An Afternoon with Grace

Last Tuesday, I had a lunch with three good friends. It was a delayed celebration of my friend's daughter's graduation. The daughter is well on her way to becoming a doctor.

A table was laid out at the porch. The beams surrounding the porch framed the skies and the clouds.

The food was sinful and for friends entering the age of 50, forbidden. Our eating was constantly interrupted by birds darting in and out of the small space above us. Two birds - related by the instinct of love and procreation - could not leave each other. They were making circles of flight around trees.

Across the room, music was playing. The words were all familiar, the tune we remembered. One song was about how tender is the night. Another was about someone going away, and this song slid into another song of a day in the life of a fool.

I spotted a wild pigeon on the roof of the neighbour's home. By the time, I got to point it to my friends, it had already flown away. Or so I thought. The wild pigeon had a home in the eaves of the roof. After a few minutes, it showed its head as it marched back and forth across the rusty shingles that were about to fly off the house. A vine had crept up to an old bough and the wild pigeon hid in the round leaves every now and then.

A tiny bird, tinier than the common house sparrow, soon showed itself. Its head was slightly bigger than the smallest leaf in the cluster of shrubs in the garden. Its beak was long though and thin as the fine lightning that ran across the greying sky.

It will rain, we told each other. Soon, we could smell the rain. We knew it from childhood: the faint rustle of heat lifting off the ground, the quiver of the ground when the upper layer of the grass gets wet.

The music continued. We are now playing the blues. Billie Holiday has something on her mind. Still like peaceful dreams I see the road leads back to you. We knew that longing. All of us had the persistent longing for this city, what it was before when the world was a bud. And what the city would be when our spots in bars and karaoke bars had disappeared and, in its place, bad poetry about memories.

The blues persist and the songs became torch songs. These were songs sung by women - and by men - who pined for love lost. The torch was raised while covering waterfronts or meditating upon passing clouds and boulevards of broken dreams and bridges of Sighs. That love never came back but the torch was forever lighted, the songs forever sung.

As the rains continued, vodka and beer came upon us with the gentleness of a storm brewing mountains and mountains away.

How much would this lunch cost us somewhere? What price can we attach to this afternoon?