There are about 850,000 people in Amsterdam, and more than 1,000,000 bicycles. Bremen was rife with cyclists, as well. It took skill to discern what part of the sidewalk was for bikes and what part was for pedestrians. We saw families on bikes, babies in infant seats perched precariously between handle bars, and dogs in baskets attached to the front frame. People of all ages, even very old people, rode bikes to get places and go shopping. No one wore helmets.
We marveled at the freedom Bremen and Amsterdam parents gave their children. There were unsupervised children all over the place, riding to and from school and the shops, with no hovering adults to be seen. Daughter-in-law commented that she wished US children could have a similar lifestyle. I read somewhere that German parents encourage and expect a great deal of independence and self-sufficiency from their children, and that “free range” parenting is the norm there. Risk taking is thought to teach safety.
I am sure that there are bad people in Amsterdam and Bremen, and that bad things happen to children there, but no one seemed to let that change their behavior or restrict their children’s mobility. I told this to some of the more hovering parents I know, and they were appalled, yet curious. There is a dignity in risk.
Daughter and Husband planned the last half of our recent trip to Europe. Our trip ended in Dublin, where they booked us into a really swanky hotel called The Merrion. It is the sort of place where the Bell Captains wear top hats and the housekeepers lay out soft mats and bedroom slippers on either side of the bed when they do up the room. It was really grand.
We arrived in Dublin by ferry from Holyhead, Wales. The streets were really crowded and it was hard to find a taxi. We strolled around Trinity College and down Grafton Street and it was wall to wall people. We were told by the travel agent that we were lucky to find hotel rooms in Dublin the weekend we were there, as she was told by someone that there were lots of things going on in town. Those “things” turned out to be:
The Irish Open
Josh Groban in concert
A very important soccer match
Bruce Springsteen in concert Friday and Sunday evenings.
Everyone seemed to be talking about Bruce Springsteen. Nils Lofgren and Stevie Van Zandt were playing with him, and the newspapers had the whole play list for the concerts, which took place in a large outdoor arena that held 65,000 people. One taxi driver told us that there were 100,000 extra people in Dublin just for those concerts.
As we were checking into our hotel, I heard a man asking after a female guest who was “a member of the Springsteen party”, and I realized that Bruce was staying at The Merrion, too. That explained all the people with cameras milling around outside the hotel.
We never saw Bruce, but we heard about him from some delightfully gossipy taxi drivers. They confirmed that he was indeed at The Merrion, and gave us a running itinerary for him, letting us know that on Saturday morning he worked out in the gym around the corner from the hotel, and that on Sunday morning he went bowling.
Bowling? Now, in all our time in Europe, I never saw a bowling alley. Did he go lawn bowling? Can you imagine Bruce Springsteen lawn bowling, upsetting the octogenarian bowlers in their white lawn bowling get ups? Why would he go bowling? Why not a short trip to the coast or to some castle, or a private view of the Book of Kells. Maybe he could have gone to church. If I were Bruce Springsteen, would I want to go bowling? I just don’t know.
My friend Janelle from work has all the luck. She is keenly observant with a sensitive radar for the absurd, and notices more funny things in the world than anyone else I know. She recently told me about something she witnessed only a block or two from my house and oh, I wish I had been there.
Janelle stopped after work to see her brother. They were standing out front of his house talking to one of the neighbors when she noticed that there were two small Postal Service trucks delivering mail. Now, this is odd in itself, as the mail in our neighborhood is delivered around noon, not after 5:00 pm, and there are never two trucks working in tandem. The mail carriers parked on the same side of the street, and each got our of their truck and walked ahead to deliver the mail. When they went back to get more mail, they traded trucks and each drove the other’s truck down the block, as though they were leap-frogging, trading vehicles as they went. Just then, two large mail vans pulled up, and their drivers got out and started delivering more mail to houses that had just had mail deliveries from the first two carriers. The drivers of the small trucks turned their vehicles around and drove back to the larger vans. The street was blocked with mail trucks. All the carriers got out of their vehicles and yelled and waived their arms around with angry gestures. Then they all returned to their trucks and drove away. At this point neighbors came out of their homes and looked through their mail and traded mail with one another, as much of it had been delivered to the wrong addresses!
I can’t even begin to guess what was going on in this scenario.
Play is repeated, incompletely functional behavior differing from more serious versions structurally, contextually, or ontogenetically, and initiated voluntarily when the animal is in a relaxed or low stress setting. VanFleet, et al., 2010 p. 7
It has been a discouraging winter here, especially for State employees, what with the oil bust, lowered revenue, and budget cuts. My next door neighbor in the office is an extremely funny woman and we manage to lighten the atmosphere when we can. We have fun playfully harassing the construction workers who have been our companions for three months. My coworker is pretty impulsive, and I have stopped her just in the nick of time from putting her footprint in wet cement patches the construction guys had put down to plug some holes in the floor. I also convinced her to not draw hearts and smarmy messages on the foreman’s truck windows in red lipstick, after he let us know his wife was a really jealous type. Everyone else at work has been sort of gloomy, until this week.
Throughout the year, the five floors of our agency take turns having fundraisers in aid of the Agency Social Committee.The money helps pay for our annual Christmas party as well as funeral flowers for deceased relatives. This week, 2nd floor staff raised money (I guess extorting would be a better word) by raiding offices and filling them with a flock of five foot tall, inflatable flamingos. You have to pay $5.00 to have them removed. You can recommend others to get “flocked” once you have been flocked. I had to ride in the elevator a couple of times this week with a flamingo remover, four fully inflated flamingos, and a couple of child clients who believe that our agency is a pretty magical place.
I observe play most days in my work as a play therapist, and much of the time it is pretty grim business. I know it is therapeutic for children to run over abusive parental doll figures with the toy police cars, but I am exposed to this stuff all the time and it can be dispiriting to watch on a daily basis. It was gratifying to see my coworkers start to get out of the doldrums and really play with the flamingos. We know there is only so much levity you can display at an agency that provides addiction and mental health services, but the clients seem to enjoy seeing the flamingos get moved around. By Wednesday my coworkers were giving the flock costumes. My office neighbor and I gave one a head scarf and reading glasses and named her Lena. Another one was dressed in surgical masks and christened “Dr. Who”. Yet another was dressed up like a Ninja Turtle, the purple one whose name I forget.
Play is observable all around us. My terrier is always ready to play, even if it is not the way I would want her to play, as you can see from the photo. How fun! She steals a roll of toilet paper and then mom chases her all over the house! A flock of crows in the neighborhood starts playing at 5:30 am, chasing and careening and cawing. It serves some purpose, like all play does. I just wish they were quieter. 5th floor denizens at my workplace were giggling over their fundraiser for next month. I wonder how they can top the flamingos. I hope it allows for continued play.
Whenever our children come home to visit at the same time, I have to scramble to make certain that there are enough bed pillows to keep everyone happy. We have a saying in our family “A well made bed is a work of art”, and that means a minimum of two goose down pillows for each head. Son once had six pillows on his bed, and daughter would have that many if I would purchase more for her. I notice that bed pillows start disappearing from our bed when the children visit, until husband and I are left with one apiece. Then we steal them back. I have been known to take my pillows with me on the road because you can never find a good pillow in most hotels.
This pillow obsession is my maternal grandmother’s fault. Omie prided herself on giving each grandchild two, made-to-order, goose down pillows upon the occasion of their marriage. She had a goose connection in a neighbor woman (a Mrs. Flanagan, I think) and made the pillows herself. She asked each recipient their preferences for pillow thickness and whether they were side, back, or stomach sleepers. My mom had many Omie pillows, and I grew up expecting my pillows to be soft and wonderful . My husband and children expect the same.
We also have down comforters on each bed, and daughter asked for a down mattress pad for her birthday this year. She insisted that we give her best friend a down comforter as a high school graduation gift. Friend says it is like sleeping under a cloud.
I don’t go in for decorative pillows, just fat and soft standard size bed pillows with plain white pillowcases. A good night’s sleep is important, and I think that good bedding is a sensible investment. I would rather have good bedding than fancy cars or boats or jewelry or any of the other things people buy to spoil themselves. It is just a good thing no one here is allergic to feathers.
I have been doing ancestor research on an on-line genealogical service preparatory to our May trip to Europe. We are travelling to Bremen, where my maternal grandparents were born, and then to Scotland, where husband’s mother’s family originated. I realize that the details of much of this research are purely conjectural , as following one thread may take you to Robert the Bruce, while another, equally possible thread just peters out into oblivion. You can never be sure if you have the right ancestor.
What has been most interesting is finding out where they generally were and when they immigrated to the US, since that can fuel the imagination as to what their lives may have been like if you have some knowledge of the history of their times. Husband’s family were solidly Scots-Irish Presbyterians, some of whom immigrated from Scotland to Northern Ireland in County Tryone and County Antrim very early, and then left there for the Colonies in 1690. Others stayed in Northern Ireland as coal miners until 1870, when they went back to Scotland to work in the coal mines around Glasgow. Husband’s great great grandfather Carson died in a mine cave-in in 1878. The Scottish Mine Disaster website was quite helpful identifying the very pit in which he died. We hope to visit the are on our trip. We don’t know if his body was ever recovered. His children immigrated to Ohio and West Virginia and worked in coal mines and steel mills. Some things don’t change that easily.
Family names have been fun to find. My father’s Friesland family has first names like Weert, Okke, and Freerk. The Scots have names like Alexander, Robert, James, Margaret, Andrew, and Jennie. My mother’s Bremen family, all solidly Saxon, has common German names like Wilhelm, Herman, Christian, Metta, Greta, Johan, Anna, Sophie, and Otto. My favorite family last name is Hellwinkel.
We aren’t travelling to Stuttgart to see where husband’s German family comes from (they raised sheep, so I guess you could call them German shepherds), but it was in that family tree I found another favorite name-that of poor Walburga Merkle. Oh, how fun it wold be to see her, to know if her name was considered beautiful or odd, to know what her life was like.
Husband said that, perhaps, in five hundred years people will be excited to find they are related to us. I don’t know about that, but doing this research really impressed me with the randomness of our very existence and how strange nature or chance or divine influence has led each of us to be who we are.
Your future relatives are listening, 500 years hence. Why should they be excited to learn that they are linked to you?
About twenty years ago I told my supervisor, also a psychologist, about the latest movie husband and I watched. We liked dramatic, offbeat films at the time. I remember feeling somewhat appalled and a little disdainful when my supervisor told me he could no longer watch heavily dramatic and/or suspenseful films any longer. He attributed it to his clinical work and the trauma and heartbreak he dealt with all day. I remember thinking that nothing like that would ever happen to me.
Well, it has happened. For the past couple of years I have found that I can’t tolerate the least bit of suspense or uncertainty or drama in films. We usually watch films at home (not having the greatest of movie theatres in town), and once things start getting worrisome or too suspenseful I excuse myself and leave the room until I deem it safe to go back. Then husband has to tell me what happened while I was gone.
I can only describe the sensation as major knots in my stomach accompanied by an overwhelming urge to flee. Guardians of the Galaxy just about did me in, since my clever but annoying son stopped the movie every time I left the room, and wouldn’t start it up again until I came back.. We had to take first two seasons of the recent BBC production of The Three Musketeers back to the library half watched. I particularly dislike plots involving people wrongly accused of crimes, and such plots are far too plentiful in this version of the Musketeers. I take some comfort that my supervisor also suffered with this, and it isn’t just my own neuroses to blame.
One of my friends is a former State inspector of butcher shops, meat markets, and meat-packing plants. Her experiences in this job left her quite sensitive to issues surrounding the handling of raw and processed meat. If she is coming over for supper, I know that I have only a few locations where I can buy the meat for our meal. Her husband says he always knows when they are having chicken for dinner, as he can smell the bleach she douses all the kitchen surfaces with during meal preparation even before he gets in the house. She wasn’t always like this before she had her inspector job.
I wonder if hotel housekeepers get to the point that they can only sleep at home, knowing what they know about hotel rooms. Do fire fighters lie awake wondering if the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors are really working? Do classical musicians find that they can only listen to certain works performed by certain ensembles with certain conductors at just the right tempi?
Occupational hazards come in many forms. I hope that after I retire I can return to watching new and suspenseful films. Until then, I am stuck with comforting reruns.
Header image: detail from Andrea Mantegna “Agony in the Garden” [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota
I really have very little to complain about. I have a job, a home, a wonderful husband, good friends, reasonable children, my health, etc. There are some times, however, when stupid, annoying things happen to take all the fun out of life, and leave me disgusted and crabby and preoccupied. I am a natural worrier, and these annoying occurrences just fuel that worry and I have a hard time managing it.
February was one of those months. Early in the month we got a new credit card with the security chip, preparatory to our trip to Europe this spring. We had it a week when we heard from the company that it had been breached and there had been all sorts of suspicious charges and the card was deactivated. This was just before daughter was going to Washington, DC for spring break and was going to use the card on her travels. We only have one credit card, so when it is out of action, we are all out of luck. There wasn’t enough time to get a replacement card before she left for DC, but she managed with her debit card. Still, it left me fuming and fussing since we never had this happen before.
Our next issue happened the day before we were to leave for Sioux Falls for the weekend. I noticed that the freezer in our fridge was dripping water inside and the ceiling in the freezer was hot. We emptied the freezer and phoned the repair person. He told us it was not a problem and that it was defrosting itself and we had it too full, so we just took half the things out and it was fine. I worried about it the whole time we were in South Dakota. It is still working fine, but I think the compressor sounds louder than before, so now I worry it is going to break down some time soon.
Lastly, last week, the actuarial experts at State Farm miscalculated and decided that my husband was a great risk and cancelled his car insurance. It was a total error on their part, but it will take a week or two to get all the correct information into their calculators so husband still has insurance at the end of the month. Honestly, if you can’t trust a statistician, who can you trust.
This looks like real trouble.
I read my words and I think, “Renee, you have nothing to complain about and many people have more serious and deadly things to worry about, so get over yourself”. I wonder if too many of us in this country don’t have enough gratitude for what we have, and that perhaps we need to stop expecting life to be trouble free.
Maybe that attitude accounts for the rise of demagogues like The Donald who speaks to that inside ourselves that puts us first and others second, and makes is believe that we are owed something just because we are who we are.
I read once that a martyrdom of pinpricks is still a martyrdom. Well, I have a working credit card, the freezer that is loud, but works, and an insurance company that admitted it is wrong. I need to realize that pinpricks will happen and they are nothing to let ruin my day.
Some time ago I submitted a post about a large piece of carved Chinese jade in my possession that my maternal great grandfather hauled from Hamburg, Germany to New York to Minnesota in 1914. I thought it was an incense burner, and couldn’t figure out why it was so important that the family brought it with them when they immigrated to the United States.
My son did a little research this fall and discovered that it isn’t exclusively an incense burner. It is called a Scholar’s Mountain, Scholar’s Rock, or Spirit Stone (Gongshi), and it was used to encourage wisdom and deep thoughts as it was gazed upon. The holes, some natural and some that were carved in it, are for calligraphy or paint brush handles, and the round basin is either for incense or for water for rinsing the brushes. Who’d have thought?
Most were naturally occurring rocks carved and perforated by water, sometimes embellished with carvings, sometimes placed in gardens as points for contemplation or else brought inside. They were chosen on how well they emulated the natural world of landscape, especally mountains and elevations. Ours is 10 inches by 7 inches. It is carved with a stag, a bat, a bear, two ravens, and a honey comb or coral shape. Now that I know this, the shape and design and purpose make sense. I wonder what scholars or deep thinkers might have used this for inspiration.
I used to worry what would happen to this after I am no longer here, and now that son has taken an interest and we know what it is, I think it will continue on its journey with him. He is a scholar and a deep thinker, after all.
Describe a sight or an object that encourages you to think deep thoughts.
The Saturday after New Year’s Day, our churlish next door neighbor stormed over to our house and told my husband that we had to keep our dog quiet. Did we know how many times she had barked that day? Husband just said “Ok”. and shut the door. We were pretty puzzled about this, since she really hadn’t barked at all that day.
Our dog is 14 years old. She is a terrier. Terriers bark. We have tried our hardest to minimize her vocalizations over the years. We don’t let her out in the yard unsupervised, and she does her business on the deck in the back. Our neighbor has complained about her for years, and it seems that nothing we do is good enough.
There are plenty of other dogs in the neighborhood that we hear barking, but he seems to be obsessed with our little Maggie. He spends a lot of time in his family room, the closest room in his house to our deck, which is the only place she barks. He has even installed white noise machines. There was a dog in the garage of the house on the other side of neighbor’s house that barked continuously for 5 hours the day he came over to complain. We think that he assumed the noise was coming from our dog.
Now, to put Maggie’s barking into perspective, her barking never lasts more than 10 seconds at any one time before we bring her in, and she doesn’t bark in the house. After this last visit from neighbor, we started collecting data on the times she went out, whether she barked, and the duration of her utterances, if any. We stand by the patio door until she is finished with her business so that we can leap out and quell any barking that might occur. Her barking, which wasn’t much to begin with, has been reduced even further. Now we have actual data to use in the event neighbor complains to the police. The longest string of barks she has produced outside since we started data collection is 5 woofs long and lasted less than 5 seconds. She barks less than 3 percent of the times she goes outside. Ooh, I love being a behavioral scientist!
Our dog is getting frail and I think this is her last winter. I have a secret plan for when she passes that would be satisfying to implement, particularly if she dies before next Christmas. I plan to tell the neighbor that she has died. I want to lull him into a false sense of relief, and then I want to start broadcasting from our deck this musical selection that husband found on the internet.
One of my friends tells me that someone has to be the bigger person here. I suppose she is right. There is an entire album of Barking Dogs’ Christmas music, though! It is pretty tempting to do, especially since neighbor hasn’t thanked us for the nearly silent neighborhood in which he now lives. Of course, he never thanks us for anything. Sigh.
Trail Baboon 