A Scentimental Journey

by Madeleine Kando

I drove to Paris yesterday. It took me only 25 minutes because it was Saturday and traffic wasn’t so bad. The radio announced that a snow storm would start at around 5 pm. It was getting dark and the snow gusts were starting to twirl across the surface of the highway, but my urge to get to Paris overrode my fear of getting stuck.

I didn’t really drive to Paris. How could I? I live in the suburbs of Boston. And I didn’t key in Paris in my GPS, just the name of a boutique in the next town over, that supposedly sells fancy perfumes.

As the road slowly turned white, I had to drive through a section of Watertown where the majority of signs pointed to auto body shops, liquor stores and car washes. ‘Not exactly the exotic French landscape’, I thought.

'You have reached your destination', my GPS told me. I parked in front of a small, brightly colored store with a sign that said ‘Colonial Drug Store’. Ok, I get it. It’s one of those CVS type stores where they sell cheap perfumes for a dime a dozen. I was about to drive back home, but the snow and the cold told me to go in and at least warm my poor frozen feet, buy a candy bar and then drive back home with my tail between my legs.

There were two odd looking, life sized statues guarding the door. They were clad in bright red tailcoats, knee breeches and tricorn hats, colonial era style. A homey sounding bell rang when I opened the door and once inside, the smell of freshly polished wood greeted me. Read more...

European Traffic

by Tom Kando

I am looking forward to our next European trip, this spring. Due to illness, we didn’t get to travel much in 2019. As we get older, international travel becomes more challenging. However, my wife and I haven’t thrown in the towel yet. Unlike many of our friends, we still tough it out driving, taking trains, sleeping at small hotels and walking around foreign cities as much as we are able to, rather than going on cruises.

This year, though, we will not rent a car. We’ll spend a week each in Amsterdam, Paris and Rome, and only a suicidal imbecile would rent a car to circulate in those cities, where public transportation is cheap and efficient, and vehicular traffic is nerve-racking.

Many American drivers find driving in Europe challenging, and many American pedestrians find crossing streets in foreign cities scary.

Actually the single greatest traffic problem overseas is not that Europeans and other foreigners are wild and dangerous drivers. No. By far the greatest risk to your life exists in those countries that still drive on the wrong side of the road, namely on the left. These countries include Australia, Britain, most of the Caribbeans, India and South Africa, courtesy of the former British Empire. They also include Ireland and Japan, and a few other countries that refuse to come to their senses. Read more...

Insomnia

by Madeleine Kando

I spend a lot of time in my head these days. I always have, because I am an insomniac. There is nowhere else to go when you are lying flat on your back, waiting for sleep to honor you with a visit. I could spend time in my toes or my elbows, but there is really not much going on at those locations, except the occasional itch or involuntary twitching.

My head at least, is a place where things happen, most of them beyond my control. I am always a bit apprehensive before I enter because it’s such a mess. There is a big sign hanging over the entrance that says ‘organizing strictly prohibited beyond this point’.

As I walk about in that chaotic place, I stub my toes against remnants of my day scattered on the floor. Did I turn the stove off? Did I put the left-over food in the fridge? Did I close my car windows? Usually, those nasty little buggers cross my mental path when I am almost asleep and with a jolt I am wide awake again, heart pounding. I am back to square one.

Us insomniacs are advised to establish what is called sleep hygiene. You couldn’t come up with a more distasteful term if you tried. No, it doesn’t mean washing the mud off your feet before going to bed, it is more on par with mental hygiene. Read more...

Temporal Myopia

by Madeleine Kando

Temporal myopia is like visual myopia, except it causes clarity to decrease in time rather than in space. When you suffer from visual myopia and a wolf approaches, you might think that the blur you see is your best friend in a fur coat.

With temporal myopia, if your doctor told you that you will die tomorrow, you would probably faint on the spot, but if he told you that you will die fifty years from now, you might think nothing of it.

Temporal myopia, rather than making us more cautious, makes us reduce the importance of a future event. It’s called ‘hyperbolic discounting’. Even though I know that abstaining from eating chocolate cake will extend my life in the future, I choose to discount the importance of that fact. The short-term gain of tasting the chocolate melt on my tongue is far more important.

'Temporal myopia is the archenemy of delayed gratification'. (Click to Tweet)

When I wake up in the morning, half dead, I cannot wait for my first cup of coffee. If the gratification of caffeine rushing through my veins gets delayed, there is a good chance that I will become dangerous to the people around me. I am temporarily myopic to the knowledge that I’ll feel like a wet rag a few hours later, a typical side-effect of caffeine.

But sometimes delayed gratification wins the battle over temporal myopia. I met this man in the therapy pool yesterday, who started to yell at me because I had positioned myself in his ‘lane’ (how you can swim laps in an exercise pool not much larger than a good sized bathtub is beyond me). He was so loud and verbally abusive that I started to laugh. This didn’t sit well with him. He called me arrogant and told me he would swim right over me if I didn’t move. I wanted to give him a kick in the you know what, but knowing enough about physics to realize that water does not help you in your kicking efforts, I preferred to bide my time. I devised a plan to get back at him with all the might of my delayed gratification technique. I called the manager and revel in the knowledge that this man will pay for his crime by being officially reprimanded. In this case I preferred to wait for my vengeance and make it taste that much sweeter. Read more...

Our New Year’s Resolutions

by Madeleine Kando

We have resolved, decided and put down in writing that we no longer will make New Year’s resolutions in our family. We will no longer be subject to the tyranny of this preposterous and bizarre custom and declare us free of its obligatory nature.

We find it ridiculous and nonsensical that we should make New Year’s resolutions, as if it were the only time we can promise to be good or stop doing something bad. In fact, I am making a resolution right now! There, I made one and it’s not even New Year's eve yet! I will, of course not share it with you, just in case I don’t keep it.

Why stick to an obsolete tradition that dates back to the Romans? They had this 2-faced God Janus, with one face looking backward into the old year and the other looking forward into the new year and since then, entire countries have had to make resolutions for the new year and forgive sins of the past!

This is not to ridicule those who still are naive enough to make New Year’s resolutions every beginning of a year, or a few days before it. Not at all.

It is just that, from where we stand, given the enlightened state of being that we have reached, we find it laughable and daffy that we should make such New Year’s resolutions. Read more...

My Doctor is Retiring

by Madeleine Kando

My Doctor is retiring. I told her I wouldn’t allow it, but she wouldn't listen and now I am stuck with the task of finding a new one. When I first became her patient in my twenties, I didn’t bother to find out how old she was. She looked old enough to know her business and young enough to read my chart without squinting, so I figured she would be ok for the next couple of decades. Besides, who thinks about retirement, your own or someone else’s at that age. But I should have done the smart thing, like I did when I got a new dog. I got a young one, so he wouldn’t die on me too quickly.

When she told me the news, I realized that she is one of the people who have known me the longest. Family doesn’t count, since they only know an obsolete version of you. But Doctors keep up with your life’s never ending transformations and transitions. She is the keeper of my body’s entire biography and now, decades later, it amounts to a bulging dossier, full of juicy details. If I was famous, she could sell my body’s dirty secrets for a ton of money to a tabloid magazine.

So here I am, without a doctor, without a gatekeeper. My body’s history floating out there, in limbo. I am supposed to transfer my records to a new doctor, a complete stranger! How do I know I can trust this person with my colonoscopies, my appendectomy, arthroscopic surgeries, MRI’s and cardiac stress tests?

I wonder if my Doctor feels guilty about dropping me like a sack of potatoes, discarded and forgotten. Did she feel bad when I sat on her varnished, faux leather chair and complained about my occipital neuralgia? She didn’t lean over and hold my hand with a pained look in her eyes. Thank God, I hear you say. Doctors are pragmatists. They are fixers, like a car mechanic. I wouldn’t expect Joe down the street to burst out in tears at the sight of my Honda’s broken timing belt. So, why am I so disturbed by the fact that my Doctor is retiring? Finding another fixer should not be such a problem. Read more...

Of Coffee Beans and Boiled Eggs

by Madeleine Kando

This is a children's story, but there is no guarantee

that you won't find it entertaining at any age.

As on most other days, I woke up at six this morning. That's what my body does without even asking for my permission. I gave up on a good night's sleep a long time ago. I go through the morning dragging my body around like a wet rag, until the demands of work and family forces me to ignore the feeling of exhaustion.

Today then, was no different. I stepped into the shower cell on automatic pilot, turned on the hot water and fumbled for the bar of soap with my eyes closed to rub in my face. I must have fallen asleep again, because the slippery egg-shaped object with a faint smell of almonds had suddenly disintegrated.

Instead, I was holding a tiny little miniature whale in the palm of my hand. It wasn't really a whole whale, mostly a mouth with a minuscule whale body. It stared at me with its beady little black eyes, suddenly stopped moving altogether and then spat in my face.

‘Who do you think you are?’ it said with a squeaky, piercing voice. ‘Rubbing me all over your body like that? Have you no shame? All that rubbing has caused my skin to break out. Look at me, I am a mess!’ It rolled over in my hand to show me his white belly, but it kept rolling and wriggling until it slithered its way through my fingers and landed with a flat thud on the floor of the shower cell.

I felt bad that such a small creature would suffer such a painful belly flop, even if it was in a dream. I bent over to pick it up and put it neatly back in the soap container, wondering when I would wake up. Read more...

The Dutch Farmers' Protests: What is THAT all about? *

by Madeleine Kando

Did you know that Holland is the second largest food exporter in the world, second only to the United States? It is a country the size of Connecticut with 14 times more people per square mile. Imagine having to share your bedroom with 14 other people, that’s how densely populated Holland is.

There are many amazing things about this tiny country. It is home to some of the largest companies in the world, like Shell, Phillips and the ING Bank to name a few, and it is listed as one of ten countries with the highest quality of life in the world.

But the reason Holland has been in the news lately, has to do with a crisis the Dutch call the nitrogen crisis. In Dutch they call it the stikstof crisis. Literally ‘stikstof’ means ‘suffocating dust’, a much more appropriate description of what is going on with our environment. They call it a ‘suffocating dust’, not because it suffocates humans, but because it suffocates nature.

Air is primarily made up of nitrogen (79%), so you might wonder what’s wrong with a substance that we all breathe in, all day long? Well, when nitrogen mixes with other elements, it produces so-called reactive nitrogen compounds such as nitrogen oxides (NOx) and ammonia (NH3). Nitrogen oxides are released when fossil fuels are burned in traffic, industry and buildings. Ammonia emissions mainly come from agriculture when ammonia is released from both natural manure from livestock and fertilizer. Subsequently, nitrogen deposition occurs: the nitrogen compounds end up from the air in the soil and on the plants.

If you are a gardener, you might recognize this as the Ph balance of your soil. There is then a double impact. First, the nitrogen compounds act as fertilizer for some plants. They are usually the green, fast-growing species. These take over from the species that cannot tolerate nitrogen, which means plant species not only disappear, but in turn pose a threat to the animals that depend on them. Second, nitrogen deposits acidify the soil, something that certainly not all animals and plants can handle well. Read more...

To Strip or not to Strip: The Naked Truth about Nudity

by Madeleine Kando


An article in the New York Times about present day nudism, got me thinking about why it is that wearing clothes is such a natural part of our existence. Right now it is 90 degrees here in sweaty Boston, and as I am sitting here writing about being naked, my shirt is clinging to my body. Why? Why don’t I just type away naked? I am not a prude, I have nothing against naked bodies, including my own. Wearing clothes is just something I do, like breathing or eating.

It hasn‘t always been like that, you know. In many cultures throughout history, the norm was to go about naked. The Greeks, the Egyptians, they didn’t see the point of covering their bodies. Why create a fertile habitat for lice and other unpleasant parasites? Even some present day primitive tribes do not like covering themselves unnecessarily. Who can blame them? Aren’t clothes making life extra complicated?

If I could, I would travel back in time, step out of a time machine in 5th century BC Athens, go up to a local Greek Adonis and shake his hand, me fully dressed in jeans, t-shirt and sneakers. ‘Hi, my name is Madeleine, I am doing research on your dress code.’

My Adonis would be wearing nothing but a loin cloth, or maybe a toga fastened at one shoulder with a clasp. With a flick of his finger he would undo that clasp and the whole shebang would drop at his feet, exposing his Adonis body before I could say ‘booh’. Then he would cross his arms, look at me as if to say: ‘Now, your turn’.

I would have to unlace my sneakers, fumble with my fly and worm my way out of my skinny jeans, roll my T-shirt up my torso, pull it over my head, all the while trying not to look too much like a scarecrow, undo my bra, and take off my underpants. My Adonis would be standing there, tapping his foot, looking impatiently at the sundial, pick up his toga, sling it over his shoulder, clasp it with another flick of his finger and walk away, thinking ‘What a nut ball’. Read more...

Happy Birthday, Ata

by Madeleine Kando

I wrote this short essay when my mother, Ata Kando, was still alive.

It is her birthday and even though she is no longer with me,

it is today of all days, that I miss her the most.

February, 2016

Soon, I will go to Holland for another visit to Ata, my soon to be 103 year old mother. If I am lucky, she will still be able to see my face, probably only the outlines, but her memories will fill in the blanks. She has had enough practice, taking pictures of her children in her long career as a photographer. Her most beautiful photographs are those of her three children. We were her surrogate models, since there was never any money for professionals.

Since I left Holland and the circle of photographers to which my mother belonged, I have always looked forward to my visits and the inevitable submersion into the world of photography. Bookshelves full of the most amazing photography books, boxes and boxes full of slides, negatives, contacts and prints. It felt like I was given the key to a candy store with no limits to how much I could gulp down. This is what I remember as the child of a photographer: a world of art that has shaped who I am. Ata was driven by a need to create and she used us, her children as the clay.

We spent our childhood vacations in southern Italy, wrapped in white sheets, pretending to be Greek Gods and Goddesses, frolicking amongst the Roman ruins of Paestum. While common sense families climbed the snowy mountains of Austria in heavy hiking boots and parka's, my sister and I had to wear flower crowns and skirts made of pine branches, impersonating nymphs of the Alpine forests. Where was justice, I asked myself, as I had to lay still on my brother's lap with an idyllic Bavarian scenery in the background, red ants crawling up my pants, only to be told that I would ruin a masterpiece if I dared move?

Ata had a simple fairy tale in mind, which later was published as 'Droom in het Woud' (Dream in the Forest), a dreamy and sometimes mystical story. They are brilliant, beautiful photographs and well worth the annoyance that they caused in my young life.

But back then it felt like I had to sit still a lot, smile a lot, jump off beach cliffs with cardboard cut-outs in the shape of wings taped to my ankles, because I was supposed to be Hermes, the messenger of the Greek Gods. Or balance an oversized clay urn on my head, because I was the perfect Athena. Read more...