Monday, July 10, 2006

• Edited to add that I did not take those pictures myself.  :)  What I really wanted was a good shot of the row houses on Delaware Ave, near Virginia, but I couldn't find one.  It was the back side of those houses, seen from Virginia Place, that got me started on my London musings. And that church photo makes it look like it's in the middle of an open expanse of suburbia.  I don't know how they edited out all the surrounding buildings, but it's actually crammed into an urban street.
  

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  I confess I watched the World Cup exclusively for the eye candy, but isn't that reason enough?

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  Why Buffalo, NY is a lot like London.
  

  I've never even been to London, so the following paragraphs will probably be a grand exercise in fatuousness, but I've read so many novels set in London, I almost feel like I've been there. Obviously, much of Buffalo is nothing like London. Then again, I'm sure there's much of London that is nothing like the idealized picture of it I carry in my head. If I could visit just one city in the world it would be London. (Mad Scientist—damn his luck—will be spending a week in London next April because the Charlottesville High School Orchestra has been invited to perform at a music festival there.)

  
  

  My Uncle's funeral was held at St. Louis', an old downtown church—one of those massive and ornate structures with impossible openwork stone lace on its spire.
  

  
  

  
  

  

  
  

  This is called a pierced spire, and the church's website claims it's the only one in the United States. It was a rainy day, the funeral procession crept down narrow streets crowded with old row houses and cool apartment buildings, and what you could see of the sky was cluttered with church spires and chimney pots. After mass, we made our way through more downtown streets to an ancient and decrepit hall on Franklin Street for the funeral breakfast. We parked on a narrow side lane and followed a man through down an alley and through an old gate which led us to the hall's entrance. The man, also headed for the breakfast, paused to hold the door for us and commented, “Well done.”

  It's a weak argument, but the dripping trees, tiny alleys, and old buildings really gave the impression of being someplace other than prosaic, blue-collar Buffalo.

  A few more Buffalo pictures:

    
  

  
  

  I had to stop reading Midnight's Children. Sorry, Salman, but writing that is as intentionally symbolic as yours is just annoying. I can't believe I wasted much of my vacation time wrestling through 324 pages of this book before I finally said, “What the hell am I doing?”

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