budding scholar

No buildings, only squares of light on an inky black canvas night out the window just now. Dripping rain, splattering on the already-sleek courtyard. A siren headed up the street towards the hospital a few blocks away. I stand and take the photo through the open window, click. Holding tight so my phone doesn’t fall 7 stories to the ground.

Thinking about how stories begin, and end, like this. Details against a canvas of night, sounds echoing against ears, a patchwork of lighted windows. A remembered, or forgotten, twist in the story of a house, a neighborhood, a year, a life.  Light, dark, lights on dark. And then?

Perspective, focus, from a favorite photo taken the other day. Waiting to hear this week about that fellowship I applied for last October (they said by end of April). A chai latte from Starbucks on the plaza in the sun (my first time in Barcelona). Wandering through the late spring afternoon, arms linked with my husband, wondering about what comes next for us. Reading the newspaper in Catalan and understanding it. Debating language politics while eating tapas, perched on high stools in a Basque place near our house. Now, dusk falling over the courtyard out our bedroom window, stillness falling across the bed. The muffled voices of neighbors arguing above us. Two weeks left in this apartment, this city, this space of our lives.

The birds swoop over our heads as we walk by, diving towards bread tossed from the small boy’s hand. They fly down and linger a moment, trying to fill their bellies with bits of bread. The bread blankets the beach, and the birds must quickly find as many grains of sand as crumbs of bread because they sail back to the breaking edges of waves and settle down upon the water again. But their bellies call them again, and the instinct to seek food, and once again they burst toward the bread and peck away in the sand.

We walk with shoes off, toes curling around pink, gray and brown rocks that spot the grainy sand. My nose is filled with the smell of fried food, myseriously blanketing the beach though I see no fast food joint in sight. The smell, and the loud roar of traffic in the distance remind us that we are on an urban beach, on the edge of a teaming city.

I hold my breath, stare into the foam, feel the cold Mediterranean water on my toes, and hope to follow the birds this week, bursting forth again and again, pecking in the sand, flying on inertia and instinct. My bread is my research. I am here, in this city, knocking on doors, calling for interviews, looking for people who will talk with me and share their stories. Like the smell of fast food as we walked down the beach, the weight of the project is ever present, nagging at me, sometimes scraping and grinding, sometimes sparkling into inspiration. I wonder what I’ll find in the sand this week.

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How’s the week looking to you, dear readers? Thank you for your thoughts, reactions, comments. I love hearing what my writing and photos bring to mind for you.

For my project I am interviewing education people in all 10 municipal districts in Barcelona. I visited two neighborhoods today, and brought along the camera as a way of noticing more as I walked around the new places before and after my meetings. And notice I did. Whenever I’m taking pictures I start seeing more and more possibilities, seeing details and framing images that I would have walked past if the camera weren’t in my hand, especially in the city.  I love the idea of a picture a day with the 365 project. Perhaps using the camera lens to notice this city in new ways will help me find my way into my research project, into seeing peoples’ understandings of immigration, integration, and how schools are changing.