by Willem Meiners
AT HOME we have two Kindles. If we wanted to, we could together carry 70,000 books in them. Today, all of us find this perfectly normal, reading books in an eReader. But fifteen years ago, the summer of 2009, hardly anyone had such a thing. eReaders only broke through as Christmas presents later that year, suddenly and massively. Compliments of the descendant of Bunschoten’s Gerrit Teerpenning, Marc Tarpenning, who invented the first battery-powered bookstore, the Rocket eBook.
Because that’s what it is, a portable bookstore cum home library. Unthinkable at the beginning of this century, now a perfectly normal thing. The average book weighs five ounces, 140 grams. The 70,000 books that we could store in our two Kindles would in real life weigh ten tons. That’s three times the weight of our two cars, a Subaru and a Chevy, combined.
BUT THERE was a time when there was also a Kindle that walked on two legs. I say that with unintended disrespect, but everyone remembers Raymond Babbitt, the autist from the movie Rain Man, with Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise. Raymond could count and keep track of cards at blackjack tables. He earned $86,000 for his brother which paid off his debts. The movie was fictional, but Raymond as a character was real. His name was Kim Peek and he lived in Utah. Kim’s brain memorized 12,000 books, cover to cover.
Almost all Peek families in America descend from Jan and Marie Peeck, who immediately upon arrival from Amsterdam became troublemakers. In New Amsterdam if you wanted to sell alcohol you needed a permit, which meant, among other things, that you could definitely not trade liquor with local Indians. Jan and his wife ignored that, and before long they were kicked out of Manhattan. They settled in a place on the river that is still named after them, Peekskill, with kill a reference to an old Dutch word for creek, as in Sluiskil and Dordtse Kil.
LAURENCE KIM Peek was not autistic, but he was born with an oversized head and brain anomalies. He didn’t learn to walk until he was four, but could word for word retell a story after it was read to him when he was eighteen months old. As an adult he finished a book within an hour, reading left pages with his left eye, right pages with the other. He put each read book back on the bookshelf upside down, to indicate that he had read it. He memorized all 42,000 zip codes in America, corresponding town or district and all. And just for grins he would ask you when you were born. If I had said, January 6, 1949, Kim would have answered promptly, that was a Thursday.
Subsequent Peeck generations for a long time continued marrying other Dutch immigrant families, Teunisse, Van Slijk, Rijkman, Vrooman, but eventually the C was dropped, and the surname began to be pronounced pEEk, not pAYk as it should be. For just as the Starbucks coffee from Alkmaar’s Alfred Peet is pronounced in America as pEEt’s Coffee, and yet is really pAYt, so Peek is indeed simply pAYk.
Raymond, aka Rain Man, aka Kim Peek. The movie made him famous, and he enjoyed it. He died, aged 58, of cardiac arrest in that Christmas week of 2009. Which is why, out of respect, the Kindle should have been called “Kimdle” for at least a few days, then.
* Willem Meiners is the editor of De Daily Dutchman.
The real Rain Man, Kim Peek, in a library in Salt Lake City.
