I met Irene Kontje in June 2006. We were at a bar in the Village on Bleecker Street, The Red Lion, where England supporters had been gathered that day since damn near sunrise. If you’ve been to Red Lion before, you know it’s a restaurant as well as a live music venue. However, because they’re smart, they also switch the place over to a large screen TV-packed sports bar where New York-based British expats can gather to drink gallons of lager, stout and whiskey while they cheer on their national team. Such was the case the morning I met Irene. Slightly tanned to a darker shade of peach, she had shoulder-length, straight brown hair and brown eyes. Nondescript, she blended easily with the others in the bar. But, I noticed her because she was dressed fairly sporty and wore an orange zip-up jacket with Nederland printed across the front.
ME: [points at her clothes, raises voice to yell over loud bar] I like your jacket!
HER: Thanks!
ME: [extending the hand of friendship] Twanna Hines
HER: [shakes hand] Irene Kontje
ME: C-c-coin shuh? What’s your last name?
HER: Kontje. K-O-N-T-J-E.
ME: Um, did you know your name means little ass cheeks in Dutch?
HER: [laughs] Yeah, I used to work in The Netherlands. Everyone thought that was funny.
What followed next was the realization that the woman who’d lived in Oakland / SF, California for ten years (Irene) and the woman from Illinois (me) were in a New York bar and discovered we lived in Amsterdam during the exactly same time.
ME: We were in the same area, so we probably crossed each other on the streets. Isn’t that funny?
IRENE: Very true. Life is, indeed, funny.
After that, Irene and I met up for coffee a few times in the West Village. I liked her a lot. Over coffee, we gabbed about men, dating, our respective sex lives. We reminisced about how much we love Holland, and both said we desire to live in Europe again in the future. We met up a bunch like new friends do. I remembered we saw one of the BBC documentaries from the 7-Up series at the IFC Center, too. I even blogged about her once or twice. Time passed. Via sparsely traded emails, we said we should hang out more often and catch another soccer game together. But, we didn’t. You know how it goes. We were both busy New Yorkers who lived in different neighborhoods and went out at different times in different places. Seemed hard to believe it’d been four years since we met.
Cut to the present. Thanks to mass emails and Facebook — those fine, lippy purveyors of gossip — I discover Irene is going back to Europe. She’s there now. In Spain. Given that I’d like to do the same one day (chuck it all and go back abroad), I wanted to know what she was doing, how long she was staying there and if she ever planned to come back. Curious to know about her life and her travels, I headed over to her blog and found this old post. It’s about the time she, an American, traveled to Friesland (north of Holland) on behalf of a friend of Dave Steensma. As Irene explains, Dave was the first — and, at that time, the only — Dutch fatality in the Iraq war. The story describes how she delivered a tricolor flag to his parents, Oeds and Margreet Steensma:
Oeds excused himself and returned with a large photo album. “Go ahead, look at it. The Dutch army made it for us. It’s Dave’s funeral service.” Initially Dave served in the Royal Dutch Marine Corps, but his duties later took him to the 12th Infantry Battalion of the Airmobile Brigade, Regiment “van Heutsz.” The Dutch army made a photo album for a family? My brow furrowed. I don’t think American families get that – too many dead, I suppose, how would the military keep up?
It’s a touching, brilliantly-written post. Read it. Irene is definitely on my list of Interesting People I’ve Met in New York, and I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to hang out with her more while she was still living in Manhattan. Luckily, she’s coming back. Since we both love soccer and Holland, I imagine I’ll email her about the upcoming World Cup games. I’ll suggest we catch a soccer game at one of these sports bars again. Maybe, Red Lion? Or, perhaps, Tonic — where the Dutch supporters hang out. It’s worth mentioning, on her blog, she quotes Benjamin Franklin: Either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing. Kudos to Irene Kontje for doing both. So, please, remember to read her post A Flag that Crossed Oceans.
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