Sunflower

02022-07-15 | Lx, Photos, Portugal, Writing


In a narrow cobblestone alley a few sunflowers have sprung up. Were they planted or did they surprise? In any case, they seem well cared for. The flowers are tied to bamboo poles that hold them up. The ground appears to be watered. An older person might be the caretaker of these flowers, judging by the handrail that was installed to help them negotiate the three steps into the house. It’s a simple bathroom handrail, like the ones I installed in my house, when my dad lived there. The handrail is simple and artless, in a beautiful way, making me imagine that an engineer lives here. If the sunflowers were volunteers, they could not have picked a better spot. They look perfect in front of the yellow house. Or perhaps the engineer has a partner who wanted to obscure the practical handrail by planting sunflower seeds and watering them. The gleam of the chromed handrail won’t be quite as obvious if sunflowers grow here, they might have thought.

Terrace (Fake History)

02022-07-13 | Lx, Photos, Portugal, Writing


We want a terrace. Sure, don’t we all want a terrace! Yeah, but how about we build one between our two houses? That’s a pretty good idea. Will it have access from both houses? Nope, only from our house. Then how do I use the terrace? You basically don’t, but we could add stairs to the terrace that you could sometimes use. Great, so I can enjoy the view from the terrace as well. Can we have dinner on the terrace? Well, here is the thing. I am willing to add the stairs, but I will also add a gate… so you won’t be able to go to the terrace any time you want. You want that I ask you every time I want to use the terrace. Yeah, I do. It really doesn’t sound like a great deal for me. You get a terrace and what do we get? Well, how about I pay you to paint the underpass underneath the terrace? You can paint it any way you want. You are not going to tell me what to do? No. Paint anything you like. You are paying for the building of the terrace and you will pay me to paint it. No, only underneath the terrace. But there you can paint anything you like. Let me think about this.

If I was Da Vinci’s Friend

02022-07-06 | Writing

Leonardo sent one of his assistants over to invite me to his workshop this afternoon. I was torn about going. It is always exciting, electrifying even, to see what he is working on, but it is also soul-destroying. I mean, he makes everyone else look positively lazy and stupid. Being around Leo can be a real bummer. In the excitement about his next great idea he tends to forget that while he has a hundred ideas, mere mortals are lucky to have one.
Last time I went to see him I returned home and didn’t get out of bed for three days. Depressing. And yet, I feel compelled to go. What will it be? I am so curious! Is it a painting, a sculpture, a war machine, a flying machine, or the design for a bridge? Damn you, Leo.

PS: Not sure where this came from. I was walking somewhere and those words popped into my head.

PPS: Proposed bridge would have been the world’s longest at the time; new analysis shows it would have worked.

Saffron

02019-11-27 | Writing

(short story around the word saffron)

After walking around and marveling at the Alhambra for the entire morning they had moved on. He really wanted to stay and just sit and experience the building, but his friends had seen all they wanted to see and urged him to leave. He decided he would come back by himself the next morning, very early, before they had to move on, because he knew that a building like this required time to be truly experienced and wouldn’t show itself right away… a special building that contains intention needs the sun to arc in the sky, which allows the light to reveal the details, and lets the shadows move around to give it life. And this building had a lot of depth and intention. He would come back and see, tomorrow.

From the Alhambra they had aimlessly walked through backstreets of Granada until he noticed a small guitar shop at the end of a cobblestone road. His friends were hungry and didn’t want to stop, so he urged them to find a restaurant nearby and to wait for him there.

After they had left and gone around a corner he opened the door, which triggered a little bell that rang. After entering the little shop he looked around and saw a few guitars hanging against the wall. Nobody came out to greet him, so after a while he gently took a guitar from the wall, sat down on a wooden chair and tuned it. He began to play, enjoying the strings in his hands, the scent of wood, the familiarity of holding a guitar. He hadn’t played in a couple of weeks, since starting this journey, but the music seemed to come out of his hands anyway… as if it had been waiting patiently for this moment.

He took a look at the label inside the guitar. It wasn’t a great guitar by any means, but it was a guitar and he was glad he had the chance to play a little.

A man came through the door that probably lead to the workshop. The man looked a little unkempt, in a distracted professor manner, and wore a grey lab coat. He said something in rapid Spanish. When it became obvious that he wasn’t understood, he nodded, then said: “Those guitars are for tourists, not for someone like you. Let me show you one of my real guitars.”

The man turned around and was gone for a couple of minutes. When he returned he brought a guitar he held with obvious pride. The top was a saffron color, with simple black inlays around the sound hole.

He nodded and smiled and gently took the instrument from the hands of its maker. Then he sat down with it.