forward through a lifetime of stamping on floorboards, laughing about it.
A Song of Comfort
The little angel is dressed in white. Still he doesn’t mind lying full-length on the floor. He’s searching for his car under the sofa.
The little angel is dressed all in white because today is Easter in the Orthodox calendar. It’s traditional garb, silky little shirt with sash and straight-legged slacks. He somehow keeps it all clean, despite slithering across the floor. It’s a testament to his mother, no doubt, pregnant with an angel’s brother and still industrious.
His name is Rufael. He’s named after an angel. Angels are made to work, and he has a lot to accomplish today. He needs to stamp in place for a while, watching his bare feet strike the panelling of the floor. He needs to run up and down the passage outdoors and watch his shadow as he’s running. He needs to explain to guests exactly who Dusty the airplane is and what he can do. He’s got to fish the red car out from beneath the sofa.
It’s a special day. He’s in his whites. His mother has put on traditional dress, and she makes coffee for guests. People are stopping by. There is doro wot, the holiday dish in Ethiopian homes.
This is how the holiday goes. I have seen a few more than Rufael has. I know the drill. We will gather in front of the television, where Ethiopian music videos are looping. Conversation spirals round a few familiar topics: where to shop and how much to pay. There are a few new topics, such as how to treat the aches and pains of pregnancy, and what the big day, the day of delivery, will look like. Rufael is expecting a brother about the time that we are expecting our little girl. He tries to look up his mommy’s dress when they talk about his brother. Then he lifts her hair and searches into her ear. Where is he?
This little family communicates in three languages, blending them continuously, shifting mid-sentence, one language feeding the right word when the others fail. ‘Opstaan, Rufi. Na. Come here.’
All this I’m used to. The kaleidoscope of languages, the chatter, and the food. I’m used to the full and over-full feeling after the huge meal, and the sleepiness. I’m used to the collapse into sofa cushions while the coffee is being prepared. On TV, well-fed Ethiopians dance on American streets. ‘This one,’ daddy tells me. ‘He is famous now.’ This dancer and his colleagues have already appeared in a few videos this afternoon, videos for very different singers, singers from diverging styles and different generations. But there they are again, lined up and smiling on sunny American lawns. The famous one is sincerely happy. He moves with perfect assurance, sinuous and muscular. And he smiles as if he sees you. ‘Have a good holiday,’ he says with a wink.
We share a secret, don’t we, famous one? The secret must emerge cathartically, during the meal. ‘Things are getting worse.’ I have to nod in affirmation. I’ve seen it myself. Things are becoming even harder for their countrymen back home, for the countrymen of Rufael’s family, for the countrymen of the dancers. I see it more often than they do.
Daddy attempts to draw a picture of it, how, emerging from a restaurant where altogether your bill amounts to over a thousand birr, emerging after a long meal and many beers, you are confronted by a gauntlet of boys begging, boys who have not ten birr between them, boys who sleep in the streets. He tells us emphatically, urging its truth. There is a horror to it, a sentiment alloyed with shame and fear. Are we not here, a shudder of panic, are we not here at this Easter table? Touch wood. Steady oneself at the table.
Rufael doesn’t find any of this frightening. This is his home. And Rufael is his name. He will bear the name of his angel. He will carry it forward through a lifetime of stamping on floorboards, laughing about it.
Friday, April 10, 2015
Travelogue 611 – April 10
An Easter Song
From a distance, the map of the apartment compound seems to spell ‘HE’ in merged block letters. The map is printed on little tin plaques that are hung on the yellow brick walls at several corners, and in the stairwells.
We moved into a new apartment this week. It’s been a lot of work. We have no car. Until the day a friend shows up with a van, I’m carrying duffel bags on my bicycle. It’s not too far from the old place, thankfully. We have no furniture, so the great shopping spree begins. Menna is having fun.
Everything becomes the move. It’s an occupation. Other things sink into a haze of weary confusion.
I call to Ethiopia this morning. I’m talking business with Yenebeb, even though I hear the baby in the background. He says, in his mild way, ‘Okay, okay.’ And then, ‘You know today is a holiday, right?’ Oh, is that right? I had retained in a vague and detached way that Orthodox Easter was this weekend. But then there are the extras. There is Good Friday. ‘I’m sorry, Yenebeb. I can’t keep track of all these Christian … things. I’ll talk to you Tuesday.’
I’m locking the apartment door, and I’m turning to walk along the outdoor walkway encircling our courtyard. I spot the sign across the enclosed space, on the wall opposite. ‘HE.’
It’s a beautiful day for a remembered crucifixion. Spring has arrived in a glorious way, the sun breaking through and lighting the past two days as though he were thinking of summer in Spain. Spirits are high in the streets.
We love the new flat, four rooms in the top two floors of the four-storey complex. The building is a renovated beauty from 1922, a complex built as worker’s quarters. It’s a solid, modestly art deco complex of yellow brick, set with quiet squares inside with lawns and places to sit.
Ours is a sunny flat, big windows allowing sunlight in one side in the morning and in the other in the afternoon. There’s a big window in the bathroom that lights my face as I stand at the mirror. I am suddenly confronted with all that was hidden in the former flat, which was lower to the ground and full of shadows. I see the fine wrinkles that have spread across my face. I see the grey that has spread among my hair. And these are only the most flattering developments in the intervening years at old Buytewechstraat.
It occurs to me that Jesus never had this pleasure, the very refined torture applied by Time, the experience of watching oneself decay. What must it be to be whole in the moment of death? Does one protest? ‘But I am beautiful. I am strong.’
Having served some years past my prime, I wonder what a person is, what a biography is, without the losses.
But it’s a time for celebration. It’s spring, and we have moved into a new place. I turn from the mirror. I massage the muscles that ache from the continual, domestic labours, supervised by the woman of the house. She has surprising stores of energy for this undertaking, carrying baby and willing to carry more. ‘Put that down,’ I say, and then it’s on me.
An Easter Song
From a distance, the map of the apartment compound seems to spell ‘HE’ in merged block letters. The map is printed on little tin plaques that are hung on the yellow brick walls at several corners, and in the stairwells.
We moved into a new apartment this week. It’s been a lot of work. We have no car. Until the day a friend shows up with a van, I’m carrying duffel bags on my bicycle. It’s not too far from the old place, thankfully. We have no furniture, so the great shopping spree begins. Menna is having fun.
Everything becomes the move. It’s an occupation. Other things sink into a haze of weary confusion.
I call to Ethiopia this morning. I’m talking business with Yenebeb, even though I hear the baby in the background. He says, in his mild way, ‘Okay, okay.’ And then, ‘You know today is a holiday, right?’ Oh, is that right? I had retained in a vague and detached way that Orthodox Easter was this weekend. But then there are the extras. There is Good Friday. ‘I’m sorry, Yenebeb. I can’t keep track of all these Christian … things. I’ll talk to you Tuesday.’
I’m locking the apartment door, and I’m turning to walk along the outdoor walkway encircling our courtyard. I spot the sign across the enclosed space, on the wall opposite. ‘HE.’
It’s a beautiful day for a remembered crucifixion. Spring has arrived in a glorious way, the sun breaking through and lighting the past two days as though he were thinking of summer in Spain. Spirits are high in the streets.
We love the new flat, four rooms in the top two floors of the four-storey complex. The building is a renovated beauty from 1922, a complex built as worker’s quarters. It’s a solid, modestly art deco complex of yellow brick, set with quiet squares inside with lawns and places to sit.
Ours is a sunny flat, big windows allowing sunlight in one side in the morning and in the other in the afternoon. There’s a big window in the bathroom that lights my face as I stand at the mirror. I am suddenly confronted with all that was hidden in the former flat, which was lower to the ground and full of shadows. I see the fine wrinkles that have spread across my face. I see the grey that has spread among my hair. And these are only the most flattering developments in the intervening years at old Buytewechstraat.
It occurs to me that Jesus never had this pleasure, the very refined torture applied by Time, the experience of watching oneself decay. What must it be to be whole in the moment of death? Does one protest? ‘But I am beautiful. I am strong.’
Having served some years past my prime, I wonder what a person is, what a biography is, without the losses.
But it’s a time for celebration. It’s spring, and we have moved into a new place. I turn from the mirror. I massage the muscles that ache from the continual, domestic labours, supervised by the woman of the house. She has surprising stores of energy for this undertaking, carrying baby and willing to carry more. ‘Put that down,’ I say, and then it’s on me.
Sunday, April 05, 2015
Travelogue 610 – April 5
Spring Song
There’s a boy standing in the doorway of the flat. The doorway opens directly onto the pavement, some three meters of flagstone to the bike path. I’m passing on my bicycle. The sound is surprising, like a wheezing engine, like a carnival. The boy is blowing on his harmonica.
The two of turn to look, two men on bikes. The other has just started out from his own flat. He is wobbling along the flagstones. As he brings the old bikes thumping over the kerb and into the bike path, he’s laughing. He’s delivering exclamations to me. He’s telling me his father used to play harmonica. I know enough language to understand that.
It’s a day to make songs on a harmonica. The sky is clear blue, and the sun warm. This is the outcome of a blustery week with winds gusting so powerfully they stop you as you turn the corner. It was a week of dramatic clouds racing, patches of sunlight sweeping by, tantalizing in their hints of warmth.
There is no need to chase the sunlight today. It is abundant; it is free. We celebrate with our songs. A boy stands in his doorway playing chords on his harmonica. The man on his bike is laughing. He’s riding beside me now.
‘Sorry, I don’t speak much Nederlands.’ I tell him
‘Where you from, mate?’ He hunches over his handlebars. He has a raffish look to him, tousled ginger hair and his eyes a cloudy blue harbouring racing thoughts. He assures me he has been to America. ‘And I’ve lived in England for three years.’ In Plymouth, he says.
He smiles with yellow, neglected teeth, and I do think of England. ‘I worked on the Rotterdam-America line for years, mate. I’m a cook.’ He announces the latter with much pride. I admit that it sounds like fun, cooking on the trans-Atlantic cruise ship.
The bicycle is too small for him. His knees, clothed in corduroy, swing to the sides. He hangs over the handlebars. He wears a puffy jacket in colours of combat green. He pushes the pedals with flat soiled sneakers. He makes the pose look like repose, even as he pushed the reluctant little vehicle forward, in sidling lines never straight, but like the line left by slackened rope.
‘Where you from, mate?’ he may well ask. I’m not from here. What’s more, there is no here that I’m from. There was once, but I don’t feel it. Does he say ‘mate’ because he fancies himself a sailor, or because he fancies all English-speakers as portside Brits, or all of us Aussies? I do somewhere inside me bear a pocket of blood from the British Isles, but much more of me is descended from the landlocked middle of Europe and from landlocked American tribes far from the sea.
We part ways after we cross the bridge, he heading forward on the Binnenweg, and I turning to follow the Schie a ways. I have no purpose for the moment. I left the house only to cool off from a busy day. I’m cycling north, staying with the river, staying with the light.
Spring Song
There’s a boy standing in the doorway of the flat. The doorway opens directly onto the pavement, some three meters of flagstone to the bike path. I’m passing on my bicycle. The sound is surprising, like a wheezing engine, like a carnival. The boy is blowing on his harmonica.
The two of turn to look, two men on bikes. The other has just started out from his own flat. He is wobbling along the flagstones. As he brings the old bikes thumping over the kerb and into the bike path, he’s laughing. He’s delivering exclamations to me. He’s telling me his father used to play harmonica. I know enough language to understand that.
It’s a day to make songs on a harmonica. The sky is clear blue, and the sun warm. This is the outcome of a blustery week with winds gusting so powerfully they stop you as you turn the corner. It was a week of dramatic clouds racing, patches of sunlight sweeping by, tantalizing in their hints of warmth.
There is no need to chase the sunlight today. It is abundant; it is free. We celebrate with our songs. A boy stands in his doorway playing chords on his harmonica. The man on his bike is laughing. He’s riding beside me now.
‘Sorry, I don’t speak much Nederlands.’ I tell him
‘Where you from, mate?’ He hunches over his handlebars. He has a raffish look to him, tousled ginger hair and his eyes a cloudy blue harbouring racing thoughts. He assures me he has been to America. ‘And I’ve lived in England for three years.’ In Plymouth, he says.
He smiles with yellow, neglected teeth, and I do think of England. ‘I worked on the Rotterdam-America line for years, mate. I’m a cook.’ He announces the latter with much pride. I admit that it sounds like fun, cooking on the trans-Atlantic cruise ship.
The bicycle is too small for him. His knees, clothed in corduroy, swing to the sides. He hangs over the handlebars. He wears a puffy jacket in colours of combat green. He pushes the pedals with flat soiled sneakers. He makes the pose look like repose, even as he pushed the reluctant little vehicle forward, in sidling lines never straight, but like the line left by slackened rope.
‘Where you from, mate?’ he may well ask. I’m not from here. What’s more, there is no here that I’m from. There was once, but I don’t feel it. Does he say ‘mate’ because he fancies himself a sailor, or because he fancies all English-speakers as portside Brits, or all of us Aussies? I do somewhere inside me bear a pocket of blood from the British Isles, but much more of me is descended from the landlocked middle of Europe and from landlocked American tribes far from the sea.
We part ways after we cross the bridge, he heading forward on the Binnenweg, and I turning to follow the Schie a ways. I have no purpose for the moment. I left the house only to cool off from a busy day. I’m cycling north, staying with the river, staying with the light.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)