(pdf + mp3) The Best Girlfriend You Never Had

angelweishan · 发表于 2010-7-30 18:34:41

马上注册，结交更多好友，享用更多功能，让你轻松玩转社区。

您需要登录才可以下载或查看，没有账号？注册

x

本帖最后由 angelweishan 于 2010-7-31 18:57 编辑

Author: Pam Houston
mp3 + pdf

The Best Girlfriend You Never Had

FROM Other Voices

A PERFECT DAY in the city always starts like this: my friend Leo picks me up and we go to a breakfast place called Rick and Ann's where they make red flannel hash out of beets and bacon, and then we cross the Bay Bridge to the gardens of the Palace of the Fine Arts to sit in the wet grass and read poems out loud and talk about love.
The fountains are thick with black swans imported from Siberia, and if it is a fine day and a weekend there will be wedding parties, almost entirely Asian. The grooms wear smart gray pinstripe suits and the women are in beaded gowns so beautiful they make your teeth hurt just to look at them.

The roman towers of the palace facade rise above us, more yellow than orange in the strengthening midday light. Leo has told me how the towers were built for the 1915 Panama Pacific Exhibition out of plaster and papier-mache, and even though times were hard the city raised the money to keep them, to cast them in concrete so they would never go away.

Leo is an architect, and his relationship to all the most beautiful buildings in this city is astonishing given his age, only five years older than 1.1 make my living as a photographer; since art school I've been doing magazine work and living from grant to grant.

The house Leo built for himself is like a fairy tale, all towers and angles, and the last wild peacock in Berkeley lives on his street. I live in the Oakland hills in a tiny house on a street so windy you can’t drive more than ten miles per hour. I rented it because the ad said this: "Small house in the trees with a garden and a fireplace. Dogs welcome, of course." I am dogless for the moment, but it's not my natural condition.