The Atlanta Jazz Festival was in gear, with lots of stalls selling delectables, from eats to drinks to tie-died and lushly curved and curling dresses waiting like doughtnuts slathered with chocolate icing to adorn favourite darlings to jewelry that would let arms and ears and fingers play exquisite mischief...
A single bag, imitation hippie, at best, seemed to be at all the stalls. I'd had to carry the items I needed to cover the March in my backpack—my wee camera, a notebook (in case I wanted to interview anyone), sunscreen...
My keys and a pen and pepper spray.
Plus, of course, my plastic card that, although I use as a matter of course now, does not mean I support a cashless society! It's just harder to get cash these days...
I keep five dollars on hand now for Marta emergency money. When the bar-b-que stall wanted cash, I wavered. Left to eat tacos at Willie's—but would return before I left the park to indulge.
Southern girl to the very heart of me, where bar-b-que is concerned, and I see it so seldom.
Knowing I had a post to prepare on the March for another blog, however, I'd started the morning out trying to figure some way to manage a carry-all that did not involve the backpack. So the bag quite caught my eye: it was exactly what I wanted.
Looked like hand-painted fabric squares...
Looked like distressed edges...
I needed one that would be rugged, however, and stand up to a lot of carrying.
The first one I stopped to eye and finger admiringly did seem sturdier than the others. Too, it had extras the others did not have. I guessed the stall owners had added the smart tassels and beads to differentiate their product from that wave of others, likely made by machine to identical items swatched together into infinity...
But I didn't buy until later, after I ate my taco and chips and had time to think that it really was quite okay to buy something I wanted and had a genuine need for.
What surprised (and the reason I write about my new hippie bag) is that it so very much became one of those items that gives a girl new life. Red sports car style.
Haven't quite adored something and felt it let the secret me out in a really long while...I carried it with me Monday when I walked down to Papi's for lunch. Had a Cuban sandwich and an order of sweet plantains and an iced glass of tea, half sugar and half not. The sandwich ended up so large that I ate only a third and carried the other two-thirds to eat in two separate seatings...
I worked up a draft for a new business card, late that lazy afternoon, and then I was back in my bedroom, having missed most of the news and all of M.A.S.H. and The Voice was on and all of a sudden, these two guys (I absolutely had no warning!) are playing the opening notes to Seven Bridges Road...
I live in an apartment. Terrace (pretty word for basement) with two floors (maybe three) overhead. A really old, early 1900's former boarding house, to the best of my thinking—it was never a private home.
EVERYTHING can be heard. Conversations.
Everything.
Eerie, sometimes, to be sitting here minding my own business and all of a sudden out of the middle of nowhere over to the right of my head a girl is...
Well. That thing girls do when they are with a guy that go under the head of things you'd never do otherwise.
And do have something to do with voice but not with singing.
Although, one can suppose that one might regard the sound as singing...
I never sing anymore (and I mean the more literal kind, there). Haven't for years, because of the closeness of the city.
But not sing Seven Bridges Road?
Not possible.
Oh me. It was an abbreviated version, because it was The Voice. They only do abbreviated.
But oh, I miss that song.
My voice is huskier than it used to be. And it's been alto something or 'nother for a long while. Always wished I could have become a singer...
Don't know what my neighbors thought. Be willing to bet they all heard, top and beside and across the street..
And thought it amusing, but nice to hear.
But it all made for a very pleasant holiday.
