Strangers I Have Known

~ A blog by Melissa Kotler Schwartz

Strangers I Have Known

Tag Archives: Minute

The Parrot Lover from Brazil

20 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by Melissa Kotler Schwartz in Blog Posts

≈ 4 Comments

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5pm, Advertisement, Attention, Audience, Beautiful, Bench, Captive, Cars, Clark Avenue, Crimson, daughter, Drink, Florida, Hookbills, Hour, Life, Love, Mate, melissakotlerschwartz, Minute, Notice, Ohio, olive, Outside, Parrot, Pause, Perched, Petite, Red, romantic, Sarasota, Scarf, Sitting, Sixties, Speak, Store, strangers, strangersihaveknown, Telephone, terrible, Trucks, wire, World, yes

http://photo.jellyfields.com/image/F@1/15946952139/z/sean-curran,sun-conures-sunconure-conure-bird-parrot-cute-love-sarasota-florida-nikon-d5100-photography-photograph-wildlife-nature.jpg

December 21, Sarasota, Florida, 3000 block of Clark Avenue. Just before 5:00p.m.

Sometimes if you pause for a minute you become a captive audience in a world of strangers. The pausing gives someone else a chance to speak.

So there I was sitting outside on a bench on which was painted an advertisement I didn’t care to notice, waiting for my daughter Olivia. She had run into a convenience store to buy a cool drink.

I saw a petite, olive-skinned woman in her sixties with a crimson red scarf look at me and pause as she got into her white Ford Taurus. Was she looking at me or at someone in the window of the store behind me? It seemed like she wanted to say something, so I chose to help her by looking right back at her and giving her my full attention.

“Do you see the parrots over there between the trees?” she asked me. She pointed far away. It was an unusual remark from a stranger and it took me a minute to see what she was talking about. Then, I saw some distinct shapes on the telephone wires. At first they looked like the common birds I see back home in Ohio, but on closer inspection, and to my amazement, I saw by their hookbills that they were indeed parrots. There were several groups of them, perched side by side as close as possible to each other.

“Yes, I see them,” I said. Cars and trucks drove under them in rush hour oblivion.

“They mate for life,” she said.

How romantic, I thought.

“If one dies, it’s just terrible,” she went on. “The other will kill them self, by pulling their feathers out. I’m from Brazil, I know a lot about parrots.”

“That’s so sad,” I said, picturing a lone parrot with just a few feathers left on its wing.

“It’s beautiful up there, yes?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

She smiled at me, got in to her car, quietly closed the door and started her engine.

I stared at the parrots . . . wild, in love on the telephone wire. I wouldn’t have noticed them if she hadn’t pointed them out.

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Soldier on Board

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by Melissa Kotler Schwartz in listening

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Airplane, Body, Cincinnati, Cousin, Dad, Family, Flight, Fort Mitchell, Hand, Home, Hour, Juice, Kentucky, Medicine, melissakotlerschwartz, Military, Minute, Nervous, Pill, PTSD, Relieved, Seat, Seatbelt, Soldier, Stewardess, Stranger, strangers, Touch, treatment, Veteran, Vietnam, Warm, Wedding, Window

vet_poster_2b

“Hi, I’ve got the window seat,” I said to the man in the aisle seat, who looked like a teddy bear.

“Oh sure,” he said and jumped up a little too quickly, bumping his head on the ceiling of the small plane.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He nodded and gave me room to slip in to my seat.

“Well,” he said, as he snapped his seatbelt closed. “All we can do is make the best of it.”

“Yes,” I said. I noticed that his upper left arm was touching mine. There was nothing he could do. He was a big guy and there just wasn’t enough room for his body.

“I’m going to my cousin’s wedding,” I said.

“That’s great,” he said. “I’m headed home. I’m going home after seven weeks for treatment for PTSD.”

I paused for a minute, not knowing what to say.

I settled on, “Wow. How are you feeling?”

“I’m doing better.”

Here I had thought I was sitting next to a young man with his future ahead of him. Instead I was sitting next to a young man who was fighting to get his future back. And he had done all this for our country. I felt honored to sit next to him.

“Did you know,” he said, “that the Cincinnati area has one of the best PTSD clinics in the country? It’s actually in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky.”

“No,” I said, “I didn’t know that.” I wanted to ask him so many questions, but I decided I shouldn’t because it could trigger bad memories for him.

“I hope we get there soon,” he said, looking a bit nervous as he turned to me. “What is it, an hour or so flight?”

“I think that’s about right.”

“I have my medicine,” he said and tapped at the front left pocket of his fatigues.

I was wondering if he was going to need my help on the flight. Would loud noises startle him?

“Do you have any family in the military?” I asked.

“My Dad was in Vietnam. I can’t imagine what he went through.”

When the stewardess came by to take our drink order, he asked for apple juice, took a few sips, then opened his medicine bottle and popped a pill into his mouth. He looked relieved after he took it.

While I read a book, I saw him trying to rest his eyes, but it didn’t work.

“I got another flight after this,” he said.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “but you’ll be home soon.”

After we landed and he was standing in the aisle about to depart the plane, I said, “It was nice talking with you.”

I thought he was going to shake my hand, but instead he held the palm of his hand out to me. I pressed my hand against his. It was the warmest, most inviting hand I had touched in a long time.

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 30,000 Strangers under the Age of Thirty

25 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by Melissa Kotler Schwartz in Blog Posts

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Austin, Austin Java, Body, Cincinnati, Coffee Shop, Contacts, Crowds, daughter, Directions, Drinking, Dutch, Experience, French, Go Girls, Hangover, Hotel, Lyndon B. Johnson, melissakotlerschwartz, Minute, Mom, Museum, Music, Musician, Not moving to Austin, Ouch, Perform, South by Southwest, Stoned, Stranger, strangers, strangersihaveknown, Suzanne Vega, SXSW, T-Shirt, Texas, Thumping, Traveling, Trip, TX, Young people

I spent last week with 30,000 strangers under the age of thirty. People may be having fewer children in America, and for that matter all over many parts of the world, but when it comes to hearing music and seeing films the young who can pull it off are at the South by Southwest Music Festival (SXSW) in Austin, Texas. So many languages were spoken—I heard Spanish, Dutch, German and French.

My daughter, a seventeen-year-old musician, attended SXSW because she was selected to play with Go Girls, an independent women’s music venue, at one of the Austin Java coffee shops. Of course, I had to come along. And, of course, her nana  flew in to watch her perform.

Afterwards, the two of us tag-alongs did some serious people watching, which made us feel really old. E-cigarettes everywhere, tattoos galore in some painful parts of the body (just in case you didn’t know, big trend: necklace design tattoos on women, when I look at them, I think “ouch”, my décolletage), and sightings of numerous gauges on men that I just don’t get. Lots of drinking and drugs, of course—this is a music festival. Ambulance sirens blasting every half-hour or so, unnerving my mom and I. Everywhere you go, people talking to friends about their hangovers. Not to mention the hotel shuttle we couldn’t take last night because the driver warned me that someone had just thrown-up in it. My biggest worry: the stoned people that ambled straight across streets, oblivious to traffic coming at them at twenty-five to thirty miles an hour.  If I felt outdated, my mom must have thought she was part of a museum exhibit, but she handled it really well, moving slowly but with intention through the crowds. My favorite sighting was a man in his fifties with a t-shirt that said, “I’m not moving to Austin.” I wanted to get a matching one.

There was no relief from the music, and even in our hotel room you could hear a thumping raucous bass pounding away from early afternoon until the wee hours of the night. I found it so irritating that I’ve never been so grateful to own a pair of headphones, so I could hear myself think. Music is a pleasure, but not at 1 a.m.—and not ALL music.

My daughter, on the other hand, loved every minute and used every second. She sold CD’s, handed out hundreds of business cards, and made some great contacts. She even met Suzanne Vega at a workshop and Suzanne is now following her music.

I’m so happy for her. I’m also glad not to be waiting an hour for a cab anymore, only to find one with a cab driver who has only been in this country for a week and doesn’t know where the Lyndon B. Johnson library is. (Which, by the way, is a phenomenal Presidential Library. Worth the whole trip! By the way, hardly anyone was there.)

To add to my exhaustion, I’m giving out directions to the cabby as we weave through bicycles and pedicabs—you know those bike taxis in which two people get carted around, often by someone who is struggling so hard to breathe you think he will die from a heart attack pumping them up a slight hill.

I was very tired when I returned to Cincinnati; so was my mom when she went back to Florida.  Am I glad I went? Yes. SXSW is not an everyday experience. And now, two days later, I’m just emerging from the overstimulation. Oh, to be that young again…

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Click here to view the photos from the Rolling Stone “48 Best Things We Saw at SXSW 2014.

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