When I was little I used to make up my friends , not imaginary friends, exactly , more like I gave the ability of friendship to animals , and things that realistically wouldn’t care less if I asked them to braid my hair or not , I had a grasshopper named Humphrey who rolled mud cakes with me , and a moth who munched mint leaves alongside side me , it wasn’t the type of stuff you would write a book about , but it worked for me , as we get older our ideas and thoughts change , the age gap between the people we used to look up to and , even revere, somehow quietly starts to shrink until one day we find ourselves strangley contemporaries , and often sadly our heroes simply become human.
This isn’t always a bad thing , we learn from the fall of our heroes, depending on who they are in our life : sometimes super man turns out to just be your big brother , and wonderwoman after a few years is , simply, your mom, and yes she is just as confused as you, but maybe somewhere in the process you become friends .
Its been a really long time since I made mud pies with a grasshopper , or chewed on mint leaves with a moth , but I have been fortunate to have some good friendships over the years , and even though on occasion my heroes have been de-masked , I find I’m still grateful for the time in-between .
Still if traveling has taught me anything , it’s that you can absolutely make friends with anyone anywhere,… even with anything, the first to greet me when I got off the plane in Lima was not even a person , it was a blue thread wrapped over and over again around a girls thick black hair, she had the darkest hair I had ever seen in my life , darker than ink on a white page and here was this blue thread just waving through the crowd till it was out of my line of sight . Sometimes images leave more of an imprint on our minds than we can ever forget, I would like to think that I wasn’t fazed but the sight of blue thread will forever be the color of the Andes for me , everywhere I’ve gone I never failed to see this blue thread, In the mountains in Cuzco the women work from sunrise in their traditional dress: felt hats, wool coats and pleated skirts of deep royal blue velvet spin like tops as the women wash clothes, tend to animals, and children, or fetch water . When I traveled farther inland the skirts were strait and the hair was fixed differently but the skirts were of another deep and beautiful shade of blue , the old buildings in Cuenca are often trimmed in blue, people tell me its the color of the virgin but I think it’s really the color of the people.
Every where I go , everywhere I look I find this little bit of blue thread reminding me where I’ve gone, sometimes , even, without asking,
The other day after I picked up my clothes from the laundry I noticed a rather long thread of royal blue hanging from my brown scarf , every washer woman has her way, but as I continued to look through my clothes I found that everything had been sewn or otherwise marked with a little bit of blue thread , I couldn’t help but smile it might have been twenty years since I felt the way I did making mud pies , but that’s how I felt when I found all this blue thread , maybe batman is really just a man in black socks and wonder woman burns your toast , or breaks your heart , whatever. I have found greater joy,and even kindness, in a simple blue thread .
BCT & Friends touring Lima, Cuzco, Aguascalientes, Machu Picchu Peru
