asked.
âAmerica.â It sounded like a dirty word.
âI donât live in America,â I said. âI live in Montana.â I smirked a little, thinking of my hometown, in which the police report tends to consist of cute items like somebody walking past The Paint Pot on Main Street called in to say they noticed through the window that a coffeemaker had been left on. Not exactly Florence and Normandie.
Still, Esther wouldnât drop it. âWhy would you ever want to go back there ?â she scowled, waving at the TV, where a palm tree was in flames.
âBecause itâs hugeâ was the only thing I could come up with.
I wished that I could describe the hugeness. That it wasnât just a huge mess. I wanted to tell Esther about the Montana sky and how itâs so gigantic that Montana is called Big Sky Country and how I missed it so much I pretended that behind the constant Dutch ceiling of clouds there was a big range of mountains with snow way up top. I wanted to tell her that even though I liked being twenty minutes away from Amsterdam, I was the kind of person who will sit in a car for the thirteen-hourdrive to Seattleâfor Esther the equivalent of driving to Greeceâjust to see a band I like. I wanted to tell her that every time I meet her for some dinky thimbleful of coffee in the student union I daydream about big steaming diner cups and so many free refills you canât help but talk real fast.
I wanted to tell her that looking at those riots on TV was digging a hole inside me and could she try and understand. But I ran out of there. I didnât have the heart to try and explain why my lunatic home-land was going up in smoke to a resident of that sane little country whose craziest cultural brouhaha had been the great tulip mania of 1636. I jumped on my little bike and rode through the little town past a couple of little windmills. I went up to my little room and fell to pieces.
I finally fell asleep after listening to a Beach Boys song about twenty-nine times on my WalkmanââWouldnât It Be Nice.â Wouldnât it be nice if four people werenât dead because four other people mauled their fellow citizen with billy clubs, over and over and over again? Wouldnât it be nice if all those men and women werenât running onto freeways and shooting guns in the air and shooting guns at each other and looting TV sets out of stores and being teargassed and terrorized and slain? Wouldnât it be nice if that truck driver wasnât lying in some hospital bed barely hanging on because a mob tore him out of his truck and attacked him en masse? Justice, wouldnât that be nice? I guess I needed to hear towheaded California boys singing somethingso beautiful and so sappy as âMaybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true.â The song ends âSleep tight my baby.â I kept rewinding that part.
Wasnât that why I was in Holland anyway, to get some rest, to take a break from the chaos? It just so happened I decided to leave the country during the Gulf War, an action I didnât understand then and donât understand much better now called for by a president I did not vote for once and would not vote for again. Studying abroad required a lengthy application process. I remember the exchange program office organized a seminar on anti-American sentiment a few weeks after smart bombs were dropping into Iraq. We had to sit in a circle and they asked each one of us, âWhat would you do if you were abroad and some foreigners came up to you and expressed anti-American sentiment?â
âAgree with them,â I said.
I think I wrote on my exchange program application that I wanted to study in the Netherlands to do research on the paintings of Piet Mondrian, but I didnât say why the paintings of Piet Mondrian appealed to me. Those paintings were clean little grids, immaculate white rectangles and perfect black
âAmerica.â It sounded like a dirty word.
âI donât live in America,â I said. âI live in Montana.â I smirked a little, thinking of my hometown, in which the police report tends to consist of cute items like somebody walking past The Paint Pot on Main Street called in to say they noticed through the window that a coffeemaker had been left on. Not exactly Florence and Normandie.
Still, Esther wouldnât drop it. âWhy would you ever want to go back there ?â she scowled, waving at the TV, where a palm tree was in flames.
âBecause itâs hugeâ was the only thing I could come up with.
I wished that I could describe the hugeness. That it wasnât just a huge mess. I wanted to tell Esther about the Montana sky and how itâs so gigantic that Montana is called Big Sky Country and how I missed it so much I pretended that behind the constant Dutch ceiling of clouds there was a big range of mountains with snow way up top. I wanted to tell her that even though I liked being twenty minutes away from Amsterdam, I was the kind of person who will sit in a car for the thirteen-hourdrive to Seattleâfor Esther the equivalent of driving to Greeceâjust to see a band I like. I wanted to tell her that every time I meet her for some dinky thimbleful of coffee in the student union I daydream about big steaming diner cups and so many free refills you canât help but talk real fast.
I wanted to tell her that looking at those riots on TV was digging a hole inside me and could she try and understand. But I ran out of there. I didnât have the heart to try and explain why my lunatic home-land was going up in smoke to a resident of that sane little country whose craziest cultural brouhaha had been the great tulip mania of 1636. I jumped on my little bike and rode through the little town past a couple of little windmills. I went up to my little room and fell to pieces.
I finally fell asleep after listening to a Beach Boys song about twenty-nine times on my WalkmanââWouldnât It Be Nice.â Wouldnât it be nice if four people werenât dead because four other people mauled their fellow citizen with billy clubs, over and over and over again? Wouldnât it be nice if all those men and women werenât running onto freeways and shooting guns in the air and shooting guns at each other and looting TV sets out of stores and being teargassed and terrorized and slain? Wouldnât it be nice if that truck driver wasnât lying in some hospital bed barely hanging on because a mob tore him out of his truck and attacked him en masse? Justice, wouldnât that be nice? I guess I needed to hear towheaded California boys singing somethingso beautiful and so sappy as âMaybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true.â The song ends âSleep tight my baby.â I kept rewinding that part.
Wasnât that why I was in Holland anyway, to get some rest, to take a break from the chaos? It just so happened I decided to leave the country during the Gulf War, an action I didnât understand then and donât understand much better now called for by a president I did not vote for once and would not vote for again. Studying abroad required a lengthy application process. I remember the exchange program office organized a seminar on anti-American sentiment a few weeks after smart bombs were dropping into Iraq. We had to sit in a circle and they asked each one of us, âWhat would you do if you were abroad and some foreigners came up to you and expressed anti-American sentiment?â
âAgree with them,â I said.
I think I wrote on my exchange program application that I wanted to study in the Netherlands to do research on the paintings of Piet Mondrian, but I didnât say why the paintings of Piet Mondrian appealed to me. Those paintings were clean little grids, immaculate white rectangles and perfect black
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