Other Worlds

My good friend and reading buddy blogged about her memories of Paris in this post. It is logical for all of us to have Paris in our thoughts, as the city is flooded. The internet is full of picturesque scenes of the city's monuments surrounded by mirror-like still waters, which reflect the scene as though it were an alternate reality, an underworld, a city towering low down into submerged depths to unimaginable worlds.

I must confess, even though I have a great deal of fondness for books set in Paris, this is not my favorite city in the world. I feel little kinship with its beautiful cobbled streets and the Seine. I have visited the city more than once and have always felt like a visitor. However, today, I feel a yearning to visit it. I long for the quiet days meandering through the Louvre (I deliberately forget the long lines to get in and the forever crowds, no matter the day or hour); I long to stand in the navel of the world, beneath the Rose window of Notre Dame (again, I am not going to mention the perennial crowds); I long to get lost in Shakespeare and Company, one of my favorite places in the world.

So yes, I do miss the cafes, the flower pots hanging on terrace grills, the soft consonants and curling vowels mingling with my excellent morning coffee, warm bread and some of the best cheese I have ever tasted. The used book-kiosks along the Seine were wonderful places to waste the day away and afforded a nice view of the opposite river bank, with the ubiquitous kissing couples. I remember wanting a caricature sketched, but the footpath artist at Mont Martre quoted a price that I could only stare at. Now, I think the next time I visit, I would bargain.

And undoubtedly, there will be a next time. I cannot imagine not going. My kidney disease has me tethered to this city, the city I write this from, allowing nothing longer than day-trips. But surely, this is a temporary state of affairs? How can I be bound to a single locale? I was not made for that; I was made to walk down cobbled-roads that are ancient and not mine; I was made to touch millennium-old wooden doors, hard and smooth as stone, and rub my forehead on them. I was made to ask for coffee and bread in strange languages. I was made to weep at the beauty of history and the relics that take my breath away.

My friend's post reminds us all that the rains will come for us all. I want to remember the cities and towns of the world after the rains, colored in sparkles and rainbows, redolent with the fragrance of all things wet and fresh. I want to remember the world before the rains, dry as dust on stone, stubborn against an unforgiving sky, smelling of heat and parching.

I cannot imagine the cruelty of an imposed home, a stagnant existence; that is not living! The kindness and love of a home can only be felt upon a return from other lands. Staple fare tastes best after a wandering through the moveable feasts of the world.

This post goes out in hopes that the still waters will recede, taking the strange underworlds with them, leaving the well-loved, well-remembered cities renewed and recognizable, to enable many happy returns. 

Non-days and Fairy Tales

The rains began early, started as tentative pre-dawn dripping and before a few minutes had ticked, the rains pelted, the skies lit up, all kinds of cosmic drama unleashed on my sleeping town. I have been sick since then. I can't seem to get my wellness scales quite properly balanced, and the daily thunderstorms do not help. So today, I am taking the day off from the grading, from the cleaning, from the cooking, and I am giving in to the pain, the exhaustion, the sofa, and the insistence of the cat for my lap.

And to the Doctor.

Of course, today, the sun beats down and the skies are blue. It feels like a gift to look out of the window and my little back door. I make sure that the blue skies get great, grateful smiles even as I tumble through the time vortex with the TARDIS and battle the Dalek.

Years ago, a student had suggested that I watch at least one season of Dr.Who, and thankfully, I heeded the suggestion. This was a good thing because now that I have run out of Star Trek episodes the library owns, I need some more fairy tales to heal me when I feel any of a thousand ills my flesh is heir to. Yes, I could use Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and a myriad other sites that will feed me endless, current episodes from any show, but I do not have the skill or the wherewithal to learn it when my shoulders and knees are doing their melting down thing they do when they protest, I am not quite sure what. In fact, I do not have the wherewithal to do some basic dusting and laundry.

I had always said that I would write if I had two minutes to rub together. But of late, my stories break my heart. The joy of creating characters and killing them off, or marrying them off, or sending them off, or receiving them back home, seems to have dimmed. Today, I fear that my fingers might melt if I began writing, so this blog goes out as a challenge to that inevitable melting.

Today, I fear I have morphed into Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West.

Today, I fear that I have been reading too many fairy tales.

Today, I wish for more time to read more fairy tales.

The irresistible thing about fairy tales is precisely that they are NOT escapist stories: "I am not running away from things, I am running to them before they flare and fade for all time," the Doctor claims. How can anyone resist such an Odyssey, especially when one may leave behind one's ornery, grumpy, disagreeable body? Today, I use the body of a 900 year old young man with two hearts to travel through infinite time and space, while my singular human heart jumps with worry that I might not be able to travel a few hundred miles to my child's graduation or visit my birthplace for years. These fairy tales give me hope that in a few days or hours, my melting, aching joints will ease and begin working; I will travel wherever and whenever I wish. After all, everything does end in happily ever after!

The cats' Buddha-like sleep faces bespeak of similar cat-tales. However, the cats are wiser than their dormant forms suggest. Even though the skies have been blue all day long, they are now crowded with mountains of black, belying any existence of the gold the sun had spilled everywhere a few minutes ago. I had wondered why the cats had chosen to nap indoors today; now I know! The doctor is right: things are never what they appear.

Once the parallax is adjusted, though, it all ends quite happily, all things considered. So one might say that today is a non-day, a day I invest in adjusting perception to balance parallax.