MAX MIECHOWSKI IN HACKNEY
This morning brother Martin drove us to the train station at 7:30. I was a little groggy because I woke at 1:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep. The train ride was so pleasant with comfortable seats and wide windows and not the huge crowd that we expected on a bank holiday. The only drawback to the train ride was that much of the way the track is lined with hedges so that the view is blocked and when the view opens up we were traveling so fast, maybe 150 miles an hour, that everything flipped by so quickly it was hard to focus on anything. But the ride was smooth and the shift from the cross country train to the train to London in Retford was so easy, with time to stop in a platform cafe for coffee, that the ride to King’s Cross was effortless. We took a bus to the Hackney, area in London, guided by Google, and left our bags at our Airbnb and then called Max Miechowski, brother Martin’s son, who invited us to meet him at Pophams Cafe in half an hour. We located a Popham Bakery Cafe, walked twenty minutes to get there, then realized it was the wrong Popham’s Cafe and walked another half hour in the hot sun to the right one, by which time I was creaking and leaking and aching. In the end I walked 5 miles during the day, three miles beyond my limit.
But Pophams was beautiful and our time with Max was marvelous. He told us about how he shifted from being a teenage musician to being a photographer of musicians and events to finally, with help along the way, becoming a photographer, at about 37, for National Geographic and the New York Times, the very apex of photography from my perspective. Last week he photographed four actors in a group photograph for the New York Times, one of whom was Helen Mirren and another Ben Kingsley. I wanted to bend over and touch his feet, as you do in India when in the presence of someone holy.
But Max was a regular guy. I had a toasted ham and cheese croissant at Pophams and later a lemonade in Max’s favorite bar and after that ice cream. We walked around London Fields, the artistic center of Hackney and watched a slim houseboat maneuver through the lock on a canal. Then Max said goodbye and I staggered back to our Airbnb with Susie, completely tuckered out, fell into bed and slept for two hours while Susie wandered and brought back salsa and chips for supper. It was another wonderful day.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 