Watching the World

When you stand at the edge of the upper deck of the Miradouro De Sao Pedro De Alcantara you see the red roofs of old Lisboa mixing in with the bright, shining and new. You see the old buildings colored with green, pink and yellow pastels mixing in with chrome and glass things that popularity has brought to the city. The glitzy hotels, the Hard Rock Café, these are below you wedged in among the shops that still sell Gingina or tins of sardines or cork products of all descriptions. 

 

If you look across this valley, across this beating heart of Lisboa, you will see St. George’s Castle. It hasn’t always been called St. George’s. Pieces remain from the 6th century, when it was first fortified by the Romans and they obviously did not call it St. George’s. Eventually then they were replaced by Visgoths. Then came the Moors who used it as a royal Moorish residence. And then Portugal's first king, Afonso Henriques, captured the castelo in 1147 during the reconquista. Chances are that nobody before Alfonso Henriques thought naming the ramparts St. George’s made sense.

 

Looking down to the lower level of the miradouro you see busts of Greek and Roman heroes and gods. Here baking under the Iberian sun are Minerva and Ulysses. If you listen as the day draws down to sunset, you can hear leaves rustling in the trees filling this park. The evening breeze coming as it does most every night moves them. You can also hear the large beautiful white fountain running behind you as you scan the horizon in front of you. 

 

The setting of the sun casts a warm, golden light on the scene. You really don’t have to listen hard to hear the sound of parakeets chirping, sounding to all the world like the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz. You can also hear conversations from the people around you and on the deck below. A majority of these conversation fragments are in Portuguese, spoken fast and indecipherable to anglophones. The smells of sausages cooking at the various pop-up market stalls assembled here waft through the air. As the sun prepared to drop below the horizon and the crowds gathered to watch the sunset, this view of the city was exactly what he needed to restore his soul.

The obvious song to insert here is Saturday in the Park by Chicago but that just doesn't work for me.  I viscerally resist that song, don't know why.  Maybe something happened in another life that made that song not palatable to me.  Anyway I am inserting a Jimmie Dale Gilmore song because I can.

(What follows is part of the narrative that wraps around these interstitial pieces)

 

He came to this place and this moment at the tail end of his life. Cancer twice, heart disease, deteriorating vision, and hearing loss had all plagued him. Still, he had worked the drill for years in the legal factory. Like a child who had been promised there would be cake at the end of dinner he had expectations for his retirement.  As his work calendar moved toward the last few months he truly believed he had earned a beautiful reward.

When all his friends bought houses or lots in God’s Waiting Room he knew he had to find somewhere different. His people were southern, some of his people were so far to the right he could not see their position from where he stood.,But he was long gone from them and their values. Florida was the embodiment of everything he was not. He wanted a place that would not shake him daily because he was surrounded by hate and racist vitriol. 

 

Twenty years before he retired, he wanted to live out the end of his life in the Pacific Northwest. But the money he made would never get him a decent house up there. Ten years before retirement he dreamed of Asheville, NC. But as the world he believed in shattered, and red and blue sides were taken, he knew he was on the wrong side of most of North Carolina. This was clearly true as he read the headlines from the state. Despite the island of delicious food, laughter, art and intellectualism that is Asheville, he could not move to NC. Put simply, he didn’t like his choices because the north was too cold, the east and the west were too expensive and the south was too Trump.