Allow me to point out some of the fundamentals of road trips.
Visit places just because you like the sound of a name on a map.
Notice how language is used in this foreign landscape.
Enjoy the local fare.
Compare and contrast your world with this new one. Have you discovered any major differences in the way your perceptions color this new landscape?
Reflect on the changes you see around you. What have you learned?
In honor of our travels, this month’s entry into The Pigeon of the Month Club hails from Chicago. Birds of this town are a strange lot, contending as they do with lake gulls and other watery raptors: they are skittish, fighty, and nearly impossible to photograph. Or maybe they just took me for an outsider, paying them rather too much attention.
Anyhow, our quarry here was a hale specimen. He terrorized his brethren on the platformn; any who got near enough got his beak in their feathers.
A bastard of a bird, and June’s Pigeon of the Month.
Look, they have your childhood in a cup here.
When next you are in Minneapolis, on the other side of the first bridge built over the Mississippi, do yourself a favor and stop in for a cocktail. Don’t forget to tip the man who has been playing piano for longer than you’ve been alive. He will play a Getz-Gilberto number that appeals to the 103 degree temperatures you’ve endured all day, and though the twist in your gin will have far too much pith on it, what does it matter? The place has no windows, is as dark as a tomb, and smells like home.
Remember that short-lived sit-com from 1983, about Reps who were always trying to put the moves on the girls in the next office over? Starred that guy who later got caught in a San Diego hotel room scandal. Doesn’t hold up well in re-runs.
Oscar doesn’t live here anymore.
If they were your team, you’d want that divorce.
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