Sylvia's Journal

Yesterday, after the graduation and lunch were over, Theta and I drove to Amsterdam and I got to experience rush our on the Dutch highways. Luckily we had lots of catching up to do and so we didn’t notice that we inched a long for half an hour. We still arrived one hour early for a reunion of a student committee (de lustrum commissie) that organized a gigantic 5 day celebration that takes places every five years at the student association Minerva of the University of Leiden. It is one of those ritualistic events with a long history, an illustrious cast of characters who call themselves the Winnie de Poeh Society (intentional Dutch spelling) and no gender balance until 1974. Ours was the first event organized by and for both sexes and Theta and I have the honor of being the first female commissioners in this exalted committee. We had not seen each other for many years and then started making contact again when our hair turned grey and the act of retelling old stories became increasingly rewarding. Only our treasurer was missing. It was a wonderful occasion to test our memory of the joys and nightmares of that intense time of organizing and managing together; it was also a test of spontaneous recall of names and people who populated our various subcommittees and the dramatic events that now seem exceedingly funny.

My memory was probably the worst and I can blame it on the crash or on the fact that at the time I had fallen in love with someone from outside the student society who had little patience with our vision of grandeur and accompanying follies. Since I saw everything through his eyes (love is blind as far as one’s own eyes go) I erased many of the memories, good and bad; but over cocktails and a wonderful dinner last night things began to come back into focus. My stops in Holland are a great excuse to meet up again, and continue the telling of stories, interrupted for so many years.

Being in Holland is a complex emotional experience for me. Although on some level I am home, I am not in the country I left some 30 years ago. At that time Holland was mostly a white, Calvinistic country. Now, people who used to be foreigners hold Dutch passports and speak Dutch quite fluently. There is of course resentment about that. A recent book by Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam, describes the context of Theo van Gogh’s murder and the changed make-up of Dutch society. This morning I witnessed a scene that warmed my heart. A cleaner, probably from Turkey, rolled his cleaning cart into a waiting area where one black man was sitting. He approached the gentleman and spoke to him in perfect English, “Sir, are you from Africa?” followed immediately by the words, “You are very welcome in Holland.” The two two engaged then in conversation while I walked out of earshot. It made my day.

I got my upgrade for the flight to Dubai after only two, very short, lines. It still required some back and forth and I cannot get anything arranged for the return trip, but I am happy with what I got now. And now on to Dubai.

I am back in winter time in more than one way. Holland hasn’t gone over to daylight savings time yet and it is damp and cold. The daffodils have been beaten down by a freak snowstorm on Easter Sunday. It is a sad sight to see these flattened flowers just at the height of their bloom. Only the large fields still look spectacular from the train.

The flight from Boston to Amsteram was harder than I had expected. It seemed that the space between chairs had gotten even smaller since I last sat in the back. An obese gentleman across the aisle could not lower his tray table because of the size of his belly and had to content himself with a slanted table, eating with one hand and holding on to his food items and drinks to keep them from sliding off the tray on the ground. I admired his good spirits. I once read that patience is the ability to wait without complaining. He was a patient man.

I ran into my ex colleague and good friend Barbara who was on her way to Malawi. We had some catching up to do; the last time we saw Barbara and Steve was when we were still patients and they came to cheer us up, sometime last fall or summer.

I slept fitfully during the short night and woke up with a swollen right foot and back pain, the kind I suspect Axel has all the time. It made me wonder whether he can actually make the trip across the Atlantic next month to celebrate a few important family events. Upon arrival I decided to investigate whether I could get an upgrade for any of the remaining stretches of flight. I spent the next hour standing in various lines. It was a frustrating experience because each time I made it to the front of a line I was given information that turned out to be incomplete when I arrived at the front of the next line. And each time there was another line. I gave up and tried to do things by cellphone but the experience repeated itself; all to no avail. I was told to try my luck on Friday when luck returned and I secured the much coveted upgrade for the flight to Dubai.

After my arrival I took a taxi to Aalsmeer. My driver was from Afghanistan and was very angry at first. There had been a police trap at the airport to catch drivers who had not paid their various taxes. The trap had gotten him stuck for several hours at the airport and he needed a very long ride to make up for lost time. My ride was much too short and hardly worth his while. But once he found out I was on my way to his country and actually spoke a whopping three words of Dari he thawed and we parted on good terms and he with a nice tip. He never wanted to live in Holland but was ordered there. He wants to go back to Afghanistan ‘when it is quiet.’ We both knew this may never happen.

In Aalsmeer Sietske had made my bed before she left for France. Piet received me with a few cups of coffee and a breakast of good dutch bread and then we each went our way. I took the train to Leiden University Medical Center to attend the graduation of my nephew Reinout. We were nearly complete, with me and my sister being the aunties who came from afar (Ankie came from Brussels). Only one of his (paternal) uncles was missing. With that we had surpassed the allotted 9 seats reserved for the graduates’ families but no one noticed. It was a very formal event with doctors in black velvet robes and caps and each graduate pledging the Hippocratic Oath (alternative: Promise if you did not want God Almighty to help you). My nephew choose not to ask God for assistance. After that the presiding authority presented a 5 minute biographical sketch for each of the brand new doctors. In a room with bad acoustics and 15 candidates all deserving equal air time, this was an exercise in patience, especially since it was over lunch time. We all made it through, solemnly listening to the top doc’s acknowledgments of each graduate’s unique and impressive student career. For some of us it would have been more bearable if we had actually understood what he said.

Something funny happened after the ceremony was over – the graduates and their families were offered a drink and some snacks in a room too small to hold us all. Quickly the families spread out across town for celebratory lunches. Ankie, her husband, my friend Theta and I found ourselves excluded from our nephew’s lunch arrangement for reasons we did not quite get. It stung a little bit but we got over that and ended up having a very nice and quiet lunch with just the four of us. As a result I never got to say goodbye to anyone, as we had expected to be part of the celebration over lunch. Families can be funny.