SPORTING INFANTS

As is traditional my friend the bookseller will have walked home from work all the way in the Hong Kong landlord section of the city to his spacious digs on Telegraph Hill yesterday, as he always does when public transit is filled with drunken twenty-something yutzes on Holidays. New Year, Saint Patrick's Day, Cinco De Mayo, July Fourth, Halloween, Santa Con.

I have also walked that entire distance, we have a beautiful city and it's well worth it, but now that I've had the angioplasty on the lower dexter extremity I am slightly more conscious of the arthritic state of leg joints on that side. So I don't.

Do you really want a Dutch American cussing in a multilingual bad-tempered mumble-stream on the San Francisco streets? Think of the children! No, I didn't think so.


According to the language maps one of my native languages is something very similar to the North Limburgian dialects. With some influences from Antwerpian Flemish, because many isoglosses run right through the area where I grew up.

[Wwhen I was two we went there from Southern California. So I grew up near where an ancestor (fellow named 'Gompert') lived in the twelfth century. Way before we went to New Amsterdam in the sixteen hundreds.]

Which probably explains why I'm currently rereading Gaius Julius Caesar and laboriously re-learning Latin. It's as good a common tongue as any. And persuading you all to learn Kempisch has sadly proven darn well impossible. And verdomme.

Y'all far too darn stubborn.
I hate that.

According to the guide books, the area in question is beautiful, with very gentle undulations, idyllic villages, and placid streams. Life is more Burgundian there, more in tune with culture, traditions, and good living. The guide books say nothing, not a darn thing, about the density and unintelligibility of Brabanders. Or that it resembles Yorkshire without any Engish.

Or the fact that most Netherlanders can drink Yanks under the table.
For which they've trained since childhood.
Single digits.


Think of them as being rather like the Scots, absorbent sponges also, but more cheerful and intelligent, and without that bagpipe racket.



==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================