Avignon

Wistful Memory tugs at my elbow, pointing me to Avignon, to the day we spent in the old walled town. I recall how we crawled the streets, famished from our wandering, in search of a place that promised fare familiar to our xenophobic palates.

We chose, of all places, an Irish pub. I drank stout. You, eau minerale, I think. We dined and talked, as walled in our English colloquy as the city was in stone. Amidst the din of smoke-laced Gallic babble, we relished the blessed evening. The long languid dusk seemed as reluctant to depart as a lingering party-goer who dreads his loverless bed.

The close tall trees screened the thronging revelers' venal pursuits from the Palais du papes' staid, majestic view. The air, once respired by minstrel, lord and serf, felt thick with history: countless Medieval lungs, working as alembics, distilled time into a numinous vapor that lured us modern creatures there.

I thought I knew your thoughts, believing them the same as mine: that after all this Provençal beauty we'd return to Tucson with even more disgust for those graceless stucco horrors blighting the desert like a pox; that we were strangely at home away from home--perfectly comfortable, perfectly unintelligible to others, and, at least for that day, perfectly us.