More old diaries. It was such a coincidence to turn to this one this afternoon, because I was just thinking about this meeting not an hour ago while I was driving to the library with the Indigo Girls cranked up to 11, watching the clouds roll in and the heavens open in one of those sudden summer storms.
This one comes from a journal that is mostly blank. The title page reads “Characters: A journal of people both real and fictional.” The few pages are filled with short, undated sketches of characters identified by their first names. All the ones in the journal are of the real variety. I’m thinking this might be fun to reinstate. This sketch comes from a chance encounter I had on the street on a weekend afternoon the summer of 1988 when I was walking home across Philadelphia (something I did a lot) after not being able to get a ticket to see The Last Temptation of Christ. I had walked all the way across the city to get to the theater, but it was sold out. After I turned around to head home, it began to rain.
“Irina”
She’s tiny and neatly dressed, about 80 or so, but I’m not sure if she’s the type to tell you her age. I met her at a bus top near Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia on a rainy summer day. I had the hood of my raincoat down to enjoy the rain. She said, with a heavily accented voice, “You enjoy walking in the rain?”
I nodded.
She continued, “My grandmother used to tell me when I was a little girl — I had very straight hair, and still do — that walking in the rain would make my hair curl. So I used to walk all over and get very wet.” Her hair was very curly and white. I wondered if it was a perm or the rain. I wondered what she was like as a little girl.
She was a Russian immigrant. She’d been in Russia to see the change from czars to communism and two world wars. She was returning from a shopping trip and a movie about South Africa. “Man is not civilized,” she said. “He is a cruel and ferocious beast. You are too young. I have seen war. Seen the Germans run over my country.”
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