11/12/10 A Traveler's Curiosity

In third grade, Miss Theresa asked our class to write a few sentences about what we wanted to be when we grew up, and why. My great-grandma has recently died, and she had moved here from Sweden when she was in her thirties, which I thought was pretty adventurous. So I wrote that I wanted to be a traveler like her, as if that were a profession rather than a hobby, or a part of a profession.

When you travel, you are on your guard a little, and you need to pay attention to details of tone, character, landscape and cityscape in a way that a native doesn't. You need to pay attention to transportation, signs, languages, attitudes. There may be rules only known to the locals, some of which signify danger, or amusement, or relaxation. You need to be alert to people's body language, and their habits, and to things that look out of place.

This is leading up to why I often feel alone in the business crowd downtown in the middle of the day. A whole slew of characters, a circus, really, could go by and no one would notice it but me. Walking to the bus, these two ladies came out of the public defender building. They are obviously mother and daughter, since they have the same build, same taste in clothes, same face except one is a generation younger, and purt-near the exact same hairstyle. And actually, these two women, walking arm-in-plump-but-strong arm and leaning on each other as they cross the street, look like they could be the mother and grandmother of a circus act--the trapeze artists, maybe, or scarf aerialists. Their hairdos are giant teased beehives, and I don't mean any disrespect, but they are backcombed and shaped--each of them--to the streamlined buoyancy of teeny, loosely-moored zeppelins. The grandmother had an added ornamentation of some pulled and rosetted strands in the center-back, where the dirigible's canted gonodola basket should be. No one else on their way to the bus stop batted an eye at them, but I watched them with a traveler's eye, walk across the street as if they belonged here--which I'm sure they did.

I had to stop and think what could have brought these women here in such a retro style. I know there are probably some villages up in the iron range that are less touched by modern fashion than others, and again I mean no disrespect (because certainly my relatives are not post-modern chic, nor am I for that matter), or maybe northern Wisconsin--foreigners. I settle on Slovenian iron worker wives who rarely come to the twin cities. But it also crosses my mind that they could be time travelers, visiting our downtown from some housewifey (or circus-y) vortex in 1964. Or they could be aliens who are visiting us and who have not done their research by decade, but rather by round century, like Kirk, I'm sure, in several classic Star Trek episodes. And so they blend in, but slightly anachronistically, they don't, and the effect just makes me curiouser and curiouser.