Those dang neighbors

If the truth be told, it's happened more than once on this trip--some guide somewhere attempts to explain something about the Dutch, something maybe a shade negative, like their being tight or their worrying about how things look in public. They say it as if to define Dutch people, but our little pilgrim group heartily guffaws, not because the jokes are so funny but because what the hosts and guides say defines Dutch, by our estimation, is not far off the mark. Which is to say, we know what the Dutch are like, even though most of us hadn't taken a step in Holland before last week.

So when the guide in the Delft factory talked about this odd-looking thing, when she told us it was a tulip vase (we're a little late for tulips, by the way), that was one thing. But when she explained that if some portly Dutch housewife bought such an extravagant piece of ornamental home accessory, she would be sure to put a tulip in each opening and set in her front window to show off her wealth.

To her neighbors, of course. It would be her neighbors she would want to impress. She wouldn't have to say a thing, just buy a new Delft tulip vase like this for half a year's wage and stick it in her front window, which is to say, stick it in her neighbor lady's face.

Sure, some of us said quietly--that makes sense.

Lest men giggle, I know there were lots of men in their own machine shops back in Iowa, getting everything greased and ready to go just a few weeks ago, all of them waiting for that smart-ass neighbor who goes into the field first every year, waiting so that, while they certainly wouldn't be first, they wouldn't be fifth or sixth either. Once the green light flashes, they're off on the John Deere as if that green monster was something out of NASCAR.

It's the same thing really; it's being conscious of being seen, being judged by others, others you might know. It's one of a hierarchy of horrors that afflict small-town folks, but I don't think that guide at the Delft factory meant what she said as an indictment of small-town life. What she meant it as was a quick slap and small minds, not small towns.

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall," wrote Robert Frost years ago already, and so begins a little neighborly reflection about Frost and his neighbor spending a fine spring day walking the stone fence their properties share, the two of them putting the stones back in place after the winter, after "something there is that doesn't love a wall" (a bit of a pun--frost itself) has upset things and spilled those rocks into the fields.

Famously, the poem ends, "Good fences make good neighbors." There's enough ambiguity in that line so that only the real Frost aficianado can tell whether Frost likes fences or not, but I've always thought that poem finished with a furrowed brow--Frost the curmudgeon wishes we didn't need fences, but confesses, sadly, that we do, us humans. That's my nickel's worth anyway.

Psychologists now claim that solitary confinement can turn men mad--crazy, that is--in part because their ideas can find no boundries. They have no one to bounce those ideas off, so, curses and horrors, they start believing themselves. No one questions them. No one counter argues. No one furrows a brow. Like old preachers and teachers, they start believing what's going on in their heads. Which is dangerous. They go, well, mad.

So we need neighbors, and I suppose we even need picture windows next door and stone fences and people who disagree. We need contrary voices. We need skeptics and even unbelievers. We need irony and all kinds of dubiousness. We need neighbors to question whether or not we should have shelled out half a grand for Delft tulip vase that looks as much like a pretty
blue barnacle as some kind of national Dutch treasure.

We don't need too much, however. Everything in moderation.

And this one here--if I'd have bought it, I'd have to keep teaching for the next decade. It's still there at the factory, as are all of its replicas. So don't look for it in the Schaap's windows.

Besides, if I would have bought one, I wouldn't put it in the window anyway. You think I'd want the whole world to see?

No way.

(Good Lord, we are no less curiously made than that tulip vase.)