Addresses

In a pub in Lodz, Poland at the end of an August at the end of a mad summer, I decided to call a dear friend whom I hadn’t talked with since I left Hungary in the autumn of 1995.  I had just had a sampling of local pastries and was happily swimming toward the wee hours, trying to hold off the morning and the approaching fall.  I found a phone across the street from the pub, in front of an abandoned textile factory.  As I pulled out my ragged page of addresses, Polski Fiats buzzed by and asked where the time had gone.  “Four years,” I said loudly over their lawnmower engines.  “What if he doesn’t remember my voice and the late nights and days when we lost the impatience of youth?”

It was but a rhetorical questions for any traveler knows that numbers and the people they are attached to don’t fit the old rules when you’re on the road.  And of course Polski Fiats don’t speak English.  They speak Polish with an Italian accent.

I wondered how I’d ask for him if he weren’t there.  I could recall little more than a weak, “Jó napot” In Hungarian and various cusswords that always seemed to make someone laugh but wouldn’t impress my friend’s family.

And then, as night ran to day and the sun to sky, I thought of her.  I thought of how the cold phone I held in my hand could link me to her.  She was not lost in the addresses; in fact, I looked at her:

Clare

Souldern Court

Souldern

Oxford

England

Her face was lost in the days behind me.  Her short hair and English eyes were huddled in some recess of my mind labeled, “Blown Saves”, and I was convinced that one more call would do the trick and throw noise into the silence between us.

My mind danced with the phone off the hook and wondered forever… 

Now I wonder if standing in the cool night thinking was much better than where I am at this moment – home for the last time in a long time. 

You’ll find me here.  I’m sitting in the flying leather chairs.  I wouldn’t be far from the drinkers and the hangers-on if there were any to be found in this dead town.