The Broad and the Narrow--chap. 2

There it is, on the wall in the library. I didn't take it home from the auction, but somehow it's there.

I doubt whether I chose it to hang on our wall. The woman who helped us decorate this new house told us we had such odd and interesting stuff, tons of it from 30 years in the old place, including this weird Dutch print featuring heaven and hell. So there it is, center stage.

How did it get there?

That's chapter two.

Once long ago, at a time that's beyond the reach of my memory, I must have found that rolled-up print in a closet or drawer, looked it over, giggled again, really loving its plain-and-simple sermon. I brought it to a frame shop.

Who knows when that happened? Not me. I don't remember. What I know is all of that happened before the time the Dordt College English Department moved into its new digs, our own space, something we called a pod--as if we were all drawn from Moby Dick. Of a sudden, we had our own little corner of the world, with lots of wall space and nothing to hang. "Schaap, you got stuff?"

Sure. I grabbed the Broad and the Narrow from the basement--yes, Stuff in the Basement-- and hung it up on the wall of the English Department pod. 

Some years later, my son happened by the office. He'd graduated from Dordt some years before. The dialogue must have gone something like this:

David: Hey, you got my old Dutch print hanging up here--that's okay, as long as you remember it's mine.

Me: It's yours?

David: I bought it, remember?

Me: You did?

David: You forgot?

Yup. Turns out we were in the Netherlands, 1990 or so, and he was just a little shaver. I'd determined that if I was going to help this woman I met, Berendina Eman, with her war-time memories, I'd have to at least see the places she'd talked about, places like the Veluwe and Arnhem, Gelderland and Friesland, places of my own origins, but places no one in my family had ever visited.

I'd decided that we should at least visit Terschelling, the Frisian island just off Harlingen, the place my great-grandparents left in 1868 for the enticing possibilities of a new land. That's where we were, at a little island town named Midsland, where the church cemetery is so chocked full of Schaaps that someone just had to leave. My son said he'd bought that print in a souvenir shop in Midsland, across from the church our ancestors attended. He was just a kid.

Did I tell him to buy it or buy it for him? I don't think so. Did I spot it, giggle, and show him the Broad and Narrow Way? I'm guessing I did. Was I a salesman? Maybe. Did I encourage him to buy it? Wouldn't have been out of character. Whatever happened in that tourist-y shop across the square from the Hervoormde Kerk in Midsland, Terschelling, the Netherlands, the entire story had blown away and out of my memory.

But he remembers, and never fails to remind us that it's his too, The Broad and Narrow Way, I mean. 

But there's more to this goofy little saga of heaven and hell. Tomorrow, more origins.
___________________________

Should you be of the frame of mind and, like me, love to get lost in the minutia here, go to https://www.swangallery.co.uk/view-print-image.php?sid=3c3b07b712189cdd91f97892ef2cd4a0&printid=1003245&catid=

You can create your own tour of the Broad and Narrow Way. Keep a Bible handy. English'll do.