During the entire time I was eating lunch in the restaurant beside this building, the curtain in the upstairs window was blowing around, billowing inside with enough drama to seriously take up a goodly space in the room, occasionally escaping outside the window and waving energetically, perhaps proclaiming freedom, albeit momentary.
I was enchanted. Do other people experience that lift of the heart, that sudden transport to some other time, some other place. I wonder if I once saw a movie that featured a blowing curtain as part of the atmosphere and it stuck and is rekindled. Whatever the reason my eyes kept watching.
When I had finished lunch I went and stood in the alleyway, camera poised, ready to capture the swell and swoop. The curtain and/or the wind almost left the stage. A few minor twitches and passes were all that were offered and not a single foray outside the window.
This was not a minute or so attempt but even an intrepid photo-journalist begins to have second thoughts about standing in an alleyway aiming a camera where nothing non-suspicious seems to be in the range of the view-finder.
So I quickly took these two lame-ass non-representational photos, smiled at the people sitting in the restaurant staring at me, put the camera away. I dared to look back when I was partway down the street, risking my tooth enamel in a fit of teeth-grinding should the curtain now be merrily dancing, but it was still languishing. You’ll have to use your imagination. And let me know if you saw that movie too….. Was it perhaps Rear Window…..