Announcing
middledom.com
the new domain name for new archives
maintained by Henry J. de Jong
With “Middledom” now on my horizon, I’m still not entirely sure where it is or how I might get there. The landscape is murky and only a few landmarks are clearly visible. Middledom, for me, is a land far off, but also a familiar recollection. It is a retiree’s recreational pastime and it is a life’s work beckoning.
The most prominent feature of this landscape is my father, Herman de Jong. His legacy has come to rest in my hands, as eldest child and repository for the family archives. It’s been twenty-one years now since Herman was laid to rest after a productive life. Now, with time on my hands, and the looming reality of my own, inevitable demise, and the prodding of a wife who wishes to down-size, I need to deal with all of the stuff that I’ve accumulated and that has been handed down to me.
Much of this is of a personal nature; photo albums and documents that my mother so carefully collected. The process of digitizing is well underway as we seek to reduce binders and boxes to byte size. But my father, whose work was always more public in nature, was no slouch either when it came to archiving — witness multiple bindings and the box under the bed that we first opened in the days after his death.
Herman de Jong had his day, no doubt. More than most, he was in the public eye, regaling his grade school students with stories, directing choirs, leading worship from behind the organ, writing stories for CC, directing Salem’s and Friendship Groups’ development, leading hymn sings at Shalom Manor and just hamming it up at parties or events.
But what now? Is nostalgia the only door to this past, or is there something more enduring to be gleaned from it. I vouch for the latter, though I am not immune to nostalgia, especially among family. So, the choice has become clear — buckle down for a time and reissue the collected works of Herman de Jong in a format that can better endure and disseminate. Dad’s binding supplies and CC’s printing press must be supplanted by WordPress.
But, every WordPress needs a domain, so my thinking first went to the choosing. In 2004, a week or so before my father died, I presented him with his own domain, www.hermandejong.com, and the nascent, memorial website I was developing. I gave that up after the cheap first year (tellingly, this domain name is still available). But I was looking for something more generic, because there is more stuff out there that needs preserving, not just my dad’s. In fact, I was in possession of no less than seven family memoirs, also looking for a home.
I kept coming back to the one internet domain that Herman de Jong actually published under, www.didledom.com (which I’ve always thought of as ‘diddledom’ but is probably pronounced ‘dyedledom’ in gronings. This is an old school, bulletin-board-like website from the early days. It is run by a Groninger who is gathering stories in the Gronings dialect, and to which Hermantje the Groninger contributed extensively. This website and domain are still around, so I was thinking of something like it.
After some casting around in my alliteratively, rhymingly fried mind, I hit upon “middledom”. I let that sit for while and more and more came to appreciate the possibilities. So on Boxing Day, 2024 I registered middledom.com (somewhere around the eighteenth domain that I’ve staked a claim too — most to be abandoned or relinquished).
Why “middledom”? The internet has become a nasty place. It seems to thrive on — even generate polarization. In these culture wars, I have found myself repeatedly shrinking back from the extremes towards the middle grounds — areas that seem to have been more commonly and sensibly occupied by my parents’ generation and theirs. And, in the flow of time, between the immemorial and the utopian/dystopian future that currently preoccupies us, the middle ground seems oddly comforting. We know the stories there, how they ended and how we survived, even thrived.
Lastly, a fondness for J.R.R. Tolkien has impressed on me an association of “middle” earth with a place inhabited by creatures and dramas of all kinds, where the forces of good and evil do battle, but where good prevails, and whose beating heart is the Shire with its little people — “kleine luyden”. I pray that this middledom will be an antidote to the clash of principalities and powers that currently has all ears.
February, 2025
P.S. Henry’s conquest of the World Wide Web started twenty-six years ago. Thus far the results have been middling.
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