A Man and His Dog

After a few days of rain, today broke crisp and clear and seemed like the perfect day to grab a 20 minute noon walk with Maury, the dog. I’m not surprised by the rain; after all it is the rainy season, which as near as I can tell runs from about August 15 to June 30 annually. But the sun is shining today so it was a good day to get out and enjoy it. Maury and I took one of our favorite treks, straight up our street and over a canal until we get to a river, and then we walked along a dike above the river until crossing another bridge and heading for home. Along our way today we encountered:

A couple arguing loudly in Dutch who slammed their front door shut when they became aware that we were passing. Some things translate into any culture.

31 sheep. Counting 31 sheep makes me yawn.

Two cows.

One noisy, lonesome duck. I felt a great empathy for him, because I’ve been feeling like a noisy, lonesome duck lately. More on that in my next post.

Two evil, malicious, vile, sneaky, snarling cats.

Ten other dogs. Maury greeted each one with an anxious blend of sniffing, posturing and curiosity, wondering if this is friend or foe. It occurred to me today that he and I are not too much different, except thankfully I don’t do the sniffing (although the pheromone research people say that I do). I’m just much better than Maury at hiding my anxiety.

A woman dressed as a Japanese Geisha on a bicycle. Someone recently told me a great past time here is to play, “What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen on a bike?” This is definitely an entry.

Maury is my steady companion, the only friend I have who greets me every day with fresh enthusiasm. Isn’t there a prayer to the effect of “God, help me be the person my dog thinks I am”? I wrote this poem in Maury’s honor and I hope you enjoy it.

Blessed are the Meek

Sometimes
at five or six am
when I am asleep on my side
you hop on the bed
and lie down spine to spine with me
sticking your head into my pillow
snorting and squirming
into the bouquet of dead skin cells, sweat and hair follicles
you find there.

An unhappy voice comes
from the other side of the bed saying,
he’s rutting on you, you are both disgusting,
STOP IT.

But I like it.
It sort of feels like a massage
and besides
it’s a reminder that,
despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary,
old boy,
there is still a wild beast somewhere deep inside both of us.

Odds and Ends

I need to report that I have a Dutch driver’s license in my wallet! In addition to that, I have a new train identity card. These join my already existing Dutch residency card to make a tri-fecta of cards adorned with the “Worst Picture of Me Ever Taken.”

My dad asked me the other day, “When do you sleep?” I told him that like any normal person I sleep at night and occasionally in the afternoon at my desk. Then I said, “Why do you ask?” He said, “Because you seem to post your blog entries at weird hours.” A little explanation might clear this up. The Google folks that run this blog site are based someplace on the US West Coast and all blog entries are actually posted 9 hours before what the site says. If the math is too hard to figure out, just rest assured that I sleep at night.

Ik Weet Het Niet

I got my haircut this morning. (In Journalism school at Michigan State I learned the importance of strong leads – first sentences that grab your attention and make you want to keep reading. This is not a strong lead. My favorite lead for a sports story was “Babe Herman has never doubled into a triple play, but he did triple into a double play today, which ought to count for something.” )

I’ve needed a haircut for a month or so. My hair was starting to curl over my ears, and before long I would have had sidelocks like an Orthodox Jew. All I needed was the hat. But I kept putting off getting my hair cut because it was something new that I would have to figure out. (By the way, I am getting my hair cut very short these days, and as I was sitting in the chair this morning I contemplated that over my lifetime my haircut has followed the Three Stooges: I started off as Moe, evolved into Larry, and now am Curly. Nyuk, yuk, yuk.)

“Ik weet het niet” means “I don’t know” and those words come out of my mouth more since we’ve moved than ever before. I didn’t know how to get my hair cut here before this morning. I still don’t know how much I weigh, how tall I am, what my shoe size is, what any of my other sizes are, how to get the cable company to understand what doesn’t work on my TV, and on and on. I just don’t know. I can’t tell you how many calls Gretchen and I have had to make to our Dutch friends that started, “We don’t know how to ….”

I was raised and educated to be the smartest guy in the room. I went to seminary where I studied Greek and Hebrew so that I could read things that no one else could. I have prided myself on being reasonably intelligent for a long time. And my grasp of useless trivia is especially good. I know that Babe Pinelli was the home plate umpire when Don Larsen threw his perfect game in the 1956 World Series, that Hannibal Hamlin from Maine was Abraham Lincoln’s first vice president, and that John Ritter’s father sang the theme song to the movie “High Noon.”

But I live now in a place where none of that matters. What I don’t know is astounding. For beginners, I don't know the native tongue of 99% of the people I regularly encounter. And while I am grieving the loss of my intelligence, I am beginning to see that maybe this new posture of not knowing can be an advantage.

This weekend one of our new staff people asked me a question and I said, “I don’t know” and she said, “that’s what I like about you as our leader,” and I said, “you like the fact that your regional director is clueless?” and she laughed and said, “no, I like that you don’t pretend to know it all and try to control everyone and every situation. You give us the space to figure things out.” I took that as a compliment.

I read a book recently that was about the shift from modern to postmodern thought, and one of the points the author made is that while the modern world was all about intelligence, the postmodern world is all about creativity. Intelligence, he said, is mastery over a body of knowledge. Creativity is the ability to recognize the patterns emerging from an environment and respond appropriately.

Here’s an example. Imagine you are on a train in Europe and the train stops at a station and an announcement comes on in a language you don’t understand. Everyone gets off the train. What would you do? Get off the train, of course. Then what would you do? Follow the crowd, of course. The crowd all walks to a tram stop, gets on a tram, and takes that tram to the next station down the line, where they then get on another train bound for your original destination. This isn’t hypothetical, it happened to Gretchen and me a couple of weeks ago. We actually can understand some Dutch at this point, so when the announcement came on I said, “I think there is a problem with this train” and Gretchen said, “I thought they said something about strawberries.” Is the train broken or are they about to serve strawberries to every passenger? When in doubt, we step back and watch what others do. I have always been taught the opposite – to make things happen on my own, but now I am learning to recognize the patterns and trust the wisdom of others.

Which leaves me pondering many questions today.

The great cathedrals of Europe sit mostly empty on Sunday mornings. They have more visitors during the week from tourists wanting to see the art and architecture than pilgrims searching for God at worship these days. What might we conclude from that? People vote with their feet, the old saying goes, and the people have voted.

Is this a different way to think of creativity for you? I guess I always thought creativity was creation out of nothing, but I see this definition as creation based on what others are doing around you. As I reflect on that, it seems more probable than creation out of nothing.

Is it okay for you to say, “I don’t know”? Is it okay for a leader to say that?

What might it mean to trust the wisdom of others? Throw that into the European context for a moment – are you Americans aware of how this side of the world views you? One way to put it would be to say that Europeans generally don’t think Americans have the ability to trust in any wisdom other than their own.

What patterns do you see emerging around us in the postmodern world?

Here’s to creativity. The words of the now forgotten Five Man Electrical Band seem appropriate:

Signs, signs everywhere a sign
Can’t you read the signs?

Helsinki and Henri

It’s been a whirlwind week. Gretchen and I had the full Ryanair experience last Friday, flying from Eindhoven to Nykoping, Sweden. Ryanair is like nothing else in the world. You use it because it is ridiculously cheap, but cheapness costs something. In Ryanair’s case it costs a bit of your dignity. Everyone lines up because there are no assigned seats and I inevitably moo and baa in line. I can’t help it. Treat me like a farm animal and I feel compelled to respond in kind. And it costs time. Ryanair defines Nykoping as Stockholm, but grab a map and look - it is an hour and a half away from Stockholm. Skavsta airport in Nykoping is a classic Ryanair facility – some World War II relic that they have more or less resuscitated because they can fly in and out without paying big fees. As near as I could tell, the only other planes flying out from there were on an airline called “Wizz,” which was flying to Gdansk, and left me imagining conversations. “Sorry, Bob, I can’t join you for the meeting this afternoon, I’ve got the 4:15 Wizz to Gdansk.”

So we took a train to Eindhoven, a bus from Eindhoven Central Station to the airport, a plane to Sweden, and a car to Vallentuna, where we were staying. All of this so we could ride on a boat. Of course to get on the boat we took another bus, a train, and a subway. If only we’d managed to ride our bikes or found a rickshaw we would have covered about every form of transportation.

After a full day of meetings last Saturday (you can see my Swedish friend Daniel showed up for the first meeting wearing a tee shirt with my picture on it!), we got on a boat in Stockholm Sunday afternoon to sail across the Baltic Sea to Helsinki. The boat is sort of a cruise ship and sort of a ferry. The cabins are small, but at least you have beds, a shower and a toilet. The ship is filled with restaurants, bars, a huge store, video poker and there was even a “fun center” that featured five Swedes in long dresses and white leisure suits singing and dancing. ABBA lives on, my friends! No, it wasn’t the real ABBA, just a cheap Swedish imitation, but I did see that in a few weeks Gerry and the Pacemakers are playing on this boat. You have to be a real trivia freak like me to know Gerry and the Pacemakers. They didn’t quite make it as big as another band from Liverpool. These days Gerry and the rest of the band probably have pacemakers.

We took two young couples who serve on our staff in Sweden with us, along with their new babies. Gretchen got a bit of a “baby fix” and we all enjoyed our time together. We had seven hours in Helsinki, enough time to see some wonderful architecture and be able to say, “We’ve been to Finland!” Look again at the map you got out and you’ll see that if the captain made a wrong turn we easily could have wound up in Russia. I’ve put a couple of Helsinki photos above – I’m always interested in churches and a unique thing in Finland is they have both strong Lutheran and Russian Orthodox influences. What you see is the oldest wooden church in Helsinki, which is Lutheran, and also an impressive Russian Orthodox church, close to where our boat docked. And you can see we were very, very fortunate to be there on a beautiful fall day. We also visited a church literally blasted out of stone called Temppeliaukio, but I would have needed a helicopter to really capture that well on film.

We went on the trip to scout this out as a potential regional staff retreat location – my vision is to do a floating retreat someday. There are similar ships that sail from Stockholm to Riga and Tallinn, and who doesn’t want to go to Latvia or Estonia? I do.

We headed back home on Wednesday, with our Ryanair experience this time highlighted by two drunks in the row in front of us. Drunkenness is obnoxious and pitiful in any culture. At least these guys didn’t appear to be on the verge of vomiting, like the drunk sitting next to Ken Knipp and me on the Ryanair flight we took together last April. Well, technically the drunk guy wasn’t sitting next to me. I made sure Ken was next to him and I sat coiled, prepared to leap out into the aisle regardless of the seat belt sign. Ken was ready to take one for the team if necessary. I was ready to save myself. Ken and I have had some great adventures together over the years, like the now legendary day he invited me to go check out a resort in Southwest Michigan with him for a possible family retreat. The place turned out to be “men only” and we were mistaken for a couple looking to go on vacation. That was a bit awkward.

Anyway, Gretchen and I arrived home Wednesday evening and within a couple of hours welcomed two Norwegians who were coming to town for our training group meeting this weekend. In addition to the Norwegians, we had three folks from Spain, one from France and one from Portugal join us. These folks are our first and second year staff, the hope of our future, and I loved our time together. I thought it was time well spent, but I don’t exactly have the most objective point of view about the whole thing. There is a certain ego boost involved in having people fly in from all over the continent to listen to you drone on for a few days.

We spent time with a great Henri Nouwen book called, “In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership,” and I think I’ve probably read this short gem ten or fifteen times. Let me try to sum up the three things that I tried to teach our new staff from the Nouwen book this weekend.

1. That even though we feel the temptation and expectation from the world around us to be relevant and successful, to accomplish or do something; the simple question Jesus asks us is not “what are you doing for me?” but “do you love me?” Nouwen says it like this: The question is not: How many people take you seriously? How much are you going to accomplish? Can you show some results? But: Are you in love with Jesus? Perhaps another way of asking the question would be: Do you know the incarnate God? In our world of loneliness and despair, there is an enormous need for men and women who know the heart of God, a heart that forgives, that reaches out and wants to heal.

2. That even though our world and Western culture especially values individualism and the self-made hero, ministry is a communal and mutual experience. There are great dangers when we allow ourselves to be isolated and alone. Another way to say this is “you are as sick as your secrets,” and only by finding safe places for confession in community can the dark forces that would undo us be brought to light and seen for what they really are.

3. That the greatest mystery of Christian leadership is found in following the example of Jesus Christ, who did not cling to his divine power but, as the book of Philippians says, “made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant.” The model we follow for Christian leadership is Servant Leadership. The temptation we face is the temptation to power. Nouwen says: What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life…I am not speaking about a psychologically weak leadership in which the Christian leader is simply the passive victim of the manipulations of his milieu. No, I am speaking of a leadership in which power is constantly abandoned in favor of love. It is a true spiritual leadership.

Our Norwegians and Spaniards and all the rest have headed home now, and Gretchen and I are enjoying a relaxed Sunday afternoon. It’s been a good week.

Vive la France

Praz de Lys was beautiful this weekend – we were often in clouds or sometimes above clouds and it added a sense of mystery to the whole place. Imagine being on the side of an alp in the mist and the only other sign of life besides your own breathing is the sound of cowbells coming across the valley. Here are some memories from this weekend.

I was the only American in a group of about ten other folks and our meetings were in French. At one point one of them asked me in English, “Would it help you if we spoke slower?” I laughed and said, “The only thing that could help me would be a brain transplant from someone who can speak French.”

At another point I decided to show off my French skills by saying, “Sont des mots qui vont tres bien ensemble.” (As in “Michelle, my belle”) I thought I had them fooled for a second until my friend Vincent said, “It’s funny you learned French from the Beatles because I learned English from the Beatles.” He then went on to say, “I can’t believe the same guys could go from writing I Want to Hold Your Hand to A Day in the Life in four years.” That’s an insightful comment. Then he said, “A Day in the Life is ….” and he used a French phrase that we don’t have an English equivalent for (Amanda Munroe – do you have any idea what he would have said?) He explained it to me as “having nothing that led up to it and nothing that could follow it.” Sort of like “one of a kind” or “singular” maybe, but more powerful than that. I’m not sure. Anyway, it was a nice intercultural moment. Vincent went on to tell me about the day he shook hands with Ringo Starr in the Geneva airport, and I told them my theory of the Beatles – that Paul was a musical genius, John a creative and philosophical genius, George the spiritual heart and Ringo the mascot. The French folks stopped for a moment to contemplate the depth of what I was saying and take in this new truth. There were a lot of “hmmms” in French accents around the table. I like France.

At another point in our meetings, when a new idea was presented, one of them said, “I am very disturbalized by this.” That’s my new word of the week.

I learned there are no French words for leadership, fellowship, or discipleship. “We don’t have a lot of ‘ship’ words,” my translator (and our staff person in Lyon) Marie-Aline said to me. They don’t have a word for leader the way we use that term in Young Life, either. I asked what a volunteer leader is called in France and she said simply a volunteer. That loses something in the translation. But then I asked what the team leader is called and she said “animator” and I thought that was a tremendous word.

In the morning they all poured their coffee into cereal bowls and sat dipping bread into their bowls of coffee, before picking up the bowls and drinking. If I could have remembered the term Vincent used in reference to A Day in the Life, I would have used it to describe their morning coffee ritual.

I got confused by the kissing etiquette. In the Netherlands, it is right cheek, left cheek, right cheek. In Belgium it is one time on the right cheek. But in France, where the bise is synonymous with their culture, I noticed some people were starting on the left while others started on the right. I called time out and demanded an explanation from the rules committee. Turns out the bise differs according to geographic region. “Do you ever get mixed up and wind up kissing on the lips?” I asked. “Oui.” Ooh lah lah.

ALL THINGS COME TOGETHER

As I left for the airport, I had the nagging thought that I was forgetting something. I even got out of the car before leaving for the train station and said, “I need to get my phone,” but it was in my pocket, so I got back in the car and left with an uneasy feeling. I fell asleep on the train and it wasn’t until I was in the airport that I realized I had forgotten my passport. After a few moments of panic and self- flagellation, I called Gretchen and asked her to get my passport and come to Amsterdam with it. Maybe, just maybe, if she could get on a train quickly enough, she could get there in time to save me.

Then I approached the KLM counter and told the woman there I had a big problem. She cheerfully said, “Let me see if I can help you.” I love KLM! “Do you have a driver’s license?” I pulled out the Xerox copy of my driver’s license they gave me at city hall in Dordrecht last week. I never finished the driver’s license story, so here goes. I got a letter last week from the medical director of the CBR saying that she had determined I need to wear glasses to drive. My family has known that since the summer when I was in 6th grade and I came into a room and looked at a pair of shoes in the corner and asked, “whose dog is that?” They took me to the eye doctor the next day and I’ve had glasses on since. I got the letter from the CBR on Tuesday last week, in time to take it to city hall to formally apply for a driver’s license before my Michigan license expired. I only had to go their twice on Wednesday morning last week because the first person I talked to made me get a letter from Young Life in the Netherlands about my work status that the second person didn’t ask for, but that only makes a long story longer, so let’s keep moving. They took my 53.20 euro, my documentation, and my Michigan driver’s license and told me in four weeks I will receive a call or possibly a letter telling me I can go pick up my Dutch driver’s license. They then photocopied my Michigan license and gave that back to me and said, “This is your driver’s license now, it’s okay to drive with this.”

So, the woman at the KLM counter said, “Do you have a driver’s license?” and I pulled the photocopy of my license out of my wallet. “This isn’t a license,” she said. “It’s a photocopy of a license.”

“I realize that,” I said, “but this is what your government has told me to use for a license.”

“Do you have any other identification?” she asked. I pulled out my Dutch Residency Card (see blog entry “The Worst Picture of Me Ever Taken.”) She looked and winced, but then recovered and said, “I need to show this to my colleague.” Off she went to a back room where I imagined a group of people doubling over in laughter. I think I could see them pulling back a window shade and peeking out at me. Before long she came out and said, “It’s okay, you can use this.”

I called Gretchen and asked where she was. She was sitting on a train about to leave Central Station in Dordrecht, so she was able to get off the train before it left town. Whew!

Off I went, praying that the folks in Switzerland would agree with the folks in Amsterdam. They did. The woman at the counter in Geneva even said, “Are you just going back to the Netherlands – you aren’t going on to any other countries?” “Yes,” I said. She looked empathetically at me and said, “All you want to do is go home, isn’t it?” “Yes,” I said, “that’s all I want to do.” I was like Dorothy in Oz.

So, what have I learned this week? That you can drive in Europe with a photocopy of an expired American license. That Americans don’t need passports to cross European borders by air. That French people can be fun and interesting and they don’t necessarily dislike Americans. And that, no matter how stupid, hopeless and disturbalizing the situation I create, Gretchen is willing to bail me out if necessary.

I Hung One More Year On The Line

Do you remember that Paul Simon song that begins, "Yesterday it was my birthday, I hung one more year on the line”? Doesn’t matter if you do. Yesterday it was my birthday and I hung one more year on the line. I’m aching a bit.

Not from my advancing age, though. I’m aching with some mixture of nostalgia, regret, culture shock, loneliness, and mid-life crisis. Let me try to explain.

“People are wishing you Happy Birthday on your Facebook page,” Gretchen said. “You need to check it.” Well, truth be told, Jesse set up a Facebook page for me about a year ago and I’ve looked at it maybe a total of three times. I would have looked at it more, but I forgot the password. Anyway, I got the password from him and looked for the first time in seven months or more. I should have been looking at it earlier. There were all sorts of people there – people from high school, people from Michigan State, people from Young Life in Holland, Michigan, and from Central Reformed Church in Grand Rapids. There was the little girl who played Mayor Shinn’s daughter in the Flint Southwestern High School production of The Music Man in December, 1975. I was Charlie Cowell, the anvil salesman. (But he doesn’t know the territory!) Her Facebook page said she is a prison guard in the south and her greatest joys in life are her grandchildren! How did that happen? There was a kid I took to Young Life camp 22 years ago that we nicknamed “Tiger” because the first night we were there he danced around the cabin in tiger-striped shorts to a song called “Girls, Girls, Girls.” He’s pictured in a business suit on Facebook. There was the guy I performed “Who’s on First” with in high school. There were people in Hawaii and Germany. There was a guy I remember not being all that nice to when I was younger, and there he was, 35 years later, wishing me Happy Birthday. Facebook is like a giant “come home, all is forgiven” poster. As I read these people’s Facebook pages, looked at their pictures, and contemplated their lives, I felt all sorts of feelings flooding in and through me. Most of what I felt was regret for letting them go.

You are in a sort of “review your life” frame of mind on your birthday, anyway. I started reviewing mine. I don’t have any regrets about the places we’ve lived or the decisions I’ve made or the overall direction my life has gone in. But I have real regret about walking away from relationships. And now here I am, on another continent, 4000 miles away from most of the people who have defined my life.

Place is important and God knows I’ve been seeing a lot of them. In a couple of hours, I will get on a plane and fly to Geneva and then drive down to the Praz de Lys in the French Alps. That’s what the picture is of. Can you believe I get to go to spend the weekend at a place like that? Next weekend Gretchen and I are getting on a boat in Stockholm and sailing to Helsinki. I have to pinch myself to know I’m not dreaming. But as fun and exciting as seeing all these places is, it is people that make life worth living.

Patrick Swayze died this week, and to honor the occasion Dutch TV preempted their regular programming to show a bunch of his movies. Not to speak ill of the recently deceased, but as an actor Patrick Swayze falls somewhere on my list of favorites right between Charles Bronson and Sylvester Stallone. Which is another way of saying not very high, but at least he’s above Gary Busey and Keanu Reeves. Just imagine if Patrick Swayze made a movie with Gary Busey and Keanu Reeves. Oh, that’s right, they did make a really dumb movie together about surfing bank robbers, and the Dutch showed it last week. Bhodi and Johnny Utah? Real people have names like that? Come on. They also showed Ghost and Gretchen and I wound up watching it. Whoopi Goldberg was great in that movie. Anyway, we’re watching Ghost and the thought that occurred to me was “if Patrick Swayze is dead and so in love with Demi Moore, why is he trying so hard to keep her alive? Wouldn’t he be more fulfilled if she died also? Then they’d be together.” I know I am thinking way too much about the meaning of Ghost, but it started me thinking about heaven. I hope the promise of heaven is real. I believe in it, mostly I think because I want to believe in it. I don’t have any evidence for it beyond the Bible, but I’d rather live believing in it than not. Will we know each other in heaven? ls heaven where my Facebook page goes from being virtual to real, and I will be connected to all these people from different stages and places in my life? Or will being in the presence of God so fill us that nothing else matters? Will I care one whit about the life I’ve left behind?

Which started me thinking about Bill Segrist. Bill died about ten days after we moved here, and I had promised him I would preach at his funeral, so I hopped on a plane and went back to Michigan within two weeks of starting my new life. That was a bit surreal – outside of the funeral I really didn’t want people to know I was back, because it seemed way too anti-climactic. You shouldn’t show up again two weeks after people make a big fuss over you going away. Anyway, one of the great things about Bill was that he never let people go. He stayed connected, and he sure didn’t need Facebook to make that happen. What I tried to say at his funeral was that I never knew anyone who was so unwilling to let go of people and who was so willing to be there when things were rough. When someone is in trouble, a lot of us give that person space – but Bill would move in instead of out. On the night of Gretchen’s stroke in 1985, it was Bill who was still there after everyone else had gone home. He was given six months to live three years before he died. I think he fought cancer so hard and effectively because he just wasn’t willing to let go of the people in his life. I want to be more like Bill.

We finished my birthday with a Dutch party. About eight people came over and congratulated me on having a birthday. The women all kissed me three times. That’s not a bad custom! We talked and laughed and spent several hours together. I confirmed that Dutch people don’t move around as much as Americans do. Most people here live in the town where they were born and live close to their parents and extended family. If they do move, they only live an hour or so away from each other, because the country is so small. Maybe they are on to something. Maybe they are smarter than us. But I also thought, these Dutch friends are here now and are enriching my life. I’m going to be with French friends later today and with Swedish friends next week. All of these people are enriching my life and I wouldn’t know any of them if I’d stayed on Windsor Lane in Flint, Michigan.

So I started with the poet Paul Simon and I’ll end with the philosopher John Lennon:
All these place have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I’ve loved them all.

What I Want For My Birthday

Last April my immigration lawyer explained that with my “Highly Skilled Migrant Status” I would be eligible for the “30% ruling,” which allows me to exclude 30% of my income from Dutch taxes AND allows me to exchange my Michigan driver’s license for a Dutch one. I was ecstatic, because I have heard horror stories from Americans trying to get European licenses. It is usually very hard and very expensive – most Americans cannot pass a European driving test. How do I know this? Because I watch Reality TV! Once I was watching a show in England about people trying to get their licenses (I know it sounds boring but it was gripping) and it showed a woman going for her driver’s test. The first thing the examiner asked her to do was check the brake fluid. Then he made her change a tire. Then she had to get in the wrong side of the car and drive on the wrong side of the road. Okay, that last part was just because the show was set in England, but check the brake fluid? “Blimey,” I exclaimed to the telly in an attempt to sound British, “I’m not exactly Mr. Goodwrench here.”

A friend in Spain has told me his license cost him over 1000 Euro in driving lessons, exams, and government forms. Not me. I’ve been imagining walking into the Dutch version of the Secretary of State’s office (we don’t have a DMV in Michigan), tossing them my Michigan license and them handing me a Dutch license along with a complimentary pair of tiny wooden shoes to hang from my rear view mirror. Oh foolish man. What previous experience have I had with anything here that would make me think this would be easy? First, I had to clear the immigration hurdles and get accepted as a Highly Skilled Migrant. That took six weeks, cost a few hundred Euro, and involved about twenty pages of documents - including things from the US affixed with apostilles, which had me visiting county courthouses in Ottawa and Ingham counties and going to the Secretary of State’s office every day the week before we left. Then we had to file for the 30% ruling. Another bunch of paperwork, more money, and another month, but yes, this was also granted at the beginning of September.

So I naively emailed my lawyer (and it is naïve to email your lawyer, because he bills you for 12 minutes for each email at 180 Euro an hour, or 36 Euro an email, or about $50 an email…Lawyer: Here is the information you need. Me: Thanks. Lawyer: You are welcome. Bill - $100…when oh when am I going to learn NOT to say thanks because it costs me $50 every time he says “you’re welcome.”) Where was I? Oh yeah, so I naively emailed my lawyer and asked “How do I exchange my driver’s license now that I have the 30% ruling?” I am still thinking I can go someplace and trade.

He gleefully writes back saying thanks for the chance to send you another $50 email and here are the steps you need to take. Basically, I have to go to the Stadswinkel ( which more or less is City Hall but translates literally as “city store”) and pay 20 Euro to get a form to mail to the Central Bureau Rijvaardigheidbewijzen (any Central Reformed people who read this – you can start thanking God I am not doing the spelling bee this year because I have a whole lot of new words that would make you cringe). The CBR people are in charge of driver’s licenses. After completing their form I have to mail it back to them, then they send it to the RDW (Rijksdienst voor het Wegverkeer, good but not quite as exciting as Rijvaardigheidbewijzen) who are the people in charge of the roads. After approval by the CBR and RDW then I take the forms they send me along with a passport photo (see blog entry called “The Worst Picture of Me Ever Taken”), 53 Euro, a copy of my 30% ruling AND my valid Michigan driver’s license and in a few weeks they will send me a new Dutch license in the mail.

Are you still with me? (The Dutch people who read this blog are thinking “What’s the big deal?” while the Americans are thinking “This is why I should never leave home.”) I get the first form from the CBR. For some reason they went ahead and made it in Dutch, but I can read enough of it to know I have a serious problem. It was a medical history questionnaire and it’s one of those forms where you are supposed to answer “no” to every question. You know the questions. Are you criminally insane? Do you have narcolepsy? Do you have an attention span so short that sitting through a traffic light is going to be a problem? But right there on number 8 I can see in Dutch it’s asking if I’ve ever had an operation of one of my eyes. Time for a moral dilemma. I don’t like to brag about it, but I am legally blind in my left eye. 26 years ago I had a detached retina and had eye surgery and the result is I can see out of my eye with glasses but without them I can’t see squat. I could lie and make my life easier (which is pretty much why people lie anyway) or I can tell the truth. I guess you know what I did. (Would I be writing about this if I’d gone ahead and lied?)

Did I mention it’s my birthday next Friday? I’m not saying this to entice you to send presents (not that’s there’s anything wrong with that), I’m saying this because – by some fluke of timing – my Michigan driver’s license expires this year on my birthday. I have to have a valid driver’s license to make this whole thing work. I didn’t think this was going to be a problem in June when I started working on it, but now it is September. I am starting to think God was looking the other way on this one and wondering if I might need to jump on a plane and go back to Michigan for a day to renew my license before next Friday.

So I fill out the form honestly and late Tuesday I receive a letter from the CBR telling me I need to see an eye doctor. What are the chances that that’s going to happen quickly? But miracle of miracles on Wednesday I call the Albert Schweitzer Ziekenhuis in Dordrecht to make an appointment with an eye doctor and they say I can come in at 8am on Thursday. So I go get my eyes examined by a Dutch eye doctor this morning and 45 Euro later he finds that I am blind in my left eye but with my glasses I can see fine and approves me to have a license for the next ten years. Hoping to speed this along, I get the idea of taking the form personally to the CBR in Rijswijk. We have to go to Rijswijk anyway, because Gretchen’s residency card has come in (mine took six weeks, hers took three months; mine is good for five years, hers is good for one year. “I love socialism,” he said sarcastically.) and that’s also the city where the immigration office is. We hop on the train after the exam and head to Rijswijk. I have dark glasses on, because my eyes are still dilated. We get Gretchen’s residency card (see blog entry “The Worst Picture of Me Ever Taken” for further explanation. I promised Gretchen I would not post this picture on the internet. I did not promise I would not comment on it. Simply stated she looks like Bela Lugosi after a night out on the town. I try calling her “Stella Lugosi” but she fails to see the humor.) Then we head around the corner to the CBR offices. I stumble a few times on some curbs because the sun is shining very brightly and my pupils are still dilated. Gretchen takes my hand and begins to lead me on, and I am led by the hand wearing dark glasses into the office where I want to get a driver’s license.

But it goes well there. The receptionist promises to call another woman “just after her lunch break” on my behalf…but then she changes her mind and actually picks up the phone and makes the call! And the other woman says “send his form up” so she puts it into a vacuum tube and off it goes. The first woman says “she’ll try to put it into the system today or tomorrow” and gives me a phone number to call next week to see if they’ve acted on it. I might actually hear something before next Friday!

We go home and I have another idea. I decide to see if I can contact the Secretary of State’s office in Michigan and ask for help. I see on the web site where I can send Terry Lynn Land an email, and I do so. But I notice that really these emails are for telling Terry Lynn Land your concerns about the Secretary of State’s office. And then on the side of the page I see “Out-of-State Services” and find a place where I can call to request an extension on my driver’s license for six months! I call. I explain my situation to a woman in Lansing. She says, “Well, I can’t help you if you don’t live in Michigan.” Apparently I misunderstood the nature of “Out-of-State Services.” I try to sound desperate. I make sure she understands it’s not like I’m on vacation in Toledo. She begins to soften. She asks if I have any utility bills in my name in Michigan. Sure I do. I have bills on two continents. She starts to tell me how I am going to have to send these to her when she suddenly cracks and says, “Oh, what the heck, I’m just going to do it for you. I am going to give you six months but after that we are not going to do anything more for you. Make sure those people give you a license in the next six months.” Don’t you love Midwesterners? So, I have a six month extension of my license on the way, and I might not even need it, because maybe, just maybe, the CBR is going to come through and I can get to City Hall by next Friday with all the documents I need.

Take that, Peter Stuyvesant!

Amanda and Anne

Our daughter Amanda came from Germany last week to visit and to celebrate her 22nd birthday with us. We had a real Dutch birthday celebration, which included our Dutch friends congratulating Gretchen and me on our daughter’s birthday. We don’t do that in the US, and we are poorer for it. It makes you think about your role in your child’s life. I started thinking about what we’d contributed beyond biology to her. What had we done as parents that helped make Amanda such a remarkable young woman? She’s twenty-two and living on her third continent, working for the German church, searching for grad schools, and is very much intent on making a difference with her life.

We are blessed to have two great children who are contributing in positive ways to the world around them. I use the word “blessed” very intentionally, because it seems to me that Amanda and Jesse are people who have temperaments, skills and abilities far beyond anything positive Gretchen and I ever gave to them. We are blessed. But having said that, I have been thinking about one positive thing we did with our kids that we can take some credit for.

We read to them. Both of us loved to read to them and both kids loved to be read to. We read long after most parents probably quit reading to their children – I think we read to them until they were leaving elementary school and maybe even into junior high. I have very vivid memories of Jesse as a boy laughing his head off to “The Wind and the Willows;” of crying with Amanda when we reached the end of “Charlotte’s Web;” and both of them really enjoying “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “The Lord of the Rings.” We loved “The Trumpet of the Swan” and “A Little Princess” and “The Secret Garden.” We tended to go for the classics, and Amanda and I remember reading “The Diary of Anne Frank” together when Amanda was about nine or ten years old.

She’s asked me since why I chose to read a book with such a dark theme to her when she was so young. I don’t have a great answer for that. I just felt she was old enough to learn some of the horrible truth about what it means to be human. Beyond that I am not sure.

Last Wednesday, I had a meeting in Amsterdam and Amanda and Gretchen rode along. We all headed to the Anne Frank house afterwards. It seemed an appropriate thing to do with my daughter, since I’d introduced her to Anne Frank so many years ago. This was my second time through the house, and both times when I’ve visited the overwhelming thought I’ve had is “this really happened – it isn’t just some story from a book or movie – and it really happened right here, not so long ago.” The house is dark, somber, and sad, with the blackout paper still covering the windows and the rooms all bare because Otto Frank wanted the world to see what the Nazis left behind.

Anne Frank has become one of the most well-known faces of the Holocaust. At one point in the tour there are some words on a wall from a Holocaust survivor who says, “One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.”

So when my daughter was a young girl, I chose to expose her to another girl, to introduce the whole subject of the Holocaust to her.

There is a film clip playing in one of the rooms of Otto Frank talking many years later about returning from Auschwitz(he was the only one of the eight people hiding in the secret annex to survive) and the shock he had when first reading his daughter’s diary. He knew she kept her diary, but didn’t know the depth of feeling she had about so many different things. He had felt close to her, but after reading the diary he said that he reached the conclusion that most parents really don’t know their children.

Fathers and daughters. Great and complicated stuff. A Jewish father tries to hide his family during the war. His bookish daughter keeps a diary. I am sure Otto Frank never imagined that he would spend the rest of his life as the steward of his lost family’s memory, and particularly as the steward of his youngest daughter’s memory, simply because she wrote down what was happening. I’m sure he never imagined the house they hid in would become a museum visited by millions. Almost 65 years after they were captured, and 29 years after Otto Frank’s death, one Christian father from the United States and his daughter joined the millions to walk through these bare rooms and feel the weight of the Frank family’s suffering.