Rotterdam Bike Rides, Brussels, Stockholm and Back.
Bombs leveled Rotterdam during WWII, some three KM of the city center flattened, some 25,000 homes, 24 churches, 2,300 stores, 62 stores.
Four decades later, my high school friend Renee ended up there, exploring it as a new city took shape
I had not seen Renee since we were in Dallas together, listening to XTC and Josho Misco records, hanging out at Nancy’s house. The Pajama Party was still raging and we we all felt like we were a part of it. We all loved music and art, building our lives around aesthetic possibilities, burning with optimism’s flames, lights and colors, swirling through a vast cavalcade of images and ideas.
And then time passed.
I didn’t see much of Renee after we left, everyone making our ways far and wide, away from Texas.
Renee has been in Rotterdam for years.
She met me at the Central Train Station, showing me around.
The old dances with the new here, new buildings, old ways, old pubs.
We rent bikes and zip about, past the canals, by the magic watering holes, where people enjoy the sunshine, on our way to the Depot at Boijmans, the world’s most accessible storage depot.
Reflections scream from the skyline, like the buildings back home.
Look what’s hidden away.
Dali’s Lobster Phone calls.
So does Breugel.
Look at us after all these years, we gush over a pint.
With bike paths and canals, comprehensive sex ed and sensible Dutch mores that leave choices up to individuals to minimize harms, it all seems kind of idyllic.
Rotterdam is not immune to the antagonism you find everywhere, says Renee, recalling the politician Pim Fortuyn, who was killed by an animal rights activist. Of course, the event is not without precedent. As Bryan Dijkhuizen reminds us: “At the end of the evening on the 20th of August 1672, the brothers De Witt were brutally murdered and even eaten by the Dutch people.”
Our society can be contentious, Renee confesses as we chat about the Texas of our childhood, wondering what happened to the loopy free spirited place we once knew that elected a liberal politician who launched the War on Poverty and a woman who jabbed at male politicians, teasing them on her way to the governor’s office, that was before the son of a president ran against her. Since then, nothing has been the same.
“This is a consensus culture,” says Renee. Our version of conservatism is different.
On we talk about gardens and the climate movement and cities and bikes.
“How do we slow down, reject the terms of the enemy and acknowledge the climate threat,” combating climate grief through action and art, public spaces and possibilities.
Renee has been one of the good ones for so long, one of those friends, along with Tim Flannery, Mary N, Nancy T. who mom got to know as an art historian, our lives ever extending away, sometimes re connecting, sometimes in an airport or facebook or a bike ride.
We biked all afternoon, sharing a pint, laughing about it all.
And I made my way back to Brussels for a final night, before making my way back Frankfurt and Stockholm for a final demarcation.
By the time I arrived in Gamla Stan in Stockholm, a US flight carrier had docked on the Stockholm waterfront, along the Baltic Sea. It rained as we walked through the old quarter to the old pub on the waterfront. A rainbow spread across the water as the sun came out. It's a festive scene. High school graduates zoom about in their sailor hats, everyone toasting them.
Will and I sit looking our final night, drinking some beer, snacking on herring, with schnapps. We chat about it all, reviewing the reasons for the crazy lines to get through security at the airport, sipping schnopps, recalling Dad, beer on the sidewalk, and the last scenes of the Last Battle. Will tells a story about visiting Dad as he was completing the Last Battle, as the Narnia Chronicles comes to an end, when friends and family are reunited in a mysterious domain.
“Everyone you had ever heard of seemed to be there….Lucy looked hard at the garden and saw that it was not really a garden but a whole world, with its own riversand woods and sea and mountains. But they were not strange: she knew them all… ‘This is Narnia.”
“I have come home at last! This is my real country. I belong here. This is the country I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now,” Lewis concludes.
Reading it, thinking about Dad, imagining the old man seeing everyone again, its hard not to be moved.
We’re all getting older after all.
Here’s beer on the sidewalk Dad, from New Orleans to Stockholm.
Off to sleep, to dream, and get ready to fly home.
Wills 50.
Everyone is growing up, kids are getting ready for college.
Our days are passing.
One of mine is already there, a second is on their way.
I think of James, who hosted me, and Steve, who dropped by to keep the conversation going, and Will and Helena still hiking through the years.
On the way back, my mind cycles to Tim and Elizabeth, my friends who shuffled off while I was away, the hugs with Tim, the smile from Elizabeth, walking past her garden, Diaz Y Flores in the East Village, eating dinner talking about friends, my friends who were there for all those years of New York, greeting me like few others, laughing like few others, between this life and that.
A year ago, I dropped by TIm’s when classes ended, chatting away with Mel and Tim, all afternoon, laughing and giggling, happy with the reunion. I came back a lot.
I’ll see Mel when I get back, crack open a beer and toast to Tim.
Here’s a beer on the sidewalk for ya.
Back to the USA and its crazy gun laws and strange prohibitions, protections for fetuses and artillery fire for grade school kids. Zellinsky from the Ukraine wants some of the guns we let teenagers access for the way in Ukraine, says a comic here.
Are we a failed state, Ken Schles thinks so.
I’m not quite sure.
Arriving in New York, the sun is shining, the trains arrive.
Global travelers and beach bums on beach chairs, music and chat in any number of languages, a train live in glorious New York.
I think of Whore of New York, a confession, the memoir I've been reading by Liara Roux. She writes:
“Every time I came back to NYC, I cried as soon as I saw the shimmering skyline, when the plane touched down, as soon as I crossed the bridge… the feelings I had for the city felt like coming back to a lover in a long distance relationship. My heart twisted in my chest with joy.”
The train got me home in no time.
Arriving home, everyone was eating out back, enjoying a hot summer night.
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