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When they asked me what was the best and the worst I had ever seen during my many years and many miles, I didn’t have to think for long on either one.

E. Jason Wambsgans photo/Chicago Tribune

In 1954-55 I spent nine months as an exchange student at the University of Leiden, Holland, the Netherlands. I rented a room on the second floor with another, older student, at 47 Old West Canal, across from a bakery and a dairy store. The rental apartment was a “living room” on the second floor with a pot-bellied stove, and an unheated bedroom on the third floor.

Early morning smells of newly-baked bread from the bakery, combined with fresh butter and cheese to go with hot tea from the pot-bellied stove made a recurring memory hard to forget.

But the best thing I ever saw was in a cul-de-sac close to the center of Leiden. A single house, squeezed in between two others, stood all day and all night unattended, with lights on, and the front door open a crack, just waiting for anyone who desperately needed a place to stay, but couldn’t afford a hotel room. Night after night, all year round it stood there, open and unguarded, with food in the pantry and refrigerator, and bedclothes on the beds, for whoever had need. And it was never vandalized.

That’s the very best thing I have ever seen, and I have never seen a better thing anywhere else in the world.

Living alone one day, I decided to make myself a large pot of my favorite, potato soup. Boiled a bunch of potatoes, cooked down sliced and chopped onions with a piece of bacon, added chopped celery and pints of heavy cream with several large containers of milk and cooked it in the biggest pot I could find.

Four hours later I had what must have been four gallons of soup, and it was not tasty at all. I put it in a large number of plastic containers and froze them all. And so, I was able, once a week, for a very long time, to get out a container of frozen, awful-tasting, cream of potato soup, thaw it out, heat it up and force myself to eat a bowl of really nasty stuff.

After several months of once a week thawing a container of awful tasting soup and forcing myself to eat it, it finally dawned on me that I was actually punishing myself. I was being mean to myself, and I hadn’t the slightest notion of why I was doing that. They say that feeling guilty about something is dangerous if you forget what you were feeling guilty about; because there’s no way to forgive yourself for something you can’t remember doing. There’s no escape from that trap. But what’s worse is punishing yourself for something you can’t remember, while thinking all along that you are actually being nice to yourself.

Orrin Frink is a Kennebunkport resident. He can be reached at [email protected]

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