A streetcar is trying to kill me.  I thought you should know.  Crazy?  Maybe.  Paranoid?  Certainly.  But untruthful?  You be the judge.

The bell is what announces the streetcar’s arrival.  There is no rumble, no whistle, no escaping steam to give warning.  Silence reigns as she smoothly glides along the tracks.  Three long cars connected to the earth by rails and electric wires.  The bell sounds.  It’s identical to the sound of the one on your childhood bicycle’s handle bars.  Not a blasting car horn.  No, more of a ringing that says, “Mom, look at me.”  And, sure enough, there it is, and there it goes.  Seemingly magic.

We all know that streetcars are long gone from Des Moines.  There is the periodic glimpse of a rail poking through the broken asphalt in a forgotten downtown alley.  But that’s all that remains of Des Moines’ light rail system — dull iron lying in a murky puddle.  Abandoned to cars, and buses, and Interstate 235, streetcars are a distant memory.

And fond memories they are for some.  Lord, even the acerbic Michael Gartner wrote in these very Cityview pages of meeting his father at a streetcar stop as a young boy. His father would “hop off and, first thing, lift you high in the air and give you a hug as the streetcar clangs on down the track.”  Yup, even the crusty Gartner is a believer.

Of course, my demise was also not on my mind when I first saw streetcars in the big cities of Holland.  I loved them.  And why not?  They are red, small-scale and narrow, they are clean, they give off no diesel fumes, they run nearly every ten minutes, and they just feel civilized.  People crowd on and crowd off, and no one, as far as I can see, has the urge to throw themselves onto the tracks.

But, I swear to you, my nemesis is out there.   Hidden behind a clump of trees, the streetcar silently waits for me every day.  This morning we both waited.  Who would make the first move?

Hah, she blinks first.  The streetcar pokes out her nose and then roars past me in frustration.  Another day that I’ve not been squashed.  Yahoo.

Clearly, I need help.

Samira de Blij drives thousands of people in her streetcar in The Hague.  Some days, she has several hundred folks sitting patiently behind her.  The reason for this is simple.  You want to go visit a friend, you jump a streetcar.  You need to go to the grocery store, hop on a streetcar.  You’re late for work?  Please, just get on the streetcar.

“You don’t have to be Einstein to drive a tram,” she says as she sits at the controls that operate over 45 tons of moving steel.  She then pauses, looks wistfully down the track, and tells me of the foxes she sees playing in the high grass next to the tracks in the early morning light.  She sighs.  Oh my.  A romantic realist is at the driver’s wheel.  I’m already half in love with my killer.  This isn’t good.

“I have been driving for 12 1/2 years.  I only wanted to do this a year.  It is such a beautiful job, you know.  If you love people, I love people, it is a very nice job.  People can be so good and so nice, you can play with it.  You can make sure that the atmosphere is good in your tram.  Because if you wait for someone running to catch the tram, and the other passengers see it, they have warm hearts for each other.  They love it when I am social for another human being.  That is always a good thing to see.  It gives me hope for humanity.”

Okay, fine.  Keep talking.  But a small part still wonders, when do we run over the unwary?  Mmmm . . . ?  When do we take out that poor schmuck from Des Moines, Iowa?

With seemingly cheerful indifference to my fate, Samira smiles at the loading passengers, calls out a welcome, and waits for the unbalanced to get seated.  And off we go to the next stop.

The front computer tells us that Samira is running two minutes behind schedule.  She is going slow because she is spending so much time talking to me.  “Don’t worry,  don’t worry,” she keeps saying to me.  Then we see an elderly man trying to cross the track a block ahead.  He is having a hard time.  Probably four-dozen people on the streetcar have to be somewhere at a certain time.  No matter.  Samira stops everything.  We sit in the middle of the track.  She smiles and waves the old man across.  He hobbles over the rails and returns the smile.  I glance back into the cars — all the passengers are smiling.   I’ll be darned, she’s right.  Samira and her passengers do give hope for humanity.

“Children, they love the tram.  Little kids sometimes you take them on your lap.  They push the bell.  They are so proud.”  She laughs softly to herself.  “People bring everything on the tram you know — closets, beds, mattresses, a small refrigerator, I even once had a sheep.  I drove to the stop.  My god, what a strange dog.  And it was a sheep.”

Samira pauses and then smiles at me: “Maybe I make my work bigger than it is.  But for me it is good.  It is good for me.  Because it makes me happy when I go to work. . . .   And, Joe, I see everything.  It is okay.”

With thumbs up, my ex-killer silently drives off.  Ashamed at my silliness, I head down the street.  But, I immediately have to jump back — a small ice cream truck, with tinkling bells, nearly flattens me.  See, an ice cream truck is trying to kill me. . . .

Joe

A clump of paper birch trees was planted by my neighbor in his front yard several years ago.  Today, the white-bark trees stand out proudly against his blue house in Des Moines.  They delight the eye.  Their cousin, the river birch, is in our front yard across the street.  80 feet tall.  It is a monster of a tree.  Our white-bark tree also stands proudly over our house.  Both sets of trees seem protective as they sit like sentries in our neighborhood.  Guarding us against evil.

Listen . . . .

I was not surprised to see the displays of shoes taken from the victims of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Adult shoes.  Children’s shoes.  Stylish shoes.  Yes, even shoes with holes.  All in one pile.  When the Soviets arrived to liberate the camps in 1945, they found 43,525 pairs of shoes not yet shipped out by the Nazis.

The shoes, the suitcases, the eyeglasses, the hair — these are all on display for anyone to see.  Shocking, but not surprising.

It is also no surprise the source of these items.  The Nazis deported, at a minimum, 1,100,000 Jews to these camps located on the edge of the Polish town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz to the Germans), about 30 miles from Krakow.  And those numbers don’t even include the thousands upon thousands of Poles and Roma taken to Auschwitz.  The large majority of newly-arrived victims — the children, the sick, the elderly, pregnant women, mothers with small children — were stripped of these same displayed clothes and were immediately pushed into the gas chambers.  The remaining small group, the “prisoners,” were also stripped of their clothing, their heads shaved, and they were put to work, or experimented upon, or shot, or hung.  Their lives were a couple of weeks or a couple of months or a couple of years.  As one surviving prisoner wrote: “[The Nazis told us] you did not come here to live, you came here to die, and you will.”

The size of the place is also not a surprise.  I stood midway on the train tracks in Birkenau and looked down to the far trees.  It’s like standing at the Polk County Courthouse and looking east down Court Avenue all the way to the Des Moines River.  Now, do that same distance in all four directions.  There you go.  The size of Birkenau.

Auschwitz and Birkenau were distinct camps, but they were really part of the same complex made up of several nearby camps.  Birkenau’s claim was its ability to kill and cremate the most people in the quickest time.  It had four main gas chambers with crematoriums, each able to murder 5000 people a day.   Efficiency was documented and prized by the Nazis.  Meticulous work orders were saved even for the crematoriums.   No surprise.

I was also not surprised by the display of hundreds of canisters of deadly gas pellets, Zyklon-B, that were poured down the chimneys into the gas chambers.

Our guide, a Polish woman, who committed to this life’s work when she was 18, told us that the poison gas pellets were activated by the heat of the victims’ bodies.  Even the choice of poison seemed to underscore Nazi hatred.  The Jews must die, according to the Nazis, as long as their bodies are warm.  Hate is not surprising.  Gut-wrenching.  Horrible.  But not surprising.

No, I was surprised by only one thing . . . .

The three of us walked through the main gate of Birkenau, down the tracks that run on and on until they don’t, and then we turned to the right.  We passed the gas chambers and crematoriums that the Nazis tried to destroy before the Soviets arrived.  Crematorium III, with it’s stairs going downward into the large vault where thousand upon thousands had their final moments.  Crematorium IV, which was destroyed in a mutiny by Jewish prisoners in 1944 — three SS men dead — 250 Jews killed.  The ruins of Crematorium V.

And then we looked up.

We are totally alone. Not another human soul.  Birds call somewhere in the far distance.  Muted.  The grey sky empties the late-winter landscape of all color.  Dusk in the middle of the afternoon.  Everything appears to be descending, enveloping, eroding.

And then there’s the birch trees.  They rise up out of the forest floor, stately and proud, watching us watch.

There’s a picture, taken by one of the SS officers in 1944, showing dozens of mothers and children, and an old man or two, next to these trees.  Waiting to go into the gas chamber.  Sitting and standing in this forest.  Moments from death.  Innocent.

I ask our guide if it was really this peaceful back then.

“Yes,” she says.  “I have talked to several survivors who said it was very quiet because no one wanted to say anything that would draw the Nazi’s notice.  If the Nazis noticed them, they were beaten or shot.”

And are these the same trees as back then?  “Yes,” she says.  I later read that the Polish variety of the “common birch tree” lives to over 100 years.

The guide considers me as I look closely at the trees, and she says: “You know, the name ‘Birkenau’ means birch trees.”

Of course it does.  Certainly it does.  How could it not?  A nightmare wrapped in festive paper.

Yes, I admit it, I am totally surprised as I stand next to these trees.  I know it doesn’t make sense.  I know I’m an old guy whose mind is on the way out.  I know that crazy is actually crazy.  But I can’t stop thinking — given what the birch trees saw, how can they not be weeping?

Joe

Stones are a bane to Iowa farmers.  Every year, new ones work themselves up out of the dark depths of the earth to land right smack in the middle of the field that is to be planted or plowed or disced.  Yup, right there in the middle of the row is a rock that wasn’t there last year. Every spring, the farmer will build a cairn of stones on the edges of the field to haul away for use at some other spot on the farm.  And the next year, it starts all over, another stone suddenly appears.  Birthed out of the prairie soil.

The Nazis decided the Jews could live on 184 calories a day.  So, the deaths began.  In 1941, over 100,000 died from lack of food and from the accompanying diseases that swept the ghetto.  So many died that the dead were without burial.  Bodies lay in the streets. In 1942, after the words were spoken of the “final solution to the Jewish question,” 265,000 Warsaw Jews were herded to a train station on the edge of the ghetto, known as the Umschlagplatz.

From here, the Jews were taken to their deaths at Treblinka.   265,000 in 1942 alone. Finally, by April of 1943, the Warsaw ghetto was nearly gone.  An amazing resistance was launched by the few survivors.  But by May of 1943, the ghetto was leveled.  Another horrific chapter of a many-chaptered book in the persecution of the Jews.

This is not complicated.  Someone stood where my wife and I are standing.  Today.  Yesterday.  30 years ago.  They brought a stone.  Maybe from Israel.  Maybe from Sweden.  Maybe from Des Moines.  Or just maybe from the ground beneath the wall.  It doesn’t really matter.  Someone else was here.  Someone else saw.  Someone else remembered.

You’re tired.  You’re tired of winter.  You’re tired of slogging through another day.  You’re really tired of another year silently slipping away.   Your exciting job of last fall has become relentlessly mired.  And now even the children are acting squirrelly.   Spring probably won’t come.  Listen, I’ve heard that can happen.  We will all just exist in some soggy, in-between time.  Grey will be Iowa’s new State Color.  Leftovers will be the new State Dish.  Mourning doves, now living furtively on the lam thanks to the Iowa legislature, will be the new State Bird.

How to get out of this funk?

I have an idea.  When’s the last time you were on a bike?  Do you remember the feeling?  There you are.  Gently turning the pedals.  Tall.  Upright.  Your cheeks blushed by wind.  Your ears muted by the whoosh of air.  Your eyes wet at the far corners.  And your mind focused on balance and movement and the outside.  All the while your arms reach outwards to embrace the handlebars and . . . .

Yikes!   Shake yourself. Enough of this idyllic claptrap.  Get a grip.  But . . . could this “wistful you” of late winter be the real you?  In Des Moines, Iowa?

It’s winter in Holland.  No one seems to register this fact.  In a country where there are more bikes than people, you just mount up.  You bike if you’re four years old and you bike if you’re 80 years old.  You bike to school.  You bike to the grocery store.  You bike to work.  You bike to the theater.  You even bike to pick up your Christmas tree.  Rain, sleet, hail.  Doesn’t matter.  You just bike.

Let’s start with the functional.  Are you counting the bikes in this grocery store parking lot?  Yup, well over 100.  And all close to the front door.

And where’s your three-ton SUV to haul home the toilet paper?  No problem.  The large wooden box shaped like the prow of a ship is the perfect container for groceries, or kids, or even your mother-in-law.  It’s the mini-van of the low countries.

And what about family?  How can this possibly work when you have to get kids to school, and to soccer, and to piano lessons?  Could I interest you in this green model, which offers a handy way to transport five in cozy comfort.  Heck, it even has a convertible option.  Did I tell you about the gas mileage?

Yes, I admit, it does rain nearly every day in this neck of the woods.  And that’s why God invented the umbrella to protect your business attire as you’re biking to meet a client.  Yes, you’re going to have wet shoes.  So what?  Wear wool socks.  Duh.

And what about the car’s all important function as a place to make-out with your sweetie?  Well, my favorite bike sighting is young couples.  The gal usually sits side-saddle on a wooden padded frame over the rear tire, with one arm gently resting against the the guy’s back.  A soft touch.  They chat away as they roll down the street.  When they come to a stop, she gracefully alights, and stands at the side of the bike with no break in the conversation.  The light changes, back up on the cushion, and away they go.  I imagine they get to a certain quota of stops, and then one of them just proposes marriage.  It’s time.  They’ve biked together long enough.  The other says “yes,” of course.   And 10 years later, . . . the loads gets a little heavier.  And the legs get a little stronger.

So, where are the dark enemies of these bikers?   You know, the bad guys who complain that bikes are taking up too much of Ingersoll Avenue?  Well, since everyone bikes in Holland, everyone is in the same boat.  The bike trumps pedestrians by common practice, and the bike trumps cars by strict liability laws.  The bike is the boss of the road.  Period.

Of course, there has to be evil lurking in this daydream.  It’s earthly form is the devil-red, all-devouring tram.  Everyone gets out of the way of the tram.  Although if you don’t, it slows down, rings a soft little bell, and you hop to the side.  Hell’s wrath avoided.

So, late winter blues?  Go get your bike tuned up.  Put on your helmet.  Hop up in the saddle.  And become the king and queen of all you can see.

Joe

Let’s be clear up front.  I am not a fan of fans.  Even the idea of “fans” conjures a group of normally sober Iowans, good people, suddenly sprouting bright school colors as they perch on bar stools or couches, their eyes intently focused forward while surrounded by a sea of cheesy potato chips and neon-red little hotdogs.  Some 19-year-old on the screen will soon decide whether these normal midwestern folks will spend the next few days wildly ecstatic or morosely depressed.  Really, fans are just one step away from multiple personality disorder — there they are, standing at the photocopy machine at work, meek and mild, then, BANG, they become your crazy Uncle Bob and loopy Aunt Thelma.  Trust me, I’ve been there, being a fan is not a good thing.

Well, Lolo, I’m a fan.  Back when you were at the Drake track for Roosevelt High School, my wife and I stood on the field with mouths agape watching you do the hurdles.  We were hooked.  LSU, a professional career, and two Olympics have only fanned our enthusiasm.  Yup, sure enough, that’s us on the couch.

Here you are again.  A new sport.  A new Olympics.  Good for you.  But where do you go from here?  What happens when your 38 years old?  Or 48 years old?  Or even 58 years old?

Got me.

So I talked to a guy named Rik Priester.  A world champion power lifter.  Yup, the best in the world in 1990.  Back then, he was you.  Well, you, but Dutch.   And with more hair.

In the beginning his star didn’t shine quite so brightly.

“My mother left my father when I was three or four and got another boyfriend.  It did not go well for me.  He drank a lot.  When you’re young you don’t know, but afterwards.  Every day a lot.  In the beginning, I don’t think there was any violence.  But 10, 11, 12 years old, there was violence a lot.  Against my mom and against me.  But more towards my mom, but I stand in between.  Every day you know your dad comes home, he’s drunk, and the story repeats.  Every day the same thing.”

Priester does not volunteer information about himself easily.  Maybe this reluctance is his character, or maybe it’s a cultural remnant of Dutch Calvinism.  Unclear.  Although, he looks directly in my eyes as he relates these earlier years.  Perhaps daring me to disbelieve.  I don’t.

The violence at home continued until the inevitable confrontation that resulted in Priester running away at 16 to live with his aunt.  And at 17, he joined another family — the Dutch marines.

”For six years I did everything — special forces, scuba, anti-terrorist.”

But he left the marines, looking for more opportunity.  He tried management at a factory for four years.  Didn’t work.  He tried schooling to be a fireman.  Unsuccessful.   He then became a bouncer and started a security business.  Not enough.

“I felt I had to do something with my brains.  So what can I do at the age of 43 to start studying?  I went to the University for physical education at age 43.  I was the oldest one.  I was twice as old as the other students.  In my third year, they invited me at the University to teach.  For 12 years I did that at the University.  I was very proud.  At the same time, also in the third year, I taught at the High School.”

During all this searching for meaningful work, Priester married the remarkable Harriet.  Four children followed.   Priester is very clear about Harriet, even 31 years later — “I owe her everything.”  She rolls her eyes, but smilingly pecks him on the cheek.

And his world championship as a powerlifter?  After his 1990 victory, Priester left that world far behind him.  He had other things to do.

Five years ago, he opened a family gym with Harriet.  Professional athletes began training at the gym.  Priester assisted them in their programs.  Priester’s knowledge about strength building became known to the Dutch National teams.  Within two years of opening the gym, he became the strength coach for the Dutch sailing teams and the Dutch beach volleyball teams.  He got results with his protégés that drew attention.  By 2012, he was at the Olympics in London with two of his young women.  Amazing.

So, quite a story, wouldn’t you say, Lolo.  Rags to riches.  A life well lived.  A beginning, a middle, and an end.

Ahhhhh, not enough for your competitive soul?  Try this.

He wiggles his way into the compression suit with some difficulty.  An old dog with newfangled equipment.  Clearly unhappy with the clothing’s restraint.  The mat is squared just right. The weight belt is lifted and placed and then lifted and placed again in the same spot on the bar.  A sacred ritual.  Effort can only get you so far in this world.

Priester dips under the bar hooked on the rack.  Focuses.  And then rises up from the ground, shouldering the burden.  He steps back delicately, balanced on a fine line, carrying not only the weights, but all of us who have stopped breathing as we watch.  He goes down, down, down, into a squat.  And now what?

“I started the second time when 52 years old.  Squats are my thing.  I went up to a certain level.  I decided I had to slow down, it’s enough.  Then I looked at the results of people competing.  So I started adding weights.  I now have the Dutch record in squats, but I want the record in deadlift and bench press.  I have to finish it.  I became second in the world last year at the World Championships in squatting [for all age groups].  I was 57 years old.”

And your goal?

“World champion in September.”  Okay, 58 years old and world champion in all age groups.  The best in the world.  Really?

Back at the gym, Priester gathers himself, then explodes upwards from the squat, shaking the room, raw and wild-eyed.  We breath in as he sets down his load.  I wipe my brow.

There you go, Lolo.  Something to consider as you fly down on that wild ride, tucked in your bobsled, hanging on for dear life, and wondering what is next after this giddy Olympics.

Oh, one more thing.  You remember Priester’s wife, Harriet, the woman who is his backbone through thick and thin.  I stood next to her in the gym as her husband prepared to lift.  She leaned over towards me with a smile.

“Joe, don’t tell anyone,” she said as she was watching her husband lift more weight than anyone in the world,  “but I don’t know why they say those power-lifter outfits are sexy.”

Yup, Lolo, I suggest you find a Harriet also.

Now, where are those cheesy potato chips?

Joe

Watching reality TV is like peeking down the alley into the curtained windows of the Red Light District.  Tittilating to be sure, but certainly not something you want to know too much about.  Right?  Listen, of course she’s on break from her final year of pharmacy school at Drake University.  That’s what her bio said.  Satisfied?  Too often we are.

Aren’t you just a little curious if “reality” is really reality for reality TV stars?  Do they sit down during a break from the show, shake their heads at what they did onscreen, smoke a cigarette, and quietly watch the diaper commercial?  Does Kim Kardashian, amidst all the concern about her public displays of lactating through her clothes, just noiselessly step away from the camera, nurse her kid, and wait for us to get back with the popcorn?  And Honey Boo Boo?  Seriously?

And then this brouhaha when a reality TV figure says something that shocks our sensibilities so badly that we vote them off the island.  Like the character from “Duck Dynasty” who made anti-gay comments recently.  This must be confusing to them.  Aren’t they supposed to shock our sensibilities?  Isn’t this what the audience wants?  The more unusual their behavior, the more they turn traditional good manners upside down, the more they act out as bad boys or bad girls, the more the audience loves them.  We ask them to edge some undefined line, and then we take away our love when they miscalculate.  It’s a precarious existence for sure.

The Dutch love reality TV.  In fact, they are the creators of a fair chunk of what you see out there.  Jon de Mol, yes, the man who was the spark for “Big Brother,” is the king of reality TV. De Mol is Dutch and his reality shows usually first appear in the Netherlands before they get exported.  Most recently, he sold the Dutch reality show “Utopia” to Fox for distribution in the U.S.  “Utopia” seems to be the horrible idea of abandoning 15 people for a year to create their own society — with all but the  “indispensable” persons gradually being cut from the show.    I’m thinking this isn’t going to work out well for “the poor, the orphaned, and the widowed.”

Right now in Holland, there is a reality TV show centered around a gal the public knows as “Barbie.”  Her actual name is Samantha de Jong.  Her shows are compared to “Jersey Shore.”  It’s all in Dutch, but my Dutch friends tell me that Barbie is quite a wild persona.  “She says whatever crazy thing comes into her head,” they say.  “The more inappropriate the better.”  Marriage proposal, birth of a child, fighting and making up with her husband.  My friends shake their heads.  But they all watch it.  Along with a million of their neighbors.  Yup, a million.  Except usually the first episode of the season.  That’s 1.5 million.

Two other characters appearing each week on the show are Barbie’s sister and the sister’s fiancée.  The fiancée, Patrick Huegen, is the solid-looking man on the left.  Yup, the beefcake.

Patrick, 30 years old, arrives early to our meeting.  He waves back to everyone greeting him — and there are many, as we sit at the small table.  He is curious about others, he solicits feedback, and he appears to be just one of those truly “nice guys.”  Oh yeah, he also can’t stop smiling.

When I ask him about the show, Patrick is visibly excited.

“It’s a very popular show.  Everybody in Holland talk about it.  ‘Did you see that?’ They say each week.  There happens a lot of crazy stuff in the show, but they like it.  Maybe that is the power of the series, because when there is something, we say it.  People who don’t do that, we are an example.  A lot of people talk about it.”

Patrick shows me clips from past episodes where he is a major character:  “I give my brother-in-law some tips for his marriage. And here, my brother-in-law got implants for his hair.  We are together at the clinic.  We are always laughing.  It is nice when we are together. And here, I am driving back from vacation in Spain.”

I watch the old episodes at home.  Barbie talking, laughing, crying, shouting.  Episode after episode.  I don’t understand a word.  It doesn’t matter.  This is voyeuristic heaven.  Lord, there is even a hazy clip of Barbie making love to her husband.  Amazing.

“In about two weeks, my fiancée is getting implants, we are going to film that,” Patrick tells me without a blink.

Really?  Is he kidding?

I have to tell you, Gentle Reader (as only Miss Manners can put it), my neck is getting sore.  My morals are getting bruised.  And I’m feeling self-righteous indignation about reality TV.  Enough is enough.

Ah, but of course Patrick, in his uniquely expressive English, has more to tell me.

“I was raised in The Hague,” Patrick explains.  “With my parents.  My parents break up when I was 11 years old.  My father goes this way, my mother goes another way.  My dad has gone the wrong way.  He has gone to prison.  A lot of criminal activities. . . .  He doesn’t drink anymore.  I learn from his mistakes.  I rarely drink.  I learn from him.  His faults he make, I try not to make.  It was learning.”

“I was a window washer for almost ten years.  Low to high buildings.  I worked very hard. I always worked six days in the week.  No vacation.  No holiday.  Not much money.”

“I started small on the show.  Everybody wants to be on TV sometime in their life.  It was good.  I did not expect more.  The second time they said come again.  The third time I got a small contract. This is my third contract.  I enjoy it.  I’m a character, but I am not crazy on the show.  I am just myself.  I don’t say curse words or bad things.  I am the same off the show.  I enjoy it.  I go on vacation.  I get to eat anywhere.  I am happy.”

And when the show ends?

“This show is not forever, it is not forever — I hope to get my work out of this for personal training.  It comes extra.  Maybe some guy watch the show and will come to me for training. The show is advertisement for my training profession.   I’m happy when I finish this. I am a happy guy.  When the show is on TV, I can get a lot of response from clients.  It is a big opportunity for me.  Everything from TV is extra.”

Patrick looks at me with clear eyes and no smile.

“Listen, I know it is reality TV. . . .   At least we don’t have to sing.”

And if they do ask you to sing?

“Then I can do it.”

Mmmm . . . how’s that self-righteousness thing working for you?

Joe

Des Moines really is the center of the universe.  I know, I know, there are a few doubters out there.  If you are cosmopolitan, or worldly, or perhaps a model for Abercrombie & Fitch standing shirtless outside the store at Jordan Creek, the center of the universe is wherever your perfectly sculpted abs land.  But it’s not true.  Des Moines is home central.  The rest of the world is OUT THERE.  The rest of the world is populated by PEOPLE-NOT-FROM-DES MOINES.  The rest of the world is covered by BBC World News, while the Boone News-Republican is pushing the edges of any sane person’s geographical comfort zone.

You need some proof that Des Moines is the center of the universe?  Let me tell you a story.

In 1992 a war erupted in a place I couldn’t even have identified on a map: the Socialist Republic of Boznia and Herzegovina.  This tiny country was born out of the split-up of Yugoslovia in 1991.  It was populated by Muslims Bosnians, Orthodox Serbs, and Catholic Croats.  Things turned south almost immediately between these groups, with the countries of Croatia and Serbia making the mess tragically worse.  Horrible things happened.  The words bandied about are “ethnic cleansing,” “mass rape,” “concentration camps,” and “genocide.”  Not pretty words.

A particularly gruesome part of this puzzle was the massacre at Srebernica in July of 1995.  More than 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed.  The killers were primarily Bosnian Serbs and paramilitary units from Serbia.  By the way, Srebernica was a safe area under UN protection during this massacre. That didn’t go so well, did it?

Here is a small excerpt from the summary of the trial judgment in one case:

“The prisoners were forced to surrender their property, which included identity cards, wallets, watches, and food. They were kept in cramped conditions and received some water, although hardly any food. Members of Bosnian Serb Forces did not ask or record names. . . .  Some [of the prisoners] were blindfolded and their hands were tied, and at one detention site they were given a final cup of water. Then they were transported to nearby locations, and shot. This scene played out at a field in Orahovac, a dam at Petkovci, a gravel pit at Kozluk and a farm in Pilica. In addition, hundreds were killed inside the Pilica Cultural Centre, an execution for which there are no known survivors. . . .    Loaders and excavators were either already at the sites at the time of the executions or arrived soon thereafter to bury the dead in mass graves.”

In a guilty plea in another case, a soldier admitted to being part of a firing squad at the farm in Pilica.  He and seven other solders executed Bosnian Muslims from 10 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon.  Ten victims at a time were unloaded from the buses and shot.  He estimates that he personally killed 70 people.  Men and boys from 17 to 60 years of age.

Believe it or not, a couple of victims survived.  Two survivors told a UN investigator of giving all their money to their guards (they were told they could buy their freedom), being placed on buses, taken to a farm field, and then shot.  These two faked death among the corpses.  And then miraculously fled before the excavators bulldozed their bodies.  Yup, you heard me correctly — they were actually buried alive under loved ones.  It is unimaginable.

Over 8000 murdered at Srebernica in total.

The guy running the show for the Bosnian Serbs was a sweetheart named Radovan Karadzic.  Karadzic is presently being prosecuted for various things, including the Srebernica massacre, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.  And my wife is helping in this prosecution.

Okay, you got it?

My wife spent a week helping prepare a Serb witness for trial on behalf of the prosecution.  The witness needed a translator for the preparation.  A cultured, elegant woman working for the Tribunal as a translator was assigned to the job.  As you can imagine, a conversation about the execution of 8000 people is not a particularly light-hearted topic.  Grim transcript after grim transcript were reviewed with the witness for two days.  At a break, my wife began to talk to the translator.  Slowly this led to further conversations.  The translator was a professional, who was serious and talented and correctly cautious.   And, by the way, from Serbia.  She gradually shared parts of her life with my wife.  Her job, her family, her life in Belgrade.

Eventually, the translator asks my wife where she was from.

“From the United States,” says my wife.

“Where in the United States?”  The translator pushes.

“Iowa,” my wife says.

And then out of the gloom of facts surrounding this horrible massacre, in the midst of all this senseless death, the translator says: “You must come from Des Moines.  Somebody had to.”

Whaaaat?  My wife is dumfounded.

This woman sees my wife’s confusion and smiles.  “You know.  Bill Bryson.”

Lo and behold, the opening two lines of Bill Bryson’s 1989 book The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America: “I come from Des Moines.  Somebody had to.”

So, there you have it.  From the far reaches of Serbia and The Hague.  Proof.  Des Moines is the center of the universe.

By the way, wandering around Delft the other day, I saw a mother and daughter holding hands while biking.  That’s how a story should end.

Joe

New Year’s vows are tricky for most of us.  Particularly after that first failed month down the rocky road of virtue and clean living.  You probably know what I’m talking about.  Vows made over holiday turkey and stuffing are long gone by the time the grey clamminess  of February oatmeal ferrets out the truth.  Sure, we can reasonably argue how our hope to be a better person ran afoul of bad people, bad astrology, and bad weather.   But, the cold, raw, February wind smacking us upside the head puts a quick end to that nonsense.  Here’s the bottom line — January got the best of us.  End of story.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for New Year’s vows.  I’d love to be a better person.  But for a vow to really work, I’ve read that you have to be ready, willing, and able to change.  You have to be motivated.  Most of us aren’t.

My friend, Bill Roach, an indoor cycling instructor at the YMCA in Waukee and the YMCA Healthy Living Center in Clive, teaches special January biking classes that acknowledge this motivational problem of “change. ”  He tries to help you slip the idea of your new vow into your subconscious while you’re pedaling like a maniac.  The current wisdom is that the seed of change in the subconscious mind will grow into a blossom of actual change in your conscious mind.  Clever.  But what else is Bill slipping into your subconscious mind?  Have you thought about that?  Let me ask you a question: Do you feel you want to bark like a dog when someone says the word “meatloaf”?  See, something else to think about as you’re “hill climbing” in one of Bill’s class.

No matter.  Maybe this is the year to take a sabbatical from renewing your January vows in February.  Maybe this February is the time to embrace the real you, the you in the mirror, the you inside your Spanx.   Yup, maybe it’s even high time to make friends with your belly.  That softly rounded sensuous curve deserves a little respect.  A little love.  He or she may be your closest friend.  And is undisputibly in your corner through thick and thin.

To expedite this love fest, I’d like to introduce you to my new best buddy — the lowly “oliebollen.”  Literally, “oil balls” in Dutch.  The translation says it all.  These wondrous delights are the Lamborghini of deep-fried donut holes.  The size of a tennis ball, they have a chewy dumpling consistency that doesn’t look like much, but after eating one, you’ll want to lie down on a bench, wipe your brow, and perhaps have a little swoon.  Delightfully satisfying.

Oliebollen is a traditional Dutch pastry served around the New Year’s holidays.  They’ve been in existence forever.  The going theory is that oliebollen is eaten to thwart a German goddess who appears around New Year’s Eve and tries to cut open your belly while you sleep.  If you eat oliebollen, you’re in luck:  the goddess’s sword will slide off your newly-created fat.  How awesome is that justification.  Disembowelment or dessert?  Listen, it’s a personal choice each of you have to make.

Linnie Vermolen runs an oliebollen stand.  This stand is so popular that the line stretches clear to the next street on New Year’s Eve day.

Linnie and his family have run this same stand in the same place for a long time.  “This was for my father and mother, I think now twenty-five years here.”  Linnie says with a broad smile.

His cousin, Gerda, working beside him, chimes in that the entire business is a family affair: “His mother works, his sister works, and I am here.”

They laughingly tell me, “Our English is not so good.  What do you think?”  They then talk about the ingredients in oliebollen, how kids love to put their faces up against the glass front and pick out the exact oliebollen they have been eyeballing for 20 minutes, how the dough rises in two separate bowls with one containing raisins, how good this location is for business, where Linnie works in the off season, how they put on the powdered sugar, and on and on and on.

Don’t they get tired working long hours in the stand?

“I am 63.  Linnie is 46.  Linnie is like a young dog.  We have much fun.  Sometimes we have very hard working.  But we get to talk and have fun.”  Gerda smiles broadly as she speaks.

But don’t your feet get tired?

“We don’t work, we dance always.”  And Gerda dances around in circles with Linnie.

Okay, what further information do you need?  Perhaps it is time to set aside those New Year’s vows and all the associated guilt, eat oliebollen and dance with Gerda and Linnie.   And love your belly.  If you can do this, consider yourself invited to the February requiem for those January vows.  May they rest in peace.

Joe

Red Light districts and “coffee shops” that sell marijuana is what most folks know of the Netherlands.  That’s too bad.  Don’t get me wrong, vice sells.   But illicit drugs and anonymous sex, even if we include rock and roll, seems a little unambitious for a bucket list of things you want to do before you die.  Okay, if you’re the mayor of Toronto in a “drunken stupor,” maybe it would be enough.

Truly, Holland is a magical place for all sorts of reasons besides magic mushrooms.  But it seems the naughty kid always gets the attention.  My friend, the wonderful Dutch mom Harriet Priester, who is not a fan of marijuana or alcohol, says with a shrug of tolerance, “But the coffee shops are also Holland.”  So, in pursuit of all things “Dutch,” off to the coffee shops I go.

I soon stumble across a problem — coffee shops are barred from advertising, which makes the owners and employees skittish about an interview for an international newspaper like Des Moines’ Cityview (apparently they heard about the deliveries in Altoona).   Harriet’s two adult sons, however, step up and offer to help.  Out the door we go for an adventure.

The coffee shop where the boys take me is nearly kitty-corner to the Noordeinde Palace in The Hague, the working palace of the king of the Netherlands, King Willem-Alexander.  Of course.  Where else would you put a drug den?  The location reflects the Dutch Government’s tolerance of “soft drugs.”  The Netherlands decided long ago that the way to control the use of marijuana is to regulate it.  The argument is that by legislating the location, the amount, and the type of drug available, users won’t be pulled into harder drugs, personal safety will increase, and the location won’t become a nuisance to the public.  Like its tolerance of prostitution, the Netherlands has decided to go the route of education, regulation, and treatment, rather than criminalization.  Interesting.

Creamers is like every coffee shop I see in my wanderings around The Hague.  Large windows open to the street.  Bright interior.  No skulking dark corners.  One more shop on a street of clothing stores, bakeries, and butcher shops.

Suzanne, the barmaid, is serving beverages in the section where the public gathers to drink pop, beer, or tea, and, yes, smoke marijuana.  She sees that I’m wide-eyed as I look around the room.   Laughingly, she pours me a beer and chats me up.  Yup, I’m a little discombobulated.  Part of me is drinking a beer, smiling, and looking for patrons to interview; the other part of me is waiting for the Des Moines Police to come busting through the door so we can decide who to charge and with what crime.  Is Suzanne an aider and abettor to Delivery of a Controlled Substance or merely an innocent bystander?  Should I start writing search warrants for the bicycles outside?  Lord, why is everyone sitting so nonchalantly when they should be running for the doors and jumping out windows?  It is a  topsy-turvy world and I’m having a hard time finding my balance.

The soft drugs are sold at a small counter to the left, where the marquee announces the current products and prices.  Wow.  Haze weed and skunk weed.  There’s a difference?

The marijuana is displayed in plastic containers at the counter.  I ask to see inside one of the containers.   It looks suspiciously similar to green raccoon poop.  Perhaps this brand of marijuana is like the rumored rare coffee beans that monkeys pass through their intestines for coffee connoisseurs.  Are there marijuana connoisseurs?  Of course there are.

It’s 2:30 in the afternoon.  Business is moderate.  Customers appear to range in age from 18 to 60.  Thigs, Jake, and Quentin are quietly sitting in a booth smoking marijuana and drinking tea.

“We just finished school and had some spare time.  And it is more common to smoke weed at 2:30 than have a beer.  You’re still capable to do anything.  If you have a beer eventually you end up on the ground.  You can’t do homework.”

And do you think smoking weed helps you?

“Marijuana is not bad for you, but it is not good for you.  It is smoking a cigarette.  It badly affects your health in the same way.”

Maciek sits up at the bar.  He is drinking a beer and smoking a joint.

Maciek is from Poland and has been in Holland for ten years.  A friendly guy, he tells of his handy-man job and his ability to do electrical, plumbing, carpentry, the works.  Do I have need of a handy-man?

He gets out the fixings for another marijuana cigarette.  Rolling paper, tobacco, marijuana.  And spends quite a bit of time laying out the tobacco, then putting the marijuana on top, and finally, he rolls the paper.  I am fascinated.  He kindly offers me the finished product.  For free.  When I decline, his feelings are hurt.  So, I buy him a beer.  We are friends once again.

My two tour guides, Luc and Rik, patiently sit with me and translate when necessary.  They have smoothed the way.  I ask the brothers what they think about the coffee shops.  Both preach tolerance of marijuana, but personally do not imbibe.  By the way, they also rarely, if ever, drink alcohol.

To them, “to smoke weed is not a big deal.”  They echo the government statement that legalization may save customers from being around harder drugs.  But for these two trained power lifters, the bottom line is health.  “It is simply healthier to not drink alcohol or smoke.”  So they don’t.  Period.  And out the door we go, leaving behind the drugs, booze, and rock and roll.

But let me tell you a story before you flip back to the picture of the weed.

In the middle of the 1980’s, I successfully convicted a somewhat notorious drug dealer in Des Moines.  After the jury returned the verdict, the then-county attorney allowed me to give an interview with the press.  Flush with my victory, I recall making a statement about how the jury’s actions would take a major bite out of the drug scene in Des Moines.  I may have even said that the defendant’s conviction would make Des Moines a safer town and that we were doing our part in the War on Drugs.  And, if I remember correctly, the next day’s paper even referred to the downfall of a “Drug Kingpin.”  Wow.  What success. What a victory.  The world was safe once again.

Here we are.  Nearly 30 years later.  Drug and alcohol problems are all solved.  Isn’t it wonderful?

And there you have it.  My visit to a coffee shop.

Joe

Swimming seems an activity that evokes an older time, perhaps even a better time, a time of gentle ease.  Swimming belongs in a Norman Rockwell painting.  There you are, floating on your back in a small pond bordered by Iowa prairie grass, with two dragonflies and a single grasshopper perched gently on the bent tips of the cattails edging the water; and in the distance is a cornfield standing tall against a shimmering blue sky with a lazy cloud drifting slowly past.  Rockwell, of course, would have positioned a “no swimming” sign that you happen to splash with the merest flutter of a kick, as you slip quietly and peacefully through the cool blue-green, gliding without friction, free from the pull of all earth’s desires.  Paradise.

There is just one very small personal hiccup with this rosy picture — swimming terrifies me.  Let me assure you, I’ve tried to swim.  In fact, I’ve swum thousands of laps.  Unfortunately, they were mostly to the bottom of the pool and then back to the surface and then down to the bottom again.  An exercise closely resembling drowning.  Sure, I’ve had years of swim lessons.   But come Graduation Day, I’m the one grabbing the wet end of the hook held by the swim instructor to fish out those unsuccessful students who disappear into the deep-end with no hope of resurfacing before the end of class.  Swimming has not produced my best moments.

Which is why my taking the traditional plunge into the North Sea on New Year’s Day with 10,000 of my closest Dutch friends seems a tad problematic.

Let’s just set aside the drowning issue for a moment and talk about a few other minor concerns with this venture.  First, this ocean is not called the North Sea because gentle hot springs hidden under the waves cause you to giggle self-consciously as your swim trunks bubble up around your waist.  Sorry.  It’s called the North Sea because it is best-suited for military landings.

Like this celebration the Dutch held the other day to commemorate the landing of William of Orange in 1813.  Clearly, the Lazy River at Adventureland this is not.

And then there is the small problem of the water being slightly chilly this time of year.   Look at all these swimmers in the North Sea.

Now, look again.  They all are in wet suits.  A wet suit make sense in the North Sea.  A wet suit is designed so that you don’t freeze to death in the water. Why are these swimmers all wearing wet suits?  They don’t want to die in the North Sea.  This is not subtle.

Finally, did I tell you that 10,000 folks are expected to show up for this little dip on New Year’s Day?  That’s a lot of people.  And after this theoretical dunk in the ocean, how exactly do we get our wet clothes off and our dry clothes on?   Will there be 10,000 changing rooms with small space heaters placed next to little tables holding cups of hot cocoa with marshmallows?  I’m thinking not.  Yup, 10,000 naked people on a cold, wind-swept, North Sea beach are going to be dancing on one leg trying to get their underwear on.  This might not be my brightest idea.

But, there you are.  The Dutch begin the New Year by a dip in the ocean.  It heralds a fresh start.  A new beginning.  Time to buck up and welcome the future.  What are you going to do?

So we all pay our three euro, don our orange stocking cap that is given to every entrant, along with a large tin can of split-pea soup (why not?) inside an orange bag with the sponsor’s logo, and wait patiently to strip down to our speedos and bikinis and run into the ocean.  I make my way to the middle of the crowd where I’m sure it’s nice and toasty.   Well, I slightly miscalculate.  The North Sea wind instantly freezes me, somewhat like the flash freeze they use on the spinach you buy at Hy Vee out of the freezer compartment.  As a result, I stand woodenly for 45 minutes.  Not moving.  Frozen spinach on the shelf.

Time passes slowly.  But, after three line dances and lots of stomping to techno music interlaced with polka tunes, a roar goes up, and everyone around me starts running.  I try to run, but I’m still frozen solid to the ground.   I eventually loosen up, make it to the water, dive into a wave, don’t drown, turn around, grin with delight, and raise my fists high above the spray.  This euphoria lasts about a quarter of a second.  Then I discover a small problem — I don’t have a clue where I left my dry clothes.

Do you see them anywhere?

Sure, there are 10,000 bundles of dry clothes on the beach.  That’s a fact.  I can see them.  They are all in the conveniently provided orange bags.  My clothes are also in an orange bag.  Just like every bag.  I’m a little cold.  And dripping wet.  And getting colder.  And the wind is blowing harder.  The edge of panic starts to seep into my damp brain.

By the way, I told this story to my Dutch friend.  Her grandfather was a fisherman.  Her father was a fisherman.  And her son is a fisherman.  They have all gone into the North Sea for weeks on end to make a living.  They all make it correctly home.

“Joe, you should have talked to me.  We are all taught from young about finding our way back.  You must make a line with your eye back up the shore to some mark on the land.  You follow that line to your clothes.”

Of course you follow the line.  Everyone knows that.

In the meantime, I wandered the beach like a soggy puppy.  Whimpering in a heroic sort of way.  As I contemplated taking someone else’s orange bag (how easily we turn to crime), suddenly, there was my bag.  I nearly cried with joy as I danced naked on one leg trying to get my underwear on.

So . . . what do I think?

I think this is what Norman Rockwell would have painted had he been around for this foolishness.  Not some nostalgic ideal.  But, a dance with 10,000 of my closest naked friends, crying with relief, trying to put on their underwear.  And, of course, Rockwell’s ever-present “no swimming” sign would be just visible at the corner of the painting — up on a sand dune with wet swim trunks hanging off one edge of the sign.

Now that would be a New Year’s Day picture.

Joe