Serendipity

Amsterdam: There are not churches on every corner but cafés and yoga studios and art galleries and clubs and antique shops and record stores and museums and historical buildings and architectural marvels, canals curving everywhere, every street crooked, bent, crisscrossed by trams, cycles, pedestrians, tourists lugging bags, travelers with bulging backpacks, scooters zipping in and out of everywhere, buskers dancing, twirling, singing, playing, encroaching, detaching, unlatching, and undulating, mourners blocking traffic and causing a man walking his goat to loam to the heavens as a goose flies overhead and collides with an albatross, the violence of the collision causing nearly all around to look up, the crackle deafening, the tumbling fall of the birds astonishing, the goose splattering against the cobblestones surprising, the wicked splash in the canal from the albatross enlightening, and the cyclist swerving off the road, flying over the handlebars and the short iron fence along the outermost bricks of the canal wall into the water below, quite ... satisfying.

The waterlogged cyclist popped his head out of the water and swam toward a nearby houseboat. He climbed up the side, shook the water off himself all over the deck, onto the plants but also some clothes drying on a line. An old woman emerged from a door in the cabin of the boat and walked out with a thick wooden cane about three feet long. She screamed at him in Dutch--I couldn’t understand it word-for-word--but the message was unmistakably that the motherfucker on the boat had better get the fuck off unless he wanted a cane smashed upside his head right now and again yesterday. The guy hopped ashore, flipped off the old woman, and said a few pointed words, in English, to the effect that she should go to hell except that they’re already suffering enough there without her presence.

A man on the street, older, tall, maybe six feet and two inches, slender but with good posture and broad shoulders, a rugged Dutch chin, bright blue eyes peeking through long lateral slats of lenses on either side the top third of his long straight nose, walked up to the man who had just climbed ashore. This older man on the street had a shock of white hair and wore a buttery tweed sport coat with brown patches at the elbows. His trousers, dark forest green, pleated and ironed, came down past his ankles, the fabric coming under the back heel, just a half-inch too long for his pointed-toe alligator skin boots. He reached out a hand to the other man, still soaking wet, cranky, and distrustful, and told him he would help him with his bike, pay for a taxi to a hospital if he needed medical help, offered to find a dry cleaner and even to purchase new clothes for him to wear until the next day if he was a traveler, by chance.

I was not the only person watching and listening to this exchange. There was a young woman nearby, too, possibly a student given that we weren’t far from the centrally located University of Amsterdam campus. An older couple, a young guy on a scooter who had stopped, a tram conductor and all of the passengers who were gawking, whispering, wondering, everyone who was watching, really, was viewing a spontaneously performed play, the play of the life of random circumstance but in this case with characters engaged because of unusual events that created dramatic spectacle, a sequence of events that commanded attention in such a way that the story might have been relatively the same for all viewers … but of course it could not have been so.

For the young woman, perhaps, there was the cycling of thoughts about a test she was scheduled to take within an hour. She was on her way to the university building when the birds collided overhead and the sequence of events unfolded as it had. For the scooter rider, on the other hand, he might as well have been thinking, “Are you fucking shitting me?! Birds colliding and then this shit? I gotta get back home before Cecilia or else she’s going to find Anna’s thong next to the bed. How the fuck could I have forgotten that? Or did I? Fuck, I gotta go. Fucking birds, man!”

Who knows? The man who had extended his hand and offered help was not done creating reasons to pay attention. He smiled at the younger man and told him he could live with him if he would like that. He would pay him handsomely to become his personal assistant. He needed only to spend a couple hours a day with him and the rest of the time he could do as he pleased. He said he had a wonderful guest room with an adjoining guest bathroom, full amenities, shower, sauna, a sliding glass door leading to a small, private rooftop balcony to be used for nude sunbathing or to simply lounge in a deck chair drinking Mai Tai’s, smoking ganja, and humming languid reggae laments.

If the young man didn’t take him up on the offer I figured I’d make my own pitch for consideration. Sure, he was a strange old man offering shelter, food, cash, comfort, luxury, and relative freedom in exchange for providing at least eye candy every day and probably awkward and unpredictably disturbing sex, but I figured I could steadfastly occupy the ground of “younger vibrant presence” without sacrificing my body or even too much of my attention. I wouldn’t even have to be deceptive. I could just come right out and say, “I’ll take you up on the offer this young man just refused. I know I’m not him, but I offer more than he ever could. Understand, though, that my love is for the city and my body exists for it as well. So I may be in proximity to you but I am in no way the property of you. I am autonomous, as autonomous as you and I expect to be treated as such.”

What the man’s response would have been I will never know because the young man took him up on his offer. He said he wasn’t hurt, but thank you. He turned to face the houseboat and waved his arm toward the woman who had gone back inside, complaining about the callousness of the proprietary-minded, about the disgraceful attitudes developed through an attachment to externals through the possessive attitudes fostered by belief in ownership. The distinguished older man nodded and smiled, stroked the younger man's damp hair with his long frail fingers. The younger man bent his head forward and allowed the older man to continue stroking his hair. Several onlookers began to move along. Those on the tram were still transfixed, trapped as they were by the whims of the conductor, a man still riveted to the play at hand. His mouth was agape as were those of several of his passengers. A strange sight, indeed.

Moments later, the two men were kissing, their arms tightly hugging one another, their hands groping, an outbreak of pure lust. The young woman turned to me and said something in Dutch. I said, in English, that I understood very little Dutch. She smiled and repeated what she had said, this time in English, “Do you believe in serendipity?”

I thought for a second and replied, “Not really. I’ve never given it much thought.”

“Really? Wow, I think about it all the time."

“What are you thinking about right now?”

“I was thinking about how weird it is that a dramatic gay hookup would result from a fatal collision involving two birds. Is that serendipity?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I don’t really know.”

“What do you know?”

“There might be too much for me to work with there so I’ll have to allow my intuition to direct me. My first impulse compels me to tell you that you are young and beautiful. I want the collision of birds to result in a hetero hookup, too. It’s not right that dying birds benefit only homosexual men.”

“Well, what about lesbian women? Maybe I’m a lesbian and I believe that serendipity, for me, would result in sex with another woman.”

“I don’t think your beliefs have anything to do with serendipity.”

“No? Why not? I would have to value things in a certain way for me to assign importance to specific things, enough importance related to my sense of self that I believed that the intersection of another with similar alignments of importance might mean something significant. Who else, for example, would have taken up that old guy on his offer. That was so meant to be!”

I decided not to mention that I had considered volunteering to be a cock tease for the older man just to have access to his cash and digs but I thought better of sharing this recent daydreaming. They were just whimsical thoughts, after all. I rationalized further that if the time had come for me to volunteer I would have come to my senses and realized I didn’t want to live with an old man with a thing for me no matter how much money he paid, no matter how great his digs, no matter how much freedom and luxury I would have been given. I left further reflection on the subject there to die … or at least solidify in a way that my memory would believe this assessment as the “correct” one, an infallible truth which required no further examination.

The young woman said, “I’m late. Here’s my card. Send me an email or text some time.” She turned and walked away. I threw the card into the canal. What, I'm gonna hook up with a woman who believes in serendipity?