Home For Christmas
Friday morning I stood at Arrival gate #3 watching person after person that wasn't Michael walking through the doors into the happy arms of family and friends. For the second time in a row, I hear his voice in my right ear....he has found me before I found him. This happened in July when he arrived here last. It has been four months since we've seen each other. Everyone said it would go by quickly but it didn't.
Every time Michael comes to Amsterdam he's always just finished his final exams at school. Sleep deprived, dehydrated, and unshaven, he always steps off the plane looking a little...askew. But after a few days of health and sleep and soup and the company of a good woman (:-)) the warmth returns to his skin and Miks is full on Miks. We talk a lot about the concept of "home." People ask if I am going "home" for the holidays to which I respond "I already am home." My literal home has undergone a total transformation since Michael was here last. I think he likes it. It is 7: 20 PM on a monday night and Michael is fast asleep on the futon I slept on by myself for 4.5 months. He is so deeply asleep I am not even sure he is breathing. He's jetlagged and sedated from the champagne w/orange-mango sauce we'd been sipping all day. He'll wake up around midnight wide awake. He thought it was around midnight when he started to fall asleep. The short days here have a disorienting affect.
Today was a great day. It started out with a bit of anxiety. There were a few things we *had* to find and only had half a day to find them. Sometimes in Amsterdam it is not so easy to find anything. We got up very early in the morning and started to put the tree together (yes our horrible god-forsaken artificial tree which I absolutely love). Michael plugged it in using a converter and POP!! All the electricity in the entire house went out. Shit. He reset the circuit breaker but it did nothing. Just as I was about to call Karnel...the building handyman who rescued me from this exact same predicament once before when I caused the lights to die using my 10 year old mini-cuisine art, Michael guessed correctly that there would be a main switch in the shared stairwell outside our apartment. Pop! The lights went back on again. Joy to the world.
We went through this three more times trying to get our american lights to work with a converter in the continental electircal sockets. What we needed was an actual transformer....or to buy all new lights. We formed a plan to try to find both.
We also needed to find a turkey. Turkeys are not so common here as they are in the US. We found a few at the Albert Cuyp market and we found some at the Albert Heijn grocery store the day before. What we really wanted to do was buy one from a proper butcher...assuming the butcher would be open on christmas eve and assuming they would have a turkey for us that was available and not earmarked for someone more savvy who had pre-ordered it.
With only a half day allotted to find everything we needed, we had to seriously think through our route and strategy to find everything we need: which causal affects would lead to one outcome vs. another? What is our backup plan in case we can't find what we need and where should we be in case we need to go with the backup plan?
The first thing we did was go to a very fine butcher on the Elandsgracht in the Jordaan. The place was already full of customers at 9:00 am but there was not yet a line out the door like there would be almost immediately after we left. I asked if they had turkeys and indeed they did, just a few...some very big and some small. We asked for the smallest they had and were presented with a plump little guy who will fit into our small oven perfectly. This turkey is just slightly bigger than the delicious rotisserie chickens you'll find at Whole Foods. It cost 57 euros. We were given a free bottle of wine which more than made up for it cos it was just such a kind and friendly gesture.
Michael put the wrapped turkey in his backpack and we headed out to find christmas lights. This is not an easy thing to do. The dutch do not make a huge obscene deal out of Christmas like Americans do. And this being europe, things sell out. The few places that would have christmas lights had sold out and did not waste their own time or ours being apologetic about it. The place that had the transformers we needed for our American lights was not open yet. We stopped by the Hema in our neighborhood (Hema is the dutch Target), and could not find christmas lights on our own but were directed to a small pile on sale in an aisle of other sale items. They only had white lights but we took four packages.
We went back to the electronics store which looks like this little hole in the wall in a dingy area of the Old West (my neighborhood). If you needed a transparent aluminum bracket to finish building your space ship, this place would have it. They had two transformers that we need with dispersed the wattage from the socket to our lights so that they wouldn't glow like they were radiated and then burn out in a minute.
We went home feeling really great. We found without compromise everything we needed for christmas. Michael took the turkey out of his backpack and put it in the fridge. We took the lights out of their packages, Michael plugged our american christmas lights into the transformers and they turned on. It was a beautiful, and rare moment.
Our chistmas tree was illuminated with red, white, and green lights...a thousand of them.
Then the right lights went out.
Short interlude here. I love my husband for his humor and his brain and his talent and his love and knowledge of music and many other things. But sometimes, I simply love him for being a man. He is another set of hands. He can lift the flowers out of their vases when I need to change the water. He can haul and pick up heavy stuff. He can reach things I can't. He knows about things like circuit breakers. And sometimes, his shear love of manly things, while often is huge irritant (aka the well documented star wars obsession), makes my life immeasurably better in a way that I could never make better on my own.
When the red lights went out, we were confounded because they were plugged into a transformer that was exactly the same as the one juicing the green lights and the green lights were doing just fine. Michael said "I have an idea. Do you have something very sharp?" This is one of those moments as a wife you resolve yourself to letting go, letting yoru husband be a man, and doing your best to find the fire insurance policy as quickly as possible. I handed over a box cutter from the closet and Michael went to work putting his degree in Electrical Engineering to use by somehow combining the connections or wires between two outlets in a powerstrip so that the electricity was distributed evenly between the two. A few rounds of duct tape later, my finger on the fire department button on my phone, Michael plugged the lights back in and the red lights came to life again along with all the rest. He *fixed* it like men fix things. Jury rigged, yes, but fixed nonetheless.
We spent the rest of the evening decorating the tree with our ornaments. Every year, we buy new ornaments that represent something that happened that year. There are not a lot of ornaments to be found in Amsterdam, so I thought what could be more dutch than to go to the Bijenkorf department store the first day it opens after christmas and scoop up every ornament they have left at a signifcant post-holiday discount.
