The day started less cheerfully: the elevators didn’t work and I had to walk down eighteen floors. Because of the cancer, or more likely because of the chemo, I can no longer climb stairs or cycle, but this went wonderfully well – I wasn’t completely exhausted when I got down.
However, the narcotics associated with the chemo ensure that I experience everything much more intensely than before, so that once the sun shone on my bald ball outside, it made me intensely happy.
Plus, I was on my way to my favorite neighborhood location, a small convenience store on a corner, at the bottom of the tower block that had once tempted me to move to this fine new neighborhood in the north of the big city. Let’s call him Appie, that supermarket.
In front of the entrance two fishermen – at least their bicycles parked a little further away had an impressive amount of fishing equipment, including one bucket of live worms – were talking to an unlikely young girl. It was about life, especially about the division of roles between men and women, I understood.
‘Those lesbians cheat,’ said the oldest fisherman to the girl, ‘they do it with each other but also with men, but you don’t know that then.’ The girl listened intently. The logic seemed farfetched to me.
Inside, as usual, the always cheerful but very loud-speaking manager was shouting welcome to me, the way he shouts welcome to all customers. That is easy, because many do not fit in it.
Various people work there with an obvious distance from the labor market – that is also what makes this Appie sympathetic, I think. Everyone seems happy here, even the girl with the greatest distance, who runs the cigarette counter and continuously passes difficult questions on to her benevolent colleagues.
Her counter is also the central cash register, because many construction workers from the neighborhood come here who all want to pay in cash. That sometimes causes traffic jams, especially when the braces of the lyceum around the corner have a break with their coins, but you never hear anyone complain. Because the manager always whistles loudly along the traffic jam.
In addition to the day ticket, I also bought two bottles of white wine (I had visitors) and put them in my bag, one of which collided with the other rather roughly. ‘Do you know’, the manager intervened, ‘that something like this can be fatal?’
He explained patiently and eloquently that if you throw two bottles of wine together, they could just hit each other in the wrong place and then horribly explode. He’d had the same thing happen to a refrigerator door once.
At home, I placed the bottles on the marble counter with the utmost care. You never knew.
Volkskrantjournalist Eelco Meuleman (61), who has been diagnosed with end-stage renal cancer, writes about his life every week.