The off-access gates at either end of the bridge over which my apartment looks distinguish native Dutch bikers (who zoom through) from ex-pats (who slow down) from the tourists (they come to a full stop). In this sense, it is a bridge of place.
From there too, in summer, people jump into the canal (one of Amsterdam’s better “Welcome to Fantasyland” scenes) with kids climbing up into 17th-century rigging to add height to the leap, an extra thrill the older folks forgo. So it is a bridge that sorts by time as well.
Now that my landlords are selling it, potential buyers will start to snoop around. While it is no more than two ordinary rooms, someone will buy it. Windows on magic windows are hard to come by.
I admit that moving from here is hard to discuss. Talk about privilege, to have spent a night here let alone a year certainly counts. And talk about life decisions demanding review . . . all my peers could afford to buy this place, their basic devotion to thrift and economy, perhaps industry too, what has escaped me. Crucify them as you will, some demons roll away the stone.
But let me vault over that self-pity and talk about another.
Moving means you must put your hands on everything you own. Not too laborious in my case, but still . . . which notebooks with half-written pieces can get recycled? Which are to be kept? Is this coffee mug a necessity or not? And since I am off to Johannesburg for a few months to work, what is to be kept will have to be stored somewhere even as I figure out whether or not I will come back to Amsterdam or shuffle on, and back, to the United States. Anyway, as invariably happens in a life, right now the gates look tight, the rigging high.
The only thing I am absolutely sure I must hold onto is a lovely, if slightly amateurish, painting of two geese flying against a blue sky.
The subject reminds me of the young woman (Molly) in whose name I try to work and who first introduced me to Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese.” (There is a video about the painting and a few lines of the poem here.) I found the painting a few months ago at a place near here on a day of doubt when I was all but saying to myself, “you’ve really got to make this Molly work turn into something Ted.” So that day, you might say, I needed to find this painting.
This day, though, I had the fantasy that one of the potential buyers would offer more than the asking price for the apartment if it comes with the painting, a brain bleep I converted to mean that whatever my current loss and weariness in this move, I would not trade the painting even for this one-of-a-kind view. One points toward who I aim to be, the other I just wish to possess.
We like stuff. Homes and cars and clothes. And no wonder. Nice things are nice and even if their shine hooks the ego, their beauty can serve (as beauty often does) to keep fear at bay: the fear of sadness and of being ordinary and of “not enough.”
Oliver says it better:
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Harsh . . . and exciting.
The painting, I should say, is not signed, as if the anonymity announces its value, suspends it above the current.
Here’s to the discovery of amazing windows no matter where you land and the relationships you enter on the other side of them!