Andy in Amsterdam

Kathy got us a room in a hotel in Southlake, which is near Dallas but still in Tarrant County. We’d driven by it last time we were there, but, like a virus, it has grown and spread. The Hilton is located in a completely beautiful and artificial looking “Town Center”. (We saw an exact replica in North Carolina.) It’s one of those places with perfect buildings and perfect trees and all our favorite stores, including a Barnes and Nobles and a Starbucks. We loved it. Fred said that if we were to move to Texas (don’t hold your breath), we’d have to move there. I agreed. Of course it would sort of be like living in Disneyland, but I live in a postcard now, so that wouldn’t be so bad, would it?

Sunday was reserved for a family gathering. It was going to be a bigger gathering, but my father decided to limit the number of attendees, which was a good idea. Here’s who was there: My father, Kathy, my mother, me, Fred, Jonathan (my nephew), Uncle Mac Bruce, Aunt Mary and Aunt Ema.

My father’s wife, Lene, took the picture. Here’s a snap of her wearing…we’ll get to that later.

Lene prepared a lovely brunch: quiche, cornbread (or did I dream that?) and an egg dish I would have totally flipped past if I had read it in a book, but that was very good. Hawaiian Eggs: a fried (poached?) egg, on a pineapple ring with a little salsa in the middle, on a piece of Canadian bacon and (I think) an English muffin. It worked surprising well. And, of course, there was coffee and iced tea.

It was mostly everyone sitting around talking and eating before we had a coconut cake (which thankfully did not have any candles on it). Aunt Mary and Aunt Ema are into genealogy and I got my copy of a book Ema had put together on the Brown side of the family. (That’s my paternal grandmother’s maiden name, not our African-American heritage.) Kathy said she’s got an even better one coming out about the Baker side. I like reading about my family history.

Kathy told me that the last time she’d seen Uncle Bruce, the subject of my knitting came up and he said, “Tell him to make me a hat. I can never find one big enough.” I ended up making him a Windschief, a design by Stephen West of Westknits fame. And dang it if this isn’t the only picture I have of it. I usually get better pictures. It’s Uncle Bruce right after I gave it to him. His head isn’t really that big. I hope he wears it in good health. He says he has to wear a hat to bed because his head gets cold. He lives in Texas. (Turn down the a/c.) Anyway, it’s a good knit. I recommend it.

I also made a shawl for Lene. I had made a Clapotis for my mother some time ago and then I made an Ishbel for Kathy (along with a couple of others that were just practice shawls), so Lene was next in line. I made a Traveling Woman shawl by Liz Abinante. I recommend it. It’s a really fun knit, lace but not amazingly difficult. I will say that that pattern calls for two repeats of the A pattern. I put in an extra A repeat and it’s the right size for Lene who is a small person, and it’s the right size for her. I got the yarn from Yarns Apart. It’s the Bark colorway by Madeline Tosh Socks. It’s a great yarn. I recommend. And by the way, I could have totally gotten another repeat of the A pattern.

This is not the shawl I set out to knit. That one will wait or it will be another pattern. I was too much in a rush and it quit being fun. However, the intention of the shawl remained. I knit the shawl as a forgiveness shawl. The idea (and how it pretty much worked out) was that I was knitting forgiveness into the shawl. It’s not that Lene has really done anything wrong - certainly not intentionally. She’s just being who she is and it sometimes gets on my nerves. She’s really a lovely person in her own right, and she makes my father very happy. It was an exercise in letting go of resentments.

And I recommend that. I like a little exercise that helps make it real, that I can touch and that at some point will be finished and blocked and given away. Just done do it with dental floss alpaca in a rush. That’ll give you another set of resentments. That’s the shawl on her in the photo above. Here’s a little detail Fred took.

So that was Texas mostly. I did get one souvenir worth mentioning, but I’ll write about that later in combination with something else.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Texas is a great place to be from.

Kathy, Ben, Me, Fred, Michael

Jonathan, Alyssa, Mom

(Sister, nephews, niece, mother, husband)

It’s amazing to me all you cram into a few days if that’s all you have. Due to my passport debacle, we had a short, intense trip in Texas - specifically the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. But it was a nice visit. It was mostly the basics: seeing people not places. I was really disappointed that some of our appointments got cancelled. My friend, Pam got edited. The gathering with my college friends got postponed until I make my way back - probably in October. It was mostly family this trip. And really, it was mostly my sister, Kathy.

On Friday, the day we arrived, we went with Kathy, her kids and our mother to a big, confusing Italian restaurant where they serve everything “family style”. That means all the food on big platters in the middle of the table and that the portions are large. Very good food, especially the big salad. We had a really nice meal, which ended with a big brownie and ice cream monstrosity served in a huge martini glass. They surprised me with a birthday treat and song. Fortunately, I got my own plate, which Fred and I shared. I say fortunately because Fred isn’t used to that sort of sharing of food. Those kids were digging in. Picture sharks and chum. Here’s a snap Kathy took when they were singing. I saw it coming, but was surprised nonetheless when it was for me. That’s not the realest smile I’ve ever had cross my face, but then the whole picture is a bit of a mess. That’s my mother on the right.

The next day, we had brunch with an old friend, Cynthia. She and her girlfriend live in Dallas, so we had brunch at a diner and then went to the farmer’s market. The brunch was real and very Texan - chicken fried steak, biscuits, gravy, and eggs. The market was nice, but it seemed a little expensive. I was reminded how big our cucumbers here are by how small they are in the states. We get a different kind here. Not sure what the taste difference is, probably minimal.

For dinner that evening, we (read: Kathy) had arranged for an odd collection of people from high school to meet at a restaurant. It was one of those small reunions that are easy to arrange with the advent of Facebook. My friend, Ross, has had a couple of very successful dinners like this and I thought we could try it.

There were people in attendance who I’ve seen a formal high school reunions (I’ve been to the 10 and the 20), people I’ve gone to see when I was in town and with whom I’ve kept up through Facebook. And there was an old friend (Alice) who was so happy and sweet. We were best friends for a couple of years in high school and then the last time I saw her was at her shotgun wedding twenty years ago. How does that happen? It was a fun evening. It was a bit overwhelming and a bit of a strange mix of a crowd. Again, I was surprised by a cake with a candle at the end of the evening - even though it was my birthday. This was a retake. Again, not a flattering picture of me. Hmmmm.

Fred came through for my birthday, by the way. He got me some cologne I wanted. Made in London, bought in Amsterdam, opened in Dallas. Floris Elite. I like it because it reminds me of what I imagine the Fifties to have smelled like. I also got a very nice umbrella, two shirts and a little bird thing that got left in Dallas when we departed. It tweets when it’s not upright. We figured the security at the airports we were going to be going through might not think it was as cute as Fred did when he bought it.

And that was the first two days. Lots of driving, lots of eating, lots of seeing family and old friends. It was a very nice re-entry to the country of my birth. Of course by that I mean Texas.

Last night was a strange evening. First of all, I attended a writer’s Meet Up, which was so incredibly ill-planned - due to something that I will go into later - that I question going back again. God bless the young woman who planned it, but beyond the obviously bad evening it was planned on, it wasn’t organized well at all. I think she was planning on doing very little in hopes that the group would meet and would organically organize itself the way some groups do.

I took a couple of group theory classes during graduate school for my Art Therapy degree and I have facilitated and led jillions of groups and I have been in enough groups that I know that organic organization is completely possible. Someone comes in and takes the leadership role and people fall in line and do what ever it is that they do in groups (follow, disrupt, try to take control from the leader, etc.) and it works. However, when it doesn’t happen easily or when there are only four people, it can miserable and I can go away having hated it. The biggest problem, of course, was that it was planned on the night of the World Cup Semi-Finals when Holland is playing for a spot in the Finals. There. I said it.

So we met and talked (or listened) and agreed that we’d meet again when more people were available. I rode away on my bike thinking about two things: the list (that I won’t go into here) of the ways that meeting was awful, and the fascination of big games like The World Cup.

I am not a sports fan. Any sport. I just don’t like watching them. I don’t like playing them. This morning in our SamenSpraak, Lydia started to ask me about the game this evening and she suddenly remembered that I had specifically told the guy who was matching us up that I did not want a Dutch speaking partner who wanted to talk about sports. Seriously. When asked what I wanted in a speaking partner, the only thing was that I don’t talk sports. I believe I said I would get up and walk out. (It may not be obvious, but I’m sometimes given to hyperbole.)

My dislike of sports probably stems from how much I can’t stand listening to American football games and announcers. When I was just a child, every Sunday during football season would find my parents in the watching football and screaming when the Cowboys scored. It can be so loud. I don’t even like it in the background. It sets me teeth on edge.

Coming home last night, I passed a few bars that were crowded to capacity with people wearing orange. At that point, they were like an hour into the game and everyone was waiting for something to happen. People were piled up three deep trying to look into a window at a TV. Holland was up one to zero. As I got further down the path to home, I realized that the streets were really empty. Very few cars, almost no bikers or walkers. Bars were full, but the streets were barren.

I suddenly thought, You like strategy. It’s a big game. Just watch it while you’re knitting. You could probably figure out what’s going on enough to follow it. And then I picked up the pace. I couldn’t wait to get home and try this new thing out. It was very compelling to realize that I was one of about four people in the country who were not glued to the television. What was so fascinating? The square we live on was completely deserted. It was like an empty movie set. All of the extras who fill my world had gone home for the day. (Because I am the original Truman.)

I managed to catch all of the second act half of the game. I have to say that soccer (I’m using that word for the purpose of clarity) is infinitely more interesting to watch than American football. To me. Last night. They mover faster and in more interesting ways. They hit the ball with an amazing variety of body parts - excluding hands (I know, right?) and the ball is always more in play. It bounces and flies from here to there. I mean I knew all of that, of course, but to see it was another story. And both teams were really good.

One thing I sort of missed (because the priority was still knitting and I was focused on that) was when Holland made two goals against Uruguay. Instead of ear splitting screams from a drunken bar crowd, the only reaction in the apartment was me looking up and saying, “Oh…good. That’s nice.” But then when the game was winding down and it was apparent that Holland had won, I said, “Yay! We won!” Suddenly it was my team. And we’re going to the Finals on Sunday against either Germany or Spain. We. They’re winning and I’m taking part ownership in my first 24 hours of being an soccer fan.

I told Fred that the best thing about this relationship with soccer is that it’s a relationship with an end date. I just have to stay interested until Sunday. It won’t stay around long enough to become annoying or for me to start seeing it’s bad habits and picking it apart. It’ll end and I will just enjoy thinking about the few hours we had together.

And on Sunday, Fred and I agree that we’re sitting down to watch it from the beginning. I’m totally stoked about it. I can even see trying it out again at some point. It might be fun. We’ll see.

Hup Holland Hup!

Yesterday morning, I got up and went to a yoga class for the second time. I have been trying to decide what physical activity I was going to do. This has been about a two year process of looking into things and deciding to wait on making a firm decision. The following activities were short listed: a martial art, Pilates, joining a standard gym and yoga. Swimming was under consideration for a few minutes until I remembered that I hate swimming. I’ve done the martial arts thing, so I know that it takes more time than I’m willing to put in (although the one they show on arthritis commercials with the old people in the park moving slowly is appealing to me). I’ve also done a standard gym. I liked the results, but it left me feeling sort of stiff - and there’s the time element there too. I tried Pilates for a while, but there’s no place really near me and I need that. And Patty’s been nagging encouraging me for years to give yoga a try, so I decided to join a class at the local Zen, granola, spirituality place - De Roos. Not coincidentally, I had edited the English on their website. That’s where I found out about the yoga class.

The teacher I chose (Martijn) is - I have been told - one of the more difficult teachers. Not personally. He’s a peach personally. Very patient, very calm, very Zen. It’s what he expects us to do that is the difficult part. It’s a beginners class. It’s supposed to be a day-one-no-experience yoga class. It’s rough.

The first time I went, I wrote Patty and reported that I had gone and I had hated it. I said I would go back but that it had been a really miserable experience for me. She assured me that she felt like that after her first class and that a lot of people feel like that. There are so many things my body won’t do. There are things it’s never or rarely been able to do. Like touching my toes. I can, of course, touch them. I put shoes on every day. But the straight legged toe touching? I have to work at that.

Martijn teaches the class wearing baggy shorts and a calm expression on his face. That’s all. All of the other participants are women, which I figured would be the case since it’s on Monday morning at 10:00. It’s a lot of meditation at the beginning, which for a fidgety fellow like me is sort of challenging. And he talks in Dutch the whole time, which is fine except that I can’t really make out his accent a lot of the time. I know he’s talking about relaxing and paying attention to our bodies. That’s enough. When we’re moving, I do a lot of looking around and copying what the other people are doing. It’s a whole different vocabulary. It’s not the food words vocabulary, the singing words vocabulary or the education words vocabulary. It’s the yoga words vocabulary, and I don’t know a lot of them. Like beweging. He kept saying that yesterday. Beweging this and beweging that. I thought, I should remember that. It’s probably important since he keeps saying it. It is. It means movement. I’ve learned it before, but it’s nice to have something to anchor it into place. I’ve wanted to use that word. Now I can.

At the end of class, he was announcing a summer intensive course that he is doing in August. It’s something about fire breath and it’s supposed to calm you and make your whole life better. Sort of cures what ails you. To demonstrate what the participants would be learning, he pushed all the air out of his lungs and sucked his stomach in as far as it would go. Then he proceeded to make the muscles of his stomach do big waves from right to left across the vast nothingness that was his now extremely concave stomach. Then - just because he could - he reversed the waves before finally taking a breath and encouraging us all to sign up.

I signed up for twelve weeks of regular classes. I will be taking a break in August rather than putting myself through a three hour session with him learning to fire breathe. I will show up to class and do what I can. I’ll try my best. I will do a bit at home throughout the week. When I was leaving, he said, “A lot of it is in your mind.”

I smiled and nodded, but I thought, Please! It’s all in my mind.

Fred and I arrived home on Friday morning at about 7:30. It was a rough day that began at about 10:00 the day before. And since I don’t generally sleep on flights (I knit and watch movies that Fred would never sit through), it sort of ended up feeling like a 40 hour day by the time I got to bed. Maybe that’s an exaggeration technically, but it really did feel that long. Then we arrived back to a European heat wave.

In truth, it was not that hot - and I say that as someone who grew up in Texas, lived through 14 New York City summers and has just come back from North Carolina. Those places get oppressively hot. But those places also have air conditioning. We arrived back to a hot apartment with no cross breeze. If you stood in the window you could get a little wind in the face, but I was looking for some cool comfort. You know, cool sheets and dry skin while I was trying to fall asleep.

We slept a bit and then got up and tried to be productive. (There was also a lot of yelling around town, which made sleeping difficult. Something about Holland and a ‘football’ game.) And then when we went to bed, it was still hot. I thought pure exhaustion would keep me unconscious through the worst of it, but I woke up at about 4:00 with a headache, heartburn, and a throbbing ankle (an injury I incurred at the beach trying to rescue some wildlife - story in a later post). I finally got to sleep again and we woke up at 11:30 to a cool breeze. The heat broke some time during the night. That long night is what made the day as a whole feel so very long.

What also seemed long was our vacation. In reality, it was just at three weeks (22 days), but it felt really long. I am convinced that the secret to a long vacation is chopping it up. Looking back at the pictures we took, I am amazed at how much we did and saw.

When I worked at the hospital, I would come back from a weekend and talk to my colleague, Kate, and she usually said, “Man, didn’t that weekend whiz by in a hurry?” And I would say, “Really? I had to ask myself this morning if it hadn’t been a three day weekend.” But I had gone to dinners and parties and brunches and shopping. Similarly, when I sat on the couch and did one thing (like nap and channel surf), the weekend seemed to fly by.

So I didn’t blog at all while I was gone. Part of the problem was our schedule. Driving around and seeing things all day just made me want to sit and do nothing (i.e. knit or read the books I’d brought). There was no energy left for writing about it. I did, however, take good notes. I write ‘morning pages’ every morning. (By the way, I totally recommend them. Three pages of anything at all every morning. Julia Cameron - The Artist’s Way. It’s very cleansing and, as someone who feels the need to document his life, it’s handy for note keeping.) So I plan (plan being the operative word) to highlight bits of the trip here on the blog.

It was a very nice trip. We spent a lot of time in North Carolina, which I thought was a completely random state that had nothing to do with me other than that Patty and Bill have a house there. Turns out that it’s where some of my family was living when the Civil War broke out. They had arrived from Scotland, entered through Wilmington, made their way up the Cape Fear River and settled in what is now Lemon Springs. (They moved to Texas in 1879.) This is information I got from my father who got it from my aunts. We saw a lot of North Carolina. There was a lot of driving. Thanks to my lovely sister, Kathy, for lending us Lori the GPS. She wasn’t always right, but we would have been (literally) lost without her.

Jet lag is worse coming this way, for anyone who is not experienced in trans-Atlantic flights. I’m still not quite up to speed. And true to who I am, I have a performance to attend today (my kids from school are doing their End Presentation) and then a party at the home of fellow blogger, Anita. Fred is off to Spain tomorrow, so I hope to have lots of time to blog and review the trip.

It’s nice to be home.

Fred and I are off for on fabulous vacation tomorrow morning. Before I tell what we’re actually doing, let me write a little bit about Plan A. The original idea was to go to Texas to visit my family and then do a little tour of the Southeast. We had a very nice tour of the Southwest a couple of years ago and I thought that since Texas is situated where it is, it would be a very nice starting point for a number of vacations. You can go in any direction and there’s something different. (Sometimes that different deserves air quotes, but still.) And I have romantic feelings about the Southeast. It’s got plantations and good food. What’s not to love? My suggestion was to wind our way through a few states and end up at a nice little resort somewhere on the Gulf Coast. (See where this is going?) Fred’s only demand (I’m sorry. I had to pause and laugh at the ridiculousness of those three words together.) was that we end up with a week at a beach. I said, “There’s plenty of beach. That area is all beach.”

That plan got scrapped when Fred decided that it was too much driving with no real destination. I could tell that he wasn’t thrilled with it by the way he was doing the planning. He suggested a shorter version of it. We’ll call that Plan B. We were going to drive from Dallas/Fort Worth to Northern Louisiana, see some plantations and then down to New Orleans before endng up in Galveston, which I have fond memories of for several reasons - only one of which is Glenn Campbell.

That’s when Patty stepped in and suggested that instead of a crowded Galveston beach, we could visit them on their private beach in North Carolina. And that’s when the oil spill happened. Fred went into high gear and looked into what was in that (NC) area. We wanted a little drive around before the beach. And then he made a plan and we agreed on it and set it in the proverbial stone.

We leave tomorrow and fly to Dallas/Fort Worth. Side note: There are Dallas people and there are Fort Worth people. I am a Fort Worth person. I sort of resent it when people assume that Dallas is the focus of my visit to Texas. Dallas this, Dallas that. That darn TV show! So I soften it by always saying “Dallas/Fort Worth.” Fort Worth is a lovely city, by the way. We’ll be there for almost three days. It’s a ridiculously short amount of time to see who I need to see. I even had a party canceled because of our change of plans. The focus will be my family and I’ll see some high school friends on Saturday - my birthday (but don’t tell anyone.)

From DFW, we go to Washington DC where we’ll see lots of things of historical importance to the USA. We’re there for about three days and then we head to Richmond (VA) and then Raleigh (NC), then Boone (NC), then Wilmington, then to the beach house. Then when Patty and her family kick us out and head home, we’ll move to some flea bag hotel for the rest of the time until we drive back up to DC and head back to Amsterdam. All in all, lots of time in that Revolutionary War area, and lots of good Southern cooking, I hope. We’ll be back on 2 July.

Fortunately, it worked out so that our neighbor can stay here while we’re gone. She’s having some work done on her apartment and would prefer to not be there while it’s being done. She’s going to watch the fish and water the plants. We’ve been packing and preparing for two days and we’re ready for take off.

Can’t promise to blog, but I will try. Check back and see if I managed.

And for some very exotic travel blogging, check out Alastair’s blog at www.alastairopreis.blogspot.com. He’s in Australia now. Australia is America upside down - in more ways that one.

Yesterday afternoon, I was riding my bike and I could just feel that it was about to start raining. I was rushing home on my bike when it began to pour. I was home within five minutes, but I was soaked. About ten years ago in NYC, I was telling a friend - an ex-nun in a wheelchair - how much I liked getting out of clothes that were dripping wet after I was caught in the rain. It’s such a nice, clean feeling to be out of all that heavy material and being sort of rinsed off is an extra, added bonus. She just nodded and said, “Yeah…” like she understood intellectually, but she couldn’t quite imagine it. She’d led a pretty careful life for quite a while. She didn’t seem like the kind of person who went out the house if was threatening rain, so she probably didn’t get caught in rain storms much.

It’s been raining wildly for a couple of days now. Not constantly, but sometimes it suddenly beats down for a while, and then everything looks really clean.

I wrote about my passport difficulties a few days ago, about being turned away at the consulate because I didn’t have an appointment. I haven’t written since because I’ve been waiting for the end of the story. I’ve been sort of miserable and quite snappy to certain people (not Fred). What follows is a cautionary tale.

When I showed up with my expired passport, I was told that an expired passport was not a reason to get an emergency passport even if I had already booked a flight. I understood from several people that if you showed up and had a flight booked, they would expedite your passport with no problem. I was assured that it was, in fact, easier. This is no longer the case.

I had, in fact, been asked if my passport was lost or stolen. It was not. I was asked at the window if there was a medical emergency. There was not. That’s when the woman told me that I could not get an emergency, super quick passport, but that I was welcome to apply for a new passport, which would probably arrive in 7 to 10 days. Day seven was our departure date.

My mind raced through all the lies I could have told. I could have said it was lost or stolen, but then you have to supply a police report. I could have said it was a medical emergency, but then I would have had to supply a doctor’s note or a hospital report. I don’t like lying. It gets really complicated. That’s why I’m an open homo and that’s why I think being a closeted homo is such an amazingly unattractive quality in a person. I even think lying or giving misleading statements about a friend or relative who is a homo is unattractive. Man up and deal with it. But I digress.

So I spent the week thinking about what a horrible situation I had gotten myself into and how I had dragged Fred along with me. There were tears. I thought about how incredibly sucky it would be to cancel the trip and how incredibly sucky it would be to even shave off a couple of days from the already short Texas portion of the trip. And I kept talking to a friend who kept asking, “What are you going to do if doesn’t come by Friday?” It’s amazing how completely I’d shut that voice off in my mind. And it was even more amazing to me how I managed to find time to speak with a person who would freak me out by becoming that voice. I’d even told myself - and Fred and this friend - at the very beginning, “It’ll probably come back really fast, in time for us to leave on Wednesday.” And it did. They called yesterday and I went and picked it up. Unfortunately, Fred had re-booked the tickets the day before.

I do not have a life filled with drama and close calls. I used to. I used to have a fair amount of drama and crazy situations that I had to figure out. Now I have a pretty calm life with very few of these situations that keep me from falling to sleep and that jolt me into a dark place in the middle of an otherwise normal day. So we’re leaving on Friday. I’ve contacted everyone I’m not going to see or who I’m going to see less. It’ll be fine. Tomorrow I’ll write about the trip. It’ll be good. We’re looking forward.

That picture was taken with my iPhone. Love that thing. It was done with an app I bought called Hipstamatic. ‘Cause I’m hip.

Actually, he left the whole country. It happened a couple of days ago. It was in the making for a number of months, but that’s not my story to tell. Suffice it to say that I tried my best to talk him out of it. In the end, life situations made him feel like it was best to return to the mother ship: Scotland. Nothing traumatic. Don’t worry about him. Just send him some good energy when you can. I always feel like we are where we are because that’s where we’re supposed to be. That’s how I see myself through difficult situations. That’s how I look at homeless people and not worry about them. And that’s how I manage the flood of feelings I feel about a good friend leaving.

He’s going on a fantastic voyage before he heads back to Edinburgh to make new roots - or revive the old ones. You can follow him at his blog, Alastair on Tour. I hope he writes. Go on over there and show him some love. He’s got a nice one there about leaving Amsterdam. On his amazing three month journey, he’s going to Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and some of the US. It really sounds like a wonderful trip. He’ll get lots of Alastair time, as he is traveling alone. Or should I say he’s travelling alone.

I never told him this, but now that he’s gone, I’ll confess. I have been trying to come up with the proper food metaphor for him for years. I think the first thing I called him - to Fred - was rice. Fred said, “Rice?”

I said, “No…like tofu.”

“That’s even worse.”

“Potatoes?”

I think I wanted a food metaphor because he is one of those people who we could invite to dinner and it didn’t matter who the other guest were, he fit in perfectly. I’ve been in a number of social situations with him and he blends in. Sally was like that too. We’d have a dinner party and we’d need one more guest round out the table and their names would come up. Of course they were also put on the list of people we expressly wanted to have over, but the point is that he is good with any crowd. English or Dutch speaking. Churchy or not. So what I was getting at was not that he was bland or that he soaked up the flavor of whatever crowd he was put in, but that he is like that perfect side dish that you can serve to anybody and that goes with any other dishes.

And to round out my food metaphor, I have another friend who is like cayenne pepper. He’s sort of spicy and fun, but in a group situation,  cayenne pepper is all you taste. That’s not Alastair. Alastair is like rosemary potatoes, a favorite side dish of mine.

It’s not even like I saw him a lot when he was living here. I saw him at choir practice every week and then every two weeks when we moved to the new choir. But he was a presence. He was helpful. I’ll miss knowing that he’s right around the proverbial corner and that he might call me and ask if I have time for a cup of tea. I’ll miss the helpful things he would send me to get me up to speed with choir. I’ll miss mumbling snippy bits during choir rehearsal (much less in this choir than in the former.)

And now Alastair joins a group of my favorite people who have left Amsterdam for one reason or the other: Andi, Deborah, Sally. He’s in great company. They were all stars and they all left giant holes in my life when they left. This is a beautiful city and it’s wonderful to live here, but it really sucks when people leave. That’s not to say that there aren’t some incredible people here who, like me, are lifers, but…well, you know what I mean.

Bye, Alastair. Goede reis. Safe trip. Blog!

This morning, I had just left the house when I had the incredible realization that I am living in Europe. It was a slightly cool, cloudy morning. It’s been mostly overcast for days, which I mostly love. I was riding down the red brick street on my bike. It just smelled like Europe. The trees are at a really nice state with all the new green and the air was moist. The streets had that mid-morning level of business. When Fred leaves for work, there’s generally a lot of traffic - both cars and bikes. It had slowed down a lot by the time I got out there. I was on my way to the American Consulate to try to get my passport renewed. I had read online that if I had an “imminent departure” I didn’t have to make an appointment. I understood that I could just walk in. There’s a ton of security and a number of gates, but they have open hours. That’s what I mean by ‘walk in’.

The school where I teach is right next door, so I went in and got a cup of coffee to drink while I stood in line. There’s generally a decent sized line in the mornings, so you have to wait. I was standing there when a security guard asked if anyone was there to talk about a passport. I said I was, but I didn’t have an appointment. He said, “You have to make an appointment.”

I said, “I have an imminent departure.”

He said, “When do you leave?”

I said, “June ninth.”

He said, “That’s not in less than a week, is it?” We both stood there for an embarrassing moment, neither of us able to subtract 1 from 9. “Well, it’s not within five days,” he said.

“But it said on the website that if I had an imminent departure, I could just walk in. Are you saying that I have to come back five days before my departure and they’ll do it?”

“Or make an appointment.”

“Okay.” I have a rule that armed guards win all arguments. It’s just how I am.

Making an appointment is not as easy as one might think. The website gives the option fairly clearly, but you have to give a reason and I didn’t really fit any of them exactly. I clicked the closest one and got an appointment for tomorrow. I have all of my paperwork, my plane ticket, my photos, my money. I was just there! I have to go back tomorrow.

Of course I have a Dutch passport, but I can’t enter the US on a foreign passport. They totally freak out on you. I had a friend who did it after giving up his US citizenship. I’ve told that story. It was not a pleasant experience for him.

Apparently getting the new passport is a pretty easy process if everything is in order, i.e. no name change, passport not too out of date, etc. They’ll literally have it back to you in a matter of days - and they make them in the US. I mean it’s not like there aren’t lots of flights between here and there every day, but I thought they’d like a couple of extra days. Now they’re making me jump through hoops. Okay, one hoop. But still!

My friend, Ann, and I were talking the other day and I mentioned that I had to get my passport renewed. She asked something about when I’d gotten this one - my first.

I said, “I didn’t get my first passport until I was 34.”

She said, “34!!”

I said, “I didn’t take my first trip to Europe until I was 37.”

She said, “37!!?” Her son is about eleven and is on his third. But he’s European. I know that 34 is no record in terms of getting a passport late in life.

What a funny path my life has gone down. It’s really lovely. I love unexpected surprises.

That photo above is my new wallpaper on my fabulous new iPhone. I took it out of a blue window at a place called Blue.

This is a photo of my high school choir. We were really good and really focused. Interestingly (or not - your choice), I’m Facebook (FB) friends with most of the people in this picture.

Facebook is such a strange and wonderful phenomenon. For instance, if I’m wondering what’s going on with someone I’m FB friends with, I can just click on their ‘wall’ and there’s probably something there that’s fairly recent and will enlighten me as to what is happening with them. Just looking at the walls of some of my FB friends now, there’s a pithy quote about remaining hopeful, someone just got diagnose with diabetes, and someone’s kid just made first chair trombone in first band (and she didn’t bother to blog about it).

A lot of people just put up little bits on their wall now and then: ‘On my way to work, last day before vacation!’, ‘Awesome little movie!’ (with link), and “dolly parton is on oprah today. maybe they’ll share coming out stories.” (Yeah. Whatever. You should know by the lack of capital letters that I didn’t write that.)

But some people (I won’t name names) put up way too much information on their wall. They’re going through a bad break up, they’re having a bad day and just woke up with a horrible hangover, or someone owes them money. Could you please tell that person to pay it back? (TMI, ladies. Discretion is the better part of valor.)

That’s the wall. It’s an interesting way of communicating and keeping in touch. It’s similar to Twittering (or tweeting), which is something that I don’t do. It’s mostly for letting people know that you have a lot of free time during the day OR that you’re still the nut job you were back when you were real friends and not just FB friends OR it can also be used to tell people that you’ll be in town for a few days.

Interestingly (Not your choice. This is just plain interesting.), in a few weeks, Fred and I will be in Texas for the first time in a few years. This is also the first time that we have been there since the advent of Facebook. Last time it was like “Do you have so-and-so’s email address? I’m going to be in town and I want to see him.” This time I have enlisted the help of my good friends Linda and Kathy (the latter of whom happens to also be my sister) to organize two separate gatherings for me. And by ‘enlisted the help of’, I mean, I asked them to do it.

Kathy has organized a gathering at a restaurant for people I know from high school and for people who have heard about that brother of hers who lives in Amsterdam and who are just dying to meet him and his husband, Fred. I really hope they don’t expect too much. It’s not like I do tricks.

Linda has organized a gathering at the home of a former teacher. That one is for the college (university) people. It should be fun. I haven’t seen a lot of those people since I left that place in 1987. I’m really looking forward. The menu is pizza, salad and BYOB.

I talked to someone about Facebook the other day. He insisted that he wanted nothing to with it. I took him through my profile and showed him pictures and the profiles of some people we knew in common. He said, “Well, it’s just like my mother used to say when her town paper asked her if they could write up something about a trip she’d just taken to Europe. She said, ‘I don’t want that in the paper. What I’ve done is none of those people’s business!’”

Obviously I don’t think like that. I have a blog.