My body, which shall return to dust within the next 30 years [Herman returned to dust on twenty-seventh day of July, 2004, after enjoying thirteen years of retirement], was born on the eleventh day of January 1932. More than a body, a living system of flesh, blood and bones, was born. This body had a soul, a finely tuned brain which could analyze, fantasize, drink in beauty, and abhor the ugly. I still do not exactly know where the soul is in my body. Is it the spirit that makes me different from other people? Is it the “I” of Herman? for so my parents named me (after a brother of my father). The soul can’t be the intricate thinking patterns which the human brain makes possible, for when the brain returns to dust along with the body, the soul sees eternity, to be clothed again with a new body on the new heaven and earth. It’s all quite awesome and mysterious.

Baby with children

I was a heavy baby. Despite my 12 pounds at birth, my mother did not have extraordinary difficulty to push the full-grown fetus which under her heart already had received from God all the peculiarities and characteristics of the man I was to be. Through the cells of my father and mother I would forever include in my body, mind and soul the inherited physical and psychological features of two families which before my Dad and Mom married had not known each other and which qua geological locations, spiritual environments and historically different circumstances were so very much different from each other. Not only would all the nice things of these two families combine themselves in the new-born baby Herman, but also the garbage. The capabilities to become saint and sinner, including the pulling forces to move in either direction, where present in that fat baby, born at home in the village of Vlagtwedde, the Netherlands.