Serendipity
On the ride home you stop downtown at an Italian restaurant whose owner doesn’t care for the tik-tok of it all
Two young women you admire are lining up and you know they’ve come to see the feminist who’s rocking the world with her precocious wisdom and dogged refusal to be cowed. You wave in solidarity and walk with your son into the courtyard where angles and art and concrete meet and two men walk across the road towards you both with despair and danger around their shoulders. You feel the barely discernible stiffening of your son’s back as if it’s your own and look down at the life raft in your hand.
On the ride home you stop downtown at an Italian restaurant whose owner doesn’t care for the tik-tok of it all. He brings you meatballs and linguine and red wine and chilli oil, speaking to you so discretely you feel a little embarrassed about sitting alone at a table with a single candle and a bottle of icy-cold, still-not-sparkling water as the dinner service begins.
To cover your awkwardness, you take out the book you bought by the Greek writer with the beautiful voice who spoke about his mother and about class and you think about your own mother who lived in the poorest suburb in town and wouldn’t be seen dead at a writer’s festival, which is funny because she actually is dead now. You think of her funeral and how you knew it was ok to laugh in the chapel because she would have laughed too.
Standing up on both pedals you feel the exquisite aliveness that comes after you’ve been unwell. The too-early darkness heralds the slide into winter, but for now it’s still autumn and it’s warm and as your legs revel, moving fast and furiously for the first time in a week, the still-fresh festival memories play in high definition. The friendships and the casual hellos, and the unexpected and familiar faces and the deep sense of community and the searing poetry about suicide and memory and death and dispossession that you stumbled on when you went to see your friend’s photos and the blues guitar and the conversations that flowed like rich caramel and the hot chips and the cola with ice and the literary naps because you weren’t fully well and the holding hands and the laughing. And the multiple lovers threaded through various backchannels, lovers who you met in the spaces and serendipity and magic of writer’s festivals in days gone by.
But this year your heart belongs to the friends who checked on you in your sick bed and cheered because you were well enough to come out and who shared food and dreams and ideas and thrilled with you in the glorious throng of kindred souls until you were all full to bursting.
And your son, who is starting on his own path of words which makes you want to build the biggest bridge for him and the most colourful garden and put up fairy lights and pay someone to play the flute and bake delicate little chocolate cakes with fresh cream and juicy raspberries. But you know he has to do it his own way, so you sit together and listen quietly to other writers.
Afterwards you stand where concrete and angles and art meet, and as two desperate, dangerous men walk by you know he has the words inside of him waiting to come out.