My grandmother

My grandmother was born on a US Army base in the Philippines, in a bed with the Stars and Stripes draped across the headboard, just after the beginning of the last century.

Her father was a colonel in the US 16th Infantry who had been posted to Luzon in the course of the Spanish-American War. He was Dutch by birth — his clergyman father had left the Netherlands in the 1840s along with his congregation in the doctrinal split the Dutch call ‘the separation’ and moved to Michigan — and an idealist by conviction. His various projects over the years included a plan to improve the lives of prisoners by encouraging them to take up gardening and early support for the infant League of Nations. During the First World War, when German-speakers in the USA risked lynching, he demanded that his two young daughters learn the language of Goethe and Schiller.

His Calvinist upbringing notwithstanding, he died a Shinto Buddhist. Read the rest of this entry »