I met Christopher (not his real name) at a bus stop because he had new leaf green suede moccasins
on which I remarked. And we never looked back. He is more or less my age, a hairdresser with a painful back and lives alone. We became phone friends. He has a network of contacts and callers, is one of the few people I know to regularly refer to a cousin and we exchange news and views and laugh as we can.
He suddenly asked me about a restaurant and when I said I didn’t know it, he said “I was thinking of taking you and Ivor (real name, his longtime friend and an antique dealer) there for lunch.” Why ? “Because I missed his birthday, I missed yours so let’s have it now.” My acquaintance with Ivor was limited to about 15 minutes, but Christopher swept that aside. “If you like the menu, it will be fine.”
The restaurant was everything I would have chosen,
lovely food, splendid staff courteous without being crawly, a plain place with charm. And we sat and nattered and ate and told stories – they are both benign and insatiable gossips – and drank a modest amount of what C calls “pink wine”. Time off from the world. Even the coffee was good.
We came out into the sunshine, for once coherent for a few hours, said goodbye to Ivor and Christopher and I went for the bus to take us back. So far, pretty darned good. The bus was full, the weather slipped a gear into humidity and several stops later, I got up, kissed Christopher goodbye and got out in order to breathe.
Briefly at peace with myself and the world
(not a figure of speech) I came on a family – mother and father, father pushing an ordinary buggy, mother in the flowing clothes of Asia, a smartly dressed five or six year old boy and a tiny girl, probably no more than two, dressed in singing red soft cotton, like poppies crossed with roses.
She stopped and looked at me. Both children had that fine clean black hair that looks like the feathers of a baby bird. Big Brother stepped forward to reassure his sister who turned and examined me with enormous dark eyes – and held up and out her hand. So murmuring “Hello, beauty” I took it and we walked, all of us without a word though some connecting smiles down a London thoroughfare of which I have never been less aware. It just faded into backdrop.
At the corner of a block, I thought she would have had enough so withdrew my hand but was stopped by a little noise, onomatopoeic of disapproval, like a young rhinoceros.
(I know about this from a friend and also from seeing Attenborough with one in a reserve, I love rhino.) Her brother stepped back, she took my hand again. We walked some more . Then she was willing to release me. Her brother came to stand by her, I thanked her mother who beamed at me, I told her brother he was a splendid big brother and went to the father, put my hand on his arm and said” Thank you. This was truly a blessing.”
Last week I ventured into a book my father loved, having been afraid to look at it for years in case I didn’t like it, didn’t understand it and so on. It all seemed very congruent, the encounter and the book (Kim by Rudyard Kipling), which teaches among many other things that the journey through life is inevitable. It goes on even when you are not thinking about it. And set in an India of antiquity, numberless creeds and races, over a hundred years ago, when pace was different anyway, what the Buddhist lama Kim meets calls The Way, is less for seeking than pursuing. You don’t find it, it finds you.
Current difficulties have all sorts of different names but the impact of where we are up in the world – nationally and globally – affects many of us from different angles at the same time which is wearing, tiring, destructive of peace and contemplation with which the tired old spirit is restored. The gifts of how this time was spent were intangible and invaluable, probably short in time but lingering in memory.
Annalog 