Back to Faraway Places....

Have you ever had one of those moments, where you're reading an article, a book, or suddenly see a visual and you ask yourself 'out loud' - "Why am I not doing this?"

I had one of those today, while I was reading a chapter from The Piano Tuner, a beautifully written told by a blind man, and how he became blind on the rough shores of northern Africa. A story of a piano turner, specializing in tuning rare French Eduar pianos is called to Africa on a "mission." A rare mission. So many ducks and turns and twists and passions along the way.

Story after story, image after image - the coarse sands blowing against your face. It reminded me of a journey when I was hitchhiking in the Middle East, somewhere along the Lebanese border and ran into a German with long flowing hair, a warm creative face, a backsack a quarter the size of mine and a guitar. We hitched together for a few hours, until the sun set and we were forced to pitch our tents in the dark.

It was only the next morning that we realized we had made camp in the middle of a banana plantation along the beach - warm morning water was washing up against our tents, our faces, our hands, all of us, as if washing away the stress of the unknown, which was so part of our daily lives at the time.

We woke with the sun beating on our faces, our legs beneathe our sleeping bags submerged with water, salt water from the rolling morning waves. Soft but present. We were also intertwined with seaweed from the sea, as the rubbery wet texture wrapped around our arms and in his case, the head.

After a moment of panic, we laughed, looked around, pointed to a handful of sand crabs and latent large banana peels, and he said to me in his broken English, "I wonder if we're in Lebanan or Israel." We had no idea or cared. He took out his guitar and started to sing, and there we sat until late-afternoon until we embarked on yet another adventure, this time, sans a coast line.