BREAKING UTRECHT

Until today I had nothing but fond memories of Utrecht.  But all that changed when a gunman opened fire at 10:45 this morning on a tram near the 24 Oktoberplein.  At least three people were killed and five were wounded, three seriously.  The gunman, a 37-year-old man born in Turkey, has been arrested but his motives are unclear.  It may have been a "family matter" or possibly an act of terrorism.  But in Utrecht?!  That simply can’t be.

Utrecht University Building

I remember when we first heard the name, Utrecht.  It was mid- summer in 1984 and we were on the island of Santorini, where we met a Dutch couple who lived in Utrecht.  We’d seen a lot of Dutch travelers that summer and the previous fall.  They always traveled as a family, usually in campers; they always seemed enormously happy; and they always had 4 or 5 bicycles strapped onto the backs of their vehicles.  We were quite taken with them, especially with their 6 weeks of annual vacation.  I even invented a silly jingle in their honor, with which we would break into song whenever we saw a Dutch license plate:  “Happy Nederlanders and their happy nederlander ways.”  Silly, but descriptive.

Happy Nederlander Bakery

The Dutch couple we met on Santorini proved to be no exception to the jingle, and we hit it off so well that we arranged to meet again in their hometown later in the summer.  We planned to see a Garritt Rietvelt house in the vicinity anyway, so why not?  As we said our goodbyes to them and made promises to meet again in Utrecht, we badly stumbled in our attempts to pronounce the name of their city correctly.  This prompted much laughter on their part, as well as an interesting anecdote.  They told us that under the Nazi occupation of Utrecht during WWII, the Dutch Resistance was able to identify German spies and infiltrators by their mispronunciation of "Utrecht."  German may be guttural, but it can’t hold a candle to Dutch.  If you’re going to attempt to speak their language, have a spittoon handy.

Gothic Cloister Garden

Utrecht is located smack dab in the middle of the Netherlands, about 50 driving miles southeast of Amsterdam.  It is the fourth largest Dutch city, with a population of 347,000 in 2018.  Its urban core dates back to the High Middle Ages, and the city has been the religious center of the Netherlands since the 8th century.  It turns out Utrecht was the most important city in the Netherlands until the Dutch Golden Age, when it was overtaken by Amsterdam as the country's cultural center and most populous city.  Nonetheless, Utrecht still has the second highest number of cultural events in the Netherlands.  The city is also host to Utrecht University, the country’s largest university.  So it holds its own.  (By the way, I’m harvesting this data from Wikipedia just three hours after the shooting, and the page has already been updated to include it!)

All That and a Kitty, Too!

When we visited Utrecht for the first time, it was in August, 1984, on my 37^th birthday, and I recall feeling melancholy.  (These days, like most of my peers, I’m just grateful to have a birthday.)  We found the Rietveld house, which was not open to the public, but it was worth the trek if only to see it from the outside.  Unfortunately, we had lost the address of our Dutch friends and never did find them again.  

“Our” Canal House (white building on right)

The second time we visited Utrecht was in May three years ago.  We rented an apartment in a 400-year-old canal house in the center of town for two weeks so we could take the cats along and pretend to live there—one of our favorite fantasy things to do.  Our place was just a few picturesque blocks from the neighborhood Saturday morning flower market, where I bought an enormous bunch of tulips.  The day before, we had purchased a high-end salad spinner (the apartment’s kitchen was not completely up to snuff) and a tall glass vase—perfect for tulips.  The whole thing was shaping up to be very domestic and very fun.

That first week, we made contact with a local couple our age, W, a retired professor, and his wife, to whom we had been introduced via email by H, our Berlin neighbor.  H had been a doctoral candidate in dentistry in Utrecht and had studied with W.  By sheer serendipity, W and his wife lived right across the street from a terminally hip gin bar where days before we had sipped Dutch Courage in the late afternoon sun.  We made plans for dinner at their home.

Dutch Courage

Then, as today, everything changed.  In my email on Monday morning of our second week was a message that one of our closest friends from California was in the hospital and gravely ill.  It’s the kind of message you never want to receive:  “If you want to see him, you should go now.”  I didn’t think twice.  My husband found me a flight to San Francisco, and I left him and the cats in the beautiful apartment in the 17th century canal house in Utrecht on a sunny day in May.  

So Utrecht, which will forever remain unpronounceable for me, has after today also in a way become incomprehensible to me.  How could such a thing happen in Utrecht, or anywhere, for that matter? 

Keep it real!  (And, yes, I'd like fries with that.)

Marilyn