Today I had to run an errand, and as I was walking across
campus, I saw something that kind of looked like a snow fort. Closer inspection
revealed that it had no doors but appeared to be a big pile of snow with a
flattened top. Once I had finished my errand, I walked around it and found a
spot where it seemed easy to climb, so I scrambled up to the top and looked
around. This was on a hill, so there was a good view from the top. I felt like
I was on a stage and would have burst into song (maybe “Let It Go”?) except
that there were a lot of people around; none of them looked askance at a
middle-aged woman on top of a pile of snow, but they might have reacted if I
had sung at the top of my lungs. Getting down seemed more daunting, but I just
sat down and slid on my long coat. Problem solved!
Here's a strange fact: apparently a real danger while
traveling is being hit by a plant thrown off of a balcony. Longtime readers may
remember the story from my very first blog post, back in October 2008, about
almost being killed by someone throwing a very large papyrus plant from a
balcony in the French Quarter in New Orleans. The offending gentleman heard Angela
and me scream, so he looked over the edge of the balcony and said sorry, he
hadn’t realized anyone was down there. When we asked why he would do such a
thing, he said he didn’t want the plant anymore. “Do you want it?” he asked me,
and when I replied that I was from way up North and had come by train, he came
down and chopped a small piece off for me. So then Angela (a woman I had met on
the train) and I went to Jean Lafitte’s, the oldest bar in the US, and I
ordered a vodka and cranberry for myself and a water for the plant. I still
have the plant, which is now about the size of the original one that nearly
killed me, and the commemorative Jean Lafitte’s plastic cup it traveled back up
here in. Just today I related this story to a coworker, and he said back in the
early 80’s, when he was a college student bumming around Europe with some pals,
and they were wearing those terrible silky short shorts everyone wore back
then, a similar thing happened to him. They were walking around Venice, and
suddenly a large plant flew off a balcony and nearly killed them. He said they
never saw the culprit, so maybe it was a cat or the wind, but they thought it
could have been someone offended by their short shorts. Back in those days,
Italians were more conservative and hated American tourists and their racy
fashions, or so this guy claims. (I thought Italians invented Speedos…?)
Anyway, the takeaway message here is that when you are walking somewhere with a
lot of balconies, beware of large falling plants.
Famous Hat
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