Mysteries

I was in a race one time, one that I could have won if I had followed the right strategy, because being the fastest is not enough when your competition (if any) is just as fast.  I didn't win, I'm still not sure why, I might have been too fast when I should have slowed down, or too slow when I should have speeded up, the strategy failed me, I hadn't followed it or completely forgot about it.

There are fantasy worlds created by writers of fantasy and science-fiction novels that you as a reader would like to visit or move to permanently.  And there are worlds created by writers of mainstream, realistic fiction that work in a similar way on one's imagination,  and while lacking the recognizable fantastic elements of those other genres,  when you think about it, they are these worlds as much fantasy as the others.  Not even journalism can relate a truly realistic picture of the world.  And then, there are the worlds of folk fantasies, and I'm talking about modern folk fantasies, those invented usually by city bound folks who serve us various private theories when unexplainable events happen.  Some of them are paranoid conspiracy theories, others vivid reflections of their creators' cheap reading and movie viewing habits, and most suggest a world controlled by some dark forces, a world you wouldn't want to visit or to move to live permanently.

Other people's craziness, mental and emotional states, issues and problems tend to be perfectly clear to us, with perfect and obvious solutions, only if we ourselves have gone through them and managed to resolve them for better or worse.  Otherwise, they are incomprehensible mysteries.

The Secrets of a Happy Life

I've long wanted to live on Cypress Avenue in the city of Belvedere.  No, it's not about a specific place, but about the names alone that stir my imagination.  Belvedere, from Italian, is of course a structure designed to command a view. It is also the name of an exclusive community-town in these parts.  I don't know if there is a Cypress Avenue in this Belvedere.

'Cypress Avenue', on the other hand, was a track on Van Morrison's classic LP album Astral Weeks, an album which took me a while to appreciate when it came out, and then only after I heard Morrison's next, more accessible album Moondance.  An acquired taste, Astral Weeks was.

There is a one city block short Cypress Street, which I passed walking home today, and which reminded me of these absurd longings.  There is also a Belvedere Street in our neighbourhood, which doesn't offer interesting views, but perhaps it did a century ago or so when it was first established and was surrounded by fields.

What I share with my frequently seen acquaintances are memes and private jokes that just the two of us understand, as they recall some earlier good times, earlier jokes or quasi-philosophical observations, and are now repeated under new conditions and contexts to brighten up the day and to re-establish the bond between us.  Some recent ones:  "You already know how to fish!", "Don't be so humble, you're not that great!"  There are others.

Seeing a BMW and Benz one after another zipping through a corner STOP sign yesterday afternoon during that walk I mentioned above,  I wondered if people who run STOP signs so cavalierly have better lives than mine, who doesn't (run STOP signs), and if they do, why.  (Life's not fair!) Perhaps the secret of a happy life lies in a character trait which includes among its manifestations a casual disregard for common rules.

Oasis

The sky is always blue, and the air warm but never too hot.  A gentle breeze blows from the desert in the evening.  Days are long and filled with pleasant things.  Nutritious, well prepared meals are served at regular hours, and refreshing drinks are available throughout the day and evening.   The library is stocked with classics in your native language. Works by Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere,  Twain, Dumas, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Hasek are all there.  There is no television and no Internet, the mobile phone coverage does not reach here, neither do newspapers with their gossip, news of tragedies and disasters, petty political disputes, and their relentless self-congratulatory campaigns for ill defined social justice and goodness,  but the radio plays classical music uninterrupted by commercial announcements 24 hours a day.  A second radio channel plays acoustic folk music of various cultures, while all the remaining radio frequencies transmit nothing but static or silence.

No one among us is complaining.  The staff, who also live here, are young, multilingual, enthusiastic and always ready to fulfill our wishes. A  doctor and his two nurses are on duty should you need care or medications.  I spend many of my afternoons exercising in the well equipped modern  gym, and lap swimming in the Olympic size swimming pool.  During evenings, I read and scribble notes to myself.  Or play a game of chess or Go with some of the others.

From the rooftop of our fine hotel, where we play badminton or relax in Swedish made lounge chairs, and from the nearby hill where we take our after dinner walks in the shade of palm and eucalyptus trees, you can see through the desert mist the distant airport landing strip and an outline of the Boeing 777 jet that brought all of  us 239 here landing gently  in the desert after disappearing from radar over the ocean.  It is undergoing repairs, and when they are finished, in a week, month or perhaps a year or two, no one knows when, and no one seems anxious about it or in much of a hurry, it'll fly us back to where we came from. In the meantime, and I think I can speak for all of us here, we are happy at last.

Metaphysics

Sometimes people stumble inadvertently on deep philosophical truths.  Well, maybe not deep but interesting.  Consider this.  A store has a printed sign on its door which says:

A dog

Carried in your arms

Into the store

Is still

A DOG

Why hasn't anyone until now thought of expressing such overlooked truism in writing?

Or this.  Ten days after the disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 no solid clues have emerged, and those disclosed during the first days, such as alleged ascent of the aircraft to the height of 45,000 feet have since been discounted. The media and the Internet are filled with "experts" and amateurs explaining to the world their sincerely felt theories, every one of them wilder than the next one. (Side effect of popular bad literature and movies.)

One such theory I've encountered asked why the U.S. president has been so "strangely" quiet about this incident, and concluded (it wasn't explained how!) that the silence indicated  the president knew much more than he was saying, knew what happened, and knew where the airplane was.

This inspired me to generalize this theory into a universal observation,  omitting the details of the incident and the person of the current president,  which with time regardless of the outcome of the mystery will become obsolete and irrelevant, and I arrived at this:

Nobody is saying anything, therefore they know everything!

Cat's Life

The cat leaves the house through the cat door, stays out for hours, comes back soaking wet, meowing loudly, as if to tell me about his adventures outside during the hours that I sat in front of the screen or read another book recommended to me by a newspaper critic, wondering what he (the critic, not the cat!) had seen in it that I still don't after 300 pages.  All this on a rainy day and night of the rainy season that has just been declared a draught by the government that constantly weighs and measures such things to make our lives better, it tells us, because what else is the government for, except to weigh, measure and dictate.  The cat leads a more interesting life  getting wet down there a few inches off the ground than I five feet higher all warm and dry.  If we could only communicate better.

And so, driven by some invisible, unexplainable force, I plug in her name, a name that I can barely remember how to spell, plug it into the Internet search engine, for the first time in I don't know how many years, or maybe for the first time ever, and find nothing about her, but much about her namesakes in various places around the world, because her full name is not unique, a doctor in Hollywood,  somebody in New Jersey,  Netherlands, a grave some place unspecified, the buried person eerily the same age as she would have been today.   On the other hand, I am with my unique name, all over the Internet,  I couldn't lie about my age, address or history without you finding out the truth using the same search engine, but she and others my age are nowhere to be found.

Personal computers have been around for 30 years, Internet for 20, and we, alive today,  not too old to be computer phobic, can still be totally absent from the online world.  And yet.  Maybe she's passed away, or lives as an anthropologist with the natives in some jungle.  Whoever wants to find me, can find me, and yet no one of my contemporaries does.  That's all right, I don't look for them either.

One of the few advantages of growing old away from the place where you grew up is that you avoid seeing those you grew up around pass away, become forgotten as if they never existed.

Dream Backwards

Dear J.

              Please forgive me for lying during the time of your visit when we stopped at the vista point of the famous bridge.  You remember that it was a sunny and windy day (it's always windy there),  you were wearing my overcoat and we were holding hands like a pair of teenagers. There were many other tourists there, we heard several foreign languages, constant clicks of camera shutters.  I was pointing out to you  sights of interest across the bay, when a middle aged couple approached us and the man asked a direct question that immediately identified him as American: "How long have you been married?", and I answered "Thirty years", even though we are not nor have been married. (Yet!)  He then said "I've been married twenty eight years.  We're from Iowa, where are you from?", and I answered saying "Chicago", even though I live here, and you have never left our hometown of Philadelphia.   I've been to Chicago enough times to be able to invent a home address and the name of a school where we would have sent our children, should he ask, but he didn't.   Then, his wife, I assume the woman was his wife, said, "It's awfully windy out here," and I momentarily forgot my false tourist identity and told her "It's always windy here," but immediately  realizing my mistake, I added "I read in the guidebook. Fodor's."  Yes, Fodor's. Always remember to decorate your lie with one incontrovertible truth.

Later in the car, you said you didn't like my lies, didn't understand why I had to lie.   What should I have told them? That we had been married and divorced from others, that our own love died thirty years ago to find us again only recently, that we each had had our share of disappointments and tragedies, betrayals and defeats, conflicts, intrigues and despair?  This couple returned to Iowa telling their friends there about a nice pair from Chicago they had met, who still loved each other after thirty years of marriage,  and what's wrong with that?!

I wish we had been married for thirty years, don't you?  But you can't dream backwards.

I send you all my love, hoping to see you soon,

Yours,

K.