I tricked myself a little, made myself “look” so to speak as I foraged for food in an unfamiliar city with an incorrect address on my GPS. I couldn’t find the grocery store, I had hungry people waiting for me and I had transposed something in the address because I was basically driving around in a giant square. It’s an old reporter’s trick to stay alert and focused: making mental notes about the surroundings, a visual trail of crumbs in case the journey has to be retraced, and reverse engineered.
I started out looking for the street names but the streets all began with the word “rue” which is French for road, and the houses clustered on every corner began to resemble each other. Then I looked for monuments and landmarks and tiny public gardens near the bridges.
Who got and kept my attention, though, were the people I saw: the three policemen who had left their squad cars by the side of the street and were laughing conspiratorially on the sidewalk, and then a few minutes later the homeless couple hauling away someone’s chaise discarded by the suburban curb in a borrowed grocery store cart, and then as I stumbled by accident upon the store the lovers whose bodies were in a deep embrace before they sprung apart from the light of my car’s headlamps and then got into separate cars and drove away.
The last thing I noticed as I parked was some graffiti on the concrete wall separating the store lot from an office building: “Why Pay Forever?” was the question in bubbled black and white. “Life is free.”
Devi Laskar is a founding member of the Book Writing World. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, an M.A. in South Asian Studies from the University of Illinois, is a rabid Tar Heel basketball fan, is working on a couple of novels and has 1 day to go before she finishes the first year of her art-a-day challenge.
Gorgeous!
Yeah, I second that!
Melanie