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Saturday, April 19, 2008
Apples and Addiction
An apple hangs from the tree in the garden outside the Shelter Jordan. The tree isn’t an apple tree, but I’ll get back to that.
John is one of my favorite people here at the hostel. He came to work at the Shelter Jordan for a month as a cleaner after working at the Shelter City for a month. John is legally blind. He jumped out of a 5th story window when he saw a little girl drowning in a pool below and couldn’t get anyone to save her. He jumped to save her, but he missed the pool. His face was shattered along with several of his other bones. I have never met anyone so chivalrous or with such a heart as John’s. He is a 44-year-old Hungarian. His broken English frustrates him because he fights for the Cross fervently and sometimes doesn’t have the right words.
His life is a testimony to me. John comes to mop the floor when I am finishing my sleeper shift at two in the morning. It isn’t his job, and he should be sleeping because he actually has to get up early to go to work. But he comes in and takes the mop from me and pushes me out of the kitchen. When I say ‘Thank You!” he gets a funny look on his face and says, ‘Don’t say that.’
John is a paradox. He can be tremendously serious one moment, trying to convince you that The God will give you a miracle to help you see Him, and the next minute, he is copying everyone’s sound effects and using fruit to make antlers on his head. For Lukas, he says ‘OmAha,” because Lukas can’t say “Omaha” right. For Elizabeth he makes a siren noise, because she told a story and made that noise one day.
Last night, John wanted a fifth coffee, but the night before, his heart had been racing from too many coffees, so we made a deal that he should only drink two a day. We shook on it. He came up and begged for his fifth coffee, and I firmly said “No” and offered him a hot chocolate, instead. He gave me a five-year-old-boy-begging-for-a-cookie look and leaned forward, pleading with his eyes.
“Please Kelsey!” he begged.
“No, John. We shook on it. You promised,” I said. He grabbed my neck and kissed it! Silly Old Man.“No,” I said, again, and pushed a hot chocolate across the counter.
The apple on the tree outside is some kind of reminder of original sin.
I just laugh every time I see it. I will forever think of a blind beggar with an intense coffee addiction.
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Monday Market Days
I need to issue a public apology since I have not blogged as much as I originally planned. These past few weeks have been especially busy while I have tried to suck the marrow out of my last bit of time here in Amsterdam. As a result, I will post some catch-up blogs. I hope you will bear with me and enjoy the most memorable stories from the past few weeks.
This past Monday, I was scheduled to attend class in the afternoon and then work the sleeper shift in the evening. I had a grand plan for how I would use the morning, but my plan didn’t work out. I ended up walking around my neighborhood in pursuit of a memory card and rechargeable batteries. As soon as I stepped out of my back door, I saw an increased amount of people on the street and realized, “It’s Monday Market Day!!!”
I had been wanting to go to a Monday Market since I first heard of it. Monday Markets are like the ultimate flea market/Goodwill shopping experience. Since I was raised on a steady diet of antique shopping and backwood’s Texas town touring, I really looked forward to an eclectic feast for the senses.
I wound my way through some booths, touching bolts of fabric from around the world. There were Muslim women with their head shawls and their attentive husbands trying to decide which kind to buy. There were tall Dutch women in packs looking at the piles of resale clothes, trying to find the perfect deal.
I stopped at one tent stuffed full of costumes. My family loves costumes. Our attic is full, and we regularly hunt at Goodwill for new finds; all thanks to a faithful Grandma and mom who valued the imaginations of their young daughters. My eyes lit upon a beautiful violet pair of used ballet slippers. I slipped them onto my feet. They fit!!! I puzzed over whether to buy them for a minute and then realized I would never again find such a comfortable and beautiful pair and they were only five euro!
I walked through the market some more, thinking about how much better this was than Canton Trades Days or any other flea market I had ever been to.
Then I saw it. An old map of Amsterdam. It was a remake for sure, a map made in the seventies to look like Amsterdam in 1641. I brought it to the owner and asked how much it cost. He said five euro and I could hardly believe my ears. I was looking at it, deciding whether to buy it, when a random old man with a very American voice walked up and started talking to me about it. He showed me all the differences between Amsterdam today and Amsterdam 350 years ago. He used to live in Colorado and Washington, so we talked about the States and Europe.
I then meandered on through the market and ended up at a hat booth. I picked one up and asked the vendor if it was a girl’s hat or a boy’s hat. He gave me a funny look and asked, “Exactly how do you define what is for a boy versus what is for a girl?”
This seemed like a strange response to my query until I looked down and took in his denim skirt and brown ribbed leggings ending in huge Goretex boots. Thankfully, he didn’t seem offended. There was a slightly humored look in his eyes. He was a huge Dutch man with a grizzly face and silvery gray ponytail.
The vendor grabbed my map and proceded to give me a history lesson of Amsterdam. This was becoming quite the learning experience. He asked where I was from and then told me how he hitchhiked through the United States and Canada for six months back in the 1980s.
We probably talked for 45 minutes, but he had my map in his lap, so I couldn’t really go anywhere. His story was fascinating—even if a little farfetched. At one point, he said he opened YellowStone National Park with the head park ranger who gave him the keys to open the gate and let him go off and hike in the wilderness, only cautioning him not to pick up antlers. In his story, he said on his backwoods camping excursion, he happened upon some poachers and reported them, thereby saving the park’s population of ‘beer.’ He called deer ‘beer’ which was also rather amusing to me. I didn’t think it was worth correcting since I caught his mistake only halfway through his story, and by then, it was too funny.
I decided I really like talking to people on the street. My Monday Market day started a plan formulating in my head… what if I were to walk everywhere with my map or a similar conversation piece. Think of all the people I would meet.
