EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALMay 31, 1999
Calle Conde de Barajas, Seville
Notes In Pencil
I was dreaming. Emily wagged her tail and left her tongue hanging out
the side. It flopped as she trotted. The cedar stand shook with nest-builders, making snow
of pollen and particles in ridiculous June. Then I sat at my desk, in the cool part, where
worms checked out the dampness.
It’s hardly any longer a dream about performance anxiety. Who am I
performing to? And besides, the tests aren’t bothersome. Tests have their purpose.
When you can, make up your own. Flashcards. I held them in my hands like collectibles
– stackable, flimsy mylars, smudgy in their pencil. Delicate in woody grey.
The scenes were ones from my recent past – the facades we now
almost take for granted – Triana, dilapidated gypsy houses with rotting banisters and
mysterious odours. Walk one block and it smells like Italy – rubbing rosemary –
cross the alley and we’re in Spain again – frying fish.
The pueblos make one big façade, only it’s in miniature on the
flashcard. It’s a mirage on the hillside, an organic little crop of teeth, clamped to
the Sierra’s pastoral groan of elevation. Now, on the cards, it’s only lines in
fat lead. A stack of speedy stacks, a bundle of sticks, a wobbly rendering. Mostly memory.
I could find a window and stick them to it. Seville’s hot light
would pass through the translucent mylar. There in the dream-forest, I held them above my
head and waited for the sun to stream.
