Mediocre Melanie?
If I don't say something soon to Mom or Cecily, I might explode.
Anne Frank wrote, “I'm boiling with rage, and yet I mustn't show it.”
I can relate.
Dag. (That means bye.)
Dear Diary,
All aboard! Cecily and Matt are playing Uno, Dad is reading, and I am writing. Mom isn't with us because we split up for the afternoon. She's going to the history museum and modern art museum with a Culture Pass she bought that gets her in everywhere. Since today is beauuuutiful, Dad is taking us to visit a nearby city, Haarlem, and a nearby beach.
Dad said that New York's Harlem was named for Holland's Haarlem and was started by a peg-legged Dutch guy named Peter Stuyvesant. But Holland's Haarlem has two a's and New York's has only one. Mom added that New York's Harlem was a center of jazz and art and the home of the poet Langston Hughes. She and Dad always like to tack on extra facts.
Uh-oh, I can't believe we're already pulling into the Haarlem station!!
on a pew in St. Bavokerk in Haarlem
Dear Diary,
Matt was walking really slowly and Dad kept saying “Hurry!” and Matt kept saying “Wait up!” Finally Cecily said, “Hey Matt, what do you get when you cross a turtle and a porcupine?” Matt shrugged his shoulders. “What?” Cecily said, “A slow poke!” and we all laughed. Even me.
I hope things are getting back to normal again. When things feel wrong, it makes me worry that Dad might have a point: Maybe I don't appreciate it enough when things feel right.
I wonder if Anne Frank appreciated her life when she was ten and a half. In her diary, she tries so hard to have a good attitude. She says their hiding place is “a paradise compared with how other Jews who are not in hiding must be living.”
And she really appreciates the friends who help them and bring them stuff. She wrote, “Miep is just like a pack mule, she fetches and carries so much…. We always long for Saturdays when our books come. Just like little children receiving a present. Ordinary people simply don't know what books mean to us, shut up here.”
It makes me wonder: Was Anne Frank ever just an ordinary person? Did she ever visit Haarlem or have a fight with her best friend?
I'll tell you this. We are appreciating Haarlem because it is soooo pretty! Dad took a ton of pictures of the brick alleyways and antique-y street lamps and the flowers in the courtyard of the Frans Hals Museum. Cecily liked the museum. I didn't because it was mostly full of portraits of old fogies who have been dead forever.
We did see one painting we all liked so much that we bought Mom a postcard of it. Jan Breughel (Yahn Brew Gull) painted it around 1640 and it's called
Allegory of Tulipomania
. Tulipomania sounds like a disease but isn't. It was when people got so excited about tulips that came in new shapes or colors that they spent gazillions of guilders (old Dutch money) to buy bulbs. Someone once paid as much for one bulb as it would have cost to buy an entire house!! But rich people liked having fancy tulips in their gardens because then everyone could see how rich they were. Meanwhile regular people thought they were out of their minds, and ministers gave sermons about how it's wrong to spend so much on flowers.
Well, in the painting (and postcard), dozens of
monkeys
, not human beings, are buying and selling tulips and bulbs. One monkey is peeing on tulips! (That cracked Matt up.) Dad said that was Breughel's way of making fun of rich people. He also said that Breughel's father and uncle were really famous painters. (I'd never heard of them.)
We are now in a church that is around five hundred years old. I'm sitting down because my feet feel five hundred years old.
Mozart played the organ here when he was ten. Can you believe he was famous when he was my age? (I
have
heard of Mozart!)
I am now going to shut my eyes and try to imagine what his organ concert sounded like. I am also going to try to picture him wearing one of those white
If I don't say something soon to Mom or Cecily, I might explode.
Anne Frank wrote, “I'm boiling with rage, and yet I mustn't show it.”
I can relate.
Dag. (That means bye.)
Dear Diary,
All aboard! Cecily and Matt are playing Uno, Dad is reading, and I am writing. Mom isn't with us because we split up for the afternoon. She's going to the history museum and modern art museum with a Culture Pass she bought that gets her in everywhere. Since today is beauuuutiful, Dad is taking us to visit a nearby city, Haarlem, and a nearby beach.
Dad said that New York's Harlem was named for Holland's Haarlem and was started by a peg-legged Dutch guy named Peter Stuyvesant. But Holland's Haarlem has two a's and New York's has only one. Mom added that New York's Harlem was a center of jazz and art and the home of the poet Langston Hughes. She and Dad always like to tack on extra facts.
Uh-oh, I can't believe we're already pulling into the Haarlem station!!
on a pew in St. Bavokerk in Haarlem
Dear Diary,
Matt was walking really slowly and Dad kept saying “Hurry!” and Matt kept saying “Wait up!” Finally Cecily said, “Hey Matt, what do you get when you cross a turtle and a porcupine?” Matt shrugged his shoulders. “What?” Cecily said, “A slow poke!” and we all laughed. Even me.
I hope things are getting back to normal again. When things feel wrong, it makes me worry that Dad might have a point: Maybe I don't appreciate it enough when things feel right.
I wonder if Anne Frank appreciated her life when she was ten and a half. In her diary, she tries so hard to have a good attitude. She says their hiding place is “a paradise compared with how other Jews who are not in hiding must be living.”
And she really appreciates the friends who help them and bring them stuff. She wrote, “Miep is just like a pack mule, she fetches and carries so much…. We always long for Saturdays when our books come. Just like little children receiving a present. Ordinary people simply don't know what books mean to us, shut up here.”
It makes me wonder: Was Anne Frank ever just an ordinary person? Did she ever visit Haarlem or have a fight with her best friend?
I'll tell you this. We are appreciating Haarlem because it is soooo pretty! Dad took a ton of pictures of the brick alleyways and antique-y street lamps and the flowers in the courtyard of the Frans Hals Museum. Cecily liked the museum. I didn't because it was mostly full of portraits of old fogies who have been dead forever.
We did see one painting we all liked so much that we bought Mom a postcard of it. Jan Breughel (Yahn Brew Gull) painted it around 1640 and it's called
Allegory of Tulipomania
. Tulipomania sounds like a disease but isn't. It was when people got so excited about tulips that came in new shapes or colors that they spent gazillions of guilders (old Dutch money) to buy bulbs. Someone once paid as much for one bulb as it would have cost to buy an entire house!! But rich people liked having fancy tulips in their gardens because then everyone could see how rich they were. Meanwhile regular people thought they were out of their minds, and ministers gave sermons about how it's wrong to spend so much on flowers.
Well, in the painting (and postcard), dozens of
monkeys
, not human beings, are buying and selling tulips and bulbs. One monkey is peeing on tulips! (That cracked Matt up.) Dad said that was Breughel's way of making fun of rich people. He also said that Breughel's father and uncle were really famous painters. (I'd never heard of them.)
We are now in a church that is around five hundred years old. I'm sitting down because my feet feel five hundred years old.
Mozart played the organ here when he was ten. Can you believe he was famous when he was my age? (I
have
heard of Mozart!)
I am now going to shut my eyes and try to imagine what his organ concert sounded like. I am also going to try to picture him wearing one of those white
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