Vinkeveen

Early calculations with a ten am flight, eight am boarding, and being five hours away from Amsterdam, any attempt at sleeping that night would be detrimental. Half way through the EMO Exhibition with my German partners and my early departure merited a party on my final day. After that evening of food and drink, two cold showers were sobering enough to get me on the road at two am. A couple short naps along the way put me an hour away at 7:05 am. Open windows, loud radio, and a large coffee made little difference at this phase of sleep deprivation. My dreary eyes focused on an exit sign for Vinkeveen. My mind rolled back to 1973 when I stopped there to visit Ad Bemelman, the European sales manager for my Kaiserslautern Germany work assignment. Ad had become a very special figure when in an earlier meeting he told me of his father’s involvement with the grandson of Theo Van Gogh, Vincent’s brother, to establish the Musee Van Gogh, soon to be opened, in Amsterdam. Hey, he was talking to a kid from Leonard where a library card was a level of sophistication. Here, Ad and his link to Vincent made him an icon. Moreover was his association with this community. He took me on a mini tour of Vinkeveen that day. First was a stop at a wooden shoemaker’s shop. Too touristy but an effort to explain the practical nature of a device intended to keep the farmer’s feet dry. The second stop was to meet eccentric but essential members of the community – The Recycle Siblings. Two brothers and a sister, who were unmarried and devoted to collecting garbage, sorted the valuables into piles of metal, paper, and plastic. I likened it to Dung Beetles in the play Insect Comedy where they were protective of their balls of shit. Ad was concerned who would be around to carry on after the aging siblings were gone. I now wonder. Last and most memorable was the Dutch vegetable auction. We took our place in the theatre of bidders built over a canal where boats loaded with fresh vegetables floated in with contents available for sale to the highest bidder. The uniqueness came from a descending clock on the wall. Each seat in the theatre had a button to stop the clock. There was no competitive bidding only a single stoke of someone’s button to stop the clock and buy contents at a Dutch Guilder per kilo figure.
That thought process on that Starry Night overcame the heavy early morning truck traffic and transpose me to Schiphol Airport in time for a dash to the gate for my flight home.