On September 27, it was my mother’s birthday, it shot through me in the intercity between Amsterdam and Arnhem, where I was in with my oldest daughter (10) because we were on my way to Vitesse-Willem II. At her request, we looked at an episode of the Lice mother On the phone, she is a fan of Miss Ank, where a company took a few places behind us in a childish way. Surely we also suffered from their chatter about the elections and about Lyme disease?
I said her grandmother always talked very hard on the train and that it was funny because she then described people who could hear it. Things that can no longer or may have never been possible than ‘he should not eat so much’.
On her birthday we always ate grapes from the bush under the corrugated sheets that also included their car, a metallic green Mazda 323. The weather was always nice. “The last beautiful day,” she always said, “Autumn starts tomorrow.”
“And then the winter and then spring,” my father supplemented.
We were never shy because of conversation topics.
I suddenly missed the scorchiness enormously.
My father spent hours working on the sunscreen that suddenly no longer wanted to go up or down, my mother with her many repetitions, unexpectedly visit that just didn’t want to leave, my father who still had to get Nasi Goreng at Blue Lotus and returned with Friet van Beursken. Something she continued to repeat.
“I ask Nasi, but I get fries. How do you get it in your head? This is the start of the decline.”
Eventually she started dementia, but he didn’t. He wanted to be forgotten, but forgot nothing himself. That time in Germany, that a brother of my mother had driven through a house on the campsite, he liked that.
There were work on the track like every weekend, we had to change three times from train, she was hungry and thirsty and thought the train toilet was too filthy, I didn’t think she went along again in this way. To Vitesse with a father who was too lazy to ever get his driver’s license. I started over later and that she would be happy to look back on this train journey, among other things.
The chance is small, but it is possible.
Marcel van Roosmalen Writes a column on Monday and Thursday.
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