A Way With Words

You can bet your bottom dollar there isn't a one of us here at V&V who is not enthralled with words...playing with them, poking fun, joking around, turning the phrase and laughing at their pure silliness.  [Don't get me started on how downright serious they can be as well...that's not where I'm going this time.]

On that big 65th birthday weekend (two weeks ago), Astrid and I drove all the way down (on the map, I mean) to Maastricht, one of Holland's top 5 famous cities.  It so happens to have one of the most unique bookstores in the world, the Selexyz, housed in the above former Dominican church from the 13th century.  [I have mixed feelings about a church being turned into a business, but...this post isn't about that either.  Perhaps there are books you can buy there to redeem itself?]

Turning a phrase, playing with words, puns...and things like spoonerisms.  I grew up on them with Mom.  Her favorite was the cig bity.  "We're going to the Cig Bity today!"  And that reminds me of my ex-husband who could bring down the house with his rendition of Rindercella and the Prandsom Hince.  When he got to the part where she slopped her dripper, we were crying with laughter.  In the end, of course, it fid dit, and we howled again.

And don't forget terms of endearment and all those sweet nothings we love to hear.  Aforementioned hubby of 21 years often called me his Little Chickadee.  Astrid calls me her Kleine Muis (Little Mouse) AND her Donderkoppie (Thunderhead).  How can one person be so many different things...so endearingly!  Then there's my 34-year-old son whom I always called Palooka.  Now I call his nephew, my grandson, the same thing.

Back in the early 60s I had a short-term acquaintance with a blind girl who got me interested in braille and how to write it.  I bought the brass template and the stylus and started learning the alphabet and short-hand abbreviations for the dot-punched words.  One day, out of the blue, she told me a ditty I have never forgotten (did she first learn it in Braille?):

TB or not TB.
That is the congestion.
Consumption be done about it?
Of cough, of cough,
But it takes a lung, lung time!

Here's the thing:  even in English you can get lost in translation!  So a way with words almost always includes intonation patterns, facial expressions and body language.  You might not understand the entire gist of what someone says but if you can just see their face, you know it's time to laugh.  What happens, however, when the words are written, like here in our blogs?  The other day Toni wrote a post that by all appearances should have been a heart-breaker.  But it didn't take long to figure out it was anything but a sad story.  (If you don't know what I'm talking about, go read it...I won't give it away.)  When Dutch-speaker Astrid read it, however, she didn't get it until I explained it to her.  Lost in translation.  But then she laughed with me.  HAHA!  That was funny.  Brilliant.

Laughter really is the best medicine.  [Who said that?]  Words put in just the right way to brighten the day.  Dr. Seuss had it down pat:  "My shoe is off my foot is cold.  I have a bird I like to hold."  Why did I remember that from everything he wrote?  All those books, all those amazing word combinations to put a smile on our face.  All of them, I assume, in that incredible bookstore in Maastricht!

Seniority

Surely someone out there reading this will beat me by a mile but not many of you, I'm guessing.  So let me unabashedly hoot it up a bit for age and seniority (like Kath just did).  And reaching that milestone of milestones (yesterday):  age 65.

Did someone say
S E N I O R   D I S C O U N T S

Ask Astrid:  I HAVE NO SHAME.  Some of the discounts started at age 50...like when I became a card-carrying member of AARP.  That was 15 years ago when I found out I was NOT one of the Baby Boomers, being too old by one year.  Presdident Clinton was; I was not.  Cher, Diane Keaton, Dolly Parton, Alan Rickman, Donald Trump, Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Sally Field, Susan Sarandon, Linda Ronstadt, Liza Minnelli, Suzanne Sommers, Sylvester Stallone, Tommy Lee Jones---all of them Baby Boomers.   All from 1946.

Okay, so maybe the list isn't more impressive when you go back a year to 1945 but who can argue about sharing seniority with the likes of Bette Midler, Diane Sawyer, Eric Clapton, Helen Mirren, Goldie Hawn, Mia Farrow, Priscilla Presley, Rod Stewart, Steve Martin, Carly Simon, Diane von Furstenberg, and a thousand others.

Did someone say
S E N I O R   D I S C O U N T S

Years ago when Mom and Dad were still alive but with an empty nest (after 8 kids!), I remember visiting them and hearing how their daily ritual was to drive over to McDonald's for their 10-cent coffee...because they were seniors.  You should have seen the excitement on Mom's face when she told me.  They were like teenagers on a date.

At 55, wife Astrid was able to put her name on the waiting list for the senior-living complex where we now live here in The Netherlands.  Some such places in the States have a minimum age requirement of 50.   In England, once you turn 60 you get a free bus pass.  At 62 I was able to start receiving my Social Security income.  This month, at 65, I'm now eligible for Medicare.

At 65, no one asks anymore what the senior-discount age is:  everyone is a senior by 65 and is usually eligible for at least some discount, whether it's for movies, prescriptions, concerts, exhibitions, travel, or you name it.  WHO DOESN'T LIKE MONEY!  I still bend down to pick up a penny on the sidewalk.  And why not!  I figure I deserve every cent I can find and save.  More left over for the next grand adventure, right?  One penny at a time.

Did someone say
S E N I O R   D I S C O U N T S

Ask Astrid again:  Do I have any shame?  Are you kidding me!  I will ask for every discount I can get my hands on till they're sick and tired of me.  And I will smile all the way to the bank.

By the way, there's a reason why they give us these discounts, of course.  Do you ever feel like the Little Engine that Could?  This old grey mare ain't what she used to be and sometimes repeats the daily mantra,   "I think I can, I think I can."  Does anyone know what you get for turning 70?  The above steam train was born in 1940 and gave us a dandy little ride when we visited the Steam Festival in nearby Dordtrecht a couple weekends ago.  If I look that good 5 years from now, I'll deserve more than a senior discount!

[Yesterday my Dutch wife, Astrid, was our guest blogger here at V&V.  Thank you for all the birthday wishes there!  :)]

Dutch Masters

This past week on my photography blog I did a series of these 3 rural Dutch scenes here in Holland, utilizing the PhotoShop craquelure texture to make them look like oil paintings.  When Astrid and I are out-n-about on our weekend car trips, I get inspired by what I see and sometimes can't help but "mess around" with my images, if I can get away with it.

But here is where it gets embarrassing (and shame on me for never taking an art appreciation class in college!).  I had heard the names of many painters all my life---like Rembrandt, Picasso, Dali, Vermeer, Degas, Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Matisse, Da Vinci, Raphael, Rubens, Botticelli---names that had meaning to me even if I couldn't tell you whose painting was whose.  However, it wasn't until later in my life that I ever connected "The Dutch Masters" to a country called Holland/The Netherlands...where I now live!

DUH!  Can you explain that...the disconnect we have sometimes between language and meaning.  How could I not connect that there are great painters from The Netherlands who are therefore called DUTCH masters!

That reminds me of something from my early Sunday School days when we sang the "We're going to the mansion on the happy day express" song.  "The letters on the engine are J-E-S-U-S" but what I always heard was "the letters on the engine:  R-J-E-S-U-S." When I finally got it later, I just laughed and laughed.  DUH!  Of course I know how to spell Jesus.

See, language plays tricks on us.  And I'm talking about our own Mother Tongue.  What tricks will Dutch play on me, I wonder!  My second language.  Actually, it's my third language.  Spanish is my second language, which I can speak much better and faster than Dutch.  There are times with Astrid (and even at school) when I know I need to make a non-English reply but my spontaneous, unconscious response will be Spanish.  I know the Spanish word, not the Dutch word.  I know that it's not supposed to be an English word.  HAHAHA!  It makes me laugh when I write it now but DUH!  Language.

Did you know that in English cows MOO but in Dutch they BOE (pronounced BOO).  [Maybe Eliza can tell us what they say in Swahili.]  Oh, and we in English take photos but in Dutch they make photos.  We write things down and they write things up.  We sleep in over the weekend and they sleep out.  Go figure.  This is the beauty and fun of language.

But back to "dutch masters"...there are none better for me than the windmills and the sheep...and anything else that sets foot in the polder.  That includes all the gates as well as the cows and rabbits and geese and swans (almost every polder/meadow has a pair of swans that mates there for life and never leaves).

There's nothing else like it for me.  It's an art museum I enter almost every weekend, ooohing and aaaahing...and I know every "master" by name! 

Life Is a Journey

Or to put it another way, some things are just no-brainers.

Here I am, 5 months into another country with a different language than my own (Dutch is supposedly one of the 5 toughest languages in the world), and I can't carry on even the most basic of conversations...unless you count the "bedroom" Dutch I speak with Astrid.

So today, just days shy of my 65th birthday, I'm going back to school.  The operative words here are just shy of 65 because I'm getting in just under the wire to save myself €5813 (approx. $7,262 in today's exchange).  Dutch law requires anyone who immigrates to take an inburgerings (integration) exam within 3 years of arrival showing knowledge of Dutch society and language...up until age 65.  After 65, the requirement is dropped.  Technically, when I received my initial one-year residence permit in February, I became exempt from inburgerings because my 65th birthday is in this first year.  So in that regard, I do not have to go back to school.  I'm free to remain a dummy when it comes to Dutch!

However, if I really want to learn Dutch and not use my age as an excuse, I have the good fortune of being just shy of 65 in order to take advantage of the City Hall subsidy for the one-year Dutch course at nearby Da Vinci College.  After my birthday in June, I no longer have the option of taking the €6083 course for just €270 ($337).  This is what I mean by a no-brainer.  With a little bit of scrambling, some assessment tests before my trip back to Atlanta last month, and meeting up with my class advisor after Atlanta, I am hot to trot...today.

I just refuse to be an Ugly American (don't even get me started)!

Astrid had kept her old bike from 22 years ago, which will be my faithful companion to and from school, 15 minutes each way.  Trust me, before today I took several dry runs to make sure I had it all down pat.  It's not the bike riding per se (how do you ever forget to ride a bike?) but navigating the highest-bike-population-per-capita-of-any-country-in-the-world streets of Holland alongside of car traffic.  That and narrow streets!  I've had to get more confidence in riding my bike to school than going back to school itself!

I know all of you will wish me lots of good luck, for which I thank you.  But I've been thinking about  how Life is a Journey...for ALL of us.  Sometimes it's smooth sailing with a partner at our side and a wind at our backs.  Sometimes it's a maze laced with crossroads and dead ends that keeps us turning this way and that.  Other times it's a very bumpy road with potholes and detours of every kind.  Not even our mothers told us it'd be a rose garden.  Nor were we ever really promised our heart's desires...or even the slightest of indications where we'd end up after all is said and done.

That's probably why they say it's not the destination...but the journey.  And I'm sure that's why some things are no-brainers when they come alongside of us, like a caravan, joining us for a season and inviting us to but latch on for a bit.  You just reach out and grab on, knowing you're ready for the time of your life!