This was from the opening night of a show Chris designed for a theater in Portland Maine.  She had an apartment and I had flown up for opening night.  She wore this dress for the first time, which I bought her last summer when I went to Europe.  She was designing for a series of parades at the time, and was to be gone four months.  I decided to use some savings I had, and went to Europe alone.  I was in Florence, and basically broke, but I saw this dress in a vintage store and bought it.  It wasn't at all expensive, like maybe 30 euros, but since I think I had about 60 euros total, and still had two days in Florence and then the train back to Paris, it was expensive to me.   I thought it was made for her though, and it was actually a defunct Florence label from the sixties, so I think it was worth it.  Later that night, I was doing what I did every evening, which was to take a bottle of wine and sit on a bridge over the Arno and watch the swifts and swallows come out in acrobatic masses to feed at twilight.  It was June, and sweltering, and the sweat from walking all day would evaporate in the breeze.  

I was wondering whether our sense of time is fundamentally different in America, since we are such a young country.  For example, the bridge I was sitting on is two hundred years older than our constitution.  So, I was thinking that it could be a qualitatively different sense of placement in history that you would have if you were a product of such a place, rather than growing up in a country where almost nothing is built for it's inherent beauty, but firstly for it's economic value, and is quickly replaced if it becomes financially unproductive.  I guess what is bad about that is obvious, but I will say that Florence and other parts of Italy felt really stifling.. like it was stuck in amber as a thing to be observed and not experienced newly and directly.  Maybe it was just the weight of centuries of great art bearing down.  An artist I talked to hated living there, and longed to move here to New York, for just that reason.  So, I don't know how much we are affected culturally by living in interchangeable cities.  It occurred to me that what I was watching- birds feeding at twilight when the bugs are out and the air is cooler, skimming along the river and plucking insects off the surface- was the same as when the first version of that bridge was built in the 1200s, and is the same as I've seen all my life here in America, and will be the same a thousand years from now if we've managed not to kill them all yet. 

I was talking about this with a guy sitting next to me who turned out to be Andre 3000 from Outkast.  I didn't realize it until some girls came up and asked for a photo with him, and then I recognized him.  He was in town because it was fashion week there, and he was starting a clothing line, and that evening he was alone.  We talked a while longer, and then he left, and I sat there for a while longer, and then wandered back to my non-air-conditioned cubicle in the cheapest hostel I could find.