A Bit of Sentimental

I was just sitting here reading Underworld by Don DeLillo, and I’m only thirty or so pages into the massive 827 page epic, but these first thirty pages or so have been about baseball, specifically the game where Bobby Thompson hit his famous walk-off home run back in 1954.

Now all this white wine I’ve been consuming (shrimp counts are low, but I just tried sushi—raw fish—for the first time ever; it’s not shrimp but you gotta work with what you got) and this talk of baseball and me knowing that baseball season has just started up again in the states, it all gets me a bit sentimental. I’m well aware that half the people who read this don’t care about or know anything about baseball and I know that half know some about baseball and there are a few who love it with a passion of an infinite number of burning suns the way I do, so I’ll try to keep this short. I don’t like talking about sports around people who don’t care.

But I will say this: I miss it.

As for where I am, as I am often asked online, I am back in Sydney and if you are FaceBook friends with me you’ll be well aware that I’m living ABOVE A BAR, and I caps lock that phrase because I feel a little bit like Hemingway in Paris in the 20s or Miller in Paris in the 30s. I feel a bit of romance here. It ain’t nothing special if you see my room. It’s got a single bed, a small desk, a small table, and a wardrobe to put my clothes in, there’s a shared bathroom and shower, a shared fridge that I was advised not to use, a coin operated washer and drier, and a shared microwave. When you first come in the door through a back alley behind Bar Broadway, you smell rotten beer and wine bottles that better be recycled soon, and as you walk up the 3 flights of stairs that fermenting garbage smell morphs into the smell of Asian food. I keep my windows open for now as the nights have been cool and pleasant, and you get a front row seat to all of the cars racing up and down Broadway. It’s a hypnotic sound that I find soothing, and it helps put me to sleep. That and the wine.





I wish I could articulate it better. I feel I should have the right words for it, but I just dart all around it. Perhaps I’m just being too sentimental again, but Sydney is a great city, and I feel at home here, almost as much at home as I feel at home. Maybe it’s the people, they’re so kind and helpful here. Maybe it’s the weather, it don’t snow here. Maybe it’s the parks and the cafes and the coffee and the wine, the good food and the smiling faces of friends. I don’t know. I just dance around the possible explanations. I’m here for a while longer, though, so there is plenty of time for me to find the right words.