I hailed a cab and in the car the song Another Brick in the Wall by Pink Floyd was playing. The driver, silent and seeming tense, was leaning forward and very aggressively keeping beat to the music with his fingers against the steering wheel.
“Hey teacher, leave those kids alone!” Pink Floyd sang from past.
The driver was lost to the music, and the look on his face indicated an angry agreement with it, rather than a pleasant remembrance of the time the song recalled. Thirty seconds or so likely passed, and then as if thinking out loud, in a hard, Jamaican accent, he said, “Some music stays with us, man.”
“Yeah, but it always brings something else with it, doesn’t it?” I responded. “I mean, it’s never alone.”
He shot me a look, an unfriendly one, that suggested I had intruded somewhere I wasn’t welcome, and I receded into the back seat– the rest of the drive was quiet, but for his small, out of key voice occasionally singing along to the radio, “All in all it was all just bricks in the wall, we wuz all just bricks in the wall…”
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Here are three:
Dear Mike,
I have just read a novel in which an Englishman sees Spokane, Washington for the first time from a window of an airplane. It reminds him of Northwest Pakistan. Do you ever look at a place or a thing and it reminds you of something on the other side of the world? The first time I saw Athens from the air it reminded me of a coral reef deep in an ocean where I had never been.
Dear Mike,
Do you think you would ever be able to remember everyone who ever asked you the time? The only instance I remember very clearly was when I was 18 and sitting in the airport in Milan. An Italian man in a suit said something to me and pointed to his watch. I was terrified and shrugged and waved my watchless wrist at him. It became a habitual gesture. People ask me the time and I point to my wrist, whether I am wearing a watch or not.
Dear Mike,
The first time I saw the Milky Way I was seven years old. We were driving home to Chicago from my grandparents’ house in Lorain, Ohio in the middle of the night and my dad pulled the car over in a place where there were no streetlights and showed it to me. I remember the feeling of crouching as I looked at the sky.
