Time to do this again

[fpb]

Tomorrow is my 48th birthday. Two years ago I posted this request, and I think the time has come to repeat it:

Here is my wish, for anyone dropping by, who has a few extra seconds: you share with me some special memory. This was sartorias' suggestion, which I cannot improve upon: I know how busy people are. It doesn't have to be long. One good thing about having a brain wired for image is that the briefest reference to, say, "The day i saw a triple rainbow" brings immediately to mind the day when I was ten that I saw a triple rainbow. There I am on my bike, riding downhill as fast as I can because the biggest rainbow ends, so clearly, right where Linda C lives, at the bottom of the hill below school, where two streets converge...the light is silvery-gray, and smells of wet pavement and grass, there are three levels of clouds and all of them ragged. How I loved the magic of that day--even if the end of the rainbow kept moving. But somehow it was better to never find the end.

Comments

[cheyinka]

The very first time I went into the campus chapel at Seattle University, I was struck by how effectively the walls cut out the sound of traffic (the school is in downtown Seattle) and general campus noise, making it almost perfectly silent - my own breathing was the loudest noise, and I hadn't just run a mile or anything like that. That sense of silence was my absolute favorite thing about the chapel, and it's something that even the local free paper commented on - though for them it made it one of Seattle's ten scariest places!

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

Wow, I'll have to check that out. *is moving to Seattle in a couple months*

[lazy-neutrino.livejournal.com]

Happy Birthday!

[fpb.livejournal.com]

What a nice guy. Thank you!

Happy birthday

[deansteinlage.livejournal.com]

The day I made bouillabaisse for my wife on Good Friday 7 years ago. She didn't like seafood much and didn't understand the Catholic no meat on Fridays in lent. Bouillabaisse is a family lent tradition now.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

Once, when flying out of Barcelona, as the plane was banking and ascending over the Spanish countryside, I looked out of the window and saw Montserrat rising white and shiplike over the Catalonian plain. I had never seen the mountain before -- I had flown in at night, and intervening hills and lesser mountains had blocked my view of it from the city -- but in that moment, without knowing exactly what I was looking at, I knew I was seeing something singular. Google Maps and Google Earth do not really do it justice; unless you know what you're looking for, it is practically invisible there -- but to see it in person, even from the air! It is an improbable sight, a lonely vessel of jagged rock cut adrift from the mountain-shores of the Pyrenees.

I cudgelled my brains for three days, my dear fellow –

[wemyss.livejournal.com]

– knowing that on so many counts, from your being a townee to your preferring footer to cricket, my memories should do nothing for you.

Such as it is, then, I trust you also find pleasing:

The West End after rain, at night, when the theatres let out upon a gleaming pavement;
The pewter of the Thames in late winter light just before dusk, looking upriver towards the Chilterns;
Congenial company and a keen appetite at Wilton’s or Simpson’s;
Swans and ducks where the River Kennet debouches into the Thames at Reading;
Blackwell’s, Oxon;
State Openings;
Remembrance Sunday and Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ from ‘Enigma’;
Boris bringing proper buses back to London;
Any of Wren’s churches (RC though you be);
The Bramah Tea Museum.

Many happy returns of the day, old boy.

Re: I cudgelled my brains for three days, my dear fellow â“

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Although a townee, I do appreciate the countryside (I learned English in a lovely Kentish village outside Canterbury), though my favourite part of the world, and the place I would move to if I were rich, is the mountains. Half of Italy is mountain, and their valleys and forests and the wonderful little white villages in the valleys, are one of Italy's less known glories.

[notebuyer.livejournal.com]

Walking through a zoo with my daughter, then two: I was looking, I told her, for my cow. Each exhibit we came to, I began with, "Is that my cow? It says/has X. It is not my cow. Where is my cow?" She responded "No" and "I don't know" happily to each question, and laughed at the animals.

Happy Birthday!

[joetexx.livejournal.com]

Spring 1982.

My father and I drove back from the Texas Gulf Coat. To our left, the west, the sun was setting. An upended oil derrick was sprawled horizontally on the flat wetlands and the gridlines of the riggings framed rose and orange segments of the western horizon. It was incerdibly beautiful and did not last for more than 5 minutes all told. I glanced at my father to remark on it and saw I didn't need to; was staring raptly out the window himself. I had often felt close this him, but this time especially. He died a month later.

Happy Birthday

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm a little late, but here's the most 'unique' thing I've ever seen--a few years ago my best friend and I were down at the river on the last night of our city's fireworks festival. The fireworks were cool (how can they not be) but we noticed that there was a thunderstorm blowing in from the west--you could see distant flashes of lightning etc. We made it to the grand finale without any rain, then as they were shooting off literally dozens of fireworks at once, a huge triple lightning bolt flashed right around the exploding fireworks in the sky. It was phenomenal, nothing you could even have planned, and all the tens of thousands of people up and down the river gasped at the same time.

Bonus random trivia: you and Jennifer Lopez have the same birthday.

[sanscouronne.livejournal.com]

I apologize for being late as well. I hope that you had a wonderful birthday.

There's a part of the Faure (sorry about the lack of accents) Requiem that is just exquisite. I was singing in my women's choir, and we were singing with the men of Harvard in our college chapel--an old, gothic structure, yet small and intimate at the same time, especially when nestled on the verdant New England campus of Wellesley. There's a sweet quietness in the "Lux Aeterna", that Faure places after all of the fire-and-brimstone "Dies Irae" and while singing that part (it helps to be a soprano, where your notes just sort of float above the solid foundation of the altos, as well as the men), while bathed in the soft light of the chapel, just in that moment, I felt so close to God, so safe, and unafraid. It was a religious experience.

As a lover of music, I know that you will understand and appreciate such a memory. :)