Prettiness’ got nothing to do about it, we discovered. It’s about the desperation you show to get on to the said bus and your willingness to dash to the middle of the road and stand intrepidly on its way.
But I am getting ahead of chronology here. It all starts with the way Peoria has been showing off to a pretty girl called Monjima. There’s no other way to describe it.
I mean, how often do you walk into the neighborhood mall and into approximately 10 live tigers, from the Siberian feline to the pitch-black puma? How often do you run into an Irish festival, complete with Guinness and folk music, when you are just out on a walk? How often do you saunter at 10 pm at night on the main street of Peoria and encounter five people holding up placards decrying the war and lustily asking to get the troops back home? Seriously—10 pm in the night?
Don’t even get me started on the weather—it’s been unrelentingly hovering in the 90s the past three months; now that Monjima is here, it’s at mild seventies, there’s a nippy and crisp breeze, the Illinois river is a deluge of a million diamonds, and the moon is all champagne colored and the size of 2.5 footballs!
The big show off!
Encouraged by all this, we decided to push the envelope last evening. We went to walk along Peoria’s showcase Grand View drive—it’s a lovely stretch of road on a hill hanging over the river and affords some of the prettiest views in Peoria. It’s also lined with beautiful houses and some quaint shops, making it all look more European than American.
Am I to be blamed then, for wanting to read poetry when we sat looking at the river in one of those little nooks? Wasn’t it clever of me to have had the forethought to buy an anthology of poems and heart-warming short stories, minutes before hitting the nook? (It’s a used book I got for a song worth two dollars!)
So we sat there, watching the sun dappling the foliage, the bees droning, and the silence deepening. We read poetry. Boy, did Robert Browning get it right when he wrote:
“The year's at the spring
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hillside's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his heaven –
All's right with the world!”
(I swear it was in the book I bought—talk about precognition!)
Time passed us, unnoticed, or rather, uncared for. We let the bus we’d planned to catch go. So what if the next bus was an hour away? There was so much to discover, including the fact that garlic has really pretty but vile smelling flowers.
It’s not that we didn’t get back to the bus stop in time. It’s not that Monji didn’t try to stop the bus by “wildly gesticulating”, as she puts it. It’s just that the bus driver didn’t notice us two pretty girls. He just zoomed away.
We looked at each other, disbelieving and nonplussed. It was getting to be 8:00 pm. All the shops around us were closed. We didn’t carry cell phones. We were miles away from either the hotel or the nearest bus terminus. The next bus in the opposite direction was at least half hour away, but what’s the guarantee that it will stop?
We decided to call for a taxi, but from where? From Oliver’s pub and restaurant of course. We walked in—it was a quintessential pub, all wood, with jukebox, pool table, nice lady bartender, couple of formidable matriarchs, and a group of tattooed men. We called for the taxi, drank a couple of iced teas (shameful, I know), and got out to ambush the taxi.
But to no avail…
No taxi in sight. We waited, peered at every passing car with renewed hope to be dashed yet again, walked up and down the road, tapped our foots impatiently, grew a little nervous and swore with increasing intensity.
So you can imagine our desperation when the bus turned the corner. Monji literally pushed me into the road, I ran to the middle of it, and waved like crazy.
And that’s how we got the answer to the question I asked at the beginning of this piece.
But I am getting ahead of chronology here. It all starts with the way Peoria has been showing off to a pretty girl called Monjima. There’s no other way to describe it.
I mean, how often do you walk into the neighborhood mall and into approximately 10 live tigers, from the Siberian feline to the pitch-black puma? How often do you run into an Irish festival, complete with Guinness and folk music, when you are just out on a walk? How often do you saunter at 10 pm at night on the main street of Peoria and encounter five people holding up placards decrying the war and lustily asking to get the troops back home? Seriously—10 pm in the night?
Don’t even get me started on the weather—it’s been unrelentingly hovering in the 90s the past three months; now that Monjima is here, it’s at mild seventies, there’s a nippy and crisp breeze, the Illinois river is a deluge of a million diamonds, and the moon is all champagne colored and the size of 2.5 footballs!
The big show off!
Encouraged by all this, we decided to push the envelope last evening. We went to walk along Peoria’s showcase Grand View drive—it’s a lovely stretch of road on a hill hanging over the river and affords some of the prettiest views in Peoria. It’s also lined with beautiful houses and some quaint shops, making it all look more European than American.
Am I to be blamed then, for wanting to read poetry when we sat looking at the river in one of those little nooks? Wasn’t it clever of me to have had the forethought to buy an anthology of poems and heart-warming short stories, minutes before hitting the nook? (It’s a used book I got for a song worth two dollars!)
So we sat there, watching the sun dappling the foliage, the bees droning, and the silence deepening. We read poetry. Boy, did Robert Browning get it right when he wrote:
“The year's at the spring
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hillside's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his heaven –
All's right with the world!”
(I swear it was in the book I bought—talk about precognition!)
Time passed us, unnoticed, or rather, uncared for. We let the bus we’d planned to catch go. So what if the next bus was an hour away? There was so much to discover, including the fact that garlic has really pretty but vile smelling flowers.
It’s not that we didn’t get back to the bus stop in time. It’s not that Monji didn’t try to stop the bus by “wildly gesticulating”, as she puts it. It’s just that the bus driver didn’t notice us two pretty girls. He just zoomed away.
We looked at each other, disbelieving and nonplussed. It was getting to be 8:00 pm. All the shops around us were closed. We didn’t carry cell phones. We were miles away from either the hotel or the nearest bus terminus. The next bus in the opposite direction was at least half hour away, but what’s the guarantee that it will stop?
We decided to call for a taxi, but from where? From Oliver’s pub and restaurant of course. We walked in—it was a quintessential pub, all wood, with jukebox, pool table, nice lady bartender, couple of formidable matriarchs, and a group of tattooed men. We called for the taxi, drank a couple of iced teas (shameful, I know), and got out to ambush the taxi.
But to no avail…
No taxi in sight. We waited, peered at every passing car with renewed hope to be dashed yet again, walked up and down the road, tapped our foots impatiently, grew a little nervous and swore with increasing intensity.
So you can imagine our desperation when the bus turned the corner. Monji literally pushed me into the road, I ran to the middle of it, and waved like crazy.
And that’s how we got the answer to the question I asked at the beginning of this piece.
Comments
You hit the cresendo with: "...there’s a nippy and crisp breeze, the Illinois river is a deluge of a million diamonds, and the moon is all champagne colored..."
Keep writing, you've earned a permanent admirer.