In Slow Motion

About mid-way through yesterday afternoon, I was beginning to feel exhausted. I had worked until nearly midnight the night before, and continued all morning at full speed. Even my lunch break had only been short.

So I decided to take some time off and go for a stroll. There is an Italian ice-cream parlor about 10 minutes' walk from my office, so my plan was to go there, fetch an ice and then walk around the city for a little while before returning to work.

It was a beautiful day, very hot and just right for ice cream. I got two scoops in a cornet and then, instead of going for a stroll straight off, I decided to sit on the bench outside the ice-cream parlor and eat my ice there.


There are two park benches on the sidewalk outside the ice-cream parlor, and they are always full of people eating ice-cream, no matter what time of day it is. I've never sat there before so it was a new experience. All kinds of people sit on the benches, old people, young kids, children with their parents, middle-aged people like me. Some people sit in groups or families, others are just on their own. It's like a big ice-cream-eating family.

After a moment or two, I looked down and saw a page of a book lying on the sidewalk. It looked like it had been there a while, and possibly in the rain. I bent down and picked up the page, thinking, someone has lost one page of their book, how strange. I started reading it and it was pretty good, I have to say! When I got to the bottom of the page I turned it over and read the other side, and then unfortunately when I got to the end of that, where it stopped in the middle of a sentence, well that was it, there was no more. I thought, I wish I knew which book the page had come from, because I would buy it and read it.

I kept the page and got up and walked down the street. I still had some ice-cream left. And then a little way past the ice-cream parlor, I saw another page of the book lying on the sidewalk.

I picked that up too and continued walking. And then I saw that there were more and more pages on the sidewalk. I picked them all up. I even found the cover of the book, so I now know what the book is called. And as I continued walking, another pedestrian, who was also Italian judging by his accent, called out to me, "Have you managed to lose a whole book?"

I explained to him that I was just picking up the pages I was finding because the book was interesting and he asked me what kind of a book it was, whether it was a novel, and I nodded. The man walked on and I put all the pages I had found inside the cover. I thought, I have seldom just had such a spontaneous, funny conversation with a complete stranger on the street like that before. It was odd but nice and it gave me a bit of a light-headed and happy feeling.

I walked to the end of the street where there is an old large stone church, a very impressive and interesting building. I walked all around the church and tried all the doors, but as is so often the case, the church was locked. There were two large stone domes on the ground outside the front of the church. I suddenly had a childish urge to climb up one of the domes. Simply because they were there and I felt like it. It is a busy street and there were lots of people about and I am middle-aged and I knew I would look strange but I couldn't stop myself. So I climbed up and stood on the dome.

I thought of jumping off it but I have arthritis in my knee so that wouldn't have done it any good. So I climbed down again and then climbed up onto the other dome. At that moment an elderly lady walked past and said to me "Don't fall down! Or you'll be a fallen girl", which is quite a witty joke for an elderly lady to produce spontaneously on a hot day. I laughed and climbed down again.

And then I went back to the office, resisting the temptation to buy a second ice-cream on the way. I had a sense of complete elation, and happiness, as if I had eaten or drunk or consumed something that had given me a wonderful feeling which nobody or nothing could take away from me.