Tag - family

I’m finally home from traveling 3 out of the last 4 weeks.

I remember seeing an interesting tutorial a couple of months ago on multiplying people in photographs, and we had a bit of time for fun, so I thought I’d celebrate being home by increasing the number of kids in our home.

Here are Gabrielle and Ethan, 5 times over:

Leadbetter beach at Santa Barbara …

OK, so a million people have done this, but I happened to be googling an address lately, and it was close to my parents’ house – where I grew up.

So I decided to virtually fly over and check it out:

There you have it – the house I grew up in. And my Dad’s old white van out front.

Odd, that van. He hasn’t had it for a couple of years. I guess the satellite photos aren’t incredibly up-to-date for New Westminster, BC.

Yesterday Teresa and I took the kids into downtown Vancouver to the CN Imax theatre for the Deep Sea 3D Imax film. (See the trailer.)

Here’s the obligatory shot of us all (except for Teresa, taking the picture) with our 3-D glasses. (The kids size was so big we had to hold them onto Aidan’s head!)

We all loved it, especially Gabrielle – who has always loved fish.

There’s a great scene right at the beginning as a wave rises in the distance and comes closer and closer to you in 3-D as you sit in your seat, then covers you. Everything turns to black, and then you’re underwater. But the whole movie is beautiful and amazing and incredible.

It was the first 3-D movie for Aidan, who kept trying to touch sea urchins or jellyfish that seemed to be right in front of his face. 3-D, when done well, is amazing.

The only quasi-negative was the narration, by Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet. They’re just not quite up to your standard National Geographic film narrator, or Leonard Nimoy, or Morgan Freeman, or Patrick Steward. Kind of stilted and staged, I thought, as did Teresa.

But that’s a quibble. The film is absolutely amazing, and well worth the time and expense.

After the movie, we strolled around Vancouver a little. Saw a triceratops on the street being pulled by a Hummer H3… which we saw later on as well – someone must get paid to drive it around, simply for advertising purposes:

We saw about 5-6 bear sculptures around the city – apparently part of a charity campaign, as they’ll be auctioned off in a few months:

Of course, a family day trip would not be complete without Ethan climbing something and making his mother’s heart race a little …

Teresa and the kids gave me a hockey net for my 34th birthday, last week. It took about half an hour to assemble – not bad – and it’s much better than our old one.

Ethan, Aidan, Gabrielle and I have already put it to several hours of good use!

Ethan’s latest Duplo creation …

And a shot with a slightly better view of Ethan himself …

Ethan’s way too old for Duplo now … but since his younger brother Aidan is into it (and always leaves his toys out) Ethan starts messing around with it from time to time.

On Saturday Teresa and I took the kids to Blue Heron Wetlands (we’ve been there before).

This time we went somewhere a little different – a sandbar along the side of the Sumas river. I started hitting some rocks with a stick that I found on the bar, and Aidan wanted to get into the action.

So I tossed him a couple, and Teresa captured the moment:

It was a beautiful, beautiful day, sunny, warm, and fresh. I guess this actually qualifies as stickball.

Cornelia Rinsche Hartog was born January 2, 1924, in Holland. More than that, I don’t know. Somehow, the city of Rotterdam rings a bell, but I honestly don’t know.

I always knew her as Corrie. Not that I ever called her that, of course. She was my then-girlfriend’s Oma, grandmother. But that’s the name that Rienk, her husband, always used. I can still hear him calling her now.

Old pictures have a way of captivating me. Probably you, too. Black and white. Grainy. Sometimes sepia-toned, always indefinably but unmistakably old.

And always the knowledge, the background bittersweetness, the nostalgia and the mute vague anger that here is a person, here is a human being, a soul at some stage in a life: alive, real, feeling, touching, hoping, dreaming, laughing … whose heart no longer beats. Whose breath is stilled. Who you cannot touch anymore.

A picture is a stolen moment. Stolen from us and … stolen from them.

On April 24, 1996, Corrie died of cancer in Langley Memorial Hospital. As she died, so did her husband Rienk, in a sense. He outlived her by 9 years, but in truth became only a shell of his former self.

I hardly knew her. She served us drinks and snacks, lunch. Asked questions, laughed. Said “yah, yah,” with a shake of the head in the good old-fashioned Dutch immigrant way. Always dressed up: hat, jewelry, shoes. Proper, but not stiff.

Someone – was it her father – made her that toy wheelbarrow. Maybe an uncle. The shovel that rests in it. Look at the thing – cross-bracing, handles. They knew how to make toys back then, toys that didn’t break the day after Sinterklaas. This one was love frozen into wood and metal.

See how blond she is, the prototypical Dutch girl. How artless her arms and fingers fall to her sides. How her white sleeves puck up at the edges. Her square-toed child’s shoes, with little white socks slumping down over the latches.

What is she – four, five? She was tall as an adult; probably tall as a child as well. She looks well-fed, but in just a decade and a half she would live through WWII and know both hunger and sorrow.

She’s already developed a child’s reserve – you can see it in the mouth, the cheeks, the slightly off-kilter stance. Perhaps this was the genesis of the dignity that I saw, 60 years later.

You look at her and you wonder: this girl was involved in the resistance. A brother died fighting the Germans. Her future husband helped the Canadian troops who were liberating the Netherlands. How could she know what was coming?

And after the war: marriage, immigration to Canada. A new life, a new house – many houses – throughout British Columbia. Years slipped into decades. Children – three, a teacher, a doctor, a musician. A community, a church. A home. A life.

And now a memory and a photography.

But more than that. Corrie was a Christian. That’s someone who knows a heavenly father. Someone who trusts a Savior.

And someone we’ll see again – in the fullness of time.

. . .
. . .

PS: We keep a birthday calendar in our house. I saw the scrawled “Oma” with a cross beside it about a week ago, and have been wanting to post something in her memory ever since.