Yesterday I stopped by Bob Slate’s to pick up a new brush and some acrylic paint. The nice thick kind that comes in tubes, not that thin watery stuff. Also looking at the painting supplies was an elegant and beautiful woman, perhaps sixty years old. She wore a long dull green coat and a fur hat. A friend greeted her, her voice ranging over an octave and half in the course of eleven words: “Mary, how ARE you? It is so good to see you!” Mary, at a lower and more compressed pitch range, but with the melody rising at the end of the phrase: “Wonderful, except that I just MUST find a good chiropractor for my dog. Can you recommend one?”
Strange customs in my new country! I will have to tell my friends back in Reykjavik.
By the way, it is 27 degrees Fahrenheit in Reykjavik and 21 here in Cambridge. My emigration to southern latitudes is full of surprises!
HH
PS. The weather has been horrid (see photo below). So I decided to check some numbers: Reykjavik is at 64 degrees North latitude, Cambridge, Massachusetts is at 42. Rome is at 41 degrees North! So what have I done wrong!! I doubt that my Italian friends are suffering like this. In fact, I know they are not: it is 59 degrees there, 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and they are all at the local bar talking, drinking coffee, and ogling the passersby. From time to time they whistle, or break into song – or so I imagine. Time to review my emigration documents!
Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 2011
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