Walking Commentary
Manchester to Rome 2022
I’ve no idea why I woke up this morning thinking about Terry who memorably lamented ‘I could’ve been somebody’ in On the Waterfront. Thoughts of Terry somehow dragged up lots of stuff, including toilet rolls, from the depths of my mind.
I’m on the mailing list for the The London Review of Books and every now and then their Diverted Traffic anti-news newsletter catches me with an appetite for a morsel from their archives.
While I enjoy these essays, reviews and stories, I savour the memories that they invoke. I’m living a lot of my life in my head at the moment and remembering unusual experiences gives me food for thought and a recipe for journaling.
One Saturday afternoon in Dallas, Texas my heavily first-baby-pregnant wife came into the office to help me rescue some time so we could have a weekend. While I punched cards (yes, it was that long ago), I asked Lia to help interpret some velocity scans. She set about the task after a brief introduction to the technique of selecting time and velocity pairs from patterns in the scans. Her background with x-ray imaging gave her an unusual edge. She was looking at the data as she picked out the patterns within it. She noticed an anomaly and we discussed that this was probably what we termed a bright spot, maybe even a direct hydrocarbon indicator that I thought of as Lia’s anomaly.
We were sitting eating our lunch earlier today when there was a percussive thud from the the French door at the end of the table. A recently fledged Robin hadn’t seen the glass. No immediate or obvious harm, the little bird turned and flew back into the undergrowth. Sheepishly, it seemed to me. Perhaps such a stunning might temporarily cause an avian to adopt mammalian ungulate behaviour.
Texas was almost my first thought because of the memory of a Painted Bunting that crashed into the window of my office long ago in Sugar Land. Almost the same sound today resurrected a long parked memory.
Once upon a time I felt like a surrealist sitting in front of The Alamo. The grackles were coming to roost in the live oaks, squawking and whistling and chirping. The crepuscular light also brought hordes of bats who appeared from the west and I wondered why no one worried about a rain of droppings.
I missed the photo of a lifetime. A woman walked past in a full black hijab over an iridescent blue burka. She crossed the street in front of an illuminated Cinderella-themed wedding carriage drawn by two white horses driven by a mock lonesome cowboy.
