The ball in question is floating away from a school playground . . .
It will perhaps help to set the scene of this morning's “only in Amsterdam” event to know that ten or fifteen years ago, boating in the canals was both less regulated and less expensive.
On sunny summer days, friends and friends of friends would board vessels of every Dr. Seuss design, load them up with drinks and snacks and cruise around with a “let’s not-exactly-not-crash-into-one-another” mode of navigation you might associate with bumper cars.
Along with the houseboats and year-round sightseeing flatbeds, sunshine meant sloops packed with fifty beer-drinking students and skiffs holding a family and tugboat-looking deals rented out for dinner would fill the waterways.
Out of giddy delight, tourists would wave at this armada of slow-motion-ridiculousness from bridges as if the whole thing were a parade, the frolicking locals now temporary royalty puttering beneath their admirers.
“Useless joy,” a friend called it.
These days, though, everything is far tamer and gussied up and corporate.
Someone at Amsterdam HQ decided to quell the joy or make it profitable or safer or something and rather than a backyard bbq feel, more and more boats flash cash or come with branding painted on their side.
This was true of the boat I saw this morning, a “Moet Champagne” boat, though I only noticed this after the ball rescue.
A moment earlier it had motored by me as an obvious party boat for hire, the two young Duchies on board getting seat cushions onto benches, the bottles and glasses already set up midship in tight bar formation as if the cocktailers were just a few minutes away. Not at an unusual sight for mid-July, though odd, I thought, for 9:45 AM.
As they moved parallel to me and towards the bridge I was about to cross over I could see that a woman was asking them to slow down.
What’s up?
What’s up, or rather what was down, was that soccer ball.
It had escaped the school playground on just the other side of the bridge, no doubt kicked over the short fence. While half the kids continued to play, their recess delight audible to all, another ten or twenty watch the proceedings with longing and expectation. They give directions and help the captain/bartender position his vessel, a manoeuver that takes a little doing because the ball has found refuge in an L of seventeenth-century stone that supports the bridge. But a bystander drops a rock to push the ball into proximity such that a long arm extended by a wine bottle can reel it in.
Yeeeeaaaaaa . . . cheer kids whose faces appear just above the fence.
After that the ball is launched up to the bystander . . . hooray . . . it is passed on to the teacher . . . more claps, more cheers . . . before it is passed on to teacher number two. She has some words for this crowd of eight and nine-year-old boys and girls. A warning? Surely this is not the first time a ball has needed to be rescued. Nor will it be the last.
In any case, playground football starts up again and the clamor of useful delight grows in decibels.
The boat heads off to pick up whatever business types start their day with a drink, something the original teacher who stopped the boat clearly does not need. As I pass we smile at each other, she turning back to the kids, me knowing that of course, this will be today’s post.
And as I have been writing about comparison the past few days it occurs to me how far this scene of rescue is from an active shooter, the boat flagging teacher not, it seems, consumed by lockdown drills.
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