Friday, October 21, 2011

next year in the Swal Daw Pagoda?

Hopefully trying to cure a tension headache with lots of Riesling and a Norwegian ballad.

The wind is howling outside, like it always does in October.

Fleamarket find of the day: a map of downtown Rangoon, dated 1979. Wouldn't you just love to know how it made its way to a basement shop in a Finnish town thirty years later, to be found by a tired shop assistant waiting for the last customer to leave? Me too. I have never been within a thousand miles of Rangoon but I'm studying it carefully, tracing a route from Tsing Tsong Avenue to the Sacred Cave. I don't know if they still exist like they did in the seventies (the city is not even called Rangoon anymore, is it?) but when I go to check with Google Maps, I get lost in scrolling through the satellite maps showing alien-looking pagodas and asymmetrical houses with blue roofs.

Because that's the beauty of it all: although the thought has never before struck me, someday I may no longer be dusting off books in a quiet shop, preoccupied with plans to buy a bottle of wine to go with a lonely TV dinner. Someday I might end up in Rangoon.

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