Floozies and Toast

A travel memoir by Trent Waterman

It's sunny today. It's never sunny.

Perched up on a curving concrete outline of the steps leading down from Victoria Square in Birmingham, I sat uncomfortably, my legs lying out in front of me, back rigid against the concrete. Victoria Square is the site of a several interests, notably Birmingham's town hall and the curious “Floozy in the Jacuzzi”; a massive water feature by sculptor Dhruva Mistry affectionately nicknamed so by the locals. Out of concern, I later looked up the definition of a floozy, as if it wasn't obvious enough, learning that the woman posed in the fountain was one of questionable sexual morals, which is to say, a prostitute. Who would've guessed?

I don't know if I would necessarily want to put a big statue of a prostitute in my town centre, but I suppose that's just personal preference.

As the late-morning sun rose into the sky and crept onto the Floozy's breasts, each bright glimmer on the water seemed to heighten the mood in the air exponentially, due in part, I think, to the fact that it was Friday. My senses told me that this was England, but it really could've been anywhere.

A woman began to retrieve something from the backpack of her blind friend. She pulled out a map, and I stared perplexedly. Why does a blind woman have a map? I wonder.

A younger man wheeled an older man, maybe his father, down the widening sidewalk. Perhaps, while he expertly maneuvered his cargo, he is thinking back to a day when his father used to push him in a shopping cart down the supermarket aisles. The older man looked groggy; his crinkly eyes watched the pigeons on the steps.

Joining in on the bird-watch, I noticed one pigeon carefully descending down the stairs, taking one at a time, with exactly the same caution that elderly people use when climbing out of high cars. I instantly noticed this likeness and pulled up my head, looking around to see if anyone else saw it, too. No one did.

A businessman fed his face from a McDonald's bag as he hurried by, almost running into a woman walking with loud shoes in the opposing direction. She click-clacked by me, heels drumming a steady tempo on the brick. I liked the sound of her walking away, a decrescendo in a city that could benefit from more silences.

Really, I could've been anywhere. I don't know if pigeons have different behavioral patters on this side of the ocean. They might. Perhaps blind people here can read maps, too. But in watching these scenes unfolding like a storybook that reads through in any order, I noticed how alike Birmingham is to any large American city, at least in appearances. For a moment I couldn't help feeling a little dissatisfied with the place, as if I had come here expecting to be entertained by some amusing wealth of culture shock.

Fortunately there are things besides appearances, and even the most mundane happenings will, to me, always retain a certain entertainment value that is unparalleled by anything I've seen on TV.

In recalling such empty events turned interesting, I think back to my time in Liverpool. Liverpool, as chance would have it, was recently named the European Capital of Culture 2008, but during my short visit I found the title to be a bit illusory, if untrue. I couldn't quite grasp the idea of such a quick turnaround from its previous bestowment, Capital of Homeless People 2007 (a title I awarded). Nonetheless, it was a fine city with fine people, homeless or not. I have no qualms about its inhabitants; I just found their unfamiliar technique of preparing toast a bit disorienting.

It was on a gorgeous morning in Liverpool that I found myself nervously holding a lit match up to a gas-emitting grill that did not belong to me. With a soft whoosh, the gas grill caught flame as I pulled away my right hand, setting the smoking match in the empty sink. At this exact moment, I felt like the only person in the world that wasn't preoccupied with the monotonous grind of daily living. While others were likely tending to thoughts that needed organizing, or dreading the start of the day's labors, I was alive. I was here, in Liverpool. I wanted to make toast.

To my absolute contentment on this particular morning, the English sunlight decided to make a rare appearance; its rays fell down like molten threads in a loosely knit blanket, weaving their way through the leaves of a kitchen-table houseplant and falling on my arms with reassuring warmth. The houseplant sitting on the table windowsill did not belong to me, nor did anything else in the house. I was a guest in a stranger's home, a captive of my own good manners and polite small talk until the moment I walked out the door.

In this unfamiliar kitchen, I recall putting the two slices of bread on the gas grill (no one here owns a toaster, it seems), and then paced with lazy steps around the compact kitchen. Taking full advantage of my idle time, I traced out impossible faces with my finger on the foggy windowpane, and soon forgot about the toast and the gas grill and how hungry I was; full instead with the pride of a clever artist, engrossed in my work. It all came rushing back to memory though, when my nose caught the scent of burning food. I whipped my body around, like a shark suddenly sensing the smell of blood. Verbalizing a few choice expletives almost inaudibly, as to not offend anyone within range, I situated the blackened remains on a plate, and knifed on gobs of blackcurrant jam, foolishly trying to rescue something that had given up long ago.

When I was younger, I used to burn my toast with amazing frequency. My mother used to take a knife to scrape off all the black into the sink, before handing it back to me. At the time I didn't know if she thought I hadn't seen the burnt toast earlier; that perhaps I'd forget about it's previously-charred condition during those few seconds of knife-scraping, but the idea of eating broken & repaired food was upsetting, and it never tasted as good. Nevertheless, I reluctantly adopted this same trick and used it for a few years until I eventually mastered the toaster.

(Nowadays my toast is never burnt. Look in the sink for proof.)

Before my time in Liverpool, I wouldn't have guessed that my run-in with burnt toast would reign over The Beatles Experience museum for the front row seat in my memory. Equally, before my time spent living and studying in Birmingham, I couldn't have imagined just how “Americanized” the city really would be, either. But here we are.

And the fact that we can envision new places like these before we truly see them, walking our minds though not-yet-lived experiences, is a quiet murmur of inspiration. Our own imagination is all too eager to spill out and fill in every dimple of uncertainty; responding to those questions that the heart asks but the mind doesn't have a clear answer to. And so, naturally, it feels simplest to preconceive the kind of future we are happiest with; one saturated with the anxiousness to see our expectations and desires satisfied.

This habit of presumption, I've found, can often generate some very childish notions. For a little while I half-expected that everyone in the streets of Liverpool would be relentlessly whistling Beatles' tunes, the street musicians happily strumming the chords to Hey Jude as I walked past. Sadly, no such luck.

But even after recognizing what silly things our imaginations are capable of concocting, there still lies a haunting question: Can reality ever live up to the one we've imagined?