This is the start of my intended series of life blog posts, about life and everything, often about matters in Computer Sience, Mathematics and Logic. And occasionnally about the inner life of the author. Because conscience is what makes the world move, according to some strands of thought. Even in the realm of quantum events, some say. Anyway, the subjects of writing will be chained by associative links, i.e, rather chaotic and maybe rambling. If it has every now and then a biographical flavour, that is consistent with my aim of many years to write some stuff that our cherished two grand-children girls Valerie and Charlene may once, some years or decades from now, stumble upon, with already now for me a mingling of sadness and love.
My conscious life started in a triple of dramatic events that almost terminated it right at the start.The first two have been erased from memory, the third makes me pause for wondering up to this very day.
The first almost-drowning-event was in Zuilichem at the main river of Holland, de Waal, where my great-great parents and relatives, always dressed in black and walking on wooden shoes, lived their strongly religious life in a small farm against the dike, the Waalbandijk, the southern one leading from Zaltbommel to Gameren to Brakel,to Zuilichem, Woudrichem (Woerkom), to Gorinchem (Gorkum), where I was born. Gorinchem is at the confluence of the two main rivers Maas and Waal, originating from the Rhine. (Later more on Confluence, but first we are dealing with Termination.) Behind the house was the mestvaalt, the manure heap. My parents and uncle were visiting, and my uncle Arie, who fought in the politionele acties in Indonesia from 1948-1952 as a fourier-corporal, noticed that little Jan Willem was out of sight already for several minutes. Worried, on inspection around the house he saw a tuff of yellow-blond hair sticking out of the surface of the mestvaalt morass, and pulled me out at my hair. I was scrubbed clean. The smell must have been very noticeable. I must have been between one and two years of age.
This first event set a pattern, and a few years later the same uncle Arie pulled me out of the black bubbling git mud ditch in front of the house where he lived, with my Opa Jan Willem, my Opoe Jenneke van Woerkom and my Aunts Jantje and Jaantje. Also this memorable event became a family story, often told at birthday parties with uncles with foul-smelling powdered cigars and aunts distributing delicious glasses of home-made red bowl with cherries and fruits; but beyond that as a related story it was not registered in my inner memory bank. The location of the house in Haaften at the Koningstraat was painted by my father Jan Adriaan Klop.
By contrast, the third almost drowning event was a more narrow escape, and was deeply ingrained as an everlasting puzzling memory, that sometimes seems a lesson for (my) life to be taken seriously. This is what happened. See next blog.
