My Left Bank

It was the memory in my computer - I don't have much left, which is why I was having trouble getting the thing to boot. Hopefully now, I'll be able to get the thing to work regularly so I can post what I've written. Unfortunately, I do not have my camera cord with me at the moment, so I can't upload any photos. I had to delete them from my computer to free up the memory. I'll try to upload some later on. Anyway, here's something I wrote a couple of days ago:

On the rainy streets of Washington, DC, umbrellas are mostly black. Here, they are of all colors and designs. Makes the wet drear bearable to look at as long as you aren't standing in it. The rain falls strangely, sometimes stopping, sometimes pouring, but there is no sign of it moving out. After three days, one would think it could let up. This is Europe, isn't it? Even down here near the Balkans the drear beats down on the Earth. It hasn't stopped people from going out, however. They just throw on their jackets and put up their colorful umbrellas and continue on as if it were a flawless sunny day. I had forgotten about the European rain but am now thinking about those countless wet days in Luxembourg. I now recall why I wore a red hat everywhere, even indoors. It was always cold, always wet, always dreary, yet there was something romantically wonderful in it all.

The wind is really whipping around, turning several of the umbrellas inside out. I watch some uncovered heads bob across the road - there is this rather bizarre hair coloring going on here, where many of the women have dyed their hair red, not the natural Irish redhead type of color, but the punk kind of red. I just witnessed a purple haired woman cross the street, too. Hair dying seems to be the thing to do among forty and fifty year old women.

This is about the age where people here start looking worn out, like they are much older than their actual age. You can tell which people have benefited the most from prosperity. I am now looking at a distinguished man in a well-kept designer green jacket talking to a shorter man in a cheaper black jacket with a more eroded face, and the contrast seems pretty severe until a hunched man who looks like he should not be older than sixty passes by them, his body contorted so that he walks in a near ninety degree angle.

The electricity has just gone out, and I'm the only one who seems to have blinked an eye. At least the Michael Bolton has stopped with it - the CD had just begun its third repetition. The rain is in umbrellas down mode at the moment and things are brighter - perhaps there is hope!...Ten minutes have passed and the electricity has returned. And so has the rain. Hard.

I continue to be amazed at how much older the youth look and act. A couple of kids, a girl in a bright pink jacket and a boy in a black Adidas windbreaker, stood on the the other side of a very wet street, giving me the impression that they were quite young to be unchaperoned. (Umbrellas down again.) As they approached, they grew older, until their faces were clearly visible, showing me their twelve, maybe thirteen year old ages.

Later...

The sun finally broke through and blue illuminates everything. The buzz of cars splashing through three days' worth of drear sings loudly outside the restaurant window, where I have ordered chicken gizzards because I didn't know the word for gizzards. I figured since I could tell what chicken is and what onions are, the dish couldn't be bad. It isn't. And it's only about $1.50 for a filling meal, so how can I complain?

When the blue appeared, I left the cafe and began to wander, something I hadn't been able to do in a couple of days. Yesterday I stayed in the hostel for most of the day, and it felt like a waste of living, yet it was so miserable outside, and I was in no mood to be cold and wet. Today I left, determined to do something interesting, even if it meant suffering the drear. Now, instead of rain damp, I am sweat damp, as I'm a fast walker and I've walked a lot. The feeling when sunshine appears after days of bad weather is energizing - you can see smiles on faces right now, even on some of the older ones.

In many ways, today has reminded me of Dublin, only with crappy music blaring from every cafe and shop and car that I pass. When the rains let up and the warmer air set in, the sky became spotty blue with clouds moving swiftly across the green mountains. Car exhaust heavy with moisture hangs in the air and reluctantly enters my lungs, which was one of the first things I noticed about Dublin City, as I was used to much cleaner American air, where car emissions tests are mandatory for nearly everyone.

But it was the sky and the feel of the air - how could this be when I'm about as far from Dublin as one can get and still be in Europe? Even the gray concrete houses with their red tiled roofs and red gardenias are the same. But it's more me that's the same, the wandering, curious me that is noticing a freeing of my mind, a me who used to forget everything but now is remembering names, new words for things, and the amounts my cappuccinos cost at the various cafes. I thought my scatterbrainness was an unfortunate result of getting older, but I guess it was a result of unhappiness. The human brain is strange like that.

I wonder what Dublin is like now. It's been seven years since I left it last - a pre-9/11, pre-George W. Bush world. I am sure Joyce's Dublin is dead, replaced with a city indistinguishable from any other city in the Western world and beyond. The city had such a soul, such a feeling of triumph like "We made it. We suffered for 800 years under oppressive colonial rule, but our tenacity and perseverance paid off. We're one of the most prosperous cities in Europe right now; indeed, the world, where we have to import labor because we can't fill jobs fast enough." Now, it's probably, "God has finally rewarded us, and we are repaying Him by abandoning Him for the material world." I am afraid to see Dublin, my Dublin, my favorite city in all the world. Have you become a material monster, too? I know the answer. I can look around me at this exact moment and see change happening before my eyes. I can practically see the soul of the city packing its bags. This place is like Dublin ten years ago. Maybe fifteen years ago.

My first footfull of European soil was a firm step in Dublin, alone, trying to figure out how to get on a bus from the airport into the city. It was ten years ago. Ten years - one third of my life - and I've hit the reality point where I realize life isn't one series of moments in cafes, but I want it to be, and here I sit, three weeks removed from the dullness of office life and ten years from that first step, enjoying the smell of fireplaces and watching the clouds pass overhead in the last few minutes of daylight, more content than I have been in a long time, nearly ten years, in the same state of wonder and amazement I had felt back then in the same shoes I am wearing now.