The blond guy and a girlfriend

My book collection became accessible again so I began a slow survey of those shelves which had been blocked for a couple years. I happened upon a thin memoir entitled, alfabet/alphabet, winner of the Governor General award in 2022. It reminded me of a specific passage forever stuck in my memory because it explained a particular image of my parents. I flipped through the pages in search of the exact words.

In the Dutch city of Tilburg, Ria van Dijk has made an annual visit to the shooting tent of the kermis, the travelling fair, for more than three quarters of a century. With unfailing aim, she has fired the air rifle, and activated a mounted camera that takes a portrait of her and whomever else is inside the frame. p. 113.

Instantly I understood the context of that endearing photograph of my dad engaged in the same activity, mom at his side, probably in 1956 or 1957, before their marriage. I sought it out again amidst the number of other photographs documenting my mother’s life in the Netherlands.

The author, Sadiqa de Meijer, a Dutch Canadian born in Amsterdam, continued to describe the series of photographs by Ria van Dijk, how they represented the change in fashion of those who “stand on the photo”, marked the passage of time and the aging shooter/photographer. I began a trip down a rabbit hole searching on-line for the book of images, hoping to discover the ones taken in the 1950’s to compare directly to this one of my parents. Eventually I uncover a few, and at least one from that time period, thinking the material would form the content of a blog posting. I abandoned the idea because I could not envisage the outline. There wasn’t a story no matter how you looked at it.

Nevertheless, I was enthralled by the kermis photo, staring at the screen, commenting out loud how little I know of my parent’s courtship. I know vaguely how they met; I know when they married; I know they left for Canada two weeks later; I know they landed in Montreal and rode a train to London, Ontario before departing for their first rented apartment in Belmont because a “girlfriend” of my mother lived there.

Is that couple standing behind my mother’s right shoulder in the kermis photo the same as the couple in the Belmont pictures? Were they on a double date at the Tilburg fair? I zoom in on the woman, the man, then scrounge through the “early years”, revisit the black and white photographs from 1958 to approximately 1963, starting with Mom and Dad’s arrival in Canada. A couple who clearly live in the same building are featured in numerous images, sometimes alone, others with my parents, sharing drinks and smokes and laughs. They are not the couple in the kermis photo.

The man, however, looks familiar. The blond hair, the angular nose, taller than everyone else. Is he the person standing behind my father, dressed in a suit looking directly at the target, looking more Dutch than Dad? A closer look at several more Belmont photos confirm the discovery; but who is this “blond guy”, what is his name, how is he related? I begin searching through my mother’s nursing years, looking for the face of the woman in the Belmont pictures thinking Mom’s “girlfriend” would have been a fellow nurse from either school or work, who had accompanied the “blond guy” but was outside the frame of the kermis photo.

I identify a few possibilities focusing on the short curly hair, the round face, the smile. Olga is my second set of eyes. Enlarge the picture, flip between the two time periods; nope, that is not her. The look is different, the face too thin, the mouth crooked. We cannot find Mom’s “girlfriend” among the nurses. Maybe the “blond guy” is really a bud of Dad, so I embark on another search through his photo album, the navy years and the handful of his twenty-something period. No, the “blond guy” is not there either. Maybe he is not the same person in the Belmont pictures; possibly I am scurrying down another rabbit hole, probably imagining a story that never existed. The pictures remain on the computer screen, left for another day, for another perspective, in need of a fresh pair of eyes.

A new day, a new look, and suddenly there he is, or more precisely, there they are. By chance I had been perusing my mother’s album and had left it open to a photograph used in an earlier post about the ubiquity of smoking. That photograph from Breda in 1957 shows my parents posing with an unidentified couple except now I recognize them as the pair in the Belmont photographs of 1958. It is the “blond guy” in the kermis photo and Mom’s “girlfriend”.

Immediately, I begin reviewing Mom’s pictures, yet again, but with a different set of eyes. The “blond guy” does not show up save for the two already identified. The “girlfriend”, on the other hand, is more prominent than previously thought. Is she the one in the wedding dress in between my parents? The makeup and the attire can be deceiving but the eyes and the mouth look like the “girlfriend”. The placement in the photo album lends credence to the possibility and now on closer examination, some photos which I had mistook for my mother are more likely her “girlfriend”. There she is peaking through the snowy branches, with that coat, which shows up again standing on the beach, looking at the photographer, staring out on the water. With clearer glasses I can see the vacation at Wiijkaan zee was actually a girls trip in 1953, not a secret rendezvous, repeated again in 1956 to Zoutelande. I now believe some of the images during Mom’s time at Nicholaas hospital in Tilburg, previously dismissed by me, include her “girlfriend”, laughing and smoking and drinking, sharing in the comradery of nursing colleagues.

A new story emerges and with it another mystery. Mom appears to have known this “girlfriend” since 1953 at least, attending her wedding, double dating at the kermis, leaving the Netherlands in the same time period, meeting up to share an accommodation in a new land. There are pictures at the Delaware picnic hosted by the Fathers of the Sacred Heart specifically to support Dutch immigrants. Mom and Dad are with the couple, the “blond guy” and a “girlfriend”.

They appear to have been happy, joyful times. Olga and I even believe the “girlfriend” is pregnant given her attire and mildly puffy face.

And then nothing. There is not another picture involving the “blond guy” and the “girlfriend”. They disappeared without a name, without another mention, without a trace, except it was the reason my parents settled in Belmont in 1958. By 1959 Mom and Dad are in London seemingly without the “blond guy” and the “girlfriend”. How does a person who warrants six individual photographs in my mother’s album, kept all these years, vanish from a person’s history? Another story, another mystery? Or maybe not.

One could go down another rabbit hole chasing explanations. The couple could have moved back to the Netherlands, not an uncommon response for immigrants missing family, especially when you are starting your own. Witnessing my mother’s stubbornness and her ability to hold a grudge, there may have been a falling out which was never repaired. Or it may be as simple as moving away to another town, far enough to make excuses as life gets in the way with children and jobs and stuff. They may have unwittingly drifted apart, not knowing how to bring themselves back together.

Were one to look at my wedding pictures, the same questions could be asked about some of the individuals in the photographs.

It happens.