Melanie Martin Goes Dutch (22 page)

Well, we were all B.P.s (oink oink) and we ate every crumb and and drank every drop.

Dear Diary,

It's funny how Dutch is a tiny bit like English but also not at all like English—depending on how you look at it.

Dad's guidebook says bread is
brood
(Brrode) and butter is
boter
(Bow Ter). Cabbage is
kool
(Kole) and sausage is
worst
(Vorst). Liver is
lever
(Layv Er), which is easy to remember, but who would ever want to order
lever
???

Dad taught us to count to three in Dutch:

1 een (Ayn)

2 twee (Tway)

3 drie (Dree)

I may not be learning much Dutch (much Dutch— that's a rhyme!), but I'm learning other stuff. For instance, Amsterdam is farther north than New York City, so it stays light outside until very late, which means our summer vacation days last extraaaa loooonnng.

Well, Mom wanted to spend all day at the Van Gogh Museum, so Dad said he'd take us for a bike ride and picnic and we'd meet her there later.

Instead of buying picnic food at a big supermarket, like in America, we bought cheese at a cheese shop, fruit at a fruit shop, and bread at a bread shop, and we each took turns paying.

We also bought a box of chocolates. Matt asked Dad, “Can I have one?”

“Not before lunch.”

“Can I poke a hole in one?”

“Absolutely not.”

“But don't you want to know what's inside?”

“I'm a grown-up,” Dad said. “I can wait.”

At the picnic, Matt was chomping on his sandwich and wiggling his tooth. He said that he could push his
tooth way over with his tongue so that the top of the tooth faced sideways. (Gross!) Then he asked, “Can you stick out your tongue and touch your nose?” All of us, even Dad, tried to touch our noses with our tongues (it must have looked pretty dorky). But none of us could do it. Then Matt said, “I can!” and he stuck out his tongue and touched his nose—
with his finger
.

I didn't know whether to laugh or punch him, but then he said, “My tooth fell out! My tooth fell out!”—only it sounded more like “My toof fell out! My toof fell out!”

A teeny drop of saliva splashed on me, so I said, “Say it, don't spray it. I want the news, not the weather.”

“That is the news,” Matt answered. “I lost my first tooth!” He held it high and smiled a smile with a hole in it.

Cecily said, “Put it someplace safe so you don't lose it twice!” He stuck the tooth in his pants pocket and she gave him a high five. Dad did too. So I did too.

Dear Diary,

Mom noticed the hole in Matt's smile right away, and Matt told her all about it, beaming away as if he were the first person in the history of the world to lose a tooth. Then Mom told all three of us to tie our shoes, and said she doesn't understand why shoelace makers can't make shoelaces that stay tied. She always says that. She says that if we can make rockets that go to other planets, we should be able to make shoelaces that stay tied.

The Van Gogh Museum has over two hundred paintings, five hundred sketches, and seven hundred letters, and Mom said she was going to give us a guided tour. I was worried it was going to be a snooze, but since Mom is so into van Gogh, I decided to act interested. Well guess what? Vincent van Gogh's life was interesting, and his paintings are really really really good. We even got to see the paintings of sunflowers and irises that we had pieced together as puzzles.

Here's the thing. If you step back, you see the subject
that van Gogh painted, but if you step up close, you see a jumble of different colors. For example, when he painted his own skin, he didn't paint it just skin color. He used green, red, blue, yellow, black, and white. He saw things in lots of ways—depending on the time of day and on how he was feeling—which was often mixed-up and shaky, just like his colors and brush strokes. Some of his paintings actually seem to be moving. Stars twinkle and clouds swirl and flowers bloom or droop right before your very eyes.

Unlike Vermeer's, van Gogh's paintings are not calm.

I've been thinking: maybe my life is like a van Gogh painting. If I look at it up close, things sometimes seem not quite right. But if I step back a little, things usually seem pretty good!

It is soooo pitiful that he sold only one painting and died at age 37. He didn't really even start painting until he was 27! I wish he'd sold bunches and kept on painting for years.

By the way, the Dutch don't pronounce his name van Go. They say van Goff or van Hoff with that
HHHGHHH gargly sound they all make. So if you were making a rhyme, you wouldn't say “Van Go was psycho,” you'd say “Life was rough for van Hoff.”

Here's a poem I wrote:

Today everyone loves his paintings and they sell for bazillions of dollars. A portrait he did of his doctor sold for $82,500,000—the most money anyone had ever spent on a painting. When van Gogh was alive, though, nobody appreciated him. It was as if he was a big loser. Even
he
didn't always appreciate his work— he didn't even sign most of his paintings!

The only person who was nice to him was his little brother Theo. Theo had an art gallery in Paris and tried really hard to sell Vincent's paintings, but no one
wanted them. Theo sent Vincent money anyway because Vincent needed it and Theo loved him. Later, when Theo and his wife had a baby boy, they named him Vincent.

If Matt ever had a daughter, I wonder if he'd name her Melanie.

Anyway, poor Vincent van Gogh ended up going crazy. He had a fight with a painter named Paul Gauguin, and Vincent cut off his own ear. Not the whole thing, but part of it. Some people think he did it because he said that no one liked him because he was a bad listener, so what did he need his ear for? But really he did it because he was mentally ill. Mom showed us a self-portrait with a big bandage around his head. Even though van Gogh ended up going to a mental hospital, he kept painting really fast and really well. Then in 1890, he shot himself in a wheat field. He killed himself—but it took him TWO DAYS to die!

Six months after that, his brother Theo died too. Mom said, “Some say he died of a broken heart,” but Dad said, “Nonsense! He died of syphilis.” That's a disease.

The van Gogh brothers are buried side by side in
France, where they moved when they left Holland. Mom once visited their graves. She said maybe she'd take us there someday.

If you ask me, the best van Gogh paintings are his self-portraits and old shoes. I also like a really creepy one of a skull with a lit cigarette in its bony mouth! Mom thinks the American Cancer Society should use it to help teenagers not smoke. I told her to get a poster for her classroom and she thought that was a good idea.

“When van Gogh was alive,” Matt asked, “did he ever visit that other museum we went to?”

Mom ate up that question. She said van Gogh liked the Rijksmuseum and admired Rembrandt's work.

“They were both really good at self-portraits,” I said.

“The best!” Mom agreed. She said that one reason van Gogh painted himself so often was because he wanted to learn to paint portraits but he couldn't afford to pay models. He was so poor that sometimes he painted on
both
sides of a canvas just to save money on art supplies.

What amazes me is how nice Theo was to his brother. I can't imagine Matt working hard to send me money, or me working hard to send Matt money!

I wonder if Theo and Vincent fought when they were kids.

Right now Matt is next to me on a bench, blowing on his arm making little farty noises. He's making them quietly so Dad doesn't get mad. Matt is also whisper-singing, “Oh where, oh where did van Gogh go? Oh where, oh where did he go go go?” He's trying to make us laugh and it's half working because Cecily is laughing and I'm trying not to.

The problem with Matt is that he acts his age, which, unfortunately, is six and a half. Sometimes he acts like he's six going on two. Mom should yell at him more. If he were my kid, I'd give him a permanent time-out until he was seven at least.

I told Cecily that in Italy, our favorite museum game was Point Out the Naked People, and Mom never even minded so long as we were paying attention to art. Italy has more nudie paintings than Holland, though. That might be because many Italian painters painted naked gods, goddesses, and Bible people, while van Gogh, for instance, painted real people—farmers and postmen and himself. (And you don't see too many real people
running around naked, do you? Except maybe at certain beaches!)