The Stories of our Life (1/30/2025)

The folks at my church (the Unitarian Fellowship of the Peninsula) have established what are called “Fellowship Circles.” These spiritual circles are approximately eight persons strong, meet twice a month for approximately an hour and a half and discuss a specific topic. The topic this week was “The Stories of my Life.” We were asked to discuss three questions (in a round).

The questions were:
1. Tell us a story from your life that tells us something about where you came from.
2. Tell us a story from your life that tells us something about what you are.
3. Tell us a story from your life that tells us something about where you are going.

If you read my blog regularly, my possible answer to the second question should be familiar to you; this is what this blog mostly is about. I could have given four stories that address question 1. One of the stories is about the kid that was killed for stealing a pig. This happened in Uganda (1978) and the event is still haunting me. The other stories include one on how my career started; secondly about the first kiss my wife and I exchanged in 1976 while skating on the ice between Gouda and Rotterdam; and lastly the labor riots in Curacao 1969 and what this eventually led to.

Let’s start at the beginning: Curacao. I was 15, when on May 30, we were on lunch break at our high school. We were standing just outside the gate of our school, having just returned from buying some snacks at the Portuguese shop (toko, or convenience store) across the street when a huge crowed of angry protestors marched by the school on their way downtown. I was personally blown away from seeing all these angry faces walking by and so many! The school closed down and I think it was my father who picked me up. We lived on top of a hill fairly far removed from downtown (20 or so miles) but that afternoon we watched dark billowing clouds of smoke rising from the town (Willemstad). It later appeared that downtown was partially destroyed and put ablaze by the rioters. I read reports that eventually 432 rioters were arrested. Based on those numbers you can imagine how many rioters I saw that faithful morning passing by our school. The islands went into martial law for a week, and I remember 1) family friends coming over to stay with us, to be far enough from the epicenter of the riots, 2) with my father franticly driving around the island trying to find an arms dealer or some place where he could buy a weapon to defend the family, and 3) being safely at home with my scared parents and their friends. The name of the leader of the rioters was called Pappa Godett. You can just imagine what the white minority on the island was joking about or hoping for.

A little background, we had lived in the Congo and although we had not gone (suffered) through the independence war in that country (read Atwood’s “Poisonwood Bible” or Naipaul’s “A Bend in the River”). Many of my parents’ old friends (yes, white colonialists) had and had shared the horror stories with them. These riots scared my parents shitless, enough that they started panicking. Eventually things settled down, but my parents had enough; they decided to move back to the Netherlands. They stuck me on a plane in early August to start my 3rd grade (9th for those readers in the US) in high school (the move put me back one grade). I was sent to live with my aunt and her four daughters (two more or less my age) for the first few months and was reunited with my family in December of that year.

You can imagine how this shaped me. I had just discovered girls, already fallen in love at least twice and now had a steady girlfriend. These riots pulled me away from it all, my beloved island, its culture, my friends and my girlfriend. It changed my life forever, setting a course for who I am now, not better or worse. It just made me who I am today.

Stay tuned, I will write more about the next two stories that shaped me. Who knows, I may even write the story of my future in one of these posts; however, I hinted at it in my previous two posts about the workshop with Clay Jenkins. Conversely, the current political happenings make me feel that I cannot and should not keep my mouth shut; I still have so much to say. In other words, my life stories may be interspersed by some more social and political commentary.

Yorktown Battlefield, a place where at least two battles were fought and a lot of stories were told, and lives were shaped.