Hello friends. I want to introduce to you a new section of Thought Divers, entitled The Lamp. Through this section I’ll be sending you short prose and fiction that don’t fit snuggly into the essay format I’ve used for the standard Thought Divers journals. This is my attempt to connect with you more frequently, so if you enjoy these, let me know, and i’ll be sure to keep sending them your way. Much love.
From the courtyard window, I’m watching two men sit on the steps of the square eating warm tortillas and watching the pigeons move in circles before them. Beyond them the midday sun beats down on the teal and rose adobe buildings, ornamented lamp posts await their rebirth at night, and the dying sounds of a procession fade across the square.
The men sit on the steps of the little square, under the shade of swaying branches. They sit in their jeans, their brown belts and crisp blue collared shirts. One wears a pair of eyeglasses, and the other a sombrero the color of midnight. They are figures as sure as the cobbled stones beneath them.
They wave their hands in slow and measured gestures to one another and they look content to me now and I wonder at what madness we put ourselves through back home. They are projections of simplicity and straightforwardness in my mind. Projections, like the one of my Grandfather Jim, who in reality I did not know as a man, but only as a guiding symbol from my youth.
A teenager jumps into the flock of pigeons and sends them into flight all at once. The girl with him laughs and smiles and it is clear that this is the nature of a boy and even his meaning - to make a girl smile, to stir up the world so as to show her that it may be worthy of her beauty. But his nature is like Janus; double-faced, and it is also in him to make her cry and this is how it is and must be and the people here know this and it’s in their songs and art and language.
The two lovers turn the corner and a little nino takes their place. The little nino torments the pigeons, chasing them across the cobbled square and sending them into panic with his laughter and waving little arms. The two old men have finished their meal of tortillas and they watch the sport of the little nino; the little nino - who will no doubt be too old himself one day to play with pigeons, but will be just as content to sit and watch them from the shade of a tree in some square, faintly glimpsing the life of a boy who once lived but now only resides as a passing murmur in an old man's heart.
Keep diving, AJ