A Rose by Another Name

For over 30 years Kees Bouw and I exchanged letters.  When I told people about my Dutch pen pal, I pronounced his name to rhyme with “geese.”  Then I went to Rotterdam.  As soon as I walked into the apartment and Marie said, “Kees is working,” I found out I had been wrong for all those years.

Then there was his wife.  When Kees wrote about her in his letters, I assumed “Marie” was pronounced in the French way.  Then, where he talked about her, I heard “Mary” like my mother’s name, Mary Sue.

Things got more complicated when he called her “Riet”, to rhyme with “meet” and “greet.”  I figured out that “Marie” was her formal name, while “Riet” was the familiar, family name.  Her name was Marguerite. In Albuquerque I have a friend named Elizabeth Lackmann; I always call her Betsy.  By my second visit to Rotterdam, I was calling my Dutch friend “Riet.”

All of us have assumptions about people and things.  We grow up thinking everyone thinks the way we do.  Also we think that anyone who has a different religion or skin color or political belief must be wrong, inferior, and/or dangerous.  That’s wrong.  Can we learn from our mistakes?

In Texas in1952, just before Wally and I were married, a woman came up to me in church and told me how sorry she was to hear that “You are marrying a Yankee.”   It took me years to realize that Wallace had some basic character flaws, but it was not because he was a Yankee.

I learned a lot in Rotterdam, besides learning how to say names correctly.  Most important was being with a family who had very little in material wealth but who seemed truly happy. 

Kees was a tall, lanky Dutchman with a happy smile on his long, horse face.  When he walked into the sitting room in that spare apartment, the whole world seemed warmer and brighter.  It was as if Danny Kaye had stepped out of his role in Hans Christian Andersen.  His wife’s face lit up with joy. 

The feeling of domestic contentment continued when we went to stay with their daughter Margaret in Oud Beyerland, some 40 or 50 miles south of Rotterdam near the Belgium border, where David and I had just come from.  Margaret insisted they had plenty of room for David and me and her parents.

The family lived in a row of town house with small rooms stacked three stories high.  What I remember best were the macrame hangings Margaret made to decorate the windows instead of draperies. 

This was home to Margaret and her husband Joop (rhymes with “rope”), their son Dimitri, and a big – very big – dog named Kees after her father. 

The dog was always in the middle of things.  As I sat in a chair in the small living room, the dog’s tail wagged, swishing across the calves of my legs. If he was in the way, someone patted him on the head and gently squeezed around him.  I never saw anyone in that household show any sign of annoyance or irritation with anyone else, including the dog.

What a wonderful family!  They welcomed us and told us they genuinely wanted to share their home and their country with these strangers from America.