The road worker opens a plastic box. Sandwiches invested on one side of the partition, on the other strawberries whose crowns are neatly removed. Together with two other men (she without strawberries) he is pausing from work. I have to pass them to be able to take my bike and say in passing that the strawberries look nice. He laughs and says, “She takes good care of me. I won’t let them go anymore.”
It is these kinds of small things that help me to forget the state of the world. On the economy editor of NRC We sometimes discuss that we rarely read good news or stories with more airiness in the newspaper. Logical, there are simply too many wars and other disasters that deserve space. But if it is possible, I would like to devote my last raid column to things that make me happy.
I am happy with the plant in my living room that suddenly has fresh green leaves. A train conductor who wants travelers a day with ‘cheerful thoughts’. Students who ask sharp questions during a tour. A downy dog on a Jordanese terrace called ‘Nozem’. My teenage sister who voluntarily takes a book on vacation and really reads. If someone falls off his bike and all the people who see it walk there to help. That there are then people who are actually not ‘needed’, look at each other for a few minutes to estimate whether they can already walk on.
I get happy when I look in a classroom from the street where adults listen to a teacher who writes things on a plate. Adults who learn words again and make themselves dependent on someone who knows better than they do. Those are people who think things are not stuck, that you can always start something new.
People who eat a scoop of ice cream on their own. Who went out for that, or interrupted their route somewhere. Without knowing about my appreciation for this, my love tells me that lately he sometimes cycles past an ice cream parlor after work and tries a different taste every time. Amarena Kers is his current favorite.
People who come up with a joke and experience the greatest fun of it themselves. Like the friend who “Brie or Cruesli?” Considered, in which people first have to taste well on a drunken evening, and then to guess if they eat brie or cruesli. He walked around for a week with this idea and had to cry with discharge when he finally told his company about it. We laughed with him exuberantly.
They are things that make the broken world whole. They help trust in the gentleness, creativity and hope of people. Sometimes I am only a new death toll from Gaza removed from a predominant feeling of powerlessness. Then I try to think of my grandfather who still makes the nicest jokes at the age of 92. To my sister who still has everything to choose. On the toddler of a friend who learns to walk. Or to love in a bread bin.
Sezen Moeliker Replaces Frits Abrahams.