A rainy day. I so want to go and walk the beach (Popham) near to my house. But this will require braving the elements. On a weather website I find an hourly forecast and note that, according to its eye in the sky, there is supposed to be clouds but no precipitation right now. I peer again out my window to see rain rippling several serious puddles on the walkway to my house. And in an instant I am suddenly eight years old, in our small Manhattan apartment (seven hundred square feet - around 70 metres squared) on 19th Street and 2nd Avenue,, and my parents fighting (as they always seemed to be doing), and their newborn third son crying in his crib, and my middle brother (then aged four) drawing something, and me asking my father if I could walk up to the library on my own (back then parents weren’t so uber-protective of their chilren), and he telling me to wear a raincoat, and me fleeing all that anger in a cramped apartment, and... It just takes rain dancing on a puddle beyond the room where I now write to trigger an entire floodgate of memories. And the thought: was this the moment - that rainy afternoon in August 1963 - when I started learning the necessity of escape? Was this the nascent beginning of my life as a writer and a traveler? And it’s still raining as I finish this post. And the beach will have to wait a few hours more...
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 14:51:17 +0000
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