Get on those barricades (8/18/2025)

As you may have seen in my previous posts, I have been writing about my life and of my immediate family. However, I am currently hitting somewhat of a wall. I guess that happens when you have been reading, listening and watching too much news and combining that with the responsibility as president for a board that is responsible for running a church. Don’t worry, I am not going religious on you. While Unitarian Universalism is definitively a religion, it should not be confused to proselytizing religions. Our motto is that we except folks from all religious and philosophical walks of life. This includes atheists and humanists. We don’t recruit much, but maybe we should; I think a lot of folks could find a spiritual home with us.

But let’s take a step back. These past few months we have been bombarded by news that the climate is worsening including the horrible floods in Texas where at least 135 people died; floods in Milwaukee, New England, New York City, etc.; a pretty strong earthquake and tsunami warnings; wild fires all over the world; and hurricane Erin that went from a category 1 (75 to 95 miles per hour wind) to a category 5 (more than 157 miles per hour or 252 km per hour) within 18 hours. We learn about a flip-flopping tRump who now supports Rusia again, or worse has given us whiplash from his tariff games. Finally, I cannot escape talks about sexual predators on television or in my own life, and no, I am absolutely not one of them, nor have I ever been abused. I have simply not been able to find any good news these past few months. So, why the hell write about my youth and my family; I should be on the barricades.

The Buddhists tell me to live in the moment and enjoy the shitshow. Stoics tell me that even living in the moment will not do it, since this last word I typed in already in the past. They tell me to concentrate on things that I (think) have control over. Talking about barricades, I have participated in a few demonstrations, but is that control? Maybe I have taken control of some of my frustrations by these actions. It definitively feels good to be among peers, people who think the same. However, it sure does not look like I am changing anyone’s mind.

Looking at the blogs that I wrote over the past 12 or so years, I have been warning you about climate change, political extremeness, war, gun violence, the environment, stormwater, soils, life on or near the water, and I occasionally write about life and bonsai. I am hoping that that the occasional post may affect some of you in a positive way; although I have no illusions that I can change the world this way. I confess, I am not doing a damn thing about it except write about it. Yes, I pick up the dog poop when we walk our animals; I recycle (not the poop); we have not used fertilizers or pesticides in our home in years (except my bonsai); we have little to no lawn to speak of; we drive a hybrid; and we vote. Remember, your vote matters!

What message am I trying to convey in this post, what charge am I giving you? I don’t know, maybe this is just a bitch session, a bitch post. Maybe I am trying to get myself motivated to do more; to write more; to bitch more, in the hope to change maybe one mind a year; to get you all motivated to work harder to change this world for the better, for your children and grandchildren. Our descendants deserve a livable world when we are no longer here. Fuck the fake republican fear of budget deficits, environmental deficits make the world unlivable whether we have a balanced budget or not. Let’s get on those barricades together and change the world.

Stolen from the movie Les Misérables

The Story of my parents (Part 2) (8/4/2025)

Back to 1940. A few days after the Dutch government surrendered my grandparents on my father’s side got a knock at the door. The visitor was someone from the red cross informing my grandmother that one of her son’s had died during the Battle of the Grebbeberg. The visitor handed Wim’s military dog tag to my oma and he left. I have been told that my distraught oma locked herself into a private room and meditated for three days. My oma was a known fortune teller; family lore told us that one of her foremothers was a gypsy fortune teller. I remember that when I was young, during card games with my oma, she would suddenly gasp when she looked at the new hand she had been dealt and say something like “Oh my someone I know will become ill and will be dying soon.” She would refuse to tell you who the person was and that made it even more spine-chilling.

When my oma exited her room after three days, she announced that “Wim wasn’t dead.” Less than a week later Wim walked in the home, very much alive. His partner in the foxhole had been killed and Wim had swapped dog tags with the dead body in the attempt to hide his identity and enable him to join the resistance without implicating the family. The story goes that my grandmother’s hair had turned white during the three days of meditation. She had been a redhead before the episode.

It also seems that my dad worked in France during the early part of WWII. This might have been in 1940 or 41. He never told us much about it, except that he lived or spend time in a brothel in northern France (near Amiens?). While I assume he had a good time with the ladies, he never provided a lot of details of his life there. I found old photographs which showed him on a building site at an airport. On a few pictures you can see him doing some kind of roofing job; he was sitting on top of the roof rafters. I can assume that this was a work camp of sorts. The Germans forced a lot of young adults into forced labor. Jan, my mother’s oldest brother ended up in a labor camp (the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen) and died there two days after being liberated by the Americans.

What happened after that is somewhat of a mystery. I don’t know when exactly it took place, but my dad told me that he tried to escape to either a neutral or an allied country, and he traveled to Finland to try to cross the border into Sweden. I assume he somehow left or escaped the labor camp in France. He probably made it back to the Netherlands and took off for Sweden. I am not sure what his route was, except that he spent some time in Latvia. My research shows that Latvia was officially occupied by the German Army in July 1941 during operation Barbarossa when Hitler tried to invade Russia. Latvia remained under German occupation until October 1944. I also wonder how the heck he was able to do this as a young adult (it must have been in either 1941, 42 or 43, so he was between 19 to 21 year-old) without attracting the attention of the Germans and being (re)captured; however, it seems that he made it to Rovaniemi in Finland and spent the winter there.

The stories that my dad told me of this time include an account of him sitting in a soup kitchen in Latvia across from an elder man with a Jewish star on his jacket. My father told me he was able to sneak one of his id-s in the hope that the guy could use it to stay out of the hands of the Nazis. Stories of Finland include tales of cold, darkness, skiing, drinking and saunas. I learned about one of his buddies who was drunk and went outside to relieve himself. They found him, the next morning, just outside the door dead, frozen solid. Dad told me that they assumed that he tripped and that was it. Dad was never able to cross the Swedish border and somehow made it back to Holland.

Here it gets strange. When I got an interview for a job at a company in Amersfoort, my father insisted on going with me, and he and Donna went to visit the site of Kamp Amersfoort. After my interview they took me there, as well. It seems that my father ended up in that camp after the Finland episode. Amersfoort was a work/transfer camp. I am not sure how long he was back before he was captured. Kamp Amersfoort seemed to house a few Jews, but mostly workcamp evaders waiting for transfer to work camps in Germany. Furthermore, it had some resistance fighters, black marketeers and Russian prisoners of war. It seems that the surviving Russians (Uzbeks) were executed after a few months. Dad talked about having to work in the camp filling sandbags. He told us that he responded to an inquiry by the Germans if there was someone who could operate a train. The train was taking the sandbags to a point from where they were shipped to who knows where. Dad told us that he volunteered but did not know how to drive a train. The train promptly derailed. Did dad sabotage it? He claimed he did, but I am not sure. It could also have been pure incompetence. He told us that he was put in the “Rose Garden”, an enclosure surrounded by barbwire and had to stand in it for 36 hours without water and food.

He became ill with dysentery in the camp and credits his survival on a Russian guard who somehow smuggled in opium which stopped the diarrhea. Amersfoort was mostly a transfer camp. Jews were sent to extermination camps in Germany and the non-Jews to work camps. At times they were the same camps. It is therefore no surprise that my father was put on a transport train to the German concentration camp Buchenwald. It appears that he was not sitting in a cattle car but in a regular passenger car with guards. This might be a separation between the forced labor and the Jews, who I am sure were stuck in cattle carts. Somehow the Dutch resistance jumped the train near Venlo, overwhelmed the guards and my father was thrown out of the slow riding train. He was still very ill and somehow made it to a nunnery or cloister in Belgium, where he was rehabilitated. He told us that he was in a coma for approximately a week. “I saw the light,” he often told me, a near-death experience.

There is another gap in his stories and the next one he told me about was that he joined the Canadian soldiers in the spring of 1945 when they fought their way through the Netherlands, freeing it from the Germans. They were sitting in a barn somewhere in Over-IJssel or the Achterhoek when all the sudden a projectile came flying through one of those typical thatched roofs that many Dutch farmhouses and barns had. It had gotten stuck in the thatch, not exploded and was hanging above their heads. One of the soldiers was brave enough to climb on a chair and decommission the bomb while it was hanging in and from the ceiling. He mentioned that this was one of the scariest episodes in his life. And there you have it, my father’s life till the end of World War II, as I can remember from his stories.

A picture of my mother and her friend Hennie being silly during the war.  The sign says "Safety order, it is forbidden to take pictures or have cameras on you.  The storm troupes from the Netherlands."  These were the German troupes stationed and/or recruited in the Netherlands under Hitler.

The Story of my parents (Part 1) (7/29/2025)

My father was born in 1922 in Rotterdam; he was the youngest of three brothers. I would need to do some research one of these days to figure out if being the youngest had anything to do with how he turned out. It always seemed to me he was always running away from something; maybe not so by the end of his life; but that is even debatable. He committed suicide in 1984, which is a method of getting away from it all; but that is getting ahead of the story.

My grandfather owned a contracting business. I previously wrote about my family’s background in the construction trade in my blog, and the following is a quote from the post:

Uncle Willem (Wim), dad's brother owned a construction company, and when we moved back to the town of Capelle and den IJssel in 1996 he had developed and built almost ¾ of that town. As I mentioned before my opa (grandfather) owned a construction company, as well. However, my uncle Wim built his company on his own, from scratch. My great-grandfather (my grandfather’s father) was also into construction. He was a very skilled carpenter and his claim to fame was that he supposedly built the Bijenkorf (a large department store) in the center of The Hague (Den Haag). This must have been in the early 1900s.

The one thing he told me about his growing up was the meetings that were held at his home. I think they had maybe clandestine meetings of the Dutch communist party. I am not sure if these meetings were held before or after the second World War. He told me about his memory of the singing of the “International”, the communist anthem. He also mentioned often intently listening to Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concerto de Aranjuez; during or after discussions on the Spanish civil war of the 1930s; the same one Hemingway was in. This concert was published in 1939 and first recorded in 1947. My father played it a lot when I was young, telling me that it brought him back to those (post WWII) meetings; to the time, I guess, when he was 25 and about to marry my mother in 1948. The second movement of the piece may actually be a memorial to the bombing of Guernica in 1937.

My father had one best friend, Piet Doornbos and his parents lived in an upstairs apartment in the house owned by my grandfather. Piet’s father worked for my grandfather and stories abound that my grandfather would frequent the upstairs apartment, especially when Piet’s father was at work. My grandfather had a reputation of sleeping around; and my mother, Piet’s wife and my grandmother (oma) were always privately wondering if my father and Piet were half-brothers, since they were so alike in behavior. But on the other hand, they grew up together, so who knows? They confided their suspicion to me, but I do not think they ever told the two men. I am not even sure if Piet’s kids were ever told of the women’s suspicion.

My grandparents owned a vacation cabin and a daysailer on the Rottemeren, a lake on the river de Rotte, north-northeast of Rotterdam. I have photographs of the family outings to the lake, and my father and brothers (including Piet) as boy scouts sailing on the lake.

Germany invaded the Netherlands on May 10, 1940. My father was barely 18 years old. His brothers were in the Dutch military, and my understanding is that they took part in the Battle of the Grebbeberg. The Germans won that battle and slowly advanced. On May 14 they bombed Rotterdam and demanded unconditional surrender. Right after the bombing, probably on the 14th or 15th the city emptied; people fled the burning city. My father and his parents traveled up the Rotte to their cabin. It is my understanding that during that evacuation or maybe during previous outings, my mother who lived in Terbregge along the river noticed my father and vice versa and a love story developed. My mother was almost 13 years old at the time of the bombing, and she told me that her friends and her were fascinated by these older boisterous boys on the river.

My mother told me that she did not have a happy youth. Her mother was mean; and when I grew up, we all thought grandma looked like a witch. I realize that is not a nice way to think about your grandmother, but later I learned she had acted a little like that as well. When my mother grew up, she would tell her: “I don’t understand why I have three beautiful sons and you an ugly daughter. I am not sure where you came from; maybe the milkman left you here with one of his deliveries.” She also treated her husband like dirt, and he walked (was kicked) out of his home three times for six-month stints, and then he crawled back home. He (Simon van den Ende) was the proprietor of the local butcher shop and when he left home he moved into a boarding house near his store. My mother told us that he was somewhat of a pushover, a softy. Hence, my young mother’s interest in this happy family that had fun on the river.

Opa van den Ende died in 1956. I know that I met him (I have a photograph of me sitting on a potty in front of him); I was 3 at the time. I stayed with oma in Terbregge for 3 months in the summer and early fall of 1959. I briefly attended the first grade in the village and contracted mononucleosis; kissing disease at the ripe old age of 6. I remember the walk from school to the gate in oma’s back yard.

My grandparents on their sailboat on the Rottermeren

My parents.  I am not sure what the date is, if they were dating or married.

My eulogy/autobiography (7/4/2025)

I just turned 72 and am sitting here on pins and needles waiting for the word that my first grandson was born. This will be a thing of the past by the time this writing will be made public, either as part of a memoire and/or a blog post. Why now, can we blame turning 72, my grandson, or my daughter or her wife for this introspection? I don’t know; it is probably a combination of a lot of things.

I am in a men’s group, and we assigned ourselves the project of writing our own eulogy. If that wasn’t enough, during a birthday get together a good friend asked me all kinds of biographical questions, and unbeknown to me he taped the whole conversation. He showed me that he was recording it after my birthday dinner at a Mexican restaurant. This made me feel self-conscious, and together with the fact that I now will have someone to carry on the torch (a grandson), it made me want to record a little more of mine and my family’s history. I have done a bit of this already in some of my blog posts, and I may refer to them when appropriate. I expect that I will publish sections of this writing in my blog, again in the hope that those of my direct family that comes after me will read it and find it interesting, useful and informative.

Where to start? But below is a section of the eulogy that I wrote for myself or maybe for those celebrating my life on this blue marble once I kick the proverbial bucket.

“What the heck is Kalemi? Well actually it is a town in the far eastern part of Congo. During colonial times it was the Belgium Congo, and the town was named Albertville after one of Belgium’s monarchs. I (my name) was born in that town on June ??, 195?. We are gathered here to celebrate the premature passing of Jan-Willem or as many of his friends knew him “Jan the man.” As he often told us that when at a doctor’s office no one got up when a name was called, it meant it was his turn to see the doctor. Everybody seemed to have difficulties pronouncing his name, and then when “Jan” got up they seemed even more confused. Is Jan a guy?”

Did it frustrate me that folks had difficulties with my name, my first and last name? Not at all, I found it amusing. In its own way it showcased the lack of cosmopolitan experience that I have observed in this country. Living in Cincinnati in the late 1990s I was always tickled when during our first meeting folks would ask me which high school I had graduated from. Like the majority in the area, they had never spread their wings, and they could obviously not fathom that there was actual life outside Cincinnati. Even more fun was when they told you about the great vacation they had in Indiana, a state maybe less than 20 miles to the west. Here in the Hampton Roads, where I currently live, it is a little less narrow-minded, since there is a large concentration of military and ex-military that have spent time in foreign countries on military installations or at war.

During the clandestinely recorded interview our friend Mason wanted to know how the heck I ended up being born in a small town situated on Lake Tanganyika (or now Lake Tanzania). Well, my father had a job there as director of a furniture company. That raised even more questions, so here we need to pause and start with the story of my father, which then raised the question of how my father and mother met. As you can imagine, the questions never ended.

I'll stop here.  If there is a next post it will be about my father before 1948.

Me as a 10-month-old on Lake Tanganika in the Congo

My dad and I around the same time.

Mother and son

Chaos anyone? or the three C-s of this administration. (6/20/2025)

Recently, I read somewhere about the 3C-s of the Republican Administration. It seems that the tRump Whitehouse thrives on:

• Chaos
• Cruelty, and
• Corruption

I would like to add three more C-s:

• Carelessness
• Criminality
• Confusion

Although it seems that chaos and carelessness may be related as are corruption and criminality, but then, the Supreme Court kind of ruled that the president is above it all.

When all fails, the administration can always resort to name calling and accuse others of conduct that they are actually doing. One of the latest was tRump calling Bruce Springsteen and wrinkled old prune and then to think the plump old prune in the Whitehouse is older than Bruce. Moreover, he has a much lower cognitive ability, cannot remember things and has a reduced language ability. But it seems that there is never a dull moment in American politics these days. I am just amazed that every Republican in Congress just rolls over and plays dead; I cannot imagine that they do not see it. Real character is missing or are they afraid of losing their cushy, high paying job?

I have been reading a book on the old Greek and in particular Roman stoic philosophers (A Guide to the Good Life by William B. Irvine). While reading this, I have concluded that tRump and a lot of the folks associated with his regime are simply very unhappy, un-balanced people. Truth be told, if you are happy in your skin and with your life, you do not crave approvement, constant acknowledgement, stroking, bribes, more wealth, more possessions, more power; you do not need to gaslight everybody. I can go on. When you are happy with the situation you are in, you are at peace with yourself, calm, tranquil and you work for the betterment of society, not your financial, social or political standing. Even the portraits he put up of himself show that he is brooding, angry and suspicious. His incessant use of social media illustrates his need for validation and his need for power. He cannot rest on his laurels. He is not tranquil, and I wonder what he is running from or to.

In the past, I mentioned that in order to break him we need to ignore him for a week or maybe even a day or two <here>. Do not mention him in the news, give him complete radio silence. Lack of attention: may be dangerous; he is likely to start a nuclear war just to get in the news; however, it may also give him such a fit that he may perish in loneliness, or lack of attention. For one, he should know that we will all perish one day as was detailed by the senator from Iowa (Jodi Ernst). In full disclosure, I have only watched the (inter)national news probably 3 or 4 times since his election, but I do watch local news and read two national newspapers in which he features prominently. In other words, I have yet to ignore him myself. But then the world seems to go to hell in a hurry; in LA, the Middle East and who knows where else.

Back to the newscasts. I started writing this post at the time of the big divorce between the two buddies tRump and mUsk. Crazy, and as I mentioned, there is something new every day. How should I feel now that the guys that I hate the most have a fall out? I’m not sure, but I definitely do not want vAnce. Maybe it is better that they kiss and make up. And the invasion of LA by his troops. This country is really between a rock and a hard place, isn’t it? That serenity prayer that I wrote about sounds so good (and stoic).

I spend a lot of time in the garden and with my bonsai.  That is the only way I can achieve some sanity and tranquility.