Mini-Redemptions # 3
Sunday, October 4th, 2009
New Year's Day 1996: Photo courtesy of Edgar Arredondo
When I finished my degree I stayed on at Lancaster for a year in the picturesque little village of Galgate. It was a year of transition – I had met a very sexy Portuguese girl, fallen in love, and we decided to stay in Lancaster for another year to see how things would go. She opted to do a Master’s Degree in Environmental Philosophy, I started to work writing and defining songs. The arrival of Edgar Arredondo in our lives was a profound event. He had come from Mexico to do the Master’s and he ended up sharing a house with my girlfriend, Tess. Beautiful, and athletic, philosopher and poet, and with a magnetism that draws everyone who meets him deep inside, we were blessed to count him as a close friend. We used to visit the Lake District regularly, and this photo was taken there on the first day of 1996. That same winter we ecstatically built a snowman. Here’s a text I wrote about that night:
A Snowman to The Bird-Howling Seas
In Galgate, drawn from our coal-fire in the wee small hours, half-stoned and drunk, we stumbled through the narrow streets and over fences to the primary school playground. And we all started in our ways, each in our own excitement, kindling our own memories of childhood, rolling up these massive balls of snow. The night was gentle, and hazy pink, the kind of cold that’s perfect if you wrap up warmly, the kind of night that lingers into dreams. We rolled and tripped and tumbled, hollered and laughed and then, with renewed seriousness, built the biggest snowman I have ever seen. Four great balls and then the sculpting began – arms, feet and then a carrot for his nose, coal for his eyes, a scarf and a wooly hat. Refreshed with such a magical taste of life and friendship at its most joyful, we parted ways and went off to sleep for a while.
The children must have been amazed when they arrived a few hours later. When we passed, anonymously, later on, we saw that the teachers had protected the snowman with traffic cones. And as we wondered what stories were going on in these young minds about this mysterious apparition – how did he get there? did he walk? was it a spaceship that brought him? was it magic? – we went walking up past the old graveyard to the campus. I was lost in my own daydream trying to imagine the first ever snowman, and every other snowman that’s ever been made. I saw them melting down, drifting, drifting down into the water, into the rivulets and streams that would lead them to teeming rivers, and, finally, to rest in the wild, bird-howling seas.