Today we are in Nijmegen, a much bigger Dutch town than Enkhuizen, with a pop of 185,000 and a bustling marketplace L and I will revisit after lunch. I’d like to find some cheese to bring back for Caity, coffee beans for Sam, and beer for me. A young woman on the waitstaff talked me into a second beer the other night: a very smooth dark German beer that starts with a K.
Nijmegen’s history goes all the way back to Year Zero — 2000 years! Roman times. It’s the oldest town in Holland, although Maastricht claims that honor too, the guide said. It’s just 10 miles from the German border and British pilots bombed it by accident, killing 800 people and damaging much property during WWII. Horrible. About that many Jews were also deported from the town by the Nazis after they took over. There is a small site of remembrance and an annual ceremony commemorating their loss. If you look closely, you can see the Jewish star in the fence surrounding the woman who symbolizes the deported.
Ever see these little black things on the outer walls of older buildings and wonder what they are?
They are anchors, we learned, that help stabilize the building. They go through the outer wall of the building and are anchored to an interior floor, thus literally holding up the outer wall.
It’s a gorgeous sunny day. We’ll walk around town on our own after lunch, and I’ll no doubt get us hopelessly lost again.
This poem by Ada Limon is called The Raincoat. It was yesterday’s Poem of the Day from The Poetry Foundation, no doubt in honor of her birthday (she’s 49). I vaguely remember sharing it on OC once before, but that’s okay. It’s worth a second shot. Got kids?
When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled to take me
to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
and move more in a body unclouded
by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
songs to her the whole forty-five-minute
drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
five minutes back from physical therapy.
She’d say that even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. Today,
at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
another spine appointment, singing along
to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.
The sweetest of Rex’s commenters is Lewis, who always finds something nice to say about even the worst of the puzzles. He noted something about yesterday’s constructor, Zhouqin Burnikel.
Zhouqin’s last Times puzzle came a week after Helene hit. It was like the Twilight Zone here. And what do I remember most? Everybody was out of their homes helping everybody else. “What can I do for you?” “How can I help?” “What do you need?”
What I learned was that beneath a world that might feel dark at times, there lies a well of light that feels infinite.
This brings me solace and hope, and reminds me of Ghandi’s words: “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it – always.”
Larry Josephson was an old radio personality. He once said: Discussing the Mahatma with a three-year-old is like taking Gandhi from a baby.
The dining area on our ship is huge, but there are no isolated two-person tables. L and I have been seating ourselves way in the back — the staff there is very friendly (the waiter sings much of the time and the waitress is adorable) — and it seemed to offer the best chance of avoiding having to socialize. It should be obvious to you by now that I am an inveterate misanthrope and dread having to make idiotic small talk with strangers. It worked for a while, but the last few meals we were hit. I fail to see the appeal of engaging in idiotic chit-chat while I am trying to focus on over-eating. And yet that seems to be a big part of what the rest of the folks on the cruise enjoy. Where are you from? Is this your first cruise with Viking? OMG — Man the lifeboats!! Get me outta here!!
Here’s the start of a poem I elected NOT to share with you in Owl Chatter:
You wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches,
and have to choose between the starving month’s
nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings.
The liturgy begins to echo itself and why does it matter?
My phone led us to a local craft beer shop where the very nice young man offered some friendly guidance. It seemed pricey, so I just bought two items, one an amber he recommended that you can see in tiny print was brewed right here in Nijmegen. I’ll have it as a treat on a special night in Jersey. The other is an IPA also brewed here that he recommended.
Burp! See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 