Good morning Hank; it's Friday.
I woke up last Sunday in Bruges.
Uughh.
Hmm. I wonder what happened the night before.
What starts with L and rhymes with mistake? ...Let's have another beer... take.
Got up anyway, took a shower, brushed my teeth, got dressed- wait, why aren't you brushing
your teeth?
Cause I left my toothbrush in Amsterdam.
Right, so I headed out into Bruges with a burning need to disregard currency and acquire
one, a toothbrush, and two, some of that fancy Belgian chocolate I'd heard so much about.
Fortunately, Bruges has a lot of stores; unfortunately most of them are closed on Sunday mornings,
and I was starting to worry that I was going to have to do the non-ideal pre-modern thing
of brushing one's teeth with one's finger when ah look! Chocolate! The woman wrapped
up my chocolate for me in a fancy box as if I was not going to eat it right away.
Did you know Hank, that the ancient Belgians used chocolate as a way of staving off bad
breath... is a fact I just made up?
I found a lot of places that didn't sell toothbrushes like the french fry museum and a fancy shoe
store and a book store with John Green books and the Concept Store which presumably only
sells concepts; I wanted to buy utilitarianism, but it was closed.
I kept walking until at last I found Sam & Co, uw buurtwinkel. Hank, I know from my extensive
knowledge of Dutch that "winkel" means "store"; I could only hope that "buurt" meant "toothbrush"...
and it did. It did occur to me that I paid two euros for something that if you gave me
one hundred years, I could not build from scratch.
Hank, I realize this is stating the obvious, but everything in Bruges is really fracking
old. This is a school. And this is a Domino's. Parts of Bruges's famous belfry date back
to 1240 meaning that this building is four hundred years older than the idea of gravity.
I heard a lot of people call Bruges "quaint" but while it did feel like an open-air history
museum to me, there's nothing quaint about living amid history, grappling with the gifts
and insufficiencies of your ancestors.
To live in Bruges is to be reminded every day that there were people before you were
a person, which of course also reminds you that there will be people after. I think we
owe both the dead and the not-yet-living precisely the same thing-- the daily awareness that
human life is ours only in trust.
It's worth remembering that seven hundred years later we don't remember the individuals
who built the belfry or dug the canals; we don't remember their political affiliations
or even their nationalistic identities; we remember them as a collective, just as we
ourselves will be remembered as a collective for what we did and failed to do together.
Late I found myself in a park with Nerdfighters from all over Belgium, grateful to be part
of a community that builds friendships while trying to make the world suck less.
In short, Hank, I felt grateful to the 13th century, but lucky to be alive in 2011, living
in a world where with a series of ones and zeros, we can build our own relationships
and our own monuments. Plus, toothbrushes are crazy cheap!
Hank, I'll see you on Monday.