Pivot

“Go where it ended, and begin there.” I wasn’t sure what I would think as the subway neared Harvard Yard. In fact, I didn’t really give much thought to thinking anything at all. So I was surprised when I began to feel a little queasy, an incipient shiver thrusting up from my midsection someplace.I looked at the windows, rushing past long dark stretches of tunnel wall, slowing as we took the final curve. Was this to be nothing more than a wasteful conceit? Two days later, to a visiting music professor from England, I would respond, “Unfinished business,” to his question of why I was coming back. But could unfinished business truly justify resuming a part of my life that had seen me convinced I'd lost my place and my path? Perhaps it was just me trying to live as though I were a character in a storybook. Sasha might have said that to me, once. But now Sasha seemed supportive. We’ve both changed since the days when he was from South Africa and I could get drunk off the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack.

The subway halted. I emerged.

The shiver never quite manifested, and I passed through the turnstiles to face the first choice of the day. Left, to Harvard Yard and yesterday. Or, right, to C’est Bon, breakfast and, presumably, the future.That’s when the phrase took me by surprise.

Go back to where it ended, and start there.

Signal a new direction by commencing where the old one failed. Two rays can share the same terminus and journey different ways. One ray emerged from Canaday A-13 in May 1995 and made it to a taxi cab in Harvard Square. From there, it took me to Chile, to Stanford, to CASIO and Dr. Hurlbut, to Albania and Kosovo. It was a good ray, despite its inauspicious beginning.

This one would start in the same place again but go somewhere else. I exited left.

Cover is Destroyed and Never Reused

Today I encountered, for the first time, a device in a public toilet stall that sits behind the toilet itself and, at the touch of a button, rotates a plastic cover over the toilet seat, digesting it at one end and emitting it at the other. "Cover is destroyed and never reused," a sticker reassures you, and a little LED display lets you know how many covers remain stored for future use. How wondrous!

Once, in Peru, I noticed that none of the toilets even had seats. They were otherwise normal, porcelain bowls, sporting brand names such as "American Standard." In Cuzco, I caved in to my curiosity and visited a toilet shop. "Porque no tienen asientos?" I asked, gesturing at row upon seatless row of merchandise. The saleswoman shrugged, and explained, "Cuestan menos asi." They cost less this way. It was a simple answer, but sensible.

When I visited Albania two months ago, I learned that they had recently remodeled the capital city's airport to provide modern bathrooms for Western visitors. I walked in and at first glance was appropriately impressed. They had installed a shiny concrete floor, a bank of urinals along the wall, sinks with mirrors and even canisters of antibacterial soap. But then I noticed that beneath each urinal was a wooden bucket—perhaps a sign that "modernization" is still a work in progress there.