Dear Reader,
Memory is a strange phenomenon. Just when we think we’ve pinned it down, it throws us a curve. My memories have been all over the place recently as I write about a particularly vulnerable section of my life. I’m sure I’ve told you that my narrator shares certain experiences with me (as well as having many other, more fanciful ones) and I wanted him to take something like the Mediterranean trip that I took in the spring of 1990.
There are pivotal moments in the story, of course, but I was also grabbed by tiny tangentials as I browsed through the timeline. And one of those felt so sweet that I couldn’t resist including it. For now, anyway. So I wanted to share this bit from Chapter One of AND LOVE ENDURES, at least as it now exists in the first draft. All you need to know is that the cruise has ended, and now they are all staying for a few days in a small hotel in a resort town north of Athens:
“One morning I stepped into the tub and threw open the window. It was late May, the sun was shining, a slight breeze rustled the trees that were trying to obscure my view of the Aegean, and a house just to the right was covered with bougainvillea and other flowering bushes in exotic colors. I stood in the shower with hot water pouring down my back and drank in the view and the scents of spring, and flowers, and an ancient sea. And I had a moment of complete happiness. They are, after all, relatively rare.”
And speaking of memories, the image below has long been a favorite of mine. I shot it from the roof of our hotel late one afternoon in Veracruz City (Mexico) in 1995. For me it captures the tropicality of the city, and it instantly transports me to breakfasts in a huge café on the square with young guys carrying large pots of hot coffee and hot milk dashing about, in unison, to refill patrons’ glasses in answer to a bell-like ring from an empty glass tapped with a knife. Three taps, I seem to remember, is considered appropriate. One or two might be missed from half-a-block away. But four taps would be rude.
In the zocalo in the evening, when the air ceases to move, old women pedal flowers around the Cathedral. And the scent of gardenias is so intense that Veracruz takes on an almost dangerous quality in the waning light. What adventure might be lurking around the corner on such a sultry evening? Who knows? And all of that comes back to me with one image.
Thank you for indulging me with my memories, and for coming along on the adventures.
Bruce
0 Comments