Author: nivtric

Perhaps You Can See The Irony of That

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We’re on a road to nowhere

After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, a right-wing populist politician, Pim Fortuyn, gained popularity because traditional politicians had failed to address the growing unease of the Dutch about Muslim immigrants. Fortuyn promoted a messianic personality cult. He called himself the Son of the People of the Netherlands. About the leader the Netherlands needed, Fortuyn wrote in his book De Verweesde Samenleving (The Orphaned Society), ‘A leader of stature is Father and Mother in one. He dictates the law and watches over the cohesion in the herd. The skilful leader is the Biblical Good Shepherd.’ Fortuyn anticipated the coming of the Great Leader of the Netherlands as he wrote, ‘Towards a Father and a Mother, on the way to the Promised Land,’ and, ‘Let us prepare for his arrival so that we can receive him.’ He posed himself as a Messiah. That was a reason why I didn’t like him. Perhaps you can see the irony of that.

Fortuyn called Islam a backward religion and claimed Western civilisation was superior. Christians and Many Muslims hold on to a medieval worldview. Still, Islam opposes interest charges on money and debts, and I believed that interest was one of the grave threats to civilisation, so my views of Islam were more favourable. The secondary role of women in Islam is not something worth copying, but we could learn something from Islam nonetheless. Even more so, out-of-control technology might end human civilisation, either by some apocalyptic event or by altering humans so humans cease to exist. You can’t blame Islam for that. It is Western civilisation that has brought us to the apocalypse. And if you must choose between doom and women wearing headscarves and backward practices like honour killings, the choice is not that difficult. We are on a road to nowhere,

We’re on a road to nowhere
Come on inside
Taking that ride to nowhere
We’ll take that ride
I’m feeling okay this morning
And you know
We’re on the road to paradise
Here we go, here we go

Talking Heads, Road To Nowhere

Ironically, the song says that the road leads to paradise. The West can take pride in that. Previous generations have worked very hard to get here. Everywhere Fortuyn went, there was chaos and conflict. He seemed to enjoy it. Perhaps establishment politicians didn’t like him because they feared he would undermine society by causing division and conflict. The Netherlands had a consensus-building tradition called the Polder model for over a century.

False Messiah

Fortuyn saw himself as the coming Great Leader of the Netherlands, but history took an unexpected turn. On 6 May 2002, a left-wing loner assassinated him. It was an event that shocked the Netherlands. ‘The bullet came from the left,’ Fortuyn’s supporters claimed. That might seem so at first glance, but exactly 911 days later, an Islamic fanatic murdered the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. That is noteworthy because Fortuyn’s sudden popularity was closely linked to 9/11, while Theo van Gogh had just finished 06/05, a motion picture about the assassination of Fortuyn. Van Gogh was killed on 2 November 2004 (11/2 in American notation), while 112 is the European emergency services telephone number. That points to the hand of God. The Bible has warned us of false messiahs. I hope you can see the irony of that as well.

Jan-Peter Balkenende
Jan-Peter Balkenende

Fortuyn aspired to become Prime Minister. Instead, Jan-Peter Balkenende got that job. He looked like an apprentice from the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry Potter became his nickname. And that was not a coincidence, as the Netherlands was in for a massive bout of magic. Captain Decker, a song by Boudewijn de Groot, has the following lines,

Captain Decker, Flying Dutchman,
climbs above the timeless
space machine you’re living in,
starts to turn you inside out,
he needs you to know
what he was really all about

Captain Decker, Boudewijn de Groot

The timeless space machine could refer to the place where God is living. A Dutchman may need God to know what he is about. The animation picture Kroamschudd’n in Mariaparochie of Herman Finkers dwells on the possibility of Christ being born in Twente. My birthplace is Eibergen, just over the border in Achterhoek. In the 1980s, there were plans to create an independent province of Twente that included Eibergen and Nijverdal. Finkers came from Almelo, like Ilse DeLange. DeLange’s fourth studio album, The Great Escape, plays a central role in God’s messages in pop music.

World peace

In December 2008, there were many strange incidents. One of them was that the candy vending machine delivered a message at my work. Often, I went there to fetch a Twix bar. This time, the machine malfunctioned and failed to produce a Twix. It repeatedly misfired. That had never happened before, and to my knowledge, no one else had trouble with the machine that day. After trying three different options, it finally worked after choosing option 22, a Nuts bar. That was nuts, even more so because 22 = 11 + 11.

It was about to get even nuttier. To me, 11:11 represents a strange coincidence that has two parts. The next day, I bought a bag of potato crisps from the same machine. This time, it worked fine, but after opening the bag, I found a small piece of paper with the crisps. It was a temporary tattoo with the following Chinese text:

世界和平

A colleague knew a Chinese man who translated it for me. The characters stand for world peace. No one else did get a temporary tattoo with a bag of crisps. It was a production glitch. The paper had slipped into the bag, perhaps from another product line, and this bag happened to end up in my hands. Remarkably, my colleague Ronald Oorlog was absent that day. He had fallen ill. His last name, Oorlog, is the Dutch word for war. Now, that is a funny coincidence. Another colleague, Rene H, joked about the text, saying, ‘World peace is what Miss World would say she wanted after winning the prize.’

Linking it to Sneek

A nursing home in Sneek is named Nij Nazareth (New Nazareth). It might indicate that the Second Coming comes from this particular town, which was, by some miraculous accident, also my town of residence. To rule out it was a regular occurrence that would make the coincidence less impressive, I googled for buildings with similar names in other places, but nothing came up. Perhaps I was making too much of this coincidence. In the song Het Sneker Café, the unrivalled poet of the Dutch language, Drs. P, mocks the making of outlandish connections to a pub in Sneek,

There once was a girl of seventeen years of age,
the only child of a wine merchant,
who sought shelter in the Jura,
because she was lost on a trip.
She found an unoccupied house at the edge of the forest,
and felt from the outset that this is not right.
She took a glance at the window and what appeared:
Inside was the skeleton of a salesman in toiletries,
who had been missing for years
and had once stayed with his uncle and aunt in Bordeaux when he was young.
And there, they had almost exactly the same type of lampshades
as a small pub in Sneek.

Drs. P, Sneker café

That is scary indeed. The song reveals a few more equally sinister connections and concludes,

You see now how the pub again and again
affects the social interaction.
How here and there, and yes, even overseas
one stumbles upon this pub from Sneek.
It’s inexplicable and almost occult,
something that fills the world with trepidation.

Drs. P, Sneker café

Pope end times prophecy

In early 2013, an Australian poster on the message board godlikeproductions.com claimed he had been seeing 112 coming up in the media unusually often. He started a thread named 112 Keeps Coming Up In The Media. Other posters joined in with their selective bias, and they found a lot of 112 popping up in the media. It is the European Emergency Services telephone number, while I had lived in room 112 on that fateful dormitory, so the thread attracted my attention. The discussion remained active for several weeks. During that time, Pope Benedict XVI suddenly resigned on 11 February 2013, a highly unusual move. He was the first pope to step down in almost 600 years.

That became excellent material for this thread. 11 February is also the 112 European Day to celebrate the emergency services telephone number. 11 February is 11/2 in European notation, and 112 is the European emergency services telephone number, so that is why. You must admit that the European bureaucrats have found a most peculiar occasion to throw a party. In any case, the Pope’s resignation came unexpectedly, like a bolt from the blue. And lightning struck the Vatican a few hours after the Pope had resigned. It made several people wonder, so the thread came back alive.

Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation on 112 European Day is also noteworthy because of the 112th Pope End Times Prophecy attributed to Saint Malachy. The prophecy alleges 112 popes would reign, starting with Celestine II, until the End of Times. Benedict XVI was the 111th Pope. His resignation prepared for the arrival of the 112th Pope, who supposedly would be the last Pope before the End of Times and Jesus’ return. It made me curious, so I investigated the matter and discovered Saint Malachy had died on 2 November (11/2 American notation) 1148 and added that to the thread. My psychosis occurred in 2008, and if its message is correct, that prophecy is remarkably close. The same holds for Finkers’ animated picture of Christ being born in Twente. Likewise, my superstorm prediction was too accurate to be a coincidence, yet it was not precise. These prophecies tend to be somewhat off the mark for some reason. Perhaps you can see the irony of that as well.

Heaths near Nijverdal

Worried Parents

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The school switched to a new method called the Jena plan. There were no old-fashioned classes. Mr. B was my teacher for four years. He was a gentle person with a beard and perhaps a bit of a hippy. After all, these were the 1970s. You had some freedom. The Jena plan had task hours. Every day, you had one or two hours to perform tasks you had to finish before the end of the week. Once you had finished them, you were free to do as you please. You could read books or make drawings if you wanted.

At the start of the fourth grade, Mr. B gave everyone a weekly task schedule for the entire year. I remember finishing the whole task list for the year in three months. Mr. B then gave me my work for the fifth grade. I then slowed my pace and spent two and a half years, most of the time drawing or doing other things. At the end of the sixth grade I had finished all these tasks precisely on schedule.

The school emphasised group work. That might have been due to the Jena plan. The classes consisted of children from different levels, ranging from the first to the third or the fourth to the sixth grade. They split the class into small groups of mixed levels so we could help each other. We still had old-style classes and different teachers for some fields, such as calculus or geography. Mr. B took personal development, expression, social skills and teamwork seriously. He probably found them more important than learning. And so he reported to my parents that I did well on my school tasks but was a strange kid who didn’t connect with other children, often went out alone during playtime, and acted oddly.

My parents became worried. My mother then forced me to join the Boy Scouts to play with other children and work in groups. Perhaps a psychologist had given my parents this advice. A young woman led the group. In the narrative of the Boy Scouts, she was our mother. She supposedly was a wolf, and we were her pups. We had a yell, ‘Akela, we do our best, and you do the rest.’ I endured being a Boy Scout for over a year while trying to find an excuse to quit.

Then came the epic winter of 1979, with snow storms and temperatures reaching minus twenty degrees Celsius. The bad weather started just after Christmas. On one of the last days of 1978, we split into two groups and went outside. One group supposedly was lost in the forest while the other group came to the rescue. We were the lost group. It took the other group a long time to find us. By then, it seemed we indeed needed rescuing. But no one was injured, so it wasn’t that serious.

After this chilly adventure, I refused to go there again. My mother then made me choose a sport. I wasn’t good at sports and didn’t like them. My father later recalled that I once wrote a hilarious essay about sports being a waste of time and energy. I selected judo because my friends Marc and Hugo did it, too. Judo is about harnessing your opponent’s force to your advantage. Again, I schemed to get out and succeeded after over a year.

My parents sent me to Almelo for psychological evaluation. I went there by bus every week and stayed for hours. Psychologists questioned me and watched me play with other children. I didn’t trust them and didn’t tell them about my thoughts and feelings. After accidentally saying I loved to dream, the psychologist asked me to elaborate. I cut off the conversation and tried to do and say what they expected of a normal child. And I took the hint. In later school reports, Mr. B noted I socialised more and played like an ordinary kid. He also mentioned I had a vivid imagination and appreciated my writing skills.

The report further noted that my desk drawer was a mess. Mr. B then made me responsible for keeping the materials closet in order. But I am very organised, not in irrelevant detail, but in essential matters. My files are currently neatly organised, but the room is not tidy. The drawer needed no organisation. It was easy to find what you needed. The materials cabinet had drawers for various parts, which was a file-type organisation, so I could indulge in organising it, which I did with fervour, much to the delight of Mr B, who believed he had taught me something.

Featured image: Heaths near Nijverdal. Jürgen Eissink (2018). Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Close up of chestnut tree branch at De Famberhorst in the Netherlands

The Tree Garden

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Once I went to bed in the evenings and sometimes during the day, my imagination took over, most notably when sitting on the swing in the back garden. There were several different fantasies, often recurring. In one, I drove a car on a road called De Weg (The Way), reflecting my life path. There is a parallel with the Chinese Tao. And our home had wings and could fly, but only in my imagination. Once, in a dream, all the houses in Nijverdal spread their wings, went up in the air, and installed themselves in new locations during school time, so I got lost on my way home. That gave me the idea.

A few times, I had a crush on a girl. And out of nowhere came a strange and scary imagination. She would consume me or digest me inside her stomach. The inside of her stomach consisted of giant gears that crushed me. That imagination didn’t relate to my feelings for these girls, which weren’t particularly strong, or a fear for them as they weren’t particularly intimidating. It just seemed to come out of the blue. In hindsight, it was a foreboding of things to come three decades down the line.

In the autumn of 1976, I had gathered a bag of chestnuts and left them on the ground behind the shed in the backyard. The following spring, dozens of small chestnut trees popped up on the spot. It was the start of my tree garden in the backyard land and the germinate club that specialised in growing trees, most notably chestnut trees. The backyard land belonged to our neighbour, Mrs. Schaap (Mrs. Sheep). She came from the Dutch Indies and was in her sixties when we moved there. She was a widow. Her husband had died a few years earlier, and the patch would become a kitchen garden tilled by her husband. And so, that land remained fallow, and I could begin a tree garden there.

Mrs. Schaap didn’t mind, and we could get along. I was often on her terrace, drinking lemonade with her. She also drank nettle tea, ate nettle soup against her rheumatism, and let me taste them. They were not a thrilling taste sensation. They were like green tea. Ms Schaap became very old and died in 2014, aged 100. On the other side was a garden centre owned by the Ter Horst couple. The wife often came over to let my mother do her hair. To me, the garden centre was an adventure centre. I could hide between the bushes and trees and move inconspicuously. I saved trees and plants from the garbage heap, sometimes with friends, to relocate them in the tree garden. Once, I sold a plant to Ms Schaap, but my mother cancelled the sale.

For over a decade, Mrs. Schaap had a fancy man, Mr. Langelaar. His wife had dementia and later died. He often came over, and they sat in the garden reading books. Ms Schaap sometimes came to buy a few cigarettes from my mother. She didn’t want to keep them at home as that would make her smoke more. I vaguely remember Ms Schaap having a fish tank in the living room at first. My father later confirmed it. That is noteworthy, as at our previous address in Eibergen, our next-door neighbour was also a lady of the same age from the Dutch Indies with a fish tank. I regularly visited the other neighbours as well. They were mostly older people who had kitchen gardens, chickens, cows and rabbits.

We had a horse, first a pony named Tilly, and later, a real horse, Desi, for my mother to ride. A horse in your pasture attracted girls who wanted to ride it. My mother only allowed Alexandra to do that. She had long, curly blond hair and was beautiful, but she was six years older, so I barely looked at her. As the story goes, she had been on holiday with her parents in Morocco once, where a wealthy man offered her parents 3,000 camels to marry her. My mother sold the horse in the early 1980s when interest rates skyrocketed, and mortgage payments became a drag on the budget.

Trees became special to me. I made drawings of trees and made up stories about them in which they could talk and fly. And I began drawing maps, first of the Netherlands and later of Europe or imaginary countries with coastlines, villages, cities, roads, and rivers. These imaginations made life more agreeable. In bed, a fairy tale world took over. This situation remained so during my teenage years and didn’t change during adulthood. There was a strict disjunction between reality and imagination. I was imaginative but didn’t believe my imagination. That was unusual. Most people are less imaginative but believe in their fantasies.

I still love trees. After buying my house, I left the garden and the trees the way they were, much to the chagrin of my neighbour, a lawyer who wanted them cut down. And I planted Christmas trees next to the railroad near my home. One survived and has grown large. In the early 2000s, a deadly chestnut disease began to kill chestnut trees. They suffered the same fate as the elms culled by the Dutch Elm Disease. That is peculiar, as I was born on Elm Street in the Netherlands and had grown chestnut trees later on. The fact that the elm disease is Dutch adds some juice to this coincidence.

In school, a book once presented the children with a choice about the type of future they preferred. Option one was a sober room with a light bulb. A boy on a wooden stool asked his parents, ‘When will there be electricity so I can read?’ This option represented a simple life with little comfort. Option two was a boy attached to a machine. He didn’t appear all that healthy. It represented an advanced technological society. I chose the first option.

Feature image: Close-up of a chestnut tree branch at De Famberhorst in the Netherlands. Dominicus Johannes Bergsma (2016). Wikimedia Commons.

Primary school class

Primary school

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My primary school was De Klimroos, a Roman Catholic school. I was a loner. The harassment usually wasn’t extreme, but occasionally it was, making the school a war zone. Every day was a battle. But I was in it for the long run to finish school. That came with thoughts like, ‘Standing with the back against the wall is not so bad because they can’t attack you from behind.’ And, ‘Humiliation is bearable as most people will forget about it after a week or so.’ Sometimes, they blamed me for things I didn’t do. Once, there was a fight between two boys. One boy’s glasses fell on the ground and broke. I was one of the bystanders. Someone might have accidentally stood on the glasses. Everyone said it was me. I had seen these glasses lying, and they weren’t close to my feet but to other children’s feet. Only no one believed me. It was pointless to argue. It became an insurance affair, but in the end, the insurers agreed that it wasn’t my fault because the glasses were already lying on the ground.

Not being good at sports was another disadvantage. Sports at school was one year of torment, but it ended on a high note. Before the summer holidays, the last lesson was monkey cage, a freestyle adventure and great fun. The teacher sometimes made the children choose teams. I was always the last one remaining. No one wanted me in their team. We had school swimming for a year. Nearly all the children got their swimming diplomas, except me. The following year, my mother made me go to the swimming pool alone to attend swimming courses early in the morning before school, between seven and eight AM. And so, I got the first diploma, A, and the year after, even the second, B. The year after that, my teacher, Mr B*****, once sent me on an errand to another class led by Mr. H*********. When I came in, some kid yelled, ‘Enasniël can’t swim.’ Mr H********* then whispered in my ear, ‘What diploma do you have?’ I whispered, ‘B.’ And then he asked the kid, ‘What diploma do you have?’ He said, ‘A.’ ‘Enasniël has B,’ Mr H********* said. And then the joke was on him.

My lucky number was twenty-six. When looking at it, you immediately see why it is such a beautiful number. So that doesn’t require any further explanation. My date of birth, 26 November, was another reason. Green was my favourite colour, also for obvious reasons. Everyone can see that other colours aren’t as green. Green is also the colour of success, while red is the colour of failure. If something goes well, you see a green check mark. If something goes wrong, you see a red cross. I dedicated a little poem to the number twenty-six. It may go down in history as one of the best poems about the number twenty-six ever written, but that is entirely due to a lack of competition. The English translation is below,

Twenty-six letters in the alphabet,
Twenty-six weeks makes half a year
Two litres of mercury weigh close to twenty-six kilogrammes
And oh, how heavy that is.

Near the entrance was a sign attached to the fence. On it was the name of the company that had installed it. On its back, someone had written, ‘Enasniël Drogoel ís crazy.’ The text remained there for several years. Everyone could see it when passing the gate. It was nearly impossible to miss. It reminded me of what others thought of me. There was a wall around me, so it hardly mattered. One day, a teacher gave me a chore near the entrance and some tools, allowing me to remove the sign.

For many years, I had two friends, Marc and Hugo. They were classmates. Hugo came first. I ran into him when passing his home. He invited me in. And so, we became friends. Hugo’s mother had a board position in the Roman Catholic Church. His father was a manager. Marc came somewhat later. His father was a sales agent for a Swedish firm. They had a Volvo. They had a dog, a boxer named Boris. Marc had a sleeping room in the attic with his younger brother, filled with Legos and other toys. The Swedish firm sold sewing threads, so we had a lot of wires to play with. And there was a radio.

We started a few clubs. I was the instigator. Our inventions club came first. We gathered money to buy technical items and Legos and experimented with a broken television my mother had left in the attic. We opened it, inspected its interiors, removed some parts, and put them back together. Marc warned me about the capacitor, which he believed was inside it, as it had an electrical charge, and we made fun of what might happen if we hit it. We made the television work again without understanding how.

Later came the germinate club. And the antique club, which was more of an excavations club. We found pottery pieces in the ground and stored them in the shed. We also buried a tube with a document in the forest. It contained our names, signatures, a date and an explanation, and we hoped someone would uncover it after 1,000 years. And we listened to the radio. Marc and I shared a passion for the radio programme Dik Voormekaar Show, with funny voices and noises, and where everything went wrong, a brainchild of the comedian André van Duin. I truly enjoyed everything he did. Van Duin also made songs and sketches together with Corrie van Gorp. It was hilarious.

Marc was fond of gadgets. In the 1970s, digital watches from Japan came to the market. They were expensive at first, costing as much as 300 guilders, but Marc soon had one. These watches had features like a stopwatch, time zones or a calculator. Hugo was a bragger. The things he or his parents owned were always better. When his father bought a Hyundai car, these were the best cars in the world, even though a Hyundai didn’t come close to a Volvo. We had a Peugeot and no reason to boast.

One day, when arriving at school, the children were awaiting me on the path from the gate to the schoolyard. They stood on both sides and scolded me while I passed. They had all agreed on it and had perhaps organised it. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be enough kids to fill the entire stretch on both sides. Marc walked at my side like a true friend, but Hugo was among the kids scolding me. Hugo once explained his friendship as a kind of charity. He said his mother had told him it was a good deed to befriend sorry kids like me. His mother was a high-ranking figure in the Catholic Church, so she might have taught Hugo that he had to earn his place in heaven.

And then there was the strange incident with the plum. Once, I told Hugo that two plum trees were in our backyard. Hugo said that was impossible, ‘Plums grow on bushes, not on trees.’ And there was no way of convincing Hugo. He was sure I was wrong. We had two plum trees, and it was late autumn or early winter, so the trees were bare, and it was impossible to show him plums hanging in a tree. After the argument, we went to the fallow land behind the shed, which would later become my tree garden. There also was a plum tree, one I hadn’t thought of, and there, high up, hung one shrivelled plum in that tree, which was otherwise completely bare. And I pointed at the plum, saying, ‘There you see a plum hanging in that tree.’ That finally convinced Hugo. In hindsight, it is most peculiar that there was a plum. One sole plum was hanging there. The birds had not eaten it. That wind hadn’t blown it out. You could almost think it was left hanging there for me to prove Hugo wrong.

Whenever someone complimented me, I believed this person was mocking me or wanted something from me. Some children praised me for my calculating skills, but they were jeering, and I knew. They didn’t like clever kids. In the sixth grade, we had mental arithmetic, so we couldn’t use paper to calculate. Once, the teacher asked us to calculate the average of 1/3 and 1/5. And then the teacher said the answer was 1/4. Everybody had that answer except me, as I had 4/15. And so, I laid out the proper calculation, which we all had learned, loudly in the class, making the teacher, Mr R****, look like a fool. More than three decades later, my wife once went shopping with my mother in Nijverdal. Someone discovered she was my mother’s daughter-in-law, so this person said to her, ‘So, you married Mr Headstrong?’ If you are right and they are wrong, they ridicule you and call you stubborn.

And my father regularly said, ‘You are so good at tuning the radio. Can you please do that for me?’ He followed courses named Management Labour New Style. To inspire workers, you praise them and tell them how great they are to make them do what you want. Tuning a radio was a simple job anyone could do, so he was lazy, making me wonder, ‘Does he really think I am that stupid?’ Criticism worked better with me. People usually don’t lie when they criticise you.

My grades were not exceptional. They mostly ranged between seven and eight, with ten being the maximum. That is partly due to the school’s egalitarian socialist philosophy, which made getting a higher grade than eight nearly impossible. Some children were as intelligent as I was. Hugo was among them. And there was a girl named Madelon who was more intelligent. However, the combination of being clever, a strange loner and doing poorly at sports was particularly unlucky, making me a subject of pestering.

After initially being timid, I grew more courageous over time while liking a good joke. I prepared a smoking device and lit it near the paper storage next to the bicycle shed, making it appear that the papers had caught fire. At eleven, I had become the tallest boy at school, had grown fearless, settled some scores, and intimidated those who stood in my way. Once, there was an incident with fountain pen refills. We had fountain pens. They had refill cartridges, which some kids, including me, collected to make rings or other objects. Some kids played with them in class, so the teacher took the cartridges from them and put them in the bin. I took them out, probably on the way to the toilets, and they saw me doing it. They demanded them back and threatened me, but I didn’t return them.

Another incident was at a school camp. We were biking, and another kid tried to push me off the road. I didn’t budge and crashed into him, which severely damaged my bike’s wheel. It folded. The teachers made a school camp newspaper with jokes about the damaged bike. I gave the perpetrator a bloody nose, but I don’t remember whether that was at school camp or later. There probably were a few more incidents. The final year’s school report has gone blank because Mr. B****** had used a different type of ink that didn’t stand the test of time. Still, I vaguely remember him expressing concern about my increasing assertiveness and the clashes with other children.

I was also a sensitive kid. Once, I accidentally hit a girl or broke something of her. She kept complaining about the incident, making me miserable because I had wronged her. Ultimately, I could make her happy with a guilder, which settled the matter.

Twenty-five years later, we had a primary school reunion. My former schoolmates gave me a hero’s welcome. They all cheered when I came in. It felt like being an Olympic gold medal winner returning to his home village after the games. One of them said that they appreciated my coming. They believed they had made my life so miserable they had expected that I wouldn’t come. All the other black sheep hadn’t shown up. But the thought of not coming had never crossed my mind.

Featured image: my primary school class

Nijverdal

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A few hills surround Nijverdal, and locals call them mountains. Evers Mountain is fifteen metres high. The Netherlands is flat, so fifteen metres can be impressive to some, especially if they are on a bike. Nijverdal is a small town, even though locals still call it a village. It didn’t exist before the Industrial Revolution. It is there because a British entrepreneur found it a superb location for a factory. My life in Nijverdal got off on the wrong footing. A few days after relocating, my mother sent me to kindergarten. A new home, a new village, going to school and being without my mother for the first time in a matter of days was too much. I cried for over two weeks in a row and incessantly. They just let me cry. The teacher then put me in another classroom with another teacher, and I stopped crying.

That was tough love. No one seemed to care. Being four years old, I concluded I was alone in this world. It was the first turning point in my life. From then on, I depended on my judgment only, not expecting anything from anyone, not even my mother, who had left me there. And so, I erected a wall around me, and the hard times began. Nijverdal is part of the Hellendoorn municipality. Also, in Dutch, that name starts with hell and ends with thorn. It might refer to thorny bushes on a slope.

My parents had grown up on small farms. They had been poor, and their lives had not been easy. They ignored my complaints just like their parents had ignored theirs. That was not a lack of love. Harsh conditions can make you stronger, so making your children weak is a lack of love. When I was two years old, my mother made me a pair of trousers. They gave me an intolerable itch, but I had to wear them every other week as I only had two. Luckily, I grew out of them after some time. My father was tough, but my mother was tougher. She often said, ‘Kan niet ligt op het kerkhof en wil niet ligt ernaast.’ It means something like, ‘If you say you can’t, you probably mean you don’t want to, but you will have to.’ And children, she never said children but always brats, can never be right, even when they are.

I could read and write numbers and calculate before I could read and write words. At kindergarten, I became intrigued by numbers. I chalked them down on the pavement. I associated numbers with genius and wisdom, so I embarked upon a personal project you might call counting to infinity. At first, I recited numbers on the way back home from kindergarten. My mother was biking, and I sat on the back, counting. I could ask her questions. After arriving at 99, I asked my mother, ‘What comes after 99?’ ‘One hundred,’ she said. And I continued. The next day, I still counted, ‘998, 999, ten hundred.’ ‘No, not ten hundred, but a thousand,’ my mother said.

Soon, I mastered the number system and knew what came after what. Then, I asked my mother, ‘How far can a university professor count? Is it a million?’ ‘Yes, a university professor can count that far,’ my mother answered. But I wasn’t planning to stop at a million. I was aiming for infinite wisdom. I soon found that counting to infinity would be laborious and take a long time. And so, I divided the effort into parts and started counting in bed in the evenings. And then, I fell asleep and lost count. And so, I had to start over again the next day from a number I was sure I had already recited to ensure that I hadn’t missed a single number. Otherwise, it didn’t count. Somewhere near 16,000, I realised it was pointless and gave up.

And money intrigued me. Once, my mother bought some groceries. She paid with one banknote and received several banknotes and coins in return. And so, I asked her, ‘How is that possible? You give one banknote and get groceries, more banknotes and coins in return.’ She said, ‘I gave a one hundred note and received two of twenty-five, one of ten, and some guilders and cents, which is less than one hundred.’

One morning, a pile of banknotes lay on the table in the living room. The amount was 750 guilders, seven notes of a hundred, and two of twenty-five. I took a one hundred out and hid it in my room to marvel at it. I was six and had some awareness of my deed not being right. I took a one hundred, not because it was worth more but because there were more of them, so its disappearance would be less noticeable. I showed it to my sister, Anne Marie, who told my mother.

I was about to receive my first pocket money, so my parents postponed my pocket money by nearly a year. She had left this money there for my father for expenses at work. He had requested 750 guilders, and when he found only 650, he thought my mother had made a mistake and didn’t discuss it with her any further. In this way, it could go unnoticed for weeks. Once I did receive pocket money, I saved it to buy a globe. It had a light inside. You could see the world’s countries in different colours if you put it on. The next thing I saved for was a microscope.

I often woke when daylight broke. In the Summer, that could be as early as 5 AM. I wasn’t allowed to go out of bed that early. So, I lay awake in bed for hours, staring at the ceiling and watching patches of sunlight gradually move on the wall as time passed, probably just thinking, and I sang songs. I waved my father goodbye from my bedroom window when he left in his car to work around 6 AM.

My father and I were very different, but we both enjoyed watching old-style cartoons like Tom and Jerry, Tweety and Silvester, Droopy, Buggs Bunny and Elmer J Fudd, Donald Duck, the Pink Panther, and Roadrunner and Wile E Coyote. And we often went with him to Cafe H* in Daarle, where his friends gathered. It was a traditional Dutch pub called a brown cafe, where the hunters in the area hung out. There wasn’t much to do, so you could go outside or sit inside and hear the hunter’s tales. There was a billiard table, and there was a slot machine. Sometimes, one of my father’s friends gave me a guilder to play it. I had no qualms about hunting but noticed that hunters lived a life of excess. They found it a poor showing if there wasn’t too much meat.

Featured image: Royal Steam Bleachery: Exterior Overview Complex With Halls. A. J. van der Wal. CC BY-SA 4.0.