POSTCARDS

A POSTCARD TAKES ABOUT FIFTY WORDS gracefully, which is how to write one. A few sweet strokes in a flowing hand—pink roses, black-face sheep in a wet meadow, the sea, the Swedish coast—your friend in Washington gets the idea. She doesn’t need your itinerary to know that you remember her.

 

Fifty words is a strict form but if you write tiny and sneak over into the address side to squeeze in a hundred, the grace is gone and the result is not a poem but notes for a letter you don’t have time to write, which will make her feel cheated.

 

So many persons traveling to a strange land are inclined to see its life so clearly, its essential national character, they could write a book about it as other foreign correspondents have done (“highly humorous ... definitely a must”), but fifty words is a better length for what you really know.

 

Fifty words and a picture. Say you are in Scotland, the picture is of your hotel, a stone pile looking across the woods of Druimindarroch to Loch Nan Uamh near the village of Arisaig. You’ve never seen this country. For the past year you’ve worked like a prisoner in the mines. Write.

 

Scotland is the most beautiful country in the world and I am drinking coffee in the library of what once was the manor of people who inherited everything and eventually lost it. Thus it became a hotel. I’m with English people whose correctness is overpowering. What wild good luck to be here. And to be an American! I’m so happy, bubba.

 

In the Highlands, many one-lane roads which widen at curves and hills—a driving thrill, especially when following a native who drives like hell—you stick close to him, like the second car of the roller-coaster, but lose your nerve. Sixty mph down a one-lane winding road. I prefer a career.

 

The arrogance of Americans who, without so much as a “mi scusi” or “bitte” or “s’il vous plait,” words that a child could learn easily, walk up to a stranger and say, “Say, where’s the museum?” as if English and rudeness rule the world, never ceases to amaze. You hear the accent and sink under the table.

 

Woke up at six, dark. Switzerland. Alps. Raining. Lights of villages high in the sky. Too dark to see much so snoozed awhile. Woke up in sunny Italy. Field after field of corn, like Iowa in August. Mamas, papas, grammas, grampas, little babies. Skinny trees above the whitewashed houses.

 

Arrived in Venice. A pipe had burst at the hotel and we were sent to another not as good. Should you spend time arguing for a refund? Went to San Marco, on which the doges overspent. A cash register in the sanctuary: five hundred lire to see the gold altar. Now we understand the Reformation.

 

On the train to Vienna, she, having composed the sentences carefully from old memory of intermediate German, asked the old couple if the train went to Vienna. “Ja, ja!” Did we need to change trains? “Nein.” Later she successfully ordered dinner and registered at the hotel. Mein wunder-companion.

 

People take me for an American tourist and stare at me, maybe because I walk slow and stare at them, so today I walked like a bat out of hell along the Ringstrasse, past the Hofburg Palace to Stephans Platz and back, and if anyone stared, I didn’t notice. Didn’t see much of Vienna but felt much better.

 

One week in a steady drizzle of German and now I am starting to lose my grip on English, I think. Don’t know what to write. How are you? Are the Twins going to be in the World Series?

 

You get to Mozart’s apartment through the back door of a restaurant. Kitchen smells, yelling, like at Burger King. The room where he wrote Figaro is bare, as if he moved out this morning. It’s a nice apartment. His grave at the cemetery is not marked, its whereabouts being unknown. Mozart our brother.

 

Copenhagen is raining and all the Danes seem unperturbed. A calm humorous people. Kids are the same as anywhere, wild, and nobody hits them. Men wear pastels, especially turquoise. Narrow streets, no cars, little shops, and in the old square a fruit stand and an old woman with flowers yelling, “WŌSA FOR TEW-VA!”

 

Sunbathing yesterday. A fine woman took off her shirt, jeans, pants, nearby, and lay on her belly, then turned over. Often she sat up to apply oil. Today my back is burned bright red (as St. Paul warns) from my lying and looking at her so long but who could ignore such beauty and so generous.