Travelogue 658 – October 28
The Second Half
Part Three

Baby usually wakes late. She has had a feeding time very early, and then she sleeps again. Once she wakes, she is in a good mood. It’s her best time of day. She lies in bed, and she smiles sweetly. We make her laugh. Today I have to listen to her laugh over the phone.

This morning, she is far away. She is back where the days are constricting, where winter is coming. Here the daylight is still strong. It comes on at nearly the same time as it always does. The birds have begun with song. The priests and the imams have joined in with their song. I was blessed with water, and I have had the privilege of a hot shower.

By the time Baby wakes, and by the time her mommy is tickling her and kissing her, I’ve already been up and busy. I’ve closed the gate to my old house just as the guy across the dirt road does. His house is set only a meter or less behind the crooked and battered fence of corrugated iron. He wears the same shiny grey suit today as he will tomorrow. He carries in one hand the worn, black briefcase. In his other hand is the phone. He speaks into it with a grave urgency. ‘Where are you?’ he asks in Amharic. It’s 7am.

Addis is a city of business. The buildings keep rising all over town, rising among sea of neighbourhoods like ours, among the mud and tin and stone villages that make up the aggregate city. I’ve walked up the neighbourhood hill to the asphalt road, from village to city, where I am to meet Shimeles, my driver. A couple of young men up there are cautioning everyone, there are electrical cables down. They lie across the sidewalk and across half the road. A speeding taxi van screeches to a halt in front of the cable, which is only visible at the last minute.

Last night I read about Europe, about post-war West Germany. Le Carré has created the story about an Embassy man gone missing. The story is a pretext for Le Carré to explore a bit of obscure history, the history of post-war Germany. It’s a fascinating time, but one that has gone dark. We prefer the history of the war to the history of the reconstruction. Reconstruction doesn’t have the adrenalin appeal. It’s hard and steady work during times of deprivation. There are nameless, hungry mobs of displaced persons, and refugees are unpopular these days. They gather at the borders and they selfishly ask for jobs. Reconstruction is a time for quiet civil servants who problem-solve, and we hate those sorts, too.

We can say that the saving grace of the period is the Cold War, at least in terms of entertainment value. It’s a time of spies, people who work in the shadows to keep things stable. There’s something psychologically appealing about the concept of the spy. The tightly bound energy of the Cold War seems best expressed by that gritty image: the person who works in the shadows. Little matter that most spies spent their careers pushing paper.

I’m only halfway through the book, and enjoying it more than I’m likely to later. The mystery is at its most tantalizing. There is no urgency to move the plot along. There is room for speculation and for exploration.

The downed electrical cables have fallen just where I usually meet Shimeles. I circle round the danger, and walk down the hill. I walk a while, passing the neighbourhood shops, the sidewalk cafes, the meat shop, the tiny hair salon. There is a steady train of people on their way down the hill with me. Every morning this is the course they walk. It occurs to Shimeles isn’t coming. I start watching for other taxi drivers.

He doesn’t speak much English, but he’s eager to talk. He wants to know where I’m from. He wants to know what I’m doing here. I answer, and he needs a few minutes to formulate his next question. He’s enjoying it. We speed along the roads toward the busy center of Addis, where on every side rise bare concrete supports overhead. It’s a city experiencing new youth.

Travelogue 657 – October 27
The Second Half
Part Two

I’m getting used to seeing only the first halves of movies. After that, the distractions at home are too much. I can catch bits and pieces of second halves. I manage to get to know the characters, understand the set-up and the premise for the plot, the conflict and where things must go. And then I have to piece together the rest from fragments. Or I leave it unresolved.

The conclusions generated in Hollywood are rarely satisfying, anyway. Sometimes I think the movie industry is in the business of sabotaging good ideas. One sees a genius in the parts and a failure in the sum. I imagine it’s the amount of money involved in making a major film. It discourages risk-taking. The writer takes risks, on his or her own, before any major investment has been made. Then the studio takes charge. First halves show the original innovation. The second halves show the estimation of the market.

We’re watching ‘The Tailor of Panama’. The plot has opened up into the middle game. The tailor has told fabulous stories to the ruthless intelligence agent. The agent has parlayed them into riches. There will be hell to pay. First to pay will be the tailor’s friends and family.

Baby is inconsolable. She stands in my arms and she cries. She looks in my eyes in distress, with such trust in me, as though I could make everything all right. And I would, at that moment, fix the world if I could. I tell her she just wants to sleep. The tailor will be fine.

It’s a story about story-tellers and the trouble they cause. Stories can be blunt instruments when wielded by the literal-minded. The tailor makes up stories, because that’s what he does, and Pierce Brosnan sells them to the highest bidders. The stories are wound tightly around their purpose. Before they can unravel, the rogue agent escapes with the money.

I hold Baby just under her arms. Her legs are strong enough to stand, her feet planted on my legs. She is making a pouting face and looking at me. It will be all right, sweetheart. You’re going to sleep soon. We’ll put you in the crib. While you’re sleeping, you’ll grow some more. One day you’ll stand on your own. You’re going to walk. The story gets better and better.

And now I’m waking in Addis Ababa. I’m awake at four. That seems my default time for waking when I travel. The city is silent, except for the waves of barking from the dogs, moving across the neighbourhoods, moving toward the mountains.

I’m listening for the birds. They are just getting started. I’ve been here so many times. I first slept in this tiny room in Addis six years ago. I awoke, and I listened for the morning birds. It’s always been a sign of hope.

Today I’m hoping for water, and I’m building resolve to go and check. It’s usually my best chance at a shower, before the sun has risen. I’ll listen a few more minutes. The first human sound is usually the calls to prayer, Muslim and then Christian, voices amplified to rise above the valleys of the city.

Travelogue 656 – October 26
The Second Half
Part One

I wake from a deep sleep with the impression that I’ve been sleeping on a train. I don’t know where I am. It comes back slowly. I’m in my house in Addis Ababa. The night is dark; I see outlines among my small bedroom space, the edges of the bed, the cabinet, and the door. I lie back again. I listen to the dogs barking in the distance.

I’ve been in Addis only one day. It’s been one day overshadowed by fatigue. I didn’t sleep at all on the overnight slight. The sun, once it was out, was hot. I sat in a hotel courtyard much of the afternoon, doing my best to concentrate on a set of documents I have to read through. I’m not doing very well with them.

I miss Baby terribly. When I think of her, I realize I suffer from a real poverty of imagination. I cannot get the measure of her, what she is, so suddenly, in my life. What she is, in sum or at length, even as she grows so quickly, escapes me, and therefore it has escaped me what it is to be human. Something terribly fleeting.

I’m reading. Before sleep I’m reading Le Carré. I like his early stuff, the suffocating accounts of human folly, his shrewd eye for detail. This one is set in Bonn, the old capital of West Germany, fog-bound and small, now a center of international intrigue. Old Germany and new are circling each other here. It’s a time of student rebellions, and a time of reaction against the West. A staff person from the British Embassy has disappeared.

Le Carré is a good story-teller. A few of his stories have made it into a film. One is on the TV in Holland one night before I leave for Addis. We have a habit in our house, surviving from times before Baby, of watching the 8:30 movie before bed. It’s an empty ritual now. The TV is on, but Baby requires attention. There is something in her that fights sleep. I find that intriguing, having reached an age myself when I hunger for sleep almost always, some days from the time I wake.

Baby is a light sleeper. She lies on the sofa next to Mommy, and she holds her blue ball with both hands. She tries to bite the ball. She tries to stuff it into her mouth, but it’s almost as big as her head. It’s a hollow ball, made of a kind of web of durable plastic so she can hang on to it. She’s frustrated she can’t bite her toy. She starts up with a low-grade whine. She is sleepy.

The film is ‘The Tailor of Panama’. Geoffrey Rush plays the tailor, a caring and loyal old man who happens to be a compulsive fraud. It’s a fortunate compulsion for a tailor. He’s entertaining, and he’s gracious. He has created a comforting back-story, as a London tailor trained on Savile Row. In truth he learned his trade in prison. But the fiction works for everyone, and his suits are the best in the city.

The story opens, characters and premise are introduced. Conflict is introduced, and with that the arc of the plot. In a two-hour movie, there is only time to open up all the possibilities, hold the tension for the duration of a few scenes, and then quickly spin toward resolution.

The conflict comes quickly, with the arrival of Pierce Brosnan, playing the new British intelligence agent in town, looking for dirt. He wants some juicy intelligence, and he wants it fast. He’s a rogue, assigned to Panama as a kind of demotion after scandal. He needs something good. Who better a source of dirt than the tailor to the rich and powerful? He applies pressure. The tailor, always eager to please, begins telling stories.

Travelogue 655 – October 14
The Glow
Part Three

So poor old Gerard Philips cuts no dashing figure, but his idea is the foundation of a corporate empire, and the organising principle for the story of a city.

In 1891, this Gerard Philips set up a factory for light bulbs in Eindhoven, financed by his father, Frederik, who was a banker. When eventually they brought in Gerard’s bright young brother, Anton, the company prospered, became Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken, and expanded into many other electrical products.

By mid-century, Philips was an innovator, having pioneered electric razors, radios in the 20s, and later television, audio tape and CDs. It was led by Philips family until 1971.

The Philips family was very loyal to the town that gave them their start. The company did more than provide jobs. They built and they donated.

In 1913, Gerard and his brother Anton founded the Philips Sport Vereniging, PSV, the football club that would become a force in Dutch football, and even, during select periods, European football. I ask the taxi driver about Memphis. That’s the name of a PSV star who became famous during the World Cup with a few key strikes. He is currently on loan to Manchester United, and I’ve watched him in a few games playing well in tandem with Rooney. The taxi man says Memphis has let his fame go to his head. He tells a story of Memphis balling up a parking ticket and throwing it on the ground. He shakes his head, and I’m thinking that among American athletes this looks like good citizenship.

Yes, suddenly there’s Anton. Gerard did have a younger brother. And Anton may be the reason Gerard gets so little press. The fact is, Philips under Gerard’s leadership was a failing enterprise. A decade after the company’s founding, Anton is invited in, and things start looking up. Gerard is good for one idea, or rather for the one critical task that made all subsequent history possible, convincing Daddy that investment in light is a smart move. Sadly, Daddy’s gone by the time Anton starts making it a thriving business, but I’m sure he didn’t regret the indulgence. (Is it important, or just weird, that Daddy’s first cousin is none other than Karl Marx?)

Anton’s son, Frits becomes something of a folk hero. When his elders fled to America ahead of Hitler’s advance, Meneer Frits stayed behind to run the factory. He was held in a concentration camp during 1943 because of a work shut-down in the factory. He protected the lives of 382 Jews who worked in the factory.

Frits became president of the company in time, and became Meneer Frits to the town. They loved him. He didn’t hold himself aloof. He mixed with his factory workers, attended football games regularly, sitting with the crowd rather than in the business lounge. Though he stepped down from leadership of the company in 1971, he survived to see his hundredth birthday celebrated by the whole city.

On the way to our hotel, we pass the Evoluon. Built in 1966 according to a sketch by Meneer Frits on a cocktail napkin, it looks like a landed UFO. It was meant to be an educational center for science and technology, and for a while it was. Now it functions as a conference center. They’ve embraced the weird place, taking it as symbol of their brainy city.

Menna has taken a liking to this town. It’s smaller, seems friendlier than Rotterdam. She’s taken a liking to the Market Square in central Eindhoven, host to a tall bronze statue of Meneer Frits. It’s a likeable square, combining elements of the historical with the urgency of modern commercialism. This weekend it’s the scene of considerable drinking, a line of bars there filling all their outdoor tables with runners and family and friends. There were already quite a few full marathoners celebrating during the half marathon. The course passed through the square during the last two kilometers, and it narrowed to a tight channel delineated by ad hoc barriers holding back the crowds of weekender fans, surging forward in tottering, bellowing support while we, the suffering few, elbowed each other for space in fevered and impatient anticipation of the finish line.

I had to remind myself that this was the race of the many false finishes. I’m judging my progress solely by my watch. Every quarter kilometre or so, there is another balloon arch, and a few optimistic souls surge forward, only to pull to the side in winded disappointment when the colourful display offers no finish. I make it to the finish, completely spent. That’s a good feeling, only because it means I did my best.

A few hundred meters on, I see Batu standing with the baby carriage amid the swirling crowd, looking somehow perfectly composed among the chaos. Menna is somewhere trying to take a picture of me. I laugh. I lean over sweet Baby. I make her laugh, lightly pinching her cheek. ‘What do you think, Baby? What do you think of the town that light bulbs built?’

Travelogue 654 – October 13
The Glow
Part Two

Authorities can agree that the light bulb was not invented in Eindhoven in North Brabant in the Netherlands. But beyond that it becomes hard to say much with authority. It’s one of those stories in history we’re getting used to, qualified by so many asterisks that one wonders if anyone ever gets an idea alone.

I’m guessing we have to settle for the simple answer, no. No one person could have invented the light bulb. Things technical require a series of ideas. Even something small like the mundane light bulb. Or the gloeilamp. Even if one person came up with the idea complete, there is no context. The light bulb requires an electrical network. The light bulb in all its glory requires apparatus to support it. It requires a commercial process to make it economically viable. And what sense is something like the light bulb if it can’t be sold in the market? Before that could happen, dozens of minds had to fiddle with the details, the vacuum inside the bulb, and which kind of filament to light up.

The inventors of the early nineteenth century were tinkerers, in the tradition of the eighteenth-century gentleman scientist. There was one Humphry Davy, cast in just that mould, chemist and tinkerer and mad scientist, born in Cornwall and apprenticed to a doctor and apothecary. Inquisitive and irrepressible boy and man, he never stopped playing with chemicals, and he seemed charmed in his chain of acquaintance, quickly making impressions on the likes of Watt and Coleridge, Southey, and Priestley, graduating to sharing nitrous oxide with this group of worthies. He became lab supervisor at the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, graduated to the Royal Institution in London, and then to the Royal Society. He became a famous lecturer, known for sensational demonstrations of chemistry in action. Among his incessant experimentation, he managed to discover a number of elements, most notably sodium and potassium.

In 1802, Davy exhibited a burning filament of platinum in the Royal Institution. This was probably intended more as a demonstration of the power of his homemade battery, the most powerful in the world at the time. Light didn’t seem a primary preoccupation of his set. They preferred the sizzle of funny compounds in the lab. And yet, here stands Mr. Davy as an early milestone in our story of the light bulb. He did go on, in 1806, to demonstrate an arc light between two charcoal rods. But after that, he left it to another generation to continue the work.

Stories like the light bulb’s need their celebrities like Davy and Edison. And then there are the grey soldiers in between, whose parts are limited, due to either misfortune or lack of ambition. Brilliance doesn’t presuppose natural star power or ruthless intent.

There are the walk-ons, like one John Starr from Cincinnati who filed the first U.S. patent for an incandescent lamp, in 1844. He travelled to Europe to market his idea, and he contracted tuberculosis and died. He had the ambition, but he had no luck. Before him, there was one Scotsman, James Bowman Lindsay demonstrating a constant incandescent light for a group in Dundee in 1835. But he didn’t follow up, being more interested in pursuing his ideas around wireless telegraphy. He apparently had a number of ideas well ahead of his time, but little of the drive that would have cemented his achievements in the public mind. He had his own priorities. He poured years into compiling a dictionary of fifty-three languages, and he never finished. He turned down a post at the British Museum in order to care for his ageing mother. And history passed him by.

And so it is that, after the flashy achievements of Edison and Swan and Tesla, that there comes along another flavourless character, one Gerard Philips, who convinces his dad the banker, that there is a future in mass producing light bulbs. Though he seems singularly uninspiring – it’s hard to find more than a few paragraphs of biography about him, -- his little company went on to be the biggest producer of light in the world. And he started it in a factory building in little Eindhoven – not even a decade after Vincent Van Gogh lived in nearby Neunen and painted some of his early masterpieces.

Travelogue 653 – October 12
The Glow
Part One

Last year when we went to Eindhoven, Troy and I took a bike ride out toward Neunen in search of the glow trail laid in honour of Vincent Van Gogh. We only found the turned up earth where we guessed the bike trail would be laid. We did also find the watermolen, the old mill, that Vincent painted in 1884.

I suppose it’s in remembrance of that great expedition that the psyche presented me with a dream last night. Troy and I were performing in a band at an art fair. Troy was calling himself Pez, and he was center stage. He was on guitar, and I was playing bass. The composition was a good one, the bass melodic and the guitar providing metallic abstractions. No one was listening because it was an art fair, of course, but the music was impressive.

We’ve returned to Eindhoven, but without Troy this year. The Eindhoven half marathon is the close to my annual cycle of road races.

Menna likes Eindhoven. It’s a city that feels like a small town. That’s precisely what the taxi driver says about Eindhoven. We’re asking him what it’s like. ‘It’s like a village. You leave your house in the morning, you see people you know on the street. It’s nice.’

The city is small enough that Troy and I were able to ride our clunky rental bicycle from the center of town out past the city limits, out into the countryside and all the way to the edges of the town of Neunen. The flat fields, lit by yellow rapeseed, were still modelling for nineteenth-century painters. The broken clouds were flying low over the horizon, and the autumn sunlight seemed attenuated.

Menna and I, Batu and Baby are staying in a hotel outside the center. It’s far enough out that we can see some fields, though only a fifteen-minute city bus ride from the center. It stands on the opposite side of town than Neunen; otherwise I would be tempted to rent a cycle and try again. Maybe the glow trail has been laid. What would Vincent have thought, coming across a glowing path by his rustic water mill?

The race itself almost defeats me before I’ve begun. Roads are blocked all over town, and the buses are diverted. And I only piece that together on the morning of the race. I have to call a taxi and hope for the best. We arrive as the race is starting, the driver pulling up as close as he can. I’m pulling sweats off in the front seat, then pinning my number to my chest. I’m out of the car and running toward the back of the pack up ahead. Once I reach them, it’s ten minutes before our section passes the starting line. It’s a big crowd. I spend almost the whole race surging through the mob, trying to find my place among runners at my pace.

The taxi driver is proud of his town. He says it’s a city that feels like a village. But it’s got a lot that a village doesn’t. There are many big businesses centered here. It’s a center of tech and design. He says there is a huge international school. Menna likes that.

I’m enjoying his civic pride. We discuss PSV, the Eindhoven football team, the best in Holland. He tells us about Meneer Frits.

Eindhoven is a corporate town, and it must be one of the oldest corporate towns there is. It’s with genuine sadness that the taxi driver tells us that Philips has been in the process of moving out for some time. Philips was founded here over a hundred years ago and the company has given the history of this town definition.

And the story begins with the light bulb, that strange little invention with such impact on the life of the species, glass bulb filled with gas, tiny carbon filament set in the middle and super-heated until it glows. In Dutch, it’s called a gloeilamp, a glow lamp.

Travelogue 652 – October 6
Bill Retires

I’m running beside the water of Teatown Lake, blue waters thick with lily pads, blue waters reflecting the clear and the dark blue skies, autumnal Atlantic skies of the Hudson River Valley. There are touches of red among the leaves of the trees.

Now I’m running on the water. There’s a stretch of floating boardwalk, and as I run, it creaks and it bangs section against section. Just above the nearest bank is the road. There are houses. A few neighbours are watching me. At the far end of the boardwalk, the trail dives back into hilly woods, and the lakeshore recedes. I have to watch my feet here, the trail leaping over roots as thick as heavy nautical rope left uncoiled, and leaping over ridges of exposed grey stone.

It’s been a good workout. I’ve done two circuits around the lake, supplemented by long digressions down woodland trails. This run has certainly worked the ankles. Every step has to be carefully placed, and none was the same as the last. It’s exhilarating. It keeps you alert. I’ve missed the trails in Ethiopia. The dance within the run keeps the body and mind young.

And it’s peace. The water stares skyward in an attitude of waiting. I’ve been lucky this trip, finding opportunities with nature. In Minneapolis I returned to Fort Snelling State Park and run the trails by the river. Now this at Teatown. I’ve missed that America. The sky quietly returns its blue to the water of the lake.

After the run I look for peace again, this time in Rick’s back yard. I rest my aching joints and muscles in the hammock in Rick’s yard. I’m looking up through the encircling branches, some oak, some fir. I’m listening to the birdsong. I’m awake but I would like to be drowsing. The jet lag has made sleep uneasy.

I’m allowing the busy circles of the previous weeks to echo and spend themselves among my thoughts. I would need weeks in the hammock to allow the time to unravel, trivial scenes rising like bubbles in their solution, ready each to burst with their small load of tension. Last week was Minnesota and the annual rituals of business.

I’m waiting for my number in the surprisingly comfortable DMV office downtown in the Hennepin County courthouse, Minnesota. The receptionist is a friendly man, quick to help. I’m there to renew my driver’s license. He produces a number. The chairs are upholstered comfortably in soothing colours. There is a play area for children in one corner. A Hispanic dad lifts his little daughter onto the plastic play set there. The whole space is designed to calm. I watch the screen for my number, and my thoughts bubble and pop. As the minutes pass, and I am forced to stay put, I feel my body relax. By the time my time approaches, I’m regretting having to move. I withdraw my new glasses from their case. The last time I was here, I barely passed the vision test. I remember the kind elderly woman behind the counter, how she let me try again. I place the glasses on the bridge of my nose, and I wait to be called. I’ll be next.

Another morning dawns in Westchester County. I’ve returned to the Starbucks in Chappaqua where I can wait for the appearance of Bill and Hillary. The windows are fogged. The streets of little Chappaqua are wet. Inside it’s cosy, almost absurdly so. I’m watching the people coming in, and I’m wondering about them. Are they all children of privilege? What are the signs of it? I’m not sure what I should be looking for. They do seem cheerful. Is that a bad sign? Chappaqua was a town founded by the Quakers. Has the philosophy of peace suffused the place, becoming a part of the green landscape? Is that what has drawn all the optimists?

Taking a minute to glance at the headlines of the New York Times, I see Mr. Putin is misbehaving again, charging into the china shop in Syria just because he can.

They say Peter the Great attended Quaker services when he visited in England, but did he take any home with him? Did he invest them with any colonies to build into outposts of affluence for future generations, places where retired kings may share a coffee with the common man? The sect was built upon the notion, after all, of a priesthood of believers. In peaceful Chappaqua, you could still believe we are chosen, ‘an holy nation, a peculiar people’. If only Mr. Putin had such a legacy, maybe he wouldn’t be afraid to retire. He might trust that there was a hammock in the yard even for the old czar.

Travelogue 651 – October 5
Arborvitae

We’re sitting by the pool. I’m asking Rick about the trees around his yard, the trees we can see surrounding us in his expansive back yard. I’m thinking I’m seeing fir and pine, maple and oak. He confirms, and he tells me more. There are ash. There are some cedars. He says this used to be a white cedar swamp. He points one white cedar out to me, but I don’t see anything distinct about it. Rick dreams of planting more and resurrecting the natural habitat, but he fears the zoning restrictions. Rick knows nature. He used to manage nature centers in New England.

I’m visiting Westchester County, New York. We’re sitting outdoors on a sunny afternoon. We’re relaxing in the sunshine out by his pool, even as the squirrels cavort among the highest branches of the oaks above us, raining down upon us a regular bombardment of heavy acorns. They strike the cement of the patio with a thud. They bounce a man’s height. They plunk into the pool.

I’m learning that the white cedar is also called ‘arborvitae’, tree of life, because of its purported medicinal qualities. I’m trying to imagine these hills in their virginal state, something Rick can picture quite readily. The woods and swamps would be nearly impassable. I wonder at the labour expended by those hardy colonizers of the seventeenth century.

Yes, I’m back in New England, where America has real history. I mean a history that is palpable, lives cohabitant in our space. I’ll include Westchester County in New England, since we’re only a few miles from the Connecticut border. I hope they don’t mind. The roads are certainly New England style, narrow and winding precariously among the wooded hills. Rick is commenting on the roads as we drive them, noting which follow trading routes dating back to the colonial days. Some routes are over three hundred years old. It’s true, some are clearly in need of repair. But still, how does one summon the powers of imagination to see this for what it once was, a Sleepy Hollow wilderness with mere trails for passage?

Even as they are, the roads seem hardly passable. At the least I can say they are unnerving. I see everything through a runner’s eyes, and I see myself perishing on the crumbling shoulder of any one of these curves.

Rick is the prefect host. He drives me to a state park for one day’s long run. I’m not sure that it isn’t a practical joke. Kim is along for the ride. He warns me that the trails may be hard on the ankles. I boast that I’ve run trails in the mountains of Ethiopia. Of course, only two hundred meters down the first trail I twist my ankle, and not lightly. I push through the pain, as I’ve learned well – yes, on the trails in Ethiopia, -- so that I don’t allow the ankle to swell. But I slow down, reminded now that I am in New England, and the earth is hard and gnarled as the roots of the dense trees.

This is Teatown Lake Reservation, where the forests and wildlife are protected, and where children learn about nature. There is a pack of them there to witness my fall from grace. I’m thinking as I run that this must be a New England hazing ritual for visitors. The trail is faint, barely discernible in places. Fortunately the routes are well-marked by coloured reflectors. The leaves have fallen over the rocks and roots, so one must be vigilant in protection of one’s ankles. I am led through thorns and over hunch-backed boulders, deposited onto asphalt roads at intervals, where I have to search for the trail on the other side. I run through marshy spots, where the trail is a series of boards laid in disjointed lines. I am led up one relentless hillside, slick with fallen leaves. There is no view from the summit, the trees being too thick. Eventually I make it back to the central lake. It’s a humble body of water. It is small, its placid waters distributed among a few fingers. It looks cold already, dark blue against the heavy green of the forests.

Travelogue 650 – September 30
Dreams Made Real

My first book event was a small event. It was little more than sitting at my friends’ dining room table holding the book in my hands, talking to a group of half a dozen. It’s my book. I touched it for the first time yesterday. It’s an object. It has weight. There are so many pages. I feel writer’s block just looking at it. How did I come up with all that to say? I feel a quick sense of panic, as though I have to say it again.

And then I’m holding it in my hands, talking to a circle of friends. It’s Westchester County. It’s been raining. We can hear the waves of rain against the roof.

In some sense, I haven‘t arrived yet. I’ve been in the States for a week. I wake at four every morning. Four in Minnesota. Here in New York, that’s five in the morning. I sit up in bed, and I talk to Menna on Viber. It’s midday for her. I listen to Baby attaching sounds to her first thoughts. Outside, the sun is shedding its first light.

The rule is, the dream never looks the same, beginning to end. I’ve had the good fortune in this life to shepherd a few toward realization, and they never look on earth the way they did in heaven.

Making a book is such a long process, one can be forgiven for forgetting what the original thought was. I hold the book in my hands. The slight weight of it, the texture of the cover, the name on the front cover, the features of it are still new to me. It operates as an object of magic.

The event is an informal occasion. We are gathered around the dining room table. I have a few minutes to frame the topic. Yes, I did this, and it’s a source of wonder to me. I’m telling you about it as though it were someone else’s story. Friends are asking questions about Ethiopia and the work. ‘I don’t know what NGO means,’ David says. A few others jump in helpfully. I laugh to hear the definitions.

Ultimately we must talk about grief, and the nature of those events that change lives. Most everyone has something to say. The stories branch. I still hold the book, fascinated by the feel of it.

Our journeys are long ones. Still everything is sudden. Sometimes it seems like the vocation of the species is recovery from the shock of transitions. I’m getting sleepy. I’m still exhausted by the travel. Later we’ll drink in celebration; then we’ll sleep. I’m alone on the floor of the vast living room. The windows are black. The rain doesn’t let up.

In the morning, I’m writing all this down at the Chappaqua Starbucks. The place is cosy in green, trademark fashion. Irritating and cosy. The people streaming by my table are alert, their chatter like birdsong. The windows are fogged from the abating storm. A few locals are commenting about power outages. It’s just another day in a rich small town, where quiet streets wind among wooded hills. Houses have New England pillars. Up the ascending street opposite the Starbucks entrance is the house of old Horace Greeley. Horace ran for president against Ulysses in 1872. Ulysses won.

I’m scanning the quiet streets outside for signs of Bill or Hillary. Chelsea is due to speak at the town library tonight.

I have these vigils in life, posts beside the trails of history. I hope to witness something. I know I won’t see Bill; I won’t see Horace. But it’s the setting, a pedagogical form of its own. History happens in places, and the places impart a knowledge, a sense of the imminent.

I’m reading the New York Times. Putin has decided to intervene in Syria. Obama meets with him, and he has put on a darkly stern expression. Obama looks like this a lot lately, during his final years in office. Would he run again? Does the White House look like it did in 2008? What stories will he tell in retirement? What would Bill say if I saw him this morning?

Travelogue 649 – September 18
Rules of the Road

I’m at Schiphol Airport, ready to fly to Minnesota. For a few weeks, I’m on the road again. The rules change, as soon as I enter the airport. I’ll pay €3.75 for a bottle of water. I’ll pace bright hallways in search of latrines. I’ll find bookstores. I’ll browse news shops. I’ll map the places to sit. I’ll make my way through an entire newspaper. I’ll be topically informed again, versed in the surface news of the day.

I had my brush with history the other day. I wasn’t travelling, but I was passing through the central train station. I wanted to replenish my travel card. There was a policemen at the entry way saying there were no trains. I shrugged him off and entered anyway. Only later did I notice all the police around the station. Only then did I question why there were no trains.

As it happens, there was a man who had to be dragged out of one the train’s latrine. Shutting down all train traffic through Rotterdam seems like a strong reaction, but this is only weeks after a man pulled out guns and knives on a Thalys train to Paris. Police are jumpy.

I’m reading a headlines in Dutch lately, with dictionary at my side. I never get too far that way, but I get the idea. The front pages have been dominated for what seems like all summer with news of the vluchtelingen, the refuges from the Middle East and Africa and the Balkans assaulting the borders of Europe. It’s been surreal, the reading thereof in a foreign language. It’s a ready reminder that I don’t belong here any more than they do. I’m a legal immigrant, but the building resentment against the outsider in Europe makes my status feel little more secure than the status of these refugees,

Earlier this month, the government in Hungary shut down the train station in Budapest, while tension mounted among the thousands of refugees encamped there. Hundreds of them decided to walk the hundred miles or so to Austria. I don’t know what happened to them, don’t know whether they made it. I imagine many ended up in one or another of the receiving camps being hastily erected around frontline countries.

I have time for an espresso in one of the cafés next to the train station. There are two on other side of the station. Menna and I call them Azedebo and Fundame, after two school projects in Ethiopia. I’m in Fundame, and at the next table are a young couple. They are from somewhere else. Are they Romany? They are clearly disoriented. The woman walks outside to consult with a taxi driver, and apparently without satisfaction.

When she walks, it’s with a curious, cautious shuffle, taking very small steps and leaning backward. She fixes her wide eyes on her target and she shuffles forward. She leans into the taxi window, and it’s no quick consultation. It takes a while, but when she shuffles back it’s only to sit again in silence.

A policemen visits Fundame for a coffee. The Romany woman fixes him with her wide brown eyes. She stands and she shuffles, and she accosts him with a long list of questions, delivered in a soft but deliberate voice.

In contrast, the policeman has a strong Dutch voice. ‘What are looking for?’ She whispers. He takes them outside, and points. They enter, and the woman hovers close to him, fixing his face with her wide-eyed gaze. She asks again.

The policeman says, ‘Bring you? No, I’m not a taxi service. You have to do it yourself.’

He is enunciating for them Dutch philosophy in its several words. All are equal. The rules are for equals. There are no exceptions. One wins no concessions with charm or money in Holland. Romany’s big eyes melt with confusion and hurt feelings.

He softens his stance only so far as to say, ‘It’s easy.’ ‘Come,’ he says, and he takes them outside again, pointing as though he could brush a line of colour down the sidewalk and onward for five kilometres ahead.

The policeman leaves. The Romany couple stands outside. They light cigarettes, and they discuss strategies. They look longingly down the road, along the route painted with the policeman’s eyes. They pull on their cigarettes slowly and thoughtfully, staring together.

Travelogue 648 – September 10
Meet Brad

Home in the evening, tired from the trip to Tilburg, we sit to eat and listlessly we watch TV. There’s a film on tonight, a classic from 1998. It stars a young and sultry Brad Pitt, cast opposite Anthony Hopkins. ‘Meet Joe Black’ it’s called. Joe Black is Death in disguise. He looks like Brad Pitt. Anthony Hopkins negotiates for a few more days, and Death uses this opportunity for a vacation among the mortals.

I’m wondering about the persisting trope in human thinking that makes humanity a destination for deities and supernaturals, who are drawn to visit for sentimental reasons. ‘You’re a fascinating species,’ they will say. And then they incinerate us.

I’ve always liked Brad Pitt, but here he’s too young to have been matched with Anthony Hopkins. The result is happy one for humanity, in that the human is by far the more interesting study. It could have been Milton’s Satan again, the alien more sympathetic than the people, liberated from convention and fear to be playfully, excessively and attractively human.

But Brad, perhaps at the bidding of an uninspired director, reaches only as far as the deadpan alien, a kind of mildly amused Vulcan on reconnaissance, settling for the occasional cheap laugh in a clumsy naivete. He loves peanut butter. There’s a bit of Chauncey-Gardiner-style truth-telling thrown in, casting Death in a light of innocence, an angle that has a spark of potential to it, but is wasted in the cheapest effect.

So we’re going to be disappointed. The whole premise has such great potential for perversity. I can’t help thinking that the later Brad Pitt would have had much more fun with it, smirking through it all with a provocative chill and detachment.

Instead, he is outclassed by Hopkins, for whom the highest compliment is going to be that everything he does makes sense. In a plot that challenges logic, and allows itself a few too many turns toward the silly, his choices are consistent and absolutely correct. He’s going to die, and what is more, he’s trapped in a sort of cat-and-mouse game with Death himself, whose behaviour is wildly erratic. The man is mourning. His life is being trashed by this visitor. He struggles to maintain dignity. He is finally forced into standing up to this terrifying entity. The potential here for great narrative and cinematic moments is untapped. One senses that the writers and director have grabbed an idea by the tail and been unequal to the project.

Along the way we are treated to one more unbelievable movie romance. The actress works very hard to play against her lifeless partner. She forces this hasty love in the best way she can, and we are disappointed for her. She deserves better. She deserves real evil before this listless affair. Pitt the Elder would have proven game, would have charmed her, with all the worst intentions.

Hopkins plays a man of honour. But he has made a deal with Death for a few more days. That Death then wreaks havoc should be a morality tale. We should be allowed to watch in horror as the life of the good man is trampled underfoot. At the end Death will shrug and take him away, the man’s last view of life is the prospect of ruin, everything he had worked so hard for laid waste, even his beloved daughter poisoned by agency of his one weak moment.

Or even more fun would have been to free the scenario into the chaos beyond our consciousness, which can only appear evil at first contact. The divine, or the god-like, must be fearsome and terrible. It was something the ancients understood better than we have, as delicate as we have become. We’re more afraid of each other than of the powers in the shadows.

Paint a scenario. ‘Why me?’ asks Hopkins’s character. Pitt the Elder replies simply, ‘I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me.’ Could be good. Instead we struggle through the attempt at a happy ending and turn off the TV, feeling restless.

Travelogue 647 – September 9
The Tilburg Ten
Part Three

I’m slipping back through memories. It’s a wonder we don’t lose track as we get older and collect more memories, lose track of the directions on the compass. It’s sometimes like boarding a train at an unfamiliar station and having to guess which direction the train will go. There are seats facing both ways. I’ve noticed how much people hate to face backward. I wonder why. Others don’t care. They’ll be staring at their phones the whole way, anyway.

There’s lots of time to think when you’re with family. Baby needs feeding. I’m sitting across from family at our booth at the pub in Tilburg. I’m staring out the window, studying with half my attention the light post across the street, pointedly experimental, artistic in its design, with a thick base panelled in light wood, tapering toward a pointed top and set with three huge, flaring spot lights. The wood, I notice, set against the rose-coloured brick of the building behind is perfect in colour tone. Dutch design, a product of Brabant.

I get some precious time to space out. I’m rewinding through the race, and more, through the training that fed the race. I see, as though out the train window, my long training routes, where I’ve put in hundreds of miles, up along the Schie toward Delft, along the city’s northern canal, along park paths, through the Zestienhoven Park, though the Roel Langerakpark, through the Vroesenpark, past the city zoo, past Sparta stadium. Some days have been long and slow, in summer’s humidity and some days in light, misty rains. Some days, I’ve added sections of speed, pushing.

I tell myself I could have done better.

It’s the curse of once having been young. I can still remember how easy it used to be. The memory train skips a blur of years, and another ten-mile race comes into view. I’m attending university. That was Santa Barbara. The course followed the beach. The race was a lark. I hadn’t trained very intensively.

When I first came to the university as a freshman, I had tried out for the cross country team. I’d been accepted, but I was far from qualifying for varsity. Ultimately I wasn’t serious enough, something the university coach made clear in the few disparaging remarks I earned. And then I sprained my ankle in a weekend basketball game. The coach had shrugged. That was the end of it, my career as a competitive runner.

The detail isn’t sharp as I remember the race. I don’t remember the streets. I don’t remember the water stations or mile markers. I don’t remember the finish. I don’t remember the time exactly, though I remember it was good. What I do recall is the feeling, the ease. I feel the pace, fluid and strong and natural. The miles melted away. It was exhilarating.

When I tell myself, years later, that I have to push harder, it’s this dream I’m chasing, There’s no record I need to beat. Race times are arbitrary markers in time, they are tools for training. But the emotion is there, in the exultation in the body liberated for a while from its mundane function to express free spirit, running without purpose. Racing.

I pause in my memories to taste the Belgian beer. It’s been a long time since running felt like that. I still enjoy it, but it never ceases to be work at my age. I’m never free of some drag, some fatigue, some aching joint. I do it for fun, but it’s a different sort of fun. It’s a chance to breathe the autumnal air, redolent these days with lavender, and find nature’s restless kind of peace, the sound of the wind.

But when I tell myself to push harder I’m confusing my motivations. As one ages, I suppose he must cure himself of living in multiple moments.

There are things at any age that come easily, that have the flow of a liberating mastery. I must appreciate those experiences. Maybe it’s simply the grace with which I taste and measure this beer. Maybe it’s the ease with which I admire my family.

We walk slowly back to the train station, strolling down the humble street in the humble town. My legs are sore, pleasantly sore with achievement. We find our track, climb the steps to the platform, and as we emerge we hear applause. It’s coming from across the tracks, from the platform for the train going the opposite way. There is a group of runners wearing the same medallion as I am. They are saluting me. I wave. I hold up the medallion.

I’ll be back in Brabant next month. My next race will be in Eindhoven, city of genius, for my second run of the Eindhoven Half.

Travelogue 646 – September 8
The Tilburg Ten
Part Two

After the race we walk slowly along a quiet brick street, away from the station. We’re pushing the buggy with sleeping Baby. We’re only a mile or two away from the race, on the other side of the station, and the streets are sleeping. The occasional cyclist clatters by. If we see others, they are wearing the same medallion I’m wearing around my neck.

Places like this are calming for me, the brick modesty of northern European streets. There’s history, but a humble sort of history. Beauty, and a humble sort of beauty, accommodating the budgets of aspiring bourgeois merchants and bankers and tradesmen and civil servants in the bourgeois centuries before Hitler. There is just the right pitch of variety inside the uniformity. Every construction has individuality, but the sort that doesn’t clamour for attention.

We discover an intersection, five brick roads in five directions, where a few pubs have taken over the brick sidewalks with outdoor seating. We park the buggy and find a booth inside. Baby needs feeding. Daddy needs a beer. Menna is going to teach Batu how to play Connect Four. I found the Connect Four game for one euro in a discount store. It brings back memories of Ethiopia, afternoons with the athletes as they play the game over and over, or sitting by the lake in Debre Zeit with Mark. Batu looks at the game with the same face she brings to anything new, an expression of distaste. She shakes her head in a vigorous negative. Menna insists, and they play.

I’m staring out the bar’s window. I’m thinking about the race. I did get some momentum going, despite the cold start. I held a constant pace throughout, an enjoyable pace, the kind made three-quarters of push and one of cruising. I was passing people the whole way, which is only a measure of how far back I started.

September is nearly perfect for running, the sun magnificent when it’s out, and it’s out intermittently now, after having hidden from us all morning.

The streets of Tilburg were narrow enough that I was never quite free of the crowd. Even in the final miles, we were piling up in places, channelled through bottlenecks made tighter by the cheering crowds. The people have been my favourite part of races in Brabant, the warm welcome. There’s a section in the last mile of the Tilburg Ten that leads between two banks of bars and every outdoor seat is filled with smiling patrons, and more are crowding in and cheering like we were the Tour de France. It’s hard to resist feeling exhilarated.

Friendly Brabant, all peace now. More or less an improvised district during the heady days of great Carolus, and a minor jewel in the ill-fated Middle Francia, it went on to reprise the role contrived for it in its birth, always a middle and middling place to be traded among larger powers, but still somehow retaining its first identity, Brabant, the marshy place. It becomes a duchy, and rises to prominence and wealth in the High Middle Ages. It becomes an acquisition for the Burgundians, the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons and the revolutionaries. It becomes a battleground. The most defining conflict is between the Dutch and the Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Little Brabant is unable to be saved. Like the throwaway character in disaster movies, she can’t maintain her grip, and she drops back into the sea that is despotic Spain. Spanish Flanders and Brabant don’t get a chance at independence until the great realignment after Napoleon, and even then the new nation of Belgium can only accommodate half of Brabant.

Baby needs feeding. The game is set aside. Still Papa gets some space-out time. I’m enjoying the uneventful big window. I’m enjoying the taste of the Belgian beer. Beer and frites, two of the signal contributions of the region to the world. I’m happy to be doing my part in carrying on the tradition.

Travelogue 645 – September 7
The Tilburg Ten
Part One

We miss the first train. We miss the second train. Travel with family is something I’m still getting used to. On my own, I’m ready in fifteen minutes; I arrive at the race early so I can warm up. Now I have family. I do want them there. So I become accustomed to joining in the mob of runners even as they’re surging toward the starting line, tugging off my sweats as I go. My warm-up is the first five kilometres of the race.

This is the first time Baby gets to watch her daddy run. All in all she seems underwhelmed. Riding in the buggy is soothing. She sleeps. When she wakes, she has all kinds of interesting things to look at. Sweaty daddy is the least of them.

The second train we miss by a matter of minutes, rushing into Central Station three minutes too late, just as a light rain starts to fall. We are rushing, though I know we’ve already missed the train and have a half hour. It’s the energy of the terminal hall, people crossing the cavernous space in dedicated lines. Travellers are unyielding. They are concentrated. Inside the terminal we slow, and we drift. The big hall is made dim by the showers outside. The flagstones inside the sliding doors are dark with wet tracks. We stop and we evaluate. There is a café at the top of the escalators. We have just enough time for a quick snack, though I’m wondering how much I dare burden my digestive tract. Just an apple juice, please. Okay, one small espresso, too.

The train is quiet. The journey is pleasant. Baby is dozing. Tilburg is only three stops. Past Dordrecht, the landscape is open and green. Batu enjoys watching the fields as we pass. She tells us, ‘Yamaral.’ It’s pretty. She deserves the peaceful distraction. Next week she goes into surgery.

The race is underway, and I’m assessing systems. Out of the station, we had to quickly look around for signs to the course’s starting area. We had to follow other runners. I’m among my comrades again, the congregation of weekend endurance athletes, gathered in a communion of exertion. We crowd into the pen for starters, all facing the same direction, though we can’t even see the start. Everyone is bouncing on the balls of their feet, stretching, checking watches. Very slowly, the crowd begins to move. The inflated archway over the starting line appears. The crowd is walking faster. We cross the mats where the timing system records our each chip passing over, and there is room to start jogging. I’m assessing systems, points of resistance, points of pain. I set a pace that is moderate enough to allow the body’s kinks to work themselves out and fast enough to keep me within reach of a decent finishing time.

Tilburg is a nice town. It’s quiet, quiet as a university town can be. It was once one of those centers of wool trade and craft so dear to northern Europe. But there is nothing remarkable about it. I just find myself drawn to the smaller cities lately. There is a feeling of refuge. Even the big cities in the Netherlands feel so much more peaceful than major American cities. Maybe it’s Baby’s influence. I want safe spaces.

This is the province of North Brabant, this peaceful countryside that Batu contemplates from the train, the green fields stretching between calm towns. The peace belies its stormy past. Brabant appears in history during times of empire, when the heirs of Great Carolus, Charlemagne, negotiate ways to divide lands among them. The sliver of ‘marshy land’, Pagus Bracbantensis, becomes a bargaining chip, becomes a part of the failed Middle Francia. Within a few more centuries, it will be elevated to a duchy.

Travelogue 644 – August 24
Vinyl in the Desert
Part Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 643 – August 23
Vinyl in the Desert
Part Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 642 – August 22
Vinyl in the Desert
Part One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I have,’ I say.

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

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

It was beautiful today, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelogue 640 – August 6
Looking Up
Part Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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