Dillard, on youth looking at age (her view of her parents):

“Our beauty is a mere absence of decrepitude; their beauty, when they had it, was not passive but earned; it was grandeur; it was a party to power, and to artifice, even and to knowledge.  Our beauty was, in the long run, merely elfin.”

Walked down to Old Town Center, the Jewish Cemetery.  I was lost a million times over.

All day I wander around in the rain.  Sit on a bench in some open square eating ice cream watching people, taking pictures of pigeons gathering in the street, a little girl throwing bread crumbs.  Her mother sitting next to me looks suspiciously at my phone, afraid maybe that I am taking a picture of her little girl.  She seems appeased when she sees the nondescript photo on my screen, just dirty pigeons eating bread.  She lights a cigarette and smokes it.  Doesn’t ask –is this okay?  Do you mind?  Her thigh is touching my own.   In America, obese people in small-town Walmarts wearing Spandex and seated in their motorized carts, navigate aisle after aisle, abundant.

Everywhere people are looking at maps.  The phones are no good.  I activate google maps and it has me walking in circles, turning into brick walls.  No one knows where they are going, no one speaks English –or if they do they are equally lost.  To everyone who has asked me for help, I shrug my shoulders, hands out what can I do.

At a cafe I disappear again.  Wine and spaghetti.  The sky darkens, opens.  A French couple sitting a table over invite me under the protection of their awning, which then starts to drip –big heavy drops and then more.  Two young American girls behind me chatter –my daughter’s age.  We talk.  I buy them both glasses of wine.  We discuss our lives, snap our photos with our smart phones to document our journeys.

Later, I meet Carol from Berlin for dinner –in what appears to be a similar café.  I discover in looking at the menu that it is exactly the same.  I have stumbled on a chain, like a Burger King or McDonald’s, only masked for tourists. We discuss our lives, but because we are older we don’t take our picture for Facebook.  (It’s distracting.  Too easy to just be lost in the make-believe world. Or am I lost in the world of make-believe here?)  I feel sad when Carol and I hug and part –on a big wide boulevard where I was lost earlier in the day, whose name I can’t pronounce.  She majored in English, her step daughter majored with a degree in graphic design.  Hugging her goodbye, I feel alone again, fearful –of things lost.

I wait.  I  have been here all along.