This was the place to be, where one could hope to meet a suitable young lady to marry and start a family with. The goal was to have children who looked like us, rather than resembling the milkman from the village. My little brother and I were two of the mischievous kids who were set free on the water like floundering, headless chickens. We had already left our diaper days behind, but accidents still happened occasionally, and our mom would hang our soiled sheets out on the street as a lesson. "That"ll teach you," she would say. It was the late 1970s, and we strutted around in sponge shorts that accentuated whatever we had to show off, which wasn't always much. In those days, summer shorts didn't feature a stripe along the side. But I do recall that during the winter, when snow blanketed everything and global warming wasn't yet on our rader - we sported striped outfits. Dark blue tracksuits with two orange stripes, and a third vertical stripe for the pretentious. In our neigbourhood, it was just two stripes, both on the pants and the sleeves. If you wanted to fit in, you had to own that tracksuit. In the summer, however, sponge material was in fashion. Althought I can't imagine those styles being shown on the catwalks of Paris and Milan at the time. Both of us were so thin that you could see it very clear when we were half-naked at the waterfront in our sponge shorts. We looked like walking skeletons, with no meat on our bones. back then, no one would have suspected that we were deliberately eating so little as a form of protest. The truth was, our dad would sneak into our room at night and do things to us that we couldn't talk about. It was a dark secret that we kept to ourselves. Our little white curly poodle, named 'Whitney', was always on board for our trips to 'The Forest Farmer' where we could hunt for pretty girls. She was ahead of her time, being a female dog, but also a lesbian. Our dad was accepting of this, but he could not tolerate when later one of his sons also came out as gay, causing a scandal in Holly Woods and beyond. In our family of dockworkers, having a homosexual son was not acceptable. But our Whitney was his treasure. The curls around her snout were showing some reddish signs of aging, but that white doggie remained playful. Her eyes sparkled like a tinkling bell in a rolled-up snowball, and her tail wagged up an down. We made a sport out of throwing small twigs in the water at 'The Forest Farmer', and our little doggie would fetch them back to us. And then... everything fell apart. My little brother stood waist-deep in the water wearing his blue sponge suit. The images flicker by me in slow motion. He grabbed a twig and tried to throw it, but the twig slipped slowly through his fingers like melted chocolate that I wouldn't even consider licking up. The smell of it was worse than a fresh ball of garlic. Brown sludge dripped from his fingers and seeled to dissolve in the clean swimming water. It was actually our beloved dog Whitney's 'chocolate'. * Any remblance to existing people or places is purely coincidental, the text is completely fiction. 
Hanan Scheers I travel the world to find unexpected stories. 15 March 2023
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