Travelogue 1111 – 29 November
Messy

It was a jarring sight. Teachers from the girls’ school were gathered in front of the main entrance, sitting on the ground in a semi-circle. They had set small tents up, and they sat in sleeping bags. As the children began to gather and stare at them, the teachers sang songs. The children were entranced.

My girls had to explain to me. The teachers were camping out here to prevent Rommel Piet from getting into the school. Sinterklaas arrived in the Netherlands a few weeks ago. The saint travels with a coterie of ‘Piets’, who are his assistants. One of those Piets is notorious now and may be known to my readers: ‘Zwarte Piet’ or Black Piet. Because he has become so controversial, Zwarte Piet keeps a low profile these days, at least in urban Holland. Another of the Piets is Rommel Piet. ‘Rommel’ means mess, and Rommel Piet likes to steal into homes and schools and leave a huge mess, mischievously tipping chairs over and hiding things. Every year he seems to break in somehow, to make a 'rommel' of the classrooms, and every year the teachers try to thwart him.

I enjoy this small survival of the trickster in a culture so dedicated to order. It speaks in some way to my soul, so lost in the thicket called November. What was so jarring about the sight of teachers sitting on the ground was the season. It was near freezing, and chilly showers had been coming and going. Seeing them on the ground was to empathically feel the cold and wet concrete against one’s tender morning skin. And yet, those dedicated teachers smiled and welcomed the children, and they cheerfully offered up songs about the saint.

Travelogue 1110 – 28 November
Candles

Dante is reciting from the “Inferno” from the shelter of an open portico. The cobble stones in this piazza tilt upward, as they did in the last one, and as we follow the incline, past the steps of a medieval church toward a passage between the side of the church and the shops lining the lane, we climb to another piazza at another level. Two high, square towers rise above us, like a medieval version of New York’s ill-fated Twin Towers. We are nearing the top of the hill.

Is it a dream, Dante reciting for coins, and tourists queueing up a hundred metres for gelato? No, this is a memory. I am recapturing bits from my trip in October. This is the hike through the village of San Gimignano, a funny and lovely little place an hour or so outside Florence in Tuscany, where the burgers of the Middle Ages competed with each other to build the highest tower. At one time there were 72 of them standing on this Tuscan hill. These days, it’s the tourists fighting for attention, shopping for boar’s sausage or elbowing in at a vista for their selfie. But still it’s a beautiful village with long views of the green hills and their vineyards round about.

Like consciousness itself, memory occupies an ambiguous position between light and its shadows, retreating one way from noxious fogs generated by stress or virus, retreating another from their abrupt seizure and distortion during sleep, advancing toward the light whenever the force of neglect threatens to drown it forever in the unconscious.

As in the case of the mysterious unconscious, memory inspires all manner of theories. Whole memories exist somewhere, like Plato’s perfect forms; memories are glimpses of a universal tapestry, containing all the data of life; memories suggest in their ephemeral nature the final extinguishing of self. They are special sight; they are psychic rubbish. But certainly memories come to comprise so much of the content of thought that they assume a special place in the day. We come to be living in memory as much as living in experience.

Perhaps one day, sorting through the bits and bobs of childhood, I find a trapdoor. And I open the door to see Scaliger looking back. Is he as lonely as I am, he in his time, and I in mine? He has celebrated his last Christmas. It’s grey winter, and he sits alone in his study. Young Heinsius has been by to check on him, but now he must return to his work. Instead, he studies the wavering flame of a candle. He does this to recover his focus. The house in Leiden is gloomy in winter, even in the afternoon. He has one candle against the darkness.

Travelogue 1109 – 24 November
Nothing

I was too hopeful, it seems. We all were in thinking that the nominal centrist Pieter Omtzigt would be the big winner on Wednesday. Instead, it was Holland’s longstanding crazy uncle, Geert Wilders. It only made sense. Rutte had spent most of his career fighting off the steady encroachment by Wilders into the mainstream. We had placed too much faith in centrism and too little in Rutte’s political skills. So the genie of hate is out of his bottle. It will be hard now to dismiss him as a crank, but it does remain to be seen how stable any government Wilders could assemble would actually be. His sort of provocative rhetoric plays well to a crowd but may not get him far in negotiations with serious politicos when the press is outside the room. It’s a corollary of the new politics, best demonstrated by congressional Republicans in the U.S. ‘Vote for me, I’ll achieve nothing!’ could be their slogan. They still win elections. The twenty-first-century electorate is made up of cackling masochists. Modern voters seem to take as their model 80s football hooligans, happy to trash their own stadium for a laugh. There’s no shame the morning after. It’s part of the game; it’s someone else’s job to clean up.

I woke again to the pitter-pat of little raindrops on the dark panes of our windows. I’m up hours before first light in this season, and my first task is Sinterklaas duty. The girls’ shoes are in the entryway, and I have to quietly drop gifts into the shoes. First, I get to read the heart-breakingly sweet notes my girls have written to the saint. Little Ren is just learning to write, and her notes are sometimes cryptic, always illustrated with her drawings, asking for some gift, astonishingly cute. I am alone in the morning with these notes in the morning, wishing time would stop.

In some sense time has already stopped. The month of November is a kind of sinkhole of consciousness, even when it doesn’t begin with convalescence from COVID. November is always a convalescence, existentially, a convalescence from itself, from decay. Its darkness is a course of treatment, a round of waters from Lethe, a dip in chilly waters, a subsidence of consciousness. We are reminded that living is experiencing the shifting boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness. We spend the years explaining that moving line to each other. The unconscious is inside us. It is the divine; it is the true consciousness. It is the blackness from which consciousness miraculously arose and which will swallow us again. It is a source of wisdom. We own it. God owns it. It is literally nothing. All these things we tell each other, explaining a mystery that – if there is in fact design to the universe – was specifically designed to be unknowable.

Travelogue 1108 – 21 November

Self-Determination

When we emerge from the Metro station, there is a collection of campaign workers ready with leaflets and smiles. They represent half a dozen parties vying for seats in Parliament tomorrow. They are friendly. The stakes in this election are higher than usual because of the resignation of our long-time premier, Mark Rutte, who seemed like the old oak tree of politics. It’s a moment of change. But the mood among the campaign workers is light. They aren’t aggressive. They are enjoying themselves.

Pieter Omtzigt seems the favourite to take Rutte’s place, presenting himself as the amiable face of centrism. The Dutch can’t really countenance extremism, after all. They flirt with it, but they can’t yet stomach the wild narcissism of a demagogue like Trump. Sadly, being a centrist in our time means taking positions that used to be solidly right-wing. For example, he has to be tough on immigrants. Further, he has to be sceptical about international education. There’s a whole choir of demagogues who want to limit higher education in English. I’m not sure who forms their political base here; in more than ten years, I’ve never met a Dutch person who was at all bothered about the ubiquity of English in Holland. If anything, they seem proud of it. But self-defeating nationalism seems the cause of the day.

Today Little Ren starts her day at the gym, which stands apart from the school building, across the small courtyard and playground. Because we usually arrive early, she stands among a small group of young ones at the door, waiting for the gym teacher. She says, “Papa, please wave to me by the school.” I don’t like leaving for work until I see the gym has been opened, and the children are safely inside. And I always kiss my girls before they go into school, and we wave to each other every day. “You can stay, but stand by the school, Papa.” She’s embarrassed to have me stand with her at the gym. My heart breaks a little, but I say all right. She stills gives me my kiss, and she waves good-bye as she walks across the playground and toward the gym.

Travelogue 1107 – 18 November
The Toggles

The Netherlands is a caricature of itself in this year’s November, dripping, drizzling, grey and dark. It never stops. I rode home on the bike this afternoon, all the way from Blaak, struggling with the hood of my rain jacket. The jacket is a voluminous thing that wraps around me in such an excess of material that I can rarely identify the ends of it. It flaps as I ride, something like Batman’s cape, or so I imagine. It is probably less romantic than that to fellow cyclists, more of a nuisance. And the hood is a shapeless sack that refuses to cooperate. More often than not, I have to hold it closed at my neck with one hand as I ride, adding that much more to my nuisance factor on the road. Why can’t it simply snap shut? Instead, there are two odd little toggles on strings that tighten the rim of the hood but then release it when you let go. I’ve tried too often to tie these accursed cords together while riding, entirely unsuccessfully. But that is daily life in rainy Holland, raingear on and off, fiddling with zippers and toggles, carrying a bag of raingear everywhere I go, jackets and pants for myself and the girls, just so I never find myself wanting. I’m running to work, or I’m picking girls from school, rucksacks and gym bag hanging off me. That is daily life in the rain and cold, constrictions and weight on your back. I wonder if native Nederlanders who grew up in this climate feel the burden. I wonder if their sight is unchanged. I can’t help the feeling of horizons closing in, the rain pushing my head down, the fogs and clouds obscuring distances, my errant hood pulled tight around my head for as long as I can manage, eyes on the road so I don’t splash or slip. It’s the physical analogue for the work COVID did on me after coming home from Italia. Memories are weakened as much as the lungs, and the boundaries of life and consciousness close in. What is it to be alive? One wonders when those horizons contract, when one hardly sees past the first three metres before your front tire.

Travelogue 1106 – 14 November
But, Soft!

And the skies closed in again. One day of (qualified) sunshine was enough. The rats had received their rewards, their small pellets of psychic sugar, and then it was back to the maze. Fogs returned, as though rising from the ground, while clouds were driven eastward over us, driven by the darkness at their heels. They brought mists and showers.

Time gets lost in these vapours. Was it summer once? When did school start up again? It seems as though I was always getting up at 5:30 and preparing lunches. My girls and I have walked together, hand in hand, for an unending series of mornings, through the misty air to the Metro, while rush hour surged around us. But, soft! what light through faded memory breaks? Just one month ago, we were leaving for Italia. Jumbled pictures emerge from the clouded mind, the cold and echoing space of Schiphol, a narrow, cobbled lane outside a small hotel, the fountain in the Piazza della Signoria. But the dim Dutch light of the day won’t sustain it. The memories dissipate.

The vapours and the showers have collaborators. Now I recall: the day we returned from abroad, I was already sick. I was in bed for three days with COVID, and, by the time I stood again, the beautiful trip had faded among the feverish dreams of unhappy returns. I was straight back into work, braving the heavy shadows of November.

Travelogue 1105 – 12 November
Rain Shy

The shreds of blue sky were a surprise. The bits of sunshine on the pavement were disorienting. The sustained appearance of the sun – all day! – left us startled, standing still with an anticipation of disappointment, something like dread. If we were not careful, we might drive away this strange advent of luck.

The wind and the rain had been plaguing us, following us for weeks, rarely leaving us in peace. Glancing outside while preparing to go accomplished nothing but the awakening of curses. If the air was still outside the window, the rains would start before we made it a hundred metres from home. If it was raining, it would only persist, while the wind pulled at our umbrellas.

Venturing out into the sunshine was unnerving. There were clouds on the horizon that caused us to flinch. We packed all our rain gear. But even when we were furthest from shelter, crossing the widest square, circling construction sites and diverted by malfunctioning doors, the skies stayed benevolent. I stopped to stare at the patches of blue. Was this a new style of torment? Watch the rain-shy dash for cover for no reason, just as a trauma reflex! It would have amused a cruel god.

Resentment aside, it was a day of wonder. The forecast for the morrow was gloomy, but we enjoyed the moment. Some people showed a doomsday instinct, acting recklessly, wild gleam in their eye. But most of us walked in a daze, not sure what to do with the good fortune in November.

Travelogue 1104 – 1 October
Bright Spots

The day after the violence, I was struggling through my schedule. I was struggling against a headache, persistent and aggressive; I was struggling against a streak of petty bad luck that was just as persistent, like a worm in my gut. I didn’t want to admit that I was also struggling against an emotion, an abiding despair left by the events of the day before, the violence.

Little Ren had hockey in the morning, and she was having her own struggles. I didn’t know it yet, but she was fighting against a resurgent flu bug. She was cranky and recalcitrant, and she cried over every obstruction to her cravings for sweets and comforts and every colourful distraction.

I had to step in as coach for the girls’ team, and, though we enjoyed our time on the pitch, getting off the hockey club property was arduous. Little Ren wouldn’t budge without chips from the concession inside, but the clubhouse was mad with crowds and my head was throbbing. I stood in line two different times, the unmoving line amid screaming kids and jostling parents, until I finally bailed and insisted that we go. Little Ren sulked and balked.

Once I had finally cajoled her onto the bike, once I had pedalled away from the club, up the long hill to the bridge across the highway, and pedalled halfway across the Erasmus University campus, I realized that, in the confusion, I had left behind my jacket and, in my jacket pocket, my wallet. It’s a good thing it was Saturday, and the campus was nearly empty, because I gave way to a fit of shouting into the winds that I am not proud of, particularly with my child as witness. “This is a terrible day!” Things to that effect.

Some time after that, having stopped for one more among a loathsome list of errands, we exited the store to find our bike blocked by a wheelchair. I was not gracious; I uttered some unkind observations. A man settled into that wheelchair just as I was trying to unlock my bike, squeezed into an uncomfortable corner. The man did not apologize. In fact, he asked for help putting on his jacket.

Surprisingly, my mood completely changed. I helped him. He was not the most charming man; he was brusque in his orders. This jacket, apparently gifted from a local delivery service, had two zippers, and both were difficult to line up and to pull. He was impatient and gruff, and I didn’t mind at all. I don’t know why, but this was one of the few bright moments of the day, perhaps because I was allowed to escape my own misery. 

The other brief moment of sunshine on that day came after a particularly painful cleaning at the hygienist. I gathered up Little Ren, who waited patiently for me through my suffering. We left the building and walked immediately to the closest chocolate shop, where we ordered cannoli’s, coffee, and sugary drinks. Was it a thought that I had earned some credits, or was it a guilty pleasure? Whatever the case, the day ended on a happy note. We sat at the window, watched the shoppers stroll by in the afternoon light, and did bad things to our teeth.

Travelogue 1103 – 29 September

Animal Cruelty

 

There was violence in the city yesterday. The city observed it, gave a shiver. The city absorbed it, bit its lip, bundled us off to work nevertheless under overcast skies. We submitted to the drizzle absently, steps unsure, distracted, wondering where our train of thoughts had been broken that day.

Kafka describes the day a lazy day butcher led a live ox into his shop for people to tear their meat from it alive. “I lay for a whole hour flat on the floor at the back of my workshop with my head muffled in all the clothes and rugs and pillows I had simply to keep from hearing the bellowing of that ox ….”

The man who went on a mad shooting spree in Rotterdam yesterday was known to the police. He had been charged with animal cruelty two years previously. Some of the parents at my daughters’ school knew exactly who he was, the man with angry eyes who beat his dog. He lived around the corner from the school. The woman he shot and killed had complained about him. Something snapped, and he went after the woman. He also killed the woman’s 14-year-old daughter. Then he torched their flat. All this happened while children left several schools a few hundred metres away, in two directions. Then the madman ran to the hospital where he had been failing in his studies. He shot a teacher and attempted to start another fire.

The helicopters and convoys of emergency vehicles were a society’s testimony that we weren’t falling apart. Who was convinced? People were edgy, glaring at each other angrily and fearfully.

One parent texted, “Zal denken dat is meer een verhaal van America dan van Rotterdam.” But America limps on, and we do, too. The city takes it, absorbs it. We survive. We survive in the company of the murderer, a reminder of the terrible face of survival.

Travelogue 1102 – 9 September
Capricious Spirits

These summer interludes, when all day long the skies are clear and the temperatures are high, they inspire in me some sentimentality. Maybe it’s nostalgia. I’ve lived long, nearly equal periods of life settled in places known for their weather, either for glorious sunshine or for inclement weather. I’ve been ten years now in one of the latter, in a place famous for its dreary stretches of the wet and overcast. A day of rain would be another day of rain. But a day of sunshine is special. For people who have always lived here, it’s a day of release, a day to party. For me, it’s an echo of other places and times. Perhaps, in a similar way, a rainy day releases melancholy reflections in those who have moved to L.A.

The ghost is restless again. In the middle of the night, it found Josie’s doggie toy, the one that walks and barks, while its eyes light up. I had to stumble out of bed and down the stairs to turn the toy off. These are odd gestures. I continue to wonder about the modus operandi of ghosts. I find their logic really fascinating. What do these weird little gestures add up to?

In a similar spirit, I’ve been drawn into the recent media discussions about UFOs. We are positing that aliens have solved the enormous problems posed by the vastness of the universe and discovered a primitive intelligence that cannot seriously represent much of a puzzle for them. And what do they do with this discovery? Oh, they hang around, much in the manner of ghosts, playing hide and seek for fifty years, pranking our navy pilots and pantsing our farmers, leaving puzzles in the form of crop circles, and generally being silly. I think I would take a shine to an interstellar species that was this frivolous.

Travelogue 1101 – 29 August
Old As Time

Did Adam and Eve invent walking? That was Baby Jos’s question this morning as we walked to the tram. I didn’t know what to answer. She is usually insistent upon an answer but spared me her habitual discipline because I was sick. I had been up half the night with a stomach bug, and I was miserable. I had been retching so violently the night before my throat was too sore to speak. I was shuffling along behind them, whereas I am generally the one urging them to speed up. “Or did we invent walking in modern times?” The second question made my task easier. Given that choice, it was definitely Adam and Eve. Baby Jos made a good point: they had to be able to walk to leave Eden. “That means,” she said, rolling her eyes in a silly suggestion that she would faint away with the enormity of the thought, “that walking is as old as time.” In a traditional Christian timeframe, she is right.

There is something timeless to being outside when you are sick. To move is to float, and to think is to slide downhill in mud. You haven’t the energy for ranging thought. What concentration you have is tightly focussed: must get to the tram. But the effort of even that is exhausting. Mostly you drift along in a fog. At the hour of school drop-off, everyone in Rotterdam is adrenalized and intent. They hustle and they march and they lean into the winds of their ambition, and the drifting sick man is traversing their red-dotted-line pathways in slow motion. It is dreamlike.

There is something timeless about the weather, this early autumnal cool and these early autumnal clouds. The weather does not vary for days, even weeks. The mornings dawn in grey light, and you reluctantly reach for your jackets. If there is variety, it lies in the unpredictable light showers that catch up to you while you are walking. We caught a few light drops this morning. By the time I had registered it and lifted my distracted gaze up into the mysteries of the grey mists, they had gone.

Travelogue 1100 – 27 August
Sunday Echoes

I wake to the brassy, slurring voice of a neighbour on his balcony, speaking loudly on his mobile. It’s 7am on a Sunday, the Sunday after our first week of school and work, and, as it happened, not the fun week it should have been: Ren was sick, and I had an unhappy start at work. Opening the front door to investigate, I watch him sway on his balcony, holding the mobile away from him, dancing for his auditor, laughing, waving. The courtyard rings with his shouts.

Above and around him, nature has woken. The sky is light, though full of clouds like grey pillow stuffing. The air is cool with a hint of autumn. The seagulls are whistling and laughing. Below, the pavements are damp. Surrounding him is the usual silence of a Sunday morning. He doesn’t hear the morning; he hears the cackling from the mobile.

The work week could have been better. Our return to our home campus, moving into our new building, was marred by politics - the keynote of our times. We’re sorely understaffed, after management’s budget panic last year. Management itself has been shuffled, and we’re starting the year short-staffed above as well as below. We met in unfinished rooms, taking inventories of people missing, listening to our echoes in the new rooms, where wires still hung out of ceilings and walls. We inventoried our teaching schedules, overloaded to compensate for the decimation. One colleague, hearing me say my schedule didn’t seem bad, ran straight to the only manager working that day to request in echoes that I be given her classes to teach.

Travelogue 1099 – 20 August
Playing With Dolls

Suddenly, the girls are playing with dolls. They each have a baby doll; they’ve had them for a while, though they didn’t play much with them before. Now the two sisters are very busy together, dressing up their babies, crafting for them cribs and buggies from cardboard boxes and luggage trolleys, and acting out the things that mamas do, lulling the babies to sleep, feeding them, scolding them. And keeping up long dialogues between them, involving mommies and poppies and babies and their sisters. It’s an all-consuming activity; we have trouble breaking in and getting their attention when it’s time to eat. They insist the babies must accompany them to the table. It’s a mania. It’s fun. And I wonder what their subjective experience is playing these games. I contend that the wall in our heads between what is real and what is not real is not so solid as we maintain. By the time we’re adults, perhaps we channel that experience into story-telling, surrendering to our books and movies, "suspending disbelief", as the theory goes. But fundamentally, things can be real and unreal at the same time. Maturity lies in the faith that there is a difference.

Reading the British press, a breaking and disturbing story in recent weeks has been the trial and sentencing of Lucy Letby, a nurse who murdered seven babies while on the job and attempted to kill six more. It’s a bizarre and heart-breaking story. It’s also puzzling, in the usual way with serial killers. There were no indications to friends or co-workers that this rather bland personality – nicknamed the ‘beige nurse’ by the police investigator on the case – was dangerous. A Guardian writer watched the accused during her trial for tell-tale signs of motive. He could reach no conclusion. He did offer some odd observations. During the trial, the murderous nurse didn’t cry at the testimony of her crimes, but cried during recounting of her rather ordinary life and her pathetic affair with a married colleague. She was inspired to a showy kind of pride when questioned about medical procedure. It suggests a disturbing psychological profile. Her parents were in the gallery every day. What were their thoughts?

I was put in mind, when Kundera passed, of the phrase he borrowed for the title of his novel, “the unbearable lightness of being”. I have reason to contemplate it every day. If every age distinguishes itself by finding new ways to be careless with the real lives of others, ours may prove to be one of the more creative ones. We enshrine the narcissistic complex bred by post-war prosperity, we institutionalize it and allow it rampant gambols round the globe, inverting measures of reality, until the interior story of the world is more real than objective evidence. A nurse cries herself to sleep over disappointing romances, and when she wakes she plots the death of innocents. Captured, she pities herself; accused, she pities herself. Shame is stunted. We treat guilt therapeutically so that the ego may have more range for play.

Travelogue 1098 – 3 August
Humans

The girls have dug up last year’s tails. They’re watching “Trolls” on TV, contentedly stretched out in their life-size, elastic mermaid tails. I’m not sure where the mer-impulse came from, but their whims turn with dizzying speed these days. The tails extend, in their blue and purple glory, from the hip all the way past their toes. They wave the tails like ‘real’ mermaids. “Are mermaids real?” Little Ren asks earnestly.

Maybe the minor mermaid craze arose from Baby Jos’s short obsession with tails. “What if I wake up one day, and I have a tail?” she asked with a big smile. She wished it would happen. “What would my teacher think?” she asked. I’m stumped by questions like those. But I am getting used to staggering amounts of questions from the girls. They are factories of wondering questions. I thought the questions were a phase; that was a few years ago. No one told me the questions phase was … childhood. At the end of the day, when I’m tired, I’m usually two questions behind, answering on a delay, answering the rainbow question when they’ve already moved on to fairies. “Where do fairies live, Papa?” “You can never really find the ends,” I answer. Somehow it all meshes into its own sense.

But I do remember the power of these childhood passions. I am reminded of the things I wished for at a similar age, and wished for with intensity. I wanted to fly, and I wanted to be able to time travel. I wanted to be able to change into animal form whenever I wanted. The possible and the impossible existed together in the same thought. I ‘knew’ the things I wanted were impossible, but it was within a child’s power to believe in possibility. Growing older, I remember deciding that if I believed in something strongly enough, it would be required to manifest. Then I concluded that believing strongly enough was knowing. And knowing something was possible meant forgetting that it was ever impossible. That negated the magic, and I lost interest.

While Baby Jos wanted a tail, Little Ren wanted a unicorn horn. That would give her magical powers. Little Ren is mercurial. She moves from unicorns to sombrely posing the question, “But I just want to know why I exist.” Wow, I say, that’s a big question. When you figure it out, let me know. “Why am I me?” she asks.

Little Ren is the philosopher, it seems. She’s the one who has wrestled with the term “human”. When she was younger, she used ‘human’ to describe adults. There were children, and there were humans. I was a bit mortified by that, but I don’t like rushing in with a negative: “don’t say that!” The word naturally evolved into a descriptor of people – “there are so many humans on the street” – to a somewhat fluid identifier to draw contrast with animals – “fluid” because sometimes nice animals can sometimes be human.

Travelogue 1097 – 1 August
Summer Vacation?

It’s the first of August. That date is a signal to the mood centres of the brain, a trigger for depression. I’m a teacher, and I’m a teacher in a country in which school years stretch from mid-August to mid-July.

School years in America started in September and ended in June. By the time September came, there was a hint of autumn in the air, you were rested, and you were eager to get started again. In the Netherlands, summer vacation feels just long enough to run some errands, catch up with your team of doctors and dentists, see a few friends … once each, and perhaps squeeze in a rushed and tense trip in order to store images in your phone for winter.

July turns to August, and you find the “vacation” unconvincing. Work is a beast already catching up on you, its hot breath on your neck. And it’s a formidable beast, whose tail reaches deep into the summer of the next year. One returns to work with a half-charged battery. I’ve noticed that European school years start slowly and quietly, taking a good month to build momentum. I remember American school years galloping out of the gate.

It doesn’t help that the last day of July was a rainy one. It was chilly; the rain barely paused all day. The girls and I ventured out to buy last minute party items; it was Menna’s birthday. We surprised her when she arrived home. We lit the candles on the cake, and the clouds outside made the house as dark as though it were October.

Travelogue 1096 – 23 July
The Butcher

I had a session with Dirk the Butcher yesterday. He was so enthusiastic, he found extra pain to inflict. One cavity was not enough. He found a series of them in my front teeth, and he was reluctant to let me up from his chair. “I have so much time left in our appointment. Why don’t we take care of it?” I submitted reluctantly. The truth is, I have found some appreciation for the Butcher, his ham-handed Dutchness, his sad blue eyes, his rough grace. There’s no disputing his efficiency as a dentist. He attacks with a sure hand, and the results are solid. The pain was intense after the session, but it passed quickly. I looked into the mirror and saw a cleaner smile.

I wondered what sort of psychology lurked in the long narrow skull of the Butcher. Who does this job for so long? People fear you; they tremble as they sit in your chair. You have short, emotional encounters with people, during which they cannot speak. They walk out in a daze of pain and violation. The meetings are physically intimate but formal and impersonal. I can’t imagine there’s much variety in the work.

Out in the world, people must shudder when a dentist shares with them his or her profession. It’s a bit like being an undertaker. Dirk the Butcher looks the part, somewhat underworldly, tall and pale, back a bit hunched with age and work, his eyes pale and watery and staring, his smile unsettling. He’s ageing. His arms are so scrawny, I don’t know whence the strength he exhibits when he pries open my jaw. “Relax, relax” he says curtly, as he jams one more instrument into my mouth. It’s his version of reassurance, which must, in the offices of the Butcher, be delivered in the imperative.

Travelogue 1095 – 17 July

Kundera

A favourite author passed away last week. I want to write something about Milan Kundera, and yet I find it challenging. He was a favourite in my youth; he’s someone I’ve taken for granted since then. He informs me from that distance in time, as do a set of authors who affected me powerfully back then, people as varied as Durrell and Dostoevsky, Kerouac and Eliot.

I felt I had a special right to him, I suppose, being of Czech heritage. He was one of the giants of his generation, the last Samizdat generation, the Chapter 77 generation (though he didn’t sign), the generation that also produced Havel and the writers of the new Czech constitution. Ironically, though he was possibly the most famous Czech artist at the time, he was shunned by the others for having left Czechia. I defended him. He had become an ‘international’ author, writing in French in his later years. Born to be an expat, I felt instant sympathy for his position.

The themes of ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ are a young person’s themes, which is a reason it’s remained in my past. There are novels that I have brought along with me as I aged, and novels I didn’t. This is one of the latter, like, say, “On the Road”. Dostoevsky survived into my late 30s, but still fell away. Still, something of Kundera’s novel stayed with me, something of its moral courage and its frankness. I was delighted by its philosophical frame, its unembarrassed discourse on the significance of life and what was significant about living. He seemed refreshingly free of the self-conscious jadedness I was used to, and far from devaluing what he said, his ‘naivete’ was pulled off with clarity, wit and sophistication.

It was a special time. The present times have become so dark, these dire 2020s become so much more like the 1930s than the Roaring 20s, so serious, so portentous, that I think we have grown to distrust the preceding decades. They plotted against us. Everything that seemed cheery was a wink among conspirators. Politics and climate and globalism and the tech revolution were all poisoned, and done so deliberately. But it was a special time. I was in Slovakia in the early 90s. I would never have known that certain emotions were actually possible if I hadn’t been there. Labelling them as optimism or hope would only make me a target for trolling in the Bitter 20s. I’ll keep my counsel. But I regret sometimes how Eastern Europe became so overshadowed by Ethiopia in my own story. I haven’t often had the opportunity to contemplate and appreciate the former. Thinking of Kundera brings something back.

Travelogue 1094 – 12 July

Restart, Please

This is how our summer started. Thursday was the girls’ last day at school. Baby Jos celebrated with stunts off the group swing in the playground out front. She fell badly and broke her arm. We spent the afternoon at the hospital getting x-rays, a cast, and unwelcome doses of Dutch bedside manner, which sound to the uninitiated like the grim voice of Dread. They made her cry.

The next morning, we had to bring her in for an operation. I was emotional. She had to be put under general anaesthetic. It’s the second time already Baby Jos has had to be put under. I find it too hard to take. Menna stayed with Baby Jos, and I was put in charge of her little sister. Little Ren and I explored the hospital. We had snacks in the café. We bought balloons. When it was time, we raced up to her room. Baby Jos was groggy but already cheerful. Good!

That was Friday, my last day of work during this school year. I had been scheduled to meet with my supervisor for my appraisal, on literally the last possible day. We postponed until the fall. I was able to make my second meeting of the day, late in the afternoon. This meeting was a mentor session with a literary agent. I had scheduled the meeting weeks earlier, thinking I would be in a great headspace, summer started and my writing in full swing. Instead, I was drained and distracted. I hadn’t scheduled one of these meetings in a long time because I had undertaken a major edit of the book. Not so humbly, I expected a glowing word or two. Not so humbly, she trashed it. I left the call more than schooled and defeated.

Saturday was a hot one; the temperatures stifled all thought. Sunday was busy with kids’ activities for the girls, a birthday party and a final ballet class. I spent the day worrying about Baby Jos.

Monday started with an email from my employer announcing that my supervisor was leaving. What happened? I thought. Was it me? Now I’ll start the year with an appraisal from a stranger, looking over the notes from an odd year, a year full of medical issues and tumult.

Later in the morning, I had a dental appointment scheduled. I had been unhappy with this dentist, but I only had a few cavities to fill. What could go wrong? The dentist quickly answered that unfortunate question, throwing up her hands halfway through the filling operation and saying she would go no further. She treated me like a recalcitrant school child, crossing her arms, and crying that the operation was too difficult. She would stuff in a temporary filling and refer me to her colleague Dirk, whom I call “The Butcher”. I will see him Friday.

Tuesday morning, I woke feeling odd. Still, I hefted Baby Jos on the bike to run some errands. Feeling light-headed, I stopped for coffee and snacks. The dizziness only increased. I rushed home, sweating for fear of losing my balance while carrying my delicate little girl on the back with a cast on her arm. Back at home, I popped the thermometer in my mouth: 39.5˚C. The rest of the day, I tossed and turned in bed, fighting nausea and fevers.

Okay, so, have I cleaned the cosmic slate? Shall a fresh morning dawn when the songbirds greet me, dropping laurels leaves in my hair, leading my family along a garden path to the beach? My faith in the Great Season is faltering.

Travelogue 1093 – 28 June

Fire!

When I opened the front door this morning, ready to take the girls to school, I was stunned by the sight. There was a huge column of black smoke rising from the south. The wind was blowing the smoke past us to the northeast. It was a sight to arrest the heart for a moment, The girls rushed out because I had cried out. They stared in wonder. The blaze was so intense, we could see the smoke glowing red underneath.

We had to move in the direction of the fire to go to school. Thanks to social media, I already knew what was burning. It was a building we passed every day, a colourful building in an up-and-coming little borough called Keilewerf. It was a builder’s yard, piled high with lumber. The place had a hippyish vibe, something happy and communal about it. Baby Jos would not accept that that was the building that was burning. It made her too sad. The police had cordoned off our usual route to school, so we only saw the fire from a distance. That could be any other building, Baby Jos insisted.

Think of the terror that sight would have inspired in Scaliger’s day! Fire killed. It wiped out cities. In 1452, just a century and a half before Scaliger’s day, two-thirds of Amsterdam had burned down. It was this fire we have to thank for the beautiful city we still see today. They mandated building in stone afterward, but stone was too heavy for the marshy Dutch earth. They built with brick.

Travelogue 1092 – 19 June

Baby’s Spring

It’s June. Gentle winds are shaking the leaves of the poplars, making a sound like rain. Red poppies are in bloom. There are scents of freshly cut grass in the air; there are scents of lilac. The summer hush has begun to settle over the city. This is one of my favourite times of year.

If the city has quieted, it’s not a quiet season for the girls. Their school takes them to amusement parks. Their hockey teams have picnics. They have recitals downtown. And Baby Jos celebrates her birthday. A child’s birthday is never just one day. It’s a celebration in waves. The joyous wave this week was the party for her friends. She invited her closest school friends to an adventure park, where they climbed walls and jumped on trampolines and scared themselves on obstacle courses high above the ground. They indulged in cake and cupcakes. Parents sat together and shared their exhaustion, shared photos, complained about the school and still managed to laugh.

We’re in constant motion, slaves to our springtime activities. The new summer sun has shone on all of it, imbuing everything with a surfeit of light, like living photos that were overexposed, abundant with sunshine and smiles, overwhelming the sombre Dutch colour palette with yellows, whites and greens; like memories washed out by sun and time; like the photos from our trip to Rome, in which everyone is squinting and the colours are fading into gold.

There was some concern that none of this would happen for Baby Jos because she suffered an injury to her foot a few weeks ago, having caught it in a bicycle wheel while riding behind her papa to hockey. Nothing was broken, but the doctors put her in a cast to keep the foot still while it healed. She was at first proud to be walking on crutches into school, and then she was bored and frustrated when she couldn’t play. Fortunately, it only took two weeks to get back on her feet, just in time for the parties.

The latest celebration was the recital. It fell on Father’s Day. I couldn’t have asked for a better way to commemorate the day. The girls were excited to wear make-up, proud to be on stage, transfixed by the crowds of parents cheering them on.

Baby Jos tells me it’s my best Father’s Day ever, and she’s immediately right. It was true before she said it. It is true because she says it. I’m perfectly happy.