A maternal visitation

My mom came to visit last month. Even before I met her at the airport, she had already demonstrated her maternal flair for self-advocacy, by press-ganging a surly Dutch customs official - the most resolutely unhelpful people on earth - into stamping her passport even though he was about to close his window just as she reached it.

For two weeks we bicycled around Holland, touring the dunes around Monster and Katwijk, and exploring the windmill-dotted paths near Alkmaar. We poked around The Hague, Amsterdam, Leiden, and Wassenaar.

Unsurprisingly, she was drawn to Delft blue porcelain like a junkie is drawn to the change under your car seat. I'm pretty sure she would inject Delft blue right into her neck if she could get it into a syringe. More than once I found her flinging her body piteously against shop windows full of the stuff, or trying to figure out how many Delft blue plates she could fit into her mouth so she could line her nest against the long Delft blue-less season of stateside life. To answer the primordial urge of every porcelain collector, she even braved a foreign tram system alone to make a hallowed pilgrimage to the city of Delft, into the dark heart of Delftware itself. But she exercised self-restraint worthy of a woman who had saved enough for two kids' college tuition, and returned to the US with only one small vase.

She charmed my roommates with her enthusiasm: during a dinner with Jessica and Michaël, after just one glass of wine and five minutes of politics, she was pounding the tabletop with Gallic indignation. She ended by standing in the kitchen shouting about how poorly women are treated in Pakistan. Can I get a hell yeah?

By the time she left, she had even become savvy to the erratic Dutch weather patterns. When we left the house to go to the airport, she stepped outside and said, 'Well, at least it's not raining right this very minute!'

And then there was bandwidth...

In August I moved in with Jessica and Michaël. They're getting married next month, but they don't seem to be freaking out nearly as much as I'd be. They giggle a little more, and they argue a little more. Like the debates in the run-up to an election, but different. In fact, I ought to start televising their debates, because nobody should have to miss an argument between a redheaded Texan and a surly Parisian over how to load the dishwasher.

Last week we finally got our internet connection, which was sort of like waking up and discovering that you no longer live in an underground cave where you have to subsist on worms, but instead live in a cute old fisherman's house by the North Sea. Which, in fact, we do. It looks like this:


It's on a pedestrian-alley-courtyard sort of thing. The Dutch word for courtyard is hof, but they have a tendency to make everything sound small and cute (and in this country, it probably is) by adding -je, so what we live on is called a hofje.

As though to preserve the fisherman's-enclave atmosphere, the hofje is crawling with cats. In fact, the local residents' association required that we contribute a cat to the local population in order to ensure that there's the requisite amount of kitty poo on the cobblestones, because otherwise, how will we know for certain that we're in Holland?



So we have Pancake, Jessica and Michaël's cat. She's part American Shorthair and part quarterback, with a little bit of crack habit thrown in.


She spends the mornings chasing our feet and trying to knock the lid off my teapot. Her favorite pastime is to roll over onto her back and make cute kitty faces until you actually reach toward her, at which point her perimeter alarm goes off and she latches onto your hand like that freaky thing in Aliens. That's your cue to spin her around on the floor and maybe flip her over a few times. Then she throws up on the bathroom rug and stumbles outside to pick a fight with the seagulls.