Creepy clowns are terrifying America. Suddenly they are everywhere—riding in trucks, popping up in backwoods communities, in grainy photos on city streets—always with their crazed grins hiding deeper, sinister emotions. Arrests are made; schools receive clown threats; children are frightened. Real clowns are fighting back, parading with signs: Clown Lives Matter. Ronald McDonald has gone into hiding for self-protection.
Americans like to think of Christmas as a scene from It’s a Wonderful Life, which runs comfortably nonstop on TV through the holidays. But for some the everyday reality is more like the baby in front of me, wrapped in a crocheted blanket in a plastic bassinet in the nursery of a homeless shelter I am visiting today.
The year is 1990. The time is 4 a.m. The place: Princeton. I am jolted awake by ambulances with sirens screaming, police cars, a trauma helicopter circling overhead. I live near the train station. I peer through the window at a cluster of flashing lights converging in the snowy night.
Summer in America is the coldest time of the year. Women in particular suffer from the chill that pervades the land. This is a season of goosebumps, blue fingers and toes, and chattering teeth. I always have a scarf and sweater within arm’s length. Places of extreme danger are movie theaters, offices ,and any places frequented by men.
One hundred years ago this month, a 5-year-old boy spread a quilt and lay with his parents on the grass of the backyard of their house in Knoxville, Tenn. On this summer night, he listened to the music of the evening — the murmur of neighbors talking on porches, the clop-clop of horses on the street, the hissing of hoses watering lawns, the rasping of locusts and crickets, and the flopping of a few frogs in the dewy grass. He watched the last fireflies flicker out and wondered who he was.
Princeton Magazine Mayjune Issue CoverRegular readers of Princeton Magazine will recognize Pia de Jong from a feature story that ran in
2013 shortly after the Dutch novelist and her family moved from Amsterdam to Princeton for her
husband Robbert Dijkgraaf to take up his appointment as director of the Institute for Advanced
Study. The focus of that first article was Robbert Dijkgraaf. This time around, it’s all Pia.
March 14 is Pi Day in most of the world, but in Princeton it is most visibly Albert Einstein Day. It’s his birthday, and this year of the Super-Pi — 3.14.15 — the streets are filled with kids wearing frizzy white wigs, smoking toy pipes and trying to win the Einstein lookalike contest.
The predicted Snowmaggedon of 2015 never arrived in New Jersey, but that does not matter much when I find myself sprawling face-down on the parking-lot concrete next to my car. I never even saw the black ice. I just screamed and tasted blood in my mouth after I hit the ground. My whole body hurts.
Utterly confused following the recovery of her deathly ill daughter, she began to write. (And how!) But when Pia de Jong (Lange dagen) came to the US with husband Robbert Dijkgraaf and children, she practically had to start all over again. “I missed the language. The French have a beautiful word for it - dépaysement. I was without a country; disoriented.”
‘Pick you up tomorrow morning at 7 a.m.,” my friend says to me. I glance dubiously at my watch. That’s rush hour at my house.
“Okay,” she quickly adds, “make it 7-ish.”
