Wednesday 28 April 2010

Hillsdale by the Sea

If that's the title, a traveller remembers watching in any direction to the sea.  Sometimes, as in the Guadiana at Vila Real de Santo Antonio or the Tagus at Lisbon, he watches a river, calling it sea, which it is within a mile or two.  Everywhere he walked was toward the sea . . .

This remembering goes on overlooking a hotel parking lot at the west edge of Hillsdale (not counting, the traveller adds, the western sky, just now retired into dark).  Wind blows in his open windows.

21 in Lisbon today, the same in Hillsdale.  As he would have done at the bottom of Alfama, across from the Lisbon waterfront, the traveller today found a cafe for a cup of tea.  He read the paper, which probably would have been a day old Guardian or Telegraph over there, by the sea.

In either place there was all sorts of remembering, broadly understood as a matter of invention, which might turn up in this paragraph once it's longer.

After that the traveller goes home, where he misses sea the most and, as if denying his sense of loss, watches hockey on tv.

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