DREAMING OF MALLORCA
I was invited out to lunch by Owen Bailey, a former student who went on the very first student trip to India that I organized, or rather disorganized, since I got everyone onto the plane with a stopover in Zurich or somewhere but hadn’t planned beyond arriving in Delhi. We put up in a hotel for $4 a night, but could see that was going to be too expensive so I managed through missionary friends to rent an apartment from a person who was going away for a month for $10 apiece where most everyone slept on the floor between side trips around North India which were organized as we went.
This launched Owen as a traveler. He now has a Japanese wife, Taeko. We had lunch in Mela, an Indian restaurant. He drove me there in his new electric Hyundai which was more a space ship than a car with screens flashing everywhere as we rode silently through Asheville, notified by the car whenever we approached another car or nudged the center line in the road. I was so taken by the car that he offered to take me to a new coffee shop, Short Sleeves, in Swannanoa. There we met by accident another former Warren Wilson student who I didn’t know but who had heard of me and my student trips to India. While talking with her she revealed that her father in law had lived in Mallorca, died there in an accident, and left his son and her with a house that they didn’t know what to do with which was empty half the year.
That was a mistake on her part. There is notthing I dream about more eagerly, but without hope, than discovering an empty house in a beautiful distant place. Mallorca is in the middle of the Mediterranean. She seemed quite amenable to my spending a month there sometime. So this was the high point of my day although I began to wonder if instead of being in Mallorca in October, I would be undergoing cancer treatment, if I lived that long.
In the evening I went with my daughter, Susie, to the opening of an exhibit by Madison County artists in which they would place something they were currently working on. At the show was Primrose’s Crankie show in which she tells a story illustrated by drawings made on a long roll which she scrolls through as she tells the story.
PRIMROSE’S CRANKIE SHOW
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0aeeFivb4Q43X1-j-9LW0kN1A
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 