experiences

Highly recommended food experience: a whole grain roll, cut in half, each half topped with herbed cream cheese, swiss cheese and a slice of fresh tomato. Eaten as an open-faced sandwich for breakfast, lunch or snack. Craig introduced me to this food combo when I stayed with him in Munich, and I just had it again for lunch and it was WONDERFUL.

There's another experience I wanted to share with you, a moment in Oporto when life itself seemed a metaphor.

It happened on Saturday when Leslie and I were roaming around the south bank of the river and trying to find a way up the cliff to the top part of the Eiffel bridge. We were walking west on a road that curved up the mountain; to the left was uphill and to the right downhill.

I heard a noise like metal clanking on metal and looked down over the guardrail. I saw a seagull trapped in a narrow space between the back of a little building and the retaining wall that the road was built on. The gap was just wide enough to admit the bird, but not wide enough to let it spread its wings.

The bird was pacing back and forth along the gap, tripping over cans and bottles and whatever else had found its way down into the gap. The walls on either side were too high for the bird to jump up on, and since it couldn't spread its wings it couldn't fly out either. The seagull was trapped.

Our hearts went out to it, but after some examination of the situation we discovered that there was no way we could help it. The gap was closed off by a shed on one end and by a metal wall on the other. There was no one around to talk to, no gate we could open, nothing we could lower to the bird, not even any food to throw to it. There was nothing we could do ourselves and no one whose aid we could enlist.

Whether through stupidity or bad luck, the bird had fallen into a trap, and it was doomed to pace back and forth in its grave until it died of thirst, hunger, cold or exhaustion.

It's a hard thing to accept...to see a creature in a pitiful situation and want to help but be powerless. It reminded me of someone I knew years ago who was not emotionally healthy. I wanted to help her, but the more I tried to help the worse it got. Rather than helping her, I was just entangling myself in a sick power game.

Eventually what I realized was that there was nothing I could do that would truly help the person. She had to decide to help herself. In the meantime, the most I could do was to distance myself from the situation and stop being her friend. She was really angry with me for making that decision, which I understood, but I believe it was the right decision.

The seagull is a little different in that it was clearly trying to help itself: it was looking for a way out and every so often it tried to jump up and find purchase on the pipes running along the wall. But the fact remains that it was stuck and we couldn't help. It seemed a commentary on fate itself: fate is unavoidable, sometimes cruel and seemingly senseless.