I was feeling pensive this afternoon; perhaps ruminative would be a better word, since there was nothing deep about my thinking, though neither was there anything morose about it. I was just flipping through a mental scrapbook, remember places Ive been and how I felt, remembering times and places that were especially happy. Most of them included sunrises, with a few sunsets. I remember a morning in Istanbul, looking out at the Sea of Marmara, with hundreds of ships and boats stretched out as far as I could see. It was so beautiful, and then the call to prayer started from the Blue Mosque. A couple of years later I was in Istanbul again and watched the sky turn gold in the evening from the Golden Horn, outlining the Suleiman Mosque. There was a morning when I wanted to see the sunrise from a boat in the Ganges River in Varanasi. It was cool until the sun started to rise, opening a furnace door. But there were thousands of people along the banks, going into the water from the riverside temples. There were a couple of cremations - being burned on the banks of the Ganges with ones ashes thrown into the water breaks the cycle of death and rebirth - and old women in bright saris with their grandchildren, dipping them in the water. The water looked dangerously foul to me, but it was sacred to them. It was lovely, until that golden blast furnace drove me off the water and into the shade of a temple. I remember a morning on a ranch in southern Brazil. It was early winter. The sun rose very pale through the fog, but there were shafts of light hitting scattered trees. Some gauchos were drinking mate from gourds, wrapped up in their palas (a kind of long poncho), waiting to go to work. My first visit to Moscow was in March. I stayed at the Aerostar Hotel for some meetings and didnt have time to be a tourist, but when the driver picked me up to take me to the airport, I asked him if we could go near the Kremlin. We took a road along the river on the bank opposite from the Kremlin, and the sun was rising when we got there and the domes of the Kremlin cathedrals were brilliant rose gold. I knew Id be moving there in a few months, and thinking about that I almost laughed with joy. Moscow was the city Id dreamed about for most of my life. That next November I was watching it snow from the balcony of my Moscow apartment. It was late, but I wanted to go to Red Square all of a sudden. I caught one of the last metro trains to the city center, then walked into Red Square from the Alexander Gardens, the Lenin Library to my left, the Kremlin walls to my right. There was almost no one in the square at that hour, and there was a huge space of empty white between me and St. Basils, which was illuminated by floodlights. The domes glowed in all their colors - red, blue, green, gold, purple - and the stars topping the towers on the Kremlin walls were shining red, and I just stood there in the center of Red Square and listened to the snow fall. I had to walk back to my apartment, but it was a perfect night. Moonlight on snow, walking past the Patriarch Ponds on the Garden Ring, the only sound snow squeaking under my feet - it felt like a dream wrapped in a story. These are solitary memories, memories of being happy on my own. There are even better ones that include friends and family, but those arent memories of place: Lisa on our wedding day (the first and last time I saw her wear makeup); the time we first met Harlan and Catherine in the orphanage, when Harlan wouldnt talk to us, but he talked to the hand puppets we held, then ran to hide in a corner behind a couch, then peeked out over the arm and smiled; Catherine dancing in the garden in her fairy costume, all flailing arms and legs and fairy wings; Mom making chicken cacciatore for my birthday every year, because thats always what I wanted, and Grandma Trujillo making biscochitos when Id go to see her, because she knew how much I loved them. The smell of anise and cinnamon takes me back to her kitchen every time. So thats my afternoon of rumination, just drifting down rivers of memory. I need to write all this down some day, before I forget. I dont know if anyone else will ever care, but for some reason I think that memories should be preserved. There are just so many. I could sit here lost in my own mind for hours. This weekend Im going to make chicken cacciatore and biscochitos.
Posted on: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 21:20:58 +0000
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