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: