Captain Reverend Mother

I don’t know why I find this phrase annoying, but I do and have mocked it for years. Until this week… 

I made actual bingo cards. Four of them, in fact, one per family member. It was an attempt to engage my children who would rather live in TikTok and Roblox than wind through Amsterdam’s canals.

The squares included the expected sights (windmills, tulips, gabled houses, canals and bridges), traditional foods (bitterballen, stroopwafels), art (notable pieces by Van Gogh and Rembrandt), and even Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century philosopher who was, in his day, the influencer everyone wanted to cancel. First prize was a Yes Day.

I wrote D-U-T-C-H across the top, laminated the pages, and after four hours into our trip, I had to eat crow about the NOMBC phrase, having used it in earnest. (Within 18 hours, more than once!) The universe has a sense of humor.

I have wanted to see the famed “Venice of the North” since I was in college, studying abroad in England and counting pounds and pence so carefully that a ferry ticket across the Channel might as well have been a flight to the moon. Four decades, four degrees, and a Navy career later, I finally booked the flights. The spreadsheet with our planned itinerary was a thing of beauty. Much like sandpainting…

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Uber to the bike shop, bags dropped, bikes collected, ride to the Van Gogh Museum, where the fifteen-year-old gave the sunflowers and most of their neighbors a magisterial thumbs down. Whoever came up with “as easy as riding a bicycle” clearly had yet to visit Amsterdam, where local cyclists move in pulsing schools like fish that know exactly where they are going and we tourists are lost prey.

On the way back to the AirBnB, my spouse got clipped by an e-bike. Hit and run. Ultimately, alright, just a little bruised and a lot shaken. A Frenchman named Thibaud, who happened to be on holiday and the child of a doctor, witnessed the whole thing and stopped to help. A Dutch woman whose phone was working since my SIM had not transitioned from Italy made the emergency call in real Dutch. We brought the bikes back to the shop, which refunded the rental even though the contract said they did not have to.

The next morning, our ten-year-old woke up with an eye swollen shut. A kind nurse at the hospital steered us toward a “tourist doctor” to spare us a 450€ bill for what turned out to be 30€ of antibiotic drops and an eye patch. The doctor’s office sat tucked into the seedier folds of the red-light district, which, depending on how you feel about irony, is either a perfect or a terrible place for a minister to be walking her sick child at 7:00am. 

The prescription went to a pharmacy fifteen minutes away on foot, in a neighborhood TripAdvisor had not bothered to map, and the pharmacist there walked us through the dosage in careful English. My ten-year-old took all of it in stride as now the one-eyed pirate of Mokum.

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The Rijksmuseum was a surprise. The fifteen-year-old, who had nothing kind to say about Van Gogh, stopped cold in front of a small still life nobody photographs. A silver pitcher with a reflection in it. A glass of water bending the light. Bread on a pewter plate. A stack of leather-bound books. The painting hung above a chest, not at eye level, opposite a bench where we happened to sit down to rest our feet. He stayed there a long time, longer than he has ever willingly stayed in front of anything that was not a screen. I am curious what he had to say in Art class at school on Tuesday.

Our last full day we visited Anne Frank’s House. Anne was younger than my older boy and older than my younger one, which all of us felt weighing on our chests. Anne also was born just a few months before my mother. By the time both girls were thirteen, my mother had a younger sister, got to keep her bicycle, and they had the run of the streets; Anne had an older sister, a bookcase she hid behind, and the requirement of silence during business hours. Same years, opposite sides of the world. My mother went on to have me, my aunt had my cousins, and we have all gone on to have our own children. Anne never did.

Anne’s world was taken from her in increments. A registration. A yellow star. A job closed. A neighborhood emptied. A border tightened. A definition narrowed. Small things, waved through by good neighbors sure it will not go any further, until the day they add up to something nobody can argue with.

We visit the annex because it is over. It, however, is not. (My boys will work that out for themselves.)

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I have yet to write a travel itinerary that survives contact with reality. My spreadsheets are a kind of prayer, an act of love disguised as logistics. I can read about a place for years, but I always need my senses to do the last bit of work. The cobblestone under my feet, the smell of a canal, the weight of the air make history root in me and pull me into the long line of people who came before. The spreadsheet is how I get all of us there.

What no spreadsheet can hold is Thibaud at the intersection, or the nurse who steered us toward money better spent on stroopwafels, or the four people who carried food and books and news up a narrow staircase, every morning for two years, knowing exactly what would happen to them if anyone noticed.

I missed seeing the windmill the tram passed, and the waiter forgot to bring us bitterballen, so none of us fully filled in our DUTCH card. The Yes Day, claimed by my spouse, will involve a nap and possibly Belgian waffles. And the things not on my Bingo Card are why I look forward to visiting again.