Walking Speed
On a bicycle, you get to see a lot more things happening than you ever have to engage with. You travel though the world a little bit removed, enabling you to avoid being accosted by strangers or spare-changed by panhandlers as you make your way around.
The downside of this is that it tends to eliminate some of human adventures, notably the sort you have as you stroll down the street of a warm summer evening, arm in arm with your sweetheart, after a lovely dinner featuring cocktails and a bottle of wine and capped off by a safety meeting to make the twilight more scintillating and the breeze off the Sound more pleasant.
Jen and I enjoyed that latter model last night and experienced three unusual interchanges with people I probably wouldn’t have talked to were I not so mellowed out and certainly wouldn’t have met were I on my bike.
The first was Vladimir Lestat de St. Augustine from Haiti who wrote a poem for us on the spot using what he called “the poetry of names.” This entailed writing out the letters “j-e-n-a-n-d-d-a-v-e” down the left side of a page and then constructing a free verse piece using those letters to start each line. I thought he did especially well with “v,” “Volatile as well are the thoughts in twilight.”
Next was a (probably) gay, (probably) homeless African-American guy waiting as his partner fiddled with his backpack near Pike Market; we talked of love and romance and how you ought to make a list of things you’ve never done with your lover and do those things—or at least, go bowling together. Then he sang to us, quite beautifully.
Finally, we ran into a drunk guy, “just kicking it,” he said. who remarked how much he liked seeing us walking hand-in-hand. “This is a good town for kicking it,” he said, “if know how to kick it.”
Last night, walking, we did.
The downside of this is that it tends to eliminate some of human adventures, notably the sort you have as you stroll down the street of a warm summer evening, arm in arm with your sweetheart, after a lovely dinner featuring cocktails and a bottle of wine and capped off by a safety meeting to make the twilight more scintillating and the breeze off the Sound more pleasant.
Jen and I enjoyed that latter model last night and experienced three unusual interchanges with people I probably wouldn’t have talked to were I not so mellowed out and certainly wouldn’t have met were I on my bike.
The first was Vladimir Lestat de St. Augustine from Haiti who wrote a poem for us on the spot using what he called “the poetry of names.” This entailed writing out the letters “j-e-n-a-n-d-d-a-v-e” down the left side of a page and then constructing a free verse piece using those letters to start each line. I thought he did especially well with “v,” “Volatile as well are the thoughts in twilight.”
Next was a (probably) gay, (probably) homeless African-American guy waiting as his partner fiddled with his backpack near Pike Market; we talked of love and romance and how you ought to make a list of things you’ve never done with your lover and do those things—or at least, go bowling together. Then he sang to us, quite beautifully.
Finally, we ran into a drunk guy, “just kicking it,” he said. who remarked how much he liked seeing us walking hand-in-hand. “This is a good town for kicking it,” he said, “if know how to kick it.”
Last night, walking, we did.
posted by Professor Dave at 12:17 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home