I DON’T know if you’ve ever noticed, but every week the right-hand column of this newspaper is brimming with regular Americans carrying Dutch names. Like me, VanderBus, they have all kept their grandparents’ names. Usually they no longer speak a word of Dutch, but accent-free English instead, but ask them the question that these days is fashionable among Americans: what is your ancestry, and they beam: Dutch.
Most cats don’t know who their daddy was, let alone their grandfather. I do though. My granddad was also named VanderBus because, like me, he opened the attack on a bus. Not a city bus as I did, but a tourist bus. It was a van that goes around showing tourists Stephen King’s house, here in Maine. For $55 a pop.
Grandpa was a born tour guide. He was proud of neighbor King who lives around the corner. Gramps stood right in front of the bus one day, yelling to the tourists that he would do it for free. Walk with me, he said, and I’ll show you where the neighbor lives, where Carrie was born, where Pet Sematary was filmed, where Kathy Bates practiced with a hammer on people’s ankles, and where the clown with the red balloon is hiding.
People were totally interested, but the real tour guide got angry and threw Misery’s hammer at Granddad. He died on the spot, with his boots on, leaving the bystanders lamenting, “What a bus!”. Granny heard about it, thought they said, “Van de bus,” and that’s how Grandpa got his hero’s name.
VanderBus.
It runs in the family.
* VanderBus left home at the age of six weeks and went hunting for a city bus in Maine. He caught the bus. It cost him one eye, but he won a standing ovation from everyone who watched him do it. VanderBus, since then mayor of Bicker Hollow, is running for president of the United States.
