DALMATIA IS THE CHILE OF THE MEDITERRANEAN

212. DALMATIA IS THE CHILE OF THE MEDITERRANEAN:

I was dreaming of the sea - in this case the Mediterranean which is a deep gash some two thousand three hundred miles long and never more than five hundred wide created by a vast geological upheaval which piled up mountainous folds around the sunken trough and I thought of all the peninsulas thus created and the storm-sped waves and the outcrops of softer rock between hard buttresses which warped and scarped and notched their shores - these intricate coasts encourage intercommunication - (I wanted to question that thought actually as I figured to myself that actually maybe that would encourage instead 'isolation' and singularity - but who was I to say oh humble swank that I am) and never far behind the coast of the Mediterranean anywhere are the sharp-cut and endlessly varied heights (a complex belt of high relief that actually extends all the way from Spain to Indonesia and Japan) and I realized just as suddenly what I had been doing - constructing for myself a matrix of reference wherein the sea referenced my idea of life and dream and solace and self and I knew it just as much as I knew the day or the sky or the light : I was in a waterfront antiques place in Perth Amboy once and the lady proprietor who was about 90 years old and nearly feeble but still well-dressed and coiffed enough to make a sensible case and though there were no coves or caverns or raging sailors about there was about HER a true sense of another age and another place as all her waterfront and seascape relics - everything from lamps and shades to old maps and telescopes and looking glasses and cutlery EVERYTHING within referenced back for her to another time and place in which she still lived and just as I talked to her I talked to another place and time and age - we shared stories of her wonders of the sea and the wide-fronted bay and ocean before her of which she'd lived an entire life a life which spanned centuries and was filled with stories and experiences and tales the likes of which we'd never hear again and in her sputtering short-stop of a dwindling life she now had left only the vivid memories which had already transplanted her experiences and I'd have been willing to bet she'd not sold anything not an item of value in months yet kept close watch over hundreds of people coming and going noting and watching the shifting shades and the changing lights of the coast and the sea and the sky and I'd never before truly met anyone from another place and time yet THERE she was - old frock coat and dress and jewelry and glasses thin white hands with translucent skin almost showing beneath it all veins and blood everything human about the wearer of the skin and fabric - strange so strange that there and then I'd met up with that and when - 1888 1867 it could have been any of that and no matter the difference.