Sighting

When I first read and marvelled at Kathleen Norris' Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, its structure was one of the things that impressed me. I was in awe of those little imagistic 'Weather Reports' woven around the long essays. I remember their content still, much more clearly than the longer pieces. When I started building the scaffolding of my Cambodia memoir I shamelessly copied her style, hoping to intersperse longer essays with short Sightings. I might still do that. But until then, I thought I'd adopt it for this medium. Sightings are just that: things glimpsed, seen, stumbled over, sometimes through a glass darkly, sometimes with perfect clarity.

Sighting

An old Indian man, cane tucked beneath one arm, is throwing bread for the pigeons over a railing into a small park on Nicholson Street in Edinburgh. A lot of urban dwellers despise pigeons, but this man is feeding them a whole bag of bread. The birds mill about in a grey mob in the grass beyond the railing, their pink and turquoise neck patches shimmering. By the man's feet, on a low stone wall on our side of the railing, lies a dead pigeon. Its feathers are dull and matted. The man stands beside the dead bird and feeds the live ones. His expression is grave. It is serious work, this casting of bread for birds. I leave him to it and pass on by.