We had just laid down our curtains and I unfolded the umbrella when a family came walking up the same path we had just come down. The father was about 50 years old, bald and had the kind of body you grow with a lifetime of dairy. His wife walked behind him. In their wake two blond boys, teenagers.
I knew before I heard them speak. ‘Hey’, my daughter said much too loudly, ‘they are Dutch too.’ I tried to silence her, but it was too late. The woman walked by. “Let’s hope they’re sociable,” she said, as if trying to articulate my thoughts. Coziness was not what I was hoping for. What I hoped: that they would sit out of earshot, which in the case of Dutch holidaymakers is easily about 20 kilometers.
They didn’t. In their wisdom, which was as infinite as the available space the beach had to offer, they chose to sit a few yards from us. ‘Finally’, one of the boys sighed, ‘Dutch people’.
Finally. That’s what I thought, too, when I was standing in a quiet French supermarket and a man was shouting loudly into his phone, which was on speaker mode. ‘Yes, on your right! There is construction! At the roundabout you have to go right between two gates!’ Finally – I thought too, as we sat by a lovely little lake in the French outback and screams came from the water from some bulky people with an inflatable unicorn and an inflatable leopard sofa. Finally – I think every time I see a yellow license plate. Because there’s nothing better than spending 1000 miles and endless hours in a car that’s too small to end up encountering exactly what you drove off for.
Why had that boy said ‘finally Dutch people’?, my daughter asked. We lay side by side on our cloths in the sparse shade of our umbrella. The Dutch family had been on the beach for a while and also taken a dip, but it was getting too hot for them now. They were getting ready to leave. The bags were packed again.
I got no further than ‘I really don’t know’ and resolved to come back to it later.
The father was changing. He did this in the Dutch way, without a towel and without a sense of decorum. That’s why it could happen that, just when I looked up, he bent down to take off his swimming trunks and I looked full into his Dutch Glory. Finally.