The Dutch woman in Macedonia who helps me with Trump

The Dutch lady was barely paying attention to our conversation. “It’s Bitola, not Bitola” she said, putting the stress on the first syllable instead of the second. BEET-ola. Grateful for the correction, I couldn’t fault her for her distraction. Greek bus stations are a lot to process, even without your 15 year old son getting on a bus to Macedonia by himself (previous post about him here). But eventually even the peregrinations and perturbations of buses grow dull, so we talked about her family’s relocation to Macedonia.

Waiting for a captain on Lake Ohrid, Macedonia

“We’ve lived there a little over a year now, it’s a remarkable place. We like the people, though they’re a little hard to get to know at first.” I took that with a grain of salt. After all, she was Dutch, perennial co-champions with the Canadians for World’s Friendliest People. “But it’s funny, they don’t know how good they have it.”

She trailed off, watching her son wander in search of a WC. But you can’t just say something that interesting and stop! “What do you mean?” I prompted.

Macedonians haven't figured out the cure for this either

“Well, sure the economy is shit, which they all complain about, but it just means they don’t work very long hours. So they have a lot of time to spend with family and friends, eating on the street and singing and things. The wages are enough, or not quite enough, same as everywhere. They just earn their Not-Enough faster than everyone else.”

I remembered my Macedonian colleague back in my immigrant-job days in a Belgian call center. “A lot of Macedonians go west into Europe for work though, right?”

“Oh yes, many of them do. They almost all want to. We’ve already lost some great neighbors. I’m constantly wondering that they don’t write back and tell their family to stay. Tell them that when they move, they’ll just work more and relax less. The country is beautiful! And safe. They should stay, appreciate what they have, savor the food, be grateful for their loved ones! Relax and enjoy life every day, as they have it!”

This guy knew how to enjoy the fountains in Skopje

That made sense to me then and it makes sense to me now. Here I sit, ignoring the scrolling list of Trump’s latest outrages, feeling like It’s All Over but the burning…

But then that Dutch mother’s voice comes back. Appreciate...be grateful...relax and enjoy. Yes TrumpCo is a disaster. We know that. And we know that we’ll do whatever we can to oppose his horrors, every step of the way. The worst harm will come to the most vulnerable, and that is fundamentally not okay, is soul crushing for those who care, but one can care...and not be dragged under. We can still smile. We can enjoy the food. We can appreciate what we have.

Thank you, Dutch mother. You’re helping me with a problem we never would have believed, those six months ago.

Something unexpected and totally normal happened today

I was well into my lineup of questions and answers, ordinal numbers and time sequences in class today, blue marker and red marker, hoping my students were getting something out of my antics when something unexpected happened.

She’s maybe three years old. She has the brightest eyes and incredible laughing smile, and she’d lost one of her shoes somewhere. She plays for most of my English class, blocks and panda bears, while her mother learns at a truly incredible pace, moving rapidly from knowing few words when she got to America two months ago to now, when she helps me teach the other Arabic speakers.

But the little one eventually gets bored and wanders off. She loves opening and closing doors, usually with herself on the other side, and the entire office knows her name and laughter, and soon someone will bring her back, a smile on their face, and deposit her at the table where she’ll look around, find her mom, and exclaim with the purity of a child’s joy “Mama!”

She’d snuck out during my lineup, somewhere around “Who arrived third to class today?” and I was just writing “Who got here next to last?” when she popped out from behind my white board easel with a giggle. Someone had given her a multicolored abacus, and she proudly presented it to me, setting it up with a three year old’s precision then stepping back to make space for my admiration and looking up as if saying “Can you believe this incredible thing!?”

And it was. It was an incredible thing. Because there I was on a Friday afternoon in Oakland, every cell in my body feeling heavy with the ominous portents for my country’s future, but here was this little girl, a Syrian refugee who had been through hell without even the words to name the horrors, and she was giggling up at me and presenting an abacus for my enjoyment.

It was something unexpected, and yet absolutely commonplace. I am privileged to spend some afternoons with these people, these incredible, beautiful human souls, and though the ostensible reason is so I can give them more English words and usage, the reality is that they give me hope, gratitude, and a love for our species that can be hard to grasp in the screen-shaped world.

So yes, I’m terrified for our country, but absolutely, I am confident in the human spirit. I am confident that we will continue to move forward. And I’m confident that we as America will continue to make this the kind of place people like this wonderful little girl and her mother want to come to for safety and a better future.

The Wizard of Oz is Italian

The Wizard of Oz doesn’t let you take pictures. Looking around his close-shouldered toyscape of fragile wooden forms and clustered vintage artefacts, that was understandable. Besides, I already had enough photos from outside, Orvieto, back in normal Italy.

The walls of Orvieto

Out there, looking through a lens brings the whole world more into focus, reminding me to notice the textures of the quotidian, and aiding a more deliberate examination of our scrambling world. But in Il Mago’s workshop I didn’t need that precision, in his world I was better served by the flitting fancy of a childlike eye, overthrowing the diligence of inspection for the relaxation of entertainment.

Around, above, and behind me, colors clustered and shapes lurked in delicate extravagance. Art nouveau iconography lounged in evening wear behind nostalgic paraphernalia in pajamas, stained glass butterflies hovered above Betty Boop’s Route 66 diner, and a parade of metal giraffes and jugglers was on their eternal way to childhood’s circus. Hot air balloons drifted up among Spitfires and B-12 bombers held en route to battles uncountable. Cowboys and Indians with stagecoaches to match, while the flappers and mobsters surrounded stylish cars in a sudden sense of speakeasy jazz.

No photos in Oz, but Ippolito Scalza's
Pietá is too beautiful not to share.

Such was the cacophonic harmony of an unexpected piece of this world, created by that man, who watched me from under alert eyebrows like foxholes. There was something of a residual frown on his face, until he saw the smile on mine. Then he approached, real casual like. Was there a wisp of the masked diffidence one might find in an unapologetic adult who was once a teased child? I couldn’t be sure.

“Let me know if you have any questions.” He offered, smooth but stern as old wood.

“Thank you,” I answered, and for a moment he watched while I gazed. “But truth be told, I’m not even sure what questions to ask.”

Maybe not all passion is easily shared, but the Mago’s is. His artisanal fingers pointed here and there as he explained that he finds some of the pieces by careful search through trusted sources, but that he makes most of them himself. That alone was impressive, in our modern age of Made in China stamps and supply chains redolent with karmic consequences that may last even longer than the plastic we buy and throw away.

Tragedy! Crisis! Death! Don't read
such things, cara Nonna.

My brain wanted to walk down those familiar penal paths of today’s dire adulthood, but from his basics beginning, “They come from me”, he quickly transcended to a more dreamlike place, where his various mottos, handpainted on slats of wood, were the rules of the game: “Make your reality like your dreams, and your dreams into your reality.”

Maybe it sounds better in Italian, but in that place, it made perfect sense to me. I was nodding to the notion, but that didn’t seem to be the reaction he was looking for. “Put your dreams into your reality,” he encouraged me, and swept his hand at the array of silent creations. I had weeks of tour-work still to go, and putting one of his pieces of art into a backpack would be empirical blasphemy, but it didn’t seem like a sales pitch.

“Reach out and touch your dreams!” He was enthusiastic, expectant, and I felt like I was failing a test. “Reach out! Touch the dreams!” Reach out and touch? Was there a button hidden among the delicate arms and fragile beams? Feeling lame, my finger reached out, unsure whether to go left or right, so plodded straight ahead until it landed, just for a moment, right on the...

(Oops, late for work. See you tomorrow.)

There are worse things than having been racist

The contractor was measuring the ceiling in my lady’s house when he noticed he’d tracked dog poo all over the kitchen floor. It was awkward, but he helped clean it up, cleaned his shoe, and we all went on with our day. He did not go deliberately step in more and lay fresh prints.

What if his coworker had left the smudges before he arrived? Should he say “Well, I didn’t start it” then go find a steaming fresh pile of Rover’s Revenge to spread around? It’s easy when we’re talking about puppy poop, but what if it’s something worse?

In episode 349 of The Savage Lovecast, Dan Savage talks about the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when asserting the virus was an STI could get you in a fight, as people resisted the guilt of having inadvertently caused harm. But eventually they accepted the facts and evolved. He compares this to those who still deny climate change. There comes a time when you have to accept that what you've been doing isn't right anymore, and update.

He doesn’t advocate convictions for past mistakes, or tortured guilt for things done when we didn’t know any better, but to double down and willfully continue them once you do? That’s a problem.

Scaling back from lethal disease and global catastrophe, how about being accidentally offensive? Tonight in the Netherlands, and tomorrow in Belgium and Luxembourg, Zwarte Piet will help Sinterklaas deliver presents to all the little boys and girls. Zwarte Piet (Black Peter) is basically one of Santa’s elves, with one glaring difference: he’s in blackface, big red lips, afro wig and everything.

Controversy over the figure has been growing for decades. The (white) majority says “But it's our tradition!” (True.) “We don't mean anything racist by it!” (Good, thank you.) And sometimes “If I meet you you’ll get a bullet through your head.” Charming.

I know people resist changing traditions, but just a couple sentences for perspective:

-Halloween was long based on vandalism, not changing to its current emphasis on costumes and treats until World War II

-Thanksgiving is increasingly about family, and less about genocidal religious extremists, or is that just me?

-Even Zwarte Piet himself didn’t show up until 1850, his name not standardized until the early 20th century, around the same time Sinterklaas stopped kidnapping naughty kids into slavery. And did anyone grow up believing Saint Nick came from Turkey? Well he did, but we changed it to the North Pole (and Sinterklass moved to Spain) without undue rage. So why cling so fiercely to an outdated racist icon?

(Zwarte Piet briefly took over the child slavery racket, though that’s been phased out too. We’ll talk about the function of a black character selling white children into slavery another time.)

This is all very easy for me to say; I didn't grow up with Zwarte Piet. Also, I don't really give an enraged caboodle about changing holiday details (no, I don't watch Fox News' preposterous War on Christmas either). My lady, on the other hand, grew up in The Netherlands in the days before people saw Piet as racist. She had those happy childhood mornings, when the friendly character threw candies and handed out gifts. She loved that character, but when age and perspective showed her its racist overtones, she adjusted. In her words: “A short moment of nostalgic pain is MORE than worth it for doing the right thing.”

Now want to hear something cool? The Netherlands is showing its impressive character yet again. Not waiting for everyone to find their empathy, they are changing, slowly but steadily. In previous years they’ve toned down the blackface by removing the big red lips (and earrings), consciously avoiding portrayals of him as inferior to the white Sinterklaas, and this year they’re adding other colors of Piet, including cheese yellow and (gasp!) white.

I can only imagine it’s a matter of time until people look back and say “Remember back when we had that awful racist character? Nutty!” (Though I expect the overtly racist and anti-immigration parties like the PVV and Vlaams Belang will cling to their crusty obstinacy far into the future.)

So as America roils, burns, and shatters under the weight of our own racism and malfeasance, the sickness in our system that seems unwilling to change, and I figure out my own minuscule part in it, I’m going to look at the waffle-striped Piet this year with a smile, and hope that the arc of history might speed itself up a bit here too...

Campeche nights, snakes and ebola

August afternoons in southern Mexico are punishing, but when the sun goes down off the coast of Campeche, the air takes on an apologetic softness to reward you for surviving the broiler hours. As the sky cools down and the streetlamps warm up, the colors shift from baking browns to glowing reds, under a healing blue that lays low above the Plaza de la Independencia, where people have gathered since 1541.

For a few nights I joined that gathering. Food vendors lined the periphery, selling the various corn meal permutations, fresh-caught seafood, and meat marinated in bitter orange and cooked with achiote and habanero peppers, campeche style.

I’d usually start with a tamale, test myself on something spicy, then make sure there was no shark meat in tonight’s brazo de reina (I’ll eat most animals, but those persecuted lords of the deep: no way) before buying a piece, which I’d eat under one of the large and lovely trees.

The cathedral watched over the plaza like a king at his own coronation, fundamental but removed, essential yet somewhat awkward. The stone steps were warm, almost loving, when I sat until ready for buñuelos de aire, the fritters covered with honey that made my fingers stick to my pen, or Muéganos, another fried dough delight, this one covered in piloncillo (cane sugar) syrup. Or there’s always the marzipan made from dried pumpkin seeds...

While I decided which of those best fit the night, I’d watch the locals taking their slow paseos around the park. In the center, a band thumped out traditional music from the spotless gazebo, gazed at by a small flock of kids too old to chase the balloon man, but not quite ready for the nightly soccer tournament.

Young parents pushed toddlers in three-wheelers, chubby little heads turning to follow the progress of the toy vendors, infinite infant attention fixed on the toy horses pulled on thread leashes, and I was impressed to never see a single temper tantrum or hear one wisp of whine. Eventually a flock of bubbles would drift by, and distracted delight would sweep across the wee one’s faces.

Sitting on the outer edge, I was often among the grandparents, abuelitos remembering their own days pushing strollers and cleaning scraped knees. We’d all smile at each other, no need for words. Around us, the summer’s last crop of crickets would crawl and hop across the warm stone, their song mingling with the trumpets and tuba on stage.

When I’d had enough, lids and limbs grown heavy, I’d return to the hostel, a colonial residence both dignified and personable, located incredibly right on the corner of the plaza opposite the cathedral. I’d sit in the open balcony door with a cup of tea and watch with the cathedral as the families went home, and the stars took over the music.

It was among my favorite accommodations of all time, inexpensive, clean, replete with character and right in among the authentic local living. It closed two days after I left.

It was 2009, and the Swine Flu craze had already killed most of the competition, this was among the last. I would sit on that balcony, stunned at all the people who had fled from this experience because of a disease they had a sliver’s chance of contracting. Humans are awful at risk assessment, and the news media makes the smoke of a match somehow cloud out the sun.

Memories of those Campeche nights, and all the people’s memories that didn’t have a chance to happen because of overblown fear, come back to me now as I gear up for a new career in European tourism, hearing with dismay that Americans are traveling less this year due to fear of ebola.

Ebola?!? We’re talking about Amsterdam, Paris, and Rome, not Makeni, Moyamba, and Monrovia. I understand that disease is scary, and I believe we should be supporting the areas with outbreaks and the search for a cure more than we are, but we are a long way from needing to hide in our basements.

(The other fear that is keeping Americans home, ISIS, is overblown beyond belief. Unless you’re planning a trip to Syria, ISIS will never be a factor in your vacation. I believe you’re safer traveling in Europe than you are staying home and commuting with the berserkers who hate their jobs and drive like it.)

The name Campeche comes from Yucatec Mayan Ah-Kin-Pech, which means “Place of snakes and ticks.” Sure, those both exist, just as do ISIS and ebola, but in all my time there I saw neither, and neither will you.

Dear fellow Oakland protesters, and others.

The type of legitimate protesters I went to join

Dear fellow protesters in Oakland, thank you for coming. I know you’re angry, so to not waste your time I’ll get to it:

What is the point? Your point. Your purpose. Your goal. Why are you here?

Are you here to express your frustration with race and class relations in this country, advocate for justice and change, and oppose the militarization and impunity of a segment of the police?

Or do you just want to burn shit?

Because the two are mutually exclusive. Standing for the former entails NOT doing any of the latter, and doing the latter destroys the voice of the former.

Are you here to protest, or riot? They are fundamentally different. Is your enemy hate crime, or Starbucks? Do you want to build something better, or just smash what’s here? Do you want to oppose those responsible, or just harm your neighbors?

My opinion? This War on Trash Cans accomplishes nothing but toxic fumes. This aggression towards all police officers does nothing but further inhibit dialogue and progress. I see demonstrators and police pushing each other into simplified extremism, and it makes me sad. I’ve known good cops. Men and women who I was glad were there to back me up.

When will you learn that violence does not have the effect you wanted it to when you were an angry 16 year old? It’s time to grow the fuck up.

Just an excuse for their ugly little tags

As you may have guessed, angry violent “protester”, I am sick of your shit. You are not a protester. You are a hooligan. And I will not stand by you. So tonight, as the helicopters again drift overhead, despite my desire to finish what I’ve started and demonstrate my conscience, I am staying home. It’s not because I’m scared, not afraid of being arrested again, but because last night looked to me like a movement degraded, a legitimate grievance lost in petty vandalism, and I will not participate in that, even tacitly.

To those actual protesters, both previous night, and probably tonight too, I thank you for caring. Apathy is the great enabler of discord and abuse.

And to those who have come to Oakland to hide behind your coward’s mask and make trouble in someone else’s community… Violence breeds violence, so please don’t tempt me.

Leave it to the Dutch to save the future. Maybe yours, maybe mine?

She wakes to a beautiful, clear November morning in 1976. She gets up, dresses, and has breakfast with a few nice elderly people. She has a couple errands, so takes her purse and walks the two blocks to the grocery store.

A nice young man is trimming the hedge out front, and greets her with a friendly wave. She stops and has a nice chat with him. She’s never met him before, so introduces herself, flirts a little, and they discuss the upcoming election. He’s going to vote the same way she is, and this makes her feel confident about the future.

At the store, it’s quite a funny day. There must be a costume party somewhere, because two people are dressed like it’s the 1950s, and three more in bizarre outfits like she’s never seen before. One of the staff laughs with her about it. What a nice young woman.

She walks home with her purchases and meets a nice young man who is doing some gardening out front…

* * *

She wakes to a beautiful, clear November morning in 1976. She gets up, dresses, but when she leaves her room she finds a long hallway that smells like a swimming pool storage shed, with something worse underneath. Old people in wheelchairs are staring at her. A stranger in a white shirt is playing a mean joke, insisting it’s 2014. Why would someone do that?

She wants to run a few errands, but the woman won’t let her. She is being treated like a child. Imprisoned! But her anger avails her nothing, and this woman forces her back to her room. They patronize her so! They try to make her watch TV, but the shows are all wrong. They keep telling her she’s wrong. What’s going on?

* * *

When I worked in a pharmacy in high school, I would sometimes make deliveries to three local nursing homes, which were a sad opposite Goldilocks story: three different levels of awful. And visiting my grandmother in hers, a neighbor would routinely come in and begin undressing, which, suffice to say, was not welcomed by my very prim and proper British granny.

“If I ever get like that, just put me out of my misery” seems to be something many people say, in these environments. I wonder how many of the inmates once said that... Is there a better way?

Of course there is. I may be having a rough day, but I wouldn’t blog you into this corner and leave you stranded. To the Netherlands! (Of course it’s the Netherlands. God bless those people.)

Hogeway is a small “village” on the outskirts of Amsterdam where 152 people with Alzheimer’s or dementia live in small group homes meticulously decorated in accordance with the time period when their memory got stuck. It is staffed with caregivers who appear to the residents as normal gardeners, shopkeepers, post office employees etc. They live their lives in social contact, living what is true, to them. In the retirement homes I’ve seen, residents spend a lot of time being told what they’re not, that they’re wrong, that they’re sick, dying, crazy.

With a recent This American Life episode ("Magic Words" Act 2) in mind, which discussed the newer approach to dementia care in which one joins them in their world, instead of fighting against it, I can only hope that this type of village catches on before I reach that age.

Gifts in Granada

That last post about Tarifa came from an old journal, a paragraph not relevant enough to include in my book, but I enjoyed giving it a little life somewhere else. Another such moment popped up a day and a page later, in Granada. After a long morning walk among the flamenco byways and impressive graffiti of the Andalusian city, I had found a small neighborhood park to rest for a moment.

Losing all my own pictures and having
to use other people's is driving me crazy

Granada was messing with me, one moment of still sunlight would make me wish I’d worn shorts, then the next a winter wind gave meaning to my jeans-ing. I was temporarily in the warmer former, in that place where as much grass grew in the paths as between them, when a child ran up to me.

Yellow sweater, yellow stockings, and a green shirt...with yellow triangles on it. All eclipsed by hair so blond, Rapunzel read about it as a child. Given her gouda complexion, I was expecting Swedish when she opened her mouth to address me, but instead I heard Spanish.

“Hello!”

“Hello, how are you?” The words were the same as high school oral presentations, but the premise had never been: You’re talking to a strange ethereal five year-old in a park in Granada. Introduce yourself and carry on a polite conversation.

“I’m well. Do you speak English?”

“Yes I do.” To prove it, I switched to my mother tongue to say “And do you speak English too?”

An intent pause as she examined my face. A giggle. A solid look at my feet before continuing, in Spanish. “Why are you barefoot?”

Grumble. I liked my angle of this one better.

I sited the beautiful weather, and told her I’d walked a lot that day already. She considered this, then repeated her question, verbatim, and added “My grandpa doesn’t let me take my shoes off.”

Oops. I’d been in this situation before, the accidental bad example, during my hippie days at university when my ten-toed sasquatch presence implicitly countermanded the edicts of new-parent friends. Time for damage control.

“Your grandfather is right. There are a lot of stones here, you might hurt yourself on them...” I’m sorry grandfather, I’m trying.

A moment more careful examination, then she ran off, returning with a double handful of stones. She showed them to me, then dribble-dropped them at our feet and cheerfully informed me: “Rain!” A solid giggle. Warmer than the sunlight.

But it is a good thing I'm not the only one
who noticed Granada's beautiful street art.

“Wait for me!” And she ran off to my right, disappearing behind a bush. I stood blinking, dazzled by the sun and the unexpected contact with an unfamiliar age group, then she was back, appearing from my left with a handful of leaves and twigs. She sang me an unintelligible tune that ended with a shout of “Christmas!” and the plants flung in the air. More giggles. She repeated the loop-song-toss cycle, first with grass, then with rocks. The last round, the ditty may have been about someone’s culo de caca, not sure what the deal was with that one, though it still ended with “Christmas!”

I was about to ask her about it, but she ran back to play with the other children, and left with her grandfather a little while later. I resumed my journey, so did she, so did the entire city, but it’s nice to remember a golden moment of a giggling child on a sunny day at the end of winter.

Alone together in Tarifa

If Spain were a big, worrisomely lumpy breast, then Tarifa would be the downward-sagging nipple, poking across the Strait of Gibraltar at my goal for the day: Morocco. But Tarifa was also the home of the wind, and the first two ferries were already cancelled when I arrived at the harbor in the whiskey-colored lamplight before dawn.

Hours of unrelenting wind cancelled ferry after ferry, until my last chance was the 5:00, four hours away. Tired of hard plastic chairs and neon lights, I wandered down to the beach below rotting cliffs, where the stone ribs of the Mediterranean stuck up on shore in a ragged shirt of dying drying seaweed.

Somehow over the years I lost my photos of this part of that
trip, so these are from elsewhere, in this case, and Kayakoy,
an abandoned village in Turkey.

Down among the fallen rock and discarded shoes stood a line of forgotten fortifications, broken walls with nothing much to do, but makeshift doors and the barking of barely contained dogs testified that somebody was doing something here.

The King of the Shattered was a circular bastion, gun slot barricaded with broken beer bottles and spent cigarettes. It seemed almost whole, though the roof was gone. It’s always the roofs that are the most mortal. Evicted from the beach by a rising tide, I turned to see the door of the bastion now open, framing a man in olive (canvas) pants and a camo jacket with the East German flag on the left shoulder.

We nodded our greetings in passing, but then he sent some Spanish mumbling and crumbling my way. Most of it caught in the wind and landed somewhere in Cyprus, but he added a machine-gun gesture. A wind-scoured moment passed before I realized he was telling me the history of the building. Why not, I got no place else to be. Pleased by my interest, he became an eager tour guide, albeit uninformed and unintelligible.

Windy afternoon in Iceland

His steel hair didn’t speak comb, and he had the watery eyes of someone who had spent long hours in conversation with alcohol, but their sadness was harmless. I looked down at my own olive (canvas) jacket, felt the wind in my overgrown hair, and wondered how the eyes of a traveler who’d spent too many weeks alone might look to him.

I asked to take a look inside and he gestured me forward with a shy smile of a few broken teeth, and the sweep of a quaking hand. In a mess of more broken bricks and crumbled mortar I found his treasure: five underweight chickens of missing feathers and hideous feet.

When I took out my camera, my host disappeared in a hunt-and-peck of words about someone finding out he was there. I wondered who?  I put the camera away and he reappeared, now with a few small eggs decorated with feather fluff and chicken shit, which he carefully slid into a plastic bag. Was he going to give them to me?

Same abandoned village, Kayaköy, Turkey

We hung there for a still moment, two men and five chickens, a bag of eggs awkward between us, while the wind raged just outside.  The thought that he was my future was too heavy, too possible, and I drifted out the door. We dispatched a few last words at each other, with customary incomprehension, and parted as friends.

As I pushed through air that didn’t want me there, wet sand scraping inside my socks, on my way to a barren room for one, my brain deciphered his last words:

“Perhaps you will come back, and next time take my picture.”

This man, alone in this place, as I was lonely on my road, had wanted me to take his photo. Something in our contact had reached him. Maybe he wanted someone else to see him. To recognize him, and hold a camera up to prove it. I knew how that felt.

I considered staying another day to see if the wind would relent. Perhaps go back down to that broken beach and look for him. Maybe take his picture. But that moment was gone, so I caught a bus to Granada, early the next whiskey-colored morning.

(If you are in the San Francisco area, I'll be reading this piece, or something like it, tonight at Book Passage, around 7:00 PM)