Now we come to one of those days where not a lot really happened. There were a few of them. Subjectively, plenty was happening: I was 10,000 miles from home, on the outskirts of the mythical city of Baltimore, visiting my friends, in an exciting land of square houses, exploding cars, and cheap petrol (it never occurred to me till now that there might be a connection between the cheap petrol and exploding cars.) In such a place, even a trip to the supermarket, with all its exotic and unknown brands of things is an exciting event. Still, it's perhaps not the sort of event which will have the average reader on the edge of her seat.
From the POV of 'landmark events' I suppose there isn�t a lot to report from this, the end of my first week in America. It was the day before our trip north to Albany Anthrocon, and we just decided to lay back and rest up. I'd had some half-formed plans to chase up Xydexx who lived a few hours drive away, but somehow it didn't come to pass: inertia won out. Kimba spent some time scanning some photos for me (i.e., some of the pics on the HTML version of this story); Neeko was mentally preparing himself for a trip to New Orleans, which, had I not been going to my first furry con at the same time, would have made me jealous.
The weather had clouded over and fallen cool, but the humidity was, if anything, even higher. Kimba and I went for a walk around the neighbourhood which left me beaded with sweat, though it was probably only about 60 degrees - quite an odd experience. During this walk I remember wrestling with the American street-numbering system. Back home, if the last house on a block was #24, the first one of the next block would be #26. Here though, every house managed to have at least a four-digit number - based, Kimba explained, on some sort of grid system: house #42 in block #63 west of somethingorother. Maybe they could extend this grid into a national system, numbering from the north-west to the South-east, so if you lived in Miami you could have an address like 3548602, 3-millionth St. Or maybe addresses would be expressed exponentially by that far south. But then the computer geeks would want addresses like 32K, 16M St, which would mean the postman would have to carry a decimal conversion table.
A couple of other memories from that suburban afternoon: that supermarkets sell those tacky, tabloid gossip magazines full of stories about the English Royal Family (I was sure that piece of pop culture wouldn't have migrated outside the British Commonwealth, but I was wrong.) I bought a sandwich with a funny name. Not 'Hero�, and not 'Sub' (I didn�t come across one of those till San Francisco, where I'd assumed it was a S&M thing.)
That evening we watched some TV. TV is something I rarely watch at home, but for some reason I fall into fits of TV-watching when I travel. Television in America is a daunting thing. We don't have cable in Tasmania (at least, I don't think we do). We have four channels. When I was growing up we had 2 channels (in black&white). Everyone in America seems to have at least 100 channels, or 400+ with a satellite dish. What this seems to mean is you spend most of the time surfing between shows which are half-over when you find them - unless you possess some sort of instinct for weeding out TV programs or programming VCR's - which I don't. That night we watched the Cooking Channel. I wondered what this might eventually lead to, if the number of channels and the rate of specialisation continued to increase. I expect eventually you'll have a food satellite, and you might choose to watch, for instance, the Celery Channel.
There's one other thing which stands out from this, my last night in Maryland. This was the night I first saw a firefly.
It was Robin who called me out to the kitchen to see them. It was late dusk, and fireflies had appeared in the back yard. At first I didn�t see them, then suddenly they were there, flaring into slow, hot, orange arcs against the darkening suburban sky; wonderful, hardly real. I was quite spellbound by them; they touched something deep inside of me, as if a dim echo of my childhood had suddenly returned to life. Was it because, when I was a kid of perhaps 5 or 6, one of my favourite books had been 'Sam and the Firefly'? Down the years now, miraculous impressions and memories congregate around the thought of that book, as if it somehow it holds a key to my childhood. I don�t recall whether I was aware, back in 1969, that the visions in my mind's eye from this beloved story came, in a way, from the far away land of America, where, it seems probable, someone had stood, on a warm evening like this, entranced by the same, slow luminous arcs against the suburban twilight.
