In Response to the Dutch
Dear Krammes:
There are several points I would like to make.
I have a scheduled appointment with a claims adjuster in a worker’s compensation case for 1:30 today. She has called and canceled, again. She is owning me; completely winning the psychological war that happens pre-litigation.
You did not mention to me your observations on the Dutch and yet you know how fond of them I am and of their Queen Beatrix. The Dutch do, after all, host the most prestigious chess event in the world at Wijk Aan Zee every year. I also had a Dutchman across the hall from me while I studied in Geneva. He was getting his MBA while I was studying political scienceunder the tutelage of Dr. Ibrahim Souss, a posh Palestinian holding both a Jordanian and French passport and married to Yasser Arafat’s sister. Dr. Souss’s son attended my school and lived down the hall from me.
The son had a shaggy black mop of hair on his head and wore a large wooden cross around his neck. The Souss’s were Nasrani, those Palestinians who remained Christian generation by generation by virtue of paying the religious tax imposed on them by the Muslim majority hundreds of years ago. The son liked to use large Swiss bills to snort various drugs, which he referred to as skiing. I once saw him punt a pigeon like a soccer ball in front of Gare Cornavin. I got along with the son because he let me use his cellphone almost whenever I wanted to make international calls.
Once, on my twentieth birthday, I called home and My Dad answered and we talked for a few minutes. I think I was shouting into the phone I was so excited. Tayler didn’t have a cell phone then, or I would have called her too.
I was told that Swiss currency is the only currency in the world that is texturized specifically for the visually impaired. Each bill is a different size, much like the Euro, and yes, I do remember there being little raised markings. Donc.
Coen, the Dutchman a few feet across the hall in my dorm, would often knock on my door at three in the morning to invite me to sit with him while he smoked a cigarette on the steps outside our dorm. I don’t smoke, which he chalked up to my being intrinsically American (he once said I looked like I should be riding around on a tank eating apple pie), but he was depressed to be outside, ostracized by his habit in Europe of all places, and enjoyed my company. We also played tennis together.
Coen’s mother was Dutch aristocracy and gave him, at 25 years old, 3000 euros every two weeks. When he flew back to Holland on weekends (weddings, parties, etc) he’d leave me the keys to his VW Golf (“It’s de turbo diesel, impossible to kill de engine”) and I would cruise along Rue Woodrow Wilson which is to Geneva what Lakeshore Drive is to Chicago. I would also take back-roads into France and buy my groceries. Once, I stalled his car in a parking garage at the very top of an exit ramp and very nonchallantly rolled all the way back down the ramp to a level concrete starting pad.
Tayler would do this exact same maneuver on a steep hill at a refuge for elk and other large mammals outside Saint Louis. We rolled backward down this hill, I mortified and furious in the passenger seat, as a pack of elk bugled at us from both sides of the road. Similarly, I stalled the Golf directly in front the United Nations building. Instead of elk, the peacocks which roamed freely on the U.N. grounds stared at me as I gnashed curse words and, very close to crying, prayed that I could transition from first to second and so forth and just make it back to the dorm.
One weekend I drove up the north shore to Montreaux with Kristen, another American, and only stalled the car once. Montreaux has a statue of Freddy Mercury mid-sashay. The statue is very big, I believe about 1.5 scale.
Anyway, you’re in Munich for a few days and I hope all is well and you’re having fun. More fun than I was clearly having on a cold December day at the northeast end of lake Geneva.
