After a forced farewell to her working life, my mother looked for places to spend the remaining time useful and pleasant. (With today’s wisdom: organizations could have benefited from it for another ten years.)
An acquaintance cut tickets on the tram that drove through the Open Air Museum in Arnhem. She also liked working in a different time. She could already see herself in a Brabant farm or, if necessary, behind the loom. She wrote letters to the Open Air Museum, was invited for an interview and was severely rejected.
“Too verbose, too detailed.”
The high tea she had planned for her birthday at the museum was cancelled.
“I’d rather go to that wine tasting in Dieren.”
She eventually ended up in a thrift store in Arnhem-Noord, where she could price items as she saw fit. She often bought the items herself, taking them to the student houses in large boxes, but my sister and I did not want wicker baskets and tablecloths from deceased elderly people at all.
“For God’s sake, take that rubbish to the Open Air Museum,” I shouted, and my father pressed his thumb into the open wound: “She was rejected there.”
Last week I was there with my podcast friends Roelof and Noortje, for whom the Open Air Museum was something new. They didn’t yet know how beautiful the area around Arnhem is and were amazed. At each building we were greeted by volunteers who pretended to be from another time. The older actors were so confident in their roles that it was endearing. Why had she been judged as too verbose, I wondered after meeting a woman in traditional costume who kept teaching us in the freezing cold.
I looked at Roelof and Noortje, this was real for them.
A little later we were in a forge, where a bearded Arnhemmer was standing on a wheel with a hammer. He said we could talk to him about the past, in his reality it was 1840. I bent over the cart wheel. Yep, everything was like back then.
I smelled a scorching smell. This man from the past had hidden a stove behind a wooden beam. My hair was on fire.
The reaction was truly Arnhem, immediately on the defensive.
“Don’t get your fat head so close to the stove.”
“You hide a stove behind a beam, I don’t expect that in 1840.”
“I have to work through the winter. Of course I’ll hide a heater. They would have done the same in 1840.”
“But they didn’t have heaters then.”
“You don’t know that, do you? I’m from that era, you’re not.”
He shouted to a passing employee of the Open Air Museum: “Hey, what year am I from?”
“It says on the sign at your front door.”
The man from 1840: “So.”
My mother would have fit in there just fine.
Marcel van Roosmalen writes a column on Mondays and Thursdays.