Listen. This is a different kind of post, because I just need some beauty, some reprieve. It has been a long few weeks. So, last night, at the dinner table, my daughter and I ate hot dogs and listed beautiful things. She had many. I had to think more; we can call this the result of life experience. After she went to bed I decided to think about beautiful things and pick one to write about. Not as a distraction from the sadness and worry I feel. But because if beauty has any use at all, maybe it’s to see us through, to be a handhold.
Anyway, here’s the best bit of what I wrote. By “best” I mean that it accurately reflects what I experienced as beautiful; the writing may be great or so-so — I’m less concerned with that than with rendering a beautiful moment as an act of attention and appreciation. Should it be useful to anyone else — the practice or the content — I’m sharing it here:
Twenty years ago, I was living in Florence, Italy. One weekend, I and an American friend had planned a trip to Prague when, at the last minute, standing in the small but frenetic train station, we changed our minds in favor of Siena, a tiny, ancient town two hours south of Florence.
I was just getting over a crush on my friend, but whether or not he knew that I don’t know. The old woman who ran the hotel we found must have assumed we were a couple because she gave us what was…
