I * L O V E * Trafalgar Square. You never quite know who you'll meet there, or, sometimes how you'll communicate with them.
This is a lovely Japanese woman, whom I met on the Square. She was bravely traveling alone without a word of English in her vocabulary. Somehow, we managed with what I like to think of as international sign-language and the photos we'd logged on our cameras that day. She was making her way across London, photographing herself in front monuments, buildings and bridges. I had on my camera what a friend calls "vacation snaps", only not my vacation. A visual log of conversations missed or started.
When I was a student in college, in the early 1980s, I used to take off for the hills on weekends. Literally. The hills of Appalachia. I'd go as far as half of my pocket money would take me, end up in some small town, and sit myself down in the public square with my camera. Even when it had no film (and there usually wasn't film - I couldn't afford it), I'd point it at the passing traffic. Invariably someone would stop. A conversation would pick up. I'd be invited off for dinner and hard liquor.
I can't tell you the number of times I heard, from those who took me away and gave me a room for the night, that I was incredibly stupid. I suppose that the Silence of the Lambs was a possibility. But, it struck me that if you invite a stranger into your house, the stupidity was mutual. — It strikes me now, this is a person I've hidden from almost all of you. Something about a photo of a woman whom I really couldn't talk to reveals it. Maybe it's just age, with its impulse to review what is written in, as a preacher I met called, "The Lord's little book of light".
I met all sorts of people. Grannies who lost sons to the big cities up north or on the coast, and, who just wanted to feed someone. Single men who wanted to talk about life far away. Some were sailors, the closer I got to the sea. I was taken in by couples, who wanted to talk about red-neck music, or, who spoke a language I barely understood. Sometimes, we went to backwoods bars that smelled of beer on oak floors. Then, there was Nate, the fellow who lived on a tobacco farm — had several barns in which to dry staked shoots — converted one into a disco. A disco in the middle of nowhere, complete with mirrored ball and choreographed colored lights. We kept in touch, infrequently. I learned last year, he died in a car crash, broadsided at the intersection of two roads crossing a flat field in Indiana. He had to cross the Ohio River on a ferry from western Kentucky to ride to his death; there's something poetically ancient in this fact. There was the lesbian couple who'd been together for ages. I remember they ordered what would be my first Hawaiian pizza. The delivery boy knew them both well enough to come in for a Coke. This was a time when the broadsheet of America outside small towns would have run them out. There were good up-standing Christian women, and, small-town bankers, and, students from local colleges. The latter wanted to talk about life in the "sin city" I'd come from, some thumped bibles, others were liberal with weed and dreamed of moving on. I met police and undercover cops. The undercover boys — they were always young — would come sailing into the public square like they owned it. They wore tight fitting jeans and shirts untucked. It was the black shoes and white socks, gave them away. Then, there were the conflicted, usually male high-school teachers and seminarians, who just wanted to talk all night about nothing in particular. Soft drinks were their choice of beverage; they needed a clear head, unless they took an impulse to action.
I wish, now, that I'd had film in the camera. Their stories would come back to me the more easily if I had had photos to linger over.
Generations (above). The elevator on Trafalgar Square is a glass cube. With reflections of cloud cover imposing themselves, it seemed they might sail away into the sky.
