M I A

Miami International has always been one of my favorite airports.  First encountered on those faraway trips so many years ago to The Keys or Turks and Caicos.  It was the port of call before catching a seaplane or boat to places beyond.  As the doors of the plane opened the wet scented Florida air rushed into the cabin and welcomed you.  

Inside the terminal, the smell of damp carpet was the eau de toilette that followed you around.  Rivers of delicious-smelling green carpet guided the traveller past gates to destinations that I had only dreamt of, or read about, in the pages of Graham Greene and Ian Fleming. Port-au-Price. Port-of-Spain. Caracas. Montevideo. Sao Paolo.  Miami International was, and is, a traveller’s candy shop and seeing the names of all these places made my heart miss a beat.  I wanted to know them all.

The first brush with exiled Cuba is at the airport.  They have their finger in every pie and it's hardly a secret that the best ones are sold in La Carreta.  Notice that in Miami you always will be second and always remain a gringo. Have a café con leche and get used to both.  

Alas, this trip I missed my connecting flight so I decided to stay overnight at the lofty airport hotel.  It is there, and convenient.  'Nuf said. No scrumptious 'munchie boxes' in the mini bar (ahh to be in London!).  At the restaurant, with panoramic view of the airport, South American cut-throats huddled around tables (Gold Shipment Vanishes in Mysterious Miami Airport Heist - ABC News May 16, 2013. A $625,000 gold shipment vanished early Tuesday in a brazen heist at Miami International Airport after it arrived aboard a jet from Ecuador, police said.) looking as if they had just made millions on a coke deal with Signor X.  Hmmmm… Planes roared through the sky in the background; tail lights blinking.  After a meal I wandered around the airport like a lost soul in purgatory. Gideon's angels were lurking politely.  “Have you been saved?” one of them wanted to know.  “Not yet,” I replied and moved on.  There were shrieks of reunion and waves of regret as travellers crashed in on the tide and were sucked out on the undertow.  The effect was magical, lonely, and very American. 

a journey through the living room

I wish I could write.  I ought to be able to, because there has been such a succession of characters moving across the screen of my life.  But it is useless for me to attempt to do more with these characters than to tell about them as I saw them and to show what they meant to me.

What do you think of when someone says Switzerland? Cheese? Chocolate? Bankers perhaps? Chances are a  Rittmeister* wouldn’t be very high on your list. Anybody who looked for the odd or the exotic in life would have been thoroughly satisfied with the Rittmeister. 

He was a master of horses by profession and an artist by preference, and a rather remarkable fellow in every way.  To look at him, you would believe that he had stepped out of the past, like during the intermission of a play, and had just neglected to remove his make-up and change his costume.

The end to his military career came as sudden as the drop of the blade on the guillotine.  End of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, end of emperor, end of country.

Switzerland had been home during my early school years, high above Lake Geneva and I became acquainted with the Rittmeister, and his horse Charodey, on one of my morning rides. We chatted and instantly liked one another (granddad had been of the same ilk, different emperor).  I was invited to afternoon tea. 

When I arrived the table was set and everything was ready for tea.  The Rittmeister had his own way to serve tea.  No dainty little teacups with saucers and sugar bowls.  He filled the tea glass directly from his silver samovar and drank.  Not as we did, he put a sugar cube between his teeth and drank the hot tea from the glass.  And I followed suit and enjoyed it.  He said; “One has to be completely awake in the present to enjoy the tea.”

After we had finished he ask; “Now, Solnishka what would you like to do? “Let us take a journey through your living room (Reise durchs Wohnzimmer)”, I answered.

And we did, once a week, for four years.  For a wayfarer he had been.  Destiny had made him experienced in both travel and life and the rooms in his house reflected this.  There were exquisite furnishings, walls of books, and excellent paintings; both artists and places unknown to us, for the countries had vanished after WW I.  Towns that were everywhere and nowhere and a population of astonishing diversity.   The Rittmeister lived in a twilight world suspended between the formalities of the old nineteenth-century order that had shaped his early youth and the innovations and uncertainties of the 20^th century. The haunted atmosphere of this world was beautifully displayed in these rooms.  I would much later encounter the sentiments again in the writings of Gregor v. Rezzori. 

The Rittmeister died in my senior year.  Nobody left to call me Solnishka.  But with time I learned to see myself through his eyes and realized that once loved, always loved.

Whenever I find myself in the “neighborhood” I visit his grave.  When I came at Christmas I found horse tracks in the snow leading me to it...

*Rittmeister (in the German language literally [Horse] riding master or Cavalry master).

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in a dream

Mystery and romance are indivisible, and mystery can be romance’s most valuable asset.  Desires, memories, thoughts and dreams; a face which thinks inwards as the eyes dream outwards gives nothing away.

Curiosity or vanity wonders and pries but forever remains unsatisfied.  Mystery behaves like an antonym of satiety; we are kept for a long time on the watch.

A serene sorrow is somehow part of it all-but sorrow for what?  Sorrow for unfulfilled desire, the grief of dead dreams?  Or a sorrow which is not really a sorrow at all, but wisdom, knowledge of too much, a musing tender distrust of all ordinary hope?

We all have some of this in us, and in all of us it sometimes shows.  Stay! Trouble can intervene.  The face may not match the inner person, it can be all and only veil.  When it opens its mouth the wrong sounds can come out.

So, dear reader, if we want to keep our dream of romance as a mystery, it may well be as well to avoid it altogether, to let it pass by like that forever unknown stranger in the street whom, for intangible reasons, we will remember for the rest of ours lives.  

What the Dickens…

…as Google has noted, today is the bicentenial of the birth of Our Mutual Friend. 

Would our Hard Times give him plenty of ammunition to write A Tale of…a Bleak House?

Or, perhaps, he would look ahead with Great Expectations and not discard us like an Old Curiosity Shop. 

Be a kind observer in the Pickwick Papers or The Mudfog Papers and write with a gentle Twist about The Life and Adventures of …, or The Mystery of… Our Mutual Friend(s)?

Dear Master Dickens we could use you now.

The Gift

Imagine every morning a bank will deposit 86400 Dollars into an account for you to do with as you please.  You may spend the entire amount that day but you cannot rollover what remains.  What you do not spend is lost.  But every morning when you wake-up you will find another 86400 Dollars in your account.  Be aware that the bank may cancel the arrangement at any time.  The bank can say the game is over without forewarning.

What would you do?

This game is real, every person has such a magic bank, it is called time.  Every morning we are gifted 86400 seconds of life.  What we have not used-up at the end of the day will be lost.  But every morning the account is filled again.

So then, what do you do with your daily 86400 seconds?

~Marc Levy, translated from German

Yes, Virginia, we need a little music right now

                               

Attaboy ツ

Festina Lente (Hurry… slowly)

“I do like Christmas on the whole...In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But oh, it is clumsier every year.” ~E.M. Forster

I borrowed a quote here because my own words are clumsy. I am not quite sure how to wish a Merry Christmas to everyone in my life, agnostics, atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Muslims... neighbors, friends around the globe and “otherworldly kindred spirits” or that convivial little dog named Linda on the street where I live and that I am pretty sure is a giant rat. You are all a part of my daily life in this melting pot of a planet we call home.

So, interpret this as you see fit, it is said with love, Happy Holidays.