For the next 89 nights, we would dine each evening with Otto, his wife Aida and two other couples aboard the M.S. Rotterdam on a cruise that left Southhampton, England to sail through Europe and Asia. This was an assigned table seating that truly enriched our lives.
In my trip blog back in 2016, I wrote, “We lucked out on this trip by having an excellent dinner table of eight. We are particularly taken with Otto, an eighty-plus Dutch native who now lives in Vancouver with his Filipino wife Aida. He’s adopted Robert and me as brothers he says, but Aida is quick to point out we won’t be in the will.
“Otto always keeps the table regaled with his life tales ranging from pathos (standing as a nine-year-old with his mother on a Dutch railway station platform watching Nazi soldiers prod Jewish families into cattle cars) to hilarity (sometime we’ll tell you why as a young night steward on a cruise ship in the ‘50s he threw the padded bra of a nurse out an open porthole window) to the political (even though he’s Canadian, Otto follows with disgust the Republican debates and has no use for Mr. Trump). He thinks that I need to write him into my next novel, and I have promised I will make him a character. My fear is that he just might take over the story.”
Our brotherhood did not end with our final dinner on the cruise. We visited Otto and Aida once at their home near Vancouver. More importantly, we have had long phone talks every other month or so for the past eight years. Otto always had something to say about U.S. politics, and how the MAGA movement was testing his love for America. From his early career working on Holland America ships and his wife’s later work with the same cruise line, he kept us up to date on the cruise industry—especially during those dark days of Covid. Through the two of them, we had an eye into Canadian life as well as the Dutch life of Otto’s extended family still in the Netherlands. Otto always had something amusing to say.
And I kept my promise to Otto. I used him as the model for a character in my last novel, The Long Table Dinner. As I feared, the character Otto did take over the story—at least in the sense of his character being the moral center. With Otto’s permission, I even had my character Otto tell the real Otto’s story of the nurse and the padded bra.
Over these many years, Otto has always amused us with his fantastic storytelling skills. He has also been a needed anchor of political sanity for us as we watch what’s happening to this country’s social structure. He frequently reminded us how he, as a young Dutch boy, recognized all that could be good in our country from the way we liberated his birth land.
I don’t know what causes certain people to connect as kindred spirits. But I could see it between Aida and Otto in their relationship, and Robert and I felt it deeply in our connection to both of them.
On the afternoon of April 3, 2024, Otto passed in his sleep after an extended illness.
I like to think that those we love and those who love us live on within our memories and continue to help guide us. So, as Otto always liked to say in his stories before the big finish, “Now, here it comes . . .”
Otto, you’ll be with us forever.
Please check out all my novels in either paperback or Kindle format, including The Long Table Dinner, The Finnish Girl, The Devil’s Analyst, and Tales from the Loon Town Café. All titles are available to read for free to Amazon Prime subscribers.
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