You Can't Walk On One Leg

As long as I can remember, I have always loved language.  The study of it, that is.  I must have gotten it from Mom who, for instance, not only read The Lord of the Rings trilogy but studied Tolkien's appendix of the language he created.  I never went that far, nor does it mean I speak languages (as in plural) but I do enjoy how they work and the mathematical formulas behind them.

Perhaps nothing charms me more about language than idioms--those peculiar expressions that have a meaning indirectly derived from the literal words and which almost never have a direct translation into another language.  Some examples are beating around the bush, chewing the fat, enough is enough, every picture tells a story, etc., etc.

When the idioms come from another language than my own, they often are funnier or more powerful because I've never heard them in quite the same way.  A missionary-linguist friend told me years ago, for example, that the Filipino tribal group with whom she worked would often say, "That's just like God!" whenever they'd read or hear something they didn't expect.  To this day, I still use that phase when something surprises me.

So far here in Holland, as I get situated into this new culture and language, no one idiom has charmed me more than the one I have now heard several times:  You can't walk on one leg! I've heard it mostly in the context of eating and kissing, as when offered a second cookie or kissed twice...because you can't walk on one leg.  In other words, you can't eat/have just one!

The one time, however, that takes the cake (see what I mean) was when Astrid and I ate at our favorite Greek take-out café here in our neighborhood.  While most customers come and leave quickly with take-out, there are 5 tables for those of us who like the atmosphere and eat in.  With that kind of intimacy, we have grown to know the owner, his son and his mother, all of whom keep the business hopping.  Two weeks before our wedding in February, we told them how excited we were that a date had finally been set...an excitement they appeared to share with us.  That meal we celebrated with a bottle of their Kechri wine because we loved the shape of it and decided we'd make it into an oil lamp...and even told them so.

At the cash register as we left, to our delightful surprise, the son (with father looking over his shoulder) handed us another bottle of the same wine, gratis, and said, with a big grin,  "You can't walk on one leg!"  It was their congratulations to us.

How can you ever forget an idiom like that!  It makes you want to be generous and go out and do random acts of kindness just so you can say it all the time.  Ahhhh.  The power of language.  We could have a feeding frenzy with it! 

When They Give You a Lemon

...go to Delft, of course!

Now back up a minute, alstublieft (please).

A week after Astrid and I got married, we took the 35-minute busride to nearby Utrecht to submit my application for a residence permit.  It had to be put in motion by March 5 or else I would have to leave the Netherlands for 3 months.  That wasn't gonna happen!

There are 9 IND/immigration offices in the Netherlands.  It was a no-brainer for us to choose Utrecht because it was the closest (20 miles away) and the city to which we had gone for several photo hunts in the past two years.  As a college town, it's quaint and charming.  You'd love it.  It took us an hour to submit all our important papers, with Astrid as my sponsor for my residence here.  We knew they were allowed 6 months for their official response, but the lady said it would probably be 1-2 months at the most.  Good.  We crossed our fingers and held our breath.

Many of you saw my post on Shutterchance about how Once in a Blue Moon you can be so shocked all you can do is howl at the moon.  That day in Utrecht was Friday afternoon.  By the following Tuesday a letter was written telling me I was accepted!

However, I still needed to wait for my ID card to be prepared and ready for pick-up.  THIS is where the lemon comes in!  When I received the letter, I was given the clear instruction to pick up my card in Rijswijk, not Utrecht.  Rijswijk is near Den Haag, 31 miles away, but when you don't have a car, it seemed much farther.  It was one hour by 3 different trains instead of 35 minutes by one bus...and the difference of €14.  Astrid was so spitting mad she actually called to ask why I couldn't pick the card up in Utrecht, where I had applied.  No way, José.  I had to go to Rijswijk.

But guess what!  That famous city of Delft, home to Delft Blue pottery and Johannes Vermeer, was just 4 minutes by train before Rijswijk, which meant it was also 4 minutes after Rijswijk going home.  It took me exactly 30 minutes to get off the train in Rijswijk, go find the office, take a potty break, pick up my card, and get back on the train before getting off 4 minutes later in Delft...where I then spent 3 hours.

The above church is Delft's Oude Kerk (old church), the oldest parish church in the city from 1246 and the burial place of Johannes Vermeer.  Its 75-meter tower leans 2 meters from the vertical and is seen here from the Nieuwe Kerk (new church, started in 1396 as the second oldest parish), across the market square. The tower of the Nieuwe Kerk is 108.75 meters, with 356 steps to the top.  YES, I did it!  The only other church tower taller than this in the Netherlands is...guess where!  The Dom tower in Utrecht (112.5 meters), which I climbed with Astrid back in January of 2008.

See what I mean about making lemonade when you're given a lemon!  I have now climbed the two tallest church towers in the Netherlands.  Woo Hoo!  (And someone even threw in a soulful windmill right there to the right of the church at mid-section.  See it?) 

Innocence

When I lost mine, I'm not sure.  My innocence, that is.  I didn't have a childhood to speak of, growing up in a conservative, fundamentalist preacher's home.  There were 8 of us kids, not allowed to do many "normal" things because of what people would think.  No card playing on Sunday ("they" might think we were playing Bridge!), no school fundraisers of chocolate bars ("they" might feel obligated to buy from us because they were Dad's parishoners).  Serious.

Add to that not believing in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.  No recollections of any Christmas or birthday presents, though surely I must have had them?  No doll memories.  Nothing personal just for me.  We had adjustable strap-on, skate-key roller skates that we shared and an over-sized tricycle.  We took turns.  And Grandpa gave us a gigantic, sturdy swing set that our grandchildren still use to this day at the family cottage.

Oh, and did I mention that I was the sickly one of the bunch.  A therapist once told me I was so scrawny-looking I had an invisible sign across my chest that said "FRAGILE:  DO NOT TOUCH." I had my 9th birthday in the hospital when diagnosed with mild, non-paralytic polio.  That was all I knew. That was what life was like.  Serious.

Nor did I know about Ash Wednesday or Lent or giving up anything.  The mystery of Easter was simple for me, summed up in the Easter weekend of death and resurrection.  Nothing more and nothing less.

So if I tell you I had no clue whatsoever about Mardi Gras or Carnival, you know I'm telling the truth!  Right now on my photoblog I'm posting a series of children at our Carnival here in the small city where we live in Holland.  It happened on Saturday, February 13, just 2 blocks from our apartment.  I couldn't stay away.  What would I see?  Total debauchery and licentiousness??  HA!  What were "they" afraid of?  Those voices in my head.

What I saw took my breath away.  I can't tell you anything about the floats or costumes of the adults.  Just the faces of innocent children, expectant and full of pure delight.  Dressed up on the sidelines like kids at Halloween, they waited for confetti and candies tossed to them.  Totally innocent.  Totally children.

Please tell me that when we capture our Visions we regain whatever we've lost or thought we never had.  Please tell me it's within us and we just get those lucky moments to see who we really are...and maybe always have been? 

It's About Time

For one thing, we know it flies.  Especially when you're having fun!

In my last post, I mentioned that Astrid and I were getting married here in Holland on February 5, a week ago.  Can I believe it's already a week later?  NO.  See?  That's what I mean.  Time does that.  It plays tricks on you.

The above image is the one I posted on my Shutterchance blog the day of our wedding.  It's the sundial on the side of the Grote Kerk (Big Church) two blocks from our apartment.  Astrid and I were photo hunting on January 1 after a delightful New Year's Eve celebration here at our senior-living complex.  We woke up to a bright, sunshiny day, the beginning of a new year...and walked around our citadel city with our cameras in hand, doing what we love to do.

Now, look at the time.  Can you read a sundial?  I always laugh when I see a sundial like this on the side of a church, thinking of all those people who had no excuse for not getting to church on time (remember, my dad was a preacher!).  I "collect" sundials (as I do windmills and clock towers and construction cranes and weathervanes) and then I laugh because...I have no clue how to tell sundial time, especially if the sun isn't shining (guess that's why it's a SUN dial!).  Most of it never makes sense to me.  Nor have I ever Googled to figure it out.  But if I'm not mistaken, it's 2 o'clock, right?

Guess when Astrid and I got married last Friday!  Yup.  2 o'clock in the afternoon.  Did we know on January 1, 2010, we were going to be married on February 5, 2010, at 2 o'clock?  NO.

Call it coinky-dink.  Call it serendipity.  But don't you just love it when you get to a certain age and have all these experiences under your belt that make you smile.  They're AHA! moments in time.

By the way, it was the best day of our lives together thus far!  And YOU helped to make it that way by all your fabulous best wishes.  THANK YOU.  You made Time stand still for us.  It was an "eternalized moment."  THANK YOU.

(If you wish to see our online wedding album, just let me know.)