Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls - By David Sedaris Page 0,76
the nearest post office, along with a note reading, “Aloha. These were found abandoned. Very important documents. I hope they can find their way back to the owner.” There was no name at the bottom, just the word “Thanks.”
The postal supervisor used my checkbook to track down my banker, and three days later I had my old passport back. After opening it up and kissing my Indefinite Leave to Remain sticker, I called the Hawaiian postal supervisor, who told me that my things had been found in the vicinity of the house I’d rented, not far from the area I’d scoured with Gretchen. That was all he could tell me. Neither the passport nor the checkbook smelled of mildew, so maybe they were only recently tossed out. By whom? I no longer care. Instead of thinking about my burglar, I’m turning my imagination toward the unidentified person who so thoughtfully ended my nightmare with the British Home Office. I think of good instead of evil. I believe in luck again. It would have been nice to get my computer back, but I can live with its loss. My only regret is that my case was so anticlimactic. What began as a mystery ended as an even bigger one. Who are you, Good Samaritan? I wonder. What are you doing right this minute? Donating bone marrow? Reading to the blind? Teaching crippled children to dance?
On returning to England in early December, I handed two passports to my Heathrow border agent. He looked at the old one containing my Indefinite Leave sticker, and then at the new one, which he stamped and handed back. He may have said, “Welcome home,” or it might have been simply “Next.” In the way of people who have better things on their minds, I didn’t quite bother to listen.
The Happy Place
It was late September, and Hugh and I were in Amsterdam. We’d been invited out for dinner, so at five o’clock we left our hotel and took an alarming one-hundred-twenty-dollar cab ride to the home of our hostess, a children’s book author who lived beside a canal in the middle of nowhere. By the time we arrived, it was dark. Someone opened the door to greet us, and it took me a moment to realize it was Francine. Obscuring her face were two clear plastic bags filled with water. Both were suspended by strings, just sort of sagging there, like testicles. I, of course, asked about them, and she said they were for keeping the flies away. “I don’t know what it is, but they see or sense these sandwich bags and immediately head off in another direction. Isn’t that right, Pauline?” Francine said to her girlfriend. “Not one fly all summer, and usually the house is full of them.”
I planned to think about the plastic bags of water for the remainder of the evening, but other stuff kept getting in the way—Francine’s house, for one, which was really more of a compound: the Francine Institute, with a big modern space for writing, and a separate alcove for the dozens of books she’s authored, and all the products these books have generated, the dolls and posters and calendars.
Dinner was taken in the backyard beside the canal. It was a clear night, cold enough to see our breath, and a fire was burning. Joining us were Pauline, Francine’s ex-husband, and one of their sons, a twenty-year-old named Dan. Like his mother, he was blond, with the sort of looks we all might have were we allowed to construct ourselves from a kit: perfectly spaced blue eyes, perfect cheekbones, a perfect mouthful of big white teeth. On top of that he was really kind and interesting. After dinner we moved our chairs into a circle around the fire pit and were served apple cake. Hugh asked a question about the economy, and Dan explained that the Netherlands has one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe. “As long as you get a master’s degree you’re pretty much guaranteed a job.” He himself was in his second year of college, majoring in saving the Earth. “That’s not the actual name of the program, but it’s pretty much what it amounts to,” he told us.
I asked what sort of things he was learning, and he brought up a biology class he’d sat through earlier that week. “We were talking about aging and how the average life expectancy keeps creeping upward. It used to be that people died in their midthirties,