Getting There
Only when I am right in front of her does the woman behind the glass wave.
Her wave is stilted as if she can’t raise her shoulder, as if she ages restricts the sweep of her hand from left to right.
But she does wave enthusiastically, smile excitedly.
One of the pleasures of Amsterdam is that to get almost anywhere comes with countless options for the route you might take. A semi-circular maze of canals and bridges means no straight line from point A to point B. Just to get from my place to Bruno’s for coffee offers three different “direct” routes of ten minutes each, each with a different pair of six bridges you might cross, each with countless other side-street options available should you choose to take them.
As I have been, of late, so as to pass the old-folks home (I am not sure of the politically correct term in America, let alone here) where the woman who waves sits in her wheel chair.
The three or four such establishments I happen to know of in Amsterdam look less grim than any of the places my siblings and I toured near Boston when finding spots my parents could spend their last unhappy months.
“We take care of our old people,” a native tells me proudly.
Maybe so. Still, except when waving, the woman who waves looks, if not sad, then vacant. And when we wave at each other I do not see the little girl in her so much as someone doing what she can to be engaged in the moment.
The ground floor of the building offers enough glass to expose a dining room that looks out onto the street, a street that is more alleyway than thoroughfare. Yet from where she sits, the woman who waves might just be able to see the busy intersection of the Haarlemmerplein a block away. And it is in corner of the dining room nearest to that action where she always is, in that direction which she always faces.
I question her sight more than her sightline, though, since not until we are at a kissing distance does she begin her work.
I am outside, with one more bridge to cross and know where I am bound. She knows too, and makes this her way.