Fear all

How much are we supposed to fear?  And to what end?  Going to the hardware store (picture above) is like walking into the stables of the Eight Horsemen of the (Silent) Apocalypse.  It is also, in effect, meeting someone with a good business idea:  find the fear, enhance the fear, fix the fear.

I am not a fearful person.  It is an emotion I have only recently, in middle age, begun to understand or even to experience (more on this another time).  My awareness of it as counterproductive has always been much more immediate for me than the sensations of fear itself, and so its grip on me has been limited.  It is for this reason that I discount some of my seemingly daring moves--going to Amsterdam without money or a plan for example--for without fear there is no real daring.  Such steps are easy even when they should, perhaps, be hard.

But I can be gripped by the need to solve a problem the way, I think, some people are gripped by their fears.  And in this state I react much as one plagued by a fear often does:  it holds my focus, it disturbs my sleep, it worries me.  So when I see a display like this it does not appeal to my fears as it is intended to, but that doesn't mean I can simply walk on by.  To the contrary, it grips me, for it raises a host of potential problems many of which (as readers of previous postings will have already noted) are already very much on my mind.

And for this I resent it.  We none of us live without problems and a backlog of problems.  And, in the current environment, one in which fear has been made a central, perhaps the central element of much of political and social discourse, additional fearmongering is very unwelcome even, or perhaps especially, at the hardware store.

And still I now want to know:  what are the ambient mold levels in my home, and what role do they play in my week-long cold?

Bed

I built a bed.  It was an enormous pain in the butt.  Took me weeks.  Seemed like every time I was ready to do the last critical bit of construction someone (not even always the same someone) was asleep in it.  Various elements had to be rebuilt two or three or even four times.  Got sick in the middle of the building process and stayed that way.  Initial test resulted in structural failure.  Certain areas are hidden from view and must stay that way.  And I won't actually be done until we decide to move and take it apart for shipment, at which time I'll sand and oil the parts before reassembly at a new location.

Made using all local materials, most of which were actually local to our garage.  Made without buying any new tools (only borrowings and what I found in the shed).  Only required one car trip (good thing there's a lumber yard within walking distance for the two extra wood-fetching errands I ended up taking, both, embarrassingly, on the same day).  Didn't mismeasure anything.  Cost about $200.  I guess I'm really quite happy with it.  Are you?

Missing Amsterdam

I've been trying for a while now to figure out how I really feel about not living in Amsterdam anymore.  I wish to know this for myself, and I wish to be able to tell you, the reader, whom as always I imagine as one or another of my Dutch (or at any rate Dutch-based) friends.  I have no need to figure it out for those who ask me most frequently, namely my friends here in California.  They ask, I say I don't miss it, and they seem satisfied with this answer even though it is, upon reflection, not likely to be true in any very deep sense.

Nor is it.  I do miss Amsterdam, and yet--and this is the part that puzzles me--I don't miss it in the detailed, almost holographic way I would expect to miss it having lived and loved it these past several years.  I don't miss it day by day, or often, or pointedly.  I miss it in only a very vague way, as if I had never actually lived there and am really only missing a dream of something that has not yet happened and may never will.  In short, I miss it exactly the way I have always missed it since my very first few visits there, as though I belong there but somehow can't stay.  I keep forgetting my keys in my rear wheel lock, as though I haven't secured it a thousand times before.

I am busy now writing my annual celebratory blog in anticipation of Felix's birthday this Friday.  By way of preparation I'm reviewing the last twelve months of photos, something like eight months of which were taken in or around Amsterdam.  My sense as I view these photos is one of vague incredulity, as if I can't quite believe we ever lived in such a wonderful place and did such wonderful things with such wonderful people.  It makes me feel like a banished angel.  California is a heaven, too, but that doesn't really have much to do with it.

I can only repeat what I wrote in the last entry:  won't some of you angels come see our new heaven?

Missing you

I've heard it a good few times now:  you guys are missed.  While hurtling along the ringway Elf asks if they are on the way to Felix's house, and Daantje sees ghost versions of me while biking through town.  Sergio's given up on out-of-office coffee as the flavor's not the same without the conversational topper.  Frank and Nina have friends over for dinner and realize that subconsciously they're waiting for us to arrive, too, and letting the food get cold in the meanwhile.  You look for us but we're not there.

We do not look for you here, any more than we look for canals or herring stands.  We miss you (and we also miss canals and herring stands, though not quite as much), but we don't expect to see you.  The context isn't right.  Things, and people, just don't translate.  This is sad in a way, but it does ensure that I don't walk around in a state of perpetual longing, and for that I am very thankful.

We haven't brought much of our Amsterdam life with us and a good deal of what we have brought is still in boxes, yet those fragments that are out and around us are often redolent of one or another of our Dutch loves, friends and places alike.  Jip en Janneke, nightly fare, are a constant reminder of all the kids we know, and many of the situations.  I've been looking at a blank space on our wall for weeks now and have only just realized Jorge's lightbox is the only thing to fill it.  (The lightbox is now disassembled in the garage, awaiting rewiring for US use, Jorge.)  The small rug brought back from furthest Mongolia by Coosje and Remco receives our feet here just as it did there, and reminds us as it does.  I cannot make coffee in my french press, mainstay of my office existence, without thinking of Sergio, my coffee-drinking colleague, now relegated to the reconstituted machine spew that passes for a hot drink in the Dutch kantoor.  Babette and AJ, horse fanatics, are present in spirit at the stables Felix and I visit 'most every week.  Johannes's face peers out at me from the spine of the Dikke, still my usual lunchtime read.  And so it goes.

But it isn't just the old that makes me think of you, it's the glorious new, nature in particular, and the thought of sharing it with my Dutch friends.  Do postings like "Mooi Marin" look a bit like a travel brochure?  There's a reason for that:  they're supposed to encourage you to come visit.  We'll be back, for sure, but don't wait for that before seeing us again!

It is a lot easier leaving than being left, I admit.  Apologies.