Amsterdam Layover

                I am currently in hour seven of a layover in Amsterdam. It’s two in the morning and I have eight more hours to go. The airport is quiet. I can use the bathroom and there are no cleaning ladies hovering about the mirrors and urinals. The airport here also has the best accommodations of any I’ve visited, so I might avail myself soon of one of the lounging chairs and take a nap. But I’ve also had a couple cappuccinos and a coke today, trying to use this layover to begin my shift to Seattle time, nine hours back.

                I took the train in to Amsterdam and I walked for five hours. From the grief it’s giving me, I suspect my left hip is going to protest for the rest of the week. My original intention was to take advantage of this night without kids in one of the most popular cities in the world, and to walk all night, or participate in the nightlife. And I discovered that if I had to spend the middle of the night in a city, Amsterdam was the right place to do it, because it remained crowded and bustling and inviting the entire time. But I ended up reticent about sitting at a bar by myself—though I did it and enjoyed finally getting off my feet and having a foamy coffee—and dancing appealed less when every bouncer at the door looked like the Barcs Jobbik leader, and I wasn’t ready to entrust my backpack to anyone. And then the night started to change on me.
                The energy was terrific and there were so many joyous and attractive people, walking or flying by on bicycles; and I enjoyed absorbing the vitality of it. But as the night wore on and I passed one woman throwing up at a restaurant and a man punched out on the street and taken off in an ambulance, and as men began getting drunker and stumbling into others and into me, and beggars started following people, and as I walked towards the towering façade of a hundreds year old church and stumbled immediately onto the densely crowded red light district where women in glass cubicles either resignedly texted in their underwear or tapped and beckoned at the glass, in my aloneness the thick tang of marijuana at every corner started to smell less sweet and more menacing.
                In three or four hours the sun will rise. And in Seattle my little ones will climb into bed and maybe think tomorrow is the day their father comes home.