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Down the rabbit hole, writing at my Free Fall Friday group.
Prompt- Don’t be that person.
Some people use cocaine, “recreationally,” yet never gaze into the looking glass and say, “I’m a criminal.” Some men, while in debt to other people, never look in the mirror to say “I”m a debtor,” instead continuing to lose money on pornography, drugs and silly potato chips. Don’t be that person. Forget the chips, face yourself.
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Prompt-the people you meet
I get a little skeptical of people who say traveling is for meeting the local people. I think people who say that are the ones who meet people here in their own town ; the rest of us, who aren’t good at meeting people here, won’t meet people over there either.
Of course meeting people is a skill. In the Israeli Secret Service part of their training is they have to talk to strangers. I know because a Canadian of Jewish heritage took the training, but he later moved back to Canada because he didn’t like the people he met. The Israelis, he said, have never had a value of multiculturalism.
I guess there’s no place like home. I am acquainted with a home-grown dark haired girl. She is pretty, attractive, the kind you’d like to meet—but she can walk the whole length of main street and not one person, male of female, will speak to, or be spoken to, by her. A mutual friend told me why: The poor girl walks along with a closed body, stiff eyes, in her own closeted world. In contrast, my friend walks along with scanners scanning, sensors sensing, and a bright eyed look at world: How could anyone not talk to her? She says she got that trick of being approachable off of me. I have never told her that I get an extra charge out of talking to strangers when she is there with me. I guess I’m showing off, seeming like I too could be a member of the Israeli secret service.
One of my favourite places for meeting people has been the little city of Greenwood, incorporated around the turn of the century, on the #3 Crows Nest Pass highway. There I talked with a boy at a museum who was in a movie filmed locally, “I’m the kid that drives by on the bike.” The town library still has gold window lettering from movie about circa WWII Japanese, Snow Falling on Cedars; meanwhile the banner over the street for the Strawberry Festival was taken down because it confused the tourists. (I liked the book and the movie)
There I met a man who’s father always treated the Japanese prisoners there quite well, and an older Japanese man who was gardening who told me he had a brother in the armed forces, but he didn’t belief in the forces himself. The big hotel has a little plaque to say it was the site of the first interned Japanese. And a man at the local garbage dump told me all about sucking the R3 out of the discarded refrigerators. The lady at the motel remembers me from one year to the next, so I think I’ll go back. Because of the people I meet.
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Landing with a bump, as writer peers say if two people are eager then it is amazing what they can learn from each other.
Sean Crawford
Saving up to travel
June 2021
