More Camels Indeed
Correction: In my last blog, I misidentified Walt. That is not Walt mounting the camel. That was me. Know thyself??
The moral of that story is: 1. Never work when very tired. 2. Wear your stupid glasses. Especially when working with fine details. The original size of this photo is less than 1 ½ X 1 inch. (Yeah. I know. Still locked in the Imperial Empire days of measurement. Truth is, Canada failed to convert most people over the age of, say, 30, when good old Motherland went metric. Still, grocery stores continue to sell by the pound weight.)
— — —
Dateline: Somewhere near the Mediterranean Sea on the North African Coast.
Sometime in 1963.
Slug: An innocent abroad, experiencing life.
We were running late, again – we seem to have done that a lot – and it was dark. We didn’t so much as choose a campsite as simply stop driving and pitch camp. We knew not where we were, other than vaguely, but it was all quiet, flat, and definitely isolated. So, we camped. And flaked out.
This is what we woke up to:
Well! Who were the goats then? And well, sorry, it is an old and faded photo. Sorry, too, for those among us whose memories are fading and have faded. Memories represent life. Comes a time when we become our loved one’s memory. At any rate, our lives at that point underwent a minor shock, as if we’d been experiencing a minor earthquake. Like I said, it was a rare thing indeed if we ever woke up amidst … nobody.
And then, and then…
This is what we were treated to:
A herd of camels – coming straight at us. Do these things never sleep? This old photo represents the view through my eyes — blurry from sleep. And a wake-up call to my blurry memory.
However, things did quieten down.
Now this is more like it. And we were able, eventually, to stroll across that broad square and purchase a few things in a little store there. And through it all, nobody bothered us, as witness the two striding walkers.
By the way, that beat-up old Land Rover, an ex-Brit army vehicle purchased on The Rock of Gibraltar, carried us clean across North Africa, then, via boat to Beirut, all through the Middle East, through Turkey, and on to Greece, where, sadly, our journey ended. I flew on to Rome with my remaining few bucks to meet a friend from home, and Walt eventually sold the Land Rover. He sent me a third of the proceeds. He was a better friend to me than I gave him credit for.
My big regret today (apart from any about the trip itself) is that I didn’t share more fully with my wife and boys. And now, she can’t fully share my memories – and as I say, memories make the man (meaning person) – and worse, she can’t share hers. And my memories of her memories are scanty at best. And that is sad. Please don’t make that mistake.
On the bright side, when I do share photos with her, she recognizes people and places, she smiles, and she caresses pictures of the children.
“Together we trod the boards of life,
Together we share the stage.”
–H. W. Bryce
