θαύμα - Wonder

Telemachus
"Who does she get that from?"  It took me off guard.  A mother looks into me for an instant; a poke at a sore spot.   My daughter struggles to spend money on herself.  The question directed to my my elder daughter; the trajectory deflected; locking eyes, two intersecting spotlights. A rabbit in the headlights.

I recalled a bright Saturday morning in early summer.  Shopping with my father, a rare occurrence.  We trekked the short distance across our congenial small town to buy boots from 'Eastsports'.  I was an eleven year old, preparing for walking in the Brecon Beacons with a friend, family, and their caravan.   Reluctantly my father made a purchase of twenty five pounds.  A pained scowl; so expensive.  Feeling mild shame, tumbling thoughts, unable to question.  Was money a problem? Was something a mistake?  Or was he just tight?  We walked away, the experience forgotten, time healing; like writing with water.  His generosity esponges my self deprecating thoughts.  My father spoke through his actions.  He was frequently traveling fours hours in a day to restore my old house.

So I step out again on a bright Sunday morning.  Streaming sun, dazzling eyes, through a brilliant blue sky.  On my back a bag acquired from a course I never finished. Discomfort is to be faced, failure embraced. The challenge demands a response.   I walk up to the main road; the traffic is light.  Across the street is a large rambling retirement home.  I imagine elderly house-bound people on an ocean cruise crossing a vast empty ocean.  A journey through a modern purgatory towards somewhere unknown.  My father opted out of that.  Click, and he was gone.  Climbing on to church roof to repair holes three day before he died.  I had also climbed those stairs when I visited my mother.  Vertical hoops in the wall up to a high flat roof.  We startled  a small sleeping boy.  I even more so by Hamdi the priest, clapping his hands, scolding, chasing the boy off like  a seagull.  The boy skipped, adrenaline filled, over the roof tops of the medina; away away into the distance,  to return  no doubt; a seagull scavenger.

I pass the congregational church- there are so any churches.  "What is my denomination? " I was first asked this in a Sunday School in Iran.  "I don't know."  I never have.  I'm not a nationalist: never really liked labels.

What a fine eclectic building.  Is it Arts and Crafts?  Roger has written his book, won't want another- too many churches.  And mosques, temples and gurdwara's.  Not enough room for ordinary mortals to live here in Leicester.  A mobile phone mast protrudes from the tower.  Money for old rope.  The colours have been muted.  Like a satellite dish on Kensington Palace.  One of my favorite buildings still, even with an antenna.

There, passing by on the opposite side, a familiar face.  Not a flicker.  He knows me.  To hail him? to pass by on the other side?  I note his slight limp.  A painful right hip.  Does recognition have a 'use by date'?  On a scale of one to ten, does it matter?  Over now anyhow.  What the heck.  Bet we meet next week.  It was a draw- nill all- neither of us took any initiative.

Now the view across the park.  The low early winter sunlight cuts over the tops of the trees.  Look up and everywhere is beautiful.  An amazing sky.  The silhouette of the university towers.  The Engineering Building, a Sterling structure, most famous in the city; another one for my book.  What if I had completed my course in Civil Engineering?  like my father; chip off the old block.  "At least it was not Philosophy", he said.  I understood this gentle chiding.  Psychology, the questions are better than the answers.

We walked together to school in Tehran.  They were cold winter day when we lived in the Iran Hotel, such a small insignificant hotel for such a grand name.  I called out my 'times tables' as we walked.  Very traditional; something stone-age children would never have had to do. I could have lived in the stone-age; on the edge of life and death, it would have suited me.


Ulysses