Coming home in the Zagreb airport, I looked down at a child’s composition book where he had written in large awkward letters “people are people, everyone matters” – it struck me only insofar as I had just had a bit of an awakening just two nights hence when I had been reminded of the homophobia that exists in Croatia – I thought as I got on the plane that I have embraced my love of…
My masseuse in Zagreb tells me that an Indian folk dancer came and danced in the square and said Croatians are like chickens, everyone walks around saying buck buck buck (Bok Bok Bok).
Everyone is curious to know what Croatia is like – well it’s like this: Wild blue seas, white slabs of rocks, green pine forests, cicadas singing full bore, beautiful people, ugly people, cheese, bread, gnocchi, muesli, coffee, chocolate, Eastern with an eye to Western, buses, taxies, ferries, polite, frowns, dirty, clean, agoraphobic, zenophobic, curious, sunny, fish, coasts, accommodating, claustrophobic, pleasurable, impenetrable, laid back, intelligent, nationalistic, homophobic, delicious, starry, timeless, strange and familiar.
Landing in New Orleans, I had to smile when the flight attendant said without irony “We axe that you continue sitting until the pilot has tooken the seat belt sign off.”
Turning a corner in downtown Zagreb, a tall thin man dressed in black from head to toe approached the street – a chimney sweep – our driver said quick grab a button and make a wish before we pass him.
We make a life for ourselves by carving out a piece of this vast world and rendering it familiar – the house, the car, the dogs, the cat, mother, neighbors, bed, towel and then we go away and experience the strange, while all the time seeing the familiar in our new setting – see it in another dog’s wagging tail, a shopkeeper’s friendliness, and routines around eating, drinking, and having coffee. Right now the memories…
Here in Croatia, we wear a birka, it is an invisible one but no more oppressive than the one that is tangible – this birka is a shroud that covers the fact that we are in love – two women – with each other – we do not touch in public, I do not call her ljubavi within earshot of others, and we act as if we are friends traveling together – because here homophobia…
The dream I had the other night of the Landmark hotel burning and people leaping out the windows was so iconic because it reminded me of the Tarot card for The Tower – the tower is about letting go, about claiming a new path, and that if you hold to rigidly to old ways you will invite destruction – I am here in Zagreb, still with no clothes, still learning a language that sounds as…
When I wake and say dobro jutro to my ljubavi, she turns and says te amo, querida darling, and I hold her in my arms and repeat eres para mi while she tells me volim te and I call her my cuddle bug canim askim, and she says esek, you did not drink your water, and we rise to welcome the world with its myriad tongues that all speak the language of love.
Funny how every design magazine you turn to has some header like European Spa Tub or something like that and yet there is not a bathroom in Europe that has said tub or toilet not to mention a decent shower. It is as if Americans dream of a European experience that only exists in America – oh, how I miss the sturdy toilet, the powerful flush of an American Standard, and a shower higher than…