AUGUST 28, MONDAY

THREE PLACES AT ONCE

On Saturday evening I was sitting silently by myself in the 5th floor apartment on Sarandí street in Montevideo, Uruguay, thousands of miles from anyone that I knew. So I shifted to attending a concert put on by David Garrett, a violinist who, backed up by the orchestra Teatro de Messina, gave a concert of beautiful short violin pieces by Vivaldi, Dvorak and Bach in an old Roman amphitheater high above the Mediterranean as the sun was setting in Taormina with Mount Etna in the background. In a little over a month I will be in an Airbnb in Taormina to attend Rob Amberg’s 75th birthday and anticipate this same view. The concert was a free concert provided by Arte, a European PBS like channel which presents plays and operas and cultural events from all over Europe. I watched on my large iPad and listened through my Bose earphones. It was a wonderful concert which I have attended a number of times in the last month.

And as I was watching the concert my daughter Susie called me on Facetime from Marshall, North Carolina where she and Todd were listening to a band play at the Old Marshall Jail beside the railway tracks that run along the French Broad river. Her friend Eric is in the band and this night the son of Kern Geer who worked at Warren Wilson years ago was in the band and so was the husband of a woman named Betty who was sitting at the same table as Susie and who had somehow read my daily posts recently, probably because she was referred to the photos of the Marshall Fashion Show which I attended three weeks ago and posted on billybaba.com. I said hi to Rob Amberg through Facetime. He had been to a party where people wore brightly colored clay mustaches and he was trying them on people. I listened to the music and watched people dance and felt right at home in Marshall until the power went out on Susie’s iPhone. And then I was back in the silent 5th floor apartment on Sarandí Street in Montevideo, amazed that I could be in three places, each thousands of miles apart, at the same time, each place feeling as real as the next.