A moment later I passed a man of around 70. He was wearing a leather bomber jacket and wrap-around sunglasses, the sort of look a suburban 50 year-old dad with a rock n’ roll heart might sport at a concert. He sat alone on a patio eating an omelette and drinking a half-liter of white wine–somehow anachronistic, as if a postcard from another era. It was a perfect autumn day and he was unhurried, inhaling the sunlight and pretty girls walking by as if they were oxygen– the leaves turning purple and orange around him.
And from not far off, the sound of opera drifted unexpectedly through traffic. In a language imagined rather than understood, a woman’s voice, clear and controlled, rose and fell to a piano keeping pace. The music was coming through a church window, and upon hearing something so perfect in its accidental trajectory, I had to close my eyes and let the world become just that one thing.
]]>