The Riverbed Was Dry

So I walked the bridge

For it was burning

Cello Suite No. 3 in C

Became sound and smell

Filled with smoke

At sunrise

There was a place beyond

The Joshua trees

Where I took my boots off

While watching the bridge

That was now a lit candle

Burning the morning sky

As a name does to memories

When one stops walking

Or forgets to cross the bridge

Before it burns to ashes

July 29, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

Cassette Player in Montréal, Canada

For two years, I looked at a brick wall from the only window my room had. My room had a bed, a wobbly table, and a B&W TV I had bought with money saved from my evening job. I was a student in Montréal and happy to share a kitchen and the toilet with three others who lived in rooms similar to mine on the same floor.

More than 4 decades later, and after traveling and working in more than 40 countries, I sometimes encounter a building, a street corner or a peculiar architecture that reminds me of that room in Montreal which was walking distance from the Olympic Stadium. I did indeed walk that road many times just after Nadia Comaneci scored a perfect 10 on the parallel bars. The world lost its head for a moment and so seemed the Olympic Stadium as the builders had run out of time to finish its roof.

… As I was going through my unpublished or rejected (by me) piles of pictures, this one made me stop and think again of the early 1970s. With my eyes closed. I could smell the fast food grease on Rue Maçon and the early spring muddy snow melt along the sides of Rue Dandurand.  When I walked back to my room from College, the owner of the corner Dépanneur smoked cherry flavored pipe tobacco that lingered in the humid air of spring in Montréal.

This picture is from a small town in Maine. I was driving through and suddenly all the above memories wrapped in sounds and smells of more than four decades ago made me stop the car. First, I was not sure why I stopped, as there was nothing unusual or picturesque. It was a small town with a few blocks of downtown before I get back on the interstate highway. Yet, there was something that I knew; something that had been part of my life once.

It was this building with its ubiquitous sign that rooms (or at least one room) were for rent. The window did not look to a brick wall as mine once did, but the brick side of the building reminded me of that wall.

So I took a picture, restarted the car and got back on the highway.

… Today as I stopped to look at the picture, among the many which sit forgotten in cardboard boxes here and there around my room, I finally noticed what subconsciously had stopped me in that small town in Maine. It was not the single window, nor was it the texture and depressingly monotonous angles of the brick wall. It was the radio (and am assuming cassette player) sitting at the edge of that window! I do not recall noticing that radio before. But it was there and my mind had somehow made the connection.

Yes, the connection with the radio I had bought after buying the B&W TV. It was a Zenith with bad speakers but it played cassettes!

Many today will probably not understand why a cassette player was so important to me 40 or so years ago. Today cellular phones and the Internet link us all, instantly. But then, as a lonely student in a room with one window that looked over a brick wall on Dandurand street in Montréal, my connection with my friends in countries where windows look over blue seas and angry oceans was through cassettes.

We used to talk to the microphone of the radio and record our feelings about our new life, loneliness, having spend Christmas alone, about the cherry tobacco aroma of the corner Dépanneur’s owner, about those we loved but who never knew, and about those we loved and who never loved us back. Then the cassette went into the mail and I waited weeks before someone sent a cassette back!

… As I type these lines, I know that when I post this page, readers in many countries will see it instantly. Readers who perhaps never knew how a cassette player kept lonesome students connected to those who spoke a common language, and sometimes because of the safety oceans and continents separated us, admitted on cassette, to loving the same person as others. But then only secretively….

July 16, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

Braille Love and Intuition

This morning, before sunrise, I responded to a note from a friend in Europe, then went out with my dog to watch the sunrise over the high desert.

As I was sipping on my first morning coffee 6000 feet above sea level, the desert changed colours and aroma. It is not a smell, but the desert plants seem to have a different aroma with the changing temperatures of the day.  “A glorious sunrise” I thought.

And then I realized that while I cherish these moments of solitude with my dog quietly lying down near me, the inspiration I sometime get is based on intuition and illusion. The trigger to this thought was that I had never questioned the words “Sunrise” or “Sunset” although I know that the sun does neither of those. Yet I have found ample inspiration to love, write or just feel part of a new day by awaiting sunrises and sunsets.

Awaiting illusions when intuition takes over knowledge. Awaiting inspiration when nothing else matters.

… So, I took a few more sips of coffee and challenged my now clearer mind to take me forward into the co-existence of intuitive expectations while ignoring my knowledge base.

I immediately felt at ease accepting that I am past and present, while any intuition I have is about the future. I have observed sunrises since I knew observing and still, I expect to see something new every day. To feel in a new way about an old observation.  Intuitively I know that I am past and present yet never the same. My present changes my past. My past allows my present to have illusions. Even more, to cherish many of these illusions because they challenge the very foundation of the knowledge I have!

Now the rays were already warm and making my dog’s ears pink in their transparency.  And he knew, because of past experience, that it was about time for us to take a long walk together. He had patiently sat on the rocky ground allowing me to have my morning illusion and perhaps inspiration.

So we did. He has his usual path that he checks carefully at every trip. Perhaps a rabbit had slept under that rock last night. Or a deer marked his territory by urine. He somehow knew, maybe by intuition, that rattle snakes would not be out at this early hour. And I trusted him and allowed him to go off path into the tall and dry weeds.

.. When we got back to the car, he sat down on his hind legs and waited for yet another routine. For that gentle petting I perform running my fingers through his hair to find sticky desert burrs. Then I carefully remove them as he gratefully looks into my eyes.

I call it “Braille loving” as I run my fingers carefully into where I have learned, in our 11 years of companionship, the burrs will hook to his hair. I am almost sure he thinks of it as the reward for joining me in the desert before the illusion of sun rising.

After all, he is all past and present, with predictable expectations from the future.

July 13, 2015

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2105