This is the second installment of my New Year’s resolution to stay current on my blog. This week in the category of craft improvement I worked on executing gems of instruction I found in the excellent little book, Twelve Fatal Flaws of Fiction Writing, C.S. Lakin, editor. I was working especially on the entries regarding […]

We finished the Christmas holiday with a 50th birthday party for my younger daughter, Tara. It was actually a family reunion, as she requested. About fifty people attended and Tara was thrilled. The timing was optimum, since cousins from all over the country, in town for the holiday, were able to make it. Back at […]

So, with Wednesday came the end of our wonderful stay in Holland. It was an almost perfect time, having a chance to visit everyone without rushing. There was only one missing piece. Although we didn’t see her, we remembered her well.

Can’t believe our visit is already just about over. We spent the day before our travel day with the Tolenaars. Fred very generously offered to take us on a tour of Delfshaven, the older, only un-bombed area of Rotterdam; the new market hall area; the Hoek of Holland, a beach area in the southwest corner of the […]

We took a train this morning to Amsterdam to visit Lynn Kaplanian Buller, a friend of Chan’s since Moscow days. Lynn has been a resident of Holland for forty-five years and owns the very successful American Book Center, with locations in Amsterdam and Den Haag. Willem and Lynn got acquainted, we had a lovely lunch, caught […]

Today was a day to regroup after the heavy scheduling of the previous six days. Plus, the town was taken over by soccer fever. Two clubs from Rotterdam were playing each other in semi-finals and fans from other places flooded into the city. The bar across the street from our hotel followed the example of others […]

Saturday was “catch up with the cousins” day. Elleke, on the left, and Mieke, on the right, are second cousins. Seeing Mieke’s mother, who was sick with cancer and who was married to the first cousin that Willem had spent a lot of time with as a young boy, was part of the reason for our […]

  The engraving at right is under the statue of an “everyman”. It reads, Unbroken Resistance 1940-1945. For the Netherlands, today was Bevrijdingsdag – Liberation Day; the day in 1945 when the Canadians and British liberated the majority of the country. The year before, in 1944, the Americans had liberated the southern provinces before moving […]

Notice that the flag is at half mast. Today was “Herdenkingsdag”, a day set aside to remember the dead of WWII. Lots of people had flags out, and all were at half mast. At 7:58 PM the whole country observed two minutes of silence. Everything stopped. We were on a train at the time, and […]

We spent the day in s’Hertogenbosch with Willem’s old friends, the Salas. I had met them years ago while on a business trip to the Tennant office in Uden, and we also saw Dick in 2014 on our last trip to Rotterdam. It was lovely to catch up with them and spend some time just […]