Speechless

Sometimes you are so busy browsing around Europe that you have just a few words left. Yet the impressions are always abundant.

 

The times, they are a-changing

(in my opinion, not always for the better) 

Eureka is just a street

It happens often. Mostly whilst working on boring excel lists, full of names and numbers and such dry materials. It happens softly: my mind just drifts away and brings me in that indefinite space called memory, so impalpable yet so vividly real as to make me feel the warmth of sun beams on my arms during a tepid and cloudy late winter afternoon.

It happened just a few moments ago: cell F17, VLOOKUP and…swoosh, I am on Telegraph Hill, it´s late June and I am sweating because I surely know that San Francisco is all up and down, but I did not expect Telegraph HILL (yes, that could have been a hint, true) to be that high. I don´t know it yet, but this city has already absorbed all the love that I am pouring out of my elated heart, the love that some big hands are sadly incapable of holding. That this city is slowly becoming a necessary surrogate, I slightly sense already, but on the streets of San Francisco I don´t want to listen to anything else but the noise of traffic and the chit chat of Californian girls coming out of one of the perceived millions of Starbucks I see downtown. I want to inhale the dust of the stores of Chinatown, cramped with goods wrapped up in cellophane as some strange post-modern, urban bales. I only want to lightheartedly spend money and time in high-end stores at Union Square. After all, here everything seems so cheap and I am happy, I am a very special tourist killing time waiting for the working hours to pass so that I can go to the Mission and meet up with the friends. And then afterwards go home, that home that is not really mine, where I have been invited after a “hearthquake”, to pretend that things can be ok nonetheless. That home so fucked up that every sensible person would just run-Forrest-run, but where I nevertheless so much want to belong.That home on the hill, with the view of the Golden Gate and the many unhealed, itching scars. And the wild garden. And the white front porch with the wicker lovers ‘chair, where I had my vegan dinner on a mid-summer night, content and carefree, because he was sitting next to me.

That home on the corner to Eureka Street where the enthusiasm remains just the name on a sign, or even more just a distant illusion.

Cell F17, VLOOKUP. Back to the secure world. It might not be as exciting as the one of infedele memories but at least it´s not like constantly balancing on the brink of a precipice. 

Modern bliss

Sikh-ing Dil

I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.

- Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji

A few weeks ago at an international gathering I met a guy who cracked me up: a self-confident young man with an irresistible British accent, a long nose, gorgeous smile and light brown skin. He is full of energy and wit and he looks like a skillful womanizer, though he says he only enjoys the challenge of getting a telephone number. 

The hours spent with him and his friends in a few occasions were so pleasant that I was looking forward to seeing him again at a party on Saturday. He had given me his card and mobile number last time, but with a guy like that, I thought, if you in fact use that number, you´re like yesterday´s bread. So I never did.

His way of talking to people and flirting with girls together with his attitude and self-confidence craved into my mind the idea that he is some kind of hipster from an alternative London district. Therefore the omni-present beanie on his head despite the hot temperature of the overcrowded bar, I thought.

As a teenager I had a boyfriend who never (never!) took off his baseball cap. Not even as we were plunging in his swimming pool. So this British youngster wearing a beanie made me curious and, as he came to me the other night (probably while hopping from one woman to the other) I asked him to show me his hair. “I can´t. It´s long”, he replied. My hair is long too, not a reason to hide it, I thought. And then he added "I am Sikh", taking off his beanie and revealing another cotton cap, protecting his hair.  Millions of questions corwded my mind within 20 seconds but it was definitely not the best location for a philosophical talk. We then agreed to meet the day after and I let him go back to his flirt-marathon while I went on talking to my cool Tartar friend. As I left, he was dancing quite closely to a Romanian girl. Pretty, by the way. Good choice. 

The next evening started with him coming late - very late - (he had fallen asleep) to the appointment and, on top of the delay, having trouble finding the agreed meeting point. I normally get so pissed off by disorganization that I was really tempted to blow everything off and go home, but eventually we manage to meet. Or at least I think we did, for the young man standing before me me looked exactly like the one I had met a few times before. But he was also another person. Much shier, not so fresh and bold. During the evening, his attempt to concisely explain to me his "religion" ("I don´t like to call it religion") was more than a little confused but his tone of voice and the way he tried to express his ideas struck me: it was full of respect and...feeling. Just charming.

My British friend was my first contact to Sikhism (but not the last: sounds like something I am going to further explore, let alone out of curiosity) 
My sikhy friend. A funny, witty (sham?) gangster womanizer. 
Sometimes. 

Tschüß

DumboDreaming

I dreamt of Dumbo, last night.

Or, actually, I dreamt I had a cute little baby elephant that everyone adored and even my bank consultant wanted to take a picture with.

And since last night I could not fall asleep, torn by the dilemma whether or not to accept the offer to move into a new flat abandoning the one I have shared with friends for 7 years, I decided this morning that the adorable baby elephant that eventually made it into my dreams was Dumbo, encouraging me to hold my feather tight and…fly. With no fear.

So it looks like I am probably moving into a new place, my place!, in January. 

Clap clap and thanks, Dumbo.  

Tiny beautiful things

I have the impression that the quest for happiness becomes more and more complex as years go by. Adults (me, jaw-dropped, in the first row) are mesmerized by the capacity of kids to find the most common things whimsical and magnetically fascinating and I have heard many parents proclaiming what a bewildering experience it is to re-discover the world through the eyes of their offspring. No breaking news for sure, rather a trite consideration that has found in the past centuries revered voices, for instance that of William Blake, who urged us to rediscover the child within ourselves.

I have stopped being a child many years ago and I don´t have toddlers running around chasing ants or talking eloquently to a potato chip, so basically it seems like I am doomed to be a quite rational grown-up, nailed to the idea of life as I decided to regard it. Yet, last night I was playing tennis (very generous definition of my attempt) with three friends of mine in a poorly lit indoor court and there I was, my knees slightly bent, holding my racket tight, looking at my Indian friend across the net smiling his gorgeous, elegant smile while getting ready to serve. And suddenly it started raining and the ball was flying over the net in very creative twirls and my Canadian friend was doing her funny jump-serves and my London mate was running wildly around the court yelling “Mine! Yours! No, no, mine!” and that rain…the rain kept tapping tenaciously on the plastic roof, producing a warm, reassuring music, transforming those apparently meaningless bunch of minutes into…pure bliss. 

purple rain

collections and recollections

I have a friend who is a deltiologist. If you are of average intelligence like me, you probably don´t know what a deltiologist is, like I did until a few weeks ago, when a definition question came up during the Monday Pub Quiz and this incredibly smart and cultivated man, being one, obviously knew the answer: “How do you call someone who collects postcards?” 

A deltiologist.

Though the vision of any kind of collection gives me a sense of smothering and I doubt I´ll ever start one, I find the idea of boxes and boxes of postcards (as long as in someone else´s home) romantic and enthralling. It surely has to do with the “object of desire” itself, for I am one of the few remaining people that loves to send and receive real letters and who still sends postcards who are actually physically carried by a mailman. Quite sad – though somehow understandable – that the new technologies are killing older epistolary traditions but indeed I had to acknowledge that “times they are a-changin´” when in a post office in a southern European country, last year, I had to wait over 15 minutes for the clerk to go dig, in some dusty back office, some postcard-suitable stamps. Had I asked him to please bring me some tea and Parisian macarons, it would have been easier, I reckon.

Finding out that this friend of mine is a passionate deltiologist was for me delightful, for it gave me a chance to…send postcards! And not only once or twice a year from some exotic holiday venue to some friends who would open their mailbox and look at this rectangular piece of paper with baffled surprise, No no! I could send nearly every week a postcard to a man who would open his mailbox, smile his little oh-so-mannered British smile and then climb the stairs to his flat wondering in what box my postcard would better fit.

I don´t always send the best postcards, and sometimes I play the ninny by sending the most kitschy postcards I can find. One of my favorites was from a former military and now low-cost airport in the middle of nowhere. The layout, the graphic and the picture were so appalling, that I was almost ashamed as I handed it to the cashier to pay. The postcard was so ugly, it literally made me laugh.

Today´s postcard to my deltiologist friend is an old one which has been sitting, lonely and bored, in a drawer for years. It´s a postcard depicting a glass door of the Casa Battló in Barcelona. I have been to that splendid city only once and only for a handful of days. I remember I was happy. I remember strolling down the Ramblas with a light heart. I remember standing in front of the Sagrada Familia with unexpected and overwhelming bewilderment. I remember secret codes, cheerful nights, carefree days, full of energy and hope. I remember walking on the top of the Casa Battló and thinking “I am in a fairy tale and this roof is a benevolent dragon!”. I remember leafing through the guest book and reading, with a full heart, “we are here, and we are in love”.

I would have never imagined that deltiology would indirectly carry me to sunny, lively Catalan streets on a dreary September afternoon. Pleasant surprise indeed.