Saturday morning, 1:30 am, I left for Amsterdam, Netherlands (also known as Holland) with the same USO tour I missed on January 19. I sat next to a middle-aged blonde named Bernice, a divorced lady from Austin, Texas. I tried to be friendly by asking a few simple questions of her, but she laughed at the everything I said, and not in a mentally-ill way, so I enjoyed the conversation. I like to feel funny in a controllable way. We spoke often during the trip. I think she wanted to follow me around Amsterdam, but I managed to slip away every time. We sat behind the toilet entrance on the bus, which was distracting and slightly smelly, but gave us countless opportunities for practical jokes, none of which we took advantage of. Because we had no seats in front of us, we had safety belts, unlike others on the bus. I buckled mine but Bernice said she was okay. I told her if we crashed she’d be catapulted into the toilet. She laughed again.
Two hours outside of Kaiserslautern, our bus hit a large dog and startled everyone except me. The driver didn’t stop, but I assume the dog did. We drove straight north, past Cologne, and stopped for breakfast 14 miles from Amsterdam. In the restaurant parking lot we saw the damage from the dog--the bumper of the large bus was crushed in the middle, and half the bus’s face was bent. It looked bad.
A phrase kept popping into my head,” Are you Hollish? Do you speak Hollish?” It bugged me that I couldn’t remember whom I said it to or why I kept remembering it. It was some joke from the past year. We had a tour guide in-training along with us, and when I saw her it struck me how much she looked like a high school-mate, Cathy Rener. Then suddenly the planets aligned and I remembered, ”Cathy’s mother is from Holland!” When we spoke in May, I asked her if she was ‘Hollish’. Isn’t it strange how these things happen? I’d forgotten to tell her that I was going to Holland. I also knew a wonderful, spunky old Catholic priest in Medical Lake, Washington, John Rompa, who was a Dutch boy. Mimi and I used to affectionately call him Dracula because of his thick accent, but we never did get him to say,"I've come to suck your blood". When he was on holiday, another Dutch priest filled in for him and told embarrassing childhood stories about him, probably ruining his chance of ever becoming Pope. They were delightful old men with abundant gray nose hair, and Mimi and I loved John. John and I corresponded briefly after he retired. He died in November 2008.
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