Guadalupe

My writer's strike is over, less because of a magical dissolution of the feelings that led me to stop than a realization that moments are starting to pass me by. I'm writing because of the sound of church bells.

Before I went to Europe in the summer of 2005, I asked a photographer exhibiting incredible pictures of the forgotten architecture of the Alpine countries at the Tri-Rivers Arts festival for the most important piece of advice he could give me. His reply?

"Always look up."

If the theme for Europe is "always look up," the motto of Buenos Aires seems to be "never look up." On top of the pick pockets, huge crowds and homicidal maniac drivers, I'm convinced that BsAs has th largest dog poop to sidewalk ratio of any city outside of Asia (I've never been to Asia, so I can't say.) If you find yourself enjoying the scenery and don't get hit by a car or rammed into by a business woman, you'll step in crap. It's a law.

So it happened that I'd walked to the corner café a block from my new apartment. It was called Guadalupe, which I misread to say Guatemala, and assumed it was so named because it sits at the corner of Medrano, Paraguay and Guatemala. I was sitting in the seventy-two degree afternoon air with a stack of reading and a cup of tea when I heard the bells begin to ring.

I'd heard the bells before, they reached my old apartment on breezy days, but this sounded closer. Setting down a truly un-engrossing article, I remembered that the Cathedral was a couple of blocks from my new place, so I might be able to see it from where I sat. I looked over my shoulder across the street and realized that I was sitting a highlighter's throw from Guadalupe herself, explaining why the Holy Mother's picture was on the napkins. How do you walk adjacent to and then sit for an entire afternoon across from a cathedral and not realize it?

Sitting there, watching the pigeons and wondering what the stained glass looked like from the inside, I realized that I'd let all the dogshit in this city keep me from seeing the sacred among the profane.

I'm not writing for you. Not one of you is so busy that you can't spend ten minutes once a month to let me know how you are and that you think of me at all. I'm writing this to remember. And if you happen to read it once a month when you're bored and have run out of other ways to waste time online, well? I can't stop you.