Aware

To be human is to be, or rather to become, self-aware.  Some refine it, some are content with what awareness arises in us, some wish to or even succeed in losing it again.  But none of us are born aware, and watching awareness form is one of the more interesting parts of being a parent.  It is also, at times, distressing.

I know Gideon better than anyone on earth, myself not excepted.  I am his closest parent, his closest fellow being, and to me, examined up close, he seems extraordinary.  I have been the source of his greatest challenges (and, not incidentally, him of mine) and I am the source of his ultimate comfort.  It is for this latter reason, and because Talia had had her try, that I took him in the throes of his most recent tantrum.

To me a tantrum appears to be a short-circuiting of the brain, a total overload of the circuits.  It is unmistakably an intensely unpleasant experience for the child, but I have wondered several times in watching Felix go through one whether he, in the throes of this possession, was actually aware of being possessed, or if the experience consumed him so completely as to leave no room for self-consciousness.  On more than one occasion as he began to come out of it Felix would, heartbreakingly, make it clear he wished this was not happening to him, and soon thereafter it no longer would be.

Enter the Gid.  He has tantrumed already several times, and has built his tantrums to a level that rivals anything Felix has ever displayed.  With him, as with Felix, I find myself wondering what, if anything, he is thinking when in one, but mostly I just sit there praying for it to end and wracking my brain for a distraction vivid enough to snap him out of it.  Failing that it's just a matter of time, and this time that's all I had for him.  The tempest passed, I took a picture of him, and this is what he looked like:

Exhausted, my baby boy, just utterly exhausted.  And then something strange happened.  He asked to see the photo I'd just taken.  Wanting to give him whatever I had to give, I showed it to him, whereupon he immediately burst into tears, sobbing as though his little heart was going to break.  And this is what that looked like then:

Why were you crying, Gideon?  Did seeing your worn out little face give you a glimpse of what you'd just been through?  Did you feel sorry for yourself?  It's impossible to know, and you did not tell me, but I thought then and think now that somehow, at that moment, you passed a milestone on the road to awareness, and maybe passed it sooner than I would have wished you to.

Amsterdam 2012

We're back! Hello, we love you, we'll see you again! And now we're gone.

I'm not entirely sure what the point of such a visit is. You run around, trying to see everyone and getting, and giving, little more than a glimpse. You run from here to there, doing and tasting and seeing a handful of things while passing by and wishing for a hundred more. It's a ridiculous exercise in some respects. But it's a reminder, and I'm glad we did it.

I first visited Amsterdam in the early 1990s, and from that day until we departed in October of 2009 I don't think a year went by, or not much more than one, without my finding an excuse to come back. Certainly a full two-and-a-half years was a long time to go without. What is Amsterdam to me?  It is the home of some of the people I know best and love most in the world.  It is the locus of many of my finest memories and of many more events, some remembered, some not, that have made me who I am.  It is a wonderful city in its own right, still by far the most enjoyable, magical, and yet practical I have ever found.  And it is a place I belong, one of the very few such places.  It is important to be here now and then.

The trip was an enormous effort, we have arrived home utterly exhausted, but I think we did it right.  To begin with, we stayed at our garden house which, though now owned by friends, is literally unchangeable:  the birds in the morning, the planes overhead, the pine needles underfoot, the struggle to get the refrigerator lit, this is all as it ever was.  Our tuinburen were happy to see us, the kids were served ijsjes and the adults beer even when the bar was closed, and the annual art fair produced a work that I know we will love more every day:

We split the stay into two parts, two long weekends with Haifa in between, and we began the first weekend with a BBQ in our old style.  We brought the sauce with us and, with the loan of a bakfiets, were able to get in all the additional supplies needed to feed 40 people or so.  One of our friends at the BBQ handed out ijsjes to the kids and in the process discovered there were a full 20 of them.  My, how we have grown.

Grown and, as adults, grown older, too, though on a sunny day, especially with the sun shining from behind, you'd hardly know it.

Almost everyone we invited was able to come to the BBQ, and many of them we saw again, and even again, in the days that followed.  But not everyone has stayed in Amsterdam, or even in the Netherlands, awaiting our return, and those people, those crucial people, we missed, and now, having been and not found them, miss more.

Pictures, words, a photo-essay to close:

TXOKO

I wish to say only this:  there's no mistaking a real party, and that's what a TXOKO is.

Bikes

I refer here not to the vehicles but to the game.  The rules are simple, so much so that one can hardly claim to have invented it:  you may not touch the ground, you seek to force your opponent to do the same.  You can play a no-contact version and there is a certain elegance to the game when so played but it is altogether less fun without the crashes and the wrestling.  It is just about my favorite game in the world, and almost no one will ever play it with me.  Part of what made my recent trip to Amsterdam so wonderful was that someone did (the latter movie is much the shorter, for those of you pressed for time):





A close relative of this game, which we might call "biking through the crowded Vondelpark at speed on a heavily loaded bakfiets" is shown here (narration by Felix):