In the Traveling Zone
When you travel it seems like the movement isn't just geographical but that you also enter into some weird liminal zone of consciousness where all sorts of resonances and synchronicities can occur as you encounter all the others who have stepped outside their normal lives. To wit:
1. As we found a seat in our new favorite wine bar in Venice (Vino Vero), this guy next to us told my wife he had done a double take when we came in and was going to start talking to me because I was a dead ringer for a professor of his at UC-Berkeley. Positively uncanny he said.
2. That morning, and our hotel breakfast the same thing had happened to me. There was a gray-haired Japanese guy sitting there who looked exactly like my former boss. Same haircut (not a common one), same wire rims, same size, same aspect to his presence. I was staring at him trying to make sense of it, when he looked at me and I realized it wasn't him. I gave him a "sorry" type shrug.
3. The number for our room in Verona was 367, the address for our first apartment in Somerville, all those years ago.
4. As we stood on yet another train platform, I shared a travel memory with my wife that had always stuck with me. Way back in the 80s I was standing just before sunrise on a platform at the train stop in Vernazza, Cinque Terre, Italy. Blasting out the window of a nearby window was the hit of the time, Eye In the Sky. In that pre-dawn consciousness the song struck as so perfect and inevitable, the chord changes and melody seeping in from another dimension. That night, the song came on the restaurant sound system as we were dining. Meant to be, right?
1. As we found a seat in our new favorite wine bar in Venice (Vino Vero), this guy next to us told my wife he had done a double take when we came in and was going to start talking to me because I was a dead ringer for a professor of his at UC-Berkeley. Positively uncanny he said.
2. That morning, and our hotel breakfast the same thing had happened to me. There was a gray-haired Japanese guy sitting there who looked exactly like my former boss. Same haircut (not a common one), same wire rims, same size, same aspect to his presence. I was staring at him trying to make sense of it, when he looked at me and I realized it wasn't him. I gave him a "sorry" type shrug.
3. The number for our room in Verona was 367, the address for our first apartment in Somerville, all those years ago.
4. As we stood on yet another train platform, I shared a travel memory with my wife that had always stuck with me. Way back in the 80s I was standing just before sunrise on a platform at the train stop in Vernazza, Cinque Terre, Italy. Blasting out the window of a nearby window was the hit of the time, Eye In the Sky. In that pre-dawn consciousness the song struck as so perfect and inevitable, the chord changes and melody seeping in from another dimension. That night, the song came on the restaurant sound system as we were dining. Meant to be, right?
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