INTRODUCTION
Previously I had a mere career retrospect on this page. There was a lot about what I had done and little about who I am. If you found this page, I guess you were looking for me. You are welcome. I am still exactly the same guy that you see on the picture to the left. I am his future. My mission in life is to fulfill his wildest dreams. Some of them I will share with you on these pages.
THE 1970S
The 1970s... a decade filled with going to school, drawing, writing and contemplating the odds of the universe being infinite. My oldest datable memory is watching TV with my dad when Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon in 1969. My grandfather had to laugh about it:
'It's just television – flying to the Moon, impossible!'
Regardless, I contemplated the existence of mankind in the Universe while swimming, fishing, playing and discovering the world on trips to safari park Beekse Bergen in the vicinity of Breda.
At the time, we were all completely oblivious of slightly older kids elsewhere, that were inventing desktop computers, the World Wide Web and mobile phones. Throughout the 1970s, my father’s car was pretty much the key to the world at large. In my mind, we could drive to the Moon with it. Well, perhaps not with my mother’s second hand Volkswagen Beetle, but my dad’s Ford station wagon was so big that it might fly one day.
Although we didn’t make it to the moon then, my dad’s car did bring us beyond mountains and hills, over incredible bridges, past glaciers and ravines to Austria, Germany and France. Impressive huh? Well, wait till you get a girl… Hard to tell who was my first girlfriend though. Perhaps the one I used to walk to prep school every day. I remember waiting for her at the crossing, and then we’d walk to school, hand in hand. We walked in complete silence, every day again the same ritual, for two years.
I loved all games and fairy tales
As Strangely odd as that may seem
I loved firelight and witches’ tales
You see, you were there in my dreams
I lived in a tower, cloud-top high
To stop your love from passing by.
Just as in this Elly Stone song though, I’ve forgotten her name… Then, there was the girl next door:
I remember yesterday in our secret hideaway
That was where, that was when
We became the best of friends
I remember the danger
I remember the sign
We were flashing the lights…
But no, she was just the girl next door. I simply had to play with her, and she with me. True love only arrived when Katja arranged my ‘relationship’ with Sonja. At age 11 I finally touched the moon and then also the stars beyond. Imagine to be allowed to play skipping rope with Sonja during lunchtime at primary school! Suddenly, all questions about life and infinity seemed irrelevant.
No further memories of the 1970s surpass those, except maybe when she broke the relationship after 6 weeks of playing skipping rope. To console me she said that I could still continue to play skipping rope with them during lunchtime. I guess that defines the moment when I became a man: no relationship, no skipping rope! Sometimes a man has to stand his ground. I never managed to forget her though. In 2006 she started her journey to the unknown and when I look up to the skies on a bright night, I can see her star. Small but bright it is now surrounded by a few other stars that left lasting memories in my mind.
In becoming stars they ultimately answered the essential questions that I was contemplating during this formative period in my life. But that was decades after I first took the Rainbow train to the worlds beyond. That magic train arrived every night on the station inside, to pick me up. I hopped on, and off it went, over the rainbow bridge to the Milky Way and beyond, stopping only in worlds unseen where I lived through incredible adventures. Imagine a train that never stops in the same world twice…