The Chronicles of Pimlico

Tonight I'm walking. Tonight it's Mill Avenue - and the gentle rain has smeared together all the colors and lights and made downtown Tempe one bright, bleeding, exciting, chaotic mess. Surprisingly unlike the sky you've dressed up for the evening... one bright milky eye and her ebony neck adorned with lustrous pearl. Leaning against one particularly carved and beat-up tree and pulling my faded jacket closer to keep out the chill, I fit in nicely with my surroundings. A few dreds later and I could be jamming on an old threadbare guitar with the hobo fellas down the way. Focus, Hannah, focus.

I constitute the prayer team this evening, and am on the Avenue for a reason.... the Gospel. Stationing myself just out of range of suspicion, I plant my two feet firmly into the pavement and do my best to listen in on the girls' conversation with an unlikely couple on the street corner.

15 minutes later were done, and I glance back for a moment at two people who have just heard the news of their lives. There's surprisingly little jumping going on - and it makes me wonder about you sometimes. Why make me free? I'm of no merit and relatively little use to you. Why me?

The girls' eyes are bright, their steps brisk as they pace past me. The reverie breaks and I jog to catch up and catch the moment's conversation.

'He seemed pretty receptive at first, right?'
'I thought so, but she was listening pretty intently...'
'I know, and I loved that verse you quoted... where was that?!'

My personal favorites are next - the hobo slash hippie slash really fun homeless people. Jack is noodling some pensive tune to our left; to the right some slicked-back preppy student is unwisely picking a fight with another particularly feisty one of them. Somehow my ingenious mother remembered a kind and mysterious gift of several Starbucks gift cards someone had left on our doorstep... pretty soon I'm flying back across the street with eager orders from the posse for hot chocolates and straight black coffees, leaving a couple brave girls to befriend them in the meantime.

Twenty long minutes later we're back, bearing gifts... and Meredith is busy listening to some elaborate and highly amusing shpeel that somehow connected Jesus, reincarnation, and the supernatural workings of certain healing "herbs". Finally...

'Thanks,' drawled our verbose preacher friend - 'not many people care to sit and listen to what we have to say. Keep blessing people.' Meredith's confused countenance suddenly brightens. We hug them goodbye.

'Just remember,' Jack calls after us, 'Jesus was a vagabond, too.'

Days like these make me love the world I live in. It's a desperate thing, and wants loving. Its own unloveliness, though, is its own ally... for all who weren't serious about doing so retract their outreach quickly upon contact. Loving something just the way it is; that's no small thing. It takes some time to see things through.

Reminds me of him and reminds me of you.

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Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing - say Pimlico (a resort in London formerly celebrated for its many pubs, ale, cakes, etc.) It is not enough for a man to disapprove of imlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Not, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico, for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved. ...

The man will improve the place who loves it without a reason.

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It's always good strong night before these moments come. The ancients said that the moon lured the loons outside... when the sun in all its revealing splendor had set and the "common" man - historic regulator of the "normal" - to his safe, normal little abode and safe, normal little bed (simply another form of lunacy)... forth they would flock, dancing upon the well-walked stones that held no place for them in the day, bathing in the dark light of Hanwell. Tonight I carry on the tradition and watch the gibbous moon, drunken and reeling across her canvas of night. She smiles rather understandingly back at me, and sends a few extra rays by way of lightyear to play tricks in my head and across the lawn.

The busy tempo of swing music wafts out from the dance hall just across the patio; from my picnic table bench a few strains greet me, mixing with the little breezes, tugging on wisps of hair and scarf and adding to the general otherworldliness of the moment. Distracting from the tone are the pair of couples situated in the grass - both intent on showing the other up in a playful competition of aerial dance moves. Oh! She's in his arms, now she's down.. did he really just throw her? Down again, her feet planted - the next routine begins. Any other day I'd be in the thick of it - laughing and jumping, allowing one or two gentlemen to inadvertently drop me on occasion, and adding to the racket.

In my head now I'm everywhere else. (I shouldn't make a habit of prolonging my stay there.) Running. Running. I can't get the picture out of my head... head to the sky, legs coursing, arms flailing, gloriously breathless. I know something's waiting at the finish line, 'cause there's a knowing smile across my face and fire in my veins.

Tonight my reason drives me mad. The heavens and their intricacies refuse to bend themselves into my head, or organize themselves in the lines I have drawn for them... and what's more, my actual, practical, for-real life isn't either. More irritating still.

'Every man must choose his world.' How can I when I am so uncomfortably suspended between the two given me?

I stand forever between the dreaming and the coming true.

Someone grabs my hand and pulls me up off my bench and towards the dance floor. My eyes stray back to the rays of moonshine behind me. She laughs at me the age-old laugh. My old Spanish professor would say 'Mas sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo.' (The devil knows more for being old than for being the devil.) She knows I'll never quite make sense of it, and grins quite knowledgeably at the "troubles" of youth. Perhaps that is the magical and frustrating glory of living.

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It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed and then cried:

"I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land that I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till know. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in!"

He shook his mane and sprang forward into a great gallop - a Unicorn's gallop, which in our world, would have carried him out of sight in a few moments. But now a most strange thing happened. Everyone else began to run, and they found, to their astonishment that they could keep up with him: not only the Dogs and the humans but even fat little Puzzle and Poggin the dwarf. The air flew in their faces as if they were driving fast in a car without a wind screen. The country flew past as if they were seeing it from the windows of an express train. Faster and faster they raced, but no one got hot or tired or out of breath.

If one could run without getting tired, I don't think one would often want to do anything else.